3
The following night I worked late, correcting a batch of the interminable freshman themes. I didn't have any night classes, but the offices were bright for the lecturers who did. I found it difficult to concentrate on the semi-adolescent exercises in expository composition even though the office was quiet and almost empty most of the evening. Near the bottom of the pile of papers I came across one theme that jolted me. It was called "How to Conduct a Seance." It was a juvenile and jocular approach to the subject, and I had never placed much credence myself in preternatural events and influences—or in extra-sensory powers. But now I found myself feeling defensive, resenting the spoofing tone of the student's theme. Wasn't anything possible? How much did we really know? Wasn't the wisest philosopher actually as ignorant as this nineteen-year-old?
I wondered if a man could have unusual perceptions, strange mental powers, for twenty-seven years without knowing it. Wouldn't a talent for thought transference or for hearing the mental communications of others make itself known early? Or would it be necessary to have two sensitive people involved, sender and receiver? Could you be a telepath without knowing it simply because you had never encountered another?
And I remembered the incident, distant in time and dim in memory, which I had refused to recall during the disturbing recent months. In itself, the experience, though startling at the time, was not unique. At least you hear about similar things happening to a great many ordinary people. You hear about it—but you brush off the story as coincidence or as the product of an over-active imagination.
I have mentioned my father. Until I was eighteen, I never knew who he was or that he was alive. My mother had always talked about him as if he had been killed the year I was born, during the brief Chino-American war of 1963. After I had the extraordinary vision, she told me the truth, her story muffled by tears long contained.
Ernest Cameron was a well-known physicist. He was married and had two children. If my mother can be believed, his was an unhappy marriage, but one which he did not feel justified in renouncing. During part of 1962 he was in New Mexico working with the army on atomic field weapons, the kind that did a hell of a lot of damage in a confined area, what they used to call "clean" bombs in those days before all atomic weapons were outlawed. My mother was at that time a woman in her early twenties living in Albuquerque.
She met Ernest Cameron when he was on a weekend leave. They fell in love, suddenly, catastrophically. Their passionate affair lasted for nine days. Then, as the threat of war intensified in Asia, he was abruptly transferred overseas. My mother never saw him again, but she was already carrying the infinitesimal germ of life that grew into the son he never knew. Me. Paul Cameron.
My mother always loved him. She moved to Los Angeles and took the name of Mrs. Rose Cameron, wanting me to bear my father's name. For eighteen years after I was born, she posed as a widow. The role was never questioned.
It was the vision which forced her to tell me who I really was—and who my father was. It happened on a clear sunny afternoon. I was in the yard outside our small trailer. Having just graduated from high school, I was taking a week's vacation before hunting for a job. I was sitting on a canvas chair, idly enjoying the summer sun and thinking wistfully about my hopes of going to college, when it happened.
I saw him. A sandy-haired, middle-aged man with bent, rounded shoulders and a tired walk. Preoccupied, his eyes on the ground, he stepped off a curb and started across a street I had never seen in my life. I sat in the canvas chair, staring at the familiar setting of the crowded trailer court, and the picture of the sandy-haired man was superimposed on the reality before me, equally clear and vivid. When I saw the truck hurtling toward him, the illusion was so graphic that I cried out in alarm. The man looked up at the last moment of his life, soft gray eyes widening in blank surprise, without fear, as if he had not had time to bring his mind back from some distant point of reflection to this time and place of life and death. He had stepped out from behind a parked car. The truckdriver, seeing him too late, tried to swerve. There was a terrifyingly slow sequence of brakes screeching, rubber scraping off in black streaks on the pavement, big trailer lurching sideways—and the final sickening violence of impact, of smashed bones and flesh and blood.
I stood trembling beside the overturned canvas chair amid the familiar cluster of trailers and covered patios and cement walks and hotly glittering parked cars, and I knew that the echo of a final scream of pain had broken from my own lips. My mother was standing in the doorway of our trailer, her mouth open, one hand at her breast in fright, staring at me.
She ran down the steps. "Paul! My God, Paul, what happened?"
Slowly, dazedly, I looked around me. A couple of children were watching me in owlish wonder; a man had stopped some thirty yards away, staring at me over his shoulder; the woman in the next-door trailer was frozen at her window; even the birds were silent in the trees overhead. The whole world around me seemed to be arrested, waiting for me to come back to it.
My gaze shifted to my mother's face. I moved and the scene came alive again, like a motion picture that has been momentarily stopped and then resumes, the figures jumping into motion to complete the half-finished gesture, the interrupted phrase.
"I don't know," I said slowly. "I don't know."
I lit a cigarette and opened a can of beer and took a long cool drink, all the while trying to organize the confusion in my mind, trying to understand what had happened to me. My mother kept pressing me to explain what had made me cry out, and I had an impulse to assure her that it had just been a dream. It was several minutes before I felt capable of trying to put into words what I had seen. I still felt oddly detached, as if I had been away on a long trip and had only just got back so that I hadn't had time to unpack or re-orient myself to the old familiar setting.
I told her the story without softening its raw edges, quietly and dispassionately, trusting in a mother's willingness to believe that her son was neither a liar nor a madman. When I had finished I looked at her expectantly, even a little apprehensively. In the telling, the story had begun to sound fantastic. For the first time, I thought that maybe I had actually fallen asleep in the sun without realizing it and been awakened by the nightmare. But my mother's reaction was so startling that I forgot my doubts.
For several seconds, she stared at me in silence. Without warning her eyes filmed over and a tear spilled through her lashes to trickle down her cheek. In dumb fascination, I watched the slow progression of that single tear down her weathered skin.
She spoke in a strained whisper. "Would you describe him again?"
At first I didn't know what she meant. Then, puzzled, I described the man of the vision. I could see him very clearly. Sandy hair thinning over a high forehead. Soft gray eyes mirroring a compassionate intelligence. A thin, high-bridged nose. A wide, responsive mouth, curving slightly in a pensive smile. Stooped shoulders that made him look slighter and shorter than he was, though my impression was that he was taller than average.
It was only when the portrait was complete that I realized that, except for the bent shoulders and the thinning hair, I had been describing myself.
My mother looked away, covering her face with her hands. I saw her shoulders quiver. A suspicion nibbled at the fringe of my mind, rejected instantly with a spasm of horror.
"Mom! What is it? Who was he?"
I was shocked by the agony of pain in her eyes.
"Oh, Paul!"
I put my hands quickly on her shoulders and shook her gently. "Tell me," I said. "You've got to tell me."
"I can't!"
I was young but I felt very mature and protective and able to take anything. "You don't have to hide anything from me," I said.
Haltingly, she told me about my father and about the brief days she had known him, the short interval of love on which she had built a lonely life. She pleaded with me to feel no bitterness toward the man who was my father. He had given her all he could—love, tenderness, understanding, even a child. She believed that he had really loved her and she had never blamed him for staying away from her. It was the only thing for him to do. She revealed that he had sent her letters in the first months after he left her. She had written at last to tell him that it was better if she dropped out of his life completely. She had not told him about the child.
When she had finished, I felt only pity and love for this woman who had suffered loneliness for the better part of a lifetime in exchange for a love held only for an instant, who had shielded even her bastard son from the truth that might hurt him, who had lived with her memories and her illusion of a life that was, in its own small way, complete.
Anger and bitterness came later. Shame. A feeling that I had been cheated, tricked into believing that I was normal, that I had had a real father just like everyone else. Hatred of the man for the loyalty he had given to another woman. And at last, when the hot flame of anger had burnt itself out, a lasting sense that I was different, I was an outsider.
That night, when my mother's tears had dried and she finally slept with the exhaustion of someone relieved at last of a terrible burden of secrecy, I lay in darkness with my new sense of isolation and my mind returned to the inexplicable vision which had triggered my mother's confession. I wondered what kind of dream could come when one sat with his eyes open in broad daylight, fully conscious. Yet it must have been a dream. The man of the vision was surely someone I had seen, or a projected image of myself, a man whose appearance had made my mother believe I was describing her lover of long ago. Was Ernest Cameron still alive? What would he do or say if the son he didn't know existed should suddenly appear one day to confront him?
I was never to find out. Less than a month later, investigators, easily backtracking along my mother's trail from Albuquerque to Los Angeles, traced her to our modest trailer court. She had been left half of an estate valued at over thirty thousand dollars by one Dr. Ernest Cameron, recently deceased, professor of physics at the University of Illinois, a widower with two married children who had divided the remaining half of his estate. In his will, re-written after his legal wife's death, Dr. Cameron had revealed the love he had kept secret for almost twenty years.
He had died of injuries suffered in a traffic accident on June 16, 1982. The day of my vision.
Now, nine years later, remembering that extraordinary circumstance as I sat alone in the small bright office, I thought how easily my mother and I had covered up the fearful evidence of the unknown. Almost by deliberate scheme, it seemed, we had failed to investigate the details of my father's death. There was no escaping the fact that I did appear to have dreamed of his accident, but my mother, who was a religious woman, found satisfaction in the belief that God had worked in one of His strange and unquestionable ways. And I found refuge in a recollection of the vision so blurred and hedged with qualifications that I was finally able to believe in coincidence, in a casual dream which had not really mirrored the reality of death occurring thousands of miles away, but had simply reflected some buried fear of violence of my own in a world in which accidental violence was commonplace. Ernest Cameron's death became important only because it brought my mother and me closer together and because it provided the means with which I was able to go to college.
Was I able now fully to believe in my own clairvoyance? Was the earlier vision a symptom of the extra-sensory powers which I was only now discovering in other ways? I had to believe in it. At the same time I was afraid to.
For in my recent dream of violence, I was the victim.
It was ten o'clock that night when I left the massive Liberal Arts Building and started slowly across the sprawling campus. The night classes were over and many of the lights had already gone out. There was a continuous cough and mutter of cars starting and roaring away. Clusters of students drifted by in heated conversation. Couples loitered in the deep shadows of trees or strolled hand in hand with intimate whisper of word and gurgle of laughter. I felt exhausted.
I wandered toward the modern area of stores and restaurants and bars which bordered the campus. I didn't feel like returning to my empty trailer in the hills. At that moment, I keenly regretted the strange compulsion which had kept me from forming close friendships with my colleagues at the university. Perhaps subconsciously I had been avoiding exposure to disillusion or disappointment, but in so doing I had created for myself a lonely place apart.
My path took me past the Science Building. On the first floor there was one panel of windows glowing with light. Most of the building was dark. I stopped for a minute, thinking of Dr. Jonas Temple, the revered geophysicist who was working behind those windows. They were too high to permit me to see into his offices or his laboratories but I knew he would be there. The old man's capacity for work was legendary. And in the past eighteen months those lighted windows had seemed to symbolize man's growing knowledge of life, not only on earth, but in the limitless space in which we whirled. And specifically, of course, on Mars, for Dr. Temple was the man who had directed the exhaustive program of analysis and study of the dead relics of life brought back from the red planet. Like everyone at the university I had been privileged to enter those offices and to stare in wonder at the rows of curious mineral and fossil formations behind the glass doors of their special cabinets. From these, piece by piece, Dr. Temple and his staff were slowly tracing the pattern of Martian evolution.
This night, however, he was probably more concerned with the preparations for the new Martian flight scheduled to begin sometime this month. What lists would he have drawn of things which should be brought back—to reveal what new secrets of the universe?
Once again the world's magnificent adventure made my own private problem seem petty and insignificant. What did it matter in the fantastic wilderness of space and time, one man's personal quarrel with a mind on the edge of anarchy?
I started across the campus again. While standing still I had allowed the October night's chill to penetrate the thin fabric of my coverall. Now my steps quickened. The Dugout, a popular off-campus coffee shop, was nearby, and the thought of steaming hot coffee made me swing toward it.
I was near the edge of the campus when the voice spoke—abrupt, shockingly strong, so real to my ear that I looked around quickly to see who had spoken.
"Is it safe to communicate?"
No one was near me. What I was hearing was in my own mind, a soundless emanation of thought.
"Yes, but softly. We must not be detected now when the time is so close."
I stood rigid at the rim of the dark campus, my whole body taut and quivering, my mind a clean slate upon which the voices wrote. Two of them. There was an individual quality to the thoughts, an inflection and timber of the mind as unmistakable as the personal tone of a human voice, yet oddly sexless and unemotional. The first one I had heard was more tentative in his vibrations, less in control of his power, giving the impression that he was younger; the second was older, heavier, more authoritative in his strength.
"You are comfortable?" the second voice asked.
"Yes."
"The new body is healthy?"
"Completely."
I began to move, sensing in a way I couldn't comprehend the direction from which the thoughts were coming. I stumbled along the side street which led to the Dugout, tracking the bodiless pulsations as an animal trails a scent.
The older one spoke again. "You had no difficulty with the parents?"
"They suspected nothing."
The voices were closer now, but I was alone on the street except for a couple ambling along the shadowed sidewalk a block away. And why would they have to communicate with their minds when they walked arm in arm? I didn't question the actual existence of the voices in my mind. At that moment I believed in them as naturally and unquestioningly as I accepted vocal speech. They were there. I heard them. Even the meaningless question about a "new body" did not make me wonder if the voices were hallucinatory. To talk of bodies as if they could be shed like garments and new ones tried for fit and comfort was nonsense, but I had no thought of making sense of the words I had heard. I wanted only to find their source.
And suddenly I was standing in front of the Dugout staring through the steam-clouded windows. The place was almost empty.
"What is it that you wish me to do?" The young one, calm, matter-of-fact in its subservience. It? He or she? I had no way of telling.
"You have a job—an important one."
There was no doubting the fact that they were inside the Dugout. The sense of mental presence was overpowering, as if one were in a corner of a dark closet listening to two strangers who had huddled in the tiny space and closed the door to whisper confidentially.
"Have you heard—"
I opened the door. Four students in a booth against the wall turned to stare at me. There was a sudden, total silence.
Instinct made me walk casually to the counter, where I slipped onto a stool so placed that I would be able to see the booths along the right wall without deliberately or obviously turning my head. Lois, the waitress who was on night duty at the Dugout, sauntered toward me along the narrow aisle behind the counter.
"What'll you have, Mr. Cameron?"
"Coffee, Lois."
"Coming right up!"
It never occurred to me to consider Lois as a possible agent of the thoughts I had heard. She was a student who had been working a part-time evening shift in the Dugout for almost two full semesters. She was more notable for the ripeness of breast and hip than for any indication of unusual mental capacities. I was surprised that she was still in school and not already married to one of the students who were always flirting with her across the counter. Her blonde, buxom beauty and open friendliness went better with children and home cooking than books and short order food.
The place was unusually quiet. At first I saw no one but Lois and the four students together in a front booth. Two of them I had recognized—Mike Boyle, who had been an All-Coast tackle the previous season and might make All-American this year, and Laurie Hendricks, a disturbing redhead who sat in the front row of my eleven o'clock sophomore English class. The other boy's blond crewcut and immature good looks seemed faintly familiar, probably because they were typical of so many students. The second girl, who sat next to Mike Boyle, was small and pretty and brunette. I had never seen her before.
All four looked much too normal, as they returned to their animated talk, to be part of the weird experience which had brought me there. They had given me only a casual glance. They seemed to be genuinely ignoring me as I sipped my coffee, trying to study the group without seeming to.
The next thought came without warning from the back of the room. "Have you heard anything else of the listener?"
I swallowed a deep hot draught of coffee, scalding my throat. Bending low over the counter, I struggled to keep from choking and coughing. The cup rattled in the saucer as I set it down.
I knew that I was the listener.
"Whispers. Nothing I could be sure of."
The question had come from the back, the answer was closer. I was convinced that the reply came from one of the four students in the booth not more than fifteen feet away from me.
Then I saw a hand move at the table of the last booth near the rear of the restaurant. A man's hand stirring coffee absently. He sat with his back toward me, concealed behind the high back of the booth. His was the older, heavier mental voice.
"He must be found," the man's thought came.
"Could it be—a foreign intruder? Perhaps even one of us who—"
"No. Soon we will be many—when I come back. But now we are the only ones. He must be human."
"But he speaks with the mind."
"That is not so strange. It is only strange that many do not do so, as we do."
Listening, I felt a creeping contraction of horror as if I had touched something cold and alien. My God, what did they mean? They believed that I must be—human. And what were they?
"I would like to return with you—to assist in your expedition." The bright young mind spoke.
"Your task is to find the human who speaks with his thoughts and destroy him. If he is able to hear us he is dangerous. Once we are here in force it will not matter. But now——"
The horror expanded in my mind, a revulsion exaggerated now by a consciousness of danger, of menace that was suddenly close and real. While they were hunting me, the listener, I had stumbled right into their midst. Who they were or what I did not know, but they held power in their minds beyond the scope of my imagination. And if they learned that I was—
"When do you go?" the youthful one asked.
"Soon now. The launching will be in the final week of this month, depending on suitable conditions."
"You will be able to effect the transfer?"
"There will be no difficulty in the actual change. I have already picked out the human in the space colony. He is young and strong but mentally very susceptible. Already he is under my control. I have only to find the right moment alone with him. However, since this body I now inhabit must be presumed dead when I leave it, and there will be no visible remains, it will be necessary for me to devise an accident in which the body would naturally be consumed or lost. Drowning may prove most suitable."
Drowning! My recurrent nightmare came back to me in a rush. I felt the blood drain from my face. My head felt light and faintly dizzy.
"I do not fully understand about the body," the young one thought.
"It is a superb instrument," the other replied, "but unfortunately not as dense in its material structure as those we are accustomed to inhabit. You will find that your energies will draw excessively on the body's matter. You must take great care to maintain constant control over the body shell to keep it from disintegrating too rapidly. At the same time the vital organs must not be damaged. In time, perhaps, these human bodies may adapt to our needs more satisfactorily. Until then periodic changes will be needed. I have conserved my present form only because it was vital to our plans."
"When will you make the exchange?"
"At the last possible moment—when close physical examination is no longer likely and when it is too late for the launching to be delayed."
"You might require my services when you have to take over the ship—"
"No! It is vital that you remain behind. You must understand that I might not return. Anything could happen in space. If I should fail to come back, it is still possible that others of us will be brought to earth on other ships. If the humans are more careful than before, our brothers might never escape. It will be up to you to effect their release."
"Yes, that is clear."
Suddenly I put my hands over my ears, pressing my palms hard against my skull as if the barrier of bone and tissue might cut off the bewildering voices that stole into my brain. This was not real, not possible! This was madness. Not aliens from outer space, plotting to take over the space ships and use them to bring back hordes of aliens. Not beings who could possess and use human bodies. I couldn't believe in these.
"Mr. Cameron?"
"What?" I looked up, startled and frightened, into the wondering blue eyes of the blonde waitress.
"More coffee?"
"Oh. Yes. Yes, please."
My voice cracked. The hand that spooned sugar into the cup shook. My body was seized by momentary spasms. Fear. Fear that demoralized body and mind.
Then I realized that the strange voices were silent. But there was a suspenseful quality to the silence, an indefinable tension of waiting. Had I done something to betray myself? Had the lash of fear been audible?
Slowly my gaze swung toward the booth in the back of the room. The man had withdrawn further out of sight. Even his hand was no longer visible. I forced myself to glance at the booth where the students were still talking, low-voiced, the steady murmur split by wedges of laughter. Laurie Hendricks' eyes met mine in a brief instant of recognition. She was smiling and her green eyes were speculative. At that moment, the blond youth spoke to her and she turned toward him, red mouth opening in laughter.
I looked away. Several yards down the counter Lois was busily wiping an imaginary spot on the gleaming surface. I lit a cigarette with a painstaking effort at steadiness and sat staring at the curl of steam rising from the coffee to blend with the denser cloud of cigarette smoke.
And something probed at my brain. My reaction was instinctive, like a turtle withdrawing under its shell with surprising speed. I froze my mind, shutting off all thought. I was nothing. I was blankness. I was neither thought nor emotion nor awareness. The eerie mental sensation came again, like a child's stick prodding the turtle's shell to see if it would move or to find a soft, vulnerable spot in the protective casing. A thought probing at my brain, trying to force an entry, but there was no opening.
The tentative pressure ceased. For a moment there was silence except for the murmuring at the nearby booth and the clatter of dishes as Lois piled them into a steel sink. Slowly I allowed awareness to return.
"All right." The older one was communicating again.
"What happened?"
"I was not certain. For a moment I thought——" The message broke off. "I must leave."
"When shall we speak again?"
"We must avoid all contact unless absolutely necessary. There is too much risk of detection. We should never be together again in the same place until the listener is found."
"What shall I do when I find him?"
There was a brief pause. I found myself tense as I waited for the reply, my hands clenching painfully.
"It must look like an accident."
Laughter erupted from the booth nearby, raucous and free, the young gay laughter of a normal, healthy world. I had the sudden, bitter feeling that I had left this world forever and its laughter was rude and jarring on my nerves, a bizarre punctuation to the sentence of death I had just heard pronounced on myself.
Then the students were pushing out of their booth, moving toward the door, passing near me.
"Hi, Mr. Cameron!" Laurie Hendricks called.
I nodded. My throat was constricted, unable to open for speech. The group spilled out onto the sidewalk and I felt a stab of alarm. One of them was an alien—but what could I do? How could I find out which one? Should I follow them or the man in the booth?
I shot a glance toward the rear booth. I caught a fleeting glimpse of a dark gray suit as the man disappeared down the narrow corridor which led to the restrooms.
And to a rear exit.
I stumbled to my feet, throwing a coin onto the counter. For a second I was caught in the dilemma of divided choice. Then I strode decisively through the restaurant toward the back hall. When I reached it it was empty. I whirled and raced to the front door.
The four students were across the street strolling onto the campus grounds. I trotted after them. They seemed oblivious of me. I could see the small dark-haired girl clinging to Mike Boyle's arm. The blond boy spoke confidentially in Laurie Hendrick's ear. I stopped on the far side of the street, hesitating, watching them walk slowly across the green lawn. I couldn't follow them closely without being seen. I would have to keep at a distance.
I glanced back toward the Dugout. A man stood on the sidewalk to the left of the restaurant in the shadow of a store front. Even though I couldn't see his face I could feel the impact of his eyes. He had not been there when I came out of the Dugout. My scalp prickled. I started at the shadowy figure. For a moment neither of us moved.
What I did then was incredibly foolish, and yet it was not a consciously deliberate act, not even a careless impulse. Rather I spoke to myself, voicing the question that filled my mind but unconsciously projecting it toward the unknown man who watched me across the street.
"Who are you?"
Afterwards I could not be sure what happened, but in that split second as the thought was directed toward the dark figure I seemed to catch a quick reaction of startled surprise. I was immediately shocked by my own stupidity. I had betrayed myself. Now they knew who I was.
And at that moment I saw the headlights of a car speeding toward me along the near side of the street, its lights bouncing as the car rode over a bump. Something held me there on the sidewalk close to the curb as the car approached swiftly. And suddenly it was very close, the eyes of its headlights holding my gaze hypnotized, the hum of its engine swelling in my ears.
"Now! Into the street!"
The command struck my mind with the force of a blow. I tottered forward, tripping clumsily over the curb. I had an awareness of struggling feebly, of trying to control rubbery limbs with a mind that was weak and confused, of flailing my arms wildly at the air.
"In front of the car! Fall!"
And I flung myself forward into the blinding glare of the onrushing headlights. There was a tearing screech of brakes, a scream that seemed far away, and a massive blur of metal brushing by me as I fell.