Juan Pedro de Cadiz picked up the whole thought-process easily.
"The girl--I'm sorry," he said. "But the other three--of us all, I
think, they deserve this."
"Juan!" came another thought-voice. "Have our newcomers awakened?"
"Just one of them, my sweet," replied the Spaniard. "Sonali, may I
present Mr. David Houston. Mr. Houston, the lovely Sonali Siddhartha."
"Juano has a habit of jumping to conclusions, David," said the girl.
"He's never even seen me, and I'm sure that after three weeks of being
locked in this prison whatever beauty I may have had has disappeared."
"Your thoughts are beautiful, Sonali," said Juan Pedro, "and with us,
that is all that counts."
"It is written," said a third voice, "that he who disturbs the slumber
of his betters will wake somebody up. You people are giving me dreams,
with your ceaseless mental chatter."
"Ah!" the Spaniard said. "Mr. Matsukuo, may I--"
"I heard, Romeo, I heard," said the Hawaiian. "An ex-cop, eh? I wonder
if I like you? I'll take a few thousand years to think it over; in the
meantime, you may treat me as a friend."
"I'll try to live down my reputation," said Houston.
* * * * *
It was an odd feeling. Physically, he was alone. Around him, he could
see nothing but the blackness of space and the glitter of the stars. He
knew that the sun must be shining on the back of his own personal
asteroid, but he couldn't see it. As far as his body was concerned,
there was nothing else in the universe but a chunk of pitted rock and a
set of chains.
But mentally, he felt snug and warm, safe in the security of good
friends. He felt--
"David! David! Help me! Oh, David, David, David!"
It was Dorrine, coming up from her slumber. Like a crashing blare of
static across the neural band, her wakening mind burst into sudden
telepathic activity.
* * * * *
Gently, Houston sent out his thoughts, soothing her mind as he had
soothed Harris's mind weeks before. And he noticed, as he did it, that
the other three were with him, helping. By the time Dorrine was fully
awake, she was no longer frightened or panicky.
"You're wonderful people," she thought simply, after several minutes.
"To one so beautiful, how else could we be?" asked Juan Pedro.
"Ignore him, Dorrine," said Sonali, "he tells me the same thing."
"But not in the same way, _amiga_!" the Spaniard protested. "Not in the
same way. The beauty of your mind, Sonali, is like the beauty of a
mountain lake, cool and serene; the beauty of Dorrine is like the beauty
of the sun--warm, fiery, and brilliant."
"By my beard!" snorted Matsukuo. "Such blather!"
"I'll be willing to wager my beautiful _hacienda_ in the lovely
countryside of Aragon against your miserable palm-leaf _nipi_ shack on
Oahu that you have no beard," said Juan Pedro.
"Hah!" said Matsukuo; "that's all I need now--Castles in Spain."
It was suddenly dizzying for Houston. Here were five people, doomed to
slow, painful death, talking as though there were nothing to worry
about. Within minutes, each had learned to know the others almost
perfectly.
It was more than just the words each used. Talking aloud helped focus
the thoughts more, but at the same time, thousands of little, personal,
fringe ideas were present with the main idea transmitted in words.
Houston had talked telepathically to Dorrine hundreds of times, but
never before had so much fine detail come through.
Why? Was there something different about space that made mental
communication so much more complete?
"No, not that, I think," said Matsukuo. "I believe it is because we have
lost our fear--not of death; we still fear death--but of betrayal."
That was it. They knew they were going to die, and soon. They had
already been sentenced; nothing further could frighten them. Always
before, on Earth, they had kept their thoughts to themselves, fearing to
broadcast too much, lest the Normals find them out. The little, personal
things that made a human being a living personality were kept hidden
behind heavy mental walls. The suppression worked subconsciously, even
when they actually wanted to communicate with another Controller.
But out here, there was nothing to fear on that score. Why should they,
who were already facing death, be afraid of anything now?
So they opened up--wide. And they knew each other as no group of human
beings had ever known each other. Every human being has little faults
and foibles that he may be ashamed of, that he wants to keep hidden from
others. But such things no longer mattered out here, where they had
nothing but imminent death and the emptiness of space--and each other.
Physically, they were miserable. To be chained in one position, with
very little room to move around, for three weeks, as Sonali had been,
was torture. Sonali had been there longer than the others--for three
days, there had been no one but herself out there in the loneliness of
space.
But now, even physical discomfort meant little; it was easy to forget
the body when the mind was free.
"What of the others?" Dorrine asked. "Where are the ones who were
sentenced before us?"
* * * * *
Houston thought of Robert Harris. What had happened to the young
Englishman?
"Space is big," said Juan Pedro. "Perhaps they are too far away for our
thoughts to reach them--or perhaps they are already dead."
"Let's not talk of death." Sonali Siddhartha's thought was soft. "We
have so many things to do."
"We will have a language session," said Juan Pedro. "_Si?_"
Matsukuo chuckled. "Good! Houston, until you've tried to learn Spanish,
Hindustani, Arabic, Japanese, and French all at once, you don't know
what a language session is. We--"
The Hawaiian's thought was suddenly broken off by a shrieking burst of
mental static.
The effect was similar to someone dropping a handful of broken glass
into an electric meat grinder right in the middle of a Bach cantata.
It was Sager, coming out of his coma.
Almost automatically, the five contacted his mind to relax him as he
awoke. They touched his mind--and were repelled!
_Stay out of my mind!_
With almost savage fury, the still half-conscious Sager hurled thoughts
of hatred and fear at the five minds who had tried to help him. They
recoiled from the burst of insane emotion.
"Leave him alone," Houston thought sharply. "He's a tough fighter."
* * * * *
At first, Sager was terrified when he learned what had happened to him.
Then the terror was mixed with a boiling, seething hatred. A hatred of
the Normals who had done this to him, and an even more terrible hatred
for Houston, the "traitor."
The very emptiness of space itself seemed to vibrate with the surging
violence of his hatred.
"I know," Houston told him, "you'd kill me if you could. But you can't,
so forget it."
Not even the power of that hatred could touch Houston, protected as he
was by the combined strength of the other four sane telepaths. He was
comparatively safe.
Sager snarled like a trapped animal. "You're all insane! Look at you!
The four of you, siding with a man who has betrayed us to the Normals!
He--"
What Sager thought of Houston couldn't be put into words, and if it
could no sane person would want to repeat the mad foulness in those
words.
"This is unbearable!" Sonali thought softly.
"That's not a mind," said Dorrine, "it's a sewer."
"I suggest," said Matsukuo, "that we do a little probing. Let's find out
what makes this thing tick."
"Stay out of my mind!" Sager screamed. "You have no right!"
"You seemed to think you had the right to probe into the helpless minds
of Normals," said Juan Pedro coldly. "We should show you how it feels."
"But they're just animals!" Sager retorted. "I am a Controller!"
"You're a madman," said Matsukuo. "And we must find out what makes you
mad."
Synchronizing perfectly, five minds began to probe at the walls that
Sager had built up around his personality. And as they probed, Sager
retreated behind ever thicker walls, howling in hatred and anguish.
On and on went the five, needling, pressing at every weak spot, trying
to break him down. Outnumbered and overpowered, it seemed as though
Sager had no chance.
But his insanity was stronger than they suspected. The barriers he built
were harder, more opaque, and more impenetrable than any they had ever
seen. The five pushed on, anyway, but their advance slowed tremendously.
Then, mentally, there was a sudden silence.
_Sager?_ they thought.
No answer.
"That's finished it," said Houston. "He's retreated so far behind those
mental barriers that he's cut himself off completely."
"He's not dead, is he?" Dorrine asked.
"Dead?" said Juan Pedro. "Not in the sense you mean. But I think he is
catatonic now; he has lost all touch with the outside. He is as though
he were still drugged; he is physically helpless, and mentally blanked
out."
"There's one difference," Matsukuo said analytically. "And that is that,
although he has cut himself off from us and from the rest of the
universe, he is still conscious in some little, walled-in compartment of
his mind. He has no one there but himself--and that, I think, is damned
poor company."
* * * * *
They waited then. When Pederson awoke, they were ready for him. His
hatred took a slightly different form from Sager's, but the effect was
the same.
And so were the results when the five bore down on him.
Again they waited. Lasser was next.
At first, it looked as though Lasser would go the way of Sager and
Pederson, ending up as a hopelessly insane catatonic. Like his cohorts
before him, Lasser retreated under the full pressure of the
thought-probes of the five, building stronger and stronger walls.
But, quite suddenly, all his defenses crumbled. The mental barriers went
down, shattered and dissolving. Lasser's whole mind lay bare. Instead of
fighting and hating, Lasser was begging, pleading for help.
Lasser was not basically insane. His mind was twisted and warped, but
beneath the outer shell was a personality that had enough internal
strength to be able to admit that it was wrong and ask for help instead
of retreating into oblivion.
"This one--I think we can do something with," Matsukuo's thought
whispered.
* * * * *
Eight bodies, uncomfortable and pain-wracked, floated in space, chained
to tiny asteroids that drifted slowly in their orbits under the constant
pull of the sun. Two of them contained minds that were locked
irrevocably within prisons of their own building, sealed off forever
from external stimuli, but their suffering was the greater for all that.
The other six, chained though their limbs might be, had minds that were
free--free, even, of any but the most necessary of internal limitations.
Eight bodies, chained to eight lumps of pitted rock, spun endlessly in
endless space.
And then the ship came.
The flare of its atomic rocket could be seen for over an hour before it
reached the Penal Cluster. The six eyed it speculatively. Although only
two of them were facing the proper direction to see it with their
physical eyes, the impressions of those two were easily transmitted to
the other four.
"Another load of captives," whispered Juan Pedro de Cadiz. "How many
this time, I wonder?"
"How long have we been here?" asked Houston, not expecting any answer.
"Who knows?" It was Lasser. "What we need out here is a clock to tell us
when we'll die."
"Our oxygen tanks are our clocks," said Sonali. "And they'll notify us
when the time comes."
"I do believe you morbid-minded people are developing a sense of humor,"
said Matsukuo, "but I'm not sure I care for the style too much."
The flare of the rocket grew brighter as the decelerating ship
approached the small cluster of rocks. At last the ship itself took
form, shining in the eternal blaze of the sun. When the whiteness of the
rocket blaze died suddenly, the ship was only a few dozen yards from
Houston's own asteroid.
And then a mental voice came into the minds of the six prisoners.
"How do you feel, Controllers?"
Only Houston recognized that thought-pattern, but his recognition was
transmitted instantly to the others.
"_Reinhardt!_"
Hermann Reinhardt, Division Chief of the Psychodeviant Police, the one
man most hated and feared by Controllers, was himself a telepath!
"Naturally," said Reinhardt. "Someone had to take control of the
situation. I was the only one who was in a position to do it."
His thoughts were neither hard nor cold; it was almost as if he were one
of them--except for one thing. Only the words of his thoughts came
through; there were none of the fringe thoughts that the six were used
to in each other.
"That's true," thought Reinhardt. "You see, we have been at this a good
deal longer than you." Then he directed his thoughts at members of the
crew of the spaceship, but they could still be heard by the six
prisoners. "All right, men, get those people off those rocks. We have to
make room for another batch."
The airlock in the side of the ship opened, and a dozen spacesuited men
leaped out. The propulsion units in their hands guided them toward the
prison asteroids.
"Give them all anaesthetic except Sager and Pederson," Reinhardt
ordered. "They won't need it." Then, with a note of apology, "I'm sorry
we'll have to anaesthetize you, but you've been in one position so long
that moving you will be rather painful. We have to get you to a hospital
quickly."
The minds of the six prisoners were frantically pounding questions at
the PD chief, but he gave them no answer. "No; wait until you're
better."
The spacesuited rescuers went to the "back" of each asteroid and
injected sleep-gas into the oxygen line that ran from the tank to the
spacesuit of the prisoner.
Houston could smell the sweetish, pungent odor in his helmet. Just
before he blacked out, he hurled one last accusing thought at Reinhardt.
"_You're_ the one who's been framing Controllers!"
"Naturally, Houston," came the answer. "How else could I get you out
here?"
* * * * *
Houston woke up in a hospital bed. He was weak and hungry, but he felt
no pain. As he came up from unconsciousness, he felt a fully awake mind
guiding him out of the darkness.
It was Reinhardt.
"You're a tough man, Houston," he said mentally. "The others won't wake
up for a while yet."
He was sitting on a chair next to the bed, holding a smouldering
cigarette in one hand. He looked strange, somehow, and it took Houston a
moment to realize that there was a smile on that broad, normally
expressionless face.
Houston focussed his eyes on the man's face. "I want an explanation,
Reinhardt," he said aloud. "And it better be a damned good one."
"I give you free access to my mind," Reinhardt said. "See for yourself
if my method wasn't the best one."
* * * * *
Houston probed. The explanation, if not the best, was better than any
Houston could have thought of.
When the hatred of the normal-minded people of Earth had been turned
against the Controllers because of the actions of a few megalomaniacs,
it had become obvious that legal steps had to be taken to prevent mob
violence.
It had been Reinhardt himself who had suggested the Penal method to the
UN government. At first, he had simply thought of it as a method to
keep the Controllers alive until he could think of something better. But
when he had discovered, by accident, what a small group of Controllers,
alone in space, could do, he had set up the present machinery.
As soon as a Controller was spotted, a careful frame-up was arranged.
Then, when several had been found, they were arrested in quick
succession and sent to the asteroids.
Always and invariably, they had done what Houston's group had done--the
sane or potentially sane ones had improved themselves tremendously,
while the megalomaniacs had lapsed into catatonia.
"Why couldn't it be done on Earth?" Houston asked.
"We tried it," Reinhardt said. "It didn't work. Safe, on Earth,
surrounded by Normals, a Controller still feels the hatred around him.
He can't open his mind completely. Only the certain knowledge of
impending death, and a complete freedom from the hatred of Normals can
free the mind.
"And that's why you couldn't be told beforehand; if you knew you were
going to be rescued, you wouldn't open up."
Houston nodded. It made sense. "Where are we now?" he asked.
"Antarctica," said Reinhardt. "We've built an outpost here--almost
self-sufficient. When you're in better shape physically, I'll show you
around."
"Do you mean that everyone who's been arrested is here, in Antarctica?"
* * * * *
Reinhardt laughed. "No, not by a long shot. Most of us are back out in
civilization, searching for new, undiscovered Controllers, so that we
can frame them. And, of course, some of us--the insane ones--have died.
They will themselves to die when the going gets too tough."
"Searching for recruits? Then the Group that Dorrine was working for
was--"
Reinhardt shook his head. "No. They were going about it the wrong way,
just as you thought. We picked up the whole lot of them last week;
they're occupying the asteroids now."
"What do you do with the insane catatonics?"
"Put them under hibernene and keep them alive. We hope, someday, to
figure out a method of restoring their sanity. Until then, let them
sleep."
Houston narrowed his eyes. "How long have you known I was a Controller,
Reinhardt?"
The Prussian smiled. "Ever since you first tried to probe me.
Fortunately, my training enabled me to put up a shield that you couldn't
penetrate; I seemed like a Normal to you.
"I kept you on because I knew you'd be useful in cracking Lasser and his
gang when the time came. No one else could have done what you did that
night."
"Thanks," Houston said sincerely. "What's going to happen now? After I
get well, I mean."
"You'll do what the others have done. A little plastic surgery to change
your face a trifle, a little record-juggling to give you a new identity,
and you'll be ready to go back to work for the PD Police.
"If anyone recognizes you, it's easy to take over their minds just long
enough to make them forget. We allow that much Controlling."
"And then what?" Houston wanted to know. "What happens in the long run?"
"In a way," said Reinhardt, "your friend Sager was right. The
Controllers will eventually become the rulers of Earth. But not by force
or trickery. We must just bide our time. More and more of us are being
born all the time; the Normals are becoming fewer and fewer. Within a
century, we will outnumber them--we will be the Normals, not they.
"But they'll never know what's going on. The last Normal will die
without ever knowing that he is in a world of telepaths.
"By the time that comes about, we'll no longer need the Penal Cluster,
since Controllers will be born into a world where there is no fear of
non-telepaths."
"I wonder," Houston mused, "I wonder how this ability came about. Why is
the human race acquiring telepathy so suddenly?"
Reinhardt shrugged. "I can give you many explanations--atomic radiation,
cosmic rays, natural evolution. But none of them really explains it.
They just make it easier to live with.
"I think something similar must have happened a few hundred thousand
years ago, when Cro-Magnon man, our own ancestors, first developed true
intelligence instead of the pseudo-intelligence, the highly developed
instincts, of the Neanderthals and other para-men.
"Within a relatively short time, the para-men had died out, leaving the
Cro-Magnon, with his true intelligence, to rule Earth."
Reinhardt stood up. "Why is it happening? We don't know. Maybe we never
will know, any more than we know why Man developed intelligence." He
shrugged. "Perhaps the only explanation we'll ever have is to call it
the Will of God and let it go at that."
"Maybe that's the best explanation, after all," Houston said.
"Perhaps. Who knows?" Reinhardt crushed his cigarette out in a tray.
"I'll go now, and let you get some rest. And don't worry; I'll have you
notified as soon as Dorrine starts to come out of it."
"Thanks--Chief," Houston said as Reinhardt left the room.
David Houston lay back in his bed and closed his eyes.
For the first time in his life, he felt completely at peace--with
himself, and with the Universe.