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.