off, but all he did was grunt, stagger back, dig his heels in, and then come back at me with his head down. I chopped at the bridge of his nose but missed and almost broke my hand on his hard skull. Then the other guy came charging in and I flung out a side-chop with my other hand and caught him on the wrist.
But Rhine training can’t do away with the old fact that two big tough men can wipe the floor with one big tough man. I didn’t even take long enough to muss up my furniture.
I had the satisfaction of mashing a nose and cracking my hand against a skull again before the lights went out. When I came back from Mars, I was sitting on a kitchen chair facing a corner. My wrists and ankles were taped to the arms and legs of the chair.
I dug around. They had Martha taped to another chair in the opposite corner, and the two gorillas were standing in the middle of the room, obviously trying to think.
So was I. There was something that smelled about this mess. Peter Rambaugh was a mental, and he should have been sensitive enough to keep his take low enough so that it wouldn’t drive Martha into thinking up ways and means of getting rid of him. Even so, he shouldn’t have been gunning for me, unless there was a lot more to this than I could dig.
“What gives?” I asked sourly.
There was no answer. The thug with my forty-five took out the clip and removed a couple of slugs.
He went into the kitchen and found my pliers and came back teasing one of the slugs out of its casing. The other bird lit a cigarette.
The bird with the cartridge poured the powder from the shell into the palm of my hand. I knew what was coming but I couldn’t wiggle my fingers much, let alone turn my hand over to dump out the stuff. The other guy planted the end of the cigarette between my middle fingers and I had to squeeze hard to keep the hot end up. My fingers began to ache almost immediately, and I was beginning to imagine the flash of flame and the fierce wave of pain that would strike when my tired hand lost its pep and let the cigarette fall into that little mound of powder.
“Stop it,” said Martha. “Stop it!”
“What do they want?” I gritted.
“They won’t think it,” she cried.
The bright red on the end of the cigarette grayed with ash and I began to wonder how long it would be before a fleck of hot ash would fall. How long it would take for the ash to grow long and top-heavy and then to fall into the powder. And whether or not the ash would be hot enough to touch it off. I struggled to keep my hands steady, but they were trembling. I felt the cigarette slip a bit and clamped down tight again with my aching fingers.
Martha pleaded again: “Stop it! Let us know what you want and we’ll do it.”
“Anything,” I promised rashly.
Even if I managed to hold that deadly fuse tight, it would eventually burn down to the bitter end. Then there would be a flash, and I’d probably never hold my hand around a gun butt again. I’d have to go looking for this pair of lice with my gun in my left. If they didn’t try the same trick on my other hand. I tried to shut my mind on that notion but it was no use. It slipped. But the chances were that this pair of close-mouthed hotboys had considered that idea before.
“Can you dig ’em Martha?”
“Yes, but not deep enough. They’re both concentrating on that cigarette and making mental bets when it will—”
Her voice trailed off. A wisp of ash had dropped and my mental howl must have been loud enough to scorch their minds. It was enough to stop Martha, at any rate. But the wisp of ash was cold and nothing happened except my spine got coldly wet and sweat ran down my face and into my mouth. The palm of my hand was sweating too, but not enough to wet the little pile of powder.
“Look,” I said in a voice that sounded like a nutmeg grater, “Rambaugh was a louse and he tried to kill me first. If it’s revenge you want—why not let’s talk it over?”
“They don’t care what you did to Rambaugh,” said Martha.
“They didn’t come here to practice torture,” I snapped. “They want something big. And the only guy I know mixed up with Peter Rambaugh is Scarmann, himself.”
“Scarmann?” blurted Martha.
Scarmann was a big shot who lived in a palace about as lush as the Taj Mahal, in the middle of a fenced-in property big enough to keep him out of the mental range of most peepers. Scarmann was about as big a louse as they came but nobody could put a finger on him because he managed to keep himself as clean as a raygunned needle. I was expecting a clip on the skull for thinking the things I was thinking about Scarmann, but it did not come. These guys were used to having people think violence at their boss. I thought a little harder. Maybe if I made ’em mad enough one of them would belt me on the noggin and put me out, and then I’d be cold when that cigarette fell into the gunpowder and ruined my hand.
I made myself a firm, solid promise that if, as, and when I got out of this fix I would find Scarmann, shove the nose of my automatic down his throat through his front teeth and empty the clip out through the top of his head.
Then the hotboy behind me lifted the cigarette from my fingers very gently and squibbed it out in the ashtray, and I got the pitch.
This is the way it is done in these enlightened days. Rhine Institute and the special talents that Rhine developed should and could have made the world a better, brighter place to live in. But I’ve heard it said and had it proved that the minute someone comes up with something good, there are a lot of buzzards who turn it bad and make it a foul, rotten medium for their lousy way of life.
No, in these days of mental telepathy and extra sensory perception, crumbs do not erase other crumbs. They just grab some citizen and put him in a box until he is ready to do their dirty work for them.
Guilt? That would be mine. A crime is a crime and the guy who does it is a criminal, no matter how he justifies his act of violence.
The truth? Any court mentalist who waded through that pair of unwashed minds would find no evidence of any open deal with Steve Hammond. Sure, he would find violence there, but the Court is more than well aware of the fact that thinking of an act of violence is not illegal. This Rhine training has been too recent to get the human race trained into the niceties of polite mental behavior. Sure, they’d get a few months or maybe a few years for breaking and entering as well as assault, but after all, they were friends of Rambaugh and this might well be a matter of retaliation, even though they thought Rambaugh was an incompetent bungler.
So if Steve Hammond believed that he could go free with a whole hand by planning to rub out a man named Scarmann, that would be Steve Hammond’s crime, not theirs.
They didn’t take any chances, even though I knew that they could read my mind well enough to know that I would go through with their nasty little scheme. They hustled Martha into the kitchen, chair and all, and one of them stood there with my paring knife touching her soft throat enough to indent the skin but not enough to draw blood. The other rat untaped me and stood me on my feet.
I hurt all over from the pasting I’d taken, so I took a boiling shower and dressed leisurely. The guy handed me my forty-five, all loaded, as I came out of the bathroom. The other bird hadn’t moved a muscle out in the kitchen. His knife was still pressing against Martha’s throat. He was still standing pat when I passed out of esper range on the street below.
In pre-Rhine days, a citizen in my pinch would holler for the cops because he couldn’t be sure that the crooks would keep their end of the bargain. But Rhine training has produced a real “Honor Among Thieves” so that organized crime can run as fast as organized justice. If I kept my end and they didn’t keep theirs, the word would get around from their own dirty minds that they couldn’t keep a bargain. Well, I was going to keep mine for the same reason, even though I am not a thief.
That’s the way it’s done these days. You get a good esper like me to knock off a sharp mental operator like Scarmann.
The trouble was that I didn’t really want Scarmann, I wanted that pair of mental sadists up in my apartment who were holding a knife against Martha’s throat. I wanted them, and I wanted Martha Franklin’s skin to be happily whole. And if I crossed them now, the only guys that wouldn’t play ball with me in the future would be the crooks. Them I could do without.
