Roberts' eyes were excited. "I want you to work with me. I think we
can get this Alien and sink Ben Towne's raft at the same time. There's
no single person in the country as dangerous to Towne right now as an
unregistered and unrecognized Psi-High. And that's just what you are.
And with you and Jean working this thing as a team, I think we can turn
the capture of the Alien to the benefit of all Psi-Highs."
Faircloth nodded slowly. "It could be done if my ideas are any good.
And they certainly would require Jean to put them across."
"Then you're with me?"
"Okay. You've got the aces." Faircloth gave a defeated grin. "I'll
probably hate you for this but let's get Jean over here and do some
planning. The first job on the docket is to pin this Alien and keep him
pinned."
V
Jean Sanders tossed her pencil down on the desk and flopped down
cross-legged on the floor. "I think we're going around in circles," she
said disgustedly. "Three separate circles," she added, with an owlish
glance at Bob Roberts.
"All right, we're tired," the Security chief sighed. "We've been at
this for hours."
"It's here," Faircloth said stubbornly. "We've got all the information
we need, if we can only pin down the application. Or at least we've got
enough information to make a start."
"The more I see of the whole business," said the girl, "the more it
looks fishy to me." She lit a cigarette thoughtfully. Her face was
slender, with black brows and big grey eyes, and her slim figure made
her look sixteen. "And it gets fishier and fishier the more we talk."
Paul nodded. "Exactly. There's something that we aren't seeing or
realizing or that we just don't know about this creature."
"Well, let's try classifying what we do know," said Roberts. "We've got
a picture that isn't worth a plugged nickel. We've got a few photos
of the outside of the ship before it exploded. We know that he's
psi-triple-high, fully telepathic, with the ability to fuzz up his
observer's perception of him."
"Disguise," said Jean. "It isn't perfect. He needs that to hide the
wrinkles in the disguise."
Faircloth walked across the room, staring at the walls. "Then there's
the ship. It was found near Gutenberg, Iowa, on a bluff overlooking the
Mississippi, three months ago. That's a fact. Farm kids found the ship
but didn't go near it. Scared stiff. Told their father and he called
Security. I don't suppose there was any way of telling how long the
ship had been there?"
Roberts shook his head. "Biologists and geologists both had a whack at
it, but the explosion destroyed all the flora and ground area within
twenty feet of it."
"Well, anyway, no occupant of the ship was found, and no trace of where
the occupant might have gone. Security sent a scout squad down to
photograph the ship and it blew into a million pieces."
"That's right."
"How many of the million pieces were recovered?"
"About ten. Magnesium alloy. Told us nothing."
Faircloth nodded. "Okay. Then the Psi-High report came in from Des
Moines, and you turned up the farmer and his wife who saw the Alien
the first night. What was their name? Bettendorf, I think. Jacob
Bettendorf. Rather dull folks. They fed him and sent him on his way.
Noticed nothing odd, but the farmer said his eyes felt tired all the
time the creature was there. How did their description jive with the
others you've gotten?"
Roberts shrugged. "The same--or I should say, uniformly different.
Nobody seems to agree. It's obvious that they don't actually see him in
any detail at all. They just think they do."
"You know," said the girl, suddenly, "that's one of the things that
bothers me. A lot of those people out there are Ben Towne's stoutest
supporters. They don't like Psi-Highs. They keep their eyes open
for people that act like Psi-Highs--you know, the way we're likely
to nod and start answering a question before a person gets it half
asked--or the way we sometimes forget our expressions when we've had
an accidental peep at some sweet innocent young girl's inner thoughts.
Those people can spot that. But the Alien went right through. Not even
a suspicion."
"He got into the city fast, though," said Roberts. "City folks are
likely to be a lot less observant than country people."
"All right," said Paul. "That fits well enough. Now, since he destroyed
his ship, we can assume that he is planning to stay a while. That
probably means that there have been others before him. He's too
confident for an advance scout. He knew he could mingle, and stay,
and observe, and learn, and get away with it. Probably his job is to
accumulate information, detailed information about human beings, and
with full blown telepathy he must really be making hay. And unless I
miss my guess, the information he wants most of all is information
about Psi-Highs." Faircloth faced Roberts and the girl. "This is
beginning to add up now. I don't think we're going to catch him in
a dragnet. No matter how skillfully it's laid. No matter how many
Psi-Highs we have on it, and no matter how well trained they are."
Roberts looked disgusted. "Then you're saying that we aren't going to
get him, period."
"Oh, no. I think we can catch him. At least I've got an angle that's
worth trying. We'll have no way of evaluating it first, because of
the nature of the thing, but in the end we'll either have the Alien or
we won't, and I think there's a good chance that we will. If we keep
playing the Chicago game we'll lose every time."
"But what went wrong in Chicago?" Roberts cried.
"Nothing, except that we were licked before we started. Look at it this
way. He's outguessed us every time. And if you analyze that a little,
it's not really surprising that he has because he's telepathic. He does
not need a twenty-page report and a road map to know what's going on
around him. All he needs is a hint. Just a bare touch of man's mind,
a slight flicker of contact, and he has enough of a head start to sit
down and figure out everything that's going to happen from then on.
Just like a chess game. You play along and suddenly your opponent
makes a move that reveals a whole gambit which you hadn't been able to
see before. But our Alien friend spots the gambit on the basis of the
first move instead of the tenth. We make a move and he has it pinned.
He knows we operate along fairly logical lines. He can follow out the
logical possibilities before they happen, and there's no possible way
we can trap him. Psi-Highs or no Psi-Highs."