The Foreign Hand Tie by Randall Garrett (bookstand for reading .TXT) π
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- Author: Randall Garrett
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Lenny Poe shoved open the door of Colonel Spaulding's outer office with a violence that startled Sergeant Nugget.
"Is Spaulding in?" he barked.
"I think he's expecting you," she said. There was no time to buzz the colonel; Poe was already opening the door.
"Rafe's in trouble!" Lenny said hurriedly, slamming the door behind him.
"Where have you been?" snapped the colonel.
"Never mind that! Rafe's in trouble, I said! We've gotta figure a way to get him out of it!"
Colonel Spaulding dropped all thought of bawling out Poe. "What'd he say? What's the trouble?"
"All he's doing is broadcasting that necktieβlike an animated cartoon in technicolor. And he's singing."
"Singing? Singing what?"
Sculptured there in heiroglyphics six feet wide and nine feet high
Was the threat of King Rameses to chop every man to pieces
Who, when shown the Royal diamond, would dare refuse to buy."
Colonel Spaulding blinked. "That's pretty. What does it mean?"
"Nothing; it's a song, that's all. That female Russian scientist can read Rafe's mind, and he's broadcasting this stuff to cover up!"
Quickly, he told Spaulding what the situation was as he had been able to piece it together from Rafe's secondary thoughts.
"Ye Gods!" Colonel Spaulding slapped at his brow. Then he grabbed for the telephone and started dialing.
Lenny dropped into one of the chairs, closed his eyes, and concentrated.
Rafe! Rafe! Listen to me! Rafe!
Said, 'The thing is but a common tumbler-bottom, nothing more!'
Whereupon, the King's Assassin drew his sword, and Mulai Hassan
Never peddled rings again upon the Nile's primeval shore."
But below the interference came Rafe's thoughts. And the one thing of primary importance to him was to get the information on the heat-beam generator to the United States.
No bigotry, no matter how strong, is totally impregnable. Even the most narrow-minded racial bigot will make an exception if a person of the despised race risks his own life to save the life of the bigot or someone the bigot loves. The bigotry doesn't collapseβnot by a long shot. But an exception is made in that one case.
Lenny Poe made an exception. Any information that was worth his brother's life was Important! Therefore, it was not, could not be, scientific gobbledegook, no matter how it sounded.
Rafe, give it to me! Try me! I can copy it!
But he thought that, in a pinch, he might bid fifty cents himself.
There ensued a slight commotion where he could repent the notion,
And Abdullah was promoted to the Oriental Shelf."
Rafe! Stop singing that stupid song and give me the stuff! She can't learn anything if you just think about that theory stuff. She already knows that! Come on! Give!
Lenny Poe grabbed a pencil and a sheaf of paper from the colonel's desk and began writing frantically as the Song of the Egyptian Diamond stopped suddenly.
Words. Nonsense words. That's all most of the stuff was to Lenny. It didn't matter. He spelled them as he thought they should be, and if he made a mistake, Rafe would correct him.
Rafe tried to keep a picture of the words as they would look if printed while he thought them verbally, and that helped. The information came across in the only way it could come acrossβnot as concepts, but as symbols.
Lenny hardly noticed that the Secretary of Defense and the President had come into the room. He didn't even realize that Colonel Spaulding was feeding him fresh sheets of paper.
Lenny didn't seem to notice the time passing, nor the pain in his hand as the muscles tired. He kept writing. The President left with the Defense Secretary and came back again after a while, but Lenny ignored them.
And when it was over, he pushed pencil and paper aside and, massaging his right hand with his left, sat there with his eyes closed. Then, slowly, a smile spread over his face.
"Well, I'll be damned," he said slowly and softly.
"Mr. Poe," said the President, "is there any danger that your brother will be captured within the next hour?"
Lenny looked up with a startled grin. "Oh. Hi. I didn't notice you, Mr. President. What'd you say?"
The President repeated his question.
"Oh. No. There's nothing to worry about. The little men in white coats came after Dr. Malekrinova. She started screaming that telepathic spies were stealing her secret. She smashed all her apparatus and burned all her papers on top of the wreckage before they could stop her. She keeps shouting about a pink-and-purple orgy and singing a song about glass diamonds and Egyptian kings. I wouldn't say she was actually insane, but she is very disturbed."
"Then your brother is safe?"
"As safe as he ever was, Mr. President."
"Thank Heaven for that," said the President. "If they'd ever captured him and made him talkβ" He stopped. "I forgot," he said lamely after a moment.
Lenny grinned. "That's all right, Mr. President. I sometimes forget it myself. But it was his handicap, I guess, that made him concentrate on telepathy, so that he doesn't need his ears to hear what people are saying. Maybe I could read minds the way he does if I'd been born that way.
"Come to think of it, I doubt if the Russians would have believed he was a spy if they'd caught him, unless they really did believe he was telepathic. A physical examination would show immediately that he was born without eardrums and that the inner ear bones are fused. They wouldn't try to make a man talk if an examination showed that he really was a deaf-mute."
The buzzer on the colonel's intercom sounded. "Yes?" said Spaulding.
"Dr. Davenport is here," said Sergeant Nugget. "He wants to talk to you."
"Send him in," said Colonel Spaulding gleefully. "I have a nice scientific theory I want to shove down his throat."
End of Project Gutenberg's The Foreign Hand Tie, by Gordon Randall Garrett
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