it?” he asked.
“You really want to know?” Massey asked lightly.
“Well, sure.” Whittaker looked puzzled. “What’s so funny? Am I missing the
obvious or something? If I am, all I can say is that a hell of a lot of other
people must have missed it too.”
There was silence for a few seconds. Then Vernon said, “Remember, we’re pretty
sure that Zambendorf had a confederate or two around the place. The information
he came up with was all the kind of stuff you’d expect to find inside a wallet,
plus he knew what the owner of the wallet looked like. Now think about that.”
Whittaker thought hard for a while, then looked over at Conlon. Conlon shrugged.
Whittaker looked back at Massey, shook his head, and showed his empty palms.
“Okay, I give in. How’d he know?”
Massey laughed, produced Whittaker’s wallet from his armpit, and tossed it back
to him. “That tell you enough? And there wasn’t anything on your jacket, by the
way, so don’t worry about it.”
“You’re kidding!” Whittaker protested. “You mean somebody stole it and then
turned it in?”
“See what I mean, Pat—too simple to think of, isn’t it?”
“And the things the people showed while he had the bag over his head?”
Massey brushed an imaginary speck of dust from his eyebrow, rubbed the tip of
his nose with a thumb, drew a finger lightly from left to right along his upper
lip, and then pinched the lobe of his right ear. “A confederate giving coded
signals from somewhere in the front rows . . . probably an Armenian character
called Abaquaan, who’s always close by Zambendorf somewhere, but you never see
him.”
“And the metal bar?”
“Standard magician’s equipment. If you saw it done at a school variety show
without all the hype, you’d applaud politely and say it was a clever trick. In
fact that’s one aspect of some research that Vernon and I are into at the
moment. It’s amazing—if people have made their minds up that what they’re seeing
is genuine paranormal power in action, they’ll stick to their conviction even
after they’ve agreed that any good stage magician can produce exactly the same
effect. No amount of appealing to reason will change them. In fact—”
At that moment the organ behind Vernon blasted out a series of rising and
falling notes, and a hollow, synthetic computer voice announced, “Visitor at the
portals.”
Massey glanced at the sarcophagus clock. “That’ll be the cab. Drink up. We can
have a couple more at the bar before we sit down to eat.”
They left the house five minutes later and stopped for a moment below the porch
to pick out the pinpoint of Mars in the evening sky. “It makes you think,”
Conlon said absently. “Sometime back in the eighteen hundreds, they thought it
was miraculous when the first clipper ship made it from Boston round the Horn to
San Francisco in under a hundred days. And here we are a century and a half
later, going to Mars and back in the same time.”
“Limits to Growth,” Vernon murmured.
“Huh?” Whittaker said.
“Oh, it’s the title of some dumb book I read from the seventies,” Vernon
replied.
“I see no limits,” Conlon said, scanning the stars. “Where do I look?”
“In people’s minds,” Massey answered.
A thoughtful look came over Vernon’s face as he followed Conlon’s gaze upward.
“I guess there have to be other intelligences out there somewhere,” he mused.
“Do you think they have kooks too, or is it a uniquely human thing?”
Massey snorted as they resumed walking toward the waiting cab. “Nothing out
there could be dumber than some people,” he said.
5
FRENNELECH, PRESIDING EMINENCE OF THE HIGH COUNCIL OF Priests at Pergassos, the
principal city in the land of the Kroaxians, stared down from his raised,
central seat behind the Council bench and waited for the accused to begin his
explanation. His tall headdress of fine-grown, reflective organic scales and his
imposing robes of woven wire, heavily embroidered with carbon fibers and plastic
thread, enhanced his stature and made all the more intimidating the stem
expression formed by the setting of the coolant outlet vanes above his chin and