The World Wreckers (4 page)

Conner was ready to die.

He found himself floating again, as he had floated so many times since the accident a year ago:

weightless, sick, disoriented. Dying, and death wouldn't come.
Not this again. Overdosed, I was ready
to
die. I thought it would cut this off. Now here again, is this my hell?

Time disappeared, as it always did, a few minutes, an hour, fifty years, floating across the cosmos, and a voice said clear and loud in his brain, not in words,
Maybe we can help, but you must come to us. Such
pain, such terror, there is no reason
…

Where, where?
His whole world, his whole being, one silent scream,
where can I turn this off
.

Darkover. Be patient, they'll find you.

Where are you who speak to me? Where is this place?
Conner tried to focus in the endless spinning.

The voice drifted away.
Nowhere. Not in the body. No time, no space here.

The invisible cord of contact thinned, leaving him alone in his weightless hell, and Conner screamed

inside his mind,
Don't go, don't go, you were with me Out There, don't ever go, don't go
…

"He's coming to," remarked an all too solid voice, and Conner felt despair and loneliness and anguish all disappear under a sudden sharply physical ache of sickness. He opened his eyes to the too brisk, all but

accusing eyes of Doctor Rimini, who made reassuring sounds which Conner disregarded, having heard

them all too often before. He listened without speaking, promised blandly not to do it again, and sank

into the lifeless apathy from which he had emerged only twice, both times for a futile attempt at suicide.

"I don't understand yon," Rimini remarked. He sounded friendly and interested but Conner knew now how empty the words were. No, Rimini didn't give a damn, although they regarded him as a stubborn

and still interesting case. Not a person, of course, with a unique and horrible way of suffering. Just a

case. He opened a crack in his mind to hear the doctor chattering on, "You displayed so much will to live after the accident, Mr. Conner, and after surviving that ordeal it seems all wrong that you should

give up now . . ."

But what Conner heard with a shout that drowned Rimini's words were the doctor's own fear of death

which now struck Conner as a sickening, small, petty thing, and the doctor's fear of what Conner had

become—can he read my mind, does he know that I… and the stream trailed off into a wilderness of the

small obscenities which were at least part of the reason for his will to suicide, not the doctor's alone; too many were like him, so that Conner had found even the hospital, with its animal shudderings of minds

and bodies in agony, more endurable than the outside with men preoccupied with their own hungers and

lusts and greed. He had crawled into a hole in the hospital and pulled the hole in after him, emerging

only to try dying as a change, and never succeeding.

When Rimini had babbled himself away again, Conner lay looking at the ceiling. He felt like laughing.

Not with amusement, though.

They spoke of the will to live he had demonstrated after the accident. It had been a bad one, one of the

big ships exploding in space, and the personnel hardly having time to crowd into lifeboats; four of them, instead, had made it into the experimental plastic emergency bubblesuits and had fallen into space in

those.

The others had never been recovered. Conner wondered sometimes what had happened to them: had the

life-support system mercifully failed, so that they died quickly and sane? Had they gone mad and raved

mindlessly down to death? Were they still drifting out there in the endless night? He quailed from the

thought. His own hell was bad enough.

The bubbles had been meant for protection for minutes, until pickup could be made by lifeboat, not for

days or weeks. The life-support system was fail-safe, and hadn't failed. It had worked too well. Conner,

breathing endlessly recycled oxygen, fed by intravenous dribbles of nutrient, had lived. And lived. Lived for days, weeks, months, spinning endlessly in free-fall in an invisible bubblefield, with nothing else

between himself and the trillions upon trillions of stars.

He had no measure of time. He had no means of knowing up from down, no means of orientation. He

had nothing to look at but distant flaming points of stars that spun and wheeled round him in his tiny

days of rotation on his own center.

Five hours in a sensory deprivation tank, back in the prehistory of psychology, had sent men insane.

Conner spent the first ten days or so—he later figured—in a desperate hope, clinging to sanity and the

hope of rescue.

Then, in his own endlessly prisoning universe, he went insane. Contemplating his own center, he spun

like a god and emerged knowing there was no protection or death, even in madness. There was not even

hunger upon which to orient himself.

There was only his own mind, and the universe. And so he began spinning, ranging through the

universe, his body left behind, his mind wholly free. He visited a thousand, thousand worlds, touched a

thousand, thousand minds, never knowing dream from reality.

They picked him up—chance, the merest fluke—-some four months after the crash. And Conner was

insane, but in a strange way. His brain, left alone with itself too long, had learned to reach beyond, and now he was something he could not name, or others guess. Fixed firmly in a body chained to hunger,

thirst, gravity and stress, he could not leave himself behind again; nor could he endure the life he had

resigned himself to lose.

"Mr. Conner," a voice interrupted his thoughts, "you have a visitor."

He heard the man, incurious, wishing he would go away until he heard the name of Darkover, and then

he didn't believe it.

He accepted only to escape any further contact with the hospital whose shelter had become a blind alley,

a mousetrap for his soul. And because, on a world of telepaths, there might be some who could help him

to handle this thing, to turn off the nightmare he had become without desiring it and without knowing

why.

And, perhaps, a little, to find the voice in his dream…

David Hamilton wiped the sweat from his face as he came blindly through the door, leaning briefly

against the light paneled wall.

He'd made it this time, but God! The blind terror when the anesthetic began to blot out light—

No, it was going to be too much. He'd have to quit. Around him the hospital, crammed with humans and

nonhumans, breathed and sweated pain and misery at every crack in the walls; and although David, from

years of practice, could shut most of it out, his defenses were lowered from the strain of the operation

just past and it began to wear in on him again from every direction.

Is the whole world groaning in pain?
His sharpened nerves gave him an absurd and frightening visual commentary, a planet splitting like a fractured skull, a globe of a world with a bandage round its

equator; he started to giggle and cut it off just that fraction before it became hysteria.

No good. I'll have to quit.

I'm not insane. The doctors went all over that when I was nineteen and just beginning Medic training.

I made it through Medical school on nerve and guts; and whatever else it did or didn't do, it gave me an

uncanny knack for diagnosis. But here in the hospital it's too much. Too many symptoms, too many

people in fear and terror. Too much pain, and I have to feel it all. I can't help them by sharing it.

Dr. Lakshman, dark and grave, his eyes full of compassion beneath the white surgical plastic cap, put a

brief hand on David's shoulder as he passed through the hall. David, fresh from horror, shrank from the

touch as he had learned to do, then relaxed; Lakshman, as always, was clean sympathy and all kindness,

a restful spot in a world grown full of horror. He said: "Pretty bad, Hamilton? Is it getting worse?"

David managed a smile, wrung out like a used mop, and said, "With all of medical science these days

you'd think they'd manage a cure for my particular type of lunacy."

"Not lunacy," said Lakshman, "but unfortunately no cure. Not here. You happen to be a freak of a very rare kind, David, and I've watched it killing you for over a year now. But maybe there is an answer."

"You didn't—" David shrank; Lakshman of all people to violate his confidence? Who could he trust?

The older man seemed to follow his thought; "No, I haven't discussed this with anyone, but when they sent out the message I thought of you right away. David, do you know where Cottman's Star is?"

"Not a clue," David said, "or care."

"There's a planet—Darkover they call it," Lakshman said. "There are telepaths there and they're looking for—no, listen," he added firmly, feeling David tense under his hands. "Maybe they can help you find out about this thing. Control it. If you try to go on here at the hospital—well, they can't let you go on much more, David. Sooner or later it will distract you at a crucial moment. Your work is all right, so far.

But you'd better look into this; or else forget all about medicine and find a job in the forest service on some uninhabited world.
Very
uninhabited."

David sighed. He had known this was coming, and if nine years of study and work was to be thrown

away, it didn't much matter where he went.

"Where is Darkover?" he asked. " Do they have a good medical service there?"

Chapter 3

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THEY SAW the guards lockstepped around him as he came through the crowd to the airstrip. It was icy,

cold, near evening, only a few red clouds lingering where the red sun had been, and a bitter wind eating

down from the sharp-toothed crags behind Thendara. Normally there would have been very few people

on the streets at this hour; Darkovan night sets in early and is as cold as their own legendary ninth hell, and most people seek the comfort of heated rooms and light, leaving the streets to the snow and the

occasional unlucky Terran from the Trade City.

But this was something new, and Darkovans in the streets put off minding their own business to watch

it; to follow and murmur that singular and ugly murmur which is, perhaps, the first thing a Terran on a

hostile world learns to identify.

One of the four Terran guards, hearing the movement, tensed and moved his hand closer to his weapon.

It wasn't a threatening movement, just an automatic one, just close enough that he felt reassured that the weapon was there if he needed it. But the prisoner said, "No." The Terran shrugged and said, "Your neck, sir," and let his hand fall.

Walking at the center of the close drawn guard, Regis listened to the muttering and knew it was directed

as much at him as at the Terrans guarding him. He thought wryly, do these people think I like this? Do

they think I enjoy it? I've made myself virtually a prisoner in my own house just to avoid this kind of

display, the shame of our world; a Hastur of Hastur no longer dares to walk free in his own streets. It's
my
life I'm giving up,
my
freedom, not theirs. It's my children, not theirs, growing up with Terran armed guards standing around their nurseries. I am so constantly reminded that a bullet, a knife, a silk cord or a single poison berry in their supper can mean the end of the Hastur line forever.

And what will they say when they hear that Melora, bearing my child, is being sent to the Terran

Medical for her confinement? I can hear it now. I've tried to keep it secret, but I had enough trouble

persuading her family, and these things leak out. Even if there had been much between us, this would

have ended it. Melora wouldn't even speak to me when I visited her last, and the trouble is, I don't blame her. She just stared coldly over my head and told me that she and all her family were obedient as always

to the will of Hastur. And I knew that such little love or kindness as there had been between us, for a few months, was gone forever.

It would be so easy to damn all women, but I must remember that the ones who love me are under an

infernal strain—and that's been true of the women unlucky enough to love a Hastur, all the way back to

the legend of the Blessed Cassilda herself, my hundred times great-grandmother—or so the story says.

And not the least of the strain they're under is this damned self-pity!

He sighed and tried to grin and said to Danilo, walking beside him, "Well, now we know how the freak at Festival Fair must feel."

"Except that we don't get our porridge and meat from having to listen," Danilo muttered.

The crowd was parting to let them through. As they stepped toward the special transit plane, Regis felt,

deep inside the crowd, someone with a hand raised. A stone thrown? At him, at his Terran guard? He

could hear the angry thoughts:

"Our lord, a Hastur, prisoner of the Terrans?"

"Has he asked them to cut him off from his people this way?"

"Slave!"

"Prisoner!"

"Hastur!"

It was a tumult in his mind. The stone flew. He groaned and covered his face with his hands. The stone

burst into flame in midair and disappeared in a shower of sparks. There was a little despairing "Ahhh!"

of horror and wonder from the crowd. In its backlash and before it could die away, Regis let his

bodyguard hustle him up the steps of the special transit plane, dropped into a seat inside and remarked to nobody in particular, "Damn it, I could sit down and howl."

But he knew it would be repeated all over again: guards, mutterings, crowds, resentments, maybe even