Robert Silverberg - The Four

More than a mile of dark sea-water roofed the city. It lay off the Atlantic coast of North America, nestling beneath the waves, cradled by hundreds of atmospheres of pressure. In the official records, the city’s designation was Undersea Refuge PL-12. But the official records, like the rest of the landside world, lay blasted and shattered, and the people of Undersea Refuge PL-12 called their city New Baltimore. Eleven thousand was New Baltimore’s population, a figure set by long-dead landside authorities and maintained by rigorous policies of control.

The history of New Baltimore stretched back for one hundred thirteen years. Not one of its eleven thousand inhabitants had not been born in the deep, under the laminated dome that was the city’s shield. In the ninetieth year of New Baltimore a child had been allotted to the Foyle family, and Mary Foyle was born. And in the hundred thirteenth year of the city—

Mary Foyle lay coiled like a fetal snake in her room at the New Baltimore Social Hall. She lay with feet drawn up, arms locked over her bosom, eyes closed, mouth slightly open. She was twenty-three, blonde, terrible in her wrath. She was not asleep.

At the ninth hour of the day and the second of her three-hour Free Period, she sensed the approach of a visitor, and hatred gathered in her cold mind. Bitterly, she disengaged herself from what she had been doing, and extended a tendril of thought as far as the door. The mind she encountered was weak, pliable, amiable.

Yes, she thought, Roger Carroll, the silly goose.

Roger’s mind formed the thought, Mary, may I come in? and he verbalized as far as “Mary, may—” when she darted a hissing prong of thought at him, and he reddened, cut short his sentence and opened the door.

Lazily Mary Foyle tidied her wrappings and looked up at Roger. He was thin, like all men of New Baltimore, but well muscled and strong. He was a year her junior; gifted like her, with the Powers, but weak of will and flabby of purpose.

“You’ll destroy your Powers if you don’t give them free play,” she thought coldly at him.

“I’m sorry. It was a slip.”

She glared bleakly. “Suppose I slipped and blasted your silly mind?”

“Mary, I’ve never denied that you’re more powerful than I am—than all three of us put together—”

“Quiet,” she ordered. “The others are coming. Try not to look so much like a blithering fool.”

Her mind had detected the arrival of the other two members of their little group. Moments later Roger’s slower mind had received the signal, and he added his friendly welcome to Mary’s cold one.

Michael Sharp entered first; after him, Tom Devers. They were in their late twenties. In them the Powers had ripened slowly, and Mary had found them out only two years before. Roger had been under her sway for nine years. She herself had first sensed the Powers stirring in her mind fifteen years earlier.

There was a moment of blending as the four minds met— Mary’s as always, harshly dominant, never yielding for a moment the superiority that gave her the leadership of the group. The greeting was done with; the Four were as one, and the confines of the room seemed to shrink until it cradled their blended minds as securely as the Dome held back the sea from the buildings of New Baltimore.

“Well?” Mary demanded. The challenge rang out and she sensed Roger’s involuntary flinch. “Well?” she asked again, deliberately more strident.

Slowly, sadly, came the response: affirmative from Michael, affirmative from Tom, weakly affirmative from Roger. A slow smile spread over Mary’s face. Affirmative!

Roger’s mind added hesitantly, “Of course, there’s grave danger—”

“Danger adds spice.”

“If we’re caught we’re finished—”

Impetuously Mary extended her mind toward Roger’s, entered it, made slight adjustments in Roger’s endocrine balance. Currents of fear ceased to flow through his body. Trepidation died away.

“All right,” Roger said, his mental voice a whisper now. “I agree to join you.”

“All agreed, then,” Mary said. Her mind enfolded those of the three lean, pale men who faced her. The borders of the small room grew smaller yet, shrank to the size of Mary’s skull, then expanded outward.

Four minds linked as one leaped five thousand feet skyward, toward the crisped and blackened land above.

Mary alone could not have done it. She had tried, and much of her bitterness stemmed from the fact that she had failed. She had sent her mind questing out along the sea-bottom, rippling through the coraled ooze to New Chicago and New London and New Miami and the other domed cities that dotted the Atlantic floor. It was strictly illegal for a Sensitive to make contact with the mind of an inhabitant of another Dome, but Mary had never cared much for what the legal authorities said.

She had reached the other cities of the sea-bottom easily enough—though the effort of getting to New London had left her sweat-soaked and panting—but breaking through to the surface eluded her. Time and again she sent shafts skyward, launching beams of thought through the thick blanket of water above, striving to pierce the ocean and see the land, the ruined land deserted and bare, the land made desolate by radiation. She wanted to see the sky in its blueness, and the golden terror of the naked sun.

She failed. Less than a thousand feet from the surface the impulse sagged, the spear of thought blunted and fell back. In the privacy of her room she tried again, and yet again, until her thin clothes were pasted to her body by sweat.

That was when she realized she would need help.

It was a bitter realization. Slowly Mary had sought out those she needed, from the two hundred Sensitives of New Baltimore. Roger she had known for years, and he was as much under her domination as was her hand or her leg. But Roger was not enough. She found Michael and she found Tom, and when rapport had been established she showed them what she proposed to do.

Using them as boosters, as amplifiers, she intended to hurl a psionic signal through the sea to the surface. She could not do it alone; in series, the four of them might do almost anything.

They lay, the four of them, sprawled on couches in Mary’s room. With cold fury she whipped them together into the unit she needed. Michael had objected; after all, the penalty for projecting one’s mind beyond the borders of New Baltimore was death. But Mary had quashed that objection, welded the Four into One, cajoled and commanded and pleaded and manipulated.

Now, tenuously, the threaded strand of four-ply thought wove toward the surface.

Mary had seen the tridims projected on the arching screens in General Hall. She had an idea of what the surface was like, all blacks and browns and fused glass and gaunt frameworks that had been buildings. But she wanted to see it for herself. She wanted direct visual experience of this surface world, this dead skin of the planet, cauterized by man’s evil. Mary had a lively appreciation of evil.

Upward they traveled. Mary sensed Michael and Tom and Roger clinging to her mind, helping her force the impulse upward. Eyes closed, body coiled, she hurled herself to the task.

And the blackness of the water lightened to dark green as the sun-warmed zone approached. She had not got this far on her earlier, solo attempts. Now her mind rose with little effort into the upper regions of the sea, and without warning cleaved through the barrier of water into the open air.

Michael and Tom and Roger were still with her.

The sight of landside was dazzling.

The first perception was of the sun; smaller than she had expected, but still an awesome object, glowing high in the metal-blue sky. White clouds lay fleecily under the sun.