IX

Looking into Bryce's face he slid to his feet slowly, ground out the

stub of his cigarette and stood before the desk.

Bryce took out his gun and held it where Pierce could see it. "Are

Manobas ever shot?" It was a heavy little gun, his maggy, its barrel

sleek and rounded, the heavy metal warm from being worn close to the

skin.

"Sometimes. It's a natural enough reaction."

It was a spaceworthy gun with adjustable velocity for driving through

padded suits and pressure suits. The velocity was set high, but it

would be inartistic to blow a large hole through a psychotherapist.

Bryce turned the dial down slowly, watching him.

"Do the professional ethics of privacy and non-publicity cover this

kind of situation?"

Pierce was smiling slightly with a touch of bitter humor. "It's

undiplomatic to tell you that, but yes, the contingency is covered.

There is nothing to connect myself with you as a case in any records,

nor anything to identify me as a member of the Manoba group contracted

by your company. The ethic of privacy is allowed to have no exceptions

for the family's record."

A cool curiosity held him. "Tell me--when you saw that I was beginning

to think, why didn't you just needle me down for a short nap and

leave?"

The smile remained. "I am supposed to control the shock of

realization, and make sure that it is assimilated without damage to

the subject." His dark expressionless eyes met Bryce's, and Bryce felt

the impact of them, and realized for the first time that there was the

same slight bitter off-hand smile on his own lips, and inwardly the

quiet ironical mood with the still clarity of a deep pool. His own

mood? He hefted the gun in his hand, feeling its weight and balance.

"You could have done that over the televiewer," he pointed out

dispassionately. "What is the average mortality, do you know?"

"Not high. It is only inexperience that is dangerous. If one can get

through one's first three or four cases, it's safe enough."

Looking back over the past days it was quite clear that Pierce had

control over his emotions. Any emotion Pierce chose him to feel he

would feel. It remained to be seen how much that could influence what

he was going to do. The dark-skinned young man stood before the desk

casually and answered questions with a slight restrained smile that

set the wry irony of both their minds.

A man does what he wants. That is freedom, but what he wanted could be

controlled apparently. A man _is_ what he wants. But what he wanted

could be changed. How easy had it been to change him. Bryce tried

himself with a thought of the power and glory of rule, the reign and

mastery of space--a goal that had warmed his thoughts for many years.

He didn't want it.

There was a numbness where there should have been emotion, and all he

could feel for his loss was the resignation and the faint bitter humor

permitted him by Pierce's smile. Watching that smile he shifted the

heavy little gun in his hand, turning it over casually, feeling its

familiar weight and the texture of its surfaces.

He spoke gently. "If you don't mind my asking, have you passed through

your first three cases yet?"

"You are my first," said Roy Pierce, whom he had trusted. "I'm afraid

I was clumsy."

"Oh--you did all right." Bryce shot him then, placing the bullet

carefully in the pit of his stomach where it would hurt. That was for

doing well. For justice. No man has the right to meddle in another

man's mind.

Pierce had been starting to speak. He swayed back a half step with a

flicker of change crossing his face then stood steady and smiling

again. That brief grimace touched Bryce's nerves with a sensation that

was like the jangle of something heavy dropped inside a piano, a sound

he had heard once. But the numbness did not lift from his feelings. He

was still smiling. The third bullet would be between the eyes.

The words were low and rapid but clear.

Bryce did not listen. "This is for doing a good job," he said,

overriding the other voice with his own, and pulled the trigger again,

placing the slug slightly lower this time, in the belly, where if it

entangled in one of the spinal plexus it could hurt past belief.

Pierce swayed slightly. His face went to the clay-blue color that

comes to dark-skinned races when they pale. Bleeding inside somewhere,

and already dead unless he were given help, Bryce figured.

For a moment Bryce saw something like effort in the dark unreadable

eyes. Then suddenly Pierce smiled, his young face disarmingly innocent

and merry. "Oh, come on, Bryce, it's not that serious. Be a good

sport. You don't want to--"

Suddenly Bryce saw the situation as the sheerest humor, a sort of

lunatic farce for the laughter of some cosmic joker. He swung the

gunsights up towards the smiling face. Amusement bubbled in his blood

and he heard himself laugh--heard it with a grim secondary amusement.

"The joke's on you," he said, and pulled the trigger, then laughed

again. The joke was on him.

He had missed. He had missed at a distance of three feet. Yet his hand

was rock-steady. Pierce's control had him. His laughter stopped as the

humor in Pierce's attitude faded down again to the small wry smile

that had been there from the beginning.

Bryce had not lost. He had only to wait a little and he had won.

Unless Pierce could use his control to force him to call help. He set

himself to resist and not to listen. There was not long to go. The

expressionless dark eyes that held his were beginning to widen

slightly in an effort of sight that meant that a private darkness was

closing in on the psychotherapist. The rumble of distant rockets

seemed louder, covering his fading voice. "It's your choice, Bryce. I

give it to you. You won't want this later--Bryce--but don't--hunger to

undo. It is payment enough for all--times like this--that you

change--and do not--want--them any--again--" Pierce pulled in a

strangling breath, swaying more visibly. "Gun," he whispered, reaching

out in Bryce's direction, his eyes going sightless.

Bryce handed him the magnomatic, and watched as Pierce fumbled his

hands over it, putting his prints on it blindly, his knees bending.

When he fell, Bryce picked up the phone and called Emergency. The

emergency squad would be cruising around in the halls somewhere

nearby, looking for the source of the three radio notes that had told

them that a gun was fired.

* * * * *

"That was the last I saw of him," the young man stopped talking and

looked pleased with himself.

Donahue drained his drink irritably and put it on the bar that had

been set up on the ceiling when the Gs went off. It clung

magnetically. "Make it the same, please." He turned to Roy Pierce,

floating beside him. "Stop needling me, man, finish the story. The way

you tell it, I don't know what you did, how you did it, or even

whether you died or not."

"Oh, I died," said Roy Pierce. "But they revived me," he added.

"Good! I'm glad to hear that!" said Donahue more cheerfully, wondering

suddenly just how extensively he was being kidded. "For a moment

there you had me worried. Now explain about this treatment."

"It's called soul eating," explained the dark-skinned, straight-haired

boy, "I don't think you could do it."

Donahue thought that information over carefully. "Maybe not. How's it

done?"

"In the tribes of my people the soul is supposed to be an invisible

double who walks at your side, protecting you and speaking silently to

your mind. Its face is the face that looks out of mirrors and up from

pools at you, and the shadow that walks on the ground beside you.

Evildoers, after they had spoken to a Manoba, would say that their

reflections were gone. Our family was called The Eaters of Souls, and

all the tribes were afraid of us for nine hundred miles around."

"So am I," said Donahue compactly. "As my Yiddish grandmother on my

mother's side would say, it sounds from werewolves."

"I can explain it."

"No magic?"

"Look," said the youth tersely, "Do I want to get kicked out of the

FNMA? What if I had sat in a jungle circle loaded to the ears with

herbs and spells, with the drums of my cousins throbbing around me,

and learned the best and subtlest ways of my technique back in time

looking through the eyes of my great grandfather, or conversing with

his ghost. Do you think I would say so?"

"No," Donahue admitted. He edged away a little.

The youth spoke gloomily. "Rapport and intensified empathy is

something you learn by exposing yourself to mirrors. The technique is

published, known and accepted among psychologists, but most of them

just don't try. It backfires too easily, and it takes too high a level

of skill. It originated with my family." The youth spoke even more

gloomily. "What I do is obvious enough if I make it so. It's simply

prior mimicry. I watch the trend of what goes on in his thoughts, and

express approximately what he is feeling and thinking a little before

he does. So that presently, subconsciously he is depending on me to

tell him what he thinks and how he feels.

"I was his mirror, his prior mirror. I am a clear, expressive

underplaying actor as an actor, and each shade of reaction is separate

and unmistakable. The subconscious is not rational, but it generalizes

from regularities that the conscious mind never has the subtlety to

notice. It saw me consistently representing its own internal

reactions, hour after hour in every situation more clearly than Bryce

ever saw himself express anything in a mirror, and more steadily than

he ever saw any mirror. The subconscious then associated the inside

emotion with the corresponding outside image for each one. I became

Bryce's subconscious self image. When he thinks of doing anything, the

image in the imagination that does it is not himself, it is me. This

can cause considerable mental confusion."

"It should!" Donahue agreed fervently.

"I put him in new places and situations where he was unsure and I was

sure, so that when I diverged from mirroring him, he gave me the lead

and mirrored me. One of us had to be the originator and the other the

reflection, but now it was reversed. He did not fight it

subconsciously because the results were pleasant. I kept the lead and

led him a mental dance through thoughts and reactions he had never had

before, in a personality pattern completely foreign to his own, one

that I wanted him to have. I hadn't been hired for that, but I had

time to pass before I could untangle that UT problem, and I wanted to

do it for him. The mirror link was complete the first day, but I'm

afraid the extra days made it indelible. He'll always be me in his

mind, and mirrors will never look right to him."

* * * * *

"It's so simple, it's obvious," said Donahue with disappointment. "It

doesn't sound like magic to me."

The youth was thoughtful, frowning. "Sometimes it doesn't to me

either. I wonder if the ghost of my grandfather was telling me the

right--"

"Forget the ghost of your grandfather," Donahue interrupted hastily.

On his few space trips he could never get used to this business of

floating eerily around in the air, and it seemed a poor time to talk

about ghosts. "What about Bryce Carter. What became of him? You know,"

he said defiantly, "I like his plans for organizing the Belt and

breaking UT. And, come to think of it, if I had been there when you

were interfering with _that_, I think I would have shot you myself."

"UT had only hired me to find the organizer of the smuggling ring and

persuade him to disband his organization in UT. I had done that. So

the third day, when I could walk, I left the hospital and went back to

Earth, and collected my fee for a job done. Many people had vanished

suddenly from their payrolls, and the crime statistics in some cities

had shown a startling lull. They knew I had done it, and so they paid

and were grateful." The dark youth shrugged. "I didn't feel I had to

tell them about Orillo. He tipped the police and started a rumor, and

there was evidence enough in the crime statistics of the months

before, when they were correlated with the distribution of branches of

Union Transport, though there was nothing to point at anyone in

particular except the ones who had disappeared."

Donahue remembered. "Sure that's that investigation of transportation

monopolies that raised such a stink last year. I saw part of it in

Congress."

Pierce handed him a travel folder. Gaudily illustrated, it advertised

the advantages of the C&O lines for space tourists. "Carter and

Orillo."

Donahue looked up, puzzled, "But this is the next step in what he

planned. I thought you changed him."

"Mahatma Gandhi would have followed out those plans," Pierce said with

a touch of grimness. "As you pointed out, they are attractive. But I

changed him. I won't give you personality dynamics, but if you want a

list of changes--He's married to Sheila Wesley, that's one change. And

instead of going home nights he roisters around in bars and

restaurants, talking to everybody, listening to everybody, liking them

all and enthusiastically making friends in carload lots. That's

another change. He doesn't look into mirrors because they make him

feel cross-eyed. That's because he unconsciously expects to see me in

the mirror. And he will organize the Belt and be president as he

planned. I won't stop him in that. The difference will be that he

won't want the power he'll get." Pierce said grimly, "A power-lusting

man can never be trusted with power: he goes megalomaniacal. Carter

was already halfway there. But he's safe from that now. He's going to

be given plenty of power, and see it only as responsibility, and not

want it. That's the only safe kind of man to have in a powerful

position."

"That--" said Donahue with great earnestness, "--is like sending a

poor damned soul to Kismetic paradise as a eunuch. You psychologists

are all complete sadists," he said lifting his drink. "I suppose

you've put something in my drink?"

"Absolutely nothing," Roy Pierce assured him, grinning. "Funny thing

was, when I got back to Earth that time, _I_ kept feeling cross-eyed

when I looked into a mirror. And my friends said I was not myself. If

I was not myself, I knew I must still be Bryce Carter. Things had

seemed different, and they had warned me that the technique sometimes

backfired when I was learning. So I called my uncle Mordand on the

televiewer--he's the head of the family, and he lives in an estate in

the jungle--and he--"

Donahue was fascinated again.

There was a different approach for each case, Pierce had found. It was

not ordinarily ethical to discuss any case history, but he knew with

great surety that Donahue could be trusted not to repeat what he was

being told. The only reason there wasn't something extra in his

current drink was because there had been something in the last drink.

This was case five.

* * * * *