Baldy

by Henry Kuttner

  Someone in a helicopter high up in the hot blue sky locked minds with the group Underground, faint and far-off, but as instant as the man in the nearest cave beyond Cody's locked door.

  "No, ho," the voices said in his mind. "You can't! You are all of us. You can't. Jeff, you are all of us!"

  He knew it was true. The way out was like a deep, dark well, and vertigo pulled him toward it, but he knew that he would be killing his whole race, a little, if he killed himself. Only telepaths can experience death and still live. Each time a telepath dies, all the rest within mind's reach feel the blackness close upon an extinguished mind, and feel their own minds extinguish a little in response.

  It happened so fast Cody was still feeling with two fingers along the edge of his collarbone, and the knife was not yet firm in his fist, when the single, interlocking cry of anguished protest from a hundred minds speaking as one closed down upon him. He shut his thoughts and was obdurate. He could fight them off long enough. This would only take a second. The door was locked and physical force was the only thing that could stop him.

  But he was uneasy even in this urgent press of voices and action. For Allenby's mind was not speaking with the rest. Why?

  Now the knife was firm in his hand. Now he spread his two fingers apart a little to make way for it, knowing the place to strike. Had Brewster felt as he felt, when Brewster stood here six months ago and laid down the unbearable burden of decision? Had it been hard to pull the trigger? Or easy, as it was easy to lift the knife and--

  A burst of blinding white light exploded in the middle of his brain. It was like a shooting star that crashed and shattered upon the very texture of the mind itself. In the last winking instant of consciousness Cody thought he had already struck the self-destroying blow and that this was what death looked like from within.

  Then he knew that the meteor of impact was Allenby's mind striking his a numbing blow. He felt the knife slip from his hands, he felt his knees buckle, and he felt nothing more for a very long, an immeasurable time.

  When he was aware of himself again Allenby was kneeling beside him on the floor, and the calculator looked up above him glassy and reflecting from an unfamiliar angle, a child's eye view seen with a knee-high vision. The door was unlocked and stood open. Everything looked strange.

  Allenby said, "All right, Jeff?"

  Cody looked up at him and felt the pent-up and unreleased tension in him boil toward the surface in an outburst of rage so strong that the supporting minds he felt hovering around him drew back as if from fire.

  "I'm sorry," Allenby said. "I've only done that twice before in my life. I had to do it, Jeff."

  Cody threw aside the hand on his shoulder. Scowling, he drew his feet under him and tried to rise. The room went around him in an unsteady circle.

  "Somebody had to be the man," Allenby said. "It was the odds, Jeff. It's hard on you and Merriam and Brewster and those others, but--

  Cody made a violent gesture, cutting off the thought.

  "All right," Allenby said. "But don't kill yourself, Jeff. Kill somebody else. Kill Jasper Home."

  A little burning shock went through Cody's mind. He stood motionless, not even his mind stirring, letting that strange new thought glow in the center of it.

  Kill Jasper Home.

  Oh, Allenby was a wise man. He was grinning at Cody now, his round, ruddy face tense but beginning to look happy again.

  "Feeling better? Action's what you need, Jeff-action, directed activity. All you've been able to do for months is stay put and worry. There are some responsibilities a man can't carry-unless he acts. Well, use your knife on Home, not yourself."

  A faint flicker of doubt wavered in Cody's mind.

  Allenby said, "Yes, you may fail. He may kill you."

  "He won't," Cody said aloud, his voice sounding strange to him.

  "He could. You'll have to take the chance. Get him if you can. That's what you want to do, but you haven't really known it. You've got to kill someone. Home's our basic problem now. He's our real enemy. So kill Home. Not yourself."

  Cody nodded without a word.

  "Good. We'll locate him for you. And I'll get you a copter. Will you see Lucy first?"

  A little wave of disturbance ran through Cody's mind. Allenby saw it, but he did not let his own mind ripple in response. Quietly the innumerable linking minds of the other telepaths all around them had drawn back, waiting.

  "Yes," Cody said. "I'll see Lucy first." He turned toward the door of the cave.

  Jasper Home--and what he represented--was the reason why the Baldies could not let even themselves learn the method of Operation Apocalypse and the nature of the deadly selective virus from the calculator. That secret had to be kept from Jasper Home and his fellow paranoids. For then-approach was: Why not kill all the humans? Why not, before they kill us? Why not strike first, and save ourselves?

  These were hard questions to answer, and Jasper Home was very adept at putting it to the test. If you could say the group of paranoid telepaths had any leader, then Home was that leader. How much the man knew of the Caves was uncertain. He knew they existed, but not where. He knew some of the things that were going on in it, in spite of the frequency-scrambling Mute helmets every Cave Baldy wore. If he knew about the Inductor, he would--if he could--have dropped an Egg on it with the greatest joy in life and watched the smoke-cloud arise. Certainly he knew the Operation Apocalypse had been planned, for he was doing his best to force the Baldies to release the virus that would destroy all nontelepathic human life.

  And he knew the way to force this decision. If-when-a total pogrom started, then the virus and the Apocalypse would be loosed upon the world. Then there would be no choice. When your life depends on killing your enemy, you don't hesitate. But when the enemy is your brother....

  That was the difference. To the normal Baldies, the race of nontelepathic humans was a close kin. To the paranoids they were hairy sub-men fit only for extermination. So Jasper Home worked in every way he knew to force trouble to the surface. To precipitate a pogrom. To make sure the Baldies released the virus and destroyed the hairy men.

  And Home worked in a decentralized post-Blowup society founded on fear, a fear that had been very real once. Today, no further move seemed possible. The society wavered between re-contraction and further expansion, and each man, each town, was on guard against all others. For how can you trust another when you do not know his thoughts?

  American Gun and Sweetwater, Jensen's Crossing and Santaclare and all the rest, clear across the curve of the continent. Men and women in the towns going about their business, rearing their children, tending their gardens and their stores and their factories. Most of them were normal human beings. Yet in every town the Baldies lived too, rearing their children, tending their stores. Amicably enough for the most part. But not always--not always.

  And for weeks now, over most of the nation, had lain a humid, oppressive heat wave, in which aggressions rose steadily higher. Yet, outside of a few knife-duels, no one dared strike the first blow. Other men were armed too, and every town possessed a cache of atomic Eggs, and could strike back with deadly precision.

  The time was more than ripe for a pogrom. So far, no mob had formed. No potential lynchers had agreed on a target.

  But the Baldies were a minority.

  All that was needed was a precipitating factor-and the paranoids were doing their best to provide that.

  Cody glanced up at the cavern's gray stone sky and reached with his key for the lock of his wife's apartment door. With the key already in place, he hesitated, not from indecision this time but because he knew what probably waited inside. There was a furrow between his brows, and all the little lines of his face were pulled tense and held that way by the perpetual tension that held every Baldy from the first moment after he entered the caves.

  The stone sky held down and bottled in such a complex maze of thoughts, echoing off the walls and interlacing and interlocking in a babel of confusion. T
he Cavern of Babel, Cody thought wryly, and turned the key with a gesture of small resolution. Indoors he would exchange one babel for another. The walls would give him a little shelter from the clouds of stale, sullen resentment outside, but there was something inside he liked even less. Yet he knew that he could not leave without seeing Lucy and the baby. He opened the door. The living room looked bright

  enough, with its deep, broad divan-shelf running along three sides, soft, dark mossy green under the shelves of book-spools, colored cushions scattered, the lights on low. An electric fire glowed behind a Gothic interweaving of baffles, like a small cathedral on fire from within. Through the broad window in the fourth wall he could see the lights of the Ralphs' living room next door reflecting on the street, and across the way June and Hugh Barton in their own living room, having a pre-dinner cocktail before their electric fire, It looked pleasant.

  But in here all the clear colors and the glow were clouded by the deep miasma of despair which colored all Jeff Cody's wife's days, and had for-how long now? The baby was three months old.

  He called, "Lucy?"

  No answer. But a deeper wave of misery beat through the apartment, and after a moment he heard the bed creak in the next room. He heard a sigh. Then Lucy's voice, blurred a little, said, "Jeff." There was an instant of silence, and he had already turned toward the kitchen when her voice came again. "Go into the kitchen and bring me a little more whiskey, will you, please?"

  "Right away," he said. The whiskey was not going to hurt her much, he thought. Anything that could help her get over the next few months was that much to the good. The next few--? No, the end would come much sooner than that.

  "Jeff?" Lucy's voice was querulous.

  He took the whiskey into the bedroom. She was lying face up across the bed, her reddish curls hanging, her stocking feet against the wall. Marks of dried tears ran down across her cheek toward her ear, but her lashes were not wet now. In the corner the baby slept in a small cocoon of his own incoherent animal-like thoughts. He was dreaming of warmth and enormous all-enveloping softness that stirred slowly, a dream without shape, all texture and temperament. His light-red curls were no more than a down on his well-shaped head.

  Cody looked at Lucy. "How do you feel?" he heard himself asking inanely.

  Without moving a muscle she let her eyes roll sidewise so that she was looking at him from under her half-closed lids, a stony, suffering, hating look. An empty water-glass stood on the bed table within reach of her lax hand. Cody stepped forward, unstopped the bottle and poured a steady amber stream into the glass. Two inches, three. She was not going to say when. He stopped at three and replaced the bottle.

  "You don't have to ask how anybody feels," Lucy said in a dull voice.

  "I'm not reading you, Lucy."

  She shrugged against the bedspread. "You say."

  Looking again at the sleeping baby, Cody did not answer. But Lucy sat up with great suddenness, making the bed groan, startling Cody because the motion had been so spontaneous he had not even caught the anticipation of it in her mind. "He's not yours. He's mine. All mine, my kind, my race. No--" The thought went on, "--no taint in his blood at all. Not a freak. Not a Baldy. A nice, normal, healthy, perfect baby--" She didn't say it aloud, but she didn't have to. She caught at the thought halfway through, and then deliberately let it go on, knowing she might as well have said it aloud. Then she added in a flat voice, "And I suppose you didn't read that."

  Silently he held out the whiskey glass to her.

  It had been five years now since the Egg dropped on Sequoia. Five years since the cavern colony saw the last daylight they might ever see. And the people herded from Sequoia to the caves had settled down sullenly, resentful or resigned according to their temperaments. They had every comfort of underground living which their captors could provide. They were as content as skilled psychologists could make them, psychologists who could look into their minds and read their needs almost before the needs took shape. But they were captives.

  The intermarriages had started within a few months of the captivity. It was one of the large-scale experiments which could have happened only in the caves under such controlled conditions. Partly it was to demonstrate good intent to the captives, to make them feel less isolated.

  No telepath really wants to marry a nontelepath. There are among nontelepaths quite as high a percentage of desirable mates as among Baldies, but to a Baldy, a nontelepathic human is a handicapped person. Like a lovely young girl who has every desirable attribute of mind and body but happens also to be deaf, dumb, and blind. She may communicate in finger-language, but the barrier remains all but insurmountable.

  And there is this added factor-around every human who starts out life with the best of heredity and environment, shadows of the prisonhouse are inevitably, slowly but inexorably closed in by all the problems of living which he fails to solve completely without even realizing it. But not the Baldies. There are always friends to help, there are always minds to lean upon in crises and uncertainties. There is constant check and balance, so that no Baldy suffers from those inward quandaries, those only partly recognized clouds of confusion and bewilderment which fog the happiness of every other human being. In the telepathic mind there are comparatively few un-swept chambers cluttered with old doubts and fears. It makes for a clarity of the personality which no nontelepath quite achieves.

  A telepath may become psychotic, of course, but only when subjected to such stresses, over a long period of time, as a nontelepath could endure only briefly without breaking. (The paranoid telepaths were in a different class; heredity was an important factor there.)

  So marriage between Baldy and nontelepath is, at best, marriage between an alert, receptive, fully aware being and one murky and confused, handicapped in communication and always, on some level, latently resentful.

  But by now almost every marriageable nontelepath in the caverns had been painstakingly courted by and married to a Baldy. They were at the same time, of course, inevitably married to an espionage agent, a willing but not always accepted psychoanalyst, and, most importantly, to the potential parent of other Baldies.

  The gene is dominant, which means that the children were almost invariably telepathic. Only when the Baldy spouse possessed one recessive nontelepathic gene as well as one dominant telepathic gene could the child be born a nontelepath.

  That was what had happened to Lucy and Jeff Cody....

  No human was ever to leave the caves again. No Baldy was to know of the captivity who did not wear the Mute helmet, since if the world ever learned of this captivity, the long-awaited pogrom would touch off automatically. No child of human parents would ever leave, unless it left as an infant in arms, too young to remember or tell the story. But a telepath child was a recruit at birth to the ranks of the captors. The hope had been that in a generation or two the captives could automatically be blended with the Baldies or taken out of the caves at infancy, so that the colony would once more revert to its original state of a population composed only of telepaths.

  That had been the original plan, but growing pressures had already made it obsolete.

  Lucy wiped her mouth on the back of a lightly tanned hand and held out the emptied glass to Cody. She waited a moment while the whiskey burned its way down and spread in a slow, hot coating over the walls of her stomach.

  "Take a little," she said. "It helps."

  Cody didn't want any, but he tilted a short half-inch into the glass and drank obediently. After a time Lucy gave a short sigh and sat up cross-legged on the bed, shaking the hair back from her eyes.

  "I'm sorry," she said. "Irrational."

  She laid her hand palm up on the bedspread and Cody closed his own hand over it, smiling unhappily at her.

  "I've got an appointment outside," he said. "I'll have to leave in a few minutes, Lucy."

  Her look shot wild and unguarded toward the crib in the corner. Her thought, at once blurred and clarified by the release of alcohol, unfurled
like a flag. Cody almost winced at the impact of it, but he was even more schooled in discipline than most Baldies, being husband to a nontelepath, and he showed nothing. He only said,

  "No. It isn't that. I won't take him until you say so."

  She gave him a sudden startled glance.

  "It's too late?"

  "No," Cody said quickly. "Of course not. He isn't old enough yet to remember--this."

  Lucy moved uneasily.

  "I don't want to keep him down here. You know I don't. It's bad enough for me, without knowing my own son wouldn't ever--" She shut off the thought of sunlight, blue air, distances. "Not just yet," she said, and pushed her feet over the , edge of the bed. She stood up a little unsteadily. She gave the baby one blind glance and then walked stocking-footed toward the kitchen, bracing herself against the wall now and then. Cody reached automatically toward her mind, then drew back and got up to follow her. She was at the kitchen sink splashing water into a glass. She drank thirstily, her eyes unfocused.

  "I have to go," Cody said. "Don't worry, Lucy."

  "Some--woman," Lucy said indistinctly over the edge of the glass. "There's--somebody. I know."

  "Lucy--"

  "One of your kind," Lucy said, and dropped the glass in the sink. It rolled in a bright arc, spilling water.

  All he could do was look at her helplessly. There was nothing he could say. He couldn't tell her he was on his way to try to kill Jasper Home. He couldn't tell her about Operation Apocalypse or the Inductor or the position of fearful responsibility he held. He couldn't say, "If we can perfect the Inductor in time, Lucy, you can go free-you and our child." Nor could he say, "I may have to kill you-you and our child and every nontelepath on earth-with Operation Apocalypse."