The Edge of the Knife Read online

the facultyof this college because of it. Now, what I'd like to know is, why didDoctor Whitburn, in this same room, deny, yesterday, that I'd saidanything of the sort, and accuse my students of concocting the storyafter the event as a hoax."

  "One of them being my son," Dacre added. "I'd like to hear an answerto that, myself."

  "So would I," Stanly Weill chimed in. "You know, my client has a goodcase against Doctor Whitburn for libel."

  Chalmers looked around the room. Of the thirteen men around him, onlyWhitburn was an enemy. Some of the others were on his side, for onereason or another, but none of them were friends. Weill was hislawyer, obeying an obligation to a client which, at bottom, was anobligation to his own conscience. Handley was afraid of thepossibility that a precedent might be established which would impairhis own tenure-contract. Fitch, and the two men from the Institute ofPsionics and Parapsychology were interested in him as a source ofstudy-material. Dacre resented a slur upon his son; he and the otherswere interested in Blanley College as an institution, almost anabstraction. And the major in mufti was probably worrying about theconsequences to military security of having a prophet at large. Then ahand gripped his shoulder, and a voice whispered in his ear:

  "That's good, Ed; don't let them scare you!"

  Old Max Pottgeiter, at least, was a friend.

  "Doctor Whitburn, I'm asking you, and I expect an answer, why did youmake such statements to the press, when you knew perfectly well thatthey were false?" Dacre demanded sharply.

  "I knew nothing of the kind!" Whitburn blustered, showing, under thebluster, fear. "Yes, I demanded this man's resignation on the morningof October Seventeenth, the day after this incident occurred. It hadcome to my attention on several occasions that he was making wild andunreasonable assertions in class, and subjecting himself, and withhimself the whole faculty of this college, to student ridicule. Why,there was actually an editorial about it written by the student editorof the campus paper, the _Black and Green_. I managed to prevent itspublication...." He went on at some length about that. "If I might bepermitted access to the drawers of my own desk," he added withelephantine sarcasm, "I could show you the editorial in question."

  "You needn't bother; I have a carbon copy," Dacre told him. "We've allread it. If you did, at the time you suppressed it, you should haveknown what Doctor Chalmers said in class."

  "I knew he'd talked a lot of poppycock about a man who was stillliving having been shot to death," Whitburn retorted. "And ifsomething of the sort actually happened, what of it? Somebody's alwaystaking a shot at one or another of these foreign dictators, and theycan't miss all the time."

  "You claim this was pure coincidence?" Fitch demanded. "A ten-pointcoincidence: Event of assassination, year of the event, place,circumstances, name of assassin, nationality of assassin, manner ofkilling, exact type of weapon used, guards killed and wounded alongwith Khalid, and fate of the assassin. If that's a simple andplausible coincidence, so's dealing ten royal flushes in succession ina poker game. Tom, you figured that out; what did you say the oddsagainst it were?"

  "Was all that actually stated by Doctor Chalmers a month ago?" one ofthe trustees asked, incredulously.

  "It absolutely was. Look here, Mr. Dacre, gentlemen." Fitch cameforward, unzipping his briefcase and pulling out papers. "Here are thesigned statements of each of Doctor Chalmers' twenty-three ModernHistory Four students, all made and dated before the assassination.You can refer to them as you please; they're in alphabetical order.And here." He unfolded a sheet of graph paper a yard long and almostas wide. "Here's a tabulated summary of the boys' statements. Allagreed on the first point, the fact of the assassination. All agreedthat the time was sometime this year. Twenty out of twenty-threeagreed on Basra as the place. Why, seven of them even remembered thename of the assassin. That in itself is remarkable; Doctor Chalmershas an extremely intelligent and attentive class."

  "They're attentive because they know he's always likely to dosomething crazy and make a circus out of himself," Whitburninterjected.

  "And this isn't the only instance of Doctor Chalmers' precognitiveability," Fitch continued. "There have been a number of other cases...."

  Chalmers jumped to his feet; Stanly Weill rose beside him, shoved thecased sound-recorder into his hands, and pushed him back into hisseat.

  "Gentlemen," the lawyer began, quietly but firmly and clearly. "Thisis all getting pretty badly out of hand. After all, this isn't aninvestigation of the actuality of precognition as a psychicphenomenon. What I'd like to hear, and what I haven't heard yet, isDoctor Whitburn's explanation of his contradictory statements that heknew about my client's alleged remarks on the evening after they weresupposed to have been made and that, at the same time, the whole thingwas a hoax concocted by his students."

  "Are you implying that I'm a liar?" Whitburn bristled.

  "I'm pointing out that you made a pair of contradictory statements,and I'm asking how you could do that knowingly and honestly," Weillretorted.

  "What I meant," Whitburn began, with exaggerated slowness, as thoughspeaking to an idiot, "was that yesterday, when those infernalreporters were badgering me, I really thought that some of ProfessorChalmers' students had gotten together and given the _Valley Times_ anexaggerated story about his insane maunderings a month ago. I hadn'timagined that a member of the faculty had been so lacking in loyaltyto the college...."

  "You couldn't imagine anybody with any more intellectual integritythan you have!" Fitch fairly yelled at him.

  "You're as crazy as Chalmers!" Whitburn yelled back. He turned to thetrustees. "You see the position I'm in, here, with this infernalHigher Education Faculty Tenure Act? I have a madman on my faculty,and can I get rid of him? No! I demand his resignation, and he laughsat me and goes running for his lawyer! And he is a madman! Nobody buta madman would talk the way he does. You think this Khalid ib'nHussein business is the only time he's done anything like this? Why, Ihave a list of a dozen occasions when he's done something just as bad,only he didn't have a lucky coincidence to back him up. Trying to getbooks that don't exist out of the library, and then insisting thatthey're standard textbooks. Talking about the revolt of the colonieson Mars and Venus. Talking about something he calls the TerranFederation, some kind of a world empire. Or something he callsOperation Triple Cross, that saved the country during some fantasticwar he imagined...."

  "_What did you say?_"

  The question cracked out like a string of pistol shots. Everybodyturned. The quiet man in the brown tweed suit had spoken; now helooked as though he were very much regretting it.

  "Is there such a thing as Operation Triple Cross?" Fitch was asking.

  "No, no. I never heard anything about that; that wasn't what I meant.It was this Terran Federation thing," the major said, a trifle tooquickly and too smoothly. He turned to Chalmers. "You never did anywork for PSPB; did you ever talk to anybody who did?" he asked.

  "I don't even know what the letters mean," Chalmers replied.

  "Politico-Strategic Planning Board. It's all pretty hush-hush, butthis term Terran Federation is a tentative name for a proposedorganization to take the place of the U. N. if that organizationbreaks up. It's nothing particularly important, and it only exists onpaper."

  It won't exist only on paper very long, Chalmers thought. He waswondering what Operation Triple Cross was; he had some notes on it,but he had forgotten what they were.

  "Maybe he did pick that up from somebody who'd talked indiscreetly,"Whitburn conceded. "But the rest of this tommyrot! Why, he was talkingabout how the city of Reno had been destroyed by an explosion andfire, literally wiped off the map. There's an example for you!"

  He'd forgotten about that, too. It had been a relatively minorincident in the secret struggle of the Subwar; now he rememberedhaving made a note about it. He was sure that it followed closelyafter the assassination of Khalid ib'n Hussein. He turned quickly toWeill.

  "Didn't you say you had to go to Reno in a day or so?" he asked.

  Weill hushe
d him urgently, pointing with his free hand to therecorder. The exchange prevented him from noticing that Max Pottgeiterhad risen, until the old man was speaking.

  "Are you trying to tell these people that Professor Chalmers iscrazy?" he was demanding. "Why, he has one of the best minds on thecampus. I was talking to him only yesterday, in the back room at theLibrary. You know," he went on apologetically, "my subject is MedievalHistory; I don't pay much attention to