“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.”