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—"
"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."