Warlock

overheard.”
        
        “So now we have no choice,” Richter said.
        
        “And the weight of the decision has been taken from you,” Berlarak amplified. “Now, your men should be brought to the sleep-teach machines, four at a time, to receive instruction in the handling of the weapons which they will be using upstairs. I have also prepared a tape which will outline the plan that I expect to use.”
        
        “More men will die,” Richter said, his shoulders slumped, his face empty and dead,
        
        “A few,” Berlarak confirmed. “But not many. We will have the advantage of surprise, and of the weapons they do not yet understand.”
        
        “Not much surprise,” Shaker Sandow said, “The fire in the cane field must be out by now. The Oragonians will have discovered that we did not die there.”
        
        Berlarak grinned. “We carried some bones from the wrecked train and deposited them in the cane field while a pall of smoke still covered our movements. We placed bits and pieces of your supplies there as well, smeared everything with ashes. They will be satisfied.”
        
        At the disclosure of this piece of chicanery, Richter seemed to brighten. “Perhaps, Shaker, we have aligned ourselves with winners, though I would have thought not”
        
        “And you are winners too,” Berlarak said. “We will all be rich in more ways than one.”
        
        “Will you open the city to research by Darklanders, by myself?” Shaker Sandow asked.
        
        “It will be opened to you, Shaker. Though the question that haunts you the most can be answered now. Your powers are not magics, just as you have long suspected, but something more common than that. Your powers are hidden within the minds of all men, though only a few are born with the ability to use them. Your abilities were once called 'extrasensory-perception' and were studied on many worlds, in many universities. A thousand years before the Blank, before men had even gone outward to the stars and met the Scopta'-mimas, there was a great war among the nations of the earth. Because of the radiation from that war, the after-effects of the weapons which were used, mutants were born. Some were changed in physical ways, into monsters which men put mercifully to death, while others were changed only inside, where it could not show, in the mind. You are a descendant of one of those whose mind was liberated, enlarged, changed. Yours is an inherited ability, more often than not. Your mother's death was none of your own doing, but the result of her own and your father's genes, as inevitable as the rising and the setting of the sun. And her death was, as you have surmised, caused by the transmission of your own birth pangs to her mind.”
        
        Though a number of the words were strange to him and he could not fathom what they represented, Shaker Sandow understood the gist of what Berlarak had said. Here, in an almost casual conversation, without fanfare or publicity, the one great question of his life had been answered. The doubt which had driven him to cross the Cloud Range, to risk his life and the life of his boys, this single doubt was erased in but a moment, unexpectedly, miraculously. And to this mutant, the knowledge was no mystery, but a commonly understood bit of business.
        
        The Shaker felt a mixture of sadness and joy that confused him and made him feel the slightest bit dizzy.
        
        “Whom do you cry for?” Commander Richter asked. He sat down once again, drawing his chair close to the Shaker, and took the magician's hand to offer solace.
        
        “I cry for myself,” Sandow said. “I'm crying because of all the years that I have slept so lightly. Did you know that I wake at but the drop of a pin? And the reason, though I would never admit it to myself, was that I feared dreams of my mother. I had such dreams as a boy, nightmares where she came accusingly and took me to task for causing her death, for letting the demons snatch her up to Hell as punishment for her giving birth to a Shaker. And now I know that all of that was worthless, all of that guilt and doubt.”
        
        “But that's over,” Richter said. “Now is the time to accept the truth and rejoice in it.”
        
        “So it is,” the Shaker said, drying his eyes and smiling, letting the last of sixty years of anguish drain from