"Get out!"
As I closed the door behind me, I heard the crash of the crystal ball
hitting the wall. Luckily he hadn't hurled it at the glass panel in his
office door.
My own phone was ringing as I approached my desk. I picked it up
wearily and said, "Very clever, Mr. Wood. Very damned clever."
He said, "Your basic difficulty, Captain Schnell, is that you have
sworn to uphold the law and are compelled to employ legal methods. You
must always work within the framework of the law. You would not think
of tampering with the United States mails, even to save yourself from
an unjust charge."
"Wood, if I make a single move outside of the law, you'll use it
against me, won't you?"
"I'm afraid that's the way it has to be. You play according to your
rules and I'll play according to mine."
"Well, now, Mr. Wood, in our philosophy there may be strength.
Remember, upon the day that the forces of law and order must violate
their own concepts in order to effect their own ends, on that day law
and order ceases to be the goal of honest men."
"Spoken like an idealist!"
Hanging up a telephone is not polite, but in this case hanging up did
not snap the link of communication.
V
An angry man is a poor fighter. I sat shuffling papers on my desk, half
of my intellect raging helplessly. Finally I forced myself to sit and
read the papers on the desk, even though I knew every word on every one
of them.
One reported that Wood had been one of the less conspicuous partners
in a very successful personnel-placement agency. I could have added a
penciled note that a telepath should make a very successful personnel
manager.
Another said that Florence Wood was employed as a safety deposit vault
clerk in the Third National Bank. This didn't bother me. What the
standard human gets out of staring at a solid phalanx of safety deposit
boxes is a headache, not perceptive-gained information.
There was a medical report that Wood had undergone a mild coronary
occlusion some months ago which had hastened his retirement. I wondered
whether his retirement had been hastened by a real coronary occlusion
or whether he'd used his extra-sensory power to fake the symptoms and
control the doctor's instruments.
Among the papers was a complete dissertation on the stab-wound in
Gordon Andrews' chest. There was no trace of any foreign body; the
wound did not go all the way through the chest cavity. It was not clean
cut, as if made by a sharpened weapon, but more like the semi-rounded
end of an umbrella or a blunt, heavy spike. In the opinion of the
medical examiner, the wound had been made with a rapid thrust, but it
looked as if there had been no withdrawal. An inspection of the wound
for traces of excess water (icicles) or carbon dioxide (dry ice) had
failed to disclose any plausible weapon or projectile that could have
evaporated or sublimed out of existence.
I longed to suggest that a test be made for air. If a kinematic can
create pyrotic effects by agitation of the molecules in something to
be ignited, a good kinematic could make Maxwell's Demon go to work for
him. Like compressing a volume of air into a .38 slug and projecting it
at revolver velocity.
And in the end I was not leafing the reports or reading them. I was
really staring at the wall. Specifically, I was staring at the
calendar without paying much attention to it, and as I came out of my
reverie I realized that I'd been absorbed in a little red smudge on one
of the dates.
Association is a funny process. The combination of calendar and red
blob stared at hazily had finally brought my mind around to thinking of
February the fourteenth, which honors a patron saint who has absolutely
nothing to do with Jimmy Valentine, who was reputed to have been a very
fast man with the combination of a safe, especially the type of safe
that Gordon Andrews kept his money in because he did not trust banks,
which may have been a good idea considering that Florence Wood worked
in a bank vault, and her father....
I jumped out of my office chair just as it tilted over backward. If I
hadn't jumped, I'd have split my skull on the radiator under the window
behind me.
A heavy brass-edged ruler came up from the desk and swung in a
whistling saber swipe at my face. I ducked in time to let the cut
pass over my head; it clipped a few upstanding hairs. When it reached
the end of its stroke, I wrested it out of Wood's control just to
prove that an alert local force could exert more power than a distant
kinematic force. Naturally I could. Leverage, of course.
* * * * *
Next came a metal-to-metal clicking sound; it was the police positive
in the upper left-hand corner of my desk. I thought strongly, "Psi-man,
you lift that gun and fire it at me through the desk drawer, and the
angle and everything will be enough evidence to change Weston's opinion
from angry rejection of all Psionics to a cold, calculated, vengeful
agreement with everything I've suggested."
The clicking stopped coming from the desk drawer and resumed in smaller
kind from the little desk lock in the tray drawer of the desk.
These desk locks can be picked with a bent hairpin, but picking takes
time. Everything takes _time_. At any rate, it did indeed take Edward
Hazlett Wood a finite time to juggle the little brass tumblers, turn
the main cylinder, retract the sliding bolt, withdraw the desk tray
to unlatch the side drawers, pull open the upper left-hand drawer and
extract my police positive from its holster with its mechanism entering
the firing cycle--which itself takes _time_.
By which time I'd vacated my office and was starting across the outer
office floor in the brisk, stiff-legged walk of a man in a hurry to go
a long way fast.
Wood was stalled. I thought: "Make like a poltergeist, Psi-man--and
convince everybody that you exist!"
The outer office was a bustle of the usual police activity. But Wood
did not have the ability to invade another mind and take over. At
least, not one of the men in the office suddenly had a fit of homicidal
mania with Captain Schnell listed as the first victim.
And so I made Weston's office and shoved my head in through the outer
door and yelled: "Weston--Third National Bank--and make it fast!"
I turned and headed outside as Weston started the usual top-brass
routine of wanting to know all of the infinitely variable reasons why
he should leave his office at all, let alone right now. With no one to
fire delaying questions at, and with a growing realization that he was
not going to learn a thing by sitting there in fulmination, he followed.