He smiled. “Outside? Yes, yes, of course. But it was a far different thing there, you know. All those computer diagnosticians, automatic surgery, and yes, despite all, some diseases to cure if we could. Here I give physicals and administer native-distilled medication when needed for minor aches and pains and nervous strain. Otherwise, I’m engaged mostly in research on the Warden organism itself.”
That was interesting, even if I did think I knew what he meant. “Have you found out anything new?” I asked carefully.
He shrugged. “A little, but it’s slow work. There are certain physiological and chemical factors common to those with it, but isolating them, let alone duplicating them—particularly in people not born with them—is beyond me. Perhaps with all my old laboratories and analytical computers I could do something, maybe even on Lord Kreegan’s satellite base, but here I am forced to be slow and primitive, I fear.”
I perked up. “Satellite base?”
“Oh, yes. Didn’t you know? The Medusans built it for him years ago. Since it’s Medusan, our own little pet Wardens won’t touch it, since it already has their cousins, who are much nicer about machines and such. He lives there most of the time.”
I doubted that very much. Although Kreegan might go there when he needed things, he’d be far too exposed to the Confederacy on such a satellite, liable to get blown out of the sky at any time. If I were Kreegan, I decided, I’d almost never go there. Rather I’d let underlings take the risk and just use it as my chief communications and command center with the other Warden worlds and Outside.
There was nothing more to be gained from that tack, but I wondered if I could draw him out a little in his project. “Interesting what you say about common chemical factors,” I said casually. “I had come to the conclusion that emotion triggered my surge of power and that the chemicals released into my body when I was really mad were the catalyst.”
“Very astute,” he responded, beaming a little. Clearly he enjoyed his subject. “Yes, emotion is the key, as you will find out. But each individual’s threshold level for release of those chemicals is very different, nor are the amounts the same—yet the Warden organism is very demanding of its precise catalyst Chemical triggering and will is the key. Your anger gave you the power to kill; your will to Mil him directed and released it. I have often suspected that the initial trigger is what we’ve always called the ‘killer instinct,’ for want of a better psychological term. Everybody on Lilith really has the latent power, but not everyone the force of will to use it. That’s why pawns remain pawns, I suspect.”
“You said you were trying to duplicate the catalysts in those who didn’t have it, or didn’t have it in sufficient quantities,” I prompted. “How?”
He shrugged and got up, obviously pleased with my interest. *’Come on, 111 show you.”
We walked out and down the hall a short way, then entered a larger chamber. I stopped, a little stunned at the sight. There were a dozen slabs, equally spaced, with bedding on top of each. On each slab there appeared to be a sleeping or comatose young girl. I looked hard and spotted Ti’s distinctive form far off on the slab opposite us, but while my heart felt a twinge I clamped down hard on myself so as not to betray anything I didn’t have to. Not yet, not yet, I told myself.
“Are they—still alive?” I asked, hesitant, a little fearful of his answers.
He nodded. “Oh, yes, very much so. These are pawn girls who’ve shown flashes of strong power, usually right around puberty, but have proved incapable of repeating it, or at least of doing anything by force of will. Between their first and twelfth menstrual periods girls undergo physiochemical changes far more radical than do boys at the same stage in their lives. Since a lot of these chemical changes trigger Warden phenomena, we tend to monitor all the young girls in the Keep at that stage. In these girls it was exceptionally strong, as you might guess from their highly overdeveloped bodies.”
“I thought you did that,” I blurted, then tried to cover. “I knew one of these girls. That’s why I’m so interested.” At least that much was the truth.
He appeared to be a little surprised, but accepted the statement without further thought. “Oh, no. The condition’s a by-product. I believe that during this critical change in the body, the Warden organism gets confused, misfires, or receives the wrong instructions —or misinterprets the chemical stimuli it does receive. Not all girls experience this, by any means. One in a hundred, at best, and out of these, one in another hundred show strong power and bodily mis-development. Those are the ones we test and measure and keep a close watch on, although the very unpredictability of the power during that stage limits me. I could be killed or maimed during such an involuntary exercise of the power, and though I’m willing to risk it, Sir Tiel is not. Therefore we leave them in pawn’ villages until the danger is past. Which one did you know, by the way?”
I pointed to Ti. “That one, over there.”
“Oh, of course. She’s the newest, so it’s most likely. I’m still doing a preliminary analysis on her, so I can’t say much as yet, but she had die most potential of any I’ve seen. All sorts of phenomena around her, including the most severe. Among other things, she crippled half a dozen people around her, including her mother.”
I shook my head in wonder. Little Ti a crippler? It didn’t seem possible, I told myself. Still, it made me slightly uneasy, too. I’d slept with her a great deal in the past few months, and if she’d still had any of that wild power I could have been harmed, too.
“What are you doing with them now?” I wanted to know.
“Testing and measurement, as I said,” Pohn replied. “All Masters and above have the power to see within others. Rank is mostly a matter of fine-tuning your reception, you might say, in our little society. A Supervisor senses, and therefore controls, only the total organism. You killed Kronlon, it’s true, but you couldn’t discriminate enough to affect just, say, his arm. I can isolate even more than that, much more. What I used to do with microscopes and microsurgery techniques I can now do without any mechanical aid. By concentration and study I can actually follow a single white blood cell completely through the circulatory system—and divert it, slow it, alter it, even destroy it. You can sense the Warden organism in everything, can’t you?”
I nodded.
“Well, imagine being able to isolate individual cells in any organism. That’s what a Master can. do. Naturally, without my medical training they’d have no idea what they were doing, so my knowledge gives me the edge here. Masters have different skills based on knowing what they are looking for and what they want to accomplish. All the power of a Marek Kreegan will do you no good at all if you don’t have the knowledge and the fine touch, the skill or art, to make full use of it. That’s why you see the power used so often for purely destructive ends. To destroy something is easy and requires far less knowledge or skill.”
I could see his point, and thought that many doctors back on the civilized worlds would envy his power as much as he envied their technology. To be able to look into the human body, to focus on any part of it one wanted, to study it at will in the most exacting and intimate ways possible—none but sophisticated medical computers Outside could accomplish anything like it, and the doctors and technicians controlling them had to trust them, never knowing exactly what it was the computers saw as they probed and analyzed.
Pohn, however, knew.
“They’re so still,” I noted. “Drugged?”
He shook his head. “Oh my, no! That would simply complicate things. No, I simply applied a block to certain areas of the brain, one I can remove at will. They go into deep coma and I can then study them, probe, do whatever I want or need to do. Of the batch, I’m looking for ones with key enzymes in sufficient quantities perhaps to trigger the power. Those I’ll work with until I feel I can trigger them at will; then I’ll start trying to educate and train them as best we can. Kria there, for example, can now dissolve solid rock at my command.” He pointed at one girl near the door.