A Sense of Infinity Read online

  "If you don't know of any, do you suspect any?" prompted Ixton.

  "Well, there are men on the force I don't have much personal confidence in," Jacobsen admitted grudgingly.

  "Such as who?" asked Ixton. Jacobsen hemmed and hawed until Hassbruch broke in with obvious annoyance.

  "I know he's referring to Lieutenant Wales!" he grated. "Wales is a younger man who was promoted past him, much to Jacobsen's resentment. A very good man!"

  "Is that right, Sergeant?" asked Ixton. Jacobsen nodded glumly.

  "Why do you suspect him?"

  "Well, maybe it's just that he ain't my kind of policeman, sir. But since he's had charge of recruitment, he's brought in a lot of young men whose talk I don't like." After a moment of thought, Ixton said, "Thank you, Sergeant. As you know, I'm here on a job that could be tough and dangerous, and I'll probably need police assistance before it's over. If I do, I hope you'll be working with me."

  A surprised look of pleasure creased the sergeant's face. "I hope so, too, sir!" he replied.

  "That's all for now," said Ixton. The sergeant saluted and marched out of the room. "Could we have Lieutenant Wales in next, Chief?"

  Still peeved, Hassbruch shrugged. "Sure. I'll get him." He went out and returned with a tall, snappy young man who favored Ixton with a bright smile and a firm handshake.

  "This is a rare honor, Proxad Ixton!" Lieutenant Wales said warmly, "simply to meet a man of your accomplishments, much less to have the privilege of working with you in some small way!"

  Ixton was glad nobody had a microdar monitor on him, to read his disgust. Rollo's simple-minded patronizing was annoying enough. But this Wales was a bootlicker! Perhaps Chief Hassbruch went for that kind of line . . .

  "Thank you, Lieutenant," he answered frostily. "Won't you have a seat, please."

  As soon as Wales sat, and came into the focus of the scanner, the monitor light glowed a definite yellow. Ixton unobtrusively fumbled with the catch of his satchel, to turn on the lashback transmitter.

  "Lieutenant, what can you tell me about Omar Olivine?" he asked.

  "Nothing at all, I'm sorry to say, sir."

  "You've never met him?"

  "No, sir."

  Each answer had produced an accusatory orange glow on the monitor. Ixton turned up the lashback power, and Wales rubbed his temples lightly.

  "You have neither met him nor talked to him on the phone?"

  "Definitely not, sir," Wales grimaced with the pain his answer bounced back into his head. Looking puzzled and a little sick, he tried to temporize: "Of course, one can't always be sure of the identity of people on the phone, so perhaps without knowing—" He shut up and clenched his teeth.

  "What's wrong with you, Lieutenant?" barked Hassbruch.

  "A . . . a slight headache, sir," muttered Wales.

  "Oh? Sorry to hear that. Proxad, perhaps we could talk to Wales when he's feeling better."

  "There's nothing wrong with Wales," Ixton growled, "that honest answers to my questions won't cure. Let's start at the beginning. Tell me about Olivine, Wales!"

  "But I told you I know noth . . . !" He clamped his head in his arms and appealed frantically to Hassbruch.

  "Chief, I don't know what this . . . this sadist is doing to me, but he's using torture! Surely, sir, you're not going to allow him to do this to one of your most loyal . . . OW!"

  "That's the biggest lie yet, isn't it, Wales?" Ixton remarked. "Just how disloyal are you?"

  "I'm not . . . STOP IT!" Wales screamed. He leaped from the chair and bolted for the door, but Hassbruch grabbed him by the collar and yanked him back. The chief's face was suddenly purple with rage.

  "Sit down!" he roared, shoving Wales into the chair and turning to Ixton. "Proxad, I don't know what you're up to, but . . . well, you are a proxad, and that means something! And I don't like the way Wales reacted to that last question."

  "Neither do I, and neither did he," Ixton replied grimly. "Start talking, Wales. Tell us about Olivine, and what you're doing for him."

  Slowly, the truth came out of the lieutenant: the location of Olivine's fortified hideout in the mountains, the names of Wales' confederates on the police force, their plans for infiltrating and seizing the government of Roseate with Olivine masterminding behind the scenes, the disposal through trade channels of certain "hot" valuables Olivine had brought with him to the planet, and so on for a couple of hours.

  The disclosures kept Police Headquarters hopping the rest of the day, getting witnessed confessions, running down suspects in other government departments, and more interrogations than Ixton could keep track of.

  Late in the evening Ixton sat in Hassbruch's office having a final cup of coffee with the chief.

  "What surprises me," said a dazed Hassbruch, "is that none of our criminal big shots were involved with Olivine in this. They have talent he could use."

  "I expected that, myself," Ixton nodded. "It would fit Olivine's MO. But Wales told us Olivine refused his offers to put him in touch with your racketeer crowd, saying that criminal types weren't trustworthy. Maybe Olivine has learned through experience, and has changed his MO. He's a clever guy, after all."

  The chief shook his head doubtfully, but said nothing. Ixton almost smiled. Having proved so inept a judge of character in Wales' case, Hassbruch was now very reticent about voicing his opinions. The day had left him a wiser man.

  "I'll be going after Olivine tomorrow," Ixton said. "I'd like Sergeant Jacobsen and three other officers of his choosing to back me up. And if you have forest rangers on Roseate—men who know their way around in those mountains—I could use a couple of them, too."

  "I'll arrange it," said the chief. "Also, I'll assign you a couple of armored clopters to fly you—"

  "No clopters!" said Ixton quickly. "We'll go in by land because . . . because Olivine won't expect that."

  "Good thinking!" applauded the chief.

  Thinking, Ixton admitted to himself, had nothing to do with it.

  The next day he wondered painfully if the clopters really could have been worse.

  Olivine's hideout was less than fifty miles from the city, and all but the last two could be covered, if rather bumpily and definitely frighteningly, by groundcar on the narrow loggers' roads. Still, Olivine's location was something of a pole of inaccessibility for a traveler on the ground. From the spot where they left the cars, there was no trail of any kind through the dense undergrowth, up and down the dizzying stone ledges, and across streams that gurgled between huge jumbles of boulders. The two rangers had shaken their heads dolefully the moment Ixton showed them their destination on the map Wales had marked. And long before the expedition reached the hideout, the steep terrain had the proxad in a weak-kneed, depressed condition, with a strong foreboding of failure.

  He was surprised by the ease with which Olivine was taken, once they arrived. The approach by ground had indeed been unexpected and unprepared-for. Olivine had been out in the open, inspecting his ack-ack emplacements, when they crept up.

  "You're covered by half a dozen guns, Olivine!" called Ixton, stepping into the open with leveled stunner.

  "Make it easy on yourself!"

  Olivine stared, then slowly raised his hands. Ixton and Jacobsen stepped forward to frisk him thoroughly, and cuff his wrists behind him. The renegade was still a handsome man, with a neatly trimmed beard, but somewhat paunchy from inactivity.

  "I can almost remember you, Proxad," he said lightly.

  "The name's Elmo Ixton."

  "Oh, sure!" Olivine grinned. "I place you now. The stick-in-the-mud sobersides. Still a true-blue upholder of status and legality, huh?"

  Ixton's lips tightened and he kept silent.

  "Damn!" grunted Olivine, giving him the once-over.

  "Did you get all those scratches and scrapes fighting through the bush? I hope you don't intend to drag me back the way you came!"

  "No," said Ixton, making a quick decision. A clopter ride back to town would be frightenin
g, but so would another hike over all that tilted countryside. And the ride would be mercifully brief. Besides, now that Olivine was captured, he had no tellable excuse for staying on the ground. "Jacobsen, have your men check those ack-ack controls to make sure they're not on automatic fire, and then radio for a couple of clopters."

  "Yes, sir."

  Ixton broke out his microdar kit and fixed the scanner on Olivine. The monitor light gleamed yellow.

  "What do you have cached around here?" Ixton asked. Olivine grinned but did not speak. Ixton turned on the lashback transmitter. "Start talking, Olivine!" he demanded.

  A grimace of pain twisted Olivine's face, but he was an ex-Patrolman. He could stand up under torture—and he knew silence was the best defense against microdar. Ixton shrugged. "Hassbruch's men can take this place apart a rock at a time," he said. "You'll gain nothing by keeping quiet. Why not do it the easy way?"

  Olivine did not speak. The monitor light was flashing bursts of deep yellow, which meant he was trying to hide something of importance. But what, the proxad wondered.

  "Clopter coming in!" Jacobsen sang out a few minutes later.

  "Fine. That was quick work," said Ixton distractedly, still staring at Olivine, who was sitting very quietly on a stump. The renegade's monitored reactions were definitely puzzling—no rage at being captured, no deep depression. Just an overall coolness, plus a determination to deceive, to give no hint concerning the nature of some secret. Olivine was motionless, gazing fixedly at the ground in front of him, as if a mere glance in the wrong direction would give something away. He did not even look up at the approaching clopter . . .

  "Take cover quick!" Ixton yelled to his men. But the warning was not in time. A stun-gas bomb had been dropped from the clopter, to explode whitely a few feet above their heads. Ixton was not aware of passing out.

  Consciousness returned in stages. He was still out in the bush, but not at the hideout. He was lying on the ground with bound wrists and ankles. Men were talking nearby, and he recognized Olivine's voice.

  "That was part of the plan," he was explaining to somebody. "The Patrol was supposed to get wise to Wales and his boys if I was located. Why do you think I went to such trouble to keep your organization completely separate from his? Wales was a mere distraction, a decoy, to keep the proxad too busy to come snooping after you guys in the rackets."

  "But if we ain't taking over, we gotta leave Roseate!" a rough voice objected.

  "As poor as this planet's going to be for the next couple of decades," sneered Olivine, "you wouldn't want to stick around, anyway. They'll be a week finding out just how thoroughly their treasury has been raided. We'll be on our way to bigger and better things long before then."

  "On our way how?" the other demanded.

  "Proxad Ixton will provide transportation—the kind of transportation I've wanted to use again for several years!" Olivine's voice came closer, and a boot jarred Ixton's ribs.

  "Wake up and join the party, Ixton!" Olivine snapped.

  "You're aware by now."

  Ixton opened his eyes to peer at Olivine and several other men. They were in a small forest clearing, alongside a grounded clopter.

  "Have you got the gadget ready, Boddley?" Olivine asked.

  "Yeah, Mr. Olivine," said a large, stolid-looking thug, stepping forward with a device held out for inspection. It was an old-fashioned bullet-pistol, the muzzle of which had been welded through a hole in a circular flexomet band.

  "Show our friend here how it works," Olivine directed.

  The man knelt beside Ixton, aimed the pistol at a nearby log, bent the flexomet band sideways out of the line of fire, and squeezed the trigger. Nothing happened.

  "Surprised?" asked Olivine. "Now release the trigger, Boddley." The man eased his finger up and the gun fired resoundingly. A shower of chips flew from the log.

  "A simple but handy little device," Olivine grinned. "I dreamed it up, myself. Let's say that the band's around your head, Ixton, which it will be in a few minutes, and Boddley's behind you, holding the pistol, with the trigger pulled. He walks you into the clopter, we fly to the spaceport, board your ship, and take off with me in command. What can your ship do to stop us?"

  A wave of defeat swept through Ixton, made more sickening by Olivine's references to flying in the clopter and taking off aboard Rollo. "I. . .don't know," he muttered. "Nothing I suppose. If I cooperate with you, which I won't."

  "Oh, that's no problem! A few minutes of your own microdar lashback, at peak power and non-discriminating, and you'll give up all thoughts of being a dead hero. Matt, untie him while Boddley puts the gadget on his head. We're moving out."

  Ixton's sight was clear by now, and he looked at Olivine again. As he suspected, the renegade had been using the microdar to check his reactions.

  The clopter flight was uneventful, except that Ixton vomited once, which Olivine and his men found highly amusing. Think as hard as he might, Ixton could find no flaw in Olivine's scheme. The ship could not take action that would lead to Ixton's death, and that meant it could not attack his captors. If Boddley had to pull the trigger, Rollo could finish off the whole crew before the thug's finger could even twitch.

  But there was no means by which Rollo could grasp that trigger and hold it tight if the finger loosened suddenly—either because Boddley was dead or because Olivine had ordered him to shoot. And the flexomet band was on too tightly for Ixton to slip free of it.

  So they would board Rollo, Ixton would be forced to order the ship to take off, and Olivine would have ample time in which to tamper knowingly with the controls of the compucortex. The renegade would emerge as the ship's new master—and Rollo was a treasure far surpassing all the loot he had gathered on Roseate.

  The clopter landed hard by the Patrol ship and Ixton was marched aboard.

  "Rollo's your name, huh?" remarked Olivine, who was close on Boddley's heels. "Well, Rollo, I hope you appreciate Proxad Ixton's predicament. In case you do not, let me inform you that the trigger of that pistol has been pulled. It will fire when the trigger is released. Do you comprehend?"

  "Yes, former Proxad Olivine," said Rollo.

  "What are you going to do about it?"

  "I will continue to follow Proxad Ixton's orders, to the extent they are consistent with my directives," Rollo replied.

  Olivine laughed. "Ixton's orders will be my orders!" He turned and called out the open hatchway, "O.K., men, get the stuff on board!"

  Boddley made Ixton sit down on the floor of the central control room, and Olivine began examining the compucortex panels, while the loot was brought in and stored. Ixton asked, "What did you do with the others, back at the hideout?"

  "Left them for Hassbruch to rescue," said Olivine.

  "No point in killing backwoods cops just for kicks, and they weren't bothering me."

  "Thanks for that," said Ixton.

  "As for you, I might decide to spare you the embarrassment of living this down," chuckled Olivine. "Now shut up."

  A few minutes later the one called Matt reported, "All the stuff is on board, Mr. Olivine."

  "O.K. Ixton, tell your ship to close the hatches and take off."

  "You heard the man, Rollo," said Ixton, clinching his eyes shut and wishing he was in his sleeptank. "Close up and lift off."

  After a brief hesitation, Rollo responded, "Yes, sir."

  The hatches clanged shut and the ship began lifting.

  At an altitude of approximately twelve feet, the ship halted, and hung suspended over the plastcrete like a low-hovering clopter.

  "Keep going up!" snapped Olivine.

  "Keep climbing, Rollo," relayed Ixton.

  " . . . Yes, sir," said Rollo uncertainly. The ship went up another two feet, then quickly dropped back the same distance.

  "Listen!" snarled Olivine. "I said get going! Off the planet! Ship, quit fooling around or Ixton gets a hole in his head!"

  "I'm very sorry, former Proxad Olivine," said Rollo, "but it is not pos
sible to comply with your orders."

  "Why not? What's wrong with my orders?"

  "Nothing, former Proxad Olivine."

  "Are you forbidden by a directive I don't know about?"

  "Not to my knowledge, former Proxad Olivine."

  "Damn!" grunted Olivine, whipping out the microdar and putting the scanner on Ixton. "Ixton," he barked accusingly, "what have you done to keep the ship from obeying?"

  "Nothing," said Ixton.

  "Well, what the hell's the holdup?"

  "I don't know."

  Olivine cursed and threw the microdar to the deck.

  "Some stinking wise guy at Patrol Grand Base must've hooked a special inhibitor into this bucket's guts—something specially for me! Well, I know these ships. I'll find it, never fear!" He yanked a panel off the motorcontrol bank and began checking connections furiously.

  The others stood around watching him with worried expressions, mumbling among themselves. Boddley finally spoke up, "Uh, Mr. Olivine, will this slow you down much?"

  "It'll take near all night, and maybe most of tomorrow," growled Olivine. "You guys settle down. You're safe enough in here."

  "Sure, Mr. Olivine. It's not that. It's just that I can't hold this gun that long."

  "Oh? What's the matter?"

  "My hand's already getting cramped. Why can't I let this guy have it, and—"

  "No! With Ixton dead the ship would finish us off in two seconds! Hang on while I think of something!" Olivine stared concentratedly at Ixton.

  "Try to make it quick, Mr. Olivine," urged Boddley.

  "I believe I can disconnect a sleeptank from the ship's control, so that Ixton would die in it very quickly unless one of us tended him . . . " said Olivine.

  "Now wait a minute!" objected Ixton crossly. "I don't want any deepsleep!" He hoped that Rollo got the meaning of his words, and would act upon them, while Olivine dismissed his objection as mere petulance.

  "To hell with what you want!" snapped Olivine. "Rollo, where's the nearest sleeptank?"

  "In the control lounge, former Proxad Olivine."

  The renegade hurried up to the lounge and found the tank already elevated and waiting. With careless skill, he yanked loose the majority of the tubes, wires, and guides that linked tank to ship. "O.K., Boddley," he said, "let's get our boy in the bottle! Careful with the gun!"