“What would you do?” Eleanor asked.
Verrick was silent. A strange twisted grimace knifed over his features, an agonized stir that surprised Benteley and made the others halt rigid. Abruptly, Verrick turned his attention to his plate of food, and the others quickly did the same.
When they were through eating, Verrick pushed back his coffee cup and lit a cigar. “Now listen,” he said to Benteley. “You said you wanted to know our strategy; here it is. Once a teep locks minds with the assassin he has him. The Corps never lets the assassin break off; he’s passed from one to the next all along the multiple rings. They know exactly what he’s going to do as soon as he thinks of it. No strategy works; he’s teeped constantly, right up to the moment they get bored and pop out his gizzard.”
“That’s why teeps forced us to take up Minimax,” Moore put in. “You can’t have a strategy against telepaths: you have to act randomly. You have to not know what you’re going to do next. You have to shut your eyes and run blindly. The problem is: how can you randomize your strategy, yet move purposefully toward your goal?”
“Assassins in the past,” Verrick continued, “tried to find ways of making random decisions. Plimp helped them. Essentially, plimp is assassin-practice. The pocket boards turn up random combinations by which any complexity of decisions can be made. The assassin threw on his board, read the number, and acted according to a prearranged agreement. The teep wouldn’t know in advance what the board was going to show, any more than the assassin would.
“But that wasn’t good enough. The assassin played this damn M-game but he still lost. He lost because the teeps were playing it, too, and there were eighty of them and only one of him. He got squeezed out statistically, except once in a long while. Assassins have occasionally got in. DeFafla made it by opening Gibbon’s _Decline_ and _Fall of the Roman Empire_ at random and making some kind of complicated utilization of the material presented.”
“Pellig is obviously the answer,” Moore burst in. “We have twenty-four different minds. There’ll be no contact between them. Each of the twenty-four sits in a different cube here at Farben. Each is hooked to the implementation machinery. At random intervals we switch in a different mind-picked at random. Each mind has a fully developed strategy. But nobody knows which mind is coming up next, or when. Nobody knows which strategy, which pattern of action, is about to start. The teeps won’t know from one minute to the next what the Fellig body is going to do.”
Benteley felt a chill of admiration for this ruthless, super-logical technician. “Not bad,” he admitted.
“You see,” Moore said proudly, “Pellig is Heisenberg’s random particle. The teeps can trace his path: directly to Cartwright. But not his velocity. Where Keith Pellig will be along that path at a given moment nobody knows.”
EIGHT
ELEANOR STEVENS’ apartment was a series of attractive rooms in the classified living quarters of the Farben Hill. Benteley gazed around appreciatively, as Eleanor closed the door and moved around turning on lights and straightening things.
“I just moved in,” she explained. “It’s a mess.”
“Where’s Moore?”
“Somewhere in the building, I suppose.”
“I thought you were living with him.”
“Not now.” Eleanor lowered the translucent filter over the view-wall of the apartment. The night sky with its cold host of stars, the glittering sparks and shapes that made up the Hill, dimmed and faded. Eleanor glanced at him sideways, a little embarrassed, and said, “To tell you the truth, I’m not living with anybody right now.”
“I’m sorry,” Benteley said awkwardly. “I didn’t know.”
Eleanor shrugged and smiled bright-eyed, red lips twitching. “It’s a heck of a thing, isn’t it? After I lived with Moore, I lived with one of the other research technicians, a friend of his, and then somebody in the planning board. I was a teep, remember? A lot of non-teeps won’t live with a teep, and I never got along with the Corps.”
“That’s over with now.”
“It sure is.” She strolled around the room, hands deep in her pockets, suddenly solemn and thoughtful.
“I guess I’ve wasted my life. I never saw anything in being telepathic; it meant I had to be trained for the Corps or submit to a removal probe. I signed up to keep out of the work-camps . . . I don’t have a classification. Did you know that? If Verrick drops me, that’s the end. I can’t go back to the Corps and I can’t really do anything to beat the Quiz.” She glanced appealingly at Benteley. “Do you think differently about me because I’m unattached?”
“Not at all.”
“I feel so damn funny, loose like this.” She gestured tensely. “I’m completely cut off. On my own. This is a terrible ordeal for me, Ted. I had to go with Verrick; he’s the only man I’ve ever felt completely safe with. But it cut me off from my family.” She gazed up at him pathetically. “I hate being alone. I get so frightened.”
“Don’t get frightened. Spit in their eye.”
Eleanor shuddered. “I couldn’t do that. How can you live like that? You’ve got to have people you can depend on, somebody strong, somebody to take care of you. This is a big frigid world, completely bleak and hostile and empty of warmth. You know what happens to you if you let go and fall?”
“I know.” He nodded. “They pack them off by the million.”
“I’d stay with the Corps, I guess. But I hate the Corps. Prying, listening, always knowing what’s going on in your mind. You don’t really live, not as a separate individual. You’re a sort of collective organism. You can’t really love, you can’t really hate. All you have is your job. Even that isn’t yours. You share it with eighty other people, people like Wakeman.”
“You want to be alone but you’re afraid,” Benteley said.
“I want to be _me!_ I don’t want to be alone. I hate waking up in the morning and finding nobody beside me. I hate coming home to an empty apartment. Dinner alone, cooking and keeping the place fixed up for myself. Turning on the lights at night, pulling down the shades. Watching tv. Just sitting. Thinking.”
“You’re young. You’ll get used to it.”
“I’m not going to get used to it!” She brightened. “Of course, I’ve done better than some.” She tossed her flame-red mane of hair and her eyes clouded, green and luxurious and cunning. “I’ve lived with a lot of men, since I was sixteen. I can’t remember how many; I meet them the way I met you, at work or at parties, sometimes tirough friends. We live together awhile, and then we quarrel. Something always goes wrong; it never lasts.” Her terror shivered back, violent and overwhelming. “They leave! They stay around awhile and then they take off, they let me down. Or they . . . throw me out.”
“It happens,” Benteley said. He hardly heard her; he was thinking his own thoughts.
“I’ll find the one, someday,” Eleanor said fervently. “Won’t I? And I’m only nineteen. Haven’t I done all right for nineteen? That’s not very long. And Verrick’s my protector: I can always depend on him.”
Benteley roused himself. “Are you asking me to live with you?”
Eleanor blushed. “Well, would you mind?”
He didn’t answer.
“What’s the matter?” she asked quickly, hurt-eyed and urgent.
“Nothing to do with you.” Benteley turned his back to her and wandered over to the translucent view-wall. He restored it to transparency. “The Hill looks pretty at night,” he said, gazing moodily out. “You wouldn’t know, to look at it now, what it really is.”
“Forget the Hill!” Eleanor snapped the gray mist back. “It isn’t me? Then it’s Verrick. I know—it’s Reese Verrick. Oh, God. You were so eager that day, when you came bursting into the office with your briefcase clutched like a chastity belt.” She smiled a little. “You were so excited. Like a Christian finally getting into heaven. You had waited so long . . . you expected so much. There was something terribly appealing about you. I hoped to see you around.”
“I wanted to get out of the Hill system. I wanted to get to something better. To the Directorate.”
“The Directorate!” Eleanor laughed. “What’s that? An abstraction! What do you think makes up the Directorate?” She breathed rapidly, eyes wide, pulse throbbing. “It’s people who are real, not institutions and offices. How can you be loyal to a—thing? New men come in, the old ones die, faces change. Does your loyalty remain? Why? To what? Superstition! You’re loyal to a word, a name. Not to a living entity of flesh and blood.”
“There’s more than that,” Benteley said. “It isn’t just offices and desks. It represents something.”
“What does it represent?”