“Up yours,” the car said.
“It’s curtains for you if you don’t take me there,” Schilling said.
The car, reluctantly, started up and drove down the street, making the trip the hard way, by surface. Schilling im-
patiently watched the buildings and maintenance equipment pass, one by one, until at last they reached San Rafael.
“Satisfied?” the car Max said, as it pulled to a bucking, clumsy halt before the Gardens’ apartment building.
Pete’s car and Carol’s car were both parked at the curb, he noticed as he got out. And so were two police cars.
By elevator he ascended to their floor, rushed down the hall. The door to the Gardens’ apartment was open. He stepped inside.
A vug met him.
“Mr. Schilling.” Its thought-propagation was questioning in tone.
“Where are Pete and Carol?” he demanded. And then he saw, past the vug, Carol Garden seated at the kitchen table, her face waxen. “Is Pete okay?” he said to her, pushing past the vug.
The vug said, “I am E. B. Black; probably you remember me, Mr. Schilling. Be calm. I catch from your thoughts a complete innocence of this, so I will not bother to interrogate you.”
Raising her head, Carol said starkly to Schilling, “Wade Hawthorne, the detective, has been murdered and Pete’s gone. A man and woman came and got him, according to the elevator. They killed Hawthorne. I think it was Pat McClain; the police checked at her apartment and nobody’s there. And their car is gone.”
“But—do you know why they would take Pete?” Schilling asked her.
“No, I don’t know why they would take Pete; I don’t even know who ‘they’ are, really.”
With a pseudopodium, the vug E. B. Black held something small; it extended it toward Joe Schilling. “Mr. Garden wrote this interesting inscription,” the vug said. ” ‘We are entirely surrounded by vugs.’ That, however, is not so, as Mr. Garden’s disappearance testifies to. Last night Mr. Garden called my ex-colleague Mr. Hawthorne and told him that he knew who had killed Mr. Luckman. At that time we imagined we had the killer and so we were not interested. Now we have learned we were in error. Mr. Garden did not say who had killed Mr. Luckman, unfortunately, because my ex-col-
leagues refused to listen.” The vug was silent a moment. “Mr. Hawthorne has paid for his foolishness rather fully.”
Carol said, “E. B. Black thinks that whoever killed Luckman came and got Pete and ran into Hawthorne in the elevator on their way out.”
“But it doesn’t know who that is,” Schilling said.
“Correct,” E. B. Black said. “From Mrs. Garden I have managed to learn a great deal, however. For instance, I have learned whom Mr. Garden saw last night. A psychiatrist in Pocatello, Idaho, first of all. Also Mary Anne McClain; we have not been able to locate her, however. Mr. Garden was drunk and confused. He told Mrs. Garden that the murder of Mr. Luckman had been committed by six members of Pretty Blue Fox, the six with defective memories. This would include himself. Do you have any comment on that, Mr. Schilling?”
“No,” Joe Schilling murmured.
“We hope to get back Mr. Garden alive,” E. B. Black said. It did not sound very confident.
XII
PATRICIA MCCLAIN picked up her daughter’s frightened thoughts. At once she said, “Rothman, we’ve been infiltrated. Mary Anne says so.”
“Is she right?” Rothman, old hard-eyed and tough, demanded from where he, as their leader, sat.
Looking into Pete Garden’s mind, Patricia saw his memory of the visit to Doctor E. R. Philipson, the strange sense of lightness, of fractional gravity as he walked down the corridor. “Yes,” Patricia said. “Mary’s right. He’s been on Titan.” She turned to the two pre-cogs, Dave Mutreaux and her husband Alien. “What’s going to happen?”
“A variable,” Alien murmured, ashen-faced. “Clouds it up.”
Mutreaux said hoarsely, “Your daughter, she’s going to do something; impossible for us to tell what.”
“I have to get out of here,” Mary Anne said to them all.
She rose to her feet, her thoughts scattered by her terror, “I’m under vug influence. That Doctor Philipson, Pete must have been right. He asked me what I saw in the bar and I thought he was hallucinating. But it wasn’t my fear he was picking up. He saw reality.” She started toward the door of the motel room, panting. “I have to get away. I’m dangerous to the organization.”
As Mary Anne went out the door, Patricia said urgently to her husband, “The heat-needle; set it on low. So it doesn’t injure her.”
“I’ll cut her down,” Alien said, and pointed the heat-needle at his daughter’s back. Mary Anne turned for an instant, and saw the heat-needle.
The heat-needle jumped from Alien McClain’s hand, climbed and reversed its flight. It smashed against the wall.
“Poltergeist effect,” Alien said. “We can’t stop her.” Now the heat-needle in Patricia’s hands quivered, struggled and tore loose from her fingers. “Rothman,” he said, appealing to the highest authority in the organization present. “Ask her to stop.”
“Leave my mind alone,” Mary Anne said to Rothman.
Pete Garden, on his feet, sprinted after Mary Anne. The girl saw that, too.
“No,” Patricia called after her. “Don’t!”
Rothman, his forehead bulging, concentrated on Mary Anne, his eyes virtually shut. But all at once Pete Garden flopped forward, like a rag doll, boneless, danced in the air, his limbs jiggling. He drifted, then, toward the wall of the motel room, and Patricia McClain screamed at Mary Anne. The dangling figure hesitated, briefly, and then swooped into the wall; it passed through the wall until only its outstretched arm and hand remained projecting absurdly.
“Mary Anne!” Patricia shouted. “For god’s sake bring him back!”
At the door, Mary Anne halted, turned in panic, saw what she had done with Pete Garden, saw the expression on her mother’s face and on Alien’s face, the horror of everyone in the room. Rothman, focusing everything which
he possessed on her, was trying to persuade her. She saw that, too. And—
“Thank god,” Alien McClain said, and sagged. From the wall, Pete Garden tumbled back out, fell in a heap on the floor, intact; he got up almost at once and stood shaking, facing Mary Anne.
‘I’m sorry,” Mary Anne said, and sighed. Rothman said, “We hold the dominant possibility here, Mary Anne; believe that. Even if they have gotten in. We’ll examine everyone in the organization, person by person. Shall we start with you?” To Patricia he said, “Try and find out for me just how deeply they’ve penetrated her.”
“I’m trying,” Patricia said. “But it’s in Pete Garden’s mind that we’ll find the most.”
“He’s going to leave,” Alien and Dave Mutreaux said, almost at once. “With her, with Mary Anne.” Mutreaux said, “She can’t be predicted but I think he’s going to make it.”
Rothman rose to his feet and walked toward Pete Garden. “You see our situation; we’re in a desperate match with the Titanians and losing ground to them steadily. Prevail on Mary Anne McClain to stay here so we can regain what we’ve lost; we have to or we’re doomed.”
“I can’t make her do anything,” Pete said, white and trembling, almost unable to speak.
“Nobody can,” Patricia said, and Alien nodded. “You p-ks,” Rothman said to Mary Anne. “So willful and stubborn; nobody can tell you anything.”
“Come on, Pete,” Mary Anne said to him. “We have to get a long way from here, because of me and because of you, too; they’re into you just as they are in me.” Her face was drawn with despair and fatigue.
Pete said to her, “Maybe they’re right, Mary Anne; maybe it would be wrong to go. Wouldn’t that split up your organization?”
“They don’t really want me,” Mary Anne said. “I’m weak; this proves it. I can’t stand up against the vugs. The damn vugs, I hate them.” Tears filled her eyes, tears of impotence. The pre-cog Dave Mutreaux said, “Garden, I can preview one thing; if you do leave here, alone or with Mary Anne McClain, your car will be intercepted by the police.
I foresee a vug detective moving toward you; its name is—” Mutreaux hesitated.
“E. B. Black,” Alien McClain, also pre-cog, agreed, finishing for him. “Wade Hawthorne’s partner, attached to their West Coast division of the national law-enforcement agency. One of the best they have,” he said to Mutreaux, and Roth-man nodded.
“Let’s do this carefully,” Rothman said. “At what point in time did the vug authority penetrate our organization? Last night? Previous to last night? If we could establish that, maybe we’d have something to go on. I don’t think they’ve gotten very deep; they haven’t touched me, haven’t reached any of our telepaths and we have four of them in this room and a fifth on the way here. And our pre-cogs are free, at least so it would seem.”
Mary Anne said, “You’re trying to probe into me and influence me, Rothman.” But she returned slowly to where she had been sitting. “I can feel your mind at work.” She smiled a little. “It’s reassuring.”