Detective and mystery stories; Psychic ability -- Fiction; Science fiction
I continued to nod, but his assurance didn't reassure me in the least.
With about ninety-eight per cent of the general public still not
quite willing to accept rockets, missiles and space travel, I had a
fat chance of convincing anybody that a telepath had kept guard over
the slumbering mind of Gordon Andrews, while a perceptive solved the
combination to the wall safe, so that a kinematic could twirl the
dial; that the imminent awakening of Gordon Andrews had indeed been an
imminent physical threat to a delicate extra-sensory undertaking, and
that therefore he had been silenced by the kinematic, with a weapon
located by the perceptive, after warning from the telepath; after which
the crime had continued, with the loot being floated by a levitator
along a freeway explored by the perceptive and scouted by the telepath
and cleared of barriers by the kinematic who opened and debugged them
as he went along--and that the real topper for this whopper was that
this operation was not the integrated effort of a clever gang of
extra-sensory specialists, but rather the single-handed accomplishment
of one highly talented Psi-man!
A Psi-man ruthless enough to kill before he would permit his victim to
watch the turning dial, the floating loot, the opening portal, simply
because there stood a probability that one of the two billion persons
on Earth might suspect the phenomena as parapsychical activity, instead
of the hallucinatory ravings of a rich old eccentric who hated the
incumbent political party!
How best to keep a secret?
Let no one suspect that any secret exists!
II
The rain was still coming down in wind-whipped torrents that slatted
along the avenue in drenching sheets. Huddled in the scant cover of the
apartment door was a girl of about eighteen. The raincoat she wore was
no protection; the wind drove the rain up under it. Womanlike, she was
struggling with the ruins of a fashionable little umbrella instead of
abandoning it for the tangled mess that it was.
She looked at me as I opened the door. She was without guile. She was
wet and miserable and determined to take whatever help was proffered,
and hope afterward that no unfair advantage would be taken of the
situation.
I showed her my I.D. card and she read: "Howard Schnell, Captain,
Special Detail." Her face changed from cautious immobility to a sort
of wet animation, and she added as if it were important under the
circumstances to be completely open, "I'm Florence Wood."
I took the ruined umbrella from her unresisting hand and stood it in
the foyer for the janitor to dispose of, and pointed out across the
rain-ponded sidewalk to the police car. It was almost high noon, but
the rain was so heavy that the identity of the car was by no means
conspicuous from the apartment door. Florence Wood nodded as she caught
sight of it.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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