6
Jack Hess, another of the younger instructors in the English department, asked me if I'd like to go to a nearby drive-in for lunch. I hesitated—and suddenly remembered Lois, the blonde waitress in the Dugout. Once again I had been stupid!
"No—not today, Jack," I said quickly. "I've got something on."
He looked at me quizzically, shrugged and turned away. I knew most of my colleagues thought me an odd one, reserved and even anti-social. Jack had made more of an effort than the others to be friendly. I was quite aware that my feeling of being an outsider was an unhealthy one but I couldn't help it.
I left hurriedly and strode hastily across the campus. How could I have overlooked such an obvious factor? Lois was sure to have seen the man in the back booth the night before. At the least she would have brought him his coffee. Even if he was a stranger to her, she would be able to describe him to me. And perhaps he wasn't a stranger. Maybe he came in often.
The little restaurant was jammed with students. I pushed my way to the end of the counter. Lois wasn't in sight. I waited until Harry, the sweating, somewhat greasy-faced owner of the Dugout, came near me.
"Can I talk to you a minute, Harry?"
He glanced at me, recognized me as a steady customer, and probably shrewdly placed me for what I was, a not very important young teacher.
"Can't it wait? I'm busy as hell."
He hurried back up the aisle without waiting for an answer. Harry did some of the cooking, but during the rush hours he helped out on tables or behind the counter while the regular cook took care of the orders.
In a moment he was back, flopping open an order pad. "What'll it be?"
"Hamburger and coffee," I said. "Where's Lois?"
His eyes went flat and cold. "She doesn't come on until later. Why?"
"I wanted to talk to her. What time does she get here?"
"Look, Jack, the girl has enough trouble with the kids around here without—"
"I only want to talk to her."
"Yeah." His manner was openly belligerent. "I'll turn in your order."
He spun away. It was several minutes before I could catch him again. I was aware that some students nearby were staring at me, but I didn't care.
When Harry did come within earshot, I spoke quickly. "Harry, I was in an accident outside your place last night. Right in front. I think Lois might have seen it and I want to ask her a few questions. Now how about it? What time does she come on duty?"
He looked mollified though his manner was still brusque. "Six o'clock," he grunted. "She's on from six to midnight."
I frowned. Now that the possibility of her identifying the stranger in the back booth had occurred to me, I was nervous and impatient to talk to her. Six o'clock was a long way away. A lot of things could happen before six.
When my order finally came I leaned forward and spoke urgently to Harry. "I'd like to reach her as soon as possible," I said. "Do you have her phone number?"
The aggressive coldness hardened his face instantly. His eyes were small and their expression bleak.
"I don't set up dates with the help," he said. "Even for teachers. That'll be two dollars and a quarter," he added pointedly, jerking his head toward the thin sandwich and coffee.
Irritated, I threw the money onto the counter. I would get no more information out of him. I realized that his suspicion was too quickly aroused to be normal. The chances were that he wanted Lois himself, probably didn't get anywhere with her in the face of the competition, and the constant spectacle of men and boys flirting with her in his restaurant kept him on the raw edge of frustrated anger.
Impatience gnawed at me, but there was nothing I could do but wait. I stood hesitating outside the restaurant, wondering if I should go to the registrar's office to try to find out where Lois lived. I might run into trouble. I was already planning to break one of the academic rules by arranging to have Laurie Hendricks visit my trailer that evening, but at least I had a plausible reason—and in spite of the rules, meetings with students in the home over class projects were not unusual. For me to try to get the address or phone number of a young and obviously endowed co-ed who was not in any of my classes was something else again.
I spent the afternoon, except for one lecture at two o'clock, in the safety of the library stacks. I compiled a bibliography of recent publications in the library on the subject of life on other planets. There was a special section of articles and research projects concerning Mars, most of them written by Dr. Temple himself or members of his staff. It would take much more than one afternoon to burrow through all the material, and I might not have many afternoons.
I had to act on the premise that I was sane, that I had overheard aliens conferring telepathically, that the conviction they were determined to destroy me was not a delusion. They were real. They menaced not only my safety but that of the world. And they planned to bring others of their kind back to Earth. These were the facts I had to begin with.
They pointed directly to Mars.
I was surprised at the unanimity of scientific opinion concerning the possibility of life on other planets. In our solar system, there was only one planet other than Earth which could possibly support life as we understood it. On the other planets either heat or the lack of it, the presence of poisonous gases or the absence of atmosphere, argued that life could not exist. There might well be planets in other solar systems with conditions conducive to the existence of an intelligent life form, but in ours there was only Earth—and the planet man had reached in his first great conquest of space: Mars.
There had long been heated scientific debate on the possibility of Mars supporting life, especially after the discovery of the famous canals. Even observations from the moon during the late 1970's and the 1980's had not settled the issue or resolved the mystery of the canals. There had always been a dedicated group who maintained that life on the red planet was not only possible but probable.
Then came the successful mission in 1989-90. I didn't have to read the innumerable articles to know the general facts about what humans had found there—and what they had failed to find. There was life in the form of vegetation and microscopic organisms. There was even animal life—a tiny reptile which had been seen and photographed but had shown such remarkable elusiveness that it had never been trapped alive. Besides these, there were clear signs of a dead civilization that had been created by intelligent beings. Crude by our standards, especially in crafts and tools, but intelligent. These discoveries served only to create the new Martian mystery. The planet abounded in fossil remains of lower animals. Nothing else. Nothing that seemed capable of the intelligence which had wrought the civilization of Mars and dug its amazing network of canals. It was as if the intelligent beings which had ruled the planets thousands of years ago had simply left it. They had not died there. Or they had mysteriously dissolved, leaving no trace of themselves except their handiwork, leaving behind a dying planet.
Mars was the only place from which the aliens could have come, I thought—but no intelligent aliens had returned on the space ship. Even the specimens of plant life had failed to survive the trip back to earth. And yet—
I tried to remember exactly what I had overheard. The voices had talked of a launching soon. And the fact was that a new flight to Mars was scheduled to take place. They had talked of it as returning to their own place of origin, to their fellows. But if they needed a space ship in which to return, they must have come on our ship.
And nothing had come. I read, in the dusty silence of the library's inner stacks, the accounts of what had happened when the one great ship came home to Earth. All of the survivors had been exhaustively investigated through complex physical and mental tests. No alien presence could have escaped that examination. Weren't they afraid even now of detection? Wasn't that why they wanted my own death to be accidental? Even every fragment of rock and bone and dried-up fungus had been painstakingly tested not once but over and over again. No alien life had come. I was trying to believe the impossible.
With each page turned during that long afternoon my depression grew. When at last, my eyes hot and raw with strain, I set aside the material I had read, a pitifully small portion of the total on my list, I had found not one single hopeful fact. But hope persisted. Perhaps there was something I had overlooked, or something in the later investigations I had not yet had time to read, that would offer a clue. And there was Lois—
I looked at my watch. It was a few minutes after six. Hastily I sorted the material I had read from the rest. The former I returned to the librarian, leaving the unread papers and magazines on the small desk which I had reserved in the stacks. I ran across the cool green of the campus. When I reached the street near the Dugout, I hung back from the sidewalk, waiting until there were no moving cars in sight. It would be all too easy for them to use the same technique a second time.
At this hour of the evening, the Dugout was not crowded. There were students in a few of the booths and at the counter. I recognized a history professor and a zoologist talking quietly at one end of the counter. Lois was not there. Another girl was working the tables, the same girl who had been on duty earlier in the day, and Harry himself was still behind the counter. He glared at me as I approached.
"Where is Lois?" I asked anxiously.
"How the hell should I know? Maybe you can tell me."
"She hasn't come in?"
"No, she hasn't come in." Harry obviously blamed me.
"Look, Harry, I told you I just wanted to ask her a couple of questions. It's important. But that's all I want." I paused. "Didn't she call or anything?"
"No," he grunted, less nastily. "Sometimes she's late. Sometimes she doesn't come in at all."
I felt a hollowness in my stomach. She had to come. I had to talk to her.
I sat at the counter and ordered coffee. I waited. The two teachers farther down the counter nodded at me. Students left and a few more trickled in. Every time the door opened I looked up eagerly. I ordered more coffee and let it grow cold in front of me, untouched.
An hour passed. Harry paused in front of me. He spoke grudgingly, apparently convinced at last that I was not lying. "You gonna eat? I don't think she's coming tonight."
"No, I'm not hungry. Has she ever done this before—just stayed away without telling you?"
"Yeah, sometimes." His face clouded. "These kids—"
I thought of my date with Laurie Hendricks. Lois might show up later. She had probably gone out with some student. Apparently she could be careless about her hours. Harry wasn't going to fire her no matter what she did. Yes, she would probably be in later. I could come back after Laurie left.
At seven-thirty I gave up. I just had time to get back to my trailer court before eight. It took me five minutes to walk to the local elevated station. There was another five minutes wait before a car slid swiftly out of the gathering darkness. Moments later I alighted at the Mulholland platform where the local connected with the Mulholland elevated.
I walked back to the trailer.
It was dark when I let myself in. My neighbor, the strangely withdrawn girl with the surprising figure, sat eating in her brightly lit room, the blinds partly open at the front of her trailer. Another lonely one, I thought. Another outsider.
But tonight I wouldn't be alone.