Telempath

by Spider Robinson

  The demerol helped—but not by killing the pain. What it did was keep me so stoned that I often forgot the pain was there. In a warm, creative glow I would devise a splendidly subtle and poetic means of Killing Carlson—then half an hour later the same plan would seem hopelessly crackbrained. An imperfection of the glass in the window across the room, warping the clean, proud curve of Lowe Dome, held me fascinated for hours—yet I could not seem to concentrate for five minutes on practical matters.

  Carlson came and went, asking few questions and answering fewer, and in my stupor I tried to fire my hate to the killing point, and, Collaci, my instructor and mentor and (I hope) friend, I failed.

  You must understand me—I spent hours trying to focus on the hatred my father had passed on to me, to live up to the geas that fate had laid upon me, to do my duty. But it was damned hard work. Carlson was an absurd combination: so absentminded as to remind me of Dad—and as thoughtful, in his way, as you. He would forget his coat when he left at night—but be back on time with a hot breakfast, shivering and failing to notice. He would forget my name, but never my chamberpot. He would search, blinking, in all directions for the coffee cup that sat perched on his lap, but he never failed to put mine where I could reach it without strain on my ribs. I discovered quite by accident that I slept in the only bed Carlson had ever hauled into Butler, that he himself dossed on a makeshift bed out in the hall, so as to be near if I cried out in the night.

  He offered no clue to his motivations, no insight into what had kept him entombed in New York City. He spoke of his life of exile as a simple fact, requiring no explanation. It seemed more and more obvious that his silence was an admission of guilt: that he could not explain his survival and continued presence in this smelly mausoleum without admitting his crime. I tried—how I tried—to hate him.

  But it was damnably difficult. He supplied my needs before I could voice them, wants before I could form them. He sensed when I craved company and when to leave me be, when I needed to talk and when I needed to be talked to. He suffered my irritability and occasional rages in a way that somehow allowed me to keep my self-respect.

  He was gone for long periods of time during the day and night, and never spoke of his activities. I never pressed him for information; as a recuperating assassin it behooved me to display no undue curiosity. I could not risk arousing his suspicions.

  We never, for instance, chanced to speak of my weapons or their whereabouts.

  And so the subconscious tension of our first conversation stayed with us, born of the things of which we did not speak. It was obvious to both of us—and yet it was a curious kind of kinship, too: both of us lived with something we could not share, and recognized the condition in the other. Even as I planned his death I felt a kind of empathy between Wendell Morgan Carlson and myself. It bothered the hell out of me. If Carlson was what I knew he was, what his guilty silence only proved him to be, then his death was necessary and just—for my father had taught me that debts are always paid. But I could not help but like the absentminded old man.

  Yet that tension was there. We spoke only of neutral things: where he got gasoline to feed the generator that powered wall sockets in the ground-floor rooms (we did not discuss what he would store the gas now that I’d ruined his 200-gallon tank). How far he had to walk these days to find scavengeable flour, beans, and grains. The trouble he had encountered in maintaining the university’s hydroponics cultures by himself. What he did with sewage and compost. The probability of tomatoes growing another year in the miserable sandy soil of Central Park. What a turkey he’d been to not think of using the alcohol in Organic Chem labs for fuel. Never did we talk of why he undertook all the complex difficulty of living in New York, nor why I had sought him here. He diverted the patient with light conversation, and the patient allowed him to do so.

  I had the hate part all ready to go, but I couldn’t superimpose my lifetime picture of Carlson over this fuzzy, pleasant old academic and make it fit. And so the hate boiled in my skull and made convalescence an aimless, confused time. It got much worse when Carlson, explaining that few things on earth are more addictive than oral demerol, cut me off cold turkey in my second week. Less potent analgesics, Talwin, aspirin, all had decayed quickly, and if I sent Carlson rummaging through the rucksack I’d left off campus for the remaining weed, he would in all likelihood come across the annotated map of New York given my by Collaci, and the mimeo’d Carlson Poster. Besides, my ribs hurt too much to smoke.

  One night I woke in a sweat-soaked agony to find the room at a crazy angle, the candle flame slanting out of the dark like a questing tongue. I had half-fallen out of bed, and my right arm kept me from falling the rest of the way, but I could not get back up without another arm. I didn’t seem to have one. Ribs began to throb as I considered the dilemma, and I cried out in pain.

  From out in the hallway came a honking snore that broke off in a grunted “Whazzat? Wha?” and then a series of gasps as Carlson dutifully rolled from his bed to assist me. There came a crash, then a greater one attended by a splash, then a really tremendous crash that echoed and reechoed. Carlson lurched into view, a potbellied old man in yellow pajamas, eyes three-quarters closed and unfocused, one foot trapped in a galvanized wastebasket, gallantly coming to my rescue. He hit the door frame a glancing blow with his shoulder, overbalanced and went down on his face. I believe he came fully awake a second after he hit the floor; his eyes opened wide and he saw me staring at him in dazed disbelief from a few inches away. And for one timeless moment the absurdity of our respective positions hit us, and we broke up, simultaneous whoops of laughter at ourselves that cut off at once, and a second later he was helping me back into bed with strong, gentle hands, and I was trying not to groan aloud.

  Dammit, I liked him.

  Then one day while he was away I rose from the bed all by myself, quite gratified to find that I could, and hobbled like an old, old, man composed of glass to the window that looked out on the entrance area of Butler and the hedge-hidden quadrangle beyond. It was a chill, slightly off-white day, but to me even the meager colors of shrub and tree seemed unaccountably vivid. From the overfamiliar closeness of the sickroom, the decaying campus had a magnificent depth. Everything was so far away. It was a little overwhelming. Moving closer to the window, I looked to the right.

  Carlson stood before the front doors, staring up at the sky over the quadrangle with his back to me. On his head was the same curious helmet I had seen once before, days ago, framed in the crosshairs of my rifle. Its tangle of wires was plugged into the large console I recalled. I wondered again what it could be, and then I saw something that made me freeze, made me forget the pain and the dizziness and stare with full attention.

  Carlson was staring down the row between two greatly overgrown hedges that ran parallel to each other and perpendicular to Butler, facing toward Lowe’s mighty cascade of steps. But he stared as a man watching something near him, and its position followed that of the wind-tossed upper reaches of the hedges.

  Intuitively I knew that he was using the strange machine to communicate with a Musky, and all the hatred and rage for which I had found no outlet boiled over, contorting my face with fury.

  It seemed an enormous effort not to cry out some primal challenge; I believe I bared my teeth. You bastard, I thought savagely, you set us up for them, made them our enemies, and now you’re hand in glove with them. I was stupefied by such incredible treachery, could not make any sense of it, did not care. As I watched from behind and to the left I saw his lips move silently, but I did not care what they said, what kind of deal Carlson had worked out with the murderous gas-clouds. He had one. He dealt with the creatures that had killed my mother, that he had virtually created. He would soon die.

  I shuffled with infinite care back to bed, and planned.

  I was ready to kill him within a week. My ribs were mostly healed now—I came to realize that my body’s repair process had been waiting only for me to decide to heal, to leave
the safe haven of convalescence. My strength returned to me and soon I could walk easily, and even dress myself with care, letting the left sleeve dangle. Most of the pain was gone from the stump, leaving only the many annoying tactile phenomena of severed nerves, the classic “phantom arm” and the flood of sweat which seemed to pour from my left armpit but could not be found on my side. Thanks to Carlson’s tendency toward sound sleep, I was familiar with the layout of the main floor—and had recovered the weapons he was too absentminded to destroy. He had “hidden” them in a broom closet.

  I wanted to take him in a time and place where his Musky pals couldn’t help him; it seemed to me certain that the ones I had destroyed were bodyguards. A blustery cold night obliged by occurring almost immediately, breezes too choppy to be effectively used by a windrider.

  The kind of night which, in my childhood, we chose for a picnic or a hayride.

  We ate together in my room, a bean-and-lentil dish with tamari and fresh bread, and as he was finishing his last sip of tea I brought the rifle out from under the blanket and drew a bead on his face.

  “End of the line, Wendell.”

  He sat absolutely still, cup still raised to his lips, gazing gravely over it at me, for a long moment. Then he put the cup down very slowly, and sighed. “I didn’t think you’d do it so soon. You’re not well enough, you know.”

  I grinned. “You were expecting this, huh?”

  “Ever since you discovered your weapons the night before last.”

  My grin faded. “And you let me live? Wendell, have you a death wish?”

  “I cannot kill,” he said sadly, and I roared with sudden laughter.

  “Maybe not any more, Wendell. Certainly not in another few minutes.” But you have killed before, killed more than anyone in history. Hell, Hitler, Attila, they’re punks beside you!

  He grimaced. “So you know who I am.”

  “The whole world knows. What’s left of it.”

  Pain filled his eyes, and he nodded. “The last few times I tried to leave this city, to find others to help me in my work, they shot at me. Two years ago I found a man down in the Bowery who had been attacked by a dog pack. He said he had come to kill me for the price on my head, and he died in my arms, cursing me, as I brought him here. The price he named was high, and I knew there would be others.”

  “And you nursed me back to health? You must know that you deserve to die.” I sneered. “Musky-lover.”

  “You know even that, then?”

  “I saw you talking with them, with that crazy machine of yours. The ones who attacked me were your bodyguards, weren’t they?”

  “The windriders came to me almost twenty years ago,” he said softly, eyes far away. “They did not harm me. Since then I have slowly learned to speak with them, after a fashion, using the undermind. We might yet have understood one another.”

  The gun was becoming heavy on my single arm, difficult to aim properly. I rested the barrel on my knee and shifted my grip slightly. My hands were sweaty.

  “Well?” he said gruffly. “Why haven’t you killed me already?”

  A good question. I swept it aside irritably. “Why did you do it?” I barked.

  “Why did I create the Hyperosmic Virus?” His weathered face saddened even more, and he tugged at his beard, his voice anguished. “Because I was a damned fool, I suppose. Because it was a pretty problem in biochemistry. Because no one else could have done it, and because I wasn’t certain that I could. I never suspected when I began that it would be used as it was.”

  “Its release was a spur-of-the-moment decision, is that it?” I snarled, tightening my grip on the trigger.

  “I suppose so,” he said quietly. “Only Jacob could tell us for sure.”

  “Who?”

  “Jacob Stone,” he said, startled by my violence. “My assistant. I thought you said you…”

  “So you knew who I was all the time,” I growled.

  He blinked at me, plainly astounded. Then understanding flooded his craggy features. “Of course,” he murmured. “Of course. You’re young Isham—I should have recognized you. I smelled your hate, of course, but I never…”

  “You what?”

  “Smelled the scent of hate upon you,” he repeated, puzzled. “Not much of a trick—you’ve been reeking with it.”

  How could he—impossible, sweep it aside.

  “And now I imagine you’ll want to discharge that hate and avenge your father’s death. That was his own doing, but no matter: it was I who made it possible. Go ahead, pull the trigger.” He closed his eyes.

  “My father is not dead,” I said, drowning now in confusion.

  Carlson opened his eyes at once. “No? I assumed he perished when he released the Virus.”

  My ears roared; the rifle was suddenly impossible to aim. I wanted to cry out, to damn Carlson for a liar, but I knew the fuzzy professor was no actor and all at once I sprang up out of the bed and burst from the room, through wrought-iron lobby doors and out of the great empty hall, out into blackness and howling wind and a great swirling kaleidoscope of stars that reeled drunkenly overhead. Ribs pulsing, I walked for a hundred years, clutching my idiot rifle, heedless of danger from Musky or hungry Doberman, pursued by a thousand howling demons. Dimly I heard Carlson calling out behind me for a time, but I lost him easily and continued, seeking oblivion. The city, finding its natural prey for the first time in two decades, obligingly swallowed me up.

  More than a day later I had my next conscious thought. I became aware that I had been staring at my socks for at least an hour, trying to decide what color they were.

  My second coherent thought was that my ass hurt.

  I looked around: beyond smashed observation windows, the great steel and stone corpse of New York City was laid out below me like some incredible three-dimensional jigsaw. I was at the top of the Empire State Building.

  I had no memory of the long climb, nor of the flight downtown from Columbia University, and it was only after I had worked out how tired I must be that I realized how tired I was. My ribs felt sandblasted, and the winds that swept the observation tower were very very cold.

  I was higher from the earth than I had ever been before in my life, facing south toward the empty World Trade Center, toward that part of the Atlantic into which this city had once dumped five hundred cubic feet of human shit every day; but I saw neither city nor sea. Instead I saw a frustrated, ambitious black man, obsessed with a scheme for quick-and-easy world salvation, conning a fuzzy-headed genius whose eminence he could never hope to attain. I saw that man, terrified by the ghastly results of his folly, fashioning a story to shift blame from himself and repeating it until all men believed it—and perhaps he himself as well. I saw at last the true face of that story’s villain: a tormented, guilt-driven old man, exiled for the high crime of gullibility, befriended only by his race’s bitterest enemies, nursing his assassin back to health. And I saw as though for the first time that assassin, trained and schooled to complete a cover-up, the embittered black man’s last bucket of whitewash.

  My father had loaded me with all the hatred and anger he felt for himself, aimed me toward a scapegoat and fired me like a cannonball.

  But I would ricochet.

  I became aware of noise below me, in the interior of the building. I waited incuriously, not even troubling to lift my rifle from my lap. The noise became weary footsteps on the floor below me. They shuffled slowly up the iron stairway nearest me, and paused at the top. I heard hoarse, wheezing breath, struggling to slow itself, succeeding. I did not turn.

  “Hell of a view,” I said, squinting at it.

  “View of a hell,” Carlson wheezed behind me.

  “How’d you find me, Wendell?”

  “I followed your spoor.”

  I spun, stared at him, “You…?”

  “Followed your spoor.”

  I turned around again, and giggled. The giggle became a chuckle, and then I sat on it. “Still got your adenoids, eh, doc? Su
re. Twenty years in this rotten graveyard and I’ll bet you’ve never owned a set of noseplugs. Punishment to fit the crime—and then some.”

  He did not reply. His breathing was easier now.

  “My father, Wendell, now there’s an absentminded man for you,” I went on conversationally. “Always doing some sort of Civilized work, always forgetting to remove his plugs when he comes home—he surely does take a lot of kidding. Our security chief, Phil Collaci, quietly makes sure Dad has a Guard with him at all times when he goes outdoors—just can’t depend on Dad’s sense of smell, Teach’ says. Dad always was a terrible cook, you know? He always puts too much garlic in the soup. Am I boring you, Wendell? Would you like to hear a lovely death I just dreamed? I am the last assassin on earth, and I have just created a brand-new death, a unique one. It convicts as it kills—if you die, you deserve to.” My voice was quite shrill now, and a part of me clinically diagnosed hysteria. Carlson said something I did not hear as I raved of toilet bowls and brains splashing on a sidewalk and impossible thousands of chittering grey rats and my eyes went nova and a carillon shattered in my skull and when the world came back I realized that the exhausted old man had slapped my head near off my shoulders. He crouched beside me, holding his hand and wincing.

  “Why have no Muskies attacked me, here in the heights?” My voice was soft now, wind-tossed.

  “The windriders project and receive emotions. Those who sorrow as you and I engender respect and fear in them. You are protected now, as I have been these twenty years. An expensive shield.”

  I blinked at him and burst into tears.

  He held me then in his frail old arms, as my father had never done, and rocked me while I wept. I wept until I was exhausted, and when I had not cried for a time he said softly, “You will put away your new death, unused. You are his son, and you love him.”

  I shivered then, and he held me closer, and did not see me smile.

  So there you have it, Teach’. Stop thinking of Jacob Stone as the Father of Fresh Start, and see him as a man—and you will not only realize that his sense of smell was a hoax, but like me will wonder how you were ever taken in by so transparent a fiction. There are a dozen blameless explanations for Dad’s anosmia—none of which would have required pretense.