The Game-Players of Titan (16 page)

He seated himself, warily, wondering what they were saying. Some of them sat utterly silent, staring straight ahead as if preoccupied. Telepaths, perhaps, communicating with one another. They seemed to be in the majority. The others—he could only guess. Pre-cogs, like McClain, psycho-kinesists, like the girl Mary Anne. And Rothman, whoever he was. Was Rothman here? He had a feeling, deep and intuitive, that Rothman was very much here, and in control.

From a-side room, Mary Anne appeared, now wearing a T-shirt and blue cotton shorts and sandals and no bra; her breasts were high-pointed, small. She seated herself beside Pete vigorously rubbing her hair with a towel to dry it. “What a bunch of jerks,” she said quietly to Pete. “I mean, don’t you agree? They—my mother and dad—made me come here.” She frowned. “Who’s that?” Another man had entered the room and was looking around him. “I don’t know him. Probably from the East Coast, like that Mutreaux.”

“You’re not a vug,” Pete said to her. “After all.”

“No, I’m not. I never said I was; you asked me what I was and I told you, ‘you can see,’ and you could. It was true. See, Peter Garden, you were an involuntary telepath; you were psychotic, because of those pills and the drinking, and you picked up my marginal thoughts, all my anxieties. What
they used to call the subconscious. Didn’t my mother ever warn you about that? She ought to know.”

“I see,” Pete said. Yes, she had.

“And before me you picked up that psychiatrist’s subconscious fears, too. We’re all afraid of the vugs. It’s natural. They’re our enemies; we fought a war with them and didn’t win and now they’re here. See?” She dug him in the ribs with her sharp elbow. “Don’t look so stupid; are you listening or not?”

Pete said, “I am.”

“Well, you gape like a guppy. I knew last night you were hallucinating like mad along a paranoid line, having to do with hostile, menacing conspiracies of alien creatures. It interfered with your perceptions, but fundamentally
you were right.
I actually was feeling those fears, thinking those thoughts. Psychotics live in a world like that all the time. Anyhow, your interval of being a telepath was unfortunate because it happened around me and I know about this.” She gestured at the group of people in the motel room. “See? So from then on you were dangerous. And you had to go right away and call the police; we got you just in time.”

Did he believe her? He studied her thin, heart-shaped face; he could not tell. If telepathic talent it had been, it certainly had deserted him now.

“See,” Mary Anne said quietly, swiftly, “everyone has the potentiality for Psionic talent. In severe illness and in deep psychic regression—” She broke off. “Anyhow, Peter Garden, you were psychotic and drunk and on amphetamines and hallucinating, but basically you perceived the reality that confronts us, the situation this group knows about and is trying to deal with. You see?” She smiled at him, her eyes bright. “Now you know.”

He did not see; he did not
want
to see.

Petrified, he drew away from her.

“You don’t want to know,” Mary Anne said thoughtfully.

“That’s right,” he said.

“But you do know,” she said. “Already. It’s too late not
to.” She added, in her pitiless tone, “And this time you’re not sick and drunk and hallucinating; your perceptions are not distorted. So you have to face it head-on. Poor Peter Garden. Were you happier last night?”

“No,” he said.

“You’re not going to kill yourself about this, are you? Because that wouldn’t help. You see, we’re an organization, Pete. And you have to join, even though you’re non-P, not a Psi; we’ll have to take you in anyway or kill you. Naturally, no one wants to kill you. What would happen to Carol? Would you leave her for Freya to torment?”

“No,” he said, “not if I could help it.”

“You know, the Rushmore Effect of your car told you I wasn’t a vug; I don’t understand why you didn’t listen to it; they’re never wrong.” She sighed. “Not if they’re working properly, anyhow. Haven’t been tampered with. That’s how you can always sort out the vugs; ask a Rushmore. See?” Again she smiled at him, cheerfully. “So things aren’t really so bad. It’s not the end of the world or anything like that; we just have a little problem of knowing who our friends are. They have the same problem, too; they get a little mixed up at times.”

“Who killed Luckman?” Pete asked. “Did you?”

“No,” Mary Anne said. “The last thing we’d do is kill a man who’s had so much
luck
, so many offspring; that’s the whole point.” She frowned at him.

“But last night,” he said slowly, “I asked you if your people had done it. And you said—” He paused, trying to think clearly, trying to sort out the confusion of those events. “I know what you said. ‘I forget,’ you said. And—you said our baby is next; you called it a thing, you said it was
not
a baby.”

For a long time Mary Anne stared at him. “No,” she whispered, stricken and pale. “I didn’t say that; I know I didn’t.”

“I heard you,” he insisted. “I remember that; it’s a mess, but honest to god, I have that part clear.” Mary Anne said, “Then they’ve gotten to me.” Her words
were scarcely audible; he had to bend toward her to hear. She continued to stare at him.

Opening the door of the sun-drenched kitchen, Carol Holt Garden said, “Pete—are you in there?” She peered in.

He was not in the kitchen. Bright, yellow and warm, it was empty.

Going to the window she looked out at the street below. Pete’s car and hers, at the curb; he had not gone in his car then.

Tying the cord of her robe she hurried out of the apartment and down the hall to the elevator. I’ll ask it, she decided. The elevator will know whether he went out, whether anyone was with him and if so who. She pressed the button, and waited.

The elevator arrived; the doors slid back. On the floor of the elevator lay a man, dead. It was Hawthorne. She screamed.

“The lady said no help was necessary,” the Rushmore circuit of the elevator said, apologetically.

With difficulty Carol said, “What lady?”

“The dark-haired lady.” It did not elaborate.

“Did Mr. Garden go with them?” Carol asked.

“They came up without him but returned with him from his apartment, Mrs. Garden. The man, not Mr. Garden, killed this person here. Mr. Garden then said, ‘They’ve kidnapped me and they’ve killed a detective. Get help.’”

“What did you do?”

The elevator said, “The dark-haired lady said, ‘Cancel that last request. We don’t need any help. Thank you.’ So I did nothing.” The elevator was silent for a moment. “Did I do wrong?” it inquired.

Carol whispered, “Very wrong. You should have gotten help, as he said.”

“Can I do anything now?” the elevator asked.

“Call the San Francisco Police Department and tell them to send someone here. Tell them what happened.” She added, “That man and woman kidnapped Mr. Garden and you didn’t do anything.”

“I’m sorry, Mrs. Garden,” the elevator apologized.

Turning, she made her way step by step back to the apartment; in the kitchen she seated herself unsteadily at the table. Those stupid, maddening Rushmore circuits, she thought; they seem so intelligent and they actually aren’t. All it takes is something unusual, something unexpected. But what did I do? Not much better. I slept while they came and got Pete, the man and woman. It sounds like Pat McClain, she thought. Dark-haired. But how do I know?

The vidphone rang.

She did not have the energy to answer it.

Trimming his red beard, Joe Schilling sat by his vidphone, waiting for an answer. Strange, he thought. Maybe they’re still asleep. It’s only ten-thirty. But—

He did not think so.

Hurriedly, he finished trimming his beard; he put on his coat and strode from his apartment and downstairs to Max, his car.

“Take me to the Gardens’ apartment,” he instructed as he slid in. “Up yours,” the car said.

“It’s curtains for you if you don’t take me there,” Schilling said.

The car, reluctantly, started up and drove down the street, making the trip the hard way, by surface. Schilling impatiently watched the buildings and maintenance equipment pass, one by one, until at last they reached San Rafael.

“Satisfied?” the car Max said, as it pulled to a bucking, clumsy halt before the Gardens’ apartment building.

Pete’s car and Carol’s car were both parked at the curb, he noticed as he got out. And so were two police cars.

By elevator he ascended to their floor, rushed down the hall. The door to the Gardens’ apartment was open. He stepped inside.

A vug met him.

“Mr. Schilling.” Its thought-propagation was questioning in tone.

“Where are Pete and Carol?” he demanded. And then he saw, past the vug, Carol Garden seated at the kitchen table, her face waxen. “Is Pete okay?” he said to her, pushing past the vug.

The vug said, “I am E.B. Black; probably you remember me, Mr. Schilling. Be calm. I catch from your thoughts a complete innocence of this, so I will not bother to interrogate you.”

Raising her head, Carol said starkly to Schilling, “Wade Hawthorne, the detective, has been murdered and Pete’s gone. A man and woman came and got him, according to the elevator. They killed Hawthorne. I think it was Pat McClain; the police checked at her apartment and nobody’s there. And their car is gone.”

“But—do you know why they would take Pete?” Schilling asked her.

“No, I don’t know why they would take Pete; I don’t even know who ‘they’ are, really.”

With a pseudopodium, the vug E.B. Black held something small; it extended it toward Joe Schilling. “Mr. Garden wrote this interesting inscription,” the vug said. “‘We are entirely surrounded by vugs.’ That, however, is not so, as Mr. Garden’s disappearance testifies to. Last night Mr. Garden called my ex-colleague Mr. Hawthorne and told him that he knew who had killed Mr. Luckman. At that time we imagined we had the killer and so we were not interested. Now we have learned we were in error. Mr. Garden did not say who had killed Mr. Luckman, unfortunately, because my ex-colleague refused to listen.” The vug was silent a moment. “Mr. Hawthorne has paid for his foolishness rather fully.”

Carol said, “E.B. Black thinks that whoever killed Luckman
came and got Pete and ran into Hawthorne in the elevator on their way out.”

“But it doesn’t know who that is,” Schilling said.

“Correct,” E.B. Black said. “From Mrs. Garden, I have managed to learn a great deal, however. For instance, I have learned whom Mr. Garden saw last night. A psychiatrist in Pocatello, Idaho, first of all. Also Mary Anne McClain; we have not been able to locate her, however. Mr. Garden was drunk and confused. He told Mrs. Garden that the murder of Mr. Luckman had been committed by six members of Pretty Blue Fox, the six with defective memories. This would include himself. Do you have any comment on that, Mr. Schilling?”

“No,” Joe Schilling murmured.

“We hope to get back Mr. Garden alive,” E.B. Black said. It did not sound very confident.

Patricia McClain picked up her daughter’s frightened thoughts. At once she said, “Rothman, we’ve been infiltrated. Mary Anne says so.”

“Is she right?” Rothman, old, hard-eyed and tough, demanded from where he, as their leader, sat.

Looking into Pete Garden’s mind, Patricia saw his memory of the visit to Doctor E.R. Philipson, the strange sense of lightness, of fractional gravity as he walked down the corridor. “Yes,” Patricia said. “Mary’s right.
He’s been on Titan.”
She turned to the two pre-cogs, Dave Mutreaux and her husband Allen. “What’s going to happen?”

“A variable,” Allen murmured, ashen-faced. “Clouds it up.”

Mutreaux said hoarsely, “Your daughter, she’s going to do something; impossible for us to tell what.”

“I have to get out of here,” Mary Anne said to them all. She rose to her feet, her thoughts scattered by her terror. “I’m under vug influence. That Doctor Philipson, Pete must have been right. He asked me what I saw in the bar and I thought he was hallucinating. But it wasn’t my fear he was picking up. He saw reality.” She started toward the door of
the motel room, panting. “I have to get away. I’m dangerous to the organization.”

As Mary Anne went out the door, Patricia said urgently to her husband, “The heat-needle; set it on low. So it doesn’t injure her.”

“I’ll cut her down,” Allen said, and pointed the heat-needle at his daughter’s back. Mary Anne turned for an instant, and saw the heat-needle.

The heat-needle jumped from Allen McCain’s hand, climbed and reversed its flight. It smashed against the wall.

“Poltergeist effect,” Allen said. “We can’t stop her.” Now the heat-needle in Patricia’s hands quivered, struggled and tore loose from her fingers. “Rothman,” he said, appealing to the highest authority in the organization present. “Ask her to stop.”

“Leave my mind alone,” Mary Anne said to Rothman.

Pete Garden, on his feet, sprinted after Mary Anne. The girl saw that, too.

“No,” Patricia called after her. “Don’t!”

Rothman, his forehead bulging, concentrated on Mary Anne, his eyes virtually shut. But all at once Pete Garden flopped forward, like a rag doll, boneless, danced in the air, his limbs jiggling. He drifted, then, toward the wall of the motel room, and Patricia McClain screamed at Mary Anne. The dangling figure hesitated, briefly, and then swooped into the wall; it passed through the wall until only its outstretched arm and hand remained, projecting absurdly.

“Mary Anne!” Patricia shouted.
“For god’s sake bring him back!”

At the door, Mary Anne halted, turned in panic, saw what she had done with Pete Garden, saw the expression on her mother’s face and on Allen’s face, the horror of everyone in the room. Rothman, focusing everything which he possessed on her, was trying to persuade her. She saw that, too. And—

“Thank god,” Allen McClain said, and sagged. From the wall, Pete Garden tumbled back out, fell in a heap on the
floor, intact; he got up almost at once and stood shaking, facing Mary Anne.

“I’m sorry,” Mary Anne said, and sighed.

Rothman said, “We hold the dominant possibility here, Mary Anne; believe that. Even if they have gotten in. We’ll examine everyone in the organization, person by person. Shall we start with you?” To Patricia he said, “Try and find out for me just how deeply they’ve penetrated her.”