The Randall Garrett MEGAPACK®. Randall Garrett

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СКАЧАТЬ of the Controller will show up in the actions of John Smith. Am I correct?”

      Houston nodded without saying anything. The question was purely rhetorical, and the statement was perfectly correct.

      “Very well, then,” Reinhardt continued, “by means of these peculiarities, our psychologists have found that there is widespread, but very subtle controlling going on right in the UN General Assembly itself! The amazing thing is that they all bear the—shall we say—trademark of the same Controller. Whoever he is, he seems to have a long-range plan in mind; he wants to change, ever so slightly, certain international laws so that he will profit by them. Do you follow?”

      “I follow,” said Houston.

      “Good. It has taken painstaking research and a great deal of psychological statistical analysis, but we have found that one company—and one company only—benefits by these legal changes. Did you ever hear of Lasser & Sons?”

      “Sure,” said Houston. “They’re in the import-export business, with a few fingers in shipping and air transport.”

      “That’s them,” said Reinhardt. “Someone in that company, presumably someone at the top, is a Controller. And he’s a very subtle, very dangerous man. Unlike the others, there is nothing hasty or overt in his plans. But within a few years, if this goes on, he will have more power than the others ever dreamed of.”

      “And my job is to get him?” Houston asked.

      Reinhardt nodded. “That’s it. Get him. One way or another. You’re in charge; I don’t care how you do it, but this one Controller is more dangerous than any other we’ve come across, so get him.”

      Houston nodded slowly. “Okay. Can you give me all the data you have so far?”

      Reinhardt patted a heavy folder on his desk. “It’s all here.” Then he tapped the projected map on the screen. “That’s the Lasser Building—Church Street at Worth. Somewhere in there is the man we’re looking for.”

      * * * *

      David Houston spent the next six weeks gathering facts, trying to determine the identity of the mysterious Controller at Lasser & Sons. Slowly, the evidence began to pile up.

      At the same time, he worried over his own problem. Who was betraying non-criminal Controllers to the PD Police?

      In that six-week period, two more men and a woman were arrested—one in Spain, one in India, and one in Hawaii.

      There weren’t very many Controllers on Earth, percentagewise. Of the three and a half billion people on Earth, less than an estimated one-thousandth of one percent were telepathic. But that made a grand total of some thirty-five thousand people.

      Spread, as they were, all over the planet, it was rare that one Controller ever met another. The intelligent ones didn’t use their power; they remained concealed, even from each other.

      But someone, somewhere, was finding them and betraying them to the Psychodeviant Police.

      As more and more data came in on the Lasser case, Houston began to get an idea. If there were a really clever, highly intelligent, megalomaniac Controller, wouldn’t it be part of his psychological pattern to attempt to get rid of the majority of Controllers, those who simply wanted to lead normal lives?

      And, if so, wasn’t it possible that both his cases—the official and the unofficial—might lead to the same place: Lasser & Sons?

      It began to look as though Houston could kill both his birds at once, if he could just figure out when, how, and in what direction to throw the stone.

      In the middle of the seventh week, a Controller in Manchester, England, was mobbed and torn to bits by an irate crowd before the PD Police could get to him. There was no doubt in Houston’s mind that this one was a real megalomaniac; he had taken over another man’s brain and forced him to commit suicide. The controlled man had taken a Webley automatic, put it to his temple, and blown his brains out.

      The Controller’s mistake was in not realizing what the sudden shock of that bullet, transmitted to him telepathically, could do to his own mind. In the mental disorder that followed, he was spotted and killed easily.

      * * * *

      There was still no word from Dorrine. She had flown back to the States a week after Houston had returned, but she had had to get back to England after three days. Since then, he had had three letters, nothing more. And letters are a damned unsatisfactory way for a telepath to conduct a love affair.

      The one other factor that entered in was The Group, the small band of sane, reasonable telepaths who had begun to build themselves into an organization—a sort of Mutual Protective Association.

      Personally, Houston didn’t think much of the idea; the Group didn’t have any real organization, and they refused to put one together. It was supposed to be democratic, but it sometimes bordered on the anarchic.

      He stayed with them more for companionship than any other reason. When Dorrine had come back for her short stay, Houston had met with them and tried to get them to help him trace down the megalomaniac Controller who was doing so much damage, but they’d balked at the idea. Their job, they claimed, was to get enough members so that they could protect themselves from arrest by the Normals, and then just let things ride.

      “After all,” Dorrine had said, “things will work themselves out, darling; they always do.”

      “Not unless somebody helps them, they don’t,” Houston had snapped back. “Someone has to do something.”

      “But, Dave, darling—we are doing something! Don’t you see?”

      He didn’t, but there was no convincing either the Group or Dorrine. She was passionately interested in the recruiting work she was doing, and she thought that the Group was the answer to every Controller’s troubles.

      And then she had rushed back to England. “I’ll be back soon, Dave,” she’d said. “I think I have a lead on a girl in Liverpool.”

      So far, the girl hadn’t been found. Controllers didn’t like to give themselves away to anyone, so they kept a tight screen up most of the time.

      It seemed as though everyone on Earth was in deadly fear all the time. The Normals feared losing their identities to Controllers, and the Controllers feared death at the hands of the Normals.

      And death or the Penal Cluster were their only choices if they were discovered.

      Houston worried about the risks Dorrine was taking, but there was nothing he could do. She was doing what she thought was right, just as he was; how could he argue with that?

      Houston went on with his job, putting together facts and rumors and statistical data analysis, searching out his quarry.

      And, at the end of the eighth week, everything blew high, wide, and hellish.

      * * * *

      It was late evening. A cool wind blew over New York, bringing with it a hint of the rain to come. Church Street, in lower Manhattan, was not crowded, as it had been in the late afternoon, but neither was it entirely deserted. The cafes and bars did a lively business, but the tall, many-colored office СКАЧАТЬ