Mutant, page 24
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“The telecast’s starting,” Cody said. “I wonder how many will listen to it.”
The mob that swept through the town of Easterday, secretly led by a paranoid, swirled toward a big house with a wide verandah. The mob sent up a yell at sight of the row of men standing on the verandah waiting. But the paranoid hesitated.
The man beside him did not. He shouted and sprinted forward.
There was a sharp crack and dust spurted at his feet.
“They’ve got guns!” somebody yelled.
“Get’em! ”
“Lynch ’em! ”
The mob surged forward. Again a rifle snapped.
The mob-leader—not the paranoid, but the apparent leader—swore and dropped to the ground, clutching at his leg.
On the verandah a man stepped forward.
“Get out of here,” he said crisply. “Get going—fast.”
The leader stared in amazement.
“Doc!” he said. “But you’re not a Baldy. What the hell are you doing?”
The doctor swung his rifle slowly back and forth.
“A lot of us up here aren’t Baldies,” he said, glancing along the row of silent men. Several races were represented, but the mob was not concerned with race just now. The lynchers searched out the men on the porch whom they knew to be Baldies—and found each one flanked by coldly determined non-telepaths, armed and waiting.
There weren’t many of them, though—the defenders.
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That occurred to the leader. He stood up, testing the flesh wound in his calf. He glanced over his shoulder.
“We can take ‘em,” he shouted. “It’s ten to one. Let’s go get all of
‘em!”
He led the wave.
He died first. On the verandah a runty man with spectacles and a scrubby moustache shivered and lowered his gun for a moment.
But he did not move from where he stood in the determined line.
The mob drew back.
There was a long pause.
“How long do you think you can hold us off, Doc?” someone called.
The dead man lay on the open ground between the two groups.
The air quivered with heat. The sun moved imperceptibly westward.
The mob coalesced tighter, a compact, murderous mass waiting in the sunlight.
Then a telecast screen within the house lit up, and Allenby’s voice began to speak to the world.
The telecast was over.
Baldy minds were busy searching, questioning, seeking their answer in minds that could not conceal their true desires. This was a poll that could not be inaccurate. And within minutes the poll would be finished. The answer would be given. On that answer would depend the lives of all who were not telepaths.
Jeff Cody sat alone before the electronic calculator, waiting for the answer.
There could be only one answer a sane man, a sane people, could give. For the Inductor meant, for the first time in human history, a unity based on reality. It opened the gates to the true and greatest adventures, the odyssey into the mysteries of science and art and
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philosophy. It sounded the trumpet for the last and greatest war against the Ilium of nature itself—the vast, tremendous, unknown universe in which man has struggled and fought and, somehow, survived.
No adult living today could live to see more than the beginning of that vast adventure. But the children would see it.
There could be only one answer a sane people could give. A sane people.
Cody looked at the keyboard before him.
The earth is filled with violence through them.
Yes, there could be another answer. And if that answer were given— the end of all flesh is come before me.
I will destroy them with the earth!
Cody’s mind leaped ahead. He saw his finger pressing the button on the keyboard, saw Operation Apocalypse flooding like a new deluge across the planet, saw the race of man go down and die beneath that destroying tide, till only telepaths were left alive in all the world, perhaps in all the universe. He remembered the terrible, lonely pang Baldies feel when a Baldy dies.
And he knew that no telepath would be able to close his mind against that apocalyptic murder of all mankind.
There would be the wound which could not heal, which could never heal among a telepathic race whose memories would go on and on, unweakened by transmission down through the generations. A hundred million years might pass, and even then the ancient wound would burn as on the day it had been made.
Operation Apocalypse would destroy the Baldies too. For they would feel that enormous death, feel it with the fatal sensitivity of the telepath, and though physically they might live on, the pain and the guilt would be passed on from generation to crippled generation.
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Suddenly Cody moved.
His finger pushed a button. Instantly the guarding monitor began to operate. There was a soft humming that lasted less than a second.
Then a light burned bright on the control panel, and under it was a number.
Cody pressed another button. The unerring selectors searched the calculator for the bit of crystal that held the code of Operation Apocalypse. The crystal, with its cipher of frozen dots of energy, was ready.
A thousand minds, sensing Cody’s thought, reached toward him, touched him, spoke to him.
He paused for an instant while he learned that man had not yet made his decision.
The voices in his mind became a tumultuous clamor. But the ultimate decision was neither man’s nor theirs; the responsibility was his own, and he waited no longer.
He moved his hand quickly forward and felt the cool, smooth plastic of a lever sink with absolute finality beneath his fingers.
On the bit of ferroelectric crystal waiting in the calculator, the cipher-pattern of energy shivered, faded and vanished completely.
Operation Apocalypse was gone.
Still Cody’s fingers moved. Memory after memory died within the great machine. Its vast pools of data drained their energy back into the boundless sea of the universe and were lost. Then at last the brain of the calculator was empty. There was no way to re-create the Apocalypse—no way and no time.
Only waiting was left.
He opened his mind. All around him, stretching across the earth, the linked thoughts of the Baldies made a vast, intricate webwork, perhaps the last and mightiest structure man would ever build.
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They drew him into their midst and made him one with them. There were no barriers at all. They did not judge. They understood, all of them, and he was part of them all in a warm, ultimate unity that was source of enough strength and courage to face whatever decision mankind might make. This might be the last time man would ever bind itself together in this way. The pogrom might go on until the last Baldy died. But until then, no Baldy would live or die alone.
So they waited, together, for the answer that man must give.
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Chapter Six
The helicopter has landed. Men run toward me. They’re strangers. I can’t read their thoughts. I can’t see them clearly; everything is dim, fading into wavering, shadowy ripples.
Something is being slipped around my neck. Something presses against the back of my head.
An Inductor.
A man kneels beside me. A doctor. He has a hypodermic.
The hypodermic comes second. The Inductor first of all. For none of us should die alone. None of us live alone any more. Either we are Baldies, or else we wear the Inductor that has made all men telepaths.
The Inductor begins to operate.
I meant to ask the doctor if I would live, but now I know that this is not the important thing. I know that, as warmth and life come back into the universe, and I am no longer alone. What is important is that my mind, my self, is no longer cut off and incomplete, it is expanding, joining with my people, with all life, as I rise from this lonely grave in which I have lain and I am—
We are—
We are one. We are man. The long, long war is ended, and the answer has been given. The dream has been cleansed, and the fire on the hearth is guarded.
It will not burn out, now, until the last man dies.
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