The black-and-silver eyes studied him curiously. “Isn’t that likely to be quite a while?” Pagadan inquired—with such nice control that he almost overlooked the fact that this politically important nonhuman hothead was getting angry again.
“From what we know now of the Brain, he sounds like one of our tougher citizens,” he admitted. “Well, yes . . . I might be gone all of two days.”
There was a moment of rather tense silence. Then Iliff murmured approvingly:
“See now! I just knew you could brake down on that little old temperament.”
The Lannai released her breath. “I only hope you’re half as good as you think,” she said weakly. “But I am almost ready to believe you will do it in two days.”
“Oh, I will,” Iliff assured her, “with my shipload of specialists.” He stood up and looked down at her unsmiling. “So now if you’ll give me the information you gathered on those top biopsychologists in Lycanno, I’ll be starting.”
She nodded amiably. “There are two things I should like to ask you though, before you go. The one is—why have you been trying to probe through my mind-shields all evening?”
“It’s a good thing to find out as much as you can about the people you meet in this business,” Iliff said without embarrassment. “So many of them aren’t really nice. But your shields are remarkably tough. I got hardly any information at all.”
“You got nothing!” she said flatly, startled into contradiction.
“Oh, yes. Just a little—when you were giving me that lecture about the Lannai being a proud people and not willing to be protected, and all that. For a moment there you were off guard—”
He brought the captured thought slowly from his mind: the picture of a quiet, dawnlit city—seas of sloping, ivory-tinted roofs, and towers slender against a flaming sky.
“That is Lar-Sancaya the Beautiful—my city, my home-planet,” Pagadan said. “Yes, that was my thought. I remember it now!” She laughed. “You are a clever little man, Zone Agent! What information was in that for you?”
Iliff shrugged. He still showed the form of old Casselmath, the fat, unscrupulous little Terran trader whose wanderings through the galaxy coincided so often with the disappearance of undesirable but hitherto invulnerable citizens, with the inexplicable diversion of belligerent political trends, and the quiet toppling of venal governments. A space-wise, cynical, greedy but somehow ridiculous figure. Very few people ever took Casselmath seriously.
“Well, for one thing that the Lannai are patriots,” he said gloomily. “That makes them potentially dangerous, of course. On the whole, I’m rather glad you’re on our side.”
She grinned cheerfully. “So am I—on the whole. But now, if you’ll forgive a touch of malice, which you’ve quite definitely earned, I’d like the answer to my second question. And that is—what sent that little shock through your nerves when I referred to Tahmey’s probable connection with the Ghant Spacers a while ago?”
Old Casselmath rubbed the side of his misformed nose reflectively.
“It’s a long, sad story,” he said. “But if you want to know—some years back, I set out to nail down the boss of that outfit, the great U-1, no less. That was just after the Confederacy managed to break up the Ghant fleet, you remember—Well, I finally thought I’d got close enough to him to try a delicate probe at his mind—ugh!”
“I gather you bounced.”
“Not nearly fast enough to suit me. The big jerk knew I was after him all the time, and he’d set up a mind-trap for me. Mechanical and highly powered. I had to be helped out of it, and then I was psychoed for six months before I was fit to go back to work.
“That was a long time ago,” Casselmath concluded sadly. “But when it comes to U-1, or the Ghant Spacers, or anything at all connected with them, I’ve just never been the same since.”
Pagadan studied her shining nails and smiled sweetly.
“Zone Agent Iliff, I shall bring you the records you want—and you may then run along. From now on, of course, I know exactly what to do to make you jump.”
* * *
He sat bulky and expressionless at his desk, raking bejeweled fingers slowly through his beard—a magnificent, fan-shaped beard, black, glossy and modishly curled. His eyes were as black as the beard but so curiously lusterless he was often thought to be blind.
For the first time in a long, long span of years, he was remembering the meaning of fear.
But the alien thought had not followed him into the Dome—at least, he could trust his protective devices here. He reached into a section of the flowing black outer garments he wore, and produced a silvery, cone-shaped device. Placing the little amplifier carefully on the desk before him, he settled back in his chair, crossed his hands on his large stomach and half closed his eyes.
Almost immediately the recorded nondirectional thought impulses began. So faint, so impersonal, that even now when he could study their modified traces at leisure, when they did not fade away the instant his attention turned to them, they defied analysis except of the most general kind. And yet the unshielded part of his mind had responded to them, automatically and stupidly, for almost an hour before he realized—
Long enough to have revealed—almost anything!
The gems on his hand flashed furious fire as he whipped the amplifier off the desk and sent it smashing against the wall of the room. It shattered with a tinny crackle and dropped to the floor where a spray of purple sparks popped hissing from its crumpled surfaces and subsided again. The thought-impulses were stilled.
The black-bearded man glared down at the broken amplifier. Then, by almost imperceptible degrees, his expression began to change. Presently, he was laughing silently.
No matter how he had modified and adapted this human brain for his purpose, it remained basically what it had been when he first possessed himself of it. Whenever he relaxed his guidance, it reverted automatically to the old levels of emotional reaction.
He had forced it to develop its every rudimentary faculty until its powers were vastly superior to those of any normal member of its race. No ordinary human being, no matter how highly gifted, could be the equal of one who had had the advantage of becoming host-organism to a parasitizing Ceetal. Not even he, the Ceetal himself, was in any ordinary way the equal of this hypertrophied human intellect—he only controlled it. As a man controls a machine he has designed to be enormously more efficient than himself.
But if he had known the human breed better, he would have selected a more suitable host from it, to begin with. At its best, this one had been a malicious mediocrity; and its malice only expanded with its powers so that, within the limits he permitted, it now used the mental equipment of a titan to pamper the urges of an ape. A scowling moron who, on the invisible master’s demand, would work miracles! Now, at the first suggestion that its omnipotence might be threatened, it turned guilt-ridden and panicky, vacillating between brute fright and brute rages.
Too late to alter that—he was linked to his slave for this phase of his life-cycle. For his purposes, the brute was at any rate adequate, and it often amused him to observe its whims. But for the new Ceetals—for those who would appear after his next Change—he could and would provide more suitable havens.
One of them might well be the spy who had so alarmed his human partner. The shadowy perfection of his mental attack in itself seemed to recommend him for the role.
Meanwhile, however, the spy still had to be caught.
* * *
In swift waves of relaxation, the Ceetal’s influence spread through the black-bearded man’s body and back into the calming brain. His plan was roughly ready, the trap for the spy outlined, but his human thought-machine was infinitely better qualified for such work.
Controlled now, its personal fears and even the memory of them neutralized, it took up the problem as a problem—swept through it, clarifying, developing, concluding:
It was quite simple. The trap for this spy would be baited with the precise information he sought. On Gull, meanwhile, Tahmey remained as physical bait for the other spy, the first one—the nonhuman mind which had escaped by dint of the instantaneous shock-reflex that plucked it from his grasp as he prepared to close in. That the two were collaborating was virtually certain, that both were emissaries of the Confederacy of Vega was a not too unreasonable conjecture. No other organization suspected of utilizing combat-type minds of such efficiency was also likely to be interested in the person of Tahmey.
He was not, of course, ready to defy the Confederacy as yet—would not be for some time. A new form of concealment for Tahmey might therefore be necessary. But with the two spies under control, with the information extracted from them, any such difficulties could easily be met.