"I don't see what purpose it serves."
"You will," Eleanor said. "Moore has a long story that goes with it."
"After I've eaten," Benteley said.
The three of them walked slowly along the thick-carpeted hall toward the dining room. Benteley froze at the doorway; there was Pellig sitting placidly at Verrick's table, a plate of veal cutlets and mashed potatoes in front of him, a glass of water at his pale, bloodless lips.
"What's wrong?" Eleanor asked.
"Who's in it?"
Eleanor shrugged indifferently. "One of the lab technicians. We keep somebody in it all the time; the more familiar we are with it the better chance well have."
Benteley moved toward the far end from Pellig. Its waxen pallor made him uncomfortable; it was like some insect newly out of its shell, not yet hardened and dried by the sun.
And then it came back to him.
"Listen," he said huskily. "There's something more."
Moore and Eleanor Stevens glanced sharply at each other. "Take it easy, Benteley," Moore said.
"The flying. I left the ground. And I wasn't just running." His voice rose fearfully. "Something happened to me. On and on, like a ghost. Until the fireplace." He rubbed his forehead, but there was no bump, no scar.
Of course not. It was another body.
"Explain," he demanded hoarsely. "What happened to me?"
"Something to do with the lighter weight," Moore said. The body's more efficient than a natural human body."
Benteley's face must have showed his disbelief, because Eleanor put in, "Pellig may have accepted a drug-cocktail before you entered the body. They were passing them out; I saw some of the women take them."
Verrick's gruff voice interrupted them. "Moore, you're good at abstract questions." He pushed a heap of metalfoil across to Moore's place. "I've been studying our confidential report-tapes on this crackpot Cartwright. There's nothing to him of importance, but I'm worried."
"Why?" Moore asked, as he took his seat.
"First of all, he had his p-card. That's unusual, for an unk. The chance of any one p-card coming up in a person's lifetime is so microscopically small, so utterly worthless—"
"There's always the statistical possibility."
Verrick snorted scornfully. "The bottle is the biggest racket ever thought up. The damn thing's a lottery and everybody alive holds a ticket. Why keep a card that gives you one chance in six billion, a chance that'll never come? The unks are smart enough to peddle their cards, if they're not taken from them by their Hills. What's a card worth these days?"
"About two bucks. Used to be more."
"All right. But this Cartwright keeps his. And that isn't all." A cunning look spread over Verrick's massive face. "According to my reports, Cartwright purchased—not sold— at least half a dozen p-cards within the last month."
Moore sat up straight. "Really?"
"Maybe," Eleanor said thoughtfully, "Cartwright finally found a charm that works."
Verrick roared like a gored ox. "Quack that talk! Those damn fool miserable charms." He jabbed a furious finger at the girl's bare breasts. "What's that, you have one of those little bags of eye of newt hanging there? Take it off and throw it away. It's a waste of time."
Eleanor smiled gently; everybody was used to Verrick's eccentricity, his disbelief in good-luck charms.
"What else?" Moore demanded. "You have more information?"
"The day the bottle twitched, there was a meeting of the Preston Society." Verrick's knuckles were white. "Maybe he's got what I was after. What everybody's after—a way to beat the bottle. A dope-sheet to plot out its future moves. If I thought Cartwright was sitting there that day waiting for notification to come..."
"What would you do?" Eleanor asked.
Verrick was silent. A strange twisted grimace knifed over his features, an agonized stir that surprised Benteley and made the others halt rigid. Abruptly, Verrick turned his attention to his plate of food, and the others quickly did the same.
When they were through eating, Verrick pushed back his coffee cup and lit a cigar. "Now listen," he said to Benteley. "You said you wanted to know our strategy; here it is. Once a teep locks minds with the assassin he has him. The Corps never lets the assassin break off; he's passed from one to the next all along the multiple rings. They know exactly what he's going to do as soon as he thinks of it. No strategy works; he's teeped constantly, right up to the moment they get bored and pop out his gizzard."
"That's why teeps forced us to take up Minimax," Moore put in. "You can't have a strategy against telepaths: you have to act randomly. You have to not know what you're going to do next. You have to shut your eyes and run blindly. The problem is: how can you randomize your strategy, yet move purposefully toward your goal?"
"Assassins in the past," Verrick continued, "tried to find ways of making random decisions. Plimp helped them. Essentially, plimp is assassin-practice. The pocket boards turn up random combinations by which any complexity of decisions can be made. The assassin threw on his board, read the number, and acted according to a prearranged agreement. The teep wouldn't know in advance what the board was going to show, any more than the assassin would.
"But that wasn't good enough. The assassin played this damn M-game but he still lost. He lost because the teeps were playing it, too, and there were eighty of them and only one of him. He got squeezed out statistically, except once in a long while. Assassins have occasionally got in. DeFafla made it by opening Gibbon's _Decline_ and _Fall of the Roman Empire_ at random and making some kind of complicated utilization of the material presented."
"Pellig is obviously the answer," Moore burst in. "We have twenty-four different minds. There'll be no contact between them. Each of the twenty-four sits in a different cube here at Farben. Each is hooked to the implementation machinery. At random intervals we switch in a different mind-picked at random. Each mind has a fully developed strategy. But nobody knows which mind is coming up next, or when. Nobody knows which strategy, which pattern of action, is about to start. The teeps won't know from one minute to the next what the Fellig body is going to do."
Benteley felt a chill of admiration for this ruthless, super-logical technician. "Not bad," he admitted.
"You see," Moore said proudly, "Pellig is Heisenberg's random particle. The teeps can trace his path: directly to Cartwright. But not his velocity. Where Keith Pellig will be along that path at a given moment nobody knows."
EIGHT
ELEANOR STEVENS' apartment was a series of attractive rooms in the classified living quarters of the Farben Hill. Benteley gazed around appreciatively, as Eleanor closed the door and moved around turning on lights and straightening things.
"I just moved in," she explained. "It's a mess."
"Where's Moore?"
"Somewhere in the building, I suppose."
"I thought you were living with him."
"Not now." Eleanor lowered the translucent filter over the view-wall of the apartment. The night sky with its cold host of stars, the glittering sparks and shapes that made up the Hill, dimmed and faded. Eleanor glanced at him sideways, a little embarrassed, and said, "To tell you the truth, I'm not living with anybody right now."
"I'm sorry," Benteley said awkwardly. "I didn't know."
Eleanor shrugged and smiled bright-eyed, red lips twitching. "It's a heck of a thing, isn't it? After I lived with Moore, I lived with one of the other research technicians, a friend of his, and then somebody in the planning board. I was a teep, remember? A lot of non-teeps won't live with a teep, and I never got along with the Corps."