The Game-Players Of Titan Part 5

"Good day, Kitch," Schilling said, and broke the circuit. Well, his trip to the Coast had already earned him two enemies, his auto-auto and Colonel Kitchener. A bad harbinger, Schilling decided. Most unlucky. The car, he could afford to have antagonistic to his enterprise, but not a man as powerful as Kitchener. After all, the Colonel was right; if he did have any talents at The Game they should be used to support his own Bindman, not someone else.

All at once Max spoke up. "You see what you got yourself into?" it said accusingly.

"I realize I should have checked with my Bindman and gotten his approval," Schilling agreed.

"You hoped to sneak out of New Mexico unnoticed," Max said.

It was true; Schilling nodded. Yes, it was decidedly a bad beginning.

Waking in the still-unfamiliar apartment in San Rafael, Peter Garden jumped in surprise at the sight of the tousled head of brown hair beside him, the bare, smooth shoulders, so eternally inviting-and then remembered who she was and what had happened the evening before. He got out of bed without waking her, went into the kitchen in his pajamas to search for a package of cigarettes.

A second California deed had been lost and Joe Schilling was on his way from New Mexico; that's how things stood, he recalled. And he now had a wife who-How exactly did he evaluate Carol Holt Garden? It would be good to know precisely where he stood in relation to her before Joe Schilling put in his appearance ... and that could be any time, now.

He lit a cigarette, put the tea kettle on the burner. As the tea kettle started to thank him he said, "Be quiet. My wife's asleep."

The tea kettle obediently warmed in silence.

He liked Carol; she was pretty and, to say the least, great guns in bed. It was as simple as that. She was not terribly pretty and many of his wives had been as good in bed and better and he did not like her inordinately; everything about his feelings was commensurate with reality. Her feelings, however, were excessive. To Carol this new marriage challenged her sense of ident.i.ty by way of her prestige. As a woman, a wife, as a Game-player. That was a lot.

Outside the apartment, on the street below, the two McClain children played quietly; he heard their tense, muted voices. Going to the kitchen window he looked out and saw them, the boy Kelly, the girl Jessica, involved in some sort of knife game. Absorbed, they were oblivious to anything else, to him, to the vacant, auto-maintained city around them.

I wonder how their mother is, Pete said to himself. Patricia McClain, whose story I know ...

Returning to the bedroom he got his clothes, carried them to the kitchen and silently dressed, not waking up Carol.

"I'm ready," the tea kettle said, all at once.

He took it from the burner, started to make instant coffee, and then changed his mind. Let's see if Mrs. McClain will fix breakfast for the Bindman, he said to himself.

Before the full-length mirror in the apartment's bathroom he stared at himself, concluded that he looked, while not stunning, at least adequate. And then, noiselessly, he set off, out of the apartment and down the stairs to the ground floor.

"Hi, kids," he said to Kelly and Jessica.

"Hi, Mr. Bindman," they murmured, absorbed.

"Where can I find your mother?" he asked them.

They both pointed.

Pete, taking a deep breath of sweet early-morning air, walked that way with fast strides, feeling hungry in several ways-deep and intricate ways.

His auto-auto, Max, landed at the curb before the apartment building in San Rafael, and Joe Schilling stiffly slid across the seat, opened the door manually and stepped out.

He rang the proper buzzer and an answering buzz unlocked the ma.s.sive front door. Carefully locked to bar intruders who no longer exist, he said to himself as he climbed the carpeted stairs to the fourth floor.

The apartment door stood open but it was not Pete Garden waiting for him; it was a young woman with disorderly brown hair and a sleepy expression. "Who are you?" she said.

"A friend of Pete's," Joe Schilling said. "Are you Carol?"

She nodded, drew her robe around her self-consciously. "Pete's not here. I just got up and he's gone; I don't know where."

"Can I come in?" Schilling asked. "And wait?"

"If you like. I'm going to have breakfast." She padded away from the door and Schilling followed; he found her once more, in the kitchen of the apartment, cooking bacon on the range.

The tea kettle announced, "Mr. Garden was here but he left."

"Did he say where he was going?" Schilling asked it.

"He looked out the window and then left." The Rushmore Effect built into the tea kettle did not amount to much; the tea kettle was little help.

Schilling seated himself at the kitchen table. "How are you and Pete getting along?"

"Oh, we had a dreadful first evening," Carol said. "We lost. Pete was so morose about it ... he didn't say one word all the way home here from Carmel, and even after we got here he hardly said anything to me, as if he thought it was my fault." She turned sadly toward Joe Schilling. "I just don't know how we're going to go on; Pete seems almost-suicidal."

"He's always been that way," Schilling said. "Don't blame yourself."

"Oh," Carol said, nodding. "Well, thanks for letting me know."

"Could I have a cup of coffee?"

"Certainly," she said, putting the tea kettle back on. "Are you by any chance the friend he vidphoned last night after The Game?"

"Yes," Schilling said. He felt embarra.s.sed; he had come here to replace this woman at the Game table. How much did she know of Pete's intentions? In many ways, Schilling thought, Pete's a heel when it comes to women.

Carol said, "I know what you're here for, Mr. Schilling."

"Umm," Schilling said, cautiously.

"I'm not going to step aside," she said, as she spooned ground coffee into the mid-part of the aluminum pot. "Your history of playing isn't a good one. I believe I can do better than you."

"Hmm," Schilling said, nodding.

After that he drank his coffee and she ate breakfast in awkward, strained silence, both of them waiting for Pete Garden to return.

Patricia McClain was dust-mopping the living room of her apartment; she glanced up, saw Pete, and then she smiled a slow, secretive smile. "The Bindman cometh," she said, and continued dust-mopping.

"h.e.l.lo," Pete said, self-consciously.

"I can read your mind, Mr. Garden. You know quite a bit about me, from having discussed me with Joseph Schilling. So you met Mary Anne, my oldest daughter. And you find her 'stunningly attractive,' as Schilling put it ... as well as much like me." Pat McClain glanced up at him; her dark eyes sparkled. "Don't you think Mary Anne is a little young for you? You're one hundred and forty or thereabouts and she's eighteen."

Pete said, "Since the Hynes Gland operations-"

"Never mind," Patricia said. "I agree. And you're also thinking that the real difference between me and my daughter is that I'm embittered and she's still fresh and feminine. This, coming from a man who steadily contemplates, ruminates about, suicide."

"I can't help it," Pete said. "Clinically, it's obsessive thinking; it's involuntary. I wish I could get rid of it. Doctor Macy told me that decades ago. I've taken every pill there is ... it goes away for a time and then returns." He entered the McClain apartment. "Had breakfast?"

"Yes," Patricia said. "And you can't eat here; it isn't proper and I don't care to fix it for you. I'll tell you truthfully, Mr. Garden; I don't wish to get involved with you emotionally. In fact the idea of it repels me."

"Why?" he said, as evenly as possible.

"Because I don't like you."

"And why's that?" he said, not retreating either physically or psychologically.

"Because you're able to play The Game and I'm not," Patricia said. "And because you have a wife, a new one, and yet you're here, not there. I don't like your treatment of her."

"Being a telepath is quite a help," Pete said, "when it comes to making evaluations of other people's vices and weaknesses."

"It is."

"Can I help it," Pete said, "if I'm attracted to you and not to Carol?"

"You can't help what you feel, but you could avoid doing what you're doing; I'm perfectly aware of your reason for being here, Mr. Garden. But don't forget I'm married, too. And I take my marriage seriously, which you do not. But of course you don't; you have a new wife every few weeks or so. Every time there's a severe setback at The Game." Her disgust was manifest; her lips were tightly compressed and her black eyes flashed. And I take my marriage seriously, which you do not. But of course you don't; you have a new wife every few weeks or so. Every time there's a severe setback at The Game." Her disgust was manifest; her lips were tightly compressed and her black eyes flashed.

He wondered what she had been like before discovery of her Psionic talent had barred her from The Game.

"Much like I am now," Patricia said.

"I doubt that," he said. He thought about her daughter. I wonder if she'll be this way in time, he speculated. I suppose it depends on whether she has her mother's telepathic talent or not, and if so- "Mary Anne doesn't have it," Patricia said. "None of the children do; we've looked into it already."

Then she won't wind up like you have, he thought.

"Perhaps not," Patricia said, soberly. All at once she said, "I won't let you stay here, Mr. Garden, but you can drive me into San Francisco if you wish. I have shopping to do there. And we can stop at a restaurant and have breakfast, if you care to."

He started to agree and then he remembered Joe Schilling. "I can't. Because of business."

"Strategy talks about The Game."

"Yes." Obviously, he couldn't deny it.

"You put that first, before anything else. Even with your so-called 'deep feelings' toward me."

"I asked Joe Schilling to come here. I have to be around to greet him." That seemed self-evident to him. Apparently it did not seem so to her, however, but there was nothing he could do about that. Her cynicism was too deeply embedded for him to affect it in any way.

"Don't judge me," Patricia McClain said. "You may be right, but-" She moved away from him, holding her hand up to her forehead, as if physically suffering. "I still can't stand it, Mr. Garden."

"Sorry," he said. "I'll leave, Pat."

"I tell you what," she said. "I'll meet you this afternoon at one-thirty, in downtown San Francisco. At Market and Third. We can have lunch together. Do you think you can slip away from your wife and your Game-playing friend for that?"

"Yes," he said.

"Then it's agreed," Patricia said. And she went on dust-mopping.

Pete said, "Tell me why you changed your mind about seeing me. What did you pick up in my mind? What did you pick up in my mind? It must have been fairly important." It must have been fairly important."

"I'd rather not say," Patricia answered.

"Please."

"The telepathic faculty has one basic drawback. You may not know this. It tends to pick up too much; it's too sensitive to marginal or merely latent thoughts in people, what the old psychologists called the 'unconscious mind.' There's a relations.h.i.+p between the telepathic faculty and paranoia; the latter is the involuntary reception of other people's suppressed hostile and aggressive thoughts."

"What did you read in my unconscious, Pat?"

"I-read a syndrome of potential action. If I were a pre-cog I could tell you more. You may may do it; you may not. But-" She glanced up at him. "It's a violent act, and it has to do with death." do it; you may not. But-" She glanced up at him. "It's a violent act, and it has to do with death."

"Death," he echoed.

"Perhaps," Patricia said, "you'll attempt suicide. I don't know; it's inchoate, still. It has to do with death-and with Jerome Luckman."

"And it's so bad that it would make you reverse yourself in your decision not to have anything to do with me."

Patricia said, "It would be wrong of me, after picking up such a syndrome, to simply abandon you."

"Thanks," he said, tartly.

"I don't want it on my conscience. I'd hate to hear on Nats Katz' program tomorrow or the day after that you'd taken that overdose of Emphytal that you're obsessively preoccupied with." She smiled at him, but it was a colorless smile, devoid of joy.

"I'll see you at one-thirty," Pete said. "At Third and Market." Unless, he thought, the inchoate syndrome having to do with violence and death and Jerome Luckman becomes actual before then.

"It may," Patricia said somberly. "That's another quality of the unconscious, it stands outside of time. You can't tell, in reading it, whether you're picking up something minutes away from actualization or days away or even years. It's all blurred together."

Wordlessly, Pete turned and strode out of the apartment, away from her.

The next he knew he was riding in his car, high over the desert.

He knew, instantly, that it was much later. Snapping on the radio transmitter he said, "Give me a time signal."

The mechanical voice from the speaker said, "Six P.M. P.M. Mountain Standard Time, Mr. Garden." Mountain Standard Time, Mr. Garden."

Where am I? he asked himself. "Where is this?" he said to the car. "Nevada?" It looked like Nevada, barren and empty.

The car said, "Eastern Utah."

"When did I leave the Coast?"

"Two hours ago, Mr. Garden."

"What have I done during the last five hours?"

The car said, "At nine-thirty you drove from Marin County, California to Carmel, to the Game Room in the Carmel condominium apartment building."

"Whom did I see?"

"I don't know."

"Continue," he said, breathing shallowly.