"I'm telling you that I was almost murdered three times today. This boy..."
Reich pointed to Chervil. "This boy just found me in the Inlet Esplanade more
dead than alive. Look at me, for Christ's sake. Look at me!"
"Murdered!" Crabbe thumped his desk emphatically. "Of course. That Powell is a
fool. I should never have listened to him. The man who killed D'Courtney is
trying to kill you."
Behind his back, Reich motioned savagely to Chervil.
"I told Powell you were innocent. He wouldn't listen to me," Crabbe said. "Even
when that infernal adding machine in the District Attorney's office told him you
were innocent, he wouldn't listen."
"The machine said I was innocent?"
"Of course it did. There's no case against you. There never was a case against
you. And by the sacred Bill of Rights, you'll have the protection from the
murderer that any honest law-abiding citizen deserves. I'll see to that at
once," Crabbe strode to the door. "And I think this is all I'll need to settle
Mr. Powell's hash for good! Don't go, Ben. I want to talk to you about your
support for the Solar Senatorship..."
The door opened and slammed. Reich reeled and fought his way back to the world.
He looked at three Chervils. "Well?" he muttered. "Well?"
"He's telling the truth, Mr. Reich."
"About me? About Powell?"
"Well..." Chervil paused judiciously, weighing the truth.
"Jet, you bastard," Reich groaned. "How long do you think I can keep my fuses
from blowing."
"He's telling the truth about you," Chervil said quickly. "The Prosecution
Computer has declined to authorize any action against you for the D'Courtney
murder. Mr. Powell has been forced to abandon the case and... well... his career
is very much in jeopardy."
"Is that true!" Reich staggered to the boy and seized his shoulders. "Is that
true, Chervil? I've been cleared? I can go about my business? No one's going to
bother me?"
"You've been dropped, Mr. Reich. You can go about your business. No one's going
to bother you."
Reich burst into a roar of triumphant laughter. The pain of his bruised and
broken body made him groan as he laughed, and his eyes smarted with tears. He
pulled himself up, brushed past Chervil and left the Commissioner's office. He
was more a Neanderthal vestige as he paraded down headquarters' corridors
streaked with blood and mud, laughing and groaning, bearing himself with limping
arrogance. He needed a stag's carcass on his shoulders or a cave bear borne in
triumph behind him to complete the picture.
"I'll complete the picture with Powell's head," he told himself. "Stuffed and
mounted on my wall. I'll complete the picture with the D'Courtney Cartel stuffed
into my pockets. By God give me time I'll complete a picture with the Galaxy
inside the frame!"
He passed through the steel portals of headquarters and stood for a moment on
the steps gazing at the rain-swept streets... at the amusement center across the
square, block after block blazing under a single mutual transparent dome... at
the open shops lining the upper footways, all bustle and brilliance as the
city's night shopping began... the towering office buildings in the background
great two-hundred story cubes... the lace tracery of skyways linking them
together... the twinkling running lights of Jumpers bobbing up and down like a
plague of crimson-eyed grasshoppers in a field...
"And I'll own you!" he shouted, raising his arms to engulf the universe. "I'll
own you all! Bodies, passions, and souls!"
Then his eye caught the tall, ominous, familiar figure crossing the square,
watching him covertly over its shoulder. A figure of black shadows sparkling
with raindrop jewels... looking looming, silent, horrible... A Man With No Face.
There was a strangled cry. The fuses blew. Like a blighted tree, Reich fell to
the ground.
At one minute to nine, ten of the fifteen members of the Esper Guild Council
assembled in President T'sung's office. Emergency business required their
attention. At one minute after nine, the meeting was adjoumed with the business
completed. Within those one hundred and twenty Esper seconds, the following took
place:
A gavel pounding
A clock face
Hour hand at 9
Minute hand at 59
Second hand at 60
EMERGENCY MEETING
To examine a request for Mass Cathexis with Lincoln Powell as the human canal
for the Capitalized energy.
(Consternation)
T'sung: You can't be serious, Powell. How can you make such a request? What can
possibly require such an extraordinary and dangerous measure?
Powell: An astonishing development in the D'Courtney Case which I would like you
all to examine.
(Examination)
Powell: You all know that Reich is our most dangerous enemy. He is supporting
the Anti-Esper smear campaign. Unless that is blocked we may suffer the usual
history of minority groups.
@kins: True enough.
Powell: He is also supporting the League of Esper Patriots. Unless that
organization is blocked we may be plunged into a civil war and be lost forever
in a morass of internal chaos.
Franion: That's true too.
Powell: But there is an additional development which you have all examined.
Reich is about to become a Galactic focal point... A crucial link between the
positive past and the probable future. He is on the verge of a powerful
reorganization at this moment. Time is of the essence. If Reich can readjust and
reorient before I can reach him, he will become immune to our reality,
invulnerable to our attack, and the deadly enemy of Galactic reason and reality.
(Alarm)
@kins: Surely, you're exaggerating, Powell.
Powell: Am I? Inspect the picture with me. Look at Reich's position in time and
space. Will not his beliefs become the world's belief? Will not his reality
become the world's reality? Is he not, in his critical position of power,
energy, and intellect, a sure road to utter destruction?
(Conviction)
T'sung: That's true. Nevertheless I'm reluctant to authorize the Mass Cathexis
Measure. You will recall that the MCM has invariably destroyed the human energy
canal in past attempts. You're too valuable to be destroyed, Powell.
Powell: I must be permitted to run the risk, Reich is one of the rare
Universe-shakers... a child as yet, but about to mature. And all reality...
Espers, Normals, Life, the earth, the solar system, the universe itself... all
reality hangs precarlously on his awakening. He cannot be permitted to awake to
the wrong reality. I call the question.
Franion: You're asking us to vote your death.
Powell: It's my death against the eventual death of everything we know. I call
the question.
@kins: Let Reich awaken as he will. We have the time and the warning to attack
him at another crossroad.
Powell: Question! I call the question!
(Request granted)
Meeting adjourned
Clock face
Hour hand at 9
Minute hand at 01
Second hand at Demolition
Powell arrived home an hour later. He had made his will, paid his bills, signed
his papers, arranged everything. There had been dismay at the Guild. There was
dismay when he came home. Mary Noyes read what he had done the instant he
entered.
"Linc---"
"No fuss. It's got to be done."
"But---"
"There's a chance it won't kill me. Oh... One reminder. Lab wants a brain
autopsy as soon as I'm dead... if I die. I've signed all the papers, but I wish
you'd help in case there's trouble. They'd like to have the body before rigor.
If they can't get the corpse they'll settle for the head. See to it, will you?"
"Linc!"
"Sorry. Now you'd better pack and take the baby up to Kingston Hospital. She
won't be safe here."
"She isn't a baby any more. She---"
Mary turned and ran upstairs, trailing the familiar sensory impact: Snow / mint
/ tulips / taffeta... and now mixed with terror and tears. Powell sighed, then
smiled as a highly poised teen-ager appeared at the head of the stairs and came
down with grand insouciance. She was wearing a dress and an expression of
rehearsed surprise. She paused halfway down to let him take in the dress and the
manner.
"Why! It's Mr. Powell, is it not?"
"It is. Good morning, Barbara."
"And what brings you to our little domain this morning?" She came down the rest
of the stairs with her fingertips brushing the bannister and tripped on the
bottom step. "Oh Pip!" she squawked.
Powell caught her. "Pop," he said.
"Bim."
"Bam."
She looked up at him. "You stand right here. I'm going to come down those stairs
again and I bet I do it perfect."
"I'll bet you don't."
She turned, trotted up and posed again at the top step. "Dear Mr. Powell, what a
scatter-brain you must think me..." She began the grand descent. "You must
re-evaluate your opinion of me. I am no longer the mere child I was yesterday. I
am ages and ages older. You must regard me as an adult from now on." She
negotiated the bottom step and regarded him intently. "Re-evaluate? Is that
right?"
"Revaluate is sometimes preferred, dear."
"I thought it had an extra sound" Suddenly she laughed, pushed him into a chair,
and plumped down on his lap. Powell groaned.
"Gently, Barbara. You're ages older and pounds heavier."
"Listen," she said. "What ever made me think you was... Were? Were my father?"
"What's the matter with me as a father?"
"Let's be frank. Real frank."
"Sure."
"Do you feel like a father toward me? Because I don't feel like a daughter
toward you."
"Oh? How do you feel?"
"I asked first, so you go first."
"My feelings toward you are those of a loving and dutiful son."
"No. Be serious."
"I have resolved to be a trustworthy son to all women until Vulcan assumes its
rightful place is the Community of Planets."
She flushed angrily and got up from his lap. "I wanted you to be serious,
because I need advice. But if you---"
"I'm sorry, Barbara. What is it?"
She knelt alongside him and took his hand. "I'm all mixed up about you."
She looked into his eyes with the alarming directness of the young. "You know."
After a pause, he nodded. "Yes. I know."
"And you're all mixed up about me, too. I know."
"Yes, Barbara. That's true. I am."
"Is it wrong?"
Powell heaved up from the chair and began pacing unhappily. "No, Barbara, it
isn't wrong. It's... mistimed."
"I want you to tell me about it."
"Tell you...? Yes, I suppose I'd better. I... I'll put it this way, Barbara. The
two of us are four people. There's two of you, and two of me."
"Why?"
"You've been sick, dear. So we had to turn you into a baby and let you grow up
again. That's why you're two people. The grown-up Barbara inside, and the baby
outside."
"And you?"
"I'm two grown-up people. One of them is me... Powell... The other is a member
of the governing Council of the Esper Guild."
"What's that?"
"It doesn't need explaining. It's the part of me that's got me mixed up... God
knows, maybe it's the baby part. I don't know."
She considered earnestly, then said slowly. "When I don't feel like a daughter
to you... which me feels like that?"
"I don't know, Barbara."
"You do know. Why won't you say?" She came to him and put her arms around his
neck... a grown-up woman with the manner of a child. "If it isn't wrong, why
won't you say? If I love you---"
"Who said anything about love!"
"It's what we're talking about, isn't it? lsn't it? I love you and you love me.
Isn't that it?"
"All right," Powell thought desperately. "Here it is. What are you going to do?
Admit the truth?"
"Yes!" From the stairs. Mary was descending with a travelling case in her hand.
"Admit the truth."
"She isn't a peeper."
"Forget that. She's a woman and she's in love with you. You're in love with her.
Please, Linc, give yourselves a chance."
"A chance for what? An affair if I get out of this Reich mess alive? That's all
it could be. You know the Guild won't let us marry normals."
"She'll settle for that. She'll be grateful to settle for that. Ask me. I know."
"And if I don't come out alive? She'll have nothing... Nothing but half a memory
of half a love."
"No, Barbara," he said. "That isn't it at all."
"It is," she insisted. "It is!"
"No. It's the baby part of you talking. The baby thinks she's in love with me.
The woman is not."
"She'll grow up into the woman."
"And she'll forget all about me."
"You'll make her remember."
"Why should I, Barbara?"
"Because you feel that way about me, too. I know you do."
Powell laughed. "Baby! Baby! Baby! What makes you think I'm in love with you
that way? I'm not. I've never been."
"You are!"
"Open your eyes, Barbara. Look at me. Look at Mary. You're ages older, aren't
you? Can't you understand? Do I have to explain the obvious?"
"For God's sake, Linc!"