"Because the change caught them too suddenly for escape," she said. "And
because, in our natural state, we are incompatible with Man."
"With Man," he repeated. "And what does that make us? Supermen or
monsters?"
"You're still blinded by your conditioning," she answered, "or you'd see
that we're neither, that we're not even native to this planet. I don't
know a great deal more than that myself--I haven't remembered it all
yet, because the change isn't complete...."
She broke off and, with both hands above the fireplace, gripped the
rough stone of the mantelpiece. Her tilted green eyes burned with a
contradictory play of emotions; the soft planes of her face seemed to
shift and alter, seeking an impossible balance between ecstasy and
terror and a tearing, intolerable agony.
"I'm learning the rest ... now," she whispered. "Sooner than ... I
thought."
He sensed the change that possessed her, the struggling of new emotions,
the shattering of imposed concepts and conditionings and their
realigning to shape a new personality, a new person. He knew from that
moment that she had been right, and that what he had feared from the
beginning of his first seizure was about to happen to him.
She closed her eyes briefly. When she opened them again, Alcorn drew
back. Then resentment flared in him and he was suddenly furious, at the
alteration of status that left him on the defensive.
He remembered the clippings and understood something of the frustrated
rage that must have gripped the howling mobs when they killed the two
ministers and the Nevada doctor and the Girl Scout leader.
Janice Wynn straightened from the fireplace, her head tilted as if she
were listening to some sound beyond range of his own hearing.
"Someone is coming," she said. Her voice had changed as much as her
face; her eyes watched him with a remote yet curiously intimate
compassion. "Not our people. It isn't time for them yet."
She was at the cabin door before he realized that she had moved.
"Stay here," she ordered. "Don't open the door for anyone. For _anyone_,
do you hear?"
She was gone into the outside darkness.
Alcorn felt it himself then, the indefinable certainty of approach. A
turbo-copter, then another, slanting down toward his hideaway, two
speeding machines filled with grimly intent men--Jaffers' agents.
The 'copters landed about a hundred yards away from the cabin. There was
a dragging silence and then a booming, amplified voice.
"Alcorn, come out!"
He stood fast, feeling above their tension the swift progress of Janice
Wynn through the darkness toward them. She was close to the nearer
machine when he felt a sudden veering of her attention, followed the
direction of her probing, and sensed another 'copter angling down out of
the night.