“Why, hello, Colonel Weldon,” she said. “I didn’t realize you would be on the project today.” Her gaze went questioningly past him to Dr. Lowry, who stood in the center of the room, hands shoved deep into his trousers pockets.
Lowry said wryly, “Come in, Arlene. This has been a surprise to me, too, and not a pleasant one. On the basis of orders coming directly from the top—which I have just confirmed, by the way—our schedule here is to be subjected to drastic rearrangements. They include among other matters our suspension as the actual operators of the projector.”
“But why that?” she asked startled.
Dr. Lowry shrugged. “Ask Ferris. He just arrived by his personal conduit. He’s supposed to explain the matter to us.”
Ferris Weldon, locking the door behind Arlene, said smilingly, “And please do give me a chance to do just that now, both of you! Let’s sit down as a start. Naturally you’re angry . . . no one can blame you for it. But I promise to show you the absolute necessity behind this move.”
He waited until they were seated, then added, “One reason—though not the only reason—for interrupting your work at this point is to avoid exposing both of you to serious personal danger.”
Dr. Lowry stared at him. “And what’s that supposed to mean?”
“Ben,” Ferris Weldon asked, “what was the stated goal of this project when you undertook it?”
Lowry said stiffly, “To develop a diex-powered instrument which would provide a means of reliable mental communication with any specific individual on Earth.”
Weldon shook his head. “No, it wasn’t.”
Arlene Rolf laughed shortly. “He’s right, Ben.” She looked at Weldon. “The hypothetical goal of the project was an instrument which would enable your department telepaths to make positive identification of a hypothetical Public Enemy Number One . . . the same being described as a `rogue telepath’ with assorted additional qualifications.”
Weldon said, “That’s a little different, isn’t it? Do you recall the other qualifications?”
“Is that important at the moment?” Miss Rolf asked. “Oh, well . . . this man is also a dangerous and improbably gifted hypnotist. Disturb him with an ordinary telepathic probe or get physically within a mile or so of him, and he can turn you mentally upside down, and will do it in a flash if it suits his purpose. He’s quite ruthless, is supposed to have committed any number of murders. He might as easily be some unknown as a man constantly in the public eye who is keeping his abilities concealed. . . . He impersonates people. . . . He is largely responsible for the fact that in a quarter of a century the interplanetary colonization program literally hasn’t got off the ground. . . .”
She added, “That’s as much as I remember. There will be further details in the files. Should I dig them out?”
“No,” Ferris Weldon said. “You’ve covered most of it.”
Dr. Lowry interrupted irritably, “What’s the point of this rigmarole, Weldon? You aren’t assuming that either of us has taken your rogue telepath seriously. . . .”
“Why not?”
Lowry shrugged. “Because he is, of course, one of the government’s blandly obvious fictions. I’ve no objection to such fictions when they serve to describe the essential nature of a problem without revealing in so many words what the problem actually is. In this case, the secrecy surrounding the project could have arisen largely from a concern about the reaction in various quarters to an instrument which might be turned into a thought-control device.”
Weldon asked, “Do you believe that is the purpose of your projector?”
“If I’d believed it, I would have had nothing to do with it. I happen to have considerable confidence in the essential integrity of our government, if not always in its good sense. But not everyone shares that feeling.”
Ferris Weldon lit a cigarette, flicked out the match, said after a moment, “But you didn’t buy the fiction?”
“Of course not.”
Weldon glanced at Miss Rolf. “You, Arlene?”
She looked uneasy. “I hadn’t bought it, no. Perhaps I’m not so sure now—you must have some reason for bringing up the matter here. But several things wouldn’t make sense. If . . .”
Dr. Lowry interrupted again. “Here’s one question, Weldon. If there did happen to be a rogue telepath around, what interest would he have in sabotaging the colonization program?”
Weldon blew two perfect smoke rings, regarded their ascent with an air of judicious approval. “After you’ve heard a little more you should be able to answer that question yourself,” he said. “It was precisely the problems connected with the program that put us on the rogue’s trail. We didn’t realize it at the time. Fourteen years ago . . . Have you had occasion to work with DEDCOM, Ben?”
Lowry made a snorting sound. “I’ve had a number of occasions . . . and made a point of passing them up! If the government is now basing its conclusions on the fantastically unrealistic mishmash of suggestions it’s likely to get from a deducting computer . . .”
“Well,” Ferris Weldon said deprecatingly, “the government doesn’t trust DEDCOM too far, of course. Still, the fact that it is strictly logical, encyclopedically informed and not hampered by common sense has produced surprisingly useful results from time to time.
“Now don’t get indignant again, Ben! I assure you I’m not being facetious. The fact is that sixteen years ago the charge that interplanetary colonization was being sabotaged was frequently enough raised. It had that appearance from the outside. Whatever could go wrong had gone wrong. There’d been an unbelievable amount of blundering.
“Nevertheless, all the available evidence indicated that no organized sabotage was involved. There was plenty of voluble opposition to the program, sometimes selfish, sometimes sincere. There were multiple incidents of forgetfulness, bad timing, simple stupidity. After years of false starts, the thing still appeared bogged down in a nightmare of—in the main—honest errors. But expensive ones. The month-by-month cost of continuing reached ridiculous proportions. Then came disasters which wiped out lives by the hundreds. The program’s staunchest supporters began to get dubious, to change their minds.
“I couldn’t say at the moment which genius in the Department of Special Activities had the notion to feed the colonization problem to DEDCOM. Anyway, it was done, and DEDCOM, after due checking and rumination, not only stated decisively that it was a matter of sabotage after all, it further provided us with a remarkably detailed description of the saboteur. . . .”
Arlene Rolf interrupted. “There had been only one saboteur?”
“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 super-talents 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.”