Psi-High And Others

Part Two Psi High

The alien’s ship skimmed down like a shadow from the outer atmosphere and settled gently and silently in the tangled underbrush of a hillside overlooking a bend in the broad river. There was the hiss of scorched leaves, the piping of a small, trapped animal—then silence. It was dusk, with the sunlight just departing the hilltops around; here in the cut leading down to the river the gloom of darkness was settling.

Somewhere across the hills a dog howled mournfully. Night birds made small rustling sounds through the scrub and underbrush. The alien waited, alert and tense, but he was not listening for audible sounds. If his race had ever possessed hearing, it was long since lost; they had no need to hear. Instead he sat with his cold yellow eyes half closed, waiting to feel any flickering touch deep in his mind, any whisper of surprise or wonder or fear that his powerful thought-receptors might pick up from the dark hills around the ship. Because that, above all, was critical: that his arrival here be entirely undetected. Everything depended on that.

He waited and waited as no thought-fingers came to touch him. At last he relaxed, grunted his satisfaction and scorn. Foolish of him to worry. On his world, any unidentified ship approaching within two light years of their sun would be detected and destroyed without hesitation or mercy. No such technology here, and even if the stupid cattle- people who lived here had seen his ship, they wouldn’t believe it. The alien stretched back against the couch, allowing his long, tight muscles to relax. Scouts had landed here a dozen times before, and always the reports were the same: the natives thought ships such as his were a delusion, figments of their own imaginations! No, there would be no problem here when his work was finished and the full-scale invasion began. Already the preliminary studies were completed, the plans worked out in the finest detail; and then, soon, his people would be rich with food and slaves once again, and he would even be allowed to touch the robe of the leader himself! He gloated in anticipation. There was no possible flaw, no way these dull, cowering Man-things could detect or hinder the secret, silent invasion that would come, except for one thing—

The thing he was here, alone, to evaluate.

A people without psi-presence were helpless to defend themselves against a race of powerful telepaths such as his. They would not even know they were being invaded until they were overwhelmed. This planet was a primitive world, indeed, with a ludicrously primitive people, but some few of them had psi-presence already developing. Crude, rudimentary, feeble, but just possibly enough to throw invasion plans awry.

That was what the alien had to find opt: how much, how strong, the power to enter other minds might be, in these people. For psi-presence could detect other psi-presence, always, anywhere, despite any disguise. The alien knew that. It was the one universal denominator in all the ages of conquest, plundering and enslavement that had made his people the cruel masters of half a galaxy. Before they dared to come in force, they must know the strength of the psi-presence on this world, the one weapon that could possibly defeat them.

The alien moved, finally, beginning his preparations. In the center of the cabin an image flickered, swarming flecks of light and shadow that filled out a three-dimensional form, a complete and detailed model of one of the Man-things that populated this planet. The alien sat down and studied the image carefully through hooded yellow eyes. There must be no mistake, not here, not now. The scouts had been here and returned, bringing back the necessary data and a dozen or more specimens of the Man-things that lived long enough for the laboratories to dissect their minds and bodies and work out satisfactory models for disguise. Now as he stared at the image, studying the bone structure and muscle contour, the alien marveled at the skill of the lab stuff—an almost perfect replica! Slowly, following the model, he began to work with die plastiflesh, molding the sharp angles of his members into puffy Man-like curves, skillfully laying the folds of skin, forming muscle bulges and jointed fingers, always studying the image of the strange, clumsy creature flickering in the cabin before him.

The image of a Man. That was what they called themselves. There were many of them, and somewhere among them there was psi-presence, feeble and underdeveloped, but there, somewhere. He eyed the image again, and pressed a stud on the control panel. Another image met his eyes, an electronic reflection of himself. He studied it, then carefully superimposed the two, adding contours here and there, quick eyes seeking out imperfections as he worked. There must be no mistake. He knew what failure would mean for him—the ultimate disgrace and then slow, painful death by dissociation and destruction of his psi-power neuron by neuron. The leader did not tolerate failures.

At last, satisfied, he stared again at the image, and then at himself. Not quite right—the skin tone was wrong, the yellow came through too clearly in places, and the scouts had reported that that color seemed to carry unpleasant connotations in this culture, for some reason. Any shade of sickly pink, shading into brown and on to black, was fine. He worked more brownish-pink pigment into his soft, wrinkle- free skin, then further molded out the cheeks and forehead. Hair would be a problem of course, but then there would be many small imperfections. He smiled grimly to himself. No problem there—in dealing with these stupid minds, there would be other ways to mask imperfections.

Finally the task was done. He had no way to bring a reddish color into his pale green lips, nor to create the myriad wrinkles and creases that criss-crossed the skin of the Man- things, but with his psi-power it did not matter, he would simply project those things into their minds. Rising, the alien struggled into the tight, restricting clothes that lay in a bundle, carefully folded and pressed, at his feet. The boardlike shoes cut into his flesh—he had nothing to correspond to a moveable human ankle—and the hairy fabric of the red-and-white checked skirt made him writhe in discomfort, but once outside the ship he was glad for the warmth. He stepped out onto the ground, and listened again, carefully. Then he made certain arrangements with wires, and threw a switch on a small black panel near the entry port, and began walking stiffly down the hill away from the^- ship.

He would no longer need the ship. Not now.

It was quite dark. The underbrush grew thicker, and he fought his way through the scrub until he reached a roadway. It was not even paved—incredible I To think some of the scouts had feared such simple, primitive barbarians might actually attempt to oppose them! Yet the reports insisted that far to the east there were great stone and steel cities, the places-of-madness, the scouts had called them. Well, perhaps. He certainly saw no stone or steel, only dust and the ruts of wagon wheels. He was aware only of darkness, and a light wind coming up, and the howling of some night beast somewhere over the hill.

The alien trudged on for almost an hour, trying to acclimate his legs to the fierce tug of gravity that pulled at him. And then he stopped short, and listened . . . .

He heard them, then, in the depths of his mind, somewhere very near on the other side of the hill—two Man-things, beyond doubt. No psi-presence there, but at least a contact, perhaps weak and isolated enough to be killed for food. Other mental whispers, too—dull, stupid, vagrant half-thoughts flickering through his mind. Lower life forms, no doubt. Possibly this was a farm, with work animals. The scouts had said there were such. He turned off the road, and almost cried out when the sharp barbs of a fence cut through his tender skin. A trickle of green dripped down his arm, until he rubbed a poultice across it, and it became smooth and sickly pink again. In a burst of rage he pulled the fence out, post and all, and left it on the ground, moving through the woods in the direction of the Man-things he had heard.

Soon the woods ended and he saw the dwelling across a broad clearing. Black dirt lay open in the moonlight. He started across. There was light inside the dwelling, and the dull, babbling flow of uncontrolled Man-thought struck his mind like a vapor. There were other buildings, too—dark buildings, and one tall one with a spoked wheel on top that creaked and rustled in the darkness.

He had almost reached the dwelling when a small, four- legged creature leaped out of the darkness at him, crying out in a horrible discordant barrage. The creature came running swiftly, and the alien’s mind caught the sharp whine, of fear and hate emanating from the thing. It stopped before him, baring its fangs and snarling. The alien lashed his foot out savagely; it crunched into flesh and bone, and the creature lay flopping helplessly, spurting dark wet stuff, its cry cut off in mid-yelp. The alien stepped onto the porch as the door opened, suddenly, framing a tall,thin Man-thing in a box of yellow light. “Brownie?” a voice called. “Come here, Brownie! What’s the matter—” His words trailed off as he saw the alien. “Who are you?”

“A traveler,” said the alien, his voice grating harshly in the darkness. “I need lodging and food.”

The farmer’s eyes narrowed suspiciously as he peered from the doorway. “Where are you from? Come into the light, here, let me get a look at you.”

The alien stepped closer, concentrating all his psi-power on the farmer’s mind, blurring his perception of the minute imperfections of his disguise. It was far harder than he had expected, it required all his concentration, and he had none left to probe the farmer’s mind. No problem, though, he thought as he waited, trembling. That would come later.

The farmer blinked, and nodded, finally. “Well, all right then,” he grumbled. “I suppose we can find some food for you. Come on in.” And he stepped back for the alien to enter.

Secretary of Medical Affairs Benjamin Towne slammed his cane down on the floor with a snarl, and eased himself back in his seat, staring angrily around the small Federal Security Commission anteroom. His aide, a Cabinet attache standing near the door, retrieved the cane and handed it back to Towne with a polite murmur, then regretted his action instantly when the secretary began whacking it against his palm, short staccato slaps that rang out ominously in the small room. The secretary was not in the habit of waiting; he did not like it in the least, and made no effort to conceal his feelings. His little green cat eyes roved around the. room in sharp disapproval, resting momentarily on the neat auto- desk, on the cool gray walls, on the vaguely disturbing watercolor on the wall—one of those nauseating Psi-High experimentals that the snob critics seemed to think were so wonderful. The secretary growled and blinked at the morning sunlight streaming through the muted glass panels of the northeast wall. Far below, the second morning rush hour traffic buzzed through the city with frantic nervousness.

The secretary tapped his cane on the floor, glancing up at his aide. “That Sanders girl,” he snapped. “Give me her file again.”

The aide opened a large briefcase, produced a thick bundle of papers in a manila folder. Towne took them, and glanced through the papers, chewing his lower lip. “How about Dr. Abrams and the rest of the Hoffman Center crowd that are involved? Were they questioned?”

The aide nodded in embarrassment. “We tried, but they ran us around in circles.”

Towne’s scowl deepened. “Did you give him the treatment?”

“Dr. Abrams just didn’t scare. He said if you wanted to call a full-scale Congressional investigation of his work with the Psi-Highs, and then serve him with a subpoena, he’ll testify; otherwise, he said, you’d better stay off the Hoffman Center’s back.”

“Stubborn old goat,” Ben Towne grumbled. “He knows I haven’t got anything that would stand up in a Congressional probe.” The secretary went back to the Sanders file, still tapping the floor with the cane. “Where is that Roberts? I can’t wait here all day!”

The aide glanced down at Benjamin Towne with some curiosity. It was easy to see how the man had gained and held a Cabinet seat, and a powerful voice in the government, even though he opposed the President’s views in regard to the training of Psi-High citizens. There was something overwhelming about his appearance—the heavy jaw and grim mouth line, the shock of sandy hair that fell over his forehead, the burning green eyes, the stout, well-muscled withered left leg and the grotesque twisted foot, and he looked away in embarrassment. What was so awe-inspiring about a crippled man who accumulated great power? Towne certainly had done that. Some said that Ben Towne was the most powerful politician in the country since Senator Dan Fowler had died. Some even said that he was the greatest man, but that was something quite different indeed. And some said he was the most dangerous man in the Western Hemisphere, bar none. The aide shivered. That was none of his business. If he went probing that line too far, they’d be calling him Psi-High, and he liked his job too much to risk that.

The inner door opened, and a tall man with prematurely gray hair strode in, followed by a girl in her early twenties. “Sorry to hold you up, Mr. Secretary,” the man said. “No, no, don’t get up—we can talk right here.”

Towne had made no effort to rise. He glared at the Federal Security chief, and then his eyes drifted angrily to the girl. “I said I wanted a private conference, Roberts. I don’t want one of these brain-picking snoopers in the same room with me.”

Bob Roberts shook his head as the girl turned to leave. “Sit down, Jean. Mr. Secretary, this is Jean Sanders. If you want to talk to me about the search for this alien, I want her to sit in.”

Ben Towne slowly set the papers down on the floor. “Record this, if you please,” he said to his aide. His eyes turned to Roberts. “I understand the alien slipped out of your hands again yesterday,” he said with vicious smoothness. “A pity.”

Roberts reddened. “That’s right. He slipped away clean.”

“No pictures, no identifications, no nothing, eh?”

“I’m afraid not.”

Towne’s voice was deadly. “Mr. Roberts, we both know that an unidentified creature totally alien to this planet made a landing three weeks ago and has been at large in this country, completely at large, ever since, and your Federal Security people haven’t even gotten near him. I want to know why.”

“I’d suggest that if you read our reports—”

“Look, man, I didn’t come here for insolence!” Towne slammed the cane down with a clatter.

“You’re answerable to the Congress and Cabinet of the North American States for every wretched thing you do, and I’m ready to bring charges of criminal negligence!”

“Criminal negligence!”

The Security chief stared at him. “Mr. Secretary, we’ve thrown everything we have into this search. The creature has played us for fools, every step of the way! We didn’t even, get a look at his ship; it blew up right in our faces! Do you realize what we’re fighting here?”

“I realize quite well,” said Towne, frostily.

“You’re fighting an alien creature who has slipped into our population, somehow, and just vanished. There’s no guessing why he’s here, what he wants, or what he’s doing; there’s no guessing anything about him, what powers he might have, what nature of beast he might be, or anything else. The very fact that he has sneaked in like a thief in the night suggests that his intentions are not benign, and until he is caught and interrogated, somehow, the potential threat of his presence is simply staggering. So what have you guardians of the nation done? For three weeks you’ve fumbled and alibied without even turning up a warm trail. You don’t even have a coherent description of him.”

“We’re fighting a telepath,” Roberts said softly.

“An alien with telepathic powers such as we’ve never dreamed of. That’s what we’re fighting. And we’re not winning, either.”

The girl across the room stirred uneasily. Ben Towne’s green eyes shot over to her viciously. “And you’re using freaks like her to help hunt for him, I suppose. Or to help hide him, for all I know. If he’s a telepath, then he’s one of their kind.”

“Jean Sanders is not a freak,” Roberts said coldly. “She’s an ordinary, intelligent human being who happens to have been born with a certain rudimentary degree of extrasensory perception which makes her Psi-High according to the Jim Crow laws you railroaded through Congress a few years ago. She’s had intensive Hoffman Center training to help her develop her psi-potential, in spite of your efforts to get that training program killed. She is also a loyal citizen, and when it comes to tracking down and trapping a telepathic alien, she’s about the most valuable asset we’ve got at the present moment. If not the only one. I just wish there were more Psi-Highs around with the training she’s had.”

Benjamin Towne glanced at his aide in triumph. “So! You openly admit that you’ve been using Psi-Highs in an investigation as critical as this!”

“Of course I have to, to some extent! How do you think—”

“Then you’re admitting criminal negligence right there, as far as I’m concerned,” Towne cut him off.

Roberts sighed in disgust “Mr. Towne, you don’t have any idea what you’re saying.”

“I beg to differ,” Towne said with heat. “I happen to believe that there are a group of individuals wandering around loose who will have the rest of this country in chains in a hundred years if they’re allowed to develop and use their freak powers the way they want to. Psi-Highs are a vicious menace, nothing more or less. We can’t help it that we have them; the fools in the government two hundred years ago must have been blind when they first started turning up, but nobody realized then that the psi-factor was a straight Mendelian dominant inheritable trait, and by the time we found that out it was too late to have them all sterilized. Of course, they couldn’t use their extrasensory powers without special training, so even then drastic measures didn’t seem necessary.” He picked up his cane and leaned forward toward Roberts. “Didn’t seem necessary, that is. But now the good Dr. Reuben Abrams and his meddling crowd at the Hoffman Center are busy training them, teaching some of them to use their psi-faculties, providing them with a treacherous power that has no place in civilized society. Well, I’m going to get that stopped, don’t worry. And meanwhile, I don’t want them working in Security! Is that clear enough?”

Roberts sighed tiredly, and leaned back in his chair. “You’re a little confused, Mr. Secretary. This is not a Rotary Club luncheon. It’s not a Federal Isolationist rally, and it’s not a meeting of the Cabinet. It’s just me you’re talking to. And so far, to my knowledge, you haven’t succeeded in robbing Psi-High citizens of all their rights. You’ve passed laws forcing them to take psychiatric tests and submit to Federal registration, just like drug addicts. They have to report to your Medical Affairs Department underlings every month like paroled convicts. You’ve passed laws to prevent them from marrying, you’ve blocked their education and hamstrung their training and development, you’ve done your level best to poison the minds of the general psi-negative public against them, but you haven’t as yet been able to strip them of their citizenship.”

“Not as yet,” said Ben Towne.

“And you can’t, as yet, dictate to me how I am to run the activities of the Federal Security Commission.”

“Not as yet.”

Roberts’ eyes blazed. “All right. Now you listen carefully, Mr. Secretary, tape recording or no tape recording. We’ve got an enemy in our midst, an alien we’ve never even seen. That alien could be the most malignant threat we’ve ever faced in all history. We can thank a psi-positive citizen out in Des Moines, Iowa, that we ever discovered the alien was here at all. That citizen had the good sense and the loyalty to report to us when he had accidental extrasensory contact with a psi-presence stronger than any he had ever encountered before, and thought that this was very strange. Normal psi-negative individuals can’t recognize this alien for what he is, can’t identify him, can’t even get near him. We know that because we’ve tried. So far we have not used Psi-High agents against him, but we’re going to have to, whether you happen to like it or not. Psi-negatives are whipped, the alien can run circles around them. Our only hope of catching him is to fight fire with fire, and in this case the only fire we have is the best-trained psi-positive agents we can get our hands on. Like Jean Sanders here. Or Ted Marino in Chicago. So that’s the way it is You can try to stop me if you want to, but you’re going to have to reorganize Federal Security to do it.”

Benjamin Towne lurched to his feet, his face white. “I may do that, Roberts.” He reached for his cane. “I may just do that.”

“Then you’ll have to throw the Liberal Administration out of office just. They’re supporting me, and they’re outvoting the Isolationists two to one. The President is also supporting me.

Towne gave him a shrewd look. “Well, you’d better start watching the telecasts and newstapes,” he said bluntly. “There are already rumors going around about some kind of a mysterious alien fugitive—oh, I know it’s been classified top secret, but you know how secrets leak out.” He grinned maliciously. “People get nervous about rumors like that, especially when the Administration denies them so sharply. You’d just better catch that alien pretty fast, that’s my advice.” The secretary nodded to his aide and limped to the door. Then he glanced back over his shoulder. “And if you’re really smart, you’ll keep your Psi-High freaks out of it, or you’re going to wish you’d never heard of them before.”

The door slammed behind him. Jean Sanders stood up, white-faced and trembling. “What a vicious man,” she murmured. “What did he mean, Bob? About wishing you’d never heard of us?”

Robert Roberts shook his head slowly. “I’m not sure I know,” he said.

Paul Faircloth finished reading the teletape briefing just as the little jet helicopter slipped down toward the hangar slot in South Chicago. He tossed the spools into the erasure can and flipped the switch to activate the distortion field inside the can. Then he stretched his legs, so tense he could hardly move them, and stared out at the city rising up below. For the twentieth time he wondered if he was going to come out of this alien mess alive or not, and for the twentieth time he wished it were all over.

It wasn’t all over, of course. Down there somewhere in that city, in a room high in a residential skyscraper, an utterly imponderable and dangerous alien creature from another world was once more located and pinpointed in a specific area at a specific time. It was Paul Faircloth’s job, now, to see that he did not again break through the dragnet.

Jean’s parting hug was still warm in his memory, and he remembered the worry in her big gray eyes as she had kissed him and said, “Be careful, Paul. I wish I could go, too. I don’t know what I’d do if anything happened—” Only words, spoken aloud, but she had said so much, much more without words. Those unspoken things were only vague shadows in Paul Faircloth’s mind, but even so he could sense the meaning of those shadows.

A man was waiting for him down below on the landing ramp. The hangar vault Was dark and deserted, probably Security’s work, too, he thought. He scanned the agent’s ID card, even though the face was familiar enough. “Marino? I’m Paul Faircloth. Where do we stand?”

“No change since you left Washington,” Marino said. “He’s still there.” The agent was a small, wiry man with catlike movements and exceedingly bright eyes under his jet black eyebrows. “We’d better be on our way over while I brief you.”

Faircloth nodded, and stepped into the little tube-car waiting at the end of the platform. It was a tight fit for two men, and Paul stiffened by reflex as it lurched and dipped down the chute into a narrow tunnel, hanging from the overhead cable and speeding ahead on its electronic guide beam. “You said it was the Condor Building where he was spotted?”

Marino nodded. “In Center City Chicago. First thirty-six floors are commercial, and the twenty above are residential You’ve studied the floor plan? Fine. He’s pretty definitely holed up in a large residential suite on the forty-second floor. No guessing why he chose it, or how long he’s been there, but I’m one hundred percent certain that that’s where he is—” He shot Faircloth a nervous glance, almost apologetic. “I’m Psi-High, you know. That’s why I’m sure he’s there. I located him and then three of us got him triangulated. Hard to explain exacdy how, but we did, and we can keep him pinned pretty well, too. If he doesn’t try to shower us, that is. We’re pretty sure he knows we’re there.”

“What do you mean, shower you?”

Marino tapped his forehead grimly. “Throw a barrage at us, the works. This creature has powerful voltage, and I mean powerful. He showered one of our Psi-High people yesterday, and it was brutal. Nearly ripped his mind apart.”

Faircloth shivered. “But you can keep track of him.”

“Yes.” Marino lit a cigarette with nervous fingers. “Whether you can or not is something else again. No offense. I know it’s a touchy thing, but it’s just plain fact that psi-negatives have trouble keeping track of this bird at all without the help of psi-contact. You really shouldn’t be here at all, as far as logic is concerned, but those are the orders. Roberts put us Psi-Highs out to spot him, but he doesn’t want any Psi-Highs in on the kill.” Marino’s voice was flat with disappointment. “Political pressure, I guess. Wouldn’t do to give a Psi-High credit for anything.” He glanced at Faircloth and reddened. “Sorry, it just slipped out.” He bit his lip. “Anyway, you’re to have a dozen other psi-negatives to help you. I hope God’ll be helping you too.”

Faircloth grinned tightly. “Got you nervous?”

“It’s got me plenty nervous.”

“Well, cheer up. Those ‘orders’ were strictly for the record that Benjamin Towne is going to be seeing sooner or later. Roberts has no intention of pulling you off this, or any of the others, Psi-High or otherwise. As for me, I want your best Psi-High men—every one of them—to go in with me. We’ve got to get this creature, and get him cold. He’s slick, and he’s too dangerous to fool around with. Have you got the building sewed up?”

Marino grinned. “Tight as a vacuum.”

“Good. Keep it very unobtrusive and try to keep the Psi- Highs from broadcasting any more than they have to.”

Marino gave him a queer look. “They’ll do the best they can, of course.”

“Right.” Faircloth ran a hand through his brown hair, and loosened his tie a trifle. “As soon as rush hour is over and the building is cleared we’ll go up in the elevator. I want the power cut the second we step off, all over the building. Elevators, lights, everything. We’ll be on the forty-first floor, and we’ll have a team on the forty-third. Then we’ll close in together. Sound all right?”

Marino shrugged. “I guess so. Thing is, they had him boxed in just as tight in Des Moines last week and he slid right through.” The man’s eyes were worried. “We just don’t know what we’re fighting. That’s the whole trouble. Even the Psi- Highs are up a tree.”

The car gave a lurch, and slid to a stop. They stepped out into a brightly lighted tunnel filled with people emptying out of the huge building above. The two men waited to board an express surface elevator and stepped off on the main concourse of the Condor Building. The last sunset rays made a dazzling golden display on the banks of heliomirrors, and Faircloth blinked, shielding his eyes a moment after the softer light below. Then he glanced at his watch. “Let’s get some coffee,” he said. “We’ve got a few minutes.”

They slid into an eating booth along the concourse and dropped in coins for coffee. It was so clumsy, this whole approach, Faircloth thought. Three and a half weeks since the ship had been spotted along the Mississippi, and they were still just learning how clumsy they were. Right from the beginning, when the first report of alien contact had come in, and the ship itself discovered, the attempt to examine it was a blunder. Even a crack demolition team couldn’t get near it. It had exploded when they were ten yards away. And then picking up the alien’s trail—true, they had been able to trace his route from the first farmhouse where he had stopped the night he landed, then west through the farm country to Des Moines, then northeast to the great Chicago metropolis. But when it came to contacting the creature, or capturing him. . Faircloth shook his head. Clumsy just wasn’t the right word.

He glanced at Marino, and reached across the booth and buzzed for a newstape. He scanned the Washington news hurriedly—another upheaval in the Liberal Party over the Coalition question with South America—another proposed International Council meeting—and another vicious attack by Medical Affairs Secretary Benjamin Towne on the Hoffman Center’s training program for Psi-Highs. Denouncing Dr. Reuben Abrams as the leader in a plan to train all Psi- High deviants (Towne actually used the word I) and to seek repeal of the present laws preventing two Psi-Highs from marrying. Paul went tense, searching for Jean Sanders’ name. It was not mentioned, and he took a deep breath and clenched his fist. If that filthy rabble rouser ever dragged her name into the public eye—He finished his coffee, watching sourly as the tape moved slowly up the screen.

Then his eye caught a small item with a Des Moines dateline, well hidden among the minor items. He read it, frowning:

Faircloth snapped off the tape angrily and returned to his coffee. Finally he nodded to Marino. “Better drink up,” he said, “and contact your men. It’s time to go.”

Marino finished his coffee in a gulp. Then they stepped out onto the concourse again.

Ted Marino left to give his men a final briefing, arranging to meet Faircloth back in the concourse five minutes later. Paul found a visiphone relay booth, and sank his long, lean body down in a relaxer facing the screen. The last of the rush.hour people were still drifting by in the corridor;

Paul watched them anxiously. If only he could talk to Jean! He wondered what she would think of the news item from Des Moines. He battled an impulse to call her, then compromised and dialed the priority code for the Federal Security Commission offices in Washington.

The relays clicked, and the code carried him through the front-line secretaries without any trouble. He gave a sigh of relief. He was in no mood to argue with secretaries. A moment later he was blinking at Roberts’ 3-D image on the screen.

Roberts’ face, usually quite youthful in sharp contrast to his gray hair, looked haggard now. He nodded to Faircloth. “You got there, then. Good. How does it look, Paul?”

“Everything’s just real nice,” Faircloth growled. “They think they’ve got him pinned. I hope so. The building here has a central power source, and we can bottleneck the whole place if we time it right.”

“Don’t miss, Paul.” Roberts’ voice was tense. “Whatever you do, don’t miss.”

“What’s the matter?”

“Ben Towne has worked his way into this.”

“Well, that figures. But what can he do?”

“Maybe a lot, if we miss this time. He has the whole Isolationist Party behind him, and the Liberals can’t hold out long on no results. Towne has a whole lot of people worried about these alien rumors, and if we don’t wrap it up fast I’m afraid things here in the Capitol are going to blow sky high.”

Faircloth scowled. “Did you see the newstapes tonight?”

“You mean the Bishop girl in Des Moines?” Roberts nodded unhappily. “Got the report from Des Moines on it this afternoon. Trumped up from beginning to end. I tell you, Towne is not playing around. I don’t know just how he plans to work tilings, but I’m afraid that story was just a starter. He’ll do everything he can to spread the rumor without an outright Security leak, and he’ll do his best to connect the alien with the Psi-Highs in the public eye. And you know Ben Towne when he gets rolling. The way things are in the Senate now, that could mean trouble.”

“Who’s controlling Security news releases?”

Roberts gave a short laugh. “I am, of course. But they’re monitored by the Cabinet, and Towne is on the Cabinet. Don’t miss tonight, my friend.”

Faircloth nodded, and signaled off. He sat swearing quietly to himself for a few moments. Then he saw Marino and swung out into the hall again, glancing at his watch. “Ready?”

Marino nodded. “I’ve got teams placed on the forty-first and forty-third. Power goes off when we step off the elevator on the forty-first. Okay?”

Faircloth grunted, and spread out a floor plan of the Forty- second floor, studying the careful pencil marks. “Is the building all clear?”

“The commercial levels, yes. And autolocks go on every door in the place but the one we want when the power goes off.”

“Good. At least we won’t have residents underfoot. You’ve got Psi-Highs posted outside the building?”

“Yes, in ’copters. Circling the building fairly close, out of sight range of the forty-second.”

“All right. We’ll move in on him as soon as the power goes off. I want cameras going everywhere—in the corridors, in the stairwells, even the ’copters outside. We’re going to get him, but in case somehow we don’t I want to see where he goes, and especially I want to get a picture of him. A good picture of him. Maybe he can fuzz up human eyesight, but he’ll have trouble fuzzing up a photo plate. Let’s go.”

They stepped on the elevator, felt it rush up until the automatic brake slowed it and stopped at the forty-first floor. They stepped off. As the door closed behind them, the whirring motors died, and the lights went out. Faircloth led the way swiftly to the closed stairwell where they met four other men standing by, one with a motion camera. “Cover everything,” Paul said sharply. “If you see him, stop him with a shocker, not with pellets. We want him alive.” He opened the stairwell and started up with the men behind him. Moments later they met part of the group from the forty-third; they started swiftly down the park corridor toward the pinpointed residential suite—

And then, like a bolt of lightning, something exploded in Faircloth’s brain. He cried out, felt his arms jerk, and fell forward on his face. Wave after wave of blinding light seemed, to bum through his brain; he couldn’t see, couldn’t move, couldn’t even force a sound from his throat. Somewhere nearby he heard shouts, and a whistle shrilled. Someone was running, and someone else tripped over him, tumbling to the floor with a bone-jarring crash. He tried to move, tried to fight the blinding, searing waves of fire in his mind, like staring into a succession of flashbulbs going off whoom—whoom—whoom right before his eyes, but nothing worked right. Three shots rang out even as he dragged himself to his knees, controlling his rebellious muscles by sheer force of willpower. Blinded, he clawed his way along the wall as more footsteps echoed frantically in the corridor. Suddenly, Marino was shaking his arm, helping him up, and together they pushed aside the open door of the target suite as a roar of malignant, derisive laughter seemed to burst and echo and re-echo in his mind . . . .

Faircloth opened his eyes. Through a burning red haze of pain, he saw the empty room. Then his legs gave way and he collapsed on a chair, exhausted, as Marino raced from room to room like a madman.

“Gone,” Marino groaned.

Unbelieving, Faircloth stared at him. “You—you got him on the stairs, didn’t you?”

Marino shook his head miserably. “Nobody could see him. Not a soul. He hit us with a shower and that was that. Must have gone down that stairwell like a shot, and if we didn’t get him, nobody stopped him below either.”

“What about the cameras?” Faircloth gasped.

“Three of them are smashed. I don’t know about the rest”

“You’re certain?”

Marino didn’t answer. The answer was obvious. The alien had struck once, and slipped away from them like a ghost in the night.

Robert Roberts was waiting, nervous as a cat, when Faircloth arrived at the Security office. There were deep circles under his pale gray eyes, and a dark stubble on his chin. He greeted Paul with a silent handshake; then they went back into the rear office, with its modern paneled wall looking out across the valley to the tall white buildings of the Capitol. Once it had been an inspiring sight to Faircloth. Now he hardly even noticed. A rocket rose in the morning air, leaving its white vapor trail like a pillar of cloud behind it. The weekly Venus rocket, probably, or maybe one of the dozens of speculator ships off for Titan. Faircloth scowled and sank into a relaxer with a sigh. “I’m sorry, Bob,” he said. “It was a bust. I thought we had him cold, and we weren’t even near him.”

Roberts mixed a drink and shoved it across the desk to Paul. “Okay, sometimes we don’t win. What we’ve got to know is why you weren’t even near him. Something went sour. What was it?”

Faircloth was silent for a long moment. Then he said: “Bob—you’re not going to like this.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean I think it’s more than this one fiasco in Chicago. I think our whole approach is sour from one end to the other. I think it has been from the beginning. And unless we try something radically different, I don’t think we’re going to get this bird, ever.”

“But what’s wrong with the approach?” Roberts asked.

“We’re outclassed, that’s what’s wrong with it. This alien is out of our league—way out. We haven’t got a thing that can touch him, and he knows it. He’s a telepath, Bob, and I don’t mean halfway. Not just a feeble, groping, half- baked, half-trained, poorly developed Psi-High human. We’re dealing with telepathic power no human Psi-High ever began to approach.”

Roberts’ lips were tight. “Exactly what did happen in Chicago?”

“That’s just it. I don’t know. The building was virtually escape-proof. The boys had every exit guarded three ways from Sunday. The power was off in the entire building, and there was no way he could get out short of walking through walls. And we had them walls guarded just in case he did that. We had him sewed up beyond hope of escape, and then when we went in to get him, whammo!” Faircloth clenched his fists, trembling. “I don’t want to go through that again, Bob, not for anything. It was murderous. He hit one of the boys so hard that it’s going to take the psych-docs six months to get his brain unscrambled. I got off easy. All he handed me was a sort of gentle rap on the knuckles.”

“And he slid through your net.”

“Clean. As far as I know he just walked out and hailed a taxi. Believe me, all I was trying to do was merely get up off the floor. He smashed the cameras and got away without leaving a trace.”

Roberts shook his head and fished a folder from his desk. “He didn’t smash all the cameras.” He shoved the pictures across to Paul. “See what you make of those.”

Faircloth peered at them. There were several frames, obviously printed from motion-film. Pictures of a humanoid figure running down a passageway. The face was not visible. “Not much help,” he said. “Not even for a clothing description. Can’t even be sure it isn’t one of our men.”

Roberts sighed. “I know. And you didn’t see him at all?”

Faircloth shook his head. “As I said, the whole approach is sour. We’re never going to get him this way.”

“Then I hope you’ve got some different ideas.”

“I have.”

“Well, I’m glad somebody has.” Some of the tiredness left Roberts’ face. “Let’s have them.”

Paul Faircloth looked at the Security chief and shook his head. “Sorry,” he saicj. “First I want some answers, straight answers about a certain individual.”

“You mean Ben Towne.”

“That’s right.”

Roberts scowled. “AH right, I’ll tell you about Ben Towne. It isn’t pretty. Frankly, this Chicago business was the break Towne had been waiting for. There were Psi-Highs involved in that raid. Towne knows it. And he’s going to build a story of Psi-High alliance with the alien that could get every Psi-High in the country thrown into prison and might even put Ben Towne in political control of the country.”

Faircloth nodded grimly. “Dries he have any concept of how dangerous this creature is?”

Roberts snorted. “Of course he has I But Ben Towne is obsessed with a single idea, and it twists and distorts everything else in his mind.” He leaned forward, staring at Paul. “Benjamin Towne wants to wipe psi-positive faculties off the face of the Earth. He hates Psi-Highs. Oh, I don’t know the motives behind it—maybe the fact of his own imperfect body makes him hate what he considers a sort of super- perfection appearing in the human race. It’s a false premise, of course. The predisposition of certain people to extrasensory powers is neither a perfection nor an imperfection; it’s a quality their minds happen to have. Just another tiny step in the evolutionary chain, and it isn’t all fun and games for them either. It isn’t any fun for a woman like Jean Sanders to have to be gratuitously assaulted, day after day, by all the rot flowing out of some of the cesspool minds we have walking the streets. That’s part of the price she has to pay for her precious gift, and for her special training. She can’t turn it off too well, any more. Well, it happens to be a dominant gene factor, and in our society it happens to put the Psi-High in a slightly advantageous position in comparison to psi-negatives.” Roberts threw up his hands. “But Benjamin Towne’s motives don’t really matter. He was smart enough to realize that there were lots of people who hated and feared the expansion of Psi-High powers in our society. He started fighting against it, and he’s ridden that fight right into the Cabinet. Already he’s got the Psi-Highs marked and hamstrung. His next goal is to block any training for them, even if it means destroying the Hoffman Medical Center in order to do it.”

“But they’re only doctors,” Faircloth protested.

“Not quite; they’re more than doctors. They’re researchers in a vast, government supported complex, looking for answers to questions about what human beings are and what they can do. They’re probing everywhere—in medicine, in biochemistry, in physiology, in psychiatry. And like researchers in other areas of science, they haven’t been overconcerned about whether what they learned was good for people or bad for people. They have simply been concerned to find out what human beings are capable of.”

“Well-is this bad?”

“Not necessarily—nor good, either,” Roberts said. “The Hoffman Center idea has never been massively popular; they’ve always been under attack from one quarter or another, and some of the things they’ve done have surely not been good. There was the big scandal about the Mercy Men, ’way back when the center was very new. Hiring bums and derelicts from Skid Roads and Front Streets all over the country as medical mercenaries, to serve as human guinea pigs was good business for research, I guess, but so repugnant to most people that it was finally outlawed by Congress. And take the rejuvenation program—Senator Dan Fowler found the flaw in that, and Carl Golden got it stopped for good when he won his Senate seat. Oh, they still use the techniques, all right, rebuilding bodies torn, to pieces in auto accidents, prolonging productive lives for a few years, fighting back incurable diseases. But mass-rejuvenation turned out to be meddling—bad meddling—with natural processes that had a purpose to them, and so it was stopped.”

There was silence for a moment. Paul Faircloth took a deep breath. “And do you think that training Psi-Highs is also bad?”

“Of course I don’t, but Ben Towne does.”

“And where does the alien fit in this picture?”

Roberts shrugged. “It’s obvious, isn’t it? Towne has taken an issue and split the country wide open with it. And now, along comes a visitor from the stars, an alien visitor who steps out of his ship and disappears into the population like a spirit. An alien who is fully telepathic. Towne can monitor the news releases, he can even help decide on the security classification of information about the alien. It’s been kept top secret, so far. But Ben can control the news enough to tie Psi-High humans and a fearfully dangerous enemy alien together so neatly in the public mind that every Psi-High in the country will be in danger of his life. It’s political dynamite, and Towne is controlling the fuse.”

Faircloth’s face was white. “And if the alien is caught?”

“At this point, it’s very touchy. It might be that the ‘rumored’ liaison between Psi-High humans and invaders from space could be proved. And then Towne would be in the driver’s seat.”

Faircloth nodded bitterly, and stood up, shaking the creases out of his trousers. His face was grim. As he reached for his hat, his hand was trembling. “That’s just about the way I had it lined up, too,” he said. “So long, Bob. Have a nice hunt.”

“Sit down, Paul.”

“Sorry, I’m not working to help Ben Towne.”

“No, but you’re going to work to fight him,” Roberts snapped. He sat up straight behind the desk. “You’re going to work with me, my friend, and you’re going to follow through to the bitter end. You and Jean both.”

Faircloth’s eyes darkened. “Jean’s not involved in this.”

“I am afraid she is. Just as deeply as you are. And you and Jean are going to do what I tell you to do in this investigation whether you happen to like it or not. That is, if you ever want to marry her.”

Faircloth turned slowly. “What do you mean by that? What are you saying?”

“I’m saying that you happen to be Psi-High, Paul. And I just happen to know it.”

Paul Faircloth sank down in the chair again, staring at Roberts in silence. Then he said: “That’s a pretty bad joke, Bob.”

Roberts nodded. “I’ll say it’s a joke. It’s a colossal horselaugh on Ben Towne. He was so dead certain that those Federal registry files of his contained the names and life histories of every psi-positive individual in the country! It’s no joke as far you’re concerned, though. It’s against Federal law to forge psycho-testing papers, Paul. It’s against the law for a Psi-High to remain unregistered, and in the rare cases that have turned up the courts haven’t exactly been lenient. It’s also against the law for two Psi-Highs to marry; the law’s attitude is that having people around with a single dominant gene is bad enough without doubling them up, and that law is enforced to the limit, regardless of how well or poorly the psi-powers are developed in the individuals involved. Of course, Jean’s work with Dr. Abrams at the Hoffman Center has developed her powers amazingly. Yours must be pretty crude for you to keep them hidden so well.”

“You can’t prove a thing you’re saying,” Faircloth said.

“True enough—nothing substantial. Just a few curiosities in your history that caught my eye, and then a little quiet personal investigation. You were already out of school when the registry law was passed, and you must have gotten somebody to leak the examination to you early. How you did it, I neither know nor care. But the law provides for compulsory retesting any time anyone raises a reasonable doubt.” He smiled at Faircloth cheerfully. “Care” to have me call Dr. Abrams? He’s got some nice definitive tests.”

Faircloth’s eyes fell. “That won’t be necessary.” He sighed and sank wearily back into the relaxer. “I guess I knew I’d be spotted sooner or later. I even thought for a while that Marino had spotted it.”

“He did.”

“But I never thought you’d be the one to crowd me.”

Roberts looked up at him. “Paul, I’m not fighting you. Matter of fact, I’m not even threatening you nor telling you what you have to do. I’m not going to call the law on you; it’s a vicious law that I hate as much as you do, even though I have the job of implementing it. If you want to walk out on me and this invesigation right now, you can do it and I won’t lift a finger against you. All I’m really doing is asking you not to walk out.”

“What do you want me to do?”

“I want you to work with me until this alien is caught. I think we can nail him, and I think we can sink Benjamin Towne’s boat at the same time. I’m convinced that there’s no single human being in the country as dangerous to Ben Towne and his ambitions as an unregistered, unidentified Psi-High. And that’s just what you are. With you and Jean working as a team, I think we can wrap up this alien hunt and turn it to the advantage of every Psi-High in the country.”

Faircloth shook his head, puzzled. “I don’t follow you.”

“Are you blind? Think for a minute. If one telepathic alien has made a landing on this planet, don’t you suppose others are going to follow? And if they do—suppose they mount a massive invasion—who do you think is going to stop them?”

The light broke, and Faircloth nodded. “Of course, I was just so wrapped up in my own problems that I never thought—but you’re right.”

“Okay, you said you had some ideas. Let’s have them.”

“They may not be any good,” Paul said. “And it would take Jean to put them across.”

“Jean is willing. She’s been reading this whole conversation from the next room.”

“Then let’s get her in here and do some planning. The first job we have is to pin down this alien and keep him pinned.”

Hours later Jean Sanders tossed her pencil on the desk, and flopped down cross-legged on the floor. “I think we’re going around in circles,” she said in disgust. “Three different circles,” she added, with an owlish glance at Bob Roberts.

“All right, I know we’re tired.” The Security chief sighed.

“But the answer is here, somewhere,” Faircloth said doggedly. “It’s got to be here I We have all the data we need, if we could only pinpoint some way to use it Or at least we’ve got enough data to make a start.”

“The more I think about this whole business,” the girl said, “the more fishy it looks.” She was a pretty girl, with a slender face, black brows, and huge gray eyes. She was twenty-three, but her slim figure made her look sixteen. “From what we know about this alien and what he could do, what we know that he’s actually done doesn’t make any sense at all. It gets fishier and fishier the more we talk about it.”

Paul nodded. “Exactly. There’s something that we aren’t seeing or realizing, or something important that we just don’t know about this creature.”

“Well, let’s see what we do know,” said Roberts. “We’ve got a photograph that isn’t worth a plugged nickel. We’ve got a few photos of the outside of the ship before it exploded. We know that he’s Psi-High, fully telepathic, and able to muddle up the minds of all who see him so they can’t describe him.”

“Or can’t see that anything’s wrong about him,” Jean added. “He must have a disguise. Maybe it isn’t perfect enough. Maybe he has to work constantly with his mind to hide all the little flaws.”

Faircloth walked across the room, staring at the walls. “Then there’s the matter of the ship. It was found near Gutenberg, Iowa, on a bluff overlooking the Mississippi, over a month ago. That’s a fact. Some farm kids found it, but didn’t go near it. Scared stiff. Told their father, and he called the police, and they called Security. I don’t suppose there was any way to tell how long the ship had been there before it was found?”

Roberts shook his head. “The biologists and geologists both had a whack at it, but the explosion destroyed all the flora around it and tore up the ground area within twenty feet of it. Nothing left to study. Well, anyway, no occupant of the ship was found, and no trace of where the occupant might have gone; at least, not then. Security sent a scout squad down to photograph the ship and try to examine it, and it blew into a million pieces right in their faces.”

“How many of the million pieces were recovered?” Faircloth asked.

“About ten. Fragments of aluminum alloy, completely twisted and distorted. Told us nothing.”

Faircloth nodded. “Okay. Then there was the report from the Psi-High in Des Moines, and you turned up the farmer and his wife who saw the alien the first night. What was their name? Bettendorf, Jacob Bettendorf. Not very bright folks, I gather. They fed him, but refused him lodging and sent him on his way. Noticed nothing odd, except that the farmer said his eyes felt tired all the time the creature was there, couldn’t seem to focus right. How did this description compare with the others you’ve gotten?”

Roberts shrugged. “The same, or I should say, consistently different. Nobody seems to agree on anything. It’s obvious that nobody has actually seen him in any detail at all. People just think they have.”

“You know,” said the girl suddenly, “that’s one of the things that bothers me. A lot of those people out there are Ben Towne’s strongest supporters. They don’t like Psi-Highs. They keep watching like hawks for people who act like Psi-Highs—you know, the way we’re likely to nod and start answering a question before a person gets it half asked; or the way we sometimes forget to control our expressions when somebody is saying one thing out loud and thinking something directly the opposite. People spot that, and get very indignant at being caught red-handed. Snooping, they call it. But this alien went right past them. Not even a suspicion.”

“He got into the city fast, though,” Roberts observed. “City people tend to be a lot less observant of others around them than country folks.”

“All right,” said Paul. “That fits well enough. Now, since he was willing to destroy his ship, we can assume that he planned to stay a while. That probably means that others were here before him. He’s just altogether too confident for any advance scout. He knew he could mingle with people, and stay, here, and observe, and learn, and get away with it. Probably his job is to accumulate information, detailed information about human beings. Well, with full-blown telepathy working for him, he must really be having a time for himself! And unless I miss my guess, the information he wants most of all is information about Psi-Highs.”

Roberts shrugged. “Okay, I agree. But what does this add up to?”

Fail-cloth looked at him grimly. “Seems to me it adds up to one thing: we aren’t going to catch him in any dragnet. No matter how skillfully we lay it out. No matter how many Psi-Highs we have in on it, and no matter how well trained they are.”

“Then you’re saying that we aren’t going to get him, period.”

“Not quite. I think we can catch him if we go at it the right way. At least we might have a chance, with a different approach. Well have no way to evaluate it, at first, because of the nature of the approach, but in the end, we’ll either have the alien or we won’t, and I think there’s a better than even chance that we will. If we keep playing the game we played in Chicago, we’re going to lose every tune.”

“But what went wrong in Chicago?” Roberts cried.

“Nothing, except that we were whipped before we even started. Look at it this way. He’s outguessed us, consistently, every time, right from the start. And it’s not really surprising that he has. He doesn’t need a three-hour briefing and a road map to tell what’s going on around him. All he needs is a hint, the barest touch of a man’s mind, the slightest flicker of contact, and he already has enough of a headstart to figure out everything that’s going to happen from then on. Just like a chess game—you play along, and suddenly your opponent makes a move that reveals a whole complex gambit he’s been pursuing that you hadn’t even noticed before. But our alien friend spots the same gambit before the first move instead of after the tenth. We make a move, and he’s already ahead of us. By now he knows human minds can operate along fairly logical lines, he can figure out all the logical possibilities before they happen, and figure a defense for each possibility, and we just can’t trap him, Psi-Highs or no Psi-Highs.”

Roberts scowled at him. “Then what do you propose?”

Faircloth grinned. “That we change the ground rules on him without tipping him off. That we take all the evidence we have here, and feed it into a computer and let it meditate a while and plot out a supremely logical approach for us to follow in order to trap the creature on the basis of what we know about him now. Then, we take that supremely logical approach and change it a bit. This creature is assuming well follow a logical approach. What we need is a supremely illogical approach.”

The call they were expecting came through at last, at three o’clock one morning after they had almost given it up in despair.

It had been a long, heartbreaking wait. Time after time Faircloth had argued that they must have been very close in Chicago, closer than they realized. The alien must actually have been frightened, he insisted, because since Chicago there had been no sign, no clue to his whereabouts, no hint that he was even in existence any more. Yet Faircloth was certain that the contact was bound to come, sooner or later.

It was possible, of course, that the change in the search pattern had worried the alien. Logically, a dragnet should have been set up in Chicago, and the entrance-ways to all the large cities guarded carefully. That was what the computer had said. “Probability is strong that the alien desires to remain in a city, but evidence suggests that Chicago may not be the optimum location for him. Recommend heavy Security measures be taken in all surrounding cities of size as well as Chicago. Probability is four-plus high that the alien is seeking some specific information. Advise close control of all spaceports, air transit outlets and rolling-road escape-ways.”

And so forth. That was what the computer had said. Of course, the computer was not infallible, but its analysis and recommendations were utterly logical on the basis of the information given it.

Which was exactly the reason they were being carefully ignored.

It was a gamble, and no one was more aware of this than Faircloth. Reluctantly, Roberts pulled all Security personnel out of the Chicago area, Psi-High and otherwise, except for a small crew headed by Ted Marino, who were scattered throughout the city with orders to carefully avoid contact among themselves. A gamble, but it was not entirely guesswork that made Paul so certain that the alien, if left suddenly and completely alone, would try to make contact with a Psi-High mind sooner or later. Of course, that conclusion itself was the result of logical reasoning. No matter how they tried to remove logic from their approach, it crept in, it had to creep in. It was logical that a telepathically sensitive creature, visiting an alien planet in obvious secrecy, would seek to learn something about the segment of the population that might be able to expose his presence. He would seek signs of his own kind of mental capability. He might even have to; Paul knew all too well that a Psi-High mind cut off and isolated from any psi-contact soon was a sick mind. That was why Psi-Highs always settled in the cities, why they sought each other out with such fierce, desperate clannishness—a tendency which, in itself, had bred suspicion of Psi- Highs in the minds of psi-negatives. What psi-negatives couldn’t really comprehend was that with Psi-Highs it wasn’t a matter of choice. It was a desperate need. And Paul knew how overwhelming that need could be.

No, logically the alien would make contact with a human Psi-High, sooner or later. It would not be difficult to spot such a contact. The Psi-Highs were very few in number, only a couple of hundred scattered in small colonies in the larger cities of the North American States. With painstaking care each one had been contacted and warned, and those working in Security were staked out in the most likely places for the contact that they expected. The roads were left free, and the airports and spaceports were not checked. No dragnet- just an invisible network of human minds spread across the country, delicately tuned, waiting for the spark of contact.

Faircloth was asleep when the call finally came. He rolled groggily out of bed and snapped on the visiphone screen. Ted Marino’s face materialized eerily, a frightened, shaking Marino whose eyes were wide with horror, and whose hands jerked and jerked as he tried to control them. His voice was on the thin edge of hysteria. “He hit me, Paul. Just a little while ago. He hit me hard.”

Paul leaned forward, staring at the man’s face. He had expected contact. He had not expected this kind of contact. “Ted, are you hurt?”

“No, no. But let me tell you, I can’t take that again.”

“You’re sure it wasn’t just another Psi-High contacting you? It’s deadly important, Ted.”

Marino shook his head vehemently. “No, no, no. It couldn’t have been that. I know what normal Psi-High contact is like. This was—different. It was as if he’d opened up my skull and scooped out my brains.”

Faircloth nodded, trembling with excitement, “Did you try to fight him?”

“I tried. He had me wide open before I knew what had happened, but I tried. I—I think it puzzled him. It didn’t stop him at all, he just brushed it aside like cobwebs, but it puzzled him—” The man hesitated. “It was awful, Paul. I want to get this bird as badly as you, but I don’t know if I can stand another blast like that.”

“You aren’t going to have to,” Faircloth said. “You’ve done great, but your part in it is over now. Don’t write a report about what happened. Don’t even think about it. Get dressed and get on a plane out of there. Go to Florida, Rio, any place as long as its remote and out of touch. Use your expense account, and have yourself the time of your life.”

Marino’s eyes opened in amazement. “Are you crazy? I thought this was what we’ve been waiting for!”

“It is, but your part in the plan is over. Do what I say and don’t worry about it. When you’ve gotten a good rest come back to the Hoffman Center and take up your training with Dr. Abrams where you left off.” Paul flipped the switch and turned back to the room, exultant. He clapped his hands in glee, and began to pack his bag.

The chase was on, with a vengeance. But this time, the mouse was chasing the cat.

Then, as if a dam had broken, the reports began streaming in Three more from Chicago, one from Cleveland, from a Psi High technician there who was not even remotely connected with Security. From Pittsburgh, from New Philadelphia. Like a fearful ominous flood, reports of the alien’s contact swarmed in. Paul Faircloth and Jean Sanders plotted them, and waited, and got ready.

Their headquarters were in a small suite of rooms in a middle class residential hotel in the heavily built-up metropolitan area between Washington and Baltimore. Few Federal Security agents, Psi-High or otherwise, knew this; all most of the team had was a visiphone priority code number, and a special word-key for scrambling messages. Faircloth had insisted on this. Of all the agents posted and assigned, only Paul, Jean, and Roberts knew the true nature of the operation. Each of them worked out his own illogical details without even telling the other. The wisdom of such a procedure was graphically illustrated a dozen times over. The alien’s work, when he did it, was thorough. The operative in Pittsburgh had tried to fight back the alien’s telepathic overtures, as instructed, and suffered a burst of wrath that had left him blubbering in a corner for three days until a crew of Hoffman Center physicians located him and straightened him out with stimulants and glucose. More and more, the alien’s puzzlement and frustration and anger began to seep through in the contact reports, and Paul and Jean watched and nodded approvingly.

Meanwhile, other steps were taken. Three times, when they were certain the alien had left a locality, they ordered cleanup squads to raid his former quarters, quizzing neighbors, asking multitudes of idiotic questions, uncovering half a dozen descriptions and leads—all of which they assiduously ignored. They began stabbing erratically at locations where the alien had not yet been, raids carried out with a relentless- ness and singleness of mind that left the unfortunates who were questioned shaking in their boots. Even the agents themselves were confused as to the purpose of these raids, and were cheerfully allowed to remain confused. Still other tactics were pursued, a series of disjointed, uncoordinated, abortive and harassing procedures, as though the whole search had suddenly fallen into the hands of a madman. A rocket ship bound for Venus was delayed four days beyond an opposition, adding a half-million dollars to the cost of fueling it. A whole series of road blocks was thrown up between New York and New Philadelphia, virtually paralyzing commercial traffic between the cities for two days, for no coherent reason. An order went out, quite arbitrarily, to apprehend and search all passengers on the great St. Louis-New York rolling-roads route, and Robert Roberts put in a grueling week trying to soothe the ruffled feelings of businessmen who had been held up in transit, and companies whose products had spoiled when the swift-moving strips had been halted for the shakedown.

Rumors began to drift out, rumors that there was an alien from the stars at large, that Federal Security was waging a vast underground battle to capture him before the news broke out. Telecasts buzzed with “it was alleged” and “unconfirmed reports say.” The tension mounted daily. Bit by bit, carefully sifted crumbs of information were dropped into the minds of the Psi-Highs who were still in the alien’s path, and all around the alien’s path. Long hours were spent in the headquarters suite, planning and coordinating the pattern. But in the end, it was a pattern well chosen and worth the effort, for it was soon evident that the alien was heading for the great eastern metropolitan area which surrounded the capital city as though he were drawn to the lodestone rock.

No attempt was made to contact him; quite the contrary. All the alien’s overtures yielded him no response other than futile attempts at shielding; no analysis of any contact was even attempted, and this knowledge was planted so that the alien was sure to learn it. Warnings of traps were planted in his path, “secret” knowledge of closing dragnets and carefully devised Psi-High weapons to be used against him. Occasionally such warnings were followed by abortive raids, always either too early to meet him or too late, always carried out by psi-negative Security men who had no more idea what they were doing than the man in the moon. But one by one, key facts were planted, pointing always in one direction, and always the alien moved toward the headquarters area.

Paul Faircloth and Jean Sanders seldom left the hotel even for a few minutes. Their job was to keep the pattern moving, and to plot out their individual tactics quite apart from each other. It was wearing; as the tension mounted, both of them grew more haggard. Paul had not found time to shave in a week, and there were dark circles under the girl’s eyes. Much of the time she just sat, tense, listening, waiting; other times she helped him work as he fed data into the field computer squatting in the suite. But even in the tension and exhaustion of the work, neither of them could forget the simple, awful fact that Paul Faircloth had been identified as a Psi- High, and that somehow, they would have to rearrange all the plans they had had for the future.

Each morning they spread the reports out on the table before them. “Closer,” Paul said one day. “And it’s on his own volition. He hasn’t been pushed. In fact, he’s been left out in the cold and he doesn’t seem to like it.”

The girl nodded, and glanced at the papers. “He’s definitely trying to ask questions, now, when he contacts. Karns’ call last night showed that better than any other. And of course Karns didn’t know any answers.”

Faircloth nodded. “None of them know the answers. That’s the beauty of it. Try as he will, he doesn’t get anywhere.”

“Not yet.” The girl rose, walking across the room. “Paul, I’m afraid. We’re shooting in the dark. We don’t know what we’re fighting against.”

“Are you sorry you’re in on it?”

“Oh, no!” She turned around, her face stricken. “It’s not that. It’s just—” His mind was suddenly filled with shadows, impressions struggling to get through, impressions that would make the use of words ridiculous. “Oh, Paul, I’m afraid for you, for both of us. If anything should happen—”

“Nothing’s going to happen.”

“But what about us? If something goes wrong—Roberts knows about you—”

“I’d rather Roberts knew than Ben Towne.”

The girl’s eyes were wide with fright. She seemed so small and helpless. “But we shouldn’t be together! Oh, Paul, why did Roberts have to find out? Why did anyone have to find out?” And then she was sobbing in his arms, and he held her close, trying to comfort her.

“Jeannie,” he murmured. “This just doesn’t do any good.”

“But it’s so unfair! Why shouldn’t I be allowed to marry you if I want to?”

“You know why as well as I do. Because people are afraid of us. There’s nothing we can do about it, that’s just the way people are. They’re always afraid of people who seem to threaten the way things have always been. So they passed the laws, and they think they’re right.”

“Ben Towne thinks they’re right!” she burst out scornfully. Her tears were hot on his cheek.

“Towne pushed the laws through, but he couldn’t have done it alone. People are afraid of someone carrying a single psi-positive gene, like you and me. What would they do if the gene were doubled? How could we tell what our children would be like? Look, Jeannie, think! You’re just now learning how to use your psi-powers, and look what you’re doing! You can almost get through to me, and I’ve had no formal training at all. I’ve been underground, just training myself as best I could. You’ve almost reached your limit. Dr. Abrams says you’ll have almost complete control in five years, and I could too, with the proper training. What would our children be like, with the psi-factor on both sides?”

“Well, what would be wrong with it?” The girl was fighting back the tears. “Are we such monsters? Have we done anything so terrible that we have to be caged like animals and kept under control like criminals?”

Paul shook his head. “People fear anything different, and they only know what they’ve been told. Ben Towne has been a vicious enemy, and enough people believe him to give him tremendous power. And there’s not one thing we can do about it.” He pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and dabbed at her face with it. “It doesn’t even pay to think about it, right now. We’ve got a job to do, Jeannie. It might be the most important thing the Psi-Highs have ever tried to do. We can’t flop on this job.”

“But Towne will just turn it against us.”

“Not if we work it right, he won’t. And I’ve got a hunch that we’re working it right.”

When it seemed that the strike-point could only be hours away, the visiphone buzzed and Roberts’ worried face appeared on the screen.

“Paul,” he said sharply, “there are some bad rumors around. I think we’re in trouble.”

Paul cursed. “What kind of rumors?”

“AH kinds,” said Roberts sourly. “They’re saying the hunt for the alien is a fraud, that nobody is doing anything at all about it. There were a couple of out-and-out charges that Psi-Highs are teaming up with the alien to make an attempt on the government.”

“Moon of Mars, can’t somebody put the lid on that man?”

“That wasn’t even Towne’s work. It was some Isolationist senator on One of their propaganda shows. There’s talk that the Liberals are purposely blocking an investigation of the Hoffman Center and their Psi-High program, and the President is out on a limb now that might break off any minute. I think Ben Towne is planning a direct confrontation, and that means we’re running out of time. You know that Congress hasn’t been joined into two solid political parties for over two hundred years, but it’s beginning to happen now, and it could be a bloody battle. If Towne can get the Civil Rights Party to swing their votes away from the President, it could force a general election.”

“Who’s the leader of the Civil Rights men?” Faircloth’s voice was sharp.

“That’s just the thing. It has been Mike Veriday. His son is a Psi-High, but his political stock has taken an awful nosedive since this rumor campaign started. The polls have got him trailing Kingsley from Kentucky by thirteen percent and losing ground fast. Now Kingsley, it seems, is in some unpleasant financial trouble, and some of Towne’s old cronies in the Senate have offered to clear him of some nasty charges if he plays along.” He paused for a long moment. “We haven’t got much time, Paul.”

“Well, I hope we don’t need much. But I think you can call in as many of our men as you need to. If things get too hot, list Jean and me as fugitives and throw out a dragnet for us. Because I think we’ll be working very much outside the law in another day or so.”

Roberts blinked at him. “Better tell me what you’re planning, Paul.”

“I think the less you know about it the better. Just one thing, though. You remember Eagle Rock? The place we built up in the Adirondacks that summer when we were in college? Put three men at a number where I can reach them, and give them the location of Eagle Rock. Then tell them to stand by with a fast jet scooter. Got that? And don’t let this leak, no matter what happens.”

“I wish you’d tell me—”

“We’re fighting for our lives now, Bob. And for every Psi- High in the country. I can’t tell you a thing more.”

Roberts nodded, then shrugged helplessly. “Eagle Rock,” he said. “You can count on it.”

Paul flipped the set off and winked at Jean. Together they settled back to wait for the alien to make his last contact.

He struck at ten o’clock that evening, with a ferocity beyond their worst expectations.

They had known that he was near. The reports had come in, and they had plotted and calculated his pathway, and waited. It was only a matter of time. The carefully planted information built a tangled, devious circle with a single Psi- High individual in the center.

Jean Sanders.

It had to be Jean. Paul hated it, he wished it could be he, that somehow he could take the blow and shield her, but Jean Sanders was the only possible person to bait the trap. Her psi-powers had been developed carefully and painstakingly for years under the care of Dr. Reuben Abrams and his staff at the Hoffman Medical Center. A Psi-High individual was helpless to use his powers without training; just as a child was trained through long, grueling years to use his ordinary mental faculties of thought and perception and logic, a psi-positive mind required training to control its powers of extrasensory perception and psychokinetic control, if its powers were ever to be used.

Paul knew that all too well. He too was Psi-High, but he had not even known it for years. He had not realized, in his teens, when he had plagued and baited the two Psi-High boys in his high school class, that there might be a time factor in psi-positive development. Other Psi-Highs showed the signs of abnormal sensory apparatus at the age of one or three, or seven; invariably the schools spotted them, tested them, registered them, and sent them out into a life of fea and suspicion and hatred. They were considered freaks, the more dangerous because there was no physical identification that could be used to separate them from ordinary human beings. And certain men had recognized the power waiting for the man who took advantage of the people’s fears. Ambition is blinding; certain men could see the potential danger, real or imaginary, that might arise if Psi-High minds were to work their way into the government, into law or the judiciary. But Psi-High minds matured at different ages, and at different times. And some, like Paul Faircloth, slipped through the barrage of testing undetected, only to discover later that it really wasn’t the backs of the cards they Were reading at all, but the minds of their opponents that were holding the cards.

The faculty was feeble, in people like Paul. He could not read minds. He could not sort and integrate the confused tendrils of conscious and unconscious thought that broke like an endless stream from a human mind; he could not separate the reality of here-and-now thinking from the strands of fantasy and memory and supposition and frustration and desire and half-understanding and confusion that lay beneath the surface of those minds. He could detect falsehood and he could feel suspicion; he could sense love as he had never felt it before, and he could feel himself gripped in the helpless frustration of pity; he could savor excitement with a thousand tingling nerves, and he could sense the blackest depths of despair, but he could not sort them out into a coherent picture of the thoughts streaming from a human mind. It took a long hard training for a Psi-High mind to do that, and no shortcut had ever been found. Paul Faircloth could not do these things, and he knew he could not.

But Jean Sanders could. That was why she was waiting in the room with him when the alien struck.

She was walking across the room when it happened. She stopped suddenly, with a gasp. Even Paul caught the wave of fear and revulsion that swept from her mind. She stared for a moment, terrified, and then sank to the floor, gripping her head with her hands. Paul watched helplessly as she tried to fight back the powerful invasion, in spite of herself. “Please,” she gasped, white-faced. “Get me a pillow. Then- then listen—”

“Don’t fight him,” Paul whispered. “Let him in. Let him clear in. And then—jump on him. For all you’re worth, dig, dig deep.”

Her eyes became huge, like the eyes of an animal frightened beyond hope, cornered, attacked and helpless to fight back. Her neck strained back, and her teeth clenched. The blood drained from her face as she began moaning. “I can’t, Paul—” she cried. “I—I can’t get in—”

“You’ve got to—” Frantically, Paul tried to thrust out with his mind, tried to dig through the mind-staggering wall of power he felt in the room. The alien was close, very close, and. the presence of his mind was almost overwhelming. Paul tried to break through. . Suddenly, he felt a pang of white heat sear through his brain, driving him back, a sharp, savage stroke that doubled him up, clasping his hands helplessly to his ears. Suddenly it was gone, as swiftly as it had come. He stood panting for a moment. Then he managed to stumble over to Jean. She was not responding; he listened, heard the slow pounding of her heart. He shook her, gently; her eyes flickered open, her face filled with horror and loathing.

“Oh, Paul, I got—I got so little—”

“What did you get?”

“Nothing—a picture or two, nothing more. Oh, he was so strong, I couldn’t make a dent—”

“What pictures?”

She sat up, panting. “Nothing—definite. Ben Towne—yes, there was something about him—just the flash of a mental picture, no rationale connected with it. And some papers, some sort of file—” She clasped her hands to her head. “He- he stripped me clean! I can’t—”

“Jeannie! There must have been something eke.” She looked up at him, a strange light in her eyes. “I don’t understand it,” she whispered. “He seemed to be trying to tell me something. There was a picture of a farm—yes, a farm. And a dog—And blood on a pair of pants—”

Paul sat back, staring at her stupidly. All at once, something flashed in his mind, an idea so incredible that he hardly dared to think of it. An instant later he was on his feet, staring at the girl.

“He was trying to tell you this?”

“Yes. Something.”

“And no mistaking the picture?”

“Never. It was clear as crystal.”

He began throwing clothes into a bag as the girl sat there, watching him in growing alarm. “Stay here,” he said. “I’ll call you.”

“Paul—where—”

“It’s my show, now, Jeannie. You wait here, you’ll be all right. Rest, and say a prayer or two. Because I think I’ve got this alien pinned down for sure, this time.”

It was an incredibly dangerous move, but it was utterly necessary. Paul found a visiphone booth in the rear of a station with no people around, and quickly threw an adapter across the lens of the pickup and spun a roll of tape info it. The tape started when the party at the other end flipped on the switch, and the conversation was brief. Paul gave the address of a roof garden apartment in Central Washington, and then disconnected. After removing the film, he dialed a number he had given Roberts a few hours before. Ted Marino’s face appeared, and Paul heaved a sigh of relief. “Sorry, Ted, but I’m afraid you’re back in the game. How many men do you have?”

“Two.”

“Both Psi-High?”

“Certainly.”

Paul nodded. “All right, we’re beyond the law from now on. If you or the others want out, take off.”

Marino’s dark eyes sparked. “Roberts said this was the kill.”

“It’s not the kill you think. But it’s a kill, all right. Take the men to this address.” He gave the roof garden number. “Have a jet scooter there, and see that nobody spots it. Use Federal Security insignia. Sound off loud and clear if anything goes wrong. I’ll meet you there.”

He rang off, and soon was rising high above the city in his own jet scooter. In ten minutes he had reached the roof garden, and set the little ship gently down. He walked inside, and sat down in the darkness, and waited.

Moments later another jet scooter landed. Marino walked in with two men whom Paul remembered vaguely. He nodded to them, and they also sat down. Paul fingered the shocker in his pocket, his nerves screaming a thousand warnings in his ears.

The guard robot on the ground floor bleeped sharply. Paul reached for the lock release switch, and heard the elevator start to whine. He unlocked the door and left it ajar, then motioned to one of the men. “Cover the hallway, and back them up when they come. Don’t be worried about who it is.”

The man disappeared down the hall. Paul sat quietly; he heard the elevator open. There were footsteps, and tapping sounds. The footsteps stopped at the door.

“Come on in,” Paul called out. “Bob’ll be here in just a minute.”

The door swung open, and Secretary Benjamin Towne walked into the room, followed by two tight-faced men. One of the men had a hand in his jacket pocket. Towne blinked at Faircloth, and his grin began to fade into alarm. “Who in hell are you?”

“One of Roberts’ men.”

“Roberts said you had the alien here,” Towne snarled. His green eyes peered around the room.

Marino swung on the man to the right, bringing him down with one short blow. Paul slapped Towne’s cane to the floor, and pounced on the other guard like a cat. The secretary staggered against the door jamb, cursing a steady stream. Moments later the bodyguards were helpless, and Paul and Marino were dragging Towne out to the middle of the room. “The files,” Paul said sharply. “Where do you keep them?”

“What files?”

“The private files you’ve been keeping, Mr. Secretary. The blackmail files, the personal dossiers you’ve compiled or every registered Psi-High in existence. Your backstop, Mr Secretary—the files you planned to use to personally break every Psi-High on the wheel if for some reason you couldn’t beat them down legally. All right, I want those files. Now.”

Towne’s eyes were deadly; his breath came heavily. “You freaks will never get away with this.”

“The files, Mr. Secretary.”

Towne’s eyes went around the room fearfully. “The boys know where they are,” he said finally, his voice so low it was hardly audible.

“Any duplicates?”

“Not of the files you want.”

Paul nodded to Towne’s men. “Take these thugs down and revive them,” he told Marino. “And get the files. Then turn the boys over to Roberts. Tell him that they’re to be held in maximum security until this is over.” He turned back to Ben Towne. “As for you, you’re taking a little ride.”

“When this hits the papers, it’ll be the end of the road for you freaks,” Towne snarled. “You can’t stop it now.”

“Well see,” said Faircloth. “Now shut up and get moving.”

They left the cane in the room. Paul helped Marino load the man aboard the jet scooter. “Take him up to Eagle Rock. Keep him there. Dismantle the engine, if you have to, but keep him there. I’ll join you in a few hours.”

Marino nodded. “Should I report to Roberts?”

“Don’t bother. Roberts would have a stroke. I trapped Towne into coming over here by using a dummy visiphone tape of Roberts, which will put him in enough hot water as it is.”

“And where are you going?”

“West, for a few hours. I’ve got a visit to make. I’ve got to see a man about a dog.”

The farmer blinked across the table at him, red-eyed and suspicious. “I don’t know what you want,” he was saying, querulously. “I didn’t ask for no trouble with your Federal men. They asked me all them questions, and I told them—”

“That’s right,” said Faircloth. “I’m just rechecking. You were the first human being the alien contacted, as far as we can tell. The ship landed on your property, didn’t it?”

The farmer nodded. “Over by the river. Scrub oak and elms standing over there, on the bluff. Haven’t never cleared it because it’d be too rocky to farm.”

“All right, all right,” said Faircloth sharply. “I want you to tell me what happened that night.”

The farmer’s eyes flitted to Faircloth’s face, and back down to the table. “I already told you twenty times,” he whined. “Why pick on me? I couldn’t help it he happened to stop here. Heard him on the porch about ten o’clock at night. I was just gettin’ ready for bed. And he said he was travelin’ through and wanted something to eat. We don’t see strangers around here very often, mister—” He looked up at Faircloth fearfully. “I—I looked at him, and he seemed all right to me. My eyes was tired, like I said, I couldn’t see him too well, but he come in, and ate. Didn’t want to bed him down, but he said he had to make on for Des Moines anyway.”

Faircloth watched the man’s eyes. “Details, Mr. Bettendorf. You’ve skipped a few things, haven’t you? I have your original statement here, filed by our field agent” He pulled out a sheaf of papers and scanned them in the dim kitchen light “Says something about your dog barking—”

The farmer’s face went white. “Anything wrong with that? I reckon the dog did bark. I don’t remember.”

“And you went to open the door, and the stranger was there on the porch, eh?”

The farmer nodded his head eagerly. “I told you everything.”

“And you brought him in, and fed him, and then sent him on his way?”

“That’s right, just like I said.”

“You’re a liar,” said Faircloth. He eyed the man coldly. “Try the story over again.”

The farmer jolted to his feet, his eyes feverish. “I done just like I said, you can’t call me no liar! I heard the dog barking—”

“And you opened the door, and saw the stranger there.” Faircloth’s voice was sharp. “So then what? Step by step. Minute by minute. I mean it, mister, I want the truth.”

“I—I looked at him—”

“With just the porch light on?”

“That’s right, just like I just showed you—”

“And what did the stranger say?”

“He said, ‘I’m a traveler, and I’d like something to eat.’ ”

“And what did his voice sound like?”

The farmer faltered. “It was funny-like gravel in a tin can. A funny kind of a voice—”

“And where was the dog all this time?”

The farmer blanched. “He—he was somewhere outside. He saw it was all right—”

“Where’s the dog now?”

“I sold him. I mean he ran away. You can’t keep a dog forever, mister.”

Faircloth’s face was very close to the old man’s. “The stranger was out on the porch, and you talked to him, and let him come in. And then what happened?”

“I—he sat down at the table, I think—I—I—”

“You went over to get some food from the stove, didn’t you?”

“Yes, yes, that’s right—”

“And then you saw blood on his pants, didn’t you? And you remembered hearing your dog give a yelp, out there in the yard, didn’t you? And that stranger had blood all over his pants and boots, didn’t he?”

The farmer’s eyes were wide with fear, and he was shaking his head helplessly. “No—no—”

And so you took that shotgun off the rack over there and you shot him, didn’t you?”

And then the old man’s face was in his hands, and he was bending over the table, crying like a baby—huge, fearful sobs racking his bony shoulders. “He killed my dog,” he choked out. “He killed my Brownie, gave him a kick that split his head wide open. He didn’t have to do that to poor old Brownie, did he? I knew he was a bad one when he did that. Yes, I shot him, right through the chest. Buried him down by the river, what was left of him.”

The news broke to the nation that night, and the country went into a panic unequalled since the days of the Chinese Confrontation. Paul Faircloth spent an hour on the visiphone from Des Moines, talking to Robert Roberts, going over the whole business, from beginning to end, while the Security chief stared at him as though he were demented. Finally Roberts put a call through to the President. Half an hour later, while Faircloth was making his way back to Washington, Roberts was in top-secret conference with the Senate leaders and the Cabinet and finally with the President himself. At last the carefully prepared news broke. It was an official White House news conference, and it was barely over when the radios and TVs were carrying the announcement.

Faircloth brought his plane down in Washington. He saw the crowd swarming across the landing strip before he could get unstrapped. A dozen flashbulbs popped, and between him and the Security limousine was a tight circle of reporters.

“How long has the alien been at large, Mr. Faircloth?” one of them asked.

“Sorry. The chief will have to answer that.”

“Is there any doubt that he’s telepathic?”

“No doubt whatsoever. I know that from personal experience. It’s the only way he could move freely in the population.”

“How was he first detected?”

Paul smiled to himself. “The President told you that, didn’t he? A Psi-High citizen spotted him in Des Moines. The Psi-Highs have been on his trail ever since.”

One of the reporters was tugging at his arm. “There’s been a lot of rumor about some kind of—well, conspiracy between the alien invader and the Psi-Highs in this country.”

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:

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.

“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 announcement 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.”

“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.”