Robert Adams - Bili the Axe

“But back then, in our original bodies, there was a vast disparity in our ages. Dr. Arenstein… dammit! Erica … was no more than thirty-eight or -nine, while I was nearing seventy. I had my full share of enemies then, both outside and inside the Project, and the last thing I wanted or felt I could afford was to have the label ‘dirty old man’ added to all the other canards; nor would that have then been all, of course. I then had a still-living wife, though we had not lived together for years.

■ “That frigid, feminist bitch! She would have loved nothing so much as to have had the ammunition to publicly humiliate me… us, Erica and me… had I been so rash as to give it to her. May she rot and suffer in whatever hell she’s been in for these last thousand or so years!”

“And so, Jay, I was emotionally saddled with those same, senseless inhibitions for long centuries. Only when, last year, I… when I thought that Erica… dear, lovely woman… only then did I admit to myself just how stupid I had been for so long a time.

“Then, last winter, I began to have strange, disturbing dreams… dreams of Erica. I could see her in some low, smoky place… perhaps a cave… and there were other people there, too, men, 1 think, some of them, at least, armed with rifles. Laugh at me if you wish, but… but it all seemed so… so real that… that I thought, perhaps, if… ?”

“It’s entirely possible, David. According to Morty Lilienthal, an intense emotional attachment when combined with enforced separation and longing can heighten, increase, latent psychic abilities.”

Old frames of mind become often rock-hard and old habits are hard to break even in the face of suffering. “That fraud?” Sternheimer snorted scornfully. “That pompous ass of a Rhine-blinded idiot! I just wish I knew how that so-called psychometric, that lousy louse of a cheap fortuneteller, got assigned to the Project to begin with. I’m sorry to say so, Jay, but you have a very poor choice of associates.”

“David,” Corbett began, “now I know, along with everyone else at the Center, that you and Dr. Lilienthal don’t particularly care for each other…”

Sternheimer snorted again. “That, General Corbett, is the unparalleled understatement of two millennia!”

Corbett pushed on, regardless. “No matter, David, you are just now caught between a rock and a hard place, and, like it or him or not, Morty Lilienthal just may be the only one down there who can help you.

“Now you have just gone through a protracted and obviously difficult admission to me about an affair of the heart that everyone save only you at the Center has known about or at least surmised for centuries. You once considered— and likely a part of you still considers—even admission of these feelings to yourself to be far beyond the pale, much less the thought of consummating them, but still you have found the strength within yourself to sufficiently reshuffle your mind enough to admit them not only to yourself but to me.

“Now you’re going to have to do a bit more reshuffling, David. For all that mindspeak, as they call it, is a reality and has been a reality on this continent for centuries, and that this mindspeak is nothing more or less than what we once called telepathy, you have continued to regard it and all the other of the host of extrasensory abilities as, at the very best, pseudo-science and, as such, unworthy of your notice. Well, you’ve been wrong and you’re just going to have to bite the bullet and admit that too.

“David, Mcrty Lilienthal respects you and admires you, has always admired you and fought very hard to get assigned to the original Project in hopes that his then-rare specialty might be of help to you and your Project. He has since been hurt and embittered by your often and loudly expressed scorn of him and his field, but still he never has ceased to admire you and your unimpeachable accomplishments.

“Go to him, David. Better yet, call him to your office and tell him all that you’ve just told me. He can teach you to mindspeak, if you possess the germ of the ability. He’s already taught me in just the last few months to contact those capable of receiving at as much as several hundred meters distant.

“And David, there is another type of telepathy, one which non-Center people call farspeak. Certain unusual minds possessing this talent can communicate over vast distances, hundreds of kilometers; the outer ranges have never been determined. If you prove capable of this rarity, David, and if Erica is still alive somewhere, you might be able to actually contact her, converse with her or exchange thoughts and so make it easier for us to find her and bring her back to the Center… to you. Would that be worth the consumption of a helping of crow to you, David?”

“Abase myself to that young charlatan? Never!” snarled Sternheimer, adding in a more normal tone, “You ask too much, Jay. You must remember, I am after all the Director.”

“All right,” agreed Corbett, trying to mask from his tone the exasperation and disgust he was beginning to feel for Sternheimer and his rigidly closed mind. “Look at the matter this way, David. If you do possess long-range telepathy and you can find a way to develop mastery of that ability, it just might prove of value—possibly, of inestimable value—against the mutants, all of whom do any important long-range discussion in just that way.

“And please understand, David, I’m not saying you should make a decision on it now; just think about it, weigh it in your mind. As of tonight, we’re nowhere near where Erica was lost, and won’t be for a week or more at our present rate of march. Besides, I want to see the job well underway up ai the site of the landslide before I take any troops off on what well might well be a wild-goose chase and highly dangerous to me and my men, to boot.”

A few hours after the end of that radio communication, it began to rain, nor did it ever stop for more than a few hours at a time, day or night, for weeks. Moreover, with the rain and mist came a drop of temperature to a level unseasonably low for the area they were traversing. The thin layers of soil covering the rocks on the higher elevations of the track became slick patches of mud, making these stretches even more hazardous than usual for the riders and heavy-laden pack animals. Corbett often found it necessary not only to dismount the column but to have men detailed to garner large quantities of weeds and brush to cover the slippery spots and provide some manner of traction for both men and beasts.

Consequently, the formerly good progress was slowed to a mere crawl, nor did all but sleepless nights of shivering under wet blankets add to the daytime efficiency of the troops and civilian packers. Tempers waxed short and the generally easygoing officers and noncoms found it necessary to exact and enforce strict, harsh discipline in order to maintain a unit rather than a mob.

Nor did the march on lower levels of the track provide any rest for the weary column. Streams that Corbett’s mental map had recorded as hardly fetlock-deep were found, on this trip, to have metamorphosed into raging rivers, swirling, muddy, icy water between steep, slippery banks and belly-high for even a long-legged mule. Thicker layers of loam on the valley trails quickly developed countless and seemingly bottomless mudholes, from which cursing, mud-caked and thoroughly soaked men often had to extricate screaming, thrashing and terrified mules or ponies.

Due to these multitudinous difficulties, it was close to three weeks before the column wended its way between the high, rocky walls of that pass wherein Dr. Harry*raun had clubbed Dr. Erica Arenstein to earth and left her to the tender mercies of the cannibal Ganiks, while he galloped on after Gumpner and the wounded, leaving Corbett and the bulk of the force doggedly holding the northern mouth of the gap against hundreds of the savage Ganiks, and fully expecting to give their lives that their comrades and the two scientists might have a better chance at survival.