To Save a World (3 page)

"Meanwhile, it's part of my responsibility to see that there aren't any more of you murdered. Protective custody might not work. Not with you people—" Jason smiled, adding, "You damned thick-headed isolationists of whom I happen to be one. But it would help if we had something to offer in return for the extra services it may take to keep you from disappearing."

"I can offer one thing," Regis said grimly, "and it isn't anything we want to give. But it's for everybody's good to keep the matrix sciences from dying out just from lack of telepaths to work them. I'll give ourselves, Jason. There are telepaths out there," his gesture swept the night sky and the infinite stars. "Not so many as on Darkover, perhaps, or with so many talents. Remember; before the Ages of Chaos, we bred for
laran
gifts. We went too far; we're inbred. Find us some more, Jason. Find out how the Darkover telepaths differ—if they do—from those on Terra or Vainwal or the fourteenth planet of Bibbledygook. If we can survive as a caste, or if what we have can be trained into others—well, maybe this thing can be stopped. Because if we're all that's keeping Darkover out of the stream of entropy—and whether you like it or not, the Empire
is
a process of entropy, and I won't argue ethics with you again—well, we've got to keep standing in that door. We
had
our time of Chaos," he added, "I can show you radioactive craters on the Forbidden City. What's left of us isn't primitive, Jason, or barbarian; it's what left after we've been to the limits of so-called Progress; and the few who survived it have learned what not to do with it. Find us more telepaths, Jason, and you have the word of a Hastur that you'll learn what and why we are!"

DEPARTMENT OF ALIEN ANTHROPOLOGY:

COTTMAN FOUR (Darkover)

TO ALL Empire Medical Services on Open and Closed planets: You are directed to seek out any humans bearing telepathic or psi talents, preferably those latent and undeveloped. This offer does not extend to those who are using clairvoyant gifts for profit, as those can be simulated by advanced technology. You are empowered to offer them Class A medical contracts . . . .

When you sweep a wide net to the ends of the known universe, some curious things are caught up in the meshes . . . .

Rondo was a little, wizened man of no particular age, and he was very badly scared. He could feel the fear like a cold taste in his mouth, and he tried to shut it off, knowing it interfered with the control so necessary for what he was trying to do.

He was only one of the fifty-odd pairs of eyes following the helical path of a ball, spinning through an increasingly eccentric orbit inside the great crystal gambling machine. As it hit other randomly spinning specks of matter, the orbit altered, changed, drifted, as it spun down, down through weightlessness, to fall—to fall into one—into one of the cups—

Here,
here.
The
thing
in his mind—he had no other word for the gift that had always been with him—reached out and touched, delicately, the ball. Like another fleck of drifting dust, it moved the unpredictable orbit, ever so lightly, toward the mouths of the continuously spinning row of cups at the bottom of the machine.
Slower, faster
—
wait, wait, mine's not here yet . . . now, NOW!

The ball spun down faster, as if magnetized; down it went,
click
into a cup. There was the sigh of released tension from all the fifty-odd waiting throats, mouths. Then, inarticulate, a sigh of disappointment, of frustration.

The croupier droned, "Number eight-four-two wins, six to one."

Rondo was shaking so hard he could hardly reach out to rake in his winnings. The eyes of the croupier belied the passionless drone. They said, "Wait, you bastard. They're coming. You've pushed your luck too far this time, you little bastard . . ."

This was his thought while he was droning, "Place all bets for next round. All money down," and his hand tripped the punch which sent the little ball up for another round of the long-orbit game.

Rondo fumbled in his winnings and, as if compelled, started to shove them all toward the cup which yawned—two inches across to every eye, a waiting chasm to his—just before him. He should have quit before; he knew this and yet in the grip of the compulsion that was like a disease, he saw one cup shining, gleaming, brimming with gold that could be his . . .

He shoved them toward the cup, which opened up like a vast mouth in his imagination, gripped with the sight of a flow of gold . . .

It was a sickness. He knew it as he watched the ball spin; a sickness, perhaps born of that uncanny skill of his. Again, helplessly, now that the bets were placed, he sought the spinning ball with his eyes and berated himself in self-castigation so rough it seemed that the men beside him in the gambling parlor must hear:

Damn fool
—,
no sense
—
take winnings and get out
—
they're on to you, they're on to you, take winnings and run, RUN, RUN, they're COMING, COMING NOW . . .

But he stood quite still, paralyzed, until the hand fell on his shoulder and a quiet voice arrested the upward spin of the little gold ball, with:

"All bets off, ladies and gentlemen. The next game will commence in three megaseconds. We have reason to believe—"

Rondo squealed, not hearing what came next, "You say yourself your machines are cheat proof, you dirty welshers! Did anybody see me touch a finger to the machine?"

The voice was quiet, but rang like a bell inside the gambling parlor. "No machine is proof against an esper. You've been winning too damned often." The hand on his arm tightened and Rondo went without another word. He knew protest was useless, and his fright ran counterpoint,
my own damned fault . . . no restraint . . . no proof, no PROOF . . .

Outside the hall, the gripping hand relaxed a little, then tightened. The man towering over the little gambler said, "We have no legal proof and there's no law against esping a machine to win. If you'd been a little cleverer—we can't touch you legally. But get the hell out and if we catch you in here again you won't live long enough to enjoy your winnings."

A rough hand turned his pocket inside out. "You've made enough already," the man said, "forget about today's harvest. Now get!" A well-placed kick and Rondo stumbled out of the building into the street, under the great, brilliant artificial moon of the pleasure planet of Keef.

He stood there, shaking like a whipped dog, numbly fingering his empty pockets. He had done it again. He had been banned, by now, from every gambling hall on Keef, just as he'd eventually worn out his welcome on four or five worlds just like it. Sooner or later they spotted him. It was the sickness of the compulsive gambler that kept him going back and back, that would not let him make a small killing, normal winnings, and get out, to play again some other day or week.

He stood under the huge fake moon, with its rose-colored light, and hated, and hated. But mostly he hated himself. He had done this to himself; he knew it in his saner moments. The reason why was buried deep in a life where the strange thing which made him able to predict, to control the fall, was also buried—and had made him hated everywhere, even when he had used it (for a little while, long, long years ago) to warn, to help; to heal. And now the sickness he could never control kept him going back and back, to wipe out everything in the fever of the fall of a card, a ball.

What could he do now? Hidden in his lodgings was less than his necessary getaway money. He was stranded here on Keef, and Spaceforce at this end of the Empire was far from the gentle with the indigent. On a planet of the affluent, the stranded, sick or impoverished were herded out of sight. He could perhaps find work as a bath attendant in the great pleasure houses euphemistically called the baths; he was neither young enough nor handsome enough for anything else there, even if the thing in his mind had allowed him to be that close to the average pleasure seeker on such a world as this. He could keep from sickening only by using all his forces on gambling . . .

And now he was shut away even from that.

His jaw tightened and his face was very ugly indeed. They had thrown him out because he won too often. Very well, let them see what they had done when they incurred his anger! The red overpowering rage of the poorly controlled psychotic began to flow across him. No matter what had done it to him. That was ages ago now. Now he only knew that he was barred from the one thing on the whole pleasure planet that held pleasure for him, the fall and spin and drift of a long-orbit ball, and he hurt, and he wanted revenge.

He stood there motionless, his mind gripped on the one thing that made sense to him; the falling ball, the falling ball . . .

Around him the world faltered, came to a stop. The thing in the telepath's semi-psychotic mind was paralyzing him and paralyzing, too, the one thing which made sense . . .

Inside the gambling parlor, seventy puzzled gamblers and a croupier and a manager stared in dismayed incomprehension as the spinning, falling gilt fleck inside the machine hung suspended in mid-air, not moving.

After half an hour of this, as the angry patrons began to drift into the night again in quest of other pleasures, Rondo came to himself and remembered to run. By then it was too late.

They left him finally, bloody, bleeding and more than nine-tenths dead, lying in the gutter of a darkened alley, to be found moaning there an hour later by two Spaceforce men who didn't know who he was, gave him the benefit of the doubt, and took him to a hospital. And there he stayed for a long, long time . . .

When the world began to go round again under him, he had two visitors.

"Darkover," Rondo said, not believing, "why in the name of all that's unholy would I want to go there? All I know about Darkover is that it's a cold hell of a world off on the edge of the universe, and not even decently part of the Empire. Other telepaths? Hell, it's bad enough, being a freak myself. I'm supposed to like the idea of other freaks?"

"Nevertheless, think it over," said the man beside his hospital bed. "I don't want to put pressure on you, Mr. Rondo, but where else would you go? You certainly can't stay here. And forgive me for mentioning it, you don't look as if you have much chance for any other employment."

He shrugged. "I'll find something," he said, and meant it. There were always suckers coming in on the big ships. He wasn't a marked man all over the planet. He'd get a stake somehow and get away; and there were still planets he hadn't tried.

It wasn't until the second visitor came along that he changed his mind. The plan sounded tempting enough. All gambling machines were equipped, by the stiff Empire law which couldn't be bribed or bought off, with tamperproof fields—but, the visitor told him beguilingly, a tamperproof field couldn't keep out esp. They'd provide disguises, and a liberal cut of the winnings . . .

And through their persuasions he caught the unmistakable feel of the gangster. One such group had beaten him within an inch of his life. Now he was supposed to get involved with another?

Rondo was a loner, had been one all his life, didn't intend to change now. Bad enough to be at the mercy of one gang. The thought of being caught between two made even his self-destructive gambling instinct flinch.

Anyway, even though Darkover didn't sound like his kind of place at all, they couldn't make him stay there. There must be a big spaceport, and where there was a spaceport there was gambling, and where there was gambling he could make a stake—and then there was a whole big galaxy waiting for him again.

He called the number his first visitor had left.

Conner was ready to die.

He found himself floating again, as he had floated so many times since the accident a year ago: weightless, sick, disoriented. Dying, and death wouldn't come.
Not this again. Overdosed, I was ready
to
die. I thought it would cut this off. Now here again, is this my hell?

Time disappeared, as it always did, a few minutes, an hour, fifty years, floating across the cosmos, and a voice said clear and loud in his brain, not in words,
Maybe we can help, but you must come to us. Such pain, such terror, there is no reason
. . .

Where, where?
His whole world, his whole being, one silent scream,
where can I turn this off
.

Darkover. Be patient, they'll find you.

Where are you who speak to me? Where is this place?
Conner tried to focus in the endless spinning.

The voice drifted away.
Nowhere. Not in the body. No time, no space here.

The invisible cord of contact thinned, leaving him alone in his weightless hell, and Conner screamed inside his mind,
Don't go, don't go, you were with me Out There, don't ever go, don't go
. . .

"He's coming to," remarked an all too solid voice, and Conner felt despair and loneliness and anguish all disappear under a sudden sharply physical ache of sickness. He opened his eyes to the too brisk, all but accusing eyes of Doctor Rimini, who made reassuring sounds which Conner disregarded, having heard them all too often before. He listened without speaking, promised blandly not to do it again, and sank into the lifeless apathy from which he had emerged only twice, both times for a futile attempt at suicide.

"I don't understand yon," Rimini remarked. He sounded friendly and interested but Conner knew now how empty the words were. No, Rimini didn't give a damn, although they regarded him as a stubborn and still interesting case. Not a person, of course, with a unique and horrible way of suffering. Just a case. He opened a crack in his mind to hear the doctor chattering on, "You displayed so much will to live after the accident, Mr. Conner, and after surviving that ordeal it seems all wrong that you should give up now . . ."

But what Conner heard with a shout that drowned Rimini's words were the doctor's own fear of death which now struck Conner as a sickening, small, petty thing, and the doctor's fear of what Conner had become—can he read my mind, does he know that I . . . and the stream trailed off into a wilderness of the small obscenities which were at least part of the reason for his will to suicide, not the doctor's alone; too many were like him, so that Conner had found even the hospital, with its animal shudderings of minds and bodies in agony, more endurable than the outside with men preoccupied with their own hungers and lusts and greed. He had crawled into a hole in the hospital and pulled the hole in after him, emerging only to try dying as a change, and never succeeding.

When Rimini had babbled himself away again, Conner lay looking at the ceiling. He felt like laughing. Not with amusement, though.

They spoke of the will to live he had demonstrated after the accident. It had been a bad one, one of the big ships exploding in space, and the personnel hardly having time to crowd into lifeboats; four of them, instead, had made it into the experimental plastic emergency bubblesuits and had fallen into space in those.

The others had never been recovered. Conner wondered sometimes what had happened to them: had the life-support system mercifully failed, so that they died quickly and sane? Had they gone mad and raved mindlessly down to death? Were they still drifting out there in the endless night? He quailed from the thought. His own hell was bad enough.

The bubbles had been meant for protection for minutes, until pickup could be made by lifeboat, not for days or weeks. The life-support system was fail-safe, and hadn't failed. It had worked too well. Conner, breathing endlessly recycled oxygen, fed by intravenous dribbles of nutrient, had lived. And lived. Lived for days, weeks, months, spinning endlessly in free-fall in an invisible bubblefield, with nothing else between himself and the trillions upon trillions of stars.