Stop Look and Dig, George O. Smith [carter reed txt] 📗
- Author: George O. Smith
Book online «Stop Look and Dig, George O. Smith [carter reed txt] 📗». Author George O. Smith
In pre-Rhine days, a citizen in my pinch would holler for the cops because he couldn't be sure that the crooks would keep their end of the bargain. But Rhine training has produced a real "Honor Among Thieves" so that organized crime can run as fast as organized justice. If I kept my end and they didn't keep theirs,[pg 062] the word would get around from their own dirty minds that they couldn't keep a bargain. Well, I was going to keep mine for the same reason, even though I am not a thief.
That's the way it's done these days. You get a good esper like me to knock off a sharp mental operator like Scarmann.
The trouble was that I didn't really want Scarmann, I wanted that pair of mental sadists up in my apartment who were holding a knife against Martha's throat. I wanted them, and I wanted Martha Franklin's skin to be happily whole. And if I crossed them now, the only guys that wouldn't play ball with me in the future would be the crooks. Them I could do without.
So if they figured that an esper could take a mental like Scarmann, why couldn't an esper take the pair of them?
All I had to do was to think of something else until I could get my hands on their throats. Sure, they'd follow my mind as soon as they felt my mental waves within range, but if I could really find something interesting enough to occupy my attention--and maybe theirs as well--they could not identify me.
So I went back into the lobby of my apartment and dug into the mailbox of another party, thus identifying myself as the man in three eight four. Then I punched the elevator button for the Fourth and leaned back against the elevator and let my mind wander up through the apartments above.
I violated all the laws against Esping Toms as the elevator oozed upwards. Eventually my sense of perception wandered through my own apartment and I located her lying on the bed, fully dressed. She'd probably been freed lest some esper cop get to wondering why there was a woman taped to a chair in a bachelor's kitchen. I shut my mind like a clam, but I couldn't withdraw my perception too fast. I let it ooze back there like the eyes of a lecherous old man at a burleycue.
I left the elevator at the Fourth and walked up the stairs by reflex, while my mind was positively radiating waves of vulgarity.
My mind managed to identify her as "The girl on the bed" without thinking any name. She was a good looking strawberry blonde with a slender waist and a high bosom and long, slender legs. She was wearing a pair of Dornier shoes with three inch heels that did things to her ankles. Her nylons were size eight and one half, medium length, in that dark shade that[pg 063] always gives me ideas. Her dress was a simple thing that did not have a store label on it, and so I dug the stitches for a bit and decided that it had been hand made. Someone was a fine dress-maker because it fitted her slender body perfectly. Her petticoat was store type. It was simple and fitted, too, but it had a label from Forresters in the hem. Her bra was a Graceform, size thirty two, medium cup, but the girl on the bed did not have much need for molding, shaping, uplifting, padding or pretense. She was all her and she filled it right to the brim. I let my perception dawdle on the slender ankles, the lissome waist, and the rounded hips.
My door key came out by habit-reflex and entered the keyhole while my sense of perception let them have one last vicarious thrill. The girl on the bed was an honest allover strawberry blonde. She....
Then the door swung open and hell went out for breakfast.
My forty-five bellowed at the light as I slid in and sloped to one side. The room went dark as I dropped to the floor in front of my bookcase. From across the room a hitburner seared the door and slashed sidewise, cutting a smoking swathe across my encyclopedia from A-AUD to CAN-DAN and then came down as I squirmed aside. It took King Lear right out of Shakespeare before the beam winked out. It went off just in time to keep me from sporting a cooked stripe down my face.
I triggered the automatic again to make a flash in their faces while I dug the room to locate them in the dark. The needle beam flared out again and drilled a hole in the bookcase behind me. The other guy made a slashing motion with his beam to pin me down, but he made a mistake by standing up to do it.
I put a slug in his middle that slammed him back against the wall. He hung there for a moment before he fell to the floor with a dull, limp sound. His needle beam slashed upward and burned the ceiling before his hand went limp and let the weapon drop.
I whirled to dig the other guy in the room just as the throb of a stun-gun beam moaned over my head. I wondered where they'd got the arsenal, dug the serial number, and realized that it was mine. It gave me a chuckle. I'm a pistol man, so the stun-gun that old gorilla-man was toting couldn't have had more than one more charge. I tried to dig it but couldn't. Even a Doctor Of Perception can't really dig the number of kilo-watt-seconds[pg 064] in a meson chamber.
My accurate esping must have made the other guy desperate, because he made a dive and let his needle ray burn out a slashing beam that zipped across over my head. My forty-five blazed twice. He missed but I didn't, just as the throb of the stun-gun rang the air again. I whirled to face my stun-gun coming out of the bedroom door in front of Martha Franklin.
The slug intended for Martha's body never came out of my gun because her stun-gun got to me first. It froze me like a hunk of Greek statuary and I went forward and toppled over until I came on a three-point landing of elbow, the opposite knee, and the side of my face.
I was as good as dead.
My brain was still functioning but nothing else was. I was completely paralyzed. My heart had stopped breathing and my lungs had stopped breathing, and I've been told that a healthy man can retain consciousness for maybe a minute or so without a fresh supply of blood to the brain. Then things get muddy black and you've had it for good. My esp was still functioning, but that would black out with the rest of Steve Hammond.
There was no physical pain. They could have drilled me with a blunt two-by-four and I'd not have felt it.
Then because I couldn't stare Death in the face, I shut my mind on the fact and esped my late girl friend. She was standing there with my stun-gun in her hand with a smile on her beautiful puss and that vibrant body swaying gently. I wanted to vomit and I would have if I'd not been frozen solid. That beautiful body presided over by that vicious brain made me sick.
Her smile faded as I began to realize the truth. Her story was thin. Rambaugh, a mental, would have been able to play his blackmail game to the fine degree; he would have known when Martha's patience was about to grow short--if Martha's story were true. No blackmailer pushed his victim to the breaking point. And Rambaugh wouldn't have gone for me if this had just been a plain case of blackmail.
No, by thinking deeply, Martha Franklin had engineered the death of Rambaugh and she'd almost engineered the rubbing-out of Scarmann. A mental, Martha Franklin. A high-grade mental, capable of controlling her thoughts so that her cohorts could be led by the mind into doing her dirty work.
My mind chuckled. I'd be gone[pg 065] before they caught up with Martha, but they'd catch up all right. She'd leave the apartment positively radiating her act of violence and then the cops would have a catch. And you should see how a set of Court Mentalists go to work on a guilty party these days. Once they get the guy that pulled the trigger on the witness stand, in front of a jury consisting of mixed mentals and espers, with no holds barred, the court record gets a full load of the killer's life, adventures, habits, and attitude; just before the guilty party heads for the readjustment chamber.
Things were growing blacker. Waves of darkness clouded my mind and I found it hard to think straight. My esper sense faded first and as it faded I let it run once more over Martha's attractiveness and found my darkening mind wishing that she were the girl I'd believed her to be instead of the female louse she was. It could have been fun.
But now I was about to black out from stun-gun paralysis, and Martha was headed for the readjustment chamber where they'd reduce her mental activity to the level of a menial, sterilize her, and put her to work in an occupation that no man or woman with a spark of intelligence, ambition, or good sense would take.
She would live and die a half-robot, alone and ignored, her attractiveness lost because of her own lack-luster mind.
And I'd been willing to go out and plug Scarmann for her.
Hah!
And then she was at my side. I perceived her dimly, inconstantly, through the waves of blackness and unreality that were like the half-dreams that we have when lying a-doze. She levered my frozen body over on its hard back and went to work on my chest. Her arms went around me and she squeezed. Air whooshed into my dead lungs, and then she was beating my breastbone black and blue with her small fists. Beat. Beat-beat. Beat. I couldn't feel a thing but I could dig the fact that she was hurting her hands as she beat on my chest in a rhythm that matched the beat of her own heart.
I dug her own heartbeat for her, and she read my mind and matched the beat perfectly.
Then I felt a thump inside of me and dug my own heart. It throbbed once, sluggishly. It struggled, slowly. Then it throbbed to the beat of her hands and the blackening waves went away. My frozen body relaxed and I came down to rest on the floor like a melting lump of sugar.
Martha dropped on top of my[pg 066] body and pressed me down. Her arms were around my chest as she forced air into my lungs. She beat my ribs sore when my heart faltered, and squeezed me when my breathing slowed. I felt the life coming back into me; it came in like the tide, with a fringe of needles-and-pins that flowed inward from fingers and toes and scalp.
Martha pressed me down on the carpet and kissed me, full, open mouthed, passionate. It stirred my blood and my mind and I took a deep, shuddering breath.
I looked up into her soft blue eyes and said, "Thanks--slut!"
She kissed me again, pressing me down and writhing against me and obviously getting a kick out of my reaction.
Then I came alive and threw her off with no warning. I sat up, and swung a roundhouse right that clipped her on the jaw and sent her rolling over and over. Her eyes glazed for a moment but she came out of it and looked pained and miserable.
"You promised," she said huskily.
"Promised?"
"To kill Scarmann."
"Yeah?"
"You thought how you'd kill Scarmann for me, Steve."
"Someday," I said flatly, "I may kill Scarmann, but it won't be for you!"
She tried to claw me but I clipped her again and this time I made it stick. She went out cold and she was still out like a frozen herring by the time Lieutenant Williamson arrived with his jetcopter squad to take her away.
The last time I saw Martha Franklin, she was still trying to convince twelve Rhine Scholars and True that any woman with a body as beautiful as hers couldn't possibly have committed any crime. She was good at it, but not that good.
Funny. Mental sensitives always think they're so damn superior to anyone else.
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