"In particular there," Weldon agreed. "The department's experience made the emergence of any human supertalents worth worrying about seem highly improbable. In any event, DEDCOM crowded its luck. It didn't stop at that point. The problems besetting the colonization program were, it stated, by no means the earliest evidence of a rogue telepath in our midst. It listed a string of apparently somewhat comparable situations stretching back through the past three hundred years, and declared unequivocally that in each case the responsible agent had been the same--our present saboteur." * * * * * Weldon paused, watched their expressions changing. A sardonic smile touched the corners of his mouth. "All right," Dr. Lowry said sourly after a moment, "to make the thing even more unlikely, you're saying now that the rogue is immortal." Weldon shook his head. "I didn't say it ... and neither, you notice, did DEDCOM. The question of the rogue's actual life span, whatever it may be, was no part of the matter it had been given to investigate. It said only that in various ways he had been interfering with mankind's progress for at least three centuries. But added to the rest of it, that statement was quite enough." "To accomplish what?" "What do you think?" Weldon asked. "The report passed eventually through the proper hands, was properly initialed, then filed with DEDCOM's earlier abortions and forgotten. Special Activities continued, by its more realistic standard investigative procedures, to attempt to find out what had bogged down the colonization program. As you're aware, the department didn't make much headway. And neither has the program." "The last is very apparent," Lowry said, looking puzzled. "But the fact that you've failed to solve the problem seems a very poor reason to go back now to the theory of a rogue telepath." Weldon blew out a puff of smoke, said thoughtfully, "That wouldn't have been too logical of us, I agree. But our failure wasn't the reason for reviving DEDCOM's theory." "Then what was your reason?" Irritation edged Lowry's voice again. "The unexpected death, five years ago, of one of the world's better-known political figures," Weldon said. "You would recognize the name immediately if I mentioned it. But you will not recognize the circumstances surrounding his death which I am about to relate to you, because the report published at the time was a complete falsehood and omitted everything which might have seemed out of the ordinary. The man actually was the victim of murder. His corpse was found floating in the Atlantic. That it should have been noticed at all was an unlikely coincidence, but the body was fished out and identified. At that point, the matter acquired some very improbable aspects because it was well known that this man was still alive and in the best of health at his home in New York.