"That's right."
Roberts scowled and threw down his cigar. "All right, I'll tell you
about Ben Towne. It isn't pretty. Frankly, this Chicago fiasco was the
break Towne has been waiting for. There were Psi-Highs involved in
that raid. Towne knows it. And he's going to build a story of Psi-High
alliance with the Alien that will carry him to the White House."
Faircloth nodded grimly. "Does he have any conception of the
dangerousness of this creature?"
* * * * *
Roberts snorted. "Of course he knows it! But Ben Towne is obsessed
with a single idea, and it twists everything he thinks into horrible
distortion." He leaned forward, staring at Paul. "Benjamin Towne wants
to wipe psi-positive faculties off the face of the Earth. He hates
Psi-Highs. Oh, I don't know the motives behind it. Maybe the fact of
his own imperfect body makes him hate what he considers a sort of
super-perfection appearing in the human race. It's a false premise,
of course. The predisposition of certain people to high extra-sensory
powers is neither a perfection nor an imperfection.
"It's just another tiny step in the evolutionary chain. It happens
to be a dominant gene factor, and in our society it happens to put
the Psi-High in a slightly advantageous position in comparison to
psi-negatives."
Roberts threw up his hands. "But the motives don't really matter.
Towne was smart enough to realize that there were lots of people
who hated and feared the expansion of Psi-Highs in our society. He
started fighting against it, and he's ridden that fight right into the
Chairmanship of the American Senatorial Council. If he can split up the
Liberal Council just a little bit, he can throw them out of office, and
move his American Party right in."
"And where does the Alien fit in?"
Roberts shrugged. "It's obvious, isn't it? Towne has taken an issue and
split the country wide open with it. And now, along comes a visitor
from the stars, an Alien visitor who steps out of his ship and just
disappears like a spirit into the population. An Alien who is fully
telepathic. Towne can control the news releases; he has the power to
decide on the security classification of information about the Alien.
It's been kept top secret up 'til now. But Ben can control the news,
and he can tie Psi-High humans and a vicious enemy Alien together so
neatly in the public mind that every Psi-High in the country will be in
danger of his life. It's political dynamite, and Towne is controlling
the fuse."