Alton's Unguessable

by Jeff Sutton

  Watching her shoulders move convulsively, he could sympathize with her. Being a telepath was one thing; having the world know it was something quite else. It meant closed doors, few friends, hostility and outright hate. It also meant, on the part of many, envy. Most nontelepaths believed that the talent meant an open look into every mind, a peek at every secret. But it wasn't that way at all. Telepathy came in varying degrees. Most telepaths were quite limited. A few could only grasp the essentials of thought, and then only at a very short distance and under the most favorable conditions. He was the exceptional telepath. How exceptional, he wasn't certain, but he knew his ability far transcended the textbook limits. And there had been other episodes beyond telepathy. That was one of the things he had kept to himself. So how could he criticize Lara? He felt a touch of guilt.

  Finally, when she dabbed her eyes and turned, he said, "Why not talk about it? I'm certain you'll feel better."

  "It's a shock for someone to know." She tried a smile. "But I'm still not certain how much of a telepath I am. I haven't tested it, haven't wanted to. Even though, thoughts often come through quite clearly. I hear things that I don't want to hear, if I can use the word."

  "Hear? It's a good word. Telepaths use it all the time."

  "It's like hearing, yes. Sometimes even at a distance the telepathy comes through almost as clearly as if the person were talking directly to me. Background thoughts often come through in much the same way."

  "I'd say your telepathic sense was quite strongly developed. Only the more gifted ones pick up the background chatter."

  "I really don't understand it—the telepathy, I mean. You said that when you called from the skimmer I couldn't hear you, that I had read your mind. How could I when I wasn't even aware that you were there?"

  "The same way you pick up background thoughts. At the subconscious level your whole mind was probably attentive, listening."

  "It seems more logical that you projected the warning into my mind," she insisted. "I've read theories to that effect."

  "It's possible, but I don't believe anyone really knows. But you still read me. That makes you telepathic."

  "Read?"

  "Another term."

  "Is distance a factor? I've heard that it is."

  "It usually is when a telepath is reading a nontelepath," he told her. "The reception is usually rather poor unless he is quite close to the subject."

  "And between two telepaths?"

  "Quite often communication can be established over vastly greater distances, although there are many variables. There also are wide differences in ability." He saw that she was avid for answers to questions that had nagged her for years, and went into the subject in more detail. "Actually the number of telepaths is too limited to provide any sort of reliable data," he ended.

  "I've always wondered." She glanced away. "Right now, I want to forget all about it."

  "I don't believe you should."

  "Why not?"

  "The alien," he answered softly.

  "What has that to do with it?"

  "The* birds are its eyes," he reminded, "therefore they must^ be telepathic. How else could they receive orders, transmit back what they see? Or perhaps, as you suggested, he invades their minds, and for all practical purposes becomes one with them."

  "But when you killed the birds?"

  "He must have withdrawn." He debated the possibilities. "He couldn't see us, that's why he destroyed the entire forest in the attempt to kill us. He was hurling the mind power in the blind."

  "That's frightening."

  "He—I keep thinking of it as a he—must exist in his own body somewhere. While he undoubtedly controls the minds of the birds by telepathy, it scarcely seems possible that the birds could know what to look for or what to report. I believe your surmise was right; he actually must invade their minds—become part of them."

  "There were two birds above the clearing," she reminded.

  "I've considered that. Either there are a number of aliens, each of which can project its mind into a bird, or there's a single alien which can fragment its mind, perhaps even become a part of a large number of birds at once. Perhaps…" He snapped his fingers. "That's it, the roaring I've sensed."

  "What about it?"

  "A communication network. I've theorized that one existed." He felt a sudden jubilance. "It's the thing, whatever the thing is, talking with the birds."

  "That is frightening," she whispered.

  "With the mind power, yes."

  "What can ,we do?"

  "That's why we need your telepathy. We need every weapon we can get."

  "I can't see…"

  "What might we find when we return to the ship?" he interrupted. "What of the bird Yozell captured? If the alien can penetrate the minds of birds, control their actions, perhaps it can do the same to a human. Perhaps Weber's death was an abortive attempt. At least the pk, the psychokinesis, could explain his broken neck."

  When she remained silent, he continued, "He has the power to destroy the ship, but hasn't. Why not? I puzzled over that when I realized he has the mind power. It struck me that he hasn't destroyed the ship because he needs it."

  "Good Lord!" Her face showed shock.

  "Can you imagine what might happen if a creature like that managed to penetrate the Empire? Man would be relegated to second place overnight; in time, he would be eliminated. I'm certain that's what happened to the temple builders."

  "You keep using the singular." Her eyes held a question.

  "Perhaps There are thousands of them, millions. I made it the singular form because that's how I hope it is. I'd hate to think the planet was filled with them."

  She forced a smile. "I'll buy the singular, but how can we stop it?"

  "I don't know." He shook his head wearily. "But I do know that we have to escape from this world, and without an alien on board. That's why we have to scan the minds of every person on the ship, make certain the alien isn't parading in human form."

  He saw the protest in her face and added, "I don't like it any better than you, but it's necessary. The stakes are that high."

  She raised her head. "And if we find someone?"

  "We'll resolve that when we come to it," he said grimly.

  Half-erect, she struggled to look out over the top of the grass. He knew her thoughts; it would be all but impossible to return to the ship during daylight, especially since all the birds around it might be telepathic. And they would be; he held scant doubt of that.

  He said, "We'll keep a sharp eye. We "might have to crawl when we get closer."

  "I'll crawl." She laughed nervously. Starting to lower her body, she suddenly stiffened. "The birds—they're coming!" He saw them at the same instant, a distant line of small dots against the sky.

  "Down," he urged. As she dropped to his side, he pulled the grass together above them, but not so much as to be noticeable. "Don't move a muscle," he warned. He felt her shiver and patted her shoulder reassuringly before rolling over to watch the sky.

  After what seemed an eternity, the birds came. Their wings flapping slowly, they flew in a long line that extended laterally to their flight path. Scarcely daring to breath, Keim momentarily expected the grasslands on which they lay to erupt into nothingness. When finally they passed, he rose to a crouch to study the sky. The birds again had become small white blobs in the distance. "Safe," he murmured.

  She moved to a sitting position. "I don't know how much more of this I can take," she confessed. "It's nerve-racking."

  "But it tells us something; they didn't sense us."

  "Because they couldn't see us?"

  He nodded soberly. "At least it has some limitations, or the birds have."

  "They'll keep looking," she asserted. He nodded. The chance of reaching the ship safely during daylight appeared extremely remote. They'd have to hide, wait for the fall of night, hope for the best when the protective force field was lifted at dawn. It also was likely that when they failed to return, Kimbro
ugh would dispatch skimmers to look for them. He most certainly would reason their destination. Suppose someone on a reconnaissance flight spotted what had happened to the forest? He stirred uneasily. The Alpha Tauri would abandon the planet within minutes. And with a bird on board! Still, they'd have to kill it; that order was rock hard. But he couldn't worry about all that now.

  He looked at Lara. Her steady blue eyes showed none of the fright they'd displayed earlier. She'd do, he thought. "Thank you," she murmured. Remembering her telepathy, he colored, then laughed.

  "That'll take some getting used to," he offered. "For us both."

  "It's not unpleasant once you accept it."

  "Does one ever get used to it, Roger?"

  "In time."

  He looked over the top of the grass in the direction in which lay the Alpha Tauri. Calculating its distance, he realized that the night scarcely would be long enough to shield them all the way. They'd have to cover as much distance as possible by day. And when they reached the ship? He was almost afraid to think. But one thing was certain, the battle between man and alien had begun.

  Were the telepaths dead?

  The question filled Uli's mind as he watched the grasslands unfold through the eyes of the birds. With it he felt a fear that all but verged on terror. It was an emotion he'd never known until the coming of these bipeds; since then, he had experienced it with disturbing frequency.

  Why should he fear? The word implied that the bipeds were a source of danger—a patent absurdity! Nothing in the entire universe could threaten a Qua. Hadn't they conquered a million sun systems? But he couldn't deny his uneasiness. It had been a shock to discover that the female biped—Lara Kamm was the name he'd dredged from her mind—also had been a telepath. Had been? Yes, for most certainly she was dead now, along with the tele-path Keim.

  Still UK fretted. When first he'd discovered the female biped enroute to the site where the ancient temple had stood, his immediate impulse had been to kill her. It would have been simple then, but he'd delayed to probe her mind —quite a good mind, at least by human standards. She had wanted to know what had caused the temple to collapse, what had happened to its builders. More, in the dim recesses of her mind, she'd held a worry about a possible threat to her own civilization. It seemed incredible that she could link the collapse of an ancient temple on this remote planet to the possible annihilation of a stellar civilization, yet that had been the direction of her thoughts.

  More disconcerting had been his failure to detect her telepathic ability. At least at first. Unlike the creature Keim, she'd kept it well concealed, almost from herself, as it were. There hadn't been the slightest indication of it in her consciousness. That alone was remarkable.

  His decision to kill her had been followed by the question of how. He'd pondered it uneasily. Her death, by any seemingly unnatural means, might easily frighten the others from the planet; he was not yet ready for that. A falling tree? Ah, that was the kind of thing the humans could understand.

  The arrival of the male telepath had caught him by surprise. He'd known the instant Keim had left the ship, but he hadn't bothered to consider what his destination might be. There'd seemed nothing imperative about it at the time. The girl had been the immediate problem. Then suddenly Keim was there. Instantly sensing the danger, he'd warned her. And in that same fractional second she had revealed her telepathy. Through Keim's quick action, the falling tree had failed to kill her. It was then that he'd panicked.

  But had he killed them? The question obsessed him. Tree nor bush nor vine remained of the jungle. In his frantic desperation—after the male telepath had blinded him by killing the birds—he'd utterly destroyed the forest and every life form in it for vast distances in all directions. The very hills had been leveled, seared; nothing remained but a glassy plain. Only the fear of frightening the other humans into precipitate flight from the planet had deterred him from destroying the grasslands.

  Despite himself, he had to marvel at the male telepath. His was, by far, the strongest mind he'd yet encountered. But it wasn't that at which he marveled; it was at the telepath's almost total disregard of death. His calm. His logic. The rapidity of his thoughts. Even in the face of what most certainly was his imminent destruction, he'd immediately constructed a quite accurate theory of what was happening, what might happen, and what had happened to the bipeds of old. He also correctly had interpreted the role of the birds. Incredible! More baffling still, he had understood the nature of what was happening. Psychokinesis, the mind force! But how had he understood the phenomenon? Had it occurred elsewhere? Did other humans possess the power? The possibility was deeply perturbing. But Keim's mind, and that of the female telepath, were far more complex than that of the biologist Yozell. Such beings were dangerous.

  But were they dead?

  Not that it made a difference. He reflected on it uneasily. Before the night was over he'd control the minds of the captain, the chief scientist, all the key humans. He'd control the ship. If the two telepaths somehow had managed to escape from the fury in the forest—if they had escaped!—-he'd kill them when they returned to the ship. Perhaps he'd have Yozell do it. Or Captain Woon. No matter, he would kill them.

  Still, as he watched the grasslands unravel through the eyes of the birds, he felt a distinct uneasiness. Although he tried to banish his annoyance, it persisted, for whatever reason he didn't know. Yet, inwardly, he did know. It had to do with one man. That man was Roger Keim.

  SEVEN

  Moon K-1.2 edged above the horizon.

  Its bluish beams, fanning out over the grasslands, gave the night a spectral, illusory quality distorting of distance. A deep, endless, shimmery night.

  Keim first became aware of the change in light while slogging knee-deep through a marsh with Lara. He halted so abruptly that she stumbled against him. A hand shot out to steady her, pull her close; he felt her tremble.

  Wordlessly they stared ahead. Silent and inert in its man-made cocoon fashioned of a force field, the survey ship Alpha Tauri hunched against the dark sky. His first impression was of a gigantic slug sprawled athwart the plain. "Made it," he exulted telepathically.

  "I knew we would." Her silent whisper came to his mind as a simple declaration of faith. He hadn't been at all that certain. The hours just past had been plucked from a nightmare—endless, numbing hours of wading through bogs, pushing through grasses and reeds that often reached high above their heads, slogging through the knee-deep muck that nourished their roots; all in a Stygian night in which the few faint stars were but fleeting ghosts in the heavens. And the birds! Scores of times they'd halted, frozen by the wild flapping of wings as feathered creatures rose in alarm from their path. Each time they'd waited—caught with the dread that this might be one of the birds—waited for the grasslands to be seared from the face of the planet. Only the knowledge that they had to reach the Alpha Tauri before the first birds awakened had kept them pushing relentlessly ahead. The few times Lara had faltered, he'd slackened his pace; but never once had she complained. He felt increasingly proud of her.

  Now, eyeing the ship, he knew their danger could increase a thousandfold. He felt the tension in her mind, an anxiety that communicated itself to him. But he also sensed an insistent determination; she wasn't about to quit.

  He listened inwardly for the muted thunder, heard none, and took it as an omen that the gulls were all roosting. How then did the alien watch the night? Or did it sleep? More imperative, who or what was the alien? What was the nature of a being with a mind so incredibly powerful that it could uproot forests, level hills, reduce them to a seared and glassy plain? That last was the most baffling of all.

  "How can we get past the birds . . . through the force field?" Her question, tinkling in his mind, brought him back to the reality of their predicament. It was a question he'd kicked around during the long hours just past. Telling her of his plan, he hoped it would work.

  Ahead the ground grew less marshy, the grass scarcely waist-high. Movin
g toward the black hulk backdropped by the bluish radiance of moon K-1.2, he probed ahead and to all sides, every sense attuned to the night. Rustlings in the grass, the scurrying of rodents—evidence of life all around them—kept his nerves at a taut, raw edge.

  To his dismay, he realized that the horizon had brightened, dawn was in the offing. Dreading the moment when the first gulls would waken, he hurried his steps. Lara's breath whistled in her throat. Suddenly the ship loomed immensely.

  He had noticed earlier that most of the birds, when not wheeling in the vicinity of the ship, tended to congregate in the grass close to the midship sides where the big freight elevators and passenger hatches were located. Alton Yozell had remarked the same thing. Hoping that the gulls maintained the same pattern during their roosting hours, he circled cautiously toward the ship's nose.

  Closer, he crouched, motioning Lara down. Slowly, advancing but a foot at a time, he parted the grass ahead with infinite care. Lara moved like a silent wraith behind him. Their thoughts flowed from one to the other, some deliberately and some not. He was glad, for he felt that he was coming to know her very well. She no longer was the aloof, introspective woman he'd known before. She was, in fact, most feminine. And she held an awareness of him as a man. That was satisfying.

  "It's getting light," she warned. He nodded, measured the distance yet to go and calculated where the edge of the force field might be. What he should do if the gulls awakened and wheeled above him. Do? Quite obviously there was very little he could do. Smiling wryly, he moved ahead. Careful! Careful! Careful! The word sang in his mind.

  After what seemed an interminable period, he reached a position off the Alpha Tauri's bow. High up, the dura-metal ports—opened to enable direct vision from the command bridge—glinted in the first rays of dawn. What of Yozell? What of the bird he had taken inside? He couldn't afford to worry about such things now.

  He gripped the laser, unlocked the safety and knelt lower. With the barrel of the weapon held parallel to the ground at a height of an inch or so, he squeezed the firing key, holding it back but a scant fraction of a second during which he moved the barrel laterally to its line of fire. A low hissing filled the air. When it died away a long black carpet appeared to have been unrolled through the grass.