There was a barely perceptible pause before Weldon replied. "Yes,"
he said then, "it's possible. It's a small chance--perhaps only a
theoretical one. But we're not omniscient, and we may not know quite as
much about him as we think. It remains possible."
"Then why take even that risk?" Arlene asked. "Wouldn't it be better
to destroy the projector now--to leave things as they are--rather
than offer him a weapon which would reduce us all to helpless chattels
again?"
Weldon shook his head. "Arlene, we can't leave things as they are!
Neither can the rogue. You know that really--even though you refuse to
admit it to yourself at the moment."
"I ... what do you mean?"
* * * * *
"This year," Weldon said patiently, "we have the diex projector. What
will we have five years from now when diex energy has been more fully
explored? When the other fields of knowledge that have been opened
in recent years begin to expand? We could, perhaps, slow down those
processes. We can't stop them. And, at any point, other unpredictable
weapons may emerge ... weapons we might use against the rogue, or that
he might use against us.
"No, for both sides the time to act is now, unless we're willing to
leave the future to chance. We aren't; and the rogue isn't. We've
challenged him to determine whether he or mankind will control this
planet, and he's accepted the challenge. It amounts to that. And it's
very likely that the outcome will have become apparent not many hours
from now."
Arlene shook her head but said nothing. Dr. Lowry asked, "Ferris,
exactly what is _our_ role in this situation supposed to be?"
"For the next few hours," Weldon said, "you'll be instructing me in the
practical details of operating the projector. I've studied your reports
very carefully, of course, and I could handle it after a fashion
without such help. But that isn't good enough. Because--as the rogue
knows very well--we aren't bluffing in the least in this. We're forcing
him to take action. If he doesn't"--Weldon nodded at the polished
hardwood box on the table before Dr. Lowry--"one of our telepaths
presently _will_ be placed before that instrument of yours, and
the rogue will face the possibility of being flushed into view. And
there is no point on the globe at this moment which is more than a few
minutes' flight away from one of our strike groups.
"So he'll take action ... at the latest as soon as the order is given
to move our telepath to the Cleaver Project. But you two won't be here
when it happens. You're not needed for that part, and while we've been
talking, the main project conduit has been shunted from our university
exit here to a security island outside the area. You'll move there
directly from the project as soon as you finish checking me out, and
you will remain there until Operation Rogue is concluded.
"And now let's get busy! I think it would be best, Ben, if I assumed
Arlene's usual role for a start ... secondary operator ... and let you
go through the regular pattern of contacts while I look on. What do you
say?"
* * * * *
Arlene Rolf had taken a chair well back from the table where the two
men sat before the diex projector. She realized it had been an attempt
to dissociate herself--emotionally as well as physically--from what was
being done there, and that the attempt hadn't been at all successful.
Her usual composure, based on the awareness of being able to adjust
herself efficiently to the necessities of any emergency, was simply
gone. The story of the rogue had been sprung on them too abruptly at
this last moment. Her mind accepted the concept but hadn't really
assimilated it yet. Listening to what Weldon had said, wanting to
remain judiciously skeptical but finding herself increasingly unable to
disbelieve him--that had been like a slow, continuous shock. She wasn't
yet over it. Her thoughts wouldn't follow the lines she set them on but
veered off almost incoherently every minute or two. For the first time
in her adult life she was badly frightened--made stupid with fear--and
finding it something she seemed unable to control at will.
Her gaze shifted back helplessly to the table and to the dull-blue
concave viewplate which was the diex projector's central section.
Unfolded from its case, the projector was a beautiful machine of spider
web angularities lifting from the flat silver slab of its generator
to the plate. The blurred shiftings of color and light in the center
of the plate were next to meaningless without the diex goggles Dr.
Lowry and Weldon had fitted over their heads; but Arlene was familiar
enough with the routine test patterns to follow their progress without
listening closely to what was said....
She wanted the testing to stop. She felt it was dangerous. Hadn't
Weldon said they still couldn't be sure of the actual extent of the
rogue's abilities? And mightn't the projector be luring their minds out
now into the enemy's territory, drawing his attention to what was being
done in this room? There had been seconds when an uncanny certainty
had come to her that she could sense the rogue's presence, that he
already was cynically aware of what they were attempting, and only
biding his time before he interfered. That might be--almost certainly
was--superstitious imagining, but the conviction had been strong.
Strong enough to leave her trembling.
But there was, of course, exactly nothing she could do or say now to
keep them from going on. She remained silent.
So far it had been routine. A standard warm-up. They'd touched
Vanderlin in Melbourne, Marie Faber in Seattle. The wash of colors in
the viewplate was the reflection of individual sensory impressions
riding the diex field. There had been no verbalizing or conscious
response from the contacted subjects. That would come later. Dr.
Lowry's face was turned momentarily sideways to her, the conical grey
lenses of the goggles protruding from beneath his forehead like staring
insect eyes.
* * * * *
She realized he must have said something to Weldon just now which she
hadn't heard. Weldon's head was nodding in agreement. Dr. Lowry shifted
back to the table, said, "Botucato, Brazil--an untried location. How
the pinpointing of these random samplings is brought about is of
course...." His voice dropped to an indistinct murmur as he reached out
to the projector again.
Arlene roused herself with an effort partly out of her foggy fears.
It was almost like trying to awake from a heavy, uncomfortable
sleep. But now there was also some feeling of relief--and angry
self-contempt--because obviously while she had been giving in to her
emotional reactions, nothing disastrous had in fact occurred! At the
table, they'd moved on several steps in the standard testing procedure.
She hadn't even been aware of it. She was behaving like a fool!
The sensory color patterns were gone from the viewplate, and now as she
looked, the green-patterned white field of the projector's location map
appeared there instead. She watched Dr. Lowry's practiced fingers spin
the coordinating dials, and layer after layer of the map came surging
into view, each a magnified section of the preceding one. There was a
faint click. Lowry released the dials, murmured something again, ended
more audibly, "... twenty-mile radius." The viewplate had gone blank,
but Arlene continued to watch it.
The projector was directed now towards a twenty-mile circle at ground
level somewhere in Brazil. None of their established contacts were
in that area. Nevertheless, something quite definite was occuring.
Dr. Lowry had not expected to learn much more about this particular
process until a disciplined telepathic mind was operating through the
instrument--and perhaps not too much more then. But in some manner the
diex energy was now probing the area, and presently it would touch a
human mind--sometimes a succession of them, sometimes only one. It was
always the lightest of contacts. The subjects remained patently unaware
of any unusual experience, and the only thing reflected from them was
the familiar generalized flux of sensory impressions--
* * * * *
Arlene Rolf realized she was standing just inside the open records
vault of Dr. Lowry's office, with a bundle of files in her arms. On the
floor about her was a tumbled disorder of other files, of scattered
papers, tapes. She dropped the bundle on the litter, turned back to
the door. And only then, with a churning rush of hot terror, came the
thought, _What am I doing here? What happened?_
She saw Dr. Lowry appear in the vault door with another pile of papers.
He tossed them in carelessly, turned back into the office without
glancing in her direction. Arlene found herself walking out after him,
her legs carrying her along in dreamlike independence of her will.
Lowry was now upending the contents of a drawer to the top of his desk.
She tried to scream his name. There was no sound. She saw his face
for an instant. He looked thoughtful, absorbed in what he was doing,
nothing else....
Then she was walking through the living room, carrying something--the
next instant, it seemed, she'd reentered Lowry's office. Nightmarishly,
it continued. Blank lapses of awareness followed moments in which her
mind swayed in wild terrors while her body moved about, machinelike
and competent, piling material from workshop and file cabinets
helter-skelter into the records vault. It might have been going on for
only three or four minutes or for an hour; her memory was enclosed in
splinters of time and reality. But there were moments, too, when her
thoughts became lucid and memory returned ... Colonel Weldon's broad
back as he disappeared through the narrow door in the living room wall
into the private conduit entry, the strap of the diex projector case in
his right hand; then the door closing behind him. Before that had been
an instant when something blazed red in the projector's viewplate on
the table, and she'd wondered why neither of the two men sitting before
it made any comment--
Then suddenly, in one of the lucid moments, there was time for the
stunned thought to form: _So the rogue caught us all!_ Weldon's
self-confidence and courage, Dr. Lowry's dedicated skill, her own
reluctance to be committed to this matter ... nothing had made the
slightest difference. In his own time, the rogue had come quietly
through every defense and seized their minds. Weldon was on his way to
him now, carrying the diex projector.
And she and Dr. Lowry? They'd been ordered by the rogue to dispose of
every scrap of information dealing with the projector's construction,
of course! They were doing it. And after they had finished--then what?
Arlene thought she knew when she saw Dr. Lowry close the vault, and
unlock and plunge the destruct button beside the door. Everything in
there would be annihilated now in ravening white fire. But the two
minds which knew the secrets of the projector--
* * * * *
She must have made a violent effort to escape, almost over-riding the
rogue's compulsions. For she found herself in the living room, not ten
feet from the door that opened into the outer halls where help might
still have been found. But it was as far as she could go; she was
already turning away from the door, starting back across the room with
the quick, graceful automaton stride over which she had no control. And
terror surged up in her again.
As she approached the far wall, she saw Dr. Lowry come out of the
passage from the office, smiling absently, blinking at the floor
through his glasses. He turned without looking up and walked behind her
towards the closed narrow door before Colonel Weldon's nonspace conduit
entry.
So it wasn't to be death, Arlene thought, but personal slavery. The
rogue still had use for them. They were to follow where Weldon had
gone....
Her hand tugged at the door. It wouldn't open.
She wrenched at it violently, savagely, formless panic pounding through
her. After a moment, Dr. Lowry began to mutter uneasily, then reached
out to help her.
The room seemed suddenly to explode; and for an instant Arlene Rolf
felt her mind disintegrating in raging torrents of white light.
* * * * *
She had been looking drowsily for some moments at the lanky, red-headed
man who stood, faced away, half across the room before any sort of
conscious understanding returned. Then, immediately, everything was
there. She went stiff with shock.
Dr. Lowry's living room ... she in this chair and Dr. Lowry stretched
out on the couch. He'd seemed asleep. And standing above him, looking
down at him, the familiar raw-boned, big figure of Frank Harding. Dr.
Frank Harding who had walked up to the Cleaver Spaceport entry with her
today, told her he'd be flying back to the coast.
Frank Harding, the....
Arlene slipped quietly out of the chair, moved across the room behind
Harding's back, watching him. When he began to turn, she darted off
towards the open hall entry.
She heard him make a startled exclamation, come pounding after her.
He caught her at the entry, swung her around, holding her wrists. He
stared down at her from under the bristling red brows. "What the devil
did you think you were doing?"
"You....!" Arlene gasped frantically. "You--" What checked her was
first the surprise, then the dawning understanding in his face. She
stammered, almost dizzy with relief, "I ... I thought you must be...."
Harding shook his head, relaxed his grip on her wrists.
"But I'm not, of course," he said quietly.
"No ... you're not! You wouldn't have had to ... chase me if you were,
would you?" Her eyes went round in renewed dismay. "But I don't ... he
has the diex projector now!"
Harding shook his head again and took her arm. "No, he doesn't! Now
just try to relax a bit, Arlene. We did trap him, you know. It cost
quite a few more lives at the end, but we did. So let's go over and sit
down. I brought some whisky along ... figured you two should be able to
use a little after everything you've been through."
Arlene sat on the edge of a chair, watching him pour out a glass. A
reaction had set in; she felt very weak and shaky now, and she seemed
unable to comprehend entirely that the rogue had been caught.