Mind of My Mind (11 page)

It was light out when Karl woke me by sitting up in bed and pulling the blankets off

me. Late morning. Ten o'clock by the clock on my night table. It was a strange

awakening for me. My head didn't hurt. For the first time in months, I didn't have even a

slight headache. I didn't realize until I moved, though, that several other parts of my body

hurt like hell. I had strained muscles, bruises, scratches—most of them self-inflicted, I

guessed. At least, none of them were very serious; they were just going to leave me sore

for a while.

I moved, gasped, then groaned and kept still. Karl looked down at me without saying

anything. I could see a set of deep, ugly scratches down the left side of his face, and I

knew I had put them there. I reached up to touch his face, ignoring the way my arm and

shoulder muscles protested. "Hey, I'm sorry. I hope that's all I did."

"It isn't."

"Oh, boy. What else?"

"This." He did something—tugged at the mental strand of himself that still connected

him to me. That brought me fully awake. I had forgotten about my captives, my pattern.

Karl's sudden tug was startling, but it didn't hurt me, or him. And I noticed that it didn't

seem to bother the five others. Karl could tug only his own strand. The other strands

remained relaxed. I knew what Karl wanted. I spoke to him softly.

"I'd let you go if I knew how. This isn't something I did on purpose."

"You're shielded against me," he said. "Open and let me see if there's anything I can

do."

I hadn't realized I was shielded at all. He had tried so hard to teach me to form my

own shield, and I hadn't been able to do it. Apparently I had finally picked up the

technique without even realizing it—picked it up when I couldn't stand any more of the

mental garbage I was getting.

So now I had a shield. I examined it curiously. It was a mental wall, a mental globe

with me inside. Nothing was reaching me through it except the strands of the pattern. I

wondered how I was supposed to open it for him. As I wondered, it began to disintegrate.

It surprised me, scared me. I wanted it back.

And it was back.

Well, that wasn't hard to understand. The shield kept me secure as long as I wanted it

to. And there were degrees of security.

I began the disintegration process again, felt the shield grow thinner. I let it become a

kind of screen—something I could receive other people's thoughts through. I

experimented until I could hold it just heavy enough to keep out the kind of mental noise

I had been picking up before and during my transition. It kept out the noise, but it didn't

keep me in. I could reach out and sense whatever there was to be sensed. I swept my

perception through the house experimentally.

I sensed Vivian still asleep in Doro's bed. And, in another way, I sensed Doro beside

her. Actually, I only sensed a human shape beside her—a body. I was aware of it in the

way I was aware of the lamp on the night table beside it. I could read Vivian's thoughts

with no effort at all. But somehow, without realizing it, I had drawn back from trying to

read the mind of that other body. Now, cautiously, I started to reach into Doro's mind. It

was like stepping off a cliff.

I jerked back instantly, thickening my screen to a shield and struggling to regain my

balance. As fast as I had moved to draw away, I had the feeling I had almost fallen. Safe

as I knew I was in my own bed, I had the feeling that I had just come very near death.

"You see?" said Karl as I lay gasping. "I told you you'd find out why actives don't

read his mind. Now open again."

"But what was it? What happened?"

"You almost committed suicide."

I stared at him.

"Telepaths are the people he kills most easily," he said. "Normally he can only kill the

person physically nearest to him. But he can kill telepaths no matter where they are. Or,

rather, he can if they help him by trying to read his mind. It's like begging him to take

you."

"And you let me do it?"

"I could hardly have stopped you."

"You could have warned me! You were watching me, reading me. I could feel you

with me. You knew what I was going to do before I did it."

"Your own senses warned you. You chose to ignore them."

He was colder than he had been on the day I met him. He was sitting there beside me

in bed acting like I was his enemy. "Karl, what's the matter with you? You just worked

your ass off trying to save my life. Now, for heaven's sake, you'd let me blunder to my

death without saying a word."

He took a deep breath. "Just open again. I won't hurt you. But I've got to find a way

out of whatever it is you've caught me in."

I opened. Obviously, he wasn't going to act human again until I did. I felt him reach

into my mind, watched him review my memories—all those that had anything to do with

the pattern. There wasn't much.

So, in a couple of seconds he knew how little I knew. He had already found out he

couldn't break away from the pattern. Now he knew for sure that I couldn't let him go

either. He knew there wasn't even a way for him to force me to let him go. I wondered

why he thought he'd have to force me—why he thought I wouldn't have let him go if I

could have. He answered my thought aloud.

"I just didn't believe anyone could create and maintain a trap like that without

knowing what they were doing," he said. "You're holding six powerful people captive.

How can you do that by accident or instinct or whatever?"

"I don't know."

He withdrew from my thoughts in disgust. "You also have some very Dorolike

ideas," he said. "I don't know how the others feel about it, Mary, but you don't own me."

It took me a minute to realize what he was talking about. Then I remembered. My

proprietary feelings. "Are you going to blame me for thoughts I had while I was in

transition?" I asked. "You know I was out of my head."

"You were when you first started to think that way. But you aren't now, and you're

still thinking that way."

That was true. I couldn't help the feeling of rightness that I had about the pattern—

about the people of the pattern being my people. I felt it even more strongly than I had

felt Doro's mental keep-out sign. But that didn't matter. I sighed. "Look, Karl, no matter

what I feel, you find me a way to break this thing, free you and the others, and I'll cooperate in any way I can."

He had gotten up. He was standing by the bed watching me with what looked like

hatred. "You'd better," he said quietly. He turned and left the room.

PART TWO

Chapter Four

SETH DANA

There was water. That was the important thing. There was a well covered by a tall,

silver-colored tank. And beside it there was an electric pump housed in a small wooden

shed. The electricity was shut off, but the power poles were all sturdily upright, and the

wire that had been run in from the main road looked all right. Seth decided to have the

electricity turned on as soon as possible. Otherwise he and Clay would either have to haul

water from town or get it from some of the nearer houses.

Seth looked over at Clay, saw that his brother was examining the pump. Clay looked

calm, relaxed. That alone made Seth's decision to buy him this desert property

worthwhile. There were few neighbors, and those widely scattered. The nearest town was

twenty miles away. Adamsville. And it wasn't much of a town. About twelve hundred

dull, peaceful people. Clay had been reasonably comfortable even while they were

passing through it. Seth wiped the sweat from his forehead and stepped into the shadow

cast by the well's tank. Just morning and it was hot already.

"Pump look all right, Clay?"

"Looks fine. Just waiting for some electricity."

"How about you?" He knew exactly how Clay was, but he wanted to hear his brother

say it aloud.

"I'm all right too." Clay shook his head. "Man, I better be. If I can't make it out here, I

can't make it anywhere. I'm not picking up anything now."

"You will, sooner or later," said Seth. "But probably not much. Not even as much as

if you were in Adamsville."

Clay nodded, wiped his brow, and went to look at the shack that had served to house

the land's former occupant. An old man had lived there pretty much as a hermit. He had

built the shack just as, several years before, he had built a real house—a home for his

wife and children. A home that they had lived in for only a few days when the wind blew

down the power lines and they had to resort to candles. One of the children had invented

a game to play with the candles. In the resulting fire, the man had lost his wife, his two

sons, and most of his sanity. He had lived on the property as a recluse until his death, a

few months back. Seth had bought the property from his surviving daughter, now an

adult. He had bought it in the hope that his latent brother might finally find peace there.

Clay shouldn't have been a latent. He was thirty, a year older than Seth, and he should

have gone through transition at least a decade before. Even Doro had expected him to.

Doro was father to both of them. He had actually worn one body long enough to father

two children on the same woman with it. Their mother had been annoyed. She liked

variety.

Well, she had variety in Clay and Seth. One son was not only a failure but a helpless

failure. Clay was abnormally sensitive even for a latent. But as a latent, he had no control.

Without Seth he would be insane or dead by now. Doro had suggested privately to Seth

that a quick, easy death might be kindest. Seth had been able to listen to such talk calmly

only because he had been through his own agonizing latent period before his transition.

He knew what Clay would have to put up with for the rest of his life. And he knew Doro

was doing something he had never done before. He was allowing Seth to make an

important decision.

"No," Seth had said. "I'll take care of him." And he had done it. He had been nineteen

then to Clay's twenty. Clay had not cared much for the idea of being taken care of by

anyone, least of all his younger brother. But pain had dulled his pride.

They had traveled around the country together, content with no one place for long.

Sometimes Seth worked—when he wanted to. Sometimes he stole. Often he shielded his

brother and accepted punishment in his stead. Clay never asked it. He saved what was left

of his pride by not asking. He was too unstable to work. He got jobs, but inevitably he

lost them. Some violent event caught his mind and afterward he had to lie, tell people he

was an epileptic. Employers seemed to accept his explanation, but afterward they found

reason to fire him. Seth could have stopped them, could have seen to it that they

considered Clay their most valuable employee. But Clay didn't want it that way. "What's

the point?" he had said more than once. "I can't do the work. The hell with it."

Clay was slowly deciding to kill himself. It was slow because, in spite of everything,

Clay did not want to die. He was just becoming less and less able to tolerate the pain of

living.

So now a lonely piece of land. A so-called ranch in the middle of the Arizona desert.

Clay could have a few animals, a garden, whatever he wanted. Whatever he could take

care of in view of the fact that he would be incapacitated part of the time. He would be

receiving money from some income property Seth had insisted on stealing for him in

Phoenix, but in more personal ways he would be self-sufficient. He would be able to bear

his own pain—now that there would be less of it. He would be able to make his land

productive. He would be able to take care of himself. If he was to live at all, he would

have to be able to do that.

"Hey, come on in here," Clay was calling from within the hermit's shack. "Take a

look at this thing."

Seth went into the shack. Clay was in what had been a combination kitchen-bedroomliving room. The only other room was piled high with bales of newspapers and

magazines and stacked with tools. A storage room, apparently. What Clay was looking at

was a large cast-iron wood-burning stove.

Seth laughed. "Maybe we can sell that thing as an antique and use the money to buy

an electric stove. We'll need one."

"What we?" demanded Clay.

"Well, you, then. You don't want to have to fight with that thing every time you want

to eat, do you?"

"Never mind the stove. You're starting to sound like you changed your mind about

leaving."

"No I haven't. I'm going as soon as you're settled in here. And—" He stopped, looked

away from Clay. There was something he had not mentioned to his brother yet.