The World Wreckers Read online

  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 esp-ing 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 Me 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 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 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 Space-force 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 you," 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 Conne
r 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 fie 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. 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.

  He had no measure of time. He had no means of knowing up from down, no means of orientation. He had nothing to look at but distant flaming points of stars that spun and wheeled round him in his tiny days of rotation on his own center.

  Five hours in a sensory deprivation tank, back in the prehistory of psychology, had sent men insane.

  Conner spent the first ten days or so-he later figured -in a desperate hope, clinging to sanity and the hope of rescue.

  Then, In his own endlessly prisoning universe, he went insane. Contemplating his own center, he spun like a god and emerged knowing there was no protection or death, even in madness. There was not even hunger upon which to orient himself.

  There was only his own mind, and the universe. And so he began spinning, ranging through the universe, his body left behind, his mind wholly free. He visited a thousand, thousand worlds, touched a thousand, thousand minds, never knowing dream from reality.

  They picked him up-chance, the merest fluke-some four months after the crash. And Conner was insane, but in a strange way. His brain, left alone with itself too long, had learned to reach beyond, and now he was something he could not name, or others guess. Fixed firmly in a body chained to hunger, thirst, gravity and stress, he could not

  leave himself behind again; nor could he endure the life he had resigned himself to lose.

  "Mr. Conner," a voice interrupted his thoughts, "you have a visitor."

  He heard the man, incurious, wishing he would go away until he heard the name of Darkover, and then he didn't believe it.

  He accepted only to escape any further contact with the hospital whose shelter had become a blind alley, a mousetrap for his soul. And because, on a world of telepaths, there might be some who could help him to handle this thing, to turn oil the nightmare he had become without desiring it and without knowing why.

  And, perhaps, a little, to find the voice in his dream. . . .

  David Hamilton wiped the sweat from his face as he came blindly through the door, leaning briefly against the light paneled wall.

  He'd made it this time, but God! The blind terror when the anesthetic began to blot out light-No, it was going to be too much. He'd have to quit. Around him the hospital, crammed with humans and non-humans, breathed and sweated pain and misery at every crack in the walls; and although David, from years of practice, could shut most of it out, his defenses were lowered from the strain of the operation just past and it began to wear in on him again from every direction.

  Is the whole world groaning in pain? His sharpened nerves gave him an absurd and frightening visual commentary, a planet splitting like a fractured skull, a globe of a world with a bandage round its equator; he started to giggle and cut it off just that fraction before it became hysteria.

  No good. I’ll have to quit.

  I'm not insane. The doctors went all over that when I was nineteen and just beginning Medic training.

  I made it through Medical school on nerve and guts; and whatever else it did or didn't do, it gave me an uncanny knack for diagnosis. But here in the hospital it's too much. Too many symptoms, too many people in fear and terror. Too much pain, and I have to feel it all. I can't help them by sharing it.

  Dr. Lakshman, dark and grave, his eyes full of compassion beneath the white surgical plastic cap, put a brief hand on David's shoulder as he passed through the hall. David, fresh from horror, shrank from the touch as he had learned to do, then relaxed; Lakshman, as always, was clean sympathy and all kindness, a restful spot in a world grown full of horror. He said: "Pretty bad, Hamilton? Is it getting worse?"

  David managed a smile, wrung out like a used mop, and said, "With all of medical science these days you'd think they'd manage a cure for my particular type of lunacy."

  "Not lunacy," said Lakshman, "but unfortunately no cure. Not here. You happen to be a freak of a very rare kind, David, and I've watched it killing you for over a year now. But maybe there is an answer."

  "You didn't-" David shrank; Lakshman of all people to violate his confidence? Who could he trust? The older man seemed to follow his thought; "No, I haven't discussed this with anyone, but when they sent out the message I thought of you right away. David, do you know where Cottman's Star is?"

  "Not a clue," David said, "or care."

  "There's a planet-Darkover they call it," Lakshman said. "There are telepaths there and they're looking for-no, listen," he added firmly, feeling David tense under his hands. "Maybe they can help you find out about this thing. Control it. If you try to go on here at the hospital-well, they can't let you go on much more, David. Sooner or later it will distract you at a crucial moment. Your work is all right, so far. But you'd better look into this; or else forget all about medicine and find a job in the forest service on some uninhabited world. Very uninhabited."

  David sighed. He had known this was coming, and if

  nine years of study and work was to be thrown away, it didn't much matter where he went.

  "Where is Darkover?" he asked. "Do they have a good medical service there?"

  Ill

  they saw the guards lockstepped around him as he came through the crowd to the airstrip. It was icy, cold, near evening, only a few red clouds lingering where the red sun had been, and a bitter wind eating down from the sharp-toothed crags behind Thendara. Normally there would have been very few people on the streets at this hour; Darkovan night sets in early and is as cold as their own legendary ninth hell, and most people seek the comfort of heated rooms and light, leaving the streets to the snow and the occasional unlucky Terran from the Trade City.

  But this was something new, and Darkovans in the streets put off minding their own business to watch it; to follow and murmur that singular and ugly murmur which is, perhaps, the first thing a Terran on a hostile world learns to identify.

  One of the four Terran guards, hearing the movement, tensed and moved his hand closer to his weapon. It wasn't a threatening movement, just an automatic one, just close enough that he felt reassured that the weapon was there if he needed it. But the prisoner said, "No." The Terran shrugged and said, "Your neck, sir," and let his hand fall.

  Walking at the center of the close drawn guard, Regis listened to the muttering
and knew it was directed as much at him as at the Terrans guarding him. He thought wryly, do these people think I like this? Do they think I enjoy it? I've made myself virtually a prisoner in my own house just to avoid this kind of display, the shame of our world; a Hastur of Hastur no longer dares to walk free in his own streets. It's my life I'm giving up, my freedom, not theirs. It's my children, not theirs, growing up with Terran armed guards standing around their nurseries. I am so constantly reminded that a bullet, a knife, a silk cord or a single poison berry in their supper can mean the end of the Hastur line forever.

  And what will they say when they hear that Melora, bearing my child, is being sent to the Terran Medical for her confinement? I can hear it now. I've tried to keep it secret, but I had enough trouble persuading her family, and these things leak out. Even if there had been much between us, this would have ended it. Melora wouldn't even speak to me when I visited her last, and the trouble is, I don't blame her. She just stared coldly over my head and told me that she and all her family were obedient as always to the will of Hastur. And I knew that such little love or kindness as there had been between us, for a few months, was gone forever.