Sordman the Protector by Tom Purdom (classic books for 7th graders TXT) 📖

picture phone and punched out a number.

The screen lit. It was in full color, praise God.

"Andy!"

His wife smiled when she saw him. She was a big girl with long breasts and full thighs. She wore a dark kimono.

She bowed. "Good afternoon, Husband."

"Good afternoon, Wife." He pressed his palms together and returned the bow.

"Why are you calling, Andy?"

"Because I love you. And I want to ask you a favor, Tina."

"What, Husband?"

"Will you undress for me now?"

"Andy! My, my, my."

He explained the situation to her. "Be careful," she said. "I love you."

"I'll be careful. But I've got to be aware of myself as a physical being. You understand."

She smiled. "May I take my time?"

"Not too long."

She was an uninhibited girl and took great pleasure in displaying herself. Her skin was pure white and her stomach smooth and softly rounded. He could feel the weight of her breasts on his palm.

"God is good," he said.

"Thank you."

His glands flooded his body. His body ached to stroke, squeeze, kiss, penetrate.

"You'd better go," he said. "Before I break the screen down."

She bowed. "Live with God, Husband."

"Live with God, Wife."

The screen faded. He put on his robe and jabbed the hypodermic into his wrist. Then he knelt to pray.

He did not pray for power. Intelligence and hard work could give him that. He prayed for mercy, compassion, recognition of his own flawed nature. He prayed for courage and the end of fear.

The balls danced between his hands. He sang the Song of Praise, the love song to the world. Gloria mundi. Glory in the world, glory in the flesh, glory in the flow of life. Creation is a flow and man a bubble bouncing on the flow. Bubble that will burst but bubble that is. Bubble that feels, strives, blends with other bubbles.

Bubble that can fill Creation!

He roared at the walls of existence. His mind yawned and stretched and came awake. He prowled across the woods and parks. Gigantic, he gazed at the mortals who stumbled through the shaded tunnels of the world. These are such as me. These share my doomed existence.

And that one? That one lying in the brush with an axe? That one, preparing to kill, clawing since he was a baby at a world that torments him?

That also is me.

Smith rose to his knees and swung the axe. John Dyer crumpled with a severed spine. The axe swung twice and two men fell. The hunters dropped to their bellies. Rifles cracked. Bullets sang in the grass.

Now they knew they had to kill Smith or die. Now they felt no mercy.

Sordman hovered over them. What he feels, I will feel. His hate will be my hate. His anger mine. His hate must be absorbed in great compassion, in tenderness and rationality. Or I will be destroyed with him.

In the room the balls spun and whirled. He lay prostrate on the floor, the yellow bomb-burst on his back. He was afraid. His weakness was naked. He had always known he would someday meet a personality he could not forgive. When that day came he would shatter and flee, like Smith, to any refuge he could make.

"Show your heads! Show your heads and I'll kill you!"

A bullet smashed into Smith's leg. He screamed and flailed the axe. Shouting curses and threats, he crawled through the brush. The hunters crawled after him.

Sordman located Smith. He shuddered as malice bit the edges of his mind. He sang a long note of praise to life.

Then he opened his mind.

Listen, Smith. I'm your friend. I am Sordman, the Protector of all, of the hunters and the hunted. I come in love. I am Sordman, small brother of the Lord, bubble in the Fountain of Creation....

Once men had thought a Talent would fell his opponents with a blast of mental energy. It wasn't that easy. Sordman had to find the cause of Smith's hate. He was no rifleman, hurling a blast of energy, but a surgeon probing for the source of a disease.

Two minds tangled. Sordman bore the light of himself into darkness.

—I'll kill you, too. Get out of me. Get out!

Snarl, growl, slash. Two minds linked as one. Sordman fighting Sordman, Smith fighting Smith.

Aaaaaaaah!

He doubled up on the floor and hugged his knees. The Protector wept and sobbed. Hate! How he hated hate. How he wanted to kill the haters. They clawed his brain, they tortured every moment, and yet he had to love them. Love them!

God, grant your servant strength. Be merciful....

He had lost his contact but he had to go back. Weak man or not, he had to return or Smith would die.

—I'll kill them all.

He saw the hunters creeping after him. He felt his body's dirty sweat and the blood draining on his leg. Run, said his belly. A hunter fired. He saw a blue morning coat in the bush and felt the gun pointed at his head. Kill!

The axe swung back in his hand. He remembered the swift stroke, the hard resistance of the spine, the joy of having struck and won. I never got to win. They always held me back. My hands wouldn't paint what I told them, my mind wouldn't reach where I wanted to go. When I loved Raven she didn't let me out, she denied me, she made me hold my feelings back. But now I strike! Now I swing an unfettered arm.

Sordman knew what he was joined with now. Smith was what the psycher Talents called an unopened personality. A mind totally absorbed in what things meant to itself. A mind which had not learned to feel the pain and joy of other minds.

Smith's arm had stretched all the way back. He had to act now or someone else would die. He was Sordman the Protector, one of the four best Talents in the world and his powers were running like a river at flood. All he had to do was make the right move.

He linked Smith's mind with the mind of the rifleman.

The man in the blue morning coat was forty-three years old. He worked in New York City, the assistant manager of a transportation line's local office. His second wife had grown pregnant by accident, which under law meant they were automatically married for life. They had been married for fifteen years and still didn't know each other. His two sons thought he was a spineless old fool who slept all the time and couldn't give them what they needed. He didn't like his job but he knew it was all he would ever do, an exact definition of his limits. Alone in his house, imprisoned by his work, he smoked and slept and ate without appetite.

But now he aimed his rifle and thought, I'll kill the witch. That will be something. I'll know I did that.

The two minds were one. Each knew the other's pain, the other's fear. If one died, the other felt his death.

Each recognized the other man's hunger, his frustration, his imprisonment within his body and the limits of his life.

Sordman felt the weight of their lives. He gathered in the strength he called a gift. His voice and mind, his total self, sang the Liturgy of Joy. He gave his feelings and thoughts.

The axe dropped.

The finger squeezed the trigger and the bullet cut the bark from a tree.

His thoughts became a lullaby, a drowsy murmuring of peace and healing sleep.

George and Lee ran from the woods.

"Andy! Don't shoot them. Andy!"

"Where?"

—Here.

He wiggled the leaves and branches of the brush.