Free Three to Conquer by Eric Frank Russell Page A

merely shrugged.
     
                  Switching on his little intercom-board, Jameson spoke into its mike. "Is Miss Keyes there? Put her on. Miss Keyes, I want you to type a column of twenty eight-digit numbers, chosen at random. Bring it to me immediately you have finished." He switched off, gave Harper a challenging look, poked the paper toward him and said, "See what you can do with that." '
     
                  "Now I've got to search through the general mess for somebody concocting meaningless numbers," Harper complained. "I may miss the first one or two while I'm feeling around."
     
                  "Never mind; do the best you can. If you get only a quarter of them, it will convince me that the age of miracles has not passed."
     
                  Harper wrote down eighteen of them, plus the last two digits of the nineteenth. Taking the paper without comment, Jameson waited for Miss Keyes. She arrived shortly, gave him her list and departed with no visible surprise. Jameson compared the two columns.
     
                  Finally he said, "This is worse than a bomb in the Pentagon. Nothing is private property any more."
     
                  "I know."
     
                  "How did it happen?"
     
                  "Can a man with a harelip tell you how it happened? All I know is that I was bo rn that way. For a few years, I assumed that everyone else was precisely like myself . Being a child, it took quite a time to learn that it was not so; to learn that I was a one-eyed man in the kingdom of the blind; to learn that I could be feared, and that the feared are hated."
     
                  "There must be a reason for it," said Jameson. "Does it matter?"
     
                  "It matters a hell of a lot. You are a freak created by some very special arrangement of circumstances. If we could detail those circumstances fully and completely, we could estimate the likelihood of them being duplicated elsewhere. That, in turn, would give us a fair idea of whether there are any more like you—and, if so, who's got them."
     
                  Harper said quietly and soberly, "I don't think that matters a damn—not any more."
     
                  "Why doesn't it?"
     
                  "Because I made mental contact with Jocelyn Whittingham, and she promptly called me an insulting name. So I shot her."
     
                  "You considered that adequate motive for murder?" prompted Jameson.
     
                  "In view of the name, yes ! "
     
                  " What did she call you? "
     
                  " A Terrestrial bastard."
     
    -
     
6. Unheralded Return
     
                  For a full two minutes Jameson sat there like one paralyzed. His thoughts milled mildly around, and he was momentarily oblivious of the fact that Harper could read them as easily as if they were in neon lights.
     
                  Then he asked, "Are you sure of that?"
     
                  "The only person in the world who can be positive about someone else's mind is a telepath," assured Harper. " I'll tell you something else: I shot her because I knew I couldn't kill her. It was a physical impossibility."
     
                  "How d'you make .that out?"
     
                  "No living man could harm Jocelyn Whittingham—because she was already dead."
     
                  "Now see here, we have a detailed police report—"
     
                  "I killed something else," said Harper. "I killed the thing that had already slaughtered her."
     
                  Jameson promptly went into another whirl. He had a cool, incisive mind used to dealing with highly complicated problems, but essentially normal ones. This was the first time within his considerable experience that he had been