“I don't smoke,” he said, which was not true. But this was brother kin to the uncountable police line-ups he had gone through, all the way across the American Continent, across Earth, and from A Centauri IX back here. It annoyed him, and it terrified him, for he knew he was trapped.
Except this time there were no hard rocky-faced cops out there in the darkness beyond his sight. This time there were hard, rocky-faced Bureau men, and SpaceCom officials.
Even Terrence, head of SpaceCom, was sitting in one of those pneumoseats, watching him steadily.
Daring him to be what he was!
He lifted the cylinder hesitantly, almost put it back.
“Smoke it, Alf!” snapped a different voice, deeper in tone, from the ebony before him.
He put the cigarette between his lips. They waited.
He seemed to want to say something, perhaps to object. Alf Gunnderson's heavy brows drew down. His blank eyes became—if it were possible—ever blanker. A sharp, denting V appeared between the brows.
The cigarette flamed into life.
A tongue of fire leaped up from the tip. In an instant it had consumed tobacco, paper, filter and de-nicotizer in one roar. The fire slammed against Gunnderson's lips, searing them, lapping at his nose, his face.
He screamed, fell on his face and beat at the flames with his hands.
Suddenly the stage was clogged with running men in the blue and charcoal suits of the SpaceCom. Gunnderson lay writhing on the floor, a wisp of charry smoke rising from his face. One of the SpaceCom officials broke the cap on an extinguisher vial and the spray washed over the body of the fallen man.
“Get the Mallaport! Get the goddammed Mallaport, willya!” A young Ensign with brush-cut blond hair, first to reach the stage, as though he had been waiting crouched below, cradled Gunnderson's head in his muscular arms, brushing with horror at the flakes of charred skin. He had the watery blue eyes of the spacemen, the man who has seen terrible things; yet his eyes were more frightened now than any man's eyes had a right to be.
In a few minutes the angular, spade-pawed, Malleable-Transporter was smoothing the skin on Gunnderson's face, realigning the atoms—shearing away the burned flesh, coating it with vibrant, healthy pink skin.
Another few moments and the psioid was finished; the burns had been erased; Gunnderson was new and whole, save for the patches of healthier-seeming skin that dotted his face.
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 Gunnderson a moment, then raised his watery blue eyes to the other officials standing about.
He stared at them with a mixture of fear and bewilderment.
Gunnderson had been saying: “Let me die, please let me die, I want to die, won't you let me die, please!”
* * * *
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 snap-out.
Now the ship whirled through the crazy quilt of inverspace, cutting through to the star-system of Earth's adversary.
Gunnderson sat in the cabin with the brush-cut blond Ensign. All through the trip, since blast-off and snap-out, the pyrotic had been kept in his stateroom. This was the newest of the Earth SpaceComships, yet he had seen none of it. Just this tiny stateroom, in the constant company of the usually stoical Ensign.
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?”
Gunnderson's eyes came up from their focus on his boot-tops, and stared at the spaceman. He idly flipped the harmonica he had requested before blast-off, which he had used to pass away the long hours inverspace. “No idea. How long have you been at war with the Delgarts?”
“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...”
Gunnderson cut him off. “Yes, I know. But how long have you been at war with the Delgarts? I thought they were our allies under some Treaty Pact or other?”
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.”
Gunnderson wished he could shut out the words. He had heard the same story all the way from A Centauri IX and back. Someone had always jumped someone else... someone was always at war with someone else... there were always bastards to be cleaned out... never any peace... never any peace...
The invership whipped past the myriad odd-colors of inverspace, hurtling through that not-space toward the alien cluster. Gunnderson sat in the teleport-proof stateroom, triple-coded loktite, and waited. He had no idea what they wanted of him, why they had tested him, why they had sent him through the pre-flight checkups, why he was in not-space. But he knew one thing: whatever it was, there was to be no peace for him... ever.
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, channeled teleport faculty that was useless for anything but the creation of fire. He damned it soulfully, wishing he had been born deaf, mute, blind, incapable of having to ward off the world.
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 non-directive 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 aflaming, 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 connection with the mighty battle being fought between Earth and the Delgarts, but of what use could his unreliable powers be?
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. Gunnderson. I wasn't told what was in there, but I was told to keep you away from it until the other two got here.”
Gunnderson slumped back hopelessly on the acceleration-bunk. He dropped the harmonica to the metal floor and lowered his head into his hands. “What other two?”
“I don't know, sir. I wasn't told.”
* * * *
The other two were psioids, naturally.