Baldy Read online

  Burkhalter nobly resisted the temptation. "No Baldy would read--"

  "Go on, get out!"

  "Listen! You wouldn't have a chance in a duel with me!"

  "Do you know how many notches I've got?" Reilly asked.

  "Ever dueled a Baldy?"

  "I'll cut the notch deeper tomorrow. Get out, d'you hear?"

  Burkhalter, biting his lips, said, "Man, don't you realize that in a duel I could read your mind?"

  "I don't care ... what?"

  "I'd be half a jump ahead of you. No matter how instinctive your actions would be, you'd know them a split second ahead of time in your mind. And I'd know all your tricks and weaknesses, too. Your technique would be an open book to me. Whatever you thought of--"

  "No." Reilly shook his head. "Oh, no. You're smart, but it's a phony set-up."

  Burkhalter hesitated, decided, and swung about, pushing a chair out of the way. "Take out your dagger," he said. "Leave the sheath snapped on; I'll show you what I mean."

  Reilly's eyes widened. "If you want it now--"

  "I don't." Burkhalter shoved another chair away. He un-clipped his dagger, sheath and all, from his belt, and made sure the little safety clip was in place. "We've room enough here. Come on."

  Scowling, Reilly took out his own dagger, held it awkwardly, baffled by the sheath, and then suddenly feinted forward. But Burkhalter wasn't there; he had anticipated, and his own leather sheath slid up Reilly's belly.

  "That," Burkhalter said, "would have ended the fight."

  For answer Reilly smashed a hard dagger-blow down, curving at the last moment into a throat-cutting slash. Burkhalter's free hand was already at his throat; his other hand, with the sheathed dagger, tapped Reilly twice over the heart. The freckles stood out boldly against the pallor of the larger man's face. But he was not yet ready to concede. He tried a few more passes, clever, well-trained cuts, and they failed, because Burkhalter had anticipated them. His left hand invariably covered the spot where Reilly had aimed, and which he never struck.

  Slowly Reilly let his arm fall. He moistened his lips and swallowed. Burkhalter busied himself reclipping his dagger in place.

  "Burkhalter," Reilly said, "you're a devil."

  "Far from it. I'm just afraid to take a chance. Do you really think being a Baldy is a snap?"

  "But, if you can read minds--"

  "How long do you think I'd last if I did any dueling? It would be too much of a set-up. Nobody would stand for it, and I'd end up dead. I can't duel, because it'd be murder, and people would know it was murder. I've taken a lot of cracks, swallowed a lot of insults, for just that reason. Now, if you like, I'll swallow another and apologize. I'll admit anything you say. But I can't duel with you, Reilly."

  "No, I can see that. And I'm glad you came over." Reilly was still white. "I'd have walked right into a set-up."

  "Not my set-up," Burkhalter said. "I wouldn't have dueled. Baldies aren't so lucky, you know. They've got handicaps-like this. That's why they can't afford to take chances and antagonize people, and why we never read minds, unless we're asked to do so."

  "It makes sense. More or less." Reilly hesitated. "Look, I withdraw that challenge. O.K.?"

  "Thanks," Burkhalter, said, putting out his hand. It was taken rather reluctantly. "We'll leave it at that, eh?"

  "Right." But Reilly was still anxious to get his guest out of the house.

  Burkhalter walked back to the Publishing Center and whistled tunelessly. He could tell Ethel now; in fact, he had to, for secrets between them would have broken up the completeness of their telepathic intimacy. It was not that their minds lay bare to each other, it was, rather, that any barrier could be sensed by the other, and the perfect rapport wouldn't have been so perfect. Curiously, despite this utter intimacy, husband and wife managed to respect one another's privacy.

  Ethel might be somewhat distressed, but the trouble had blown over, and, besides, she was a Baldy too. Not that she looked it, with her wig of fluffy chestnut hair and those long, curving lashes. But her parents had lived east of Seattle during, the Blowup, and afterward, too, before the hard radiation's effects had been thoroughly studied.

  The snow-wind blew down over Modoc and fled southward along the Utah Valley. Burkhalter wished he was in his copter, alone in the blue emptiness of the sky. There was a quiet, strange peace up there that no Baldy ever quite achieved on the earth's surface, except in the depths of a wilderness. Stray fragments of thoughts were always flying about, subsensory, but like the almost-unheard whisper of a needle on a phonograph record, never ceasing. That, certainly, was why almost all Baldies loved to fly and were expert pilots. The high waste deserts of the air were their blue hermitages.

  Still, he was in Modoc now, and overdue for his interview with Quayle. Burkhalter hastened his steps. In the main hall he met Moon, said briefly and cryptically that he'd taken care of the duel, and passed on, leaving the fat man to stare a question after him. The only visor call was from Ethel; the playback said she was worried about Al, and would Burkhalter check with the school. Well, he had already done so-unless the boy had managed to get into more trouble since then. Burkhalter put in a call and reassured himself. Al was as yet unchanged.

  He found Quayle in the same private solarium, and thirsty. Burkhalter ordered a couple of dramzowies sent up, since he had no objection to loosening Quayle's inhibitions. The gray-haired author was immersed in a sectional historical globe-map, illuminating each epochal layer in turn as he searched back through time.

  "Watch this," he said, running his hand along the row of buttons. "See how the German border fluctuates? And Portugal. Notice its zone of influence? Now--" The zone shrank steadily from 1600 on, while other countries shot out radiating lines and assumed sea power.

  Burkhalter sipped his dramzowie. "Not much of that now."

  "No, since... what's the matter?"

  "How do you mean?"

  "You look shot."

  "I didn't know I showed it," Burkhalter said wryly. "I just finagled my way out of a duel."

  "That's one custom I never saw much sense to," Quayle said. "What happened? Since when can you finagle out?"

  Burkhalter explained, and the writer took a drink and snorted. "What a spot for you. Being a Baldy isn't such an advantage after all, I guess."

  "It has distinct disadvantages at times." On impulse Burkhalter mentioned his son. "You see my point, eh? I don't know, really, what standards to apply to a young Baldy. He is a mutation, after all. And the telepathic mutation hasn't had time to work out yet. We can't rig up controls, because guinea pigs and rabbits won't breed telepaths. That's been tried, you know. And well, the child of a Baldy needs very special training so he can cope with his ultimate maturity."

  "You seem to have adjusted well enough."

  "I've learned. As most sensible Baldies have. That's why I'm not a wealthy man, or in politics. We're really buying safety for our species by foregoing certain individual advantages. Hostages to destiny-and destiny spares us. But we get paid too, in a way. In the coinage of future benefits-negative benefits, really, for we ask only to be spared and accepted-and so we have to deny ourselves a lot of present, positive benefits. An appeasement to fate."

  "Paying the pipery" Quayle nodded.

  "We are the pipers. The Baldies as a group, I mean. And our children. So it balances; we're really paying ourselves. If I wanted to take unfair advantage of my telepathic power my son wouldn't live very long. The Baldies would be wiped out. Al's got to learn that, and he's getting pretty antisocial."

  "All children are antisocial," Quayle pointed out. "They're utter individualists. I should think the only reason for worrying would be if the boy's deviation from the norm were connected with his telepathic sense."

  "There's something in that." Burkhalter reached out left-handedly and probed delicately at Quayle's mind, noting that the antagonism was considerably lessened. He grinned to himself and went on talking about his own troubles. "Just the same, the boy's fathe
r to the man. And an adult Baldy has got to be pretty well adjusted, or he's sunk."

  "Environment is as important as heredity. One complements the other. If a child's reared correctly, he won't have much trouble--unless heredity is involved."

  "As it may be. There's so little known about the telepathic mutation. If baldness is one secondary characteristic, maybe-something else-emerges in the third or fourth generations. I'm wondering if telepathy is really good for the mind."

  Quayle said, "Humph. Speaking personally, it makes me nervous--"

  "Like Reilly."

  "Yes," Quayle said, but he didn't care much for the comparison. "Well anyhow, if a mutation's a failure, it'll die out. It won't breed true."

  "What about haemophilia?"

  "How many people have haemophilia?" Quayle asked. "I'm trying to look at it from the angle of psychohistorian. If there'd been telepaths in the past, things might have been different."

  "How do you know there weren't?" Burkhalter asked.

  Quayle blinked. "Oh. Well. That's true, too. In medieval times they'd have been called wizards-or saints. The Duke-Rhine experiments but such accidents would have been abortive. Nature fools around trying to hit the ... ah... the jackpot, and she doesn't always do it on the first try."

  "She may not have done it now." That was habit speaking, the ingrained caution of modesty. "Telepathy may be merely a semisuccessful try at something pretty unimaginable. A sort of four-dimensional sensory concept, maybe."

  "That's too abstract for me." Quayle was interested, and his own hesitancies had almost vanished; by accepting Burkhalter as a telepath, he had tacitly wiped away his objections to telepathy per se. "The old-time Germans always had an idea they were different; so did the Japanese. They knew, very definitely, that they were a superior race because they were directly descended from gods. They were short in stature; heredity made them self-conscious when dealing with larger races. But the Chinese aren't tall, the Southern Chinese, and they weren't handicapped in that way."

  "Environment, then?"

  "Environment, which caused propaganda. The Japanese took Buddhism, and altered it completely into Shinto, to suit their own needs. The samurai, warrior-knights, were the ideals, the code of honor was fascinatingly cockeyed. The principle of Shinto was to worship your superiors and subjugate your inferiors. Ever seen the Japanese jewel-trees?"

  "I don't remember them. What are they?"

  "Miniature replicas of espaliered trees, made of jewels, with trinkets hanging on the branches. Including a mirror always. The first jewel-tree was made to lure the Moon-goddess out of a cave where she was sulking. It seemed the lady was so intrigued by the trinkets and by her face reflected in the mirror that she came out of her hideout. All the Japanese morals were dressed up in pretty clothes; that was the bait. The old-time Germans did much the same thing. The last German dictator, Hitler, revived the old Siegfried legend. It was racial paranoia. The Germans worshiped the house-tyrant, not the mother, and they had extremely strong family ties. That extended to the state. They symbolized Hitler as their All-Father, and so eventually we got the Blowup. And, finally, mutations."

  "After the deluge, me," Burkhalter murmured, finishing his dramzowie. Quayle was staring at nothing.

  "Funny," he said after a while. "This All-Father business--"

  "Yes?"

  "I wonder if you know how powerfully it can affect a man?"

  Burkhalter didn't say anything. Quayle gave him a sharp glance.

  "Yes," the writer said quietly. "You're a man, after all. I owe you an apology, you know."

  Burkhalter smiled. "You can forget that."

  "I'd rather not," Quayle said. "I've just realized, pretty suddenly, that the telepathic sense isn't so important. I mean --it doesn't make you different. I've been talking to you--"

  "Sometimes it takes people years before they realize what you're finding out," Burkhalter remarked. "Years of living and working with something they think of as a Baldy."

  "Do you know what I've been concealing in my mind?" Quayle asked.

  "No. I don't."

  "You lie like a gentleman. Thanks. Well, here it is, and I'm telling you by choice, because I want to. I don't care if you got the information out of my mind already; I just want to tell you of my own free will. My father ... I imagine I hated him ... was a tyrant, and I remember one time, when I was just a kid and we were in the mountains, he beat me and a lot of people were looking on. I've tried to forget that for a long time. Now"--Quayle shrugged--"it doesn't seem quite so important."

  "I'm not a psychologist," Burkhalter said. "If you want my personal reaction, I'll just say that it doesn't matter. You're not a little boy any more, and the guy I'm talking to and working with is the adult Quayle."

  "Hm-m-m. Ye-es. I suppose I knew that all along-how unimportant it was, really. It was simply having my privacy violated.... I think I know you better now, Burkhalter. You can-walk in."

  "We'll work better," Burkhalter said, grinning. "Especially with Darius."

  Quayle said, "I'll try not to keep any reservation in my mind. Frankly, I won't mind telling you-the answers. Even when they're personal."

  "Check on that. D'you want to tackle Darius now?"

  "O.K." Quayle said, and his eyes no longer held suspicious wariness. "Darius I identify with my father--"

  It was smooth and successful. That afternoon they accomplished more than they had during the entire previous fortnight. Warm with satisfaction on more than one point, Burkhalter stopped off to tell Dr. Moon that matters were looking up, and then set out toward home, exchanging thoughts with a couple of Baldies, his co-workers, who were knocking off for the day. The Rockies were bloody with the western light, and the coolness of the wind was pleasant on Burkhalter's cheeks, as he hiked homeward.

  It was fine 'to be accepted. It proved that it could be done. And a Baldy often needed reassurance, in a world peopled by suspicious strangers. Quayle had been a hard nut to crack, but-- Burkhalter smiled.

  Ethel would be pleased. In a way, she'd had a harder time than he'd ever had. A woman would, naturally. Men were desperately anxious to keep their privacy unviolated by a woman, and as for non-Baldy women--well, it spoke highly for Ethel's glowing personal charm that she had finally been accepted by the clubs and feminine groups of Modoc. Only Burkhalter knew Ethel's desperate hurt at being bald, and not even her husband had ever seen her unwigged.

  His thought reached out before him into the low, double-winged house on the hillside, and interlocked with hers in a warm intimacy. It was something more than a kiss. And, as always, there was the exciting sense of expectancy, mounting and mounting till the last door swung open and they touched physically. This, he thought, is why I was born a Baldy; this is worth losing worlds for.

  At dinner that rapport spread out to embrace Al, an intangible, deeply-rooted something that made the food taste better and the water like wine. The word home, to telepaths, had a meaning that non-Baldies could not entirely comprehend, for it embraced a bond they could not know. There were small, intangible caresses.

  Green Man going down the Great Red Slide; the Shaggy Dwarfs trying to harpoon him as he goes.

  "Al," Ethel said, "are you still working on your Green Man?"

  Then something utterly hateful and cold and deadly quivered silently in the air, like an icicle jaggedly smashing through golden, fragile glass. Burkhalter dropped his napkin and looked up, profoundly shocked. He felt Ethel's thought shrink back, and swiftly reached out to touch and reassure her with mental contact. But across the table the little boy, his cheeks still round with the fat of babyhood, sat silent and wary, realizing he had blundered, and seeking safety in complete immobility. His mind was too weak to resist probing, he knew, and he remained perfectly still, waiting, while the echoes of a thought hung poisonously in silence.

  Burkhalter said, "Come on, Al." He stood up. Ethel started to speak.

  "Wait, darling. Put up a barrier. Don't listen in." He touched her mind gen
tly and tenderly, and then he took Al's hand and drew the boy after him out into the yard. Al watched his father out of wide, alert eyes. Burkhalter sat on a bench and put Al beside him. He talked audibly at first, for clarity's sake, and for another reason. It was distinctly unpleasant to trick the boy's feeble guards down, but it was necessary.

  "That's a very queer way to think of your mother," he said. "It's a queer way to think of me." Obscenity is more obscene, profanity more profane, to a telepathic mind, but this had been neither one. It had been-cold and malignant.

  And this is flesh of my flesh, Burkhalter thought, looking at the boy and remembering the eight years of his growth. Is the mutation to turn into something devilish?

  Al was silent.

  Burkhalter reached into the young mind. Al tried to twist free and escape, but his father's strong hands gripped him. Instinct, not reasoning, on the boy's part, for minds can touch over long distances.

  He did not like to do this, for increased sensibility had gone with sensitivity, and violations are always violations. But ruthlessness was required. Burkhalter searched. Sometimes he threw key words violently at Al, and surges of memory pulsed up in response.

  In the end, sick and nauseated, Burkhalter let Al go and sat alone on the bench, watching the red light die on the snowy peaks. The whiteness was red-stained. But it was not too late. The man was a fool, had been a fool from the beginning, or he would have known the impossibility of attempting such a thing as this.

  The conditioning had only begun. Al could be reconditioned. Burkhalter's eyes hardened. And would be. And would be. But not yet, not until the immediate furious anger had given place to sympathy and understanding.

  Not yet.

  He went into the house, spoke briefly to Ethel, and televised the dozen Baldies who worked with him in the Publishing Center. Not all of them had families, but none was missing when, half an hour later, they met in the back room of the Pagan Tavern downtown. Sam Shane had caught a fragment of Burkhalter's knowledge, and all of them read his emotions. Welded into a sympathetic unit by their telepathic sense, they waited till Burkhalter was ready.