Pebble in the Sky (18 page)

But why? If it were the Sixty, why not kill him out of hand?

The time-slip theory was fading out in his mind; amnesia again. He was a criminal, perhaps—a dangerous man, who must be watched. Maybe he had once been a high official, who could not be simply killed but must be tried. Perhaps his amnesia was the method used by his unconscious to escape the realization of some tremendous guilt.

And so now he was walking down an empty highway toward a doubtful destination, with death walking at his back.

It was growing dark, and the
wind had a dying chill to it. As usual, it didn’t seem right. Schwartz judged it to be December, and certainly sunset at four-thirty was right for it, but the wind’s chill was not the iciness of a midwestern winter.

Schwartz had long decided that the reason for the prevalent mildness was that the planet (Earth?) did not depend on the sun entirely for its heat. The radioactive soil itself gave off heat, small by the square foot but huge by the million square miles.

And in the darkness the follower’s Mind Touch grew nearer. Still attentive, and keyed up to a gamble. In the darkness, following was harder. He had followed him that first night—toward the shiningness. Was he afraid to take the risk again?

“Hey! Hey, fella—”

It was a nasal, high-pitched voice. Schwartz froze.

Slowly, in one piece, he turned around. The small figure coming up to him waved its hand, but in the sunless time of day he could not make it out clearly. It approached, unhurrying. He waited.

“Hey, there. Glad to see you. It ain’t much fun beating it along the road without company. Mind if I go along with you?”

“Hello,” said Schwartz dully. It was the correct Mind Touch.
It was the follower. And the face was familiar. It belonged to that hazy time, in Chica.

And then the follower gave every sign of recognition. “Say, I know you. Sure! . . . Don’t you remember me?”

It was impossible for Schwartz to say whether under ordinary conditions, in another time, he might or might not have believed the other to be sincere. But now how could he avoid seeing that thin, ragged layer of synthetic recognition that overlay the deep currents of a Touch that told him—shouted at him—that the little man with the very sharp eyes had known him from the start? Knew him and had a death weapon ready for him, if necessary.

Schwartz shook his head.

“Sure,” insisted the little man. “It was in the department store. I got you away from that mob.” He seemed to double up in artificial laughter. “They thought you had Radiation Fever.
You
remember.”

Schwartz did, too, vaguely—dimly. A man like this, for a few minutes, and a crowd, which had first stopped them and then parted for them.

“Yes,” he said. “Pleased to meet you.” It wasn’t very brilliant conversation, but Schwartz could do no better, and the little man did not seem to mind.

“My name’s Natter,” he said, shoving out a limp hand at the other. “I didn’t get a chance to talk much with you that first time—overlooked it in the crisis of things, you might say—but I’m sure glad to get a second chance. . . . Let’s have the mitt.”

“I’m Schwartz.” And he touched palms with the other, briefly.

“How come you’re walking?” asked Natter. “Going somewheres?”

Schwartz shrugged. “Just walking.”

“A hiker, huh? That’s for me too. All year round I’m on the road—puts the old kibosh on the grummlies.”

“What?”

“You know. Makes you full of life. You get to breathe that air and feel the blood pumping, hey? . . . Walked too far this time. Hate to get back after night by my lonesome. Always glad for the company. Where you going?”

It was the second time Natter had asked the question, and the Mind Touch made plain the importance attached to it. Schwartz wondered how long he could evade the issue. There was a questing anxiety in the follower’s mind. And no lie would do. Schwartz didn’t know enough about this new world to lie.

He said, “I’m going to the hospital.”

“The hospital? What hospital?”

“I was there when I was in Chica.”

“You mean the Institute. Ain’t that it? That’s where I took you before, that time in the department store, I mean.” Anxiety and increasing tension.

“To Dr. Shekt,” said Schwartz. “Do you know him?”

“I’ve heard of him. He’s a big shot. Are you sick?”

“No, but I’m supposed to report once in a while.” Did that sound reasonable?

“Walking?” said Natter. “Doesn’t he send a car for you?” Apparently it did not seem reasonable.

Schwartz said nothing now—a clammy silence.

Natter, however, was buoyant. “Look here, chum, soon’s I pass a public Communi-wave, I’ll order a taxi from the city. It’ll meet us on the road.”

“A Communi-wave?”

“Sure. They have ’em all along the highway. See, there’s one.”

He took a step away from Schwartz, and the latter found himself in a sudden shriek. “Stop! Don’t move.”

Natter stopped. There was a queer coldness in his expression as he turned. “What’s eating you, bud?”

Schwartz found the new language almost inadequate for the rapidity with which he hurled words at the other. “I’m tired of this acting. I know you, and I know what you’re going to do.
You’re going to call somebody to tell them I’m going to Dr. Shekt. They’ll be ready for me in the city and they’ll send out a car to pick me up. And you’ll kill me if I try to get away.”

There was a frown on Natter’s face. He muttered, “You’re sure right on the gizzbo with that last—” It was not intended for Schwartz’s ears, nor did it reach them, but the words rested lightly on the very surface of his Mind Touch.

Aloud he said, “Mister, you’ve got me confused. You’re shoving a fast one right past my nose.” But he was making room, and his hand was drifting toward his hip.

And Schwartz lost control of himself. He waved his arms in a wild fury. “Leave me alone, why don’t you? What have I done to you? . . . Go away!
Go away!
”

He ended in a voice-cracked shriek, his forehead ridged with hate and fear of the creature who stalked him and whose mind was so alive with enmity. His own emotions heaved and thrust at the Mind Touch, attempting to evade the clingingness of it, rid itself of the breath of it—

And it was gone. Suddenly and completely gone. There had been the momentary consciousness of overwhelming pain—not in himself, but in the other—then nothing. No Mind Touch. It had dropped away like the grip of a fist growing lax and dead.

Natter was a crumpled smear on the darkening highway. Schwartz crept toward him. Natter was a little man, easy to turn over. The look of agony on his face might have been stamped on, deeply, deeply. The lines remained, did not relax. Schwartz felt for the heartbeat and did not find it.

He straightened in a deluge of self-horror.

He had murdered a man!

An then a deluge of amazement—

Without touching him! He had killed this man just by hating him, by striking somehow at the Mind Touch.

What other powers did he have?

He made a quick decision. He searched the other’s pockets
and found money. Good! He could use that. Then he dragged the corpse into the fields and let the high grass cover it.

He walked on for two hours. No other Mind Touch disturbed him.

He slept in an open field that night, and the next morning, after two hours more, reached the outskirts of Chica.

Chica was only a village to Schwartz, and by comparison with the Chicago he remembered, the motion of the populace was still thin and sporadic. Even so, the Mind Touches were for the first time numerous. They amazed and confused him.

So many! Some drifting and diffuse; some pointed and intense. There were men who passed with their minds popping in tiny explosions; others with nothing inside their skulls but, perhaps, a gentle rumination on the breakfast just completed.

At first Schwartz turned and jumped with every Touch that passed, taking each as a personal contact; but within the hour he learned to ignore them.

He was hearing words now, even when they were not actually mouthed. This was something new, and he found himself listening. They were thin, eery phrases, disconnected and wind-whipped; far off, far off . . . And with them, living, crawling emotion and other subtle things that cannot be described—so that all the world was a panorama of boiling life visible to himself only.

He found he could penetrate buildings as he walked, sending his mind in as though it were something he held on a leash, something that could suck its way into crannies invisible to the eye and bring out the bones of men’s inner thoughts.

It was before a huge stone-fronted building that he halted, and considered. They (whoever they were) were after him. He had killed the follower, but there must be others—the others that the follower had wanted to call. It might be best for him to make no move for a few days, and how to do that best? . . . A job? . . .

He probed the building before which he had stopped. In
there was a distant Mind Touch that to him might mean a job. They were looking for textile workers in there—and he had once been a tailor.

He stepped inside, where he was promptly ignored by everyone. He touched someone’s shoulder.

“Where do I see about a job, please?”

“Through that door!” The Mind Touch that reached him was full of annoyance and suspicion.

Through the door, and then a thin, point-chin fellow fired questions at him and fingered the classifying machine onto which he punched the answers.

Schwartz stammered his lies and truths with equal uncertainty.

But the personnel man began, at least, with a definite unconcern. The questions were fired rapidly: “Age? . . . Fifty-two? Hmm. State of health? . . . Married? . . . Experience? . . . Worked with textiles? . . . Well, what kind? . . . Thermoplastic? Elastomeric? . . . What do you mean, you think all kinds? . . . Whom did you work with last? . . . Spell his name. . . . You’re not from Chica, are you? . . . Where are your papers? . . . You’ll have to bring them here if you want action taken. . . . What’s your registration number? . . .”

Schwartz was backing away. He hadn’t foreseen this end when he had begun. And the Mind Touch of the man before him was changing. It had become suspicious to the point of single-trackedness, and cautious too. There was a surface layer of sweetness and good-fellowship that was so shallow, and which overlay animosity so thinly, as to be the most dangerous feature of all.

“I think,” said Schwartz nervously, “that I’m not suited for this job.”

“No, no, come back.” And the man beckoned at him. “We have something for you. Just let me look through the files a bit.” He was smiling, but his Mind Touch was clearer now and even more unfriendly.

He had punched a buzzer on his desk—

Schwartz, in a sudden panic, rushed for the door.

“Hold him!” cried the other instantly, dashing from behind his desk.

Schwartz struck at the Mind Touch, lashing out violently with his own mind, and he heard a groan behind him. He looked quickly over his shoulder. The personnel man was seated on the floor, face contorted and temples buried in his palms. Another man bent over him; then, at an urgent gesture, headed for Schwartz. Schwartz waited no more.

He was out on the street, fully aware now that there must be an alarm out for him with a complete description made public, and that the personnel man, at least, had recognized him.

He ran and doubled along the streets blindly. He attracted attention; more of it now, for the streets were filling up—suspicion, suspicion everywhere—suspicion because he ran—suspicion because his clothes were wrinkled and ill-fitting—

In the multiplicity of Mind Touches and in the confusion of his own fear and despair, he could not identify the true enemies, the ones in which there was not only suspicion but certainty, and so he hadn’t the slightest warning of the neuronic whip.

There was only that awful pain, which descended like the whistle of a lash and remained like the crush of a rock. For seconds he coasted down the slope of that descent into agony before drifting into the black.

The grounds of the College of
Ancients in Washenn are nothing if not sedate. Austerity is the key word, and there is something authentically grave about the clustered knots of novices taking their evening stroll among the trees of the Quadrangle—where none but Ancients might trespass. Occasionally the green-robed figure of a Senior Ancient might make its way across the lawn, receiving reverences graciously.

And, once in a long while, the High Minister himself might appear.

But not as now, at a half run, almost in a perspiration, disregarding the respectful raising of hands, oblivious to the cautious stares that followed him, the blank looks at one another, the slightly raised eyebrows.

He burst into the Legislative Hall by the private entrance
and broke into an open run down the empty, step-ringing ramp. The door that he thundered at opened at the foot pressure of the one within, and the High Minister entered.

His Secretary scarcely looked up from behind his small, plain desk, where he hunched over a midget Field-shielded Televisor, listening intently and allowing his eyes to rove over a quire or so of official-looking communications that piled high before him.