“Listen,” he said, getting up to stand beside Charley; he put his arm around her and hugged her spare, hard body against him. “We’ll be in a relocation camp for a time but eventually, when this is resolved one way or another—”
The door of the room flew open. A cop, his uniform covered with gray particles like dust—which were incinerated human bone—stood there, aiming a B-14 Hopp’s rifle at them. Nick at once raised his hands, then grabbed Charley’s hands and lifted them up and out, opening her fingers to show that she had no weapon.
The cop fired his B-14 at Charley; she slumped, inert, against Nick. “Unconscious,” the cop said. “Tranquiler depth.” And fired his B-14 at Nick.
Chapter 14
Peering at the TV screen, Police Director Barnes said, “So 3XX24J.”
“What’s that?” Gram said irritably.
“In that room: that man with the girl. The two the greener just laid out. That was the sample person which the computer thought meant that—”
“I’m trying to see some of my old buddies,” Gram said, shaking him off. “Shut up and watch; just watch. Or is that asking too much?”
Barnes said curtly, “The Wyoming computer selected him as the prototype Old Man who, because of the announcement of Cordon’s impending execution would—and did—go over to the Under Men. Now we’ve caught him, although oddly, I don’t think that’s his wife. Now, what would the Wyoming computer say . . .” He began to pace. “What would its response be to the fact that we’ve caught him? That we have taken possession of the representative Old Man who—”
“Why do you say it’s not his wife?” Gram asked. “Do you think he’s shacking up with that broad, that not only has he become an Under Man but he’s also left his wife and already found someone else? Ask the computer that; see what it makes of that.” The girl, he thought, is pretty, in a tomboyish sort of way. Hm, he thought. “Can you see to it that the girl isn’t hurt?” he asked Barnes. “Are you able to communicate with the commando teams there in the plant?”
Reaching for his belt, Police Director Barnes brought a microphone to his lips, said, “Captain Malliard, please.”
“Yes, Malliard here, Director.” A puff-puffing voice, showing great agitation and stress.
“The Council Chairman asks me to ask you to see to it that the man and girl—”
“Just the girl,” Gram interrupted.
“—that a girl in a side room who has just been put out by a greener with a B-14 Hopp’s tranquilizing rifle, be protected. Let’s see, I’ll try to establish the coordinates.” Barnes peered owl-wise, sideways, at the screen. “Coordinates 34, 21, then either 9 or 10.”
“That would be to my right and a little forward of my own position,” Malliard said. “Yes, I’ll take charge at once. We have done a good job, Director—in twenty minutes we’ve taken virtual control of the plant, with a minimum loss of life on both sides.”
“Just keep your eye on the girl,” Barnes said, and returned the microphone to his belt.
“You’re wired up with tools like a telefone linesman,” Gram said to him.
Barnes said frostily, “You’re doing it again.”
“Doing what again?”
“Mixing up your private life with your public life. That girl.”
“She has a strange face. Pushed in, like an Irish mug.”
“Council Chairman, we face an invasion by alien life forms; we face a mass insurrection which may—”
“You see a girl like that once in twenty years,” Gram said.
“May I ask one favor?” Barnes asked.
“Sure.” Willis Gram felt good, now; the efficiency of the police in taking over the 16th Avenue printing plant pleased him, and his libido had been clicked to the on position at seeing the odd girl. “What favor?”
“I want to have you—with myself present—talk to the man, the man from 3XX24J . . . I want to know if his dominant feeling is positive, in that they’ve heard from Provoni, and Provoni is bringing help with him, or if his morale has been broken by being picked up in the police commando raid. In other words—”
“An average sampling,” Gram said.
“Yes.”
“Okay. I’ll take a look at him, but it better be soon; it better be before Provoni gets here. Everything has to be done before Provoni and his monsters arrive. Monsters.” He shook his head. “What a renegade. What a dispiteous, low-class, self-serving, power-hungry, ambitious, unprincipled renegade. He ought to go down in the history books with that statement about him.” He liked that description of Provoni. “Jot that down,” he said to Barnes. “I’ll have that put in the next edition of the Britannica, just like I said it. Word for word.”
Sighing, Police Director Barnes got out his tablet of paper and painstakingly wrote the sentence down.
“Add to that,” Gram said, “mentally-disturbed, fanatically radical, a creature—note that: a creature, not a man—who believes any means whatsoever is justified by the end. And what is the end in this case? A destruction of a system by which authority is put and kept in the hands of those physically constructed so as to have the ability to rule. It is rule by the most competent, not the most popular. Which is better, the most competent or the most popular? Millard Fillmore was popular. So was Rutherford B. Hayes. So was Churchill. So was Lyons. But they were incompetent, which is the whole point. Do you see my point?”
“In what way was Churchill incompetent?”
“He advocated mass night-bombings of residential areas, of civilian populations, instead of hitting key targets. It prolonged World War Two an extra year.”
Director Barnes said, “Yes, I see the point.” He thought, I don’t need a lesson in civics . . . a thought which Gram immediately picked up. That, and much else besides.
“I’ll see this man from 3XX24J at six o’clock our time tonight,” Gram said. “Bring him in. Bring them both in together—the girl, too.” He caught more unpleasant dissenting thoughts from Barnes but ignored them. Like most telepaths, he had learned to ignore the great body of inchoate thoughts in people: hostility, boredom, outright disgust, envy. Thoughts, many of which the person himself was unaware of. A telepath had to learn to have a thick skin. In essence, he had to learn to relate to a person’s conscious, positive thoughts, not the vaguely-defined mixture of his unconscious processes. At that region, almost everything could be found . . . and in almost anyone. Every clerk-typist who passed through his office had fleeting thoughts of destroying his superior and taking his place . . . and some aimed much higher than that; there existed fantastic delusional systems of thought in some of the most meek-mannered men and women—and these were, for the most part, New Men.
Some, who harbored truly deranged thoughts, he had quietly hospitalized. For the good of everyone concerned . . . especially himself. For, several times, he had picked up thoughts of assassination, and from the most surprising sources, both big and little. Once, a New Man technician, installing a series of video links in his private office, had lengthily pondered shooting him—and had carried the gun by which to do it. Again and again it came up: an endless theme which had come into existence when the two new classes of men had manifested themselves fifty-eight years ago. He was used to it . . . or was he? Perhaps not. But he had lived with it all his life, and he did not foresee losing his ability to adapt now at this late point in the game—this point at which Provoni and his nonhuman friends were about to intersect his own life-line.