Highways in Hiding by George O. Smith (ebook reader 7 inch .txt) 📗

of the pain was past. Then she got efficient again and waved Thorndyke aside to see to the little straps on the manipulator herself. She adjusted them delicately. Then she poured me a glass of ice water and put it where I could reach it with my other hand. She left after one long searching look into my eyes, and I knew that she would be back later to talk to me alone. This seemed all right with Dr. Thorndyke, the wily telepath who would be able to dig a reconstruction of our private talk with a little urging on his part.

After Catherine was gone, Thorndyke smiled down at me with cynical self-confidence. "There's your lever, Steve," he said.

The dope helped to kill all but the worst waves of searing pain; between them I managed to grind out, "How did you sell her that bill of goods, Thorndyke?"

His reply was scornful. "Maybe she likes your hide all in one piece," he grunted.

He left me with my mind a-whirl with thoughts and pain. The little manipulator was working my second finger joint up and down rhythmically, and with each move came pain. It also exercised the old joint, which had grown so rigid that my muscles hadn't been able to move it for several hours. That added agony, too.

The dope helped, but it also dimmed my ability to concentrate.

Up to a certain point everything was quite logical and easy to understand. Catherine was here because they had contacted her through some channel and said, "Throw in with us and we'll see that your lover does not die miserably." So much was reasonable, but after that point the whole thing began to take on a mad puzzle-like quality. Given normal circumstances, Catherine would have come to me as swiftly as I'd have gone to her if I'd known how. Not only that, but I'd probably have sworn eternal fealty to them for their service even though I could not stand their way of thinking.

But Catherine was smart enough to realize that I, as the only known carrier of Mekstrom's Disease, was more valuable live than dead.

Why, then, had Catherine come here to place herself in their hands? Alone, she might have gone off half-cocked in an emotional tizzy. But the Highways had good advisers who should have pointed out that Steve Cornell was one man alive who could walk with impunity among friend or foe. Why, they hadn't even tried to collect me until it became evident that I was in line for the Old Treatment. Then they had to take me in, because the Medical Center wanted any information they could get above and beyond the fact that I was a carrier. If someone from Homestead had been in that courtroom, I'd now be among friends.

Then the ugly thought hit me and my mind couldn't face it for some time.

Reorientation.

Catherine's cheerful willingness to help them must be reorientation and nothing else.

Now, although I've mentioned reorientation before, what I actually know about it is meager. It makes Dr. Jekylls out of former Mr. Hydes and the transformation is complete. It can be done swiftly; the rapidity depends upon the strength of the mind of the operator compared to the mind of the subject. It is slightly harder to reorient a defiant mind than a willing one. It sticks unless someone else begins to tinker again. It is easier to make a good man out of a bad one than the reverse, although the latter is eminently possible. This is too difficult a problem to discuss to the satisfaction of everybody, but it seems to go along with the old theory that "Good" does benefit the tribe of mankind in the long run, while "Bad" things cause trouble. I'll say no more than to point out that no culture based upon theft, murder, piracy, and pillage, has ever survived.

The thought of Catherine's mind being tampered with made me seethe with anger. I forgot my pain and began to probe around wildly, and as I probed I began to know the real feeling of helpless futility.

For here I was, practically immobilized and certainly dependent upon them for help. This was no time to attempt a rescue of my sweetheart—who would only be taken away kicking and screaming all the way from here to the first place where I could find a haven and have her re-reoriented. The latter would not be hard; among the other things I knew about reorientation was that it could be negated by some strong emotional ties and a personal background that included worthy objection to the new personality.

For my perceptive digging I came up with nothing but those things that any hospital held. Patients, nurses, interns, orderlies; a couple of doctors, a scholar presiding over a sheaf of files. And finally Catherine puttering over an autoclave. She was setting out a string of instruments under the tutelage of a superintendent of nurses who was explaining how the job should be done.

I took a deep, thankful breath. Her mind was occupied enough to keep her from reading the dark thoughts that were going through mine. I did not even want a loved one to know how utterly helpless and angry I felt.

And then, because I was preoccupied with Catherine and my own thoughts, the door opened without my having taken a dig at the opener beforehand. The arrival was all I needed to crack wide open in a howling fit of hysteria. It was so pat. I couldn't help but let myself go: "Well! This looks like Old Home Week!"

Miss Gloria Farrow, Registered Nurse, did not respond to my awkward joviality. Her face, if anything, was darker than my thoughts. I doubted that she had her telepathy working; people who get that wound up find it hard to even see and hear straight, let alone think right. And telepathy or perception goes out of kilter first because the psi is a very delicate factor.

She eyed me coldly. "You utter imbecile," she snarled. "You—"

"Whoa, baby!" I roared. "Slow down. I'm a bit less than bright, but what have I done now?"

I'd have slapped her across the face as an anodyne if she hadn't been Mekstrom.

Farrow cooled visibly, then her face sort of came apart and she sort of flopped forward onto the bed and buried her face in my shoulder. I couldn't help but make comparisons; she was like a hunk of marble, warm and vibrant. Like having a statue crying on my shoulder. She sagged against me like a loose bag of cement and her hands clutched at my shoulder blades like a pair of C-clamps. A big juicy tear dropped from her cheek to land on my chest, and I was actually surprised to find that a teardrop from a Mekstrom did not land like a drop of mercury. It just splashed like any other drop of water, spread out, and made my chest wet.

Eventually I held her up from me, tried to shake her gently, and said, "Now what's the shooting all about, Farrow?"

She shook her head as if to clear her thinking gear.

"Steve," she said in a quietly serious tone, "I've been such an utter fool."

"You're not unique, Farrow," I told her. "People have been doing damfool stunts since—"

"I know," she broke in. Then with an effort at light-heartedness, she added, "There must be a different version of that Garden of Eden story. Eve is always blamed as having tempted Adam. Somewhere, Old Adam must have been slightly to blame—?"

I didn't know what she was driving toward, but I stroked her hair and waited. She was probably right. It still takes two of a kind to make one pair.

"Steve—get out of here! While you're safe!"

"Huh?" I blurted. "What cooks, Farrow?"

"I was a nice patsy," she said. She sat up and wiped her eyes. "I was a fool. Steve, if James Thorndyke had asked me to jump off the roof, I'd have asked him 'what direction?' That's how fat-headed I am."

"Yes?" Something was beginning to form, now.

"I—led you on, Steve."

That blinkoed me. The phrase didn't jell. The half a minute she'd spent bawling on my shoulder with my arms around her had been the first physical contact I'd ever had with Nurse Farrow. It didn't seem—

"No, Steve. Not that way. I couldn't see you for Thorndyke any more than you could see me for Catherine." Her telepathy had returned, obviously; she was in better control of herself. "Steve," she said, "I led you on; did everything that Thorndyke told me to. You fell into it like a rock. Oh—it was going to be a big thing. All I had to do was to haul you deeper into this mess, then I'd disappear strangely. Then we'd be—tog—ether—we'd be—"

She started to come unglued again but stopped the dissolving process just before the wet and gooey stage set in. She seemed to put a set in her shoulders, and then she looked down at me with pity. "Poor esper," she said softly, "you couldn't really know—"

"Know what?" I asked harshly.

"He fooled me—too," she said, in what sounded like a complete irrelevancy.

"Look, Farrow, try and make a bit of sense to a poor perceptive who can't read a mind. Keep it running in one direction, please?"

Again, as apparently irrelevant, she said, "He's a top grade telepath; he knows control—"

"Control—?" I asked blankly.

"You don't know," she said. "But a good telepath can think in patterns that prevent lesser telepaths from really digging deep. Thorndyke is brilliant, of scholar grade, really. He—"

"Let's get back to it, Farrow. What's cooking?"

Sternly she tossed her head. It was an angry motion, one that showed her disdain for her own tears and her own weakness. "Your own sweet Catherine."

I eyed her, not coldly but with a growing puzzlement. I tried to formulate my own idea but she went on, briskly, "That accident of yours was one of the luckiest things that ever happened to you, Steve."

"How long have I been known to be a Mekstrom Carrier?" I asked bluntly.

"No more than three weeks before you met Catherine Lewis," she told me as bluntly. "It took the Medical Center that long to work her into a position to meet you, Steve."

That put the icing on the cake. If nothing else, it explained why Catherine was here willingly. I didn't really believe it because no one can turn one hundred and eighty degrees without effort, but I couldn't deny the fact that the evidence fits the claim. If what Farrow said were true, my marriage to Catherine would have provided them with the same lever as the little blonde receptionist. The pile-up must have really fouled up their plans.

"It did, Steve," said Farrow, who had been following my mental ramblings. "The Highways had to step in and help. This fouled things up for both sides."

"Both sides?" I asked, completely baffled.

She nodded. "Until the accident, the Medical Center did not know that the Highways existed. But when Catherine dropped completely out of sight, Thorndyke did a fine job of probing you. That's when he came upon the scant evidence of the Highway Sign and the mental impression of the elder Harrison lifting the car so that Phillip could get you out. Then he knew, and—"

"Farrow," I snapped, "there are a lot of holes in your story. For instance—"

She held up a hand to stop me. "Steve," she said quietly, "you know how difficult it is for a non-telepath to find someone he can trust. But I'm trying to convince you that—"

I stopped Farrow this time. "How can I believe you now?" I asked her pointedly. "You seem to have a part in this side of the quiet warfare."

Nurse Farrow made a wry face as though she'd just discovered that the stuff she had in her mouth was a ball of wooly centipedes. "I'm a woman," she said simply. "I'm soft and gullible and easily talked into complacency. But I've just learned that their willingness to accept women is based upon the fact that no culture can thrive without women to propagate the race. I find that I am—" She paused, swallowed, and her voice became strained with bitterness, "—useful as a breeding animal. Just one of the peasants whose glory lies in carrying their heirs. But I tell you, Steve—" and here she became strong and her voice rang out with a vigorous rejection of her future, "I'll be forever damned if I will let my child be raised with the cockeyed notion that he has some God-Granted Right to Rule."

My vigilant sense of perception had detected a change in the human-pattern in the building. People were moving—no, it was one person who was moving.

Down in the laboratory below, and at the other end of the building, Catherine was still working over the autoclave and instruments. The waspish-looking superintendent had taken off for somewhere else, and while Catherine