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Show Acting Alone Page 399 the Temple project. He had an only moderately sickly ego (for his generation) and a very healthy intellect: precisely the personality-type that would strike the most consternation and, yes, terror into local property owners' hearts. This is why the Elder had felt compelled to let the lad discover an occasional secret as though on his own. Elder Cicerone even flirted on occasion with outright security violation. He devised elaborate non-verbal ways for the "Companions" to lie to Axelrad about the enormity of their mission - or, better yet, subtly to open up avenues of possibility down which the young communist could drive his own imaginative paranoid lies. The Elder flattered Axelrad's college-boy ego and engaged his intellect harmlessly. Cunningly (he hoped with no immoderate amount of manipulative cunning, for such is the devil's own tool), the Elder let Axelrad develop the notion that he was into something really big, just to keep him horrified enough so that his small adrenal glands would be in top secreting shape for the real estate acquisition maneuver when the time came. Yes, something big. Like enlisting the services of the mad, unsexed, fanatical, amoral, high-level genius gradstudents in the computer science department at the church's own private university west of here: getting them to put their waxy crewcut heads together at night in the dormitory after evening prayers and lights out; getting them to devise a method of interfering, in some very minor and temporary way, with our nation's missile- and satellite-tracking system (shouldn't be too difficult for such minds in such a well-funded university which had placed them at the cutting edge of their discipline, even if the liberal arts programs didn't enjoy much of a national or even local reputation). . . all for a good cause. |
