Time Thieves

fell.
        
        She was soon covered by them. She batted at them with her open hands, tore them away from her mouth where they tried to scramble through her lips. She tore at her hair to be rid of them, slapped her thighs and breasts and legs and face, mashing them in her fingers
        
        He refused to open up, making himself remember that this was no more than an illusion, no matter how real it seemed. Then the second phase of the attack came.
        

----

    XIX
        
        
        He was plunged into a chiaroscuro chaos, into acidic pits of fear, into caverns of unbearable terror where strange and unhuman shapes moved in the darkness and cried out in agony as he swept by them. He was confronted with open graves and the rotting corpses that they contained. Things rose out of the gray earth and walked like men but looked like death with maggots eating their flesh even as they arose. He could sense no up or down, no form to the void as one horrendous vision followed close after another. They had reconstructed the deepest parts of Della's id, the places where nightmares went on all day and insanity was never farther than a hand's reach. Into this hurricane of dreads, they propelled him, like a man stumbling through the crafty corridors of a carnival fun house, bumbling into things that, for a moment, made him leap and want to vomit and then made him want to laugh if only to break the tension that knotted his cuscles and made his mouth dry and stale.
        
        And all the while, they kept him aware of the fact that these were his wife's fears, many unconscious, the hell she lived with every day of her life. And, slowly, they intimated that they would crack open her psychological defense mechanisms and let her see what evil and terror lived within her, let her see the animal part of herself that would drive her mad.
        
        “You wouldn't do it,” he said to them, fighting to keep his defenses intact.
        
        “We would.”
        
        “But you don't believe in causing pain. Mental pain is as bad as physical.”
        
        “We would do it.”
        
        “If you make her face all that stuff, all those interior things she doesn't even know are part of her, she's going to go mad. It can't be faced, not all at once, by anyone.
        
        “Haven't you looked into yourself?” they asked.
        
        “Little. It will take a long time to know me.”
        
        “We will do it.” Their response had begun to sound like some sort of litany. “Because we can return her to sanity. We can let her suffer, to bring you into line, then repair her. We believe, however, that you will acceed to our wishes rather than let her undergo even temporary madness.”
        
        “I'll cooperate,” he said at last.
        
        “Break down your walls. Let us into you, if you are sincere.”
        
        “Here,” he said. He peeled away the first layer of his mental defenses, felt them pressure him.
        
        “And here,” he said, stripping himself of yet another layer of psionic insulation.
        
        “And another,” he said.
        
        “This is most wise, Mr. Mullion,” the newscaster said.
        
        “Don't touch her.”
        
        “Of course not, Mr. Mullion.”
        
        He stripped away more of his wall, bringing himself closer to the utter helplessness that they desired. Around him, the four politin minds fragmented out of the super-entity they had formed. Their psionic talents were held in four individual bodies now, geometrically weaker. They considered him far less of a threat now.
        
        The moment they had disengaged their gestalt, he lashed out. He put forth all the psionic energy he could generate, meanwhile throwing up his mental shield which he had half destroyed while lulling them into a false security.
        
        One screamed, flamed and winked out of existence as he seared through its mental core and burned away everything that made it an individual. The body still lived, flopping on the floor of the command room like a fish thrown up on the beach during high tide.
        
        “What are you doing?” they demanded of him. A pacifistic race, so concerned with intelligent life that they would spend weeks repairing one damaged earthling, they could not conceive of the total destruction of a living, thinking organism when there