“You’re certain?”
Marino didn’t answer. The answer was obvious. The alien had struck once, and slipped away from them like a ghost in the night.
V
Robert Roberts was waiting, nervous as a cat, when Faircloth arrived at the Security office. There were deep circles under his pale gray eyes, and a dark stubble on his chin. He greeted Paul with a silent handshake; then they went back into the rear office, with its modern paneled wall looking out across the valley to the tall white buildings of the Capitol. Once it had been an inspiring sight to Faircloth. Now he hardly even noticed. A rocket rose in the morning air, leaving its white vapor trail like a pillar of cloud behind it. The weekly Venus rocket, probably, or maybe one of the dozens of speculator ships off for Titan. Faircloth scowled and sank into a relaxer with a sigh. “I’m sorry, Bob,” he said. “It was a bust. I thought we had him cold, and we weren’t even near him.”
Roberts mixed a drink and shoved it across the desk to Paul. “Okay, sometimes we don’t win. What we’ve got to know is why you weren’t even near him. Something went sour. What was it?”
Faircloth was silent for a long moment. Then he said: “Bob—you’re not going to like this.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean I think it’s more than this one fiasco in Chicago. I think our whole approach is sour from one end to the other. I think it has been from the beginning. And unless we try something radically different, I don’t think we’re going to get this bird, ever.”
“But what’s wrong with the approach?” Roberts asked.
“We’re outclassed, that’s what’s wrong with it. This alien is out of our league—way out. We haven’t got a thing that can touch him, and he knows it. He’s a telepath, Bob, and I don’t mean halfway. Not just a feeble, groping, half- baked, half-trained, poorly developed Psi-High human. We’re dealing with telepathic power no human Psi-High ever began to approach.”
Roberts’ lips were tight. “Exactly what did happen in Chicago?”
“That’s just it. I don’t know. The building was virtually escape-proof. The boys had every exit guarded three ways from Sunday. The power was off in the entire building, and there was no way he could get out short of walking through walls. And we had them walls guarded just in case he did that. We had him sewed up beyond hope of escape, and then when we went in to get him, whammo!” Faircloth clenched his fists, trembling. “I don’t want to go through that again, Bob, not for anything. It was murderous. He hit one of the boys so hard that it’s going to take the psych-docs six months to get his brain unscrambled. I got off easy. All he handed me was a sort of gentle rap on the knuckles.”
“And he slid through your net.”
“Clean. As far as I know he just walked out and hailed a taxi. Believe me, all I was trying to do was merely get up off the floor. He smashed the cameras and got away without leaving a trace.”
Roberts shook his head and fished a folder from his desk. “He didn’t smash all the cameras.” He shoved the pictures across to Paul. “See what you make of those.”
Faircloth peered at them. There were several frames, obviously printed from motion-film. Pictures of a humanoid figure running down a passageway. The face was not visible. “Not much help,” he said. “Not even for a clothing description. Can’t even be sure it isn’t one of our men.”
Roberts sighed. “I know. And you didn’t see him at all?”
Faircloth shook his head. “As I said, the whole approach is sour. We’re never going to get him this way.”
“Then I hope you’ve got some different ideas.”
“I have.”
“Well, I’m glad somebody has.” Some of the tiredness left Roberts’ face. “Let’s have them.”
Paul Faircloth looked at the Security chief and shook his head. “Sorry,” he saicj. “First I want some answers, straight answers about a certain individual.”
“You mean Ben Towne.”
“That’s right.”
Roberts scowled. “AH right, I’ll tell you about Ben Towne. It isn’t pretty. Frankly, this Chicago business was the break Towne had been waiting for. There were Psi-Highs involved in that raid. Towne knows it. And he’s going to build a story of Psi-High alliance with the alien that could get every Psi-High in the country thrown into prison and might even put Ben Towne in political control of the country.”
Faircloth nodded grimly. “Dries he have any concept of how dangerous this creature is?”
Roberts snorted. “Of course he has I But Ben Towne is obsessed with a single idea, and it twists and distorts everything else in his mind.” He leaned forward, staring at Paul. “Benjamin Towne wants to wipe psi-positive faculties off the face of the Earth. He hates Psi-Highs. Oh, I don’t know the motives behind it—maybe the fact of his own imperfect body makes him hate what he considers a sort of super- perfection appearing in the human race. It’s a false premise, of course. The predisposition of certain people to extrasensory powers is neither a perfection nor an imperfection; it’s a quality their minds happen to have. Just another tiny step in the evolutionary chain, and it isn’t all fun and games for them either. It isn’t any fun for a woman like Jean Sanders to have to be gratuitously assaulted, day after day, by all the rot flowing out of some of the cesspool minds we have walking the streets. That’s part of the price she has to pay for her precious gift, and for her special training. She can’t turn it off too well, any more. Well, it happens to be a dominant gene factor, and in our society it happens to put the Psi-High in a slightly advantageous position in comparison to psi-negatives.” Roberts threw up his hands. “But Benjamin Towne’s motives don’t really matter. He was smart enough to realize that there were lots of people who hated and feared the expansion of Psi-High powers in our society. He started fighting against it, and he’s ridden that fight right into the Cabinet. Already he’s got the Psi-Highs marked and hamstrung. His next goal is to block any training for them, even if it means destroying the Hoffman Medical Center in order to do it.”
“But they’re only doctors,” Faircloth protested.
“Not quite; they’re more than doctors. They’re researchers in a vast, government supported complex, looking for answers to questions about what human beings are and what they can do. They’re probing everywhere—in medicine, in biochemistry, in physiology, in psychiatry. And like researchers in other areas of science, they haven’t been overconcerned about whether what they learned was good for people or bad for people. They have simply been concerned to find out what human beings are capable of.”
“Well-is this bad?”
“Not necessarily—nor good, either,” Roberts said. “The Hoffman Center idea has never been massively popular; they’ve always been under attack from one quarter or another, and some of the things they’ve done have surely not been good. There was the big scandal about the Mercy Men, ’way back when the center was very new. Hiring bums and derelicts from Skid Roads and Front Streets all over the country as medical mercenaries, to serve as human guinea pigs was good business for research, I guess, but so repugnant to most people that it was finally outlawed by Congress. And take the rejuvenation program—Senator Dan Fowler found the flaw in that, and Carl Golden got it stopped for good when he won his Senate seat. Oh, they still use the techniques, all right, rebuilding bodies torn, to pieces in auto accidents, prolonging productive lives for a few years, fighting back incurable diseases. But mass-rejuvenation turned out to be meddling—bad meddling—with natural processes that had a purpose to them, and so it was stopped.”
There was silence for a moment. Paul Faircloth took a deep breath. “And do you think that training Psi-Highs is also bad?”
“Of course I don’t, but Ben Towne does.”
“And where does the alien fit in this picture?”
Roberts shrugged. “It’s obvious, isn’t it? Towne has taken an issue and split the country wide open with it. And now, along comes a visitor from the stars, an alien visitor who steps out of his ship a
nd disappears into the population like a spirit. An alien who is fully telepathic. Towne can monitor the news releases, he can even help decide on the security classification of information about the alien. It’s been kept top secret, so far. But Ben can control the news enough to tie Psi-High humans and a fearfully dangerous enemy alien together so neatly in the public mind that every Psi-High in the country will be in danger of his life. It’s political dynamite, and Towne is controlling the fuse.”
Faircloth’s face was white. “And if the alien is caught?”
“At this point, it’s very touchy. It might be that the ‘rumored’ liaison between Psi-High humans and invaders from space could be proved. And then Towne would be in the driver’s seat.”
Faircloth nodded bitterly, and stood up, shaking the creases out of his trousers. His face was grim. As he reached for his hat, his hand was trembling. “That’s just about the way I had it lined up, too,” he said. “So long, Bob. Have a nice hunt.”
“Sit down, Paul.”
“Sorry, I’m not working to help Ben Towne.”
“No, but you’re going to work to fight him,” Roberts snapped. He sat up straight behind the desk. “You’re going to work with me, my friend, and you’re going to follow through to the bitter end. You and Jean both.”
Faircloth’s eyes darkened. “Jean’s not involved in this.”
“I am afraid she is. Just as deeply as you are. And you and Jean are going to do what I tell you to do in this investigation whether you happen to like it or not. That is, if you ever want to marry her.”
Faircloth turned slowly. “What do you mean by that? What are you saying?”
“I’m saying that you happen to be Psi-High, Paul. And I just happen to know it.”
VI
Paul Faircloth sank down in the chair again, staring at Roberts in silence. Then he said: “That’s a pretty bad joke, Bob.”
Roberts nodded. “I’ll say it’s a joke. It’s a colossal horselaugh on Ben Towne. He was so dead certain that those Federal registry files of his contained the names and life histories of every psi-positive individual in the country! It’s no joke as far you’re concerned, though. It’s against Federal law to forge psycho-testing papers, Paul. It’s against the law for a Psi-High to remain unregistered, and in the rare cases that have turned up the courts haven’t exactly been lenient. It’s also against the law for two Psi-Highs to marry; the law’s attitude is that having people around with a single dominant gene is bad enough without doubling them up, and that law is enforced to the limit, regardless of how well or poorly the psi-powers are developed in the individuals involved. Of course, Jean’s work with Dr. Abrams at the Hoffman Center has developed her powers amazingly. Yours must be pretty crude for you to keep them hidden so well.”
“You can’t prove a thing you’re saying,” Faircloth said.
“True enough—nothing substantial. Just a few curiosities in your history that caught my eye, and then a little quiet personal investigation. You were already out of school when the registry law was passed, and you must have gotten somebody to leak the examination to you early. How you did it, I neither know nor care. But the law provides for compulsory retesting any time anyone raises a reasonable doubt.” He smiled at Faircloth cheerfully. “Care” to have me call Dr. Abrams? He’s got some nice definitive tests.”
Faircloth’s eyes fell. “That won’t be necessary.” He sighed and sank wearily back into the relaxer. “I guess I knew I’d be spotted sooner or later. I even thought for a while that Marino had spotted it.”
“He did.”
“But I never thought you’d be the one to crowd me.”
Roberts looked up at him. “Paul, I’m not fighting you. Matter of fact, I’m not even threatening you nor telling you what you have to do. I’m not going to call the law on you; it’s a vicious law that I hate as much as you do, even though I have the job of implementing it. If you want to walk out on me and this invesigation right now, you can do it and I won’t lift a finger against you. All I’m really doing is asking you not to walk out.”
“What do you want me to do?”
“I want you to work with me until this alien is caught. I think we can nail him, and I think we can sink Benjamin Towne’s boat at the same time. I’m convinced that there’s no single human being in the country as dangerous to Ben Towne and his ambitions as an unregistered, unidentified Psi-High. And that’s just what you are. With you and Jean working as a team, I think we can wrap up this alien hunt and turn it to the advantage of every Psi-High in the country.”
Faircloth shook his head, puzzled. “I don’t follow you.”
“Are you blind? Think for a minute. If one telepathic alien has made a landing on this planet, don’t you suppose others are going to follow? And if they do—suppose they mount a massive invasion—who do you think is going to stop them?”
The light broke, and Faircloth nodded. “Of course, I was just so wrapped up in my own problems that I never thought—but you’re right.”
“Okay, you said you had some ideas. Let’s have them.”
“They may not be any good,” Paul said. “And it would take Jean to put them across.”
“Jean is willing. She’s been reading this whole conversation from the next room.”
“Then let’s get her in here and do some planning. The first job we have is to pin down this alien and keep him pinned.”
VII
Hours later Jean Sanders tossed her pencil on the desk, and flopped down cross-legged on the floor. “I think we’re going around in circles,” she said in disgust. “Three different circles,” she added, with an owlish glance at Bob Roberts.
“All right, I know we’re tired.” The Security chief sighed.
“But the answer is here, somewhere,” Faircloth said doggedly. “It’s got to be here I We have all the data we need, if we could only pinpoint some way to use it Or at least we’ve got enough data to make a start.”
“The more I think about this whole business,” the girl said, “the more fishy it looks.” She was a pretty girl, with a slender face, black brows, and huge gray eyes. She was twenty-three, but her slim figure made her look sixteen. “From what we know about this alien and what he could do, what we know that he’s actually done doesn’t make any sense at all. It gets fishier and fishier the more we talk about it.”
Paul nodded. “Exactly. There’s something that we aren’t seeing or realizing, or something important that we just don’t know about this creature.”
“Well, let’s see what we do know,” said Roberts. “We’ve got a photograph that isn’t worth a plugged nickel. We’ve got a few photos of the outside of the ship before it exploded. We know that he’s Psi-High, fully telepathic, and able to muddle up the minds of all who see him so they can’t describe him.”
“Or can’t see that anything’s wrong about him,” Jean added. “He must have a disguise. Maybe it isn’t perfect enough. Maybe he has to work constantly with his mind to hide all the little flaws.”
Faircloth walked across the room, staring at the walls. “Then there’s the matter of the ship. It was found near Gutenberg, Iowa, on a bluff overlooking the Mississippi, over a month ago. That’s a fact. Some farm kids found it, but didn’t go near it. Scared stiff. Told their father, and he called the police, and they called Security. I don’t suppose there was any way to tell how long the ship had been there before it was found?”
Roberts shook his head. “The biologists and geologists both had a whack at it, but the explosion destroyed all the flora around it and tore up the ground area within twenty feet of it. Nothing left to study. Well, anyway, no occupant of the ship was found, and no trace of where the occupant might have gone; at least, not then. Security sent a scout squad down to photograph the ship and try to examine it, and it blew into a million pieces right in their faces.”
“How many of the million pieces were recovered?” Faircloth asked.
“About ten. Fragments of aluminum alloy, completely twi
sted and distorted. Told us nothing.”
Faircloth nodded. “Okay. Then there was the report from the Psi-High in Des Moines, and you turned up the farmer and his wife who saw the alien the first night. What was their name? Bettendorf, Jacob Bettendorf. Not very bright folks, I gather. They fed him, but refused him lodging and sent him on his way. Noticed nothing odd, except that the farmer said his eyes felt tired all the time the creature was there, couldn’t seem to focus right. How did this description compare with the others you’ve gotten?”
Roberts shrugged. “The same, or I should say, consistently different. Nobody seems to agree on anything. It’s obvious that nobody has actually seen him in any detail at all. People just think they have.”
“You know,” said the girl suddenly, “that’s one of the things that bothers me. A lot of those people out there are Ben Towne’s strongest supporters. They don’t like Psi-Highs. They keep watching like hawks for people who act like Psi-Highs—you know, the way we’re likely to nod and start answering a question before a person gets it half asked; or the way we sometimes forget to control our expressions when somebody is saying one thing out loud and thinking something directly the opposite. People spot that, and get very indignant at being caught red-handed. Snooping, they call it. But this alien went right past them. Not even a suspicion.”
“He got into the city fast, though,” Roberts observed. “City people tend to be a lot less observant of others around them than country folks.”
“All right,” said Paul. “That fits well enough. Now, since he was willing to destroy his ship, we can assume that he planned to stay a while. That probably means that others were here before him. He’s just altogether too confident for any advance scout. He knew he could mingle with people, and stay, here, and observe, and learn, and get away with it. Probably his job is to accumulate information, detailed information about human beings. Well, with full-blown telepathy working for him, he must really be having a time for himself! And unless I miss my guess, the information he wants most of all is information about Psi-Highs.”
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