Mutant (SF Anthology)

by Henry Kuttner

  From the thousands of Baldies scattered through the villages, from helicopter and surface car, came a thought of reassurance. We are one, it said. We are with you.

  That-from the Baldies. From the paranoids, fewer in number, came a message of hatred and triumph. Kill the hairy men!

  But no nontelepath outside Sequoia knew what was happening.

  There was an old plastic house near the edge of town where Burkhalter had been hiding. He slipped out of a side door now into the Cool quiet of the night. Overhead, a full moon hung yellow. A fan of diffused light reached upward from Redwood Street in the distance, and dimmer paths in the air marked the other avenues. Burkhalter’s muscles were rigid. He felt his throat tense with near-panic. Generations of anticipations had built up a violent phobia in every Baldy, and now that the day had come-Barbaba Pell came dazzling into his thoughts, and as his mind recalled her, so her mind touched his, wild and fiery, gloating with a triumph his whole being drew back from, while against all judgment something seemed to force him to receive her message.

  He’s dead, Burkhalter, he’s dead! I’ve killed Fred Selfridge! The word is “kill,” but in the mind of the paranoid is not a word or a thought, but a reeking sensation of triumph, wet with blood, a screaming thought which the sane mind reels from.

  You fool! Burkhalter shouted at her across the distant streets, his mind catching a little of her wildness so that he could not wholly control it. You crazy fool, did you start this?

  He was starting out to get you. He was dangerous. His talk would have started the pogrom anyhow-people were beginning to think—

  It’s got to be stopped!

  It will be! Her thought had a terrible confidence. We’ve made plans.

  What happened?

  Someone saw me kill Selfridge. It’s the brother, Ralph, who touched things off-the old lynch law. Listen. Her thought was giddy with triumph.

  He heard it then, the belling yell of the mob, far away, but growing louder. The sound of .Barbara Pell’s mind was fuel to a flame. He caught terror from her, but a perverted terror that lusted after what it feared. The same fury of bloodthirst was in the crowd’s yell and in the red flame which was Barbara Pell’s mad mind. They were coming near her, nearer-For a moment Burkhalter was a woman running down a dim street, stumbling, recovering, racing on with a lynch mob baying at her heels.

  A man-a Baldy-dashed out into the path of the crowd. He tore off his wig and waved it at them. Then Ralph Selfridge, his thin young face dripping with sweat, shrieked in wordless hatred and turned the tide after this new quarry. The woman ran on into the darkness.

  They caught the man. When a Baldy dies, there is a sudden gap in the ether, a dead emptiness that no telepath will willingly touch with his mind. But before that blankness snapped into being, the Baldy’s thought of agony blazed through Sequoia with stunning impact, and a thousand minds reeled for an instant before it.

  Kill the hairy men! shrieked Barbara Pell’s thoughts, ravenous and mad. This was what the furies were. When a woman’s mind lets go, it drops into abysses of sheer savagery that a man’s mind never plumbs. The woman from time immemorial has lived closer to the abyss than the male-has had to, for the defense of her brood. The primitive woman cannot afford scruples. Barbara Pell’s madness now was the red, running madness of primal force. And it was a fiery thing that ignited something in every mind it touched. Burkhalter felt little flames take hold at the edges of his thoughts and the whole fabric that was his identity shivered and drew back. But he felt in the ether other minds, mad paranoid minds, reach out toward her and cast themselves ecstatically into the holocaust.

  Kill them, kill-kill! raved her mind.

  Everywhere? Burkhalter wondered, dizzy with the pull he felt from that vortex of exultant hate. All over the world, tonight? Have the paranoids risen everywhere, or only in Sequoia?

  And then he sensed suddenly the ultimate hatefulness of Barbara Pell. She answered the thought, and in the way she answered he recognized how fully evil the red-haired woman was. If she had lost herself utterly in this flaming intoxication of the mob he would still, he thought, have hated her, but he need not have despised her.

  She answered quite coolly, with a part of her mind detached from the ravening fury that took its fire from the howling mob and tossed it like a torch for the other paranoids to ignite their hatred from.

  She was an amazing and complex woman, Barbara Pell. She had a strange, inflammatory quality which no woman, perhaps, since Jeanne d’Arc had so fully exercised. But she did not give herself up wholly to the fire that had kindled within her at the thought and smell of blood. She was deliberately casting herself into that blood-bath, deliberately wallowing in the frenzy of her madness. And as she wallowed, she could still answer with a coolness more terrible than her ardor.

  No, only in Sequoia, said the mind that an instant before had been a blind raving exhortation to murder. No human must live to tell about it, she said in thought-shapes that dripped cold venom more burning than the hot bloodlust in her broadcast thoughts. We hold Sequoia. We’ve taken over the airfields and the power station. We’re armed. Sequoia is isolated from the rest of the world. The pogrom’s broken loose here-only here. Like a cancer. It must be stopped here.

  How?

  How do you destroy any cancer? Venom bubbled in the thought.

  Radium, Burkhalter thought. Radioactivity. The atomic bombs—

  Dusting off? he wondered.

  A burning coldness of affirmation answered him. No human must live to tell about it. Towns have been dusted off before-by other towns. Pinewood may get the blame this time -there’s been rivalry between it and Sequoia.

  But that’s impossible. If the Sequoia teleaudios have gone dead—

  We’re sending out faked messages. Any copters coming in will be stopped. But we’ve got to finish it off fast. If one human escapes-Her thoughts dissolved into inhuman, inarticulate yammering, caught up and echoed avidly by a chorus of other minds.

  Burkhalter shut oil the contact sharply. He was surprised, a little, to find that he had been moving toward the hospital all during the interchange, circling through the outskirts of Sequoia. Now he heard with his conscious mind the distant yelling that grew loud and faded again almost to silence, and then swelled once more. The mindless beast that ran the streets could be sensed tonight even by a nontelepath.

  He moved silently through the dark for a while, sick and shaken as much by his contact with a paranoid rnind as by the threat of what had happened and what might still come.

  Jeanne d’Arc, he thought. She had it too, that power to inflame the mind. She, too, had heard-“voices?” Had she perhaps been an unwitting telepath born far before her time? But at least there had been sanity behind the power she exercised. With Barbara Pell-As her image came into his mind again her thought touched him, urgent, repellently cool and controlled in the midst of all this holocaust she had deliberately stirred up. Evidently something had happened to upset their plans, for—

  Burkhalter, she called voicelessly. Burkhalter, listen, We’ll co-operate with you.

  We hadn’t intended to, but-where is the Mute, Hobson?

  I don’t know.

  The cache of Eggs has been moved. We can’t find the bombs. It’ll take hours before another load of Eggs can be flown here from the nearest town. It’s on the way. But every second we waste increases the danger of discovery. Find Hob-son. He’s the only mind we can’t touch in Sequoia. We know no one else has hidden the bombs. Get Hobson to tell us where they are. Make him understand, Burkhalter. This isn’t a matter affecting only us. If word of this gets out, every telepath in the world is menaced. The cancer must be cut out before it spreads.

  Burkhalter felt murderous thought-currents moving toward him. He turned toward a dark house, drifted behind a bush, and waited there till the mob had poured past, their torches blazing. He felt sick and hopeless. What he had seen in the faces of the men was horrible. Had this hatred and fury existed for generatio
ns under the surface-this insane mob violence that could burst out against Baldies with so little provocation?

  Common sense told him that the provocation had been sufficient. When a telepath killed a nontelepath, it was not dueling-it was murder. The dice were loaded. And for weeks now psychological propaganda had been at work in Sequoia.

  The non-Baldies were not simply killing an alien race. They were out to destroy the personal devil. They were convinced by now that the Baldies were potential world conquerors. As yet no one had suggested that the telepaths ate babies, but that was probably coming soon, Burkhalter thought bitterly.

  Preview. Decentralization was helping the Baldies, because it made a temporary communication-embargo possible. The synapses that connected Sequoia to the rest of the world were blocked; they could not remain blocked forever.

  He cut through a yard, hurdled a fence, and was among the pines. He felt an impulse to keep going, straight north, into the clean wilderness where this turmoil and-fury could be left behind. But, instead, he angled south toward the distant hospital. Luckily he would not have to cross the river; the bridges would undoubtedly be guarded.

  There was a new sound, discordant and hysterical. The barking of dogs. Animals, as a rule, could not receive the telepathic thoughts of humans, but the storm of mental currents raging in Sequoia now had stepped up the frequency-or the power-to a far higher level. And the thoughts of thousands of telepaths, all over the world, were focused on the little village on the Pacific Slope.

  Hark, hark! The dogs do bark!

  The beggars are coming to town—

  But there’s another poem, he thought, trying to remember. Another one that fits even better. What is it—

  The hopes and fears of all the years -

  The mindless barking of the dogs was worst. It set the pitch of yapping, mad savagery that washed up around the hospital like the rising waves of a neap tide. And the patients were receptive too; wet packs and hydrotherapy, and, in a few cases, restraining jackets were necessary.

  Hobson stared through the one-way window at the village far below. “They can’t get in here,” he said.

  Heath, haggard and pale, but with a new light in his eyes, nodded at Burkhalter.

  “You’re one of the last to arrive. Seven of us were killed. One child. There are ten others still on their way. The rest-safe here.”

  “How safe?” Burkhalter asked. He drank the coffee Heath had provided.

  “As safe as anywhere. This place was built so irresponsible patients couldn’t get out. Those windows are unbreakable. It works both ways. The mob can’t get in. Not easily, anyhow. We’re fireproof, of course.”

  “What about the staff? The non-Baldies, I mean.”

  A gray-haired man seated at a nearby desk stopped marking a chart to smile wryly at Burkhalter. The consul recognized him: Dr. Wayland, chief psychiatrist.

  Wayland said, “The medical profession has worked with Baldies for a long time, Harry. Especially the psychologists. If any non-Baldy can understand the telepathic viewpoint, we do. We’re noncombatants.”

  “The hospital work has to go on,” Heath said. “Even in the face of this. We did something rather unprecedented, though. We read the minds of every non-Baldy within these walls. Three men on the staff had a preconceived dislike of Baldies, and sympathized with the lynchings. We asked them to leave. There’s no danger of Fifth Column work here now.”

  Hobson said slowly, “There was another man-Dr. Wilson. He went down to the village and tried to reason with the mob.”

  Heath said, “We got him back here. He’s having plasma pumped into him now.”

  Burkhalter set down his cup. “All right. Hobson, you can read my mind. How about it?”

  The Mute’s round face was impassive. “We had our plans, too. Sure, I moved the Eggs. The paranoids won’t find ‘em now.”

  “More Eggs are being flown in. Sequoia’s going to be dusted off. You can’t stop that.”

  A buzzer rang; Dr. Wayland listened briefly to a transmitted voice picked up a few charts and went out. Burkhalter jerked his thumb toward the door.

  “What about him? And the rest of the staff? They know, now.”

  Heath grimaced. “They know more than we wanted them to know. Until tonight, no nontelepath has even suspected the existence of the paranoid group. We can’t expect Wayland to keep his mouth shut about this. The paranoids are a menace to non-Baldies. The trouble is, the average man won’t differentiate between paranoids and Baldies. Are those people down there”-he glanced toward the window-“are they drawing the line?”

  “It’s a problem,” Hobson admitted. “Pure logic tells us that no non-Baldy must survive to talk about this. But is that the answer?”

  “I don’t see any other way,” Burkhalter said unhappily. He thought suddenly of Barbara Pell and the Mute gave him a sharp glance.

  “How do you feel about it, Heath?”

  The priest-medic walked to the desk and shuffled case histories. “You’re the boss, Hobson. I don’t know. I’m thinking about my patients. Here’s Andy Pell. He’s got Alzheimer’s disease-early senile psychosis. He’s screwed up. Can’t remember things very well. A nice old guy. He spills food on his shirt, he talks my ear off, and he makes passes at the nurses. He’d be no loss to the world, I suppose. Why draw a line, then? If we’re going in for killing, there can’t be any exceptions. The non-Baldy staff here can’t survive, either.”

  “That’s the way you feel?”

  Heath made a sharp, angry gesture. “No! It isn’t the way I feel! Mass murder would mean canceling the work of ninety years, since the first Baldy was born. It’d mean putting us on the same level as the paranoids? Baldies don’t kill.”

  “We kill paranoids.”

  “There’s a difference. Paranoids are on equal terms with us. And … oh, I don’t know, Hobson. The motive would be the same-to save our race. But somehow one doesn’t kill a non-Baldy.”

  “Even a lynch mob?”

  “They can’t help it,” Heath said quietly. “It’s probably casuistry to distinguish between paranoids and non-Baldies but there is a difference. It would mean a lot of difference to us. We’re not killers.”

  Burkhalter’s head drooped. The sense of unendurable fatigue was back again. He forced himself to meet Hobson’s calm gaze.

  “Do you know any other reason?” he asked.

  “No,” the Mute said. “I’m in communication, though. We’re trying to figure out a way.”

  Heath said, “Six more got here safely. One was killed. Three are still on their way.”

  “The mob hasn’t traced us to the hospital yet,” Hobson said. “Let’s see. The paranoids have infiltrated Sequoia in considerable strength, and they’re well armed. They’ve got the airfields and the power station. They’re sending out faked teleaudio messages so no suspicion will be aroused outside. They’re playing a waiting game; as soon as another cargo of Eggs gets here, the paranoids will beat it out of town and erase Sequoia. And us, of course.”

  “Can’t we kill the paranoids? You haven’t any compunctions about eliminating them, have you, Duke?”

  Heath shook his head and smiled; Hobson said, “That wouldn’t help. The problem would still exist. Incidentally, we could intercept the copter flying Eggs here, but that would just mean postponement. A hundred other copters would load Eggs and head for Sequoia; some of them would be bound to get through. Even fifty cargoes of bombs would be too dangerous. You know how the Eggs work.”

  Burkhalter knew, all right. One Egg would be quite sufficient to blast Sequoia entirely from the map.

  Heath said, “Justified murder doesn’t bother me. But killing non-Baldies-if I had any part in that, the mark of Cain wouldn’t be just a symbol. I’d have it on my forehead-or inside my head, rather. Where any Baldy could see it. If we could use propaganda on the mob-“

  Burkhalter shook his head. “There’s no time. And even if we did cool off the lynchers, that wouldn’t stop word of this from get
ting around. Have you listened in on the catch-phrases, Duke?”

  “The mob?”

  “Yeah. They’ve built up a nice personal devil by now. We never made any secret of our round robins, and somebody had a bright idea. We’re polygamists. Purely mental polygamists, but they’re shouting that down in the village now.”

  “Well,” Heath said, “I suppose they’re right. The norm is arbitrary, isn’t it-automatically set by the power-group? Baldies are variants from that norm.”

  “Norms change.”

  “Only in crises. It took the Blowup to bring about decentralization. Besides, what’s the true standard of values? What’s right for non-Baldies isn’t always right for telepaths.” “There’s a basic standard of morals-” “Semantics.” Heath shuffled his case histories again. “Somebody once said that insane asylums won’t find their true function till ninety percent of the world is insane. Then the sane group can just retire to the sanitariums.” He laughed harshly. “But you can’t even find a basic standard in psychoses. There’s a lot less schizophrenia since the Blowup; most d.p. cases come from cities. The more I work with psycho patients, the less I’m willing to accept any arbitrary standards as the real ones. This man”-he picked up a chart-“he’s got a fairly familiar delusion. He contends that when he dies, the world will end. Well-maybe, in this one particular case it’s true.”

  “You sound like a patient, yourself,” Burkhalter said succinctly.

  Hobson raised a hand. “Heath, I suggest you administer sedatives to the Baldies here. Including us. Don’t you feel the tension?”

  The three were silent for a moment, telepathetically listening. Presently Burkhalter was able to sort out individual chords in the discordant thought-melody that was focused on the hospital.

  “The patients,” he said. “Eh?”

  Heath scowled and touched a button. “Fernald? Issue sedatives-” He gave a quick prescription, clicked off the communicator, and rose. “Too many psychotic patients are sensitive,” he told Hobson. “We’re liable to have a panic on our hands. Did you catch that depressive thought-” He formed a quick mental image. “I’d better give that man a shot. And I’d better check up on the violent cases, too.” But he waited.