Part 6

I wondered what the Darrows would be like.

The trailer was quite old, slightly larger than my own, set on its own small plot of ground with a tiny cement patio and several square yards of grass and garden, carefully tended. In spite of its age, the trailer had a look of well-scrubbed cleanliness and perfect repair, an air of privacy and pride. I remembered my mother's attempts to keep our trailer clean and comfortable and homelike, and how restless and ill at ease she had felt in the newer trailer we had bought after my father's legacy to her, a modern trailer made of materials that shone without cleaning, full of gadgets that made cooking effortlessly impersonal and housework obsolete.

The blinds were not drawn in the Darrow trailer. I could see a man of middle age standing in the living room before a three-dimensional TV screen. He had his arm cocked in the pose of a football player about to throw a pass. In the kitchen a plump little woman moved back and forth busily, her back toward me. I saw no sign of Helen Darrow as I went up the short walk to the door.

The man answered my knock. He had a short, spare figure and defeated eyes surrounded by wrinkles that suggested he had once laughed a great deal. He carried his shoulders erect and square with a suggestion of defiant pride. At the moment the corners of his mouth were pulled down in an expression of irritation. "What is it?" he snapped.

"Is Helen in?" I asked.

Curiosity stirred in the dull eyes. "Nope. But she'll be back in a few minutes. We're just about to eat," he added pointedly.

"Ask the young man in," a voice called from within the trailer.

"Well, I don't want to interrupt your dinner," I said. "I just wanted to talk to your daughter for a few minutes."

"Nonsense," the woman said, appearing suddenly beside the man. "Come right in."

I hesitated. The man turned his back on me and trotted back to the TV screen. The woman beamed cheerfully at me. I stepped inside, feeling uncomfortable about my mission.

"My name is Cameron," I said awkwardly. "I--I'm an instructor at the university."

"Well, isn't that nice, George? He's one of Helen's teachers."

"No, I'm not," I said quickly. "But I know her and--"

"Won't you stay for dinner? Have you eaten?"

"I couldn't do that."

"Rubbish," Mrs. Darrow said brightly. "There's plenty, and it's always nice to have a guest when you're a good cook. And I am," she added with unaffected pleasure.

I smiled. The odors of fresh vegetables cooking filled the small room. "I'll bet you are," I said. "But I can't stay. I have another call to make."

"You have to stop to eat sometime," she said placidly, ignoring my protests and getting another plate from the built-in rack.

There was an unexpected thump from the living area. I turned to see George Darrow rising from the couch and going through the motions of dusting himself off. His eyes glittered with pleasure. I heard the announcer's voice from the TV set talking excitedly about someone just getting a pass away before being dumped. The pass was complete for a fifteen yard gain. With a faint smile, I realized that Darrow was one of those millions of sports addicts who lived for the synthetic participation games so popular now on television.

"You can eat while you're talking to Helen," Mrs. Darrow said behind me. "Unless it's private, of course...."

"No," I said quickly. "I really shouldn't be bothering her but I thought she might be able to help me."

"You just go into the living room with father. Helen'll be here any minute. George, isn't that game over yet?"

"We're in the last quarter," George Darrow said excitedly. "Watch that safety man!"

I was in time to see a pass skip off the outstretched fingers of a defensive halfback. Darrow sighed with heart-felt relief.

"That was close," he muttered. "We're playing the New York Bruins," he added. "I'm with the Toronto Titans tonight."

I took a seat at the side of the room so as not to get in the little man's way. It was remarkable how his eyes had lost their lifelessness. They were avid, greedy with interest. He bent forward eagerly, calling imaginary signals under his breath. The ball was snapped and it seemed to spiral directly toward us in the startling illusion of the dimensional screen. George Darrow reached to gather it in and faded back a couple of steps to pass, looking for a receiver. The announcer's voice rose in an animated description of the action.

I thought of the billions of men and sports-crazy youngsters throughout the world who would be duplicating his actions, just as he imitated the movements of the passer on the screen now, taking the passer's place through the trickery of the television cameras. The participation sports events provided a year round diet of baseball and football, hockey and jai alai, and various other games and contests in which the viewer could have the vicarious thrill of taking part. I had never enjoyed them. I could only contrast the closed, air-conditioned, private sports arenas, where the professional athletes played before the eyes of the cameras alone, with the noisy confusion of the stadiums I remembered from my childhood, where teams battled before live audiences, where you saw the action itself and not an illusion of it.

But George Darrow's sports enthusiasm might prove useful to me. He would probably not be at all reluctant to talk about Mike Boyle. I waited impatiently for the game to end. Except for the announcer's voice with its false excitement and George Darrow's quick breathing and occasional grunts, the trailer's peace was disturbed only by the small, familiar kitchen sounds of a woman preparing a family meal, happy in the surprise addition of a guest. The place was full of her warmly sentimental touches--frilly draperies, hand-crafted artifacts, an elaborately framed telephone screen in rare genuine maple. My own trailer in comparison was bare and cold and impersonal. I began to feel more keenly the absurdity of any suspicion that this warm and modest home, so typically human, could house an unearthly creature.

George Darrow pressed a chair button to turn off the TV set. The game was over. The room was abruptly silent. He sank into a chair, staring at me. After a moment he coughed, seemed about to speak, thought better of it.

"You must know Mike Boyle pretty well," I said casually.

The man's eyes brightened again. "Mike? Sure do. Best roving tackle in the country, that boy."

I had struck the chord. "Yes. I saw Mike this afternoon scrimmaging. A couple of tough games coming up this weekend."

"We'll take 'em," Darrow said. "Mike should make All-American in a walk, the kind of season he's having. He's the difference in our team." He paused, then looked up happily. "Mike and Helen are going steady, you know."

"Yes, I knew. That reminds me, did Helen see him last night? I heard the coach talked to him about being out late, again, breaking training."

Darrow laughed. "They may talk to Mike but he don't listen. He does just what he wants, that boy. Yeah, he and Helen had a date last night. Like most nights. But they weren't out late, were they, mother?"

Mrs. Darrow carried a steaming bowl over to the table at one end of the kitchen. "I'd say about eleven," she said. "Mike's a good boy, Mr. Cameron. I never worry when Helen is out with him."

"I'm glad to hear that," a voice broke in.

We all turned toward the door. The slender brunette I had seen with Boyle stood in the doorway watching me, her face unsmiling.

I rose. "We were just talking about you."

"I heard."

She took a couple of steps into the room, her eyes still sharply observant, and I wondered whether there was anything of wariness in them--or just a girl's natural suspicion of a stranger who comes around asking questions.

"Mr. Cameron stopped by to see you," her mother said cheerfully, "so I asked him to stay for dinner. It's all ready."

"Maybe he doesn't have time," the girl suggested.

"He has to eat," the woman said, briskly appraising my tall, angular frame. "And he looks like he could use a good, home-cooked meal."

I smelled the heaping bowl of vegetables and the thick slices of real bread. Sharp teeth of hunger gnawed at me.

"I guess I am hungry at that."

Although it was obvious that she did not welcome my presence, Helen Darrow did not object, nor did she press immediately to find out what I wanted to see her about. The four of us sat around the small table and ate. The girl and her father were silent. Mrs. Darrow talked with unaffected garrulousness about Helen and her aspirations in physics, her childhood successes in school, the happiness she had brought her parents. Pride bloomed in the mother's voice. The girl would sometimes smile slightly and make a mild protest which her mother brushed aside. I began to realize that the girl was not actively unfriendly, simply reserved and rather serious by disposition. Soon I was feeling quite comfortable with the intimate family group. I liked them and even envied them a little. Any suspicions I might have had evaporated. When the girl's question came at last, near the end of the meal, voiced casually as if it were not important, I felt guilty about persisting in a pointless investigation. At the same time, I had to come up with a plausible excuse for my visit.

"What was it you wanted to see me about, Mr. Cameron?"

I hesitated. "You remember that accident I had the other night?"

"Of course."

"You were in an accident?" Mrs. Darrow asked with quick concern.

"Nothing serious," I said. "But I wanted to get in touch with the man who was driving the car and I seem to have lost his address. I wondered if by any chance you remember it."

Helen Darrow frowned. "Harrison, I think his name was." She seemed to accept my explanation without question. "Albert or Alfred or something like that."

"Do you remember the address?"

"Noooo. No, I can't help you there, I'm afraid."

I smiled appreciatively. "Well, it was worth a try. Maybe one of the others will remember it. I tried to phone you last night," I added with a studied lack of emphasis. "Around eight. But you must have been out."

"I was with Mike. We went out to dinner."

"That's funny," her mother said. "Father and I were in all evening."

There was an awkward silence.

"No, we weren't," George Darrow said abruptly. "We went over to the Wallaces for a few minutes. Just about eight o'clock it was."

"That must have been when I called," I said with relief. I rose from the table. "I hate to eat and run, and I do appreciate your hospitality, Mrs. Darrow, but--"

"Won't you stay and have some coffee?"

"No, I have some other calls to make. I wish I could."

"Well, you must come again."

"I'll try to do that. It isn't often I get a chance to eat a meal like this."

The girl followed me to the door. "I hope you can find the man," she said, more openly friendly now than she had been in the beginning. More at ease, I thought, liking her, liking the serious, intent face and the quiet, intelligent eyes.

"I thought you were going to ask me about that girl who was killed," she said.

I felt an involuntary tension. "No. You heard about that?"

"It was all over school today."

I relaxed. Of course it would have been a sensational topic of conversation on the campus. I could imagine the speculations, the arguments, the macabre jokes.

"A terrible thing," I said automatically. I turned to leave. "Thanks for your trouble. And thank your parents for me again."

I went out into the cool night. The girl stood watching me, a small slim figure outlined against the warm light within the trailer.

Once again my search had been fruitless. And now I had talked to all four of the students who were in the booth of the Dugout that fateful night.

I couldn't believe that any one of them was capable of inhuman powers. Or of murder.

12

When I dialed Laurie Hendricks' number a male servant answered. The number was a Beverly Hills exchange. The man informed me politely that Miss Hendricks was not at home but that she might be reached at the beach trailer. This was the first I knew of a place at the beach, but its existence was in keeping with the expensive luxury of space I could glimpse on the telephone screen as I talked to the servant. At that moment, I made a mental connection I had failed to reach before, coupling the name Hendricks with the economy two-passenger helicopter that had brought flying within the reach of the average family's budget. The Hendricks helicopter! The name was so familiar that I had not thought to link it with Laurie Hendricks, but the wealth evident in the existence of a private home in Beverly Hills plus a beach trailer suggested that she might indeed be the daughter of Ben Hendricks, air pioneer extraordinary.

The servant gave me the address and phone number of the beach trailer. Laurie answered on the fourth ring.

"Hello?"

Her image leaped onto the screen. She was dripping wet, her red hair clinging to her head in dark, heavy strands. I glimpsed behind her a damp bathing suit tossed carelessly over the arm of a chair. She held a huge beach towel in front of her chest with one hand pressed between her breasts, the towel draping itself tantalizingly over the fullness on either side of her hand.

"Laurie? This is Paul Cameron."

I flicked the two-way switch so that she could view me on her screen. There was a moment's pause while her eyes stared steadily at me from the lifelike image. I wondered if she was aware that the picture was turned on at her end of the line, or if she was always so careless about dress when she answered the phone.

"What do you want?" Her voice was cool, distant.

"We were interrupted the other night."

"Were we?"

"I've got to talk to you."

"I don't think we have anything to talk about."

"I'm coming out there. Will you be waiting?"

"You needn't bother. I have a date tonight--with Bob. I have to get ready now so you must excuse me."

"You're going to listen to me whether you want to or not," I said, suddenly angry. "There was nothing for you to worry about between me and Lo--"

"Why should I worry?"

She broke the connection. In the instant before the image faded she turned away. There was nothing to conceal the sculptured beauty of her back. I stared at the screen long after it had turned blank, wondering if this brief provocative display had been another moment of absent-minded indifference or a deliberate taunt.

It had destroyed the effect of her cold rejection.

* * * * *

I took the automatic freeway to the beach, setting the controls for the fast inner lane. I sat back while the electronic fingers automatically steered the car safely and smoothly into the lane and carried it forward at the set speed of a hundred and fifty miles an hour.

Thinking of Laurie's image on the screen, remembering the feel of her body and her soft lips pressing against mine, I felt a slow uncurling of desire. When I had obtained her address that afternoon, I had been methodically determined to follow up every possible avenue of suspicion. She had been too quick to throw herself at me in my trailer the night before, I had argued, too ready to provide me with an alibi when the police came. Now I knew that I had simply been deceiving myself. I had eliminated her from suspicion even before I tasted the human passion of her lips. I was going to her now because I needed her. I wanted to hold her and to lose myself in her, to forget fear and threats and self-tormenting doubts of my own sanity in the intense oblivion of love.

The westbound freeway reached the intersection of the automatic ocean causeway. I made the necessary instrument adjustments and shot out over the water onto the broad cement lanes that followed the coastline to the north, a modern eight lane platform suspended on pilings a quarter mile from the shore. There was a manual drive highway just inland from the beach for slow and local traffic, but if you wanted to make speed you took the causeway out over the--

It struck me like a blow below the belt. Water! The dream! A senseless, terrorized animal, I found myself scrabbling at the door, trying to force it open. The same automatic controls which guided the car along the road also froze the doors while the car was in motion. I came out of that first blind moment of panic and sat rigid in the seat, my eyes fixed on the white ribbon of pavement directly in front of me, refusing to look to either side at the black, pounding surf. Headlights rushed at me on the inbound lanes and hurtled past. The engine whined and wind buffeted the speeding car, but I imagined that I could hear above these sounds the crash of waves below me.

Revulsion came, bitter self-recrimination, contemptuous denunciations of my own animal fears. You're going to see Laurie, I told myself. There's nothing to be afraid of. You won't have to go near the water. You won't be alone. The nightmare of drowning is a phantom of the night, symbolical only, a graphic representation of your subconscious fear of sanity. Face it. Recognize it. Accept it.

But the voice, I thought. The voice of command. The alien mind. That is real. I have heard it while I was awake and fully rational. That was no dream symbol. That was real.

But was it? Hadn't I investigated every one of the suspects, the four ordinary young people who were supposed to be possessed by some incredible thing from Mars? Hadn't I convinced myself that each one was innocent? Wasn't it about time that I began facing the irrefutable facts, admitting that the weird plot against me was a fantastic concoction of a sick imagination, revealing a not very unusual hidden desire for self-destruction?

I grew calmer. In that moment the terror of insanity seemed less horrifying than the spectre of a vicious alien force that could possess and destroy me. At last I looked toward the shoreline at the familiar sight of waves rising to a white crest and toppling over to wash upon the beach. I had seen this a thousand times. It was nothing to be afraid of. It couldn't touch me.

I was nearing the stretch of beach where Laurie's trailer should be. Numbers flashed by at each of the ramps connecting the causeway with the shoreline road. I pushed the lane change button that would shift the car into the slower outer line of traffic. At the next ramp I turned off. The automatic controls cut off as soon as the car sped onto the ramp. My hands were sticky on the wheel and my arms quivered with tension, but seconds later I was turning onto the beach highway. I began to feel safer now that there was no longer any water under me.

The road rose and dipped with the curvature of the land. Crowding the hills to the right, on the inland side of the road, were luxurious beach apartments and nests of trailer courts, their lights creating a rich pattern in the darkness. Most of the choice land along the beach itself had been usurped by beach clubs and expensive resort hotels, except for an occasional luxury group of trailers. It was in one of these, the Beachcomber Trailer Lodge, that Laurie's trailer had a uniquely desirable front row site.

I parked off the road on a bluff overlooking the trailer village and the beach. Walking down, I could hear the rolling thunder of the surf, and each reverberating crash caused my body to flinch in the way that, watching a fight, you will seem to feel the thud of a telling blow. I tried not to think about the limitless black plain of water stretching beyond the narrow strip of beach.

Laurie's was a crisply modern mobile home with a large window facing the shoreline. Most of the surrounding trailers were dark and there was the stillness of the empty and unused about them. There were few cars about and only a couple of helicopters on the landing strip near the road. This was mostly a weekend resort, I concluded, for those who could afford the extreme luxury of a home in town and a summer or weekend hideout at the beach. At this season of the year, many of them were undoubtedly deserted.

I knocked. There was no sound from within the trailer. I raised my hand to knock again at the moment the door was pulled open.

Laurie stiffened. "You! I told you not to come."

"And I said I had to talk to you."

She started to close the door but I shoved through. The door slammed behind me.

She held herself stiff with anger, her small fists clenched, but even the rigidity of her body could not change the curving softness of breast and hip and thigh to which the pale green tissue of her dress clung. Confronting her in the small room, I felt the same quick surge of desire, the same overpowering response to her beauty that had swept over me the night before when her physical presence had seemed to dominate the confined space of my own trailer. I had never reacted to a woman so immediately and so forcefully.

How much of my reaction showed in the way I stared at her I don't know, but it seemed to me that the bright spark of anger in her green eyes subtly altered.

"I'm not sure what you're trying to prove," she said, less sharply than I had expected, "but this isn't the way. You can leave right now."

"No. I'm here and you're going to listen to me."

Abruptly she turned away, scooping up a light coat from the back of a chair. She started toward the door.

"If you want to talk, there's a restaurant not far up the road. Maybe the waitress will listen."

I caught her arm. "I had to talk to Lois," I said, my fingers digging into the soft flesh of her arm. "It was important and I can't explain why. But I never saw her except in the Dugout, I never went out with her, I never made a pass at her."

Laurie's face was still aloof, indifferent. "Is that supposed to mean something to me?"

"Yes!"

"What do I do now--start to melt?"

"Are you trying to tell me that what happened last night meant nothing to you? Just another lark?"

She wrenched free. "What did you expect? You didn't really believe that bit about the student having a crush on teacher, did you? I was having some fun, Professor. And tonight I'm having it with someone else!"

I almost hit her. Rage rocketed through me with an explosiveness that was so shockingly violent I barely held the arm drawn back for the blow. And in the next instant I had pinned her against the wall and my arms were tightening around her, my mouth imprisoning hers in a brutal, angry kiss that brought the taste of blood to my lips. I wasn't even aware whether or not she was struggling. I knew only that she was intensely, excitingly desirable and that the full warm length of her was pressed against me.

I stepped back, breathing hard and quick. There was a frozen moment of time suspended while I waited for her to explode.

Laurie laughed. "My God, Professor, you certainly do keep surprising me!"

She tossed the coat she had been holding in the direction of the chair. It missed and tumbled onto the floor. Ignoring it, she was already moving back into my arms.

"Let's try that again," she murmured. "But this time don't bite."

The kiss was long and deeply disturbing. When it ended I felt shaky. I wanted her--but for the first time I wondered if my emotional attraction to her went beyond that need, if I wasn't already completely in love with her. I stared at the puffed redness of her bruised lips, at the delicate bone structure beneath the smooth skin of her cheeks, at the vivid coloring of her eyes, and the painful knowledge came to me that I was not free to love, not until I knew--

"I--I think I'm a little afraid of you, Paul Cameron," she said in a voice that was younger, more subdued, less self-assured than I had ever heard it. "I think you'd better leave now."

"But--"