21
Sleep had come to me suddenly—deep, exhausted sleep. The annoying sound nagged at the edges of my subconscious for a long time. I became remotely aware of it, a buzzing far off, droning on interminably. Vainly I tried to escape it, to bury myself in the soft, black, velvet cushion of sleep, but the sound penetrated—a thin, distant, persistent plea.
And I woke. It was still night. The same night? Or could I have slept the clock around? I peered at the luminous time and date dials in the wall. It was almost three in the morning. I had slept for less than five hours. Five hours before, I had escaped death. Time enough for a new plan to be laid.
The phone rang again. With a groan of exasperation, I dragged myself out of the bed and groped my way into the living room. Through bleary, heavy-lidded eyes I tried to make out the reception button, hit it on the third jab.
"Hello? Paul? Is that you?"
The image on the telephone screen was still dim. It brightened as I stared in disbelief.
"Laurie! What in God's name are you doing calling me at this hour?"
"Oh, Paul! Thank God!"
She sagged visibly. Even on the black-and-white screen her face showed pale and drawn, with a sharpness I had never seen in it before.
"What is it. What's happened?"
"I've been trying to get you for hours. You've got to help me. You've got to come out here!"
I felt the first premonition of danger, a warning signal in the back of my mind echoing the phone's buzz of a moment earlier. Peering narrowly at the screen I tried to shake off the fuzziness of drugged sleep.
"Tell me what's wrong," I said sharply.
"I—I can't. Please, Paul!" She began to cry silently, bending over, hugging her stomach as if she were in pain. "Please!"
I strained to see into the room behind her but her image filled most of the screen. I stared closely at her. She was in her nightgown. It had fallen off one bare shoulder and was tied loosely around her waist. Her long red hair spilled free around her shoulders. She looked as if she had been in bed. Something had aroused her—something frightening. There was no mistaking the haggard aspect of fear. She seemed to be holding herself together with an anguished effort of control.
"Is there anyone with you?" I asked quietly.
She shook her head—too quickly, I thought. Something moved in my abdomen. Fear coiling.
"Paul, help me!" she moaned. "You've got to help me. There's nobody else who can."
"You're at the beach house?" I asked, stalling, angry at the cowardice that made me delay.
"Yes, yes! Alone! I'm all alone. You'll come? You'll come right away?" Her voice grew shrill with eager hope. "I'll do anything, darling, anything you ever want me to do. I love you! You know that, don't you? You believe that? I didn't mean the things I said last night. Paul, I'll do anything!"
You don't have to keep saying it, I thought. You don't have to bribe me. I wondered with dull anger how long it had taken to affect the careless arrangement of her nightgown.
And then I repented of the impulse which had momentarily made me despise her. How could such a beautiful, spoiled child be asked to have more strength and courage than I myself had shown? I couldn't deny her the hope that cried out in her words, the terrified plea that was expressed in every straining curve of her body. I couldn't refuse to help her. For this was not an alien. This was another helpless human being whose life had touched mine, and who was now, because of that briefly intimate contact, in a state of almost mindless panic.
Mindless. I remembered Mike Boyle and how viciously he had been used.
"Yes," I said flatly. "I'll help you. I'll come."
She began to babble in an hysteria of relief, the words tumbling meaninglessly over each other. Love. Darling. Help me. Anything you want. Alone. Come. Please. Anything, anything, anything. I didn't bother to listen. When she had run down I stared at the young, lovely, tear-stained face and felt an inexpressible pity.
"You don't have to worry," I said. "I'll be there."
I did not want to go. When I thought about what I would find on that isolated beach, I cringed inside. It was no good pretending the fear did not exist, but I pushed it into a corner and tried not to look at it.
And yet I had to consider some facts. How vulnerable were the aliens? What weapons would touch them? If the bodies in which they lived were destroyed, would the aliens perish? Or did they so infuse and inform their hosts that their apparently human forms became immune to the violence which would destroy an ordinary human body? From the conversation overheard in the Dugout I had acquired the vague idea that somehow the furious energy of the aliens sapped the very flesh of the hosts they inhabited. One of them had urged the other to maintain a tight, constant control over the body to keep it from—what had he said?—to keep it from disintegrating. To hold it together. What did that mean? Could a mind hold matter in a fixed state, retaining an exterior form, when there was no longer any intrinsic unity of the body? Mind over matter, mind ruling matter. The possibility was not so fantastic. It was even a subject of scientific inquiry on earth.
But what weapons might affect a body so controlled? Would a bullet smashing into that occupied brain destroy the alien's hold? I had no way of knowing. In any event I didn't have a gun. It would have to be some other weapon.
I made a hasty but thorough search of my trailer. I took a small knife with a retractable blade from a drawer in the kitchen. As I pulled open other drawers and rummaged through them, I kept wishing that I had had the sense to arm myself with some kind of pistol. My choice of weapons was pitifully limited. In the bottom drawer of a small cabinet built into the corridor, among a jumbled collection of tools and gadgets, I found a small pocket flame-thrower, one of those all-purpose gas-fired lighters that is adjustable for the small flame needed to light a cigarette or the steady blaze that will ignite charcoal for a fire or even a miniature jet of heat suitable to cut thin pieces of metal. I started to discard the gadget but some obscure tug of memory stopped me. Heat. Heat brought more than searing pain. It consumed. All living organisms were vulnerable to it. On those planets where the temperature was too high, scientists agreed, life could not exist.
I stuck the little flame-thrower in my pocket. At least some of the time I had spent in the library had not been wasted, I thought, though the gadget seemed ridiculously small and ineffectual as a potential weapon against super-human beings.
The rest of my search was fruitless. I didn't let myself dwell on the futility of the weapons I had. If I did that I wouldn't go out. I would cower in a corner of the trailer with my panic and wait for them to come after me. It was better to face them in the open and with what protection the darkness of night might afford.
I slipped on a coverall, shoes and a light windproof jacket. I turned out all the lights and stood by the door in the living room. It crossed my mind that I might never be returning to these small rooms. The thought left me strangely unmoved. I opened the door quietly and stepped out into the cold and the darkness.
Walking along the road toward the elevated station, I glanced back once. A light shone yellow and misty, its rays radiating like a stain in the dark mist. I stopped, thinking that I had failed to turn off all the lights. Checking back in my mind I remembered the total darkness the moment before I stepped out of the trailer. This light, then, had just gone on. It wasn't from one of my rooms.
The girl next door was awake, once again aware of everything I was doing. It was uncanny. I was convinced that I hadn't made enough noise to awaken her. Unless she had been lying wide-eyed and sleepless, listening. But why? With a shrug of impatience, I turned away from the puzzle and hurried along the deserted road toward the station.
I stepped up to the landing platform cautiously. One slim tube of light ran overhead, dimmed now by the curling mist. There was no one else on the platform. I checked the night schedule listed on the board and saw that a local beach train was due in seven minutes. I was in luck. There wouldn't be another beach local for forty minutes after this one. I pressed the night pickup light and saw its red warning glow a quarter-mile away down the monorail.
A feeling of tension increased as the minutes ticked by. Little could happen to me here on this platform except for that one split-second when the train would slide in front of me, and it was unlikely that there was any danger. They wouldn't go to all the trouble of pretending to lure me to the beach if they wanted to kill me in my own back yard. Nevertheless I kept far back from the edge of the platform, and when I first heard the rush of the approaching train, the muscles tightened involuntarily in my chest and arms.
Then the serpentine column of the train slid swiftly into the station, braking fast, and I saw the warm glow of the lighted interior, the familiar sight of passengers dozing or staring out the windows. I stepped into the train and, seconds later, while I walked toward a seat at the rear of the car, the train was once more speeding away over the ridge of the hills, the momentum of its plunge hardly detectible inside the car.
There were very few travelers at this time of night. It was too early for the night shifts to be getting out, too late for revelers to be coming home. There were a half-dozen people in my car but none of them paid any attention to me after the first curious glance. I felt the tension easing in my body.
Most of the time, the thick early morning mist hid the sleeping city that lay at the foot of the hills. Occasionally I caught glimpses of light patterns far below through open patches in the fog. But generally there were no landmarks visible, not even the familiar yawning canyons or the sculptured back of the hills, and I kept getting a peculiar feeling of isolation, of rushing through a void. I thought of the men who had cruised through the infinite emptiness of space between Earth and Mars, little dreaming on their return that they brought two stowaways. How had the aliens concealed themselves? Dr. Temple's logical arguments meant little now. Somewhere there was a flaw, a crack in the wall of checks and precautions through which the aliens had slipped. I knew that I had been driven by a compulsion to face the inevitable decisive clash with the enemy. I had had to come in answer to Laurie's plea, knowing that I was probably walking into a trap. Choice really hadn't played a part in my decision. This was the inescapable moment toward which I had been compelled by everything that had happened to me—not just in the recent crowded days but in the months I had listened to the whispered voices in my mind and wondered, in the nights when I had awakened shivering from the dream.
Yes. The dream. This too I had to face. The smashing waves, the dominating voice. For an instant, remembering, I felt again the weight of hopelessness. Just as quickly I rejected it. The dream need not have been clairvoyant. It could have been a subconscious projection of my fear of the voices I had heard—and my tormenting doubt that the voices existed. No. I couldn't think about the dream. And this time the aliens would not be confronting a dumbly acquiescent, frightened animal. They were not invincible. This time the clash might be a little more equal. Unless—
A quick contraction of muscles shattered my illusion that I had conquered the fear. Unless both of the aliens would be there for the kill. I forced myself to examine the possibility rationally. The older one, the leader, did not want them to be together unless it was absolutely necessary. And why should they believe that handling me would require two superior minds? One would be enough. No, the young one would be alone, the junior partner, who wouldn't admit being unable to eliminate me without difficulty.
The reflection stirred me to a fresh sensation, a stubborn, smoldering anger.