“He got into the city fast, though,” Roberts observed. “City people tend to be a lot less observant of others around them than country folks.”
“All right,” said Paul. “That fits well enough. Now, since he was willing to destroy his ship, we can assume that he planned to stay a while. That probably means that others were here before him. He’s just altogether too confident for any advance scout. He knew he could mingle with people, and stay, here, and observe, and learn, and get away with it. Probably his job is to accumulate information, detailed information about human beings. Well, with full-blown telepathy working for him, he must really be having a time for himself! And unless I miss my guess, the information he wants most of all is information about Psi-Highs.”
Roberts shrugged. “Okay, I agree. But what does this add up to?”
Fail-cloth looked at him grimly. “Seems to me it adds up to one thing: we aren’t going to catch him in any dragnet. No matter how skillfully we lay it out. No matter how many Psi-Highs we have in on it, and no matter how well trained they are.”
“Then you’re saying that we aren’t going to get him, period.”
“Not quite. I think we can catch him if we go at it the right way. At least we might have a chance, with a different approach. Well have no way to evaluate it, at first, because of the nature of the approach, but in the end, we’ll either have the alien or we won’t, and I think there’s a better than even chance that we will. If we keep playing the game we played in Chicago, we’re going to lose every tune.”
“But what went wrong in Chicago?” Roberts cried.
“Nothing, except that we were whipped before we even started. Look at it this way. He’s outguessed us, consistently, every time, right from the start. And it’s not really surprising that he has. He doesn’t need a three-hour briefing and a road map to tell what’s going on around him. All he needs is a hint, the barest touch of a man’s mind, the slightest flicker of contact, and he already has enough of a headstart to figure out everything that’s going to happen from then on. Just like a chess game—you play along, and suddenly your opponent makes a move that reveals a whole complex gambit he’s been pursuing that you hadn’t even noticed before. But our alien friend spots the same gambit before the first move instead of after the tenth. We make a move, and he’s already ahead of us. By now he knows human minds can operate along fairly logical lines, he can figure out all the logical possibilities before they happen, and figure a defense for each possibility, and we just can’t trap him, Psi-Highs or no Psi-Highs.”
Roberts scowled at him. “Then what do you propose?”
Faircloth grinned. “That we change the ground rules on him without tipping him off. That we take all the evidence we have here, and feed it into a computer and let it meditate a while and plot out a supremely logical approach for us to follow in order to trap the creature on the basis of what we know about him now. Then, we take that supremely logical approach and change it a bit. This creature is assuming well follow a logical approach. What we need is a supremely illogical approach.”
The call they were expecting came through at last, at three o’clock one morning after they had almost given it up in despair.
It had been a long, heartbreaking wait. Time after time Faircloth had argued that they must have been very close in Chicago, closer than they realized. The alien must actually have been frightened, he insisted, because since Chicago there had been no sign, no clue to his whereabouts, no hint that he was even in existence any more. Yet Faircloth was certain that the contact was bound to come, sooner or later.
It was possible, of course, that the change in the search pattern had worried the alien. Logically, a dragnet should have been set up in Chicago, and the entrance-ways to all the large cities guarded carefully. That was what the computer had said. “Probability is strong that the alien desires to remain in a city, but evidence suggests that Chicago may not be the optimum location for him. Recommend heavy Security measures be taken in all surrounding cities of size as well as Chicago. Probability is four-plus high that the alien is seeking some specific information. Advise close control of all spaceports, air transit outlets and rolling-road escape-ways.”
And so forth. That was what the computer had said. Of course, the computer was not infallible, but its analysis and recommendations were utterly logical on the basis of the information given it.
Which was exactly the reason they were being carefully ignored.
It was a gamble, and no one was more aware of this than Faircloth. Reluctantly, Roberts pulled all Security personnel out of the Chicago area, Psi-High and otherwise, except for a small crew headed by Ted Marino, who were scattered throughout the city with orders to carefully avoid contact among themselves. A gamble, but it was not entirely guesswork that made Paul so certain that the alien, if left suddenly and completely alone, would try to make contact with a Psi-High mind sooner or later. Of course, that conclusion itself was the result of logical reasoning. No matter how they tried to remove logic from their approach, it crept in, it had to creep in. It was logical that a telepathically sensitive creature, visiting an alien planet in obvious secrecy, would seek to learn something about the segment of the population that might be able to expose his presence. He would seek signs of his own kind of mental capability. He might even have to; Paul knew all too well that a Psi-High mind cut off and isolated from any psi-contact soon was a sick mind. That was why Psi-Highs always settled in the cities, why they sought each other out with such fierce, desperate clannishness—a tendency which, in itself, had bred suspicion of Psi- Highs in the minds of psi-negatives. What psi-negatives couldn’t really comprehend was that with Psi-Highs it wasn’t a matter of choice. It was a desperate need. And Paul knew how overwhelming that need could be.
No, logically the alien would make contact with a human Psi-High, sooner or later. It would not be difficult to spot such a contact. The Psi-Highs were very few in number, only a couple of hundred scattered in small colonies in the larger cities of the North American States. With painstaking care each one had been contacted and warned, and those working in Security were staked out in the most likely places for the contact that they expected. The roads were left free, and the airports and spaceports were not checked. No dragnet- just an invisible network of human minds spread across the country, delicately tuned, waiting for the spark of contact.
Faircloth was asleep when the call finally came. He rolled groggily out of bed and snapped on the visiphone screen. Ted Marino’s face materialized eerily, a frightened, shaking Marino whose eyes were wide with horror, and whose hands jerked and jerked as he tried to control them. His voice was on the thin edge of hysteria. “He hit me, Paul. Just a little while ago. He hit me hard.”
Paul leaned forward, staring at the man’s face. He had expected contact. He had not expected this kind of contact. “Ted, are you hurt?”
“No, no. But let me tell you, I can’t take that again.”
“You’re sure it wasn’t just another Psi-High contacting you? It’s deadly important, Ted.”