The World Wreckers (15 page)

herself. Regis' eyes went swiftly, with the old fear, to the small, screened crib where the baby was lying (no more than a small red face asleep in a white hospital blanket) but he quickly brought his attention

back to Melora, gesturing to her not to rise, bending and kissing her cheek. "He is lovely, Melora. Thank you. If I had known I would have been here with you."

"There was nothing you could have done, and I was very well cared for," answered the girl coolly, turning her cheek away from the kiss. The tension in the room was palpable; the three facing her, all

telepaths of greater or lesser power, could all feel her anger. Regis knew suddenly that he had been

cowardly to let the others come in the hope that Melora would not make a scene before outsiders; she

had been distressed at the need to bear her child in this strange place; she did not understand why Regis had demanded it of her; and she was (Regis realized) entitled to make a scene if she wanted to,

unhampered by outsiders.

Keral created a small diversion by going to the baby; Melora gave a small cry as the stranger bent over

her child; then as Keral's beautiful eyes turned to her, she relaxed. She actually smiled at the chieri,

saying, "Yes, take him if you like, Noble One; you lend us grace."

Keral picked up the infant. His long hands slipped competently around the little swaddled body, as if he

were quite accustomed to handling children, although David, watching him, knew without knowing how

that Keral had never seen or touched a young baby before. Keral's smile was curiously distant,

fascinated. "His thoughts are so strange and formless. And yet how different it feels from touching a small animal."

David privately thought the baby looked like any other newborn thing, small and nondescript, but he

knew that this was born of the cultivated cynicism of the medical student. He tried for an instant to see the child through Keral's eyes, a small wonder, a miracle of newness. It was too intense; he dropped

away from the contact and said to Regis, "What will you call him?"

"That will be for Melora to say," said Regis, smiling at the young mother, "unless she asks me to give him a name."

Melora's face softened and she laid her hand in Regis'. "You may if you like," she said, and David touched Keral's shoulder. Keral put the baby down quietly and they went out, leaving the young parents

alone with their child.

David thought, later, that it was this moment of contact with the child and with Regis which sensitized

him; but at the time he let it drop from consciousness and spent the day with the remaining members of

the project. Rondo was sullen and uncooperative to attempts to measure his control of small objects,

unwilling to discuss his gambling career or how he had managed it, unwilling to attempt manipulation of

the test objects Jason and David showed him. Desideria was snappish and seemed apprehensive. Conner

had sunk into apathy again and would not even talk, let alone cooperate. David could sense, like a

tangible thing, his grief and sense of desertion now that Missy was gone.

Regis was not with them at all, and Danilo, who turned up briefly, made Regis' excuses, on the grounds

of urgent private affairs, and took himself off again as well.

In the end, after Rondo had sullenly pleaded fatigue and headache (and David felt that Conner would

have done the same if he'd cared even that much about what happened to him) David simply asked

Desideria to tell them something about the training of a telepath Keeper, and he sat listening and making listless notes—pure waste motion, he knew, as it was all being put on tape anyhow.

"We were trained at first with games, like manipulating this stuff when we were young, that is,"

Desideria told them, moving her head at the assembled dice, feathers and other small objects with which

David had been trying to arouse Rondo's cooperation. "There were also games where sweets and other

things were hidden and we had to find them, and later much more elaborate games where clues were

hidden or one group hid from the others. Later there was fairly strenuous physical training of the nerve

currents; breathing, concentration, hours and hours spent in breath control and meditation, learning to

work both in and out of the physical body. All this before we ever saw a matrix, of course. When we

could control all our natural talents, then we began to work with the matrix jewels, the small ones first

—"

David reflected that much of this sounded like the old traditional yoga training, still used by some

groups of Terrans for religious or health reasons. He put away curiosity until all this could be evaluated at leisure.

All during that evening the same sense of dullness, of everything hanging fire, pervaded all of David's

senses. Keral was edgily quiet and uncommunicative. He had been assigned to a room in the hospital

HQ near David's, and, as they had fallen into a habit of doing, they went to supper together in the

cafeteria, but he did not speak a dozen words nor did he offer to come to David's room and talk as usual.

Conner, too, seemed not to be speaking to anyone, and while Keral's silence did not worry David,

Conner's did. If this apathy continued, would it trigger another suicidal phase in the spaceman? He had

come back to life for Missy. If she was gone, would it take away his interest in living? Damn Missy

anyhow! But David hardened his heart. He couldn't, and wouldn't, take on responsibility for the mental

and physical well-being of the whole blasted project! That was Jason's baby and he could rock it.

Nevertheless, it was a long time before David could sleep; he kept having the curious illusion of voices

just at the edge of consciousness, in the same way that distant cries or sobs, even after they have ceased, seem to be going on just below the level of hearing, keeping the listener's ears and senses strained and

his nerves on edge with the fear of hearing them again.

Nevertheless, he did fall asleep at last, the sort of light sleep where the sleeper knows he is sleeping and is conscious of shuttling back and forth, half aware, from true sleep and dreams into light half-awake

drowsing and back again. Two or three times he startled upright with the brief sharp shock of falling,

weightless horror, and knew his dreams wove into Conner's; Missy's face, nightmarish and contorted

with crying, swam in and out of his dreams; and Keral, his alien hands cradling the small pink form of

the baby and a weird croon of song weaving into the dream.

Abruptly, with a sharper sense of spinning awareness cutting through the dream, he was upright and on

his feet, half-dressed, running…

Bare corridors. Keral's flying feet matching his own. The startled white face, eye pupils dilated, voice

dulled;
you can't go in there!

Door flung wide, crashing. The dark form of an intruder, menacing; Melora's breathing slowed, slack,

dilated, discolored pupils…

Keral bending, heaving, upraised dark form, a terrible scream and the shape of the intruder flying against the wall, the crunch, crack, shriek of bones breaking and snapping—and something died. Melora's white

slack face; press up one eyeball with practiced fingers, shouting for help.

The room filled with doctors, nurses; nurse crying dazedly, drugged. Bending, mouth to the girl's mouth,

breathing, breathing, breathing—

"Here, Dr. Hamilton. I'll take over."

Stand aside, breath quieting to normal. Keral, stark white. The baby in his hands; Keral's voice, ragged

and unreal:

"He will need help breathing; his chest is not crushed but I think ribs are broken"—the tiny brittle feel of minute ribs under his hand, the fitful choking crying of a half-smothered baby slowly coming to life

again…

Crowding forms bending over the dead man in the corner. Keral's shaking hands, white face just a

wedge of terror; questions, voices, uniforms. An official voice, cutting through the others:

"In his pocket here; ampules of the same drug he gave the girl. He must have drugged Nurse Conniston, too. Dr. Hamilton, what brought you here? It looks as if you were just in time to prevent two murders."

David heard his own voice, but it sounded unreal to him. "I'm not sure. Possibly I heard Keral—did you call out, Keral? All I know is that I woke up with this sense of terrible urgency. I don't know how I knew that Melora and the—the baby were in danger."

"Who is he?" Officials crowded around the dead man.

"Same old story, he could be anything. Some drifter from the spaceports—surgically altered fingerprints, even."

"Damn good thing, too. Imagine what would have happened; Regis Hastur confides his son to us for

safekeeping and the child and the girl murdered right here in the Terran HQ? Just imagine the political

capital they could make out of that?"

Vaguely, still in the blur, David wondered who
they
were and just what political capital could be made out of the death of a child, and what kind of monsters could imagine such a move. He had to tell his

story twice more, feeling more and more disoriented and disbelieving every time. The baby was in no

danger, but the HQ officials tripled the security guards around the nursery. David stood by, not needed

by the team working over Melora (it was more than an hour before she began to breathe again normally,

unaided; she had been almost fatally drugged). Jason Allison turned up and drew away the Spaceforce

men who were questioning David (Keral; where was Keral? David could no longer feel his presence,

and felt cold and bereft—) and the Spaceforce men, listening to Jason, stood staring at David as if he

were some kind of alien.

Somewhere in that hour, Regis turned up, white as a bleached skeleton. He tried to say something to

David, couldn't manage it, his face working; and finally, wordlessly, he threw his arms around David

and embraced him, pressing his cheek against the Terran's.

With the touch, David's world cleared suddenly into bright colors and reality again, like fog suddenly

clearing away. He knew suddenly that he was awake and that this was all real, not a wild, confusing

nightmare. He came up to reality with Regis' hands clasped hard over his own, and said, coming back to

himself:

"It's all right, Regis; they're both going to live and nothing more will happen now that everyone's

warned. But—Good God! Where is Keral; what's happened to him?"

He had a sudden, stark déjà-vu of Keral's face; stark with horror, standing over the man he had killed.

No chieri has ever killed any living thing. He doesn't even eat meat!

David went back to his own room, knowing without knowing how that he would find Keral there, and he

did. The chieri was curled up, hiding his face, only a wordless ball of misery and rejection, and his

breathing was so slack and silent that for a heart-stopping instant David thought the shock had killed

him. The pale, alien face held no recognition, even when David spoke to him. David turned him gently

over. He was struck again, poignantly, at the almost feminine beauty of the chieri; his own dream came

back to him with its curious overtones, and David felt an instant of startled shock and shame. Then, in

sudden anger at himself, he drove the thought out of his mind.

Keral needs you and
you
can't judge him in human terms or in terms of your own private sexual
hangups!

Keral was icy cold, almost as rigid as death. David knelt beside him on the bed and gathered him close,

holding him with blind instinct, speaking his name in a soft, repeated murmur.

"Keral, Keral. It's me, it's David. Come back. I'm here. It's all right; it's going to be all right. Keral, Keral, don't die." The words were only a meaningless croon, but they were a way of focusing his whole mind, his whole personality on a deeper call, a deeper search:

Keral. Where have you gone? Come back, come back and be with me. I call you back, with all of myself,
searching through the nowhere into which you have gone, seeking you out in the silences of fear
. …

He felt it first, the black and formless horror in which Keral had gone down and almost drowned:

Death. I brought death on a living thing. He had the child between his hands; he was killing him. How
can anyone kill a child? How can anyone bring death? My own hands and they brought death… I am

dying in his death, drowning in that darkness
…

"God help me," said David, half aloud, "how can I reach him?" He filled his mind with the picture of life slowly coming back into the baby's blued, choking face, the surge of gratitude and love that had flowed

into him from Regis' touch. Slowly, like the faltering beat of a heart under the reviving touch of a

pacemaker, he felt Keral's awareness beginning to come back to life, coming up slowly through the

darkness. He kept on holding Keral and murmuring to him (like a child; like a woman!) until at last the

chieri's gray and luminous eyes blinked open, and he looked into David's face with a reviving, desolate

grief.

"I did not want to kill him, even such an evil one. But I did not realize how weak he was and how strong my own arms when I was angry." He was trembling. "I'm so cold. So cold."

"That's shock," said David very gently. "You'll be better soon. There was nothing else you could have done, Keral."

"The child—"

"He's fine," David said, and marveled again. Keral's race, by Keral's own statement, was dying. Keral had never seen a child of his own people. How could the alien become so deeply involved with a child

of another kind? Such a deep sense of identity—