CHAPTER VIII
The Consuming Fire
At the same moment he realized that Orelle and Llesi could not help him against—Brann. Their thoughts came into his mind with a stunned, incredulous tinge of astonishment, a blank bafflement that, strangely, seemed to leave them helpless. And Miller thought he knew why.
Orelle and Llesi and all their race had been conditioned to mental perfection. Never before in their history, he sensed, had there been any case of mental aberration. The race had been too perfect for that. And now, faced with the pattern of schizophrenic split-personality, they were utterly unable to comprehend its meaning. It was too alien to them.
Insanity had never before existed in Orelle’s race.
Miller sent a frantic message to Llesi—inchoate confused memory-pictures from his scant knowledge of psycho-therapy. But Llesi did not understand. Instead he suddenly closed his mind. And, beside Miller, Orelle, too, closed her mind against a concept so shocking to this race that worshiped mental perfection that they could not consciously face it.
The blind figure on the dais bent forward. “Orelle. . . .” it said.
So Brann did not know that the other half of his mind belonged to Tsi. Naturally! Brann would not know that he was a half, an incomplete split personality. Nor would Tsi know that Brann was part of herself. What curious warp in the inherited genes had brought about this cleavage Miller never knew, but he did not think about that now.
He stepped forward.
“Brann!” he called.
“So you are back.” The thought came coldly into his mind. “Well, the machine I tricked you into carrying failed to kill Llesi but I’ll remedy that soon enough. As for you. . . .” Thin mental laughter mocked Miller.
He felt sweat crawling down his forehead. “Wait,” he thought urgently. “I can tell you where Tsi is.”
He sensed a hesitancy and then an urgent, straining question.
“Where? Where is she?”
“You are—”
Miller felt the mind on the dais close swiftly against the thought. Brann would not let himself listen to the truth. He could not.
Brann thought. “Well? Answer me?”
Troubled, uncomprehending, Orelle and Llesi waited and listened. And suddenly Miller knew the answer. He unbuckled the wrist-watch from his arm. Orelle had returned it to him, the deadly lightning machine removed. As a timepiece it was useless but habit had made Miller keep the watch.
“Take this,” he said.
Brann—Tsi—waited.
Miller held it up. “It’s not dangerous any more. Can’t you tell that?”
“A trick. You know nothing of what I wish to know. Why should I waste time on any of you?”
“If you want to find Tsi,” Miller thought, “you must take this thing. Unless you’re afraid to find her.”
The watch spun from his hand and shot glittering across the room. It was in Brann’s hand.
Miller drew a long breath. “Turn it over. That’s it. Hold it up before your face. Yes. Now . . . open your eyes.”
“My eyes will not open.”
“Open them!”
“They have never opened.”
Tension sang through the still air. Miller felt Orelle’s sudden movement toward him.
“If you open your eyes you will find Tsi.”
That was the gap in the armor. That was the one thing that could pierce Brann’s insane half-mind. The blind white eyelids quivered . . . the long lashes lifted, slowly, slowly. . . .
Brann’s eyes looked into the polished steel back of the watch. In that tiny mirror Brann’s eyes looked into—Tsi’s!
Tsi’s eyes—wide, horrified—stared into Brann’s!
There was no protection against the mental avalanche that roared out from that rocking, screaming mind—the two minds—in the single body of Tsi. For the first time Brann saw the girl he had searched for since his strange birth. And for the first time Tsi saw her own face twisted, distorted, into the grimace of chilly hatred that was irrevocably stamped on Brann’s features.
But what Miller felt was—pity. It was the basic principle of mental therapy—making the patient face his problem squarely. But no ordinary human schizophrenic had ever thus had the curtains of his brain ripped away with such sudden violence. The normal human brain has automatic safeguards against such intrusion.
Tsi was of another race—a race mentally developed to a tremendously high standard. She had been warped before birth though the madness had remained latent for a long time—but her mind was nevertheless powerful enough to be able to face the shocking incredible truth.
She had never been evil, as was Brann—weak, yes, but incapable of that cold cruelty her alter ego loved.
Face to face, for a thunderous, eternity-long instant, the two stood—good and evil mated, monstrously wedded in one body and one brain. The silence roared.
Then the hand that held the mirror dropped. The face of Tsi swung round so that her mad, wild, terrified eyes met Miller’s—and he read destruction there. The double mind looked out of those eyes into his and for an instant it was as if both Tsi and Brann spoke to him—as he had first heard them speaking when he woke in this incredible world.
But then they had not known the truth. It had been a split mind talking to itself, good and evil debating together and not guessing they were housed in a single brain. Now they knew. At some point in the past the evil inherent in Tsi had lost its battle with the good in her—and pulled free of the control of her conscious mind. It had called itself by a new name, given itself a masculine identity to disguise its origin still further, grown so strong that not even Tsi could control it any longer.
Brann was abhorrent to Tsi. And to Brann the knowledge that Tsi was himself was a thing he could not face. The split mind, rocking on its foundation, reached out into Miller’s mind with a mad destructive violence.
“You brought ruin on me!” cried the double voice. “You wrecked my castle and my life! You must die and all your kind with you!”
The eyes caught Miller’s in a drowning stare. He could not look away, and the eyes were growing larger and larger, engulfing him in darkness and in the darkness the madness of two minds swirled terribly, carrying away his own sanity on those dreadful, reasonless vortices. . . .
Miller could no longer see Orelle but he heard her moan, a soft whimper of helpless terror. “I can’t—help you,” she was saying from far away. “I can’t fight the two of them. Llesi—Llesi—where are you?”
For a moment there was no answer. The mad twin-mind buffeted at Miller’s from both sides at once, pulling it asunder, spinning in two opposite directions and straining him apart between them. No single mind could withstand the doubled strength of that split brain dragging him down to madness. . . .
And then, suddenly, he was not fighting alone. Out of the darkness Llesi’s mind came swiftly, intangibly, yet with a strength as if the man himself had set his shoulder against Miller’s, bracing him against the whirlpool whose vortex led down to insanity.
Perhaps no other mind in existence could have stood against the riven mind of Brann-Tsi. But in Miller’s brain too a double mind had been housed—his own and Llesi’s. They had learned to work together. And now they could fight. . . .
There was a voiceless scream of fury—Brann’s thin, high, sweet-toned rage. And the buffeting redoubled from two sides at once. But now there were two minds to meet the attack. Miller drew a deep breath and set himself stubbornly against the whirling drag that was pulling him down to darkness. He could feel the strong resistance of Llesi’s mind, fighting beside his own, struggling hard against the double pull.
For a timeless moment the vortex held them both. In that roaring silence, while madness raved about them, neither side seemed able to shake the others. Attacker and attacked stood matched so perfectly that the balance might have held forever with the fury of the split mind screaming its soundless cry in infinity.
Then the scream shivered up to a peak of madness that no sane mind could sustain. And while the vortex still rang with it . . .
The robed figure on the dais moved suddenly. Miller’s blindness lifted again. He could see the dark robe stream back from Tsi’s rainbow garments as she plunged down the steps toward the crystal block, where the halo of the Power turned in its singing silence.
A bolt of the mind reached out before her toward the halo—a summoning bolt. One quivering thought shook the air of the room. Death was the thought. Tsi and Brann could not live together in the same brain and face the knowledge of their oneness. There was no choice but death for them now.
The bolt of white lightning blazed up to meet that plunging figure in answer to its summons. Blazed up and swallowed Tsi—and Brann.
There was a shimmer in the air where the body and the twin mind had hovered. And then—nothing. . . .