Free Power, The by Frank M. Robinson Page A

he had acted like a sitting duck. He hadn’t fought back, he hadn’t really tried. He had accepted the idea, like DeFalco had, that fighting was impossible and that he didn’t have a chance.
    But he wasn’t entirely helpless. He knew that the man who was after him was the same man who had, somehow, killed John Olson. That it was one of those who had been at the meeting that fateful Saturday morning.
    Which one?
    He didn’t know. But Olson had known. Somewhere in the past he had met the Enemy and had known him when he had seen him again. He hadn’t been able to speak outright, but he had done his best to point the finger.
    The answer to who the Enemy was, he was suddenly convinced, lay in Olson’s own background.
    And the place to begin was with Olson’s home town.

7
     
    THE train chugged into Brockton at six, Saturday morning, when the town was still up to its neck in nightgowns and bed sheets. It stopped briefly to pick up a dozen noisy milk cans and to drop off the newspapers and William Tanner.
    He stood on the platform for a moment watching the train rattle away down the long stretch of track, then turned to the station. It was a one-story wooden structure with a sign in front saying BROCKTON in peeling, gothic letters. A note was tacked on the waiting-room door to the effect that the station didn’t open until seven.
    Apparently, when anybody left town, he thought, they had to leave on the evening train. He started walking into the village.
    Brockton. It was a small town—probably not more than two thousand population. A grid of crisscrossing streets that ran for a few blocks, then faded into the prairie. Several blocks of business section and a local tavern with a broken neon sign swinging in the early-morning air and a whitewashed church with a steeple. A combination drug and hardware store with bamboo fishing poles leaning against the display window and a town hall that featured movies every Saturday and Sunday night.
    Small town.
    Farm town.
    Backbone-of-America town where every politician wished he had been born. The town where John Olson had been born.
    He checked in at a small, rambling hotel where the dust was thick on the leather-upholstered furniture in the lobby and where the bathroom was four doors down the hall. His room looked out on the main street. It was a large room, equipped with a brass bedstead and a gigantic oak bureau with a porcelain basin and pitcher on top. A glass wrapped in dusty cellophane stood next to the pitcher.
    He hung up his coat and walked down the stairs to the hotel cafeteria which was, wonder of wonders, open for business. He ordered pancakes and coffee and watched the waitress as she walked back to the kitchen to fix them. She was young and eager to please—even at six-thirty in the morning—and bore a faint resemblance to the old man at the hotel desk. Probably a daughter or maybe even a granddaughter pressed into service.
    The pancakes were thin and didn’t soak up the syrup and the coffee was blistering hot and strong and remarkably good.
    The girl stood behind the counter three stools down, idly polishing the marble top and watching him out of the corner of her eye. She was probably wondering just who he was and exactly what he was doing there, he thought. By noon everybody in town would know that a stranger had blown in.
    “That’s pretty good coffee.”
    She walked back, a little too quickly, and he couldn’t help smiling. The walk went with the pink piece of ribbon in her hair. What did they call it? Simple and unaffected?
    “Dad orders it special—comes in every week on the train.”
    “Your father the man at the desk?”
    She nodded. “He owns the hotel.”
    “Nice place.”
    She polished the counter some more and made too much work out of wiping the top of a ketchup bottle.
    “You a salesman?”
    He raised his eyebrows and she colored. “I didn’t mean to be nosy. It’s just that we’re not exactly overrun with visitors out here.”
    “No,