Paul Faircloth lit a cigarette and slowly shook his head. "Sorry," he said. "First I want some answers. Straight answers about a certain individual."
Roberts' eyes narrowed. "You mean Ben Towne."
"That's right."
Roberts scowled and threw down his cigar. "All right, I'll tell you about Ben Towne. It isn't pretty. Frankly, this Chicago fiasco was the break Towne has been waiting for. There were Psi-Highs involved in that raid. Towne knows it. And he's going to build a story of Psi-High alliance with the Alien that will carry him to the White House."
Faircloth nodded grimly. "Does he have any conception of the dangerousness of this creature?"
Roberts snorted. "Of course he knows it! But Ben Towne is obsessed with a single idea, and it twists everything he thinks into horrible distortion." He leaned forward, staring at Paul. "Benjamin Towne wants to wipe psi-positive faculties off the face of the Earth. He hates Psi-Highs. Oh, I don't know the motives behind it. Maybe the fact of his own imperfect body makes him hate what he considers a sort of super-perfection appearing in the human race. It's a false premise, of course. The predisposition of certain people to high extra-sensory powers is neither a perfection nor an imperfection.
"It's just another tiny step in the evolutionary chain. It happens to be a dominant gene factor, and in our society it happens to put the Psi-High in a slightly advantageous position in comparison to psi-negatives."
Roberts threw up his hands. "But the motives don't really matter. Towne was smart enough to realize that there were lots of people who hated and feared the expansion of Psi-Highs in our society. He started fighting against it, and he's ridden that fight right into the Chairmanship of the American Senatorial Council. If he can split up the Liberal Council just a little bit, he can throw them out of office, and move his American Party right in."
"And where does the Alien fit in?"