Chapter 12

Walt was outside the ship. His feet planted firmly, he waited. The four advancing mutants were not yet adjusted to the space disorientation. Behind them, the tip of the Washington Monument loomed starkly white above the trees.

Walt’s anger rose to an even greater fury. He knew how Julia had felt as a child: the hot, impotent flare of rage; the senseless desire to throw something; to smash and destroy something; to disprove helplessness by some savage action.

The mutants were closer; terror was dying out of their eyes. Their lips were relaxing. Their bodies were loosening to their wills.

We’re going to kill you, Walt: with our hands.

Lyrian traitor.

Walt was breathing in shallow gasps. They would rush him in a minute. Willy, out of the saucer ship now, crouched only yards away, ready to spring. He feinted, and Walt flinched instinctively.

You can’t displace from five of us!

Not and hold the shielding, traitor!

General Tibbets, in the doorway behind Walt, began firing at the mutants with a pistol.

Bob clutched at his chest and staggered. In an instant, the others were displaced and invulnerable.

Bob fell.

Reg went to his wounded companion, held him in displacement, healed him rapidly.

Bob coughed and shook his head and scrambled to his feet. He screamed his hate at the general.

The pistol clicked on an empty chamber.

Walt retreated several steps.

... green wartle rivers of Lyria; birdsong, there, in a skybranch, partly pretty orange and soft like fur pictures...

He was in Calvin’s mind!

Calvin was sitting in the games space, on the floor, rolling the metal practice ball back and forth before him between his hairy hands. Forential was speaking. The confining walls of the space station were so comfortingly solid...

And Walt had a fix on it! Knew its position, its direction, its speed! He had an anchor!

Where is something? he thought wildly. Quick! A rock! Throw a rock! Something big: to throw: quick! Huge, heavy--

Forgotten, the advancing mutants. With every unit and sub unit and compartment and section of his mind, pouring out every available degree of telepathic power, dropping the shielding, concentrating above everything else, he seized the Washington Monument. It shook; it wobbled unsteadily; it wrenched free.

Calvin, delighted, was helping him.

Walt! he cried. We’ll play games! We’ll throw it!

It was off the ground. It poised uncertainly. It moved upward. Slowly at first, like a rocket: faster and faster, dwindling from Earth, becoming a vanishing pinpoint like a black, daylight star.

Calvin pulled it in with childish joy. It’s big! he cried proudly.

It was aimed on target.

Calvin was no longer in Walt’s mind.

With a last, exhausting burst of thought, he increased its already terrific speed. The laboratory still stood. The mutants had not realized his shielding was down. He restored it, weakened and quivering.

And they were upon him. He fought them off with his fists and elbows. He dared not displace, lest the shielding should crumble entirely. A few minutes more; if I can just gain a few minutes more, he thought.

He was down. He jerked his head out of the way of a foot. He caught a leg and twisted.

Fingers tore at his throat. He caught someone with a savage and satisfying kick.

Out in space, beyond the orbit of the moon, Fierut detected the Washington Monument on his warning device. It was coming too fast to deflect. He tried.

A heartbeat later, it ripped into the steel of the space station. It crumbled and shattered and sprayed marble, and huge fragments erupted from the opposite side. The space station became visible. There was a great, ragged, tunneling hole from rim to rim. Escaping air spewed wreckage into space. Parts of demolished machinery whirled away. In a yet-sealed compartment, a power system exploded with a great, blinding, soundless flash. Chunks of steel debris, vast shrapnel, blossomed in all directions.

The space station, its orbit altered, twisted away, a gutted, lifeless derelict.

Walt’s shielding collapsed. His mutant bridge opened; his mutant powers vanished. He screamed for help.

He saw General Tibbets slam a pistol butt against Willy’s suddenly unprotected skull.

Five minutes later, in the laboratory, amid incredible confusion, Julia stood over Walt and dabbed antiseptic on his cut, swollen lip.

Throughout the room there were shouts and laughter and cries of victory. One of the technicians--one who had worked hardest over it--was joyfully smashing the second signal generator.

In the center of the frenzy, Dr. Norvel sat slumped across the desk. She was sound asleep.

Weary and proud, Julia straightened up from Walt.