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.”