Part 6 (1/2)

”They'll never be able to do it again. Not now that we are together,” the Other said.

”I know.”

They meshed. They locked.

Flowers swayed, wilted, and dissolved.

The walls of the bas.e.m.e.nt appeared again, permanently this time, and Timothy felt the full weight of the power within his mind as it surged and leaped. The power to do anything he pleased...

He reached up through the floors of the house, through concrete reinforced with steel rods, through soundproofing, through tangled wires, through floorboards, and sought out the richly thought-filled consciousness of Jon Margle. He found it, skirted the edge of it, getting the feel of the tangle of emotions and desires and plans that beat like thousands of different hearts within that single skull. It had been confusing when only this morning he had merely let himself ride through the cerebral river of the Brother's mind. Now that he wanted to take full control of it, the task was infinitely more difficult. He thought his power was limitless, but he could not be certain-and a battle within another man's mind for control of that mind might very well be a psychologically shattering experience.

He opened the door, however, and walked in...

His mind grasped the intangible elements of Jon Margle's mind and forced them into an a.n.a.logue of something which Timothy could comprehend: a party in a huge house; Margle's mind accepted the form of a house, and his thoughts were the members of the celebration...

... In the first room, there were two hundred gaily dressed men and women dancing across the glittering onyx floor, while crystal chandeliers twirled overhead, casting marvelous reflections in the polished stone below. Many of them were colorfully clothed in satins and laces of all the brightest hues, the women in low-cut gowns, the men in velveteen suits with flowing capes.

The chatter of shrill conversation and squealed bursts of laughter was so utterly intense that Timothy could not make out a single word spoken by any of those who were present. There was a roar of noise without any fine delineation between speakers. The dancers moved so swiftly that their faces were nothing more than blurs, and their bodies were flashes of brilliant yellow, emerald, red.

He crossed the ballroom, stumbling into a great number of people, rebounding, excusing himself. He pa.s.sed through the archway into a drawing-room where a number of people sat about engaged in conversation, speaking quietly and almost reverently, a totally different group from those engaged in the madness of the ballroom. From there, he went into a long dining-hall that contained an enormous banquet table where one man in a blue and green clown suit sat and nibbled in melancholy fas.h.i.+on at deep purple grapes.

He spoke to the man.

He received no reply.

He continued.

It seemed that he knew where to go, almost instinctively, to seize control of this house-though he had never attempted anything like this before.

He found the kitchen, sparkling white-walled place that looked stunningly like an operating theater in some large city hospital. On the table were cuts of meat. They were fresh. They gleamed with beads of blood. Each cut, he saw, was some portion of human anatomy...

He looked away from that. He did not, at this moment, want to think about the nature of the mind which he had entered, the sort of ugly dreams and visions it contained.

In the kitchen, he found the pantry door, opened it, went through and carefully went down the cellar steps. The walls here were of natural rock, and odd, dark creatures clung to the wall, staring at him with huge, luminous eyes. He was aware that these creatures knew very little about the house upstairs and that the people up there knew absolutely nothing about the demons below them.

In the last room of the bas.e.m.e.nt, where dark-winged things cowered from him, he found the power generator of the house, changed the lock upon it with tools he created out of thin air, and forged the only key to that lock...

The a.n.a.logue disappeared, and he was in total control of Jon Margle. He looked out through the Brother's eyes at the room in which the man had been sitting. It was a study with thick, green carpeting, oak-paneled walls, bookshelves full of volumes that seemed to have been selected by the most common of literary standards: the color of the bindings and their harmony with the chamber's decor. Margle was seated at a heavy plasti-wood desk, in a tulip-shaped chair on a swivel base. There was no one else in the room.

Briskly, Ti scanned the man's thoughts and discovered there were three others in the house. Baker, of course. A man named Leopold, from Chicago, was sleeping in a bedroom just down the hall. Timothy was startled to discover, through the captured mind he possessed, that Leopold was Jon Margle's superior. Ti pushed his curiosity about the power structure of the Brethren to the back of his mind and got on with immediate business. The third man was named Siccoli and, like Baker, was a surgically created bodyguard.

He directed Margle to call Baker into the study. This was accomplished by pressing a stud on the desktop that sent lights flas.h.i.+ng throughout the house. On the third burst of color, Baker's footsteps sounded on the stairs. When the giant entered the room, Timothy almost lost control of Margle as his emotions welled up and cracked the sh.e.l.l of his cold psionic intellectualism. He held the anger and hate in check and used Margle to say, ”Get Mr. Leopold and Siccoli over here. I have received some orders.”

When Baker left his master's study, unaware that his master now had a master of his own, Timothy rifled Margle's store of knowledge and discovered the location of a nonlethal pin gun in the top left drawer of the desk. He got it out and held it in Margle's lap, under the desk. He waited for almost five minutes before the three men entered, then directed them to sit on the couch facing the desk from the other side of the room.

”Dammit, I just got to sleep!” Leopold said. He was a brawny man who had begun to let his physique slip and was now entering the first stages of desolation-that desolation of forgetfulness that looks so much worse than the heaviness of a man who was born to be heavy.

Margle-Timothy raised the narcodart pistol and unloaded a third of a clip of darts at the men across the room. By the time Baker and Siccoli fell, they were halfway across the study, trying to get him. Leopold had only begun to rise, and when half a dozen needles stung his belly, he folded like a collapsible chair. Margle-Timothy directed the barrel of the weapon on his stomach and fired. In a few moments, Jon Margle was asleep.

He left the quiet house of Margle's mind and returned to his own husk in the bas.e.m.e.nt. Before he did anything else, he had to take care of Polly and make certain she was well out of the way. He drifted over to her and hovered beside her. With invisible fingers of ESP, he reached within her and tenderly exorcised the PBT from her system, restored unhealthy cells to health, leaving her even better than she had been before she had become involved in all of this.

When she was awake, she was full of questions. He answered only those which he felt like answering, and only for as long as it took him to escort her to a grav-plate car which he found parked before the house. Now that the ESP powers within him had reached maturity, she did not seem so beautiful or so fragile or so interesting. He realized that, having fulfilled this part of his evolution, he had divorced himself completely from empathy with other human beings. But his hatred remained: there was a job to do on the Brethren, and he would see it done. Besides, as he concentrated on the problem of finding their headquarters and tearing down their organization, his mind was free from worrying about the future, a future bound to be lonely, a future with a challenge so large it frightened him...

”I'm afraid you'll get yourself in trouble,” she said as he was closing the door of the car behind her. ”They're tough men.”

”And I'm I'm G.o.d,” he said. G.o.d,” he said.

She started the car then, as she realized he did not want to talk any more and that he would not be swayed by any arguments she could give. ”Be careful,” she said.

”I don't have to.”

When the car was out of sight, he walked back to the house on his invisible legs, no longer using the grav-plate mobility mechanism in his silver trunk cap. At the house, he called his servos to his side and smashed them repeatedly against the wall until they were shattered and useless. He no longer needed those, either.

He reached out with his psi and opened the door.

It swung inward.

He went inside and drifted up the steps toward the second floor where the four drugged members of the Brethren awaited him...

CHAPTER 11.

The four Brothers were exactly as Timothy had left them, slumped on the floor in almost comic disarray, like tired children who had flung themselves down in exhaustion and had swiftly fallen asleep. Margle had slid down in his tulip chair until he was precariously close to falling out of it, into the cavity under his desk. The sound of their breathing was even and deep, indicating that they would require quite a few more hours of unconsciousness before they would fully weather the effects of the darts and could move without grogginess.

Which suited Ti's purposes perfectly.

He drifted to Jon Margle and extended prying fingers of thought into his mind without totally occupying the body as he had done earlier. The a.n.a.logue of the house was the continued manner in which Timothy's own mind chose to present Margle's thoughts to him. In the main ballroom, the dancing had stopped and colorful figures had disappeared. The place was empty, desolate, like the littered morning-after of a party. This, of course, was the conscious mind that had been stilled by the narcotics in the darts. In the cellar, the demons teemed as fully as before. And though there were many things that were not in the cellar of his mind, in the subconscious, that had been in his conscious, there were a number of things Ti could discover.

It had come as a suprise when he had discovered earlier that Jon Margle, and his brother Klaus before him, were nothing more than figureheads, puppets painted to look like authority, but with all the strings carefully hidden. The Inner Council made all the decisions, a group consisting of Leopold and six other men Margle could not even name. But surpa.s.sing this revelation was what Timothy learned as he probed the Brother's subconscious now. Besides Margle's ignorance about his superiors, the man had no knowledge whatsoever concerning the source of PBT!

Refusing to believe such could be the case, he rampaged through the cellars of Margle's subconscious mind, prodding the hideous denizens of these lairs (beings which were concretizations of Margle's id longings, the festering fantasies of his ego), searching for some clue he might have overlooked. But there was nothing in his mind, in the vast catalogue of the man's data storage cells, that pointed to any solution of the mystery.

At last, perplexed, he left the mind. He turned to Leopold next, and probed lightly into his quieted mind. Surely a man of the Inner Council would know where the stuff came from, where the home lab was, and what might compose the unidentifiable substance.

In dealing with the totally different mind of Leopold, Timothy's psionic system established another type of a.n.a.logue of the Brother's thoughts. Instead of a house that had represented Jon Margle's mental landscape, there was a towering, thousand-storied block building whose walls glittered dark emerald, a sinister color that seemed shot through with pulsing veins and clotted, dark lumps of indefinable material. Inside the structure, the walls were ringed with data banks, billions upon billions of memory units storing nearly every minute detail of Leopold's life; he was, apparently, the sort of man who forgot nothing-which would help to explain his position of importance in such a rugged and compet.i.tive arena.

Timothy went up through the floors of the place, calling forth data, disregarding it when it proved of no importance.

On the eighty-first floor, seconds after his entry into the mental construct, he found a bit of relevant information.

The source of PBT was a farmhouse owned by the Brethren near a small town in Iowa called Charter Oak. He sought further details and learned that Charter Oak was in the west of the state, near Sioux City. After that, Leopold's memory bank offered no more. Timothy searched through all nine hundred and nineteen floors, but whenever he got close to the subject again, Leopold's mind-even though he was unconscious-radiated fear and loathing so heavily that Timothy could not make any sense of the data. But what could the man have to fear in the synthesis of a drug?

He picked one of the data points concerned with the farmhouse and obtained a perfect picture of the place: a large, white, rambling structure that had been built of moderate size and thereafter added to every generation as the clan grew larger and larger still. There were three large trees, perhaps willows, on the flat and rolling lawn-then nothing but yawning stretches of tabletop land in all directions, the vague phantoms of other houses at distant points. There was a swing on the front porch. The inside had been renovated, supermodern and expensively furnished. The house was occupied by a couple in their early thirties, Richard and Thelma Boggs. They seemed, judging from the mental picture which Leopold had of them, the stereotype of the average Middle American farm couple. He was lanky, wiry, well-muscled, with short curly hair, a rich, leathery tan. She tended toward plumpness, with heavy b.r.e.a.s.t.s, a milky complexion, and large blue saucer eyes. Her mouth was drawn in a petulant pout, and she looked as if she might be just a bit difficult to get along with.

With this much in the open, Ti probed deeper, seeking the source of PBT...