Baldy

by Henry Kuttner

  The blue, empty wastes of air were all about Barton now; the torrents of world-thought had lessened to a faint, nearly imperceptible beat. He closed the cabin, turned on air and heat controls, and let the copter rise. He lay back in the cushioned seat, a distant alertness ready to galvanize his hands into action if the copter should go into one of its unpredictable tantrums. Meanwhile he rested, alone, in a complete silence and vacancy.

  His mind was washed clean. Pure calm, a sort of Nirvana, soothed him. Far below the turbulent world sent vibrations jangling through subetheric levels, but few radiations reached this height, and those did not disturb Barton. His eyes shut, utterly relaxed, he looked like someone who had, for a while, forgotten to live.

  It was the panacea for abnormally sensitive minds. At first glance, few took Barton for a Baldy; he wore his brown wig close-cropped, and his years in the jungle had made him almost unhealthily thin. Baldies, naturally self-barred from competitive athletics except among themselves, were apt to grow soft, but Barton was not soft. Outguessing predators had kept him in good trim. Now he relaxed, high above the earth, as hundreds of other Baldies were resting their taxed minds in the blue calm of the upper air.

  Once he opened his eyes and looked up through the transparent ceiling panel. The sky was quite dark, and a few stars were visible. He lay there for a while, simply watching. Baldies, he thought, will be the first to develop interplanetary travel. Out there are clean new worlds, and a new race needs a new world.

  But it could wait. It had taken a long time for Barton to realize that his race, not himself, was important. Not until that knowledge came to a Baldy was he really mature. Until then, he was always a possible potential danger. Now, though, Barton was oriented, and had found, like most Baldies, a compromise between self and race. And it involved, chiefly, development of the social instinct and diplomacy.

  Several hours had gone past quickly. Barton found a packet of food concentrate in a compartment, grimaced at the brown capsules, and stuffed them back in their place. No. While he was back in America, he wanted the luxuries of civilization. In Africa he had eaten enough concentrate to blast his taste buds. That was because certain game was psychically repugnant to him, after contact with the animal minds. He was not a vegetarian; he could rationalize most of the feeling away, but--for example--he could certainly never eat monkey.

  But he could eat catfish, and anticipated the crisp flakiness of white, firm flesh between his teeth. This was good cat country. There was a restaurant in downtown Conestoga that Barton knew, and he headed the helicopter toward the airfield nearest to it, circling the village itself to avoid raising dust storms by his low altitude.

  He felt refreshed, ready to take his place in the world again. There were, as far as he knew, no Baldies living in Conestoga, and it was with surprise-pleasant surprise-that he felt a thought probe into his mind. It held question.

  It was a woman's thought, and she did not know him. That he could tell by the superficialities of the identity-queries. It was like the outspread fingers of a hand reaching out gently in search of another hand that would interlock with its grip. But the searcher's cognizance of Barton as a personality was lacking. No, she did not know him. She knew of him, probably through-Denham? Courtney? He seemed to recognize the personality--keys of Denham and Courtney sifted through her query.

  He answered her question. Available. Here. A courteous, friendly greeting, implying-you are one of Us; a willing desire to help.

  Her name, Sue Connaught, with its curious shadings of how Sue Connaught realized her own identity-an indescribable key thought that could never afterwards be mistaken. The mental essence of pure ego.

  She was a biologist, she lived in Alamo, she was afraid--

  Let me help.

  {Vital urgency} Must see you

  Danger, eyes watching secretly

  Beasts around--Sue Connaught

  Danger--now?

  The complicated thought meshed and interlocked as he increased his pace.

  Beasts-"I" of all the world knowing--Utterly alone

  {Most urgent secrecy}

  Beasts-"I" am in zoo, waiting

  Hurrying to you; my mind is with yours; you are one of Us, therefore never alone. Faster than words, the thoughts raced. Oral or written sentences slow the transmission of mental concepts. Adjectives and adverbs convey shades of meaning. But between telepaths complete ideas move with light-speed. In prehuman times simple meanings were completely transmitted by grunts. As language developed, gradations were possible. With telepathy, a whole universe can be created and-conveyed.

  Even so, common denominators are necessary. The girl was dodging some vital issues, afraid to visualize it.

  What? Let me help!

  Even here, danger of Them {Wariness}

  Pretend utterly all is normal…

  Use oral speech until…

  Her mind closed. Puzzled, Barton automatically raised his own barrier. It is not, of course, ever possible to shut one's mind completely away from the persistent probing of another telepath. At best one can only blur the thought wave by superimposing others upon it, or by submerging the salient ideas deep down in the formlessness of nonthought. But they are resilient things, thoughts. Not even the trained minds of Baldies can keep them submerged very long--the very fact of concentrating to keep them down maintains their wavering shapes cloudily in the background of the mind.

  So a barrier can be raised, of willful obscurity or deliberate confusion-reciting the multiplication tables is one evasion-but not for very long or very efficiently. Only the instinctive politeness which a Baldy learns with his alphabet makes the raising of a barrier the equivalent of blanking. A barrier's efficiency is mostly in the mind of the other man, not one's own--if he be a proper telepath.

  Barton, like most Baldies, was. He "looked" away immediately as Sue Connaught's thoughts veered from contact with him. But he was the more eager to meet her now and read in her face, if he could, what convention forbade him to read in her mind. The gates of the zoo lay open before him.

  Barton stepped through them, noticing a small crowd, mostly out-villagers who had helicoptered over to see the new acquisitions he had brought.

  But, despite barriers, he could, as always, sense a Baldy here, and he let his instinct guide him to where a girl, slim in slacks and white blouse, was standing by a railed enclosure, held there by some fascination. He sent his thought forward, and it was met by a sudden, desperate warning.

  Barrier! Barrier!

  He reacted instantly. He stepped up beside her, looking beyond the railing, into the enormous tank where a torpedo body moved lazily. He knew that Sue Connaught had looked into the shark's mind, and had seen something there that held a tremendous significance to her.

  "So you don't like it," he said. There was no danger in speech; to a telepath, with barrier raised, it was more secret than thought.

  "No," she said. "I suppose it takes conditioning."

  "But you're a biologist."

  "Rabbits and guinea pigs. Even those make me blush sometimes. But--carnivores."

  "Tackle a weasel sometime," he suggested. "It's pure insanity. Come on." He led her out of the crowd, toward the terrace where canopied tables were scattered. "Have a cocktail?"

  "Thanks." She glanced back at the shark's tank. Barton nodded; it could be bad, if one wasn't used to it. But he was used to it.

  "Shall we go somewhere else?" he asked, pausing in the act of drawing out a chair for her. "A zoo can be pretty uncomfortable if you aren't--"

  "No. It's safer here. We've got to talk, and we can do it pretty freely in a place like this. None of Us would come here for pleasure." With her mind she "glanced" around at the encircling madness of beast-thoughts, then blurred the surface of her mind again as a protection and smiled at Barton appealingly.

  They had met, as all Baldies do, upon a footing of instant semi-intimacy. Nontelepaths may take weeks of friendship to establish a knowledge of one another's character; Bald
ies do it automatically at first contact, often before they meet at all. Often, indeed, the knowledge formed in first mental meeting is more accurate than later impressions colored by the appearance and physical mannerisms of the telepaths. As non-Baldies, these two would have been Miss Connaught and Mr. Barton for awhile. But as telepaths they had automatically, unconsciously summed one another up while Barton was still in the air; they knew they were mutually pleasant in a contact of minds. They thought of one another instantly as Sue and Dave. No non-Baldy, eavesdropping on their meeting, would have believed they were not old friends; it would have been artificial had the two behaved otherwise than this, once their minds had accepted each other.

  Sue said aloud, "I'll have a Martini. Do you mind if I talk? It helps." And she glanced around, physically this time, at the cages. "I don't see how you stand it, even with your training. I should think you could drive a Baldy perfectly gibbering just by shutting him up in a zoo overnight."

  Barton grinned, and automatically his mind began sorting out the vibrations from all around him: the casual trivialities from the monkeys, broken by a pattern of hysteria as a capuchin caught the scent of jaguar; the primal, implacable vibrations from the panthers and lions, with their undertone of sheer, proud confidence; the gentle, almost funny radiations from the seals. Not that they could be called reasoning thoughts; the brains were those of animals, but basically the same colloid organism existed under fur and scales as existed under the auburn wig of Sue Connaught.

  After a while, over Martinis, she asked, "Have you ever fought a duel?"

  Barton instinctively glanced around. He touched the small dagger at his belt. "I'm a Baldy, Sue."

  "So you haven't."

  "Naturally not." He didn't trouble to explain; she knew the reason as well as he did. For Baldies could not risk capitalizing on their special ability except in very limited cases. A telepath can always win a duel. If David hadn't killed Goliath, eventually the Philistines would have mobbed the giant out of sheer jealousy. Had Goliath been smart, he would have walked with his knees bent.

  Sue said, "That's all right. I've had to be very careful. This is so confidential I don't know who--" Her barrier was still up strongly.

  "I've been in Africa for six months. Maybe I'm not up with current events." Both of them were feeling the inadequacy of words, and it made them impatient.

  "Not current... future. Things are ... help from ... qualify-" She stopped and forced herself into the slower grammatical form of communication. "I've got to get help somewhere, and it's got to be one of Us. Not only that, but a very special kind of person. You qualify."

  "How?"

  "Because you're a naturalist," she said. "I've looked the field over, but you know what sort of work. We usually get. Sedentary occupations. Semantics experts, medical and psychiatric interns, biologists like me, police assistants--that came closer, but I need a man who... who can get the jump on another Baldy."

  Barton stared and frowned. "A duel?"

  "I think so," she said. "I can't be sure yet. But it seems the only way. This must be completely secret, Dave, absolutely secret. If a word of it ever got out, it would be ... very bad for Us."

  He knew what she meant, and pursed his lips in a soundless whistle. That shadow always hung over every Baldy.

  "What is it?"

  She didn't answer directly. "You're a naturalist. That's fine. What I need is a man who can meet a telepath on slightly more than equal terms. No non-Baldy would do, even if I could talk about this to a non-Baldy. What I've got to get is a man with a fast-moving mind who's also trained his body to respond faster than instantly."

  "Uh-huh."

  "There weren't many," she said. "Even when minds move at the same speed, there's always a fractional difference in muscular response. And we're not too well trained. Games of competitive skill--"

  "I've thought of that," Barton said. "More than once, too. Any game based on war is unsuitable for Us."

  "Any game in which you face your opponent. I like golf, but I can't play tennis."

  "Well," Barton told her, "I don't box or wrestle. Or play chess, for that matter. But skip-handball--have you seen that?"

  She shook her head.

  "The backboard's full of convolutions; you never know which way the ball would bounce. And the board's in sections that keep sliding erratically. You can control the force, but not the direction. That's one way. It's something new, and naturally it isn't advertised, but a friend of mine's got one at his place. A man named Denham."

  "He told me about you."

  "I thought so."

  "Uh-huh. For fifteen years you've been catching everything from tigers to king cobras. That takes good timing, the way you do it. Any man who can outguess a king cobra--"

  "Watch your barrier," Barton said sharply. "I caught something then. Is it that bad?"

  She drew a shaky breath. "My control's lousy. Let's get out of here."

  Barton led her across the zoo's main area. As they passed the shark's tank he sent a quick glance down, and met the girl's eyes worriedly.

  "Like that, eh?"

  She nodded. "Like that. But you can't put Them in cages."

  Over catfish and Shasta white wine she told him--

  You can't put Them in cages. Shrewd, dangerous, but very careful now. They were the middle group of the three telepathic assortments. The same mutation, but... but!

  The hard radiations had been plain dynamite. When you implant a completely new function in the delicate human brain, you upset a beautiful and long-standing balance. So there had been three groups: one was a complete failure, thrust into the mental borderland of insanity, dementia praecox and paranoia. Another group, to which Sue Connaught and

  Barton belonged-the vast majority-were able to adjust to a nontelepathic world. They wore wigs.

  But the middle group was paranoid--and sane.

  Among these telepaths were found the maladjusted egotists, the ones who for a long time had refused to wear wigs, and who had bragged of their superiority. They had the cunning and the utter self-justification of the true paranoid type, and were basically antisocial. But they were not mad.

  And you can't put Them in cages. For they were telepaths, and how can you cage the mind?

  They finished with Brazilian chocolate cake, demitasse and Mississippi liqueur, made by the monks of Swanee monastery. Barton touched his cigarette tip to the igniter paper on the pack. He inhaled smoke.

  "It's not a big conspiracy, then."

  "These things start small. A few men-but you see the danger."

  Barton nodded. "I see it, O.K. It's plenty bad medicine. A few paranoid-type Baldies, working out a crazy sabotage scheme-Tell me -a little more first, though. For instance, why me? And why you?"

  To a nontelepath the question might have been obscure. Sue raised her brows and said, "You, because you've got the reflexes I spoke of and because I had the luck to find you before I got desperate enough to look for a substitute. As for me"--she hesitated--"that's the oddest part. No one could have stumbled onto them except by accident. Because telepathy, of course, isn't tight-beam. It's a broadcast. Any receptive mind can pick it up. The minute enough people band together to make a city, that's noticeable. And the minute Baldies get together and form any sort of organization, that's noticeable too. Which is why paranoids never made much trouble, except individually. Banding together would have meant running up a flag-one that could be seen for miles."

  "And so?"

  "So they've got this special means of communication. It's secret, absolutely unbreakable code. Only it isn't merely code. Then we could detect and trace down, even if we couldn't break it. This is telepathic communication on an entirely new band, one we can't even touch. I don't know how they do it. It might be partly mechanical, or it might not. Children have a higher perceptive level, but we can catch their thoughts. This is mental ultraviolet. Do you realize the implications?"

  Smoke jetted from Barton's nostrils. "Yeah. It wrecks the b
alance of power-completely. Up to now, decentralization has kept peace. Nobody dared band together or get too big for their boots. They could be detected. But these bichos are wearing invisible cloaks." His hand clenched. "It could become worldwide! The one form of organization we can't fight!"

  "It's got to be fought," she said. "It's got to be smashed. And fast, before anyone suspects. If non-Baldies ever find out, there'll be a wave of anti-Baldism that could wipe Us out. If that should happen, people wouldn't stop to sort out the social and the antisocial groups. They'd say, 'We've been nursing a viper, and it's got fangs. Kill 'em all."

  Outside the window a man on horseback clattered past, hoofbeats making an urgent rhythm in Barton's brain.

  "How many are there?"

  "I told you it's just beginning. Only a few more. But it can spread. I suppose the immediate difficulty is in their training neophytes in their special trick telepathy. That's why I think it must be physically self-induced. Gadgets can be detected. And mobility would be necessary; they'd never know when they had to get in touch with each other. You can't pack around a big gadget."

  "You could camouflage it," Barton said. "Or it might be pretty small."

  "It might," she said, "but there's this little girl--Melissa Carr. She tapped their wave without a gadget. She must be some mutant variant."

  "Melissa Carr?" echoed Barton. "Where does she come in?"

  "Oh, I haven't told you. She's my contact. I've been in touch with her off and on for a week or so, but it was only yesterday that she let slip, very casually, what she'd learned on that special thought band."

  "She isn't one of them, then?"

  "I'm sure not. It's very odd. Even the way she reached me first--" Sue had been dressing for a party, and the tentative fingering question had crept into her mind. "It was like Cinderella, somehow. I could feel the pleasure she took in the dress I was wearing, a Mozambique model, and the Karel bag. She strung along with me mentally all evening. And after that--" After that communication had been established.