“One moment,” Braden said—and this part of his conversation was one he had rehearsed so many times in his mind he genuinely believed it now. “Are you planning to kill me?”
Lesley gave a violent nod, eyes locked wide open under her sun-bleached lashes.
“But you daren’t,” Braden said with careful cruelty. “Because you’d know what I was thinking when I died.”
He relaxed his mind now and he had a very real fear of death underneath the glacial calm he outwardly affected.
“If you kill me, Lesley, you will feel the bullet, no matter where you put it—unless you hit me in the head and destroy my brain instantly. But I doubt you can do that. I don’t see how anyone who can read minds could bear to learn to use a gun so well. You’ve never felt a slug tear up your belly or fill your lungs with blood but I have. I was out in Vietnam and I was shot three times. And later I was bayoneted, too. Look inside my head and learn how I remember that. And those were only wounds, Lesley. They weren’t death. Death is big and black and final—”
All the time he was talking, soothingly, almost hypnotically, he had been approaching her. Now she regained her presence of mind and advanced the gun as though to skewer him with it.
“You can’t use a knife either, Lesley,” Braden said in the same flat tone. “Steel in the flesh feels cold and agonizing. You can’t use your bare hands because—even though you’re probably as strong as I am after climbing up and down these rocks— every time you hit me you would feel the blow.”
Another step—and another. The outstretched gun was beginning to quiver. The girl’s eyes were bright with what he confidently took to be tears.
“You can’t give me poison because either it hurts or it takes too long. You can’t strangle me while I’m asleep, for fear I’d wake and be so terrified you’d have to give up. So you can’t kill me, Lesley. You daren’t kill me. Doing something like that would drive you insane. You know what suffering does to you, I’m sure—you must have been around people who were dying, maybe after a traffic accident—”
His thick fingers lanced out and clamped on the barrel of the gun, thrusting it aside where its slugs would whine harmlessly away. For a moment he feared she still had enough guts to struggle with him for possession of it but abruptly she let go and slapped her hands up to her temples.
Another second and she began to cry.
Contemptuously Braden broke the breech of the gun and spilled the shells in a metal rain over the edge of the plateau. About to whirl the weapon itself around his head and fling it far away from the rocks, he paused.
“I’m not throwing this down the hill in case you think to use it as a club and beat me unconscious, by the way,” he said. “There isn’t any way you could force me to let go of you now I’ve tracked you down. You can’t torture me or compel me. You see, I’ve known for a long time that I wouldn’t need to come armed against someone like you. I had a very strict and puritanical upbringing. It left me conditioned in a certain fundamental way. Of course, by now you’ve probably worked out what I’m going to tell you but I’ll say it in words just to avoid misunderstanding.”
He stared at her piercingly.
“You were a pretty big girl when life became too much for you—seventeen, weren’t you, when you vanished from your family and home? So you probably knew the facts of life. And I don’t think I need to tell you what a masochist is!”
He raised the rifle and hurled it as far as he could. Dusting his hands, he turned to confront Lesley.
“But a masochist isn’t simply someone who likes to be hurt— that’s a common error. It’s someone who needs to be hurt, and the more he’s hurt the better able he is to let go and grab after the gratification he wants. You can’t bear to be near someone who’s being hurt, let alone to be hurt yourself. It’s going to be an unequal struggle, isn’t it?”
Tear-stained, her face rose from the shelter of her hands. “What do you want from me?” she whispered.
“You have to ask?” Braden gave a thick triumphant laugh. “Don’t try and fool me. You know very well what I want from you. Go on, admit it.”
“You—” The first attempt at an answer died in a gasp, and she tried again. “You think that with me to read other people’s minds for you you could—”
“Let’s hear it. Finish the sentence, baby.”
“You could rule the world.”
“That’s right,” Braden agreed. “Or if you went crazy from the pressure, at least I’d have collected enough secrets to buy the men who count. You may be a telepath, sweetheart, but in this area I’m a clairvoyant. And all I have to do now is wait until you see the future the way I do.”
It was going to be even easier than he’d expected, he decided as he sat before the small shielded fire at the mouth of the cave Lesley called home. On a stick he was grilling some sausages he had brought with him—one of the things he had figured out in advance was that someone as squeamish as you’d imagine a telepath to be wouldn’t eat the flesh of animals.
The point amused him and for a moment he dwelled on the vivid recollection of a slaughterhouse he had once visited. From the rear of the cave a retching sound told him that the thought had had the effect he’d hoped for.
“There, there, baby,” he called. “It’s just one of these facts
