Troublemakers (16 page)

   
The first man looked up at his partner, doubt wrinkling his eyes, pursing his lips. He shrugged his shoulders, as if to say,
Who knows?

   
He turned back to Gunnderson.

   
Immobile, as before. Hewn from rock, silent as the pit.

   
“What are you in here for, Gunnderson?” He spoke the halting speech of the telepath, as though he was unused to words.

   
The dead stare swung back to the plasteel bars. “I set the woods on fire,” he said.

   
The Mindee’s face darkened at the prisoner’s words. That was what the report had said. The report that had come in from this remote corner of this remote country.

   
The American Union covered two continents with plasteel and printed circuits, relays and rapid movement, but there were areas of backwoods country that had never taken to civilizing. They still maintained roads and jails, fishing holes and forests. Out of one of these had come three reports, spaced an hour apart, with startling ramifications-if true. They had been snapped through the primary message banks in Capital City in Buenos Aires, reeled through the computers, and handed to the Bureau for checking. While the inverspace ships plied between worlds, while Earth fought its transgalactic wars, in a rural section of the American continents, a strange thing was happening.

   
A mile and a half of raging forest fire, and Alf Gunnderson the one responsible. So the Bureau had sent two Mindees.

   
“How did it start, Alf?”

   
The dead eyes closed momentarily in pain, then opened, and he answered, “I was trying to get the pot to heat up. Trying to set the kindling under it to burning. I fired myself too hard.” A flash of self-pity and unbearable hurt came into his face, disappeared just as quickly. Empty once more, he added, “I always do.”

   
The first man exhaled sharply, got up and put on his hat. The personality flowed out of his face. He was a carboncopy of the other telepath once more. They were no longer individuals; they were Bureau men, studiedly, exactly, precisely alike in every detail.

   
“This is the one,” he said.

   
“Come on, Alf,” the Mindee named Ralph said. “Let’s go.”

   
The authority in his voice no more served to move Gunnderson than their initial appearance had. He sat as he was. The two men looked at one another.

   
What’s the matter with him?
the second one flashed.

   
If you had what he’s got-you’d be a bit buggy yourself,
the first one replied.

   
They hoisted the prisoner under his arms, lifted him unresisting, off the bunk. The turnkey came at a call, and-still marveling at these men who had come in, shown Bureau cards, sworn him to deadly silence, and were now taking the tramp firebug with them-opened the cell door.

   
As they passed before him, the telepath named Ralph turned suddenly sharp and piercing eyes on the old guard. “This is government business, mister,” he warned. “One word of this, and you’ll be a prisoner in your own jail. Digit?”

   
The turnkey bobbed his head quickly. “

   
And stop thinking, mister,” the Mindee added nastily, “we don’t like to be referred to as slimy peekers!” The turnkey turned a shade paler and watched silently as they disappeared down the hall, out of the Pawnee County jailhouse. He waited, blanking fiercely, till he heard the whine of the Bureau solocab rising into the afternoon sky.

   
Now what the devil did they want with a crazy firebug hobo like that? He thought viciously,
goddam Mindees!

   
After they had flown him to Buenos Aires, deep in the heart of the blasted Argentine desert, they sent him in for testing.

   
The testing was exhaustive. Even though he did not really cooperate, there were things he could not keep them from learning, things that showed up because they were there:

   
Such as his ability to start fires with his mind.

   
Such as the fact that he could not control the blazes.

   
Such as the fact that he had been burning for fifteen years in an effort to find peace and seclusion.

   
Such as the fact that he had become a tortured and unhappy man because of his strange mind-power...

   
“Alf,” said the bodiless voice from the rear of the darkened auditorium, “light that cigarette on the table. Put it in your mouth and make it light, Alf. Without a match.”

   
Alf Gunnderson stood in the circle of light. He shifted from leg to leg on the blazing stage, and eyed the cylinder of white paper on the table.

   
He was trapped in it again. The harrying, the testing, the staring. He was different-even from the other accredited psioid types-and they would try to put him away. It had happened before, it was happening now. There was no real peace for him.

   
“I don’t smoke,” he said, which was not true. But this scene was brother to the uncountable police lineups he had gone through, all the way across the American continents, across Earth, to A Centauri IX and back. It annoyed him, and it terrified him, for he knew he could not escape.

   
Except this time there were no hard rocky-faced cops out there in the darkness beyond his sight. This time there were hard, rocky-faced Bureau men and SpaceCom officials.

   
Even Terrence, head of SpaceCom, was sitting in one of those pneumoseats, watching him steadily.

   
Daring him to be what he was!

   
He lifted the cylinder hesitantly, almost put it back. “Smoke it, Alf!” snapped a different voice, deeper in tone, from the darkness.

   
He put the cigarette between his lips. The men waited.

   
He wanted to say something, perhaps to object, but he could not. Alf Gunnderson’s heavy brows drew down. His blank eyes became-if it were possible-even blanker. A sharp, denting V appeared between the brows.

   
The cigarette flamed into life.

   
A tongue of fire leaped up from the tip. In an instant it had consumed tobacco, paper, and denicotizer in one roar. The fire slammed against Gunnderson’s lips, searing them, lapping at his nose, his face.

   
He screamed, fell on his face and beat at the flames with his hands.

   
Suddenly the stage was clogged with running men in the blue and charcoal suits of the SpaceCom. Gunnderson lay writhing on the floor, a wisp of charry smoke rising from his face. One of the SpaceCom officials broke the cap on an extinguisher vial and the spray washed over the body of the fallen man.

   
“Get the Mallaport! Get the goddammed Mallaport, willya!” A young ensign with brush-cut blond hair, first to reach the stage, as though he had been waiting crouched below, cradled Gunnderson’s head in his muscular arms, brushing with horror at the flakes of charred skin. He had the watery blue eyes of the spaceman, the man who has seen terrible things; yet his eyes were more frightened now than any man’s eyes had a right to be.

   
In a few minutes the angular, spade-jawed, Malleable. Transporter was smoothing the skin on Gunnderson’s face, realigning the atoms-shearing away the burned flesh, coating it with vibrant, healthy pink skin.

   
Another few moments and the psioid was finished. The burns had been erased; Gunnderson was new and whole, save for the patches of healthier-seeming skin that dotted his face.

   
All through it he had been murmuring. As the Mallaport finished his mental work and stood up with a sigh, the words filtered through to the young SpaceCom ensign. He stared at Gunnderson a moment, then raised his watery blue eyes to the other officials standing about.

   
He stared at them with a mixture of fear and bewilderment.

   
Gunnderson had been saying: “Let me die, please let me die, I want to die, won’t you let me die, please...”

The ship was heading toward Omalo, sun of the Delgart system. It had been translated into inverspace by a Driver named Carina Correia. She had warped the ship through, and gone back to her deep-sleep, till she was needed at Omalo snap-out.

   
Now the ship whirled through the crazy quilt of inverspace, cutting through to the star system of Earth’s adversary.

   
Gunnderson sat in the cabin with the brush-cut blond ensign. All through the trip, since blast-off and snap-out, the pyrotic had been kept in his stateroom. This was the newest of the Earth SpaceCom ships, yet he had seen none of it. Just this tiny stateroom, and the constant company of the ensign.

   
The SpaceCom ensign’s watery blue eyes swept between the pallid man and the teleport-proof safe set in the cabin’s bulkhead.

   
“Any idea why they’re sending us so deep into Delgart territory?” the ensign fished. “It’s pretty tight lines up this far. Must be something big. Any idea?”

   
Gunnderson’s eyes came up from their focus on his boottops, and stared at the spaceman. He idly flipped the harmonica he had requested before blast-off and had used to pass away the long hours in inverspace. “No idea. How long have we been at war with the Delgarts?”

   
“Don’t you even know who your planet’s at war with?”

   
“I’ve been rural for many years. And aren’t we
always
at war with someone?”

   
The ensign looked startled. “Not unless it’s to protect the peace of the galaxies. Earth is a peace-loving-”

   
Gunnderson cut him off. “Yes. I know. But how long have we been at war with the Delgarts? I thought they were our allies under some treaty or other?”

   
The spaceman’s face contorted in a picture of conditioned hatred. “We’ve been after the bastards since they jumped one of our mining planets outside their cluster.” He twisted his lips in open loathing. “We’ll clean the bastards out soon enough! Teach
them
to jump peaceful Earthmen.”

   
Gunnderson wished he could shut out the words. He had heard the same story all the way to A Centauri IX and back. Someone had always jumped someone else; someone was always at war with someone else; there were always bastards to be cleaned out...

   
The invership whipped past the myriad colors of inverspace, hurtling through that not-space toward the alien cluster. Gunnderson sat in the teleport-proof stateroom, triple-loktited, and waited. He had no idea what they wanted of him, why they had tested him, why they had sent him through the preflight checkups, why he was here. But he knew one thing: whatever it was, there was to be no peace for
him..
.ever.

   
He silently cursed the strange mental power he had. The power to make the molecules of
anything
speed up tremendously, making them grind against one another, causing combustion. A strange, channeled teleport faculty that was useless for anything but the creation of fire. He damned it soulfully, wishing he had been born deaf, mute, blind, incapable of any contact with the world.

   
From the moment of his life when he had become aware of his strange power, he had been haunted. No control, no identification, no communication. Cut off. Tagged as an oddie. Not even the pleasures of being an acknowledged psioid like the Mindees, the invaluable Drivers, the Blasters, or the Mallaports who could move the atoms of flesh to their design. He was an oddie: a nondirective psioid. Tagged deadly and uncontrollable. He could set the fires, but he could not control them. The molecules were too tiny, too quickly imitative for him to stop the activity once it was started. It had to stop of its own volition-and usually it was too long in stopping.