The paper he'd found kept the other passengers on the bus from seeing
him, but he was too deep in his own thoughts to read it. His eyes
roamed back to the story of the cop-killing monster--a seemingly
harmless florist in Brooklyn who'd suddenly gone berserk and rushed
down the streets with a knife; he'd been wrong in thinking that
concerned him. And he'd been wrong in thinking anyone would try to
kill him on sight. The reward notice and picture were in front of his
eyes--but it was a reward for information, and there was a huge box
that proclaimed he was _not_ a criminal and must not be harmed, or
even allowed to know he was recognized.
The new facts only confused the issue. He twisted about in his mind,
trying to explain why the young man had left him to drift down, and
gone rushing into the apartment. He was ready for the collecting--and
he'd been left uncollected!
The girl had said there were no aliens. Now he wondered. She had known
more than he'd found from her--she'd known his brand of cigarettes,
even. And there had been that shopping list, with the lipstick on
it--the same type he now remembered her using. He'd known her
before--and not just as a little girl. That tied him in with Meinzer,
who was a mystery in himself.
He puzzled over it. The things that had happened to him had always
been preceded by violent emotion, instead of followed by it. Usually,
it had been fear--but sometimes some other emotion, as had been the
case just before he was suddenly shifted to the Moon. Whenever he
seemed on the verge of discovering something or emotionally upset, it
hit at him. Did that mean he was only susceptible to the phenomena
when off balance? It still didn't account for the fact that some of
the things hadn't directly affected him, at all.
The more he knew, the less he knew.
He got off the bus and headed for the warehouse. This time, he had to
wait before he could see a chance to dart under the trailer and into
the entrance. He noticed that the gray sedan was parked nearby.
He darted in.
They were still there! He heard Ellen's voice, sounding as if she had
been crying, and then an answer from the other. He felt his way
carefully over the rubble, working as close as he could. Now, if he
sprang the few feet....
"... must be a time-jump," the man's voice said, doubtfully. "I tell
you, Ellen, those damned fools were firing at him, up there in the
air, while you were still with him in the apartment. That's an angle
on this psi factor stuff we hadn't expected."
The voice stopped for a moment. Then it picked up again. "Drat it! I
wish you hadn't called the F. B. I. on him--they got rattled when he
came out looking like a saint in a halo and jumped fifty feet up to
float around. Some fool started shooting, and the rest joined in."
"I had to--he was talking about alien monsters. I thought he was going
crazy, Dan. I couldn't tell him anything--I promised him I wouldn't,
and I kept my promise. But I thought enough of them might catch him,
somehow.... Dan, can't we find him now? He needs us!"
* * * * *
Hawkes lay frozen. He tried to move forward, but his body was tensed,
waiting for more. If something happened now....
"Alien monsters?" Dan's voice grew bitter. "It is alien--and a
monster. This psi factor...."
The words blurred, and seemed to echo and re-echo inside Hawkes' head.
That made twice he'd heard them mention the psi factor--the strange
ability a few human minds had to perform seeming miracles. Men who had
it could make dice roll the way they wanted. Young girls sometimes
had it before puberty, and could throw heavy objects around a room
without touching them; they did not even know they were the cause of
the motion, but blamed it on poltergeists. Other men caused strange
accidents--fires, for instance--the old salamander legend!
There'd been a piece of paper--psi equals alpha, the psi factor was
the beginning of infinity for mankind. But it had been wrong. He'd
changed that, on the other side. It should have read psi equals omega,
the absolute end.
He gasped hoarsely, and heard their startled voices stop, while the
flashlight beam swung around, to pick him out in the darkness. He felt
Ellen and her younger brother, Dan, pulling him forward into the
little cave with them, and he heard their voices questioning him. But
his head was spinning madly under the sudden flood of memories that
the missing key word had suddenly brought back.
The letter from Professor Meinzer had been about his paper on
poltergeists which the old man had seen before publication. He'd been
doing research on the psi factor for the government, and he needed a
mathematician--even one who proved something which he knew wasn't
true, provided the mathematics could handle his theories.
Hawkes' head was suddenly brimming with mental images of the seven
months, while he worked on the mathematics to tie down the strange
pattern of brain waves the old professor had found in the minds of
those who had the mysterious psi factor. Dan had worked with them, in
the little cluttered apartment, building the apparatus they needed. It
was through Dan that Ellen was hired, as a general assistant and
secretary.
There had been only the four of them, working in deepest secrecy in
the three rooms which the government had felt were more suitable to
maintain complete security than any deeply buried laboratory could
have been. Ellen made a pretense of living there, and it was a
neighborhood where no landlady worried about the men who went to a
girl's place, provided everything was quiet.
They'd succeeded, too--they had found the tiny bundle of cells that
controlled the psi factor, and learned to stimulate them by artificial
wave trains and hypnosis. But the small group in the top division of
the government to whom they were responsible had demanded more proof.
* * * * *
Hawkes had treated himself secretly, not knowing that Meinzer had done
the same two days before. And both had learned the same thing. The
wild talents appeared, but they couldn't be controlled. Meinzer hadn't
found security in the hospital, hard as he'd tried to find it. He'd
gotten up in the middle of the night and walked through the solid
wall, unable to stop until he was back with the group.
Hawkes had tried another way to stop the wild abilities that operated
without his conscious control. He'd prepared a new hypnotic tape,
worded to make him forget everything he knew, or even the fact that he
had worked on the psi factor. He'd put in commands that would make him
avoid any reference to it, so that he couldn't learn accidentally.
He'd ordered his brain to have nothing to do with it. Then he'd
drugged himself with a combination of opiates and hypnotics that
should have knocked out a horse. Then he'd telephoned Dan to have men
pick him up in an hour and keep him drugged. He'd turned on the tape
recorder and stumbled back to the bed.
He groaned, as he remembered his failure. "It's the ultimate, absolute
alien, all right--the back of a man's own mind. It's Freud's
unconsciousness, or id. The psi factor is controlled by that, and not
by the conscious mind. And the id is a primitive beast--it operates on
raw impulse, without reason or social consciousness. Every man's
unconsciousness is back in the jungle, before civilization--and we've
given that alien thing the greatest power that could exist when we
wake up the psi power."
"Meinzer thought it was controlled, for a while," Ellen said. "He came
when Dan and I called him. I went with him up to your apartment, while
Dan got the men to carry you away. But we couldn't reach you--Meinzer
barely touched the tape-recorder when something seemed to pick us up
and drive us out of the room and down the stairs. We were just going
back when you came out."
She shuddered, and Hawkes nodded. He'd obviously used that psi factor
to throw off the drugs at the first sign of anyone near him. He told
them sickly what had happened to the old man.
"So I killed him," he finished bitterly.
Dan shook his head. "No. Your psi factor works differently. You
control heat and radiation, you can move yourself or any object in
space for almost any distance, instantly if you want, and it seems you
can do the same through time. But you can't disintegrate things, as
Meinzer could. He had a suicide urge--we knew that before. When it got
out of control again, he blew himself up--just as your dominant urge
to protect yourself did all those things around you."
* * * * *
Hawkes grimaced. It wasn't pleasant to know, that he'd been doing all
the things he'd blamed on monsters. He'd somehow remembered that
someone was supposed to come to get him, and he'd run out in wild
fear, while his unconscious mind blasted the apartment with heat to
destroy all traces. He'd blasted down the subway entrance with another
bolt of energy to make his getaway. The poor cat had surprised him,
and been killed. His unconsciousness gone wild had tossed Dan's car
two hundred feet to the roof of the garage. When it found him losing
control emotionally with Ellen, it hadn't let his conscious brain give
it the information it needed--it had simply thrown him completely off
Earth, pulled air to him, and warmed the rocks. Then, when it found
the Moon unfit for life, it had thrown him back to his own world. It
had tossed him hours back in time this morning, and lifted him into
the air while it pelted his "enemies" with rocks, and built a wall
around him by throwing the bullets back instantly.
And it had somehow clung to the implanted idea that he must not find
out about himself. It had destroyed anything where the written word
might give him a hint, and had even melted the telephone so that he
couldn't continue listening to other evidence.
It had probably done a thousand other things that he couldn't even
remember, whenever its wild, reasonless fears were aroused and it
decided that he had to be protected!
"You should have killed me," he told them. But he knew that they
couldn't have done it.
"We had to let you sweat it out. You made us promise not to tell you
anything, and we thought you might be right," Ellen told him. "We
thought that it might adjust after awhile. All we did was to try to
pick you up, until we knew it was impossible."
"Until Sis tipped off the Government men," Dan added. Hawkes could
imagine what their reaction had been to having a man with his power
running wild. He was surprised that they had bothered to make even an
attempt to see that he wasn't harmed.
He shrugged helplessly. "And where does it leave us now--beyond this
hole in the ground?"
"The Government's put about fifty specialists on the notes you and
Meinzer left," Dan answered, but there was no assurance in his voice.
"They're trying to find some way to bring the psi factor under the
control of your logical, rational mind."
He got to his knees and began crawling out of the little cave, while
Hawkes tried to help Ellen follow him. Outside, Dan knocked off the
dirt from his clothes and headed for the sedan he'd, somehow gotten
off the roof.
Hawkes followed, for want of anything better to do.
He knew the answers now--and he was worse off than ever. Instead of a
horde of outside aliens, he had one single monster in his own skull,
where he could never fight it, or even hope to escape it.
The power had been meant as a hope for the world. A man who could work
such seeming miracles might have ended the threat of war; he'd have
been the perfect spy, or better at attack than a hundred hydrogen
bombs that had to smash whole cities to remove a few men and weapons.
But now the world was better off without him. So long as he still
lived, there would be nothing but danger from the alien monster in his
head. He had no idea of his limits--but he was sure that it could
trigger the energies of the universe to move the whole world out of
its orbit, if that seemed necessary for his personal survival!