The Randall Garrett Omnibus. Randall Garrett

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 bodies, chained to eight lumps of pitted rock, spun endlessly in endless space.

      And then the ship came.

      The flare of its atomic rocket could be seen for over an hour before it reached the Penal Cluster. The six eyed it speculatively. Although only two of them were facing the proper direction to see it with their physical eyes, the impressions of those two were easily transmitted to the other four.

      "Another load of captives," whispered Juan Pedro de Cadiz. "How many this time, I wonder?"

      "How long have we been here?" asked Houston, not expecting any answer.

      "Who knows?" It was Lasser. "What we need out here is a clock to tell us when we'll die."

      "Our oxygen tanks are our clocks," said Sonali. "And they'll notify us when the time comes."

      "I do believe you morbid-minded people are developing a sense of humor," said Matsukuo, "but I'm not sure I care for the style too much."

      The flare of the rocket grew brighter as the decelerating ship approached the small cluster of rocks. At last the ship itself took form, shining in the eternal blaze of the sun. When the whiteness of the rocket blaze died suddenly, the ship was only a few dozen yards from Houston's own asteroid.

      And then a mental voice came into the minds of the six prisoners.

      "How do you feel, Controllers?"

      Only Houston recognized that thought-pattern, but his recognition was transmitted instantly to the others.

      "Reinhardt!"

      Hermann Reinhardt, Division Chief of the Psychodeviant Police, the one man most hated and feared by Controllers, was himself a telepath!

      "Naturally," said Reinhardt. "Someone had to take control of the situation. I was the only one who was in a position to do it."

      His thoughts were neither hard nor cold; it was almost as if he were one of them—except for one thing. Only the words of his thoughts came through; there were none of the fringe thoughts that the six were used to in each other.

      "That's true," thought Reinhardt. "You see, we have been at this a good deal longer than you." Then he directed his thoughts at members of the crew of the spaceship, but they could still be heard by the six prisoners. "All right, men, get those people off those rocks. We have to make room for another batch."

      The airlock in the side of the ship opened, and СКАЧАТЬ