The Mind's Eye, page 13
“That’s what they used to say about niggers,” Roger said. He used the pejorative for shock value. “And then Hitler used to say the same about the Jews. They didn’t ask to be telepaths ...”
“And we didn’t ask to have our minds read,” the girl snapped. “Don’t you dare pull a Godwin on this conversation!”
“He’s a reporter,” a third leader said. “What do you expect? Besides, Godwin’s Law is really Godwin’s Folly.”
Roger would have said something else, but then a new wave of shouting burst out over the crowd. A young boy – he couldn’t have been much older than fifteen – had fallen to the ground, blood flowing from his nose and ears. The crowd had gathered around him and were slowly kicking him to death, screaming “telepath, telepath” out loud. Roger watched in horror, unable to move, unable even to summon the police to intervene. The small camera mounted on his lapel caught it all as the boy was battered to death. The crowd roared, as if it were a living thing, and surged forward towards the campus – and Professor Zeller’s telepaths.
He was suddenly able to move again, but it was far too late to help the boy. His body was lying on the ground, trampled under thousands of pairs of feet as the crowd kept moving. A wave of bile rose up in his throat and he vomited in disgust, unable to believe his eyes. He heard sounds from the police lines, and the pop-pop-pop of tear gas canisters, but somehow he knew that it would be far too late to save the boy. The entire crowd had gone mad.
***
“You shouldn’t be here,” Leo said, as Elizabeth stood at the window, watching the surging crowd down below. It seemed to be a living thing, thousands of minds blurring into one single supernatural creature. She could barely look at it without feeling a growing pounding inside her mind, yet she kept forcing herself to look. She needed to develop her mental shields, whatever it took. “They want us dead.”
Elizabeth nodded. She’d felt at least one person die within the crowd, a sensation akin to feeling a rubber band snap in her mind. She didn’t want to know what would happen if someone died while she was within their mind, although she had a suspicion that the shock would kill her or drive her insane. Professor Zeller had wanted to reach out and test the inhabitants of the closest mental hospital for telepathy, but the moment they’d reached the building they’d been repelled by the waves of maddened thought reaching out towards them.
“I have to be here,” she admitted. Part of her believed that it was all her fault. Ron was down there, whipping up the crowd against telepaths; Ron, her former boyfriend. She suspected, from his mood, that Janelle had dumped him as well. “I have to see it happen in person ...”
“They’re morons,” Leo said, simply. Unlike Charlie, or Elizabeth for that matter, Leo had always had a superiority complex. He was fiendishly smart – and knew it, and made sure that everyone else knew it – and telepathy had only added to his arrogance. He’d proposed, quite seriously, that the telepaths should breed together to produce telepathic children who would be stronger than their parents. Professor Zeller had been inclined to support the idea, but all of the female telepaths had flatly refused. “They’re lashing out in hatred and fear at something they don’t understand and will never have for themselves.”
Elizabeth scowled. In two weeks, she had come to realise that every time a normal person – a mundane, to use Leo’s term, which he’d stolen from Babylon 5 – met a telepath, there was a brief flash of fear and shame, fear at the thought that their mind would be read and shame at the thought of someone else knowing their darkest secrets. She found it depressing and a little demeaning – she was more than just her telepathy – but some of the other telepaths, Leo in particular, got off on that sick little feeling.
“They’re scared of us,” she said. She hadn’t dared go back to her flat, not even to pick up her possessions. Professor Zeller had cleared the building for the telepaths and set up a camp bed for her in one of the abandoned offices. It was uncomfortable, but at least she wasn’t surrounded by babbling minds. “Wouldn’t you be scared if your innermost thoughts were known to the entire world?”
“Perhaps,” Leo said, easily. He slipped into the telepathic waveband, transmitting his thoughts to her directly. “But then, my thousands of intimate thoughts are not known to the entire world.”
Elizabeth was preparing a cutting reply when the door burst open, revealing a campus policeman. “You have to get out of here now,” he said, sharply. “The crowd has gone berserk and is heading here ...”
“Doubtless with pitchforks and torches,” Leo said, calmly. Elizabeth couldn’t detect any concern in his words, which suggested either foolishness or bravado. “The modern-day witch-hunters are coming to kill us all.”
Elizabeth turned and looked back out of the window ... and stood, transfixed by the roar of emotion that was reaching out towards them. Thousands of people were advancing on the building, their minds baying for blood – telepath blood. She couldn’t move as their screaming minds bore down into hers. She was only vaguely aware of the other two until someone slapped her face, hard. Elizabeth staggered and fell towards the floor; Leo caught her just before she could hit the ground.
“They’re coming,” Leo said. For the first time, he sounded shaken ... and yet the fear in his mind was rapidly becoming replaced by anger. “They’re coming for us.”
“You’re not superhuman, you dimwit,” Elizabeth swore at him. She allowed her contempt to flow into her voice as the noise outside grew louder. “You have to move, now.”
Her legs were still wobbly and she had to hang on to Leo’s arm as they stumbled off towards the rear of the building. “We’re evacuating the surrounding area,” the policeman said. His words were reassuring, but his mental tone was grim and worried. And, she realised with a shiver, part of him was wondering if the crowd wasn’t right after all. It had simply never occurred to her, before, that policemen were human too and would worry about mental intrusion. “Once we get outside, we should be met by others who will escort you to a safe area and ...”
The entire building shook. Elizabeth felt, more than heard, rioters pouring in. She could hear the police demanding, through megaphones, that the crowd stand still or disperse, but it didn’t seem to be working. The crowd had turned into a maddened animal, its thoughts pervading the telepathic waveband and demanding blood. It would be impossible to stop the crowd until the madness faded away. Perhaps the police could use knock-out gas on them, or...did the police even have knock-out gas? They hadn’t used it at the last protest she’d attended ...
She winced. If she had realised just how terrified the targets of those protests had had to be, she wouldn’t have gone and added her voice to the crowd. She had been all fired up with youthful outrage and she hadn’t thought about their victims. Now ... now, if she could take it all back, she would. The policeman grabbed her arm and pulled her back, too late. The protesters had, deliberately or otherwise, blocked their line of escape. Elizabeth stared in horror as they advanced, their faces twisted with madness, as they had recognised her. Professor Zeller had identified her to the world and now she was their target. Their thoughts and feelings bombarded her, hatred so deep that it was far beyond logic and reason, the same kind of hatred that she felt for rapists and molesters. In lashing out at her, they were lashing out at all telepaths, hating them all. Shame turned her legs to jelly and she collapsed, knowing that her life was about to come to an end. The campus policeman was drawing his pistol, clearly intending to go down fighting, yet there was no hope of escape. The crowd was closing in, the ones at the back pushing the ones at the front forward ...
Leo caught her arm. GO AWAY, he thought. It took Elizabeth a second to realise that he was broadcasting to the crowd, a desperate measure. They’d never been able to communicate telepathically with mundane humans. GO AWAY, GO AWAY, GO AWAY ...
Fear for her life gave her thoughts power and she pushed as hard as she could, adding her mental voice to Leo’s. GO AWAY, GO AWAY, GO AWAY ... the crowd recoiled, as if it had run into an unbreakable barrier. GO AWAY, GO AWAY, GO AWAY ...
***
Roger had been trying to run, to get away from the crowd and the advancing policemen, when the thoughts slammed into his brain. The power and compulsion was impossible to resist. He ran, unable to stop himself, fleeing for his life as unholy terror washed through his mind. He saw a police helicopter fall out of the sky as the pilot jumped out – without a parachute – and saw the police lines breaking up into chaos. The protesters had turned on one another and were fighting and kicking to get the hell out of dodge. He couldn’t help himself; he just kept running until the compulsion faded away. Stumbling, he fell to the ground and gasped for breath, one thought running through his head.
What the hell had just happened?
Chapter Fourteen
An emergency report from the riot at Harvard claims that upwards of four hundred people have been killed in the crush and over a thousand others have been injured. Police sources are saying nothing about the riot, but the governor stated that martial law had been declared in the area and that the National Guard had been deployed to assist with the clean-up. The President is expected to address the nation at some point this day.
-AP News Report, 2015
“It looks like a freaking war zone.”
Art said nothing, but he couldn’t disagree with Alice. It had been barely two hours since the telepathic blast had stopped the riot and the local police, National Guardsmen and emergency services had barely been able to make a dent in the damage. The official estimate was that five hundred protesters, policemen and innocent bystanders had been killed in the riot. Art suspected that the actual number was far higher. He’d never seen anything like it in Iraq or Afghanistan.
There were bodies – dead or merely stunned – everywhere, too many for the emergency services to handle at once. Many of them were policemen who had been caught up in the telepathic blast or crushed by the protesters in their unreasoning flight from danger. Others had just been caught up in the disaster, or jumped out of windows when the telepathic blast had roared into their heads. Art had sensed it from several hundred miles away; in fact, he was sure that telepaths had felt it all over the world. It was lucky that non-telepaths outside a mile or so from the epicentre of the blast had felt nothing, or the disaster would have been far worse. Even so, there were crashed cars on the roads and hundreds more dead and wounded when they’d suddenly found themselves consumed with an urgent desire to run away. It would take weeks to sort out the damage and months to reassure the public that it wouldn’t happen again – except it might just happen again. Art knew that there was no way to predict such an event or prevent it from happening. He wasn’t even sure what had happened at Harvard.
He looked over towards the line of prisoners and scowled. He had never had much time for protesters in his life, yet watching lines of young men and women being cuffed, searched and loaded into police vans was chilling. They’d probably all be released unless something could be pinned on them; according to the police, quite a few protesters had arrived with weapons and bad intentions. The fire raging on the other side of the campus was proof of that, apparently; the protesters had brought Molotov cocktails and tried to use them on the telepaths. God alone knew how many had really been injured.
The wounded, at least, were being treated decently. If there was one good thing to come out of the crisis, it was that the protest had been stopped dead in its tracks, allowing the wounded to be evacuated without further delay. Art didn’t know how many of the wounded could be saved. The city’s doctors had all been alerted, but were they prepared for so many casualties? Years ago, he’d taken part in an exercise that had rehearsed what the Marines would do if a nuclear bomb was deployed against an American city and the results had not been encouraging. Local medical centres had either been destroyed or overwhelmed. It had proven hard to get the wounded to centres that were further away.
“Yes,” he agreed. “It does look like a war zone.”
The media coverage they’d picked up as they’d been raced from Washington to Massachusetts hadn’t been too detailed. It looked as if the protest had somehow gotten out of hand and then ... something had triggered a telepathic blast. The talking heads on the various networks hadn’t known anything more than that, which hadn’t stopped them pontificating on the implications and on what they thought the government ought to do about it. Some of them were suggesting, loudly, that the government should lock up every telepath at once to prevent a second disaster, without caring one whit for human rights. A couple were even claiming that this proved that the more absurd claims against telepaths – including one where a woman claimed that a man had telepathically forced her into bed – were actually true and therefore criminal offences.
Art shook his head. The Looking Glass project hadn’t produced anything other than mind or emotion readers, but this ... he caught sight of a pair of dead bodies, their features twisted by absolute terror, and shivered. The world had just changed again. He knew, from the feeling of the mental blast as it slammed into his skull, that the telepaths who’d broadcast it had been absolutely terrified, yet somehow he doubted that it would matter. If the government could consider new gun control acts because someone – terrified – had shot the wrong person, he had no doubt that they would consider new telepathic control laws. Worse, those laws would be extremely difficult to enforce, which would weaken them. He had no idea where the world was going, yet he doubted that he would enjoy the destination when he found out.
And to think that, several months ago, he’d been in Afghanistan. Everything had been so much simpler then.
The police had moved the telepaths – and their representatives – to the Houghton Library. The Houghton Library, he’d been told, held many of the university’s special collections, at least under normal circumstances. Now, it had been cleared and was being used as a clearing house for the lightly-wounded and, separately, the telepaths. No one knew if the telepaths could or would produce a second telepathic blast, but they didn’t want to take chances. The policemen at the door saw their ID cards and looked – and felt – relieved. They didn’t want to handle their dangerous prisoners any longer. Art found it hard to blame them.
“Thank you for coming,” Professor Zeller said. The man was still as much a blank as ever, but his self-confidence didn’t seem diminished by the disaster. “We need you to help escort these two out of the police lines.”
Art pressed his lips together, angrily. The two telepaths – Elizabeth Tyler and Leo Davidson – looked rather shell-shocked by what had happened. He found it impossible to blame them. Their lives had turned upside down when they’d developed telepathy and then turned upside down again when they had developed new powers under stress. Art scowled. Back at the Looking Glass headquarters, Doctor Sampson was doubtless already devising experiments to stress telepaths further, in hopes of developing stronger and more remarkable powers.
“I’m afraid that they will have to remain in custody for the moment,” Alice said, firmly. “Far too many people have been killed for any other ...”
“You cannot, legally, hold them,” the lawyer said. Mr Ganchi had an odd mental tone, Art realised; he was nervous being so close to the telepaths, yet he was determined to defend their rights. “They acted in self-defence. I could get a judge to order their release quickly ...”
“I doubt it,” Alice said, angrily. “Do you know how many people died out there?”
“They were trying to kill us,” Leo snapped. He looked up angrily, his eyes glaring daggers at Alice. Art sensed the thoughts accompanying the words and scowled. Just what they needed – a self-righteous prick who thought that he was God. He’d met too many young officers who had had the same attitude and they, of course, had lacked telepathic abilities. Leo sounded as if he was on the verge of hysteria. “They were trying to kill us!”
“Call it protective custody,” Alice said, patiently. “The fact remains that whatever happened here, whoever was right or wrong, is going to have alarming effects right across the world. The public needs to know that matters are under control or worse things may happen ...”
“Why should we do anything for them?” Leo demanded. “They tried to kill us!”
Art scowled, unsure of how to proceed. The hell of it was that Leo was right, in one sense; they had acted in self-defence. And, in addition, they hadn’t known what they were capable of doing until they had been stressed and forced to develop new abilities. They could not be held responsible for what they had done, any more than a child who found a gun could be held responsible if he or she accidentally shot someone. And many of the people who had died were trying to kill the telepaths when the telepathic blast sent them running for their lives.
On the other hand, many of their victims hadn’t been protesters. Policemen who had been trying to save their lives had been killed, either directly or indirectly by the telepathic blast, and dozens of drivers had been killed or wounded well away from the protest itself. The telepaths weren’t homeowners who had shot intruders without bothering to ask questions first; they had more in common with homeowners who had opened fire with machine guns and sprayed bullets over the neighbourhood. They could be charged with negligent homicide, he suspected – law wasn’t his strong suit – except they hadn’t known what they could do. The lawyers were going to have a field day.
“Because people are scared,” he said, finally. “You’re telepathic, just like me. You ought to know that.”
Leo stared at him, angrily. “And do you agree to keep your talent under control because it would upset people if you didn’t?”
Art swallowed the urge to smack some sense into the young man. “You seem to have missed the point that people are scared,” he repeated, calmly. He’d endured drill sergeants and recruits who should have been kicked out of Parris Island in disgrace. He could handle one young man with an inflated sense of entitlement. “What happened here – and your blast killed or harmed people who were not trying to kill you as well as people who were trying to kill you – is going to send shockwaves across the globe. You need to help us put a lid on it before it gets far more out of hand.”
