Entities: The Selected Novels of Eric Frank Russell (30 page)

“Heavens above, you
too!”

“What one can do another can do and that was the bond between us.” She watched him sit down and feel the face he did not know. “There is a law as strong and basic as that of physical survival. It says, ‘I am Me—I cannot be Not-Me.’ ”

He remained silent but rocked to and fro and nursed the face.

“So always you will hunger for that which is rightfully yours. You will hunger as one in imminent danger of death yearns tremendously for life. Always you will crave yourself, badly, madly, and never know peace, rest, tranquillity, never know 
completeness,
unless—”

“Unless?” His hands came away fast as he looked up startled.

“Unless you play it our way,” she informed. “If you do, then what has been done can be undone.”

“What do you want of me?” He was upright now, a gleam of hope showing.

“Implicit obedience.”

“You shall have it,” he promised fervently.

Briefly and inanely she felt relieved of the problem of Raven’s suit and the owner-who-wasn’t-the-owner.

The boss of the waiting gang was a thin-boned individual named Haller, six feet tall, Martian born and a Type Three Mutant, a pyrotic. Leaning against the tail of his ship, he fiddled with a silver button on the jacket of his phony police uniform and registered disappointment as Steen and Grayson came up.

“Well?”

“No luck,” said Steen. “Gone.”

“How long has he been gone?”

“Forty minutes,” informed Steen.

“He had three hours’ start,” Haller said, picking at his teeth, “so that means we’re catching up. Where’s he making for?”

“That,” said Steen casually, “is something he omitted to divulge to the generous helping of femme he left in the house. All she knows is that he came in an antigrav cab, snatched some stuff he had planted here and shot off in XB109.”

 “A female in the house.” Haller stared at him. “What’s her place in his life?” 

“Ha!” said Steen, smirking.

“I see,” declared Haller, not seeing at all. His gaze transferred to the silent, dummy-like Grayson, lingered there a while. Eventually a frown corrugated his forehead as he asked, “What the devil is afflicting
you?”

“Eh?” Grayson blinked uncertainly. “Me?”

“You’re a telepath and supposed to be able to read my mind although I can’t read yours. I’ve just asked you ten times mentally whether you’ve got a bellyache or something, and you’ve reacted as if thought is a strange phenomenon confined to some outlandish place the other side of Jupiter. What’s the matter with you? To look at you one would imagine you were suffering from an overdose of hypno.”

 “An overdose of his own medicine,” Steen put in, quickly smothering Haller’s awakening suspicions. “He tangled with the lady who happened to be one of his own kind. How’d you like to be nagged to death telepathetically as well as vocally?”

“Heaven forbid!” said Haller soothed. Dismissing the question of Grayson’s peculiar lack of zip he added, “Let’s take steps. This Raven isn’t giving us any time to waste.”

He climbed into the ship, the others following. While the lock closed and the propulsion tubes warmed, he dug out his interplanetary register, thumbed its pages, found the item for which he was seeking,

“Here it is, XB109, a berilligilt-coated single-seater with twenty tubes. Earth-mass three hundred tons. Maximum range half a million miles. Described as a World Council courier boat bearing police and customs exemption. H’m! That makes it awkward to intercept openly with any official witnesses around.”

“Assuming that we ever find it,” Steen qualified. “One world is a big place.”

“We’ll get our cross hairs dead on it,” asserted Haller, with complete confidence. “That half million range is a comfort. It ties him down to Earth or Moon. We know he can’t have sneaked away direct to Mars or Venus.”

He consulted a coded list of radio channels correlated with times. Three-thirty: channel nine. Pressing the appropriate stub, he spoke into a hand-microphone. What he said went out in pulses, scrambled, and was much too brief to permit detection and unsorting by any eavesdropper. “Combine call: Haller to Dean. Find XB109.”

Turning the pilot’s seat sidewise, Haller sat in it, lit a black Venusian cheroot fifteen inches long, puffed luxuriously. He put his feet up on the edge of the instrument board, watched the loudspeaker.

It said, “XB109. Not listed in today’s departures. Not shown on any of today’s police observation reports. Stand by.”

“Service!” boasted Haller, sending an appreciative glance along the cheroot and toward Steen.

Five minutes, then, “XB109. Not in Council parks one to twenty-eight. Stand by.”

“Queer,” remarked Haller, taking a long suck and blowing a lopsided smoke ring. “If it’s not on the floor it must be off the floor. But he couldn’t lift it today without getting it marked airborne.”

“Maybe he took it yesterday or the day before and stashed it here,” Steen suggested. Carefully he closed the door of the pilot’s cabin, made sure that it was firmly shut. Sitting on the edge of the instrument board alongside Haller’s feet, he waited for the next message. It came after ten minutes.

“Dean to Haller. XB109 in charge of Courier Joseph McArd at Dome City, Luna, refueling for return. Closing channel nine.”

“Impossible!” Haller ejaculated. “Arc-possible!” He stood up, bit an inch off his cheroot, spat it on the floor. “Somebody’s lying!” His ireful eyes came level with Steen’s and promptly he added, “You?”

“Me?” With a pained expression Steen also stood up. He was almost chest to chest with the other.

“Either that or the dame gave you a cockeyed registration number and Grayson was too dopey to detect the deception in her mind.” Haller waved the cheroot. “Maybe it was the dame. She pointed down a blind alley and laughed herself silly when you two went yipping into it. If so, Grayson’s to blame for that. He was the mind-probe of you two. Send him in to me—I’ve got to get to the bottom of this.”

“How could Grayson penetrate a mind as flat and blank as a mortuary slab?” asked Steen.

“He could have told you he was stymied and let you put her under the influence. After you’d made her play statues he could have dug out her taste in paper sunshades, couldn’t he? Where’s the point of you going around in pairs if you’re too dumb to co-operate?”

“Not dumb,” denied Steen, unoffended.

“Somebody’s nursing a month-old mackerel,” Haller insisted. “I can smell it. Maybe that darned woman stuffed it up Grayson’s vest. He’s got the stupefied air of someone whose best friends have just told him. That’s not like Grayson. You go fetch him—I want to give him a going over.”

“I don’t think we’ll need him,” said Steen, very softly. “This is just between us two.

“Is it?” Haller’s self-command and lack of surprise revealed him as a hard character. There was a gun on his desk but he made no attempt to grab it as he gently placed his cheroot beside it and turned to face the other. “I’d a notion it was you who lied. I don’t know what’s come over you but you’d better not let it go too far.”

“No?”

“No! You’re a hypno but what of it? I can burn away your insides some three or four seconds before you can paralyze mine, and moreover paralysis wears off after a few hours, whereas charring does not. It’s decidedly permanent.”

“I know, I know. That is power, pyrotic power.” Steen gestured and his hand touched Haller’s casually, almost accidentally.

The hand stuck. Haller tried to pull his own away, found he couldn’t. The two hands adhered at point of contact like flesh united to flesh—and something outrageous was happening at the junction, through the junction.

“This, too, is power,” said Steen.

Far beneath the innocuous pile of warehouses nominally belonging to the Transpatial Trading Company there existed a miniature city that to all intents and purposes was not part of Earth though sited upon it. Unknown to and unsuspected by most surface dwellers it had been taken over long since.

Here was the field headquarters of the Mars-Venus underground movement, its very heart. A thousand came and went along its cool, lengthy passages and through a series of great cellars, a hand-picked thousand none of whom were men as others are men.

In one cellar worked a dozen slim-fingered oldsters who moved around slowly, fumblingly, in the manner of those seven-eighths blind. Their eyes were not eyes but something else, something too short-focused to photograph clearly anything more than three or four inches from the tip of the nose. Yet they were quasi-visual organs that within those brief limits could count the angels dancing on the point of a pin.

The oldsters worked as if continually smelling the objects of their tasks, fingers almost to nose, their not-eyes directed at abnormal angles and functioning with supernormal vividness. These were Type Nine Mutants, generally called mini-engineers. They thought nothing of building a seven-year radium chronometer so incredibly minute that it could serve as the center jewel in a diamond ring.

And in an adjacent cellar were beings similar but not the same. Pranksters continually testing their eerie powers on one another.

The two men sat opposite each other. A swift change of facial features, altering them out of all resemblance. “There you are—I’m Peters.”

An equally swift and precisely similar facial change on the part of the other. “That’s funny—so am I!”

Two hollow laughs. As alike as twins they sit down and play cards, each surreptitiously watching the other for the first moment when a rubber face would forgetfully relax and betray its owner’s true identity.

Two more enter with the motive of turning the card game into a foursome. One registers a moment of intense mental strain, floats clean over the table and into a chair on the opposite side. The second glares at a nearer chair which trembles, hesitates, then places itself under him as if shifted by invisible hands. The twins accept these phenomena as normal, everyday occurrences and proceed to redivide the cards.

The second entrant, the chair-mover, makes his share leap straight into his ready fingers, grunts as he studies them, says with much boredom, “If you two dummies feel that you just
have
to be Peters let’s have different smells so we’ll know who from which.” Another grunt. “I pass.”

Someone going along the outer passage pauses to have a look through the door then goes on his way grinning. Ten seconds later the first Peters makes to suck his cigarette and discovers that it is now lit at both ends. With a hearty curse he leaves his chair and shuts the door, taking his cards with him lest during his absence they turn over twice of their own accord.

Grayson came into this subterranean menagerie with his mind closed against all possible intrusions, his eyes alert, suspicious, his manner jumpy. He was in a hurry and had the air of one with every reason to fear his own shadow.

At the end of a long passage where it terminated in a heavy steel door, Grayson came face to face with a hypno guard who said, “No further, chum. This is where the boss lives.”

“Yes, I know. I want to see Kayder at once.” Grayson stared back along the passage, made an impatient gesture. “Tell him he’d better hear me before all this blows up under us.”

The guard eyed him calculatingly, then he opened the mike-trap in the door and spoke to it. Seconds later the door opened.

Grayson went through, tramped across the long room to where its sole occupant was seated at a small bureau.

A squat, broad-shouldered man with heavily underslung jaw, Kayder was of Venusian birth and probably the only Type Eleven Mutant located on Earth. He could converse in low, almost unbearable chirrups with nine species of Venusian bugs, seven of them highly poisonous and willing to perform deadly services for friends. Kayder, therefore, enjoyed all the appalling power of one with a nerveless, inhuman army too vast in numbers to destroy.

“What is it this time?” he snapped, removing his attention from a wad of documents. “Make it quick and to the point. I feel low this morning. This world doesn’t suit me.”

“Me, too,” Grayson endorsed. He went on with, “You dug up something on this David Raven and ordered that he be brought in.”

“I did. I don’t know what’s he’s got but it’s alleged to be good. Where have you put him?”

“Nowhere. He got away.”

“Not for long,” assured Kayder with confidence, “I know that he is hell-bent for a hideout someplace. It will take a little while to pry him out.” He waved a hand in dismissal. “Keep on the trail. We’ll get him in due time.”

“But,” said Grayson, “we did get him. He was flat on his belly with his tongue hanging out and his sides heaving. A fox right at the last lap. And he got away.” Kayder rocked back on the hind legs of his chair. “Mean to say you actually had him? You let him slip? How was that?”

“I don’t know.” Grayson was badly worried, made no effort to conceal the fact. “I just don’t know. I can’t make it out. It has got me baffled. That’s why I’ve come to see you.”

“Be more specific. What happened?”

“We broke into his hiding place. A woman was with him—true telepaths, both of them. Steen was with me, as good a hypno as any we’ve got. Raven made a monkey of him.”

“Go on, man! Don’t stand there enjoying dramatic pauses!”

“Steen gave
me
the treatment,” continued Grayson, hurriedly and morbidly. “He caught me on one leg and made me marble-minded. He compelled me to return to the ship and tell Haller that we’d seen nothing of Raven. Then he went into Haller’s cabin.”

A small, spidery thing scuttled many-legged up one side of Kayder’s pants. Lowering a casual hand, he caught it, helped it onto the bureau. It was thin and bright green with eight crimson pinheads for optics.

Distastefully watching this creature, Grayson said, “A few hours later my wits drifted back. By then Haller was crazy and Steen had disappeared.”

“You say Haller was crazy?”

“Yes, he was babbling. Seemed as if his brain had been twisted right round and sort of got itself back to front. Kept talking to himself about the infantile futility of Mars-Venus, Terra squabbles, the supreme wondrousness of the universe, the glory of death and so forth. Acted as if for two pins he’d jump straight into the afterlife but needed time to work up the guts.”