A mile and a half of raging forest fire, and Alf Gunnderson the one responsible. So they had sent two Bureau mindees.
“How did it start, Alf?”
The dead eyes closed momentarily, in pain, opened, and he answered, “I was trying to get the pot to heat up. Trying to set the kindling under it to burning. I fired myself too hard.” A flash of self-pity and unbearable hurt came into his face, disappeared just as quickly. Empty once more, he added, “I always do.”
The first man exhaled sharply, got up and put on his hat. The personality flowed out of his face. He was a carbon copy of the other telepath once more.
“This is the one,” he said.
“Come on, Alf,” the mindee named Ralph said. “Let’s go.”
The authority of his voice no more served to move Gunnderson than their initial appearance had. He sat as he was. The two men looked at one another.
What’s the matter with him? the second one flashed.
If you had what he’s got — you’d be a bit buggy yourself , the first one replied. They were no longer individuals; they were Bureau men, studiedly, exactly, precisely alike in every detail.
They hoisted the prisoner under his arms, lifted him off the bunk, unresisting. The turnkey came at a call, and still marveling at these men who had come in — shown Bureau cards, sworn him to deadly silence, and were now taking the tramp firebug with them — opened the cell door.
As they passed before him, the telepath named Ralph turned suddenly sharp and piercing eyes on the old guard. “This is government business, mister,” he warned. “One word of this, and you’ll be a prisoner in your own jail. Clear?”
The turnkey bobbed his head quickly.
“And stop thinking, mister,” the mindee added nastily, “we don’t like to be referred to as slimy peekers!” The turnkey turned a shade paler and watched silently as they disappeared down the hall, out of the Pawnee County jailhouse. He waited, blanking fiercely, till he heard the whine of the Bureau solocab rising into the afternoon sky.
Now what the devil did they want with a crazy firebug hobo like that? He thought viciously, Goddam mindees!
After they had flown him cross-continent to Buenos Aires, deep in the heart of the blasted Argentine desert, they sent him in for testing.
The testing was exhaustive. Even though he did not really cooperate, there were things he could not keep them from learning; things that showed up because they were there:
Such as his ability to start fires with his mind.
Such as the fact that he could not control the blazes.
Such as the fact that he had been bumming for fifteen years in an effort to find seclusion.
Such as the fact that he had become a tortured and unhappy man because of his strange mindpower.
“Alf,” said the bodiless voice from the rear of the darkened auditorium, “light that cigarette on the table. Put it in your mouth and make it light, Alf. Without a match.”
Alf Gunnderson stood in the circle of light. He shifted from leg to leg on the blazing stage, and eyed the cylinder of white paper on the table.
It was starting again. The harrying, the testing, the staring with strangeness. He was different — even from the other accredited psioid types — and they would try to put him away. It had happened before, it was happening now. There was no real peace for him.
“I don’t smoke,” he said, which was not true. But this was brother kin to the uncountable police line-ups he had gone through, all the way across the American Continent, across Earth, and from A Centauri IX back here. It annoyed him, and it terrified him, for he knew he was trapped.
Except this time there were no hard rocky-faced cops out there in the darkness beyond his sight. This time there were hard, rocky-faced Bureau men, and SpaceCom officials.
Even Terrence, head of SpaceCom, was sitting in one of those pneumoseats, watching him steadily.
Daring him to be what he was!
He lifted the cylinder hesitantly, almost put it back.
“Smoke it, Alf!” snapped a different voice, deeper in tone, from the ebony before him.
He put the cigarette between his lips. They waited.
He seemed to want to say something, perhaps to object. Alf Gunnderson’s heavy brows drew down. His blank eyes became — if it were possible — ever blanker. A sharp, denting V appeared between the brows.
The cigarette flamed into life.
A tongue of fire leaped up from the tip. In an instant it had consumed tobacco, paper, filter and denicotizer in one roar. The fire slammed against Gunnderson’s lips, scaring them, lapping at his nose, his face.
He screamed, fell on his face and beat at the flames with his hands.
Suddenly the stage was clogged with running men in the blue and charcoal suits of the SpaceCom. Gunnderson lay writhing on the floor, a wisp of charry smoke rising from his face. One of the SpaceCom officials broke the cap on an extinguisher vial and the spray washed over the body of the fallen man.
“Get the mallaport! Get the goddamned mallaport, willya!” A young ensign with brush-cut blond hair, first to reach the stage, as though he had been waiting crouched below, cradled Gunnderson’s head in his muscular arms, brushing with horror at the flakes of charred skin. He had the watery blue eyes of the spacemen, the man who has seen terrible things; yet his eyes were more frightened now than any man’s eyes had a right to be.
In a few minutes the angular, spade-pawed, malleable-transporter was smoothing the skin on Gunnderson’s face, realigning the atoms — shearing away the burned flesh, coating it with vibrant, healthy pink skin.
Another few moments and the psioid was finished; the burns had been erased; Gunnderson was new and whole, save for the patches of healthier-seeming skin that dotted his face.
All through it he had been murmuring. As the mallaport finished his mental work, stood up with a sigh, the word filtered through to the young SpaceCom ensign. He stared at Gunnderson a moment, then raised his watery blue eyes to the other officials standing about.
He stared at them with a mixture of fear and bewilderment.
Gunnderson had been saying: “Let me die, please let me die, I want to die, won’t you let me die, please!”
The ship was heading toward Omalo, sun of the Delgart system. It had been translated into inverspace by a driver named Carina Correia. She had warped the ship through, and gone back to her deep sleep, till she was needed at Omalo snapout.
Now the ship whirled through the crazy quilt of inverspace, cutting through to the star system of Earth’s adversary.
Gunnderson sat in the cabin with the brush-cut blond ensign. All through the trip, since blastoff and snapout, the pyrotic had been kept in his stateroom. This was the newest of the Earth SpaceComships, yet he had seen none of it. Just this tiny stateroom, in the constant company of the usually stoical ensign.
The SpaceCom man’s watery blue eyes swept between the pallid man and the teleport-proof safe set in the cabin’s bulkhead.
“Any idea why they’re sending us so deep into Delgart territory?” the ensign fished. “It’s pretty tight lines up this far. Must be something big. Any idea?”
Gunnderson’s eyes came up from their focus on his boot tops, and stared at the spaceman. He idly flipped the harmonica he had requested before blastoff, which he had used to pass away the long hours in inverspace. “No idea. How long have you been at war with the Delgarts?”
“Don’t you even know who your planet’s at war with?”