"You know who I mean. Laurie! I know she went to your place last night."
"That--that was about a term paper assignment," I stammered.
"Don't try to kid me. I saw her when she came home last night. She was
so mad she wouldn't even talk to me--and she didn't smear her lipstick
all by herself."
I began to recover from the stunning surprise of his outburst. The
danger I had expected was so much more to be feared than the anger of
a jealous boy that I had an hysterical impulse to laugh. But his anger
seemed genuine. I think if the librarian hadn't been there in the
stacks nearby he would have started a fight.
"She's my girl," Jenkins snapped. "Keep away from her!"
"That's for her to decide, isn't it?" I asked quietly. "But I don't
think you have anything to worry about. I doubt that she'll want to see
me again."
"Don't try to brush me off!" the boy said fiercely. "If you don't
leave her alone, maybe the school would like to know about it. The
authorities wouldn't like it!"
I felt a trace of answering anger. "If you're thinking of creating
a scandal," I said coldly, "maybe you'd better think about Laurie's
reputation too. If you try to damage me, you'll be hurting her as well."
The words shook him. He glared at me, fists clenched, breathing hard
and quick as if he had been running, and I sensed the conflict in his
mind, the rage made impotent.
"Damn you!" he choked. "I'm warning you. Next time I'll make you pay
for it!"
He flung away down the aisle, vanishing from sight as he bolted along
a connecting corridor. I could hear the harsh fall of his steps fading
away from me. I took a deep breath and held it, let it out slowly,
feeling some of the tension subside in my arms and legs and chest.
Chalk up another threat, I thought wearily. First vicious, powerful
minds that toyed with me. Then suspicious police. Mysterious neighbors.
And now a kid's jealousy so strong and blind that it could make him do
something foolish. I could never get an insurance policy, I thought
with a feeble attempt at humor. The odds were against my being around
to pay next month's premium.
Jenkins' abrupt appearance and his jealous wrath had seemed honestly
motivated. If he were one of the aliens would he have acted that way?
What purpose would it serve? Then I remembered the librarian's timely
interruption. Had she halted more than a threatened fist fight? Had
Jenkins' plan for an accident been spoiled by the presence of someone
else, forcing him to improvise a clever and plausible reason for
stalking me?
No. It was probably true that he would have had to explain his purpose
in order to gain access to the stacks. The librarians guarded the
entrance as zealously as they undoubtedly guarded their bedroom doors.
If he had planned any serious harm to me, he wouldn't have advertised
his guilt. This was not the place he would have chosen.
My mind was tired of questions. Jenkins was still not removed from
suspicion. No one was. I was no closer to getting any answers than I
had ever been.
10
I found Mike Boyle on the practice football field at the west end of
the campus. The first team was scrimmaging a group of substitutes who
were running through the plays of one of the schools on the weekend's
double-header. I saw Boyle roving wide to defend against an attempted
end run, saw him follow the play, not moving fast, until suddenly he
was charging forward, bouncing off the interference in such a way that
he kept his feet and sliced through to the halfback who was caught open
and hemmed in near the sidelines, a sitting duck for the tackle that
slammed him to the ground. And then Boyle was on his feet, amazingly
nimble and springy for such a big man, trotting away without glancing
back at the runner, who rose slowly and stiffly.
The deceptive ease of the play showed why Boyle was an All-American
candidate. It also revealed something I had heard about the big roving
tackle--whose position was one added to football's original eleven-man
team in order to give the defense some needed help in the increasingly
wide-open style of the game. Boyle showed an uncanny ability to divine
what the opponent was going to do. Somehow, wherever a play went,
he was there in front of it, anticipating it almost as if he knew
precisely where it was going. The fact was an innocent one, but now it
made me wonder as I watched him in action. Everything was suspect now,
I thought. Nothing was innocent.
The scrimmaging continued for twenty minutes while I watched. Then the
first team was called off the field for a rest and the second unit
went in against the same tired group of subs. Some of the first team
limbered up after the bruising workout by running up and down the
sidelines. Others flipped a football or just stood watching.
I walked toward Mike Boyle. As I neared him he gulped water from a
ladle dipped into a pail and spewed it out in a great gusher. Then he
drank, his throat working visibly, sweat pouring down his face to mix
with the water that spilled around his mouth and ran down his throat.
He seemed to do everything in a big, robust way. In the padded uniform,
he appeared immense, twice as broad as I and towering over me. He had
not seemed nearly as big in street clothes.
I stood waiting while he drank. I was sure that he had not noticed my
approach but he spoke as he dropped the ladle into the pail.
"Hi, Prof. Been running into any more cars?"
"I manage to keep out of the way of most of them."
He grinned. His mouth was full lipped and wide, matching the
proportions of a prominent nose that had once been broken and an unruly
mass of black hair. Only the eyes were too small for the face, but that
might have been due to the habitual squint against the sun of a young
man who spent a great deal of his time outdoors.
"You professors kill me," Boyle said. "What was on your mind, Prof? A
poem or something?"
"Something I heard."
"Yeah? It must have been good," he said offhandedly, "to make you walk
in front of the only damn car on the street."
"It was," I said.
The small brown eyes regarded me curiously and I wondered if their
glint held amusement or something deeper.
"Well, you better be careful," Boyle said. "Hearing things like that
won't do you any good if you're dead."
I read menace into the words, but it was belied by the faintly
contemptuous grin on his face. He had the habitual cockiness which
I had often seen in the professional campus athlete to whom public
adulation has come too soon, before the mind is mature enough to
discount it. The attitude was always irritating.
"That's a nice looking girlfriend of yours," I said, perhaps too
casually. "Isn't she a physics major?"
"Helen? Yeah, she's a brain," he agreed. "A cute kid, though," he
added, as if the combination of cuteness and intelligence was cause for
surprise. "We have a ball."
"Miss Hendricks said you were going steady."
"Yeah? You might say that, Prof. But I'm not the kind of guy that likes
to be tied down. You know?"
I was groping, trying to find a way to ask him where he had been the
night before without seeming to be probing. I found myself disliking
the youthful arrogance and it was an effort to keep the amiably stupid
smile on my lips. I stood for a moment in silence, watching the
scrimmage. The subs executed an intricate play that caught the defense
completely out of position for the pass. Boyle cursed vehemently.
"They should have smelled that one a mile off," he growled.
"Doesn't the coach object when you go out on dates during the week?" I
asked suddenly. "Or do you have a curfew?"
He spat vigorously. "Nuts," he said. "I'm his bread and butter. I go
out when I want to."
I hesitated. "I thought I saw you and Helen again last night," I said.
"Pretty late, too. I was on my way home from a movie."
He swung around slowly and the small brown eyes caught mine in a fixed
stare. The indefinable trace of contempt marked the expression of his
eyes and mouth.
"Prof," he said softly, "you didn't see me and Helen out last night.
You got something on your mind. Maybe you should tell me what it is."
"I guess I was mistaken," I said, glad at that moment that I had
had the sense to pick this time and place to sound him out, with a
hundred people in clear view and within shouting distance. I was not
sure what the hint of ugliness in his voice and manner signified.
The thickly-muscled chest and arms didn't frighten me. Rather it was
the thought of this brutal strength directed by a supremely powerful
intelligence.
"Yeah, you made a mistake, Prof. Helen was with me last night but you
didn't see us. I tell you what. You want to know if Helen was with me
last night, you just go ask her, huh? And don't bother me with your
nosy questions."
"I can assure you I wasn't being nosy," I said in my best and huffiest
imitation of professorial dignity. "I was merely making conversation."
"Sure you were. Well, you just go talk to yourself, Prof. Only watch
out for those cars. We'd miss you around here."
He turned his back on me and began to do a series of leg exercises,
squatting and jumping erect, thick thighs stretching the pants of his
uniform each time he dropped into the crouch.
I walked away slowly. The momentary irritation I felt over the open
contempt shown by a muscle-headed athlete was not important. But if
his statement about being with Helen Darrow could be believed, it was
highly significant. It meant that they could vouch for each other,
providing that they were together at the time Lois Worthington was
killed. Boyle was the one suspect I knew who could easily have broken
the girl's neck without even breathing hard. But I was convinced that
Lois' death was linked to the aliens and I knew there were not three
of them. There was the man who had been in the back booth and one
student. Not two. Helen Darrow could prove that both she and Mike
Boyle were innocent. In one stroke the possible number of suspects
would be cut in half.
11
I felt a compulsion to keep moving. Even the negative results I had
garnered so far gave me a feeling of accomplishing something. In
addition I was avoiding being a fixed target. The fact that the aliens
had not already struck again surprised me. Almost two full days had
passed since the first hastily improvised attempt on my life. It was
not comforting to reflect that they would want to be absolutely sure of
me the second time--and it was probably not easy to arrange a foolproof
accident.
Besides--came the chilling thought--they had been busy the night before
with Lois Worthington.
I needed greater mobility. That meant a car. I rented a small closed
aluminum model from a lot near the university. While the cost was high,
I seemed to have acquired a new indifference to economics. Whether I
ate next week or paid next month's rent didn't seem to matter any more.
My entire perspective had gradually been changing. Even the conditioned
obedience to academic rules of propriety was disappearing. Twenty-four
hours before I had been reluctant to seek Lois' address from the
registrar's office, afraid that my motive might be questioned. That
had cost the girl her life. Now I had no hesitation about going to the
office for the two addresses I wanted. Ironically, the girl behind the
counter didn't even appear curious. I wouldn't have cared if she had.
Was this the schizophrenic's apathy, his progressive lack of
orientation? There were gaps in the days when I had done habitual
things like shaving and changing clothes. I couldn't remember doing
them. The car's mirror reflected an image that could have been someone
else, a young man whose face showed little evidence of strain and
fatigue. In fact, despite my lack of sleep, I didn't feel tired. I felt
as if I had been wound up tight and any minute I would be released and
would begin to spin madly.
Madly. The word stuck. It kept coming back, the awful fear. My
stumbling investigations had a double-edged motive: to find the
aliens--and to prove that I was not mad. And I was slowly, inexorably,
trapping myself in a narrowing circle. If I sat back, if I did nothing,
I wouldn't know for sure. I could believe in mysterious beings from
outer space, in sinister plots against me, in the hallucination of
bodiless voices. I wouldn't have to confront unpleasant implications
about morbid attempts at self-destruction or a disintegrating
personality.
Even during the twenty-seven years of my life, society had come a
long way in its attitude toward insanity. No longer was it viewed
with a sense of shame or revulsion, something to be ignored or swept
into a corner of society where you didn't have to look at it. But
it was still the nation's number one disease, it still inspired the
terror of the unknown. We had had many scientific breakthroughs--the
famous virus break in 1971 which meant the end of cancer, the virtual
elimination of the common cold; the successful "heart patch" of 1975
which changed heart disease from a leading killer to a rarely fatal
disease; the total elimination of polio and multiple sclerosis and many
other vicious enemies of the human organism. But the mind remained
impregnable.
There had been gigantic strides in treatment, but mental hospitals were
still jammed far beyond capacity. One American in five had some form
of mental illness. Some, the luckier ones, found quick cures in the
K7U drugs available under prescription, the laboratory narcotic that
had proved startlingly effective, enabling you to induce exaggerated
symptoms of psychoses under their influence, thus making possible an
accurate diagnosis that could lead to prompt treatment. But there had
been many cases of alarming toxic side effects from K7U. And in one
area of mental illness the miracle drug had quite a different result.
It accelerated the advanced stages of paranoid schizophrenia and its
rarer, more logically organized cousin, paranoia.
There was a small bottle of K7U pills in the top drawer of the built-in
chest in my trailer bedroom, a supply I had surreptitiously borrowed
from the psychology laboratory when I first became aware of what seemed
hallucinatory voices. I had been afraid to use them. If mine were a
minor illness, the pills would expose it to accurate treatment. There
was the risk of side effects but that did not deter me. My symptoms did.
The hallucination of voices where no one was present was a common
one. It was frequently allied to a fairly well organized delusional
system in which the person held the bizarre conviction that supra-human
beings were trying to possess or destroy him--and often was convinced
that he himself had some extraordinary powers that accounted for the
persecution. He might seem quite normal in other phases of his life,
well-oriented to his surroundings except for a tendency to withdraw
socially, avoiding close personal relationships, and an increasing
emotional apathy sometimes alternating with moments of exaggerated
feeling.
This symptomatic pattern was common in paranoid schizophrenia.
Grimly I thrust aside the conclusion to which my thoughts had led me,
ignoring the tight stomach cramp of fear, pretending that the reason
for panic did not exist.
I was heading south through the Culver basin, the west end of the
city's sprawling complex of trailer courts that ranged from the
utilitarian government projects for low income dwellings to luxurious
resort-like courts. I stayed off the automatic drive freeways,
preferring to control the car manually even though it meant a slower
trip. I needed contact with busy, noisy, normal humanity.
Moving on the ground level streets through the trailer basin gave
me a viewpoint I had not had in two years. I had lived in the basin
with my mother up to the time of her death. Afterwards I had obeyed
the inclination to cut myself off from everything and everyone I had
known. I had been fortunate in finding the vacancy in the court off
Mulholland Drive. In a city of sixteen million people forever bursting
out of their housing, that had been an even luckier chance than I had
realized. There was already a public clamor to re-zone Beverly Hills
for apartments and middle-income trailer courts. It was the city's last
remaining area of private homes and only the vast wealth and influence
of the rich and politically powerful who lived there had kept it from
being overwhelmed by the creeping mass of trailers and great apartment
cities.
Now, viewing the basin after a long absence, I could see the smothering
effects of overcrowding. The sidewalks were so jammed that people had
to move in funereal procession. At those rare cross streets where there
was not a pedestrian underpass there were three minute intervals while
cars waited for the surging wave of pedestrians to flow across the
street. Automobile traffic was heavy in spite of the great numbers who
no longer drove, preferring to take the speedy elevated trains which
thundered overhead at frequent intervals. And over the whole area there
was an unending murmur of sound, of feet and horns and voices and
loudspeakers of public telescreens and taped music, the whole orchestra
of sound like the unending drone that would exist in the center of a
giant beehive. And the city smelled. It smelled of sweat and oil and
seared meat and smoke and French perfumes. It smelled of humanity
penned into a seemingly airless enclosure. I had the feeling of being
imprisoned within solid walls of sound and smell and motion.
The world was fast becoming much too small. Over twenty-five years
of uninterrupted peace had combined with the achievements of science
against sickness and disease and accident to produce a vast population
explosion with all of its attendant overcrowding and unemployment and
food shortages. The world needed space. Already the crime rate was
climbing alarmingly. Traditional food resources were being exhausted.
We needed the universe to grow in. But what enemies lay waiting for us
on those distant planets circling through the void? Was it conceivable
that I, alone in all the world, had met the first of those enemies?
That I held the fate of mankind in my hands? Would anyone believe me if
I could warn those who might save us?
No. They wouldn't listen. An overcrowded world had produced a surplus
of fanatic prophets of doom. They would be sympathetic, the leaders who
might hear my cry of warning. If I got violent, they would forcibly
confine me for treatment. But if what I believed was not madness but
reality, and if I failed to stop the aliens, humanity would perish.
Absorbed in thought I missed the intersection I was searching for. In
no time, I was lost in the maze. The street pattern was so chaotic
that, even with a map, it took me an hour to find what I sought, the
Lucky Galaxy Trailer Court. By then it was dusk and I realized I would
probably be arriving just at dinner time.