Barbeau was definitely out to kill me now. No doubt about that. And Matthews was still working for him, as was the rest of the group…
The group… It was somehow the key. It had once included me, as much as I hated to think of it now. It also included Willy Boy, and Marie Melstrand. Cora? No, she’d never been involved. I really had met her for the first time on her Florida vacation. And Ann Strong? Very much so. There had been the four of us. Yes. Four of us with something in common…
We all had odd mental powers. I talked with machines, I possessed a form of human-to-computer telepathy. I could read their programs at a distance. Marie? Marie’s power was a force she could exert upon things. PK, they used to call it. While she could wreck a computer, she was incapable of reading it the way I could. Ann? Ann was a human-to-human telepath. She couldn’t read computers either, but she could both receive and transmit information, from and to other people—up to and including real-seeming visual impressions. And Willy Boy…? A kind of PK, I suppose, but not quite. His was a subtle form of physiological manipulation, working with matter and energy inside living systems exclusively.
How good were they? What were their limits? Another memory came through… Marie took great pride in her cooking, and she was good. I recalled that she’d had us all over for dinner on several occasions. Rather than fool with padded gloves or pot-holders, she had once, while seated at the table, levitated a huge tureen of steaming soup out in the kitchen, causing it to drift eerily into the dining room and settle to a perfect landing before us. I’d seen her spill a drink and freeze the droplets in midair, then cause them all to drift back into the glass without moistening anything nearby. The maximum mass she could affect…? Once, on a bet, she had raised Ann several feet above the floor and held her there for half a minute, but she was panting and sweating before the time was up, and she let her down kind of hard…
Old Willy Boy… The nearer you were to him the faster he could affect you. Sudden death within ten feet, a little slower out to twenty—thirty or forty feet caused him a lot more work, slowed him considerably. I’d say fifty feet was his absolute maximum, but that it might take him a quarter of an hour to get results at that range—strangely, the approximate radius of the larger tents he used to work in. Thinking about it, it occurred to me that I must now be one of the few people to have felt both his healing and his destroying touch. I recalled the morning after that drinking session at his place. I had sacked out on the sofa, and I awoke when I heard him moving around, cursing. My head was splitting. I got up and walked to his bathroom. He was in there gulping aspirins. He grinned at me. “You don’t look too good, boy,” he’d said. I told him to save a couple for me. “What for?” he answered, reaching out and tousling my hair. “Heal! Heal, you sinner!” I’d felt a sudden rush of blood to my head, my temples had throbbed for a moment and then all of the pain was gone. I felt fine. “I’m okay,” I said, surprised at my undeserved recovery. “Praise the Lord!” he replied, taking a final aspirin. “Why don’t you do it for yourself?” I said then. He’d shaken his head. “I can’t work it on me. My little cross in this vale of tears.” And that was all I knew about Willy Boy’s power.
Ann… Her ability did not seem to fall off with distance. She could have been sitting in a motel room down in the Keys causing me to see that serpent as we were landing in Philadelphia. Her weaknesses were at some other level, and I couldn’t recall them. She did have a thing about flowers, though. Reading their primitive life emanations somehow soothed her. She returned to them whenever she was troubled. They were so prominent in her mental life that they often colored—or perfumed, I suppose—her transmissions. And it seemed that she could also make you not see something that was indeed present.
The four of us, then—a team, a set of tools for Barbeau. We were the reason that Angra had outdistanced all the competition some years ago. I could steal data from anyone’s computer. And if it wasn’t there, Ann could pluck it from the minds that held it Marie could ruin experiments, cause accidents, set back anyone’s research project. And if some particular individual were really troublesome, a certain Southern gentleman might pass him on the street, sit near him in a theatre, eat at the same restaurant…
But could I be sure of the extent of everyone’s abilities now? Back at the airport lounge, Marie had made a comment about getting better at what she did. Had everyone’s powers continued to develop, to improve with the passage of time? An intangible. Impossible for me to estimate. Best to assume that they had. Give Matthews a few more feet, maybe, intensify Ann’s hallucinations, assume Marie can lift a bit more, hold it a little longer. I never knew her range. Greater than Willy Boy’s, nothing like Ann’s. That was all.
What about Barbeau himself? Had he some special power beyond simple ruthlessness and a keen intellect? I didn’t know. If he did, he either kept it well-hidden or I was missing that memory.
And where was Cora? What had they done with her? I doubted they would have harmed her. Dead, she would have been worthless to them as a hold over me. I hadn’t seemed too tractable to Barbeau. Maybe there had been a signal from Ann to the effect that she had scanned me and that I was now useless to him. So he had not even bothered to offer a trade: Cora, for my coming back. On the other hand, he had known I was coming. He would take me back if I were willing, and he was ready to dispose of me if I were not. And just in case, just in case I got away, he wanted Cora for insurance. That seemed to make some kind of sense. I was certain that he had her alive, somewhere very safe.
The car began to slow. I peered ahead. It was getting on into evening now, and a bit harder to see… Traffic jam. An accident, maybe. I saw parked police cars.
No. It was a roadblock, near a little strip of parkland which filled the bulge between this and another highway. My stomach tightened. They were stopping everyone, letting them through slowly, one by one. Checking IDs, obviously.
Despite continuing civil libertarian protests, everyone had a Social Registration Card these days. They’d come in in the late ’80s, providing one number for everything—Draft Registration, Social Security, Driver’s License, voting, what have you. I could see now that, up ahead, the police were just looking at these cards and feeding the numbers through a little unit they carried.
I had known that an alarm would go out for me. But I had not expected anything this fast, this efficient. It was interesting, though, that they were after a number rather than a face. Perhaps Barbeau had not wanted just anyone to know which man he wanted so badly. Perhaps the police computer was merely set to identify my number. Perhaps it had been furnished mine and a list of phonies, so that they would not easily be able to ascertain my true identity. Yes, that seemed the way Barbeau would go about it.
I wondered, as we drew even nearer to the block—Should I simply tell the police my story, now that there were police available?
My more cynical self, which had been slow in making its comeback, sneered at the thought. At best, they would take me to be confused, upset… At worst—I did not know how many grains of truth there had been in Barbeau’s version of the past—uncomfortably many, according to my own returning memory. Was I really guilty of some crime or crimes of such scope that it had necessitated my being retired with a new identity? Somehow, I did not doubt that The Boss would have a better chance of making charges stick against me than I would against him.