"Just where do you expect to get the money for all of this?" I asked around a mouthful of food. "If you're expecting the rest of the telepathic community to fork it over, you can forget it. None of us has the resources you're talking about."
"You fly all over the country whenever you want to, don't you?" he scoffed. "That isn't exactly cheap."
"Most of us have small stipends from universities that are studying us," Colleen explained to him. "The amounts aren't nearly enough to supply you with x-ray machines and computers, though."
Green's mouth twitched. "Well... then I guess you'll have to earn the money some other way."
"Such as?" I asked. Most businesses, I've found, aren't all that enthusiastic about having telepaths on the payroll.
"I suppose industrial espionage would be the most profitable," he said, watching me closely.
If he was looking for a reaction, he wasn't disappointed. Some breadcrumbs, tried to go down the wrong way, and it took me half a minute to cough them out. "Forget it," I snarled when I could talk again. "If you think we're going to do that-" way, and it took me half a minute to cough them out. "Forget it," I snarled when I could talk again. "If you think we're going to do that-"
"Then you'll have to hit key employees at off hours," Green said stubbornly. "Or else wear disguises. I need that equipment-don't you understand?"
"And what about us?" Colleen asked. "Don't you see what involving us in crime would do to the trust we've built up between ourselves and the general populace? We can't survive without that good will, Ted."
"I'm sorry. I really am. But it's not my fault." He shifted his gaze to me, where it became more of a glare.
"If he hadn't been all noble and virtuous and had let me keep going, none of this would have happened."
"Oh, sure-blame it on me," I growled. "Why not blame your parents, society, and the planet Jupiter while you're at it?"
He ignored me. "I want to know how to contact Calvin Wolfe-I know he's a friend of yours and his Pueblo phone's unlisted. I also want something I can say to him that'll prove you two are with me."
My mind raced. Was there some way I could slip in a clue as to where we were? Rathbun, reservoir, lake-I couldn't think of any way to code any of those words so that Green would miss it. I'd never been here before, so referring to a past visit was out. Distance from Des Moines? I hadn't the foggiest idea. I was still trying to come up with something when Colleen gave him Calvin's number and unconsciously undercut my effort. "Just give him your name," she told Green. "He knows who you are."
"Okay." He stood up and gestured toward the door. "We'll have to find a phone booth to make the call from; I don't want anyone tracing us here."
It was an hour before we got back to the cabin, Green having taken us halfway to Ottumwa to get the distance he wanted. We were left in the car while he made the call, and he wouldn't tell us anything about it afterward except that Calvin had agreed to take up the matter with the rest of our group.
"Do you think that's the truth?" Colleen asked me when we were locked again in the relative privacy of our room.
"Probably," I told her. Outside the window the evening had faded into night, and the lights from two or three other cabins could be dimly seen through the trees. Too far away to see a signal, even if I could think of some way to send one without tipping off Green. "Calvin would agree to anything at this stage to gain time." Pulling the shade, I turned on the light and sat down on the bed next to Colleen. The light switch had gone on with a loud click; no quiet SOS possible with that. "I just hope we don't get some gung-ho SWAT team bursting in with M-16s blazing."
"I doubt if there's any danger of that," she sighed. "We'd already decided to keep the authorities out of this when the shield cut me off."
I nodded; I'd rather hoped they'd seen things that way. At the moment no one but us knew it was even possible to build an electronic mind reader. If the word ever got out, chances were someone would eventually figure out how to do it. "Good. I guess. Anything else happen while I was out of touch?"
"Yeah. How do you test a telepath shield?"
"Obviously, with a telepath. Gordon was going to catch the next plane to Des Moines, and Scott will most likely come up from New Orleans now that I've also disappeared. He was anxious to get involved and has always rather liked me." She opened her eyes briefly. "Something I just thought of: could Robert modify Amos's telepath finder to locate a lack of telepathic signals?"
"Like this shield?" I shrugged. "I don't know, but I doubt it. We had to take apart the finder to get parts for the shields; Rob would have to rebuild as well as redesign it. And, anyway, he hadn't gotten much into design work when Green took over." A fresh wave of shame and anger washed over me. "I should've waited until Rob was available again," I muttered.
Colleen was silent for so long I began to think she'd fallen asleep. Turning off the light I lay down beside her, hating both Green and myself and wondering if I was tired enough to escape into sleep myself for a few hours. Then Colleen stirred. "Dale... why did you do it?"
It took me a moment to understand what she was asking. "For us," I told her. "I wanted to be able to see and hold you, to share more than just my thoughts with you. I-when I say it like that it sounds pretty selfish, doesn't it?"
"A little," she admitted. "More like Nelson Follstadt than Dale Ravenhall."
I sighed, closing my eyes in an effort to block the sudden tears forming there. Nelson again-always it was Nelson. Was I never going to be free of him? Or were my motivations and judgment going to be forever skewed by what he'd done to me in the California mountains? It was like carrying my own personal ghost along with me, someone to fowl up everything I did, someone- Someone to blame.
The thought leaped out at me with almost physical force. Was I using my psychological injury as a scapegoat, a convenient excuse whenever anything went wrong? I didn't really believe it-certainly didn't want to believe it. But the possibility was there... and blaming other people had been one of Nelson's most annoying traits.
And I'd just argued myself in a circle. I never argued in circles. Or, rather, Dale Ravenhall never had....
Colleen's arm slid over my chest, breaking through the spiral of fear and self-pity. "It's all right, Dale," she said soothingly. "We'll get out of this somehow."
For a long time she held me tightly, as if comforting a child. Gradually, my black depression began to lighten; and as it did so my need for her changed, both in nature and urgency. Her response, whether from love, fear, or a combination of both, was so strong it surprised me... but within seconds surprise and all other emotions were crowded out by the passion exploding within me.
I stared at the shadows of tree branches swaying across the window shade for at least an hour after that, tired but not really sleepy. With time, I knew, I could learn to be a better lover to her-but time was the least certain commodity in our world just now. I wondered how long it would take Green to get the money and equipment he wanted... and I wondered how long the batteries powering the shield would last. Eventually, I fell asleep.
We both woke fairly early the next morning. That turned out to be a mistake, because the day quickly became one long study in boredom. Green had slipped out before we woke and had brought back donuts and coffee and the necessary ingredients for sandwiches. That last was a disappointment; I'd hoped for the chance to break the window and escape when he left to buy lunch. But as usual, he was one move ahead of me.
To his credit, he also brought back a couple of decks of cards and three paperbacks of the sort found on grocery store book racks. But neither Colleen nor I were great shakes as card players; and I, at least, was too wrapped up in my own real troubles to have any patience with someone else's fictional ones.