Part 7

"Please! It was true what I said about Bob--I do have a date with him. He should have been here by now." Her eyes were pleading. "I was mad at you. Besides--" she hesitated, her gaze searching my face as if she wanted to remember every line. "I think I need a little while to mull this over. This little girl isn't used to being swept off her feet. Not like this."

I reached for her but she backed away quickly. "No! Let's--let's see how we feel tomorrow when we're both a day older and wiser and--calmer. I'll be here--waiting for you."

At last I nodded. "You're right, Laurie. But if you let that blond kid--"

She smiled. "I can handle Bob."

She didn't move as I went to the door. Before I opened it her words came softly and with a surprising note of tenderness. "Goodnight--darling."

13

The trailer was in a slight hollow. From inside, you could see the white froth along the shore, but when you stepped down to the sand outside, a smooth ridge cut off the view of the water. I could hear the smash of a breaker coming in, the receding rattle as it washed back over a bed of stones. The sound didn't frighten me now. For the moment the dream had been forgotten. Laurie's last words drifted on the cool night air, bringing their own tingling warmth.

He struck out of darkness.

I had a split-second of warning, time enough to flinch against the whiplash of command. It didn't come. The shadow that had moved around the corner of the trailer closed in on me swiftly, but the blow was not a sickening mental force. It was a clumsily swinging fist that skidded painfully off my shoulder as I dodged. I heard a choking sob.

"Damn you!"

The white blob of a fist arched toward me and smashed against my jaw. I was caught off balance. Falling, I had a strange floating sensation. My cheek was numb. Even on the soft sand, the fall was jolting, and for a second I couldn't move. The figure stood panting over me and I saw blond hair caught in the slanting light from Laurie's window.

"Get up!" he raged. "Damn you, get up and fight!"

I laughed. Fear fell away from me and the reaction of relief was so intense that there was no room for anger or pain or even surprise. Jenkins! The jealous youth who had warned me to keep away from his girl.

The laughter enraged him even more. He dove on top of me. I rolled as his lean hard body slammed against me. His fingers tore at my chest, reaching for my throat. I fought back automatically, not really wanting to fight, desiring merely to stop this foolishness, yet instinctively defending myself. My flailing arm banged against the side of his head. He grunted. For an instant the pressure of his hold weakened. I wrenched free and tumbled away from him.

He came to his feet more quickly than I did. I was still in a crouch when he stepped in and brought up his knee in a short, vicious piston stroke. It exploded against my chin. My head snapped back and I toppled backwards like a limber doll.

"I'll kill you!" he snarled.

Still I felt neither anger nor fright. There was a fleeting sense of alarm, of recognition that here was a real threat, something that had to be stopped, not just a laughable mistake. And there was pain. Blood filled my mouth and my jaw was bruised and throbbing. But everything was clear and rational and without emotion.

Somehow I got to my feet again. Absurdly the thought crossed my mind that he wasn't playing the game according to the rules. You weren't supposed to kick a man when he was down, you shouldn't use your knee at all. Then there was no more time for reflection. He rushed at me, fists pumping, and I managed to sidestep. He whirled and came at me again. His fist grazed the top of my head. I punched back, hitting for the vulnerable stomach, hoping only to slow him down. I wasn't breathing very well and I was aware of blood streaming from my nose.

We fought standing up now, without speaking, the thud of a blow echoed by a grunt or a gasp, our breathing loud and wheezing. My arms began to feel leaden where they had caught the heavy impact of his fists.

"Don't be a damned fool!" I gasped.

"I warned you!"

I was wearing down, like a mechanical doll wound up and now nearing the end of its dance, beginning to slow, each jerky movement more labored, more artificial. He was younger, in better condition, harder, stronger, more rested. I saw the end coming. His blows broke through my barriers of elbow and shoulder more frequently. He must have sensed that I was weakening and he pressed his attack more savagely.

I went down again, not so much from one blow as from an accumulation of them. The thought came dimly to me that I had no hope of winning because my heart wasn't in it. I didn't care. I had no sense of being a warrior battling for my love against the evil knight. I was apathetic. I fought only because I had to defend myself. It had nothing to do with Laurie, nothing to do with courage or honor.

Without knowing how or why, I was on my feet again, aiming for the flat hard stomach, oblivious of the knotted fist that slashed across my cheek as I drove in, not knowing why I persisted in this futile form of resistance.

A scream ripped across the darkness. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Laurie standing in a pool of light at the front of the trailer. The cry must have stopped Jenkins. I was already driving in, smashing my fist into the only target I knew, the unguarded stomach. He gave a short, emphatic grunt.

Laurie cried out again and rushed toward us. Jenkins sagged backwards and sat down hard. I stood over him, swaying, and spat blood onto the sand.

"My God! What are you doing, Paul? Why?"

"He started it," I mumbled childishly.

Jenkins said nothing. He sat where he had dropped, doubled over, his fists pressed into his stomach. I heard a strangled sound as he tried to suck air into his lungs.

Laurie began to cry. I stared at her stupidly. It seemed to be too much trouble to speak again.

"You--you bully!" she choked through tears. "Why did you have to fight him? You didn't have to!"

It would take too long to explain. She really ought to understand that I hadn't wanted to fight. I couldn't explain it all to her now.

She sank to her knees beside Jenkins. "Oh, Bob," she said soothingly. "You're hurt." She glared up at me. "Why do you always have to spoil things? Just when everything was so perfect, why--oh, go away! I never want to see you again!"

She held him gently, pressing his bent head against her bosom like a mother cradling her child. I wanted to tell her that he wasn't really hurt. I was the one who was hurt. Every bone in my body was broken. He'd only had the breath knocked out of him.

But I knew she wouldn't listen, and the effort of trying to convince her didn't seem worthwhile. Nothing mattered. I was dead tired and aching and very old.

Turning, I staggered away across the sand.

14

I sat in the little aluminum car for a long time. I don't know how long. The numbness slowly left my chest and arms and face, clearing the way for a thousand jabbing needles of pain. But the emotional numbness, the dull apathy, remained.

A fight shouldn't wreck you like this, I thought. At twenty-seven you aren't exactly an old man. Weren't you supposed to reach your physical peak at that age?

Why had I felt no real anger? The unemotional, automatic resistance during the fight was abnormal. My feeling now of being drained and empty was disproportionate. A reaction to the weeks of strain, perhaps, with the physical beating I had taken providing the finishing blows.

Or did it go deeper than that? My reaction to Laurie was not normal either. The emotional pendulum was swinging far too wide at both ends of its arc. I was not a kid any more, not an unstable adolescent. Kissing a young and beautiful girl was not a unique, soul-shattering experience. The moment's passion with Laurie had meant too much. Granted she was no ordinary girl, and in my self-imposed isolation I had not been leading what could be called a full and satisfying sex life. Yet neither of these facts seemed to account fully for the highly charged, volatile reaction I had had to her on the two occasions we had been alone for a few minutes.

Could she be exercising some unnatural influence?

As I examined the thought a feeling of disgust welled up in me. It won't work, I thought dully, the revulsion itself a gray, listless emotion. Laurie is dangerous only if you're afraid of love, timid in the face of a strong relationship. She is not a monster. Nor is Jenkins. He had his opportunity right there on the beach in the darkness. It would have been easy for him to use the brutal force of a super-mind instead of awkward fists. He could have done it before Laurie heard the sounds of fighting and came out. It could have been done as it was in the dream. "Drown! Drown yourself!" And no one would have known how or why it happened.

No. Not Jenkins, not Laurie, not Helen Darrow or Mike Boyle. It had to be one of these and it was none of them. So I could no longer hide behind my bizarre delusion. There were no aliens. There was no enemy but the one who hid inside me. Myself.

And yet--there was one fact which was not imaginary. Lois Worthington had died. She had seen the man in the back booth, I had tried to reach her, and she had been brutally murdered. This fact was all too real. And the vision I had had so long ago of my father's death, that could not be dismissed or explained away now. That too had happened. At the time I was able to believe in coincidence. No longer.

Moreover, if the aliens existed only as part of an elaborate delusion of persecution, if whispered voices were hallucinations, there should have been accompanying symptoms before this, evidence of a greater deterioration of my thinking. But nothing else had changed. The world looked the same to me. I didn't even have to look far for a plausible explanation of my abrupt swings from apathy to extreme emotionalism. This instability could logically be accounted for by the unnatural pressures of fear and worry.

Dubiously I examined the evidence for and against the existence of the aliens. The structure of argument on which I could support belief in my sanity was weak, thin-walled, its foundations shallow. I closed my mind to shelter it against the winds of fact and logic.

* * * * *

I drove slowly away from the beach trailer community. There had been no sign of Laurie or Jenkins while I sat in the car. Some of the pain in my bruised body had subsided. Nothing after all had been broken except the tip of one tooth whose nerve throbbed like a hot wire in my jaw. My clothes were torn and bloody and the skin had been ripped off my knuckles, but otherwise I had come out of the fight in fair shape. The bruises would turn yellow and finally fade away, new skin would cover the knuckles, the puffiness around one eye would disappear, a plastic cap would disguise the broken tooth.

I glanced at the time dial on the instrument panel. It was not yet eleven o'clock. Still early. The forty-eight hours which had passed since the voices drew me across the campus toward the Dugout seemed more like endless weeks. Time had lost its meaning.

At this hour the shoreline road along which I moved was relatively deserted. Only an occasional car approached me along the outbound lanes. My pace was slow and one or two cars accelerated to pass me. The headlights of another slow-moving car bobbed in my rear view telescreen. Out on the causeway over the water traffic was much heavier, a glittering pattern of speeding lights.

A cat darted away from the side of the road. My foot jammed down in a sudden reflex action. I swerved sharply. For a second, the cat disappeared under the hood of the car and I felt a quick tension in expectation of the thump of contact. Then the cat reappeared, somehow having eluded the squealing tires, and I straightened the car. It had slowed almost to a crawl.

Accelerating, I glanced automatically into the rear view screen. The headlights of the car behind me were exactly the same distance away they had been before. For a moment I stared dully at the screen, not comprehending the significance of the other car's movement, yet aware that something was wrong. Understanding came slowly and, with it, the first bright streak of emotion to penetrate the gray cloud which enveloped me, a quick pulsation of fear.

I drove faster, climbing swiftly up from thirty to fifty miles an hour. The headlights remained steady on the screen, keeping pace. The car was following me.

There was a frozen moment when reality slipped away from me. I was aware of a creeping coldness, like the cutting chill of a damp wind, penetrating until my flesh crawled and my teeth began to chatter uncontrollably. Somehow I kept the car on the road in its lane, maintaining the same speed. Then I saw the lights staring at me like eyes from the screen and I came out of my horrified trance with a jolt.

I had lost precious seconds. My foot jammed down and the little car leaped forward, the purr of its engine rising to a steady whine. The hills on my left side were a blur, and the clustered trailers on the ocean side of the road zipped past me with slapping wind sounds. I was approaching a speed of a hundred miles an hour and I had to fight to keep the light car on the road. It seemed to bounce and leap, hardly touching the ground.

And there were the headlights, dancing and winking on the small screen. The needle of the speedometer touched a hundred, edged past it--and at that instant I knew that I had played right into the pursuer's hands. This was what he wanted. This was to be the accident.

I slammed on the power brakes. They held, grinding loudly, while the car dipped and veered sharply, sliding into a skid.

"Release the brake!"

The thought cracked across my mind like the blow of a club. Momentarily stunned, I still kept my foot on the brake. The car was skidding dangerously now and the wheel seemed to have a life of its own, twisting and jumping in my hands. The scream of tires was like a cry of terror. But the car's speed had dropped swiftly.

"Release it!"

Sweat started on my forehead and under my arms. For a long moment my mind was locked in conflict with the force that tried to break it. Then, as if it were a wooden appendage attached to me but out of my control, my leg jerked. The car rolled free.

"Drive faster!"

I started to obey automatically as if the command had been my own, the message swiftly telegraphed from brain to foot. Anger brought resistance. I concentrated on steering the slowing car, trying to shut my mind, to create a blank wall of stubborn resistance. The muscles in my legs jerked with tension.

"Faster!" The word broke through like one of Jenkins' fists smashing through my feeble guard.

And, while my hands clenched the wheel until they ached, my foot inched inexorably toward the accelerator, nudged it, clamped down. The car lurched forward with gathering speed. A crushing weight of defeat made me slump on the seat. Tears of frustration blurred my vision of the road ahead. The speedometer climbed rapidly. A car's horn blasted and I swerved from the middle of the road back into my lane. I caught a glimpse of a red, angry face flashing past. The familiar headlights winked in the rear view screen like the eyes of the alien whose power had smashed through my flimsy barrier of resistance. Despair twisted like a fist in my stomach.

"Faster!" The voice that spoke in my mind was cold, unmoved, arrogant in its knowledge of power.

And I obeyed, letting myself relax, trying to ease the aching muscles of my arms and legs, not thinking about what I was going to do or what was about to happen to me. The speedometer's needle began to waver erratically above one hundred and ten miles an hour.

"Faster! Faster!"

The one word, repeated over and over, drumming in my brain until it obliterated thought. I was an automaton, steering the lurching, whining car along the blurred ribbon of road, a puppet controlled by tenuous strings of mental force, a wooden puppet without will or thought of its own, dumbly responding to the master's word.

And at last it came, the command, so dreaded in the deep recesses of my consciousness that protest shrieked in my mind, breaking me out of the stupor.

"Turn the wheel!"

And in that instant, when the immediate pull of obedience was almost overwhelming, a final frenzied cry of defiance was heard. I saw ahead the slanting curve of a ramp shooting out toward the ocean causeway. For long agonizing seconds I held out against the pressure--and when my hands moved on the wheel it was at that precise and last possible second which sent the car careening onto the ramp and into a long banked curve.

The maneuver caught my pursuer by surprise. There was a brief, bewildered respite before the clear cold voice spoke again, stamping out the elation that gripped me. The line of the causeway beckoned, so near now, less than a quarter of a mile away--

"Turn! Turn now!"

And I had spent the last remaining reserve of strength to resist. My hands obeyed. I spun the wheel.

The little car bounced off the low parapet at the edge of the ramp, kicked back out of control and shot across the narrow cement strip, its tail beginning a slow fishtailing motion, sliding into a spin. The low barrier on the other side of the ramp loomed up swiftly and I cringed against the impact--

And the car was caught by a sudden jerk that slammed me against the door with bone-jarring force. I felt the invisible electronic fingers of the automatic road controls grasping at the car, pulling it back, fighting against the momentum that carried it forward. Hope leaped in my chest. I had made it!

For a flashing second the car seemed to hang suspended, caught between the conflicting forces, and I was aware of the speeding lanes of traffic on the causeway now so near to me, of the whirling canopy of the star-stabbed sky, of the gray cold water surging far below. But the car's momentum had been too great. The plucking fingers of the electronic ribbon imbedded in the road slipped and lost their hold. The car's left front wheel and fender hit the parapet.

And the car was in mid-air, leaping the low wall and tumbling end over end in a long, soaring arc of flight, plummeting down, down, to smash at last into the wall of water. The wall broke and crashed around me and I plunged through it into a vast, unending pool of darkness.

15

Faces swam through the water, distorted and shimmering. There was a distant roaring in my ears like the clamor of the sea trapped in a seashell. The din faded away gradually and in the immensity of silence I waited shivering for the unseen force that would grip my mind.

"It's a miracle!" someone said clearly.

My eyelids pushed open like dusty blinds. I saw the faces again, blurred like a picture slightly out of focus but much sharper than before. I remembered an earlier awakening when five pairs of eyes had stared down at me in open curiosity and I had flinched in fear. Or had it all been a dream from which I was only now awakening?

"Don't move," a man said.

I had no intention of moving. My head ached and there was a deep throbbing in my arm, extending from a point near the shoulder down past the elbow, a throbbing not really painful but curiously electric and tingling.

I closed my eyes and re-opened them. There were two pairs of eyes, set in two faces which were quite clear. A man and a woman, middle-aged or older. Strangers. The man's hair was steel grey and very wet against his skull. The woman looked like a bird. She bent toward me and I had the momentary impression that she was going to peck at me with her long, sharply-pointed nose.

"Can you hear us?" she asked in a thin, piping voice. "Do you know what we're saying?"

"Yes."

I thought I spoke aloud but she continued to watch me expectantly. Behind her the sky was black and the fact surprised me. I had somehow expected hot sunlight and a hard blue sky.

"Henry pulled you out of the car," the woman said. "We saw it happen."

I heard a breaker topple over and the swish-swish of two cars passing on the highway. Then I remembered.

"The voice!" I cried. "Turn the wheel!"

The man crouched over me threateningly. "What's that you said?"

I tried to twist away. Pain sliced through my head in a clean stroke that seemed to take the top of my skull off.

"Please!" I groaned. "The voice--"

"What about the voice?"

"It told me--turn--turn the wheel."

"Henry! Did you hear what he said?"

"He's delirious, mother. It don't mean anything."

"But he heard voices. He must be one of them."

"He doesn't know what he's saying."

My eyes had shut against the pain in my head. Opening them I saw the two people in sharply dimensional focus. The man was soaking wet. He appeared worried. The woman's bird-like features were curiously pinched, her eyes bright with excitement.

"Did you hear a voice?" she asked quickly. "Is that what you're trying to say? Did a voice speak to you?"

"Told me to turn," I said weakly. "The alien voice--"

"In your mind?" she demanded. "Can you hear voices--even when there aren't any people talking?"

I nodded faintly. "Tried to make me--kill myself."

"He needs a doctor," the man said suddenly.

"No!" The woman whirled on him. "The Exalted One would wish that he be brought to him."

"We aren't sure--"

"But he must be one who can hear the voices. You heard what he said--and you said yourself he should have been killed in that accident. If he hadn't been a Chosen One--"

"He might be hurt worse than we can see."

"The Swami will know. We must take him there."

Bewildered, I listened to them argue, not understanding what they could mean. They spoke in casual tones as if others had heard the voices. But if that were true then I was not alone, it wasn't something I had imagined--

"You've heard the voices?" I asked eagerly. "You've heard them?"

The brightness faded from her eyes, clouded over with sadness. She shook her head. "We try, Henry and me, but we can't hear them. We are weak. We have not learned the fullness of believing. But the Swami says we are approaching the purity of full knowledge." Her voice rose earnestly. "Our day will come--if not in this life, then in the next."

The man grunted, interrupting her. "Can you move your legs?" he asked of me.

I hesitated, then tried. I could wriggle my toes and flex my knees. I felt as if this were a great accomplishment.

The man shook his head. "You should have been killed," he said as if it were a grudging admission. "I guess maybe mother is right." He stood, turning toward the woman. "I'll bring the car down here. Don't let him move." He glanced down at me. "We can't do anything about your car right now. We'll report it and maybe they'll be able to fish it out. But the water's pretty deep there."

The loss of the car meant nothing to me. At the moment it did not even occur to me that the car was not mine and I would be responsible for any damage to it. The man had trudged up the beach toward the road and I stared at the bird woman.

"This person you're taking me to--has he heard them?"

"Oh, yes!" she said, evidently surprised. "He is exalted!"

I didn't understand. Fatigue pressed down on me and I was conscious of the pain in my head, of the deep throbbing in my arm. I tried to concentrate on what the couple had said, feeling an impatient excitement, but I couldn't seem to think clearly. I clung to the one fact that emerged clearly. There was someone else who had heard the voices, someone who could help me. I wouldn't be alone any more.

A car chugged through the soft sand and stopped nearby. A door opened. I felt hands sliding under my arms, lifting me. There was a cry of pain. A dizzying spiral of brightness whirled me around and around, released me, and I went sailing off into dark, empty space once more.

16