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pistol to his head and pulled the trigger, to remind him that some gents whose instruments were more percussive than those of an orchestra were also waiting in Toronto. Kent simmered down quickly.

    Pard landed the clopter at a public field in Green River, and steered Kent to a rent-a-car agency. The girl behind the desk looked like a person of culture, which worried Kent briefly, but she did not recognize his name when he signed for the car. He decided she couldn't be so very cultured after all.
    * * *

    From a distance the place looked like a ranch out of a TV western. It was about fifty miles out of Green River, a distance that took Pard nearly an hour and a half to drive over narrow country roads that were by turn pot-holed and rutted. They saw no other car during the final ten miles.

    Pard parked out of sight and approached the house on foot, staying under cover. Kent wondered where Pard had learned his infiltration technique. They hadn't had military training, but Pard dashed from tree to bush to gully as if he knew what he was doing.

    The frightening thing to Kent was that Pard thought it advisable to sneak up on the ranch house in this manner. Here he was, miles from nowhere without even a peashooter, and Pard was behaving as if he were going up against a machine-gun nest!

    "This is crazy!" Kent mouthed.

    Relax.

    "Nuts to relaxing! Just when our career was starting to look so great . . ."

    But he didn't interfere with Pard's actions. Pard seemingly knew the score, and this was probably better than just waiting to be killed, and—

    Machine-gun slugs stitched the dirt four feet from where Pard had crouched behind a bush, and the air was rent by the weapon's startling chatter. Pard hugged the ground, staring at the house still over a hundred yards away.

    A loudspeaker bellowed at him: "SURPRISE, LINDSTROM! DIDN'T EXPECT REMOTE CONTROLLED DEFENSES, DID YOU! WALK FORWARD WITH YOUR HANDS UP!"

    Pard crouched a moment longer, then stood up and started toward the house. Take over, he twitched.

    The man on the loudspeaker lowered the volume to a more conversational level and said jovially, "That's one of the advantages of this rustic setting. It makes people think in terms of cowboys toting six-shooters! No gun without a man behind it. So fools and telepaths rush in!" The voice stopped and a mine exploded fifty feet behind Kent, knocking him flat on his face.

    "You're not hurt!" the voice snapped. "Get up and come on! That was to remind you of two things: that you're never out of my range, and I don't care greatly if you wind up dead!"

    Kent got to his feet, groggy with concussion, and plodded through the yard and onto the porch. The door opened and two guys with pistols came out.

    "Inside, Buddy!" one of them barked, stepping aside.

    Kent went through the door and saw a third man who was covering him from in front.

    "Down on your belly!" this one ordered. Kent obeyed, and only then did one of the men step forward to frisk him. "Roll over real slow," he was told. He did so, and the man finished frisking him.

    "Now get up and move! Down the hall and down the stairs!"

    Kent stood and moved off, noticing that the gunmen stayed a careful distance from him at all times, with their pistols leveled at his middle. Their caution was puzzling, but not comforting. They looked intelligent as well as tough, and they weren't giving him a chance to try anything desperate, even if he had the nerve, which he definitely did not. But maybe Pard did.

    "Nothing rash," he pleaded silently.

    Relax.

     

     

7

    He was steered into a room where three people were waiting: A beetle-browed man sitting behind a desk, wearing an army general's uniform. Mr. Byers from Los Angeles, standing by the desk and smiling triumphantly. And the "mystery girl," in a chair in a corner of the room with her right wrist manacled to a hook in the wall.

    Kent felt slightly acquainted with all three.

    The man behind the desk said, "I'm sure there's