The Randall Garrett MEGAPACK®. Randall Garrett

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      In one of the small coffee shops, David Houston sat, smoking a cigarette and stirring idly at a cup of cooling coffee.

      Across the street was the Lasser Building; high up on the sixtieth floor, a whole suite of offices was brightly lit. The rest of the building was clothed in blackness.

      Who was up there in that suite? Houston wasn’t quite sure. He had narrowed his list of suspects down to three men: John Sager, Loris Pederson, and Norcross Lasser, three top officials in the company. Sager and Pederson were both vice-presidents of the firm; Sager was in charge of the Foreign Exports department, while Pederson handled the actual shipping. Lasser, by virtue of being the grandson of the man who had founded the firm, was president of Lasser & Sons, Inc.

      Lasser seemed like a poor choice as chief villain of the outfit; he was a mild, bland man, quiet and friendly. Besides, his position made him an obvious suspect; naturally, the majority stockholder of the firm would profit most by the increased power of the company. And, equally obviously, a Controller wouldn’t want to put himself in such an exposed position.

      Which made Lasser, in Houston’s mind, a hell of a good suspect. If anything happened, Lasser could cover by claiming that he, too, had been controlled, and the chances were that he could get away with it. A Controller never did anything directly; their dirty work was done by someone else—a puppet under their mental control. At least, so ran the popular misconception. If Lasser were the man, he stood a good chance of getting away with it, even if he were caught, provided he played his cards right.

      That reasoning still didn’t eliminate Sager or Pederson. Either of them could be the Controller. And there still remained the possibility that some unknown, unsuspected fourth person had the company of Lasser & Sons under his thumb.

      That was what Houston intended to find out tonight.

      He took a sip of his coffee, found it still reasonably hot.

      Damn the megalomaniacs, anyway! Houston subconsciously tightened his fists. He, personally, had more to fear from the Normals than from another Controller. Normals could kill or imprison him, while a Controller would have a hard time doing either, directly.

      But Houston could understand the Normal man; he could see how fear of a Controller could drive a man without the ability into a frenzied panic. He could understand, even forgive their actions, born and bred in ignorance and fear.

      No, the ones he hated were the ones who had conceived and fostered that fear—the psychologically unstable megalomaniac Controllers. There were only a handful of them—probably not more than a few hundred or a thousand. But because of them, every telepath on Earth found his life in danger, and every Normal found his life a hell of terror.

      Let Dorrine and her do-nothing friends run around the globe recruiting members for their precious Group; that was all right for them. Meanwhile, David Houston would be doing something on a more basic action level.

      He glanced at his watch. Almost time.

      “How’s the deployment?” he whispered in his throat.

      “We’ve got the building surrounded now,” said the voice in his ear. “You can go in anytime.”

      “How about the roof?”

      “That’s taken care of, sir; we’ve got ’copter that can be on the top of the Lasser Building at any time you call. They can land within thirty seconds of your signal.”

      “Okay,” Houston said; “I’m going in now. Remember—no matter what I say or do, no one is to leave that building if they’re conscious. And keep your eyes on me; if I act in the least peculiar, handcuff me—but don’t knock me out.

      “And if I’m not back on time, come in anyway.”

      “Right.”

      * * * *

      Houston finished his coffee, dropped a coin on the counter, and headed for the other side of the street.

      The big problem was getting into the building itself. It was ringed with alarms; Lasser & Sons didn’t want just anybody wandering in and out of their building.

      So Houston had arranged a roundabout way. The building next to the Lasser Building was a good deal smaller, only forty-five stories high. A week before, Houston had rented an office on the eighteenth floor of the building; on the door, he had already had a sign engraved: Ajax Enterprises.

      It was a shame the office would never be used.

      Houston walked straight to the next-door building and opened the front door with his key. Inside, a night watchman lounged behind a desk, smoking a blackened briar. He looked up, smiled, and nodded.

      “Evening, Mr. Griswold; working late tonight?”

      Houston forced a smile he did not feel. “Just doing a little paper work,” he said.

      He took the automatic elevator to the eighteenth floor. He didn’t relish the idea of walking up to the roof, but taking the elevator would make the nightwatchman suspicious.

      He didn’t bother going to the office; he headed directly for the stairway and began his long climb—twenty-seven floors to the roof.

      All through it, he kept up a running comment through his throat mike. “I wish I weighed about fifty pounds less; carrying two hundred and twenty pounds of blubber up these stairs isn’t easy.”

      “Blubber, hooey!” the earphone interrupted. “Any man who’s six-feet-three has a right to carry that much weight. Actually, you’re a skinny-looking sort of goop.”

      Both men were exaggerating; Houston wasn’t fat, but his broad, powerful frame couldn’t be called skinny, either.

      When he finally reached the roof, he paused and surveyed the wall of the Lasser Building, which towered high above him, spearing an additional thirty stories in the air. Up there, the lights on the sixtieth floor gleamed in the night.

      The air was growing cooler, and the beginnings of a mist were forming. Houston hoped it wouldn’t start to rain before he got inside.

      * * * *

      The forty-sixth floor of the Lasser Building had no windows on this side, but there were plenty on the forty-seventh.

      Leading up to them was an inviting looking fire escape, but Houston knew he didn’t dare take that. By law, every fire escape was rigged with a fire alarm, in addition to the regular burglar alarm. He’d have to use another way.

      The Lasser Building was a steel structure, shelled over with a bright blue anodized aluminum sheath. Only the day before, Houston, wearing the gray coverall of a power-line workman, had checked the wall to find the big steel beams beneath the aluminum. He had also installed certain other equipment; now he was going to make use of it.

      Concealed in the louvers of the air-conditioner intake of the lower building was a specially constructed suit and several hundred feet of power line which was connected to the main line of the building.

      In the darkness, Houston slipped on the suit. It was constructed somewhat like a light diving suit or a spacesuit, but without the helmet. In the toes, knees, and hands, were powerful electromagnets СКАЧАТЬ