第20节
to be a bluff. A windup.
What the hell would she do out there? No. With Clearwater out of the
way Roz had what she wanted.
Steve Brickman. Karlstrom was convinced he was back on the rails. The
psychologists who selected, shaped and supervised the people on the
Special Treatment List knew what made that young man tick. He wanted
power, and he wanted to get even. That was why the results of his
final exams at the Flight Academy had been fixed, giving him fourth
place instead of first and the honours he merited. Yes . . . that had
really lit a fire under him. And the Federation was the only place his
needs could be satisfied.
These thoughts provided Karlstrom with scant comfort.
Roz and Brickman were both telepaths, sensitives of a remarkable
kind.
Did Brickman possess the same latent powers to bend reality out of
shape? Right from the very beginning, Karlstrom had been reluctant to
meddle with the grey area the Life Institute called 'psionics'. But
faced with the threat from such people as Mr Snow, the Federation could
not afford to ignore what little homegrown talent it possessed.
Karlstrom knew of Steve and Roz; only the P-G and COLUMBUS knew who the
rest were.
If there were any others Karlstrom hoped not. The PG had likened Steve
and Roz to a weapon-system. But what was the point of a weapon-system
whose workings no one fully understood and whose destructive potential
was incalculable?
No one in their right mind would launch such a weapon.
But the appropriate target data had been fed into Steve and Roz
Brickman and the button had been pressed.
They had been fired towards enemy lines. Were they, as Karlstrom
sometimes feared in the small hours of the morning, beyond recall? Was
this weapon they had unleashed about to veer off course - turn back on
its makers? That was what Karlstrom feared the most. And he wondered
if the handful of quacks who had elbowed themselves into an
unassailable position as the sole experts in the so-called 'science' of
psionics had had the foresight to fit their charges with a
self-destruct mechanism.
Probably not. How could they when none of them could explain in words
of less than three syllables (that any normal person could understand)
how and why someone like Roz Brickman could fall to the ground with a
hole punched through her upper arm by a phantom crossbow bolt? A real
hole, with real blood, that healed and disappeared without leaving any
scar tissue within eight hours!
They had no answers because they didn't know. There was no science,
only jargon. Psycho-babble. The Department of Psionics at the Life
Institute was an empty shell providing nothing but a few quick
promotions, some cheap prestige. A scam. He had never wanted to get
involved. He had been pressed into using Steve and Roz, and as a
result he was marooned in the middle of a fucking minefield - with the
President-General watching from the other side of the warning tapes.
Faced with the possibility that the decision to deploy Roz alongside
her kin-brother might backfire with sufficient force to remove him from
office, Karlstrom decided to take some avoiding action of his own. He
would agree to Steve's request to leave Red River in Nebraska.
Clearwater, in any case, could not be moved. There was no danger of
losing her: any rescue attempt mounted by force of arms would be
fatal.
And despite the risk that she might- just might - defect, he would
leave Roz there too.
To bring her back into the Federation after this demonstration of new,
uncharted powers would be an act of criminal folly. If there was going
to be any heat, Wallis and the task force could take it. Karlstrom was
aware that his decision placed the entire crew of Red River in jeopardy
but there was, for the moment, no acceptable alternative. He had no
desire to find himself sitting on top of a dizzying pinnacle of rock,
or whatever other horror she might produce from the depths of her
mind.
And until some way could be found to deal with the problem he, for one,
did not intend to get within a hundred miles of her.