* * * * *
Number Three was the screwiest one of all, yet it made a weird kind of
sense. Suppose that Sir Lewis himself had had a grudge against Harris?
The whole thing would have been ridiculously easy; all he'd have to do
would be to act just as he had acted and then give evidence against
Harris.
The thing that made it odd wasn't the actual frame-up (if that's what it
was); these days, every crime was blamed on a Controller. A man accused
of murder simply looked virtuous and said that he would never have done
such a thing if he hadn't been under the power of a Controller. Ditto
for robbery, rape, and any other felony you'd care to name.
An aura of fear hung over the whole Earth; each man half suspected
everyone with whom he came in contact of being a Controller.
So it wasn't that the frame-up in itself was peculiar in this case; it
was simply that it wasn't Sir Lewis Huntley's style. If Sir Lewis had
wanted to get Harris, he'd have done it legally, without any underhanded
frame-ups. Still, the theory remained as a possibility.
_I suppose it does_, Dorrine agreed, _but how does that tie in with our
own Group? What about Jackson and Marcy? What happened to them?_
_I don't know_, Houston admitted, _I just don't know_.
Jackson and Marcy had been members of the Group of telepaths who had
banded together for companionship and mutual protection. Both of them
had been trapped by the PD Police in exactly the same way that Harris
had been trapped. They were now where Harris would be in a matter of
hours--in the Penal Cluster.
Their arrests didn't make sense, either; they had been accused of taking
over someone's mind for the purpose of gaining money illegally--illegal,
that is, according to the new UN laws that had been passed to supersede
the various national laws that had previously been in effect.
But Houston had known both men well, and neither of them was the kind of
man who would pull such a stunt, much less do it in such a stupid
manner.
Dorrine thought: _Well, Dave, this Harris case is out of our hands now;
we've got to concentrate on getting others into the Group--we've got to
find the other sane ones._
_You're ready to take over here, then?_ he asked.
* * * * *
At the table, several yards away from where Houston was sitting,
Dorrine, still looking at the book, smiled faintly.
_I'll have to; you're being transferred back to New York at six in the
morning._
Houston allowed a feeling of startled surprise to bridge the gap between
their minds. _How'd you know that?_ He hadn't told her, and she couldn't
have forced the knowledge from his mind. A telepath can open the mind
of a Normal as simply as he might open the pages of a book, but the mind
of another Controller is far stronger. One telepath couldn't force
anything from the mind of another; all thoughts had to be exchanged
voluntarily.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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