23
The challenge came. It was quite close, coming from out there in the mist and the darkness, strong and cold and relentless. It pulled me across the room. I jerked open the door. As I stepped out into the night I heard Laurie give a whimpering cry. Ahead of me the pounding surf beckoned. I felt the unwanted constriction of fear but I felt something more—human pride and defiance.
It was chill and damp and dark as a mine on the beach. The heavy mist was moist against my face. I stood facing the pulsations of the alien mind and slowly, like the curtain rising on a play, the mist began to lift. With a fog's capriciousness, it rose above my head and stopped to hang suspended over the beach, revealing now the white curve of sand, the black swell of waves, the dim gray shapes of trailers, but still blotting out the hills rising beyond.
And I saw her—a slim, small figure some fifty paces away, standing very straight, a figure of fragile innocence. I thought with pity of the young girl she once had been, the girl now soul-destroyed, the human named Helen Darrow.
I felt no surprise. How easily I had been duped! I wondered if her parents knew what she was or if they too were puppets dancing on a string, playing a perfect pantomime of human life. And then I severed all these cords of thought, cutting off the smell and taste and touch of the sea air, opening my mind to the vibrations beating against it, seeing, not with my eyes, but with the sightless vision of the mind.
I saw a coldness which wore the mask of hate but had not hatred's feeling. My spirit shriveled at the sight of the ugliness, the vicious indifference of the alien mind. An instinctive repugnance made me recoil as if, feeling blindly in the grass, I had touched the cold white belly of a snake. At that moment the alien struck.
"Drown!" The voice spoke.
"No!" I shouted aloud. "Not this time!"
The alien lashed out again, its overpowering vibrations forming words that were in my mind but not of it. "Drown! Drown yourself!"
My feet dug into the sand. I braced myself against the thundering echo in my ear.
"Walk! Now! Into the water!"
The strange motionless struggle continued, two minds locked in conflict in that first struggle for mastery, like two wrestlers testing strength, standing with feet spread wide, thick legs firm, hand linked behind each other's neck, muscles bulging as the heads and shoulders bend under the pressure, until the greater strength begins to tell and in the weaker man a foot shifts suddenly, the corded forearms begin to tremble, he feels himself slipping, weakening, falling as the force comes down hard and strong and overpowering.
Tears blinded me. The alien voice obliterated thought, blotting out the frustration and the anger and the pride. And one foot moved. A feeble protest formed in familiar words as I spoke to myself, to the robot body that had always been mine to command. Now the body heard another voice, was deaf to the child's protesting cry.
"Walk! Walk! Walk!"
And I lived the dream of long ago, the nightmare which had brought me here to the final crisis, the vision I had known would come true. I felt the remembered numbing cold around my ankles, rising swiftly in a cascade of foam. My feet dragging in the heavy surf, each step a battle lost, each movement a breach smashed in the crumbling wall of my will. I saw on the beach the alien enemy, cold, merciless, all-powerful, and the consciousness that I had lost even before I had begun to fight struck me down. My knees gave way and a toppling breaker tore my feet from under me.
I rose out of the water to fight and lose again. And slowly I was driven out to meet the deep black oblivion of the sea. Rigidly I kept my mind locked against the one remaining hope. I walked, a broken, tottering shell of resistance, without strength.
"Walk! Drown! Drown!"
And the undertow joined its tugging weight to the pressure of the mind that drove me. The water swelled and dipped, rose at last above my head and I went under. I had failed. Now it was over. Defeat and the knowledge of hopelessness pushed me deeper. Now I could cease to fight. Now I could give myself to the freezing numbness that stunned my flesh. Now I could taste the warming draught of memory, relive in the final instant of existence all that I had ever known and felt and dreamed, all that I had loved and lost—
The feeble spark of life still flickered. Mind and body rebelled against obliteration. I struggled weakly, straining upwards, steeling my mind against the final, crushing blow of the alien mind.
Its voice was silent.
I dared not believe the sudden stab of reviving hope. For only a moment I existed in what seemed a mental vacuum, hardly realizing that this was but the normal state of the mind's autonomy. My eyes were open to the cold wet sting of the salt water. I could see the brightness above me near the surface. Lungs straining to burst, I thrust suddenly toward the surface. There was a chance. It might have worked!
I burst like a bubble into the open, gulped life-giving air, my chest heaving convulsively. I went under again as the bosom of the ocean heaved in a giant swelling. I came up sputtering.
"Swim back!"
The alien spoke once more in my mind. My arms and legs began to move automatically. They felt as if they were weighted down. I tried to grasp the meaning of the new command. The voice had not been stilled, but—
"Swim! Swim!"
Confused, still unable to control my limbs, I struck out weakly toward the shore, was caught by the gathering thunderhead of a breaker and carried swiftly forward, only to fall behind as the foaming crest rushed on. Another wave picked me up like a bobbing cork and flung me onward, arms threshing. In the torrent of the smashing waves another tumult raged in my mind, a bewilderment of questions and brightening hope.
"Swim!"
I caught the panic in the alien cry, sensed that the call was weaker. The strength of exultation surged in my arms. With a renewed vigor, I drove on to reach the peak of a swiftly rolling wave and soared in like a surfboard on the rushing crest, was flung ahead to tumble head over heels in the churning uproar of the broken wall of water. And now the water rushed swiftly back away from me, receding down the slope of the shore, and I was kneeling on my hands and knees just a few steps away from the glistening sand of the shoreline. I dragged myself up and staggered forward, stumbled, felt the strength go out of my legs and fell face downward on the sand.
"Get up!" The alien voice spoke feebly. "Come here!"
I raised my head. The being housed in the body of Helen Darrow crouched on the wet sand thirty feet away. Her face was grotesquely white like the painted mask of a clown, her eyes huge black holes in the white mask. She was pressing one hand tightly to her side and against the pale color of her dress I saw a darker stain. My gaze swung up the beach.
Laurie Hendricks lay inert, sprawled forward on her face. Beyond her outflung hand something metallic glittered on the sand. The gun! Triumph burst full blown in my mind. It had worked! While the alien fought to drive me into the sea, Laurie, obedient to the impulse I had planted in her mind, had crept unnoticed from her trailer and—
But what had happened to her? What had I done to her?
"Come here!"
The thought struck viciously with a desperate strength. I looked again at the alien's twisted face, at the arm held out toward me in dramatic repetition of the call to come. And at the end of the outstretched arm was a crumbling stump. There was no hand!
I fought then with all the power that still remained in me, sensing that I had almost won, driving from my mind the horror that beckoned me, admitting no thought save the single dominant denial of the alien call. And still the overwhelming pull of the strange vibrations dragged me forward—one, two, three painful steps. There I held. I felt the momentary flutter of her terror, saw a strange vision of the frozen state of death, and from the alien's weakness found the power to hold. She was dying! Life was pouring out of the mortally wounded body—and the thing pulsating within wanted me! Wanted my body!Neededit!
I held and knew the rising pulsation of its fear. The force which pulled at me grew weaker. At last it hesitated, lashed out weakly, stopped. The alien mind drew in upon itself. The vibrations of its panic hammered at me without the power to move.
I stood motionless and watched the girl die. In the final moment of life she gave a human cry. The body toppled forward and rolled over on its back.
The pulsations of the alien mind went on. I felt them now as pain, wave after wave of wordless vibrations beating in my brain until my eyes filmed over. I blinked against the tears. Through the blur, the body on the sand seemed to lose its distinguishable shape, to shed its human form, to disintegrate in the way that the trunk of a hollow, rotten tree eaten away from within will present a smooth, untarnished shell to the eye until one day a sudden blow smashes the outer crust and the tenuous hold of form is broken and the whole tree topples, collapses, dank smelling, into a soft and shapeless heap of dust and debris.
And I saw the alien. It flowed like saliva from the open mouth, flowed out and began to spread, out of the mouth that was no longer a mouth but a shapeless hole in the face that was caving in upon itself. Rigid with horror, I saw the body dissolve into powder. And among the soft crumbling bones moved a thing of dazzling colors, a network of glistening chains of cells spreading like the fingers of a spider web. Salt spray blew over it and the dust of the decaying body stirred like ashes in the wind. I saw the faintly gleaming, almost transparent membranes that joined the network of cell fingers. Drops of water from the spray clung to the filmy membranes like dew. The thing spread like a stain upon the sand, groping among the powdery remains of Helen Darrow's body, reaching out, stretching astonishingly.
Then it began to shrink, to draw its fingers in, folding in upon itself, its movements jerky now, stiffening. The clamor of the alien voice grew shrill. A probing tentacle touched the gray wet body of a dead fish washed up on the shore. With blinding speed the membraneous web contracted upon the fish, enveloping it in a tissue-thin film that seemed to part and shrink as the alien invaded the foreign body, oozing through the gaping mouth. I saw the white slit of a cut on the belly of the fish and stared incredulous as the gash began to close, knitting together, the wound healing as the alien exerted its terrifying power upon the dormant flesh.
With a soft, wet squish, the dead body of the fish exploded, unable to contain the hideous force. My skin crawled with revulsion. This was a power of which I could not have dreamed, a force which had invaded a human body, sapping its very fibers, devouring it from within while holding its matter together until the last spark of life was snuffed out, the alien's hold broken by the bullet from Laurie's gun smashing into the decayed body. Sickness twisted in my stomach. I swayed dizzily. The strumming vibrations of the alien mind shivered through my head, soundless yet like an unendurable, endless screech.
And still I could not move as the alien flowed again on the wet sand, drawing together as a cluster of frothy bubbles, spreading out once more, the moist membranes hardly visible, the rainbow-hued strings of its web-like body reaching, groping blindly, creeping toward me, closer and closer. And a small sand crab scuttled toward it across the sand between us. Sweating and shaking, I watched the hard-shelled creature crawl toward its unseen enemy. A claw touched the moist tissue and the alien struck with sudden violence, silent and terrible, enveloping, smothering, invading the helpless body.
At last I moved. Looking around wildly I saw a chunk of jagged rock half buried in the sand. I pawed it loose. The crab, possessed now, turned a beady eye toward me as I swung around. The painful pulsing in my mind rose harrowingly. With a choking sob of fury I smashed the rock down upon the crab, raised it and smashed down again and again and again, burying the broken, pulpy body in the sand. A sticky piece of protoplasm flew through the air and stuck to my wrist. I brushed it off and it adhered to my fingers like a living thing. I saw the glitter of a tiny string of beads. It moved.
Acting without thought, I clawed in my pocket with my free hand and grasped the small metal cylinder of the pocket lighter. I jerked it out and pressed the button on the end. A thin blue finger of fire danced from the nozzle. I turned the flame upon my fingers where the sticky bit of substance stirred. In my mind there was a snap and shriek like a violin string breaking. Gritting my teeth against the searing pain of the burning flesh, I shook my fingers. The blackened thing dropped off.
I bent down to direct the flame upon the smashed remains of the crab where the alien still crawled. I held it there until at last I was struck by silence. The pulsations were gone. I stared down at the contracted body of the alien.
At first my mind could register only shocked disbelief. What I saw was so familiar that I could not comprehend its meaning. I thought I must be truly mad. Glittering on the wet sand was a small hard cluster of surfaces arranged into the frozen patterns of ordinary rock crystals. On impulse I turned the blue jet of fire upon the chunk. It blackened slowly. At first there seemed to be an infinitesimal shrinking, then only a dark discoloration. When at last I stood erect, turning off the lighter, I knew this alien mind was silenced forever.
I stared down at the blackened chunk of crystals, trying to sort out all the answers that crowded through the suddenly opened door in my mind. This much I knew for certain—strange rock and crystal formations had been brought back from Mars. I had seen them carefully placed on their shelves behind special glass doors. I remembered how strikingly beautiful they had appeared in their dazzling interplay of light and color.
With a shudder I thought of the scientist's habit of touching strange crystals with the tongue.
When I reached Laurie, she was already stirring. I felt an intense relief. Oblivious of the throbbing burn in my left hand, I knelt beside her and put my arm under her shoulders to raise her to a sitting position. Fainting had saved her life—and mine. If she had been conscious the alien would not have neededmybody. He would have had no need to call me back from the grave.
"Laurie? Can you hear me?"
Her eyes fluttered open, widened as she recognized me. I felt her stiffen.
"It's all right now. She's dead. Because of you. Because you helped me—"
She wrenched violently away from my supporting arm, cringing back from me. "Don't touch me!"
Her voice was shrill with hysteria.
"There's nothing to be afraid of," I said soothingly. "It's all over now."
I put out my hand and she began to whimper. "No! No, don't! You're—you're one of them!"
The accusation stunned me.
"You're one of them!" Her mouth began to quiver. I saw the bloodless lips, the glazed eyes of shock and fear. "Please," she begged. "Please don't."
"Laurie, it's not true. I'm not one of them. I had to use you, I had to make you shoot her. It was the only way...."
The words didn't reach her. For a moment longer I knelt beside her trembling body on the sand, tasting the bitterness of her fear of me. Of me! I knew there was nothing I could say that would wipe away the memory of the dreadful whiplash of my own projected thoughts.
I stood up. She shrank further away from me. I turned to stare at the blackened crystal fragment, at the shapeless heap of dust beside it, washed now by the incoming tide. I felt no sense of triumph. In the end it was not I who had won. The alien had been destroyed by an ordinary, frightened human being.
The thought startled me. I confronted it with growing wonder. I had used the phrase automatically: an ordinary human being. And what was I? A thing to be feared. A step beyond.
I too was an alien mind.
In that moment I was conscious of a new aloneness. For years, I had known an isolation from the world around me. I had walked apart, and the sense of exile had walked with me, not understood, beyond any experience that would have allowed me to understand it. And now I knew at last the thing which made me different, like the impulse which had driven the first feeble-legged creature from the sea to walk apart upon the land.
I turned back to Laurie. For a moment longer I stared at her. Slowly, I bent to pick up the gun she had dropped. The movement made me wince as pain shot through me from the stiff, scorched fingers of my left hand. They felt as if the flame still burned upon them. They smelled of smoking flesh. I set my teeth against the pain. Without a word, I turned my back on the girl's frightened eyes and walked back down the slope of the beach.
The blackened crystal glittered wet. I picked it up. A dead piece of rock. Frozen matter. Nothing. I took it with me. It seemed fitting that the two aliens should meet once more, the one who had died—and the one who lived.