Read The Mind-Riders for Free Online Page A

more.”
    I shouldn’t have said all that out loud. It spilled out. Maybe I should have saved it all for Valerian. Maybe I should have bottled it up forever. But at three a.m. anyone can get caught on the hop. For a moment or two I was tilted by circumstance, and it all spilled. But it helped to clear my head.
    Maybe I’d given it up, but it was here.
    A chance.
    What did it matter whether two years had gone by, or twenty, or two hundred? The long wait had been just that. In transit between phases of a life. Like a thirty-mile cruise on the monorail, frozen in a seat and whirled through a liquid world.
    To arrive—where? By now, maybe it was a joke. A farce.
    But I knew that Valerian played all his games hard, and this one hardest of all. He had to be up against the wall now, to have changed his mind after so long. I’d been squeezed out, but now I was in again. He had to be getting desperate. It wasn’t a joke. Not so far as Valerian was concerned.
    Suddenly, I felt a distinct and cold aversion to the idea of being a pawn in a sick drama. I revolted.
    â€œGet dressed,” said Curman.
    â€œGo pick up your gun,” I said, calmly. “I’ll join you in the lobby.”
    â€œPack a bag,” he advised.
    â€œNot yet,” I told him. “I want to see Valerian first. Maybe after that I’ll come back and pack a bag. But let’s not take things for granted.”
    He shrugged. He was obviously a man who always took things for granted—a man so much at peace with the world and all it contained that he could afford to take everything for granted. It is given to certain people that they should find themselves at home in their lives. He was probably a damn good bodyguard.
    He left, shutting the door quietly. He moved softly, like a sneak-thief. I dropped my trousers and began getting into my underpants.
    I took my time, and even buckled on my wrist-set with calm, deliberate precision. I could feel things swelling inside me. A little resentment, perhaps a little disgust for Valerian. Mostly, it was something indefinable—something heavy and warm.
    Damn near twenty years, I thought, puppet-jerking spares. And now—I can jerk myself. As Valerian’s puppet.
    Like hell, I added.
    I locked the door and went slowly along the corridor. I hadn’t bothered to pack. Not even a gun. Curman would look after my health and safety.
    The elevator, dropping thirty-nine floors, took a little of the weight off my stomach.
    He was waiting for me, wearing a smile like a cheap plastic sphinx. He had a big black limousine down in the drop, looking very lonely. Nobody in the capstack had the credit or the pull to rate a car in these economically stagnant days. This car was a rude gesture directed at the world—all the things a car shouldn’t be according to today’s priorities. Such gestures are the prerogatives of pure wealth—the toys of a rich man who doesn’t have to bother courting public goodwill. Apolitical wealth, if there is such a thing.
    The superintendent let us out through the double doors, holding his shotgun in the crook of his elbow. Absently, I wondered when he ever found the time to sleep. He probably didn’t.
    The car drove smoothly and silently. The capstacks loomed around us like fiery needles even at this time of night. Curman threaded a way through the maze of streets back to the arterial highway, and then he turned outwards, away from the urban complex. Valerian, I knew, lived a long way out—up in the foothills where darkness actually fell, and where the sun shone throughout the daylight hours. His home was his castle, and from its battlements he could look down at the sprawling city, the civilization which laid futile siege to his way of life. Valerian was determined to maintain feudalism as a living social system within his own little enclave, and he had the money to do it.
    My eyes probed the shadows that littered the roadside,