Again the bodiless thought struck into his mind.
"_That is not for you to know--now or possibly ever. The girl is
working for General Atomic. Do not allow yourself to be duped. It is
decidedly not our policy that General Atomic or any of the corporations
learn the secret of the stellar drive!_"
* * * * *
Saxon's eyes opened with surprise. He had no intention of giving G.A.
the secret of the stellar drive. It was a government secret, for one
thing....
"_We are quite aware of your intentions_," came the telepathic
communication. "_Otherwise, you would no longer be._"
Saxon swallowed dryly, realized his palms were sweating. He glanced at
Ileth. The moonlight had crept into the doorway, illuminating her oval
face clearly. He noted the perplexed slant to her fine black brows, the
sober, half frightened expression clouding her patrician features.
"Why don't we go?" she asked. "What are you waiting for?"
"In a minute."
He sent his thought probing out toward the alien minds. And brought up
sharp before an absolute mental barrier.
No neophytes here. Whatever the creatures were, they were masters of
thought-transference. Excitement sent the blood surging through Saxon's
veins, blotted out momentarily his alarm.
Until this moment, he had believed himself unique, the single telepath
on Earth.
He had been thirty-one when he first became aware of his telepathic
potential. It had developed overnight, a seventh extra-human sense,
that isolated him forever from the rest of mankind.
There had been something indecent, prying about seeing into the minds
of his fellows--like a peeping Tom. It had been intolerable at first,
the naked baring of souls before him, intolerable and shocking, until
he had learned to block out their thoughts.
He felt the girl shiver against him.
"But what are you afraid of, Jon?"
He didn't answer because the alien thoughts intruded on his mind again.
"_This is a warning, Jon Saxon. Do not divulge the stellar drive to
anyone. It is not and never was intended for you to know. Only the
unfortunate development of a telepathic sense enabled you to steal it
from Villainowski's brain...._"
"_I didn't steal it!_" Saxon thought indignantly. "_I worked with
Villainowski building the ship. It would have been impossible for me
not to learn it._"
"_Exactly_," came the reply. "_And your continued existence hinges
entirely on your silence._"
A chill wind blew up Saxon's spine, but it only fanned the flame of
eagerness which had sprung up in him. Here were others like himself,
possessed of telepathic powers.
"_Who are you?_" he thought passionately.
He realized in dismay that the prickling in skin and scalp had
diminished. The telepaths were withdrawing, deserting him without a
hint of further contact.
"_Who are you? How can I find you?_"
Nothing!
He and the girl were alone again in the moonlit doorway.
A strange sense of exhilaration replaced Saxon's first feeling of
letdown. There were other telepaths on Earth and sometime, someplace
their paths would cross again. He stepped into the street, saying to
Ileth, "Let's go. I was mistaken. There's no one here."
In the rays of the street lamp, he looked more like a pugilist than
a Government Bureau of Research man and one of Terra's top nuclear
physicists. He had a big nose, twice broken, strong white teeth and a
square massive jaw. He caught the girl's thought and grinned down at
her.
"_He's not handsome_," she was thinking, "_not by any standard, but
when he grins like that you don't think about his looks and virility
radiates from him like heat waves. He's a dangerous man! Emil
underrates him!_"
"Hadn't we better take the conveyor?" she asked aloud.
* * * * *
Jon Saxon nodded, swung the girl lightly by her elbows to the pick-up,
transferred to commuter, then express. They found seats while the
buildings flowed past on either hand like a speeded-up movie.
"You have a frightening job," said Ileth, looking up at his from big
hazel-green eyes. Her shiny black hair she wore in a shoulder length
page-boy bob. She smoothed her short-waisted chartreuse jacket over
small firm breasts. "I'm surprised Government lets you go out without
your bodyguard."
"They don't." Saxon's unprepossessing features lit with a boyish grin.
"But I slip away from them once in a while."
"You were afraid of an ambush back there in the street?"
He nodded. "Yes. I thought one of the corporations may have got wind of
my escapade."
The girl, he saw from her thoughts, was satisfied with his explanation.
In these days of savage competition, the big corporations maintained
their own factories and laboratories. General Atomic, Tri-World,
Amalgamated Plastic, a score of lesser companies employed staffs
of technicians and research scientists. The lives of these men
were fraught with a peculiar danger. They were subject to bribery,
kidnapping and torture by the spy agencies of rival companies in their
efforts to extort from them any new discovery or guarded scientific
process their corporations might possess. Independent agencies manned
by corrupt technicians had men everywhere.
The corporations protected themselves by confining their technicians
to barracks and never permitting them to wander forth unescorted. It
was a condition which Jon Saxon found little better than slavery. The
constant surveillance irked him to the point of rebellion.
Now he was confronted suddenly with the fact that he had been under
observation of an infinitely more subtle kind as well. Some group was
keeping constant watch upon his mind. But who?
Ileth sighed and laid her sleek black head on his shoulder. "Jon,
you've been so quiet tonight. Is it because tomorrow the expedition
leaves for Alpha Centauri?"
"I don't know. I'm not afraid, exactly. We know the drive is
practicable, but it's the first attempt man's ever made to reach the
stars. We've never been beyond the Solar System before, Ileth."
He felt the girl's arms slip around his neck, cling with surprising
strength. "I'm afraid, Jon. I wish you weren't going."
"What are you afraid of?"
Ileth bit her lower lip. She was feeling rather than thinking, Saxon
realized, a mental chaos bubbling in the primitive thalamic regions of
her nervous system, a formless intuition of disaster stalking the first
expedition into stellar space.
"I--I don't know exactly," she confessed. "I don't understand it, Jon."
Saxon's eyes narrowed. He had intercepted that dread of the
expedition's fate before. He had felt it emanating from hundreds of
individuals otherwise unrelated. It was like a hypnotically imposed
command: "_Don't venture into the Stellar Depths!_"
And it always stemmed from the subconscious, the regions of the human
mind telepathically closed to him. At first he'd been inclined to think
it was dread of the unknown. But now he was not so sure.
Facts, Saxon knew, were assimilated by the subconscious, later to
emerge as hunches and intuition. He had grown to believe that there
must be reason behind this universal fear of stellar space.
He had even felt it in himself; in his chief, Villainowski; in his
co-workers at Government's Bureau of Research. It was a very real
feeling that nothing but disaster for the human race could come of this
venture to the stars.