Pstalemate Page 10

  "Good heavens, no. It took years—most of my adult life, and I'm older than I look. You might say collecting data on all the telepathic mutants I could locate was a bit of an obsession with me. Oh, come, my dear—don't look so surprised. Harry must have let you know I shared his secret."

  She shook her head. "It wasn't that. I just remembered you. You were the professor from Yale who came to see Dr. Bronson about your wife. And after she died, you kept coming back. You gave Harry a pocketknife with a green handle for his birthday."

  "Did I? Yes, you're right, dear girl, I'd forgotten." He smiled at the memory. "And that's when I began this notebook. I always meant it for Dr. Bronson's son, if he recovered his power."

  "But—but you couldn't be! I'd have known at once if you were—were one of us." Unconsciously, she'd drawn further back in the chair, as if trying to reestablish some distance between them.

  "Are you quite sure?" he asked. For a moment more, he kept the flow of surface thoughts that served better to guard his mind than any blanking out could have done. Then he began to open some of the memory channels of his thoughts to her. "The human brain has its limits, my dear. But it can learn quite a few tricks when it thinks it must."

  His development had been the earliest in his records, even though he was only a second-generation mutant. His wild talents were beginning well before his father was killed in a coal mine disaster and his mother went into a fatal collapse on learning of that. Then there had been the years at the ill-funded and overfilled orphanage. It had been a rugged school for him, teaching conformity to all the ways of the ungifted—even within his own mind. And the long struggle up from his background had deepened and refined his ability to conceal any difference that would not be accepted by the clever minds he had chosen to live with.

  He began to close his mind to hers then and to rebuild the pattern that was his shield. But as he did so, he felt her seemingly relaxing probe suddenly sharpen and penetrate, before it withdrew completely.

  "Oh, Bud!" She was on her knees in front of him, her hands clutching his tightly. "You can't go there alone! Let Harry and me come with you!"

  He freed one hand to brush the hair from her forehead and then lifted her chin until her eyes met the smile that was still on his face. "The doctors will be good to me there, my dear. I've seen to that. And I think nothing—nothing at all—will bother me there. Look again—deeper this time."

  He had never felt another mind completely free within his own since his wife had died, and it was something he bad missed. He guided her probing thoughts gently, refusing nothing, showing what she might have overlooked. And then he ended it and was alone with himself again.

  "You're not afraid," she said wonderingly. "Not at all afraid. You can accept even that!"

  "Even that," he echoed. Then he sighed and rose to his feet, helping her to stand beside him. "But now I really must go. You'll see me to the door, of course? And I don't think Harry would mind too much if you were to kiss me once in farewell. After all, dear girl, I did know you long ago."

  It had gone rather well, he thought as the elevator took him down.

  He settled himself comfortably into the waiting limousine and nodded as the chauffeur resumed his place. Yes, it had gone quite well.

  "All right, James," he said. "You can take me home."

  X. SEARCH

  Harry got up from the kitchen table, stretching his cramped muscles and glancing at the clock. He'd been aware of daylight coming in the window for some time, but hadn't realized the day was that far advanced. He'd been digging into Coleman's notes longer than he'd planned. No wonder he felt stiff. He turned on the heat under the coffee and tiptoed toward the bedroom, where Ellen was sleeping.

  She was curled up tightly on her side, but a faint wash of vague sleep images reached him, telling him it was one of her better nights. The past month had been hard on her. Now, however, it seemed she was winning the torturous fight within herself. Somehow, Coleman's brief visit seemed to have given her more strength to face herself as she really was. Her thoughts were jumbled, but peaceful enough. And even in her sleep, she seemed aware of his mind touching hers; she stirred faintly, and something warm and soft reached out gently toward him.

  Well, he'd wondered what was the value of telepathy. Now he knew.

  The smell of scorching coffee roused him from his reverie and sent him back to the kitchen. Mechanically, he began dumping the pot and cleaning it to make fresh.

  The odor of the ruined coffee must have roused Ellen. He heard her going into the bathroom and drew his mind back from her. As part of her fight with herself, she refused to put up a blanking guard even where it would be normal; but the first week of marriage had been time enough in which to establish those areas where privacy was important, and Harry respected them now without conscious thought.

  She came out in a brief robe, glanced at the clock in surprise and then at the table where he had been working. Her thoughts were concerned for him and his lack of sleep, but she made no comment. She poured herself a glass of orange juice before she began bustling about to prepare breakfast. "I heard you come in, but I couldn't get myself up," she said. "You were awfully late—long after the library closed. Oh, Harry! You went to see that Jamieson woman. Was it so horrible?"

  "It wasn't good," he admitted. He let her see enough from his mind to give a general picture.

  Coleman had discovered and kept records on nearly two hundred mutants, but then had turned to theoretical considerations ten years before, with the result that the larger part of his notes was of little value now beyond a list of names to track down. The Jamieson woman had been seemingly the most hopeful evidence of recovery. She had been institutionalized twice but had made enough progress to be released, and the notes indicated she still had telepathic powers.

  Unfortunately, she did have them—though she was no longer consciously aware of them. She had fragmented her mind and blocked them off, though they were all that enabled her to avoid the consequences of her present sick quest for satisfaction in a dulled world. What Harry had found in the back of her thoughts offered no answer to any problem. She was living in terror of something—but the threat was too blurred for him to see whether it was alien or not. Anyhow, he was pretty sure she'd soon be unable to pretend sanity. With the best of luck, she might wind up in some violent ward.

  "I told you to leave her to me. Women's minds are easier for a woman. I was going to see her today," Ellen protested as she placed the food on the table.

  He salted his eggs and began eating mechanically, shaking his head. "Sure, I should leave them all to you. Honey, I'm no tower of strength like Bud Coleman, and I know I've collapsed every time I've had a real shock. But I'm not quite weak enough to hide behind you every time something has to be done."

  "You're not weak, darling," she said positively. "I told you that before. Most of us have trouble learning to handle in ten or fifteen years what you've had to learn in a couple of months. Bud didn't think you were weak. He thought you were the only one of all of us who had any chance of finding a solution. But you can't do everything yourself."

  "I can't seem to do anything. If I only had a full year—" he began for the hundredth time. But he didn't; he had barely two more months of sanity. One month had already been spent in what he now knew were basically wasted efforts.

  "You'd better get some sleep," she suggested. She finished stacking the dishes in the dishwasher, then followed him into the bedroom to begin changing to street clothes.

  He watched her, again conscious that she was making progress in her efforts with herself. She was beginning to enjoy the pleasure he felt in looking at her, and there was a hint of the provocative as she reached back for the zipper on her dress. She sensed his approval and smiled. Then she sobered quickly.

  "Oh, I forgot. Harry, Uncle Charley called last night. He wants you to see him."

  "I don't need his damned money now," Harry told her. For the two months left, he could have made out well eno
ugh even without the option money that had finally come through from England. But he sighed and gave in to Ellen's desires. "Oh, all right. I'll see him when I get up."

  She kissed him, her mind already worried about handling the agonizingly slow search through the newspaper microfiles at the library. He was vaguely aware later of her pleasure in getting a cab quickly, but he lost her as his thoughts turned back to his problem.

  He still had no clue to what he thought of as the Alien Entity. There was no hint of it in Coleman's notes, nor had he found conclusive evidence in any other mind. There was always some lurking menace behind the madness he had seen elsewhere, some fear of terrible change, but nothing definite, in the same way his own vision had been real. He could still recall his horror, though he found it impossible to remember the specifics about it that had created his revulsion.

  Somehow, though, it must be related to the madness that seemed the doom of all those he had learned to call mutants. Perhaps the madness was a result of the threat of alien possession—it seemed probable. There were some things no sane mind could bear. And in that case, the retreat into insanity might be a real defense against the possession, making the mind useless to the Alien Entity. On the other hand, it was a possibility that madness was itself a trap, making the mind defenseless against whatever was trying to take it over. He had found no evidence of a mind that had been through its insane phase and was then occupied by any alien presence, but that could mean only that it was too clever for detection.

  He had tried to imagine what the Alien menace could be, but there was no way to guess that. Fantasy writers had assumed possession by immortal minds, by creatures from beyond time and space, and almost everything else, including true demons. What he could remember of his precognition made him doubt that the Alien Entity could be anything human, but he had no clue to what it might be.

  He had let Ellen's idea that it was only another delusion of his madness stand as if he accepted it, so far as their conversation was concerned. And in a way, he had to treat it so. There was a body of data concerning madness, and he could deal with that to some extent, but nothing on alien minds. Anyhow, since the burst of madness came first, he was forced to look for a way of holding that off. Then, if he could somehow pass through that, he might be able to begin on the further horrors of the later threat. But so far everything looked hopeless.

  He sighed in fatigue and tried to drop his worries, building up his guard against obtruding thoughts as he began to fall asleep. He was now able to control most of his powers in ways that had seemed impossible before. There were only background impulses from the mass of human misery around him and a few merely disquieting dreams of his own.

  Then he was sitting upright with a scream ringing in his mind and the shriek of subway wheels grinding against brakes, ending suddenly ...

  Miss Jamieson had blown far earlier and more wildly than he had expected. The full awareness of that hit him, together with the realization that his probing might have been what broke the barriers she had built against herself. He fought his adolescent guilt reaction with the honest knowledge that it was almost certainly for the best in her case, but he could win only half a victory from such truth.

  The clock said he had been asleep less than three hours, but there was no more rest for him. He stumbled out to the kitchen to reheat the breakfast coffee. It was bitter in his mouth.

  The phone rang, and he answered with no effort to conceal his foreknowledge of the caller. "Hello, Uncle Charles. I was just about to come up."

  "Oh." There was a slight pause, as if the fairly polite words had taken the old man by surprise. "Henry, can you read my mind from down there?"

  "I thought you considered all that pure nonsense!" Harry switched the receiver so he could pick up his coffee with his right hand. Then he decided to answer honestly. "I can. But I don't intend to, unless you force me. What is it you want?"

  "Two things. First, to thank you for the invitation to your wedding. Though I don't usually go where I'm not wanted."

  "You could have come," Harry told him. It wasn't the most gracious way of putting it, he realized, but habits were hard to break.

  Grimes seemed to accept the intent, however. "Ah. Well, I also wanted to give you some good business advice. I can guess why you're trying to find out things about certain people. But you're going at it all wrong. And I don't like your using Ellen to interview them. You can go to hell to your own tune, Henry; but she's a decent girl, and you have no right getting her mixed up in your dirty business."

  "And you have no right having her followed. Damn it, she's my wife now!"

  "Then treat her like one, not like a paid flunky! No, wait." Grimes stopped to cough before resuming in a more restrained voice. "Henry, I don't want to quarrel with you this time. And I'm not telling you what to do—just how to do it better without involving her. You're both clumsy amateurs. So when you don't know how to do something, you hire an expert who does. That's what private investigators are for. Get one!"

  Harry grunted, wanting to kick himself. Grimes was absolutely right! He and Ellen were amateurs, and there wasn't enough time for them to learn how to locate persons and information. He'd been an idiot not to have found trained help from the beginning.

  Grimes seemed to misinterpret the delay in replying. "Look for one in the phone book if you don't trust the ones I use. And if you're worried about the cost, have them send the bill to me and I'll pay it."

  And that, of course, was his real point, Harry thought. The old man was still being clever. He'd pay—and the man who paid the piper called the tune. With an inside source like that, he could spy on them much better than by using any outside tracers.

  "I'll think about it," he conceded, trying to sound unconvinced. "But why should I trust your advice now when I've never been able to get any of the information I need from you before this?"

  "Because I'm helping Ellen, not you, you ungrateful whelp! What information?"

  "Background facts. For instance, the old man Ellen and I remember playing with in that colony—was he one of our grandparents?"

  Grimes snorted. "You must mean my uncle. A worthless bum I had to support, but you kids always liked him. You never acted that way around me. Anyhow, if you want to know about your grandparents, stop being so damned indirect and ask what you want to know. I can't tell you much. Ellen's grandparents were never mentioned. Your father's parents died in a train wreck when young— legitimately, I discovered. But your mother's—well, they went suddenly wild about some cult religion and ran off together, leaving your mother to an aunt—and leaving some pretty wild stories behind. Your mother was very young, but it left scars on her, I'm afraid. I tried to trace them once, but they had simply vanished." His voice had been growing reminiscent, but now it sharpened. "What else?"

  "Where's the Idle Hollow Retreat?"

  There was an amused bark from the phone. "So you've discovered your mother is still alive, eh? Your information is about fifteen years out of date, Henry. It proves you need an expert. That place went out of business, and I had her transferred. Anyhow, what are you planning? A visit? Don't!"

  "Why?"

  "All right, see her then! Maybe you should, to see what kind of muddy waters you're fishing in. I'll have the office prepare directions along with a letter authorizing you as her son to see her and get it all delivered to you. Now— what about that agency?"

  "I'll hire one," Harry agreed, tacitly accepting the old man's assumption that the information had been given as part of a bargain.

  He hung up and began studying Coleman's early notes again. He had realized that the man's real interest lay in building a theory, but had assumed that the early collection of data on telepaths would be more immediately valuable. Now he could no longer trust it. If the brief entry on his mother had been that long out of date, how useful was anything else? His father was listed as having disappeared without trace after being released from a course of shock therapy, but in seventeen years, would he have r
emained traceless? There was no sign Harry could find that Coleman had ever gone back to the original data to revise or update the entries.

  He dug the classified directory out of the closet and turned to private investigators, amazed at the length of the listing. There could no longer be any question of his need for such help. And, fortunately, the option money should permit him to pay for it himself.

  How could anyone choose one from among all the listings? The answer came as a sudden flash of precognition, and he turned the page quickly. There was a single line entry for Robert Gordon, with an address much closer than that of most other agencies. A woman's voice with a slight accent answered his call and gave him an appointment within the hour.

  The office turned out to be a single room in a ground-floor apartment, with a private door to the hall. There was no lusty secretary, no trench coat over a chair, and no empty liquor bottles and filled automatic pistols strewn around. Nor did the man who shook his hand and waved him to a seat resemble anyone in the private eye films. Robert Gordon was a rather husky, middle-aged Negro of medium height who walked with a slight limp and whose smile was businesslike in a pleasant but undistinguished face.

  He leaned back in his chair, studying Harry thoughtfully. Then he nodded. "I thought I recognized your name, Mr. Bronson. You get to remember such things in this business. I used to work for the agency employed by your uncle, Mr. Grimes. Good. I know enough about you so I won't have to waste time making sure you don't want your information for some illegal purpose. That helps."

  He went into the matter of the various services offered and his rates with a casual assumption that money meant nothing to Harry—as would have been true at one time. His full-time services were based on a sort of portal-to-portal hourly rate, plus expenses. It wasn't cheap, but the amount he named came to considerably less than Harry had expected.

  With that business settled, Gordon took the envelope with the names from Coleman's notes and the other information Harry had accumulated and began going through them, asking an occasional question until he was generally sure of what Harry expected. He nodded.