by Various
"Burned, please," she said, smiling weakly at me for my intention. I smiled back.
On my way to Rambaugh's bedroom I dug the rest of the thug's safe but there wasn't anything there that would give me an inkling of why he was gunning for me. I came back with one of his needle-rays and burned the contents of the safe to a black char. I stirred up the ashes with the nose of the needier and then left it in the safe after wiping it clean on my handkerchief.
"Thank you, Mr. Hammond," she said quietly. "Maybe I can answer your question. Rambaugh was probably after you because of me."
"Huh?"
"I've been paying Rambaugh blackmail for about four years. This morning I decided to stop it, and looked your name up in the telephone book. Rambaugh must have read me do it."
"Ever think of the police?" I suggested.
"Of course. But that is just as bad as not paying off. You end up all over the front pages anyway. You know that."
"There's a lot of argument on both sides," I supposed. "But let's finish this one over a bar. We're crowding our luck here. In the eyes of the law we're just a couple of nasty break-ins."
"Yes," she said simply.
We left Rambaugh's apartment together and I handed Martha into my car and took off.
It struck me as we were driving that mental sensitivity was a good thing in spite of its limitations. A woman without mental training might have every right to object to visiting a bachelor apartment at two o'clock in the morning. But I had no firm plans for playing up to Martha Franklin; I really wanted to talk this mess out and get it squared away. This she could read, so I was saved the almost-impossible task of trying to convince an attractive woman that I really had no designs upon her beautiful white body. I was not at all cold to the idea, but Martha did not seem to be the pushover type.
"Thank you, Steve," she said.
"Thanks for nothing," I told her with a short laugh. "Them's my sentiments."
"I like your sentiments. That's why I'm here, and maybe we can get our heads together and figure something out."
I nodded and went back to my driving, feeling pretty good now.
A man does not dig his own apartment. He expects to find it the way he left it. He digs in the mailbox on his way towards it, and he may dig in his refrigerator to see whether he should stop for beer or whatever else, because these things save steps. But nobody really expects to find trouble in his own home, especially when he is coming in at three o'clock in the morning with a good looking woman.
They were smart enough to come with nothing deadly in their hands. So I had no warning until they stepped out from either side of my front door and lifted me into my living room by the elbows. They hurled me into an easy chair with a crash. When I stopped bouncing, one of the gorillas was standing in front of me, about as tall as Washington Monument as seen from the sidewalk in front. He was looking at my forty-five with careful curiosity.
"What gives?" I demanded.
The crumb in front of me leaned down and gave me a back-and-forth that yanked my head around. I didn't say anything, but I thought how I'd like to meet the buzzard in a dark alley with my gun in my fist.
Martha said, "They're friends of Rambaugh, Steve. And they're a little afraid of that prehistoric cannon you carry."
The bird in front of Martha gave her a one-two across the face. That was enough for me. I came up out of my chair, lifting my fist from the floor and putting my back and thigh muscles behind it. It should have taken his head off, but all he did was grunt, stagger back, dig his heels in, and then come back at me with his head down. I chopped at the bridge of his nose but missed and almost broke my hand on his hard skull. Then the other guy came charging in and I flung out a side-chop with my other hand and caught him on the wrist.
But Rhine training can't do away with the old fact that two big tough men can wipe the floor with one big tough man. I didn't even take long enough to muss up my furniture.
I had the satisfaction of mashing a nose and cracking my hand against a skull again before the lights went out. When I came back from Mars, I was sitting on a kitchen chair facing a corner. My wrists and ankles were taped to the arms and legs of the chair.
I dug around. They had Martha taped to another chair in the opposite corner, and the two gorillas were standing in the middle of the room, obviously trying to think.
So was I. There was something that smelled about this mess. Peter Rambaugh was a mental, and he should have been sensitive enough to keep his take low enough so that it wouldn't drive Martha into thinking up ways and means of getting rid of him. Even so, he shouldn't have been gunning for me, unless there was a lot more to this than I could dig.
"What gives?" I asked sourly.
There was no answer. The thug with my forty-five took out the clip and removed a couple of slugs.
He went into the kitchen and found my pliers and came back teasing one of the slugs out of its casing. The other bird lit a cigarette.
The bird with the cartridge poured the powder from the shell into the palm of my hand. I knew what was coming but I couldn't wiggle my fingers much, let alone turn my hand over to dump out the stuff. The other guy planted the end of the cigarette between my middle fingers and I had to squeeze hard to keep the hot end up. My fingers began to ache almost immediately, and I was beginning to imagine the flash of flame and the fierce wave of pain that would strike when my tired hand lost its pep and let the cigarette fall into that little mound of powder.
"Stop it," said Martha. "Stop it!"
"What do they want?" I gritted.
"They won't think it," she cried.
The bright red on the end of the cigarette grayed with ash and I began to wonder how long it would be before a fleck of hot ash would fall. How long it would take for the ash to grow long and top-heavy and then to fall into the powder. And whether or not the ash would be hot enough to touch it off. I struggled to keep my hands steady, but they were trembling. I felt the cigarette slip a bit and clamped down tight again with my aching fingers.
Martha pleaded again: "Stop it! Let us know what you want and we'll do it."
"Anything," I promised rashly.
Even if I managed to hold that deadly fuse tight, it would eventually burn down to the bitter end. Then there would be a flash, and I'd probably never hold my hand around a gun butt again. I'd have to go looking for this pair of lice with my gun in my left. If they didn't try the same trick on my other hand. I tried to shut my mind on that notion but it was no use. It slipped. But the chances were that this pair of close-mouthed hotboys had considered that idea before.
"Can you dig 'em Martha?"
"Yes, but not deep enough. They're both concentrating on that cigarette and making mental bets when it will--"
Her voice trailed off. A wisp of ash had dropped and my mental howl must have been loud enough to scorch their minds. It was enough to stop Martha, at any rate. But the wisp of ash was cold and nothing happened except my spine got coldly wet and sweat ran down my face and into my mouth. The palm of my hand was sweating too, but not enough to wet the little pile of powder.
"Look," I said in a voice that sounded like a nutmeg grater, "Rambaugh was a louse and he tried to kill me first. If it's revenge you want--why not let's talk it over?"
"They don't care what you did to Rambaugh," said Martha.
"They didn't come here to practice torture," I snapped. "They want something big. And the only guy I know mixed up with Peter Rambaugh is Scarmann, himself."
"Scarmann?" blurted Martha.
Scarmann was a big shot who lived in a palace about as lush as the Taj Mahal, in the middle of a fenced-in property big enough to keep him out of the mental range of most peepers. Scarmann was about as big a louse as they came but nobody could put a finger on him because he managed to keep himself as clean as a raygunned needle. I was expecting a clip on the skull for thinking the things I was thinking about Scarmann, but it did not come. These guys were used to having people think violence at their boss. I th
ought a little harder. Maybe if I made 'em mad enough one of them would belt me on the noggin and put me out, and then I'd be cold when that cigarette fell into the gunpowder and ruined my hand.
I made myself a firm, solid promise that if, as, and when I got out of this fix I would find Scarmann, shove the nose of my automatic down his throat through his front teeth and empty the clip out through the top of his head.
Then the hotboy behind me lifted the cigarette from my fingers very gently and squibbed it out in the ashtray, and I got the pitch.
This is the way it is done in these enlightened days. Rhine Institute and the special talents that Rhine developed should and could have made the world a better, brighter place to live in. But I've heard it said and had it proved that the minute someone comes up with something good, there are a lot of buzzards who turn it bad and make it a foul, rotten medium for their lousy way of life.
No, in these days of mental telepathy and extra sensory perception, crumbs do not erase other crumbs. They just grab some citizen and put him in a box until he is ready to do their dirty work for them.
Guilt? That would be mine. A crime is a crime and the guy who does it is a criminal, no matter how he justifies his act of violence.
The truth? Any court mentalist who waded through that pair of unwashed minds would find no evidence of any open deal with Steve Hammond. Sure, he would find violence there, but the Court is more than well aware of the fact that thinking of an act of violence is not illegal. This Rhine training has been too recent to get the human race trained into the niceties of polite mental behavior. Sure, they'd get a few months or maybe a few years for breaking and entering as well as assault, but after all, they were friends of Rambaugh and this might well be a matter of retaliation, even though they thought Rambaugh was an incompetent bungler.
So if Steve Hammond believed that he could go free with a whole hand by planning to rub out a man named Scarmann, that would be Steve Hammond's crime, not theirs.
They didn't take any chances, even though I knew that they could read my mind well enough to know that I would go through with their nasty little scheme. They hustled Martha into the kitchen, chair and all, and one of them stood there with my paring knife touching her soft throat enough to indent the skin but not enough to draw blood. The other rat untaped me and stood me on my feet.
I hurt all over from the pasting I'd taken, so I took a boiling shower and dressed leisurely. The guy handed me my forty-five, all loaded, as I came out of the bathroom. The other bird hadn't moved a muscle out in the kitchen. His knife was still pressing against Martha's throat. He was still standing pat when I passed out of esper range on the street below.
In pre-Rhine days, a citizen in my pinch would holler for the cops because he couldn't be sure that the crooks would keep their end of the bargain. But Rhine training has produced a real "Honor Among Thieves" so that organized crime can run as fast as organized justice. If I kept my end and they didn't keep theirs, the word would get around from their own dirty minds that they couldn't keep a bargain. Well, I was going to keep mine for the same reason, even though I am not a thief.
That's the way it's done these days. You get a good esper like me to knock off a sharp mental operator like Scarmann.
The trouble was that I didn't really want Scarmann, I wanted that pair of mental sadists up in my apartment who were holding a knife against Martha's throat. I wanted them, and I wanted Martha Franklin's skin to be happily whole. And if I crossed them now, the only guys that wouldn't play ball with me in the future would be the crooks. Them I could do without.
So if they figured that an esper could take a mental like Scarmann, why couldn't an esper take the pair of them?
All I had to do was to think of something else until I could get my hands on their throats. Sure, they'd follow my mind as soon as they felt my mental waves within range, but if I could really find something interesting enough to occupy my attention--and maybe theirs as well--they could not identify me.
So I went back into the lobby of my apartment and dug into the mailbox of another party, thus identifying myself as the man in three eight four. Then I punched the elevator button for the Fourth and leaned back against the elevator and let my mind wander up through the apartments above.
I violated all the laws against Esping Toms as the elevator oozed upwards. Eventually my sense of perception wandered through my own apartment and I located her lying on the bed, fully dressed. She'd probably been freed lest some esper cop get to wondering why there was a woman taped to a chair in a bachelor's kitchen. I shut my mind like a clam, but I couldn't withdraw my perception too fast. I let it ooze back there like the eyes of a lecherous old man at a burleycue.
I left the elevator at the Fourth and walked up the stairs by reflex, while my mind was positively radiating waves of vulgarity.
My mind managed to identify her as "The girl on the bed" without thinking any name. She was a good looking strawberry blonde with a slender waist and a high bosom and long, slender legs. She was wearing a pair of Dornier shoes with three inch heels that did things to her ankles. Her nylons were size eight and one half, medium length, in that dark shade that always gives me ideas. Her dress was a simple thing that did not have a store label on it, and so I dug the stitches for a bit and decided that it had been hand made. Someone was a fine dress-maker because it fitted her slender body perfectly. Her petticoat was store type. It was simple and fitted, too, but it had a label from Forresters in the hem. Her bra was a Graceform, size thirty two, medium cup, but the girl on the bed did not have much need for molding, shaping, uplifting, padding or pretense. She was all her and she filled it right to the brim. I let my perception dawdle on the slender ankles, the lissome waist, and the rounded hips.
My door key came out by habit-reflex and entered the keyhole while my sense of perception let them have one last vicarious thrill. The girl on the bed was an honest allover strawberry blonde. She....
Then the door swung open and hell went out for breakfast.
My forty-five bellowed at the light as I slid in and sloped to one side. The room went dark as I dropped to the floor in front of my bookcase. From across the room a hitburner seared the door and slashed sidewise, cutting a smoking swathe across my encyclopedia from A-AUD to CAN-DAN and then came down as I squirmed aside. It took King Lear right out of Shakespeare before the beam winked out. It went off just in time to keep me from sporting a cooked stripe down my face.
I triggered the automatic again to make a flash in their faces while I dug the room to locate them in the dark. The needle beam flared out again and drilled a hole in the bookcase behind me. The other guy made a slashing motion with his beam to pin me down, but he made a mistake by standing up to do it.
I put a slug in his middle that slammed him back against the wall. He hung there for a moment before he fell to the floor with a dull, limp sound. His needle beam slashed upward and burned the ceiling before his hand went limp and let the weapon drop.
I whirled to dig the other guy in the room just as the throb of a stun-gun beam moaned over my head. I wondered where they'd got the arsenal, dug the serial number, and realized that it was mine. It gave me a chuckle. I'm a pistol man, so the stun-gun that old gorilla-man was toting couldn't have had more than one more charge. I tried to dig it but couldn't. Even a Doctor Of Perception can't really dig the number of kilo-watt-seconds in a meson chamber.
My accurate esping must have made the other guy desperate, because he made a dive and let his needle ray burn out a slashing beam that zipped across over my head. My forty-five blazed twice. He missed but I didn't, just as the throb of the stun-gun rang the air again. I whirled to face my stun-gun coming out of the bedroom door in front of Martha Franklin.
The slug intended for Martha's body never came out of my gun because her stun-gun got to me first. It froze me like a hunk of Greek statuary and I went forward and toppled over until I came on a three-point landing of elbow, the opposite knee, and the side of my face.
/> I was as good as dead.
My brain was still functioning but nothing else was. I was completely paralyzed. My heart had stopped breathing and my lungs had stopped breathing, and I've been told that a healthy man can retain consciousness for maybe a minute or so without a fresh supply of blood to the brain. Then things get muddy black and you've had it for good. My esp was still functioning, but that would black out with the rest of Steve Hammond.
There was no physical pain. They could have drilled me with a blunt two-by-four and I'd not have felt it.
Then because I couldn't stare Death in the face, I shut my mind on the fact and esped my late girl friend. She was standing there with my stun-gun in her hand with a smile on her beautiful puss and that vibrant body swaying gently. I wanted to vomit and I would have if I'd not been frozen solid. That beautiful body presided over by that vicious brain made me sick.
Her smile faded as I began to realize the truth. Her story was thin. Rambaugh, a mental, would have been able to play his blackmail game to the fine degree; he would have known when Martha's patience was about to grow short--if Martha's story were true. No blackmailer pushed his victim to the breaking point. And Rambaugh wouldn't have gone for me if this had just been a plain case of blackmail.
No, by thinking deeply, Martha Franklin had engineered the death of Rambaugh and she'd almost engineered the rubbing-out of Scarmann. A mental, Martha Franklin. A high-grade mental, capable of controlling her thoughts so that her cohorts could be led by the mind into doing her dirty work.
My mind chuckled. I'd be gone before they caught up with Martha, but they'd catch up all right. She'd leave the apartment positively radiating her act of violence and then the cops would have a catch. And you should see how a set of Court Mentalists go to work on a guilty party these days. Once they get the guy that pulled the trigger on the witness stand, in front of a jury consisting of mixed mentals and espers, with no holds barred, the court record gets a full load of the killer's life, adventures, habits, and attitude; just before the guilty party heads for the readjustment chamber.
