Philip Dick - World of Chance

"There was no diminution. The entire personality was cut off instantly, not merely the thoughts."

Shaeffer cursed. "And Wakeman's on Luna. We can't use telepathy—I'll have to use the regular ipvic."

"Tell him something's terribly wrong. Tell him the assassin disappeared into thin air."

Shaeffer hurried to the transmission room. As he was jerking into life the closed-circuit to the Lunar resort a new flurry of transferred thoughts chilled him.

"I've picked him up!" came from an eager Corpswoman, relayed by the network from one point to another. "I've got him!"

"Where are you?" responded insistent calls from up and down the network. "Where is he?"

"Theatre. Near the clothing shop. Only a few feet from me; shall I go in? I can easily———"

The thought broke off.

Through the network radiated tortured, twisted, in­coherent, gibbering psychosis.

"Cut her out of the network," Shaeffer commanded savagely, and the quivering frenzy faded. He collapsed in a chair and pounded his throbbing forehead. What had happened?

He managed to raise Peter Wakeman on the ipvic vid­screen. "Peter," he croaked, "we're beaten."

Wakeman jerked violently. "What do you mean? Cartwright isn't even there!"

Shaeffer struggled with an unfamiliar medium of expres­sion. "We picked the assassin up, then we lost him. We picked him up later on—in another part of the city. Peter, he got past three stations. And he's still moving. How he——"

New thoughts from telepaths smashed at him with stunning force. "I have him. But he's not——" Con­fusion and uncertainty. "But, Shaeffer, it isn't the same mind!"

"I have him!" The next station of the network, in excitement and jubilation. "His taxi is directly behind my own, heading directly for the main building."

"Kill him!" Shaeffer shuddered.

"I'm stopping my cab. I'll kill him as he tries to pass. His driver is drawing level with me. He's only yards away; I got him full-blast."

The mind sending the message screamed.

Shaeffer clapped his hands to his head and closed his eyes. Gradually the storm died. Mind after mind was smashed, short-circuited, blacked-out by the overload, by the shattering pain that lashed through the entire web of telepaths.

"Where is he?" Shaeffer shouted. "What happened?"

The next station responded faintly. "He lost him. He's dropped from the network. He's dead, I think. Burned-out. I'm in the area but I can't catch the mind he was scanning. The mind he was scanning is gone!"

On the vidscreen Peter Wakeman's image tried hopelessly to gain Shaeffer's attention. Shaeffer was like a corpse, face dead and blank, all energy concentrated on the invisible struggle going on up and down the web-strands of the network.

"Listen to me," Wakeman commanded. "Once you get hold of his mind, stay with him. Follow him until the next station takes over. Maybe you're too far apart. Maybe———"

"I've got him," a thought came to Shaeffer. "I'll find him; he's close by."

The network quivered with excitement and suspense.

"I'm getting something strange." Doubt mixed with curiosity, then startled disbelief. "There must be more than one assassin. Yet that's not possible." Growing excite­ment. "I can actually see Pellig. He's going to enter the Directorate building by the main entrance; it's all there in his mind. Now he's thinking of crossing the street and going———"

Nothing.

Shaeffer waited. Still nothing came. "Did you kill him? 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."

The telepath dribbled off in infantile mutterings, and Shaeffer dropped him from the network. It didn't make sense. Keith Pellig was standing face to face with a Corpsman, within easy killing-distance—yet Keith Pellig had vanished.

Verrick turned to Eleanor Stevens. "It's working better than we had calculated."

"Corps members depend on telepathic rapport. They hang 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 a while."

Eleanor shuddered. "I don't want to see it."

A buzzer sounded on the man's desk. "List of flights out of Batavia," a monitor told him. "Total count of time and destination for the last hour. Special note of unusual flights."

Verrick accepted the metalfoil sheet and dropped it into the litter heaped on his desk as he hoarsely said to Eleanor: "It won't be long."

His hands in his pockets, Keith Pellig was striding up the marble stairs leading to the main entrance of the central Directorate building at Batavia... directly towards Leon Cartwright's suite of offices.

Peter wakeman had made a mistake.

He sat for a long time letting this realization seep over him. With shaking fingers he got a bottle from his luggage and poured himself a drink. There was a scum of dried-up protine in the glass. He threw the whole thing into a dis­posal slot and sat sipping from the bottle. Then he got to his feet and entered the lift to the top floor of the Luna resort.

Corpsmen were relaxing in a 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 land­scape out. Laughter, the splash of lithe bodies, the flutter of colour, the texture of bare flesh, blurred past him as he crossed the deck.

Rita O'Neill was sun-bathing a little way beyond the main group of people. Her sleek body gleamed moistly in the hot light. When she saw Wakeman she sat up quickly, her black hair cascading down to her tanned shoulders and back.

"Is everything all right?" she asked.

Wakeman threw himself down in a deck chair. "I was talking to Shaeffer," he said, "back at Batavia."

Rita took a brush and began stroking out her cloud of hair. "What did he have to say?" she asked, as casually as she could. Her eyes were serious.

Wakeman allowed the warmth to lull him to silence. Not far off, the crowd of frolicking bathers splashed and laughed and played games. A shimmering water-ball lifted itself up and hung like a sphere before it plunged down into the grip of a Corpsman. Against her towel, Rita's body was a dazzling shape of brown and black, supple lines of flesh moulded firmly into the charm of youth.

"They can't stop him," Wakeman said at last. "He'll be here not long from now. My calculations were wrong."

Rita's eyes widened. She stopped brushing, then started again, slowly and methodically. "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. Perhaps I can find out what went wrong. I may get more information about Keith Pellig."

"Will you take Leon somewhere else?"

"This is as good a place as any. At least there aren't many minds to blur scanning." Wakeman got stiffly to his feet; he felt old and his bones ached. "I'm going down­stairs and go over the tapes we scanned on Herb Moore—those we got the day he came to talk to Cartwright."

Rita slipped on a robe, tied a sash around her slim waist and dug her feet into boots. "How long before he gets here?"

"We should start getting ready. Things are moving fast."

"I hope you can do something." Rita's voice was calm, emotionless. "Leon's resting. I made him lie down."

Wakeman lingered. "I did what I thought was right, but I must have forgotten something. We're fighting something much more cunning than we realized."

"You should have let Leon run things," Rita said. "You took the initiative out of his hands. Like Verrick and the rest of them, you never believed he could manage. You treated him like a child, and he gave up and believed it himself."