Paul frowned. “If that were true, would we be working twenty-four hours a day to trap him? Use your head, man.
I know the rumors, but I can speak for the Psi-Highs, and I think Commissioner Roberts will back me up on this: the alien is menacing our very civilization. He’s struck out against one of our most beloved public servants, Secretary Ben Towne, in an attempt to undermine our government and prepare our planet for a full-scale invasion. There isn’t a Psi-High citizen in the country who will rest until the monster is caught, and until Secretary Towne has been returned safely to Washington.”
“But what about Towne’s anti-Psi legislation? He’s always hated Psi-Highs.”
“Nonsense. Towne has been a loyal servant of the North American people. He’s fought for what he thought was right, and has exposed himself to great dangers and personal vilification in order to do it. Sometimes he hasn’t seen the Psi-Highs’ side of things, but that’s not a matter for us to be vindictive about at a time like this.” He looked around the circle soberly. “The fact remains that he’s in the hands of a dangerous enemy, and it’s our job to save him if it can possibly be done.” He nodded, and stepped into the Security limousine. It honked its way through the crowd, then dipped down into the government tunnel that led to Central Washington and Capitol Hill.
Inside the car, Paul picked up a newspaper and peered at it eagerly. The full-color picture of the President’s grave face stared out at him in 3-D, with photos of Robert Roberts and Ben Towne on either side. It was an old picture of Towne, almost a flattering picture. Paul grinned as he read the story rapidly:
Secretary Towne Kidnaped From Secret Meeting President Reveals Alien Telepath At Large
“The President of the North American States revealed tonight in a special press conference that Medical Affairs Secretary Benjamin Towne was kidnaped from a secret meeting with Federal Security agents last night in what was described as the first step in a plan for large-scale invasion of Earth by an alien race from another planet. The President reported that one alien, believed to be fully telepathic, has been at large in the country since his landing near Gutenberg, Iowa, last May 26th.
“The alien’s presence was first detected by a loyal Psi-High citizen of Des Moines, Iowa, and was reported immediately to the Federal Security Commission. Robert H. Roberts, Chief of Security, has been active in directing a nationwide dragnet to capture the alien.
“Secretary Towne left his home last night at 11:00 p.m. in response to a call allegedly from Commissioner Roberts. It is believed that the call was forged by the use of a dummy-film; the secretary was reported missing when he did not return home. The two aides who accompanied him apparently suffered severely from the encounter with the alien’s telepathic powers; their condition is reported satisfactory but they were unavailable for questioning at the Hoffman Medical Center this morning.
“The President commented on the excellent and selfless work of certain Psi-High citizens during the past months in the course of a manhunt that has been shrouded in secrecy. The alien’s telepathic powers invariably overcame the efforts of psi-negative individuals, but through the efforts of the Psi-Highs, Commissioner Roberts has expressed every hope of ending the search within days and securing Secretary Towne’s release. It is believed that Towne was kidnaped by the alien in order to obtain information regarding the extent of psi-development in our culture, prior to a large-scale invasion.
“Notable among the directors of the nationwide search is Security Agent Paul L. Faircloth of this city, whose work with Security has been so secret that the fact of his Psi-High status has been carefully concealed, even from Federal Registry—”
Faircloth flipped the page, glancing at the smaller headines. An interview with Dr. Abrams reporting the training jrogram for Psi-Highs in progress at the Hoffman Center; i long article, discussing the value of Psi-High powers in;ombating a ruthless telepathic alien force; an article by Roberts, very carefully worded, explaining that if one telepathic alien had come to Earth, others could be expected: o follow. Roberts expressed the opinion that human psi-positives were the nation’s strongest safeguard against such an invasion. “The time has come,” the article quoted Roberts, “for the people of the North American States to recognize that in such an emergency as this, fire must be fought with fire. The powers of the alien now are too great for even the best-trained Psi-High to oppose completely. But with further training and proper development of the psi-positive resources in the population, there should be little chance for an invasion which depends on the telepathic power of the aliens to succeed in the future.”
Faircloth carefully folded the paper and spoke to the driver of the limousine. The car emerged from the next tunnel exit and sped north. Paul waited, impatiendy. At last he stepped out of the car at the secret Baltimore headquarters. Moments later he was holding Jean Sanders in his arms, while Robert Roberts, across the room, looked slightly embarrassed but enormously pleased with himself.
XV
“It was handled beautifully,” Faircloth was saying. “The timing was perfect, and there’s no question that it will go across.” He looked at Jean. “You’re sure you got everything through to him when he contacted you the second time?”
She nodded. Her face was still pale. “He turned me inside out. Cleaned out everything I knew. I didn’t resist. And then, when we’d heard from you, he contacted me a third time, and I knew that we were right. He’s been in touch with me ever since. He’ll be here soon.”
Faircloth nodded to Roberts. “And you’ve arranged for the fake raids to start up through New England?”
Roberts nodded. “Everything’s under control. Marino has a mockup spaceship ready for takeoff, and we’ve been moving artillery into the area near Eagle Rock to blast it down. Fortunately, there aren’t too many nosey people up around there.” He grinned. “The pictures will probably come out pretty bad, but after all—field conditions, you know—what can people expect? It will certainly look like the same sort of ship that landed out in Iowa, and there won’t be enough left when the blasting is finished to tell for sure whether the mangled mess that they drag out of it later is man, alien, or oily rags. Those guns do a good job.”
Something touched Faircloth’s mind, lightly, like a timid knock. He swung around, his eyes wide. “He’s here,” he said, and saw that Jean already knew. “Down below. Tell him to come up.”
She nodded, and closed her eyes. Moments later they heard footsteps on the stairs, hesitant footsteps. The door swung open. They stared at him for a moment, and then both Paul and Roberts were wringing his hand, offering him a glass. He nodded, murmuring his thanks, and sank down on the cot they had ready for him.
“You must be exhausted,” Paul said quietly.
“I am, I am,” he said. “Mind if I lie down?”
He was an ordinary looking man, slender, about thirty, and very pale. A little disappointing, Paul thought. Of course, a single-factor Psi-High had no distinguishing physical characteristics so there was really no reason to expect a double-factor psi-positive to look any different. But somehow Paul had half expected a godlike creature. Instead here was just a wary, frightened looking, tired young man. His face was mild, with a trace of sadness about it. But his eyes were clear and sharp, and his mouth was a grim line, as he sank back on the couch. “I was afraid you were never going to spot it,” he said. “For a while it looked as if the whole thing was backfiring on me. I mean, when Towne started publishing the scare stories and it began to look as if he might actually succeed in forcing an election. That really scared me, and right about then you started your cat-and-mouse game.”
Faircloth nodded. “We had no choice. We didn’t know, of course, that the alien had been destroyed before he even got started. And you didn’t dare to reveal to anyone just what you were or what you were trying to do.”
The man shook his head. “There wasn’t a soul I was sure I could trust, not even Psi-Highs, until I contacted Jean, and then saw from the President’s an
nouncement that you were on to me but weren’t saying anything. But it turned out better this way, much better. Originally I’d planned to kill Towne and then let you capture me, counting on you to handle the cover stories the right way. Then nobody but you people would ever have known that the alien was killed less than two hours after he had landed.”
Faircloth smiled. The computer even listed that as one possibility. Low probability, but that was on the basis of what we knew. We hadn’t even considered it. Yet every living Psi-High has known, for a long time, that someday two Psi-Highs would have a child, laws or no laws. We could only guess what the child might be like.”
The man looked at them sadly. The child would be lonely. beyond words,” he said. “He would be able to hide, yes. ; He would be able to tone down his psi-powers in order to appear like an ordinary Psi-High, roughly comparable, in a psi-negative, to voluntarily having both eyes and ears destroyed. But whatever happened, a double-Psi could never reveal the truth about himself. Not even to his closest friends.”
“And you knew from the start that the real alien had been killed?”
“Almost as soon as it happened. He died in agony. He had a powerful mind; ordinary Psi-Highs must only have picked up a ripple, but a hundred miles away in Des Moines I got a shower that nearly killed me. I knew that was from nothing human, not even another double-Psi. So I went down to the place and picked the details out of the farmer’s brain, masquerading as a Security agent. He was too frightened to tell anybody what he had done, and of course nobody later paid too much attention to him anyway.” The man shifted wearily on the cot. The alien must have been working so hard trying to maintain his disguise that he missed what the farmer was thinking until it was too late. But as soon as I knew that an alien with that kind of power had landed, I knew what I had to do: step into his shoes, pretend that I was he, and somehow give human Psi-Highs a chance to prove to the whole world that they were loyal, reliable human beings and not some new kind of dangerous freaks.”
XVI
“Of course Towne will fight,” said Roberts later, when the man had drifted off into an exhausted sleep. “He’s clever, and resourceful. When we rescue him from Eagle Rock, he’s going to know exactly what happened.”
Jean Sanders laughed happily. “And everyone is going to believe Dr. Abrams’ considered opinion that his mind has been affected by his terrible experience with the alien. Which is going to leave him helpless.” She looked at Paul. “And that’s something I’m vindictive enough to want to see. I want to see Ben Towne helpless, for once.”
Paul grinned. “You will. Things will have moved ’way ahead of him, by then. And of course, there will be a physical and mental examination. It will be a pity that the alien left his mind in such a state of shock and delusion, but maybe, after a few months of psychiatric treatment, someone will find out the real reason why he hates Psi-Highs so much. Of course, we can guess: an imperfect man, with that clubfoot of his, fighting to prove that he really is not a cripple in a world of normal men, fighting and hating the ones who are physically flawed. . and hating even more viciously those few of us he regards as super-perfect. And probably not even realizing that that’s why he hates us. If he could only be helped to see it and make peace with it and with us, we’ll have a powerful fighter on our side instead of against us.” He looked around at the others, his face grave. “We can’t afford to have the world against us again, not ever. That part of the news broadcast was perfectly true: there was an alien. He was telepathic. And there will be others coming, maybe in a year, maybe in five, or ten, or a hundred.” He leaned back wearily in the relaxer. “What happened this time, turned out to be an incredibly lucky break for us, thanks to our double-Psi friend here. But we must never forget the things about this alien scare that were true.”
Jean smiled, and put her arm around him. “Others will come, sometime, yes. But in the meantime, hundreds of Psi-Highs are going to be in intensive training. Psi-Highs are going to be marrying Psi-Highs. When other aliens come, they’ll find the Earth well guarded.” Her eyes drifted to the sleeping man on the cot, and then returned to Paul’s and held them. “And when they do come, there’ll be others—like him—to stop them.”
Part Three
Mirror, Mirror
Somewhere down on the surface of Saturn the Enemy was waiting.
The Earth outpost on the Satellite ship orbiting Saturn knew that he was there, with his four great ships and the unimaginable power that had brought him from whatever place he had come. But the Earth outpost did not know why he had come, and now they did not know what he intended, to do.
He had come into the solar system, and struck with pointless savagery, and then fled to a place where Earth ships could not follow him. Now he waited there, silent and enigmatic. His very presence was intolerable: the i-.irth outpost knew they had to fight him, somehow, but the fight was on his terms, on the battleground he had chosen.
It was an impossible war from the very start, a vicious war, draining the last reserves of the tiny group of Earthmen who had to fight it. It engulfed their waking hours and tortured their sleep with nightmares. There was no time to stop and ask themselves: why are we fighting this war?
They were fighting it, that was enough. Only the Enemy knew why . . . .
I
The waiting was the most terrible part of all for John Provost.
There was no chronometer in the day room of the Satellite ship, but Provost had his own private chronometer buried in his skull somewhere in that vague impersonal space that lay between his left ear and his left eyebrow, deep down, ticking away hours, minutes, seconds, ridiculous fractions of ridiculous segments of seconds, marking them off against him inexorably, the epitome of all timepieces. It was there in his head and he couldn’t get away from it, not even when his shift was over and he was back in. Relief, laboriously rebuilding the fragments of John Provost that the Enemy had torn away. Now, almost whole and fresh again, he could hear the chronometer clicking away against him, and once more he was certain that it was the waiting he feared far more than he feared the Enemy.
Almost time, Provost. Almost your turn to go down again . . . .
He paced the day room of the Satellite ship and felt sweat trickle down his chest from the waiting and the silence. Always, in the last hour before his shift, he lived in an envelope of self-induced silence. Canned music blared from the wall speaker, unnaturally loud, but Provost did not hear it. There was talking and chatter in the day room, harsh laughter all about him, noises of glasses clinking, feet shuffling. A dozen men were here, but to Provost the day room was like a TV with the sound turned off. He was utterly isolated, and that was the way he wanted it.
He rubbed wet palms against his trousers and waited.
Nobody looked at him, of course. The men knew that his shift was next. Nobody spoke to him; he might smile and answer them pleasantly, or he might turn on them, savagely and without warning, like a cornered rat. It had happened before, with others. He was like a crossbow with the spring drawn tight, waiting to be triggered, and nobody wanted to tamper with him twenty minutes before shift change. Everyone knew he wouldn’t be responsible for what he might do.
And with every passing second the spring was pulled tighter. That was what made the waiting so terrible.
He went below and stepped into a hot foam shower, felt the powerful muscles of his shoulders and neck relax a trifle. Briefly he thought of the Turner girl. Would she be in Relief when he returned? Of course, there were others equally well trained to help the men through the period of childish regression that inevitably occurred when their shifts were over and the pressure suddenly off—the only way they could rebuild their mental resources for another shift—but to John Provost, the Turner girl seemed better than any of the others.
They’d actually begun to be good friends as he had come, slowly, to trust her under circumstances in which trust was difficult if not impossible. And then that new woman that DepPsych had sent out from the Hoffma
n Center, Dorie Kendall—what about her? Help, or hindrance? Dangerous, sending out new people at a time like this. Yet, she’d listened when he’d told her how he could use his Analogue to take his mind and sensorium down to Saturn’s surface without actually leaving the Satellite ship at all. Maybe she’d do. Maybe she might even be able to help him, somehow.
Provost dressed quickly now as the fear grew stronger in his mind. There was no use trying to fight it down; he knew that from long experience. It was far more exhausting to try than just to give in to it, start counting the minutes to Relief from now instead of when the shift began. It made things balance better in his mind that way, even if it made the DepPsych people scream and wring their hands. Well, let them scream. There was nothing they knew about this Idiot War that he didn’t know—absolutely nothing. He was an expert on this war. They couldn’t even imagine what an expert he was.
He checked at the Control board. “Provost on.”
“Are you steady?” the voice from Control asked.
Provost grunted.
“All right, here’s the report.” The voice hesitated an instant “I don’t think you’re going to like it very much.”
“Let’s have it.”
“Dead quiet on the front all through the last shift,” Control said.
Provost blinked. “Quiet!”
“That’s the report”
Provost shivered. “What do you suppose they’re cooking up now?”
“I wish I could tell you.” The voice from Control was puzzled and sympathetic. “They’re brewing something down there, that’s certain. Chances are it’ll be nasty, too. They haven’t given us a quiet shift in months.” Provost could almost see the face of the controller, somewhere deep in the lower regions of the Satellite ship. “You may be the one to get hit with it, John, whatever it is. But then, maybe it’ll stay quiet for you, too.”
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