The Mind-Riders by Brian Stableford Read Free Book Online Page B

I wanted my chance back. I knew then that the only way I was likely to get back into the ring was with your backing. I waited for you. You needed me, I needed you. But where were you? For eighteen years, where were you? And you think that now you can lose your temper at three in the morning, and right out of the blue you can say, ‘Where’s Ryan Hart? Find him. Fetch him’.
    â€œDo you think those eighteen years count for nothing? Do you think I’m the same man now that I was then? I know you are. But not me. Those eighteen years came out of my life, out of the good years. And I counted them—to me they mean something. It’s too late, Mr. Valerian. It’s sixteen, seventeen, eighteen years too late. There’s no going back now.”
    â€œYou have to,” he said.
    â€œAn offer I can’t refuse?”
    â€œIf you like. I can take your job, your home, your life. I can buy you. But it doesn’t come down to that.”
    â€œYou can threaten me all you want,” I said, scratching my cheek. “But there’s a nice banal saying. You can drive a horse to water but a pencil must be lead.”
    â€œI don’t have to threaten you,” he said. “Because even if you do hate me worse than you hate Paul Herrera, you want to get back to the ring. You want to win. And you’ll do it whichever way you can.” He said it with a curious note of triumph in his voice—the certainty of a man who knows that he is right and who knows that even if he is wrong he can enforce what he is saying. I may not know what I am talking about but I will defend to the death my right to say it—and make it stick. That’s justice—the exclusive brand.
    Velasco Valerian only had to reach out and take what he wanted. Right now, I was inside his fist.
    Trapped.
    And he was right. I would fight. I would win. I would do my utmost to avoid winning his way, and use every scrap of my ingenuity to get what I wanted without compromising, but I would win. I had to.
    At long last, the moment had come.
    I stared at him, and he knew that the understanding he had demanded was there.

CHAPTER FOUR
    We rode the elevator up to the thirty-ninth just as the milling hordes were clamoring to ride it down. The working day was launched and on its way.
    I wouldn’t have been with them anyway—I had a couple of days off owing to me—but I couldn’t help feeling alien as I jostled with them, heading in the wrong direction and not intending to turn back. Not ever.
    As I walked along the corridor to 3912 Jimmy came out of 3909. We almost collided.
    â€œâ€” Hey, Mr. Hart,” he said, in a tone far too jocular to be decent at eight-twenty, “you’re going the wrong way.”
    I clapped him on the shoulder and made as if to go right on past him, saying, “I know it, kid, I know it.”
    He didn’t get it. He was suddenly frozen, the wheels of his mind sticking as he tried to follow me with one eye and look Curman over with the other. Curman was behind me, carrying a big suitcase Valerian’s valet had lent me.
    â€œHe looks like a gangster because he is one,” I told Jimmy. “I’m being snatched by a millionaire and held to ransom. My intellectual chastity is in deadly danger.”
    Not unnaturally, this didn’t do a lot for the kid’s state of confusion. He was going purple with the effort of getting his ideas under way again.
    â€œSorry, Jimmy,” I said, a little more gently, stopping to face him. “I won’t be going in today. I won’t be going in when I’m due back on Monday either. I quit. I’m going to work for Velasco Valerian.”
    He looked a little disappointed. Things had moved too fast and left him stranded. He’d figured me for a human contact, something to hang on to in a world which was still, from his point of view, fearful in its pace of change. I had been his first barricade against the