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“Get the mallaport! Get the goddamned mallaport, willya!” A young ensign with brush-cut blond hair, first to reach the stage, as though he had been waiting crouched below, cradled Gu
In a few minutes the angular, spade-pawed, malleable-transporter was smoothing the skin on Gu
Another few moments and the psioid was finished; the burns had been erased; Gu
All through it he had been murmuring. As the mallaport finished his mental work, stood up with a sigh, the word filtered through to the young SpaceCom ensign. He stared at Gu
He stared at them with a mixture of fear and bewilderment.
Gu
The ship was heading toward Omalo, sun of the Delgart system. It had been translated into inverspace by a driver named Carina Correia. She had warped the ship through, and gone back to her deep sleep, till she was needed at Omalo snapout.
Now the ship whirled through the crazy quilt of inverspace, cutting through to the star system of Earth’s adversary.
Gu
The SpaceCom man’s watery blue eyes swept between the pallid man and the teleport-proof safe set in the cabin’s bulkhead.
“Any idea why they’re sending us so deep into Delgart territory?” the ensign fished. “It’s pretty tight lines up this far. Must be something big. Any idea?”
Gu
“Don’t you even know who your planet’s at war with?”
“I’ve been rural for many years. But aren’t they always at war with someone?”
The ensign looked startled. “Not unless it’s to protect the peace of the galaxies. Earth is a peace- loving …”
Gu
The spaceman’s face contorted in a picture of conditioned hatred. “We’ve been after the bastards since they jumped one of our mining planets outside their cluster.” He twisted his lips in open loathing. “We’ll clean the bastards out soon enough! Teach them to jump peaceful Earthmen.”
Gu
The invership whipped past the myriad-odd colors of inverspace, hurtling through that not-space toward the alien cluster. Gu
He silently cursed the strange mental power he had. The power to make the molecules of anything speed up tremendously, making them grind against one another, causing combustion. A strange, cha
From the first moment of his life when he had realized his strange power, he had been haunted. No control, no identification, no communication. Cut off. Tagged as an oddie. Not even the pleasures of being an acknowledged psioid, like the mindees, or the invaluable drivers, or the blasters, or the mallaports who could move the atoms of flesh to their design. He was an oddie. A strange breed, and worse: he was a nondirective psioid. Tagged deadly and uncontrollable. He could set the fires, but he could not control them. The molecules were too tiny, too quickly imitative for him to stop the activity once it was started. It had to stop of its own volition … and occasionally it was too long in stopping.
Once he had thought himself normal, once he had thought of leading an ordinary life — of perhaps becoming a musician. But that idea had died a-flaming, as all other normal ideas that had followed it.
First the ostracism, then the hunting, then the arrests and the prison terms, one after another. Now something new — something he could not understand. What did they want with him? It was obviously in co
Why was he in this most marvelous of the new SpaceCom ships, heading toward the central sun of the enemy cluster? And why should he help Earth in any case?
At that moment the locks popped, the safe broke open, and the clanging of the alarms was heard to the bowels of the invership.
The ensign stopped him as he started to rise, started toward the safe. The ensign thumbed a button on his wrist console.
“Hold it, Mr. Gu
Gu
“I don’t know, sir. I wasn’t told.”
The other two were psioids, naturally.
When the mindee and the blaster arrived, they motioned the Ensign to remove the contents of the safe. He walked over nervously, took out the tiny trecorder and the single speak-tip.
“Play it, Ensign,” the mindee directed.
The spaceman thumbed the speak-tip into the hole, and the grating of the blank space at the begi
“You can leave now, Ensign,” the Mindee said.
After the SpaceCom officer had securely loktited the door, the voice began. Gu
“Gu
“You will arrive in two days Earthtime at a slipout point approximately five hundred million miles from Omalo, the enemy sun. You will be far behind enemy lines, but we are certain you will be able to accomplish your mission safely, that is why you have been given this new ship. It can withstand anything the enemy can throw.
“But we want you to get back for other reasons. You are the most important man in our war effort, Gu