Complete Short Fiction (Jerry eBooks)

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Complete Short Fiction (Jerry eBooks) Page 104

by James H. Schmitz


  Councilman Mavig shook his head. “The interrogation machines are supposed to be infallible,” he remarked. “Possibly they are. But I am not a psychologist, and for a long time I refused to accept the reports they returned. But still . . .”

  He sighed. “Well, as to what is to happen with you. You will be sent to join the previously arrested members of your group, and will remain with them until the last of you is in our hands, has been examined, and . . .”

  Mavig paused again.

  “You see, we can accuse you of no crime!” he said irritably. “As individuals and as a group, your intention from the beginning has been to prevent the crime against the Federation from being committed. The Great Satogs simply did too good a job. You have been given the most searching physical examinations possible. They show uniformly that your genetic pattern is stable, and that in no detail can it be distinguished from a wholly human one of high order.

  “You appreciate, I imagine, where that leaves the Federation! When imitation is carried to the point of identity . . .” Federation Councilman Mavig shook his head once more, concluded, “It is utterly absurd, in direct contradiction to everything we have understood to date! You’ve regarded yourselves as human beings, and believed that your place was among us. And we can only agree.”

  ROGUE PSI

  How do you trap a man who has the entire world at his mercy?

  SHORTLY after noon, a small side door in the faculty restaurant of Cleaver University opened and a man and a woman stepped out into the sunlight of the wide, empty court between the building and the massive white wall opposite it which bordered Cleaver Spaceport. They came unhurriedly across the court towards a transparent gate sealing a tunnel passage in the wall.

  As they reached the center of the court, a scanning device in the wall fastened its attention on them, simultaneously checking through a large store of previously registered human images and data associated with these. The image approaching it on the left was that of a slender girl above medium height, age twenty-six, with a burnished pile of hair which varied from chestnut-brown to copper in the sun, eyes which appeared to vary between blue and gray, and an air of composed self-reliance. Her name, the scanner noted among other details, was Arlene Marguerite Rolf. Her occupation: micromachinist. Her status: MAY pass.

  Miss Rolf’s companion was in his mid-thirties, big, rawboned and red-haired, with a formidably bulging forehead, eyes set deep under rusty beetle-brows, and a slight but apparently habitual scowl. His name was also on record: Dr. Frank Dean Harding. Occupation: marine geologist. Status—

  At that point, there was an odd momentary hesitancy or blurring in the scanner’s reactions, though not quite pronounced enough to alert its check-mechanisms. Then it decided: MAY NOT PASS. A large sign appeared promptly in brilliant red light on the glassy surface of the wall door.

  WARNING—SOMATIC BARRIERS!

  Passage Permitted to Listed

  Persons Only

  THE man looked at the sign, remarked dourly, “The welcome mat’s out again! Wonder if the monitor in there can identify me as an individual.”

  “It probably can,” Arlene said. “You’ve been here twice before—”

  “Three times,” Frank Harding corrected her. “The first occasion was just after I learned you’d taken the veil. Almost two years now, isn’t it?” he asked.

  “Very nearly. Anyway, you’re registered in the university files, and that’s the first place that would be checked for an unlisted person who showed up in this court.”

  Harding glanced over at her. “They’re as careful as all that about Lowry’s project?”

  “You bet they are,” Arlene said. “If you weren’t in my company, a guard would have showed up by now to inform you you’re approaching a restricted area and ask you very politely what your business here was.”

  Harding grunted. “Big deal. Is someone assigned to follow you around when you get off the project?”

  She shrugged. “I doubt it. Why should they bother? I never leave the university grounds, and any secrets should be safe with me here. I’m not exactly the gabby type, and the people who know me seem to be careful not to ask me questions about Ben Lowry or myself anyway.” She looked reflective. “You know, I do believe it’s been almost six months since anyone has so much as mentioned diex energy in my presence!”

  “Isn’t the job beginning to look a little old after all this time?” Harding asked.

  “Well,” Arlene said, “working with Doctor Ben never gets to be boring, but it is a rather restrictive situation, of course. It’ll come to an end by and by.” Harding glanced at his watch, said, “Drop me a line when that happens, Arlene. By that time, I might be able to afford an expert micromachinist myself.”

  “In a dome at the bottom of some ocean basin?” Arlene laughed. “Sounds cosy—but that wouldn’t be much of an improvement on Cleaver Spaceport, would it? Will you start back to the coast today?”

  “If I can still make the afternoon flight.” He took her arm. “Come on. I’ll see you through the somatic barrier first.”

  “Why? Do you think it might make a mistake about me and clamp down?”

  “It’s been known to happen,” Harding said gloomily. “And from what I hear, it’s one of the less pleasant ways to get killed.” Arlene said comfortably, “There hasn’t been an accident of that kind in at least three or four years. The bugs have been very thoroughly worked out of the things. I go in and out here several times a week.” She took a small key from her purse, fitted it into a lock at the side of the transparent door, twisted it and withdrew it. The door slid sideways for a distance of three feet and stopped. Arlene Rolf stepped through the opening and turned to face Harding.

  “There you are!” she said.

  “Barely a tingle! If it didn’t want to pass me, I’d be lying on the ground knotted up with cramps right now. ‘By, Frank! See you again in two or three months, maybe?”

  Harding nodded. “Sooner if I can arrange it. Goodby, Arlene.” He stood watching the trim figure walk up the passage beyond the door. As she came to its end, the door slid silently shut again. Arlene looked back and waved at him, then disappeared around the corner.

  Dr. Frank Harding thrust his hands into his pockets and started back across the court, scowling absently at nothing.

  THE living room of the quarters assigned to Dr. Benjamin B. Lowry on Cleaver Spaceport’s security island was large and almost luxuriously furnished. In pronounced contrast to the adjoining office and workrooms, it was also as a rule in a state of comfortable disorder. An affinity appeared to exist between the complex and the man who had occupied it for the past two years. Dr. Lowry, leading authority in the rather new field of diex energy, was a large man of careless and comfortable, if not downright slovenly personal habits, while a fiendish precisionist at work.

  He was slumped now in an armchair on the end of his spine, fingering his lower lip and staring moodily at the viewphone field which formed a pale-yellow rectangle across the living room’s entire south wall, projecting a few inches out into the room. Now and then, his gaze shifted to a narrow, three-foot-long case of polished hardwood on the table beside him. When the phone field turned clear white, Dr. Lowry shoved a pair of rimless glasses back over his nose and sat up expectantly. Then he frowned.

  “Now look here, Weldon—!” he began.

  Colors had played for an instant over the luminous rectangle of the phone field, resolving themselves into a view of another room. A short, sturdily built man sat at a desk there, wearing a neat business suit. He smiled pleasantly out of the field at Dr. Lowry, said in a casual voice, “Relax, Ben! As far as I’m concerned, this is a command performance. Mr. Green just instructed me to let you know I’d be sitting in when he took your call.”

  “Mr. Green did what?”

  The man in the business suit said quickly, “He’s coming in now, Ben!” His hand moved on the desk, and he and the room about him faded to a pale, colorless outline in the field. Superi
mposed on it appeared a third room, from which a man who wore dark glasses looked out at Dr. Lowry.

  He nodded, said in a briskly amiable manner, “Dr. Lowry, I received your message just a minute ago. As Colonel Weldon undoubtedly has informed you, I asked him to be present during this discussion. There are certain things to be told you, and the arrangement will save time all around.

  “Now, doctor, as I understand it, the situation is this. Your work on the project has advanced satisfactorily up to what has been designated as the Fourth Stage. That is correct, isn’t it?”

  Dr. Lowry said stiffly, “That is correct, sir. Without the use of a trained telepath it is unlikely that further significant advances can be made. Colonel Weldon, however, has seen fit now to introduce certain new and astonishing conditions. I find these completely unacceptable as they stand and . . .”

  “You’re entirely justified, Dr. Lowry, in protesting against an apparently arbitrary act of interference with the work you’ve carried out so devotedly at the request of your government.” One of Mr. Green’s better-known characteristics was his ability to interrupt without leaving the impression of having done it. “Now, would it satisfy you to know that Colonel Weldon has been acting throughout as my personal deputy in connection with the project—and that I was aware of the conditions you mention before they were made?”

  DR. LOWRY hesitated, said, “I’m afraid not. As a matter of fact, I do know Weldon well enough to take it for granted he wasn’t simply being arbitrary. I . . .”

  “You feel,” said Mr. Green, “that there are certain extraneous considerations involved of which you should have been told?”

  Lowry looked at him for a moment. “If the President of the United States,” he said drily, “already has made a final decision in the matter, I shall have to accept it.”

  The image in the phone field said, “I haven’t.”

  “Then,” Lowry said, “I feel it would be desirable to let me judge personally whether any such considerations are quite as extraneous as they might appear to be to . . .”

  “To anybody who didn’t himself plan the diex thought projector, supervise its construction in every detail, and carry out an extensive series of preliminary experiments with it,” Mr. Green concluded for him. “Well, yes—you may be right about that, doctor. You are necessarily more aware of the instrument’s final potentialities than anyone else could be at present.” The image’s mouth quirked in the slightest of smiles. “In any event, we want to retain your ungrudging cooperation, so Colonel Weldon is authorized herewith to tell you in as much detail as you feel is necessary what the situation is. And he will do it before any other steps are taken. Perhaps I should warn you that what you learn may not add to your peace of mind. Now, does that settle the matter to your satisfaction, Dr. Lowry?”

  Lowry nodded. “Yes, sir, it does. Except for one detail.”

  “Yes, I see, Weldon, will you kindly cut yourself out of this circuit. I’ll call you back in a moment.”

  Colonel Weldon’s room vanished from the phone field. Mr. Green went over to a wall safe, opened it with his back to Dr. Lowry, closed it again and turned holding up a small, brightly polished metal disk.

  “I should appreciate it incidentally,” he remarked, “if you would find it convenient to supply me with several more of these devices.”

  “I’ll be very glad to do it, sir,” Dr. Lowry told him, “after I’ve been released from my present assignment.”

  “Yes . . . you take no more chances than we do.” Mr. Green raised his right hand, held the disk facing the phone field. After a moment, the light in Dr. Lowry’s living room darkened, turned to a rich, deep purple, gradually lightened again.

  Mr. Green took his hand down. “Are you convinced I’m the person I appear to be?”

  Lowry nodded. “Yes, sir, I am. To the best of my knowledge, there is no way of duplicating that particular diex effect—as yet.”

  ARLENE ROLF walked rapidly along the passage between the thick inner and outer walls enclosing Cleaver Spaceport. There was no one in sight, and the staccato clicking of her high heels on the lightgreen marblite paving was the only sound. The area had the overall appearance of a sun-baked, deserted fortress. She reached a double flight of shallow stairs, went up and came out on a wide, bare platform level with the top of the inner wall.

  Cleaver Spaceport lay on her left, a twenty-mile rectangle of softly gleaming marblite absolutely empty except for the narrow white spire of a control tower near the far side. The spaceport’s construction had been begun the year Arlene was born, as part of the interplanetary colonization program which a rash of disasters and chronically insufficient funds meanwhile had brought to an almost complete standstill. Cleaver port remained unfinished; no spaceship had yet lifted from its surface or settled down to it.

  Ahead and to Arlene’s right, a mile and a half of green lawn stretched away below the platform. Automatic tenders moved slowly across it, about half of them haloed by the rhythmically circling rainbow sprays of their sprinklers. In the two years since Arlene had first seen the lawn, no human being had set foot there. At its far end was a cluster of low, functional buildings. There were people in those buildings . . . but not very many people. It was the security island where Dr. Lowry had built the diex projector.

  Arlene crossed the platform, passed through the doorless entry of the building beyond it, feeling the tingle of another somatic barrier as she stepped into its shadow. At the end of the short hallway was a narrow door with the words nonspace conduit above it. Behind the door was a small, dimly lit cube of a room. Miss Rolf went inside and sat down on one of the six chairs spaced along the walls. After a moment, the door slid quietly shut and the room went dark.

  For a period of perhaps a dozen seconds, in complete blackness, Arlene Rolf appeared to herself to have become an awareness so entirely detached from her body that it could experience no physical sensation. Then light reappeared in the room and sensation returned. She stood up, smoothing down her skirt, and discovered smiling that she had been holding her breath again. It happened each time she went through the conduit, and no previous degree of determination to breathe normally had any effect at all on that automatic reaction. The door opened and she picked up her purse and went out into a hall which was large, well-lit and quite different in every respect from the one by which she had entered.

  In the wall screen across the hall, the image of a uniformed man smiled at her and said, “Dr. Lowry has asked that you go directly to the laboratory on your return, Miss Rolf.”

  “Thank you, Max,” she said. She had never seen Max or one of the other project guards in person, though they must be somewhere in the building. The screen went blank, and she went on down the long, windowless hall, the sound of her steps on the thick carpeting again the only break in the quiet. Now, she thought, it was a little like being in an immaculately clean, well-tended but utterly vacant hotel.

  ARLENE pressed the buzzer beside the door to Dr. Lowry’s quarters and stood waiting. When the door opened, she started forwards then stopped in surprise.

  “Why, hello, Colonel Weldon,” she said. “I didn’t realize you would be on the project today.” Her gaze went questioningly past him to Dr. Lowry who stood in the center of the room, hands shoved deep into his trousers pockets.

  Lowry said wryly, “Come in, Arlene. This has been a surprise to me, too, and not a pleasant one. On the basis of orders coming directly from the top—which I have just confirmed, by the way—our schedule here is to be subjected to drastic rearrangements. They include among other matters our suspension as the actual operators of the projector.”

  “But why that?” she asked startled.

  Dr. Lowry shrugged. “Ask Ferris. He just arrived by his personal conduit. He’s supposed to explain the matter to us.” Ferris Weldon, locking the door behind Arlene, said smilingly, “And please do give me a chance to do just that now, both of you! Let’s sit down as a start. Naturally you’re angry . . . no one can blame
you for it. But I promise to show you the absolute necessity behind this move.”

  He waited until they were seated, then added, “One reason—though not the only reason—for interrupting your work at this point is to avoid exposing both of you to serious personal danger.”

  Dr. Lowry stared at him. “And what’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Ben,” Ferris Weldon asked, “what was the stated goal of this project when you undertook it?”

  Lowry said stiffly, “To develop a diex-powered instrument which would provide a means of reliable mental communication with any specific individual on Earth.”

  Weldon shook his head. “No, it wasn’t.”

  Arlene Rolf laughed shortly. “He’s right, Ben.” She looked at Weldon. “The hypothetical goal of the project was an instrument which would enable your department telepaths to make positive identification of a hypothetical Public Enemy Number One . . . the same being described as a ‘rogue telepath’ with assorted additional qualifications.”

  Weldon said, “That’s a little different, isn’t it? Do you recall the other qualifications?”

  “Is that important at the moment?” Miss Rolf asked. “Oh, well . . . this man is also a dangerous and improbably gifted hypnotist. Disturb him with an ordinary telepathic probe or get physically within a mile or so of him, and he can turn you mentally upside down, and will do it in a flash if it suits his purpose. He’s quite ruthless, is supposed to have committed any number of murders. He might as easily be some unknown as a man constantly in the public eye who is keeping his abilities concealed . . . He impersonates people . . . He is largely responsible for the fact that in a quarter of a century the interplanetary colonization program literally hasn’t got off the ground . . .”

  She added, “That’s as much as I remember. There will be further details in the files. Should I dig them out?”

 

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