Part 5

Everyone was giving me an alibi, I thought. Nobody wanted me in jail. I wondered why. The bewildering sequence of events, the jolting pile-up of shocks, had left me confused, unable to think clearly. But after a while, still standing in the open doorway looking at the blind walls of the trailer just a few yards away, I thought of a reason why.

Jails were safe.

9

I had another night of fitful sleep that left me bone weary in the morning. I fought against the deep sleep that might bring a recurrence of the terrifying dream in which I was sucked down into cold black waters, and as a result I dozed and woke in momentary panic and lay sweating in bed and finally dozed again and woke again, on and on through the night. Images of dreams and reality kept getting mixed up in a disorganized montage. I would be holding Laurie in my arms, feeling the firm and vital strength of her young body warm against me, and suddenly the face which tilted up to meet mine, the lips that parted, were not hers but those of a shy and timid girl with soft blonde hair whose name I didn't know. Or I would dream fragmentarily of being trapped in a corner with the meaty face of Sgt. Bullock shoving aggressively at me and snarling, "Why did you kill her?" And, waking, I would think of Lois and ask myself why she had died, knowing in my heart that she had had to die, that I had marked her for death. Because she knew. She had seen the alien. When I had tried to find her I had become the unwitting instrument of her death. Guilt hung over me like a heavy, airless blanket, smothering me, clogging my lungs like the thick black waters of the dream. At last the gray dawn came abruptly to the crest of the mountains and found me leaden-eyed and exhausted.

It was a Friday. I had two classes that morning, including the eleven o'clock sophomore survey. Laurie Hendricks was absent. Somehow I managed to stumble through the lectures, not sure afterwards what I had said, surprised at times to find myself talking fluently with apparent coherence and logic, asking questions and answering them, functioning like a robot, well-trained to impersonate an English instructor.

And somehow it was afternoon and the last class of the day was over. I was free to return to the library. Dully, I began to read the articles and papers I had set aside the previous day. I read without hope, almost without interest, convinced that I would find nothing to explain the puzzle of the invading minds--yet believing more firmly now that they were real, not a product of my own sickness, because a woman had died who might have named them. And at length I shoved the pile of magazines and papers aside with sudden impatience.

I would find no answers here. I had to go out to find them. I could neither hide from the aliens nor attempt to outwit them, but I could force them into the open. I could attack even if I had no chance to win. One of the four students had already been tested--and I could not bring myself to believe that Laurie was still suspect. Her conduct the night before, in retrospect, seemed too clearly the actions of a lovely, spoiled young girl used to having what she wanted--and at the moment wanting me. But she was only one of four.

A sound broke the wandering circle of my thought. A footstep on a metal staircase. The library stacks were a network of crowded aisles with two levels packed into each story of the building and short connecting flights of metal stairway linking the many levels. Yet why had this footstep struck my ear? There had been movement all afternoon through the stacks as the librarians came and went.

This step was furtive, I thought. I rose slowly from the little desk under the window. The other sounds had had a normal sequence unconsciously recorded by the mind. This step had been a single isolated sound, one that was not supposed to be heard, made by a person moving stealthily and silently.

I peered along the narrow aisle which ended at the window. I was conscious of the afternoon light at my back, framing me against the window. No one was in sight, but I knew someone was there, approaching me, and I felt a now familiar flinching as fear tightened its grip.

He stepped out of a side aisle, confronting me so suddenly that it was as if he had materialized before my eyes.

"What do you want?" I asked sharply.

"I want to talk to you, Mr. Cameron," Bob Jenkins said in a low, tight voice.

"You're not supposed to be back here in the stacks."

"I told them I had to see you."

Of course, I thought. The librarians were reasonable people. How could they know why Jenkins had to see me? Why should they be suspicious? _If_ he had talked to them.

Jenkins stepped forward and I saw the hard crease of his mouth, the snap of anger in narrow blue eyes. At that moment, we both heard the rapid tattoo of a woman's steps on a ladder nearby. Jenkins spun around. Bustling movement went along a nearby aisle, going away from us. When Jenkins swung back, he seemed to have relaxed slightly, though his face was still coldly unfriendly.

"Leave her alone!" he said harshly.

I gaped at him in pure astonishment.

"You know who I mean. Laurie! I know she went to your place last night."

"That--that was about a term paper assignment," I stammered.

"Don't try to kid me. I saw her when she came home last night. She was so mad she wouldn't even talk to me--and she didn't smear her lipstick all by herself."

I began to recover from the stunning surprise of his outburst. The danger I had expected was so much more to be feared than the anger of a jealous boy that I had an hysterical impulse to laugh. But his anger seemed genuine. I think if the librarian hadn't been there in the stacks nearby he would have started a fight.

"She's my girl," Jenkins snapped. "Keep away from her!"

"That's for her to decide, isn't it?" I asked quietly. "But I don't think you have anything to worry about. I doubt that she'll want to see me again."

"Don't try to brush me off!" the boy said fiercely. "If you don't leave her alone, maybe the school would like to know about it. The authorities wouldn't like it!"

I felt a trace of answering anger. "If you're thinking of creating a scandal," I said coldly, "maybe you'd better think about Laurie's reputation too. If you try to damage me, you'll be hurting her as well."

The words shook him. He glared at me, fists clenched, breathing hard and quick as if he had been running, and I sensed the conflict in his mind, the rage made impotent.

"Damn you!" he choked. "I'm warning you. Next time I'll make you pay for it!"

He flung away down the aisle, vanishing from sight as he bolted along a connecting corridor. I could hear the harsh fall of his steps fading away from me. I took a deep breath and held it, let it out slowly, feeling some of the tension subside in my arms and legs and chest.

Chalk up another threat, I thought wearily. First vicious, powerful minds that toyed with me. Then suspicious police. Mysterious neighbors. And now a kid's jealousy so strong and blind that it could make him do something foolish. I could never get an insurance policy, I thought with a feeble attempt at humor. The odds were against my being around to pay next month's premium.

Jenkins' abrupt appearance and his jealous wrath had seemed honestly motivated. If he were one of the aliens would he have acted that way? What purpose would it serve? Then I remembered the librarian's timely interruption. Had she halted more than a threatened fist fight? Had Jenkins' plan for an accident been spoiled by the presence of someone else, forcing him to improvise a clever and plausible reason for stalking me?

No. It was probably true that he would have had to explain his purpose in order to gain access to the stacks. The librarians guarded the entrance as zealously as they undoubtedly guarded their bedroom doors. If he had planned any serious harm to me, he wouldn't have advertised his guilt. This was not the place he would have chosen.

My mind was tired of questions. Jenkins was still not removed from suspicion. No one was. I was no closer to getting any answers than I had ever been.

10

I found Mike Boyle on the practice football field at the west end of the campus. The first team was scrimmaging a group of substitutes who were running through the plays of one of the schools on the weekend's double-header. I saw Boyle roving wide to defend against an attempted end run, saw him follow the play, not moving fast, until suddenly he was charging forward, bouncing off the interference in such a way that he kept his feet and sliced through to the halfback who was caught open and hemmed in near the sidelines, a sitting duck for the tackle that slammed him to the ground. And then Boyle was on his feet, amazingly nimble and springy for such a big man, trotting away without glancing back at the runner, who rose slowly and stiffly.

The deceptive ease of the play showed why Boyle was an All-American candidate. It also revealed something I had heard about the big roving tackle--whose position was one added to football's original eleven-man team in order to give the defense some needed help in the increasingly wide-open style of the game. Boyle showed an uncanny ability to divine what the opponent was going to do. Somehow, wherever a play went, he was there in front of it, anticipating it almost as if he knew precisely where it was going. The fact was an innocent one, but now it made me wonder as I watched him in action. Everything was suspect now, I thought. Nothing was innocent.

The scrimmaging continued for twenty minutes while I watched. Then the first team was called off the field for a rest and the second unit went in against the same tired group of subs. Some of the first team limbered up after the bruising workout by running up and down the sidelines. Others flipped a football or just stood watching.

I walked toward Mike Boyle. As I neared him he gulped water from a ladle dipped into a pail and spewed it out in a great gusher. Then he drank, his throat working visibly, sweat pouring down his face to mix with the water that spilled around his mouth and ran down his throat. He seemed to do everything in a big, robust way. In the padded uniform, he appeared immense, twice as broad as I and towering over me. He had not seemed nearly as big in street clothes.

I stood waiting while he drank. I was sure that he had not noticed my approach but he spoke as he dropped the ladle into the pail.

"Hi, Prof. Been running into any more cars?"

"I manage to keep out of the way of most of them."

He grinned. His mouth was full lipped and wide, matching the proportions of a prominent nose that had once been broken and an unruly mass of black hair. Only the eyes were too small for the face, but that might have been due to the habitual squint against the sun of a young man who spent a great deal of his time outdoors.

"You professors kill me," Boyle said. "What was on your mind, Prof? A poem or something?"

"Something I heard."

"Yeah? It must have been good," he said offhandedly, "to make you walk in front of the only damn car on the street."

"It was," I said.

The small brown eyes regarded me curiously and I wondered if their glint held amusement or something deeper.

"Well, you better be careful," Boyle said. "Hearing things like that won't do you any good if you're dead."

I read menace into the words, but it was belied by the faintly contemptuous grin on his face. He had the habitual cockiness which I had often seen in the professional campus athlete to whom public adulation has come too soon, before the mind is mature enough to discount it. The attitude was always irritating.

"That's a nice looking girlfriend of yours," I said, perhaps too casually. "Isn't she a physics major?"

"Helen? Yeah, she's a brain," he agreed. "A cute kid, though," he added, as if the combination of cuteness and intelligence was cause for surprise. "We have a ball."

"Miss Hendricks said you were going steady."

"Yeah? You might say that, Prof. But I'm not the kind of guy that likes to be tied down. You know?"

I was groping, trying to find a way to ask him where he had been the night before without seeming to be probing. I found myself disliking the youthful arrogance and it was an effort to keep the amiably stupid smile on my lips. I stood for a moment in silence, watching the scrimmage. The subs executed an intricate play that caught the defense completely out of position for the pass. Boyle cursed vehemently.

"They should have smelled that one a mile off," he growled.

"Doesn't the coach object when you go out on dates during the week?" I asked suddenly. "Or do you have a curfew?"

He spat vigorously. "Nuts," he said. "I'm his bread and butter. I go out when I want to."

I hesitated. "I thought I saw you and Helen again last night," I said. "Pretty late, too. I was on my way home from a movie."

He swung around slowly and the small brown eyes caught mine in a fixed stare. The indefinable trace of contempt marked the expression of his eyes and mouth.

"Prof," he said softly, "you didn't see me and Helen out last night. You got something on your mind. Maybe you should tell me what it is."

"I guess I was mistaken," I said, glad at that moment that I had had the sense to pick this time and place to sound him out, with a hundred people in clear view and within shouting distance. I was not sure what the hint of ugliness in his voice and manner signified. The thickly-muscled chest and arms didn't frighten me. Rather it was the thought of this brutal strength directed by a supremely powerful intelligence.

"Yeah, you made a mistake, Prof. Helen was with me last night but you didn't see us. I tell you what. You want to know if Helen was with me last night, you just go ask her, huh? And don't bother me with your nosy questions."

"I can assure you I wasn't being nosy," I said in my best and huffiest imitation of professorial dignity. "I was merely making conversation."

"Sure you were. Well, you just go talk to yourself, Prof. Only watch out for those cars. We'd miss you around here."

He turned his back on me and began to do a series of leg exercises, squatting and jumping erect, thick thighs stretching the pants of his uniform each time he dropped into the crouch.

I walked away slowly. The momentary irritation I felt over the open contempt shown by a muscle-headed athlete was not important. But if his statement about being with Helen Darrow could be believed, it was highly significant. It meant that they could vouch for each other, providing that they were together at the time Lois Worthington was killed. Boyle was the one suspect I knew who could easily have broken the girl's neck without even breathing hard. But I was convinced that Lois' death was linked to the aliens and I knew there were not three of them. There was the man who had been in the back booth and one student. Not two. Helen Darrow could prove that both she and Mike Boyle were innocent. In one stroke the possible number of suspects would be cut in half.

11

I felt a compulsion to keep moving. Even the negative results I had garnered so far gave me a feeling of accomplishing something. In addition I was avoiding being a fixed target. The fact that the aliens had not already struck again surprised me. Almost two full days had passed since the first hastily improvised attempt on my life. It was not comforting to reflect that they would want to be absolutely sure of me the second time--and it was probably not easy to arrange a foolproof accident.

Besides--came the chilling thought--they had been busy the night before with Lois Worthington.

I needed greater mobility. That meant a car. I rented a small closed aluminum model from a lot near the university. While the cost was high, I seemed to have acquired a new indifference to economics. Whether I ate next week or paid next month's rent didn't seem to matter any more. My entire perspective had gradually been changing. Even the conditioned obedience to academic rules of propriety was disappearing. Twenty-four hours before I had been reluctant to seek Lois' address from the registrar's office, afraid that my motive might be questioned. That had cost the girl her life. Now I had no hesitation about going to the office for the two addresses I wanted. Ironically, the girl behind the counter didn't even appear curious. I wouldn't have cared if she had.

Was this the schizophrenic's apathy, his progressive lack of orientation? There were gaps in the days when I had done habitual things like shaving and changing clothes. I couldn't remember doing them. The car's mirror reflected an image that could have been someone else, a young man whose face showed little evidence of strain and fatigue. In fact, despite my lack of sleep, I didn't feel tired. I felt as if I had been wound up tight and any minute I would be released and would begin to spin madly.

Madly. The word stuck. It kept coming back, the awful fear. My stumbling investigations had a double-edged motive: to find the aliens--and to prove that I was not mad. And I was slowly, inexorably, trapping myself in a narrowing circle. If I sat back, if I did nothing, I wouldn't know for sure. I could believe in mysterious beings from outer space, in sinister plots against me, in the hallucination of bodiless voices. I wouldn't have to confront unpleasant implications about morbid attempts at self-destruction or a disintegrating personality.

Even during the twenty-seven years of my life, society had come a long way in its attitude toward insanity. No longer was it viewed with a sense of shame or revulsion, something to be ignored or swept into a corner of society where you didn't have to look at it. But it was still the nation's number one disease, it still inspired the terror of the unknown. We had had many scientific breakthroughs--the famous virus break in 1971 which meant the end of cancer, the virtual elimination of the common cold; the successful "heart patch" of 1975 which changed heart disease from a leading killer to a rarely fatal disease; the total elimination of polio and multiple sclerosis and many other vicious enemies of the human organism. But the mind remained impregnable.

There had been gigantic strides in treatment, but mental hospitals were still jammed far beyond capacity. One American in five had some form of mental illness. Some, the luckier ones, found quick cures in the K7U drugs available under prescription, the laboratory narcotic that had proved startlingly effective, enabling you to induce exaggerated symptoms of psychoses under their influence, thus making possible an accurate diagnosis that could lead to prompt treatment. But there had been many cases of alarming toxic side effects from K7U. And in one area of mental illness the miracle drug had quite a different result. It accelerated the advanced stages of paranoid schizophrenia and its rarer, more logically organized cousin, paranoia.

There was a small bottle of K7U pills in the top drawer of the built-in chest in my trailer bedroom, a supply I had surreptitiously borrowed from the psychology laboratory when I first became aware of what seemed hallucinatory voices. I had been afraid to use them. If mine were a minor illness, the pills would expose it to accurate treatment. There was the risk of side effects but that did not deter me. My symptoms did.

The hallucination of voices where no one was present was a common one. It was frequently allied to a fairly well organized delusional system in which the person held the bizarre conviction that supra-human beings were trying to possess or destroy him--and often was convinced that he himself had some extraordinary powers that accounted for the persecution. He might seem quite normal in other phases of his life, well-oriented to his surroundings except for a tendency to withdraw socially, avoiding close personal relationships, and an increasing emotional apathy sometimes alternating with moments of exaggerated feeling.

This symptomatic pattern was common in paranoid schizophrenia.

Grimly I thrust aside the conclusion to which my thoughts had led me, ignoring the tight stomach cramp of fear, pretending that the reason for panic did not exist.

I was heading south through the Culver basin, the west end of the city's sprawling complex of trailer courts that ranged from the utilitarian government projects for low income dwellings to luxurious resort-like courts. I stayed off the automatic drive freeways, preferring to control the car manually even though it meant a slower trip. I needed contact with busy, noisy, normal humanity.

Moving on the ground level streets through the trailer basin gave me a viewpoint I had not had in two years. I had lived in the basin with my mother up to the time of her death. Afterwards I had obeyed the inclination to cut myself off from everything and everyone I had known. I had been fortunate in finding the vacancy in the court off Mulholland Drive. In a city of sixteen million people forever bursting out of their housing, that had been an even luckier chance than I had realized. There was already a public clamor to re-zone Beverly Hills for apartments and middle-income trailer courts. It was the city's last remaining area of private homes and only the vast wealth and influence of the rich and politically powerful who lived there had kept it from being overwhelmed by the creeping mass of trailers and great apartment cities.

Now, viewing the basin after a long absence, I could see the smothering effects of overcrowding. The sidewalks were so jammed that people had to move in funereal procession. At those rare cross streets where there was not a pedestrian underpass there were three minute intervals while cars waited for the surging wave of pedestrians to flow across the street. Automobile traffic was heavy in spite of the great numbers who no longer drove, preferring to take the speedy elevated trains which thundered overhead at frequent intervals. And over the whole area there was an unending murmur of sound, of feet and horns and voices and loudspeakers of public telescreens and taped music, the whole orchestra of sound like the unending drone that would exist in the center of a giant beehive. And the city smelled. It smelled of sweat and oil and seared meat and smoke and French perfumes. It smelled of humanity penned into a seemingly airless enclosure. I had the feeling of being imprisoned within solid walls of sound and smell and motion.

The world was fast becoming much too small. Over twenty-five years of uninterrupted peace had combined with the achievements of science against sickness and disease and accident to produce a vast population explosion with all of its attendant overcrowding and unemployment and food shortages. The world needed space. Already the crime rate was climbing alarmingly. Traditional food resources were being exhausted.

We needed the universe to grow in. But what enemies lay waiting for us on those distant planets circling through the void? Was it conceivable that I, alone in all the world, had met the first of those enemies? That I held the fate of mankind in my hands? Would anyone believe me if I could warn those who might save us?

No. They wouldn't listen. An overcrowded world had produced a surplus of fanatic prophets of doom. They would be sympathetic, the leaders who might hear my cry of warning. If I got violent, they would forcibly confine me for treatment. But if what I believed was not madness but reality, and if I failed to stop the aliens, humanity would perish.

Absorbed in thought I missed the intersection I was searching for. In no time, I was lost in the maze. The street pattern was so chaotic that, even with a map, it took me an hour to find what I sought, the Lucky Galaxy Trailer Court. By then it was dusk and I realized I would probably be arriving just at dinner time.