Here was a real esper for you. I’ve got a range of about two blocks for good, solid, permanent things like buildings and street-car tracks, but unfamiliar things get foggy at about a half a block. I can dig lethal machinery coming in my direction for about a block and a half because I’m a bit sensitive about such things. I looked at Lieutenant Williamson and said, “With a range like yours, how come there’s any crime in this town at all?”
He shook his head slowly. “Crime doesn’t out until it’s committed,” he said. “You’ll remember how fast we got here after you pulled the trigger. But you’re clean, Hammond. Just come to the inquest and tell all.”
“I can go?”
“You can go. But just to keep you out of any more trouble, I’ll have one of the jetcopters drop you off at home. Mind?”
“Nope. But isn’t that more than the police are used to doing?”
He eyed me amusedly. “If I were a mental,” he said, “I could read your mind and know that you were forming the notion of calling on Scarmann and asking him what-for. But since I’m only a mind-blank esper, all I can do is to fall back on experience and guesswork. Do I make myself clear?”
Lieutenant Williamson’s guess-work and experience were us good as mental sensitivity, but I didn’t think it wise to admit that I had been considering just exactly how to get to Scarmann. I was quickly and firmly convoyed home in a jetcopter but once I saw them take off I walked out of the apartment again.
I had more or less tacitly agreed not to go looking for Scarmann, but I had not mentioned taking a dig at the apartment of the dear departed, Peter Rambaugh.
Rambaugh’s place was uptown and the front door was protected by an eight tumbler cylinder job that would have taxed the best of esper lockpicks. But there was a service entrance in back that was not locked and I took it. The elevator was a self-service job, and Rambaugh’s back door was locked on a snaplatch that a playful kitten could have opened. I dug the place for a few minutes and found it clean, so I went in and took a more careful look.
The desk was not particularly interesting. Just papers and letters and unpaid bills. The dresser in the bedroom was the same, excepting for the bottom drawer. That was filled with a fine collection of needle-rays and stunguns and one big force blaster that could blow a hole in a brick wall. None of them had their serial numbers intact.
But behind a reproduction of a Gainsborough painting was a wall safe that must have been built before Rhine Institute discovered the key to man’s latent abilities. Inside of this tin can was a collection of photographs that must have brought Rambaugh a nice sum in the months when the murder business went slack. I couldn’t quite dig them clear because I didn’t know any of the people involved, and I didn’t try too hard because there were some letters and notes that might lead me into the answer to why Rambaugh was hotburning for me.
I fiddled with the dial for about fifteen minutes, watching the tumblers and the little wheels go around. Then it went click and I turned the handle and opened the door. I was standing there with both hands deep in Rambaugh’s safe when I heard a noise behind me.
I whirled and slid aside all in one motion and my hand streaked for my armpit and came out with the forty five. It was a woman and she was carrying nothing more lethal than the fountain pen in her purse. She blanched when she saw my forty-five swinging towards her middle, but she took a deep breath when I halted it in midair.
“I didn’t mean to startle you,” she apologized.
“Startle, hell!” I blurted. “You scared me out of my shoes.”
I dug her purse. Beside the usual female junk she had a wallet containing a couple of charge-account plates, a driver’s license, and a hospital card, all made out to Miss Martha Franklin. Miss Franklin was about twenty-four, and she was a strawberry blonde with the pale skin and blue eyes that goes with the hair. I gathered that she didn’t belong there any more than I did.
“I don’t, Mr. Hammond,” she said.
So Martha Franklin was a mental sensitive.
“I am,” she told me. “That’s how I came to be here.”
“I’m esper. You’ll have to explain in words of one syllable because I can’t read you.”
“I was not far away when you cut loose with that field-piece of yours,” she said flatly. “So I read your intention to come here. I’ve been following you at mental range ever since.”
“Why?”
“Because there is something in that safe I want very much.”
I looked at her again. She did not look the type to get into awkward situations. She colored slightly and said, “One indiscretion doesn’t make a tramp, Mr. Hammond.”
I nodded. “Want it intact or burned?” I asked.
“Burned, please,” she said, smiling weakly at me for my intention. I smiled back.
On my way to Rambaugh’s bedroom I dug the rest of the thug’s safe but there wasn’t anything there that would give me an inkling of why he was gunning for me. I came back with one of his needle-rays and burned the contents of the safe to a black char. I stirred up the ashes with the nose of the needier and then left it in the safe after wiping it clean on my handkerchief.
“Thank you, Mr. Hammond,” she said quietly. “Maybe I can answer your question. Rambaugh was probably after you because of me.”
“Huh?”
“I’ve been paying Rambaugh blackmail for about four years. This morning I decided to stop it, and looked your name up in the telephone book. Rambaugh must have read me do it.”
“Ever think of the police?” I suggested.
“Of course. But that is just as bad as not paying off. You end up all over the front pages anyway. You know that.”
“There’s a lot of argument on both sides,” I supposed. “But let’s finish this one over a bar. We’re crowding our luck here. In the eyes of the law we’re just a couple of nasty break-ins.”
“Yes,” she said simply.
We left Rambaugh’s apartment together and I handed Martha into my car and took off.
It struck me as we were driving that mental sensitivity was a good thing in spite of its limitations. A woman without mental training might have every right to object to visiting a bachelor apartment at two o’clock in the morning. But I had no firm plans for playing up to Martha Franklin; I really wanted to talk this mess out and get it squared away. This she could read, so I was saved the almost-impossible task of trying to convince an attractive woman that I really had no designs upon her beautiful white body. I was not at all cold to the idea, but Martha did not seem to be the pushover type.
“Thank you, Steve,” she said.
“Thanks for nothing,” I told her with a short laugh. “Them’s my sentiments.”
“I like your sentiments. That’s why I’m here, and maybe we can get our heads together and figure something out.”
I nodded and went back to my driving, feeling pretty good now.
A man does not dig his own apartment. He expects to find it the way he left it. He digs in the mailbox on his way towards it, and he may dig in his refrigerator to see whether he should stop for beer or whatever else, because these things save steps. But nobody really expects to find trouble in his own home, especially when he is coming in at three o’clock in the morning with a good looking woman.
They were smart enough to come with nothing deadly in their hands. So I had no warning until they stepped out from either side of my front door and lifted me into my living room by the elbows. They hurled me into an easy chair with a crash. When I stopped bouncing, one of the gorillas was standing in front of me, about as tall as Washington Monument as seen from the sidewalk in front. He was looking at my forty-five with careful curiosity.
“What gives?” I demanded.
The crumb in front of me leaned down and gave me a back-and-forth that yanked my head around. I didn’t say anything, but I thought how I’d like to meet the buzzard in a dark alley with my gun in my fist.
Martha said, “They’re friends of Rambaugh, Steve. And they’re a little afraid of that prehistoric cannon you carry.”
The bird in front of Martha gave her a one-two across the face. That was enough for me. I came up out of my chair, lifting my fist from the floor and putting my back and thigh muscles behind it. It should have taken his head
