I

Mervyn Grey, nicknamed the Boy Wonder of the Business World, had not become a millionaire at twenty-nine through indecisiveness.

Accordingly, when he found an overnight memo sent by teleprinter from Edgar Casson, his London deputy, which said Casson counted himself fortunate to have obtained three shillings a share for holdings in a company that yesterday had been quoted at nine shillings and sixpence, he left the Grand Bahama headquarters of his financial empire on the next VC-10. He hadn’t bothered to send ahead and say he was coming, but the stolid, heavy-set broker was not surprised when a chauffeur-driven Rolls arrived before his expensive home that evening. He told his wife to entertain the dinner guests on her own, to keep his food warm for later and not to interrupt him on any account, and he himself welcomed Grey in the library.

Short, blond, tense to the point of feverishness, always seeming — even when sitting behind his desk, to be on the point of heading elsewhere at a dead run, Grey dropped into the most comfortable chair, took the fuller of the two glasses of sherry which Casson poured and demanded, “What in hell’s name happened to Lupton & White?”

Casson had been anticipating this; but, as usual, having the width’ of the Atlantic between them had given Kim an exaggerated impression of His ability to deal calmly with Grey in a bad temper. He licked His lips nervously and said in a defensive tone, “It’s still Happening, you know. They went through one and sixpence by close of business this afternoon, and tomorrow you won’t be able to give them away. Under the circumstances — ”

“What happened?” Grey said. “And give me another glass of that muck you were conned into buying as sherry.”

Casson complied with a sigh. Much of the day he had been mentally rehearsing the explanations he was going to give if Grey turned up, and with’ considerable polishing he felt He Had prepared a rather impressive story: the initial astonishment, the quick reaction which shaved their losses, the discreet pumping of knowledgeable acquaintances, the eventual remarkable discovery …

But the hell with it. If He prevaricated, Grey would quite likely fire him. He set down the newly filled glass and reached into the inner pocket of his impeccable dinner jacket.

“That happened to them,” He said baldly, and thrust a sheet of paper, folded twice, into Grey’s outstretched Hand.

Factsheet Five” Grey read aloud from the heading. “What does this have to do with it?” “Read the whole thing,” Casson shrugged. “Then you’ll know as much as I do, or anyone else that I’ve spoken to.”

Grey scowled, but did as He was told. What he had been given was a sort of leaflet, produced by photo-offset from a typed original — a badly-typed original, moreover, with irregular margins, many errors and even two or three lines which Had been crudely x’ed out. The Heading was in bold black Letraset capitals, but even that was a sloppy job; and the capital “F” of “Five” was creased at the top.

Altogether there were about ten or a dozen short paragraphs, each prefaced with’ the name of a company, of which he recognized the majority. With’ growing anger and bewilderment, he read through them.

Dale, Dockery & Petronelli Ltd. Ice-cream and ice-lolly manufacturers. During the last six months 3,021 children who had bought their products contracted stomach disorders.

Grand International Tobacco Corp. “Prestige,” “Chilimenth” and “Cachet” cigarettes. 14,186 of the cases of lung cancer diagnosed last year occurred among users of these brands.

Scientifically Tested Protectives Ltd. Surgical rubber goods. 20,512 unwanted pregnancies occurred last year in cases where the parents had relied exclusively on this firm’s products.

And there was the one He’d been looking for: Lupton & White Ltd. Catering equipment. 1,227 employees of firms using bread-slicers, bacon-slicers and other cutting devices supplied by this company lost one or more fingers in the period under review.

Grey winced and shuddered at the momentary image of a Hand spouting blood across the clean white enamel of a bacon-slicer, but he had a twenty-thousand- pound loss on his mind. He looked up at Casson, who had taken a chair facing him and was gloomily piercing a cigar for himself.

“This — this rag did for Lupton & White?”

“So I’ve been told,” Casson agreed.

“But — but for heaven’s sake!” Grey counted rapidly on both sides of the paper. “There are eleven named companies here. Did anything happen to the others? How about Grand International Tobacco?”

“They launched a new promotion scheme two weeks ago which has already visibly increased their sales. It started an upward trend in their price, too. But, for whatever reason the trend leveled off yesterday, and today they slipped back three pence. I agree, that isn’t evidence. But the coincidence is indicative.”

“Oh’, for the Lord’s sake! That happens all the time, that kind of thing; but a nosedive like Lupton & White’s is practically unprecedented! How can you argue that a slovenly scrap of paper like this is responsible? And in any case, why this firm in particular, with’ twelve Hundred alleged victims, and not the contraceptive makers with twenty thousand?”

“Because there’s no way of get-

ting back at the firm which landed you with an unwanted baby. But there is a new and very much stiffer Industrial Compensation Bill before Parliament at the moment, which makes the manufacturer as well as the operator of industrial equipment liable if the employee gets hurt. If the performance of last year is repeated next, Lupton & White could be hit for an estimated three hundred thousand in claims, which would wipe out their gross profit…

“Phfft!”

“Re-tooling to cure the problem, make the machines safer?” Grey snapped his fingers. “No, don’t bother to answer. They restyled their entire line three years ago, didn’t they?”

“And still haven’t paid off more than sixty per cent of the loan they obtained to finance the job.” Casson gave the words an air of finality. “No, confidence in Lupton & White is nil, and what they can look forward to is bankruptcy. Which is, I suppose, a kind of poetic justice — assuming they really did cost all these people their fingers, or their Hands.” “Nonsense!” Grey exclaimed. “Any idiot should know that a sharp cutting instrument is dangerous! So’s a pocket-knife — so’s a razor-blade, come to that!”

Masson’s mouth twisted as though he were amused despite his depression. “The person who puts out that Factsheet is fully aware of that,” he said. “You haven’t read the other side, have you? Look at — I think it’s the last item but one.”

Grey turned the paper over. He read aloud, “New Dawn razor-blades were used in 23 of the 28 face-slashing cases known to the police in — ” And, breaking off, abruptly, he stared at Casson.

“How in the world could anyone take this rubbish seriously? There must be a lunatic behind it!”

“Someone took it seriously. A lot of people, in fact. The proof is in what happened to Lupton & White, isn’t it?”

“No, of course that isn’t proof!” Grey jumped up and began to pace the room. “What about all these other companies? I didn’t see a simultaneous crash by all of them.”

Three of them aren’t public companies, so they can be disregarded. And the rest are all subsidiaries of much larger combines, which can cushion the blow.” “But —!” Grey slammed fist into palm furiously, and the Factsheet floated to the floor. Casson bent and recovered it.

“But what, Mr. Grey?”

“But granting that you’re right, something ought to be done about it! Isn’t this — well — libel, or something?”

“Apparently not. You can’t libel a corporation, only an individual.”

“But it’s such’ transparent nonsense!” Grey thundered. “Who in heaven’s name could track down,oh, for example, the parents of all these unwanted babies? It’s absurd!”

“Absurd or not, I tell you it is taken very seriously by a lot of people. Shall I explain?”

“Yes, go ahead,” Grey said wearily, and slumped back into his chair.

“It took me a lot of probing to get hold of that issue of the Factsheet,” Casson said. “I called — well, a long-time friend of mine, let’s say — while I was trying to find out what had happened to Lupton’s, and he said if he’d only realized I had a holding in the firm he’d have tipped me off. I asked how he knew, and he said he’d tell me if I had lunch with him. I did, and that was when he showed me that paper. He told me he had a photostat so I was welcome to have it.

“He said he doesn’t know anyone else who receives it, he has no idea why he receives it or who sends it to him. It just arrives, roughly once a month, in a plain envelope and always with a different postmark. He’s been getting it since issue number three, which’ he thought was a crank’s ravings and threw away. However, one item did stick in his memory because it referred to a canned-meat company he was interested in, and implied that they were lax in their hygiene. So, superstitiously — to quote his own term — he revised his intention of buying in. A few days later an outbreak of typhoid in Leeds was traced to a canned corned beef shipped by that very firm. Naturally, the bottom dropped out of their sales for three months until the impact of the news faded.”

“Go on,” Grey said, listening intently.

“Well, next time he received a Factsheet, of course, he read it very carefully. He had no holdings in any of the firms it listed, but he kept an eye on them out of curiosity. One, of the entries was similar to this one here, about the ice-cream, and said a lot of children had fallen ill after buying toys imported by Kid Dee Fun. You know them?”

“Of course. Dolls and novelties from Hong Kong and Japan. And they were the firm that ran foul of Consumers’ Association.” “Correct,” Casson nodded. “There proved to be an arsenical compound in the paint used on some of their dolls, and they Had to call in ten thousand pounds’ worth’ and bum them.”

“Who the hell was it who told you all this?” Grey demanded.

“He asked me not to give his name to anyone,” Casson murmured. “But — well, I checked on some of the companies he admitted having stock in when I’d left him after lunch, and I can safely estimate that he’s worth half a million, so He must be competent and Have good judgment. Which’ I already believed, of course. I’m far too cynical to believe a yam like this without, as it were, verifying the teller’s credentials.”

Grey looked at him for a long moment. He said finally, “Has he ever gone for any of the very big companies?”

“I don’t know.”

“Let me see that leaflet again!” Grey snatched at it and pondered in silence for long moments. At length’ He said, “I have to give the guy credit. He’s smart, isn’t he?”

“How do you mean?” Casson countered.

“OH, come off it!” Grey snorted. “It’d be obvious if you could see beyond the end of your nose! This is a brilliant con job, put out by one of the cleverest market-manipulators I ever Heard of. There’s a pattern here which gives him away. You honestly don’t see it?”

The nervousness which Casson thought he Had escaped by convincing Grey of the truth of his assertions returned in full force. Feebly he shook his head.

“In that case you’re more gullible than I imagined,” Grey snapped. “Maybe I should think about handing my affairs over to someone who isn’t going soft in the Head with premature senility! Goddamn it, man, think! From what you’ve told me all these sheets follow a similar pattern. Each’ includes a kernel of Hard fact — the infected meat, the arsenical paint — which could be established by anybody with’ access to the right channels of information. I’m willing to bet I could compile a list of twenty damaging facts off the top of my head which I could use against as many different companies with household brand-names! Then I could invent lots more, dressed up with statistics, which could neither be verified nor disproved but which would take color from their surroundings. And I’ll bet that’s what He’s doing, whoever he is. And then I could salt the whole lot with an item about a company which is peculiarly vulnerable, like Lupton & White. Result: the ultimate in inside market information, the self-fulfilling prophecy.”

Casson said, “Yes, but — ” “But what?” Grey waited an instant, then added, “Oh,come on, come on! What’s your opinion of the man who puts this collection nonsense together?’

“Well — ”

“A public benefactor, drawing attention to products which make people ill, chop their fingers off, kill them in accidents? In that case why doesn’t he attack big companies with a staff who could follow up his charges? Directly or indirectly I control a labor force of sixty thousand, don’t I? I could hire a hundred more and set them to work tomorrow if I had to, checking out the claim that umpty-dozen cars riding on Ultrac Tires were involved in accidents last month, or however many housewives were drowned in Miracle Whirl washing-machines.”

“And would you?” Casson said.

“Would I what?”

“Would you hire the people to check the claims? When the car-testers reported that Ultracs skidded more easily and were more likely to come away from the rim of the wheel when cornering at speed -—”

“I did sweet Fanny Adams about it. Correct. How in hell could I? Any tire will misbehave if you treat it badly enough! And things went on exactly as before, didn’t they? Ultracs sell well because they’re cheap and well advertised. All this consumer-testing nonsense affects maybe a hundred thousand buyers in this whole country, and there are millions over and beyond those few who want what I’m giving them. These are hard commercial facts, Casson. I didn’t invent the market, and no more can I be held responsible for the people it consists of. You haven’t answered my question: did you honestly picture the publisher of this Factsheet as a knight in shining armor, crusading against dangerous consumer goods? No, you couldn’t be that naive.”

Hideously embarrassed, Casson felt himself begin to flush’ under the lashing scorn of Grey’s tongue. Not for the first time He wondered how much longer He could stand working for this — this youth. He himself was over fifty, almost twice Grey’s age, experienced, successful, Highly regarded in his own held. Yet there was something about Grey which^1 could make him cringe, want to curl up inside himself and go a long way away very quickly. Perhaps it was what the admiring gossip columnists Had no qualms about terming ruthlessness; perhaps it was just that His unashamed greed made him acutely sensitive to the greed of the people who bought the products he offered. It had begun with household durables, and the discovery that people resented Having to pay so much for the equipment to perform unglamorous chores like doing the laundry, yet felt forced to acquire high-priced, High-precision equipment for them because that act itself loaned the work a smidgin of glamour.

That led to knocked-down washing machines, assembled in half an hour with a screwdriver supplied. The result was handsome; he hired good designers to package his products. From there he went on to other expensive items for the home, likewise in kit form, and thence to the car, the next highest investment in the family budget. First there were things to make a routine vehicle look like a custom-built modification, and then there was the major breakthrough into the tire business, following the discovery that drivers resented having to pay so much for equipment no one but experts would notice and comment on and would rather fit a sun-visor and a windtone horn than a new set of high-performance tires.

And so on, in a fantastic pyramid. There Had been nothing like it since John Bloom’s meteoric rise, and unlike his predecessor Mervyn Grey showed no sign of over-reaching himself. Even the loss on Lupton & White would be absorbed by a holding company worth ten times as much.

What next?

He grew aware that Grey was staring at him sardonically and fished back in memory for the echo of the last thing that Had been said to him.

“Well — ah, no! I don’t suppose I did picture whoever is responsible for the Factsheet as a ‘crusader.’ ” Recovering rapidly from his moment of dismay, he ploughed on. “On the other hand, he must have a bee in his bonnet, don’t you think? Perhaps he suffers from misplaced idealism.” Grey considered the suggestion, his expression becoming more cordial. “I think not, though it’s a rational possibility. A monomaniac obsessed with things like safety, the Health of children and so on would be more likely to let fly wildly at the big corporations, as

I said before. No, this has all the earmarks of a cunning, thoroughly planned campaign. So let’s take advantage of it.”

He leaned back in his chair and put his fingertips together. “I want you to do two things. First, buy Lupton & White.”

“What? But I told you — they’re headed for bankruptcy!” “Blockhead! I don’t mean take them over direct! I mean sweep up a good fat majority holding. Who financed their restyling the other year — one of the merchant banks, was it? Well, it doesn’t matter. Whoever did it won’t want the company to go bust. They’ll become the effective controllers of what assets survive, and if the property won’t cover their outlay they’ll listen to a scheme for recovery, won’t they? This Industrial Compensation Bill won’t become law next week, for heaven’s sake! We can dump any stocks of dangerous products — export ’em at cost, if we have to. There’s bound to be some ignorant nignog somewhere who’d like to pretty up his jungle grocery store with a nice new slicing machine! Hell, why should I Have to spell out the details to you of all people? A change of title and the magic of the name ‘Mervyn Grey,’ and we can have the firm back where it was inside a couple of years. All what’s wrong is that you panicked and dumped our holdings, so now we’re going to Have to buy it back, aren’t we?”

Casson said, “But when it started to slide so fast—”

“You stuck to rigid principles instead of using a bit of imagination. AH, never mind. With luck we’ll come out in one piece after all. But you’re going to Have to make up for it, you know, Cassie-boy!”

“Don’t call me that!” Casson snapped.

“Why not?” Grey’s tone was a savage caress. “When you behave like somebody years my junior, can I Help thinking of you as an inexperienced teen-ager? Shut up, anyway — I don’t want to spend longer than I can help in this chilly damp country. The other thing you’re going to have to do to make up for your mistake is find me the person who publishes that.” He stabbed His finger through’ the air towards the Factsheet. “He’s got something going for Him. I’d like to Have it going for me. Never let it be said that I can’t recognize an original idea, especially when it pays this kind of conspicuous dividends.”

He rose and Headed for the door. “You’ve got until the next issue comes out, Cassie-boy,” he threw over His shoulder. “Otherwise you’re through. ‘Bye!”

II

The more Grey thought about it, the more he was impressed with the brilliant simplicity of the Factsheet idea. If, in the space of a few short month’s, the man behind it had built up such a fund of confidence as to take in Casson— who, for all Grey’s gibes, was extremely competent — and Casson’s anonymous friend and at least several score other people with substantial holdings in Lupton & White, since otherwise the price-slide would not have been so swift or so complete, then he had a remarkable gift for exploiting gullibility, It was Grey’s lifetime conviction that the mass of the world’s population were idiots. Finding someone else who had arrived at the same conclusion and benefited from his insight was enough to make Him decide that that person was going to be useful.

Day by day little snippets of information arrived across the ocean from London which enabled him to round out his picture of the mysterious market manipulator. He began to think of him as a financial counterpart of a gypsy fortune teller, not merely because he used the standard technique of slipping in the crucial item among a fog of carefully chosen irrelevancies to give the whole a phoney air of precision by employing those incredible statistics, but also because of the ingenious misdirection he had adopted from the start when presenting his monthly bulletins.

If he had issued something slick and professional, people would at once Have associated him with the regular market information agencies. Instead, he took the risk of having his material dismissed as the drivel of an incompetent amateur and banked on luck supplying him with a small Hard core of people who Had actually read some single item closely enough to remember it when the prediction it contained was fulfilled. With’ Casson’s friend, it Had been the canned-meat company; doubtless with many more “clients” it had been the affair of the poisonous toys. Then, next time one of the Factsheets turned up …

“Neat,” Grey said to the air. And added: “I want that man! What the hell is Casson playing at?”

For, though information was coming in almost daily, it still summed up to nothing useful. Other people had been found who received the sheets, always anonymously, always in plain envelopes and never with the same postmark twice. They were clearly hand-picked. They included people who handled the investment program for unit trusts and some of the biggest insurance companies, the flywheels of the stock market, but not only such — also there were key men in the distribution of consumer products, like the head buyers for chain stores, procurement directors for car accessory dealers and service stations, the chairmen of export agencies Handling millions of pounds’ worth of British goods every year.

But they were in close enough contact with the financial world to learn quickly about the accuracy of the warnings which appeared in the shabby little mailings they received out of the blue.

Watching the course of the companies named in the sheet Casson Had given Kim, Grey detected the shadow of what Bad Happened to Lupton 6s White in the gradual decline of Grand International Tobacco over the next couple of weeks, in the reversion of a former slow rise in another company, in the sudden cancellation of a takeover bid for yet a third.

O

n the spur of the moment He called Casson direct and learned little enough for his pains. The envelopes in which the Factsheets arrived were the largest-selling brand in the country; the paper they were printed on was made by the largest mills; the typewriter was a discontinued model and could be one of several thousand still in use. Listening to the flow of excuses, he grew suddenly angry.

“You have one more week!” He rapped. “If I’m not on the mailing list for Factsheet Six, I’ve finished with you — is that clear?”

There was a moment of silence. At length Casson cleared his throat.

“Well, there is one thing it occurred to me you could do,” he said. “I Hesitated to suggest it, but…”

“What is it?”

“You could advertise, perhaps? Say in the Financial Times? I’m certain the — ah— the publisher must read the financial press very closely.”

Grey was on the point of declaring that it was a ridiculous idea, when he checked the words and reconsidered. In sober fact the points Casson had mentioned, like the commonness of the materials used to prepare the Factsheets, did imply that it would be hard to breach the wall of anonymity surrounding the publisher. And he did want to find that man. He wanted it so much it was becoming an obsession. He kept finding himself daydreaming of the ways in which! he could exploit the reputation the Factsheets now enjoyed to drag down the price of companies and let him buy into them, reorganize them and put them back on the market under new names sponsored by What he referred to as his “magic.”

But he was too impatient merely to copy the idea and start his own monthly bulletin along similar lines. He wanted the fund of goodwill — or rather, gullibility the existing version Had established. Hence he wanted the mailing-list.

Casson said, “I thought we should put a few anonymous advertisements in other places, too, like —”

“Anonymous?” Grey cut in. “Hell, not Are you determined to undermine the good impression made by your occasional fits of insight? Why anonymous? If it’s known that Mervyn Grey is interested in the Factsheet, this is going to give the guy the kind of cachet he’s after, isn’t it? It’ll probably drive the last of the skeptics into his net. He’d love me for that! Yes, go ahead and place those ads at once!”

Ill

Six days later the morning mail included a note typed on half a sheet of plain white paper, in an ordinary airmail envelope addressed to “Mr. Mervyn Grey, Mervyn Grey Enterprises, Grand Bahama Island.” It ran, curtly enough:

I understand you are interested in the forthcoming issue of my Factsheet. Well you might be. I shall be pleased to show you a copy personally. If you call, however, do so by yourself.

At the top there was an address, in a small town several miles north of London. At the bottom there was a name — George Handling. And not only was the typeface the same as that of the Factsheet, but so was the clumsy use of the machine, with a good Half-dozen errors in the few lines of the note.

Jubilantly Grey told his secretary to get him on a flight to England as soon as possible. He was about to instruct her to put a call in to Casson as well, when he changed his mind. Even though the man’s idea of advertising for the Factsheet’s publisher had paid dividends, it had taken an unconscionable time. Casson, He decided, was due to be discarded in favor of somebody younger and more enterprising, and it would be better to provoke Kim into resigning than to dismiss Him openly. Best of all, of course, would be “retirement” — not to salve Casson’s feelings, because Be regarded people who couldn’t protect themselves as a liability and would not go out of his way to Help them, but simply because it would do an inescapable minimum of damage to the image of his financial empire if the outside world were allowed to detect an internal disagreement.

So let it work this way, he decided: he would go to England without telling anyone He was coming; He would make his way to the home, or office, or whatever it was, of this Mr. Handling, and he would make him a proposition — a very good one. He might even offer Him Casson’s post, in due time, if His other talents matched his skill in exploiting credulity. It was going to take a person of unusual ingenuity to make the most of the new vistas that control over the Factsheet was opening up.

There had to be lavish tips, of course: to the airline’s staff, to ensure no one mentioned His arrival to the gossip columnists — almost every time lie went to England he found - a couple of journalists waiting for him —- then, on arrival, to the ground staff at the airport so that he did not have to appear publicly among the passengers in the customs Hall, and still later to the car-hire firm from whom He rented a small inconspicuous family sedan.

He was, however, reasonably content with his precautions when he picked his way around the northern fringes of London under a dull autumnal sky which occasionally shed a half-hearted drizzle on him. Tomorrow, or the next day, when Casson called with the latest of his useless scraps of information, it would be a real pleasure to announce that he had already been to see the man who published the Factsheets and Had closed a favorable deal with Him. That would be the first of a series of carefully chosen wounds intended to compel Casson’s eventual resignation. It would work. He had done it often enough before.

Despite the gloominess of the afternoon he began to whistle as he drove along.

On reaching the small town which was his destination, However, he grew puzzled. He had expected to find the street named on the letter he carried at the center of the town; in his experience, even though businessmen decentralized away from the metropolis, they liked to centralize in the places they moved to. After much aimless driving back and forth, he asked a pedestrian and was directed to the outskirts, to a drab postwar Housing development lacking all character and all charm. At the end of a cul-de-sac he found a large bungalow with one lighted window, the garden; before it overgrown with’ weeds, the door of the adjacent garage wide open to reveal that there was no car inside.

But the street bore the right name, and the right number was on the gatepost.

Grey parked the car and got out slowly. This low-income neighborhood, this badly-maintained house with its wild garden, did not fit his preconceived idea of the brilliant inventor of the Factsheets. Could he have been hoaxed? He reminded himself that the letter he had received was clearly from the same typewriter as the Factsheets, shrugged and walked up the path, noticing that it was concreted where one might have expected gravel and that the weeds had been cut back along its edges.

It was full dark by now, and the nearest street-lamp was too far away to illuminate the front door of the bungalow. He went the last few feet cautiously, not wanting to trip over a step. There was no step. That struck him as peculiar, but he couldn’t decide why. It was probably not significant, anyway.

He felt across the door jamb until he located a bell and pushed it. Shortly an overhead light went on, and the door was opened for turn.

“Yes?” a voice said, and then, changing instantly to a tone he could not decipher: “Ah’, it’s Mr. Mervyn Grey, isn’t it? Come in, please. It’s cold and nasty out, isn’t it?”

Staring, he failed to respond for a moment. He hated to be at a loss, but this — this creature who had appeared before him was so totally askew from the mental pictures he had conjured up that he was astounded.

He was in a wheelchair, to begin with’ — a battery-operated wheelchair with controls on the right arm rest. His left arm was shriveled, and the Hand twisted, doubled back almost at right angles to the wrist. His legs were concealed under a gray blanket spotted with’ gravy marks and a smear of egg yolk. Above a woollen shirt with a button missing, Half his face was covered with an untidy brown beard, but the other half was a smooth keloid, almost purple, reaching from cheekbone to jaw. Both’ the eyes, however, were alert and piercing, and under their intent gaze he grew uncomfortable.

“Are you George Handling?” he forced out.

“That’s right,” the man in the wheelchair nodded.

“The person who publishes the Factsheets?”

“Yes! Look, don’t just stand there — you’ll make the house cold if I have to keep the door open, and heating is bloody expensive these days.”

But I should have thought you made enough from using the Factsheets to —

Grey bit the words back. Numbed by the possibility that all his deductions had been false, and he had merely stumbled across a lunatic after all, he stepped inside and now had a chance to survey his surroundings. This was the most peculiar house he had ever been in. The reason for not having a step at the front door had been instantly clear when handling appeared in his chair, but the logic of that went all through his home. The internal walls had been knocked away, giving an open plan complete, except for what He guessed must be a bathroom at the back. There was a bed in one place, with a curtain which could be drawn around it; there were cases of books in another, a desk with a typewriter on it in another, a lithographing press in another.

Or was the feeling subjective, due to shock. stacks of paper and big cartons of envelopes nearby.

Moving with the automatic jerkiness of a puppet, he followed Handling across the open floor towards. the desk. There was a large paraffin stove burning there, of the convector-radiant type with a hot wire mesh glowing in the middle of a chromed reflector, but despite that and despite what Handling had said about shutting the door to keep the place warm the house was very cold.

“Sit down,” Handling said, swinging his chair expertly around so that it cleared the stove by inches. He tilted his head towards a chair with’ papers and a tea cup on it. “Sorry you have to move all those things, but I can’t have things on the floor—-they get in my way, for one thing, and I can’t reach’ to pick them up, for another. I have to go and get my tongs if I drop something. Well! I suppose I ought to offer you a drink, oughtn’t I? Only I haven’t any. One doesn’t get much pleasure out of it in my condition. I could make you a cup of tea, if you like.”

Grey had found a place for the cup and papers on the end of the desk and had taken a little longer than necessary in arranging them there, just in case there was a sample entry from the next Factsheet to be seen. But there was nothing — only a stack of blank paper and half a dozen handwritten letters, upside down.

“No — ah — no thank you,” he said, forcing himself towards normality. “I suppose I should really have let you know when to expect me, but … Well, to be frank, your Factsheets have impressed me so much that the moment I knew where to find you I just dropped everything.”

“OH, there was no need to warn me of your arrival,” Handling said, and chuckled. “No need at all. I could say I’m flattered at your taking the trouble to fly the Atlantic just to call on me, but I doubt if there’s any need for that, either.”

Grey’s eyes roved the monstrous room into which the house had been converted, spotting here and there among the general bachelor disarray of shirts hung on chair-backs and stacks of old newspapers things which gave some anchor of credence to Handling’s identity. He recognized the familiar red cover of the British Industrial Annual, a number of commercial directories, publicity material and prospectuses from various large companies of which he himself had copies in his office on Grand Bahama. He said, almost at random and to cover his inquisitiveness, “Well, you’ll have gathered from our advertisements that I’m most interested in your publication.”

“Advertisements?” Handling said.

Grey blinked af him and immediately had to look away again, the sight of that fungoid patch of scar-tissue among the unkempt beard threatened to turn his stomach.

“Why, of course! That was why you wrote to me, wasn’t it? We advertised in the Financial Times and the Economist and …” The words trailed away, and he stared around the house again. Nowhere was there a sign, among all the heaps of old newspapers, of the conspicuous pink of the Financial Times.

“Oh, I wouldn’t know about that,” Handling said, with an abortive attempt at a shrug which’ struck Grey as rather horrible.

“Then how did you know I was interested in your work?”

“It’s a trade secret, Mr. Grey,” Handling said, and gave a noise closer to a simper than a chuckle. “You’ve seen at least one of my productions, haven’t you? Then you know I have a great many trade secrets,”

Grey was conducting a furious debate with himself. An unclean cripple in a wheelchair was so far from the image he had mentally created of a gifted and prosperous market manipulator that he was half-minded to dismiss Handling as the crank he had at first assumed, when Casson showed him Factsheet Five. Yet there was incontestably a fund of credulity, tapped by Handling, which he could exploit if he had the chance. He would have to be tactful. Even if the man proved to have been deranged by his awful condition, he could be used.”

“Yes, they impressed me enormously,” he said, forcing warmth into his voice. He linked his fingers together, realized he had forgotten to take off his driving-gloves and decided against removing them now because the house still felt bitterly cold. “Inside information like yours could be worth a fortune, handled in the proper way. In fact — Well, never mind that.”

“You were probably going to say you’re surprised to find the possessor of it living in a jerry-built bungalow in an ugly development on the fringe of a dull, little provincial town,” Handling said. His tone was quite unemotional. “But it’s easier to keep out of people’s way here, Mr. Grey. And besides, I no longer have any use for a fortune. I had a wife. I had a son. They both died in the accident which reduced me to this state.”

“I — I’m sorry,” Grey said.

“Thank you for being sorry.” There didn’t seem to be any way to follow up that remark. Casting about for a way to change the subject, Grey said, “But you must have some purpose in publishing these bulletins of yours. Or is it just a hobby?” “It’s more than a hobby. It’s practically a full-time occupation. Compiling the information is a slow job in itself, and then there’s the business of making the litho plate and running off the actual sheets and addressing all the envelopes … Oh, it keeps me very well occupied.”

“I see.” Grey licked his lips. “How do you manage to Have the sheets sent from so many different places? I don’t imagine you mail them yourself.”

“Oh no. There’s a commercial service which’ collects them and takes them anywhere I choose within a hundred miles for quite a small fee. I thought I’d muddle the trail a little until I was ready to show myself.”

“You — ah — you have a big mailing list now?”

“I started off with five hundred, picked more or less at random,” Handling said. “This month it will be over a thousand.” “No wonder it keeps you busy! Ah … I’d have appreciated being included in the list myself, by the way.”

“Oh, you aren’t at all the sort of person I aimed it at,” Handling exclaimed. “I worked it all out very carefully. There are certain key figures in the financial world of this country, and you can find out who they are if you put lots of little bits of published information together. It took me several months to make my list up, but that was all right. I had plenty of time on my hands. Or rather, on my hand.” He picked up the limp left one with’ the live right and regarded it curiously, as though’ He had come upon a dead frog in the garden. “I selected people administering the very big investment funds, people concerned with important exports, people responsible for choosing the brands of goods which are sold in the biggest chain stores all over the country, and so on. People whose decision to accept or not to accept a company’s products could make or break the company, you see?”

Grey gave a cautious nod. “And why did you choose them in particular?” he ventured.

“OH, because of the kind of information I was getting,” Handling said. “They seemed to me to be the people who ought to be told what I knew. You’ve seen the sort of stuff I get!”

“Ah — yes, of course I Have. But why that information? How do you come by it?”

“I’m a psychometrist. Psychometry is a branch of clairvoyance. Actually I think the whole thing is all part of an all-embracing talent which will eventually be fully revealed to us, but that’s by the way. I get odd extras every now and then — the curtain lifts, as the saying goes. Sometimes I can glimpse the future, sometimes I can deduce or sense what a person is thinking, but my specialty is being able to work out from objects their associations with injury and death.”

IV

What a farrago of nonsense.

All Grey’s enthusiasm for getting hold of the Factsheet mailing list evaporated on the instant. He got to his feet

“Well, thank you very much, Mr. Handling. I’m sorry to have taken up your time. However, if you’re really restricting your mailing list to —”

“Oh, really, Mr. Grey!” Handling cut in. “You didn’t honestly come all the way from the Bahamas just for five minutes chat and not even a peek at Factsheet Six, did you?” He added after a fractional pause, “This one is devoted to firms you’d be especially interested in.”

Grey wavered. On the one hand, the cripple was certainly a crank; on the other, he had certainly influenced the market.

“Yes, I should like to look at number six,” he admitted.

“I thought so!” Handling crowed and moved his wheelchair around the desk, once more missing the paraffin stove by a fraction. He tugged open a drawer and peered in.

“Unfortunately it looks as though I only have spoiled copies left,” he went on. “Yes, that’s a spoiled one, and that’s blank on one side, and …. Never mind, it won’t take a moment to put the second side on it. I still have the plate on the machine.”

Dexterously he headed for the litho press. His deftness with only one hand, Grey admitted silently, was admirable, although everything he had to do was necessarily slow. He waited impatiently; meanwhile Handling, disinclined to hurry, chatted away.

“Yes, this talent of mine I suppose must always have been with me, at least in rudimentary form. For example, I never wanted to buy that washing machine which chopped my little boy’s hand off; but of course it was a lot cheaper than all the others, and we weren’t exactly rolling in money, so I gave in. And I had my doubts about the sewing machine, too, but Meg couldn’t go out to work for a long while after the — ” “Did you say your son lost his hand?” Grey said in a dead voice. “Why, yes. The washing machine wasn’t fitted with one of those automatic brakes, you see, so you could have the what’sit going round while the lid was open; and without any water in it, it spun amazingly fast, and poor little Bobby managed to turn it on and lift the lid, and …

Ah, here we go now, or rather in a moment when the tiling’s warmed up. Yes, like I was saying: Meg couldn’t go out to work for a long while after the soleplate of her iron fell on her thigh and the burn turned septic — not much of an iron, but it was very cheap, of course — and then the sewing machine she’d bought to make a little extra at home ran wild and stitched across the palm of her hand, and it was while I was driving her to the hospital that it happened. The tires on the car, you see. I had my doubts about those as well; but we were pretty skint, what with’ Meg not going out to work, so I had to settle for what I could afford when it was absolutely essential to get new tires, and there was Meg crying and nursing her hand, and Bobby on the back seat squalling because he didn’t have a hand to nurse any more, you see, and . , . Ah, here’s your copy now. Complete.”

He rolled back across the floor to a spot directly facing Grey and held out the piece of paper, boldly headed FACTSHEET SIX.

Mechanically Grey took it, but didn’t look down. His eyes were riveted on Handling’s face. He heard himself say, “So — what happened?”

“According to the policeman who explained at the inquest, those tires tend to spring away from the wheel-rim when you go round a comer fast, and of course this lets all the air out — they’re tubeless, you understand — and the car just went completely out of control. Smashed into a lamp standard. Meg and Bobby were lucky, I suppose. Certainly I couldn’t have done much’ to support them in this condition. But it was while I was laid up in the hospital that I began to discover my talent. All of a sudden one day when I was being given an injection I said, ‘The last man who had a shot from that one died, didn’t he?’ And they thought I was just being morbid, but I felt sure. So I started following it up. And what I found was that I could — well — sense when I took hold of something whether it, or anything like it, was going to hurt someone.

“At first I could only get snatches, but I had lots of time, especially before I got this chair and had to wait in bed for someone to attend me. The worst snag was that I thought the things I was detecting had already happened, so I was sort of straining the wrong way into time to get at them. I can’t make it very clear, I’m afraid. It doesn’t happen to many people.

“Then I suddenly realized that I was feeling forward — not backward — and I got the hang of it, properly. Mark you, it could never be a quick job, working out one of these things. Sometimes, especially with the real mass-production items, I spent up to thirty-six hours struggling before I sorted it out and could afford to go to sleep and rest up.”

Almost hypnotized by Handling’s sudden burning intensity, Grey could not drag his eyes away from the ruined face straight ahead of him. He said, “What — what exactly is it you do?” And reflected with paradoxical detachment that it was a change for him to be dominated, however briefly. He told himself he was putting up with’ it, though’, because. he wanted to be completely convinced that the man was out of his mind. Otherwise he might suffer from the pangs of disappointment.

“It’s more sort of what I did,” Handling explained in a thoughtful tone. “I told you — when I first started sensing that the other things which matched what I was holding would hurt such’-and-such a number of people I thought this was what had already taken place. But I found out that sometimes the thing I’d picked on was too new to have done all that, so then I realized the truth. I could sense what was going to happen. Oh, no doubt you’ll say how could I be sure? Well, I couldn’t, could I? Not until I’d checked up. So I noted down everything I thought was exact, and whenever I got the chance I cross-referenced my notes. Like the Consumers’ Association tests were very helpful, when they said that something I’d worked on was unusually dangerous, and sometimes I found things in the paper about food-poisoning and toys being dangerous to children and so on. After about a year or so, I was absolutely certain I was right.”

“Oh, but this is ridiculous!” Grey forced out. “How could you know about — well, twenty thousand unwanted children, to take a really far-fetched example?”

“The numbers sort of add up in my subconscious,” Handling said. “I lie awake at night, and I can feel them ticking away in my head. When they stop, I can feel how long they’ll take to reach that total — three months, six months, a year. And then I write it all down. When the time is up, I put it into my current Factsheet and off it goes to all these people. I did think of other ways of spreading the news, but I decided they wouldn’t work so well.

I mean, the newspapers are controlled by the advertisers, aren’t they? And the consumer journals have their own tests and their own way of going about it. Not as good as mine, but there it is. And they’re definitely taking notice now. Especially since — you did say, didn’t you, that you’d advertised to get in touch with me?”

“Yes.” Grey bit the word off short, like the snap of wire-cutters.

“You could tell it was you, from the advertisements?”

“Yes!” Grey felt the prickle of sweat inside his clothes. how could he have imagined that this house was cold and have kept on his coat, His gloves and scarf? It was boiling in here!

“Well, that certainly ought to convince everyone that I’m worth paying attention to,” Handling said smugly. The virtual echo of his own remark to Casson galled Grey.

“It’s a load of garbage!” He exclaimed. “Taking hold of something and saying that during the next year it’s going to hurt or kill so many people — you must be insane! And this Factsheet of yours is nothing more than a grandiose confidence trick!”

“You may not believe me, Mr. Grey,” Handling said softly. “But the best part of a thousand people are going to when they open their mail tomorrow morning. The mailing company collected Factsheet Six this afternoon, and it’s on it’s way. Aren’t you even curious to know what’s in it this time?”

Grey raised the hand which held his copy, intending to ball it up and march out, but from the corner of his eye he spotted three words that petrified him; Mervyn Grey Enterprises. Horrified, He read down the page.

Miracle Whirl washing-machines electrocuted so many people through faulty wiring, started so many domestic fires, leaked and flooded so many homes, bringing down the ceilings on the floor below; Ee-Zee-Smoothe irons started other fires, came apart in use and burned the user; cars shod with Ultrac tires were involved in so many fatal accidents …

His head was ringing as he thought of the people to whom this list of accusations was going and the buying power they controlled and the markets they could slam the door on. He barely heard Handling say, “Yes, it was a Miracle Whirl which’ cost my boy his hand, and one of your irons that kept Meg at Home so she had to try and make money sewing with one of your machines which stabbed her hand, and it was Ultrac tires I had to buy and which wrecked the car while I was rushing her to the hospital. You have more than just blood on your hands, Mr. Grey. You have all kinds of suffering. You seem to have hurt at least one person for every day of your life.”

“You bastard,” Grey whispered. He thrust the leaflet into the side pocket of his overcoat. “You can’t do this! It’s libel — it’s a filthy, dirty, stinking libel!”

“There’s no libel about saying that a product is faulty,” Handling said and grinned. “OK, you could certainly sue me! I suppose I’ve committed a civil tort. But I haven’t committed any kind of crime.”

“You smug devil!” Grey roared, and hurled himself bodily forward. Cripple or no cripple, he had to wipe that grin off Handling’s face!

But the impact drove Handling’s wheelchair backward, and it rammed straight into the paraffin stove, and knocked it over and spilled a sea of blazing oil instantly over thirty square feet of the floor. Flames soared up, High as Handling’s head. There was a sudden image seared into Grey’s retinas, a distorted face with’ eyes perfectly round, mouth’ open in a choking gasp that drew in sterile oxygenless air, beard crisping and hair writhing like Medusa’s snakes —

And he was out of the house, and the door was shut behind him, and he was running for his car. He jumped in, started the engine, accelerated wildly down the road. Just before he turned out of sight, he glanced back. As yet, there was no sign of fire from outside the house; the curtains were drawn against the cold autumn night, and so were everyone else on the street that fact too became a still image in memory, like a stopped movie.

V

Forty miles away, on a lonely roadside he stopped the car again. Slavering, yet beginning to recover his self-possession, he drove himself to rational examination of his situation. It wasn’t so bad — was it now? He could hardly conceal the fact of being in England altogether, but there was no reason at all for it to be known that he’d visited Handling’s hometown. He’d spoken to exactly one person, to ask directions — but he’d done so at dusk, from the shadowy interior of a car identical to thousands of others. Long before anyone noticed that Handling’s home was burning, he had been well clear off the town, perhaps over the county border. He concentrated on the memory of the deserted street Yes, it could Have been a long while before anyone noticed the fire!

And no one had seen him arrive, or leave, and that minor miracle of not taking off his gloves meant he could have left no fingerprints, and he could go quietly back to London, to the apartment which was always, ready for him to walk into without notice, and he could go out nonchalantly to a club where he was known and have dinner and watch a good cabaret, and tomorrow morning at about ten o’clock he could let it be discreetly known in circles where it counted that this time the Factsheet was a tissue of lies and the financial empire of Mervyn Grey Enterprises was in no danger, no danger at all, and —

The Factsheet!

Frantically he fumbled in the pocket of his coat and drew out the bit of paper. This was the only thing to link him with Handling. He must get rid of it at once. On the point of winding down the window and throwing it out, he canceled the movement and instead took out his lighter. In another minute this could be anonymous wind-blown ashes, and he would be safe. Oh yes, and the letter from Handling, of course! Lord! Had anyone seen that, in the Grand Bahama office? Well, then: just in case, he could walk into Casson’s office in the morning, saying he’d been too tired to go straight there this afternoon, and announce his intention of visiting Handling . . Yes, that way would be all right, too. He’d be perfectly safe. Even if people believed the Factsheet and He lost a lot of money, he still Had the talent which had made him the Boy Wonder of the Business World. He could survive.

Snapping the lighter, He held the copy of Factsheet Six towards its flame. The instant before igniting it, He stopped dead. This time, he was looking at the second side of the sheet. He was looking at a paragraph bordered with black lines, inaccurately hand-drawn with’ a wide felt pen.

Inside the border, in Handling’s usual bad typing, it said:

This is the last issue of Factsheet. The publisher, Mr. George Handling of 29 Wyebird Close, Blentham, was murdered yesterday by Mr. Mervyn Grey in an attempt to stop this information being circulated.

He sat there for a long time thinking of a thousand people of great influence opening the plain envelopes which’ would arrive in tomorrow morning’s mail. When he had finished thinking about it, he just sat.

JOHN BRUNNER

- NER