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with mental contact. But across the table the little boy, his cheeks still
round with the fat of babyhood, sat silent and wary, realizing he had
blundered, and seeking safety in complete immobility. His mind was too weak to
resist probing, he knew, and he remained perfectly still, waiting, while the
echoes of a thought hung poisonously in silence.
Burkhalter said, "Come on, Al." He stood up. Ethel started to speak.
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"Wait, darling. Put up a barrier. Don't listen in." He touched her mind gently
and tenderly, and then he took Al's hand and drew the boy after him out into
the yard. Al watched his father out of wide, alert eyes.
Burkhalter sat on a bench and put Al beside him. He talked audibly at first,
for clarity's sake, and for another reason. It was distinctly unpleasant to
trick the boy's feeble guards down, but k was necessary.
"That's a very queer way to think of your mother," he said. "It's a queer way
to think of me."
Obscenity is more obscene, profanity more profane, to a telepathic mind, but
this had been neither one. It had been-cold and malignant.
And this is flesh of my flesh, Burkhalter thought, looking at the boy and
remembering the eight years of his growth. Is the mutation to turn into
something devilish?
Al was silent.
Burkhalter reached into the young mind. Al tried to twist free and escape, but
his father's strong hands gripped him. Instinct, not reasoning, on the boy's
part, for minds can touch over long distances.
He did not like to do this, for increased sensibility had gone with
sensitivity, and violations are always violations. But ruthlessness was
required. Burkhalter searched. Sometimes he threw key words violently at Al,
and surges of memory pulsed up in response.
In the end, sick and nauseated, Burkhalter let Al go and sat alone on the
bench, watching the red light die on the snowy peaks. The whiteness was red-
stained. But it was not too late. The man was a fool, had been a fool from the
beginning, or he would have known the impossibility of attempting such a thing
as this.
The conditioning had only begun. Al could be reconditioned. Burkhalter's eyes
hardened. And would be. And would be. But not yet, not until the immediate
furious anger had given place to sympathy and understanding.
Not yet.
He went into the house, spoke briefly to Ethel, and televised the dozen
Baldies who worked with him in the Publishing Center. Not all of them had
families, but none was missing when, half an hour later, they met in the back
room of the Pagan Tavern downtown. Sam Shane had caught a fragment of
Burkhalter's knowledge, and all of them read his emotions. Welded into a
sympathetic unit by their telepathic sense, they waited till Burkhalter was
ready.
Then he told them. It didn't take long, via thought. He told them about the
Japanese jewel-tree with its glittering gadgets, a shining lure. He told them
of racial paranoia and propaganda. And that the most effective propaganda was
sugar-coated, disguised so that the motive was hidden.
A Green Man, hairless, heroic-symbolic of a Baldy.
And wild, exciting adventures, the lure to catch the young fish whose plastic
minds were impressionable enough to be led along the roads of dangerous
madness. Adult Baldies could listen, but they did not; young telepaths had a
higher threshold of mental receptivity, and adults do not read the books of
their children except to reassure themselves that there is nothing harmful in
the pages. And no adult would bother to listen to the Green Man mindcast. Most
of them had accepted it as the original daydream of their own children.
"I did," Shane put in. "My girls-"
"Trace it back," Burkhalter said. "I did."
The dozen minds reached out on the higher frequency, the children's
wavelength, and something jerked away from them, startled and apprehensive.
"He's the one," Shane nodded.
They did not need to speak. They went out of the Pagan Tavern in a compact,
ominous group, and
file:///F|/rah/Henry%20Kuttner/Kuttner%20-%20The%20Best%20of%20Kuttner%201%20U
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C.txt crossed the street to the general store. The door was locked. Two of the
men burst it open with their shoulders.
They went through the dark store and into a back room where a man was
standing-beside an overturned chair. His bald skull gleamed in an overhead
light. His mouth worked impotently.
His thought pleaded with them-was driven back by an implacable deadly wall.
Burkhalter took out his dagger. Other slivers of steel glittered for a little
while-
And were quenched.
Venner's scream had long since stopped, but his dying thought of agony
lingered within
Burkhalter's mind as he walked homeward. The wigless Baldy had not been
insane, no. But he had been paranoidal.
What he had tried to conceal, at the last, was quite shocking. A tremendous,
tyrannical egotism, and a furious hatred of nontelepaths. A feeling of
self-justification that was, perhaps, insane.
And-we are the Future! The Baldies! God made us to rule lesser men!
Burkhalter sucked in his breath, shivering. The mutation had not been entirely
successful. One group had adjusted, the Baldies who wore wigs and had become
fitted to their environment. One group had been insane, and could be
discounted; they were in asylums.
But the middle group were merely paranoid. They were not insane, and they were
not sane. They wore no wigs.
Like Venner.
And Venner had sought disciples. His attempt had been foredoomed to failure,
but he had been one man.
One Baldy-paranoid.
There were others, many others. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]