“They’ve found an old man working in one of the laboratories. They can’t understand how they missed him before but”—he waved an arm impatiently—“that doesn’t matter. I told them to leave him alone while I figure this out.”
Gosseyn did not doubt the translation. Thorson was pale. For more than a minute, the big man stood with a black frown on his face. At last:
“This is one chance I’m not taking,” he said. “We’ll go inside, but . . .”
They climbed the fourteen-carat gold steps and passed the jewel-inlaid platinum doors and into the massive anteroom, with its millions of diamonds set into every square inch of the high walls and domed ceiling. The effect was so dazzling that it struck Gosseyn the original builders had overreached themselves. The structure had been put up at a time when a great campaign was on to convince people that the so-called jewels and precious metals, so long regarded as the very essence of wealth, were actually no more valuable than other scarce materials. Even after hundreds of years, the propaganda was unconvincing.
They walked along a corridor of matched rubies, and climbed an emerald stairway that shimmered with green iridescence. The anteroom at the head of the stairs was solid, untarnishable silver, and beyond that was a corridor of the famous and colorful plastic
“He’s in there.”
Gosseyn stood in a mental mist. His lips parted to ask for a description of the old man who had been discovered. “Does he have a beard?” he wanted to say. But he couldn’t utter a sound.
He thought in agony, “What am I supposed to do?”
Thorson nodded at Gosseyn. “I’ve put a blaster company in with him. They’re there now, watching him. So now it’s up to you. Go on in and tell him this building is surrounded, and that our instruments show no source of radioactive energies, so there is nothing he can do against us.”
He raised himself to his great height, and stood half a head above his prisoner. “Gosseyn,” he roared, “I warn you, make no false moves. I’ll destroy Earth and Venus if anything goes wrong now.”
The sheer savagery of the threat struck an answering fire from Gosseyn. They glared at each other like two beasts of prey. It was Thorson who broke the tension with a laugh.
“All right, all right,” he snapped, “so we’re both on edge. Let’s forget it. But remember, this is life or death.”
His teeth clamped together with a click. “Move!” he said.
Gosseyn was cold with the cold which derives from the nervous system. Slowly he stiffened. He began to walk forward.
Gosseyn jumped as if he had been struck. No words had been spoken, yet the thought had come into his mind as clearly as if it were his own.
There was no doubt of it now. In spite of what Prescott had once said about the necessity of establishing twenty-decimal similarity with another brain before there could be telepathy, he was receiving someone else’s thoughts.
The climax had come so abruptly, so differently than he had expected, that he froze where he was. He remembered thinking, “I’ve got to get going! Get going!”
“
He was already moving toward the door when that thought came. He could see the alcove ten feet away, then five; and then there was a roar from Thorson.
“Get out of that alcove! What are you trying to do?”
“
He was trying. His body pulsed with silent energy as it became attuned to the vibrator. His vision blurred, then cleared as a bolt of artificial lightning sizzled past the alcove, straight at Thorson. The big man went down, his head nearly burned off, and the great fire coruscated past him down the corridor. Men screamed in agony. A fireball floated from the ceiling and engulfed the circular vibrator. It blew up in a cloud of flame, tearing to shreds the men who had been manning it and protecting it.
Instantly, the weight of vibratory pulsations cleared from Gosseyn’s nerves.
Hurt! In an agony of anxiety Gosseyn pictured the man dying before he could get any information from him. He snatched for a source of power—and in ten minutes wrecked the building and the square. Corridors were seared with the murderous fire he poured along them. Walls caved in on shouting men. Tanks smoldered and burned like fury. “No one”—almost like fire itself was the thought—“no one of this special guard can be allowed to get away.”
Not one did. A regiment of men and machines had swarmed into the square. Torn, blackened bodies and smashed metal was all that remained. Gosseyn looked up from one of the doorways. The planes hovered at a thousand feet. Without orders from Thorson they would hesitate to bomb. Perhaps already Crang had taken them over.
He couldn’t wait to make sure. Back into the building he raced, along a smoldering corridor. As he entered the laboratory, Gosseyn stopped short. The corpses of Thorson’s guards sprawled in every direction. Slumped in an easy chair beside a desk was an old, bearded man. He looked up at Gosseyn with glazed eyes, mustered a smile and said, “Well, we did it!”
His voice was deep and strong and familiar. Gosseyn stared at him, remembering where he had heard that bass voice before. The shock of recognition held his own reaction down to a single word.
“ ‘X!’ ” he said loudly.
XXXV
The old man coughed. It was not a pleasant sound, for he twisted in agony. The movement brushed aside
