“I’d rather Roberts knew than Ben Towne.”
The girl’s eyes were wide with fright. She seemed so small and helpless. “But we shouldn’t be together! Oh, Paul, why did Roberts have to find out? Why did anyone have to find out?” And then she was sobbing in his arms, and he held her close, trying to comfort her.
“Jeannie,” he murmured. “This just doesn’t do any good.”
“But it’s so unfair! Why shouldn’t I be allowed to marry you if I want to?”
“You know why as well as I do. Because people are afraid of us. There’s nothing we can do about it, that’s just the way people are. They’re always afraid of people who seem to threaten the way things have always been. So they passed the laws, and they think they’re right.”
“Ben Towne thinks they’re right!” she burst out scornfully. Her tears were hot on his cheek.
“Towne pushed the laws through, but he couldn’t have done it alone. People are afraid of someone carrying a single psi-positive gene, like you and me. What would they do if the gene were doubled? How could we tell what our children would be like? Look, Jeannie, think! You’re just now learning how to use your psi-powers, and look what you’re doing! You can almost get through to me, and I’ve had no formal training at all. I’ve been underground, just training myself as best I could. You’ve almost reached your limit. Dr. Abrams says you’ll have almost complete control in five years, and I could too, with the proper training. What would our children be like, with the psi-factor on both sides?”
“Well, what would be wrong with it?” The girl was fighting back the tears. “Are we such monsters? Have we done anything so terrible that we have to be caged like animals and kept under control like criminals?”
Paul shook his head. “People fear anything different, and they only know what they’ve been told. Ben Towne has been a vicious enemy, and enough people believe him to give him tremendous power. And there’s not one thing we can do about it.” He pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and dabbed at her face with it. “It doesn’t even pay to think about it, right now. We’ve got a job to do, Jeannie. It might be the most important thing the Psi-Highs have ever tried to do. We can’t flop on this job.”
“But Towne will just turn it against us.”
“Not if we work it right, he won’t. And I’ve got a hunch that we’re working it right.”
When it seemed that the strike-point could only be hours away, the visiphone buzzed and Roberts’ worried face appeared on the screen.
“Paul,” he said sharply, “there are some bad rumors around. I think we’re in trouble.”
Paul cursed. “What kind of rumors?”
“AH kinds,” said Roberts sourly. “They’re saying the hunt for the alien is a fraud, that nobody is doing anything at all about it. There were a couple of out-and-out charges that Psi-Highs are teaming up with the alien to make an attempt on the government.”
“Moon of Mars, can’t somebody put the lid on that man?”
“That wasn’t even Towne’s work. It was some Isolationist senator on One of their propaganda shows. There’s talk that the Liberals are purposely blocking an investigation of the Hoffman Center and their Psi-High program, and the President is out on a limb now that might break off any minute. I think Ben Towne is planning a direct confrontation, and that means we’re running out of time. You know that Congress hasn’t been joined into two solid political parties for over two hundred years, but it’s beginning to happen now, and it could be a bloody battle. If Towne can get the Civil Rights Party to swing their votes away from the President, it could force a general election.”
“Who’s the leader of the Civil Rights men?” Faircloth’s voice was sharp.
“That’s just the thing. It has been Mike Veriday. His son is a Psi-High, but his political stock has taken an awful nosedive since this rumor campaign started. The polls have got him trailing Kingsley from Kentucky by thirteen percent and losing ground fast. Now Kingsley, it seems, is in some unpleasant financial trouble, and some of Towne’s old cronies in the Senate have offered to clear him of some nasty charges if he plays along.” He paused for a long moment. “We haven’t got much time, Paul.”
“Well, I hope we don’t need much. But I think you can call in as many of our men as you need to. If things get too hot, list Jean and me as fugitives and throw out a dragnet for us. Because I think we’ll be working very much outside the law in another day or so.”
Roberts blinked at him. “Better tell me what you’re planning, Paul.”
“I think the less you know about it the better. Just one thing, though. You remember Eagle Rock? The place we built up in the Adirondacks that summer when we were in college? Put three men at a number where I can reach them, and give them the location of Eagle Rock. Then tell them to stand by with a fast jet scooter. Got that? And don’t let this leak, no matter what happens.”
“I wish you’d tell me—”
“We’re fighting for our lives now, Bob. And for every Psi- High in the country. I can’t tell you a thing more.”
Roberts nodded, then shrugged helplessly. “Eagle Rock,” he said. “You can count on it.”
Paul flipped the set off and winked at Jean. Together they settled back to wait for the alien to make his last contact.
He struck at ten o’clock that evening, with a ferocity beyond their worst expectations.
They had known that he was near. The reports had come in, and they had plotted and calculated his pathway, and waited. It was only a matter of time. The carefully planted information built a tangled, devious circle with a single Psi- High individual in the center.
Jean Sanders.
It had to be Jean. Paul hated it, he wished it could be he, that somehow he could take the blow and shield her, but Jean Sanders was the only possible person to bait the trap. Her psi-powers had been developed carefully and painstakingly for years under the care of Dr. Reuben Abrams and his staff at the Hoffman Medical Center. A Psi-High individual was helpless to use his powers without training; just as a child was trained through long, grueling years to use his ordinary mental faculties of thought and perception and logic, a psi-positive mind required training to control its powers of extrasensory perception and psychokinetic control, if its powers were ever to be used.
Paul knew that all too well. He too was Psi-High, but he had not even known it for years. He had not realized, in his teens, when he had plagued and baited the two Psi-High boys in his high school class, that there might be a time factor in psi-positive development. Other Psi-Highs showed the signs of abnormal sensory apparatus at the age of one or three, or seven; invariably the schools spotted them, tested them, registered them, and sent them out into a life of fea and suspicion and hatred. They were considered freaks, the more dangerous because there was no physical identification that could be used to separate them from ordinary human beings. And certain men had recognized the power waiting for the man who took advantage of the people’s fears. Ambition is blinding; certain men could see the potential danger, real or imaginary, that might arise if Psi-High minds were to work their way into the government, into law or the judiciary. But Psi-High minds matured at different ages, and at different times. And some, like Paul Faircloth, slipped through the barrage of testing undetected, only to discover later that it really wasn’t the backs of the cards they Were reading at all, but the minds of their opponents that were holding the cards.