Part 2

Then his eye caught a small item with a Des Moines dateline, well hidden down at the bottom of the backside of the tape. He read it, frowning:

WOMAN CHARGES PSI-HIGH CONSPIRACY

Des Moines, Ia., 27 June, 2157. A woman whose name was withheld today placed charges against Miss Martha Bishop, 23, of Oak Park Section, Chicago, whose name is listed in the Federal psi-positive registry. The charge was made at local Federal Security offices, and accused Miss Bishop of mental interference. The victim, who allegedly had information concerning the rumors of an Alien visitor which have been persistently appearing lately, claimed that Miss Bishop had attempted to prevent her from reporting her information. After failing in this attempt, Miss Bishop was charged with using her psi-powers to erase the information from the woman's mind. Miss Bishop could not be reached for comment.

Mr. J. B. Dunlap, spokesman for the Liberal Senatorial Council in Washington, has repeatedly denied that the rumor of alien visitors has any basis in fact. Nevertheless, the charges against Miss Bishop are being investigated fully--

Faircloth crumpled the tape with a snarl and returned to his coffee. Finally he nodded to Marino. "Drink up," he said, "and get in touch with your men. It's time to go."

Ted Marino left for the elevators to corral his men, arranging to meet Faircloth in the concourse five minutes later. Paul found a visiphone relay booth, and sank his long, lean body down in a relaxer facing the screen. The last of the rush-hour people were still drifting by in the corridor; Paul watched them anxiously. Then he gave a nervous laugh, forcing himself to relax for a moment. If only Jean were here! He battled an impulse to call her. Finally he dialed the priority code for the Federal Security Commission offices in Washington.

The relays clicked, and the code carried him through the front-line secretaries without any trouble. He gave a sigh of relief. He was in no mood to argue with secretaries. A moment later he was blinking at Roberts' tri-di image on the screen.

Roberts' face looked haggard. He nodded to Faircloth. "You got there, then. Good. How does it look, Paul?"

"Everything's just real nice," Faircloth growled. "They think they've got him pinned. The building here has a central power source, and we can bottleneck the whole place if we time it right."

"Don't miss, Paul." Roberts' voice was tense. "Whatever you do, don't miss."

"What's the matter?"

"Ben Towne has worked his way into this."

"Oh, god!"

"Well, I can't help it, there was nothing I could do. He has the whole American Council behind him, and the Liberals can't hold out long on negative results. Towne has the whole picture now, and if we don't wrap it up fast, things here in the Capitol are going to blow sky high."

Faircloth scowled. "Did you see the newstapes tonight?"

"You mean the Bishop girl in Des Moines?" Roberts nodded unhappily. "Got the report from Des Moines on it this afternoon. Trumped up from beginning to end. I tell you, Towne is not playing around. I don't know how he plans to work things, but I'm afraid that story was just a starter. He'll do everything he can to tie the Alien up with the Psi-Highs in the public eye--and you know Ben Towne when he gets rolling. He'll play this rumor business up to the hilt. And the way things are in the Senate now, that could mean real trouble."

"Who's controlling Security news releases?"

Roberts gave a short laugh. "Take a guess. Just one guess. Don't miss tonight, my friend."

* * * * *

Faircloth nodded and signalled off. He sat swearing quietly to himself for a few moments. Then Marino came by, and he swung out into the hall again, glancing at his watch. "Ready?"

Marino nodded. "Got the squads placed on the 41st and 43rd. Power goes off when we step off the elevator on the 41st. Okay?"

Faircloth grunted, and spread out a floor plan of the 42nd floor. "Is the building all clear?"

"All the commercial levels, yes. And autolocks go on all the doors but the one we want when the power goes off."

"Good. At least we shouldn't have residents underfoot. You've got Psi-Highs posted outside the building?"

"Yes, in 'copters. Circling the building fairly close, out of sight range of the 42nd."

"All right. We'll move in on him as soon as the power goes off. I want cameras going everywhere--in the corridors, in the stairwells, even in the 'copters outside. If there's a slip-up, I want to see where he goes, and especially I want a picture of him. A _good_ picture of him. Maybe he can fuzz up human eyesight, but he'll have a hell of a time fuzzing up a camera. Let's go."

They stepped on the elevator, felt it rush up to the 41st floor. They stepped off. As the door closed behind them, the whirring motors died, and the lights went out. Faircloth led the way swiftly to the closed stairwell where they met four other men, one with a motion camera. "Cover everything," Paul said sharply. "If you see him, stop him with a shocker, not with pellets. We want him alive." He opened the stairwell and started up with the men behind him. Moments later they met part of the group from the 43rd; they started swiftly down the dark corridor toward the pinpointed residential suite.

And then, like a savage blow, a wall of fire exploded in Faircloth's brain. He gave a scream and jerked out his arms in an agonized convulsion. He fell forward on his face.

Wave after wave of searing agony burned through his brain; he jerked on the floor, trying to scream again, unable to force a sound through his twisted lips. He heard shouts around him, and a whistle shrilled; there were running feet. Somebody tripped over him, tumbled to the floor with a bone jarring crash. Three shots rang out even as he dragged himself to his knees.

He was blinded; he had never felt such horrible, driving pain, and he clawed along the wall as more footsteps echoed frantically in the corridor. Suddenly Marino was shaking his arm, and together they burst through the open door of the suite as a roar of derisive laughter tore through his mind.

Faircloth opened his eyes and saw the empty room through a burning red haze of pain. He collapsed on a chair, exhausted, as Marino threw open all the doors. He gave a shout down the hall and others came running.

Unbelieving, Faircloth stared around him, then looked frantically at Marino. "You--you got him on the stairs?"

Marino shook his head miserably. "Nobody could see him. Not a soul."

The hoarse laughter grew louder in Faircloth's ears. "The cameras!" he gasped.

"Three of them are smashed. I don't know about the rest--"

"You're certain?"

Marino didn't answer. The answer was obvious. The Alien had slipped away like a ghost in the night.

IV

Robert Roberts was waiting, nervous as a cat, when Faircloth arrived at the Security office. There were deep circles under his pale grey 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 panelled 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 couldn't help it."

Roberts mixed a drink and shoved it across the desk to Paul; then he touched off the end of a long black cigar. "What's done is done," he said sourly. "You thought he was sewed up, and it turned out that he wasn't." He turned worried eyes to Faircloth. "What we've got to know is why he wasn't sewed up. Something went sour. What was it?"

Faircloth was silent for a long moment. Then he said: "I think the whole approach is sour."

"Very possibly. How do you mean?"

"I mean we're outclassed, that's what. This Alien is out of our league--way out." His eyes caught Roberts'. "He's a telepath, Bob, and I don't mean halfway. He's not just a feeble, groping, half-baked, half-trained, poorly developed Psi-High human. I mean we're dealing with telepathic power no human Psi-High ever even dreamed of--"

Roberts' lips were tight. "Exactly what happened in Chicago?"

"That's just it, I don't know." Faircloth sprang to his feet, his face white. "Look, Bob, 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 the walls guarded just in case he could. We got him sewed up, and then we went in to get him, and WHAMMO!" Faircloth clenched his fists, trembling. "I don't want to go through that again, Bob, not for anything. It was murderous. And the horrible part of it was that he wasn't using his full power on me. What I got was just a gentle rap on the knuckles--"

"And he slid through."

"Clean. Smashed the cameras; 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 blinked at them. There were several frames, obviously printed from motion film. Pictures of a man-like figure running down a passageway. The face was not visible. "Not much help," said Faircloth. "Gives us a clothing description, maybe. Nothing else. He certainly looks human enough!"

Roberts nodded sourly. "At that distance anything would. Can't even get reliable measurements. And you didn't even see him?"

Faircloth shook his head. "Like I said, the whole approach is sour. You're never going to get him this way."

"You've got some ideas, I suppose?"

"I have."

"Well, thank God somebody has." Some of the tiredness left Roberts' face. "Let's have them."

Paul Faircloth lit a cigarette and slowly shook his head. "Sorry," he said. "First I want some answers. Straight answers about a certain individual."

Roberts' eyes narrowed. "You mean Ben Towne."

"That's right."

Roberts scowled and threw down his cigar. "All right, I'll tell you about Ben Towne. It isn't pretty. Frankly, this Chicago fiasco was the break Towne has 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 will carry him to the White House."

Faircloth nodded grimly. "Does he have any conception of the dangerousness of this creature?"

* * * * *

Roberts snorted. "Of course he knows it! But Ben Towne is obsessed with a single idea, and it twists everything he thinks into horrible distortion." 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 high extra-sensory powers is neither a perfection nor an imperfection.

"It's just another tiny step in the evolutionary chain. 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 the motives don't really matter. Towne was smart enough to realize that there were lots of people who hated and feared the expansion of Psi-Highs in our society. He started fighting against it, and he's ridden that fight right into the Chairmanship of the American Senatorial Council. If he can split up the Liberal Council just a little bit, he can throw them out of office, and move his American Party right in."

"And where does the Alien fit in?"

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 and just disappears like a spirit into the population. An Alien who is fully telepathic. Towne can control the news releases; he has the power to decide on the security classification of information about the Alien. It's been kept top secret up 'til now. But Ben can control the news, and he can tie Psi-High humans and a vicious 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?"

"All the better for Towne. Then the 'rumored' liason between Psi-High humans and invaders from space can be 'proved.' Towne is 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. "Good-bye, Bob. Have a nice hunt."

"Sit down, Paul."

"Sorry. I'm not working on Ben Towne's payroll."

"I think you are," Roberts snapped. His eyes flashed, and he sat up straight behind the desk. "You're going to work with us, and you're going to follow through to the bitter end. You and Jean both."

Faircloth's eyes darkened. "Jean is not involved in this."

"I am afraid she is. Just as deep as you are. And you and Jean are going to do what I tell you in this investigation whether you happen to like it or not. That is, if you ever want to marry Jean--"

Faircloth whirled on Roberts, his eyes blazing. "What do you mean by that?" he said softly. "What are you trying to say?"

Roberts' eyes caught Paul's, and held them. "I'm saying that you happen to be a Psi-High, Paul. And I just happen to know it."

* * * * *

Paul Faircloth sank down in the chair again, staring at Roberts' face. There was silence in the room for a long time. Then Paul said, "That's a pretty bad joke, Bob."

Roberts nodded sharply, his eyes twinkling. "I'll say it's a joke. It's a colossal horse laugh--on Ben Towne. He was so sure that that private file of his contained the names and histories of every psi-positive individual in the country! It's a horse on you, too. It's against Federal law to forge examination papers, Paul. It's against the law for a Psi-High to be unregistered. Both state and Federal registration are required. And it's against the law for two Psi-Highs to be married, regardless of their stage of developement. Jean's work with Dr. Abrams has developed her powers amazingly in the last couple of years. Yours must be pretty crude, in order to keep them hidden so well--"

"You've gone out of your mind," said Faircloth flatly.

"Sorry, my friend. I'm afraid not."

"But you have no proof--"

"True, its strictly a hunch, and a little personal investigation. You were through school when the registry law went through, and you must have found somebody to leak the examination to you early. How you did it, I neither know nor care. But all I need is a good strong suspicion to subpoena you over to the Hoffman Center for a test." He smiled at Faircloth. "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 knew it would be spotted sooner or later. I even thought for a while that Marino had spotted it."

"He had."

Faircloth nodded listlessly. "All right. What do you want, Bob?"

Roberts' eyes were excited. "I want you to work with me. I think we can get this Alien and sink Ben Towne's raft at the same time. There's no single person in the country as dangerous to Towne right now as an unregistered and unrecognized Psi-High. And that's just what you are. And with you and Jean working this thing as a team, I think we can turn the capture of the Alien to the benefit of all Psi-Highs."

Faircloth nodded slowly. "It could be done if my ideas are any good. And they certainly would require Jean to put them across."

"Then you're with me?"

"Okay. You've got the aces." Faircloth gave a defeated grin. "I'll probably hate you for this but let's get Jean over here and do some planning. The first job on the docket is to pin this Alien and keep him pinned."

V

Jean Sanders tossed her pencil down on the desk and flopped down cross-legged on the floor. "I think we're going around in circles," she said disgustedly. "Three separate circles," she added, with an owlish glance at Bob Roberts.

"All right, we're tired," the Security chief sighed. "We've been at this for hours."

"It's here," Faircloth said stubbornly. "We've got all the information we need, if we can only pin down the application. Or at least we've got enough information to make a start."

"The more I see of the whole business," said the girl, "the more it looks fishy to me." She lit a cigarette thoughtfully. Her face was slender, with black brows and big grey eyes, and her slim figure made her look sixteen. "And it gets fishier and fishier the more we talk."

Paul nodded. "Exactly. There's something that we aren't seeing or realizing or that we just don't know about this creature."

"Well, let's try classifying what we do know," said Roberts. "We've got a picture 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-triple-high, fully telepathic, with the ability to fuzz up his observer's perception of him."

"Disguise," said Jean. "It isn't perfect. He needs that to hide the wrinkles in the disguise."

Faircloth walked across the room, staring at the walls. "Then there's the ship. It was found near Gutenberg, Iowa, on a bluff overlooking the Mississippi, three months ago. That's a fact. Farm kids found the ship but didn't go near it. Scared stiff. Told their father and he called Security. I don't suppose there was any way of telling how long the ship had been there?"

Roberts shook his head. "Biologists and geologists both had a whack at it, but the explosion destroyed all the flora and ground area within twenty feet of it."

"Well, anyway, no occupant of the ship was found, and no trace of where the occupant might have gone. Security sent a scout squad down to photograph the ship and it blew into a million pieces."

"That's right."

"How many of the million pieces were recovered?"

"About ten. Magnesium alloy. Told us nothing."

Faircloth nodded. "Okay. Then the Psi-High report came in from Des Moines, and you turned up the farmer and his wife who saw the Alien the first night. What was their name? Bettendorf, I think. Jacob Bettendorf. Rather dull folks. They fed him and sent him on his way. Noticed nothing odd, but the farmer said his eyes felt tired all the time the creature was there. How did their description jive with the others you've gotten?"

Roberts shrugged. "The same--or I should say, uniformly different. Nobody seems to agree. It's obvious that they don't actually see him in any detail at all. They just think they do."

"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 stoutest supporters. They don't like Psi-Highs. They keep their eyes open for people that 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 our expressions when we've had an accidental peep at some sweet innocent young girl's inner thoughts. Those people can spot that. But the Alien went right through. Not even a suspicion."

"He got into the city fast, though," said Roberts. "City folks are likely to be a lot less observant than country people."

"All right," said Paul. "That fits well enough. Now, since he destroyed his ship, we can assume that he is planning to stay a while. That probably means that there have been others before him. He's too confident for an advance scout. He knew he could mingle, and stay, and observe, and learn, and get away with it. Probably his job is to accumulate information, detailed information about human beings, and with full blown telepathy he must really be making hay. And unless I miss my guess, the information he wants most of all is information about Psi-Highs." Faircloth faced Roberts and the girl. "This is beginning to add up now. I don't think we're going to catch him in a dragnet. No matter how skillfully it's laid. No matter how many Psi-Highs we have on it, and no matter how well trained they are."

Roberts looked disgusted. "Then you're saying that we aren't going to get him, period."

"Oh, no. I think we can catch him. At least I've got an angle that's worth trying. We'll have no way of evaluating it first, because of the nature of the thing, but in the end we'll either have the Alien or we won't, and I think there's a good chance that we will. If we keep playing the Chicago game we'll lose every time."

"But what went wrong in Chicago?" Roberts cried.

"Nothing, except that we were licked before we started. Look at it this way. He's outguessed us every time. And if you analyze that a little, it's not really surprising that he has because he's telepathic. He does not need a twenty-page report and a road map to know what's going on around him. All he needs is a hint. Just a bare touch of man's mind, a slight flicker of contact, and he has enough of a head start to sit down and figure out everything that's going to happen from then on. Just like a chess game. You play along and suddenly your opponent makes a move that reveals a whole gambit which you hadn't been able to see before. But our Alien friend spots the gambit on the basis of the first move instead of the tenth. We make a move and he has it pinned. He knows we operate along fairly logical lines. He can follow out the logical possibilities before they happen, and there's no possible way we can trap him. Psi-Highs or no Psi-Highs."

Roberts scowled at him. "Then what do you propose?"

Faircloth grinned. "It should be obvious by this time. We feed the computer with all the evidence we have, and let it meditate a while and plot out a supremely logical approach to trap the creature on the basis of what we know of him now. Then we take that supremely logical approach, and change it a bit. We change it into a completely _illogical_ approach."

* * * * *

The call they were waiting for came through at three o'clock one morning, after they had almost given it up in despair.

It had been a long, heartbreaking wait. Time after time Faircloth had pleaded that they must have been very close in Chicago, closer than they realized, that the Alien was just temporarily frightened, because there had been no sign, no due to the Alien's whereabouts, no sign that he was even in existence since the Chicago raid. Yet Faircloth felt sure that sooner or later the contact would come.

It was possible, of course, that the change in the search pattern had worried the Alien. Logically, a dragnet should have been set up in Chicago, and the entranceways to all the large cities guarded carefully. That was what the computer had said. "Probability is very strong that the Alien desires to remain in a city, but suggests that Chicago may not be the optimum location for him. Recommended heavy Security measures be taken in Chicago and surrounding cities of size. The probability is very high that the Alien is seeking some specific information. Advise close control of all spaceports, air, and rolling-road escapeways--"