Entities: The Selected Novels of Eric Frank Russell (34 page)

“Get on the jump and shoot this around: an Intelligence raid is due shortly. Number one cover-up plan to operate at once. Number two plan to be prepared in readiness.” His angry glare was directed toward the door as he went on, knowing full well that the escapee must still be near enough to pick up every word. “David Raven is now on the run from this address. Trip him up on sight. Put him out of business any way you can. That’s top priority—get Raven!”

The door opened and Santil came in saying, “Look, he caught me napping in a way I—”

“Idiot!” interjected Kayder, bristling at the sight of him: “You telepaths kid yourselves you're superior examples of Nature’s handiwork. Pfah! Thank the fates I’m not one myself. Of all the mentally gabby dopes you represent the lowest limit!”

“He was blank, see?” protested Santil, flushing. “When you’re born and bred a telepath you can’t help being conditioned by it. I forgot this fellow could still feel around while mentally deader than a dead dog and accidentally let slip a thought. He snatched it so quickly I didn’t realize he had it until he spoke just now.”

“You forgot,” jibed Kayder. “It’s top of the list of famous last words, ‘I forgot.’ ” His irate features became darker. His gaze shifted to a large, mesh-covered box standing in one corner. “If those jungle hornets were able to recognize individuals I’d send them after him. No matter how far he’s gone they’d reach him and strip him down to his skeleton before he could utter a squeak.”

Keeping his attention away from the box, Santil said nothing.

“You’ve got a mind or what passes for one,” Kayder went on, acid-toned, slightly vicious. “Come on, use it! Tell me where he is now.”

“I can’t. He’s blank like I said.”

“So are you—blanker than a stone wall.” He picked up the telephone, dialed, waited a while. “You, Dean? Put those emergency pips on the air. Yes, I want to speak to the-man-we-don’t-know. If he phones back tell him Raven’s likely to put the finger on local base. I want him to use his influence either to postpone or minimize a raid.” Racking the instrument, he pondered irefully, meanwhile plucking at his bottom lip and releasing it with little plopping sounds.

“He’s got good range. Ten to one he overheard you,” Santil pointed out.

“That is taken for granted. Lot of good may it do him when we don’t know ourselves whom we’re talking to.”

The phone shrilled again.

“This is Murray,” announced a voice at the other end. “You sent me to dig up stuff on this Raven.”

“What have you got?”

“Not so much. I’d say the Terrans are becoming desperate, scouring the planet and making wild guesses.”

“Take care not to make a few of your own,” Kayder snapped. “Heraty, Carson and the others are no fools even if they have got a ball and chain shackled to each leg. Give me what you’ve got and leave the guessing to be done at this end of the line.” “His father was a pilot on the Mars run, an exceptionally efficient telepath coming from four telepathic generations. There was no mixing of talents maritally speaking until Raven’s parents met.”

“Go on.”

“The mother was a radiosensitive with an ancestry of radiosensitives plus one supersonic. According to Professor Hartman, the product of such a union would most likely inherit only the dominant talent. It’s remotely possible that the offspring—meaning Raven—might be telepathically receptive across an abnormally wide band.”

“He’s wrong there. This skewboy can pull others in even while he’s holding them off.”

“I wouldn’t know about that,” Murray evaded. “I’m no professional geneticist. I’m only telling you what Hartman says.”

“Never mind. Let’s have the rest.”

“Raven followed in his father’s footsteps to a limited extent. He got his Mars-pilot certificate and thus holds the space rank of captain. That’s as far as he went. Though fully qualified he hasn’t worked at it. He’s never taken a ship Marsward. Having acquired his rank he appears to have done little more than mooch aimlessly around this planet until Carson hauled him in.”

“H’m! That’s strange!” Kayder’s brows became corrugated with thought. “Any reason that you could discover?”

“Maybe he feels that his health won’t stand for any Mars trips,” hazarded Murray. “Not since he was killed.”

“Eh?” His back hairs stiffening, Kayder urged, “Say that again.”

“He was at the spaceport ten years ago when the old
Rimfire
exploded like a bomb. It wrecked the control tower and did some slaughter. Remember?”

“Yes, I saw it on the spectroscreen.”

“Raven was picked up with the other bodies. Definitely he was one of the dear departed. Some young doc played with the corpse just on whim. He lifted splintered ribs, injected adrenaline, shoved the head into an oxygen auto-breather and massaged the heart. He brought him back from wherever he’d gone. It was one of those rare returned-from-the-grave cases. Murray paused, added, “Since then I reckon he’s lost his nerve.”

“Nothing more?”

“Is all.”

Racking the phone. Kayder lay back, stared at Santil. “Lost his nerve. Bunkum! From what I saw of him he never had any to lose in the first place.”

“Who says he lost it?” Santil inquired.

“Shut up and let me think.” The spider-thing crept out of his pocket, blinked around. Putting it on the desk, he let it play with his finger-tip while he mused aloud.

“Raven had a weirdly inhuman attitude toward death. He guessed Haller would do the dutch about ten minutes before it happened. That’s because it takes one nut to recognize another.”

“Maybe you’re right.”

“It suggests that his own extremely narrow escape has left him queer in the head. He regards death as something to be despised rather than feared because he has defied it once and argues that he can do it again and again.” His attention transferred from the spider to Santil. “Raven’s death data is so unusual that he makes loony computations upon it. You see what it means?”

“What?” asked Santil, uneasily.

“Unlimited, foolhardy, crackpot courage. He’s a better-than-average telepath with the mental attitude of a religious fanatic. One taste of death has killed his fear of it. He’s likely to try anything that strikes his fancy at any given moment. That makes him totally unpredictable. Doubtless Carson is counting on precisely those factors: a high-grade adept who thinks nothing of rushing in where angels fear to tread—as he did right here.”

“I expected he’d be a lot more than that,” Santil ventured.

“So did I. Goes to show that the farther a rumor is passed along the more it becomes exaggerated. I have the measure of him now. Give him enough rope and he’ll hang himself.”

“Meaning—?”

“Meaning it’s always the onrushing, headstrong animals that fall into the pit.” He tickled the spider-thing under its crinkled belly. “He is the kind that runs out of one trap straight into another. All we need do is bide our time and wait for him to drop down a hole.”

Something went
pip-pip-pip
under the floor. Pulling open a drawer he took from it another and smaller telephone.

“Kayder.”

“Ardern here. The raid is on.”

“How’s it going?”

“Hah! It would give you a big laugh. The hypnos are weighing and bagging tree almonds; the mini-engineers are assembling ladies watches; the teleports are printing news-from-Venus sheets and everyone’s acting like they’re being good at school. The entire place is happy, peaceful, innocent.”

“Got the blanking done in time?”

“Most of it. Six weren’t treated when Intelligence burst in. We smuggled them out through the chute. They got away all right.”

“Good,” said Kayder, with satisfaction.

“That’s not all. You’ve put out an urgent call for a smoothie named David Raven? Well, we’ve pinned him down.”

Kayder sucked in his breath with a low hiss that made the spider jump. He soothed it with a finger.

“How did you manage to find him?”

“No trouble at all. Metaphorically speaking, he walked into the cage, locked the door on himself, hung his identity card on the bars and yelled for us to come look at him.” His chuckle sounded hearty over the wires. “He has stitched himself up in a sack and consigned himself to us.”

“I’m too leery of him to see it that way. There’s something funny going on. I’m going to check on it myself. Expect me around in ten minutes.”

Hiding the phone and closing its drawer, he ignored Santil and the spider-thing while he stared introspectively at the desk. For some reason he could not identify he felt apprehensive. And for some other reason equally dodgy his mind kept returning to the notion of bright-eyed moths that glide through the dark.

Brilliant, glowing, soaring through the endless dark.

Kayder made it in seven minutes. The unpretentious house to which he went was the terminal of the secret chute from underground base. This was where the half dozen unblanked escapees from the Intelligence raid had emerged, taken to the streets and gone their several innocent ways.

The man waiting for him was small, thin and had features permanently yellowed by past spells of Venusian valley fever. He was a Type Two Mutant, a floater with a bad limp acquired in his youth when once he overdid the altitude and exhausted his mental power while coming down.

“Well?” demanded Kayder, staring expectantly round the room.

“Raven’s aboard the
Fantôme,
"informed Ardern.

Kayder’s ire started to rise with characteristic ease. “What d’you mean by giving me that stuff about having him caged with his card on the bars?”

“So he is,” insisted Ardern, unabashed. “As you well know, the
Fantôme
is a homeward boat about to blow for Venus.”

“With a Terran crew. All spaceship crews are Terrans.”

“What of it? Neither he nor they can get up to any tricks in mid-space. They’ve got to land. This Raven will then be on our own planet, among our own millions, and subject to our own local authority. What more could you want?”

“I wanted him to deal with myself.” Going to the window, Kayder mooned through the dark at a string of green lights marking the distant spaceport where the
Fantôme
rested.

Ardern limped across, joined him. “I was by the gangway when this fellow came from the copter as if he’d only ten seconds to spare. He gave the checker his name as David Raven and claimed a cabin. I thought to myself, ‘That’s the guy Kayder’s screaming for,’ whereupon he turned, grinned at me like an alligator grinning at a naked swimmer and said, ‘You’re dead right, my boy!’ ” He shrugged, finished, “So, of course. I made a dash for the nearest phone and told you.”

“He’s got enough bare-faced impudence to serve a dozen,” Kayder growled. “Does he think he’s invincible or something?” He paced rapidly to and fro, afflicted with indecision. “I could dump a box of bugs on that boat but what’s the use? My little soldiers don’t know one individual from another unless one can talk to them.”

“And you don’t have much chance to get aboard, anyway,” Ardern pointed out. “The
Fantôme
is due to lift in the next five minutes.”

“Who’s on her that we know?”

“It’s too late to get a complete passenger list. She carries some three hundred, not counting the crew. Part of them will be Terrans, the rest plain, ordinary Venusians and Martians incapable of doing or thinking anything not connected with trade.” Ardern mused it a moment. “Pity we can’t search the lot and pick out the few skewboys. The only ones I know are twelve of our own men returning for fourth-year leave.”

“What types are they?”

“Ten mini-engineers and two teleports.”

“An ideal combination of talent to send a pinhead explorer through his keyhole and smear him across his bed,” said Kayder with much sarcasm. “Bah! He’d read their every intention the moment it jelled and be twenty jumps ahead of them all the way.”

“He has to sleep,” Ardern volunteered.

“How do we know that? Nocturnals never sleep and maybe he doesn’t either.” “Tell you what, there’s still radio contact so let’s get those twelve to search the ship for a homeward-bound telepath. They could then enlist his help.”

“No good,” scoffed Kayder, waving it aside. “Raven can make his mind feel like a lump of marble. If a telepath made a pass at him through the cabin door and got a complete blank, how could he tell whether Raven was awake or asleep? And how could he tell whether or not his own bumps were being felt?”

“I reckon he couldn’t,” Ardern admitted, frowning.

“Some mutational aptitudes give me the gripes.” Kayder returned his attention to the far-off lights. “Now and again I get fed up with our so-called array of superior talent. Bugs are best. Nobody can pick a bug’s mind. Nobody can hypnotize a bug. But bugs obey those they love and that’s that. Let me tell you it’s plenty.” “I once saw a pyrotic burn a thousand of them.”

“Did you now? And what happened afterward?”

“Ten thousand came and ate him.”

“There you are,” said Kayder, feeding his own ego. “Bugs—you can’t beat them!” He meandered to and fro, pausing now and again to scowl at the lights, then said, “Nothing for it but to pass the buck.”

“How d’you mean?” asked Ardern.

“We’ll let them handle him at the other end. If an entire world can’t cope with one not-so-hot skewboy we might as well give in right now.”

“That’s what I told you in the first place. He’s caged himself.”

“Maybe he has and maybe he hasn’t. I’m sitting on
his
world and I’m not caged, am I?”

The faraway lights were suddenly outshone by a vivid shaft of intense white fire that crawled upward from ground level and increased speed until eventually it was spearing into the heavens. Soon after came a deep roaring that made the windows rattle. Darkness swamped back and the green lights reappeared, by contrast seeming dimmer than before.

Ardern screwed up his yellowish face, looked bothered. “I had to leave the gangway to go to the phone—”

“And so—?”

“How do we know he’s actually on that boat? He’s had all the time in the world to walk off it again. That cabin booking could have been an act to send us snuffling along the wrong trail.”