The Man Who Staked the Stars/Chapter IX

IX
ooking into Bryce's face he slid to his feet slowly, ground out the stub of his cigarette and stood before the desk.

Bryce took out his gun and held it where Pierce could see it. “Are Manobas ever shot?” It was a heavy little gun, his maggy, its barrel sleek and rounded, the heavy metal warm from being worn close to the skin.

“Sometimes. It's a natural enough reaction.”

It was a spaceworthy gun with adjustable velocity for driving through padded suits and pressure suits. The velocity was set high, but it would be inartistic to blow a large hole through a psychotherapist. Bryce turned the dial down slowly, watching him.

“Do the professional ethics of privacy and non-publicity cover this kind of situation?”

Pierce was smiling slightly with a touch of bitter humor. “It's undiplomatic to tell you that, but yes, the contingency is covered. There is nothing to connect myself with you as a case in any records, nor anything to identify me as a member of the Manoba group contracted by your company. The ethic of privacy is allowed to have no exceptions for the family's record.”

A cool curiosity held him. “Tell me—when you saw that I was beginning to think, why didn't you just needle me down for a short nap and leave?”

The smile remained. “I am supposed to control the shock of realization, and make sure that it is assimilated without damage to the subject.” His dark expressionless eyes met Bryce's, and Bryce felt the impact of them, and realized for the first time that there was the same slight bitter off-hand smile on his own lips, and inwardly the quiet ironical mood with the still clarity of a deep pool. His own mood? He hefted the gun in his hand, feeling its weight and balance. “You could have done that over the televiewer,” he pointed out dispassionately. “What is the average mortality, do you know?”

“Not high. It is only inexperience that is dangerous. If one can get through one's first three or four cases, it's safe enough.”

Looking back over the past days it was quite clear that Pierce had control over his emotions. Any emotion Pierce chose him to feel he would feel. It remained to be seen how much that could influence what he was going to do. The dark-skinned young man stood before the desk casually and answered questions with a slight restrained smile that set the wry irony of both their minds.

A man does what he wants. That is freedom, but what he wanted could be controlled apparently. A man is what he wants. But what he wanted could be changed. How easy had it been to change him. Bryce tried himself with a thought of the power and glory of rule, the reign and mastery of space—a goal that had warmed his thoughts for many years.

He didn't want it.

There was a numbness where there should have been emotion, and all he could feel for his loss was the resignation and the faint bitter humor permitted him by Pierce's smile. Watching that smile he shifted the heavy little gun in his hand, turning it over casually, feeling its familiar weight and the texture of its surfaces.

He spoke gently. “If you don't mind my asking, have you passed through your first three cases yet?”

“You are my first,” said Roy Pierce, whom he had trusted. “I'm afraid I was clumsy.”

“Oh—you did all right.” Bryce shot him then, placing the bullet carefully in the pit of his stomach where it would hurt. That was for doing well. For justice. No man has the right to meddle in another man's mind.

Pierce had been starting to speak. He swayed back a half step with a flicker of change crossing his face then stood steady and smiling again. That brief grimace touched Bryce's nerves with a sensation that was like the jangle of something heavy dropped inside a piano, a sound he had heard once. But the numbness did not lift from his feelings. He was still smiling. The third bullet would be between the eyes.

The words were low and rapid but clear.

Bryce did not listen. “This is for doing a good job,” he said, overriding the other voice with his own, and pulled the trigger again, placing the slug slightly lower this time, in the belly, where if it entangled in one of the spinal plexus it could hurt past belief. Pierce swayed slightly. His face went to the clay-blue color that comes to dark-skinned races when they pale. Bleeding inside somewhere, and already dead unless he were given help, Bryce figured.

For a moment Bryce saw something like effort in the dark unreadable eyes. Then suddenly Pierce smiled, his young face disarmingly innocent and merry. “Oh, come on, Bryce, it's not that serious. Be a good sport. You don't want to—”

Suddenly Bryce saw the situation as the sheerest humor, a sort of lunatic farce for the laughter of some cosmic joker. He swung the gunsights up towards the smiling face. Amusement bubbled in his blood and he heard himself laugh—heard it with a grim secondary amusement.

“The joke's on you,” he said, and pulled the trigger, then laughed again. The joke was on him.

He had missed. He had missed at a distance of three feet. Yet his hand was rock-steady. Pierce's control had him. His laughter stopped as the humor in Pierce's attitude faded down again to the small wry smile that had been there from the beginning.

Bryce had not lost. He had only to wait a little and he had won. Unless Pierce could use his control to force him to call help. He set himself to resist and not to listen. There was not long to go. The expressionless dark eyes that held his were beginning to widen slightly in an effort of sight that meant that a private darkness was closing in on the psychotherapist. The rumble of distant rockets seemed louder, covering his fading voice. “It's your choice, Bryce. I give it to you. You won't want this later—Bryce—but don't—hunger to undo. It is payment enough for all—times like this—that you change—and do not—want—them any—again—” Pierce pulled in a strangling breath, swaying more visibly. “Gun,” he whispered, reaching out in Bryce's direction, his eyes going sightless.

Bryce handed him the magnomatic, and watched as Pierce fumbled his hands over it, putting his prints on it blindly, his knees bending.

When he fell, Bryce picked up the phone and called Emergency. The emergency squad would be cruising around in the halls somewhere nearby, looking for the source of the three radio notes that had told them that a gun was fired.

hat was the last I saw of him,” the young man stopped talking and looked pleased with himself.

Donahue drained his drink irritably and put it on the bar that had been set up on the ceiling when the Gs went off. It clung magnetically. “Make it the same, please.” He turned to Roy Pierce, floating beside him. “Stop needling me, man, finish the story. The way you tell it, I don't know what you did, how you did it, or even whether you died or not.”

“Oh, I died,” said Roy Pierce. “But they revived me,” he added.

“Good! I'm glad to hear that!” said Donahue more cheerfully, wondering suddenly just how extensively he was being kidded. “For a moment there you had me worried. Now explain about this treatment.”

“It's called soul eating,” explained the dark-skinned, straight-haired boy, “I don't think you could do it.”

Donahue thought that information over carefully. “Maybe not. How's it done?”

“In the tribes of my people the soul is supposed to be an invisible double who walks at your side, protecting you and speaking silently to your mind. Its face is the face that looks out of mirrors and up from pools at you, and the shadow that walks on the ground beside you. Evildoers, after they had spoken to a Manoba, would say that their reflections were gone. Our family was called The Eaters of Souls, and all the tribes were afraid of us for nine hundred miles around.”

“So am I,” said Donahue compactly. “As my Yiddish grandmother on my mother's side would say, it sounds from werewolves.”

“I can explain it.”

“No magic?”

“Look,” said the youth tersely, “Do I want to get kicked out of the FNMA? What if I had sat in a jungle circle loaded to the ears with herbs and spells, with the drums of my cousins throbbing around me, and learned the best and subtlest ways of my technique back in time looking through the eyes of my great grandfather, or conversing with his ghost. Do you think I would say so?”

“No,” Donahue admitted. He edged away a little.

The youth spoke gloomily. “Rapport and intensified empathy is something you learn by exposing yourself to mirrors. The technique is published, known and accepted among psychologists, but most of them just don't try. It backfires too easily, and it takes too high a level of skill. It originated with my family.” The youth spoke even more gloomily. “What I do is obvious enough if I make it so. It's simply prior mimicry. I watch the trend of what goes on in his thoughts, and express approximately what he is feeling and thinking a little before he does. So that presently, subconsciously he is depending on me to tell him what he thinks and how he feels.

”I was his mirror, his prior mirror. I am a clear, expressive underplaying actor as an actor, and each shade of reaction is separate and unmistakable. The subconscious is not rational, but it generalizes from regularities that the conscious mind never has the subtlety to notice. It saw me consistently representing its own internal reactions, hour after hour in every situation more clearly than Bryce ever saw himself express anything in a mirror, and more steadily than he ever saw any mirror. The subconscious then associated the inside emotion with the corresponding outside image for each one. I became Bryce's subconscious self image. When he thinks of doing anything, the image in the imagination that does it is not himself, it is me. This can cause considerable mental confusion.“

”It should!“ Donahue agreed fervently.

”I put him in new places and situations where he was unsure and I was sure, so that when I diverged from mirroring him, he gave me the lead and mirrored me. One of us had to be the originator and the other the reflection, but now it was reversed. He did not fight it subconsciously because the results were pleasant. I kept the lead and led him a mental dance through thoughts and reactions he had never had before, in a personality pattern completely foreign to his own, one that I wanted him to have. I hadn't been hired for that, but I had time to pass before I could untangle that UT problem, and I wanted to do it for him. The mirror link was complete the first day, but I'm afraid the extra days made it indelible. He'll always be me in his mind, and mirrors will never look right to him.“

t's so simple, it's obvious,” said Donahue with disappointment. “It doesn't sound like magic to me.”

The youth was thoughtful, frowning. “Sometimes it doesn't to me either. I wonder if the ghost of my grandfather was telling me the right—”

“Forget the ghost of your grandfather,” Donahue interrupted hastily. On his few space trips he could never get used to this business of floating eerily around in the air, and it seemed a poor time to talk about ghosts. “What about Bryce Carter. What became of him? You know,” he said defiantly, “I like his plans for organizing the Belt and breaking UT. And, come to think of it, if I had been there when you were interfering with that, I think I would have shot you myself.”

“UT had only hired me to find the organizer of the smuggling ring and persuade him to disband his organization in UT. I had done that. So the third day, when I could walk, I left the hospital and went back to Earth, and collected my fee for a job done. Many people had vanished suddenly from their payrolls, and the crime statistics in some cities had shown a startling lull. They knew I had done it, and so they paid and were grateful.” The dark youth shrugged. “I didn't feel I had to tell them about Orillo. He tipped the police and started a rumor, and there was evidence enough in the crime statistics of the months before, when they were correlated with the distribution of branches of Union Transport, though there was nothing to point at anyone in particular except the ones who had disappeared.”

Donahue remembered. “Sure that's that investigation of transportation monopolies that raised such a stink last year. I saw part of it in Congress.”

Pierce handed him a travel folder. Gaudily illustrated, it advertised the advantages of the C&O lines for space tourists. “Carter and Orillo.”

Donahue looked up, puzzled, “But this is the next step in what he planned. I thought you changed him.”

“Mahatma Gandhi would have followed out those plans,” Pierce said with a touch of grimness. “As you pointed out, they are attractive. But I changed him. I won't give you personality dynamics, but if you want a list of changes—He's married to Sheila Wesley, that's one change. And instead of going home nights he roisters around in bars and restaurants, talking to everybody, listening to everybody, liking them all and enthusiastically making friends in carload lots. That's another change. He doesn't look into mirrors because they make him feel cross-eyed. That's because he unconsciously expects to see me in the mirror. And he will organize the Belt and be president as he planned. I won't stop him in that. The difference will be that he won't want the power he'll get.” Pierce said grimly, “A power-lusting man can never be trusted with power: he goes megalomaniacal. Carter was already halfway there. But he's safe from that now. He's going to be given plenty of power, and see it only as responsibility, and not want it. That's the only safe kind of man to have in a powerful position.”

“That—” said Donahue with great earnestness, “—is like sending a poor damned soul to Kismetic paradise as a eunuch. You psychologists are all complete sadists,” he said lifting his drink. “I suppose you've put something in my drink?”

“Absolutely nothing,” Roy Pierce assured him, grinning. “Funny thing was, when I got back to Earth that time, I kept feeling cross-eyed when I looked into a mirror. And my friends said I was not myself. If I was not myself, I knew I must still be Bryce Carter. Things had seemed different, and they had warned me that the technique sometimes backfired when I was learning. So I called my uncle Mordand on the televiewer—he's the head of the family, and he lives in an estate in the jungle—and he—”

Donahue was fascinated again.

There was a different approach for each case, Pierce had found. It was not ordinarily ethical to discuss any case history, but he knew with great surety that Donahue could be trusted not to repeat what he was being told. The only reason there wasn't something extra in his current drink was because there had been something in the last drink.

This was case five.