"On the roof," the bartender said. "It's yours."
Alcorn took him along to unlock the controls. On the roof landing, a
cool evening wind was blowing. There was a dim thin sickle of moon and a
pale haze of stars, a wraithlike scattering of small white clouds that
drifted in the reflected spectrum of the city's multicolored glow.
He sat in the turbo-copter with a feeling of incredulous unreality. The
vast and shining breadth of the city was spread about him like a
monstrous alien puzzle, a light-shot maze without meaning. Where, in
that suddenly foreign tangle, could he go?
He set the 'copter off at random, knowing that its owner would have the
police on his heels the moment he recovered volition. Alcorn was still
trying to settle upon a course when a seizure fell upon him again.
First he had seen the city as something alien; now he felt it, a
clamorous surf-roar of conflicting individual emotions, an unresolved
ant-hill scurrying of hates and hopes and endless frustrations.
Then he was on the polar plain. The pit and scaffolding were the same,
but the enigmatic groupings of people on the streets had changed. Four
of them had faces now. Three were unfamiliar, but the fourth he
recognized as Ellis, the research chemist who had disappeared from his
laboratory in New York City.
* * * * *
By the time Alcorn was composed, he discovered that he had chosen a
course without conscious intent. Dark, open country fled past beneath,
pricked here and there with racing points of light that marked the main
artery of northward surface traffic. Familiar mountain shapes loomed
ahead, indicating where he was bound.
He was heading, lemminglike, for his cabin in the Catskills.
The knowledge made him wonder if he could trust the instinct that had
decided him. Jaffers might or might not know of the cabin; certainly
Janice Wynn knew, for she had said she would pick him up there at 21:00.
Kitty, when he failed to call her as he had promised, would know at once
where he had gone, and would either radophone him or come to him
quickly.
He frowned unhappily over the possibilities, caught between an eagerness
to see Kitty and a dread of having her involved in his trouble. He
considered taking Kitty and fleeing in his borrowed turbo-copter to some
isolated place where the two of them might make a fresh start, and gave
up the idea at once as worse than impractical.
Jaffers would find him without difficulty, now that he knew what to look
for. And there was the progressive reality of his visions--for he had
ceased to think of them any more as hallucinations. The coming of Janice
Wynn and the inexorable sharpening of his awareness proved that reality
beyond doubt.
He found the twin-notched peak that landmarked his cabin. The cool of
night and the mountain quiet, when he climbed out, were a tonic to his
abraded nerves. There was a nostalgic calling of night-birds, the clean
breath of pines and, from some tangled rocky slope, the faint pervading
perfume of wild honeysuckle.
He had not guessed how sharp his awareness had become until he realized
that someone was waiting for him inside the cabin.
* * * * *
He halted outside, feeling like a man just recovering vision after a
long blindness. Janice Wynn was in the cabin and she was alone. He knew
that as certainly as if he had seen her walk in.
[Illustration]
When he went in, she was standing before the wide cold mouth of the
cabin's fireplace. She wore the same quiet suit she had worn in
O'Donnell's office, and her tilted green eyes were at once relieved and
anxious.
"I was afraid you might have lost your head and run away," she said.
"It's good you didn't. There wouldn't have been time to find you
again--the change is too close on us both."
"Change?"
She gave him a disappointed look. "I thought you'd have guessed by now
the relation between ourselves and those people in the clippings. You
had another seizure in the 'copter, didn't you?"
He stared, too disconcerted to answer.
"You saw four faces this time," she went on, "where you had seen none
before. And you recognized one."
"It was Ellis, the chemist," Alcorn said. And with a numb premonition of
the truth, he quietly asked, "How did you know that?"
"You were broadcasting it like a beacon. We're both in the last stages
of the change. Now that our conditioning is lifting, we're reverting to
our original telepathic nature. That's how _they_ found you and me, as
they found Ellis and the others--by tracking down our communication
auras."