Stop Look and Dig | Page 7

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 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 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.