The Game-Players Of Titan

XII

PATRICIA MCCLAIN picked up her daughter's frightened thoughts. At once she said, "Rothman, we've been infiltrated. Mary Anne says so."

"Is she right?" Rothman, old hard-eyed and tough, demanded from where he, as their leader, sat.

Looking into Pete Garden's mind, Patricia saw his memory of the visit to Doctor E. R. Philipson, the strange sense of lightness, of fractional gravity as he walked down the corridor. "Yes," Patricia said. "Mary's right. He's been on Titan." She turned to the two pre-cogs, Dave Mutreaux and her husband Alien. "What's going to happen?"

"A variable," Alien murmured, ashen-faced. "Clouds it up."

Mutreaux said hoarsely, "Your daughter, she's going to do something; impossible for us to tell what."

"I have to get out of here," Mary Anne said to them all.

She rose to her feet, her thoughts scattered by her terror, "I'm under vug influence. That Doctor Philipson, Pete must have been right. He asked me what I saw in the bar and I thought he was hallucinating. But it wasn't my fear he was picking up. He saw reality." She started toward the door of the motel room, panting. "I have to get away. I'm dangerous to the organization."

As Mary Anne went out the door, Patricia said urgently to her husband, "The heat-needle; set it on low. So it doesn't injure her."

"I'll cut her down," Alien said, and pointed the heat-needle at his daughter's back. Mary Anne turned for an instant, and saw the heat-needle.

The heat-needle jumped from Alien McClain's hand, climbed and reversed its flight. It smashed against the wall.

"Poltergeist effect," Alien said. "We can't stop her." Now the heat-needle in Patricia's hands quivered, struggled and tore loose from her fingers. "Rothman," he said, appealing to the highest authority in the organization present. "Ask her to stop."

"Leave my mind alone," Mary Anne said to Rothman.

Pete Garden, on his feet, sprinted after Mary Anne. The girl saw that, too.

"No," Patricia called after her. "Don't!"

Rothman, his forehead bulging, concentrated on Mary Anne, his eyes virtually shut. But all at once Pete Garden flopped forward, like a rag doll, boneless, danced in the air, his limbs jiggling. He drifted, then, toward the wall of the motel room, and Patricia McClain screamed at Mary Anne. The dangling figure hesitated, briefly, and then swooped into the wall; it passed through the wall until only its outstretched arm and hand remained projecting absurdly.

"Mary Anne!" Patricia shouted. "For god's sake bring him back!"

At the door, Mary Anne halted, turned in panic, saw what she had done with Pete Garden, saw the expression on her mother's face and on Alien's face, the horror of everyone in the room. Rothman, focusing everything which

he possessed on her, was trying to persuade her. She saw that, too. And—

"Thank god," Alien McClain said, and sagged. From the wall, Pete Garden tumbled back out, fell in a heap on the floor, intact; he got up almost at once and stood shaking, facing Mary Anne.

'I'm sorry," Mary Anne said, and sighed. Rothman said, "We hold the dominant possibility here, Mary Anne; believe that. Even if they have gotten in. We'll examine everyone in the organization, person by person. Shall we start with you?" To Patricia he said, "Try and find out for me just how deeply they've penetrated her."

"I'm trying," Patricia said. "But it's in Pete Garden's mind that we'll find the most."

"He's going to leave," Alien and Dave Mutreaux said, almost at once. "With her, with Mary Anne." Mutreaux said, "She can't be predicted but I think he's going to make it."

Rothman rose to his feet and walked toward Pete Garden. "You see our situation; we're in a desperate match with the Titanians and losing ground to them steadily. Prevail on Mary Anne McClain to stay here so we can regain what we've lost; we have to or we're doomed."

"I can't make her do anything," Pete said, white and trembling, almost unable to speak.

"Nobody can," Patricia said, and Alien nodded. "You p-ks," Rothman said to Mary Anne. "So willful and stubborn; nobody can tell you anything."

"Come on, Pete," Mary Anne said to him. "We have to get a long way from here, because of me and because of you, too; they're into you just as they are in me." Her face was drawn with despair and fatigue.

Pete said to her, "Maybe they're right, Mary Anne; maybe it would be wrong to go. Wouldn't that split up your organization?"

"They don't really want me," Mary Anne said. "I'm weak; this proves it. I can't stand up against the vugs. The damn vugs, I hate them." Tears filled her eyes, tears of impotence. The pre-cog Dave Mutreaux said, "Garden, I can preview one thing; if you do leave here, alone or with Mary Anne McClain, your car will be intercepted by the police.

I foresee a vug detective moving toward you; its name is—" Mutreaux hesitated.

"E. B. Black," Alien McClain, also pre-cog, agreed, finishing for him. "Wade Hawthorne's partner, attached to their West Coast division of the national law-enforcement agency. One of the best they have," he said to Mutreaux, and Roth-man nodded.

"Let's do this carefully," Rothman said. "At what point in time did the vug authority penetrate our organization? Last night? Previous to last night? If we could establish that, maybe we'd have something to go on. I don't think they've gotten very deep; they haven't touched me, haven't reached any of our telepaths and we have four of them in this room and a fifth on the way here. And our pre-cogs are free, at least so it would seem."

Mary Anne said, "You're trying to probe into me and influence me, Rothman." But she returned slowly to where she had been sitting. "I can feel your mind at work." She smiled a little. "It's reassuring."

To Pete Garden, Rothman said, "I'm the main bulwark against the vugs, Mr. Garden, and it'll be a long time before they penetrate me." His leatherlike face was impassive. "This is a dreadful discovery we've made here today, but our organization can surmount it. What about you, Garden? You're going to need our help. For an individual it's different."

Somberly, Pete nodded.

"We must kill E. B. Black," Patricia said.

"Yes," Dave Mutreaux said, "I agree."

Rothman said, "Go easily, here. We've never killed a vug. Killing Hawthorne was bad enough, sufficiently dangerous but necessary. As soon as we destroy a vug—any vug—it'll become clear to them not only that we exist but what our final intentions are. Isn't that so?" He looked around at the organization for confirmation.

"But," Alien McClain said, "they obviously know about us already. They could hardly penetrate us without knowing of our existence." His voice was sharp, edged with exasperation.

The telepath Merle Smith spoke up from her seat in the

corner; she had taken no part in the colloquy so far. "Roth-man, I have been scanning each person here in the motel and I find no indication that anyone has been penetrated in addition to Mary Anne McClain and the non-P Garden whom she wanted brought here, although there is a peculiar inert area in David Mutreaux' mind which should be looked into. I wish you other telepaths would do that, right now."

At once Patricia turned her attention on Dave Mutreaux.

Merle, she discovered, was correct; there was an anomaly in Mutreaux' mind and she felt at once that it implied a situation unfavorable to the interests of the organization. "Mutreaux," she said, "can you turn your thoughts to—" It was difficult to know what to call it. She had, in her hundred years of scanning, never run into anything quite like it. Puzzled, she passed over Mutreaux' surface thoughts and probed into the deeper levels of his psyche, into the involuntary and repressed syndromes which had been excluded as part of his ego-character, of the conscious self-system.

Now she was in a region of ambivalent drives, and of nebulous and stillborn wishes, anxieties, doubts interwoven with regressive beliefs and libido wishes of a fantastic nature. It was not a pleasant region but each person had it; she was accustomed to it, by now. This was what made her existence so rife with difficulty, running into this hostile area of the human mind. Each perception and observation which Dave Mutreaux had rejected in himself existed here, imperishable, living on in a kind of half-life, feeding deeply on his psychic energy.

He could not be held responsible for these, and yet there they were anyhow, semi-autonomous and—feral. Opposed to everything Mutreaux consciously, deliberately believed in. In opposition to all his life aims.

Much could be learned about Mutreaux' psyche by this examination of what he chose to—or had to—reject from consciousness.

"The area in question," Patricia said, "simply will not open up to scanning. Can you control it, Dave?"

Mutreaux said haltingly, a bewildered expression on his face, "I don't understand what's being discussed. Everything

in me is open to you, as far as I know; I'm certainly not deliberately holding back."

Now she had picked up the pre-cognitive region of Mutreaux' mind, and by entering it she made herself, temporarily, a pre-cog; it was an eerie sensation to possess this talent as well as her customary one.

She saw, as if arranged in neat boxes, a supple, viable sequence of time-possibilities, each one obviating all the others, strung so as to be knowable simultaneously. It was pictorial, and oddly static rather than dramatic. Patricia saw herself, frozen in a variety of actions; some she blanched at—they were hideous, sequences in which she yielded to her most deranged suspicions and—

My own daughter, she thought bleakly. So it's possible that I might do that to her, possible but not probable. The majority of sequences showed a rapproachement with Mary Anne, and a healing of the split within the organization rather than a widening. And yet—it could happen.

And, in addition, she saw in one swift instant a scene in which the telepaths within the organization pounced on Mutreaux. And Mutreaux himself certainly was aware of this; the scene after all existed in his consciousness. But why? Patricia wondered. What could he do that would warrant this? Or what could we discover?

Mutreaux' thoughts became diffused, all at once. "You're evading," Patricia said, and glanced at Merle and then at the other telepaths in the room. "It's the arrival of Don," she said to them. Don was the missing telepath, on his way now from Detroit; he would arrive any time. "In Mutreaux' pre-cog area there's a sequence in which Don will, on his arrival here, ferret out the inlet area involved, will open and explore it. And—" She hesitated, but the three other telepaths had picked up her thought anyhow.

And will destroy Mutreaux because of it, she thought.

But why? There was nothing to suggest the vuggish power about it or about him; this was something else, and it completely baffled her.

Was it certain that Don would do this? No, only probable. And how did Mutreaux feel, knowing this, knowing

that his death was imminent? What did a pre-cog do under such circumstances?

The same as anyone else, she discovered as she scanned Mutreaux' mind. The pre-cog ran.

Mutreaux, rising to his feet, said huskily, "I've got to get back to the New York Area I'm afraid." His manner was easy, but inside the opposite! "Sorry I can't stay," he said to Rothman.

"Don is our best telepath," Rothman said meditatively. "I'm going to have to ask you to remain until he gets here. Our only defense against the penetration of our organization is the existence of four telepaths who can dig in and tell us what's going on. So you must sit down, Mutreaux,"

Mutreaux reseated himself.

Closing his eyes, Pete Garden listened to the discussion between Patricia McClain, Mutreaux and Rothman. This secret organization, composed of Psi-people, stands between us and the Titanian civilization, its domination over us or some such thing; his thoughts ran together muddily. He still had not recovered from last night and the manner in which he had been awakened this morning—that, and Hawthorne's pointless, shocking death.

I wonder if Carol's all right, Pete thought.

God, he thought, I wish I could get out of here. He thought of the moment when Mary Anne, through her psycho-kinetic talent, had made him a floating particle, and tossed him into and through the material wall of the room, and then somehow, for reasons unclear to him, had let him come back; she had changed her mind at the last instant.

I'm afraid of these people, he said to himself. Of them and their talents.

He opened his eyes.

In the motel room, discoursing in shrill, chattery voices, sat nine vugs. And one human being besides himself. Dave Mutreaux.

He and Dave Mutreaux, standing in opposition to the rest of them. Hopeless and impossible. He did not stir; he simply stared at the nine vugs.

One vug—it spoke in the voice of Patricia McClain—said

agitatedly, "Rothman! I've picked up an incredible thought from Garden."

"I have, too," another vug said in agreement "Garden - perceives us all as—" It hesitated. "He sees us, with the exception of Mutreaux, as vugs."

There was silence.

The vug which spoke as Rothman said, "Garden, this implies then that the penetration of our group is complete? Is that right? Complete with the exception of David Mutreaux, at least."

Pete said nothing.

"How can we consider this," the vug calling itself Rothman said, "and keep on being sane? We've already lost, if Garden's perceptions are to be believed. We must try to consider rationally; possibly there's some hope. What do you say, Mutreaux? If Garden is right, you're the only authentic Terran among us."

Mutreaux said, "I have no understanding of this." He glanced at Pete. "Ask him, not me."

"We'll, Mr. Garden?" the vug Rothman said, calmly. "What do you say?"

"Please answer," the Patricia McClain one pleaded. "Pete, in the name of all we hold holy—"

Pete said, "I think you know now what there is in Mutreaux that your telepaths couldn't scan. He's a human being and you're not. That's the difference. And when your last telepath gets here—"

"We'll destroy Mutreaux," the Rothman vug, said slowly, thoughtfully.