Psychosphere (4 page)

“What? But how could you possibly—” she began—and paused. For of course she knew that if anyone in the world could know such a thing, that someone was Garrison.

“And when he can't do it he likes to think about doing it,” Garrison's voice had turned to a snarl. “Doing it to you!” His face had twisted in rage, its color rapidly draining away.

Vicki knew that behind Garrison's heavy sunglasses with their built-up sides, his golden eyes were burning bright. “Come,” he said. “
Wir gehen!
”

He half-dragged her from beneath the shade of the rock, hurriedly picking a way through boulders and coarse shrubs and grasses back to the path. Stumbling behind him, she had known fear. His being was in flux, its change betrayed by a voice which retained very little of Richard Garrison's true nature. There was a certain harshness about that voice, and those words he had spoken in German—

He paused to fill his lungs, drew her up alongside him. His fingers tightened on her side, digging into the flesh of her waist. He glanced back—and his face was no longer Garrison's. Not quite.

“
Thomas!
” Vicki whispered.

Her companion's eyebrows formed a frown, drew together, dipped down in the center behind his special glasses. His gaze was upon the pair of youths where they stood now amidst the patch of pod-bearing plants. For their part they stared back, the face of the older one wearing a contemptuous grin.

“Swine!” Garrison/Schroeder said, but the word had sounded more like
Schwein
to Vicki. She had known instinctively that he scanned the youth's mind. More deeply now.

“Richard,” Vicki had clutched his arm. “It's not your business.”

“But it has to be somebody's!” he told her harshly. “And
you
are my business—and that bastard's thinking things about you! He needs a lesson.” And again his eyebrows had drawn together.

At that very moment Vicki had heard the sudden yelping of the youths. She had followed Garrison/Schroeder's gaze—and behind her own special sunglasses her golden eyes had gone very wide. She gasped at what she saw.

The younger Greek was stumbling jerkily out of the patch of pod-plants, backing away from the other youth until he came up against the white rock of the cliff. The older boy, the unwitting subject of Garrison's manipulation, stood as if rooted to the spot—while all around him the sprawling bed of vegetation went totally insane!

It was a scene of madness, an alien scene, or one perhaps from Earth's prime, when the
flora
could more ably match the
fauna
in ferocity. The plants tossed and churned, each leaf violently flapping, pods straining, swelling and bursting from their stems with sounds like muted machine-gun fire. And their juices—concerted,
directed
—fell upon the Greek youth where he stood wildly wind-milling his arms, his feet apparently mired in the now sodden earth. Then, in a final frenzy, a last burst of vegetable violence, the entire patch ejaculated into his eyes.

The youth screamed and clapped his hands to his face. His hair, the skin of his face, his entire upper torso was drenched in plant fluid—but at last he could move, and now he commenced a grim, hopping dance of agony.

“No!” Vicki had cried. “
Nein
, Richard!
Bitte, blind ihm nicht!
”

Garrison had glanced down at her. In his face she had seen something of him, also a lingering trace of Thomas Schroeder—but mainly the blunt hardness of Willy Koenig. Garrison's third facet had surfaced, the most ruthless facet of all.

“As you will,” Garrison/Koenig's voice rasped. “And you're right, of course, Vicki—for we know what it's like to be blind, don't we? But—” His gaze fell once more upon the terrified youth.

The pod-bearing plants were dead now, wilted and shrivelled, black and stinking. Their stench wafted to Garrison and Vicki on a breeze suddenly blown up from the sea. The Greek youth's agonized dance had slowed to a moaning stagger, his feet stumbling in the slop of decaying vegetation. He still clutched at his face but, in another moment, stood still and tentatively took away his hands, peering gingerly, unbelievingly all about him. The pain went out of his eyes and blotched face and he began to laugh hysterically. But only for a moment.

“A lesson,” Garrison/Koenig repeated—and with his words the Greek youth's eyes suddenly stood out from their sockets. He gave a great howl, threw his hands down as if to protect his groin, bent forward and fell face-down in the rot of decay. And there he lay, his body threshing spasmodically upon the putrid earth.

Garrison climbed up on to the path and turned towards the village. Vicki ran after him, her red hair flying behind her. “Richard, you didn't—?”

“No, I didn't,” he answered her unspoken question. “I didn't ruin them, merely kicked him in them. A sort of forever kick.”

“A forever kick?” she caught him up, grabbed at his hand. He paused in his striding to put an arm around her. The strength in his fingers was hard, rough, in no way the gentle, firm grip of Richard Garrison. Not of Garrison alone.

He nodded. “I simply put another kink in his mind—a kink to counter those already there. From now on, whenever he looks at or thinks of a woman that way, like a beast, he'll feel like he's just been shot in the balls!”

“But in effect that's—”

“Castration? Right! But it's less than what I'd have done to him if you hadn't stopped me…”

That had been yesterday, and by the time they got back to their rooms Garrison had been himself once more—or as much himself as he ever could be. There was an aftermath, however, inevitable in the wake of any resurgence of his Schroeder and Koenig facets: a scratchy, unreasoning irritability.

Vicki, totally aware of Garrison's Jekyll and two Hydes existence and as well versed as could be expected in such matters, had coped with the problem in a manner tried and trusted. Namely, she had plied Garrison's senses with a bottle of dirt-cheap brandy!

Strange how this simple device always seemed to turn the trick, or perhaps not so strange when one thought about it.

Bad brandy had been Garrison's tipple ever since his Cyprus “initiation,” when on occasion, usually after several losing hands of three-card brag, a bottle of one-star had been all he could afford to buy! And so he had actually come to like, even to prefer the stuff.

On the other hand, but of equal consequence, bad brandy had certainly
not
been Thomas Schroeder's drink, whose taste had always been impeccable and therefore far more expensive. Nor had Koenig, a born Schnapps drinker (though when the mood was on him he could generally drink anything), ever greatly fancied Garrison's favorite.

The way brandy worked, Vicki suspected, was simply as a stabilizer: it helped him stay “in character”—or helped his character stay in him. On this occasion Lindos, too, had helped, for the old Garrison had been very “Med-conscious,” had loved the Mediterranean from first sight; and a third stabilizer (Vicki liked to think of it as the most important) was their sex.

Even though their affair in that earlier time had been brief, it had been intense. She had remembered his preferences and, in the two years flown since her resurrection, had practiced pleasuring him until she was expert. No woman knew or had ever known Garrison's body or the way it responded to sexual stimuli better than Vicki Maler. As for the Schroeder and Koenig facets: their tastes were entirely different. Moreover they respected Garrison—so far, at least—and they had
never
intruded or in any way attempted ascendence in this respect.

For that Vicki was naturally glad; but in another way, and however paradoxically, she was not so glad. She was fairly sure that Garrison
himself
was faithful to her, but there had been more than a few occasions—always when he had found it necessary to let one of his alter-facets take ascendency—when
his body
had absented itself from her bed, often for two or three nights at a stretch. Twice she had found evidence of his visiting high-class London call girls; and she was well aware that a onetime “secretary” of Thomas Schroeder, one Mina Grunwald, now lived in Mayfair where Garrison (or rather Garrison/Schroeder) was in the habit of seeing her.

This then was Vicki's problem, the reason for her…yes, jealousy: that while she knew that the Schroeder/Koenig facets respected Garrison's privacy, she could not be one hundred percent certain that he respected theirs. After all, his was the original, dominant facet, and it remained housed in its own body. Vicki was not yet quite used to the idea that when the subsidiary facets were in ascendence they could use that body to sate their own sexual appetites. Fortunately neither one of the subsumed or adopted characters had been overtly sexual in their own bodies, else Vicki might not have been able to live with her own feelings and emotions. But then again, what could she have done about it? She knew for a certainty and quite literally that she could not live without Garrison. Or so she had been led to believe…

At any rate, her ploy had worked yet again, when the cheap brandy, her own body, and the Greek island atmosphere had all combined perfectly to dampen Garrison's excitability and bring about a complete resurgence of his true identity. At eight in the evening he had desired to go out; they had eaten in the village's best taverna, where he had consumed a little more of the local brandy; following which they had found a disco and danced the night away, so that the stars had already started to fade in the sky by the time they had returned to their rooms.

Garrison had been tired by then, perhaps too tired to sleep, and it was plain there was something—perhaps many things—on his mind. Things he must talk about.

Having changed into cool night clothes, the pair had sprawled themselves upon a wide, raised Lindos bed to talk and sip coffee. And after a while Garrison had asked: “Vicki, how much have I told you? Ever, I mean? You never asked me a hell of a lot—never pushed it, anyway—but how much have I really told you?”

“Some things you told me, Richard. Some I guessed. After I woke up—I mean when I lived again—you told me a lot of things. You didn't really say anything, not in words, but I was made to understand a lot. You remember?”

“Oh, yes,” he nodded. “I was kind of a god, wasn't I? I could just get into your mind and make you understand.” For the first time since her reincarnation, Vicki definitely felt his uncertainty. Amazingly, Garrison seemed to be displaying insecurity! His words were all past tense. I
was
a god. I
could
get into your mind.

“Your powers are still godlike, Richard,” she told him.

“You mean demoniac!” he replied, but without venom. “
My
powers, when
I
use them, are…safe.”

“Safe?”

“They don't hurt anyone, not much anyway. Not deliberately. But Vicki—” he caught up her hand almost pleadingly, “—when
they
use them…”

“Oh, Richard, I know!”

“But you don't know, not everything. Some of the things they've done…they go way over the top. They protect me, yes, but they over-protect. They won't let me run my own life, my own body. Hell, it's not ‘my own body'—it's theirs too!” He was nervously massaging her fingers, drawing comfort from her presence.

“How did it come about?” she eventually asked. “I mean, at the beginning.”

Garrison sighed. “Let's see if I can break it down for you. Thomas Schroeder wanted to be immortal. He was deep into parapsychology, augury, transmigration—all that stuff. 1972, we were in Northern Ireland. Him on business, me as a soldier. I'd been having this recurring dream, about bombs. That wasn't odd in itself, lots of the boys over there dream about bombs. It's all part of the job. But my dream, my nightmare, was different. It wouldn't go away. It came to me night after night. A warning about something I could neither escape nor even avoid.

“So…it happened, my first glimpse of ESP in action. The first hint that maybe my mind was different from the minds of other men. There was a bomb blast. I saved Schroeder's life, the lives of his wife and kid. They were OK, but he was badly chopped up inside and I was blinded. Afterwards—well, it worked out that he thought he owed me.”

“He
did
owe you, Richard. I remember all of that like it was yesterday: you coming out to the Harz. How proud you were, how smart in your uniform.”

“Oh, yes, all of that,” Garrison grunted, “but before I got out there things had happened. For one thing, Schroeder knew by then that he was dying. And he didn't want to stay dead. Reincarnation—in me!”

She nodded. “I knew something was going on, that his interest in you should be so—consuming.”

Garrison smiled wryly. “Consuming, yes,” he repeated her. “Anyway, I had always had a quiet interest in Schroeder's sort of thing, the paranormal I mean, and I admit he fascinated me. But at the same time I didn't believe he could do it, you know? It was too weird. I might just have washed my hands of the whole thing. But…there was a carrot for the donkey. That carrot was a friend of Schroeder's, a guy called Adam Schenk. He predicted Schroeder's death, yours too, a lot of things. And for me: he predicted I'd see again. This would be made possible through Schroeder himself, and through a machine. What sort of machine…?” he shrugged. “I didn't know, not then…

“Anyway, out there in the Harz, things were happening to me. Schroeder had a lot of tricks up his sleeve. A whole building full of them. Gear for testing a man's ESP potential. He tested mine and it was high. Very high. And all the time I was becoming more and more convinced that he really had something. And anyway, how could I lose? All the dice were loaded in my favor.

“I was blind—he offered me sight!

“I was an ex-soldier, crippled—he offered me money. Money beyond my wildest dreams.

“I was a nothing, a nobody with nowhere to go—and he offered me power and position.

“How could I refuse?”

“You couldn't,” Vicki answered.

“I didn't. We made…a pact,” Garrison shrugged again. “Simple as that. No big deal. We just agreed that when he died,
if
something of him remained and
if
it could find its way to me, then that I'd receive it. He could live again in me.

“In return there was the chance, however remote, that I'd see again; meanwhile there were a couple of tricks to help me find my way around the blindness.

“I had special ‘spectacles' that worked on sound instead of vision. I had bracelets for my wrists, too, which worked the same way. And I had Suzy. My dear, wonderful Suzy. She's getting old now, but I look after her. Hell!—and hasn't she looked after me?” For a moment he grinned. “Damned right, she has!” The smile slipped a little and he nodded. “And of course there was Willy Koenig.

“Willy looked after me, too—just as he'd always looked after Thomas, his beloved Colonel.” The smile slipped away completely. “Just as he's looking after us even now—damn him!”

“Richard!” she gripped his hand. “Don't! You only make it easy for them.”

He relaxed, grunted: “You're right, of course. I do make it easy for them, and I really can't afford to. Not any longer.” Again the insecurity.

“What is it, Richard?”

He shook his head. “Let me tell it my own way, in my own time…

“Schroeder made me rich before he died. After he died I was incredibly rich. Now—? Even I don't know how rich I am. You see, since coming back he's opened up sources only he had the keys to, funds which had doubled and sometimes trebled during the years passed between. His interests were worldwide. Even in his lifetime he made some of your so-called ‘tycoons' look like penniless paupers by comparison! And all of that is mine now—or ours. His, mine, Koenig's. Thirty guys have a big office in London—more a block of offices, really. They look after my interests. Some of my interests, anyway. There are other people in Zurich, Hamburg, Hong Kong—you name it. But none of them knows what I'm really worth.

“Suddenly the world of international finance was open to me, and I couldn't resist it. And no risk involved. With my ESP powers working for me I couldn't pick a loser. I was a Midas. Everything I touched turned to gold! And then…then one day I heard about the machine. I stumbled across Psychomech.”

As he paused Vicki said: “You've missed something out, Richard. What about your wife? You never did tell me about her.” Vicki's voice was soft, low. “Or does it hurt too much?”

He shook his head. “It doesn't hurt at all, not now. Terri was something that had to be—she'd been ‘foreseen' by Adam Schenk—and without her I'd never have found Psychomech. You might have remembered something about Terri and her lover, something unpleasant, but I made you forget. I removed it from your mind. Believe me, it really doesn't matter now.” Again he paused, then continued in a burst:

“Anyway, I found Psychomech. A machine that could blow up a man's darkest fears to giant size—until they're about to crush him or drive him insane—and then give him the strength to fight back, to defeat them. A tremendous boon to psychiatry. A mechanical psychiatrist. A tin shrink.

“But think about it:

“What happens if you totally liberate a man's mind, if you rid it of all its fears? Would there be any limits to the scope of such a mind? And what if that mind were already rich in psychic energy, powers almost beyond imagination?”

Vicki's golden eyes were wide behind dark lenses. “That's what happened to you,” she sighed. “The birth of a god!”

He nodded. “Or a demon, yes. But on my own I wasn't ready for it, wasn't big or strong enough. I had to have help, had to let Schroeder in, fulfill our pact. Then…
we
let Koenig in.”

Vicki shuddered. “I seem to remember something of that. Willy was there, and you told me not to be afraid, and then—he wasn't there any more.”

Garrison said: “It was the only way. He wasn't like Schroeder and me. He was clever in his own way, but not in ours. And I was a god! Psychomech had blown me up into something awesome. I was bigger than myself, bigger than Schroeder and myself, bigger than Psychomech—or so I thought. My powers seemed immeasurable. God!—I brought you back, didn't I? Took away your agony, gave you life, sight?

“Absorbing Willy was—” he shrugged, “—a mere nothing. Ultimate power, ultimate ego, infinity stretching away and out before me. Infinity, Vicki, with all its infinite possibilities! Until—”

“Yes?”

“Until something went wrong. I'm not sure what…Or maybe I am. Maybe I'm ready to admit it now.” For a moment he was silent, his mind miles away. Then: “Anyway, I destroyed Psychomech.” He sat up and took her hands. “With Psychomech I was, could have been, immortal. Without Psychomech? I'm a man, a three-dimensional body, flesh and blood. How could I hope to contain all of that power in this little battery? I couldn't. The battery leaks. The power is leaving me, more every day. And now? Each time I use—each time
they
use—that power, I grow just a little weaker.

“Do you remember my gambling phase: London, Monte Carlo, Las Vegas? Do you know what that was all about? I mean, didn't you ever ask yourself what I got out of it? Me, rich as Croesus, playing cards and roulette? Winning money on the horses, the football pools? Hell, I would've enjoyed that sort of thing when I was in the army, but with my sort of money? So why did I do it? I'll tell you why: at first it was the sheer excitement! Oh, I knew I couldn't lose, but still it was exciting to win! Do you see? Every gambler's ultimate fantasy.