Marion Zimmer Bradley Super Pack. Marion Zimmer Bradley
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Spade flung himself forward and threw his pistol to the ground at Andrew’s feet. “Kamellin!” .he screamed, but the voice was not his own. Andrew’s heart thudded. He stepped forward, letting the dark intruder in his mind take over all his senses again. A prisoner, he heard the alien voice shouting, felt his throat spewing forth alien syllables. There were
shouts, a despairing howl, then somewhere two pistols cracked together and Andrew flickered back to full consciousness to see Hansen reel, stumble and fall inert. Andrew sagged, swayed; Montray held him upright, and Andrew whispered incredulously, “You shot him!”
“I didn’t,” Montray insisted. “Rick Webber burst out of that doorway—fired into the crowd. Then—”
“Is Rick dead too?”
“As a doornail.” Montray gently lowered the younger man to the sand beside Reade. “You were raving yourself, for a minute, young Slayton.” He shouted angrily at the roughneck who had shot, “You didn’t have to kill Webber! A bullet in the leg would have stopped him!”
“He ran right on me with the gun—”
Montray sighed and struck his forehead with his clenched hands. “Somebody made a stretcher for Reade and one for the kid here.”
“I’m all right.” Andrew shoved Montray’s hand aside; bent to look at Reade.
“He’s in a bad way,” the man from Dupont said “We’d better get them both back to Mount Denver while there’s time.” He looked sharply at Andrew. “You had better take it easy, too. You went shouting mad yourself, for a minute.” He stood up, turning to Montray.
“I think my theory is correct. Virus strains can live almost indefinitely where the air is dry. If such a plague killed off the people who built the city, it would explain why everyone who’s come up here has caught it—homicidal and suicidal.”
“That isn’t it—”
Montray checked him forcibly. “Slayton, you’re a sick man too. You’ll have to trust our judgment,” he said. He tucked his own coat around Reade and stood up, his face gray in the fading moonlight. “I’m going to the governor,” he said, “and have this place put off limits. Forty-two men dead of an unknown Martian virus, that’s too much. Until we get the money and the men to launch a full-scale medical project and knock it out, there won’t be any more private expeditions—or public ones, either. The hell with Xanadu.” He cocked his pistol and fired the four-shot signal to summon any stragglers.
Two of the men improvised a stretcher and began to carry Reade’s inert Body toward the sandbus. Andrew walked close, steadying the old man’s limp form with his hands. He was beginning to doubt himself. Under the setting moon, the sand biting his face, he began to ask himself if Montray had been right. Had he dreamed, then rationalized? Had he dreamed Kamellin? Kamellin? he asked.
There was no answer from the darkness in his mind. Andrew smiled grimly, his arm easing Reade’s head in the rude litter. If Kamellin had ever been there, he was gone, and there was no way to prove any of it—and it didn’t matter any more.
“... therefore, with regret, I am forced to move that project Xanadu be shelved indefinitely,” Reade concluded. His face was grim and resigned, still thin from his long illness. “The Army’s attitude is inflexible, and lacking men, medics and money, it seems that the only thing to do with Xanadu is to stay away from it.”
“It goes without saying,” said the man at the head of the table, “that we all appreciate what Major Reade and Mr. Slayton have been through. Gentlemen, no one likes to quit. But in the face of this, I have no alternative but to second Major Reade’s suggestion. Gentlemen, I move that the Martian chapter of the Geographic Society be closed out, and all equipment and personnel transferred to Aphrodite Base Twelve, South Venus.”
The vote was carried without dissent, and Reade and Andrew, escaping the bombardment of questions, drifted into the cold sunlight of the streets. They walked for a long time without speaking. Reade said at last:
“Andy, we did everything we could. Montray put his own commission in jeopardy for us. But this project has cost millions already. We’ve just hit the bottom of the barrel, that’s all.”
Andrew hunched his shoulders. “I could be there in three days.”
“I’d like to try it, too.” Reade sounded grim. “ But forget it, Andy. Shein-la Mahara is madness and death. Forget it. Go home—”
“Home? Home where? To Earth?” Andrew broke off, staring. What had Reade said?
“Say that again. The name of the city.*”
“Shein-la Mahari, the city of—” Reade gulped. “What in the hell—” he looked at Andy in despair. “I thought I could forget, convince myself it never happened. It left me when Hansen shot me. We’ve got to forget it, Andy—at least until we’re on the ship going home.”
“Ship, hell! We’re not going back to Earth, Reade!”
“Here, here,” said Reade, irritably, ‘”Who’s not going?”
Andrew subsided, thinking deeply. Then, with a flash of inspiration, he turned to Reade. “John, who owns the Society’s test animals?”
Reade rubbed his forehead. “Nobody, I guess. They sure won’t bother shipping a few dogs and chimps out to Venus! I’ve got authority to release them—I guess I’ll turn them over to Medic. Why? You want a dog? A monkey? What for?” He stopped in his tracks, glaring. “What bug have you got in your brain now?”
“Never mind. You’re going back to Earth by the next ship.”
“Don’t be in such a rush,” Reade grumbled, “The Erden-luft won’t blast for a week.”
Andrew grinned. “John, those animals are pretty highly organized. I wonder—”
Reade’s eyes met his in sudden comprehension. “Good lord, I never thought of that! Come on, let’s hurry!”
At the deserted shack where the Society’s animals were kept, a solitary keeper glanced indifferently at Reade’s credentials and let them in. Reade and Andrew passed the dogs without comment, glanced at and rejected the one surviving goat, and passed on to the caged chimpanzees.
“Well, either I’m crazy or this is it,” he said, and listened for that inner answer, the secret intruder in his brain. And after a long time, dimly, it came as if Kamellin could not at once reestablish lapsed contact.
I should have left you. There is no hope now, and I would rather die with my people than survive as a prisoner in your mind.
“No!” Andrew swung to face the chimpanzee. “Could you enter that living creature without his consent?”
There was a tightness across his diaphragm, as if it were his own fate, not Kamellin’s, that was being decided.
That creature could not give consent.
“I’m sorry, I tried—”
Kamellin’s excitement almost burst into speech. No, no, he is perfectly suited, for he is highly organized, but lacking intelligence—
“A chimp’s intelligent—”
A shade of impatience, as if Kamellin were explaining to a dull child; A brain, yes, but he lacks something—will, spirit, soul, volition—
“A chimp can be taught to do almost anything a man can—”
Except talk, communicate, use real reason. Yo« cannot entirely grasp this either, I know. It was the first time Andrew had been allowed to glimpse the notion that Kamellin did not consider Andrew his complete equal. The banshees are the first stage: A physical brain, consciousness, but no intelligence. They cannot be organized. Then your creature,