SORDMAN THE PROTECTOR
BY TOM PURDOM
Illustrated by WOOD
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Galaxy Magazine August 1960.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
He was the most powerful man in the world.
He could make anybody do anything—and yet
he was the slave of a mad criminal's mind!
In a beer hall on the eighty-first floor of the Hotel Mark Twainfourteen men held an adolescent girl prisoner.
"I'll go up there by myself," Sordman said.
He was a big young man with sloppy black hair and a red beard. Hisfashionably ornate clothes covered the body of a first class Talent.Disciplined training, plus drugs and his natural gift, had made himone of the four truly developed psionic adepts in the world. Withdrugs and preparation, he could command the entire range of psi powers.Without drugs, he could sense the emotions and sometimes the generalthought patterns of the people near him.
"We'd better go with you," Lee Shawn said. "There's an awful lot offear up there. They'll kill you as soon as they learn you're a Talent."
She was a lean, handsome woman in her early forties. Alawyer-politician, she was the Guggenheim Foundation's lobbyist. Foryears she had fought against laws to outlaw the development of Talent.
"Thanks, Mama, but I think I'd better go alone."
Sordman, though he didn't tell her, knew that symbolically Lee saw himas the tree and herself as the rain and the earth.
"Go ahead and laugh," George Aaron said. "But you'll need big medicineto fight that fear. Lee's symbolic place in your psyche is important."
"I've thought it over," Sordman said. "I'll depend on God and nothingelse."
He felt George's mind squirm. As a psychologist, George acceptedSordman's Zen-Christian faith because Sordman needed it to control thepowers of his Talent.
But George himself was a confirmed skeptic.
The men up there were scared. Sordman knew he would die if he lostcontrol. But Lee and George were scared, too. Even now, standing in thepark in early morning, their fear battered at his mind.
He thought about swimming in the ocean. He made his skin remembersalted wind. The real Atlantic, a mile away, helped the illusion.
It was the right symbol. He felt his friends calm.
"Let him go," George said.
"He's manipulating us," Lee said.
"I know. But let him go."
Sordman laughed. Lee bent and tore a clump of grass from the earth."Take this, Andy."
"Thank you."
It was wet with dew. He held it to his nose and smelled the dirt andgrass. Two things kept him from destruction by his own Talent. He lovedthe physical world and he believed in God.
"I'll call you if I need you," he said.
"Be careful," George said. "Many people need you."
"You've got status," Lee said. "Use it. You're dealing with the kind ofpeople it impresses."
The hotel stood three hundred stories tall. Surrounded by afive-mile-square park, connected to the major coastal cities by highspeed vacuum tubes, the building was a small town. Eighty-five thousandpeople lived within its walls.
Sordman rode an empty elevator. Through the glass sides he studied thedeserted halls and shops.
They were frightened here. Murder had been done. A Talent haddestroyed two men. Lord, protect us from the malice of a witch.
The eighty-first was a commercial floor. He got off the vator an