Paul sat at attention, straining his senses to find where the man was located. There was no clue. He did not think of the city’s name nor see anything with his eyes that might give a scrap of identification. Only the moving cars and people and blinking signs.
“Are you sleeping?” Karen demanded.
“No.” Paul opened his eyes and looked at her.
“I thought that bourbon and beer might have taken toll. Are you tired?”
He nodded. “Some. I’m still not much of a dancer. We’ve been walking a lot today.”
“Then let’s just sit here and enjoy ourselves. Where did you walk to? What did you see?”
He laughed, remembering the discomfiture of the two bodyguards. “All over town!” He told her about some of the points of interest they had visited, some of the famous buildings he had seen in pictures many times but not in the stone until yesterday, or today.
“Then you like Washington?”
“Very much so.” He nodded.
“What do you do here?” Karen watched him with gay, laughing eyes.
“Nothing.”
The brows went up again. “Nothing?”
“Nothing.”
“The idle rich?” Her tone was bantering.
“Well, idle anyway.”
“That is quite fascinating. I’ve always wanted to meet a man who could afford to do nothing.” She laughed, and set a fresh drink before him. “I should warn you I’m husband hunting.”
“Have fun.”
“You’re supposed to pick me up on that.”
Paul sampled the bourbon. “Someday I might. I like blonde hair.”
“But someday won’t do. I’m getting old.”
He studied her. “Twenty-six.”
Her eyes widened, but her lips disclaimed. “That’s unkind, really. Twenty-three.”
“Twenty-six,” he said with finality.
“I think you’re mean.” When he said nothing more, she nibbled on a sandwich and pretended to sip at the drink. “Emily and Peter are getting on very well—but then, they always do. Are you a good friend of Peter’s?”
“You might call it that.”
“Have you known him long?”
“Not very long.”
She dropped her voice to a secretive whisper. “He’s in government—high up in government.”
“Oh, not so high,” Paul contradicted. “Not nearly as high as Slater.”
“Who is Slater?”
“The man above Peter.”
“Paul Breen, I think you talk in riddles!”
He said casually, “Who told you my last name?”
Karen stared at him. “Well, we were introduced.”
“As Paul, and Peter, and Karen, and Emily, yes. I don’t believe I heard any other names mentioned.”
“Someone must have mentioned it,” Karen recovered nicely. “Or I wouldn’t have known it.”
“I guess that’s right. How’s your drink?”
She said her drink was warm, and he offered to make another, but she declined. She left him for a moment to mix the new drink herself and to recover her inward composure. She had slipped up. Five years with the department, the last two of them employed on confidential matters, and she had made her first slip. His name had been written on the memo pad, confound it! And she was twenty-six. How had he guessed that with such smug accuracy? But damn his good-looking eyes, he wouldn’t talk; only those two sentences in which he mentioned
Slater’s name could be construed as loose talk—and that was next to nothing. If the remainder of the evening was to be no more than this, she could turn in a complimentary report on him. Nice guy. Seemed to be a bit younger than she, but then that did not matter.
Karen carried the drink back to where they had been sitting, only to find him gone. She looked around. Emily, also alone, pointed a finger toward the bathroom and drifted over to where Karen waited.
“Beautiful party!” She glanced at her watch. “I can’t stay too late. How’s your Joe?”
“Quiet,” Karen said. “The strong, silent type.”
Paul leaned against the wall and watched Conklin combing his hair, peering closely into the bathroom mirror. “Having fun?” Conklin wanted to know.
Paul nodded. “She’s nice. Talks too much, but nice.” Conklin glanced sidewise in the mirror and caught Paul’s reflected image. He seemed to be asking a question. “Yeah,” the image replied. “I know.”
“I’m sorry, Paul. I truly am.”
“Not your fault.”
“No, it isn’t, but I might have guessed it in advance. I spoke with Carnell on the telephone, but still I might have guessed what was coming. I didn’t know until Karen entered the door; she was expecting to find me here, and of course I recognized her instantly.” He paused. “Slater?”
“The initials on her message were R.B.”
Conklin nodded unhappily. “Rose Busch. I know her. Slater.”
“That’s what I figured.”
“Well—what do you want to do?”
Paul grinned at him. “Let’s get on with it. I’m having fun, are you?”
“Emily is always fun.”
“Too bad about the two shadows outside. No girls for them.”
“To the victor . . .” Conklin quoted.
The victors rejoined the ladies.
One of the two victors awoke the next morning with a head and a mouth which betrayed the beginnings of a hangover. Conklin groaned and lay very still on the pillow, pressing his fists into his closed eyes.
Paul, long awake, sat up in the opposite bed to stare across at him. “You must be rusty.”
“I didn’t drink that much,” Conklin protested indignantly. “I swear it! That vixen poisoned me.”
“The vixen is too much in love with you to know which day is Tuesday.” He swung his feet to the floor and started for the bathroom. “I’ll get an aspirin.”
“They never help,” Conklin told him. “And there aren’t any; we didn’t buy aspirin. I’d like to crawl under a rock.” Paul continued on to the bathroom and soaked a washcloth with cold water, which he folded and placed over Conklin’s eyes and forehead. He stood there for a moment, pressing his fingers lightly on the covered eyelids. “Go back to sleep, Peter. You’ll feel better when you wake up.” He looked down at the partly concealed face and the tiny drops of water streaming from the cloth. Conklin relaxed. When his breathing changed to a sleepful state, Paul removed his fingers from the eyes. “And forget all this,” he said with finality.
Paul shaved and dressed, then put his head into the other room where the bodyguards slept. They were up.
“How about breakfast?”
“Any time you’re ready, we are! The boss awake?”
“Not yet. He had a hard night.”
“Hard night—hah!” Lips and eyes suggested just how terrible the evening must have been.
“Knock it off,” the second fellow advised. He said to Paul, “Any of that bourbon left?”
Paul nodded and pointed to the far room. “Help yourself. I’m going to phone down and order.” As he spoke into the phone he could hear one of the shadows mumbling behind him, a long rambling dissertation having to do with soft lights, sweet music, beautiful women and a never-ending supply of liquor. He grinned and finished ordering.
They breakfasted while Conklin slept on.
Paul fell to considering the problem of the army sergeant who now inhabited a couple of anonymous rooms in some unknown city. He could see the man clearly whenever he chose to look, could see his near surroundings, his thoughts and his wishes. Right at the moment the ex-sergeant was sleeping off a beer-bust that had been in progress the night before; and at that moment Paul could see nothing outside the man’s mind because his eyes were closed in sleep. But once he awoke, Paul would be able to follow his every move with ease, to see the surroundings the sergeant was seeing, to know everything that crossed the sergeant’s line of vision and train of thought. The trouble was, Paul reflected
wryly, the object of the desperate search wasn’t thinking enough. During that short interval in the dining car Paul hadn’t bothered to inquire too deeply into the noncom’s mind and so he did not know too much of his background; the scanning had covered the surface thoughts and no more. The result now was that the man was like a stranger to him. He could follow only those random thoughts the man chose to contemplate, could see only what the other was seeing.
There was someone named Alex and another someone called David involved, plus a considerable sum of money and a fanatical interest in secrecy. There was also that horrible new weapon called the atomic bomb which had recently been tested in the Western desert. (That had come from Slater; all unknowingly Slater had passed on to Paul the fiery scene witnessed in New Mexico.) And of course there was now the feverish anxiety to find the missing sergeant. Alex and Dave were somehow aware of that, or had anticipated it, and had impressed on the man’s reluctant mind the necessity of remaining under cover. Paul easily guessed that the Alex and Dave had purchased information from the sergeant, but no one seemed to know the precise nature or extent of the information—and the sergeant never dwelt on it. And that was the fine point where he personally was disappointed. He simply didn’t know the hiding man well enough to discover anything worthwhile.
(He must develop his talent further in that respect. He must carefully cultivate the ability to follow anyone he had once met, however briefly. He must train his mind to locate and observe them at any time—to observe all of them and not merely what they chose to consider. Conklin, Palmer, and now Slater and Carnell—he knew them well enough to track their movements with ease, and after last night he could trace Karen. A clever man like Slater could still keep secrets from him by sheer determination; but because he was angry with Slater he resolved to discover the identity of Willis. As for those others who had not fallen under his close scrutiny—the sergeant, Emily, the two bodyguards—why, he knew no more about them or the girl on the switchboard than what had been told him.
And he wanted very much to know more of Martha Merrill. All that was a part of his still developing faculty which he must encourage. If he were able. Was there a finite limit to his powers?)
Paul experienced a sudden thought, and it frightened him momentarily.
Suppose he could force that hiding man to reveal his whereabouts? Well . . .? There were two recent precedents which gave rise to faint hope. That other day in the office of Slater and Carnell he had caused Slater to develop a bad headache. Not actually caused it—no; the headache had been there in the beginning, but in an angry moment Paul had reached into his mind and magnified it, had made Slater acutely aware of it. And only a few minutes ago he had sent Conklin back to sleep with the gentlest of hypnotic pressure, suggesting to him that the hangover would have vanished when he again awoke. As well as all memory of the incident. If that worked—and Paul never doubted that it would—then why could not he force the sergeant out of the room and into the open? Had he the ability to do that over the distance?
Paul closed his eyes and tried, tried harshly.
He thrust his will power across the space separating them and attempted to seize the mind of the sleeping man, to jerk him into wakefulness. The sergeant growled in his sleep and only turned over to bury his face in the pillow. There was no more.
“What’s the matter? Too hot in here?”
Paul opened his eyes on the breakfast table. “What?”
“You’re dripping sweat. Something the matter?”
“No, I’m all right. Last night’s bourbon, I guess.” That had failed; he couldn’t do it. Was it necessary to be in contact with a person, be in the same room? He continued eating.
Late in July an army bomber crashed into the fog-enshrouded top of the Empire State Building and Paul read the headlines of a New York paper through the eyes of the still-hiding sergeant in that distant, dirty room. He never ceased his periodic watch over the man, and, although he did not mention the subject to Conklin, he learned from Slater and Carnell that the search was going on. The fugitive stayed where he was, and occasionally the one called Alex visited him, attempted to cheer him and repeated ever and again the need to remain out of sight. Paul could discover next to nothing about Alex because the sergeant knew him as only a contact and there were no telltale thoughts. So day by day he looked in, always seeking some new clue. The New York paper had been a day old and so meant little; Alex brought it on a visit along with a varied stack of magazines, but the age of the paper only suggested the hide-out was somewhere near New York. Alex had arranged for periodic shipments of beer and food. The man did his own cooking, and was always there when the deliveries were made. Paul bided his time.
Almost without mental debate he decided to say nothing to anyone of this ability to watch the fugitive over a distance. It would do little to improve his situation and might even cause further personal distress in the strained relations with Slater. Slater and Carnell knew only so much concerning him, and even Conklin who was now his closest friend knew little more; all of them had assumed it was necessary for Paul to be in the same room with a given person to know that person’s mind, and they had used him accordingly. None of them had cause to suspect there was a broader scope to his talent, and so he did not enlighten them.
Whatever may have been believed about Slater’s sudden headache, no one supposed Paul had created it with some mysterious, devilish mental magic; and the morning after the party Conklin had sprung from the bed fresh for a day’s work, holding no memory of a previous awakening. But they used Paul to the extent of their knowledge of him.
He sat in on interviews which were conducted in one office or another, always the silent second or third party in the room who listened politely to the conversations and then afterward reported the visitor’s mental reservations. It was a thrilling experience to meet some of the people in those interviews. He sat silent, watching, weighing, prying, as Congressmen, State Department personnel, military officers of all branches, job seekers, industrialists, planners and engineers, espionage agents, security people, governmental assistants, diplomats, pests, all trooped into the room and had their say or listened to what was said and trooped out again. Palmer and his superiors at the F.B.I. appeared, argued and were shown out. Captain Evans was called in from his post, sworn to silence and sent away. And after each interview, Paul would report to Carnell or Slater what had been freely spoken, what had been thought, what had been held back.
When the long-absent presidential party returned from Potsdam there had been one hell of a row between Slater and Carnell in a locked office. Paul and Peter Conklin waited in another room, Conklin hearing none of it but Paul listening attentively. Slater was quite certain that events had transpired in Potsdam which were not duly reported to proper agencies—meaning himself; Carnell argued that a presidential party was above their jurisdiction and they had no right to force the intrusion of this particular privacy. In the end, Slater and Carnell, Conklin and Paul all visited the White House, where Paul was offhandedly presented to a president who had never before seen or heard of him. Slater did not make Paul’s talent known, and afterward pumped him of everything observed during the visit.
In early August, Paul discovered the answers to some questions he had been mildly curious about. Slater was definitely withholding knowledge of him from high government figures, was confining the knowledge to a small knot of people. Apparently only seven people knew a telepathic agent existed in Washington: Palmer and two of his superiors of the F.B.I., Evans, Conklin, Carnell and Slater himself. Only those seven. The president had not been told, nor of course Karen, Emily, the bodyguards or those other persons in contact with Breen.
Only seven.
Still mildly curious, Paul wondered why.
Barely a week later he suddenly interrupted a cocktail at the hotel to seize Conklin’s arm.
“Peter—send down for a paper.”
“A paper? Can’t it wait until we finish?”
“No, pl
ease. Get a paper now.”
One of the bodyguards left his unfinished drink and took an elevator to the lobby. He was back in a hurry, breathless.
“Hey!” he yelled from the doorway, “look what we did to those Japs! We got a new bomb and they don’t have a town called Hiroshima any more.”
VIII.
1945-1948
The routine continued, with but two exceptions before the end of the year. The party of four moved from the hotel into new quarters and were increased in numerical strength “for greater security purposes,” and Paul located the undercover fugitive.
That event happened first.
Paul had never given up his watch over the dingy rooms despite occasional misgivings that it would come to nought. He had tried once again to force the man to move, to obey his will from a distance, and failed as before. And then one late November night, via the waiting man’s senses, he saw and heard Alex enter the room for the last time, listened to the careful plans of escape and flight which were outlined to the former sergeant. Places were named, timetables read, tickets exchanged and certain persons mentioned. The two of them would leave shortly after dawn from the Newark airport.
Paul sat upright in bed—and then hesitated. How to give this information to Conklin without revealing all? He sat there for long minutes, fuming at his own delay, and then thought of a passable scheme. It was weak, but the only subterfuge he was capable of concocting at the moment. Its only strength lay in the knowledge that all people have mirages that come in the nighttime. He got out of bed and crossed over to Conklin, shaking him.
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