It was not until she was actually boarding the slow-arriving monotrack that realization of where she was going and why finally struck her. Roger! He was dying.
She began to weep, for Roger, for the missing Cornut, for herself; but there was no one else on the car to see.
At that moment, Cornut, sore-eyed, was picking himself up from the floor. Over him stood Jillson, patient and jolly, holding a club wrapped with a wet cloth. Cornut was aching as he had never imagined he could. He mumbled, 'You don't have to hit me any more.'
'Per-haps we do,' said St Cyr from his blue-green throne. 'We do not like this, you know. But we must.'
'Speak for yourself,' said Jillson cheerfully, and the ancient blonde screeched with laughter. They were talking among themselves, Cornut realized; he could hear only the audible part, but they were joking, commenting... they were having a fine old time, while this methodical maniac bludgeoned him black and blue.
The fat senator wheezed, 'Understand our position, Cornut. We aren't cruel. We don't kill you shorties for nothing. But we aren't human, and we can't be judged by human laws ... All right, Jillson.'
The bodyguard brought the club around, and Cornut sank against cushions the thoughtful old blonde kept re-piling for him. What made it particularly bad was that the senator held a gun. The first time he was beaten he had fought, but then the senator had held him at gun-point while Jillson methodically battered him unconscious. And all the time they kept talking!
St Cyr said mildly, 'Stop.'
It was time for another break. That had been the fifth beating in six or seven hours, and in between they had interrogated him. 'Tell us what you un-der-stand, Cor-nut.'
The club had taught him obedience. 'You are a worldwide organization,' he said obediently, 'of the next species after humanity. I understand that. You need to survive, and it doesn't matter if the rest of us don't. Through your telepathic abilities you can suggest suicide to some persons who have the power in a latent form—' Thud.
'An a-bort-ed form,' corrected St Cyr as Cornut struggled erect again after the blow.
He coughed, and saw blood on the back of his hand. But he only said, 'An aborted form. Like myself.'
'Abortions of mutations,' chuckled the senator. 'Unsuccessful attempts on the part of nature to create ourselves.'
'Yes. Abortions of mutations, unsuccessful attempts. That is what I am,' Cornut parroted. 'And - and you are able to suggest many things, as long as the subject has the - the abortive talent, and as long as you are able to reach his mind when it is not fully awake.'
The blonde said, 'Very good! You're a good learner, Cornut. But telepathy is only a fringe benefit. Do you know what it is that makes us really different?'
He cringed away from Jillson as he shook his head.
The bodyguard glanced at the woman, shrugged and said, 'All right, I won't hit him. Go ahead.'
'What it is that makes us different is our age, my dear boy.' She giggled shrilly. 'For example, I am two hundred and eighty-three years old.'
They fed him after a while and let him rest.
Although he ached in every cell, there was hardly a mark on him; that was the reason for the padding on the club. And that had a meaning too, Cornut thought painfully. If they didn't intend to mark him, then they realized that he would be seen. Which meant that, at least, they weren't going to kill him out of hand and dump his body in the sea.
Two hundred and eighty-three years old.
And yet she was not the oldest of the four of them; only Jillson was younger, a child of a century or so. The senator had been born while America was still a British colony. St Cyr had been born in de Gaulle's France.
The whole key had been in the restricted areas of the stacks, if he had only seen it; for the anomaly in the Wolgren application was not Wolgren's fault at all. What the data would have shown was a failure of some people to die. Statistically insignificant for thousands of years, that fraction had grown and grown in the last two or three centuries - since Lister, since Pasteur, since Fleming. They were immortal -not because they could not become diseased or succumb to a wound, but because they would not otherwise die.
And with the growth of preventive medicine, they had begun to assert their power. They had really very little. They were not wiser than the rest of humanity or stronger. Even their telepathy was, it seemed, only unique because the shortlived human had not the time to develop it; it depended on intricate and slow-forming neuronic hookups; it was a sign of maturity, like puberty or facial hair. Everything that made them powerful was only the gift of time. They had money. (But who, given a century or two of compound interest, could not be as rich as he chose?) They had a tight-held closed corporation devoted to their mutual interests - which was only sensible. They had furthered many a war, for what greater boon than war is there to medical science? They had endowed countless foundations, for the surgery of the short-lived could help preserve their own infinitely more valuable lives. And they had only contempt for the shortlived who fed them, served them and made their lives possible.
They had to be a closed corporation. Even an immortal needs friends, and the ordinary humans could for them be nothing more than weekend guests.
Contempt ... and fear. There were, they told him, the Cornuts, who had a rudimentary telepathic sense, who could not be allowed to live to develop it. Suggest killing, and the short-lived one died; it was that easy. The sleeping mind can build a dream out of a closing door, a distant truck's exhaust. The half-awake mind can convert that dream into action...
He heard a shrill laugh and the door opened. Jillson came in first, beaming. 'No!' cried Cornut instinctively, bracing himself against the club.
CHAPTER XIV
Locille sat next to her mother in the hospital's cafeteria, grateful that at last they had found a place to sit down. The hospital on the texas was unusually busy, worried visitors occupying every inch of space in the waiting-room, the halls outside the reception area, even the glassed-in sundeck that hung over the angry waves and was normally used for the comfort of the patients during the day. It was very late, and the cafeteria should have been closed; but the hospital had opened it for coffee and very little else. Her mother said something but Locille only nodded. She hadn't heard. It was not easy to hear, with the loud bull-roarer twangg of the suspended cables from the texas droning at them. And she had, besides, been thinking mostly of Cornut.
There had been no fresh news from the night proctor on the phone; Cornut had not returned.
'He ate so well,' her mother said suddenly. Locille patted her hand. The coffee was cold, but she drank it anyhow. The doctor knew where to find her, she thought, though of course he would be busy...
'He was the best of my babies,' said her mother.
Locille knew that it was very close to ending for her brother. The rash that baffled the medics, the fever that glazed his eyes - they were only the outward indicators of a terrible battle inside his motionless body; they were headlines on a newspaper a thousand miles away, saying 800 Marines Die Storming Iwo; they represented the fact of blood and pain and death, but they were not the fact itself. Roger was dying. The outward indicators had been controlled, but salve could only dry up the pustulant sores, pills could only ease his breathing, shots could only soothe the pain in his head.
'He ate so well,' said her mother, dreaming aloud, 'and he talked at eighteen months. He had a little elephant with a music box and he could wind it up.'
'Don't worry,' whispered Locille falsely.