“Hell!” Verrick grunted, “if we haven’t destroyed Cart-wright in a year it won’t make any difference!”
“Are you sure a synthetic couldn’t be built so accurately that the aud and vidtapes would—” Eleanor began, but Moore cut her off.
“I can’t do it,” he stated flatly. There was a strange note in his voice. “If it can be done, I sure as hell don’t understand how.” Abruptly he shook himself and hurried to the door of the lab. “Pellig should be entering the teep defense network. I want to be integrated in the apparatus when that happens.”
Verrick and Eleanor Stevens followed quickly after him, the dummy of John Preston forgotten.
“This should be interesting,” Verrick said briefly, as he hurried toward his office. Anticipation gleamed from his heavy face as he rapidly snapped on the screen the ipvic technicians had set up for him. With Eleanor standing nervously behind him, Verrick prepared himself for the sight of Keith Pellig as he stepped from the intercon transport, onto the field at Batavia.
Keith Pellig took a deep breath of warm fresh air and then glanced around him.
Fluttering excitedly, Margaret Lloyd rushed down the ramp after him. “I want you to meet Walter, Mr. Pellig. He’s around somewhere. Oh, dear! All these people …”
The field was crowded. Commuters were getting off transports, hordes of Directorate bureaucrats were lined up for transportation home. Milling groups of passengers waiting fussily for interplan ships. There were stacks of luggage and hard-working MacMillans everywhere, and a constant din of noise and furious activity, the voices and the roar of ships, public loudspeakers, the rumble of surface cars and buses.
Al Davis noted all this, as he halted the Pellig body and waited warily for Miss Lloyd to catch up with him. The more people the better: the ocean of sound obscured his own mental personality.
“There he is,” Margaret Lloyd gasped, breasts quivering, bright-eyed and entranced by the sights. She began waving frantically. “Look, he sees us! He’s coming this way!”
A thin-faced man in his middle forties was solemnly edging through the throngs of talking, laughing, perspiring people. He looked patient and bored, a typical classified official of the Directorate, part of its vast army of desk men.
He waved to Miss Lloyd and called something, but his words were lost in the general uproar.
“We can have dinner someplace,” Miss Lloyd said to Pellig. “Do you know a place? Walter will know a place; he knows just about everything. He’s been here a long time and he’s really got to where he—” Her voice momentarily faded, as a giant truck rumbled by.
Davis wasn’t listening. He had to keep moving; he had to get rid of the chattering girl and her middle-aged companion and start toward the Directorate buildings. Down his sleeve and into his right hand poured the slender wire that fed his thumb-gun. The first sight of Cartwright, the first moment the Quizmaster appeared in front of him—a quick movement of his hand, thumb raised, the tide of pure energy released …
At that moment he caught sight of the expression on Walter’s face.
Al Davis blindly moved the Pellig body through the milling people, toward the street and the lines of surface cars. Walter was a teep, of course. The moment of recognition was evident as he caught Davis’ thoughts and his brief run-through of his program of assassination. A group of people separated and the Pellig body sprawled clumsily against a railing. With one bound Davis carried it over the railing and onto the sidewalk.
He glanced around … and felt panic. Behind him, Walter had kept on coming.
Davis started down the sidewalk. He had to keep moving. He came to an intersection and hurried to the other side. Surface cars honked and roared around him; he ignored them and raced on.
The full impact was just beginning to hit him. Any of them might be teeps. The word passed on, scanned from one mind to the next. The teep network was a connected ring; he had run up against the first station and that was the trigger. There was no use trying to outrun Walter; the next teep would rise up ahead of him and intercept him.
He halted, then ducked into a store. He was surrounded by fabrics and materials, a dazzling display of colors and textures on all sides of him. A few well-dressed women were examining and languidly buying. He sped past a counter toward a rear door.
At the door a clerk cut him off, a fat man in a blue suit, pudding face flushed with indignation. “Say, you can’t come back here! Who the hell are you?” His fat body wedged itself in the way.
Davis’ mind raced frantically. He dimly sensed rather than saw the group of figures quietly entering the swank entrance behind him. He ducked down and then hurled himself past the astonished clerk, down an aisle between counters. He bowled over a terrified old woman and emerged beside a vast display rack that majestically revolved to reveal its anatomy. What next? They were at both doors; he had trapped himself. He thought frantically, desperately. What next?
While he was trying to decide, a silent whoosh picked him up and slammed him violently against the protective ring that circled his body. He was back at Farben.
Before his eyes a miniature Pellig raced and darted on the microscopic screen. The next operator was already working to solve the problem of escape, but Davis wasn’t interested. He sagged limply in his chair and allowed the complex wiring attached to his body—his real body—to drain off the bursts of adrenaline that choked his chest and heart.
Another red button, not his own, was illuminated. He could ignore the shrill sounds scratching at his ears; somebody else had to work out the answer, for a while. Davis tried to reach his hand up to the good-luck charm inside his shirt, but the protective ring stopped him. It didn’t matter: he was already safe.
On the screen Keith Pellig burned through the plate-plastic window of the luxurious clothing store and floundered out onto the street. People screamed in horror; there was pandemonium and confusion.
The fat red-faced clerk stood as if turned to stone. While everyone else raced around frantically, he stood motionless, his lips twitching, his body jerking in convulsive spasms. Saliva dribbled from his thick mouth. His eyes rolled inward. Suddenly he collapsed in a blubbery heap.
The scene shifted, as Pellig escaped from the pack of people clustered around the front of the store. The clerk was lost from sight. Al Davis was puzzled. Had Pellig destroyed the clerk? Pellig was speeding lithely down the sidewalk; his body was built for rapid motion. He turned a corner, hesitated, and then disappeared into a public theater.
The theater was dark. Pellig blundered in confusion: a bad strategy, Davis realized The darkness wouldn’t affect the teeps, who depended not on sight but on telepathic contact. The operator’s mind was as obvious in darkness as in broad daylight; and the movements of the body were impeded.
The operator now realized his mistake and sought an exit. But already vague shapes were moving in on him. The questioning figures were only partly visible. Pellig hesitated, then dashed into a lavatory. A woman followed him to the door and halted briefly. In that interval Pellig burned his way through the wall of the lavatory with his thumb-gun and emerged in the alley behind the theater.
The body stood considering, trying to make up its mind. The vast shape of the Directorate building loomed ahead, a golden tower that caught the mid-day sunlight and sparkled it back. Pellig took a deep shuddering breath and started toward it at a relaxed trot …
And the red button twitched.
The body stumbled. The new operator, dazed with surprise, fought for control. The body smashed into a heap of garbage, struggled up, and then loped on. Nobody followed. There were no visible pursuers. The body reached a busy street, glanced around, and then hailed a robot-operated public taxi.
A moment later the cab roared off, in the direction of the Directorate tower. Other cars and people flitted past, as it gained speed. In the back, Pellig relaxed against the soft seat cushions, face placid. This operator was learning confidence fast. He nonchalantly lit a cigarette and examined the passing streets. He cleaned
his nails, reached down to touch a burned spot on his trouser leg, tried to interest the robot driver in conversation, then settled comfortably back.
Something strange was happening. Davis turned his eyes to the location schematics, which showed the space-relationship of the body to the Directorate offices. The body had gone too far. Incredibly, the teep network had failed to stop it.
Why?
Sweat stood out on Davis’ palms and armpits. A dazzling nausea licked through him. Maybe it was going to work. Maybe the body would actually get through.
Calmly, confidently, lounging in the back seat of the public taxi, Keith Pellig sped toward the Directorate offices, his thumb-gun resting loosely in his lap.
Major Shaeffer stood in front of his desk and bellowed with fright.
“It’s not possible,” drummed the disorganized thoughts of the Corpsman nearest him. “It isn’t, isn’t, isn’t possible.”
“There must be a reason,” Shaeffer managed to think back.
“We lost him.” Incredulous, fearful, the thoughts dinned back and forth through the web-strands of the network.
“Shaeffer, we lost him! Walter Remington picked him up as he stepped off the ship. He had him. He caught the whole syndrome. The assassin’s thumb-gun, his fear, his strategy, his personality-characteristics. And then—”
“You let him get away.”
“Shaeffer, he disappeared.” A running stream of disbelief. “Suddenly he was gone. He vanished in thin air. I tell you, we did not lose him. At the second station he ceased to exist.”
“How?”
“I don’t know.” There was numb misery in the man. “Remington passed him to Allison at the clothing store. The impressions came clear as glass; no doubt of it. The assassin began to run through the store. Allison kept lock easily; his thoughts stood out the way an assassin’s thoughts do, that highly-colored etched intentness.”
“He must have raised a shield.”
“There was no diminution. The entire personality was cut off instantly—not merely the thoughts.”
Shaeffer’s mind dived crazily. “It’s never happened to us before.” He cursed in a loud, wild voice that shook the objects on his desk. “And Wakeman’s on Luna. We can’t teep him; I’ll have to use the regular ipvic.”
“Tell him something’s terribly wrong. Tell him the assassin disappeared into thin air.”
Shaeffer hurried to the transmission room. As he was jerking the closed-circuit to the Lunar resort into life, a new flurry of excited thoughts chilled him.
“I’ve picked him up!” An eager Corpswoman, relayed by the network from one to another. “I’ve got him!”
“Where are you?” A variety of insistent demands came from up and down the network. There were quick, urgent calls as the frantic teeps collected for action. “Where is he?”
“Theater. Near the clothing store.” Rapid, disjointed instructions. “He’s heading into the men’s room. Only a few feet from me; shall I go in? I can easily—”
The thought broke off.
Shaeffer squalled a shattering blast of despair and rage down the network. “Go on!”
Silence, And then … the mind screamed.
Shaeffer clapped his hands futilely to his head and closed his eyes. Gradually the storm died down. All up and down the network the violence rolled and lapped. Mind after mind was smashed, short-circuited, blacked-out by the overload. Shattering pain lashed through the entire web of telepaths, back to the original mind.
Three in a row.
“Where is he?” Shaeffer shouted. “What happened?”
The next station responded faintly. “She lost him. She’s dropped from the network. Dead, I think. Burned-out.” Bewilderment. “I’m in the area but I can’t catch the mind she was scanning. The mind she was scanning is gone!”
Shaeffer managed to raise Peter Wakeman on the ipvic vidscreen. “Peter,” he croaked aloud, “we’re beaten.”
“What do you mean? Cartwright isn’t even there!”
“We picked up the assassin and then lost him. We picked him up again later on, a few minutes later—in another location. Peter, he got past three stations. And he’s still moving. How he—”
“Listen to me,” Wakeman interrupted. “Once you get hold of his mind, stay with him. Close ranks; follow him until the next station takes over. Maybe you’re too far apart. Maybe—”
“I’ve got him,” a thought came to Shaeffer. “He’s near me. I’ll find him: he’s close by.”
The network yammered excitement and suspense.
“I’m getting something strange.” Doubt mixed with curiosity, and was followed by startled disbelief. “There must be more than one assassin. But that’s not possible.” Growing excitement. “I can actually see him. Pellig just got out of a cab—he’s walking along the street ahead of me. He’s going to enter the Directorate building by the main entrance; it’s all there in his mind. I’ll kill him. He’s stopping for a streetlight. Now he’s thinking of crossing the street and going—”
Nothing.
Shaeffer waited. And still nothing came. “Did you kill him?” he demanded. “Is he dead?”
“He’s gone!” The thought came, hysterical and giggling. “He’s standing in front of me and at the same time he’s gone. He’s here and he isn’t here. Who are you? Who do you want to see? Mr. Cartwright isn’t here just now. What’s your name? Are you the same man I … or is there … that we haven’t out this is going out is out …”
The damaged teep dribbled off into infantile mutterings, and Shaeffer dropped him from the network. It didn’t make sense. It wasn’t possible. Keith Pellig was still there, standing face to face with a Corpsman, in easy killing-distance—yet Keith Pellig had vanished from the face of the Earth!
At the viewing screen rigged up for monitoring the progress of the assassin, Verrick turned to Eleanor Stevens. “We were wrong. It’s working better than we had calculated. Why?”
“Suppose you were talking to me,” Eleanor said tightly. “Carrying on a conversation. And I vanished completely. Instead of me a totally different person appeared.”
“A different person physically,” Verrick agreed. “Yes.”
“Not even a woman. A young man or an old man. Some utterly different body who continued the conversation as if nothing had happened.”
“I see,” Verrick said avidly.
“Teeps depend on telepathic rapport,” Eleanor explained. “Not visual image. Each person’s mind has a unique taste. The teep hands on by mental contact, and if that’s broken—” The girl’s face was stricken. “Reese, I think you’re driving them insane.”
Verrick got up and moved away from the screen. “You watch for a while.”
“No.” Eleanor shuddered. “I don’t want to see it.”
A buzzer sounded on Verrick’s desk. “List of flights out of Batavia,” a monitor told him. “Total count of time and destination for the last hour. Special emphasis on unique flights.”
“All right.” Verrick nodded vaguely, accepting the metal-foil sheet and dropping it with the litter heaped on his desk. “God,” he said hoarsely to Eleanor. “It won’t be long.”
Calmly, his hands in his pockets, Keith Pellig was striding up the wide marble stairs, into the main entrance of the central Directorate building at Batavia, directly toward Leon Cartwright’s suite of inner offices.
TWELVE
Peter Wakeman had made a mistake.
He sat for a long time letting the realization of his mistake seep over him. With shaking fingers he got a fifth of Scotch from his luggage and poured himself a drink. There was a scum of dead dried-up protine in the glass. He threw the whole thing in a disposal slot and sat sipping from the awkward bottle. Then he got to his feet and entered the lift to the top floor of the resort.
Corpsmen, dressed in bright vacation colors, were relaxing and enjoying themselves around and in a vast tank of sparkling blue water. Above them a dome of transparent plastic kept the fresh spring-sce
nted air in, and the bleak void of the Lunar landscape out. Laughter, the splash of lithe bodies, the flutter of color and texture and bare flesh, blurred past him as he crossed the deck.
Rita O’Neill had climbed from the water and was sunbathing drowsily a little way beyond the main group of people. Her sleek naked body gleamed moistly in the hot light that filtered down through the lens of the protective balloon. When she saw Wakeman she sat up quickly, black hair cascading in a glittering tide of motion down her tanned shoulders and back.
“Is everything all right?” she asked.
Wakeman threw himself down in a deck chair. A MacMillan approached him and he automatically took an old-fashioned from its tray. “I was talking with Shaeffer,” he said, “back at Batavia.”
Rita took a brush and began stroking out her heavy cloud of hair. A shower of sparkling drops steamed from the sun-baked deck around her. “What did he have to say?” she asked, as casually as she could. Her eyes were large and dark and serious.
Wakeman sipped his drink aimlessly and allowed the bright warmth of the overhead sun to lull him to half-slumber. Not far off, the crowd of frolicking bathers splashed and laughed and played games in the chlorine-impregnated water. A huge shimmering water-ball lifted itself up and hung like a living sphere before it plunged down in the grip of a flashing white-toothed Corpsman. Against her towel Rita’s body was a dazzling shape of brown and black, supple lines of flesh moulded firm and ripe in the vigor of youth.
“They can’t stop him,” Wakeman said. In his stomach the whiskey had formed a congealed lump that settled cold and hard into his loins. “He’ll be here, not long from now. I had it calculated wrong.”
Rita’s black eyes widened. She momentarily stopped brushing, then started again, slowly and methodically. She shook her hair back and climbed to her feet. “Does he know Leon is here?”
“Not yet. But it’s only a question of time.”
“And we can’t defend him here?”
“We can try. Maybe I can find out what went wrong. Maybe I can get more information on Keith Pellig.”