saw it was me, she let her mouth hang loose some while before closing it and taking a much needed breath.
'If I'm interrupting a good book, I'll come back later,'
I said, nodding at the propaganda.
She threw it down. 'That drivel is really fascinating,' she said. 'The guy who writes it is either the biggest con man in existence or he believes it himself-in which case he has to be a mongoloid idiot, no question.'
'Aren't you glad to see me?' I asked. 'Aren't you going to hug and kiss the hero in your midst?'
'You can't be in my midst, because I'm only one person, not a multitude. Though this goddamned prison baggies do make me look like more than one woman.'
She pulled at the uniform, shrugged. 'You're here. I never expected you, don't know how you managed it, and doubt if we'll get back out. Like I said, the prison baggies here?'
I pulled jeans, sweater, and thin windbreaker from under my overcoat, all of which I had secreted there before leaving her apartment. 'Do me the honor of a striptease?' I asked.
She grinned, stripped without asking me to turn my back (which I would have refused to do anyway), and dressed in the clothes I had brought.
I felt every inch the hero, all the while my mind was yelling 'Fool' at top volume.
As she pushed past me to leave the cell, she stood on her toes a moment and kissed me, then turned quickly away again. Before she could take two steps, I grabbed her and turned her around. What I thought I had seen was in her eyes: tears.
'Hey,' I said, feeling the male stupidity that cannot cope with tears. 'Hey.' Really stupid.
'Let's go,' she said.
'Something wrong?'
'I've been wondering if you were alive, wondering if even you were whether you would care enough to come for me.'
'But of course-'
'Shush,' she said, stopping the tears. 'We haven't time for this, have we?'
We closed the cell door and locked it, went up and past the other cubbyholes. Each was separated from the other by cement walls, but the fronts were all bars through which we could see the occupants. None of them, however, seemed to care much about us.
We went up in the first elevator, passed the first and second unconscious guards. When the second elevator opened on the main ground floor corridor, we walked briskly into the lobby, pushed open the glass doors and breathed in the cold night air. No one in the lobby or at any of the work desks paid the least bit attention to us. I took Melinda's arm, and we walked down the steps-just in time to confront General Alexander Morsfagen and four young and dedicated men with guns in their hands!
'Good evening,' he said, bowing to us.
The four men with guns did not bow.
'I do believe you're surprised, Mr. Kelly. I didn't expect to see your cool broken like that.' But whether or not he expected it, he certainly did enjoy it. His face was split with a grin you seldom see outside of mental wards.
'Who is he?' Melinda asked.
'Morsfagen.'
'The title too, please,' he said. But he was not just being humorous. His voice was stiff and deadly beneath the surface delight.
'General Morsfagen,' I told her.
'And you're under arrest, of course,' he said.
The four guards advanced on us, efficient but somehow less wary than they had been at first. It would have been possible, perhaps, to use my two pistols on the lot of them. They did not seem to expect that I might be armed, and with both my hands in my pockets and wrapped around the sweat-slicked butts of the weapons, they might have bought it but good before they realized what was happening.
Might have.
But nothing is certain.
Besides, the back of my mind played with the memory of those flaming corpses on the beach, with the picture of the howler drivers screaming as they fell to sudden death.
I didn't want more blood on my hands.
I contemplated using my esp on them. But the problem was that I could only invade one mind at a time. I knew I could not work fast enough to incapacitate all of them before one of those four boys panicked and put a few rounds of hard steel into Melinda and me.
What had happened to the god?
What was this? Mere men overpowering me and outthinking me, me a god?
'This way, please,' Morsfagen said.
We followed him.
VII
Morsfagen had directed the placement of armed soldiers in the storm drains under and within four blocks of the Tombs. He had positioned a man behind every one of the slit windows of the administration building where I might possibly be able to force entrance. Even in the maze of aluminum air-conditioning ducts which wound through the great structure, a hundred men waited in silence with their narcotics pistols drawn and their nerves honed to crisp attention. With all of this waiting for me, I had walked up the front steps and through the lobby as brazen as a man could be. But even that had been planned for, and a watch had been kept from one of the apparently empty howlers parked before the Tombs entrance. They had watched me go in, had identified me, had let me get the girl, had let me bring her out, and then had nailed us.
Perhaps Morsfagen let it go on that long so that he could level charges of jailbreak against both of us on top of what the government already had drummed up. But I half thought that he wanted to humiliate me as much as anything. And he had.
They put us in a howler, took us through snowy streets to the AC complex. They took Melinda away to a separate preventive detention apartment and placed me in another, where there were no sharp instruments or windows.
'General Morsfagen will see you tomorrow,' the guard told me as he left.
'Can't wait,' I said.
The door closed, the lock snapped, and quiet descended.
I flopped onto the bed and listened to the springs whine, and I thought about what a stupid, fumbling idiot I had been, even with Child's intellect integrated with my own. I had gone back to the house to pack, even when I should have realized that they would be coming for me.
That had ended in the deaths of an entire howler crew, smashed and burning on my beach. Then I had gone to the prison after Melinda, with my brilliant plan of boldness, though I should have known that they would have been expecting the unexpected. Perhaps part of the plan was based on Child's cleverness-but another part was based on my own impetuousness, and Morsfagen knew my personality like the back of his hand-or better.
Look at yourself, Kelly, I yammered inside my head.
The only esper in the world, amplified by a partial absorption of the psychic energies of the most complete genius-and still a failure. Still charging around with delusions that invariably trip you up.
Before my meeting with Child and my therapy in the mechanical psychiatrist, I had been going on the assumption that I was some holy character, some bright and shining product of godly grace, the Second Coming. Basically, I had been nothing more than a man, and I had only suffered by my refusal to understand that. I blundered into things acting like a god, and when I got hurt or frightened, I couldn't cope. I had never prepared myself against hurt and fear, for I could not see where either commodity would impinge upon a god.
Now, with Child, I had unconsciously begun to accept the god role again. Smug in the knowledge that I was esper with a genius inside me, I slipped back into the habit of looking on lesser mortals with contempt. And in my self-assurance, I had failed to use all my talents and intellect, had underestimated my enemy as the first
