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.”