Telempath

by Spider Robinson

  It looked as though his effort had paid off.

  I wondered whether Carlson was expecting me. I wasn’t sure if the sound of the car I’d shot downtown could have traveled this far, nor whether an explosion in a city full of untended gas mains was unusual enough to put Carlson on his guard. Therefore I had to assume that it could have and it was. Other men had come to New York to deal with Carlson, as independents, and none had returned.

  My mind was clicking efficiently now, all confusion gone. I was eager. A car-swiped lamp post leaned drunkenly against a building, and I briefly considered taking to the rooftops for maximum surprise factor. But rooftops are prime Musky territory, and besides I didn’t have strength for climbing.

  I entered the campus at the southwest, though the 115th Street gate. As my father had predicted, it was locked—only the main gates at 116th were left open at night in those days, and it was late at night when Carlson dropped his flask. But the lock was a simple Series 10 American that might have made Teach’ laugh out loud. I didn’t laugh out loud. It yielded to the second pick I tried, and I slipped through the barred iron gate without a sound—having thought to oil the hinges.

  A flight of steps led to a short flagstone walkway, grey speckled hexagons in mosaic, a waist-high wall on either side. The walkway ran between Furnald and Ferris Booth halls and, I knew, opened onto the great inner quadrangle of Columbia. Leaves lay scattered all about, and trees of all kinds thrashed in the lusty afternoon breeze, their leaves a million green pinwheels.

  I hugged the right wall until it abutted a taller perpendicular wall. Easing around that, I found myself before the great smashed glass and stone facade of Ferris Booth Hall, the student activities center, staring past it toward Butler Library, which I was seeing from the west side. There was a good deal of heavy construction equipment in the way—one of the many student groups that had occupied space in Booth had managed to blow up itself and a sizable portion of the building in 1983, and rebuilding had still been in progress on Exodus Day. A massive crane stood before the ruined structure, surrounded by stacks of brick and pipe, a bulldozer, storage shacks, a few trucks, a two-hundred-gallon gasoline tank and a pair of construction trailers.

  But my eyes looked past all the conventional hardware to a curious device beyond them, directly in front of Butler Library and nearly hidden by overgrown hedges. I couldn’t have named it—it looked like an octopus making love to a console stereo—but it obviously didn’t come with the landscaping. Dad’s second intuition was also correct: Carlson was using Butler for his base of operations. God knew what the device was for, but a man without his adenoids in a city full of Muskies and hungry German Shepherds would not have built it further from home than could be helped. This was the place.

  I drew in a great chest- and belly-full of air, and my grin hurt my cheeks. I held up my rifle and watched my hands. Rock steady.

  Carlson, you murdering bastard, I thought, this is it. The human race has found you, and its Hand is near. A few more breaths and you die violently, old man, like a harmless cat in a smokeshop window, like an eight-year-old boy on a Harlem sidewalk, like a planetwide civilization you thought you could improve on. Get you ready.

  I moved forward.

  Wendell Morgan Carlson stepped out between the big shattered lamps that bracketed Butler Hall’s front entrance. I saw him plainly in profile, features memorized from the Carlson Poster and my father’s sketches recognizable in the afternoon light even through white beard and tangled hair. He glanced my way, flinched, and ducked back inside a split second ahead of my first shot.

  Determined to nail him before he could reach a weapon and dig in, I put my head down and ran, flat out, for the greatest killer of all time.

  And the first Musky struck.

  Terror sleeted through my brain, driving out the rage, and something warm and intangible plastered itself across my face. I think I screamed then, but somehow I kept from inhaling as I fell and rolled, dropping the rifle and tearing uselessly at the thing on my face. The last thing I saw before invisible gases seared my vision was the huge crane beside me on the right, its long arm flung at the sky like a signpost to Heaven. Then the world shimmered and faded, and I clawed my pistol from its holster. I aimed without seeing, my finger spasmed, and the gun bucked in my hand.

  The massive gasoline drum between me and the crane went up with a whoom! and I sobbed in relief as I heaved to my feet and dove headlong through the flames. The Musky’s dying projections tore at my mind and I rolled clear, searing my lungs with a convulsive inhalation as the Musky exploded behind me. Even as I smashed into the fender of the crane, my hindbrain screamed Muskies never travel alone! and before I knew what I was doing I tore loose my plugs to locate my enemy.

  Foul stenches smashed my sanity; noxious odors wrenched at my reason. I was torn, blasted, overwhelmed in abominable ordure. The universe was offal, and the world I saw was remote and unreal. My eyes saw the campus, but told me nothing of the rank flavor of putrefaction that lay upon it. They saw sky, but spoke nothing of the reeking layers of indescribable decay of which it was made. Even allowing for a greenhouse effect, it was much worse than it should have been after twenty years, just as legend had said. I tasted excrement, I tasted metal, I tasted the flavor of the world’s largest charnel house, population seven millions, and I writhed on the concrete. Forgotten childhood memories of the Exodus burst in my brain and reduced me to a screaming, whimpering child. I couldn’t stand it, it was unbearable. How had I walked, arrogant and unknowing, through this stinking hell all day?

  And with that I thought I remembered why I had come here, and knew I could not join Izzy in the peaceful, fragrant dark. I could not let go—I had to kill Carlson before I let the blackness have me. Courage flowed from God-knows-where, feeding on black hatred and the terrible fear that I would let my people down, let my father down. I stood up and inhaled sharply, through my nose.

  The nightmare world sprang into focus and time came to a halt.

  There were six Muskies, skittering about before Butler as they sought to bend the breezes to their will.

  I had three hot-shots and three grenades.

  One steadied, banked my way. I fired from the hip and he flared out of existence.

  A second caught hold of a prevailing current and came in like an express train. Panic tore through my mind, and I laughed and aimed and the Musky went incandescent.

  Two came in at once then, like balloons in slow motion. I extrapolated their courses, pulled two grenades and armed them with opposing thumbs, counted to four, and hurled them together as Collaci had taught me, aiming for a spot just short of my target. They kissed at that spot and rebounded, each toward an oncoming Musky. But one grenade went up before the other, killing its Musky but knocking the other one safely clear. It whistled past my ear as I threw myself sideways.

  Three Muskies. One hot-shot, one grenade.

  The one that had been spared sailed around the crane in a wide, graceful arc and came in low and fast, rising for my face as one of its brothers attacked from my left. Cursing, I burned the latter and flipped backwards through a great trail of burning gas from the tank I’d spoiled. The Musky failed to check in time, shot suddenly skyward and burst spectacularly. I slammed against a stack of twelve-inch pipe and heard ribs crack.

  One Musky. One grenade.

  As I staggered erect, beating at my smoldering turtleneck, Carlson reemerged from Butler, a curious helmet over his flowing white hair. Wires trailing from it.

  I no longer cared about the remaining Musky. Almost absentmindedly I tossed my last grenade in its direction to keep it occupied, but I knew I would have all the time I needed. Imminent death was now a side issue. I lunged and rolled, came up with the rifle in my hands and aimed for the O in Carlson’s scraggly white beard. Dimly I saw him plugging his helmet into that curious machine by the door but it didn’t matter, it just didn’t matter at all. My finger tightened on the trigger.

  And then something smash
ed me on the side of the neck behind the ear, and my finger clenched, and the blackness that had been waiting patiently for oh! so long swarmed in and washed away the pain and the hate and the weariness and oh God the awful smell…

  Chapter Four

  “…and when I came to, Carlson was dead with a slug through the head and the last Musky was nowhere in smell. So I reset my plugs, found the campfire behind the hedges and ate his supper, and then left the next morning. I found a Healer in Jersey. That’s all there is, Dad.”

  My father chewed the pipe he had not smoked in eighteen years and stared into the fire. Dry poplar and green birch together produced a steady blaze that warmed the spacious living room and peopled it with leaping shadows.

  “Then it’s over,” he said at last, and heaved a great sigh.

  “Yes, Dad. It’s over.”

  He was silent, his coal-black features impassive, for a long time. Firelight danced among the valleys and crevices of his patriarch’s face, and across the sharp scar on his left cheek (so like the one I now bore). His eyes glittered like rainy midnight. I wondered what he was thinking, after all these years and all that he had seen.

  “Isham,” he said at last, “you have done well.”

  “Have I, Dad?”

  “Eh?”

  “I just can’t seem to get it straight in my mind. I guess I expected tangling with Carlson to be a kind of solution to some things that have been bugging me all my life. Somehow I expected pulling that trigger to bring me peace. Instead I’m more confused than ever. Surely you can smell my unease, Dad? Or are your plugs still in again?” Dad used the best plugs in Fresh Start, entirely internal, and he perpetually forgot to remove them after work. Even those who loved him agreed he was the picture of the absentminded professor.

  “No,” he said hesitantly. “I can smell that you are uneasy, but I can’t smell why. You must tell me, Isham.”

  “It’s not easy to explain, Dad. I can’t seem to find the words. Look, I wrote out a kind of journal of events in Jersey, while the Healer was working on me, and afterwards while I rested up. It’s the same story I just told you, but somehow on paper I think it conveys more of what’s bothering me. Will you read it?”

  He nodded. “If you wish.”

  I gave my father all the preceding manuscript, right up to the moment I pulled the trigger and blacked out, and brought him his glasses. He read it slowly and carefully, pausing now and again to gaze distantly into the flames. While he read, I unobtrusively fed the fire and immersed myself in the familiar smells of woodsmoke and ink and chemicals and the pines outside, all the thousand indefinable scents that tried to tell me I was home.

  When Dad was done reading, he closed his eyes and nodded slowly for a time. Then he turned to me and regarded me with troubled eyes. “You’ve left out the ending,” he said.

  “Because I’m not sure how I feel about it.”

  He steepled his fingers. “What is it that troubles you, Isham?”

  “Dad,” I said earnestly, “Carlson is the first man I ever killed. That’s…not a small thing. As it happens, I didn’t actually see my bullet blow off the back of his skull, and sometimes it’s hard to believe in my gut that I really did it—I know it seemed unreal when I saw him afterward. But in fact I have killed a man. And as you just read, that may be necessary sometimes, but I’m not sure it’s right. I know all that Carlson did, to us Stones and to the world, I know the guilt he bore. But I must ask you: Dad, was I right to kill him? Did he deserve to die?”

  He came to me then and gripped my shoulder, and we stood like black iron statues before the raving fire. He locked eyes with me. “Perhaps you should ask your mother, Isham. Or your brother Israfel. Perhaps you should have asked the people whose remains you stepped over to kill Carlson. I do not know what is ‘right’ and ‘wrong’; they are slippery terms to define. I only know what is. And revenge, as Collaci told you, is a uniquely human attribute.

  “Superstitious Agro guerillas used to raid us from time to time, and because we were reluctant to fire on them they got away with it. Then one day they captured Collaci’s wife, not knowing she was diabetic. By the time he caught up with them she was dead for lack of insulin. Within two days, every guerilla in that raiding party had died of a broken neck. Fresh Start has not been raided in all the years since. Ask Collaci about vengeance.”

  “But Jordan’s Agros hate us more than ever.”

  “But they buy our ax heads and wheels, our neosulfa and our cloth, just like their more sensible neighbors, and they leave us alone. Carlson’s death will be an eternal warning to any who would impose their values on the world at large, and an eternal comfort to those who were robbed by him of the best of their lives—of their homes and their loved ones.

  “Isham, you…did…right. Don’t ever think differently, son. You did right, and I am deeply proud of you. Your mother and Israfel are resting easier now, and millions more too. I know that I will sleep easier tonight than I have in eighteen years.”

  That’s right, Dad, you will. I relaxed. “All right, Dad. I guess you’re right. I just wanted to hear someone tell me besides myself. I wanted you to tell me.” He smiled and nodded and sat down again, and I left him there, an old man lost in his thoughts.

  I went to the bathroom and closed the door behind me, glad that restored plumbing had been one of Fresh Start’s first priorities to be realized. I spent a few minutes assembling some items I had brought back from New York City and removing the back of the septic tank behind the toilet bowl. Then I flushed the toilet.

  Reaching into the tank, I grabbed the gravity ball and flexed it horizontally so that the tank would not refill with water. Holding it in place awkwardly, I made a long arm and picked up the large bottle of chlorine bleach I had fetched from the city. As an irreplaceable relic of Civilization it was priceless—and utterly useless to modern man. I slipped my plugs into place and filled the tank with bleach, replacing the porcelain cover silently but leaving it slightly ajar. I bent again and grabbed a large canister—also a valuable but useless antique—of bathroom bowl cleaner. It was labeled “Vanish,” and I hoped the label was prophetic. I poured the entire canister into the bowl.

  Hang the expense, I thought, and giggled insanely.

  Then I put the cover down on the seat, hid the bleach and bowl cleaner and left, whistling softly through my teeth.

  I felt good, better than I had since I left New York.

  I walked through inky dark to the lake, and I sat among the pines by the shore, flinging stones at the water, trying to make them skip. I couldn’t seem to get it right. I was used to the balancing effect of a left arm. I rubbed my stump ruefully and lay back and just thought for awhile. I had lied to my father—it was not over. But it would be soon.

  Right or wrong, I thought, removing my plugs and lighting a joint, it sure can be necessary.

  Moonlight shattered on the branches overhead and lay in shards on the ground. I breathed deep of the cool darkness, tasted pot and woods and distant animals and the good, crisp scents of a balanced ecology, heard the faraway hum of wind generators storing power for the work yet to be done. And I thought of a man gone mad with a dream of a better, simpler world; a man who, Heaven help him, meant well.

  Behind me in the far distance came the sound of a flushing toilet, followed by a hideous gargling noise, and suddenly I laughed with real amusement, choking on smoke. The sound of justice: whoosh-splash-gllgh! It was the grandest joke in the universe; I laughed until I couldn’t cry any more.

  Then, taking my time, I recovered the hidden pack and supplies I cached on my way home. As I strapped up, I thought of the tape recording I had left behind on the Sony in the living room, and wondered briefly what Collaci and the Council would think of it. But I didn’t really care much. For the first time in eighteen years, I was at peace. The Hand of Man had retired.

  I set out for New York City.

  Chapter Five

  Transcript of a Tape Recording Made by Isham S
tone (Fresh Start Judicial Archives)

  I might as well address this tape to you, Collaci—I’ll bet my Musky-gun that you’re the first one to notice and play it. I hope you’ll listen to it as well, but that might be too much to ask, the first time around. Just keep playing it.

  The way I picture it, by the time this is found the Council will have decided that I murdered Dad—both because I’ve disappeared, and because the murder weapons had to come from a city. You don’t believe it, though, and so you’ve been looking around for clues to the real identity of the killer. That’s how you ran across this tape, threaded and ready to go. Good old efficient Collaci.

  Well, I’m sorry to disappoint you, Teach’, but you’re wrong. I did set the trap that killed Dad, or anyway I will after I’ve finished making this recording. What’s that called? Patricide? That sounds right, like herbicide or insecticide.

  But it’s gonna take a lot of talking before I’ve explained why I have to kill my father, and you’ll have to hear it two or three times and think about it awhile before you’ll be ready to accept and believe. I know: it’s taken me awhile. So maybe we’d best get to it. Whip out one of your toothpicks, sit down, and try to listen.

  It goes back a couple of months, to when I was in the city. By now you’ve no doubt found my journal, with its account of my day in New York, and you’ve probably noticed the missing ending. Well, here it is…

  I drifted in the darkness for a thousand years, helpless as a Musky in a hurricane, caroming off the inside of my skull. Memories swept by like drifting blimps, and I clutched at them as I sailed past, but the ones tangible enough to grasp burned my fingers. Vaguely, I sensed distant daylight on either side, decided those must be my ears and tried to steer for the right one, which seemed a bit closer. I singed my arm banking off an adolescent trauma, but it did the trick—I sailed out into daylight and landed on my face with a hell of a crash. I thought about getting up, but I couldn’t remember whether I’d brought my legs with me, and they weren’t talking. My arm hurt even more than my face, and something stank.