“Yes,” she answered. “Do you want to prove it, Dalgetty?”

  There was stillness in the room. After a moment Dalgetty spoke. “You were thinking, Bancroft, ‘All right, damn you, can you read my mind? Go ahead and try it, and you’ll know what I’m thinking about you.’ The rest was obscenities.”

  “A guess,” said Bancroft. Sweat trickled down his cheeks. “Just a good guess. Try again.”

  Another pause, then. “ ‘Ten, nine, seven. A, B, M, Z, Z…’ Shall I keep on?” Dalgetty asked quietly.

  “No,” muttered Bancroft. “No, that’s enough. What are you?”

  “He told me,” put in Elena. “You’re going to have trouble believing it. I’m not sure if I believe it myself. But he’s from another star.”

  Bancroft opened his lips and shut them again. The massive head shook in denial.

  “He is—from Tau Ceti,” said Elena. “They’re way beyond us. It’s the thing people have been speculating about for the last hundred years.”

  “Longer, my girl,” said Tighe. There was no emotion in his face or voice save a dry humor, but Dalgetty knew what a flame must suddenly be leaping up inside him. “Read Voltaire’s Micromégas.”

  “I’ve read such fiction,” said Bancroft harshly. “Who hasn’t? All right, why are they here, what do they want?”

  “You could say,” spoke Dalgetty, “that we favor the Institute.”

  “But you’ve been raised from childhood.”

  “Oh yes. My people have been on Earth a long time. Many of them are born here. Our first spaceship arrived in nineteen sixty-five.” He leaned forward in the chair. “I expected Casimir to be reasonable and help me rescue Dr. Tighe. Since she hasn’t done so, I must appeal to your own common sense. We have crews on Earth. We know where all our people are at any given time. If necessary, I can die to preserve the secret of our presence, but in that case you will die too, Bancroft. The island will be bombed.”

  “I…” The chief looked out the window into the enormity of night. “You can’t expect me to—to accept this as if…”

  “I’ve some things to tell you which may change your mind,” said Dalgetty. “They will certainly prove my story. Send your men out, though. This is only for your ears.”

  “And have you jump me!” snapped Bancroft.

  “Casimir can stay,” said Dalgetty, “and anyone else you are absolutely certain can keep a secret and control his own greed.”

  Bancroft paced once around the room. His eyes flickered back and forth over the watching men. Frightened faces, bewildered faces, ambitious faces—it was a hard decision, and Dalgetty knew grimly that his life rested on his and Elena’s estimate of Thomas Bancroft’s character.

  “All right! Dumason, Zimmermann, O’Brien, stay in here. If that bird moves, shoot him. The rest of you wait just outside.” They filed out. The door closed behind them. The three guards left posted themselves with smooth efficiency, one at the window and one at either adjoining wall. There was a long quiet.

  Elena had to improvise the scheme and think it at Dalgetty. He nodded. Bancroft planted himself before the chair, legs spread wide as if braced for a blow, fists on hips.

  “All right,” he said. “What do you want to tell me?”

  “You’ve caught me,” said Dalgetty, “so I’m prepared to bargain for my life and Dr. Tighe’s freedom. Let me show you—” He began to rise, gripping both arms of his chair.

  “Stay where you are!” snapped Bancroft, and three guns swiveled around to point at the prisoner. Elena backed away until she stood beside the one near the desk.

  “As you will.” Dalgetty leaned back again, casually shoving his chair a couple of feet. He was now facing the window and, as far as he could tell, sitting exactly on a line between the man there and the man at the farther wall. “The Union of Tau Ceti is interested in seeing that the right kind of civilizations develop on other planets. You could be of value to us, Thomas Bancroft, if you can be persuaded to our side, and the rewards are considerable.” His glance went for a moment to the girl, and she nodded imperceptibly. “For example…”

  The power rushed up in him. Elena clubbed her gun butt and struck the man next to her behind the ear. In the fractional second before the others could understand and react, Dalgetty was moving.

  The impetus which launched him from the chair sent that heavy padded piece of furniture sliding across the floor to hit the man behind him with a muffled thud. His left fist took Bancroft on the jaw as he went by. The guard at the window had no time to swing his gun back from Elena and squeeze the trigger before Dalgetty’s hand was on his throat. His neck snapped.

  Elena stood over her victim even as he toppled and aimed at the man across the room. The armchair had knocked his rifle aside. “Drop that or I shoot,” she said.

  Dalgetty snatched up a gun for himself, leveling it at the door. He more than half expected those outside to come rushing in, expected hell would explode. But the thick oak panels must have choked off sound.

  Slowly, the man behind the chair let his rifle fall to the floor. His mouth was stretched wide with supernatural fear.

  “My God!” Tighe’s long form was erect shaking, his calm broken into horror. “Simon, the risk…”

  “We didn’t have anything to lose, did we?” Dalgetty’s voice was thick, but the abnormal energy was receding from him. He felt a surge of weariness and knew that soon the payment must be made for the way he had abused his body. He looked down at the corpse before him. “I didn’t mean to do that,” he whispered.

  Tighe collected himself with an effort of disciplined will and stepped over to Bancroft. “He’s alive, at least,” he said. “Oh, my God, Simon! You could have been killed so easily.”

  “I may yet. We aren’t out of the woods by any means. Find something to tie those two others up with, will you, Dad?”

  The Englishman nodded. Elena’s slugged guard was stirring and groaning. Tighe bound and gagged him with strips from his tunic. Under the submachine gun, the other submitted meekly enough. Dalgetty rolled them behind a sofa with the one he had slain.

  Bancroft was wakening too. Dalgetty located a flask of bourbon and gave it to him. Clearing eyes looked up with the same terror. “Now what?” mumbled Bancroft. “You can’t get away—”

  “We can damn well try. If it had come to fighting with the rest of your gang, we’d have used you as a hostage, but now there’s a neater way. On your feet! Here, straighten your tunic, comb your hair. Okay, you’ll do just as you’re told, because if anything goes wrong, we’ll have nothing at all to lose by shooting you.” Dalgetty rapped out his orders.

  Bancroft looked at Elena, and there was more than physical hurt in his eyes. “Why did you do it?”

  “FBI,” she said.

  He shook his head, still stunned, and shuffled over to the desk visiphone and called the hangar. “I’ve got to get to the mainland in a hurry. Have the speedster ready in ten minutes. No, just the regular pilot, nobody else. I’ll have Dalgetty with me, but it’s okay. He’s on our side now.”

  They went out the door. Elena cradled her tommy gun under one arm. “You can go back to the barracks, boys,” said Bancroft wearily to the men outside. “It’s all been settled.”

  A quarter hour later, Bancroft’s private jet was in the air. Five minutes after that, he and the pilot were bound and locked in a rear compartment. Michael Tighe took the controls. “This boat has legs,” he said. “Nothing can catch us between here and California.”

  “All right.” Dalgetty’s tones were flat with exhaustion. “I’m going back to rest, Dad.” Briefly his hand rested on the older man’s shoulder. “It’s good to have you back,” he said.

  “Thank you, son,” said Michael Tighe. “I can’t tell you more. I haven’t the words.”

  -9-

  Dalgetty found a reclining seat and eased himself into it. One by one, he began releasing the controls over himself—sensitivities, nerve blocs, glandular stimulation. Fatigue and pain mounted within him. He looked out at the stars and listened to the dark whistle of air with merely human senses.

  Elena Casimir came to sit beside him, and he realized that his job wasn’t done. He studied the strong lines of her face. She could be a hard foe but just as stubborn a friend.

  “What do you have in mind for Bancroft?” he asked.

  “Kidnapping charges for him and that whole gang,” she said. “He won’t wriggle out of it, I can guarantee you.” Her eyes rested on him, unsure, a little frightened. “Federal prison psychiatrists have Institute training,” she murmured. “You’ll see that his personality is reshaped your way, won’t you?”

  “As far as possible,” Simon said. “Though it doesn’t matter much. Bancroft is finished as a factor to be reckoned with. There’s still Bertrand Meade himself, of course. Even if Bancroft made a full confession, I doubt that we could touch him. But the Institute has now learned to take precautions against extralegal methods—and within the framework of the law, we can give him cards and spades and still defeat him.”

  “With some help from my department,” Elena said. There was a touch of steel in her voice. “But the whole story of this rescue will have to be played down. It wouldn’t do to have too many ideas floating around in the public mind, would it?”

  “That’s right,” he admitted. His head felt heavy, he wanted to rest it on her shoulder and sleep for a century. “It’s up to you, really. If you submit the right kind of report to your superiors, it can all be worked out. Everything else will just be detail. But otherwise, you’ll ruin everything.”

  “I don’t know.” She looked at him for a long while. “I don’t know if I should or not. You may be correct about the Institute and the justice of its aims and methods. But how can I be sure, when I don’t know what’s behind it? How do I know there wasn’t more truth than fiction in that Tau Ceti story, that you aren’t really the agent of some nonhuman power quietly taking over all our race?”

  At another time Dalgetty might have argued, tried to veil it from her, tried to trick her once again. But now he was too weary. There was a great surrender in him. “I’ll tell you if you wish,” he said, “and after that it’s in your hands. You can make us or break us.”

  “Go on, then.” Her tone withdrew into wariness.

  “I’m human,” he said. “I’m as human as you are. Only I’ve had rather special training, that’s all. It’s another discovery of the Institute for which we don’t feel the world is ready. It’d be too big a temptation for too many people, to create followers like me.” He looked away, into the windy dark. “The scientist is also a member of society and has a responsibility toward it. This—restraint—of ours is one way in which we meet that obligation.”

  She didn’t speak, but suddenly one hand reached over and rested on his. The impulsive gesture brought warmth flooding through him.

  “Dad’s work was mostly in mass-action psych,” he said, making his tone try to cover what he felt, “but he has plenty of associates trying to understand the individual human being as a functioning mechanism. A lot’s been learned since Freud, both from the psychiatric and the neurological angle. Ultimately, those two are interchangeable.

  “Some thirty years ago, one of the teams which founded the Institute learned enough about the relationship between the conscious, subconscious, and involuntary minds to begin practical tests. Along with a few others, I was a guinea pig. And their theories worked.

  “I needn’t go into the details of my training. It involved physical exercises, mental practice, some hypnotism, diet, and so on. It went considerably beyond the important Synthesis education, which is the most advanced thing known to the general public. But its aim—only partially realized as yet—its aim was simply to produce the completely integrated human being.”

  Dalgetty paused. The wind flowed and muttered beyond the wall.

  “There is no sharp division between conscious and subconscious or even between those and the centers controlling involuntary functions,” he said. “The brain is a continuous structure. Suppose, for instance, that you become aware of a runaway car hearing down on you.

  “Your heartbeat speeds up, your adrenalin output increases, your sight sharpens, your sensitivity to pain drops—it’s all preparation for fight or flight. Even without obvious physical necessity, the same thing can happen on a lesser scale—for example, when you read an exciting story. And psychotics, especially hysterics, can produce some of the damnedest physiological symptoms you ever saw.”

  “I begin to understand,” she whispered.

  “Rage or fear brings abnormal strength and fast reaction. But the psychotic can do more than that. He can show physical symptoms like burns, stigmata or—if female—false pregnancy. Sometimes he becomes wholly insensitive in some part of his body via a nerve bloc. Bleeding can start or stop without apparent cause. He can go into a coma, or he can stay awake for days without getting sleepy. He can—”

  “Read minds?” It was a defiance.

  “Not that I know of.” Simon chuckled. “But human sense organs are amazingly good. It only takes three or four quanta to stimulate the visual purple—a little more, actually, because of absorption by the eyeball itself. There have been hysterics who could hear a watch ticking twenty feet away that the normal person could not hear at one foot. And so on.

  “There are excellent reasons why the threshold of perception is relatively high in ordinary people—the stimuli of usual conditions would be blinding and deafening, unendurable, if there weren’t a defense.” He grimaced. “I know! ”

  “But the telepathy?” Elena persisted.

  “It’s been done before,” he said. “Some apparent cases of mind reading in the last century were shown to be due to extremely acute hearing. Most people subvocalize their surface thoughts. With a little practice, a person who can hear those vibrations can learn to interpret them. That’s all.” He smiled with one side of his mouth. “If you want to hide your thoughts from me, just break that habit, Elena.”

  She looked at him with an emotion he could not quite recognize. “I see,” she breathed. “And your memory must be perfect too, if you can pull any datum out of the subconscious. And you can—do everything, can’t you?”

  “No,” he said. “I’m only a test case. They’ve learned a great deal by observing me, but the only thing that makes me unusual is that I have conscious control of certain normally subconscious and involuntary functions. Not all of them, by a long shot. And I don’t use that control any more than necessary.

  “There are sound biological reasons why man’s mind is so divided and plenty of penalties attached to a case like mine. It’ll take me a couple of months to get back in shape after this bout. I’m due for a good old-fashioned nervous breakdown, and while it won’t last long, it won’t be much fun while it does last.”

  The appeal rose in his eyes as he watched Elena. “All right,” he said. “Now you have the story. What are you going to do about it?”

  For the first time she gave him a real smile. “Don’t worry,” she said. “Don’t worry, Simon.”

  “Will you come hold my hand while I’m recuperating?” he asked.

  “I’m holding it now, you fool,” Elena answered.

  Dalgetty chuckled happily. Then he went to sleep.

  Silent Victory

  Prologue

  Sundown was brief, night came swiftly out of the Atlantic and flowed across the world. A few lamps blinked on in the city, but most of it lay in darkness; there was more light overhead, as the stars came forth. Intelligence Prime, lord of the Solar System, opened the window and leaned out to watch the constellations and breathe the warm air that sighed in from the endless Brazilian lands. A lovely world, he thought, a broad fair planet, this Earth—one to fight for, to seize and hold like a beloved mate.

  It was not risky for him to appear at the window. His secret office was so high above darkened São Paulo that the very noises were lost.

  Up here there was only the slow sad wind, quiet and loneliness everywhere.

  He sighed, turning away as the lights strengthened automatically in the room. Weariness lay like a weight on his shoulders.

  The hunt was over, yes, this last episode was finished—but was it? And what would come after? So much to do, so terribly few to do it; he himself, chosen ruler of his people, was a slave to their own conquest. What would strike at them next, and how soon? When could they ever know peace under friendly stars?

  He sat down at his desk, shoving the vague despair out of his mind with an effort. Overwork, nervous strain, it was no more than that, he thought irritably. And there was no place for it in this enormous age. He took up some papers, reports from Mars, and began studying them.

  A chime sounded, jarring him in the great quiet. When would they ever let him get his work done? “Come in,” he said. The annunciator carried his voice to the ante-chamber, and the door opened.

  Intelligence Prime looked up as the sub-officer entered. “What do you want?” he asked. “I’m busy.”

  The sub-officer halted, and one arm rose in a rubbery motion, a salute. “It’s more on the Arnfeld case, lord,” he said. “Some new material, just brought to me.”

  “Well, let’s see it, then. Don’t just stand there. Death and corruption, this business was the tightest spot we’ve been in since the Exodus.”

  The sub-officer moved slowly across the floor and laid the book on the desk. “They found it while taking that cabin apart, lord,” he said. “Apparently Arnfeld was making a last attempt to tell the story to his people—he’d hidden it under the floorboards.”

  “Pathetic, in a way,” said Intelligence Prime. “I can admire that creature and his friends. They were a brave group. Even the woman who betrayed them at the last did so for a selfless reason.”

  The cold light of the fluoros gleamed off his great crested head as he bent over the relic. It was a school notebook, torn and dirty, and the first few pages held a child’s scrawl, a few arithmetic sums, a clumsy drawing. Then the adult hand began, and the rest of the book was filled with it—a firm masculine writing, small and close together, obviously done in haste.