The Man Who Staked the Stars
Page 16
sightless.
Bryce handed him the magnomatic, and watched as Pierce fumbled hishands over it, putting his prints on it blindly, his knees bending.
When he fell, Bryce picked up the phone and called Emergency. Theemergency squad would be cruising around in the halls somewherenearby, looking for the source of the three radio notes that had toldthem that a gun was fired.
* * * * *
"That was the last I saw of him," the young man stopped talking andlooked pleased with himself.
Donahue drained his drink irritably and put it on the bar that hadbeen set up on the ceiling when the Gs went off. It clungmagnetically. "Make it the same, please." He turned to Roy Pierce,floating beside him. "Stop needling me, man, finish the story. The wayyou tell it, I don't know what you did, how you did it, or evenwhether 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, wonderingsuddenly just how extensively he was being kidded. "For a momentthere you had me worried. Now explain about this treatment."
"It's called soul eating," explained the dark-skinned, straight-hairedboy, "I don't think you could do it."
Donahue thought that information over carefully. "Maybe not. How's itdone?"
"In the tribes of my people the soul is supposed to be an invisibledouble who walks at your side, protecting you and speaking silently toyour mind. Its face is the face that looks out of mirrors and up frompools at you, and the shadow that walks on the ground beside you.Evildoers, after they had spoken to a Manoba, would say that theirreflections were gone. Our family was called The Eaters of Souls, andall the tribes were afraid of us for nine hundred miles around."
"So am I," said Donahue compactly. "As my Yiddish grandmother on mymother'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 theFNMA? What if I had sat in a jungle circle loaded to the ears withherbs and spells, with the drums of my cousins throbbing around me,and learned the best and subtlest ways of my technique back in timelooking through the eyes of my great grandfather, or conversing withhis ghost. Do you think I would say so?"
"No," Donahue admitted. He edged away a little.
The youth spoke gloomily. "Rapport and intensified empathy issomething you learn by exposing yourself to mirrors. The technique ispublished, known and accepted among psychologists, but most of themjust don't try. It backfires too easily, and it takes too high a levelof skill. It originated with my family." The youth spoke even moregloomily. "What I do is obvious enough if I make it so. It's simplyprior mimicry. I watch the trend of what goes on in his thoughts, andexpress approximately what he is feeling and thinking a little beforehe does. So that presently, subconsciously he is depending on me totell him what he thinks and how he feels.
"I was his mirror, his prior mirror. I am a clear, expressiveunderplaying actor as an actor, and each shade of reaction is separateand unmistakable. The subconscious is not rational, but it generalizesfrom regularities that the conscious mind never has the subtlety tonotice. It saw me consistently representing its own internalreactions, hour after hour in every situation more clearly than Bryceever saw himself express anything in a mirror, and more steadily thanhe ever saw any mirror. The subconscious then associated the insideemotion with the corresponding outside image for each one. I becameBryce's subconscious self image. When he thinks of doing anything, theimage in the imagination that does it is not himself, it is me. Thiscan cause considerable mental confusion."
"It should!" Donahue agreed fervently.
"I put him in new places and situations where he was unsure and I wassure, so that when I diverged from mirroring him, he gave me the leadand mirrored me. One of us had to be the originator and the other thereflection, but now it was reversed. He did not fight itsubconsciously because the results were pleasant. I kept the lead andled him a mental dance through thoughts and reactions he had never hadbefore, in a personality pattern completely foreign to his own, onethat I wanted him to have. I hadn't been hired for that, but I hadtime to pass before I could untangle that UT problem, and I wanted todo it for him. The mirror link was complete the first day, but I'mafraid the extra days made it indelible. He'll always be me in hismind, and mirrors will never look right to him."
* * * * *
"It's so simple, it's obvious," said Donahue with disappointment. "Itdoesn't sound like magic to me."
The youth was thoughtful, frowning. "Sometimes it doesn't to meeither. I wonder if the ghost of my grandfather was telling me theright--"
"Forget the ghost of your grandfather," Donahue interrupted hastily.On his few space trips he could never get used to this business offloating eerily around in the air, and it seemed a poor time to talkabout ghosts. "What about Bryce Carter. What became of him? You know,"he said defiantly, "I like his plans for organizing the Belt andbreaking UT. And, come to think of it, if I had been there when youwere interfering with _that_, I think I would have shot you myself."
"UT had only hired me to find the organizer of the smuggling ring andpersuade him to disband his organization in UT. I had done that. Sothe third day, when I could walk, I left the hospital and went back toEarth, and collected my fee for a job done. Many people had vanishedsuddenly from their payrolls, and the crime statistics in some citieshad shown a startling lull. They knew I had done it, and so they paidand were grateful." The dark youth shrugged. "I didn't feel I had totell them about Orillo. He tipped the police and started a rumor, andthere was evidence enough in the crime statistics of the monthsbefore, when they were correlated with the distribution of branches ofUnion Transport, though there was nothing to point at anyone inparticular except the ones who had disappeared."
Donahue remembered. "Sure that's that investigation of transportationmonopolies that raised such a stink last year. I saw part of it inCongress."
Pierce handed him a travel folder. Gaudily illustrated, it advertisedthe advantages of the C&O lines for space tourists. "Carter andOrillo."
Donahue looked up, puzzled, "But this is the next step in what heplanned. I thought you changed him."
"Mahatma Gandhi would have followed out those plans," Pierce said witha touch of grimness. "As you pointed out, they are attractive. But Ichanged him. I won't give you personality dynamics, but if you want alist of changes--He's married to Sheila Wesley, that's one change. Andinstead of going home nights he roisters around in bars andrestaurants, talking to everybody, listening to everybody, liking themall and enthusiastically making friends in carload lots. That'sanother change. He doesn't look into mirrors because they make himfeel cross-eyed. That's because he unconsciously expects to see me inthe mirror. And he will organize the Belt and be president as heplanned. I won't stop him in that. The difference will be that hewon't want the power he'll get." Pierce said grimly, "A power-lustingman can never be trusted with power: he goes megalomaniacal. Carterwas already halfway there. But he's safe from that now. He's going tobe given plenty of power, and see it only as responsibility, and notwant it. That's the only safe kind of man to have in a powerfulposition."
"That--" said Donahue with great earnestness, "--is like sending apoor damned soul to Kismetic paradise as a eunuch. You psychologistsare all complete sadists," he said lifting his drink. "I supposeyou've put something in my drink?"
"Absolutely nothing," Roy Pierce assured him, grinning. "Funny thingwas, when I got back to Earth that time, _I_ kept feeling cross-eyedwhen I looked into a mirror. And my friends said I was not myself. IfI was not myself, I knew I must still be Bryce Carter. Things hadseemed different, and they had warned me that the technique sometimesbackfired when I was learning. So I called my uncle Mordand on theteleviewer--he's the head of the family, and he lives in an estate inthe jungle--and he--"
Donahue was fascinated again.
There was a different
approach for each case, Pierce had found. It wasnot ordinarily ethical to discuss any case history, but he knew withgreat surety that Donahue could be trusted not to repeat what he wasbeing told. The only reason there wasn't something extra in hiscurrent drink was because there had been something in the last drink.
This was case five.
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