American Science Fiction Five Classic Novels 1956-58 (44 page)

Kempsey drank the whiskey, still dazed, still exulting. “Free,” he muttered. “God bless him! Free. You don’t know what I’ve been through.” He drank again. “I still can’t believe it. It’s like a dream. Why don’t you take off, man? I—” Kempsey choked and dropped the glass, staring at Foyle in horror. “Your face!” he exclaimed. “My God, your face! What happened to it?”

“You happened to it, you son of a bitch!” Foyle cried. He leaped up, his tiger face burning, and flung the ampule like a knife. It pierced Kempsey’s neck and hung quivering. Kempsey toppled.

Foyle accelerated, blurred to the body, picked it up in midfall and carried it aft to the starboard stateroom. There were two main staterooms in the yawl, and Foyle had prepared both of them in advance. The starboard room had been stripped and turned into a surgery. Foyle strapped the body on the operating table, opened a case of surgical instruments, and began the delicate operation he had learned by hypno-training that morning . . . an operation made possible only by his five-toone acceleration.

He cut through skin and fascia, sawed through the rib cage, exposed the heart, dissected it out and connected veins and arteries to the intricate blood pump alongside the table. He started the pump. Twenty seconds, objective time, had elapsed. He placed an oxygen mask over Kempsey’s face and switched on the alternating suction and ructation of the oxygen pump.

Foyle decelerated, checked Kempsey’s temperature, shot an anti-shock series into his veins and waited. Blood gurgled through the pump and Kempsey’s body. After five minutes, Foyle removed the oxygen mask. The respiration reflex continued. Kempsey was without a heart, yet alive. Foyle sat down alongside the operating table and waited. The stigmata still showed on his face.

Kempsey remained unconscious.

Foyle waited.

Kempsey awoke, screaming.

Foyle leaped up, tightened the straps and leaned over the heartless man.

“Hallo, Kempsey,” he said.

Kempsey screamed.

“Look at yourself, Kempsey. You’re dead.”

Kempsey fainted. Foyle brought him to with the oxygen mask.

“Let me die, for God’s sake!”

“What’s the matter? Does it hurt? I died for six months, and I didn’t whine.”

“Let me die.”

“In time, Kempsey. Your sympathetic block’s been bypassed, but I’ll let you die in time, if you behave. You were aboard ‘Vorga’ on September 16, 2436?”

“For Christ’s sake, let me die.”

“You were aboard ‘Vorga’?”

“Yes.”

“You passed a wreck out in space. Wreck of the ‘Nomad.’ She signalled for help and you passed her by. Yes?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Christ! Oh Christ help me!”

“Why?”

“Oh Jesus!”

“I was aboard ‘Nomad,’ Kempsey. Why did you leave me to rot?”

“Sweet Jesus help me! Christ, deliver me!”

“I’ll deliver you, Kempsey, if you answer questions. Why did you leave me to rot?”

“Couldn’t pick you up.”

“Why not?”

“Reffs aboard.”

“Oh? I guessed right, then. You were running refugees in from Callisto?”

“Yes.”

“How many?”

“Six hundred.”

“That’s a lot, but you could have made room for one more. Why didn’t you pick me up?”

“We were scuttling the reffs.”

“What!” Foyle cried.

“Overboard . . . all of them . . . six hundred . . . Stripped ’em . . . took their clothes, money, jewels, baggage . . . Put ’em through the airlock in batches. Christ! The clothes all over the ship . . . The shrieking and the—Jesus! If I could only forget! The naked women . . . blue . . . busting wide open . . . spinning behind us . . . The clothes all over the ship . . . Six hundred . . . Scuttled!”

“You son of a bitch! It was a racket? You took their money and never intended bringing them to earth?”

“It was a racket.”

“And that’s why you didn’t pick me up?”

“Would have had to scuttle you anyway.”

“Who gave the order?”

“Captain.”

“Name?”

“Joyce. Lindsey Joyce.”

“Address?”

“Skoptsy Colony, Mars.”

“What!” Foyle was thunderstruck. “He’s a Skoptsy? You mean after hunting him for a year, I can’t touch him . . . hurt him . . . make him feel what I felt?” He turned away from the tortured man on the table, equally tortured himself by frustration. “A Skoptsy! The one thing I never figured on . . . After preparing that port stateroom for him . . . What am I going to do? What, in God’s name am I going to do?” he roared in fury, the stigmata showing livid on his face.

He was recalled by a desperate moan from Kempsey. He returned to the table and bent over the dissected body. “Let’s get it straight for the last time. This Skoptsy, Lindsey Joyce, gave the order to scuttle the reffs?”

“Yes.”

“And to let me rot?”

“Yes. Yes. Yes. That’s enough. Let me die.”

“Live, you pig-man . . . filthy heartless bastard! Live without a heart. Live and suffer. I’ll keep you alive forever, you—”

A lurid flash of light caught Foyle’s eye. He looked up. His burning image was peering through the large square porthole of the stateroom. As he leaped to the porthole, the burning man disappeared.

Foyle left the stateroom and darted forward to main controls where the observation bubble gave him two hundred and seventy degrees of vision. The Burning Man was nowhere in sight.

“It’s not real,” he muttered. “It couldn’t be real. It’s a sign, a good luck sign . . . a Guardian Angel. It saved me on the Spanish Stairs. It’s telling me to go ahead and find Lindsey Joyce.”

He strapped himself into the pilot chair, ignited the yawl’s jets, and slammed into full acceleration.

“Lindsey Joyce, Skoptsy Colony, Mars,” he thought as he was thrust back deep into the pneumatic chair. “A Skoptsy . . Without senses, without pleasure, without pain. The ultimate in Stoic escape. How am I going to punish him? Torture him? Put him in the port stateroom and make him feel what I felt aboard ‘Nomad’? Damnation! It’s as though he’s dead. He
is
dead. And I’ve got to figure how to beat a dead body and make it feel pain. To come so close to the end and have the door slammed in your face . . . The damnable frustration of revenge. Revenge is for dreams . . . never for reality.”

An hour later he released himself from the acceleration and his fury, unbuckled himself from the chair, and remembered Kempsey. He went aft to the surgery. The extreme acceleration of the take-off had choked the blood pump enough to kill Kempsey. Suddenly Foyle was overcome with a novel passionate revulsion for himself. He fought it helplessly.

“What’s a matter, you?” he whispered. “Think of the six hundred, scuttled . . . Think of yourself . . . Are you turning into a white-livered Cellar Christian turning the other cheek and whining forgiveness? Olivia, what are you doing to me? Give me strength, not cowardice . . .”

Nevertheless he averted his eyes as he scuttled the body.

After two centuries of colonization, the air struggle on Mars was still so critical that the V-L Law, the Vegetative-Lynch Law, was still in effect. It was a killing offense to endanger or destroy any plant vital to the transformation of Mars’ carbon dioxide atmosphere into an oxygen atmosphere. Even blades of grass were sacred. There was no need to erect KEEP OFF THE GRASS neons. The man who wandered off a path onto a lawn would be instantly shot. The woman who picked a flower would be killed without mercy. Two centuries of sudden death had inspired a reverence for green growing things that almost amounted to a religion.

Foyle remembered this as he raced up the center of the causeway leading to Mars St. Michel. He had jaunted direct from the Syrtis airport to the St. Michel stage at the foot of the causeway which stretched for a quarter of a mile through green fields to Mars St. Michel. The rest of the distance had to be traversed on foot.

Like the original Mont St. Michel on the French coast, Mars St. Michel was a majestic Gothic cathedral of spires and buttresses looming on a hill and yearning toward the sky. Ocean tides surrounded Mont St. Michel on earth. Green tides of grass surrounded Mars St. Michel. Both were fortresses. Mont St. Michel had been a fortress of faith before organized religion was abolished. Mars St. Michel was a fortress of telepathy. Within it lived Mars’s sole full telepath, Sigurd Magsman.

“Now these are the defenses protecting Sigurd Magsman,” Foyle chanted, halfway between hysteria and litany. “Firstly, the Solar System; secondly, martial law; thirdly, DagenhamPresteign & Co.; fourthly, the fortress itself; fifthly, the uniformed guards, attendants, servants, and admirers of the bearded sage we all know so well, Sigurd Magsman, selling his awesome powers for awesome prices. . . .”

Foyle laughed immoderately: “But there’s a Sixthly that I know: Sigurd Magsman’s Achilles’ Heel . . . For I’ve paid Cr 1,000,000 to Sigurd III . . . or was he IV?”

He passed through the outer labyrinth of Mars St. Michel with his forged credentials and was tempted to bluff or proceed directly by commando action to an audience with the Great Man himself, but time was pressing and his enemies were closing in and he could not afford to satisfy his curiosity. Instead, he accelerated, blurred, and found a humble cottage set in a walled garden within the Mars St. Michel home farm. It had drab windows and a thatched roof and might have been mistaken for a stable. Foyle slipped inside.

The cottage was a nursery. Three pleasant nannies sat motionless in rocking chairs, knitting poised in their frozen hands. The blur that was Foyle came up behind them and quietly stung them with ampules. Then he decelerated. He looked at the ancient, ancient child; the wizened, shriveled boy who was seated on the floor playing with electronic trains.

“Hello, Sigurd,” Foyle said.

The child began to cry.

“Crybaby! What are you afraid of? I’m not going to hurt you.”

“You’re a bad man with a bad face.”

“I’m your friend, Sigurd.”

“No, you’re not. You want me to do b-bad things.”

“I’m your friend. Look, I know all about those big hairy men who pretend to be you, but I won’t tell. Read me and see.” 

“You’re going to hurt him and y-you want me to tell him.”
 

“Who?”

“The captain-man. The Skl— Skot—”
The child fumbled with the word, wailing louder.
“Go away. You’re bad. Badness in your head and burning mens and—”

“Come here, Sigurd.”

“No. NANNIE! NAN-N-I-E!”

“Shut up, you little bastard!”

Foyle grabbed the seventy-year-old child and shook it. “This is going to be a brand new experience for you, Sigurd. The first time you’ve ever been walloped into anything. Understand?”

The ancient child read him and howled.

“Shut up! We’re going on a trip to the Skoptsy Colony. If you behave yourself and do what you’re told, I’ll bring you back safe and give you a lolly or whatever the hell they bribe you with. If you don’t behave, I’ll beat the living daylights out of you.”

“No, you won’t. . . . You won’t. I’m Sigurd Magsman. I’m Sigurd the telepath. You wouldn’t dare.”

“Sonny, I’m Gully Foyle, Solar Enemy Number One. I’m just a step away from the finish of a year-long hunt . . . I’m risking my neck because I need you to settle accounts with a son of a bitch who— Sonny, I’m Gully Foyle. There isn’t anything I wouldn’t dare.”

The telepath began broadcasting terror with such an uproar that alarms sounded all over Mars St. Michel. Foyle took a firm grip on the ancient child, accelerated and carried him out of the fortress. Then he jaunted.

URGENT. SIGURD MAGSMAN KIDNAPED BY MAN TENTATIVELY IDENTIFIED AS GULLIVER FOYLE, ALIAS FOURMYLE OF CERES, SOLAR ENEMY NUMBER ONE. DESTINATION TENTATIVELY FIXED. ALERT COMMANDO BRIGADE. INFORM CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE. URGENT!

The ancient Skoptsy sect of White Russia, believing that sex was the root of all evil, practiced an atrocious self-castration to extirpate the root. The modern Skoptsys, believing that sensation was the root of all evil, practiced an even more barbaric custom. Having entered the Skoptsy Colony and paid a fortune for the privilege, the initiates submitted joyously to an operation that severed the sensory nervous system, and lived out their days without sight, sound, speech, smell, taste, or touch.

When they first entered the monastery, the initiates were shown elegant ivory cells in which it was intimated they would spend the remainder of their lives in rapt contemplation, lovingly tended. In actuality, the senseless creatures were packed in catacombs where they sat on rough stone slabs and were fed and exercised once a day. For twenty-three out of twenty-four hours they sat alone in the dark, untended, unguarded, unloved.