Nothing.
Shaeffer waited. And still nothing came. “Did you kill him?” he demanded. “Is he dead?”
“He’s gone!” The thought came, hysterical and giggling. “He’s standing in front of me and at the same time he’s gone. He’s here and he isn’t here. Who are you? Who do you want to see? Mr. Cartwright isn’t here just now. What’s your name? Are you the same man I . . . or is there . . . that we haven’t out this is going out is _out_ . . .”
The damaged teep dribbled off into infantile mutterings, and Shaeffer dropped him from the network. It didn’t make sense. It wasn’t possible. Keith Pellig was still there, standing face to face with a Corpsman, in easy killing-distance— yet Keith Pellig had vanished from the face of the Earth!
At the viewing screen rigged up for monitoring the progress of the assassin, Verrick turned to Eleanor Stevens. “We were wrong. It’s working better than we had calculated. Why?”
“Suppose you were talking to me,” Eleanor said tightly. “Carrying on a conversation. And I vanished completely. Instead of me a totally different person appeared.”
“A different person physically,” Verrick agreed. “Yes.”
“Not even a woman. A young man or an old man. Some utterly different _body_ who continued the conversation as if nothing had happened.”
“I see,” Verrick said avidly.
“Teeps depend on telepathic rapport,” Eleanor explained. “Not visual image. Each person’s mind has a unique taste. The teep hands on by mental contact, and if that’s broken—” The girl’s face was stricken.
“Reese, I think you’re driving them insane.”
Verrick got up and moved away from the screen. “You watch for awhile.”
“No,” Eleanor shuddered. “I don’t want to see it.”
A buzzer sounded on Verrick’s desk. “List of flights out of Batavia,” a monitor told him. “Total count of time and destination for the last hour. Special emphasis on unique flights.”
“All right,” Verrick nodded vaguely, accepting the metal-foil sheet and dropping it with the litter heaped on his desk. “God,” he said hoarsely to Eleanor. “It won’t be long.”
Calmly, his hands in his pockets, Keith Pellig was striding up the wide marble stairs, into the main entrance of the central Directorate building at Batavia, directly toward Leon Cartwright’s suite of inner offices.
TWELVE
PETER WAKEMAN had made a mistake.
He sat for a long time letting the realization of his mistake seep over him. With shaking fingers he got a fifth of Scotch from his luggage and poured himself a drink. There was a scum of dead dried-up protine in the glass. He threw the whole thing in a disposal slot and sat sipping from the awkward bottle. Then he got to his feet and entered the lift to the top floor of the resort.
Corpsmen, dressed in bright vacation colors, were relaxing and enjoying themselves around and in a vast tank of sparkling blue water. Above them a dome of transparent plastic kept the fresh spring-scented air in, and the bleak void of the Lunar landscape out. Laughter, the splash of lithe bodies, the flutter of color and texture and bare flesh, blurred past him as he crossed the deck.
Rita O’Neill had climbed from the water and was sunbathing drowsily a little way beyond the mam group of people. Her sleek naked body gleamed moistly in the hot light that filtered down through the lens of the protective balloon. When she saw Wakeman she sat up quickly, black hair cascading in a glittering tide of motion down her tanned shoulders and back.
“Is everything all right?” she asked.
Wakeman threw himself down in a deck chair. A MacMillan approached him and he automatically took an old-fashioned from its tray. “I was talking with Shaeffer,” he said, “back at Batavia.”
Rita took a brush and began stroking out her heavy cloud of hair. A shower of sparkling drops steamed from the sun-baked deck around her. “What did he have to say?” she asked, as casually as she could. Her eyes were large and dark and serious.
Wakeman sipped his drink aimlessly and allowed the bright warmth of the overhead sun to lull him to half-slumber. Not far off, the crowd of frolicking bathers splashed and laughed and played games in the chlorine-impregnated water. A huge shimmering water-ball lifted itself up and hung like a living sphere before it plunged down in the grip of a flashing white-toothed Corpsman. Against her towel Rita’s body was a dazzling shape of brown and black, supple lines of flesh moulded firm and ripe in the vigor of youth.
“They can’t stop him,” Wakeman said. In his stomach the whiskey had formed a congealed lump that settled cold and hard into his loins. “He’ll be here, not long from now. I had it calculated wrong.”
Rita’s black eyes widened. She momentarily stopped brushing, then started again, slowly and methodically. She shook her hair back and climbed to her feet. “Does he know Leon is here?”
“Not yet. But it’s only a question of time.”
“And we can’t defend him here?”
“We can try. Maybe I can find out what went wrong. Maybe I can get more information on Keith Pellig.”
“Will you take Leon someplace else?”
“It’s not worth it. This is as good a place as any. At least there aren’t many minds to blur scanning, here.” Wakeman got stiffly to his feet and pushed away his half-finished drink. He felt old; and his bones ached. “I’m going downstairs and go over the tapes we scanned on Herb Moore, particularly the ones we got the day he came to talk to Cartwright. Maybe I can put something together.”
Rita slipped on a robe and tied the sash around her slim waist. She dug her feet into ankle-length boots and fished together her brush and sun-glasses and lotion. “How much time do we have before he gets here?”
“We should start getting ready. Things are moving fast. Too fast for anyone’s good. It all seems to be . . . falling apart.”
“I hope you can do something.” Rita’s voice was calm, emotionless. “Leon’s resting. I made him lie down; the doctor gave him a shot of something to make him sleep.”
Wakeman lingered. “I did what I thought was right. I must have left something out. It’s clear we’re fighting something much more complex and cunning than we realized.”
“You should have let him run it,” Rita said. “You took the initiative out of his hands. You’re like Verrick and the rest of them. You never believed he could manage. You treated him like a child until he gave up and believed it himself.”
“I’ll stop Pellig,” Wakeman said quietly. “I’ll correct things. I’ll find out what it is and stop him someplace, before he gets to your uncle. It’s not Verrick who’s running things. Verrick could never work anything out this clever. It must be Moore.”
“It’s too bad,” Rita said, “that Moore isn’t on our side.”
“I’ll stop him,” Wakeman repeated. “Some way, somehow.”
“Between drinks, maybe.” Rita halted for a moment to tie the laces on her boots, and then she disappeared down a descent ramp toward Cartwright’s private quarters. She didn’t look back.
Keith Pellig climbed the wide marble stairs of the Directorate building with confidence. He walked swiftly, keeping up with the fast-moving crowd of classified bureaucrats pushing good-naturedly into the elevators and passages and offices. In the main lobby Pellig halted a moment to get his bearings.
With a thunderous din, alarm bells went off throughout the building.
The good-natured milling of officials and visitors abruptly ceased. Faces lost their friendly monotony; in an instant the easy-going crowd was transformed into a suspicious, fearful mass. From concealed speakers harsh mechanical voices dinned:
“Clear the building! Everyone must leave the building!” The voices shrilled in a deafening cacophony. “The assassin is in the building! Everyone must leave!”
Pellig lost himself in the swirling waves of men and women pouring around with ominous grimness. He edged, darted, pushed his way into the interior of the mass, toward the labyrinth of passages that led from the central lobby.
There was a scream. Someone had recognized him. There was rapid firing, a blackened, burned-out patch of charred bodies, as guns were fired in crazed panic. Pellig escaped and continued circling warily, keeping in constant motion.
“The assassin is in the main lobby!” the mechanical voices blared. “Concentrate on the main lobby!”
‘There he is!” a man shouted. Others took up the roar. “That’s him, there!”
On the roof of the building the first wing of military transports was settling down. Green-clad soldiers poured out and began descending in lifts. Heavy weapons and equipment appeared, dragged to lifts or grappled over the side to the ground level.
At his screen, Reese Verrick pulled away briefly and said to Eleanor Stevens, “They’re moving in non-teeps. Does that mean—”
“It means the Corps has been knocked out,” Eleanor answered. “They’re through. Finished.”
“Then they’ll track Pellig visually. That’ll cut down the value of our machinery.”