The Penal Cluster by Randall Garrett (fiction novels to read TXT) 📕

dimmer nuances of thought gleam through. Each thought tells the receiver much more than can be put down in crude verbal symbols.

Thus, Houston already knew that Lasser, Sager, and Pederson were the three top men in a world-wide clique of megalomaniac Controllers. This was the top of the madmen's organization; these three were the creme de la creme of the Normal human's real enemies.

He knew that there were twelve others scattered over Earth, and he knew where and who they were. That brief exchange had brought all the information into Houston's own mind as it leaked from the minds of the others. He knew it without thinking about how he knew it.

And they were not the ones who had been turning the sane Controllers over to the Psychodeviant Police!

Then who was? And why?

Houston was right back where he had started.

But that brief instant of confusion was Houston's downfall. Sager instantly realized that he had delivered, inadvertently, a telling blow to Houston's mind.

Physically, Houston had been propelling himself toward the open door. At the instant of the revelation, he had been part way through it. And at that moment, Sager acted.

He slammed all his weight violently against his side of the door, knocking Houston off balance as the door swung and struck him. He went down, and Sager was on top of him before he struck the floor.

It was the weirdest battle ever fought, but its true worth could only have been detected by another telepath. It was intense and brutal.

The men fought both physically and mentally. They struggled for possession of the stun gun, at the same time hurling emotion-charged shafts of mental energy at each other's brains.

The struggle lasted less than a minute. Somehow, Sager managed to get one hand on the gun, twisting it. Houston, trying to keep it out of Sager's hand, jerked it up between them.

It coughed once, sending a beam of supersonic energy into the bodies of both men.

The effect was the same as if they had both been crowned with baseball bats.

Little pinpoints of light against a sea of darkness.

I'm cold, Houston thought. And I'm sick.

He couldn't tell whether his eyes were open or closed—and he didn't much care.

He tried to move his arms and legs, found he couldn't, and gave it up.

He blinked.

My eyes must be open, he thought, if I can blink.

Well, then, if his eyes were open, why couldn't he see anything? All he could see were the little pinpoints of light against a background of utter blackness.

Like stars, he thought.

Stars? STARS!

With a sudden rush, total awareness came back to him, and he realized with awful clarity where he was.

He was chained, spread-eagled, on an asteroid in the Penal Cluster, nearly a hundred million miles from Earth.

It was easy to piece together what had happened. He dimly remembered that he had started to wake up once before. It was a vague, confused recollection, but he knew what had taken place.

The PD Police, coming in response to his call, had found all four men unconscious from the effects of the stun beam. Naturally, all of them had been taken into custody; the PD Police had to find out which one of the men was the Controller and which the controlled. That could easily be tested by waiting until they began to wake up; the resulting mental disturbances would easily identify the telepath.

Houston could imagine the consternation that must have resulted when the PD men found that all three suspects—and their brother officer—were Controllers.

And now here he was—tried, convicted, and sentenced while he was unconscious—doomed to spend the rest of his life chained to a rock floating in space.

A sudden chill of terror came over him. Why wasn't he asleep? Why wasn't he under hibernene?

It's their way of being funny, came a bitter thought. We're supposed to be under hibernene, but we're left to die, instead.

For a moment, Houston did not realize that the thought was not his own, so well did it reflect his own bitterness. It was bad enough to have to live out one's life under the influence of the hibernation drug, but it was infinitely worse to be conscious. Under hibernene, he would have known nothing; his sleeping mind in his comatose body would never have realized what had happened to him. But this way, he would remain fully awake while his body used up the air too fast and his stomach became twisted with hunger pangs which no amount of intravenous feeding could quell. Oh, he'd live, all right—for a few months—but it would be absolute hell while he lasted. Insanity and catatonia would come long before death.

That's a nasty thought; I wish you hadn't brought it up.

That wasn't his own thought! There was someone else out here!

Hell, yes, my friend; we're all out here.

"Where are you?" Houston asked aloud, just to hear his own voice. He knew the other couldn't hear the words which echoed so hollowly inside the bubble of the spacesuit helmet, but the thought behind them would carry.

"You mean with relation to yourself?" came the answer. "I don't know. I can see several rocks around me, but I can't tell which one you're on."

Houston could tell now that the other person was talking aloud, too. So great was the illusion carried to his own brain that it almost seemed as though he could hear the voice with his ears.

"Then there are others around us?" Houston asked.

"Sure. There were three of us: a Hawaiian named Jerry Matsukuo; a girl from Bombay, Sonali Siddhartha; and myself, Juan Pedro de Cadiz. Jerry and Sonali are taking a little nap. You're the first of your group to wake up."

"My group?"

"Certainly, my friend. There are five of you; the other four must still be unconscious."

Four? That would be Lasser, Sager, Pederson, and—and Dorrine!

Juan Pedro de Cadiz picked up the whole thought-process easily.

"The girl—I'm sorry," he said. "But the other three—of us all, I think, they deserve this."

"Juan!" came another thought-voice. "Have our newcomers awakened?"

"Just one of them, my sweet," replied the Spaniard. "Sonali, may I present Mr. David Houston. Mr. Houston, the lovely Sonali Siddhartha."

"Juano has a habit of jumping to conclusions, David," said the girl. "He's never even seen me, and I'm sure that after three weeks of being locked in this prison whatever beauty I may have had has disappeared."

"Your thoughts are beautiful, Sonali," said Juan Pedro, "and with us, that is all that counts."

"It is written," said a third voice, "that he who disturbs the slumber of his betters will wake somebody up. You people are giving me dreams, with your ceaseless mental chatter."

"Ah!" the Spaniard said. "Mr. Matsukuo, may I—"

"I heard, Romeo, I heard," said the Hawaiian. "An ex-cop, eh? I wonder if I like you? I'll take a few thousand years to think it over; in the meantime, you may treat me as a friend."

"I'll try to live down my reputation," said Houston.

It was an odd feeling. Physically, he was alone. Around him, he could see nothing but the blackness of space and the glitter of the stars. He knew that the sun must be shining on the back of his own personal asteroid, but he couldn't see it. As far as his body was concerned, there was nothing else in the universe but a chunk of pitted rock and a set of chains.

But mentally, he felt snug and warm, safe in the security of good friends. He felt—

"David! David! Help me! Oh, David, David, David!"

It was Dorrine, coming up from her slumber. Like a crashing blare of static across the neural band, her wakening mind burst into sudden telepathic activity.

Gently, Houston sent out his thoughts, soothing her mind as he had soothed Harris's mind weeks before. And he noticed, as he did it, that the other three were with him, helping. By the time Dorrine was fully awake, she was no longer frightened or panicky.

"You're wonderful people," she thought simply, after several minutes.

"To one so beautiful, how else could we be?" asked Juan Pedro.

"Ignore him, Dorrine," said Sonali, "he tells me the same thing."

"But not in the same way, amiga!" the Spaniard protested. "Not in the same way. The beauty of your mind, Sonali, is like the beauty of a mountain lake, cool and serene; the beauty of Dorrine is like the beauty of the sun—warm, fiery, and brilliant."

"By my beard!" snorted Matsukuo. "Such blather!"

"I'll be willing to wager my beautiful hacienda in the lovely countryside of Aragon against your miserable palm-leaf nipi shack on Oahu that you have no beard," said Juan Pedro.

"Hah!" said Matsukuo; "that's all I need now—Castles in Spain."

It was suddenly dizzying for Houston. Here were five people, doomed to slow, painful death, talking as though there were nothing to worry about. Within minutes, each had learned to know the others almost perfectly.

It was more than just the words each used. Talking aloud helped focus the thoughts more, but at the same time, thousands of little, personal, fringe ideas were present with the main idea transmitted in words. Houston had talked telepathically to Dorrine hundreds of times, but never before had so much fine detail come through.

Why? Was there something different about space that made mental communication so much more complete?

"No, not that, I think," said Matsukuo. "I believe 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,