Part 1

The Outcasts Of Solar III

By Emmett McDowell

Of all Terra's bloodily brawling billions, only mighty scientist Jon Saxon sensed the Others. Even as he swung his fists and dodged the tearing dart guns, his skin crawled weirdly. Who--_who_--was so coldly watching this war-torn, hell-bent planet?

[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Spring 1948. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]

"Quiet!" Jon Saxon's voice was a breath in the night as he cautioned the girl. A warning prickle of danger had run over his skin like gooseflesh. He was a big man, over six feet, with thick brawny shoulders and arms like a blacksmith. Before the girl could cry out, Saxon swept her into the deep shadow of a doorway. His dark gray eyes probed the street but he could see no one.

This seventh level thoroughfare of Adirondaka appeared utterly deserted. Only occasional street lamps revealed glimpses of the magnificent architecture of the post-atom capitol of Earth. Down the center of the boulevard the public conveyor swept silently, endlessly without a passenger anywhere along its ribbon-like length.

"Where are they?" the girl whispered.

He shook his head. "I can't see them." But his skin continued to prickle its warning. Somewhere in the shadows were men, several of them, stalking him soundlessly.

He became aware of an alien quality about the figures ringing in him and the girl, figures he could sense but not see. Still nothing moved in the street. The girl, he realized, was strangely quiescent.

Then, sharp as speech, her thought impinged on Jon Saxon's consciousness. "_The fools! And after I told Emil not to let them crowd him!_"

Jon Saxon's eyes narrowed. So the girl thought the invisible figures were G.A.'s men. He had known, of course, from their first meeting that the girl was a General Atomic spy. But by not so much as a hint had he let her suspect that her very thoughts betrayed her.

The tingling sensation intensified, warned him that the shadows were closing in. The feel of alienism was stronger, as if they were not quite human. His heart pumped faster, the pulse throbbing in his ears.

The moon was rising, he saw, competing indifferently with the street lights. Its rays streamed down through the ninety-eight levels of the capitol, down through crystal plastic roadways into the dense blackness of the pit itself.

Again he became aware of the girl's thought, "_Why, there's nothing here! He's imagining things!_" It was accompanied by a wave of relief, and at the same time she whispered,

"What is it Jon? What do you see?"

"Hold it, Ileth!"

His hands gripped her slender shoulders, silenced her. The public conveyor still swept past without a sound.

Bewilderment grew in him.

The alien entities were close, all about them, apparently without substance. The tingling sensations were like hot and cold flashes now, signaling him of something present, something which he couldn't identify.

They were not the girl's men, whatever she thought. He would have recognized them by their feel.

No, these escaped classification. He had never experienced anything like them before. His strange sixth sense, the first extra-human sense which he had begun to develop inexplicably in his twenty seventh year, could perceive nothing beyond their presence.

He took his hand from Ileth's shoulders, groped for the button controlling the door against which they crouched.

"_Stop!_"

The thought rang like a bell in his skull.

Jon Saxon stiffened. "_What is it?_" he concentrated. "_Who are you?_"

Again the bodiless thought struck into his mind.

"_That is not for you to know--now or possibly ever. The girl is working for General Atomic. Do not allow yourself to be duped. It is decidedly not our policy that General Atomic or any of the corporations learn the secret of the stellar drive!_"

* * * * *

Saxon's eyes opened with surprise. He had no intention of giving G.A. the secret of the stellar drive. It was a government secret, for one thing....

"_We are quite aware of your intentions_," came the telepathic communication. "_Otherwise, you would no longer be._"

Saxon swallowed dryly, realized his palms were sweating. He glanced at Ileth. The moonlight had crept into the doorway, illuminating her oval face clearly. He noted the perplexed slant to her fine black brows, the sober, half frightened expression clouding her patrician features.

"Why don't we go?" she asked. "What are you waiting for?"

"In a minute."

He sent his thought probing out toward the alien minds. And brought up sharp before an absolute mental barrier.

No neophytes here. Whatever the creatures were, they were masters of thought-transference. Excitement sent the blood surging through Saxon's veins, blotted out momentarily his alarm.

Until this moment, he had believed himself unique, the single telepath on Earth.

He had been thirty-one when he first became aware of his telepathic potential. It had developed overnight, a seventh extra-human sense, that isolated him forever from the rest of mankind.

There had been something indecent, prying about seeing into the minds of his fellows--like a peeping Tom. It had been intolerable at first, the naked baring of souls before him, intolerable and shocking, until he had learned to block out their thoughts.

He felt the girl shiver against him.

"But what are you afraid of, Jon?"

He didn't answer because the alien thoughts intruded on his mind again.

"_This is a warning, Jon Saxon. Do not divulge the stellar drive to anyone. It is not and never was intended for you to know. Only the unfortunate development of a telepathic sense enabled you to steal it from Villainowski's brain...._"

"_I didn't steal it!_" Saxon thought indignantly. "_I worked with Villainowski building the ship. It would have been impossible for me not to learn it._"

"_Exactly_," came the reply. "_And your continued existence hinges entirely on your silence._"

A chill wind blew up Saxon's spine, but it only fanned the flame of eagerness which had sprung up in him. Here were others like himself, possessed of telepathic powers.

"_Who are you?_" he thought passionately.

He realized in dismay that the prickling in skin and scalp had diminished. The telepaths were withdrawing, deserting him without a hint of further contact.

"_Who are you? How can I find you?_"

Nothing!

He and the girl were alone again in the moonlit doorway.

A strange sense of exhilaration replaced Saxon's first feeling of letdown. There were other telepaths on Earth and sometime, someplace their paths would cross again. He stepped into the street, saying to Ileth, "Let's go. I was mistaken. There's no one here."

In the rays of the street lamp, he looked more like a pugilist than a Government Bureau of Research man and one of Terra's top nuclear physicists. He had a big nose, twice broken, strong white teeth and a square massive jaw. He caught the girl's thought and grinned down at her.

"_He's not handsome_," she was thinking, "_not by any standard, but when he grins like that you don't think about his looks and virility radiates from him like heat waves. He's a dangerous man! Emil underrates him!_"

"Hadn't we better take the conveyor?" she asked aloud.

* * * * *

Jon Saxon nodded, swung the girl lightly by her elbows to the pick-up, transferred to commuter, then express. They found seats while the buildings flowed past on either hand like a speeded-up movie.

"You have a frightening job," said Ileth, looking up at his from big hazel-green eyes. Her shiny black hair she wore in a shoulder length page-boy bob. She smoothed her short-waisted chartreuse jacket over small firm breasts. "I'm surprised Government lets you go out without your bodyguard."

"They don't." Saxon's unprepossessing features lit with a boyish grin. "But I slip away from them once in a while."

"You were afraid of an ambush back there in the street?"

He nodded. "Yes. I thought one of the corporations may have got wind of my escapade."

The girl, he saw from her thoughts, was satisfied with his explanation.

In these days of savage competition, the big corporations maintained their own factories and laboratories. General Atomic, Tri-World, Amalgamated Plastic, a score of lesser companies employed staffs of technicians and research scientists. The lives of these men were fraught with a peculiar danger. They were subject to bribery, kidnapping and torture by the spy agencies of rival companies in their efforts to extort from them any new discovery or guarded scientific process their corporations might possess. Independent agencies manned by corrupt technicians had men everywhere.

The corporations protected themselves by confining their technicians to barracks and never permitting them to wander forth unescorted. It was a condition which Jon Saxon found little better than slavery. The constant surveillance irked him to the point of rebellion.

Now he was confronted suddenly with the fact that he had been under observation of an infinitely more subtle kind as well. Some group was keeping constant watch upon his mind. But who?

Ileth sighed and laid her sleek black head on his shoulder. "Jon, you've been so quiet tonight. Is it because tomorrow the expedition leaves for Alpha Centauri?"

"I don't know. I'm not afraid, exactly. We know the drive is practicable, but it's the first attempt man's ever made to reach the stars. We've never been beyond the Solar System before, Ileth."

He felt the girl's arms slip around his neck, cling with surprising strength. "I'm afraid, Jon. I wish you weren't going."

"What are you afraid of?"

Ileth bit her lower lip. She was feeling rather than thinking, Saxon realized, a mental chaos bubbling in the primitive thalamic regions of her nervous system, a formless intuition of disaster stalking the first expedition into stellar space.

"I--I don't know exactly," she confessed. "I don't understand it, Jon."

Saxon's eyes narrowed. He had intercepted that dread of the expedition's fate before. He had felt it emanating from hundreds of individuals otherwise unrelated. It was like a hypnotically imposed command: "_Don't venture into the Stellar Depths!_"

And it always stemmed from the subconscious, the regions of the human mind telepathically closed to him. At first he'd been inclined to think it was dread of the unknown. But now he was not so sure.

Facts, Saxon knew, were assimilated by the subconscious, later to emerge as hunches and intuition. He had grown to believe that there must be reason behind this universal fear of stellar space.

He had even felt it in himself; in his chief, Villainowski; in his co-workers at Government's Bureau of Research. It was a very real feeling that nothing but disaster for the human race could come of this venture to the stars.

II

Ileth's apartment was on the ninety-eighth level, flush against the transparent plastic dome which hermetically sealed in Adirondaka.

Jon Saxon followed the girl out of the lift, watching her with admiration.

She was a slim, long legged creature in chartreuse green, jodhpur-like trousers that moulded her slender waist and rounded hips with amazing fidelity before flaring at her thighs.

Ileth Urban was as fetching a bit of scientist-bait as General Atomic could have desired.

All the corporations used these girls. They scoured the Solar System for the cleverest, most beautiful ones to be found. They paid them fantastic wages and trained them to worm secrets from susceptible males. Scientific Mata Hari's.

Government itself used them, Saxon was fully aware. Only by employing even more ruthless measures than the corporations was government able to maintain itself. Government had the finest research department anywhere. And the Terrestial Intelligence Service was the most efficient organization of its kind. Not only that; Government had power, power unbelievable in its Space Navy.

Ileth paused, allowing him to come abreast of her, her hazel-green eyes smiling at him.

Saxon hastily blocked out her thoughts in embarrassment. "_You're a pretty little Judas_," he thought, then glanced up as a bright glare lit the night sky.

A trail of orange flame streaked above the city and disappeared like a meteor in reverse. The _Morning Star_, a crack luxury liner, was heading out for Venus. It must be nineteen hours.

"Our last night," said Ileth softly. "Tomorrow we'll be leaving for Alpha Centauri like that ship."

They had reached a door in the glistening plastic face of a building. The door opened automatically, responsive to the girl's personal vibration.

Saxon saw a lambent darkness beyond the entrance. The ceiling of Ileth's apartment was the transparent rind of the city itself. The moon streamed through the crystal plastic, lighting it faintly.

His nerves tightened, his sixth sense of feel exploring the apartment for a trap.

But no warning tingle prickled his skin. Then the lights came on as Ileth passed inside. They glowed from the walls like cold flame.

With a sigh of relief, Saxon saw that the chamber was empty.

"Sit down," said Ileth, "I'll get you a drink." She disappeared through a doorway across the room, stripping her yellow green jacket from her shoulders as she went.

Jon Saxon sank onto a lounge, following Ileth's progress by her thoughts.

"_Soda. Where's that soda? Oh, here it is. Emil must have put it there. Like a man._" Then, "_Contact Emil?_"

A moment's indecision. Saxon could almost hear the girl thinking. "_Not yet_," she decided with a mental shiver. "_Saxon would be no good to us dead._" Then, "_Make the drink strong. Take a gallon to make him drunk. Big brute. Shoulders like a door. I could...._"

Saxon hastily blocked out her thought in embarrassment. The girl's mind was too graphic.

For the hundredth time his brain grappled with the identity of those alien telepaths who had warned him in the street tonight.

The radiation branch of Government's Bureau of Research had been experimenting with thought projection. Could they have been successful? It might account for the alien feel he had experienced for that impenetrable barrier which had defeated his attempt to reach their minds.

A machine?

Unconsciously, he shook his head. His sixth sense, the ability not only to feel a presence but identify it almost as if he were seeing it, convinced him that there had been life in the street, a strange invisible form of life possibly; but the reality of it was inescapable. In some ways his heightened sense of feel was more reliable than his ears or eyes.

Ileth returned bearing a tray with glasses, a decanter of whiskey and soda. "I wasn't long, was I?"

* * * * *

There was a hard bright glitter in her hazel-green eyes. Saxon saw that she had changed to a halter and skirt of Martian microweb. He swallowed, feeling a pulse beginning to tick in his throat. The microweb was as black as the girl's hair, but not anywhere so thick.

Only her cold determination to keep him there until after the sailing, which he could feel like a dash of cold water, defeated her purpose.

She handed him a glass, set the tray on an end table, switched on the telecaster.

Instead of music, the newscaster was blaring forth the announcement of the expedition to Alpha Centauri.

"... greatest page in the annals of the Empire. Tomorrow at nine hours the _Shooting Star_ with a picked crew, with a staff of specialists and representatives from all the great corporations will blast off for Alpha Centauri.

"Under the directorship of John Villainowski of Government's Bureau of Research, the man who developed the stellar drive, the expedition plans to investigate the planetary systems of the Centaurian suns.

"His excellency, Mustapha IX, will be present...."

Ileth snapped off the telecaster.

"Jon," she asked and leaned against him, "why did you sneak out tonight of all nights?"

He sensed the girl's tension, knew that it would be difficult to fool her. Suddenly, he decided to quit beating around the bush and strike straight into the heart of the opposing forces.

"I know you're an agent of General Atomic, Ileth. I've...!" He paused.

Ileth had gasped and drawn back from him. Her thoughts were in turmoil. "_Emil! I must reach Emil!_" was clear.

Saxon went on inexorably. "I've wind of a plot by General Atomic against the _Shooting Star_. If they could get their hands on the stellar drive, no doubt they could control deep space. They'd be in a position to dictate to Government."

Ileth was thinking furiously now, Saxon realized, trying to figure how much he knew and how much he was guessing.

He laughed without amusement. He knew damned little, too damned little.

Only this morning, he had intercepted the stray thought of one of his co-workers and realized that the man had sold out to General Atomic. To his horror he had read in the man's mind where General Atomic, after securing the stellar drive, intended to overthrow Government.

How General Atomic planned to get the drive, who else was in the plot, the man hadn't known. He had been bribed to take orders from a G.A. agent, whom he knew only as Q62.

Saxon couldn't inform the T.I.S. of his knowledge. He had no proof, except what he had read in this one man's mind.

He had told Villainowski of his suspicions. The chief had promised to set the T.I.S. onto the case, but they had turned up no evidence of any kind against the great corporation.

General Atomic had done its work with utmost secrecy, not letting its right hand know what its left hand was doing.

Saxon was desperate. He grasped the girl's slight shoulders. "What do you know about it, Ileth?"

"I don't know anything. Oh Lord, Jon, I'm to be General Atomic's representative aboard the _Shooting Star_, and they've told me nothing of any plot against the ship. Nothing, Jon, I swear it."

With a disheartening feeling of defeat, Jon realized the girl was telling the truth. She had been told nothing of General Atomic's plan. She, too, he read in her frightened thoughts, had been instructed to take orders from a General Atomic's agent whom she knew as Q62.

"Who's Q62?" he shot at her.

Ileth's hazel-green eyes were enormous. "You! How did you know?"

"Who's Q62?"

"I don't know. I've never met him."

"How will you know him?"

"I don't know. They said he would be able to identify himself. That's all. They wouldn't tell me how."

All at once Saxon's skin began to prickle its warning of danger. He released the girl, wheeled towards the door just as it was flung viciously back.

He saw three men in the opening and reached for his dart gun.

With a half sob, Ileth hurled herself on him, bearing him backward to the couch, her arms around his chest, her long legs tangled with his.

"Emil!" she panted. "Quick! He's got a gun!"

"Easy. Easy. Easy," said a man's low amused voice.

Jon Saxon succeeded in throwing Ileth off his chest and surging to his feet. He found himself staring into the tiny barrel of a dart gun. The dart gun was being held steady as a rock by a gray-eyed, yellow-haired man with a faint smile on his wide thin lips.

Saxon let his hand fall away from his holster.

"Get his gun, Ileth."

"Right, Emil."

Saxon felt the girl's cool fingers slip inside his blouse, pluck his automatic from his holster.

"Has he any other weapons?"

She patted Saxon deftly, impersonally, shook her head, her black hair swinging.

"No. That's all."

The blond man lowered his gun. "You may sit down, sir."

Saxon sat down.

* * * * *

There were two others behind the blond man but Saxon kept his eyes on Emil, recognizing a dangerous type. Obviously well educated, intelligent, the blond man was fiercely loyal to General Atomic.

Not such a queer combination in these times, Saxon thought; when the corporations had come to replace countries in men's loyalties.

The anarchist revolt against Bureaucratic-Socialism had seriously weakened Terra and corporate business had fought its way back to power. Determined never again to permit the sacred laws of property to be so violated, it had fastened its tentacles to the very roots of society. It organized a government in an image of itself--a corporate government.

Men became known no longer as American or Spanish but as General Atomic men, or Tri-World men, or Corporate Government men and were as blindly patriotic to their corporations as they had been in earlier ages to the lands of their birth.

Such a one, Saxon recognized, was Emil of General Atomic, a fanatic who would consider it the greatest honor to die for his company.

"You realize, sir," said Emil, "that we regret very much what we must do."

"Why do it, then?" Jon Saxon asked bluntly.

The blond Emil looked shocked. "Are you suggesting treason, sir?"

"I'm not suggesting anything," replied Saxon, who had already read his death sentence in Emil's brain. "But you don't expect me to give you any information, when you plan to kill me immediately after."

Emil's expression was vaguely disturbed. "Nonsense! I'm commissioned to offer you a post in General Atomic's research department at twice your present salary, if you can give us the information we wish."

But Saxon still read nothing but inexorable death in Emil's mind.

"Eyewash," he said.

In the ensuing silence the men's thoughts beat at Saxon's brain like the confusing racket of people talking all at once.

At length Emil moved aside, saying, "We're prepared for obstinacy. Georg, take over."

A plump man of middle age drew up a chair facing Saxon.

"Georg," explained Emil, "is an N.P.A."

Saxon stared into the moon faced neural-psychoanalyst. The man possessed the most unusual pair of twinkling blue eyes like bits of glass, a smooth pink face, thin sandy hair. He was dressed like Emil in loose, comfortable coveralls of a gray siliconex.

He took Saxon's wrist, said pleasantly, "Hmmm, pulse rapid but strong. Unusual nervous control. Strip to the waist, if you please."

As Saxon pulled off his blouse, the plump N.P.A. turned to the third man, obviously his assistant, and said, "Bring the machine, Alph."

The man called Alph lugged a heavy case in front of the couch, opened it. Georg began to attach saucer shaped suction discs to Saxon's temples, the base of his skull, his solar plexus. Wires led from the discs to the machine in the black case.

"Quite ready," said Georg to Emil. "Ask any questions you wish."

Saxon could feel a delicate tingle rippling up his spine into his brain like a mild electric shock. Emil asked, "Do you know the secret of Villainowski's stellar drive?"

"No," returned Saxon. "That's preposterous. No one understands that except Villainowski himself. Do you think Government would be so stupid as to let the secret out?"

The plump N.P.A. who had been studying a bank of dials, looked up and said, "He's lying. From that I would infer that he understands the stellar drive."

"What?" gasped Emil.

With a sinking heart Jon Saxon realized that the blond man had not been expecting such luck. They had thought that he might be able to give them some clue to the stellar drive, but not that he actually could reproduce it.

"What's his torture coefficient?" Emil shot at the N.P.A.

Georg adjusted several dials. The tingling became livid fire coursing up Saxon's spine. His eyes closed, he crushed his lips between his teeth until a trickle of blood coursed down his chin.

The room swayed sickeningly. Sweat burst from his pores, made his sick white face glisten in the indirect lighting.

Then as sudden as it came, the fire smoldered and died out of his spine.

He heard the N.P.A. speak in an awed voice, "His torture coefficient is below his will to live. He'll die first."

* * * * *