Psichopath

by Randall Garrett

seemed to be contemplating something _beyond_ the ceiling.

  It was pure coincidence that the focus of his thoughts happened to belocated in about the same volume of space that his eyes seemed to befocused on. If Brian Taggert and Senator Gonzales had been in the roombelow, his eyes would still be looking at the ceiling.

  In repose, his face looked even younger than his twenty-eight yearswould have led one to expect. His close-cropped brown hair added tothe impression of youth, and the well-tailored suit on his slim,muscular body added to the effect. At any top-flight university, hecould have passes for a well-bred, sophisticated, intelligent studentwho had money enough to indulge himself and sense enough not to overdoit.

  He was beginning to understand the pattern that was being woven in theroom above--beginning to feel it in depth.

  Senator Gonzalez was mildly telepathic, inasmuch as he could pick upthoughts in the prevocal stage--the stage at which thought becomesdefinitely organized into words, phrases, and sentences. He could go alittle deeper, into the selectivity stage, where the linking processesof logic took over from the nonlogical but rational processes of thepreconscious--but only if he knew the person well. Where the senatorexcelled was in detecting emotional tone and manipulating emotionalprocesses, both within himself and within others.

  Brian Taggert was an analyzer, an originator, a motivator--and more.The young man found himself avoiding too deep a probe into the mind ofBrian Taggert; he knew that he had not yet achieved the maturity tounderstand the multilayered depths of a mind like that. Eventually,perhaps....

  Not that Senator Gonzales was a child, nor that he was emotionally orintellectually shallow. It was merely that he was not of Taggert'scaliber.

  The young man absently took another drag from his cigarette. Taggerthad explained the basic problem to him, but he was getting a widerpicture from the additional information that Senator Gonzales hadbrought.

  Dr. Theodore Nordred, a mathematical physicist and one of thetop-flight, high-powered, original minds in the field, had shown thatEinstein's final equations only held in a universe composed entirelyof normal matter. Since the great Einstein had died before thePrinciple of Parity had been overthrown in the mid-fifties, he hadbeen unable to incorporate the information into his Unified FieldTheory. Nordred had been able to show, mathematically, that Einstein'sequations were valid only for a completely "dexter," or right-handeduniverse, or for a completely "sinister" or left-handed universe.

  Although the universe in which Man lived was predominantlydexter--arbitrarily so designated--it was not completely so. It had a"sinister" component amounting to approximately one one-hundred-thousandthof one per cent. On the average, one atom out of every ten million in theuniverse was an atom of antimatter. The distribution was unequal of course;antimatter could not exist in contact with ordinary matter. Most of it wasdistributed throughout interstellar space in the form of individual atoms,freely floating in space, a long way from any large mass of normal matter.

  But that minute fraction of a per cent was enough to show that theknown universe was not totally Einsteinian. In a purely Einsteinianuniverse, antigravity was impossible, but if the equations of Dr.Theodore Nordred were actually a closer approximation to true realitythan those of Einstein, then antigravity _might_ be a practicalreality.

  And that was the problem the Redford Research Team was working on. Itwas a parallel project to the interstellar drive problem, beingcarried on elsewhere.

  * * * * *

  The "pet spy," as Taggert had called him, was Dr. Konrad Bern, amiddle-aged Negro from Tanganyika, who was convinced that only underCommunism could the colored races of the world achieve thetechnological organization and living standard of the white man. Hehad been trained as a "sleeper"; not even the exhaustiveinvestigations of the FBI had turned up any relationship between Bernand the Soviets. It had taken the telepathic probing of the S.M.M.R.agents to uncover his real purposes. Known, he constituted no danger.

  There was no denying that he was a highly competent, if not brilliant,physicist. And, since it was quite impossible for him to get anyinformation on the Redford Project into the hands of theopposition--it was no longer fashionable to call Communists "theenemy"--there was no reason why he shouldn't be allowed to contributeto the American efforts to bridge space.

  Three times in the five months since Bern had joined the project,agents of the Soviet government had made attempts to contact thephysicist. Three times the FBI, warned by S.M.M.R. agents, had quietlyblocked the contact. Konrad Bern had been effectively isolated.

  But, at the project site itself, equipment failure had becomeincreasingly more frequent, all out of proportion to the normalaccident rate in any well-regulated laboratory. The work of theproject had practically come to a standstill; the ultra-secret projectreports to the President were beginning to show less and less progressin the basic research, and more and more progress in repairing damagedequipment. Apparently, though, increasing efficiency in repair workwas self-neutralizing; repairing an instrument in half the time merelymeant that it could break down twice as often.

  It had to be sabotage. And yet, not even the S.M.M.R. agents couldfind any trace of intentional damage nor any thought patterns thatwould indicate deliberate damage.

  And Senator John Peter Gonzales quite evidently did _not_ want to facethe implications of _that_ particular fact.

  "We're going to have to send an agent in," Taggert repeated.

  (_That's my cue_, thought the young man on the fifth floor as hecrushed out his cigarette and got up from the chair.)

  "I don't know how we're going to manage it," said the senator. "Whatexcuse do we have for putting a new man on the Redford team?"

  Brian Taggert grinned. "What they need is an expert repairtechnician--a man who knows how to build and repair complex researchinstruments. He doesn't have to know anything about the purpose of theteam itself, all he has to do is keep the equipment in good shape."

  Senator Gonzalez let a slow smile spread over his face. "You've beengulling me, you snake. All right; I deserved it. Tell him to come in."

  As the door opened, Taggert said: "Senator Gonzales, may I present Mr.David MacHeath? He's our man, I think."

  * * * * *

  David MacHeath watched a blue line wriggle its way erratically acrossthe face of an oscilloscope. "The wave form is way off," he saidflatly, "and the frequency is slithering all over the place."

  He squinted at the line for a moment then spoke to the man standingnearby. "Signal Harry to back her off two degrees, then run her upslowly, ten minutes at a time."

  The other man flickered the key on the side of the smallcarbide-Welsbach lamp. The shutters blinked, sending pulses of lightdown the length of the ten-foot diameter glass-walled tube in whichthe men were working. Far down the tube, MacHeath could see theanswering flicker from Harry, a mile and a half away in the darkness.

  MacHeath watched the screen again. After a few seconds, he said:"O.K.! Hold it!"

  Again the lamp flashed.

  "Well, it isn't perfect," MacHeath said, "but it's all we can do fromhere. We'll have to evacuate the tube to get her in perfect balance.Tell Harry to knock off for the day."

  While the welcome message was being flashed, MacHeath shut off thetesting instruments and disconnected them. It was possible tocompensate a little for the testing equipment, but a telephone, oreven an electric flashlight, would simply add to the burden.

  Bill Griffin shoved down the key on the lamp he was holding and lockedit into place. The shutters remained open, and the lamp shed a beam ofwhite light along the shining walls of the cylindrical tube. "How muchlonger do you figure it'll take, Dave?" he asked.

  "Another shift, at least," said MacHeath, picking up the compact,shielded instrument case. "You want to carry that mat?"

  Griffin picked up the thick sponge-rubber mat that the instrument casehad been sitting on, and the two men started off down the tube,walking silently on the sp
onge-rubber-soled shoes which would notscratch the glass underfoot.

  "Any indication yet as to who our saboteur is?" Griffin asked.

  "I'm not sure," MacHeath admitted. "I've picked up a couple of leads,but I don't know if they mean anything or not."

  "I wonder if there _is_ a saboteur," Griffin said musingly. "Maybeit's just a run of bad luck. It could happen, you know. A statisticalrun of--"

  "You don't believe that, any more than I do," MacHeath said.

  "No. But I find it even harder to believe that a materialisticphilosophy like Communism could evolve any workable psionicdiscipline."

  "So do I," agreed MacHeath.

  "But it can't be physical sabotage," Griffin argued. "There's not atrace