A man does not dig his own apartment. He expects to find it the way he
left it. He digs in the mailbox on his way towards it, and he may dig in
his refrigerator to see whether he should stop for beer or whatever else,
because these things save steps. But nobody really expects to find trouble
in his own home, especially when he is coming in at three o'clock in the
morning with a good looking woman.
They were smart enough to come with nothing deadly in their hands. So I
had no warning until they stepped out from either side of my front door
and lifted me into my living room by the elbows. They hurled me into an
easy chair with a crash. When I stopped bouncing, one of the gorillas was
standing in front of me, about as tall as Washington Monument as seen from
the sidewalk in front. He was looking at my forty-five with careful
curiosity.
"What gives?" I demanded.
The crumb in front of me leaned down and gave me a back-and-forth that
yanked my head around. I didn't say anything, but I thought how I'd like
to meet the buzzard in a dark alley with my gun in my fist.
Martha said, "They're friends of Rambaugh, Steve. And they're a little
afraid of that prehistoric cannon you carry."
The bird in front of Martha gave her a one-two across the face. That was
enough for me. I came up out of my chair, lifting my fist from the floor
and putting my back and thigh muscles behind it. It should have taken his
head off, but all he did was grunt, stagger back, dig his heels in, and
then come back at me with his head down. I chopped at the bridge of his
nose but missed and almost broke my hand on his hard skull. Then the other
guy came charging in and I flung out a side-chop with my other hand and
caught him on the wrist.
But Rhine training can't do away with the old fact that two big tough men
can wipe the floor with one big tough man. I didn't even take long enough
to muss up my furniture.
I had the satisfaction of mashing a nose and cracking my hand against a
skull again before the lights went out. When I came back from Mars, I was
sitting on a kitchen chair facing a corner. My wrists and ankles were
taped to the arms and legs of the chair.
I dug around. They had Martha taped to another chair in the opposite
corner, and the two gorillas were standing in the middle of the room,
obviously trying to think.
So was I. There was something that smelled about this mess. Peter Rambaugh
was a mental, and he should have been sensitive enough to keep his take
low enough so that it wouldn't drive Martha into thinking up ways and
means of getting rid of him. Even so, he shouldn't have been gunning for
me, unless there was a lot more to this than I could dig.
"What gives?" I asked sourly.
There was no answer. The thug with my forty-five took out the clip and
removed a couple of slugs.
He went into the kitchen and found my pliers and came back teasing one of
the slugs out of its casing. The other bird lit a cigarette.
The bird with the cartridge poured the powder from the shell into the palm
of my hand. I knew what was coming but I couldn't wiggle my fingers much,
let alone turn my hand over to dump out the stuff. The other guy planted
the end of the cigarette between my middle fingers and I had to squeeze
hard to keep the hot end up. My fingers began to ache almost immediately,
and I was beginning to imagine the flash of flame and the fierce wave of
pain that would strike when my tired hand lost its pep and let the
cigarette fall into that little mound of powder.
"Stop it," said Martha. "Stop it!"
"What do they want?" I gritted.
"They won't think it," she cried.
The bright red on the end of the cigarette grayed with ash and I began to
wonder how long it would be before a fleck of hot ash would fall. How long
it would take for the ash to grow long and top-heavy and then to fall into
the powder. And whether or not the ash would be hot enough to touch it
off. I struggled to keep my hands steady, but they were trembling. I felt
the cigarette slip a bit and clamped down tight again with my aching
fingers.
Martha pleaded again: "Stop it! Let us know what you want and we'll do
it."
"Anything," I promised rashly.
Even if I managed to hold that deadly fuse tight, it would eventually burn
down to the bitter end. Then there would be a flash, and I'd probably
never hold my hand around a gun butt again. I'd have to go looking for
this pair of lice with my gun in my left. If they didn't try the same
trick on my other hand. I tried to shut my mind on that notion but it was
no use. It slipped. But the chances were that this pair of close-mouthed
hotboys had considered that idea before.
"Can you dig 'em Martha?"
"Yes, but not deep enough. They're both concentrating on that cigarette
and making mental bets when it will--"
Her voice trailed off. A wisp of ash had dropped and my mental howl must
have been loud enough to scorch their minds. It was enough to stop Martha,
at any rate. But the wisp of ash was cold and nothing happened except my
spine got coldly wet and sweat ran down my face and into my mouth. The
palm of my hand was sweating too, but not enough to wet the little pile of
powder.
"Look," I said in a voice that sounded like a nutmeg grater, "Rambaugh was
a louse and he tried to kill me first. If it's revenge you want--why not
let's talk it over?"
"They don't care what you did to Rambaugh," said Martha.
"They didn't come here to practice torture," I snapped. "They want
something big. And the only guy I know mixed up with Peter Rambaugh is
Scarmann, himself."
"Scarmann?" blurted Martha.
Scarmann was a big shot who lived in a palace about as lush as the Taj
Mahal, in the middle of a fenced-in property big enough to keep him out of
the mental range of most peepers. Scarmann was about as big a louse as
they came but nobody could put a finger on him because he managed to keep
himself as clean as a raygunned needle. I was expecting a clip on the
skull for thinking the things I was thinking about Scarmann, but it did
not come. These guys were used to having people think violence at their
boss. I thought a little harder. Maybe if I made 'em mad enough one of
them would belt me on the noggin and put me out, and then I'd be cold when
that cigarette fell into the gunpowder and ruined my hand.
I made myself a firm, solid promise that if, as, and when I got out of
this fix I would find Scarmann, shove the nose of my automatic down his
throat through his front teeth and empty the clip out through the top of
his head.
Then the hotboy behind me lifted the cigarette from my fingers very gently
and squibbed it out in the ashtray, and I got the pitch.
This is the way it is done in these enlightened days. Rhine Institute and
the special talents that Rhine developed should and could have made the
world a better, brighter place to live in. But I've heard it said and had
it proved that the minute someone comes up with something good, there are
a lot of buzzards who turn it bad and make it a foul, rotten medium for
their lousy way of life.
No, in these days of mental telepathy and extra sensory perception, crumbs
do not erase other crumbs. They just grab some citizen and put him in a
box until he is ready to do their dirty work for them.
Guilt? That would be mine. A crime is a crime and the guy who does it is a
criminal, no matter how he justifies his act of violence.
The truth? Any court mentalist who waded through that pair of unwashed
minds would find no evidence of any open deal with Steve Hammond. Sure, he
would find violence there, but the Court is more than well aware of the
fact that thinking of an act of violence is not illegal. This Rhine
training has been too recent to get the human race trained into the
niceties of polite mental behavior. Sure, they'd get a few months or maybe
a few years for breaking and entering as well as assault, but after all,
they were friends of Rambaugh and this might well be a matter of
retaliation, even though they thought Rambaugh was an incompetent bungler.
So if Steve Hammond believed that he could go free with a whole hand by
planning to rub out a man named Scarmann, that would be Steve Hammond's
crime, not theirs.
They didn't take any chances, even though I knew that they could read my
mind well enough to know that I would go through with their nasty little
scheme. They hustled Martha into the kitchen, chair and all, and one of
them stood there with my paring knife touching her soft throat enough to
indent the skin but not enough to draw blood. The other rat untaped me and
stood me on my feet.
I hurt all over from the pasting I'd taken, so I took a boiling shower and
dressed leisurely. The guy handed me my forty-five, all loaded, as I came
out of the bathroom. The other bird hadn't moved a muscle out in the
kitchen. His knife was still pressing against Martha's throat. He was
still standing pat when I passed out of esper range on the street below.
In pre-Rhine days, a citizen in my pinch would holler for the cops because
he couldn't be sure that the crooks would keep their end of the bargain.
But Rhine training has produced a real "Honor Among Thieves" so that
organized crime can run as fast as organized justice. If I kept my end and
they didn't keep theirs, the word would get around from their own dirty
minds that they couldn't keep a bargain. Well, I was going to keep mine
for the same reason, even though I am not a thief.
That's the way it's done these days. You get a good esper like me to knock
off a sharp mental operator like Scarmann.
The trouble was that I didn't really want Scarmann, I wanted that pair of
mental sadists up in my apartment who were holding a knife against
Martha's throat. I wanted them, and I wanted Martha Franklin's skin to be
happily whole. And if I crossed them now, the only guys that wouldn't play
ball with me in the future would be the crooks. Them I could do without.
So if they figured that an esper could take a mental like Scarmann, why
couldn't an esper take the pair of them?
All I had to do was to think of something else until I could get my hands
on their throats. Sure, they'd follow my mind as soon as they felt my
mental waves within range, but if I could really find something
interesting enough to occupy my attention--and maybe theirs as well--they
could not identify me.
So I went back into the lobby of my apartment and dug into the mailbox of
another party, thus identifying myself as the man in three eight four.
Then I punched the elevator button for the Fourth and leaned back against
the elevator and let my mind wander up through the apartments above.
I violated all the laws against Esping Toms as the elevator oozed upwards.
Eventually my sense of perception wandered through my own apartment and I
located her lying on the bed, fully dressed. She'd probably been freed
lest some esper cop get to wondering why there was a woman taped to a
chair in a bachelor's kitchen. I shut my mind like a clam, but I couldn't
withdraw my perception too fast. I let it ooze back there like the eyes of
a lecherous old man at a burleycue.
I left the elevator at the Fourth and walked up the stairs by reflex,
while my mind was positively radiating waves of vulgarity.
My mind managed to identify her as "The girl on the bed" without thinking
any name. She was a good looking strawberry blonde with a slender waist
and a high bosom and long, slender legs. She was wearing a pair of Dornier
shoes with three inch heels that did things to her ankles. Her nylons were
size eight and one half, medium length, in that dark shade that always
gives me ideas. Her dress was a simple thing that did not have a store
label on it, and so I dug the stitches for a bit and decided that it had
been hand made. Someone was a fine dress-maker because it fitted her
slender body perfectly. Her petticoat was store type. It was simple and
fitted, too, but it had a label from Forresters in the hem. Her bra was a
Graceform, size thirty two, medium cup, but the girl on the bed did not
have much need for molding, shaping, uplifting, padding or pretense. She
was all her and she filled it right to the brim. I let my perception
dawdle on the slender ankles, the lissome waist, and the rounded hips.
My door key came out by habit-reflex and entered the keyhole while my
sense of perception let them have one last vicarious thrill. The girl on
the bed was an honest allover strawberry blonde. She....
Then the door swung open and hell went out for breakfast.
My forty-five bellowed at the light as I slid in and sloped to one side.
The room went dark as I dropped to the floor in front of my bookcase. From
across the room a hitburner seared the door and slashed sidewise, cutting
a smoking swathe across my encyclopedia from A-AUD to CAN-DAN and then
came down as I squirmed aside. It took King Lear right out of Shakespeare
before the beam winked out. It went off just in time to keep me from
sporting a cooked stripe down my face.
I triggered the automatic again to make a flash in their faces while I dug
the room to locate them in the dark. The needle beam flared out again and
drilled a hole in the bookcase behind me. The other guy made a slashing
motion with his beam to pin me down, but he made a mistake by standing up
to do it.
I put a slug in his middle that slammed him back against the wall. He hung
there for a moment before he fell to the floor with a dull, limp sound.
His needle beam slashed upward and burned the ceiling before his hand went
limp and let the weapon drop.
I whirled to dig the other guy in the room just as the throb of a stun-gun
beam moaned over my head. I wondered where they'd got the arsenal, dug the
serial number, and realized that it was mine. It gave me a chuckle. I'm a
pistol man, so the stun-gun that old gorilla-man was toting couldn't have
had more than one more charge. I tried to dig it but couldn't. Even a
Doctor Of Perception can't really dig the number of kilo-watt-seconds in a
meson chamber.
My accurate esping must have made the other guy desperate, because he made
a dive and let his needle ray burn out a slashing beam that zipped across
over my head. My forty-five blazed twice. He missed but I didn't, just as
the throb of the stun-gun rang the air again. I whirled to face my
stun-gun coming out of the bedroom door in front of Martha Franklin.
The slug intended for Martha's body never came out of my gun because her
stun-gun got to me first. It froze me like a hunk of Greek statuary and I
went forward and toppled over until I came on a three-point landing of
elbow, the opposite knee, and the side of my face.