* * * * *
Number Three was the screwiest one of all, yet it made a weird kind of
sense. Suppose that Sir Lewis himself had had a grudge against Harris?
The whole thing would have been ridiculously easy; all he'd have to do
would be to act just as he had acted and then give evidence against
Harris.
The thing that made it odd wasn't the actual frame-up (if that's what it
was); these days, every crime was blamed on a Controller. A man accused
of murder simply looked virtuous and said that he would never have done
such a thing if he hadn't been under the power of a Controller. Ditto
for robbery, rape, and any other felony you'd care to name.
An aura of fear hung over the whole Earth; each man half suspected
everyone with whom he came in contact of being a Controller.
So it wasn't that the frame-up in itself was peculiar in this case; it
was simply that it wasn't Sir Lewis Huntley's style. If Sir Lewis had
wanted to get Harris, he'd have done it legally, without any underhanded
frame-ups. Still, the theory remained as a possibility.
_I suppose it does_, Dorrine agreed, _but how does that tie in with our
own Group? What about Jackson and Marcy? What happened to them?_
_I don't know_, Houston admitted, _I just don't know_.
Jackson and Marcy had been members of the Group of telepaths who had
banded together for companionship and mutual protection. Both of them
had been trapped by the PD Police in exactly the same way that Harris
had been trapped. They were now where Harris would be in a matter of
hours--in the Penal Cluster.
Their arrests didn't make sense, either; they had been accused of taking
over someone's mind for the purpose of gaining money illegally--illegal,
that is, according to the new UN laws that had been passed to supersede
the various national laws that had previously been in effect.
But Houston had known both men well, and neither of them was the kind of
man who would pull such a stunt, much less do it in such a stupid
manner.
Dorrine thought: _Well, Dave, this Harris case is out of our hands now;
we've got to concentrate on getting others into the Group--we've got to
find the other sane ones._
_You're ready to take over here, then?_ he asked.
* * * * *
At the table, several yards away from where Houston was sitting,
Dorrine, still looking at the book, smiled faintly.
_I'll have to; you're being transferred back to New York at six in the
morning._
Houston allowed a feeling of startled surprise to bridge the gap between
their minds. _How'd you know that?_ He hadn't told her, and she couldn't
have forced the knowledge from his mind. A telepath can open the mind
of a Normal as simply as he might open the pages of a book, but the mind
of another Controller is far stronger. One telepath couldn't force
anything from the mind of another; all thoughts had to be exchanged
voluntarily.
She was still smiling. _We've got a few spies in the UN now_, she told
him. _I got the information before you did._
_You knew before you left New York?_ he asked incredulously.
_That's right_, she thought. _The decision was made last night. Why?_
_Nothing_, he told her. _I was just surprised, that's all._ But deep
behind the telepathic barrier he had erected against her probing mind,
he was thinking something else. He had been assigned to London to
capture the Controller--then unknown--who was said to be active in
England. But his recall order had been decided upon _before_ Harris was
caught--or even suspected. Someone in the UN Psychodeviant Police
Supreme Headquarters in New York must have known that Harris would be
caught that day!
_Something's bothering you_, Dorrine stated flatly.
_I was thinking about leaving London_, he replied evasively. _I haven't
seen you for six months, and now I have to leave again._
_I'll be back in New York within three weeks_, the girl thought warmly.
_I'll be--_
Her thoughts were cut off suddenly by a strident voice in Houston's ear.
"Attention; all-band notice. Robert Bentley Harris, arraigned this
evening on a charge of illegal use of psychodeviant powers for the
purpose of compounding a felony, has been found guilty as charged. He
was therefore sentenced by the Lord Justice of Her Majesty's Court of
Star Chamber to be banished from Earth forever, such banishment to be
carried out by the United Nations Penology Service at the Queen's
pleasure."
The words that were running through Houston's brain, had been
transmitted easily to Dorrine. For a moment, neither of them made any
comment. Then Houston glanced at his watch.
_Twenty-one minutes_, he thought bitterly. _What took them so long?_
* * * * *
High in the thin ionosphere, seventy miles above the surface of the
Earth, a fifteen-hundred-mile-an-hour rocket airliner winged its way
westward across the Atlantic, pushing herself forward on the thin,
whispering, white-hot jets of her atomic engine. Behind her, the
outdistanced sun sank slowly below the eastern horizon.
David Houston wasn't watching the sunrise-in-reverse; he was sitting
quietly in his seat, still trying to puzzle out his queer recall to New
York. When Hamilton had told him about it over the phone, he'd assumed
that New York, having been notified that Harris had been captured, had
decided to send for Houston, now that his job was over.
But now he knew that the order had come through nearly twenty-four hours
before Harris was captured.
Did someone at UN Headquarters know that Harris was going to be
captured? Or did someone there suspect that there was something odd
about Police Operative David Houston?
Or both?
Whatever it was, Houston would have to take his chances; to act
suspiciously would be a deadly mistake.
A stewardess, clad in the chic BOAC uniform, moved down the aisle,
quietly informing the passengers that they could have coffee served at
their seats or take breakfast in the lounge. The atmosphere of the
plane's interior was filled with the low murmur of a hundred
conversations against the background of the susurrant mutter of the
mighty engines.
_Uhhh--uh--uh--dizzy--head hurts--uh--uh--_
The sounds in the plane altered subtly as the faint thought insinuated
itself on every brain inside the aircraft. None of the Normal passengers
recognized it for what it was; it was too gentle, too weak, to be
recognized directly by their minds.
But David Houston recognized it instantly for what it was.
Somewhere on the plane, a Controller had been unconscious. _Had_ been.
For now, his powerful mind was trying to swim up from the black depths
of nothingness.
_Uh--uhhhh--uhh--_
The Normal passengers became uneasy, not knowing why they were
disturbed. To them, it was like a vaguely unpleasant but totally
unrecognizable nudge from their own subconscious, like some
long-forgotten and deeply buried memory that had been forced down into
oblivion and was now trying to obtrude itself on the conscious mind.
_Uhhh--Oooohh--where?--what happened?--_
A fully conscious telepath could project his thoughts along a narrow
locus, focusing them on a single brain, leaving all other brains
oblivious to his thoughts. Like a TV broadcasting station, he could
choose his wavelength and stick to it.
But a half-conscious Controller sprayed his thoughts at random, creating
mental disturbances in his vicinity. Like a thunderstorm creating radio
static, there was no selectivity.
Savagely, David Houston did what he had to do. It might be a trap, but
he had to avoid the carnage that might follow if this went on. He hurled
a beam of thought, hard-held, at the offending mind of the awakening
telepath.
_DON'T THINK! RELAX!_
Normally it was impossible for a Controller to take over the mind of
another Controller, but these were abnormal circumstances; the
half-conscious man, whoever he was, was weakened mentally by some kind
of enforced unconsciousness--either a drug or a stun gun. Houston took
over his mind smoothly and easily.
_Robert Harris!_
Houston recognized the mind as soon as he held it.
He didn't try to force anything on Harris's mind; he simply held it,
cradling it, helping Harris to regain consciousness easily, bringing him
up from the darkness gently.
In normal sleep, everyone's mind retains a certain amount of
self-control and awareness of environment. If it didn't, noise and
bright lights wouldn't awaken a sleeping person.
* * * * *
In normal sleep, a telepath retained enough control to keep his thoughts
to himself, even when waking up.
But total anaesthesia brought on a mental blackout from which the victim
recovered only with effort. And during that time, a Controller's mind
was violently disturbing to the Normal minds around him, who mistook his
disordered thoughts for their own.
Like pouring heavy oil on choppy waters, Houston soothed the
disturbances of Harris's mind, focusing the random broadcasts on his own
brain.
And while he did that, he probed gently into the weakened mind of the
prisoner for information.
Harris was a Controller, all right; there was no doubt about that. But
nowhere in his mind was there any trace of any knowledge of what had
happened to Sir Lewis Huntley. If Sir Lewis had actually been
controlled, it hadn't been done by Robert Harris.
Houston wished he'd been able to probe Sir Lewis's mind; he'd have been
able to get a lot more information out of it than he had in his
possession now. But that would have been dangerous; if Sir Lewis was a
Controller himself, and had been acting a part, Houston would have given
himself away the instant he attempted to touch the baronet's mind. If,
on the other hand, Sir Lewis had actually been under the control of
another telepath, any probing into the mind of the puppet would have
betrayed Houston to the real Controller.
Harris knew nothing. He wasn't acquainted with any other Controllers,
and had kept his nose clean ever since he'd discovered his latent
powers. He knew that megalomaniac Controllers were either captured or
mobbed, and he had no wish to experience either.
The Normals had long since discovered that the only way to overcome a
Controller was by force of numbers. A Controller could only hold one
Normal mind at a time. That was why a mob could easily kill a single
Controller; that was why the Psychodeviant Police had evolved the "net"
system for arresting a telepath.
Harris, then, had been framed. Or could it be called a frame-up when
Harris was really guilty of the actual crime? Because the crime he had
really been accused of was not that of controlling Sir Lewis, but the
crime of being a telepath. That, and that alone, damned him in the eyes
of the Normals; the crime of taking over a mind for gain was incidental.
The stigma lies in what he _was_, not what he did.
Harris himself was in the bottom of the plane, in the baggage section
near the landing gear. After his trial, still drugged, he had been
secretly put aboard, to be taken to the Long Island Spaceport in New
York. It had had to be secret; no Normal would knowingly ride on an
aircraft which carried a Controller, even if he were drugged into total
unconsciousness.
With Harris were two PD Police guards. Their low conversation impinged
on Harris's ears, and was transmitted to Houston's mind.