"Mr. Cameron," Dr. Temple said quietly, "no parasite entered earth in
the body of any of the men who came back. I need hardly tell you that
each of those men was put through exhaustive, painstakingly complete
physical and mental tests under rigidly controlled conditions, even
before coming in contact with any humans back here on earth. You see,
we had to be careful. There was the risk of bringing back deadly
viruses that might not yet have visibly affected the men. There was
the question of radiation, of contagious diseases, of any number of
harmful effects. In addition, the very fact that these men had survived
extensive space flight made them priceless subjects for study. Mr.
Cameron, you needn't take my word for it, you can easily verify what
I'm saying, but nothing unusual could have escaped the examination
these men underwent." Dr. Temple swung toward the glass cases along the
wall. "Why, even every bit of rock and bone and dead fungus you see in
these cabinets was exhaustively examined and re-examined and tested
with every means known to science before ever being touched by human
hands!"
"But there must be some way--"
"Let me finish. There is another factor which you may have failed to
consider, one that you could not be expected to know. The men on our
ship never once came in direct physical contact with any object on Mars
or among the items brought back from that planet. The landing party
was never directly exposed even to the Martian atmosphere. It was too
great a risk. A protective wall always interposed between the men and
the objects they contacted. Nothing was touched by human hands. So how
would a parasite have made entry?"
"I don't know!" I said harshly. "But it happened!"
Something stirred in my mind, something urged into activity by Dr.
Temple's words, but the moment I concentrated on it, trying to isolate
it, a door seemed to close solidly down a dimly lighted corridor of my
mind.
"Maybe it was dormant when it was brought in," I said desperately.
"Maybe it didn't show up under the tests. How can we be so sure our
instruments tell us everything?"
For a moment the scientist did not answer. I saw the compassion in his
eyes and knew that he did not believe the aliens existed. He was trying
to be kind and patient. I was taking up a great deal of his valuable
time but he gave no indication of this. His pipe had burnt out again
and now he set it carefully in the big ash tray on his desk. He leaned
forward.
"Mr. Cameron, I am a scientist. When I'm presented with a strange new
set of facts or apparent facts, even if they seem to contradict my own
established theories, I have to consider them. I must try to let the
facts speak for themselves without my imposing a preconceived meaning
upon them. I've tried not to do that with what you've told me. I've
tried to consider seriously the theory or explanation you've offered
for the particular set of facts. However, when investigation appears
to preclude one possible explanation we have to look for another, an
alternative meaning, and see if it will provide a vessel into which the
facts might fit precisely. In the present situation there does seem to
be another possible answer."
"I know what you're going to say--"
"There may be no alien minds," Dr. Temple said quietly. "Or rather,
there may be only one. Your own."
The words dropped with a brutal finality into my brain.
"I am not a psychiatrist," Dr. Temple went on gently, each word falling
like the blow of a hammer, "but everything you have told me admits of
a known delusional pattern with which even I am familiar. The presence
of enemies with super-human powers, your own possession of abnormal
abilities and the fact that your unique talents make you an object of
persecution by these enemies, seems to fit a schizophrenic syndrome. I
would have to look it up, but--"
"That won't be necessary," I said dully. "I looked it up. Paranoid
schizophrenia."
"The hallucinations, if I'm not mistaken, both visual and auditory
are also part of that pattern," the scientist added. "And also the
indications of withdrawal which you've admitted. Even the idea of being
possessed, forced to do things you don't want to--"
"Oh, yes," I agreed bitterly. "It all fits. Perfectly."
Dr. Temple caught himself and stopped abruptly, as if embarrassed by
his own absorption in the problem. He coughed self-consciously. I
avoided his eyes. Silence was loud in the room.
"I'm sorry, Mr. Cameron," the scientist said at last. "You have come to
me for help. I can't give it to you--but I think you can help yourself.
You were confronted suddenly when you were young with a shocking fact
which apparently destroyed your sense of security. Now, years later,
your attempt to escape the reality you tried to push out of your mind
has created an intolerable conflict. But now that you know what has
happened you can resolve that conflict. You can face the reality. After
all, it is not so very important or shameful to know that you are the
bastard son of a very distinguished scientist and a woman you loved
deeply. Is it so hard to accept that you must escape from it into
fantasy?"
I shook my head, unable to answer. The mind is not that simple, I
thought. It does not move in such neatly laid out channels. I rose
stiffly and walked to the windows. For a moment I stood there staring
at the city becoming lost in darkness. On impulse, I opened one
window. Fresh, cool air washed against my face. I stood listening to
the whisper of voices, soft in the distance, to the tinkling fall of
laughter.
The final god had spoken. I knew at last, without doubt, that I was
insane.
19
Alone and on foot, I wandered through the garish streets of the city.
I moved without purpose or destination, with the drunk's uncertain and
aimless step. Like the sponge it resembled, my brain soaked up the
sights and sounds, soon became sodden with the glut of sensation until
the images were overlapping, blurred and meaningless. I walked. Around
me there was the blare of horns, the swish of tires on pavement, the
scrape and clip of feet along the sidewalk, the eager call and the
murmured phrase. Overhead, the slow and heavy throbbing of a helicopter
or, higher in distance and frequency, the whine and clap of a jet
slapping through the sound barrier. Sometimes the rumble of an unseen
train speeding along the monorail nearby, whistling shrilly as it
neared a stop. At intervals the clashing sound effects and throbbing
voices from a public telescreen, rising in volume and urgency as I
approached, then fading slowly behind me. And always there was music,
blaring from a loudspeaker, muffled by an intervening wall, exploding
as a door was opened. The soar of a violin, the call of a trumpet, the
crash of a drum, the croon of a human voice. All these followed me
along the crowded streets.
The night was sound and it was light. Telescreens flickered in their
harsh-hued colors. Ribbons of white tubing ran overhead, bringing
the brightness of high noon to the streets, a brightness unrelieved
by shadow or warmth. The hills were a mass of light clusters, like a
field of white flowers in full bloom. And, as I moved away from a main
thoroughfare, car headlights tore great gaps out of darker streets and,
as they approached each other, seemed to fence like ancient warriors in
swordplay.
I seemed acutely sensitive to all sensation. My eyes ached from the
assault of light, my head reverberated with the Saturday night
sounds, my body seemed bruised and battered from the jostling of the
crowds spilling along the sidewalks. I moved deliberately away into
darker, quieter streets, unconscious of weariness, hardly aware of
the dull ache of the gash in my arm or the steady throbbing of my
head. I stumbled aimlessly through the network of vast apartment
projects and sprawling trailer parks, aware of life and laughter and
shared enjoyment all around me, of the tightening kiss and the flushed
angry face and the quiet amusement and the tension of waiting. I felt
intensely alone.
I lost all sense of time. How many miles I walked I don't know. At one
time I found myself in a section of the Culver basin of trailer courts
that seemed familiar. I wondered if I had once lived here, if I could
be near the site of the trailer in which I had grown up with my mother.
I found familiar landmarks and, groping along the trail of memory, came
upon unfamiliar streets and stores and shining new trailers. Too much
had changed. The past was lost, all but a few traces obliterated by the
indifferently destructive feet of progress.
Slowly the crowds withdrew. The clamor of the city stilled. Public
telescreens clicked off, were seen as massive square patches of gray
against the darker sky. The close-packed streams of cars thinned out.
The sidewalks emptied except for the occasional straggler. Lights
winked out on the hills encircling the city.
I walked alone, a madman, looking as if for the last time at the
ugliness, the beauty, the raw scars of love and hate, the broken window
of violence, the scented flower of affection.
As dawn broke, I left the normal world of humanity behind me. I caught
an almost empty train to the top of the hill. When I reached my
trailer, the sun, still invisible behind the eastern range of hills,
had set the sky on fire. I stood on the step for a moment, casting a
long, searching look at the sleeping city.
Then I went in and closed the door.
20
At first the pills seemed to have little effect. In spite of the
warning on the bottle I took a third pill. I stared fixedly at the
label: K7U. I wondered what the letters symbolized. One part of K to
seven parts of U? Or was this the formula arrived at on the seventh
try? I tried to read the words printed in Latin on the label. My eyes
refused to focus.
Drowsily I lay back on the bed. My eyelids were heavy weights, my legs
were leaden. I made an attempt to shift my feet, but I lacked the
strength. I seemed to sink deep into the soft folds of the bed. At last
I slept.
The day was broken into bright fragments of consciousness projecting
out of a woolly fuzz in which I was often neither fully awake nor
asleep. The barrier between consciousness and the oblivion of
unconsciousness seemed to have disintegrated. At one point--I thought
it was in the morning, but the time of day was not important, time
itself had ceased to exist--the phone rang incessantly and I wanted
desperately to answer it, but I was chained to the bed. And there was a
moment when the girl next door was beating upon the window, her mouth
twisted in grief. She saw me watching her and she fled. I called after
her but there was no sound. At some point in the late afternoon I stood
at the window. The sun was a blazing ball in the hard steel plate of
sky. It seemed to have not only light and heat but sound, clashing and
grinding until my head seemed sure to shatter from the vibrations.
Always in those sharp, isolated moments of crystal clarity, I saw
everything with extraordinary vividness. Colors held an intensity
I had never seen before--the shimmering green of a patch of grass,
the brown of a tree trunk projecting from the yellow hills, the hot
red of a plastic chair, the glittering white of a trailer, the shiny
yellow-and-black of a police helicopter stuck against the intense blue
of the sky. I saw in the most commonplace plant an unimaginable beauty,
an exquisite natural architecture of life.
My perspective was faulty. Distances deceived me. Walls that should
have met seemed to be in different planes. Space was an illusion. I
reached for a glass on a table and missed it completely. Once I tried
to sit on a chair and tumbled to the floor. Crawling, I seemed to inch
forward over an interminable distance, taking hours to cover the few
feet from one side of my living room to another, and this was not at
all surprising or disturbing to me. At one time I was sitting on the
floor of the kitchen looking up in wonder at the immense cliff of
the sink high above me. And again I was walking down the narrow hall
between my bedroom and the front of the trailer. The floor wobbled and
waved and the hall stretched on endlessly, a bewildering corridor of
doors that I kept reaching for and missing, until at last I burst out
of the corridor into the bedroom, and then I was falling toward the
bed, falling, floating through the cold black infinity of space.
While the hot mid-day sun beat down upon the trailer, I stood
indifferently watching the still, white face of my mother, what had
been my mother, lying rigid in the meaningless calm of death. I felt a
total numbness, an absence of feeling, as if my whole body and brain
had been shot with novocain.
But later, much, much later, I stared out at a gray city under a gray
sky, relieved only by the streaks of orange and red and purple left by
the sun at the horizon, and tears rolled down my face. I cried without
knowing why I grieved.
I slept and dreamed of waves washing over me, of voices pounding
with the fury of waves, lifting and tossing me at will, thundering
and growling. And in the chaos of semi-consciousness, I tasted the
delicious sweetness of red lips, felt the incredible softness of
breasts crushed against my chest, touched with my fingers the silken
mass of red hair--and found it inexplicably turned to gold, to the
yellow of a field of grain under a hot August sun.
And in the evening, when darkness crouched like a living thing in the
corners of the small bedroom, I woke suddenly to a moment of ordinary
reality in which I saw the room exactly as it had always been, saw the
open bottle of pills on the built-in chest within arm's reach, smelled
the odor of my sweat-drenched body. Bewilderment flooded through me.
I had the fleeting thought that this was wrong, that the pills had
failed, that the snake pit into which I had plunged had been only an
illusion. I groped toward understanding, but sleep descended upon me
like a thick black fog. I tried to escape the darkness, grasping at
the flickering light of reason, but it fled into the distance like the
vanishing light in the center of a television screen turned off, the
dot of light swiftly receding into a pinprick of brightness, winking,
winking out....
* * * * *
The floor creaked. I woke trembling with an immediate and frightening
impression that someone was in the trailer. I was not sure what had
awakened me and for a moment I had no memory of the long, lost day.
Then the floor creaked again.
And still I didn't understand. In a tumbling confusion of pictures I
remembered the pills and the distortions they had produced. As quickly
as this memory jelled, I knew that the pills had not worked. They
had failed to induce the symptomatic exaggeration of my illness. My
reaction had been violent, but it was no more than a normal mind's
response to a heavy dosage. Moreover, the effects had worn off too fast.
All this I saw, but its significance escaped me. I was still thinking
fuzzily. My head ached with an almost unbearable pressure and my limbs
still felt heavy. The third warning creak brought me fully awake, and I
knew that someone was creeping along the narrow hall toward me. I could
see nothing in the darkness and there was no sound of breathing or of
stealthy feet. But the complaining floor was a voice too familiar to be
missed. It could mean only one thing.
I waited tensely, straining every sense. Nothing moved. I began to make
out shadowy shapes as my eyes adjusted to the dark. Doubts attacked
me. Could this be it after all--the mind's final breaking point? The
self-created monster in the darkness?
At last full understanding came. No. I was not insane. The pills had
merely proven my sanity. They had done their job after all. The danger
now was real. Everything that I had been ready to dismiss as the
delusions and hallucinations of a sick mind--all of it was real. And
now--
He attacked.
In the instant I knew that I was rational and whole, I was able to
move, rolling to the side. A giant figure crashed onto the bed where
I had lain. I could hear his hoarse, quick breathing, no longer held
in silence. I spun away from him. A huge hand caught at my arm, but
I broke free. Still rolling, I tumbled onto the floor. As he pulled
himself off the bed, I staggered to my feet. The room reeled around
me. The effects of the drug had not fully worn off. I tried to take a
step toward the hall and it was like walking through deep water, my
steps slow and sluggish. I could see the man towering above me as he
leaped off the bed. A great hand grabbed at my suit as I fell away,
and the fabric tore. I stumbled, off balance, unable to control the
loose flopping of my arms and legs. A fist slashed at me and glanced
off my cheek. Even the slashing blow was so powerful that it smashed me
backwards, half-stunned, to crash against the wall beside the bed. I
went down heavily. My cheekbone felt as if it had been pulverized.
Panic came. The relief which had first soared in me at the knowledge
that I was a sane man was lost now in the bitter realization that I had
discovered the truth too late. There was no way I could survive this
giant's attack. But who was he?
A huge hand plucked me from the floor and flung me down on the bed.
He was bending over me then, his hands clutching at my throat. His
breath whistled through his open mouth. He shifted, bringing up his
thickly-muscled leg to pin me under him. With the desperation of fear
and the blind urge to survival, I twisted wildly. One free hand raked
at his eyes. He gave a bellow of rage and pain and pulled away, pawing
at his face. I wrenched away from the loosening grasp of the hand which
still gripped my throat.
I broke past him. It was an immense effort to drag my heavy thighs
forward, straining for speed. In the fleeting seconds it took me to
stumble to the doorway, I seemed to live an eternity of effort and
jumbled thoughts. This was the alien--it must be! No subtleties now, no
clever tricks of the mind--just brute force. And I had a vivid picture
of Lois Worthington as she must have looked with her neck snapped like
a brittle twig. I knew that I would not get away, that this was the end
of all my running.
My hand, catching the door frame, brushed against a switch and the room
suddenly blazed with light. Over my shoulder I saw him charging after
me--saw the shock of black hair, the powerful shoulders and arms, the
thick features twisted now in fury. Mike Boyle!
For an instant the light blinded him. And in that moment, out of the
confusion and shock of recognition, I had time to feel a surge of
disbelief. He couldn't be the one! I knew this slow, arrogant mind. And
if he could control me as the alien had, why hadn't he stopped me now
from trying to get away?
And then he was lumbering toward me. As I tried to spin away from him
along the hall, his big hands pulled me back. I felt his arms slide
around my chest and tighten. Twisting, I stared directly into his eyes.
They were glazed, unseeing, frighteningly dumb. A crushing pressure
squeezed my ribs together. I struggled weakly, kicking at his legs,
trying to reach his eyes with my hand. Pain lanced through my chest,
increasing swiftly in intensity as the terrible pressure drove the air
from my lungs and my chest seemed to cave in.
And through the streaks of pain slipped a stab of perception. He was
controlled! This was not the alien. This was a weaker mind, helpless
to resist the command which drove him to kill just as I was helpless
in his terrible embrace. Here was a weapon I had not counted on, an
ultimate weapon beyond resistance--
The pain grew savage. I seemed to hear a cracking of bones yielding
and I thought I could not bear the pain. A stifled, breathless cry
broke through my locked jaws. Consciousness began to slip away from me
and the trailer seemed to tip slowly like a ship listing.
"There is no pain, no sickness, no evil beyond the power of the mind to
control."
The rich, vibrant voice of Swami Fallaninda echoed in the recesses of
my mind. _No pain_, I thought dimly. _Concentrate and there will be no
pain. Draw the mind in upon itself, obliterate the knowledge of the
body's anguish. Concentrate intensively, know the power of your own
mind, and there is nothing you cannot do_--
"Stop!"
I flung the mind's command at Boyle with all the force of my wavering
consciousness. I felt his powerful body go rigid against me. I had
reached him! The impulsive desperate try had broken through the barrier
of his mind. He could be controlled! If the alien could do it, why not
I?
"Release me!"
His throat worked and he gave a strangled cry. I could see his red
face contorting with strain. His crushing arms slackened their hold. I
tried to draw myself into a ball, to snuff out all pain, all sensation,
everything except the awareness of being, of mind, of mental force. I
existed only as awareness.
"Now!" My mind hammered the unspoken command at him. "Release me!"
I felt his arms slip loose like a broken spring uncoiling. Twisting
free, I backed away from him down the hall. He stood transfixed, his
great bulk filling the narrow space, and I saw in his eyes the dumb
pain of an animal goaded into a corner, trapped in an intolerable
dilemma of conflict. It was only then that I caught some remote
glimmering of the torment my counter-command had produced in his
captive mind.
I thought again of the swami's ringing words: "Know your own strength,
believe in it, fear not!" The little man no longer seemed ridiculous.
The squeal of a police helicopter's siren shrilled close by--so loud
that it seemed to come from almost directly overhead. Its shriek seemed
to snap something in Mike Boyle's mind. I felt a shiver of horror, as
if I had seen a mind broken even as a neck might snap or a rib crack
under pressure.
He plunged toward me. Stumbling out of the corridor, I lost my balance
and fell backwards. Boyle brushed past me as if I had not been there.
He charged across to the door, clawed at its knob, hurled himself
through the opening. His shoulder struck the door frame and he went out
staggering.
As I reached the doorway, he was lurching into the street. A spotlight
slashed toward him out of the darkness. He darted away from it, but the
beam pinned his running figure against the outline of a trailer across
the way.
"Halt!" a voice barked.
I caught the dim shape of a black police helicopter, its yellow stripe
gleaming dully, and I had time to wonder how the police had got there,
and I was aware out of the corner of my eye of light glowing in the
next-door trailer. Then Mike Boyle was sprinting down the street,
ignoring the warning shout, dodging like a halfback through an open
field, moving his bulk with startling agility and speed.
Low and vicious, a policeman's silenced special spat out of the
darkness. Boyle's legs went out from under him as if he had been hit
by a low, hard tackle. The smack as he hit the pavement was brutally
audible. Echoing it, so close that it brought me spinning around, was a
low cry.
I stared into the frightened eyes of the blonde girl next door. She
stood barely two paces away. I had a sudden intuition as if she had
spoken to me aloud.
"You called the police," I said.