The hurt, mostly, was in his brain, and he choked back a scream. He
could not think. And then the outer edge of the shield began to crumble.
He concentrated. Every muscle, bone, nerve. Veins stood out on his
neck. He fought.
He was dented by fire inside his head. Hot, lancing tongues of flame.
He tried to shrink away. He whimpered, groveled. His hands fumbled
uselessly.
She was nearly inside of him now. It was almost over. Her thoughts were
like fingers rending and tearing at quivering unprotected flesh.
He struggled hopelessly, retreating under a mental assault of
unendurable ferocity. His outer memory was ripped away, a section of
his childhood vanished forever.
And then there was desperation in the assault wave. He could feel
her trying to shake off an attempt to breach her concentration. He
stiffened, relaxed, arched his body, struggled with her.
Her attack suddenly crumbled into a distracted muddle. Her
concentration had been shattered.
His mind was trembling jelly, creamed with throbbing pain. But he could
resist now, and slowly he forced her out.
"I'll be back!" she lashed at him. And the hate in the thought was
alive. "I'll kill you for this!" Then her thoughts began slowly to fade
away and her mind shield came down.
Parr shook with every muscle.
"Buddy. Buddy," someone was saying, shaking his shoulder. "You sick,
huh?"
He struggled to his knee twisting his head back and forth, trying to
regroup his memories. The sear places were vacant, empty, part of
himself cut cleanly away. Immediate memories not yet stored and filed
seemed to be floating free, unassociated--too widely spread to have
been cut out, not too widely spread to have been mixed and shuffled. He
was panting as he struggled with them, capturing them, tying them down,
ordering them.
Then he began to vomit.
"You drink too much? Hey, buddy, you drink too much? I guess you drink
too much, maybe?"
* * * * *
Understanding--half understanding--came with the words. He scrabbled up
the wall until he was erect. His back pressed against the vertical tile
for support. He turned and staggered from the stinking rest room, his
hands forcing clumsily against the walls.
In the short hallway he could hear voices.
"And when he slumped over...."
"She just sat there like she was _thinking_...."
"You see the cop shake her?"
"I thought she was gonna hit him with the ash tray."
"Well, they sure hauled her outta here!"
Parr staggered back into the night club. Eyes turned to stare at him.
His head spun in nausea. He began to move leadenly toward the exit.
There was a police officer in his path.
The officer reached out to stop him, and he tried to shake the hand
away from his shoulder. He tried to think, to reactivate his trained
responses, knowing that he would have trouble with this man.
He muttered wordlessly.
The officer looked grim.
"Not drunk," Parr gasped. "Sick." The officer was incredulous.
Parr shook his head, and an explanation appeared from the basic
psychology of the natives: a coded scrap, death-fear.
"It ... it ... was horrible ... seeing him like that."
The officer hesitated.
"One minute he was alive, the next minute...."
"Yeah. Yeah. You better get a cab, buddy."
"Fresh air. I'll be all right, with fresh air."
Suddenly sympathetic, the officer helped him up the stairs.
Once outside the wave of sickness began to recede. Parr waited
unsteadily while the officer signaled for a cab.
As he got in the cab he whispered, "Drive."
The driver looked suspiciously at his fare, but the policeman said,
"He's sick, that's all. He's just sick."
The driver grunted, meshed gears.
"Where to, Mister?"
"Just drive," Parr said tonelessly, rolling down the window until he
felt air hitting his face. He lay back against the seat cushions.
* * * * *
Balloon-like, memories floated, rose, fell. He struggled with them.
Drifting away, his hotel's name. Before he lost it, he bent forward,
muttered it at the driver.
The Oholo--a female, he knew now--suddenly whispered in his mind from a
distance: "You killed the wrong one, didn't you?" He struggled with his
mind shield in terror, finally got it set against her. He shivered.
At the hotel, he stumbled from the cab, started in.
"Hey, Mister, what about me?"
"Eh?"
"Money, Mister. Come on, pay up!"
He fumbled at his wallet, found a bill, handed it over.
In his room at last, he peeled off his suit, his underclothes.
He lay prone on the coverlette.
After hours, or what seemed hours, his mind was stable enough for hate.
He lay in the darkness hating her. Even above the instinctive fear he
hated her.
He tossed in fever thinking of after the invasion when she would be
captured. The last of the sickness ebbed away. His thoughts adjusted,
found more and more stability.
Slowly he drifted toward sleep which would heal up the confusions. As
he hovered in the dark of near sleep, he felt a wash of mental assault
from too far away to be effective. Her thoughts tapped at his shield
and he dissolved it partly to let a little defiance flash out.
"I'll get you!" she answered coldly.
And after that, he slept, healing.
* * * * *
He awoke, automatically assessing the damage. It was less than he had
expected. Sleep had resolved it into tiny confused compartments.
And he knew how hard it would be to keep up his shield for four weeks.
There was fatigue on it already.
Then, too, there was the pressure.
A gentle insistent pressure. As if to say, "I'm here." He remembered
how strong Lauri's mind was and he knew that she would be able to hold
the pressure longer than he could hold the shield. Once, in training
he had shielded for nearly thirteen days--but now, under the sapping
of his energy by physical activity, by the multiple administrative
problems, by the pressure itself....
He shook his head savagely.
He looked at his suit across the edge of the bed. He shuddered with the
memory of his sickness and reached for the phone to order new clothing.
And the pressure. He was going to have to learn to get used to it.
Later, he reported to the Ship, his voice fumbling and hesitant.
The answer crackled back. "She's alerted the others, you idiot! We
picked up her message. There's four more of them down there."
Parr tried to think of an excuse, knowing how pointless it would be
even to offer one.
"You should have used your head," the Ship continued. "What made you
think the Oholo was necessarily male?"
"I ... I don't know. I just did."
"You know what happened on Zelta when an advanceman was careless? You
want that to happen here?"
"I...."
On Zelta? He knew it should be familiar to him. He cursed inwardly,
reaching for other memories, to see how many he had lost.... A
sentence, unbidden, flashed across his mind: "Never sell an Oholo
short." It was what someone had told him once. "They think differently
than you do." How, he pondered confusedly, could they expect him to
think like an Oholo?
"I can't think like an Oholo," he said tonelessly.
"You could.... Never mind."
"I could? Listen, how can they be thinking, to leave a flank like this
unprotected? Why didn't they take this planet into protective custody
long ago? How can you _think_ like that? They aren't logical. How could
I know they'd let a woman...."
"Parr!" the Ship ordered sharply.
Parr gulped. "Sorry."
"Insubordination on your record."
Parr clicked off the comset.
Damn! he thought angrily.
There was still the annoying pressure on his mind. "Damn you!" he
thought without lowering his shield. "Damn you!" he thought again,
dissolving enough of the shield to let the thought escape.
She did not answer.
There was a knock at the door.
A man with his suit.
* * * * *
It was almost ten o'clock when Parr arrived at the warehouse. The
windows were alive with sunshine, and through them he could see the
freshly cleaned interior.
The men with the furniture were waiting, the driver angry at the delay,
his assistant indifferent. Already there was a line of job applicants
who shifted uneasily, eyes turned curiously upon Parr as he crossed and
unlocked the warehouse doors.
Parr, one hand resting on the knob, said to the delivery man, "Bring
the stuff inside."
The driver growled and picked up a clip board from the seat. "I gotta
bill here, doc. You wanna pay before I haul the stuff out?" He held out
the clip board, jerking it savagely for Parr's attention.
Parr glanced at the sum. He reached for his wallet. One by one he
removed the bills and handed them over to the driver. When he had met
the amount there were only two bills remaining.
"Now take them inside."
"Okay, doc."
Parr went immediately to the roof. The shed had been knocked down as he
had ordered, and the chute had been installed.
The two packages were lying at the top of the chute. The bundle of
money and the sample, dummy parcel--both night deposited from the Ship.
He picked them up.
Walking down the stairs, he peeled away the wrapper from one bundle,
exposing green sheaves of currency. Back on the ground floor he put the
stacks of bills on the newly arrived desk, and the dummy parcel in the
drawer. He took one of the chairs, carried it to the desk and sat down.
He looked toward the door.
"You, there! At the head of the line! Come here." He was careful of his
accent, realizing the necessity of impressing the waiting workers. He
was pleased to find the accent near perfect.
The woman, frail and elderly, came forward hesitantly. "My name is
Anne, sir."
"All right," he said, reaching for a bill from the top sheaf. "I forgot
to bring a pen and paper. Take this and go get some. You may keep the
change, and there'll be another bill when you get back."
Her eyes widened. "Yes, sir." She held out a wrinkled hand.
He did not need to glance toward the door again to know that an initial
and important impression had been established.
After she had gone, Parr leaned back in the chair and said to the other
applicants, "You may come in now."
They shuffled inside.
* * * * *
Parr watched them settle into chairs. As he did so, he was aware of
_her_, Lauri, holding the pressure steady on his mind, and memories of
last night came back. Concentrating away from them he tried to analyze
his feelings toward the natives. He found a mixture of contempt and
indifference.
"I'm going to say this only once," he announced crisply. "I will expect
you to inform any late comers. When I have finished I will interview
each of you."
He balanced his hands before him on the rim of the desk, holding them
steady. He looked around at the waiting faces. He let his mind relax,
and the speech--it had been graven on his brain in the Ship--came
bubbling to the surface. He searched forward along it, and he found it
to be complete, untouched by his contact with the Oholo. He wrinkled
his forehead and began, seeking to give the impression that each word
was being carefully considered.
"I intend to hire some of you to help me sort and load packages of
promotional literature. Those hired will be paid five dollars an hour."
They shuffled unbelievingly. "Yeah, but when, Mister?"
Parr's mind dipped for information. "Whenever you wish to. At the
beginning of every day. Will that be satisfactory?"
The listeners twisted uncomfortably, embarrassed by their doubt. "Now
you're talkin'," the original critic said.
Parr cleared his throat heavily for effect. "The work day may be as
long as fourteen hours, depending on the circumstances."
No questions, now.
"The literature will come already packaged and labeled. It will be
delivered to the roof by helicopter, and your job will be to sort it
and transfer it to trucks." He looked them over. "I will need you for
approximately three weeks."
The pressure was still on his mind, not demanding, merely present. He
writhed at it inwardly. Outwardly he was calm, his voice undisturbed.
"Hey, Mister," another of them said. "I'd like to get somethin'
straight right now. You ain't havin' us to handle no explosives or
somethin' dangerous like that, are you?"
It was an objection Parr had been prepared for. Scarcely thinking, he
bent to the drawer and picked up the dummy parcel. He put it on the
desk top.
"There is no danger. You will need no special instructions save to
handle as you would normal mail. I have a sample package here." He bent
over and stripped off a section of wrapping paper to permit them to see
a stack of printed material.
* * * * *
He rippled the dummy sheets with his thumb. "The nature of the
advertising is secret for the moment, but," he lied, "this is what it
looks like." He returned the bundle to the desk. "It's just paper."
That was true, and he smiled faintly as he imagined the amount of
disorganization mere paper would be able to accomplish. For an instant,
the uncertain emotion returned as he thought of the invasion fleet,
rushing communicationless through hyperspace for its rendezvous with
Earth.
"There is, of course, a reason for the high wages," he said, the words
coming automatically. "We want to hit the market before--ah--" and the
phrase and the hesitation were memorized, calculated for effect, "a
competitor."
He pursed his lips speculatively. "Naturally we want to avoid
publicity. Anyone violating this requirement will be dismissed
immediately."
He seemed to study the faces individually, looking for spies from the
rival company.
"I will probably not require you for more than a few hours the first
several days. In that event, you will receive pay for a full eight hour
day."
He stopped talking, and the applicants' faces were excited.
"As soon as the woman returns with the paper, I will begin the
interviews. Those of you whom I hire will receive a fifty dollar bonus
before you leave the building."
When she returned, Parr interviewed. His questions were perfunctory.
By noon, he had enough workers, and he had one of them hang out a
penciled sign reading: "Jobs Filled." After that, he closed the doors
and assembled them before him.
"If you'll form a line, I'll give you your bonuses. Give me your names
to check against my list. You will sign a sheet of paper here in
receipt. I've hired enough people to take care of any of you who do not
choose to come back tomorrow, so there will be no further vacancies and
no chance to collect a second bonus.... Report for work at nine o'clock
tomorrow morning. At that time, I'll have someone here to fill out the
necessary government employment forms for each of you."
Sitting at his desk, he began to count out the bills into neat little
stacks. After each applicant had signed, he pushed a stack toward him.
After that he spent the afternoon making further arrangements with
truckers and locating a woman to handle the employment records of his
workers. He even had time to purchase some extra clothing and buy a few
personal articles.
As night fell, while he lay comfortably naked on his hotel bed, he felt
the pressure on his mind begin to fluctuate subtly.