The Man Who Staked the Stars Part 12

Would he know if it was gone?

The black sharp-edged shadows of the crater walls were drawing across the landing plain outside, bringing to a close the two weeks of daylight, and the reflected sunlight was dimming in the room. He could hear the rumble of a heavy ship of a cargo fleet lowering in to a landing.

His a.s.sistant was sitting quietly on the edge of the desk as he had been for some time, motionlessly watching the thin plume of smoke that rose from a cigarette in his hand. He was as still as if he were listening for some subtle sound far away. Rocket jets flashed an orange glow through the venetian blinds and fell in stripes of orange light across the dark young face. The brief rumble of a rocket take-off came, transmitted through the ground and the building. Smoke curling up from the cigarette was the only motion.

"Roy, is Pierce your real name?"

The light flashed and faded in bars of orange across the young face he had thought was like his own, the boy he had thought had come from Pop Yak. The quick deep rumble of sound came and faded in the walls around them. A fleeting smile touched the face, and the dark eyes rested on his for a moment as Roy Pierce gave the information casually as if it were any other information, answering the question that had been meant. "It is my mother's name. We always take our mother's names. I am a Man.o.ba--a Man.o.ba of Jaracho."

IX

Looking into Bryce's face he slid to his feet slowly, ground out the stub of his cigarette and stood before the desk.

Bryce took out his gun and held it where Pierce could see it. "Are Man.o.bas ever shot?" It was a heavy little gun, his maggy, its barrel sleek and rounded, the heavy metal warm from being worn close to the skin.

"Sometimes. It's a natural enough reaction."

It was a s.p.a.ceworthy gun with adjustable velocity for driving through padded suits and pressure suits. The velocity was set high, but it would be inartistic to blow a large hole through a psychotherapist.

Bryce turned the dial down slowly, watching him.

"Do the professional ethics of privacy and non-publicity cover this kind of situation?"

Pierce was smiling slightly with a touch of bitter humor. "It's undiplomatic to tell you that, but yes, the contingency is covered.

There is nothing to connect myself with you as a case in any records, nor anything to identify me as a member of the Man.o.ba group contracted by your company. The ethic of privacy is allowed to have no exceptions for the family's record."

A cool curiosity held him. "Tell me--when you saw that I was beginning to think, why didn't you just needle me down for a short nap and leave?"

The smile remained. "I am supposed to control the shock of realization, and make sure that it is a.s.similated without damage to the subject." His dark expressionless eyes met Bryce's, and Bryce felt the impact of them, and realized for the first time that there was the same slight bitter off-hand smile on his own lips, and inwardly the quiet ironical mood with the still clarity of a deep pool. His own mood? He hefted the gun in his hand, feeling its weight and balance.

"You could have done that over the televiewer," he pointed out dispa.s.sionately. "What is the average mortality, do you know?"

"Not high. It is only inexperience that is dangerous. If one can get through one's first three or four cases, it's safe enough."

Looking back over the past days it was quite clear that Pierce had control over his emotions. Any emotion Pierce chose him to feel he would feel. It remained to be seen how much that could influence what he was going to do. The dark-skinned young man stood before the desk casually and answered questions with a slight restrained smile that set the wry irony of both their minds.

A man does what he wants. That is freedom, but what he wanted could be controlled apparently. A man _is_ what he wants. But what he wanted could be changed. How easy had it been to change him. Bryce tried himself with a thought of the power and glory of rule, the reign and mastery of s.p.a.ce--a goal that had warmed his thoughts for many years.

He didn't want it.

There was a numbness where there should have been emotion, and all he could feel for his loss was the resignation and the faint bitter humor permitted him by Pierce's smile. Watching that smile he shifted the heavy little gun in his hand, turning it over casually, feeling its familiar weight and the texture of its surfaces.

He spoke gently. "If you don't mind my asking, have you pa.s.sed through your first three cases yet?"

"You are my first," said Roy Pierce, whom he had trusted. "I'm afraid I was clumsy."

"Oh--you did all right." Bryce shot him then, placing the bullet carefully in the pit of his stomach where it would hurt. That was for doing well. For justice. No man has the right to meddle in another man's mind.

Pierce had been starting to speak. He swayed back a half step with a flicker of change crossing his face then stood steady and smiling again. That brief grimace touched Bryce's nerves with a sensation that was like the jangle of something heavy dropped inside a piano, a sound he had heard once. But the numbness did not lift from his feelings. He was still smiling. The third bullet would be between the eyes.

The words were low and rapid but clear.

Bryce did not listen. "This is for doing a good job," he said, overriding the other voice with his own, and pulled the trigger again, placing the slug slightly lower this time, in the belly, where if it entangled in one of the spinal plexus it could hurt past belief.

Pierce swayed slightly. His face went to the clay-blue color that comes to dark-skinned races when they pale. Bleeding inside somewhere, and already dead unless he were given help, Bryce figured.

For a moment Bryce saw something like effort in the dark unreadable eyes. Then suddenly Pierce smiled, his young face disarmingly innocent and merry. "Oh, come on, Bryce, it's not that serious. Be a good sport. You don't want to--"

Suddenly Bryce saw the situation as the sheerest humor, a sort of lunatic farce for the laughter of some cosmic joker. He swung the gunsights up towards the smiling face. Amus.e.m.e.nt bubbled in his blood and he heard himself laugh--heard it with a grim secondary amus.e.m.e.nt.

"The joke's on you," he said, and pulled the trigger, then laughed again. The joke was on him.

He had missed. He had missed at a distance of three feet. Yet his hand was rock-steady. Pierce's control had him. His laughter stopped as the humor in Pierce's att.i.tude faded down again to the small wry smile that had been there from the beginning.

Bryce had not lost. He had only to wait a little and he had won.

Unless Pierce could use his control to force him to call help. He set himself to resist and not to listen. There was not long to go. The expressionless dark eyes that held his were beginning to widen slightly in an effort of sight that meant that a private darkness was closing in on the psychotherapist. The rumble of distant rockets seemed louder, covering his fading voice. "It's your choice, Bryce. I give it to you. You won't want this later--Bryce--but don't--hunger to undo. It is payment enough for all--times like this--that you change--and do not--want--them any--again--" Pierce pulled in a strangling breath, swaying more visibly. "Gun," he whispered, reaching out in Bryce's direction, his eyes going sightless.

Bryce handed him the magnomatic, and watched as Pierce fumbled his hands over it, putting his prints on it blindly, his knees bending.

When he fell, Bryce picked up the phone and called Emergency. The emergency squad would be cruising around in the halls somewhere nearby, looking for the source of the three radio notes that had told them that a gun was fired.

"That was the last I saw of him," the young man stopped talking and looked pleased with himself.

Donahue drained his drink irritably and put it on the bar that had been set up on the ceiling when the Gs went off. It clung magnetically. "Make it the same, please." He turned to Roy Pierce, floating beside him. "Stop needling me, man, finish the story. The way you tell it, I don't know what you did, how you did it, or even whether you died or not."

"Oh, I died," said Roy Pierce. "But they revived me," he added.

"Good! I'm glad to hear that!" said Donahue more cheerfully, wondering suddenly just how extensively he was being kidded. "For a moment there you had me worried. Now explain about this treatment."

"It's called soul eating," explained the dark-skinned, straight-haired boy, "I don't think you could do it."

Donahue thought that information over carefully. "Maybe not. How's it done?"

"In the tribes of my people the soul is supposed to be an invisible double who walks at your side, protecting you and speaking silently to your mind. Its face is the face that looks out of mirrors and up from pools at you, and the shadow that walks on the ground beside you.

Evildoers, after they had spoken to a Man.o.ba, would say that their reflections were gone. Our family was called The Eaters of Souls, and all the tribes were afraid of us for nine hundred miles around."

"So am I," said Donahue compactly. "As my Yiddish grandmother on my mother's side would say, it sounds from werewolves."

"I can explain it."

"No magic?"

"Look," said the youth tersely, "Do I want to get kicked out of the FNMA? What if I had sat in a jungle circle loaded to the ears with herbs and spells, with the drums of my cousins throbbing around me, and learned the best and subtlest ways of my technique back in time looking through the eyes of my great grandfather, or conversing with his ghost. Do you think I would say so?"

"No," Donahue admitted. He edged away a little.

The youth spoke gloomily. "Rapport and intensified empathy is something you learn by exposing yourself to mirrors. The technique is published, known and accepted among psychologists, but most of them just don't try. It backfires too easily, and it takes too high a level of skill. It originated with my family." The youth spoke even more gloomily. "What I do is obvious enough if I make it so. It's simply prior mimicry. I watch the trend of what goes on in his thoughts, and express approximately what he is feeling and thinking a little before he does. So that presently, subconsciously he is depending on me to tell him what he thinks and how he feels.

"I was his mirror, his prior mirror. I am a clear, expressive underplaying actor as an actor, and each shade of reaction is separate and unmistakable. The subconscious is not rational, but it generalizes from regularities that the conscious mind never has the subtlety to notice. It saw me consistently representing its own internal reactions, hour after hour in every situation more clearly than Bryce ever saw himself express anything in a mirror, and more steadily than he ever saw any mirror. The subconscious then a.s.sociated the inside emotion with the corresponding outside image for each one. I became Bryce's subconscious self image. When he thinks of doing anything, the image in the imagination that does it is not himself, it is me. This can cause considerable mental confusion."