"Yeah?" he asked, looking up from the magazine of undressed girls and overdressed fiction.
I probed out, struck into the center of his mind, fishing through the currents of thoughts there, seeking the fragments of scenery from his past and from the future he imagined for himself. I had not done this thing since I had been a child in the AC complex and they had made me do it in experiments. It was distasteful and painful, to me as well as to my victim. But I found the worst of his thoughts, the deepest id dreams which would horrify him and which would make him cringe with shame. The one I chose was of him and his eleven-year-old sister-a whip and a chain and all the horrors of sexual perversion those symbols represented. And I pushed them up into his conscious mind with such force that they became reality for him, so that he lost sight of me for only a split second and fell back, reeling, under the force of the ugliness which had welled up from the center of him.
Then I got out of there.
He was bent over the desk, clutching the corner of it, gagging, shaking his head, moaning to dispel the vision which he refused to believe could be his. I stepped forward, producing a pistol from my pocket, and struck him across the side of the head. He went down, hard, and stayed there. I wrestled him behind the desk, took off his jacket, ripped the arms loose, tied his ankles and wrists. I stuffed his handkerchief in his mouth, rolled the bulk of the jacket up, and tied the handkerchief in place.
And then I took his keys and opened the prisoner file, found her cell number. It was eight floors further down.
Committed to this insanity now, I used another of his keys to open the restricted elevator which led to the lower levels. I went down.
When the elevator doors opened again, there was another guard waiting, though this one was more alert than the first. He looked at me and saw that I had not come with an escort, even though I was obviously not a regular traveler in these halls. He unsnapped his holster with a clean, swift move, slipped fingers over the butt of his gun with the reactions of a trained fighter.
I pried open his mind and found his id.
I wallowed in it.
I dredged up a vision of his own basic blood lust, a gruesome, mad match that even he would never have known existed inside him. It involved his unvoiced, unrealized, unknown desire to-as an adolescent boy-rise up in the middle of the night and slaughter both his parents in their bed. There were spraying blood, harsh and strangled screams, terrified faces of two gentle people, the boy's hands wielding an ax whose blade gleamed wickedly in the thin light which streamed through the bedroom window from the iron street lamp beyond
When I got out of his head, he had dropped his pistol and had turned to the wall, where, screaming, spitting, on the verge of losing his sanity, he smashed his fists into unyielding, gray concrete. I clubbed him mercifully with one of my pistols. The vision would not return when he woke, and he would probably not even remember what had given him his fit. But knowing that didn't make me feel any more heroic.
When he was tied and gagged, I took the cell block keys from the desk and went after Melinda.
She was sitting in her cell; her reading lamp was on, and she was absorbed in some propaganda literature she was permitted to read. I rattled the key in the lock and swung the door open before she looked up. When she saw it was me, she let her mouth hang loose some while before closing it and taking a much needed breath.
"If I'm interrupting a good book, I'll come back later,"
I said, nodding at the propaganda.
She threw it down. "That drivel is really fascinating," she said. "The guy who writes it is either the biggest con man in existence or he believes it himself-in which case he has to be a mongoloid idiot, no question."
"Aren't you glad to see me?" I asked. "Aren't you going to hug and kiss the hero in your midst?"
"You can't be in my midst, because I'm only one person, not a multitude. Though this goddamned prison baggies do make me look like more than one woman."
She pulled at the uniform, shrugged. "You're here. I never expected you, don't know how you managed it, and doubt if we'll get back out. Like I said, the prison baggies here "
I pulled jeans, sweater, and thin windbreaker from under my overcoat, all of which I had secreted there before leaving her apartment. "Do me the honor of a striptease?" I asked.
She grinned, stripped without asking me to turn my back (which I would have refused to do anyway), and dressed in the clothes I had brought.
I felt every inch the hero, all the while my mind was yelling "Fool" at top volume.
As she pushed past me to leave the cell, she stood on her toes a moment and kissed me, then turned quickly away again. Before she could take two steps, I grabbed her and turned her around. What I thought I had seen was in her eyes: tears.
"Hey," I said, feeling the male stupidity that cannot cope with tears. "Hey." Really stupid.
"Let's go," she said.
"Something wrong?"
"I've been wondering if you were alive, wondering if even you were whether you would care enough to come for me."
"But of course-"
"Shush," she said, stopping the tears. "We haven't time for this, have we?"
We closed the cell door and locked it, went up and past the other cubbyholes. Each was separated from the other by cement walls, but the fronts were all bars through which we could see the occupants. None of them, however, seemed to care much about us.
We went up in the first elevator, passed the first and second unconscious guards. When the second elevator opened on the main ground floor corridor, we walked briskly into the lobby, pushed open the glass doors and breathed in the cold night air. No one in the lobby or at any of the work desks paid the least bit attention to us. I took Melinda's arm, and we walked down the steps-just in time to confront General Alexander Morsfagen and four young and dedicated men with guns in their hands!
"Good evening," he said, bowing to us.
The four men with guns did not bow.
"I do believe you're surprised, Mr. Kelly. I didn't expect to see your cool broken like that." But whether or not he expected it, he certainly did enjoy it. His face was split with a grin you seldom see outside of mental wards.
"Who is he?" Melinda asked.
"Morsfagen."
"The title too, please," he said. But he was not just being humorous. His voice was stiff and deadly beneath the surface delight.
"General Morsfagen," I told her.
"And you're under arrest, of course," he said.
The four guards advanced on us, efficient but somehow less wary than they had been at first. It would have been possible, perhaps, to use my two pistols on the lot of them. They did not seem to expect that I might be armed, and with both my hands in my pockets and wrapped around the sweat-slicked butts of the weapons, they might have bought it but good before they realized what was happening.
Might have.
But nothing is certain.
Besides, the back of my mind played with the memory of those flaming corpses on the beach, with the picture of the howler drivers screaming as they fell to sudden death.
I didn't want more blood on my hands.
I contemplated using my esp on them. But the problem was that I could only invade one mind at a time. I knew I could not work fast enough to incapacitate all of them before one of those four boys panicked and put a few rounds of hard steel into Melinda and me.
What had happened to the god?
What was this? Mere men overpowering me and outthinking me, me a god?
"This way, please," Morsfagen said.
We followed him.