"Only one who knew what he was doing, yes."
"The rogue telepath?" Dr. Lowry asked.
"Who else?"
"Then if the department has had his description...."
"Why is he still at large?" Ferris Weldon asked, with a suggestion of
grim amusement. "Wait till you hear what it sounded like at the time,
Ben! I'll give it to you from memory.
"Arlene has mentioned some of the points. The saboteur, DEDCOM informed
us, was, first, a hypnotizing telepath. He could work on his victims
from a distance, force them into the decisions and actions he wanted,
leave them unaware that their minds had been tampered with, or that
anything at all was wrong.
"Next, he was an impersonator, to an extent beyond any ordinary meaning
of the word. DEDCOM concluded he must be able to match another human
being's appearance so closely that it would deceive his model's most
intimate associates. And with the use of these two talents our saboteur
had, in ten years, virtually wrecked the colonization program.
"Without any further embellishments, DEDCOM's report of this malevolent
superman at loose in our society would have raised official eyebrows
everywhere...."
"In particular," Miss Rolf asked, "in the Department of Special
Activities?"
"In particular there," Weldon agreed. "The department's experience
made the emergence of any human supertalents worth worrying about seem
highly improbable. In any event, DEDCOM crowded its luck. It didn't
stop at that point. The problems besetting the colonization program
were, it stated, by no means the earliest evidence of a rogue telepath
in our midst. It listed a string of apparently somewhat comparable
situations stretching back through the past three hundred years, and
declared unequivocally that in each case the responsible agent had been
the same--our present saboteur."
* * * * *
Weldon paused, watched their expressions changing. A sardonic smile
touched the corners of his mouth.
"All right," Dr. Lowry said sourly after a moment, "to make the thing
even more unlikely, you're saying now that the rogue is immortal."
Weldon shook his head. "I didn't say it ... and neither, you notice,
did DEDCOM. The question of the rogue's actual life span, whatever it
may be, was no part of the matter it had been given to investigate. It
said only that in various ways he had been interfering with mankind's
progress for at least three centuries. But added to the rest of it,
that statement was quite enough."
"To accomplish what?"
"What do you think?" Weldon asked. "The report passed eventually
through the proper hands, was properly initialed, then filed with
DEDCOM's earlier abortions and forgotten. Special Activities
continued, by its more realistic standard investigative procedures, to
attempt to find out what had bogged down the colonization program. As
you're aware, the department didn't make much headway. And neither has
the program."
"The last is very apparent," Lowry said, looking puzzled. "But the fact
that you've failed to solve the problem seems a very poor reason to go
back now to the theory of a rogue telepath."
Weldon blew out a puff of smoke, said thoughtfully, "That wouldn't have
been too logical of us, I agree. But our failure wasn't the reason for
reviving DEDCOM's theory."
"Then what was your reason?" Irritation edged Lowry's voice again.
"The unexpected death, five years ago, of one of the world's
better-known political figures," Weldon said. "You would recognize the
name immediately if I mentioned it. But you will not recognize the
circumstances surrounding his death which I am about to relate to you,
because the report published at the time was a complete falsehood and
omitted everything which might have seemed out of the ordinary. The man
actually was the victim of murder. His corpse was found floating in
the Atlantic. That it should have been noticed at all was an unlikely
coincidence, but the body was fished out and identified. At that point,
the matter acquired some very improbable aspects because it was well
known that this man was still alive and in the best of health at his
home in New York.
"It could have been a case of mistaken identification, but it wasn't.
The corpse was the real thing. While this was being definitely
established, the man in New York quietly disappeared ... and now a
number of people began to take a different view of DEDCOM's long-buried
report of a hypnotizing telepath who could assume the identity of
another person convincingly enough to fool even close friends. It was
not conclusive evidence, but it did justify a serious inquiry which was
promptly attempted."
"Attempted?" Arlene Rolf asked. "What happened?"
* * * * *
"What happened," Weldon said, "was that the rogue declared war on us. A
limited war on the human race. A quiet, undercover war for a specific
purpose. And that was to choke off any kind of investigation that might
endanger him or hamper his activities. The rogue knew he had betrayed
himself; and if he hadn't known of it earlier, he learned now about
the report DEDCOM had made. Those were matters he couldn't undo. But
he could make it very clear that he wanted to be left undisturbed, and
that he had methods to enforce his wishes."