The world opened for Starn of Pack Foser one day when he was eight years old.
He had gone nearly a mile down the creek from the Compound, into a swampy tangle far from the farmed land and grazes, in hope of getting away from the other boys. Maybe Huill or Rob wouldn't bother to follow him so far, or, if they did, maybe he could guard his thoughts so they couldn't find him.
The young telepaths seldom left him in peace. The fact that Starn was large for his age, and much taller and stronger than any other eightor nine-year-old in the Pack, seemed to give them all the more delight in their little tortures.
Starn was not a telepath, or much of anything else. His father Virnce was a pretty fair perceptor, and his mother Becca premoted now and then, but Starn couldn't do hardly anything. His only trace of a Novo ability was a sense of danger that was too weak to amount to much. So he had to control his thoughts in the swamp if he wanted to avoid discovery. He had to think things that most anybody would think, and avoid thoughts that could be identified as coming especially from him. Adults were good at doing that, after years of experience, but it was exceedingly hard for Starn.
So as he sat by the creek fishing he busied his mind by reading the book "Sacred Genetic Law" which his father had given him the year before. Lots of people read religious books if they had time to spare in the afternoons, so if he kept his mind on the book he figured he would be fairly safe. He would rather have thought about other things while he fished—of growing up to be a great raider, and leading unbelievably successful attacks on enemy Packs, and pillages of Olsapern trading posts, or even taking a whole army through the Hard Line and slaughtering hundreds of Olsapern infidels in their own country. But Huill or Rob would know if he thought things like that. So he read.
Book-English, the language in which all writing was done, was a funny language. It left out a lot of r's, especially before n's where they most always came in common talk. And it put in a lot of d's, and used m's to begin many words that really started with an n sound. It seemed to Starn that it would be better to write BookEnglish the way people really talked, but the Pack teacher had explained that if that were done, the religious texts would have to be revised into the new writing or people would forget how to read them. And nobody would ever revise the religious writings.
It was hard to believe the Olsaperns actually talked the way Book-English was written, but they did. All the kids laughed the time the teacher spoke some Olsapern to show them how it sounded. She had called Starn "Stan"—and that was something else Huill and Rob wouldn't let lie. They were always yelling "Stan, Stan, the Olsapan!" at him, and making like he really was an Olsapern because of his size and lack of Novo senses.
Perhaps this identifying thought was what gave him away, but when he sensed trouble it was too late to escape. Huill, Rob, and another boy named Houg were almost upon him. They had sneaked through the bushes, and when he detected their presence and turned they were running at him full speed. It didn't take telepathy to know they meant to push him into the creek. Frantically Starn thought of using his fishing pole to punch them away, but that wouldn't work because they could read him and dodge the way they always did. Or he could grab a rock and . . . but that wouldn't work either. At the last split-second, without thinking about it, Starn flopped sideways to hug the ground. Huill stumbled over him and fell down the bank. He hit the cold water with a yell. Rob was also thrown off balance and skidded down the bank on his belly, managing to stop at the water's edge. He was liberally smeared with mud. Houg, who wasn't a telepath but a perceptor, was not caught so badly off guard. But when Starn sat up and glared at him, Houg backed off. Without the help of his telepathic buddies, he was no match for Starn and he knew it.
"T-that was a dirty trick!" shivered Huill, climbing out of the creek with his buckskins dripping, and close to tears. "You done that and didn't think it!"
Starn was as startled as they were. He wasn't sure just how it had happened, or if he could do it again, or . . .
"Push him in, Houg!" yelled Rob. "I'll tell you what he's thinking!"
Houg grinned and started toward Starn, who thought of flopping on his other side and jerking Houg past him, or getting up and fighting it out despite the coaching Houg would get. But Rob was spouting his plans faster than he could make them so . . .
Without planning, Starn swished his pole back over his shoulder, as if landing a fish, and dealt Houg a lashing blow on the top of his head. Houg bellowed and hastily scampered away, feeling his stinging scalp for blood. Despite his size, Starn had never won a fight before. He felt confident and elated. "Come on! Just try something!" he challenged fiercely.
"You wait till my mamma finds out!" whined Rob, trying to rub the mud from his clothing. "Look what a mess you made!"
"Your ma'll just whip you for being a clumsy oaf!" retorted Starn, delighting in using the epithet that had so often been used on him.
"I'm going home!" quavered Huill.
"Me, too," said Houg.
"O.K.," giggled Starn. "Huill, you're wet anyhow, so you carry my fish! And Rob . . . well, a little mud won't hurt my fish-pole. And Houg, carry my Book-English book!"
"I ain't carrying your junk!" Rob yelled.
Starn's fist flew up suddenly and hit him in the nose.
"You take that pole!" he ordered.
Rob sniffled, and obeyed, as did Huill and Houg.
But Starn gave in to their pleas before they got back to the Compound, and did not force them to humble themselves by carrying his stuff in front of the adults of the Pack. But in an isolated community of less than two hundred souls, with one out of every half-dozen a telepath, the full story wasn't long in getting around. The fact that Starn had outmaneuvered two telepaths was widely discussed around many hearths that night. Such a deed was unheard of, and there was ample speculation on the nature of the sense Starn had suddenly learned to use.
Starn basked in this new experience of adult approval, and resolved to heed the advice of his father to give his new sense a lot of exercise and make it strong.
The Foser himself visited Virnce's hut that evening, and he spoke to Starn for the first time the boy could remember.
To his parents the Pack chief said, "You must be mighty proud of your lad."
"Indeed we are!" beamed Becca, and Virnce nodded. Starn decided The Foser was awful good to say something like that about him, especially in front of the neighbors who had dropped in to talk.
Turning to the boy's father the Pack chief said, "Virnce, I'm told you have some interesting thoughts on the significance of all this. I'd like to hear them."
Virnce looked uncomfortable. "A man's thinking about his own children suffers from immodesty, Foser," he protested.
The Foser shook his head. "You were never a man to hold false pride, Virnce. And you understand and abide by the teaching of the Sacred Gene as well as any man in the Pack."
"Well," Virnce began slowly, "we are sometimes troubled at heart by false beliefs of the Olsapern kind, that we of the Packs are not the chosen of the Sacred Gene. The infidels claim that when Science fell long centuries ago, the whole of humanity suffered a deep spiritual shock of such potency that the very chromosomes of our forebears cowered in despair, and beat an evolutionary retreat.
"Thus, they pretend, we of the Packs are not a people far advanced toward the Ultimate Novo, but rather are throwbacks toward the ancestral man of a million years ago. They would have us believe that, far from leading us onward, the Sacred Gene has not simply forsaken us but has pushed us backward into savagery! They choose to ignore, or to explain away, our durable if humble civilization, the continued literacy of our children, and above all our blessed Novo senses.
"But there is, in the Novo sense my son has revealed today, something the Olsaperns cannot explain away! We know the early prophets, even in the days before Science fell, were aware of traces of telepathy, premonition, perception and the various other Novo senses in certain people of their own time. We need not believe the evil theories of the Olsaperns, that these senses were present even in the most primitive men, were perhaps even prevalent at the dawn of humankind. We need not believe this, but we have been hard put to disprove it!
"However," and here Virnce's eyes glinted triumphantly, "even the oldest of prophets and commentators make no mention of such a sense as Starn's! Nothing like it has ever been known before! It is new—Novo without question! And it is a clear manifestation of the logic and balance with which the Sacred Gene leads us forward to the Ultimate, in that it provides a desirable foil and counter to the telepathic sense he has previously bestowed on us!
"I cannot help but believe, Foser," Virnce concluded solemnly, "that in my young son the Sacred Gene not only sends us another bountiful blessing, but that he is giving his people a convincing reaffirmation: The Gene is with us; he is with us indeed!"
At that inappropriate instant Huill's mother Nari rushed into the hut and hugged Starn's mother. "Oh, Becca!" she gushed, "I'm so happy for you and Virnce! We've all felt such sympathy for you, and for poor little Starn! And now it turns out that he has this marvelous instinct!"
"Instinct?" flared Becca, pushing Nari away in anger.
"What kind of Olsapern talk is that? As if Starn were an animal! Honestly, Nari, you are the most exasperating woman in the whole Pack!"
"Oh, I'm so sorry, Becca!" Nari apologized. "The word just slipped out!"
"I'll bet it did!" huffed Becca.
"Easy, Becca," soothed Virnce, putting a hand on his wife's shoulder. He looked at The Foser, at Starn, at the others, gathered before his fire, and said, "Perhaps the whole Pack has been engaging in Olsapern talk tonight, like a group of proud, senseless scientists trying to explain a new star, or a new kind of fruit. I perhaps more than the rest of you have been guilty. In our first excitement over Starn, we can pray this was a forgivable error."
In a voice of impressive depth he finished, "But we must not persist in this! Hereafter my wife and I will seek to see Starn as what he is—a blessing from the Sacred Gene to be accepted humbly and gratefully, with no questions, no attempts to pit our meager wisdom against that of the Sacred Gene himself!"
"Amen!" exclaimed Becca, with a final glare at Nari. And the others, The Foser included, echoed the word.
Good things kept happening to Starn after that. A few months later, for instance, the Pack chose his father as the Gene's Voice for the Tenthday services.
But the boy was too fascinated with his newfound sense to give more than the required amount of devotion to its mighty Bestower. He spent an hour or two every day working with Huill or Rob in mock contests, learning to act effectively, and without thinking, to meet the challenges produced by his telepathic friends. There wasn't really much to learn, except to do it. That was the right way, anyhow, because as his father had said, it would be wrong to try to figure out how the sense worked. That was the Sacred Gene's business, not his.
Starn made the most of the world which had opened to him that day by the creek. Because his sense was superbly useful in battle, especially in the raids and counter-raids on traditional enemy Packs that had telepaths to be outwitted, his childhood dream of being a great warrior promised to come true. In fact, at the age of nineteen he was elected Raid Leader of the Pack. Even at that age he was the tallest of The Foser's men, and had physical strength to match his impressively rugged appearance.
Another high moment came when he was twenty-two. That was when he found his wife, Cytherni, at the annual spring parley of Packs allied to the Fosers.
Cytherni was a lovely girl, and as he had suspected from their first meeting she was not basically the timid person she appeared. Her initial shyness with him, and later with the entire Pack when he brought her home, was real, but he could guess its cause easily enough.
In fact, part of her attraction for him was a sense of similarity—a feeling that "there, but for the grace of the Sacred Gene, go I." Like himself, Cytherni had displayed little Novo capability as a child; but unlike him, she had never revealed such talents later on. Starn could readily imagine himself growing up, without his "surprise sense," into a person much like Cytherni. It gave him deep pleasure to see her bloom, with fears and selfdoubts forgotten, when they were alone together.
But just four months after their marriage, Starn's bright, open world began closing.
The trader Nagister Nornt was known by repute to every Pack east of the mountains. Many people said he was the closest man to the Ultimate Novo—the goal man of the future—then alive. Without question, his powerful Novo abilities made him someone to be feared and hated. He was a dangerous man.
But he was also a trader of unusual scope, trafficking in many goods the Packs needed—salt from the coast, bulletlead perhaps from the ruins of some ancient city, and fine, but honest, cloth from Packs far to the south who had maintained the arts of weaving. Thus, when word came that Nagister Nornt was heading their way, the people of Pack Foser were both pleased and disturbed.
The point was carefully drilled into the children that Nornt was a man to be hated, because that was the best defense against a telehypnotist who could invade and enslave an unwary mind. And they were warned not to take even the briefest nap during the several hours Nornt would be in or near the Compound, because they couldn't hate him while they slept, and could wake up with their wills in his control, doomed to be Nornt's slavies for the rest of their lives.
The trader arrived one midmorning with his vacanteyed slavies and his heavy-loaded train of mule-drawn wagons. The Foser greeted him ceremoniously, at the same time making it clear that Nornt was to conclude his business there by midafternoon and be at least three miles away by nightfall. Nornt agreed, showing his protruding yellow teeth in an ugly grin, and proceeded to display his wares in the Compound yard.
He was a hunched, heavy man, better described as hairy-faced rather than bearded. He looked as if he had grown bald-jowled and had left untrimmed the few straggling facial hairs that remained. He smelled unclean. Nornt was, indeed, an easy man to abhor. Starn wondered, as he made his rounds to assure himself that the Pack's men were all armed and alert for trouble, why the trader didn't fix himself up a bit. Surely, if hating Nornt was a good defense against him, the trader shouldn't make the hating so easy for everybody. But then the Sacred Gene had made Nornt's personality what it was, and perhaps the man was unable to change his ways.
Nornt glanced at him and chuckled, evidently amused at Starn's thoughts. Starn regarded him coldly before moving away.
But Nornt had beautiful cloth, and Starn had a young and lovely wife. It was necessary for them to do business.
When Starn returned with Cytherni, the trader was a few yards from the cloth display with his back turned, haggling with one of the older wives over a skin of salt. Cytherni fingered a swath of light-blue fabric under the dull but watchful eyes of a slavie.
"How much prime leather for the blue?" Starn asked.
"Trader trades," the slavie said tonelessly.
Starn shrugged and reconciled himself to dealing directly with Nagister Nornt.
Nornt soon concluded the deal for the salt and turned to face Starn and Cytherni. He did not move toward them but stood motionless, his eyes examining the young woman with uncouth interest.
Huill hurried to Starn's side. "Watch out!" he warned.
"He's yenning for Cytherni!"
"I can see that!" growled Starn.
"But he means to have her!" the telepath hissed urgently.
Starn swept a rapid glance over the slavies and found them reaching for their knives, pistols, or long-guns.
"Hold it, Nornt!" he yelled. "Start anything here and you're a dead trader!"
"I think not!" cackled the trader. "Your men don't have—"
In a flash Starn whipped his throwing knife from its sheath. It zinged through the air to plunge deep into Nornt's right shoulder. The trader screamed and fell, and his slavies lost interest in their weapons.
"He read us that you could do things like that," Huill explained excitedly, "but he didn't believe you could fool him!"
The Foser came hurrying up. "Trading's over!" he bellowed. "All you women and kids go home! Get inside! Nagister Nornt, pack up and get out!" All moved to obey except Cytherni, who seemed afraid to stray from Starn's side.
Grimacing horribly, Nornt got to his feet. One of his slavies pulled the knife from his shoulder and helped him to a comfortable seat, where another removed his filthy jacket and bandaged the wound. Meanwhile the other slavies began repacking the wares and hitching the mules.
Within fifteen minutes Nornt was helped onto a wagon seat and the train started out of the Compound. The trader turned to direct a final baleful stare at Starn as he departed.
"Holy somes!" cursed Huill. "He's raving mad! I never read such hate in my life! He's not through with you, Starn! He means to even things up, and get Cytherni!"
"Let him try!" said Starn grimly. "He'll just get more of the same!"
"I don't know, Starn," said the worried telepath. "You caught him at a disadvantage today."
"No I didn't! His slavies had their weapons drawn!"
"Yeah, but to his way of thinking, he was still at a disadvantage! He was here, where he could be attacked, and he didn't have to be! What if he'd been waiting half a mile away, and had sent his slavies to take Cytherni or anything else he wanted? He can do that, you know! And slavies are cheap to him!"
Starn frowned. "Let's not think more about it while he's in reading range," he said. "Are you all right, Cythie?"
His wife wore a sick expression, but she nodded.
"His looks revolted her," Huill said helpfully.
"I'd better get you home," Starn told her.
That night the Pack's chief men met by The Foser's fire. Nagister Nornt, the telepaths reported, was camping for the night five miles west, and intended to continue in that direction, trading with the mountain Packs, for several weeks before turning back. But he did mean to return to Foser Compound.
"We won't let him get close!" growled Starn.
"Don't underestimate him," warned The Foser.
"Huill, what do you make of his attack strategy?"
"It isn't clear," said the telepath. "He can control his thoughts unusually well, and has avoided thinking about his plans. But the picture I got was of him waiting in some safe place, and sending his slavies up to read us—he can use them as telepathic relays, you know—and to snipe our scouts and sentries. If we go out to fight, the slavies kill some of us while we're killing them, and if we don't go out they besiege the Compound. We'd have to go out."
With an unhappy expression Huill continued, "But, if we do kill his slavies, he'll just recruit more from Packs that aren't alert for trouble, or from farms that can't keep telepathic guards out all night. Thirty slavies at a time is about all he can control without straining, but he can get new ones faster than we can kill the old ones, and after each battle there'll be fewer of us left for the next fight. He means to get what he wants if he has to wipe out Pack Foser to do it!"
Starn bolted to his feet. "This is between Nornt and myself!" he snapped. "It's my fault for not finishing him today, and I'm going after him right now!"
"Sit down," said The Foser sternly. "Sit down and listen to me!" It was an order, and Starn grudgingly obeyed.
"Nagister Nornt was taken by surprise today," the Pack chief said, "because he didn't believe in your sense. Now he's seen you in action, and he won't be off guard a second time, tonight or later. He's a wily man, Starn, who's survived many battles and knows how to protect his skin. His slavies would come at you singly and in bunches, and you would have to kill them all before you got a crack at him! Don't forget that every one of those men is under his complete command! Their bodies are his, as if his brain was in each of them! Don't let the dull look of their eyes fool you!
"As for this being your fight and not the Pack's," The Foser continued, "you know better than that! You know no Pack can let an enemy demand and get his choice of its women or children! A Pack that sells out the least of its people is soon no Pack at all, but the timid prey of any raider who comes along!
"Neither the Pack nor your wife can spare you, to get yourself killed in a foolish one-man venture against Nornt! You'll defend your wife as a leader of the Pack!" Starn snorted. "Defend her how? You heard what Huill said! How do we beat Nornt against that kind of strategy, and with guns no better, if as good, as his slavies have?"
"That's why we need you," The Foser explained. "Your sense will provide the answer if anything will."
Starn grunted and stalked unhappily around the fire.
"My sense will help me, but in a long series of scattered skirmishes I can lose a lot of good friends, and the Pack a lot of good men, while I'm engaged elsewhere! The only way we could win would be to push through to Nornt himself, no matter what kind of defenses he threw up! We'll waste many men doing that—unless we have weapons far better than anything in the slavies' hands!" After a moment The Foser said, "Well?"
"Well," Starn replied angrily, "we'll have to get the weapons we need! We'll have to raid the Olsaperns first, so we can fight Nagister Nornt!"
A raid on an Olsapern trading post wouldn't have helped. The posts were not defended by any weapons worth stealing. Starn wondered about this sometimes. Why were the Olsaperns so unconcerned about their trading posts being pillaged? Of course about the only goods they stocked were basic rations, which were freely stolen during drought years and long winters to keep the Packs alive, and such items as books and artificial fabrics, both of which the Packs disdained in favor of the honest cloth and books certain Packs produced for trading. The fact that the trading posts stayed well-stocked and practically defenseless was just one more example of the idiocy of the Olsaperns.
But the Olsaperns did have a few outposts in Pack country that were heavily defended, with the kind of weapons the Pack needed. The only such installation close to Pack Foser was a copper mine twenty miles northwest of the Compound. The mine would have to be raided.
This was not necessarily a desperate risk. The Olsaperns were a cowardly lot who seldom chose to expose themselves to battle. Trading-post keepers invariably deserted their stations when under attack, to scoot away like frightened birds in their flying machines, seldom stopping before they were safely behind the Hard Line hundreds of miles to the north.
But the mine's defenses were automated and could prove deadly effective, Starn was well aware. Perhaps the Olsaperns didn't much care about their trading posts, but they obviously cared about the tons of ore they removed from the mine each day, to carry off in giant flying wagons. Not since the days of Starn's great-grandparents had the mine's perimeter been tested by Pack raiders, and that attack had been a disaster. Ten raiders had been killed, and twenty-eight captured and subjected to the Treatment.
Of course the long decades of peace following that raid could have lulled the Olsaperns into letting the defenses fall into disrepair. That could be hoped. Nevertheless, Starn laid his plans with strict care to minimize potential losses and to put his men at the best possible advantage. With Huill's help he questioned the Pack's oldest members, to get the most direct accounts available of what the long-ago raid had encountered.
What he learned made him delay the attack for three weeks, fretting over the possibility that Nornt might return earlier than expected, but convinced that the raid would be far more likely to succeed if carried out in the right kind of weather. When at last the premonitors advised him a day-long rainstorm was due, he led his thirty-man party forth to the attack.
They approached the mine complex in a heavy downpour, and were thoroughly soaked beneath their hardleather armor and face masks.
Starn intended no broad frontal attack. Against automatic defenses that would probably do nothing but increase the casualties among his men. What he hoped for was a point penetration, the driving of a hole through the perimeter defenses, by which all could enter and defeat any last-ditch stand of the Olsapern miners.
The task of making the penetration he reserved for himself. His men gave him argument about this, but they had to admit that he was best equipped for the job. Though there were no telepathic defenders for his special sense to surprise, his ability to act instantaneously and effectively served him well in any tight spot where there was little time for thought.
The first barrier was a fence of steel mesh, intended mainly to keep animals and hunters from straying onto dangerous ground. The party quickly chopped a slit in the mesh, and Starn stalked forward through the forest which continued for several hundred feet inside the fence. With him were Huill and a perceptor, Jaco. Six more men followed twenty yards behind, spreading out only slightly to explore the sides of the route and under urgent orders to take no chances. Their essential duties were to mark the trail clearly and to back up the threeman point, protecting its rear and coming to the rescue if that proved necessary. At intervals behind them followed two four-man squads, and then a string of twoman teams.
This needle of men was wide open to flank attack, but with defenses automated Starn expected no such counter. The unmanned weapons along their flanks would almost certainly stay poised for a frontal assault, and the only defenses the raiders needed to worry about were those almost directly ahead of them.
Have we sprung a warning system yet? Starn wondered.
"No," hissed Huill. "The Olsaperns are still thinking about their work, not about us."
Starn looked a question at Jaco, who shrugged an answer. He was percepting nothing worth reporting.
They came to the edge of the forest. Beyond lay what was once a clearing but now had grown a fair amount of cover in the form of bushes and young evergreens—a promising sign of neglect. The buildings clustered at the mine shaft rose into view no more than two hundred yards away. The only visible barrier was another fence, this a high one of strung barbed wire, some distance inside the old clearing. The scene looked dreary and deserted under the thick clouds and hard-blowing rain.
"Slowly," warned Starn, and he moved forward with Huill and Jaco close behind. Suddenly his long-gun pushed back against his chest, stopping him in his tracks.
"We're at the Metal-Stopper," he hissed over his shoulder. "I'm going to try to push through." He got a firm purchase with his cleated boots and shoved forcefully against his long-gun. It broke clear of the unseen barrier and he fell forward a few inches, to be stopped by the knife and hatchet attached to his belt. Another hard lunge put these metal objects past the barrier also. As he had theorized, the Metal-Stopper was electromagnetic, and whatever electrical fields supported it were partially shorted out by the heavy rain. Beyond this point the earlier raiders had gone armed only with stone and wooden weapons.
"Try to get through," he told his companions.
"They know we're out here now!" Huill reported as he, too, pushed his ironware past the barrier, with Jaco close behind.
"WARNING TO INTRUDERS!" a mechanical voice bellowed in Book-English. "YOU ARE TRESPASSING ON A HEAVILY-DEFENDED INSTALLATION OF . . . OMBINE! RETU . . . EDIATELY, OR WE WILL NOT . . . SEQUENCES! REPEATING! WARN . . . UDER . . . ARE TRESPASS . . . FENDED INSTALL . . . "
"That's scaring them more than it is us!" chuckled Huill. "They think if their loudspeakers are out of whack, their weapons might be, too!"
"What are the weapons like?"
"They don't know. They were all installed before their day, and are kept secret from them so telepaths can't read them. But they're wishing they had some really good stuff out here!"
Starn nodded. "Let's move on."
They walked forward slowly, Starn not bothering to stay under cover of the bushes, which he figured would be a waste of time and add dangerous footage to the length of their trail.
"Something's moving!" Jaco hissed.
"Down!" yelled Starn, hitting the dirt. A split-second later a fearsome tat-tat-tat! startled them, and twigs and leaves were shredded over their heads.
"That's a rapid-fire gun!" yelled Huill.
"Where is it?" Starn shouted back.
"Beyond the barbed wire!"
We could use something like that, thought Starn. He motioned to the others and began crawling forward on his belly. He had not gone far when the gun's chatter ceased.
"It's jammed," reported Jaco.
"Anything else moving up there?"
"No."
Cautiously Starn rose to his feet. Nothing happened, so he walked on toward the fence.
"Ferrik in the back-up didn't duck fast enough," said Huill. "Bad flesh wound in the shoulder. He's being tended."
Starn nodded and kept moving. The fence, he saw, was of horizontal heavy-gauge, single-strand barbed wire, the strands about a foot apart. This was as far as the long-ago raiders had gotten, because the wire was electrified and they had lacked the means of attacking it. They had spread out along it in search of a weak spot, and that had cost them dearly.
The electricity was on, as Starn could tell from steam rising from the wet insulators on the fence posts. The rain was helping them again by shorting the wires to some degree.
"Did Houg get that chain through?" he asked.
"Yes," reported Huill.
"Tell him to bring it up."
Houg came warily forward from the back-up group, lugging a length of heavy chain.
"Put it down here," said Starn, "and all of you move back a little." As they did so, he picked up the chain, swung it in his hand to get the feel of it, and then tossed it into the barbed wire. A noisy uproar of sparks erupted as the iron links looped over the lower four strands and shorted them into the soggy ground.
"Wow!" complained Houg.
Starn's expectation was that the sparks would burn through the wire strands, or at least weaken them enough for him to finish the job with a quick, fairly safe swipe of his hatchet. After watching the sparks briefly, he decided the hatchet would be necessary to part the heatresistant wire.
He wiped the hatchet handle as dry as he could get it and moved up to kneel carefully beside the dancing chain, ignoring the sparks leaping about him. He leaned forward on his left arm, took precise aim at the wires and brought the hatchet down in a firm stroke.
There was an instant of elation as he felt the blade slice through the strands, but after that a sudden nightmare of pain and confusion. The loose ends of the wire whipped and coiled like unleashed spring-steel snakes. One caught him murderously in the groin, shredding his protective leather and his flesh like so much wet paper, before jerking away to roll into a tight coil against the nearest post. Another grabbed his left forearm and didn't let go. It wrapped the arm in a tearing, bone-snapping grip, and dragged him hard into the post.
Dimly he heard Huill shouting something about "Memory Metal," and felt his companions tugging at him. I know about things like that, he thought in a strangely detached way. A rubber band that goes back to its original shape after it has been stretched a long time. But who would have thought a coil of wire could be made with such a strong memory, and one that would last for so many decades!
He pulled his mind back to the job and ordered, "Never mind me! Go get that gun! And other weapons!"
He didn't know if the order was obeyed or not.
The bed fabrics felt sleekly soft to his hands, and the bed itself strangely smooth. When he opened his eyes the flat whiteness of the ceiling overhead told him he definitely was not in Foser Compound.
An Olsapern hospital-prison? He had heard of such places from certain elderly Pack men who had been in them after being wounded and captured in skirmishes with the Olsaperns. They had been healed, given the Treatment, and released.
Suddenly remembering the slashing barbed wire, he lifted his left arm to examine it. It was strong and whole. But it wasn't his arm. A graft. He wondered who it had belonged to as he studied it, comparing its fingers—a little too long and thin—to those of his right hand.
But he had received another injury. He quickly reached under the cover to explore with anxious fingers. What he didn't find left him with a dismal empty feeling. Despite his father's position as the Gene's Voice of Pack Foser, Starn had never been overly occupied with the forms of religion, but his faith was deep nevertheless. There was for him an essential rightness in the concept of the Ultimate Novo, the completely-sensed man of the future, the reason beyond reasons for man's existence in his present confused, troubled, and unfulfilled shapes. He was trending toward the Ultimate; that was his highest task.
And Starn had been specially blessed with a new sense, one that he had expected—with what he hoped was due humility—would be preserved in his offspring to bring the Ultimate Novo into being far sooner than most people would dare hope—perhaps while the name of Starn of Pack Foser was still recalled in the legends.
But he would produce no offspring now! That strand of barbed wire had seen to that!
The realization was numbingly bitter. Had the Sacred Gene forsaken him for unworthy pride? Or was his special sense of no value after all, something that should not be passed on?
And what of his wife, whose expectation of children was, if possible, stronger than his own?
But of course, he realized with a start, childlessness was a price he would have had to pay, regardless of that barbed wire, once he fell into the infidel hands of the Olsaperns. It was part of the Treatment. The Olsaperns did two things to men of the Packs taken in battle. They installed a psychological block that would prevent a released man from fighting the Olsaperns again. And they performed an operation to render him sterile, so he could breed no new enemies to attack their sons.
There was a certain comfort in this thought, because the danger of the Treatment was one that had to be faced by any man dedicated to the armed support of his Pack. That dedication made the danger acceptable, even to a special individual like Starn, because the Pack's heritable potential was more important to the Ultimate than that of any one of the Pack's members.
The door of the hospital room opened and an Olsapern walked in—one of the few Starn had ever seen in the flesh, so he studied him curiously. He looked human enough, except that he was closely shaven instead of trimmed, which gave him an odd young-old look. Other than that and his pure-white clothing, he might have passed for a Pack man—a little large, perhaps, but so was Starn.
"Awake at last, huh?" grunted the Olsapern. "I'll get you some breakfast." He left without waiting for a reply.
Starn decided that, thanks to the skills of the Olsapern medics, he felt like getting up. He found clothing, and managed to figure out how to dress himself before the orderly returned.
The food was good despite its unfamiliar taste. When he had eaten he prowled around the windowless room, tried the door and found it locked, and finally sat down on the bed. He did not rise when the door opened to let in a middle-aged man, somewhat taller than himself, in gray jacket and trousers.
"You're Raid Leader Starn of Pack Foser," the man said, not making it a question.
Starn nodded.
"My name's Higgins. I'm Director of Domestic Defense," the visitor said.
The title meant little to Starn, except that he could not recall any ex-prisoners of the Olsaperns telling of encountering such a person. He said nothing.
"That raid of yours made a real glom!" the older man finally remarked.
After a pause, Starn said, in the best Book-English he could muster, "I was not conscious to witness the outcome."
"Speak your dialect!" Higgins said impatiently. "I can understand it. As for the outcome of your raid, none of your men got much farther than you did. Two of them, named Jaco and Houg, were killed, and another besides yourself was captured. His name is Huill. He was questioned and Treated and returned to your Pack a week ago."
"Seven days?" asked Starn. "How long have I been here?"
"About three weeks."
A long time to be unconscious! thought Starn.
"You really glommed things!" Higgins grunted. Crossly Starn responded, "What's your complaint? You beat us off, didn't you?"
"Yeah, we beat you off, but not before you softened the mine's outer defenses, and spied some of our interior layout! And you Pack people, with your lousy telepaths, can't keep secrets! So when Nagister Nornt came along a day later he helped himself to weapons none of you should have, much less Nagister Nornt!"
Startled, Starn asked, "What has he done with the weapons?"
"For one thing he's forced your Pack to hand over your wife! And he shot up two of our trading posts!" Starn sat in stiff silence, trying to conceal his sick dismay.
"One consoling thought for you," the Olsapern added, "is that your wife was already pregnant."
"Cytherni pregnant?" gasped Starn.
"She was waiting until after the raid to tell you, and the telepaths were keeping her secret. Nornt will not make a slavie out of her as long as she's cooperative."
"You got this from Huill?"
"Partly. We made him talk freely."
"Where's Nornt now?"
"If I knew, I might not be here!" growled Higgins.
"We've got to recover those weapons! And kill him if we get the chance! He's trouble now, and could be big trouble in the future!"
* * *
Starn had been about to demand his immediate release, so he could hunt Nornt down and rescue Cytherni. But the words "big trouble in the future" made him pause.
Yes, the Ultimate Novo would definitely be "big trouble in the future" for Higgins and all the obsolete Olsaperns! And though Starn wanted Cytherni back, and wanted to be the known father of his unborn child, the fact remained that he could give Cytherni no more children. And Nornt, distasteful though the thought might be, could! Also, Nornt could very well be in direct line to the Ultimate! Personal animosity had to be thrust aside for such a profound religious consideration.
He saw that Higgins was watching him with an air of almost friendly expectancy. A very clever fellow, this Higgins! The way he seemed to take for granted that Starn was his ally against Nornt was so convincing that Starn had been almost taken in! But Higgins had let slip a telling reminder that he was an Olsapern, while Starn and Nornt were Pack men.
It was a mistake, Starn decided, to even converse with this man. So he sat in silence.
Higgins fidgeted and growled, "No trafficking with the enemy, huh? O.K., if you're the kind who'll let his only child be destroyed by that creature Nornt, there's no point in talking!" He started for the door.
"Hold it!" snarled Starn. "Nornt won't destroy my child!"
Higgins turned. "No? Do you think he'll let your child grow up to challenge his own brood? Nornt believes in his own bloodline, not yours!"
"That's absurd! It's against the creed of the Sacred Gene!"
Higgins shrugged. "All I know is what I was told by the men who returned your friend Huill to Foser Compound. They parleyed with your Pack chief, who told them what Nornt had thought when he discovered his prize was pregnant. He doesn't mean to let your child grow up, creed or no creed! Oh, he'll make a pretense for a few years, to keep the child's mother content. But when the child's about six . . . well, it will 'wander off' some day and never be found! And not being a telepath, your wife won't learn the truth from Nornt!"
"That's the kind of lie I ought to expect from degraded infidel scum!" roared Starn, surging to his feet and facing the bigger man.
But Higgins showed no anger nor intention to fight. He smiled, and shook his head sadly.
"I don't wish to argue religion with you, Raid Leader," he said. "That would only raise animosity between us, and stir up side issues at a time when we ought to work together for a common cause. But let me point out a couple of facts. One, if I'm lying, you'll find that out soon enough when you return to your Compound, so the lies would have gained me nothing. Two, if Nagister Nornt is a step toward where your Sacred Gene wants humanity to go, then your Gene has chosen a most despicable vessel!"
"The ways of the Gene are mysterious to the eyes of man," Starn quoted sternly.
"They are that!" sighed Higgins. "So mysterious that he can lead you in reverse for centuries and you still think you're going forward!"
"The way of the Gene has no turning!" snapped Starn. He stared at the Olsapern in disgust. "Even your primitive Science should tell you that! The ancients knew that evolution moved steadily ahead, as relentless as death and time!"
"That was one of the errors of the Science Age," said Higgins easily. "They knew so much that they didn't know how much was still unknown! Don't try to tie me down to the beliefs of Science, Raid Leader! That age fell under its own weight, and good riddance! It was just another experience men should learn from, although many men, including your own ancestors, learned less than they should!
"There are relationships, Raid Leader, that ancient scientists never recognized. They specialized too much to see the broad interweavings of nature. For example, they never observed the linkages between certain unconscious levels of the mind and the information of heredity which is coded in DNA molecules. Consequently, they would have denied as readily as you do that the profound psychological shock which hit the human race when the Science Age toppled could have any direct effect on our evolutionary process. They would have said the extreme change in environment would make certain traits more suitable for survival than if the Science Age had continued, but this would merely be a change in the selection vector, not in the evolutionary force itself.
"But we know differently today, Raid Leader. The state of the human mind can communicate with the genetic code structure, thereby changing the structure. And the collapse of human morale that went with the collapse of Science was a clear message—a signal to retreat!—to the codons of the vast majority of the race! About the only people who escaped the reversal were the few who realized that the Science Age should fall, that despite its victories it had turned reactionary and anticreative."
Higgins paused, then concluded thoughtfully, "I hope history will call our own time the Creative Age. Science could have been that, but despite its lip service it never really loved creativity, nor fostered the creative personality. Probably not one of its adults in a hundred was allowed to develop into effective creativity, and that alone was enough to doom the Science Age!"
Trembling with rage, Starn forced himself to sit down on the bed again. Such heresy was hard to endure! Especially that absurdity about the human mind influencing—actually changing!—DNA! As if the humble human intellect could not only enter the inviolable abode of the Sacred Gene in man, but could pillage there!
Still, Higgins had been right about one thing: the futility of religious argument between Pack man and Olsapern. And he might be right in his estimation of Nagister Nornt. The telehypnotic trader would indeed be a despicable vessel for the will of the Sacred Gene, particularly if he meant to subvert that will by murdering Starn's child.
At last Starn growled, "If you Olsaperns are so creative, why don't you create a way to catch Nagister Nornt?"
"Self-restraint," answered Higgins. "I'm not going to explain that, because it's something you shouldn't know. I'll only say that we limit ourselves, in our relations with the Pack people, in the materials and techniques we use. I'm pretty sure you won't believe that; otherwise I wouldn't have said even that much!"
"You're right, I don't!" grumbled Starn. "But never mind. You want me to find Nornt and kill him, don't you?"
Higgins nodded. "I'm prepared to give you a little help if you'll try."
"What kind of help?"
"Have you ever noticed that Treated men are poor hunters and fighters?" asked Higgins.
"No. The only ones I know are old men."
"Well, they are. The psychological block that keeps them from fighting us can't be strictly contained. It dims their combative spark generally. If you're going up against Nagister Nornt, you'll have a better chance if you're left Untreated. So here's my offer, Raid Leader: I'll release you without Treatment in return for your solemn oath to never participate in hostile action against normal—against the Old Sapiens as you call us—in the future."
Starn gave a grunt of disbelief. "You can't break your rules like that!"
"Rules are useful in ordinary situations," replied Higgins. "They are meant to be broken when an emergency demands radical action."
This was a strange attitude toward rules, but it was of no concern to Starn. The offer was one he felt he could honestly accept. "I solemnly promise not to war against the Olsaperns in the future," he said.
"Good! Now let's get you home! And this time, for pity's sake, follow your own ideas when you go after Nornt! Don't let anybody sidetrack you the way they did before!"
"Huh? Who sidetracked me? How?" demanded Starn.
"Your Pack chief. He insisted that you work with the Pack instead of going after Nornt as soon as you were aware of the danger! From what I've learned of this socalled 'surprise sense' of yours, I'm pretty sure you could have killed him then, while he was wounded and confused. All this glom would have been avoided!"
Starn stared at the man. Higgins was full of surprises, himself! He all but admitted the Olsaperns' inability to track down Nornt; he broke a basic rule to help Starn do the job instead; and now he seemed to be half-praising a Novo sense! But then the Olsaperns lacked a religion of their own, in opposition to that of the Packs. They had a sort of nonreligion. And maybe a nonreligion wasn't of much help in keeping a man's thinking straight. Or maybe the Olsaperns were finally falling apart, as they were destined to do sooner or later, anyway.
But Starn found Higgins' advice in accord with his own thinking, so he nodded. "I wished many times that I had gone after Nornt immediately. If I had settled everything then, Cytherni and I would still be like we were."
"I don't know about that," frowned Higgins. "I think you could have killed him, but he would probably have finished you while you were doing it! What I'm saying is that this whole glom would have been avoided, which would have suited me fine!"
Starn returned to Foser Compound for two days, just long enough to pay his respects to his parents and The Foser and to rearm himself. He needed a telepathic companion, and was pleased when Huill volunteered. He had learned that Huill had been captured by the Olsaperns because he had stayed at the electric fence, trying to free Starn, until it was too late to escape. Even though Huill had been Treated, Starn felt high confidence in him. They set out on horseback, following Nornt to the south. Trailing the trader, which the Olsaperns had found all but impossible, was no job at all for them. They could ask friendly questions and get friendly answers from the folk who lived along the way. Nornt was not trying to conceal his tracks. He was trading as he went, in his usual manner. The telepaths Huill communicated with generally knew where Nornt intended to make his next few stops, but he was avoiding thoughts of his winter destination.
"He's worrying everybody," remarked Huill after they were several days on the road. "They don't like the way he's thinking. He wants . . . everything! He was vaguely like that all along, but since he captured those Olsapern weapons and took Cytherni, he's much worse! He thinks about having children who will be telehypnotics like himself, and about getting craftsmen together who can copy those weapons. He's figuring his sons and weapons will make him king of the world!"
Starn nodded grimly. "The Olsaperns seem to be afraid of something like that," he agreed.
"I thought they'd never quit probing at me about him and his Novo ability," complained Huill. It went on for hours, and they got more worried, the more I told them! They made me talk a lot about you, too."
"I can imagine," said Starn.
"But your Novo ability didn't worry them. It just aroused their curiosity, because it was something they had never heard of before."
"Isn't Nornt's a new one, too?" Starn asked.
"They don't think so . . . well, of course, you know they don't think any Novo senses are really new, and that people had them back when we were still almost like the apes a million years ago. But they think there have been people with a little of what Nornt has in historical times—a combination of telepathy and hypnotic force. They think men like Alexander, Hitler, Rasputin, Barstokee and Quillet had touches of it."
"All those men were supposed to be crazy," Starn remarked.
"And you think Nornt isn't!" said Huill. "The Olsaperns call him a megalomaniac."
"They seem to know all about him, except how to catch him," Starn remarked wryly.
"They're a knowing bunch of people," replied Huill seriously. "Of course, they're wrong about, a lot of things, too, like thinking we're subhuman and that the Novo senses aren't worth studying, much less having. But you know what, Starn?"
"What?"
"One of the Olsaperns who questioned me would be a telepath if he could let himself. He had the sense; I could feel the shape of it in him. But, somehow, he couldn't use it at all. I guess because if he could, that would've made him a Pack man."
The mountains slanted eastward to the south and Nornt's trail gradually climbed into the higher foothills. Starn had been thinking for days about possible strategies of attack, but as he and Huill approached maximum telepathic range of the trader he dropped these thoughts. Instead, he concentrated on getting into a position where he and Huill would have flexibility of action—where his special sense would have plenty of room in which to work.
The foothills seemed right for this. They were almost empty of people, and provided a variety of covers and obstacles, without fettering choices the way high mountains could.
He was under no delusion that victory was assured. Nornt had around twenty slavies to throw into the fight, and he would not hesitate to expose them to any risk imaginable to save himself.
But in compensation, Starn had his advantage of surprise. This was no small thing in conflicts where full telepathic knowledge of the opponents' plans and strategies was taken for granted. As Raid Leader of Pack Foser, Starn's unanticipated actions and decisions had often given his men a more than momentary advantage, because of the time required for the enemy to shift forces to meet a totally unexpected situation.
They were riding up a thickly-wooded valley, following the bed of an ancient highway, when Huill made contact with Nornt's rear guard. "Three of them!" he reported.
"About half a mile ahead of us and a mile behind the main train with one telepathic relay between them! They're on horseback!"
"Let's take them!" snapped Starn, pushing his mount into a gallop.
Huill stayed alongside him. He chuckled. "Nornt didn't expect us! He's in a panic . . . Something about getting to Pile-Up Mountain . . . Hey, guess what? He premotes the Olsaperns are in this with us! Instead of running he's driving his wagons off the road to get them out of sight of Olsapern fliers!"
"Why does he think that? Can't he read us?"
"Yeah, but he thinks we could be leading the Olsaperns to him without us knowing about it! He figures they made you trackable somehow while you were captured!" It was a strange but possible notion which Starn wondered about briefly and dismissed. There were more urgent matters to think of.
"Can we overtake the rear guard before they reach the wagons?" he asked.
"I think so. He's making them slow up to hold us back while he fortifies himself. He's trying to get the Olsapern guns set up! Hey, the rear guard's turned off to the west! Nornt figures we'll either have to follow them down or take a chance of having them come in behind us!"
"He's right," said Starn grimly. "We follow the rear guards. Lead the way!"
A short distance farther Huill swung off to the right in the track of the three riders. Meanwhile, he reported, Nornt was deploying his men in defensive positions.
"Can you read Cytherni?" asked Stare.
"Indirectly, yes. She's all right. He's still leaving her alone in return for her good behavior. She doesn't know what's scaring him . . . doesn't know you're here."
"What about the men we're chasing?"
"They're riding hard, and Nornt's looking for a good place for them to make a stand." A few minutes passed.
"Stop!" yelled Huill.
"They've ridden out of range! No need to chase them any farther."
"How'd they outdistance us?" Starn demanded.
"Not us! I mean they're out of Nornt's range! They're not his men any longer! And not our enemies . . . not much use to themselves either!" Huill looked a bit sick from what he was seeing in the ex-slavies' minds. "They'll die soon if somebody doesn't find them and take them in."
"Let's head back," Starn ordered. They turned their horses and he asked, "Why did he let them get away?"
"He didn't intend to. It's hard to judge telepathic range when you travel twisted roads like these. He's down to seventeen men now."
Starn nodded, wondering if he and Huill would have to fight them all before getting at Nornt.
"He sure means for us to!" said Huill. "He's trying to locate ten of them out where they can close in on us no matter where we strike!" He described the terrain between them and Nornt, and the placement of the defenders.
They were less than a mile from the wagons when Starn noticed a trail angling off to the left and apparently up a low ridge that paralleled the road. Without hesitation he swung his mount into the trail and up the ridge.
"He didn't notice this trail," informed Huill.
"I hoped he hadn't. How many men are in front of us?"
"Just four on the ridge. But those across the road are moving over to head us off . . . A steep bank in the roadcut's blocking them! They can't get up in time!"
Starn grinned. His sense was working with its usual success! "Nornt's crazy-mad!" Huill reported gleefully.
"You ought to read the things he's thinking about us! He's going to fight his men like maniacs!"
"Be ready to yell and jump for cover the instant one of them sees us," warned Starn.
Their horses galloped along the silent ridge, both men sharply alert.
"Jump!" Huill yelled suddenly.
Starn tensed but didn't jump. Instead he spurred his horse into a sudden sprint forward.
Gunfire spurted from the bushes ahead, and Starn heard an answering bark from Huill's long-gun. His surprise maneuver had fooled the defenders, though. At least two of them fired where he would have been if he had jumped, and the other two had shot at Huill. Before they could cock and re-aim he had ridden past them and leaped from his horse. They were caught between an enemy in front and an enemy behind.
His first shot downed the only slavie in plain sight, while Huill yelled hoarsely, telling him there were two left and their locations. Starn stayed low, making swift moves as his sense inspired him. The slavies took several shots, all aimed at him as far as he could tell. Huill's gun spoke twice more giving him covering fire. Finally he brought a slavie into plain view and shot him through the chest as he was raising his gun.
"The last one's taking off down the south slope!" called Huill in a tight voice.
Is Huill hurt? Starn wondered, dashing after the slavie.
"In the leg, just as I jumped!" Huill yelled the reply.
"Get him and hurry back!"
Starn put caution aside as he dashed after his quarry. When he was halfway down the hillside and approaching a rocky bald area he heard Huill's distant bellow. "To your left!"
Starn dropped on his backside to slide down a pebbly stretch while his eyes searched for the enemy. A spurt of gunfire, aimed too high, revealed the man, and Starn threw a pistol shot at him. The man rolled out of his hiding place with dying hands clutching his stomach.
"They're up the bank!" Starn heard Huill's dim call. Hurriedly he started back, losing his footing once on the loose pebbles. He had not gone far when he heard Huill shout, "They're on me!" A volley of shots rang out.
"Huill!" he called in the ensuing silence. No answer.
Without hesitation but with deep sorrow, Starn turned left toward the wagons, fighting his way through the undergrowth at a dead run. Telepathically blind now, his only hope was to bull and sense his way through to Nornt, and kill the man before the slavies could kill him. From what Huill had said of the terrain, the wagons and their master had to be somewhere below the south end of the ridge. If he could find a high spot that overlooked them . . .
He could hear the slavies thrashing through the woods some distance to his rear and to his right. At best, he had only a half-minute lead on them. He would have to hurry if he—
A long-gun spurted from behind a tree just ahead of him and a slug hit his left shoulder, knocking him sprawling. He clung to his rifle but was lying on top of it. Before he could get it into action the slavie stepped out of hiding and shot him in the right forearm.
"I gave your friend a clean death, Starn the Olsaperns' eunuch!" said the slavie, voicing Nornt's thoughts with an expressionless face. "He was a mere telepath who never did me any real harm. But you and that quick knife of yours have caused me much pain! During the next few minutes, before you die, you're going to suffer as much as I have in the past two months!"
The slavie's gun fired again, and the slug tore into Starn's left ankle. The other slavies had arrived by then, and a couple of them got out their knives and began methodically slashing and stabbing Starn's limbs and body, careful not to deliver any immediately fatal wounds, and pausing when he almost blacked out.
"You should see yourself, eunuch!" said the first slavie.
"What a revolting shambles you are! Even your friends the Olsaperns couldn't patch your body now! Especially after we break your spine in a few places! Try to stay with us for this, eunuch! I don't want you to miss any of the fun!"
But when something heavy struck him in the small of the back, the torture ended for Starn.
He was shocked into sudden wakefulness. Overhead was a white ceiling he had seen before, and at one side was the remembered face of the Olsapern Higgins. Two white-clad medics were detaching electrodes from his chest and wheeling a machine away from his bedside.
"Sorry we couldn't get there fast enough to save more of you, Starn," said Higgins. "And there was nothing we could do for your friend Huill. He was shot through the head. But we arrived in time to keep them from damaging your brain, and everything else is replaceable." Starn regarded him steadily and replied, "I'm not grateful for this, Olsapern."
Higgins muttered "I suppose not," and turned away for a moment. Then he asked, "How do you feel?"
"Like I ought to be dead," grunted Starn. But he sat up with a feeling of dreamy detachment and looked down at his bare body.
No, not his body, but a fair copy. At least it wasn't the patchwork of grafts he expected to see. But on the other hand, it was not quite real human flesh. And it definitely did not feel real. The sensations of touch, when he experimentally squeezed his left arm, were strange. His brain got the message all right: that his forearm was being squeezed by his right hand. But it was as if the message was in a new language with a new sound. There was no suggestion of pain, for one thing.
"What is this?" he asked.
"Your body? It's an artificial structure, a sort of machine of pseudo-flesh and bone. I'm sorry it has to be artificial. We can regenerate your entire body—your brain contains all the information needed for that, of course—but that takes time we don't have. Nagister Nornt is still at large, and your wife is still in his hands."
"She can stay there," retorted Starn dully. "He defeated me in a fair fight—his Novo abilities against mine. That ends it."
Higgins frowned thoughtfully. "You mean he's proved himself your superior, and has earned the privilege of mating with your wife, and destroying your own child, without further interference from you," he said.
Starn winced but nodded.
"That's the will of your Sacred Gene, so to speak."
Again Starn nodded.
Higgins grunted in disgust. "I halfway anticipated this! How do you like that? I anticipated your attitude without being a premonitor! Get some clothes on! I'm sending you on a little trip!"
A few minutes later Starn was put aboard a flier which carried him south almost to the Hard Line that guarded the Olsapern border. The craft set down at a small complex of buildings and the pilot ushered him into one of them. An older Olsapern than Starn had seen before greeted him.
"My name's Richhold, and I'm an anthropologist if that means anything to you," the man said. "I understand I'm supposed to give you an illustrated lecture, in the company of an old friend of yours. Holden, send that telepath in."
The pilot went out and a few moments later Rob of Pack Foser entered.
"Rob!" exclaimed Starn. "It's good to see you!"
Rob stared at him, gasped, and backed away. "W-what are you?" he stuttered in terror.
"Why . . . I'm Starn, Rob! I know I don't look exactly like I did, but I'm still me!"
"But I c-can't read you! I can't even know you're there!"
"You mean I'm a blank?" asked Starn in amazement. Rob gulped and nodded.
Starn could guess what must have happened. The Olsaperns had some means of screening a brain against telepathy, and they had built the screen into his artificial skull. This was a numbing thought, because Starn had never heard of such a thing, and was, therefore, inclined to doubt if it could have come out of the Science Age. If it had, it would have been used before now, and there would be legends about it.
And it was completely unacceptable that either the ancient scientists or their diehard followers, the Olsaperns, had devised a counter to telepathy that even outdid his own Gene-given sense!
The Olsapern Richhold fidgeted impatiently while Starn and Rob discussed these thoughts. "Never mind that!" the old man snapped at last. "You don't know what you're talking about, anyway! You're here to learn a few things, and this telepath was talked into coming so he could verify that what I tell you is the truth, so far as I know it. So let's get started!"
He waved his hand and a wall of the room vanished to display a series of projections and exhibits. Richhold spoke boredly about what was being shown, as if this were elementary stuff that he had recounted a hundred times before.
The lecture proceeded backward through the history of man, starting with a typical Olsapern figure and modifying it step by step, back to a creature Richhold called "the link." Each modification was justified by the replica of a skeleton which he said originated in the era being described.
"You don't see people today who look like the link," said Richhold when the backward journey was completed. "But let's come forward and look again at some later models."
The projection revealed a squat, scraggly-haired creature with a near-gorilla face and a sharply-receding forehead. "Higgins said he wanted you to take a good look at this one. Resemble anyone you know?"
Starn grimaced with annoyance but nodded. Higgins' intentions in exposing him to this lecture were obvious, because the projection looked like Nornt, except Nornt's forehead was higher and straighter.
"All right," said Richhold, "let's move several thousand years closer to the present." He chuckled and glanced at Rob when the new image appeared.
"My head's not that low!" snarled the telepath.
"True," agreed Richhold, "but look at the shape of your jaw, and the form and stance of your body!"
"Hold on!" said Starn. "People come in all shapes and sizes, and you know it! Higgins is a large man; you're small! The pilot who brought me here is thin; one of the men at the hospital is fat! And your faces and heads have different shapes!"
"We're dealing with averages!" snapped Richhold crossly.
"But that's not all!" said Starn. "How do you get off calling us apemen when you can see our brains are much bigger than those you've been showing us?"
Richhold shrugged. "Cave bats go blind in a comparatively few generations, but keep their eyes much longer. Land animals which return to live in the sea keep vestiges of their legs for millions of years, and seldom lose their lungs at all. So in man the brain grew and developed slowly as he became more advanced; now the portion of the race that is regressing isn't losing its big brain immediately. You won't be exactly the same on the way down as you were on the way up. You'll carry remembrances of what you were. But the big brain will finally go."
"You claim to be so all-knowing about the direction we're going," sneered Starn, "but your whole theory depends on that stupid idea Higgins told me about—that the unconscious mind can communicate with the chromosomes. How do you know that nuclear radiation didn't cause the mutations of the Pack men, aside from the ones authored by the Sacred Gene to give us our senses? There was radiation when Science fell, wasn't there?"
"Radiation had its effects, certainly," rapped Richhold, "but they were doubtless random in direction, seldom even viable. Don't argue with facts, young man! There is evidence in plenty that Pack mutations have been in a regressive direction.
"As for that 'stupid idea' as you call it, of a linkage between the unconscious and the genetic structure, its existence has been rigorously demonstrated by a means I can't expect you to understand. The ancients almost discovered it, but they were looking in the wrong direction and for something else at that time. They were trying to find a cure for the aging process, of all things!"
"They discovered that the cells of normal human tissue can subdivide through only sixty cell-generations or thereabouts, before the cells lose their functionality and die out. They were very interested in discovering the reason for this, hoping thereby to make their cells, and thus themselves, practically immortal.
"The reason is obvious, of course, to anyone who knows communication theory. In repeated transmissions any message suffers a loss of information. That's entropy, young man, and it's unavoidable. When a cell divides, it must, in a real sense, transmit its genetic message to both new cells. The information loss is unimportant through many subdivisions, but becomes critical in human cells after about fifty generations. After that the cells, the tissues, the human body in general, must go downhill at a rather rapid rate.
"But instead of asking why human cells deteriorate, the ancients should have been asking a far more important question: Why do other types of living cells fail to deteriorate? Why do one-celled animals go on subdividing for millions of years without apparent loss of genetic information? Is the code transmission mechanism in these creatures perfectly error-free?
"The answer is that it can't be; no such process is perfect! There has to be a corrective agent, something completely outside all the redundancies and other corrective processes of the transmission mechanism itself, something that 'knows' when the message is getting garbled, and can step in and clear it up.
"The word 'consciousness' is as good a description for that agent as I can expect you to understand. One-celled animals have it. So do many kinds of cells in plants, and in other animals.
"But it is missing in the cells of humans, and in other animals that stop growing when they reach maturity. Why is it missing? Because in these creatures 'consciousness' has become concentrated in special organs, to serve the needs of the animal as a whole. This is a kind of sacrifice cells are often called on to make when they become components of a more complex organism. They give up their abilities to respond as individuals to environmental stimuli—to light, to heat, to contact, even to the presence of nourishment.
"But that old cellular consciousness of the genetic message is not completely lost when the consciousness becomes concentrated. It is still there, almost totally buried in the unconscious mind of the human, but functional to a limited extent. The mind can direct it at times, provided the mind maintains the same desire with sufficient intensity through a sufficiency of human generations.
"Thus, when the post-Science environment told the average human 'Retreat!' the message got through. And your genes retreated! Back to primitivism!"
Starn gazed at Richhold for a long moment after the scientist fell silent. Then he said, "This 'consciousness' you speak of sounds to me like an Olsapern version of the Sacred Gene. What does it do that the Sacred Gene cannot?"
"Nothing," shrugged Richhold. "The only difference is that the 'consciousness' is real. Probably so!"
Starn glanced a question at Rob, but got no response. He had forgotten the telepath couldn't read him. "Does he believe all that nonsense?" he had to ask aloud.
Rob nodded. "As far as he knows, he's telling it straight. And the Olsaperns think he's very wise about such things." His voice took on a whining tone. "He's got me all confused! I can't go back to the Pack halfway believing the stuff he's said! They'd kick me out!"
"We're not novices in dealing with such trivial mental problems!" snorted Richhold. "You'll be hypnoed into forgetting everything you've experienced here! It's a shame in a way to send you back as ignorant as you came, but that's our policy, and a necessary one."
Rob looked relieved.
The stunning thing to Starn was not that Rob had found the mind of Richhold honest, but that, after looking behind the man's thoughts as they were expressed, the telepath had been forced to believe them!—or if not to believe, then at least to doubt the eternal truths of the Sacred Gene and the Ultimate Novo!
The whole matter was so completely absurd!
In a mental turmoil, he scarcely realized his interview with Richhold was over, and that Rob was rather nervously shaking his hand and saying, "Great Gene, Starn, I'm glad I won't have to remember this, or seeing you all vacant inside!"
He remained in a distracted state all the way back to the hospital-prison, where he was vaguely relieved not to find Higgins waiting for him in his room. He was in no condition to talk to the Olsapern or to anybody else.
Higgins stayed away for two days, until Starn came out of his shocked stupor. When he appeared, Starn glowered at him.
"I've got one question to ask you Olsaperns, Higgins: Where do you think you're going? You have no belief in the Gene, so how do you find any purpose or direction in your lives? What are you good for?"
Higgins smiled at him. "Old Richhold really shook you up, didn't he? Where are we going? The same place you think you are! Toward a more advanced human species! The difference is that we define the superman quite a bit differently than you.
"Take these Novo senses, for instance. Did Richhold tell you the theory that apemen had some of them a million years ago?"
"I've heard that one before," growled Starn.
"Of course, it's only a theory and can't be proved. Some of Richhold's colleagues say the Novo senses are just make-work activity for your left-over big brains, but others suspect that the dawn men needed those special senses to survive in a savage environment, full of enemies stronger and faster—and at that time probably just as bright—than they were.
"That may be right. At any rate, the Novo senses can't be the next step up for man, because they make a specialist out of him! Man's whole strength is his lack of specialty, his ability to find ways to live anywhere, eat anything, do anything! Specialists are so loaded with their special equipment that they can't change! They're static, inflexible!
"What would your Ultimate Novo be, Starn? Telepathic, premonitorial, perceptional, and maybe hypnotic like Nornt? All right, what would he do with all those abilities? Would he use them to build a marvelous civilization?"
"Certainly!" replied Starn.
"I'm not so sure he would," chuckled Higgins, "but let's say you're right. He builds his Ultimate civilization, but what does he do then?"
"He lives in it, naturally!"
"Forever?"
"Well . . . " Starn hesitated, suspecting a trap.
"Ah, there's the rub!" trumpeted Higgins. "Forever's a long time! And what will keep your Ultimate Novo from asking himself the same question you asked me? Where will he be going, Starn?"
"Perhaps there will be more Novo senses to develop, senses we don't know about now," Starn replied.
"Ah! Then he won't be the Ultimate until he's acquired them all! You're begging the question! Once the ultimate Ultimate comes, where does he go from there?"
"Why do you think he'll have to go anywhere?" stormed Starn. "We don't know what he'll be like! Maybe he wouldn't need a purpose in life of the kind we understand!"
"Very good!" approved Higgins wryly. "That's the kind of unanswerable supposition that makes further debate futile! But it leaves one question open: Is such an unstriving Ultimate man the kind of goal you striving Pack people consider worthy of your centuries of toil and deprivation? Can you really devote yourself to achieving that kind of result?"
Starn shrugged. What was the use of arguing with an Olsapern who thought he knew all the answers?
After a pause Higgins went on: "Striving, like generalizing, is a basic feature of man, Starn. Make man a specialist and he'll be less than human. And if something ever stopped him from striving the same thing would happen.
"You call us infidels because we don't take your Sacred Gene seriously, except as a scientific principle. And you consider us obsolete, partly because we don't have Novo senses but more because we refuse to disdain the Science Age as an era of rampant evil. Certainly the Science Age brought its own destruction with it, and nearly destroyed man in the process! But that was because it was too much like the civilization you dream of for your Ultimate Novo! It built itself a super structure of interdependent techniques and specialties, social orders, and economic mores that had to become increasingly rigid simply to support itself, the bigger and more complex it grew. It couldn't create answers to the kinds of problems it faced because it was unable to accept those problems. Its rigidity led to its final ruin when it had to change, but couldn't.
"We're not trying to recreate the Science Age, Starn! We know of too many things that were wrong with it! But we do recognize that science was a tremendous step forward for man. Whereas your people have opted for its total rejection, we have tried to retain it, not as a divine revelation or a way of life never to be modified, but as what it was—a step forward.
"In the last analysis, Starn, the mistake of the Science Age was the same one you're guilty of, and the same one the Christian priests made in pre-Science times—the same one practically all civilization-builders have made. You strive for an end to strife—for permanence, either now or in some dreamed-of future, despite the fact that permanence is against the nature of man and the world." Starn remarked, "Then you think man's real future lies in ceaseless change?"
"Yes."
"But you're opposed to change in man himself!" Starn shot back. "You find excuses to treat Novo senses as a dead end, and you refuse to see them when you have them yourselves! You may be right about a lot of things, but you're wrong about the Packs being subhuman, and Novo senses worthless!"
"Why are we wrong? Where's the flaw in our picture?"
"I don't know," Starn admitted angrily, "but the flaw is there somewhere!"
Higgins laughed and replied patiently, "What's the better means of communication, Starn, a language or telepathy? Remember that telepathy has no privacy, as Nornt recently demonstrated to your Pack's dismay. Remember, too, that language can be transmitted over vast distances, and that if it is well-structured and effectively used, it can carry almost precisely the message the sender intends, with no unwanted and perhaps embarrassing side-disclosures."
Starn recalled with a slight wince the anguish of his childhood, when he had to force himself to control his odd thoughts and wild daydreams to avoid the censuring laughter of his telepathic playmates. Of course his childish thoughts were probably worthless, but . . .
But Higgins was continuing: "What's the better means of exploring your surroundings, Starn, special devices we can imagine and create, or your perception? You've noticed, I suppose, that a perceptor detects only objects in motion, and usually only objects moving toward him. Did you know that your weak 'danger sense' is a form of perception that works only when something is moving up behind you? You're not much of a Novo, Starn, with just that one weak sense."
Starn tended to forget his "danger sense" because it proved useful to him so seldom. But Higgins was wrong in saying that was his only Novo sense. He was about to protest when Higgins again interrupted his train of thought.
"And what about premonition? Isn't it far better to understand the functionings of man and nature, so well as to predict what they are likely to do next, than to depend on the spotty, over-emotionalized glimpses of the future your premonitors can produce?
"And the same is true, I think, of any other Novo sense you might propose. With a little effort and creative imagination, we can come up with something better! And with us, it's an open-ended process! Creative imagination knows no ultimate limit, Starn, and has no ultimate goal. It just keeps going! If anything can give man unending existence in a changing universe, his creative mind will do it!"
When Starn finally replied, his question sounded like a non sequitur, but Higgins did not treat it as such.
"Why didn't you let me die?"
The Olsapern smiled. "Because I was using my creative imagination! Sure, we could dream up some means of hunting Nornt down without your help, but that sort of dreaming can take time, and we want Nornt stopped quickly.
"As I told you before, there are methods we refrain from using. I suppose I can explain that to you now. We try not to reveal our capabilities too fully to the Pack people. We use almost nothing in our defenses that was not known to the Science Age, and the only members of our society who allow themselves within reading distance of your telepaths are . . . well, they're our lower-intelligence citizens who don't know—and don't care to learn—just what our capabilities are. You remember that Rob's memories of contact with Richhold had to be erased? Also, it would be bad for the Packs to learn of your artificial body.
"The reason for all this is that we don't want to give the Pack people's morale another shock that would hasten their evolutionary retreat! The past has made them all too susceptible to that kind of damage!
"So you can see why you're the weapon we need, Starn. If you kill Nornt, we will not need to display ourselves to the detriment of the Pack people. Also, we won't run the risk of making a martyr of that madman, which is something else we want to avoid!
"We think your wife and child are worth saving, Starn. Are you with us?"
Starn was tempted. He realized that his religious faith had been seriously eroded by Richhold and Higgins. He no longer felt he would be morally wrong in continuing his battle with a man who had once defeated him fairly. And the sense of deep depression with which he had awakened in his artificial body was giving away to a restlessness, a desire to be doing something—anything at all.
But he shrugged. "What would be the use? What happened before would happen again. I'm the same man Nornt has proved he can beat."
"Not quite," replied Higgins. "Rob couldn't read you, remember! You were a blank to him. You would be the same to Nornt and his slavies! He wouldn't even know you were around unless someone was eyeballing you! And he'll find this body of yours isn't easy to kill!"
Starn considered this. What Higgins said was probably true, and that would make a fight with Nornt a very unusual affair! It would be more like a hunt than a battle. The old woodman skills of following sign and tracking would be more critical, perhaps, than the Novo senses. To a man who had always enjoyed hunting, it was an appealing picture.
Slowly he nodded.
"Fine!" exclaimed Higgins. "Now, there's just one problem that can't be solved the way we did before. Your people won't accept you now, because you can't be read—and we don't want them in contact with you, anyway. So the question is; how do we locate Nornt?"
"I think I know where he is," said Starn thoughtfully.
"Something Huill caught from his thoughts when we first came in range and frightened him. He thought about Pile-Up Mountain. I'll look for him there."
Pile-Up Mountain was a lonely peak at the end of a minor offshoot of the main range. It stood above a low rolling countryside that, while thickly wooded and certainly fertile, was seldom trod by men. The area had an evil repute, and was the subject of numerous ugly legends. Probably some time in the dim centuries of the past, perhaps all the way back in the years of terror following the fall of Science, deeds of great horror had happened thereabouts.
In the pre-dawn of a crisp winter morning a dark Olsapern flier dropped onto a bald strip of old roadway three miles from the mountain, and Starn leaped to the ground. The flier soared away, to follow, from great altitude, Starn's fortunes through special devices included in his artificial body.
Starn walked rapidly toward the mountain, taking advantage of what darkness was left to get close while there was little risk of being seen. The old roadway brought him close under the mountain's steep eastern slope, where he turned into the thick underbrush and began a slow ascent. By then there was enough light to disclose footprints or other signs of man. He did not unsling his long gun, but carried at the ready the weapon he preferred under the circumstances: a powerful bow. He reached the sheer rockwall that stood around the summit without seeing a trace of human trail. This was not surprising; assuming that Nornt really was somewhere about, he would have no need to send his slavies out on sentry patrols. He could trust telepathy to detect any nearby intruders, with perhaps one lookout on the summit to watch for fires and smoke beyond telepathic range.
There would be a trail somewhere, through a break in the rockwall, leading to the summit. Starn began working his way along the foot of the cliff.
He circled almost halfway around the peak before hitting the path. Then he paused in thought. Should he climb to the summit and kill the lookout? If nothing else, the mysterious death of the slavie would scare Nornt, and a frightened opponent was seldom a clever opponent. The decision was taken out of his hands by the sound of footsteps coming up the trail—the morning relief on his way up to replace the night lookout. Starn readied his bow, crouched out of sight behind some brush, and waited.
Starn did not shoot at first sight. He waited until he recognized the slack emptiness of face that marked the man for what he was. Then Starn put an arrow through his throat. The slavie fell, tumbled a few yards down the slope, and lay still.
Starn readied another arrow and waited. Only a few minutes passed before the lookout came rushing down the path, sent by Nornt to learn what accident had befallen his relief. Starn waited until he reached the fallen man, and stood gazing down at him, before zinging an arrow at his back. But this slavie—or perhaps Nornt himself through his presence in the slavie's mind—had a danger sense similar to Starn's. The slavie jumped sideways almost as soon as the arrow flew and took it in his sleeve. He whirled with long gun raised and fired at Starn, who had dropped to the ground as he brought his own gun into play.
The slavie did not shoot a second time. He simply stared at Starn until a slug smashed through his heart. Nornt was just as shocked as Rob had been, Starn guessed, to see a blank man, particularly an enemy probably presumed dead who rose from the ground to kill his slavies. The thing to do was give him no time to recover his wits. With long paces Starn hurried down the trail.
Ghosts were not prominent in Pack religion, since it was not based on expectations of a surviving personal soul. But there were tales of certain spirits of departed men, particularly men whose deaths had been unusually painful and brutal, which walked in evil places on the earth. And Pile-Up Mountain was supposedly an evil place. Nornt probably had little belief in such tales; else he would not have chosen the spot as his hideaway. But if he could be made uncertain, just for a little while, the result could be most important to Starn.
He rounded a curve in the trail and confronted two slavies. He raised his gun and fired, killing one, then leaped sideways. But Nornt had learned something from his previous brushes with Starn. The other slavie did not shoot immediately, but waited until the leap was completed. His slug ploughed into Starn's chest, knocking him backwards. With his gun recocked, he sat up and plugged the slavie in the act of rushing forward. Starn had little time for curiosity about his wound, from which a blood-red oil was oozing. The point was that he was still functioning, so no vital part had been hit. The Olsaperns had provided some sticky repair patches for such eventualities, so he pressed one over the hole and continued down the trail.
As soon as the terrain opened enough he left the path and crept through the brush, to guard against being caught in an ambush. Moving slowly, he went some three hundred yards before his danger sense awakened suddenly to make him whirl and hit the dirt. He had bypassed an ambush, and now the slavies were spreading out through the woods behind him. He could not see them, but the crackling of bushes told the story. Cautiously he readied his bow and waited until the one headed in his direction came into view. He shot him through the heart.
The noise of the other slavies increased as their search became more frantic, but, as Starn had hoped, they did not close in on his position. Since telepathy was only roughly directional, it could actually be confusing when people were spread out and hidden from each other in unfamiliar surroundings. Neither Nornt nor the other slavies knew just where the dead one had been in relation to them, and Starn's silent arrow had not betrayed his position.
Cautiously he crept away from the sound of the hunt, and continued in the direction he had been going, roughly parallel to the trail.
The path curved back to him, and after peering up and down he stepped into the open and increased his speed. The slavies he had slipped past would soon be brought scurrying back to provide Nornt a close defense, and he had to stay ahead of them.
He came upon the tunnel mouth suddenly, and sprinted for cover through a hail of slugs that spurted from an Olsapern weapon concealed within the dark opening. He was hit three times, twice in the body and once in the left arm. The arm was obviously broken, and he had no time for complicated repairs. He discarded his bow—useless to a one-armed man—and edged with a stumbling gait to a spot from which he could approach the tunnel from the side, unseen until he stepped into the opening itself. This maneuver would have brought defenders hurrying into the open if he had been readable, but as a telepathic blank he got away with it.
He entered the tunnel in a staggering run and pushed past the Olsapern weapon and the slavie operating it, collecting two more slugs in the lower part of his body. He shot the slavie down and hastily examined the weapon. The Olsaperns had explained the functioning of these automatic guns to him, and it was easy to adjust this one to fire at anybody approaching or entering the tunnel.
He noticed he was leaking red oil quite rapidly now, and his legs were working erratically. Something in his body had been damaged by those last slugs. But he had escaped head wounds, and he guessed his strange bodymachine would keep working in some fashion as long as his brain was undamaged. He turned and limped deeper into the tunnel, which was dimly lit by occasional oil lamps perched in recesses high in the walls.
"Starn of Pack Foser!" the voice of a female slavie called from some distance ahead. "Leave immediately or I will kill your pregnant wife!"
"That will unite her with me, Nagister Nornt!" he responded hollowly. "Go ahead!"
The voice blasphemed the Sacred Gene and fell silent. Starn moved ahead as fast as he could, his eyes and ears alert for possible attacks from the dark side tunnels. Evidently the carved-out underground labyrinth was huge, and he could not guess its original purpose. He followed the lamps which lighted the portion Nornt was using, guessing they would lead him finally to his enemy. A muffled rattle came from the Olsapern weapon back at the entrance, presumably halting the slavies who had followed him down the trail.
But there was enough trouble waiting for him just ahead, where he rounded an oblique turn and faced Nornt and his final line of defense less than one hundred feet away.
Two Olsapern guns opened fire and the slugs knocked him flat on his back. He had caught a glimpse of two slavie women operating them, of a third female armed with an ordinary long-gun, of the wild face of Nagister Nornt glaring hate at him, and behind them all a huddled form which he guessed was Cytherni.
He had rolled behind the angle in the wall, out of range of the guns. His body was riddled with holes! And the tunnel was totally silent, which hardly seemed likely, so his hearing was obviously knocked out. With a clumsy right hand he explored his head and found a gaping hole through his forehead. A slug had passed through the center of his skull, and even yet he was functioning after a fashion!
The Olsaperns must have placed his brain elsewhere in his body, but where he had no idea. He didn't seem to have enough unpunctured area anywhere to contain a cat's brain!
His sight was flickering on and off, and he knew he had little time left. He managed to drag himself erect and lurch forward, his long gun up and ready for one final shot, and his body leaning into the hail of bullets. He stumbled toward the spurting gunfire, forcing himself to keep moving as the slugs tore at his artificial flesh.
He raised his wavering gun to aim at Nornt's frantic form, then hesitated as his sight flicked off. When his eyes came on again he adjusted his aim, but suddenly fell forward on his face when the Olsapern weapons stopped spurting at him. He was having trouble moving any part of himself, but finally managed to twist his head around so he could see what was happening.
The slavie women were slumped like discarded dolls behind their weapons. Nornt's mouth was open and frothy with screams Starn could not hear, and he cowered back in terror when Starn's eyes stared at him. Cytherni was moving. She took a long-gun from a limp slavie woman, raised it, and shot Nornt down. Then she gazed in horror at Starn for an instant before crumpling.
Starn tried to call out to her, but his voice was gone. Soon whatever life his artificial form had ever held was gone as well.
The dreams went on and on.
Sometimes there were scenes; sometimes there were thoughts that strung themselves together into patterns that seemed to hold astonishing power, but these patterns were elusive. They were suddenly unrememberable when a dim awareness attempted to grasp and hold them.
Scenes and thoughts came and went.
He was fishing on the creekbank, and whirled to confront an approaching danger, and there was Nagister Nornt screaming soundlessly . . . A snake of steel was crumpling his left arm . . . His father was preaching at the Tenthday service and was shouting: "Where is the flaw in our reasoning?" (No, it wasn't his father, it was Higgins.) He stood up and started to answer the question but couldn't remember what the question was . . . His body was being flexed—was this a dream—while it hung suspended between six glowing suns . . . He was with Huill swimming in the river and the water—so warm—swirled against his bare skin . . . He was arguing with Higgins . . . His mother was cooking breakfast, but he was too tired and sleepy to get out of bed . . . Music was weaving strange patterns and somebody was talking in Book-English . . .
There were more scenes, and some returned again and again. The elusive answers and the flexing and the music and the swirling water. The face of Higgins loomed over him against a smooth white ceiling and it said, "You're awake now."
Starn sat up in bed, wondering how many more times this was going to happen in dream or reality, and realized that indeed he was awake.
He stared around the hospital room, trying to get the fantasies in his mind labeled as such and thrust aside, and to remember his last real moment of consciousness. It had to be in the tunnel, when Cytherni had killed Nornt, but that seemed so long ago! He had been in an artificial body which Nornt's slavies had shot up, and—He looked up at Higgins with a sudden question.
"Where was my brain?"
"Here in this building," the Olsapern replied. He grinned. "We finally got a bright idea on how to defeat a telepath! Nornt couldn't read a mind that wasn't even there! So we kept your brain safely bedded down here, but directing your body through a highly redundant system of transceivers. Nornt must have thought he was fighting a ghost!"
"That's what I tried to make him think," said Starn.
"Otherwise he might have killed Cytherni. Is she all right?"
"Oh yes, she's fine! She and the baby will be in to see you shortly, but I wanted to look you over first. Do you feel normal now?"
"I suppose so," shrugged Starn.
"Still a faithful sheep of the Sacred Gene?"
Starn growled at the frivolous tone of the question, "After the way you've used me, Olsapern, I don't even have faith in my own death anymore!"
"Don't take it too hard, lad!" chuckled Higgins.
"That's done with now! I'm not unsympathetic about your state of mind. You've lived through more weirdness than an ordinary Pack man could possibly endure. I'm not sure I could have stood it myself! But you've got an innate flexibility of mind, lad, that couldn't be stiffened by all the rigidities of Pack law and religion! Frankly, I envy you more than I sympathize with you!"
Starn shook his head at this puzzling speech. He got out of bed and looked around for clothes. "If you're through with me," he grumbled, "I want to get back to Foser Compound. Bring in my wife and . . . baby did you say?"
"That's right," nodded Higgins.
"But . . . but Cytherni was only . . . five months gone!"
"And your baby is now nearly a year old," agreed Higgins. "Quit hunting for clothes and go take a look at yourself in the mirror."
* * *
Starn glared at him, and then strode to the full-length mirror on the door. He gazed at his image for several minutes without speaking.
It was his own body, in perfect condition. He had his own left arm back, and . . . and he was a whole man again.
He realized Higgins once remarking that the brain contained all the information needed to reconstruct its body. No wonder those dreams had seemed so endless! They had lasted more than a year while his body was building.
The wonder of his discovery lessened as he stood gazing at his reflection, but his elation grew. He was beginning to remember—and grasp—some of those thoughts that had eluded him during his long dream-state. What he saw in the mirror fit those thoughts precisely.
So far as his appearance was concerned, the kids in the Pack had been right. His posture was too erect, his shoulders too horizontal, his belly too flat, and his head too big for him to look like a Pack man. Physically, even allowing some spread for individual differences, he was thoroughly Olsapern!
And it didn't matter! Except that it supported his new thoughts. After all, he had two Novo senses, one major and one minor.
He thought of Cytherni's figure and frowned. In a purely feminine way, her form departed from the Pack norm in the same direction as his. She had shown no Novo senses . . . but then not every individual had to be living proof of his theory.
Almost to himself he remarked, "She couldn't have given Nornt children that resembled him."
"Your wife?" said Higgins. "Probably true. I have a theory that something deep in Nornt's genetic structure knew he had to be defeated. That Sacred Gene of yours abhors regression in the final analysis, and is trying to block wrong-way evolution among the Pack people. The combination of factors leading to environmental and psychosomatic shock when the Science Age collapsed is breaking up now, as the existence of you and your wife and son amply testify. Anyway, when Nornt chose his mate, something right in all his wrongness led him to pick a woman who could not possibly give birth to a telehypnotist. As I told you before, a rapport exists between genetic information and certain unconscious levels of the mind, so—"
"You always have a theory, don't you, Higgins?" Starn broke in impatiently. "A theory, and a framework of facts to hang it on. But somehow, Higgins, your theories always seem to know more than your facts do!"
Higgins shrugged. "That's the way knowledge advances, Starn. A lot of old information, plus a new bit or two, plus a few guesses about how the new bits fit in and what they mean. We keep in mind that our theories are just guesses. They don't get in the way of recognition of new information when it comes along. Not anymore. We stay flexible."
"You do, do you?" grunted Starn disdainfully. "Then tell me this: How is it that you've never theorized that the genetic shock effects of the fall of Science didn't end quickly, within a couple of generations after the event? The fall wouldn't be much of a shock to people who had no personal memory of it, would it? But as Richhold said, genetic changes don't come and go in one generation. If the Pack people were thrown back then, we could still be showing the effects in our shapes today."
Higgins looked a little surprised, but after a moment he nodded. "An expert in the field might argue with you on that. But I know no objection to the idea. Not that it matters either way . . . "
"No? Well, tell me this, Higgins. Have your people ever made a study of Pack people's traits, from generation to generation, to see if physical indications of regression are rising or falling at the same rate as the Novo senses?"
"I doubt it," said Higgins.
"Then how, in the name of the Sacred Gene or the objective knowledge you pretend to worship, can you tie the two things together? You've failed to make the kind of study that would provide real evidence for or against your belief that the Novo senses and the regressive signs have the same source! You have no use for the Novo senses, just like the ancient scientists. But you can't deny their existence like they did, so instead you put your evidence together in a way that says 'Novo senses are primitive, and no good!'
"What's more, you've overlooked something important about this connection you say exists between the genetic structures and the unconscious mind. The Pack people have been seeking stronger Novo senses for hundreds of years! Our unconscious minds must be as aware of that as they were of the fall of Science! Why don't you admit that this desire might be getting through to our chromosomes, Higgins? Is it because that would be admitting the Pack people are making progress in a very real way, and in a way you haven't touched with all your miraculous gadgetry?"
"Nonsense!" Higgins exploded. "Of all the absurd, self-justifying pieces of warped reasoning I've ever heard—"
"Don't get so red in the face, Higgins," Starn chided him icily. "After all, I was merely presenting a theory."
"Umpf!" grunted Higgins, obviously annoyed at himself over his loss of temper. He simmered down. "I'm sorry I blew up that way, Starn. As you say, you were merely presenting a theory—an extremely childish one, I must say, but . . . "
"Where's the flaw?" asked Starn.
"Let's see if I have this straight," said Higgins. "Your idea is that the fall of Science did have a regressive effect on the Pack people, but that this had nothing to do with the Novo senses, which received their stimulus later on, and from another source."
"That's about it. Where's the flaw?"
"Well, I can't say right off. But there has to be one there somewhere! Something wrong in another way, though, is your motivation for producing such a theory. You have a deep emotional need for it to be true, Starn! The truth of a theory with such a motivation is necessarily suspect."
"And doesn't that apply to Olsapern theories that make Pack men degenerates?" demanded Starn.
"Absolutely not! We have no ill will toward the Pack people. Our trading posts, which we keep going solely to relieve hardships within the Packs, should make that clear."
"Solely for that reason?" Starn countered. "Don't you think helping the poor Pack savages gives you another reason to feel superior? Or that you might actually be trying to keep us inferior by making us dependent?" Higgins grimaced angrily and strode off across the room to gaze out a window. Starn smiled. He had the Olsapern on the run.
"Don't ignore the lesson of this fight with Nagister Nornt, Higgins," he continued relentlessly. "Your science didn't stop him, and our Novo senses didn't stop him. He was beaten by the combination of the two, working together! We needed your talents and you needed ours! You can't keep pretending the Novo senses are worthless, and beneath the attention and understanding of your scientists, when you find them very worthwhile indeed when you're face to face with a dangerous enemy.
"And one final point, which my father made years ago: What about my own special sense, Higgins? I know you Olsaperns are fascinated and puzzled by it. Why? Because it is without precedent! You can't find a single slim thread of evidence tying it to ancestral man! That disturbs you, doesn't it? You're afraid it is something completely new, something leading directly toward the Ultimate Novo!"
He fell silent and eyed Higgins expectantly, waiting for the man to turn and face him. But when Higgins turned, the smile on his face was not one of gracious surrender. It was, startingly, a smile of triumph.
"Starn, lad," he chuckled, "how can you be so sure you're right about everything else when you're so totally wrong about yourself! A special Novo sense? Hell, boy! You have no such thing! What you have is a creative mind, and a fine one even if it is overloaded with nonsense! That 'special sense' is something you created, to meet a critical need of your boyhood, to make you the equal or better of your telepathic playmates!"
Starn shook his head. "It was nothing I did. It was just there."
"Not when you first needed it. Not until you were eight years old. You needed it before then. Novo senses don't wait that late to appear, do they?"
Starn frowned but didn't speak as Higgins continued, "We know quite a bit about the creative process, lad. It's our stock in trade, after all. One thing we know is that it isn't a conscious process entirely. The key activity is unconscious. Of course you have to be aware of a problem that urgently needs solving. Also, it helps to cast around consciously for an answer, or for data and ideas that might help supply one, but this is only to feed the unconscious mind, and to focus its attention. The creative solution doesn't come from reasoning and the use of logic. It suddenly just flashes up from the unconscious! Then all you have to do is make it work.
"In your case, you had to have a defense against telepaths, and your unconscious went to work on the problem. When you were fishing that day and needed the solution, the unconscious had finished its job and gave you the answer! Of course you couldn't understand that it was something you had created—that was part of the solution. You had to think it was a Novo sense, because nothing else would have made you normal and acceptable."
Higgins beamed at him. "Why do you think we've gone to such expenditure of effort and resources to grow you a new and genuine body, now that Nornt is disposed of? Out of sheer gratitude? Not that we're ungrateful for your valuable collaboration in a critical matter, but . . . well, gratitude isn't that strong a motivation.
"We did it because of the unique quality of your mind, your creative potential. We don't know of any mind ever displaying such flexibility, or such immediate or total rapport between conscious and unconscious as that 'special sense' of yours requires. Your wife has more than a touch of it, herself, and your son—well, we'll have to watch him and see. The point is, you've got the seeds of greatness in you, Starn!"
Feeling stunned, Starn slumped on the bed. He had found reason to reject many Olsapern theories, and those objections still held good whether Higgins accepted them or not. But so far as the nature of his own, highlyprized special sense was concerned, the Olsaperns were obviously and damnably right!
Novo senses did not wait until the age of eight to suddenly appear. And there were his strange dream experiences, while his new body was growing, in which hundreds of thoughts and clues had milled around, finally fitting themselves together into answers to the puzzling mysteries that had plagued him for so long—answers that came readily to conscious recall after he woke. The experience fitted Higgins' description of creative thinking with appalling accuracy.
"Then there is nothing special about me," Starn muttered. "No special sense."
"The only special sense anybody needs," Higgins beamed cheerily. "The infinity sense—the creative imagination. There's no limit to it."
Starn hardly heard him, because the world that had opened when he was eight years old had finally, irretrievably closed. He was no unique step toward the Ultimate Novo. He was, in fact, little more than what he looked like—an Olsapern with a silly imagination!
His failure to make Higgins see the value of the Novo senses was another blow. Because he had been wrong about one thing—himself—he had given Higgins the only excuse the man needed to conclude, quite comfortably, that he was wrong about everything else as well. Why, if Higgins thought his mind was so uniquely gifted, was he so eager to discard its products?
Because, Starn realized. Higgins had a mind every bit as tightly closed as that of Starn's own father, back in Foser Compound preaching the gospel of the Sacred Gene and belaboring the sins of the Olsaperns! Higgins could give all the lip service he wished to "objectivity" and willing receptiveness of new data and theories, but on the subject of Novo senses his views were more firmly fixed than the stars in the sky. Reasoning and debating the question would never sway him, nor in all probability the majority of Olsaperns, by an inch!
And with that thought, Starn suddenly saw what he had to do. The infinity sense? That's what Higgins had called it, although creative imagination was not really a "sense" in a strict interpretation of the word. But if that was what Starn had, he might as well put it to work! Higgins was talking: " . . . So why don't you dress and I'll send in your wife and son? Too bad we can't continue this discussion for hours, and clear up some of your faulty assumptions. But other duties are calling me."
"O.K.," said Starn distractedly, and began dressing as Higgins left.
His reunion with Cytherni and his introduction to his son was a moment of joy that briefly dispelled his doubts and gloom. But the decision he had reached a few moments earlier was going to affect the futures of his wife and child as well as himself. He had to talk it over with her, and hardly knew how to begin.
For a while Cytherni did not give him a chance. He had never seen her in such a talkative mood.
"And you should see the lovely house and things they've given us," she chattered rapidly, "with a garden and lots of forest and a sciencey kitchen you just wouldn't believe and a whole room full of books and a flier I've already learned to operate and I've taken up paint-sculpturing which is an art-form and a lot of people like my work and say it's imaginative and . . . "
She saw that Starn was staring at her strangely, and came to an uneasy silence. She looked embarrassed.
"You have liked it here?" he asked.
"Oh yes!"
Starn sighed. That eased him of part of his burden, at least.
"Cythie," he began, "it's been so long since we've talked that I'm afraid I'll sound like a stranger to you. I've thought about things we never thought about before. The Olsaperns aren't wrong about everything, Cythie. They've got a part of the truth. Their science has a reality. But in the Packs we have another part, and it is real and true, too, in its way.
"But . . . but the two parts have to be put together, Cythie! And nobody wants to! The Packs want nothing to do with Olsaperns and their science, and the Olsaperns refuse to study the Novo senses of the Packs. But if we ever hope to know the whole truth—and maybe if we ever expect to reach Ultimate Novo—they have to come together!
"The Olsaperns say I have an unusually strong creative imagination, Cythie . . . "
"Oh, you have, Starn," she replied earnestly.
"Well, it looks like that's about the only thing unusual I do have," he said, "so I'm going to use it. I'm going to stay here and try to become a scientist, Cythie! I'll never convince the Packs and Olsaperns that they have to get together by arguing with them. I'll have to show them! I'll have to prove the value of studying the Novo senses by doing it myself, and then producing results!
"So I can't go home, Cythie! There's too much to learn here that I can't learn in the Compound. And I already know things the Olsaperns couldn't let me take home in my head, so they would have to put me through hypnotic erasure to remove that knowledge, and I'd have to start from scratch when I came back.
"I'll have to spend my whole life with the Olsaperns, Cythie, because . . . well, because this is what I have to do. I hope you will stay too. This must sound strange and outlandish to you, but one thing about me hasn't changed. I still love you. Very much."
Suddenly she was in his arms sobbing happily. "Oh, Starn, you big oaf! I was so afraid you would insist on going back! And I don't think I could have, not with little William, or Billy, or Huill, or whatever you decide to call him! Did you think for a second that I could allow our son to suffer through the same kind of childhood we had, with those awful telepaths telling him what he could and couldn't think? I couldn't bear it!"
"You mean you would want to stay here, even if I didn't?" Starn asked, astonished.
"Yes. And don't worry about our people wondering what became of us. When the Olsaperns picked me up at Pile-Up Mountain, they took me to Foser Compound, and the telepaths read me. They know I killed Nornt and they think you're dead, because that's what I thought then. I had . . . gone crazy . . . so the people let the Olsaperns take me to cure me. That's all Higgins says the Pack people ought to ever know. We don't have to go back."
Starn held her close. Cytherni, the very best part of his old world now closed forever, was going to be with him in whatever new world was opening. And ahead was work to be done—a challenge of sweeping import that would have been incomprehensible to him in his earlier life.
The realization came abruptly that he had gained far more than he had lost.