Part 1

Earth Needs A Killer

DYNAMIC FEATURE NOVEL

By Bryce Walton

_You are the man we need, Ray Berton. You're a killer, but you're sane and rational. Those we are fighting are insane, irrational, and they'll destroy humanity if they are not stopped. We have power, but we can't use it for destruction, no matter how great the need. But we can give you power--then it's up to you!_

[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Future combined with Science Fiction Stories July-August 1950. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]

From an evening tele-audiocast by International Information Service, New York City, September 8, 1983: Reporter: ... _and now, as a special dramatic interest story, here's something for the Fortean Society, though a more scientific diagnosis will certainly be forthcoming._

_At five P.M. today, a man's body materialized out of thin air at an altitude of over ten thousand feet above Uptown Manhattan. According to many reliable witnesses, the body plunged down to smash into an unrecognizable mass on the plasticrete of Tier 19 and Grav-lift 6-H, Fifth Avenue II._

_The reliable witnesses include twenty passengers of the trans-State jetliner, all of whom agree that the unknown man did materialize out of the air very near the liner's position as it circled for a cradle in La Guardia Field._

_Every witness tells about the same story that the body did appear suddenly from the atmosphere. There was no other air vessel near. Also it was reported that another object followed the body out of the air, according to preliminary reports, a manuscript oddly written on a scroll of metal._

_Stay visioed to I.I.S. for further reports on this Fortean mystery. The manuscript, we hope, will contain some kind of explanation which will be forwarded to you as soon as it reaches our news clearance scanners...._

* * * * *

It starts for me on Mars. I guess Mars is about the only place it could have started. Maybe they'll bring the real earth law there someday, and clean up dives like Jelahn's _krin-krin_ tavern on the North Canal, a breeding place for crime, and where a man can be goaded into killing. That night I didn't care much.

The place was crawling with scum, strained through the sieves of Marsport, and Jokhara and Sanskran where the worst of the asteroid miners and space bums gather. Earthmen and Martians and half-breeds whom the Solar cops, said to be the toughest ever to wear a shield, would have gone at with care.

I was feeling high, with enough _krin-krin_ burning in me to make a Martian _srith_-dog sit up and talk Esperanto. And by the time I'd been blotting up _krin-krin_ for a few hours, any space bum thinking to push me around was crazy. So the big yellow skinned Martian with the green eyes was crazy for trying to drag this breed tavern girl away from my table.

Crazy first, then dead. I'd seen plenty of dead men before, and I knew the look. I knew I'd hit him too hard as soon as he stretched on the bright green stones of Jelahn's tavern, and didn't try to get up. Standing there looking down at him, I knew he'd never get up by himself.

The whole tavern had dried up like a scab. The place was so quiet you could hear the Martian's blood trickling from his mouth onto the floor. "You certainly lowered that poor, poor Marty," somebody whispered.

I swung around fiercely, but the speaker eased away from me. "What in a blasted jet's the use of hitting a man, if you don't hit him right?" I yelled. I was drunk, and I was getting sick; I'd never liked the sight or smell of dead men.

Nobody said anything. Everybody looked at the dead Marty. The blood stopped running. I prodded him with my foot. Oh, he had the look all right, the kind a man only gets once and for always. People stared. Even on Mars, death isn't so common that it isn't interesting.

I could hear myself breathing in the silence. I was sick. I'd never been the kind of space tough one of those Martian Colonial Administrator's women would invite to a Double Moon tea, but just the same everyone doesn't like to kill.

My record wasn't too bad; brawls, drunks, a few killings in self defense. Born in the asteroids, father a prospector, me a prospector. At twenty-three, I'd hit a strike a month ago, and cushioned into the big port at Sanskran to unload, get more machinery and return to that meteorite where I'd hit "heavy" beryllium, paired-atom stuff worth twice its weight in platinum to the Atomician boys on Earth.

The breed girl, the cause of the trouble, cried, "He's dead!"

Nobody moved. Then the girl came at me; the few jewels, which was all she wore, flashed as red as her eyes and her clawing nails. "You killed him!" she screamed. I pushed in her face with my flat hand, and sent her sprawling beside the dead guy she was so nuts about.

The _krin-krin_ went out of me. The place was hot and somebody said the cops were coming. There was no time for talking or thinking or feeling sorry; I measured my chances and ran for the door. I knocked two guys out of the way and went through the blue stone doors into the street. Up the red stone street like it was swimming in blood, a black jetcar was coming fast under the shine of the Deimos.

Cops. I'd never had any trouble with them before. Now it was just Ray Berton and the cops--and nothing in between but the cold Martian night. So I turned and ran the other way. A knot of men came out of the tavern and came at me. I stopped. Another jetcar curved into the street from the other end of the block. _All right._ I turned, backed into the side of the triangle of stone, stood waiting and my fists were hard. I'd never had any parents, not much. My mother died when I was born, and twelve years later, my dad died from over-exposure to above ten point cos-rays. It isn't anything to remember, seeing an old man die like that.

So I'd been a space bum, and ended up a drunken brawling killer in a North Canal scum sieve! _All right, so maybe you could have done better. Come on and get it, you guys who think you could have done any better. Come on, come on...._

And then it hit me. _Thought._ A big hot fist of it, punching into my head. A big exploding fire of thought--_but not my own_.

"_Step over here into the shadows, Ray Berton._"

* * * * *

I didn't think of telepathy then, though I thought plenty about it afterwards. I stumbled back, wanting to get away, but scared. I started to sweat; somebody could get inside me, and stay there and do things to me. Things worse than a Martian cop could do with his coercoats and neuron twisters.

My head hurt and I yelled something. Everything around me started to melt and run together, and the stone under my boots got soft. I got a fading look at them, two of them, standing like purple shadows. A girl with black black eyes. And a man, a big Earthman, aristocratic and distinguished-looking, with eyes like polished Venusian fog crystals.

I heard the fading thunder from the spaceport outside Sanskran, and that was all, for a while. The next thing I knew I was coming into Earth, a place I'd never been, and wasn't supposed to be able to go to because I'd never been 'purified'. I had no Solar visa, I thought, and didn't want to go through the psyche treatment necessary to get one.

But a lot of things changed for me that night when they took me off that street. Teleportation, that's what it was--whatever _that_ is. They had machines all right. Their minds and nervous systems, which they had perfected, were machines. Mind-energy, the basic energy.

I learned a little about that stuff later, but not very much.

Even after they gave me some of their 'power' like giving a kid candy, I didn't know what it was. Like any dumb atomeer can use the power of breaking atoms and not know anything more about physical science than a New York debutante knows about a _krin-krin_ hangover. Like the experts who still can't tell you what electricity is.

I came out of the fog feeling pretty good, considering. I knew one thing right off, as any spacer would: I was in space, at C-acceleration, beyond the neutral-gravity point between planets, and in free fall.

I sat up on foam-rubber cushioning and this girl was looking at me with those black black eyes, so black they were almost purple. The big aristocratic guy was sitting beside her.

She was young and very nice to look at. Her eyes softened, and I felt more at ease. The gent smiled; both of them gave me the idea of having a lot more energy and vitality than any ordinary person.

"We saved you from the police," she said. Her body moved softly under skin-tight resensilk. She had used her voice, but I felt her thoughts. I knew she didn't have to use her lips to tell me anything. It was a funny feeling. "You're on a space-cruiser. We'll be in a La Guardia field cradle in five hours."

"How?" I said. "How did it happen? How did you--?"

She shook her head. "You wouldn't understand. Not yet."

"All right," I said. "You saved my life, and a lot more. You may know how the Martian cops crack down. You did a lot for me." I leaned forward. "Now what's the catch?"

"You can repay us personally. You can do us a big favor in return. By so doing, you can possibly save Earth from annihilation."

I laughed and her eyes widened. "Wouldn't you want to do that?"

My laugh faded; she meant it. Maybe she was crazy, but she didn't know it. And for crazy people, they certainly had pulled a good job of getting me off that street, into a cruiser, and to Earth. Maybe some kind of a gag.

She said in a whisper. "You--_killed_ a man!"

I looked into her eyes until I thought I was passing out. I clenched my hands. "An accident. Hit him too hard. I'm no killer, I--"

"But you did kill him, and you've killed before...."

"In self defense, sure," I said. "But out there in the Asteroids, you have to--"

She said, "I understand. Now, you'll do some things for us. You won't ask questions because you wouldn't understand; later, you may understand without asking."

I felt like the commonest kind of crook. "So you saved my life," I said, "just so you'd have a sucker to pull some kind of a job for you. Now I suppose if I don't want to do what you say, you'll threaten to turn me over to the Solar authorities for shipment back to the Martian cops!"

She flushed a little. "Wait," she said, "until you find out the truth, then I'm sure you'll _want_ to help us. I'm sure you want to save Earth and its billions of people from death."

* * * * *

I shrugged. "What'd Earth ever do for me? What's it ever done for any of the poor guys dying from cosmic-rays and getting killed because there aren't any laws out there? It takes our metal for precious atomician work, and what does it give us in return? A few lousy credits, and a sign saying 'Keep out--no admission'. The devil with Earth."

"You must help us," the man said very softly and yet very forcefully.

"You mean I've got no choice, is that it?"

The girl raised her eyebrows. "There would be no sense in your making a choice now; you can't understand, so no choice would be valid. It would be only blind emotionalism."

"I see." I was mad. I could handle this cruiser myself. I'd been kidnapped by people who considered me nothing more than a robot they were going to use. I swung my feet around, got them planted solidly down on the mesh grid flooring.

I got my hands down on either side of me so I could move fast and hard. "I see. Well, I'm not playing sucker for anybody."

I could hear the soft whispering of space against the platinum lined skin of the cruiser. Her eyes burned into me. I felt helpless and very much alone. But the devil with them I thought.

So I jumped straight for the aristocratic gent, and swung a long stiff right for his jaw. He faded into the air. I yelled wildly as he seemed to drift away like smoke, and into nothingness. I turned and there he was over in the corner of the cabin.

His eyes shot sparks, but he wasn't mad; he just looked grim. "You may cause us trouble when we cushion in," he said softly. "So I think you had better go back to sleep." He moved toward me. I tried to move my arms and legs, but I suddenly found that I couldn't move anything. "And perhaps it will be better if you have no more resistance to our suggestions after we reach earth."

His eyes seemed to expand out and out and out. It was like I was falling into a widening black pool.

"And," I heard his distant voice say, "that is the way it will be. Until you can make free choice of your own, you will have to agree with us completely. Subconsciously you know we are right; some time you will know it with your full consciousness."

They had it all right, whatever it was. But not as much as their friends. They had as much of the greater power as you can have, and still be bounded by Third-Plane reality.

It was mental power. Mind-energy they called paraphysical. Nothing trite, like I'd seen the quack women along the North Canal pull with mass hypnotism; this was something big and way beyond me.

I fell forward into a black hole.

2

Kill For Us!

Their names were Glora and Malcolm Mergon; he was her father. They could make suckers out of anyone they wanted to; they could get into another guy's mind and make him think, see, feel, hear anything they wanted him to. Take Extra Sensory Perception, and imagine somebody who's perfected all of it--and that's the way Glora and Malcolm Mergon were. Only more so.

We didn't need visas; we didn't have to go into the antiseptic wards; we didn't have to be scanned. Every time we came into contact with Guards, or doctors or officers--those guys thought whatever Glora and Malcolm wanted them to think. So we walked right straight through all the red tape, and caught a sky-taxi to a sky-top hotel bordering Central Park West; by then it was noon of a nice spring day.

I sat there, sweating and feeling cold in spite of the even temperature. I didn't savvy anything; I felt like a kid who'd gotten lost.

They brought a three-dimensional map out of the air, I guess; I couldn't tell. It hung in the air like it was glued to nothingness. Glora moved around me and stood in front of the big tri-dimensional map. Her legs were long and slim and smooth; she'd be a prize for some big shot, I thought; but she wasn't my kind. My kind you'll still find along the North Canal, with very little on, and nothing in their heads but phony dreams.

"Now," she pointed at various marked sections on the map. "These are the locations of the ten Uranium Piles that supply all of Earth's power. If these piles should all reach critical mass at the same time, the earth would vaporize instantaneously.

"Scientific theory here is that even if all of them blew at once, though the destruction would be terrific, it wouldn't be fatal. That a hundred square miles around each pile would be destroyed only. That's so wrong, Ray. Through special abilities, Mal and I are aware of an unstable element existing here; Earth scientists can't discover it. If those Ten Piles reach simultaneous critical mass, it will react on this big unstable element. The Earth won't exist anymore."

I gulped. "Is that liable to happen?"

"It probably will, unless you can stop it from happening."

I felt gray sickness on my face, felt that she knew what she was talking about. "How?" I whispered. "Who'd want to do a thing like that?"

"There's an atomician Chief in control of each of those Piles. Men who have been tested and scanned and conditioned until the Atomic Energy Commission hasn't any doubt of their reliability. But we happen to know that an unintegrated personality of great mental power--powers like our own--has gotten control of these ten Chief's minds. At a specific time, acting in complete unconscious accord, they will respond to a posthypnotic command already planted in their unconscious minds. Upon responding, they will allow those Piles to reach critical mass."

And so then, naturally, I wanted to know what that had to do with me.

Malcolm Mergon spoke then. "So--you are going to meet this person who controls them. We can not move against those ten while he is around, and he is stronger than we are. When he is gone, then we can go to work on those Chief's minds. _You will have to kill this man!_"

"_Who_ is this man," I said, not very loud.

"Ronal LeStrang," he said. "President of the Atomic Energy Commission."

I jumped up. I was mad and scared and confused. "Hey wait now! You think just because I'm a bit of nameless scum you picked up out of a Martian garbage pit, you can make a sucker out of me! I'm no professional killer! You guys are hypnotists. How do I know that what you're saying is fact? How do I know you aren't some foreign agents, wanting to start a world revolution or something? You think I can go out and kill a man just because a couple of guys tell me to!"

She pleaded with me. "That's why we came to Mars, Ray," she said. "We might never have found anyone like you otherwise. You're strong, you have courage, and very strong latent ESP potentials. But more than any of those things, you can--_kill_. Except for on the frontier planets and the asteroids, the ability to kill has been bred out by the new psychogenic surgery and conditioning marts."

She hesitated, then said, "And he has to be killed, Ray; that's the only way left. Killing is destructive, and we can't do it. We're mentally incapable of doing it. But he isn't; that's our handicap. You've got to help us."

And I knew she was right. Whether I knew it because of my own thinking, or whether Malcolm Mergon's mind had forced me to know it--that wasn't important any more. I knew I had to do it.

He moved toward me. His eyes burned.

"Wait," I said quickly. I looked around for a way out. I was trapped, and I didn't know whether I really wanted to get away or not. I only knew I was scared of what they could do to my mind. My mind wasn't much, but I was used to it. It was all I had. "Wait a minute, you guys. Give me a chance. Give--"

"We haven't much time, Ray," he said. "But first we must give you some added ability. It's already in you, but it's dormant. We'll bring it into the active stage. Maybe you would like to have some of the--power that we have, Ray? Anyway, you will need it. Now, Ray, go back to sleep so we can give you the power. It won't take long. Go back to sleep, Ray.

"_Ray, go back to sleep!_"

* * * * *

This time when I recognized daylight again, I was different. I felt funny, not the same; things were twisted around now. I was walking down the big new Eighth Tier of Uptown Broadway, feeling the jet-cars pushing past in their different speed lanes. The sun was shining on the big lacework of tiers and tubes, and I was walking. But things were not the same.

I felt like everything that had happened since hitting the Martian in Jelahn's tavern was part of a dream, and that now I was coming awake maybe for the first time. The life around me looked faded, blurred, not quite real.

I had some of _their_ power all right. I could feel it, and it was like a new kind of Martian rotgut was giving me a crazy highness. I felt like I'd suddenly gone screwy, but didn't care--as though nobody could touch me for it. I had some of their power, whoever or whatever they were, but not very much I thought; just enough to help me kill Ronal LeStrang.

A tele-audio flash information band on the side of the building shocked me as I stared at it. It gave the date. September 6, 1983.

Since Malcolm Mergon had walked toward me saying "Ray, go back to sleep," it had been three weeks! I'd been out three weeks. It jolted me. Three weeks. Work on my brain; work on my body; do things to my nervous set-up; make me different. This Glora and Malcolm Mergon--I knew they could do an awful lot to a guy in three weeks.

I stumbled a little, ran into a cute little blonde. She glared at me then looked scared. I felt her thoughts, felt hundreds, thousands of thoughts that belonged to the pedestrians around me, swarming and beating at my head like moths at a light. "He's a drunk! ... looks like one of those non-rehabilitated space men ... see the cosmic-ray burns on his face ... stay away from him ... dangerous...."

Dangerous, sure. They'd done plenty to me, but I didn't know what nor how much. And I didn't even know why ... not for sure; just what they'd told me to believe. But I remembered--dangerous--I was supposed to kill.

A piece of uncultured, ignorant, un-psyched space-rot! Picked up and brought to Earth to do a murder job. They got me, Ray Berton, killer. But that wasn't enough for them, oh no. They had to give me added abilities--make me a super-delux killer!

Me, Ray Berton. The guy who would save the world!

* * * * *

I took a grav-raise tube up the building front to the top of the big central UN Building in International Square. I stepped into a scanning cubicle. A mechanical voice said: "State the purpose of your visit, please."

I stared around me at the mosaicked floors and walls. A super-super delux killer. And with one of the most important men in the world to kill. I knew that, through Glora and Malcolm, I'd made an appointment. Made it sound important.

"An appointment to see Mr. Ronal LeStrang. About a 'heavy' beryllium strike in the asteroids." As head of the Atomic Energy Commission, LeStrang would be more than willing to have a personal talk about that. The Earth was supposed to be International minded, but it was still a case of getting the most and getting it first then saying "See!"

"You may go in, Mr. Berton."

I dropped my right hand into my jacket pocket, wrapped my fingers around a small coiled bunch of deadly metal. Metal with a trigger that would release enough energy to kill the biggest man in the world as quickly as any other.

As I came into the big glass-lined office, LeStrang got up from behind a desk. He was short and stocky, with a naked-looking head and white eyebrows. There wasn't any sense in wasting time, I figured. I had a slight advantage of surprise; I took it.

I jumped across the room, and took the little neutron gun out of my pocket. Before LeStrang could shrug his eyelashes, I had that gun jabbed right at his belly.

I shivered. His body didn't look real. His eyes didn't belong in that body; they seemed to flame out at me. I felt thought fingers grabbing at my mind, but there seemed to be automatic shields clicking into place, blocking him.

"The interview's over," I said, and started to pull the trigger.

Something stopped me. Sweat ran into my eyes; I felt like I was going to lay down on the floor. His eyes looked at my cosmic-rayed face, the purple scars of burns from the wild radioelements of the asteroids.

I heard myself whimpering like a scared _srith_-dog. His thoughts were stronger, in a way, than Glora's or Malcolm's. They started eating away at my mind like dark acid--thought fingers getting hold and trying to squeeze like my brain was a sponge.

"Glora and Mal sent you of course. They couldn't touch me here, so they sent you. I didn't think they'd stoop so low as to hire animals to work for them. Well, they can't win anyway; I had the thing all set, but now it's just a case of postponement. I'll fix it next time so they can't stop me."

I raised the neutron gun. "Next time," I said. "There isn't going to be any."