Time Thieves

cheated.”
        
        “If I promise not to open another mind, no one else-”
        
        “We cannot trust in promises.”
        
        “But-”
        
        The eyeless face disappeared and was replaced by blackness, leaving only the disembodied hands which, a moment later, also vanished.
        
        “Whether or not you cooperate,” the alien said, “the operation must now begin.”
        

----

    XVIII
        
        
        He could feel the tension as they summoned their four alien consciousnesses into a single strike force, coalescing the energy that their quartet of minds possessed, directing it with precision, zeroing in on him where he lay pinned to the dais.
        
        They had said, early in the conversation, just after he had awakened, that they would like his help for what they wished to do to him. Perhaps that indicated some doubt on their part. Did they think that he had grown so psionically powerful that even the four of them would be hard put to match him move for move? Had their bumbling surgical machines made him even more telepathically gifted than they?
        
        Come on, he thought. Try me. Now.
        
        And they struck.
        
        They launched a cunningly strategic attack, not at all the sort of thing he had been preparing himself for. He had sought to protect himself from the insistent pressure he had sensed before. He strengthened those walls against such an eventuality, tensing himself to patch the ephemeral but desperately important partitions if the slightest crack should appear. And then they came to him with subtle weapons far more dangerous than force might have been.
        
        They used Della against him.
        
        They did not directly involve her, however. They were not a violent race, he supposed. They would never have considered harming her or torturing her either mentally or physically in order to break him. But they used her fears and images of her, designed to peel away his defenses and to leave the meat of him exposed for the bite of their more potent teeth.
        
        A hundred thousand centipedes descended from the sky, like rain drope, fled across the dome protecting his mind, skittered along the walls as if hunting a damp crevice, a nook in which to draw up their spindly legs and devour their obscene foods. They copulated on the walls, writhing, their legs vibrating furiously, produced children in the passage of a minute. Generation by generation, their numbers grew geometrically until millions of them blackened the walls of his mind, so many that their movement produced an audible roar, like a small waterfall. They shifted, darted here and there, climbed over one another, died and were born, cannibalized each other, a billion legs kicking and trembling like the thinnest of rare feathers, two hundred thousand greasy, flicking antennae searching out food/shelter/mates/warmth/ dampness…
        
        Pete knew where the vision had originated, but he could not see any purpose to it. This was Della's dread, not his. It might make her a shivering, helpless mad-woman, but it would not bother him.
        
        And then Della appeared. She was perched upon the top of his mental ramparts, a solitary figure against the sky, kicking frantically at the tiny insects that beat a path towards her. Every single centipede had set out up the wall, drawn toward her as if she were something too delicious to be ignored, as if she were the quantity which two hundred thousand antennae all sought.
        
        “Della,” he said.
        
        He called to her even though he knew that he was only seeing a projected image, a fluff, the fantasy of the alien minds as they played upon his own consciousness.
        
        Her terror was so real, her face a mask of death expectancy, her skin white and clammy, that he wanted to open his walls and take her in and caress her.
        
        He saw centipedes stream across her feet.
        
        They started up her long, lovely legs, beneath her dress, like cancerous spoors against her prettiness.
        
        She screamed.
        
        “Della!”
        
        She could not hear him. She only had ears for the teeming insects that converged on her.
        
        The sky darkened; more of them fell from it, raining over her as the hordes below swarmed upon her.
        
        She