Lansberg shrugged. “It will get hot just as soon as the Eurasian League figures they are far enough along in spacecraft construction to get the Martian colonies if they win. Then they’ll try to smash us before we can retaliate; then, and not before.
“We can’t start it. Our only hope is that when they start, they’ll underestimate us. Say, what’s that you’re fooling with?”
The sudden change of subject startled Karnes for an instant. He looked at the mind impressor in his hands. He had been toying with it incessantly, hoping it would repeat its performance, or perhaps give additional information.
“This?” He covered quickly. “It’s a—a puzzle. One of those plastic puzzles.” Maybe it doesn’t work on the same person twice. If I can get George to fool around with it, he might hit the right combination again.
“Hmmm. How does it work?” George seemed interested.
Karnes handed it to him. “It has a couple of little sliding weights inside it. You have to turn the thing just right to unlock it, then it comes apart when you slide out a section of the surface. Try it.”
Lansberg took it, turned it this way and that, moving his hands over the surface. Karnes watched him for several minutes, but there didn’t seem to be any results.
Lansberg looked up from his labors. “I give up. I can’t even see where it’s supposed to come apart, and I can’t feel any weights sliding inside it. Show me how it works.”
Karnes thought fast. “Why do you think I was fiddling with it? I don’t know how it works. A friend of mine bet me a ten spot that I couldn’t figure out the combination.”
Lansberg looked back at the impressor in his hands. “Could he do it?”
“A snap. I watched him twice, and I still didn’t get it.”
“Mmm. Interesting.” George went back to work on the “puzzle.”
Just before they landed on the roof of the UN annex, Lansberg handed the impressor back to Karnes. It had obviously failed to do what either of them had hoped it would.
“It’s your baby,” Lansberg said, shaking his head. “All I have to say is it’s a hell of a way to earn ten bucks.”
Karnes grinned and dropped the thing back in his coat pocket.
By the time that evening had rolled around, Karnes was beginning to get just a little bored. He and Lansberg had been in and out of the New York office in record time. Then they had spent a few hours with New York’s Finest and the District Attorney, lining up a net to pick up all the little rats involved.
After that, there was nothing to do but wait.
Karnes slept a couple of hours to catch up, read two magazines from cover to cover, and played eight games of solitaire. He was getting itchy.
His brain kept crackling. What’s the matter with me? I ought to be thinking about this Brittain fellow instead of—
But, after all, what did Brittain matter? According to the records, he was born Alex Bretinov, in Marseilles, France, in nineteen sixty-eight. His father, a dyed-in-the-wool Old Guard Communist, had been born in Minsk in nineteen forty.
Or had he been wound up, and his clockwork started in January of nineteen fifty-three?
The radio popped. “Eighteen. Alert. Brittain just left his place on foot. Carson, Reymann following. Over.”
Lansberg dropped his magazine. “He seems to be heading for the Big Boy—I hope.”
The ground car followed him to a subway, and two men on foot followed him in from Flatbush Avenue.
* * * *
Some hours later, after much devious turning, dodging, and switching, Brittain climbed into a taxi on the corner of Park Avenue and Forty-seventh Street, evidently feeling he had ditched any tails he might have had.
Karnes and Lansberg were right behind him in a radio car.
The cab headed due south on Park Avenue, following it until it became Fourth, swung right at Tenth Street, past Grace Church, across Broadway. At Sixth, it angled left toward Greenwich Village.
“Somewhere in the Village, nickels to knotholes,” Lansberg guessed as he turned to follow.
Karnes, at the radio, was giving rapid-fire directions over the scrambler-equipped transceiver. By this time, several carloads of agents and police were converging on the cab from every direction. From high above, could be heard the faint hum of ’copters.
Lansberg was exultant. “We’ve got them for once! And the goods on every essobee in the place.”
The cars hummed smoothly through the broad streets, past the shabby-genteel apartment neighborhood. Back in the early sixties, some of these buildings had been high-priced hotels, but the Village had gone to pot since the seventies.
A few minutes later, the cab pulled up in front of an imposing looking building of slightly tarnished aluminum paneling. Brittain got out, paid his fare, and went inside.
As the cab pulled away, Karnes gave orders for it to be picked up a few blocks away, just in case.
The rest of the vehicles began to surround the building.
Karnes, meanwhile, followed Brittain into the foyer of the apartment hotel. It was almost a mistake. Brittain hadn’t gone in. Evidently attracted by the footsteps following him, he turned and looked back out. Karnes wasn’t more than ten feet away.
Just pretend you live here, thought Karnes, and bully-boy will never know the difference.
He walked right on up to the doorway, pretending not to notice Brittain. Evidently, the saboteur was a little flustered, not quite knowing who Karnes was. He, too, pretended that he had no suspicions. He pressed a buzzer on the panel to announce himself to a guest. Karnes noticed it was 523; a fifth floor button.
The front door, inside the foyer, was one of those gadgets with an electric lock that doesn’t open unless you either have a key to the building or can get a friend who lives there to let you in.
When Karnes saw Brittain press the buzzer, he waited a second and took a chance.
“Here,” he said, fishing in his pocket, “I’ll let you in.” That ought to give him the impression I live here.
Brittain smiled fetchingly. “Thanks, but I—”
Bzzzz! The old-fashioned lock announced that it was open. Karnes stopped fishing and opened the door, letting Brittain follow him in. He stayed in the lead to the elevator, and pushed the button marked “4.”
“You getting off before four?” he asked conversationally.
“No.”
The elevator slid on up to four without another word being said by either man.
Karnes was judging the speed of the elevator, estimating the time it took for the doors to open as they did so, and making quick mental comparisons with his own ability to climb stairs at a run. The elevator was an old one, and fairly slow—
When the doors slid open, he stepped out and began to walk easily down the hall toward the stairway. When the elevator clicked shut, he broke into a run and hit the stairway at top speed, his long legs taking the steps three at a time.
The stairway was poorly lit, since it was hardly ever used, and, at the fifth floor, he was able to conceal himself in the darkness as Brittain turned up the hall toward 523.
Karnes looked closely at his surroundings for the first time. There was a well-worn, but not ragged, nylon carpet on the floor, dull chrome railing on the stair bannisters, and the halls were lit by old-fashioned glo-plates in the ceiling.