intention of harming him. Bertram, go with your colleagues and explain the situation to these people.”
I should have been scared, or angry, but all I could think was : Colleagues. Co-leagues. Heh.
“Shouldn’t I stay out here with Del?” Bertram said. “I could help—”
“That’s an order,” Stoltz said.
The man behind me pulled my torso into a sitting position. My helmeted head lolled forward like a bowling ball. Two goons herded the group to the main house. Lew glanced back as they reached the top of the steps, and hesitated. The gunman behind him gestured with his Taser, and Lew reluctantly went inside.
The commander patted me on the shoulder. “Let’s walk and talk.”
“At first I didn’t believe Bertram’s story,” Commander Stoltz said. “He has a history of mental troubles, as you know.”
I was too afraid of being Tasered again to point out that this was coming from a human hot plate who got his operating instructions from a pulp science fiction novel. We were walking slowly down the gravel road toward my cabin, one Human Leaguer a few feet ahead of us and two behind, their flashlights bouncing along the ground with us, skidding up into the trees. It had taken a few minutes to get my land legs back. My hands were cinched behind me in some kind of plastic cuffs, and they’d also fastened one of those packs onto my back. It was heavier than it had looked on the fat boys; the thing must be all battery.
“The independent evidence, however, was irrefutable. And considering your recent troubles in Chicago, it seemed as if indeed you were losing control for good. You must understand that we had to act quickly.”
“Oh, sure, of course,” I said, keeping the sarcasm out of my voice. I tried to subtly flex my hands, but the cuffs, whatever they were made of, had no give. I needed to stay calm, think my way out of this, but all I wanted to do was run screaming into the trees.
“The helmet you’re wearing operates on the same principles as my own personal integrity system,” he continued. “The constantly shifting electromagnetic field creates a kind of Faraday cage that interferes with the psionic frequencies of the GedankenKinder. Not only does it—”
“The who?”
“The Thought Children. A parallel race, descended from Neanderthals, with psychic abilities far beyond our own. The source of the so-called demons.”
What the fuck? Neanderthals?
We’d passed Lew’s cabin and my own. The yellow light shining through the trees ahead of us came from the safety light above the washhouse door.
“I thought you guys were all about the slans,” I said. “Bertram said—”
“Bertram’s only been a member of the league for a year. He’s not been fully authorized, and his personal integrity system is not up to the required level.” The commander touched me on the shoulder, trying to impart the seriousness of the matter. “We’re at war with telepaths, Del—intelligence can’t be trusted to an unsecured medium.”
“But you’re telling me,” I said.
“This is on a need-to-know basis—and I very much want you to understand some things, my friend. Bertram’s already told you that Van Vogt”—he pronounced the name Van Vote—“used the word ‘slan’ as a code for what popular culture has mislabeled ‘demons.’ That much is obvious, even to the casual reader. What Bertram has not been trusted with are the many other coded meanings embedded in the text. For example . . .”
There was no way of stopping the commander now.
“. . . consider the tendriled and tendrilless slans in the book. Van
Vogt made the tendrils external, which is excellent melodrama, but does that mean we should be on the alert for people with actual snakelike appendages growing out of their heads?” He laughed dismissively. Oh yeah, how silly. “Only now do we understand that ‘tendrils’ represent the physical structures present in the brains of the GedankenKinder, deformations that human neuroscientists have only recently confirmed. And think about the emphasis in the book on electronic thought broadcasters and receivers, and all the uses of numerical combinations and codes. Once I understood how Van Vogt had sowed the book with clues to the psionic blocking frequencies, it was only a matter of time until I could build our own versions of the Porgrave devices. That helmet you’re wearing —while it’s not quite up to the level of the three-sixty system I use—is more than adequate to block their telepathic scans. And as for ‘possession,’ mental transference in either direction, what Van Vogt called ‘hypnotic control,’ is completely impossible.”
My God, I thought. It’s always the same. One day this guy’s the assistant manager at Home Depot, the next he’s a prophet with a direct line on eternal truth. It didn’t matter if it was John 3:16 or the Kabala or No Money Down Real Estate audio tapes. It all came down to the Book, the Mission, and the absolute fucking Certainty. I tilted my helmeted head toward him. “And you’ve tested these things,” I said skeptically.
“My system has never been penetrated,” he said, clapping a hand on my shoulder. “Not once in the ten years since I discovered the frequencies. It’s our greatest weapon against them, Del.” We went past the washhouse, all the lights behind us now. I’d walked this way earlier, but nothing seemed familiar in the dark. The road ended somewhere ahead of us—it couldn’t be more than fifty yards—at a cabin that had looked vacant to me this afternoon. At least, its eye-stabber door decoration hadn’t had a fish on it. Beyond the cabin was a short pier, and beyond that was nothing but water and forest and a footpath snaking through the trees, roughly skirting the lake. “The field generator accomplishes with technology what you’ve managed to do on your own, by accident. But it’s not perfect. Which brings us to our problem.”
“There’s no problem,” I said earnestly. I didn’t know what this walk in the woods was about, but I did not like being tied up and jerked through the forest like a squealer in a mob film. “The demon’s totally under control.”
“Del, Del.” He chuckled condescendingly. “We know your control’s slipping. Bertram told us all about it. Isn’t that how you two ended up meeting each other in the first place?” He was pleased with this point. “No, your system isn’t working at all.”
“You want to put me in a cage, is that it? Or you want to wire me up like you. That’s the solution Bertram was talking about.”
He shook his head, but I couldn’t make out his expression. It was dark, and the helmet had slid down, obscuring my vision. He gripped the back of my arm and tugged me forward.
“I wish it were that easy. Or rather, that simple. Installing a threesixty system is no trivial matter. It’s painful—I can attest to that—and the chance of infection is very high. But once you’re fully wired, there’s no better defense on the planet. However . . .”
I didn’t like the sound of “however.”
“As good as the three-sixty system is, it’s not secure enough for your needs. Now, most of us, we’re only trying to keep the slans out, whenever they might turn their attention to us. And if they succeeded in psychically seizing me, I’m only one man, a citizen no more important than any member of the league.” He’d delivered the speech before. No doubt the Man of the People thing went over real big with the troops. “But with you, Del, the beast is already inside the cage. Say that we fitted you with the three-sixty system—what if the power supply fails? What if you cut yourself and break the field? These are dangers I constantly live with, but with you, the stakes are much higher. Can we risk letting the beast out? Can we allow the Hellion to ruin the lives of untold children?”
Oh shit.
Bertram was a nut job, but he was my friend, and all this time I’d
been banking on the fact that he wouldn’t go along with something that would do me real harm. But the commander knew that too. So they’d lied to Bertram. And they’d made sure he wasn’t along on our little walk in the woods.
I stopped in the road, head down, fighting a wave of nausea. The men behind us pointed their flashlights at
