Astounding Science Fiction Stories Vol 1

by Anthology

  "This guy Passarelli is coming up for re-election shortly," our caller said. A light began to dawn. "We're making sure he doesn't make it--and that our man does."

  My laugh was more a bark. "He can't find Mary Hall," I told Renner.

  Horace's lower jaw shot out at me. "I don't like guys who know what I'm thinking!" he snapped.

  I had to laugh in his face. "Who needs TP? You want to tar Passarelli with the brush of Psi--and this hallucinator would be Exhibit 'A'."

  He subsided. "So I can't find her. What then?"

  I shook my head. "You say it," I suggested. "Too early to have to wash my mouth with soap."

  Dunn made his big pitch to Renner. "Maragon has a connection with these Psis--it's all over town that he got Keys Crescas off. This Crescas can find Mary Hall--you know how Psis stick together." Renner nodded rapt agreement. "And," Dunn added, finally sticking it in us, "it would be good politics for Maragon to do it--would kind of sweeten up the stench of his getting Crescas off, eh?"

  Renner thought he had to sell me: "Pete," he insisted, "You've got to! Defending Crescas was sure to hurt our reputation. That girl has it coming for--"

  I waved a hand in his face, shutting him up. "Why should I care what happens to the girl?" I said, getting up. "Just make sure Horace pays us a fat fee. After all, it's tax exempt."

  "Tax exempt?" he asked, frowning.

  "Sure," I said, walking out. "Religious contribution. Thirty pieces of silver."

  * * * * *

  Keys Crescas is the kind of odd-ball you can't find till after dark. Good looking in a romantic, off-beat sort of way. No visible means of support--a typical Psi. Renner made one white-jowled attempt to read me the riot act for failing to plead him guilty when Passarelli had tapped me as Public Defender. I came close to throwing the meat-ball out of my private office.

  What could I have done? Sure, Crescas has the Stigma--he doesn't try to hide it. It's only TK, though, and I don't suppose much of that. Just enough, the cops will tell you, to make him a good man at picking locks and earn his nickname--Keys.

  People like Crescas run to a pattern. I left my number in about ten of the spots he might turn up, and around six o'clock one of them hit pay dirt.

  I pressed the "Accept" key when the phone rang, and Keys Crescas' olive face and curly black hair filled the screen. His black eyes had that lively watchfulness you associate with Psis. He had the gain way down and the aperture wide, so that he wasn't in focus any farther back than his ears. And that scope setting hid from where he was calling as effectively as a veil. Did you ever know a Psi who didn't seem to be harboring a secret?

  "Hi, Mouthpiece," he grinned, showing even white teeth. "How'd you know where to find me?"

  "Best place for worms is under a manure pile," I said. "I used parallel logic."

  That took that smug, Stigma grin off his puss. "What do you want?" he asked, sullen now.

  "A lead to a Psi who's gone into hiding."

  You know what he told me to do. "Mary Hall," I added. "She's got Stigma Troubles."

  "Not even counting you, eh?" Crescas sneered. He made the same suggestion again. I let it ride. "Go on," he dared me. "Make your pitch. I'll laugh later."

  "That 'Not Guilty' verdict doesn't mean a thing, Crescas," I told him. "That was a National Bank she tried to rob. There's a Federal rap still to be settled. She has big Stigma troubles and needs counsel--and not one of those shysters who hang around the Criminal Courts building sniffing for Psi business."

  "She's in no trouble till they find her," he said accurately, and I could see his hand come up to cut the image. "For my dough they've given up trying to find her and are using you for a stalking horse," he added with fiendish accuracy.

  "So don't trust me," I snarled. "You can send her saw blades baked in a cake." I reached up, too.

  "Hold it."

  I stopped, trying to keep my glower going.

  "Passarelli would have to be in on it, too," he decided. "And I can't figure him for a louse. O.K., Maragon. I'll pick you up at your office at about eight o'clock."

  * * * * *

  With nearly two hours to kill, I went out to eat. I still felt glum and lousy. Part of it was the knifelike penetration of Crescas' intuition--his knowing that I was just a stalking horse so that the big guns could zero in on Mary Hall. And there was that little tremor of fear that comes from knowing that a Psi may think you've doublecrossed him. They have some powerful abilities when it comes to exacting vengeance. Well, if everything about the deal was as much screwed up as the part I had heard so far, I decided, I might get out with a whole skin at that.

  That was my attempt at consolation--that and an order of sweet-breads, Financiere, which is a ridiculous dish for a sawed-off shyster tending toward overweight.

  I was back in the law library by ten minutes of eight, trying to occupy my mind with the latest Harvard Law Review, when the 'phone rang. Keys' face, a little tight-lipped and bright-eyed, peered at me from the screen, which it completely filled. He must have darned near swallowed the 'scope.

  "Ready?" he asked softly.

  "Sure. You picking me up?"

  His lip curled in half a smile. "What do I look like?" he sneered. "Grab a cab. You know a bar called the Moldy Fig?" I nodded. "That's where." He cut the image.

  Well, this was more like it. You can't deal with Psis without the whole affair acting like something out of E. Phillips Oppenheim. I closed up the office, turned out the ceiling, and rode the elevator down to the street.

  The night howled and shrieked with air-borne traffic. A hot-rodding kid gunned his fans up the street a way and ripped what silence might have remained to the night into shreds as he streaked past me. The jerk wasn't forty feet off the ground, and was pouring the coal to his turbine. The whine of his impellers sounded a strong down-Doppler as his ripped past me, nose dropped a good thirty degrees and dragging every knot he could get out of his 'copter.

  I waved to a cab standing at the rank up the block a way and watched the skim-copter rise a couple inches off the ground as the hacker skimmed on the ground-cushion toward me. City grit cut at my ankles from the air blast before I could hop into the bubble and give him my destination. He looked the question at me hopefully, over his shoulder, his hand on the arm of his meter.

  "Oh, what the hell," I said, still sore at the world, and a little worried about what I was trying to do. "Let's 'copter!" He grinned and swung the arm over to the "fly" position with its four-times-higher rate. His turbine screamed to a keener pitch with wide throttle, and he climbed full-bore into the down-town slow lane.

  * * * * *

  The swift ride down to the Village was long enough to induce that odd motion-hypnosis so common in night flight over a metropolitan area. The dizzy blur of red and green running lights from air-borne traffic at levels above and below us, the shapes of 'copters silhouetted beneath us against the lambent glow of the city's well-lit streets, all wove into a numbing pattern.

  "Here's the Fig, Mac," the hacker said as we grounded. I stuck my credit card in the meter and hopped out, not fast enough to duck the fan-driven pin-pricks of sand as he pulled away.

  Crescas appeared as if by magic--Psis act like that--and had me by the arm. "Quick!" he said, pushing me back into the spot he had appeared from. It was a doorway beside the Moldy Fig, opening on a flight of steps running to an apartment above the bar. As we climbed the clean and well-lit stairs, I reminded myself that I was probably entering a den of Psis--and clamped down tight on my thoughts. There was plenty they had better not peep.

  Keys didn't have to knock on the door--there's always a telepath hanging around these Stigma hideouts who knows who's coming. A husky young man, quite blond and pink of face, opened the door. A soft rustle of music spilled out around his big shoulders. He wore a T-shirt, and his powerful forearms were bare.

  "Hey!" he said to Keys, spotting himself as a Southerner as surely as if he'd had the Stars and Bars tattooed on his forehead. We followed him d
own a short hall into a room furnished, with a couple of couches, an easy-chair, several small but delightful tables, and a piano. Here was the music. A blond bombshell was drumming box chords on the ivories, and grouped around her on side chairs were four young men, playing with her. It was jazz, if that's what you call the quiet racket that comes out of a wooden recorder, a very large pottery ocharina that hooted like a gallon jug, a steel guitar and a pair of bongo drums played discreetly with the fingertips.

  My appearance stopped them right in the middle of a chorus of "Muskrat Ramble." I'd have liked to hear more--it was Dixieland times two--what the Psis call Psixieland. That's jazz played by a gang of telepaths. Each one knows what the others are about to play. The result is extemporaneous counterpoint, but without the clinkers we associate with jazz. Almost too perfect, yet untrammeled.

  My eyes ran around the room as the four men who had been playing with the girl got up and prepared to leave. The place was spotless. Oh, the furnishings weren't costly, but they were chosen with that sense of fitness, of refinement of color and decor that is curiously Psi. I suppose that's one of the little things that annoys Normals so much. Stigma powers seem to go beyond telepathy, clairvoyance and telekinesis--they extend in some hard to define way into the aesthetic. A chaste kind of cleanliness is only part of it. Taste, I guess that's the word. Their attire, their homes, everything about Psis, seems tasteful.

  * * * * *

  In moments only Keys, the blond Southerner and the still blonder bomb on the piano bench were left to face me. Keys poked a finger at the plow-jockey in the T-shirt. "Elmer," he explained.

  "Take off yo' hat, Yankee," Elmer grinned. I felt it tipped from my head by his TK.

  I glowered at him. "Kid stuff!" I snorted. "So you can lift four ounces from six feet away. But you don't have any idea what incorporeal hereditaments are. Which is better?"

  The pink of his face got red. He could have broken me in two.

  "Just making a point," I said. "I'm stupid about TK. You're stupid about the law. I figure that makes us even."

  He clamped his mouth shut. I turned back to Keys and the girl I was sure was Mary Hall. "What I came here for--"

  "What we got you here for," Keys interrupted, "was to set you straight on something." I guess I looked as surprised as I felt. The impossibly blond girl giggled. "Over the phone, Maragon," Keys went on, sitting down on the bench beside the girl, "you said there was a Federal rap hanging over Mary's head on this 99th National Bank fracas."

  I nodded.

  "The theory being," he went on, "that the law doesn't let anybody with the Stigma get away with a thing, right?"

  "Right."

  "Then relax. Mary hasn't got the Stigma. Have you, Mary?"

  "No," she said. I looked her over more carefully. She was closer to twenty than thirty, round-faced, with blue eyes that were about as impossibly bright as her hair was impossibly white. It could have been a corneal tattoo, but somehow I doubted it. Impossibly red lips made up the patriotic triad of colors--but that was lipstick, pure and simple.

  "No Stigma?" I demanded. "I know Psixieland when I hear it, Miss Hall. Don't tell me that wasn't telepathic jazz."

  She tossed her short hair-do around. "My side-men were TP's," she conceded. "Why do you think I was playing box chords? They knew what I was playing--I didn't know what they'd play."

  Well, some of it was adding up. Still, I had to be sure. "I see. Tell me, Mary, where were your parents on the 19th of April in '75?"

  She sat up straight beside Keys on the bench, and her fair face flushed pinkly. "Drop dead!" she told me.

  I stood up. "See you in jail," I said, and started for the door.

  * * * * *

  Elmer had played tackle for Ol' Miss--he sure stopped me in my tracks. "I reckon we ain't through with you yet, Yankee," he grinned. He hurt me with his hands, big as country hams. My stiffened fingers jabbed his T-shirt where it covered his solar plexus, and he dropped back, gasping.

  "You could learn a little about fighting, too, Psi," I growled. "And you're through with me if that bottle blonde won't answer my questions."

  "Hey!" Keys protested. "Come on, relax. Everybody!" he snapped, as Elmer got his breath back and came in for another tackle. I signaled for a fair catch, and he eased up.

  I peered over my shoulder at the girl at the piano. "Well?" I asked her. "Where were your parents on the 19th of April in '75?"

  Her eyes sought out Keys'. He nodded, dropping his gaze to the floor. "About fifty miles from Logan, Iowa," she said.

  "And you don't have the Stigma?" I scoffed.

  "Not everybody inside the Logan Ring was affected," she reminded me. "Which is my tough luck. But I am being crucified because Mother and Dad were in the Ring the day the N-bomb went off, whether I have the Stigma or not."

  I came back to stand in front of her. "I'm an attorney," I said. "I have an idea what can happen to you if the Courts get hold of you. Right now they can't find you--which must mean you've been hiding." She confirmed that with a nod, biting her red, red lips. "They are after you, and a Federal rap is just the start," I said. "You have only one chance, Mary, and I'm glad you claimed it. The only way you can keep them from putting you over a barrel is to prove you don't have the Stigma. I think I know a way to do it. Are you ready to let me help you?"

  "Not that fast," she said, looking worried. "Oh, I trust Keys' judgment about you. Yes, I do," she said earnestly, turning to Crescas. "Yes, I know he got you off, Keys. But it doesn't sound right. Why should he take a chance helping a Psi--even if I really don't have the Stigma? What's his angle?"

  "Fair enough," Keys said. "How about it, Maragon?"

  "I knew it was a bum rap they were trying to pin on Mary as soon as I heard about it," I explained. "This business about Mary having HC. There just isn't any such Psi power as hallucination, and every one of you knows it--it's an old wives' tale. I wouldn't touch this little lady with a ten-foot pole if I really thought she had the Stigma. I have a living to make around this town--and you can't handle Stigma business and get any decent trade, too."

  I looked back at Mary. "How did you work your swindle at the bank?" I asked quietly.

  She sighed. "Sleight of hand," she said. "A damned fool stunt. I figured to put the money back in a day or so. If somebody else hadn't been working the same racket, they'd never have caught me. But they had set a trap--"

  "I thought it was some light-finger stuff," I grinned. "Well, it will take me a while to set up a real test of your Psi Powers. Where can I reach you--or are you spending the night here?"

  "Certainly not!" she said, casting an annoyed glance at Elmer. She looked at her watch. "Would it be much longer than an hour? I might still be here, if Elmer--"

  "Jes' fine," T-shirt said. "Unless yo' mine watching Keys and me practice." He grinned at me. "Keys is he'ping me build up mah TK," he explained.

  "That'll make you popular," I sneered, as I wrote down Elmer's phone number. They let me out. It had been a pretty room, and in a way I hated to leave it. Still, by the time a cruising 'copter had taken me halfway back to my office up-town, I could relax the shield over my thoughts--and that was worth getting out of that Stigma hideaway.

  * * * * *

  It was a little after nine when I walked into the lobby and rang for the elevator. A man lounging against the wall over near the building directory raised a wrist-phone to his mouth and spoke quietly into it as I waited for the car to come. He didn't seem to be interested in me--but then, he wouldn't want to show it if he were. Fool around with the Stigma, would I?

  The building was mostly dark--in our circle we make too much dough to be interested in overtime. I keyed myself into our waiting room, turned on the ceiling, and went into my private office. There was enough light leaking in from our foyer, so I added none.

  I found Lindstrom at home--after all, he should have been by nine o'clock. "Maragon!" he said. "Kill your focus. I have guests!"

  I reached up to twist the 'scope so
that my image would be a blur on his screen. Nice beginning. I was as welcome as a thriving case of leprosy.

  "I want you to make a test for me, Professor," I said. "Tonight."

  He shook his head. "I told you I had guests. We're entertaining. No thanks, Maragon."

  "A Normal is being crucified," I said quietly. "They've got her pegged as a Psi. I've got to get her off the hook."

  "How could this happen?" he demanded.

  "She hangs with a bunch of Stigma cases, for one thing," I said.

  "Nobody forced her to associate with a gang of Psis," he said. "Serves her right."

  "Nobody forced you to, either, Prof," I snarled. "But you have a steady stream of Stigma cases going through your laboratory."

  "That's different!" he protested.

  "Nuts. Now name a time when I can see you there."

  "I don't want any part of it. If you're along, it will just mean trouble, Maragon. You got too much publicity on defending that TK locksmith. I've got a professional standing to maintain."

  "You'd sure look silly if all the Psis in town blackballed you," I snarled at him. "Let me pass the word around--and you darned well know I've got the contacts to do it--and you've tested your last Stigma case. Then let's see what kind of a professional standing you've got."

  He knew some pretty dirty words. "What time?" I pressed him, knowing the profanity was a confession of defeat.

  "Not before eleven," he said glumly. "I won't forget this, Maragon."

  "What the hell," I said. "I'm on every S-list in town already. You hardly count beside the other enemies I'm making." I cut the image.

  As if at a signal, there was a tapping on the door to the corridor. I got out of my swivel, walked into the waiting room and opened up. The man who stood there was faintly familiar--but it was the gun in his fist that got most of my attention.

  "Maragon?" he asked softly.

  I spread my feet a little. "I knew I was making enemies pretty fast," I said to him. "But I didn't know how strongly. Listen," I snapped, "I'll bet one thing never occurred to you."

  He was taken back. You're not supposed to snarl at a guy who pokes a gun at you. In theory it gives him the edge of any conversation. "Huh?" he said.