The Fellowship of the Hand Read Online Free PDF

Blunt. I’ve come down from New York to ask him a few questions. My name is Carl Crader, and I’m with the Computer Investigation Bureau.”

4 EARL JAZINE
    H E WAS STILL LIMPING a bit when he left the elevator at the 110th floor and waved hello to Judy. “Thanks for the flowers.”
    “Good to have you back from the lion pit,” she said with a grin. “How’re you feeling?”
    “My ribs are taped up and my head’s not quite right, and I sprained my ankle. Otherwise I’m fine. Is the chief in?”
    “The chief is out of town,” she informed him. “Gone to the Gulf of Mexico to check on one Jason Blunt.”
    “The Blunt from the election computer?”
    “We think so. He’s had a half-dozen people on the case since we learned about Rogers.”
    “What about Rogers?” Jazine lowered himself into a convenient chair by her desk.
    “Sorry, I thought you knew. Somebody entered his office and killed him three days ago. He was shot at close range with a stunner on maximum power.”
    “So that’s why Sabin was sticking so close to me at the hospital! Was it the same guy who tried to feed me to the lions?”
    “We think so. A secretary who worked for Rogers described him as a nondescript man, except for a tattoo on his left cheek.”
    “That’s him,” Jazine agreed. “Somebody’s trying to stop this whole investigation.”
    Judy nodded. She’d used some of the new glowon makeup this morning, a variation of the old flippie cult colors, and Jazine found it oddly attractive. “That’s not all, Earl. After he killed Rogers, he apparently took the time to electromagnetize the FRIDAY-404 memory cells. The computer was wiped clean of all reference to the Blunt-Ambrose election.”
    Somehow the news didn’t surprise him. The only real surprise was that the tattooed man had bungled with him and left him still alive. “How did the chief get a line on Blunt?”
    “There were only two Jason Blunts listed in the names registry, and the other one is eighty-two years old.”
    “It could be an unknown—some Jason Blunt from Kansas that nobody ever heard of before.”
    Judy shook her head. “The chief and I reasoned that if there really is a secret election to HAND or some other underground group, the candidates would have to be known well enough within that group. Since the use of the FRIDAY-404 implies a nationwide election, we’re looking for someone of nationwide prominence. Jason Blunt seems to fit. We did a quick check on him and discovered he lives on a drilling island in the Gulf of Mexico. Especially interesting is the fact that the island has been the scene of a number of meetings during the past year.”
    Jazine perked up. “What sort of meetings?”
    “That’s what the chief went to find out.”
    “Christ, couldn’t he have sent Sabin, or waited till I was out of the hospital? It might be dangerous.”
    “Jason Blunt is a wealthy man. A mere investigator might get nowhere with him, but he could hardly be rude to the director of the CIB.”
    “Maybe,” But he wasn’t happy. Perhaps it was just being left out of the investigation that troubled him. “What about the other name—Ambrose?”
    “We have four Stanley Ambroses on the list. You can tackle them if you’d like.”
    He accepted the sheet of paper she gave him. Four names. “This Ambrose’s whereabouts are unknown?”
    “That’s right. The chief thought it strange too.”
    He remembered a random line in a twentieth-century book by a man named Charles Fort, written after the disappearance of Ambrose Bierce and Ambrose Small. Was somebody collecting Ambroses? He left Judy at her desk and spent the rest of the morning checking computer printouts on the four listed men. There was nothing suspicious about any of them—except for the one Stanley Ambrose’s seeming disappearance after retiring from the Venus Colony a year earlier.
    This Ambrose was a man of fifty-six years, active in government and space matters, who’d served five years as