"He must have raised a shield."
"There was no diminution. The entire personality was cut off instantly—not merely the thoughts."
Shaeffer's mind dived crazily. "It's never happened to us before." He cursed in a loud, wild voice that shook the objects on his desk. "And Wakeman's on Luna. We can't teep him; I'll have to use the regular ipvic."
"Tell him something's terribly wrong. Tell him the assassin disappeared into thin air."
Shaeffer hurried to the transmission room. As he was jerking the closed-circuit to the Lunar resort into life, a new flurry of excited thoughts chilled him.
"I've picked him up!" An eager Corpswoman, relayed by the network from one to another. "I've got him!"
"Where are you?" A variety of insistent demands came from up and down the network. There were quick, urgent calls as the frantic teeps collected for action, "Where is he?"
"Theater. Near the clothing store." Rapid, disjointed instructions. "He's heading into the men's room. Only a few feet from me; shall I go in? I can easily—" The thought broke off.
Shaeffer squalled a shattering blast of despair and rage down the network. "Go on!"
Silence. And then... the mind screamed.
Shaeffer clapped his hands futilely to his head and closed his eyes. Gradually the storm died down. All up and down the network the violence rolled and lapped. Mind after mind was smashed, short-circuited, blacked-out by the overload. Shattering pain lashed through the entire web of telepaths, back to the original mind. Three in a row.
"Where is he?" Shaeffer shouted. "What happened?" The next station responded faintly. "She lost him. She's dropped from the network. Dead, I think. Burned-out." Bewilderment. "I'm in the area but I can't catch the mind she was scanning. The mind she was scanning is gone!"
Shaeffer managed to raise Peter Wakeman on the ipvic vidscreen. "Peter," he croaked aloud, "we're beaten."
"What do you mean? Cartwright isn't even there!"
"We picked up the assassin and then lost him. We picked him up again later on, a few minutes later—in another location. Peter, _he got past three stations._ And he's still moving. How he-"
"Listen to me," Wakeman interrupted. "Once you get hold of his mind, stay with him. Close ranks; follow him until the next station takes over. Maybe you're too far apart. Maybe—"
"I've got him," a thought came to Shaeffer. "He's near me. I'll find him; he's close by."
The network yammered excitement and suspense.
"I'm getting something strange." Doubt mixed with curiosity, and was followed by startled disbelief.
"There must be more than one assassin. But that's not possible." Growing excitement. "I can actually see him. Pellig just got out of a cab—he's walking along the street ahead of me. He's going to enter the Directorate building by the main entrance; it's all there in his mind. I'll kill him. He's stopping for a streetlight. Now he's thinking of crossing the street and going—"
Nothing.
Shaeffer waited. And still nothing came. "Did you kill him?" he demanded. "Is he dead?"
"He's gone!" The thought came, hysterical and giggling. "He's standing in front of me and at the same time he's gone. He's here and he isn't here. Who are you? Who do you want to see? Mr. Cartwright isn't here just now. What's your name? Are you the same man I... or is there... that we haven't out this is going out is _out_..."
The damaged teep dribbled off into infantile mutterings, and Shaeffer dropped him from the network. It didn't make sense. It wasn't possible. Keith Pellig was still there, standing face to face with a Corpsman, in easy killing-distance— yet Keith Pellig had vanished from the face of the Earth!
At the viewing screen rigged up for monitoring the progress of the assassin, Verrick turned to Eleanor Stevens. "We were wrong. It's working better than we had calculated. Why?"
"Suppose you were talking to me," Eleanor said tightly. "Carrying on a conversation. And I vanished completely. Instead of me a totally different person appeared."
"A different person physically," Verrick agreed. "Yes."
"Not even a woman. A young man or an old man. Some utterly different _body_ who continued the conversation as if nothing had happened."
"I see," Verrick said avidly.
"Teeps depend on telepathic rapport," Eleanor explained. "Not visual image. Each person's mind has a unique taste. The teep hands on by mental contact, and if that's broken—" The girl's face was stricken.
"Reese, I think you're driving them insane."
Verrick got up and moved away from the screen. "You watch for awhile."
"No," Eleanor shuddered. "I don't want to see it."
A buzzer sounded on Verrick's desk. "List of flights out of Batavia," a monitor told him. "Total count of time and destination for the last hour. Special emphasis on unique flights."
"All right," Verrick nodded vaguely, accepting the metal-foil sheet and dropping it with the litter heaped on his desk. "God," he said hoarsely to Eleanor. "It won't be long."
Calmly, his hands in his pockets, Keith Pellig was striding up the wide marble stairs, into the main entrance of the central Directorate building at Batavia, directly toward Leon Cartwright's suite of inner offices.
TWELVE
PETER WAKEMAN had made a mistake.
He sat for a long time letting the realization of his mistake seep over him. With shaking fingers he got a fifth of Scotch from his luggage and poured himself a drink. There was a scum of dead dried-up protine in the glass. He threw the whole thing in a disposal slot and sat sipping from the awkward bottle. Then he got to his feet and entered the lift to the top floor of the resort.
Corpsmen, dressed in bright vacation colors, were relaxing and enjoying themselves around and in a vast tank of sparkling blue water. Above them a dome of transparent plastic kept the fresh spring-scented air in, and the bleak void of the Lunar landscape out. Laughter, the splash of lithe bodies, the flutter of color and texture and bare flesh, blurred past him as he crossed the deck.
Rita O'Neill had climbed from the water and was sunbathing drowsily a little way beyond the mam group of people. Her sleek naked body gleamed moistly in the hot light that filtered down through the lens of the protective balloon. When she saw Wakeman she sat up quickly, black hair cascading in a glittering tide of motion down her tanned shoulders and back.
"Is everything all right?" she asked.
Wakeman threw himself down in a deck chair. A MacMillan approached him and he automatically took an old-fashioned from its tray. "I was talking with Shaeffer," he said, "back at Batavia."
Rita took a brush and began stroking out her heavy cloud of hair. A shower of sparkling drops steamed from the sun-baked deck around her. "What did he have to say?" she asked, as casually as she could. Her eyes were large and dark and serious.
Wakeman sipped his drink aimlessly and allowed the bright warmth of the overhead sun to lull him to half-slumber. Not far off, the crowd of frolicking bathers splashed and laughed and played games in the chlorine-impregnated water. A huge shimmering water-ball lifted itself up and hung like a living sphere before it plunged down in the grip of a flashing white-toothed Corpsman. Against her towel Rita's body was a dazzling shape of brown and black, supple lines of flesh moulded firm and ripe in the vigor of youth.
"They can't stop him," Wakeman said. In his stomach the whiskey had formed a congealed lump that settled cold and hard into his loins. "He'll be here, not long from now. I had it calculated wrong."
Rita's black eyes widened. She momentarily stopped brushing, then started again, slowly and methodically. She shook her hair back and climbed to her feet. "Does he know Leon is here?"
"Not yet. But it's only a question of time."