It was some two hours before sunrise. I was dressing, packing
leisurely. There was a knock at the door.
My light was on. I could not pretend to be asleep. "What is it?"
"Police sir. We're checking for a wanted man. Will you open up, please?"
I threw the last of my stuff into the Gladstone and shoved it under
the bed. Putting my ear to the panel of the door, I listened for their
breathing. There were two of them, and probably more within call,
checking other rooms where a single man was registered. I tipped the
shade of the lamp so that my face would be in shadow, and opened the
door. They walked in, one of them diffident, the other as insolent as a
thug, with his hand on his holstered revolver.
The second would be the less dangerous, I thought; he would be faster
to draw that gun but more stupid in his reactions to a surprise than
the other, who looked the more intelligent. So as they entered, turning
to face me, I pushed the door shut with my heel and let the smart, shy
one have a quick jab on the angle of his jaw to quiet him for a time.
That left me the tough boy, and I looked forward to a good time with
him.
He was fast on the draw. His gun was not buttoned down and it fairly
flew out to cover me. I am big and make a fine target. His eyes were
squinting at my chest where he expected to shoot me and he never saw my
foot come off the floor. The gun exploded out of his broken hand and
skidded across the room.
He was full of guts. He came at me with his one good hand and his knees
and even his teeth. I did not want to be marked. I kept my face away
from him and let him hit me twice in the stomach. Then I caught his
wrist and flying-mared him over my shoulder. The crack of his skull
against the wall was a burst of sharp sweet music. I grinned wide. Then
I bent over the other policeman. I had hit him more scientifically than
I had known. He wouldn't get up any more.
That made five.
Five murders! Five killings, using no weapons, just my hands, for five
violent homicides!
* * * * *
I stood there in the center of that room, which I had made a gory
shambles, and for the first (and last) time remorse touched me. I was
Bill Cuff, law-abiding writer; if not exactly an altruistic dweller
by the side of the road and friend to man, at least I had always been
a normally decent guy who would go to a lot of trouble to keep from
hurting anybody. What had happened to me?
A voice inside me said, _But you are only killing men._
_Men?_ But I'm a man, damn it all!
No, you aren't.
What am I, an orangutan? I asked myself with heavy sarcasm.
No, not that. No more kin to ape than to man.
An extraterrestrial, then, descendant of a flying saucer pilot?
No, not that either.
I put my face in my hands. Oh for the love of God, what am I then? What
am I?
I knew I wasn't a man and I didn't know what I was.
The thing that was me, that had lain dormant until twenty-six hours
before, and then had waked and taken over its rightful inheritance
which was my body and my mind, what _was_ it?
I didn't know what it was. But I knew a few things about it. It had
once crouched in a cave with others of its breed, to listen to the
angry yelling of hunting men. It had once stolen a human she and
mated with her, and been killed by her treachery. It was master to an
incredible degree of its sense and muscular equipment, even of its
heart, which it could slew at will, and of its breathing, which it
could stop entirely for fantastic periods of time.
It was rising in me now and it was I. Remorse died forever. Human
traits and sentiments died that I could no longer remember ever
harboring. I was I and though I did not yet know exactly what I was, I
knew it was no fit of madness that had taken possession of me, no devil
of the olden times to be driven out by exorcism, no second personality
to land me in an asylum; but the soul that had come down through untold
centuries hidden in my genes, traveling its recondite course through
blood and flesh and brain matter until it woke again to conscious life
in Bill Cuff in the early autumn of 1952.
The pictures I had seen thus far were racial memory, remembrance of
a dawn world, and I knew there would be more of them. I would hold
patience in my hands and wait till time brought full recall.