Talking about it made perspiration stand out on Alcorn's forehead.
"First I'm seized with a sudden sense of abnormally sharpened
perception, as if I were on the point of becoming aware of a great many
things beyond my immediate awareness. I can feel the emotions of people
about me and I have the conviction that, in another moment, I shall be
able to feel their thoughts as well.
"Then I seem to be standing alone on a frozen arctic plain, a polar
wasteland that should be utterly deserted, but isn't. I've no actual
sensations of touch or hearing, yet the scene is visually sharp in every
detail.
"There's a small village of corrugated sheet-metal houses just ahead,
the sort that engineers on location might raise, and the streets between
are packed with snow. Machines loaded with metal boxes crawl up and down
those streets, but I've never seen their drivers. Until this morning, I
never saw any people at all on the plain."
Dr. Hagen rattled his paper and nodded agreeably. "Go on. What are these
people like?"
"I can't tell you that," Alcorn said, "because their images were not
complete. There seems to be a sort of relationship between them and
myself--a threatening one--but I can't guess what it may be. I can't
even tell you what racial type they belong to, because they have no
faces."
He crushed out his cigarette and took a deep breath, getting to the
worst of it. "I have a distinct conviction during each of these seizures
that the people I see are not ordinary human beings, that they're as
different from me as I am from everyone else, though not in the same
way. It's the difference that makes me uneasy. I can feel the urgency
and the resolution in them, as if they were determined to do--or had
resigned themselves to doing--something desperately important. And then
I know somehow that each of them has made some kind of decision
recently, a decision that is responsible for his being what he is and
where he is, and that I'll have to make a similar one when the time
comes. And the worst of it is that I know no matter which way my choice
falls, I'm going to be hideously unhappy."
The psychiatrist asked tranquilly, "You can't guess what choice it is
that you must make, or its alternative?"
"I can't. And that's the hell of it--not knowing."
The icy chill of the polar plain touched him and with it came a deeper
cold that had not been a part of the dream. At that instant, he might
have identified its source, but was afraid to.
"My fear has some relation to whatever it is these people are about to
do," he said. "I just realized that. But that doesn't help, because I've
no idea what it is."
He glanced at his strap watch, and the time made him stand up before the
little psychiatrist could speak again. The hour was 15:57, and he saw in
dismay that his 16:00 appointment with Sean O'Donnell and the Irradiated
Foods tycoon would be late.
"I don't expect an immediate opinion," he said. "You couldn't reach one
as long as I'm here. Add up what I've told you, and if it makes any sort
of sense you can radophone me tonight at 19:00. If my apartment doesn't
answer, relay the call to my cabin in the Catskills--I've kept the
location a secret, for privacy's sake, but the number is on alternate
listing."
He paused briefly at the door, touched with an uncharacteristic flash of
sour humor. "And telestat your bill to me. If I asked for it now, you'd
probably charge nothing."
* * * * *
The mood vanished as soon as he was outside and saw the gray-suited
Jaffers operative waiting with stolid patience on the ramp of a
department store across the street.
The shock of reminder brought on a giddy recurrence of his
hallucination.
The polar plain yawned before him. The silent machines crept over their
snow-packed ways, the faceless people stood in frozen groups.
He emerged from the seizure, shaken and sweating, to find that the
Jaffers man had crossed the street and was waiting a safe distance
behind. Alcorn fought down a panic desire to run away blindly only
because Kitty would be waiting for him at Consolidated--Kitty, his
bulwark of reassurance.
The gray-suited man was a deliberate hundred feet behind him when he
boarded a tube-car.
Kitty was not in his office and there was no time to ring for her.
Instead, he went through the long accounting room beyond, answering
automatically the smiles of a suddenly genial staff and headed for
O'Donnell's office.
He saw at once that he was too late.
The CA manager's door was open and O'Donnell and Mulhall of Irradiated
Foods were emerging. Both wore street jackets and both men had the
unmistakable air of euphoric calm that came within seconds of Alcorn's
approach.
O'Donnell gave Alcorn his familiar long-lipped grin, looking, with his
thin gentle face and neat brush of ermine-white hair, like an
aristocratic Irish saint.
"You missed a pleasant meeting," O'Donnell said. "I've just signed a
refund release to Charlie here, and a pleasure it was."
The awareness that they had been calmed before he'd arrived left Alcorn
speechless.
"Really shouldn't have accepted," Mulhall said sheepishly. Mulhall was a
big, solid man, bald and paunchy and, when his normal instincts were
controlled, an argumentative tyrant. "Niggling technicality, I say.
Shouldn't have taken a refund, but Sean here insisted."
They laughed together, like children sharing a joke.
"The claim was justified," O'Donnell said firmly. "Once Charlie's
secretary explained the case, there was no doubt."
Mulhall grinned at Alcorn. "Remarkable girl, Janice Wynn. She's waiting
in Sean's office. Wants to meet you, Philip."
They went toward the lift with their arms about each other, sharing an
all-too-brief moment of companionship.
* * * * *
Alcorn hesitated in front of the closed door of O'Donnell's office.
When he entered, Janice Wynn was standing at the window, watching the
soundless rush of traffic in the street below. She was dark, not pretty
in any conventional sense, but charged with a controlled vitality that
made physical beauty unimportant.
Her face was anything but serene, the complex of emotions in her tilted
green eyes far removed from the ready placidity he had learned to
expect. There was an unmistakable impression of driving urgency--the
same urgency, Alcorn thought, that he had felt in the people of his
waking dream.
"You're one," he said. His face felt stiff. "After all these years, I've
found another one like--"
"Like yourself," she said. "But it's I who have found _you_. Did you
really think you were unique, Philip Alcorn?"
He tried to answer and couldn't. The meeting he had dreamed of all his
life had come about with precisely the electric suddenness he had
imagined, but he felt none of the elation he had anticipated. He felt,
instead, a sudden panic.
For behind Mulhall's secretary, he had a shutter-swift glimpse of the
frozen plain, starkly clear with its huddle of metal buildings and its
faceless people clustered on the snow-packed street.
Janice Wynn gave him no time to flounder for control. "You're the last,"
she said. "And the most stubborn of the lot. You're lucky that we could
find you in the little time we have left."