"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.