Marino shook his head vehemently. “No, no, no. It couldn’t have been that. I know what normal Psi-High contact is like. This was—different. It was as if he’d opened up my skull and scooped out my brains.”
Faircloth nodded, trembling with excitement, “Did you try to fight him?”
“I tried. He had me wide open before I knew what had happened, but I tried. I—I think it puzzled him. It didn’t stop him at all, he just brushed it aside like cobwebs, but it puzzled him—” The man hesitated. “It was awful, Paul. I want to get this bird as badly as you, but I don’t know if I can stand another blast like that.”
“You aren’t going to have to,” Faircloth said. “You’ve done great, but your part in it is over now. Don’t write a report about what happened. Don’t even think about it. Get dressed and get on a plane out of there. Go to Florida, Rio, any place as long as its remote and out of touch. Use your expense account, and have yourself the time of your life.”
Marino’s eyes opened in amazement. “Are you crazy? I thought this was what we’ve been waiting for!”
“It is, but your part in the plan is over. Do what I say and don’t worry about it. When you’ve gotten a good rest come back to the Hoffman Center and take up your training with Dr. Abrams where you left off.” Paul flipped the switch and turned back to the room, exultant. He clapped his hands in glee, and began to pack his bag.
The chase was on, with a vengeance. But this time, the mouse was chasing the cat.
Then, as if a dam had broken, the reports began streaming in Three more from Chicago, one from Cleveland, from a Psi High technician there who was not even remotely connected with Security. From Pittsburgh, from New Philadelphia. Like a fearful ominous flood, reports of the alien’s contact swarmed in. Paul Faircloth and Jean Sanders plotted them, and waited, and got ready.
Their headquarters were in a small suite of rooms in a middle class residential hotel in the heavily built-up metropolitan area between Washington and Baltimore. Few Federal Security agents, Psi-High or otherwise, knew this; all most of the team had was a visiphone priority code number, and a special word-key for scrambling messages. Faircloth had insisted on this. Of all the agents posted and assigned, only Paul, Jean, and Roberts knew the true nature of the operation. Each of them worked out his own illogical details without even telling the other. The wisdom of such a procedure was graphically illustrated a dozen times over. The alien’s work, when he did it, was thorough. The operative in Pittsburgh had tried to fight back the alien’s telepathic overtures, as instructed, and suffered a burst of wrath that had left him blubbering in a corner for three days until a crew of Hoffman Center physicians located him and straightened him out with stimulants and glucose. More and more, the alien’s puzzlement and frustration and anger began to seep through in the contact reports, and Paul and Jean watched and nodded approvingly.
Meanwhile, other steps were taken. Three times, when they were certain the alien had left a locality, they ordered cleanup squads to raid his former quarters, quizzing neighbors, asking multitudes of idiotic questions, uncovering half a dozen descriptions and leads—all of which they assiduously ignored. They began stabbing erratically at locations where the alien had not yet been, raids carried out with a relentless- ness and singleness of mind that left the unfortunates who were questioned shaking in their boots. Even the agents themselves were confused as to the purpose of these raids, and were cheerfully allowed to remain confused. Still other tactics were pursued, a series of disjointed, uncoordinated, abortive and harassing procedures, as though the whole search had suddenly fallen into the hands of a madman. A rocket ship bound for Venus was delayed four days beyond an opposition, adding a half-million dollars to the cost of fueling it. A whole series of road blocks was thrown up between New York and New Philadelphia, virtually paralyzing commercial traffic between the cities for two days, for no coherent reason. An order went out, quite arbitrarily, to apprehend and search all passengers on the great St. Louis-New York rolling-roads route, and Robert Roberts put in a grueling week trying to soothe the ruffled feelings of businessmen who had been held up in transit, and companies whose products had spoiled when the swift-moving strips had been halted for the shakedown.
Rumors began to drift out, rumors that there was an alien from the stars at large, that Federal Security was waging a vast underground battle to capture him before the news broke out. Telecasts buzzed with “it was alleged” and “unconfirmed reports say.” The tension mounted daily. Bit by bit, carefully sifted crumbs of information were dropped into the minds of the Psi-Highs who were still in the alien’s path, and all around the alien’s path. Long hours were spent in the headquarters suite, planning and coordinating the pattern. But in the end, it was a pattern well chosen and worth the effort, for it was soon evident that the alien was heading for the great eastern metropolitan area which surrounded the capital city as though he were drawn to the lodestone rock.
No attempt was made to contact him; quite the contrary. All the alien’s overtures yielded him no response other than futile attempts at shielding; no analysis of any contact was even attempted, and this knowledge was planted so that the alien was sure to learn it. Warnings of traps were planted in his path, “secret” knowledge of closing dragnets and carefully devised Psi-High weapons to be used against him. Occasionally such warnings were followed by abortive raids, always either too early to meet him or too late, always carried out by psi-negative Security men who had no more idea what they were doing than the man in the moon. But one by one, key facts were planted, pointing always in one direction, and always the alien moved toward the headquarters area.
Paul Faircloth and Jean Sanders seldom left the hotel even for a few minutes. Their job was to keep the pattern moving, and to plot out their individual tactics quite apart from each other. It was wearing; as the tension mounted, both of them grew more haggard. Paul had not found time to shave in a week, and there were dark circles under the girl’s eyes. Much of the time she just sat, tense, listening, waiting; other times she helped him work as he fed data into the field computer squatting in the suite. But even in the tension and exhaustion of the work, neither of them could forget the simple, awful fact that Paul Faircloth had been identified as a Psi- High, and that somehow, they would have to rearrange all the plans they had had for the future.
Each morning they spread the reports out on the table before them. “Closer,” Paul said one day. “And it’s on his own volition. He hasn’t been pushed. In fact, he’s been left out in the cold and he doesn’t seem to like it.”
The girl nodded, and glanced at the papers. “He’s definitely trying to ask questions, now, when he contacts. Karns’ call last night showed that better than any other. And of course Karns didn’t know any answers.”
Faircloth nodded. “None of them know the answers. That’s the beauty of it. Try as he will, he doesn’t get anywhere.”
“Not yet.” The girl rose, walking across the room. “Paul, I’m afraid. We’re shooting in the dark. We don’t know what we’re fighting against.”
“Are you sorry you’re in on it?”
“Oh, no!” She turned around, her face stricken. “It’s not that. It’s just—” His mind was suddenly filled with shadows, impressions struggling to get through, impressions that would make the use of words ridiculous. “Oh, Paul, I’m afraid for you, for both of us. If anything should happen—”
“Nothing’s going to happen.”
“But what about us? If something goes wrong—Roberts knows about you—”