"Frightening, yes," Adam muttered. He remembered Merit's scream in the medicine man's lodge. "And the Field-builders are still right here, on this planet? You're really sure of that? I mean if you can contact them at the distance of Earth…"
Ray nodded. "They're here, all right."
"But where?"
"That question was not so easy to answer." Ray had another arrow drawn now, as if automatically getting ready to shoot again, but once drawn the shaft rested in his hand ignored. "By the end of my first day on Golden I had determined that they were somewhere in the other hemisphere. And I was also sure that Alexander Golden does not exist any longer. Not as a human being, anyway."
"What?"
"No, he's not human any longer. I can sense what they're like, Adam, the Field-builders, I can tell it by the things they do. To people here and elsewhere. And by what they'd like to do to us. But they're a little cautious. We're quite strong."
"Ray. Gods of all space, Ray."
"I know, I know. Most likely all that's left of Golden by now is a sort of telepathic frequency converter, a bridge over which messages can be forced from their minds to those of ordinary Earth-descended humans, or to the Tenoka."
Adam was listening in horror.
It was as if Ray were reluctant to speak, to reveal the horrifying things, but was able to see no other choice. "I've seen… sensed… the Field-builders' dungeons, Adam. The torture chambers, where Alexander Golden still exists—I can't really say that he still lives—along with other prisoners. By now I've determined more precisely where they are, over on the other side of the world from here. Not stone walls with chains hanging from them, no. And not physical torture, or not that particularly. They—the ones you call the Field-builders— have solved somehow the old problem. How does a being, determinedly evil, use parapsych talents to inflict pain? And how can one maim and kill… with the mind alone…"
Ray's voice had grown grim, and now it almost quivered. His expression had darkened. Adam had never seen or heard him this way before. Now the huge man paused, staring into space. Suddenly Adam saw him as tired and strained, living under a burden that would have been too great for any ordinary human.
"Alex Golden was an Earthman," Ray said suddenly. "As I am." He looked at Adam suddenly. "Those who have done what has been done to him are on this planet. And I intend to call them to account."
"You—?"
Ray smiled at Adam. "General Lorsch thinks that we Jovians consider her our enemy."
"If you don't—and if you have some definite knowledge of the Field-builders—why not tell her the truth?"
"I've tried to do so, Adam. She and I once enjoyed a very private chat. More private than the lady realized, because I turned off the spy devices in her office. And then I even used what we call projection to present our case. That method gives me very considerable powers of persuasion." Ray grinned faintly, and Adam had no trouble believing him. "But she's a tough lady, Adam, and a stubborn one—and even if she could be persuaded to come to terms with us, she could not for very long deceive or disobey her superiors, and we would still have to deal with them."
"Look, Ray—even if she doesn't like you, I don't see why you can't tell her what you've found out about the Field-builders. About your contact with them. Did you try to tell her that? And why shouldn't we tell her about this message that purports to be from Golden?"
"No, Adam. I didn't try to tell her that." For the moment Ray sounded less like an old friend, and more like a patient schoolmaster. "Because there is nothing that she or the Space Force can do about Alexander Golden, or about the Field-builders either—at least not while the Field still covers the Ringwall, over on the other side of the planet."
"That's where they are, then." Adam almost whispered it.
"That's where they are… what we must do with General Lorsch is get her to prepare for a fight—let her think, if necessary, that we are the ones who must be fought. Then we shall convincingly uncover the real enemy."
"Uncover them how?" Adam paused. "You mean you can control the Field?" If it were anyone else talking to him… but it was not anyone else. He found himself ready to believe anything of Ray.
"Not yet," said Ray calmly. I don't expect to be able to control it from this side of the planet."
"From the other side, then… the Ringwall again?"
"That's right."
"But how are you going to get there?"
It was as if Ray had been waiting for that question, as if everything he had said up to now had been calculated to lead up to it.
"Watch," the huge man said.
A moment later, Ray's heavy bow dropped to the muddy ground; the hand that had held it was gone, had winked out of sight along with the rest of Ray. Ray Kedro had vanished completely, as if he had never been.
Teleportation. It had to be that. One parapsych effect that Adam had never seen before, that no one he had heard of had ever seen. He had heard or read somewhere that not even the Jovians were capable of it. Some authorities went so far as to say that there was not a single properly authenticated case of teleportation in all of human history…
But what else could it be? Now teleportation… Adam looked to his left and right, and behind him, and he was still utterly alone.
He turned around. He called out, tentatively: "Ray?"
"I was slightly off target," said Ray's voice from-behind him. Adam spun round again. The big man was standing near the far edge of the clearing, grinning wryly at his own condition. Ray's feet and legs were plastered with wet mud, up to above his knees.
Ray picked up a piece of dead bark and with a faint grimace began to scrape away some of the goo; there were still some human situations, it appeared, that no amount of intelligence, parapsych talent, or superb co-ordination were capable of dealing with gracefully.
Pointing with the defiled bark, Ray explained: "I was aiming for the top of that little hill over there; I was sort of curious about what was on the other side, which may be why I came down beyond it, in a mudhole." He raised his eyes to Adam's. "But the point is that the parapsych talent is not adversely affected by the Field."
Adam sat down on a handy log. After all that he had learned in the past few minutes, he felt he needed to sit down. "I thought the story was that all the Jovian parapsych talents were disappearing. That they've been fading steadily since you all passed adolescence."
"You're absolutely right, Ad. That's the story."
Ray's grin was, as of old, infectious. "You don't still believe all the stories you hear, do you?"
"You mean…" Adam let it trail off.
All he could think of for the moment was that Merit hadn't seen fit to enlighten him about the powerful talents that she, too, must still have at her disposal. But all he said was: "You're lucky you didn't land on one of those jagged stumps over there where I did my logging, for the cabin. Or come down right on top of a poison lizard in the swamp."
Ray shook his head. "That would be physical harm caused directly by the use of parapsych talent, within the meaning of the law—and that, leaving out minor bruises and such, is still a practical impossibility. Remember?"
"Still an impossibility for you. Not for the Field-builders. You were just telling me how they…"
"Yes… well, they may no longer enjoy a total monopoly on the ability to use parapsych as a weapon. We must develop, are developing, means of self defense. I can put it more precisely: violent harm from parapsych causes doesn't happen to us, to Jovians, by accident… teleportation is probably the safest form of transportation yet invented."
"If you say so… Ray, what's your plan? You said you were going to call the Field-builders to account."
"I am indeed," said Ray with calm confidence. He had now finished scraping most of the mud away, and he threw down the piece of bark and came to sit on the log beside Adam. "Our siblings have finished constructing a starship, at the old base on Ganymede where Doc—"
Adam held up a hand. "The Space Force knows abo
ut your ship. I was wondering if I should mention it to you, but then I assumed you already knew they did."
"Your assumption was quite correct. And General Lorsch I suppose is worried lest we be bringing our ship here, and planning to upset things for her somehow? Well, we are. Our ninety-eight siblings are bringing our ship along to Golden now. It'll be here when we need it."
Adam got to his feet. He walked a little distance and turned back. "Ray? I don't like this. I mean this between you and the Space Force. I know them, and I know Jovians, I suppose better than anyone else does."
"I'm sure you do, Adam. And what is it you don't like, precisely?"
"They don't understand you, Ray. And I'm not sure you understand them. As soon as that ship of yours arrives in normal space near Golden they're going to arrest whoever's operating it—or try to arrest them. They consider that kind of a ship illegal, and they take things like that seriously."
Ray threw back his head, and his laughter roared out, sudden and surprising. The log rocked under him. "No, Adam, we're not going to fight a battle against the Space Force—although we could. Sorry if I let you think that, even for a minute. We'll park our ship about six hundred kilometers above the Ringwall, and there they'll surround us with a large force—I hope—trying to arrest us as you say.
"We can keep them at arm's length, until events on the surface below have made it possible for them to join us in our endeavors, and convinced them that they should do so. Does that help to set your mind at ease?"
"No, Ray. No, not really. Events on the surface? What events? I don't understand. Look, I'm just a slow human. Take it easy and explain it all to me slowly."
"Adam, we're just going to have to show the Field-builders to the Space Force. It's a case where mere explaining and arguing won't do the job."
"Show them how?"
"Bring them out into the open, out of their dungeons into the light of day. Display them as they really are. I and a few others are going to teleport to the Ringwall from here—from in the Stem or somewhere near it. We ought to be able to reach the Ringwall in, I suppose, five or six jumps. We'll do that while our ship and the Space Force ships are above it. The enemy can be found there, at the Ringwall. And they have the key to the Field there with them, Adam. I've felt it. I've seen it in their minds. Once we arrive there, we'll be able to take that key into our possession. We'll turn the place upside down and inside out if need be."
It was all coming at Adam too fast, much too fast. "You, and a few others, are just going to walk in on the Field-Builders and do all this to them? How many of them are there?"
Ray strode over to where he had dropped his bow. He picked the weapon up and stood there gripping it. "I'm not sure, but we can do it. Numbers won't count for that much, not in our part of the struggle. A little later we will need the ships and weapons of the Space Force—that's why I'm taking steps to make sure they'll be on hand. There'll be plenty for our brothers and sisters of the normal Earth-descended strain to do; but basically, primarily, this is Jovian business. We are not going to submit to being laboratory animals for the Field-builders; we don't intend to sit here like rats in a cage, tapping our noses against the Field."
Ray was obviously bitter, and deeply angry. Again, Adam thought that he had never seen Ray quite like this before.
Adam himself felt small and inadequate, as he rarely had since he had been a toddler. He asked Ray: "Why are you telling me all this?"
"Because you are a Jovian," Ray answered.
"Doc never knew about you," Ray was explaining, a little later, when Adam again felt capable of listening to explanations. "I was only two years old, myself, and a long way from being able to assume leadership, when the other children began trying to duplicate Doc's experiments. That Ganymede installation was and is a huge place. There were vast areas within it that Doc hardly ever entered, and we had a good deal of freedom. And we had abilities that Doc never imagined, at least until much later. He didn't miss a little genetic material from his stock.
"When you were decanted, Adam, one of the laboratory workers was bribed into seeing to it that you were transported to Earth safely. At that point, something about my colleagues' plan went wrong—they couldn't oversee the details from the distance of Ganymede, and you wound up in a public Home instead of a real one as they had intended. My elder siblings tell me they were sorry about that, and I believe them; but as events turned out, we all had to follow you into similar places, at least temporarily, as you know. By the time I was fourteen, I had learned about the experiment that produced you, and I was anxious to get a look at the result. I managed to get myself assigned to the Home that you were in, when it became necessary to go into one—the rest, as they say in stories, you know."
"… but I never guessed…"
Ray grinned at him. "Oh, and one more thing, Ad—Merit has never known. She'll be as surprised as you are."
It was all too much. Adam sat down on the log again, making a helpless gesture.
"I haven't told you any of this before," Ray went on, "because there have been times, many times in fact, when it seemed a distinct disadvantage to anyone to be known as a Jovian. Also, I admit, my older siblings expressed some curiosity about how you would develop, living in an environment substantially different from ours. Whether you've gained or lost by now knowing your heritage—who can say?"
Adam continued just to sit there. He felt numbed, stunned, like part of the log himself. He looked at Ray for a while, then stared into space, then looked back at Ray again. He couldn't doubt any of this, basically, that Ray was telling him.
He, Adam Mann, was a Jovian. He wondered if the curious kids who had created him had given him some other name at first. If so, he didn't think he wanted to know what it was.
No wonder that all his life he had known a sense of being different from the people he lived among, a chronic sense of outrage at the surrounding human idiocy.
"I am telling you this now," said Ray, "because very soon I am going to need the willing help of every Jovian mind and body. And you have it all, Adam. Whatever talents we have are yours, at least in potential." Ray was calmly ready to resume his archery practice, and now the big man's bowstring thrummed again.
Adam raised his eyes just in time to see the arrow hit home. A perfect shot, as always. And now, for himself too, for Adam Mann…
Gradually the realization was growing in him. A foretaste of the new world that he was about to enter. A Jovian world, in which he might climb to heights that were now beyond even his imagination.
"This is what I call the right way to convalesce," said Vito Ling, pulling two rabbit-like hoppers out of his game bag, and dropping them on a rock beside the cooking fire. The biochemistry of Gold-en's native life ran so closely parallel with that of Earth that an inhabitant of either world could generally provide safe nourishment for an inhabitant of the other.
"Convalesce!" Ray laughed. "I think you've just been loafing for the past week. Like me."
"And I'm glad," said Merit, on her knees beside the fire and feeding it with kindling. "I'm not eager for you two to vanish back into Fieldedge, and find a way to spoil this planet. I've decided I like Golden just the way it is."
"We'll convert our scientists to Field-lovers yet," Adam said. Several days had passed since he heard Ray's revelations. Ray had said he hadn't yet told Merit much about the coming struggle, though she was certainly aware of his perceptions of the Field-builders' minds. And Vito had as yet been told nothing.
Merit had been informed, by Ray, of the truth of Adam's Jovian origin. And, as far as Adam could tell, she had been as astonished by the news as he was himself.
Immediately afterward she had come to Adam with a strange look in her face: "Ray just told me…"
"About me?"
"Yes."
And those were the only words the two of them had yet exchanged on the subject. There had been little chance for them to be alone, with Vito now out of the hospital. But ever since that moment Meri
t had looked at Adam in a different way. Exactly what the difference was he could not analyze.
At the moment, Adam was sitting with his back against a tree, feeling comfortably tired and at peace in a way that he had never really known before. Since the day of Ray's revelations, Adam had been spending the mornings trying to develop his latent parapsych talents, under Ray's tutelage, and the afternoons in teaching Ray, Merit, and Vito his own hard-won skills of the primitive life. Ray had warned Adam that probably he would never be able to teleport unaided, but he had already learned to achieve some intermittent telepathic contacts.
And now, relaxed, Adam felt a sudden quick touch against his mind. It came like a glimpse of monstrous black wings overhead, foreshadowing some danger.
If Merit perceived the dark passage, she gave no sign; she and Vito were now horseplaying like happy newly weds beside the fire. But Ray stood up, and with a beckoning motion of his head got Adam to walk away from the fire with him.
Once out of sight of the clearing where the four of them had camped, on a supposed vacation, Ray stopped, looking Adam in the eye. "By this time tomorrow, we must be ready to move."
"As soon as that."
"As soon as that." Ray was brisk and businesslike. "Are you with me?"
Adam shook his head. "I'm keeping up so far." His tone was almost plaintive.
Ray grinned and clapped him on the shoulder. Like the old days, playing some game at Doc's. The message came through plainly, without spoken words. "Good enough. Right now, jump with me into Stem City, okay? Let me guide."
Adam nodded and turned his back on Ray, who was standing just out of physical reach. They had taught him teleportation theory; they had held him back, so far, from the brink of actual movement. This would be the first time—if it worked—
Adam let the wall of trees before him slide out of focus in his eyes. His vision, his attention, came to be centered somewhere else—
The Golden People Page 15
