Moore appeared, shaken and afraid. "There's no harm done. I jumped the gun a little, that's all."
Benteley retreated from Moore and examined his alien hands and face. "Verrick," his voice said, thin and empty, "help me."
Verrick said gruffly: "It'll be all right. Here's the doctor now."
Herb Moore fluttered a few paces away, afraid to come near Verrick. At the desk Eleanor wearily lit a cigarette and stood smoking as the doctor inserted a needle into Benteley's arm and squashed the bulb. As darkness surrounded him, Benteley heard Verrick's heavy voice:
"You should have killed him or let him alone; not this kind of stuff. You think he's going to forget?"
A long way off Eleanor Stevens was talking.
"You know, Reese doesn't really understand what Pellig is. Have you noticed that?"
"He doesn't understand any kind of theory." Moore's reply was sullen and resentful.
"Why should he, when he can hire bright young men to understand it for him?"
"I suppose you mean me."
"Why are you with Reese? You don't like him. You don't get along with him."
"He has money to invest in my kind of work. Look, I took MacMillan's papers, all that research he did on robots. What came of his work? Just witless hulks, glorified vacuum cleaners, dumb-waiters. All he wanted was something big and strong to lift things, so that the labouring classes could lie down and sleep. MacMillan was pro-humanity."
There was the sound of people stirring, getting up and walking, the clink of a glass.
"The mix-up was your fault."
"Benteley will keep. He'll be there for good old Keith Pellig."
"You're not going to go over the implementation, not in your condition."
Moore's voice was full of outrage. "He's mine, isn't he?"
"He belongs to the world," Eleanor replied icily. "You're so wrapped up in your chess games that you can't see the danger you're putting us in. Every hour gives that fanatic a better chance of survival. If you hadn't gone berserk Cartwright might already be dead."
It was evening.
Benteley stirred. He sat up, surprised to find himself strong and clear-headed. The room was in semi-darkness. A single light gleamed, a glowing dot that he identified as Eleanor's cigarette. Moore sat beside her, moody and remote. Eleanor stood up quickly and turned on a table lamp.
"What time is it?" Benteley asked.
"Eight-thirty." She came to the bed, hands in her pockets. "How are you feeling?"
He swung his legs shakily to the floor. They had wrapped him in a standard nightrobe; his clothes were no- where in sight. "I'm hungry," he said. Suddenly he clenched his fists and struck wildly at his face.
"It's you," Eleanor said.
Benteley's legs wobbled under him. "I'm glad of that. It really happened?"
"It happened. It'll happen again, too. But next time you'll be prepared. You, and twenty-three other bright young men."
"Where are my clothes? I'm getting out of here."
Moore got up quickly. "You can't walk out. You discovered what Pellig is—do you think Verrick would turn you loose?"
"You're violating the Challenge rules." Benteley found his clothes in a cupboard and spread them out on the bed. "You can send only one assassin at a time. This thing of yours is rigged up to look like one, but——" Benteley unfastened his nightrobe and tossed it away. "This Pellig is nothing but a synthetic. He's a vehicle, you're going to slam a dozen high-grade minds into and head it for Batavia. Cartwright will be dead, you'll incinerate the Pellig-thing, and nobody'll know. You'll pay off your minds and send them back to their work. Like me."
Moore was amused. "I wish we could do that. As a matter of fact, we gave it a try. We jammed three personalities into Pellig at once. The result was chaos. Each took off in a different direction."
"Has Pellig any personality of his own?" Benteley asked, as he dressed. "What happens when all the minds are out of him?"
"He becomes what we call vegetable. He doesn't die, but he devolves to a primitive level of existence, a kind of twilight sleep."
"What kept him going last night at the party?"
"A bureaucrat from my lab. Pellig is a good medium: not too much distortion or refraction."
"When I was in it, I thought Pellig was there with me."
"I felt the same way," Eleanor agreed calmly. "The first time I tried it I thought there was a snake in my slacks. It's an illusion. When did you first feel it?"
"When I looked in the mirror."
"How do you think I felt? I don't think Moore should try women operators."
Moore resumed: "During the last few months we've tried dozens of people. Most of them crack. A couple of hours and they get a weird sort of claustrophobia. They want to get away, as Eleanor says, as if it's something slimy and dirty close to them." He shrugged. "I don't feel that way. I think he's beautiful."
"How many have you got?" Benteley asked.
"We've found a couple of dozen who can stand it. Your friend Davis is one. He has the right personality: placid, calm, easy-going."
Benteley tightened. "So this explains his new classification?"
"Everybody goes up a notch for this. You're in on it, according to Verrick. It's not as risky as it sounds. If something goes wrong, if they start popping at Pellig, whoever's in there at the moment will be withdrawn."
"So that's the method?" Benteley said, half to himself.
"Let's see them prove a Challenge violation," Moore said spiritedly. "There's nothing they can get us on. The law specifies one assassin at a time, chosen by public convention. Keith Pellig was chosen by public Convention, and there won't be more than one of him."
"I don't see what purpose it serves."
"You will," Eleanor said. "Moore has a long story that goes with it."
"After I've eaten," Benteley stipulated.
They walked slowly to the dining-room. There Benteley froze at the doorway; Pellig was sitting at Verrick's table, a glass of water at his bloodless lips.
"What's wrong?" Eleanor asked.
"Who's in it?"
Eleanor shrugged indifferently. "One of the lab technicians. We keep somebody in it all the time; the more familiar we are with it the better chance we'll have."
Benteley moved towards the far end, away from Pellig. The waxen pallor made him uncomfortable; it was like that of some insect newly out of its shell, not yet hardened by the sun.
And then it came back to him.
"Listen!" he cried huskily. "There's something more."
Moore and Eleanor Stevens glanced sharply at each other.
"The flying! I left the ground." His voice rose fearfully. "Something happened to me. On and on, like a ghost. Until the fireplace." He rubbed his forehead, but there was no bump, no scar.
Of course not. It was another body.
"Explain," he demanded hoarsely, "what happened to me."
"Something to do with the lighter weight," Moore said. "The body's more efficient than a natural human body."
Benteley's face must have showed disbelief because Eleanor put in: "Pellig may have accepted a drug-cocktail before you entered the body."
Verrick's gruff voice interrupted them.
"Listen," he said to Benteley, "you said you wanted to know our strategy; here it is. Once a telepath locks minds with an assassin he has him. The Corps never lets the assassin break off. They know exactly what he's going to do as soon as he thinks of it. No scheming can work; he's analysed too frequently."
"That's why teeps forced us to take up Minimax," Moore confirmed. "You can't use strategy against telepaths, you have to act randomly."
"Assassins in the past," Verrick continued, "tried to find ways of making free decisions. Plimp helped them. Essentially, plimp is assassin-practice. The pocket boards turn up combinations by which any variety of decision can be made. The assassin threw on his board, read the number, and acted accordingly. The telepaths wouldn't know in advance what the boa
rd was going to show, any more than the assassin would. But that wasn't good enough. The assassin played this damned M-game but still he lost. He lost because the teeps were playing it, too, and there were eighty of them and only one of him. He got squeezed out statistically, except once in a while."
"Pellig is obviously the answer," Moore exclaimed. "We have twenty-four different minds. There'll be no contact between them. Each of the twenty-four sits in a different cubicle here at Chemie. Each is connected to the implementation machinery. At intervals we switch in a different mind—picked at random. Each mind has a fully developed strategy. But nobody knows which mind is coming up next, or when. Nobody knows which strategy, which pattern of action, is about to start. The telepaths won't know from one minute to the next what the Pellig body is going to do."
Benteley felt a chilly admiration for this ruthless technician.
Eleanor Stevens' flat was a series of attractive rooms in the living quarters of the A.G. Chemie Hill. Benteley gazed around appreciatively as Eleanor closed the door and moved about turning on lights and straightening things. She lowered the translucent filter over the view-wall of the flat. The night sky with its cold stars, the glittering sparks and shapes that made up the Hill, dimmed and faded. Eleanor glanced at him sideways, a little embarrassed.
She again strolled round the room, hands deep in her pockets, suddenly thoughtful. "I never saw anything in being telepathic; it meant I had to be trained for the Corps. I have no classification. If Verrick drops me that's the end."
She gazed up at him pathetically. "I hate being alone. I get so frightened."
"You want to be alone but you're afraid," Benteley suggested.
"I don't want to be alone. I hate waking up in the morning and finding nobody near me. I hate coming home to an empty flat."
Benteley wandered over to the translucent view-wall and restored it to transparency. "The Hill looks pretty at night," he said, gazing moodily out. "You wouldn't know, to look at it now, what it really is."
Eleanor poured drinks and brought Benteley his. He sat sipping, Eleanor beside him on the couch. In the half-light the girl's crimson hair glowed and sparkled. She had drawn her legs up and under her. Resting against the man, her eyes closed, glass cupped in her red-tipped fingers, she asked softly: "Are you going to be one of us?"
Benteley was silent a moment. "Yes," he said finally. He leaned over and set down his glass on a low table. "I took an oath to Verrick, so I've no choice, unless I want to break that oath."
"It's been done before."
"I've never broken my oath. I got fed up with Oiseau-Lyre years ago but I never tried to get away. I accept the law that gives a protector the power of life and death over serfs, and I don't think an oath should be broken, by either serf or protector."
Eleanor put her glass aside and reached up to put her smooth bare arms round his neck. He touched the girl's soft, flame-red hair and held her tight against him for a long time. She stretched up to kiss him on the mouth, her warm, intense face vibrating against his for a moment. Then she sank back with a sigh. "It's going to be wonderful, working together—being together..."
Chapter VIII
Leon cartwright was eating breakfast with Rita O'Neill and Peter Wakeman when the ipvic relay operator notified him of a closed-circuit transmission from Groves.
"Sorry," Groves said, as the two of them faced each other across billions of miles of space. "I see it's morning there. You're still wearing your dressing-gown."
The image was bad; extreme distance made it waver and fade. Grove's features had a ghostly cast, as if the transmission was coming from a grave.
"We're forty astronomical units out," Groves began. Cartwright's haggard appearance was a shock to him, but he was not certain how much was due to the distortions of a long-distance relay transmission. "We'll start moving into uncharted space soon. I've already switched from the official navigation charts to Preston's material."
The ship had gone perhaps half-way. Flame Disc held an orbit of twice the radius vector of Pluto. The orbit of the ninth planet marked the limit of charting and exploration; beyond it lay an infinite waste about which little was known though much had been conjectured. In a short while the ship would pass the final signal buoys and leave the finite, familiar universe behind.
"How have things been going?" Cartwright asked.
"I had to kill Ralf Butler. And a lot of us are recovering in the infirmary. The ship will go on, now. We squashed that. But a number really want to go back. They know we're already leaving the known system. This is their last chance to jump ship; if they don't do it now they're stuck all the way to the end, whatever it may be."
"How many would jump ship if they could?"
"Perhaps ten."
"Can you go on without those ten?"
"Some would have been useful in setting up the actual colony." Grove's dark face showed the unhurried working of his mind. "I think we could manage."
Cartwright's hands twitched. "Where would they go? Back to Pluto? There's a Hill base on Pluto; they might tip off Verrick."
"We're billions of miles from Pluto. And the lifeboat has almost no thrust; they'd have to beat back our velocity to zero before they could even start moving. It'd take them weeks to cover the distance to the nearest possible patrol station."
Cartwright licked his dry lips. "How about the emergency ipvic in the boat?"
"It's been out of commission since we purchased it."
"Go ahead, then, if it won't jeopardize the ship."
Groves was worried, but not about the ship. "When we talked before, I didn't have a chance to congratulate you. I wish I could shake your hand, Leon." Groves held his hand to the ipvic screen; Cartwright did the same, and their fingers appeared to touch separated though they were by millions of miles of dust and heatless waste. Groves kept his worry from showing and with an effort managed to smile. "You people on Earth are used to your status by this time. But here we still look upon it as a miracle."
A muscle in Cartwright's cheek jerked spasmodically. "It still seems almost—dreamlike. A kind of nightmare I can't wake up from."
"Nightmare! You mean the assassin?"
"I'm sitting here waiting for him."
"Do you know any more about him?"
"My telepaths say the name of Keith Pellig has been in the minds of Verrick and his staff for months, but what it means..."
Groves went on: "If news comes that you're dead we'll drop out of sight. We'll cut our transmission to Batavia, perhaps even demolish the transmitter."
"I hope," Cartwright replied, "that when I'm killed you'll be in sight of the Disc." He moved away from the screen. "If you'll excuse me, Wakeman is briefing me on the Corps's strategy."
"Good luck," Groves said as he broke the transmission connection.
He called Konklin into the control bubble and unemotionally briefed him in a few words. "Cartwright agrees to let them jump ship. That takes care of them; it's the rest of us I'm worried about. I suppose you know the reactors are eating up fuel faster than we had expected? Efficiency is down almost to nil; if we have to spend a lot of time looking for the Disc..."
He had intended to continue: '... then we may never be able to get back to the known system.'
"I know what you're thinking," Konklin said. "It may be hard to find because it may not be there."
Inside Groves was a gnawing fear. They had come a long way; the area of charted space was far behind them. Suppose, after all this, there was really no tenth planet? "It's too late to change our minds now," he said aloud.
"Well," Konklin said, "we could all take off in the lifeboat... just an empty ship heading out..."
"At dinner I'll announce that anybody can jump who wants to."
Groves opened one of Preston's metal-bound log-books. "Do you know Preston's article on the origin of Flame Disc?" He summarized Preston's ancient words. "The Disc probably wasn't always one of Sol's. It may have come in only a few centuries ago, perhaps in Pres
ton's lifetime."
"Then you're not going to suggest there may be no Disc?"
Groves scowled. "Of course there's a Disc! We wouldn't have come this far otherwise."
But his fear remained.
* * *
For dinner a case of frozen pork was opened. It should have been the first meal on Flame Disc, the landing cele- bration. Watching the faces of the forty-odd men, women and children, Groves knew it had been a good idea to get non-protine food on the table.
"How long has it been since you ate real meat?" Konklin asked Mary Uzich.
"I've never had any real meat before," Mary said simply.
Groves sipped at a tin cup of brandy, his meal almost untouched. The others gradually finished and pushed their dishes away. The thick metallic dust in the air became darkened by the smoke of cigarettes.
"Is it true we've passed the final marker buoys?" Larry Thompson asked Groves.
"A few hours ago."
"Then we're actually beyond the known system."
"This is outside," Groves said, "because nobody expects to find anything here but wastes and monsters." He finished his brandy and pushed the cup away. "Gardner says the lifeboat is in good shape. It's loaded with supplies and signal equipment."
"What about navigation?" Louise Tyler asked. "You're the only one who knows navigation and you're not coming."
"The lifeboat is essentially an automatic guided missile. Once it's lined up with Neptune it'll find its way there."
"What happens after we get to Neptune?" Flood demanded.
"Supply ships reach the inner planets every ten days," Groves answered.
"What if one of the Hills patrols grabbed us on the supply ship?" McLean asked. "They might force us into work-camps."
"Maybe you're safer here," Konklin said. "Maybe going back isn't such a hot idea after all."
"I'm going back," Thompson said firmly. He forced himself not to look at Louise Tyler.
Groves made a note on a tablet beside his arm. "That's Thompson."
"Let me explain," Thompson pleaded. "Louise and
I are going to marry. We want our kids to grow up to be human beings, not freaks. We want them to grow up on Earth."
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