World of Chance

Chapter X

At 5.30 a.m. the heavy construction rocket settled down in the centre of what had once been London. In front of it and behind it razor-sharp transports hissed to smooth land­ings and disgorged parties of armed guards. They quickly fanned out and took up positions to intercept stray Directorate police patrols.

Within a few moments the old building that was the offices of the Preston Society had been surrounded.

Reese Verrick stepped out and followed his construction workers to the side of the building. The air was chill and thin; buildings and streets were moist with night dampness, grey, silent structures with no sign of life.

"This is the place," the foreman said to Verrick. He indicated a courtyard strewn with rubble. "The monument is there."

Verrick raced up the littered path to the courtyard. Workmen were already tearing down the steel and plastic monument; the yellowed plastic cube which was John Preston's crypt had been yanked down and was resting on the concrete. Within the translucent crypt the dried-up shape had shifted slightly to one side; the face was obscured by an arm flung across the glasses and nose.

"So that's John Preston!" Verrick said.

The foreman squatted down to examine the seams of the crypt. "It's a vacuum-seal, of course. If we open it here it'll pulverize to dust particles."

"All right," Verrick agreed reluctantly. "Take the whole works to the labs. We'll open it there."

The work crews who had entered the building reappeared with armloads of pamphlets, tapes, records, endless boxes of documents and printing supplies. "The place is a store­room," one of them said to the foreman. "They had junk heaped to the ceiling. There seems to be a false wall and some kind of subsurface meeting chamber. We're knocking the wall down."

Verrick wandered into the building and found himself in the front office; only the bare water-stained walls, peeling and dirty, remained. The office led to a yellow hall. Verrick headed down it, past a fly-specked photograph of John Preston still hanging among some rusty hooks. "Don't forget this," he said to his foreman.

Beyond the picture a section of wall had been torn away, disclosing a crude false passage running parallel to the hall. Workmen were swarming about, hunting for more concealed entrances.

Verrick folded his arms and studied the photograph. Preston had been a tiny, withered leaf of a creature with wrinkled ears in a tangle of hair. Small, almost feminine, lips above a stubbled chin, not prominent but hard with determination. A crooked, lumpish nose (Preston was partly Jewish) surmounted an unsightly neck protruding from a food-stained shirt.

It was Preston's eyes that attracted Verrick. Two un­compromising, steel-sharp orbs that smouldered behind thick lenses. They glowered fiercely at Verrick; their alive-ness startled him. Even behind the dusty glass of the photograph the eyes seemed hot with fire and life and excitement.

Verrick turned away as the foreman announced:

"All loaded—the crypt, the stuff we found in the build­ing, the snap-models of the layout..."

Verrick followed his foreman back to the ship and almost immediately they were on their way back to A.G. Chemie.

Herb Moore appeared as the yellowed cube was lowered to a lab table. "This is his crypt?" he asked as he began rubbing dirt from the translucent shield that covered John Preston's withered body. "Get this stuff off," he ordered.

"It's old," one of the technicians protested. "We'll have to work carefully or it'll turn to powder."

Moore grabbed a cutting tool and began severing the shield from its base.

The shield split, brittle and dry with age. Moore clawed it away and from the opened cube a cloud of musty air billowed out and swirls of dust danced in their faces and made them cough and pull back.

Round the work-table vidcameras ground away, making a permanent record of the procedure.

Moore impatiently signalled. Two technicians lifted the wizened body and held it at eye-level. Moore poked at the face with a pointed probe, then suddenly grabbed the right arm. It came off without resistance and Moore stood holding it foolishly.

The body was a plastic dummy.

"Imitation!" He threw the arm down violently.

Moore walked all around the dummy, saying nothing to Verrick until he had examined it from all sides. Finally he took hold of the hair and tugged. The skull-covering came off, disclosing a metal hemisphere. Moore tossed the wig to one of the robots and then turned his back on the exhibit.

"It looks exactly like the photograph," Verrick said admiringly as he stepped nearer to the table.

Moore laughed. "Naturally! The dummy was made first and then photographed. But it's probably about the way Preston looked." His eyes flickered. "Looks, I mean."

Eleanor Stevens detached herself from the watching group and approached the dummy cautiously. "You think he's still alive in his own body?" Eleanor asked. "That isn't possible!"

Moore didn't answer. He was staring at the dummy; he had picked up the arm again and was mechanically pulling loose the fingers one by one. The look on his face was nothing Eleanor had ever seen before.

Abruptly he shook himself and hurried to the door. "Pellig should be entering the defence network. I want to be part of things when that happens."

Verrick and Eleanor followed quickly after him, the dummy forgotten.

"This should be interesting," Verrick muttered as he hurried to his office. Expectation gleamed in his heavy face as he snapped on the screen the ipvic technicians had set up for him. With Eleanor standing nervously behind him he prepared himself for the sight of Keith Pellig stepping from the transport to the field at Batavia.

Keith Pellig took a deep breath of warm fresh air and then glanced round. The field was crowded. Hordes of Directorate bureaucrats and milling groups of passengers were waiting fussily for ships; a constant din of noise and furious activity; the roar of ships and loudspeakers; the rumble of surface vehicles.

Al Davis noted all this as he halted the Pellig body and waited for Miss Lloyd to catch up with him.

"There he is," she gasped, bright-eyed and entranced by the sights. She began waving frantically. "Walter!"

A thin-faced man in his middle forties was edging through the throng of people. He was a typical classified official of the Directorate, one of its vast army of desk men.

He waved to Miss Lloyd and called out, but his words were lost in the general uproar.

Davis had to keep moving; he had to get rid of the chattering girl and her middle-aged companion and move towards the Directorate buildings. Down his sleeve and into his right hand ran the slender wire that fed his thumb-gun. The first moment the Quizmaster appeared in front of him—a quick movement of his hand, thumb raised, a tide of lethal energy released...

At that moment he caught sight of the expression on Walter's face.

Al Davis blindly moved the Pellig body towards the street and the lines of surface cars. Walter was a telepath, of course. There had been a flash of recognition as he had caught Davis's thoughts during a brief run-through of his programme of assassination. A group of people separated them and the Pellig body sprawled against a railing. With one bound Davis carried it over the railing.

He glanced back—Walter was not far behind him.

Davis strode on. He had to keep moving. Surface cars honked and roared; he ignored them.

Full realization was just beginning to hit him; any of the crowd might be a telepath. The word passed on, scanned from one mind to the next... The network was a chain ring; he had run up against the first link. He halted, then ducked into a shop. He dimly sensed rather than saw the group of figures quietly entering the entrance behind him. He ducked down, then dashed down an aisle between counters. What next? They were at both doors; he had trapped himself. He thought frantically, des­perately. What next?

While he was trying to decide, a silent whoosh picked him up. He was back at A.G. Chemie. Before his eyes a miniature Pellig raced and darted on the microscopic screen; the next operator in the automaton's body was already working to solve the problem of escape. Davis sagged limply into a chair.

On the screen Keith Pellig burned through the plate-plastic window of the shop and floundered into the street. People screamed in horror. While everyone else raced about, the fat red-faced assistant stood as if turned to stone, his lips twitching, his body jerking. Suddenly he collapsed in a blubbery heap.

The scene shifted as Pellig escaped from the pack of people clustered in front of the store. The assistant was lost from sight. Al Davis was puzzled. Had Pellig des­troyed him? Pellig turned a corner, hesitated, then dis­appeared into a theatre.

The theatre was dark and Pellig blundered in confusion: bad tactics Davis realized. The darkness wouldn't affect the pursuers, who depended not on sight but on telepathic contact.

The operator in Pellig now realized his mistake and sought an exit. But already vague shapes were moving in on him. He hesitated, then dashed into a lavatory. From here he burned his way through the wall with his thumb-gun and emerged into an alley. There he stood considering trying to make up his mind. The vast shape of the Direct­torate building loomed ahead, a golden tower that caught the sunlight and sparkled it back. Pellig took a deep breath and started towards it at a relaxed trot... .

The body stumbled. A new operator, dazed with sur­prise, fought for control. The body smashed into a heap of garbage, struggled up, and then loped on. There were no visible pursuers. The body reached a busy street and hailed a taxi.

The cab roared off in the direction of the Directorate tower. Pellig relaxed against the cushions, and non­chalantly lit a cigarette. Calmly lounging in the back seat of a public taxi Keith Pellig sped towards the Directorate offices, his thumb-gun resting loosely on his lap.

Major Shaeffer stood in front of his desk and bellowed with fright.

"It's not possible," drummed the disorganized thoughts of the Corpsman nearest to him.

"There must be a reason," Shaeffer managed to think back.

"We lost him." Incredulous, fearful, the thoughts dinned back and forth throughout the network. "Walter Reming­ton picked him up as he stepped off the ship. He had him. And then——"

"You let him get away."

"Shaeffer, he disappeared. At the second station he ceased to exist."

"How?"

"I don't know. Remington passed him to Allison at the shop. The assassin began to run. Allison kept mental touch easily."

"The assassin must have raised a shield."

"There was no diminution. The entire personality was cut off instantly, not merely the thoughts."

Shaeffer cursed. "And Wakeman's on Luna. We can't use telepathy—I'll have to use the regular ipvic."

"Tell him something's terribly wrong. Tell him the assassin disappeared into thin air."

Shaeffer hurried to the transmission room. As he was jerking into life the closed-circuit to the Lunar resort a new flurry of transferred thoughts chilled him.

"I've picked him up!" came from an eager Corpswoman, relayed by the network from one point to another. "I've got him!"

"Where are you?" responded insistent calls from up and down the network. "Where is he?"

"Theatre. Near the clothing shop. Only a few feet from me; shall I go in? I can easily———"

The thought broke off.

Through the network radiated tortured, twisted, in­coherent, gibbering psychosis.

"Cut her out of the network," Shaeffer commanded savagely, and the quivering frenzy faded. He collapsed in a chair and pounded his throbbing forehead. What had happened?

He managed to raise Peter Wakeman on the ipvic vid­screen. "Peter," he croaked, "we're beaten."

Wakeman jerked violently. "What do you mean? Cartwright isn't even there!"

Shaeffer struggled with an unfamiliar medium of expres­sion. "We picked the assassin up, then we lost him. We picked him up later on—in another part of the city. Peter, he got past three stations. And he's still moving. How he——"

New thoughts from telepaths smashed at him with stunning force. "I have him. But he's not——" Con­fusion and uncertainty. "But, Shaeffer, it isn't the same mind!"

"I have him!" The next station of the network, in excitement and jubilation. "His taxi is directly behind my own, heading directly for the main building."

"Kill him!" Shaeffer shuddered.

"I'm stopping my cab. I'll kill him as he tries to pass. His driver is drawing level with me. He's only yards away; I got him full-blast."

The mind sending the message screamed.

Shaeffer clapped his hands to his head and closed his eyes. Gradually the storm died. Mind after mind was smashed, short-circuited, blacked-out by the overload, by the shattering pain that lashed through the entire web of telepaths.

"Where is he?" Shaeffer shouted. "What happened?"

The next station responded faintly. "He lost him. He's dropped from the network. He's dead, I think. Burned-out. I'm in the area but I can't catch the mind he was scanning. The mind he was scanning is gone!"

On the vidscreen Peter Wakeman's image tried hopelessly to gain Shaeffer's attention. Shaeffer was like a corpse, face dead and blank, all energy concentrated on the invisible struggle going on up and down the web-strands of the network.

"Listen to me," Wakeman commanded. "Once you get hold of his mind, stay with him. Follow him until the next station takes over. Maybe you're too far apart. Maybe———"

"I've got him," a thought came to Shaeffer. "I'll find him; he's close by."

The network quivered with excitement and suspense.

"I'm getting something strange." Doubt mixed with curiosity, then startled disbelief. "There must be more than one assassin. Yet that's not possible." Growing excite­ment. "I can actually see Pellig. He's going to enter the Directorate building by the main entrance; it's all there in his mind. Now he's thinking of crossing the street and going———"

Nothing.

Shaeffer waited. Still nothing came. "Did you kill him? Is he dead?"

"He's gone!" the thought came, hysterical and giggling. "He's standing in front of me and at the same time he's gone. He's here and he isn't here."

The telepath dribbled off in infantile mutterings, and Shaeffer dropped him from the network. It didn't make sense. Keith Pellig was standing face to face with a Corpsman, within easy killing-distance—yet Keith Pellig had vanished.

Verrick turned to Eleanor Stevens. "It's working better than we had calculated."

"Corps members depend on telepathic rapport. They hang on by mental contact, and if that's broken——" The girl's face was stricken. "Reese, I think you're driving them insane."

Verrick got up and moved away from the screen. "You watch for a while."

Eleanor shuddered. "I don't want to see it."

A buzzer sounded on the man's desk. "List of flights out of Batavia," a monitor told him. "Total count of time and destination for the last hour. Special note of unusual flights."

Verrick accepted the metalfoil sheet and dropped it into the litter heaped on his desk as he hoarsely said to Eleanor: "It won't be long."

His hands in his pockets, Keith Pellig was striding up the marble stairs leading to the main entrance of the central Directorate building at Batavia... directly towards Leon Cartwright's suite of offices.