LITMIR.BIZ

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it is because we have lost our fear—not of death; we still fear death—but of betrayal.”

      That was it. They knew they were going to die, and soon. They had already been sentenced; nothing further could frighten them. Always before, on Earth, they had kept their thoughts to themselves, fearing to broadcast too much, lest the Normals find them out. The little, personal things that made a human being a living personality were kept hidden behind heavy mental walls. The suppression worked subconsciously, even when they actually wanted to communicate with another Controller.

      But out here, there was nothing to fear on that score. Why should they, who were already facing death, be afraid of anything now?

      So they opened up—wide. And they knew each other as no group of human beings had ever known each other. Every human being has little faults and foibles that he may be ashamed of, that he wants to keep hidden from others. But such things no longer mattered out here, where they had nothing but imminent death and the emptiness of space—and each other.

      Physically, they were miserable. To be chained in one position, with very little room to move around, for three weeks, as Sonali had been, was torture. Sonali had been there longer than the others—for three days, there had been no one but herself out there in the loneliness of space.

      But now, even physical discomfort meant little; it was easy to forget the body when the mind was free.

      “What of the others?” Dorrine asked. “Where are the ones who were sentenced before us?”

      Houston thought of Robert Harris. What had happened to the young Englishman?

      “Space is big,” said Juan Pedro. “Perhaps they are too far away for our thoughts to reach them—or perhaps they are already dead.”

      “Let’s not talk of death.” Sonali Siddhartha’s thought was soft. “We have so many things to do.”

      “We will have a language session,” said Juan Pedro. “Si?”

      Matsukuo chuckled. “Good! Houston, until you’ve tried to learn Spanish, Hindustani, Arabic, Japanese, and French all at once, you don’t know what a language session is. We—”

      The Hawaiian’s thought was suddenly broken off by a shrieking burst of mental static.

      The effect was similar to someone dropping a handful of broken glass into an electric meat grinder right in the middle of a Bach cantata.

      It was Sager, coming out of his coma.

      Almost automatically, the five contacted his mind to relax him as he awoke. They touched his mind—and were repelled!

      Stay out of my mind!

      With almost savage fury, the still half-conscious Sager hurled thoughts of hatred and fear at the five minds who had tried to help him. They recoiled from the burst of insane emotion.

      “Leave him alone,” Houston thought sharply. “He’s a tough fighter.”

      * * * *

      At first, Sager was terrified when he learned what had happened to him. Then the terror was mixed with a boiling, seething hatred. A hatred of the Normals who had done this to him, and an even more terrible hatred for Houston, the “traitor.”

      The very emptiness of space itself seemed to vibrate with the surging violence of his hatred.

      “I know,” Houston told him, “you’d kill me if you could. But you can’t, so forget it.”

      Not even the power of that hatred could touch Houston, protected as he was by the combined strength of the other four sane telepaths. He was comparatively safe.

      Sager snarled like a trapped animal. “You’re all insane! Look at you! The four of you, siding with a man who has betrayed us to the Normals! He—”

      What Sager thought of Houston couldn’t be put into words, and if it could no sane person would want to repeat the mad foulness in those words.

      “This is unbearable!” Sonali thought softly.

      “That’s not a mind,” said Dorrine, “it’s a sewer.”

      “I suggest,” said Matsukuo, “that we do a little probing. Let’s find out what makes this thing tick.”

      “Stay out of my mind!” Sager screamed. “You have no right!”

      “You seemed to think you had the right to probe into the helpless minds of Normals,” said Juan Pedro coldly. “We should show you how it feels.”

      “But they’re just animals!” Sager retorted. “I am a Controller!”

      “You’re a madman,” said Matsukuo. “And we must find out what makes you mad.”

      Synchronizing perfectly, five minds began to probe at the walls that Sager had built up around his personality. And as they probed, Sager retreated behind ever thicker walls, howling in hatred and anguish.

      On and on went the five, needling, pressing at every weak spot, trying to break him down. Outnumbered and overpowered, it seemed as though Sager had no chance.

      But his insanity was stronger than they suspected. The barriers he built were harder, more opaque, and more impenetrable than any they had ever seen. The five pushed on, anyway, but their advance slowed tremendously.

      Then, mentally, there was a sudden silence.

      Sager? they thought.

      No answer.

      “That’s finished it,” said Houston. “He’s retreated so far behind those mental barriers that he’s cut himself off completely.”

      “He’s not dead, is he?” Dorrine asked.

      “Dead?” said Juan Pedro. “Not in the sense you mean. But I think he is catatonic now; he has lost all touch with the outside. He is as though he were still drugged; he is physically helpless, and mentally blanked out.”

      “There’s one difference,” Matsukuo said analytically. “And that is that, although he has cut himself off from us and from the rest of the universe, he is still conscious in some little, walled-in compartment of his mind. He has no one there but himself—and that, I think, is damned poor company.”

      * * * *

      They waited then. When Pederson awoke, they were ready for him. His hatred took a slightly different form from Sager’s, but the effect was the same.

      And so were the results when the five bore down on him.

      Again they waited. Lasser was next.

      At first, it looked as though Lasser would go the way of Sager and Pederson, ending up as a hopelessly insane catatonic. Like his cohorts before him, Lasser retreated under the full pressure of the thought-probes of the five, building stronger and stronger walls.

      But, quite suddenly, all his defenses crumbled. The mental barriers went down, shattered and dissolving. Lasser’s whole mind lay bare. Instead of fighting and hating, Lasser was begging, pleading for help.

      Lasser was not basically insane. His mind was twisted and warped, but beneath the outer shell was a personality that had enough internal strength to be able to admit that it was wrong and ask for help instead of retreating into oblivion.

      “This one—I think we can do something with,” Matsukuo’s thought whispered.

      * * * *

      Eight bodies, uncomfortable and pain-wracked, floated in space, chained to tiny asteroids that drifted slowly in their orbits under the constant pull of the sun. Two of them contained minds that were locked irrevocably within prisons of their own building, sealed off forever from external stimuli, but their suffering was the greater for all that.

      The other six, chained though their limbs might be, had minds that were free—free, even, of any but the most necessary of internal limitations.

      Eight

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