"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.