[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Galaxy Magazine August 1960.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
He was the most powerful man in the world.
He could make anybody do anything--and yet
he was the slave of a mad criminal's mind!
In a beer hall on the eighty-first floor of the Hotel Mark Twain
fourteen men held an adolescent girl prisoner.
"I'll go up there by myself," Sordman said.
He was a big young man with sloppy black hair and a red beard. His
fashionably ornate clothes covered the body of a first class Talent.
Disciplined training, plus drugs and his natural gift, had made him
one of the four truly _developed_ psionic adepts in the world. With
drugs and preparation, he could command the entire range of psi powers.
Without drugs, he could sense the emotions and sometimes the general
thought patterns of the people near him.
"We'd better go with you," Lee Shawn said. "There's an awful lot of
fear up there. They'll kill you as soon as they learn you're a Talent."
She was a lean, handsome woman in her early forties. A
lawyer-politician, she was the Guggenheim Foundation's lobbyist. For
years she had fought against laws to outlaw the development of Talent.
"Thanks, Mama, but I think I'd better go alone."
Sordman, though he didn't tell her, knew that symbolically Lee saw him
as the tree and herself as the rain and the earth.
"Go ahead and laugh," George Aaron said. "But you'll need big medicine
to fight that fear. Lee's symbolic place in your psyche is important."
"I've thought it over," Sordman said. "I'll depend on God and nothing
else."
He felt George's mind squirm. As a psychologist, George accepted
Sordman's Zen-Christian faith because Sordman needed it to control the
powers of his Talent.
But George himself was a confirmed skeptic.
The men up there were scared. Sordman knew he would die if he lost
control. But Lee and George were scared, too. Even now, standing in the
park in early morning, their fear battered at his mind.
He thought about swimming in the ocean. He made his skin remember
salted wind. The real Atlantic, a mile away, helped the illusion.
It was the right symbol. He felt his friends calm.
"Let him go," George said.
"He's manipulating us," Lee said.
"I know. But let him go."
Sordman laughed. Lee bent and tore a clump of grass from the earth.
"Take this, Andy."
"Thank you."
It was wet with dew. He held it to his nose and smelled the dirt and
grass. Two things kept him from destruction by his own Talent. He loved
the physical world and he believed in God.
"I'll call you if I need you," he said.
"Be careful," George said. "Many people need you."
"You've got status," Lee said. "Use it. You're dealing with the kind of
people it impresses."
* * * * *
The hotel stood three hundred stories tall. Surrounded by a
five-mile-square park, connected to the major coastal cities by high
speed vacuum tubes, the building was a small town. Eighty-five thousand
people lived within its walls.
Sordman rode an empty elevator. Through the glass sides he studied the
deserted halls and shops.
They were frightened here. Murder had been done. A Talent had
destroyed two men. _Lord, protect us from the malice of a witch._
The eighty-first was a commercial floor. He got off the vator and
walked down the main corridor. A man watched him through the door of a
bar. A girl in a blue kimono froze behind the counter of a pastry shop.
He stopped before the doors of the beer hall. He dropped to his knees
and prayed.
Once the brave leader walked into a panicky group and it was enough
to _look_ calm. Now he had to _be_ calm. It was not enough to square
the shoulders, walk erect, speak in a confident tone. Sordman's true
emotions radiated from him every moment. Those within range felt them
as their own.
He drove thoughts like knives into the deepest corners of his mind. He
begged release from fear. He prayed his God to grant him love for the
frightened men within.
He stood erect and squared his shoulders. His bulb-shouldered morning
coat was grey as dawn. He thought a well loved formula, a Buddhist
prayer from the Book of Universal Worship. _All life is transitory.
All people must suffer and die. Let us forgive one another._
He roared his name and titles at the door.
"I am Talent Andrew Sordman, Fellow for Life of the Guggenheim
Foundation, by Senate Act Protector of the People! By the laws of our
country, I ask the right to enter."
Silence.
"I am Talent Andrew Sordman, Fellow--"
"_Go away, witch!_"
Without drugs and preparation, Sordman needed visual contact to sense
emotions. But he didn't need Talent to sense the hatred in that voice.
He pictured a rough block of stone.
Using a basic skill, he kept the picture in his mind as he opened the
door and planned his words.
"I have taken no drugs and made no preparation. You have nothing to
fear. I'm your Protector and I've come to talk."
* * * * *
The beer hall was large and gloomy. The butts and ashes of the night's
smoking filled its trays. Fourteen men watched him come. Half a dozen
had hunting rifles.
Hunched over, weeping, a thin, dark-haired girl sat beneath an
unshaded light. A shiver of anger crossed his brain.
"Kill the witch!" a young man shouted.
_Lord, grant me love...._
His eyes focused on the rifle bearers. One of them half-raised his gun.
Then the butt clumped on the floor.
"You're bewitched!" the young man said. "I told you not to let him in."
"I've come to talk," Sordman said. "Who's the leader of your group?"