Выбрать главу

There was a screaming and a keening in Jerome’s mind, echoes of telepathic warfare rolling and reverberating through neural pathways. He saw Belzor stagger and grow pale.

“And when you hear it,” Belzor ground out, each word like the splintering of a bone, “you will decide, of your own free will, that the Four Thousand have no place in your world…or in any other…”

CARRY THE THABBREN INTO THE DOME NOW!

“The Guardians grow angry and afraid, but they can’t impose their will on you while I am alive. Listen to me and make your own decision, Rayner Jerome.” Belzor paused, looking as though he might fall, and when he spoke again his voice seemed weaker. “The Four Thousand, whose kalds you brought to Earth, were absolute controllers of Dorrin before the Days of the Comet. They were supertelepaths who had interlinked to form a composite mind of almost infinite power. You have seen what a single supertelepath can do. Try to imagine that ability raised to the power of four thousand.

“If the Dorrinian composite mind is brought into existence again it will be absolute overlord of every being on this planet. It will decide everything. It will control everything. As a human being you treasure your free will, Rayner Jerome—and I am telling you now that this could be your last opportunity to make use of it.

“Do not make the wrong decision!”

Jerome found that he was swaying, almost losing the battle to keep his burdensome body upright. He was breathing hard, and the cold was tearing at his lungs, but the pain was remote and unimportant. The coppery disc of the Sun, almost quenched in the greyness of the horizon, was dimly illuminating a battlefield. There was no sound from the Dorrinians behind him, and Belzor had fallen silent—watching and waiting—but there was a psychic conflict raging all about him, even though he could barely sense its shivers and shocks. And he, trapped at the centre of the battle, was being required to make an impossible decision, without even being sure that Belzor’s fantastic assertion was true.

“I speak the truth,” Belzor said. “Look at me.”

Jerome looked at the face which had once been his own, saw the eyes begin to lase, felt the beginnings of the special pain…

And he was on Earth twenty thousand years earlier, vicariously present as the colonists from space set up their encampments and spread their civilization, untroubled by competition from the indigenous tribes. The settlers were not surprised to find human beings already present—most of the suitable worlds in that region of space had been seeded during long-forgotten migrations—and they were on a technological crest which made them confident of their ability to deal with any adversity.

But the first major threat came from within.

A successful mutation occurred, creating individuals who possessed certain psi powers, including that of telepathy. The dominant genes of the mutation would have permeated the entire gene pool in the normal course of events, but the non-psi majority quickly became alarmed and took action to isolate the mutants. They chose to place them on the planet nearest the Sun because its natural conditions would force the mutants to live underground, unable to develop the physical resources needed for space travel.

But they failed to foresee that the telepaths would breed supertelepaths, and that the supertelepaths would coalesce into composite entities of increasing size and power, reaching the ultimate in the form of the Four Thousand—the vast aggregate mind which assumed total control of every aspect of life on the planet…

The pain faded and Jerome saw that Belzor had sunk to his knees. The near-subliminal shrilling in Jerome’s mind was rising in pitch and intensity, becoming unbearable, evidence that the psi battle was nearing its climax.

“It’s time for you to make that decision, Rayner,” Paul Nordenskjöld said from behind Jerome. “We are slowly overcoming the Prince, and in an hour’s time we will be able to take the decision out of your hands. But for the present you retain your freedom of choice. Are you going to use it wisely? Are you going to side with the evil that is Belzor, allow him to destroy the Thabbren, and accept whatever reward he decides to give you?”

“I’ll make you immortal,” Belzor whispered. “I’ll give you body after body. You can live for ever.”

Nordenskjöld responded at once. “Think carefully, Rayner. You know what Belzor is. As soon as he has the Thabbren in his hands he will kill every Dorrinian here, and quite probably he will kill you as well. But even if he did keep his promise there would be no eternal life for you—because your world is rushing to destruction. The coming nuclear winter will see the end of all human life on this planet.

“And that brings us to the other choice you can make on behalf of every man, woman and child on Earth.

“All you have to do is carry the Thabbren into the dome, and there will be an end to war. And to famine. And to disease. And to crime against man, and crime against the planet. Your cherished free will can never have been as precious to you as at this moment, Rayner. We don’t offer eternal life to you as a person—but your kind can grow as old as the Sun.”

Jerome stood quite still for three beats of his jolting heart, then he began to walk towards the dark entrance of the dome. His knees sagged at every step and he knew that if he fell it would be impossible for him to rise again, but he managed to move in a straight line and to prevent his head from wobbling. It was important that the Bearer of the Thabbren should arrive with dignity.

Belzor’s voice was tortured, so faint that it might have been a telepathic communication. “Don’t be a fool, Jerome! Don’t let them trick you! Do you really believe you’re acting under your own free will at this moment? Do you think you have ever had…?”

Jerome continued walking towards the dome.

The circular main chamber was filled with a chill white mist which all but obscured the banks of metred caskets. Rows of ceiling lights glowed like faint greenish moons. At a central location on the floor was a slim pedestal which terminated in a large hemispherical crystal. Jerome knew without being told, as in a dream, that he must go to the pedestal. He was no longer aware of the physical process of walking.

As in a dream, he approached the pedestal and saw there was a disc of platinum set into the crystal’s flat upper surface. As in a dream, he removed his left glove.

The opal ring of the Thabbren slid off his finger easily, and he placed it on the disc.

There was no sound, no visible consequence of his action, but the etheric agitation in his mind, the nearly-heard clamour of telepathic conflict, came to an abrupt end.

Belzor is dead, he thought, without emotion. He turned away from the pedestal, intending to walk back to the group who were waiting at the chamber’s entrance, but the weight of his body was suddenly insupportable, the fierce gravity of Earth too much to contend with any longer. He stumbled and went down hard on to his knees, and waited helplessly while Nordenskjöld and another man rushed to his aid. They raised him to his feet and carried him out of the chamber and its shifting silvered mists into an anteroom.

Jerome tried to smile at Nordenskjöld as he was being placed in a chair. “I didn’t expect to be so…so weak. I don’t know if I can go on like this for very long.”

“You won’t have to,” Nordenskjöld said. “We reward our own.”

“But I don’t see what you can…”

There was an instant of pain, the special pain, and Jerome found himself kneeling in the drifted snow beside the flight of steps leading up to the Cryodome. He stood up and, even in his turmoil of shock and confusion, was aware that the action had been accomplished with complete lack of effort. There was a solid object in his right hand. He looked down at the rifle and—trying to express the inexpressible—threw the weapon away, sending it whirling high over the windbreaks.