Willingly now, no longer rejecting the memory, I followed my
recollection as Catherine and I went along that highway at a happy pace.
With care I recalled every detail of Catherine, watching the road
through my mind and eyes, how she'd mentioned the case of the missing
spoke, and how I'd projected back to perceive that which I had not been
conscious of.
Reminding myself that it was past, I went through it again,
deliberately. The fallen limb that blocked the road, my own horror as
the wheels hit it. The struggle to regain control of the careening car.
As a man watching a motion picture, I watched the sky and the earth turn
over and over, and I heard my voice mouthing wordless shouts of fear.
Catherine's cry of pain and fright came, and I listened as my mind
reconstructed it this time without wincing. Then the final crash, the
horrid wave of pain and the sear of the flash-fire. I went through my
own horror and self condemnation, and my concern over Catherine. I
didn't shut if off. I waded through it.
Now I remembered something else.
Something that any normal, sensible mind would reject as an
hallucination. Beyond any shadow of a doubt there had been no time for a
man to rig a block and tackle on a tree above a burning automobile in
time to get the trapped victims out alive. And even more certain it was
that no normal man of fifty would have had enough strength to lift a car
by its front bumper while his son made a rush into the flames.
That tackle had been rigged and burned afterward. But who would reject a
block and tackle in favor of an impossibly strong man? No, with the
tackle in sight, the recollection of a man lifting that overturned
automobile like a weight lifter pressing up a bar bell would be buried
in any mind as a rank hallucination. Then one more item came driving
home hard. So hard that I almost jumped when the idea crossed my mind.
Both Catherine and Dr. Thorndyke had been telepaths.
A telepath close to any member of his underground outfit would divine
their purpose, come to know their organization, and begin to grasp the
fundamentals of their program. Such a person would be dangerous.
On the other hand, an esper such as myself could be turned aside with
bland remarks and a convincing attitude. I knew that I had no way of
telling lie from truth and that made my problem a lot more difficult.
From the facts that I did have, something smelled of overripe seafood.
Government and charities were pouring scads of dough into a joint called
the Medical Research Center. To hear the scholars of medicine tell it,
Mekstrom's Disease was about the last human frailty that hadn't been
licked to a standstill. They boasted that if a victim of practically
anything had enough life left in him to crawl to a telephone and use it,
his life could be saved. They grafted well. I'd heard tales of things
like fingers, and I know they were experimenting on hands, arms and legs
with some success. But when it came to Mekstrom's they were stopped
cold. Therefore the Medical Research Center received a walloping batch
of money for that alone; all the money that used to go to the various
heart, lung, spine and cancer funds. It added up well.
But the Medical Research Center seemed unaware that some group had
solved their basic problem.
From the books I've read I am well aware of one of the fundamental
principles of running an underground: _Keep it underground!_ The Commie
menace in these United States might have won out in the middle of the
century if they'd been able to stay a secret organization. So the
Highways in Hiding could stay underground and be an efficient
organization only until someone smoked them out.
That one was going to be me.
But I needed an aide-de-camp. Especially and specifically I needed a
trained telepath, one who would listen to my tale and not instantly howl
for the nut-hatch attendants. The F.B.I. were all trained investigators
and they used esper-telepath teams all the time. One dug the joint while
the other dug the inhabitant, which covered the situation to a
faretheewell.
It would take time to come up with a possible helper. So I spent the
next hour driving toward Chicago, and by the time I'd crossed the
Ohio-Indiana line and hit Richmond, I had a plan laid out. I placed a
call to New York and within a few minutes I was talking to Nurse Farrow.
I'll not go into detail because there was a lot of mish-mash that is not
particularly interesting and a lot more that covered my tracks since I'd
parted company with her on the steps of the hospital. I did not, of
course, mention my real purpose over the telephone and Miss Farrow could
not read my mind from New York.
The upshot of the deal was that I felt that I needed a nurse for a
while, not that I was ill, but that I felt a bit woozy now and then
because I hadn't learned to slow down. I worked too fast and too long
and my condition was not up to it yet. This Miss Farrow allowed as being
quite possible. I repeated my offer to pay her at the going prices for
registered nurses with a one-month guarantee, paid in advance. That
softened her quite a bit. Then I added that I'd videograph her a check
large enough to cover the works plus a round trip ticket. She should
come out and have a look, and if she weren't satisfied, she could return
without digging into her own pocket. All she'd lose was one day, and it
might be a bit of a vacation if she enjoyed flying in a jetliner at
sixty thousand feet.
The accumulation of offers finally sold her and she agreed to
arrange a leave of absence. She'd meet me in the morning of the
day-after-tomorrow, at Central Airport in Chicago.
I videographed the check and then took off again, confident that I'd be
able to sell her on the idea of being the telepath half of my amateur
investigation team.
Then because I needed some direct information, I turned West and crossed
the line into Indiana, heading toward Marion. So far I had a lot of
well-placed suspicions, but until I was certain, I could do no more than
postulate ideas. I had to know definitely how to identify Mekstrom's
Disease, or at least the infected flesh. I have a fairly good recall;
all I needed now was to have someone point to a Case and say flatly that
this was a case of Mekstrom's Disease. Then I'd know whether what I'd
seen in Ohio was actually one hundred percent Mekstrom.