She laughed. "I am here because I live here," she said.
He tried to assimilate the information, but could not. Perceiving his
difficulty, the girl went on, "My parents indentured themselves to the
Great Starway Cartel and were assigned to the rubber plantations of
Dubhe 4. They died of yellow-water dysentery before their indenture ran
out, and in accordance with Interstellar Law I was auctioned off along
with the rest of their possessions. Eldoria bought me."
Five years as a roving psycheye had hardened Blake to commercial
colonization practices; nevertheless, he found the present example of
man's inhumanity to man sickening.
"How old are you?" Blake asked.
"Fourteen."
"And what are you going to be when you grow up?"
"Probably I shall be a psychiatrist. Eldoria is sending me to the
mission school now, and afterward she is going to put me through an
institute of higher learning. And when I come of age, she is going to
give me my freedom."
"I see," Blake said. He indicated the book on her lap. "Homework?"
She shook her head. "In addition to my courses at the mission school, I
am studying the humanities."
"Xenophon," Blake said. "And I suppose Plato too."
"And Homer and Virgil and Aeschylus and Euripides and all the rest of
them. When I grow up I shall be a most well-educated person."
"I'm sure you will be," Blake said, looking at the arras.
"My name is Deirdre."
"Nathan," Blake said. "Nathan Blake."
"Eldoria will be arriving soon. I must go and prepare her dais."
* * * * *
She got up, parted the arras, and slipped into the next room. Shame
flamed in Blake's cheeks, and for a moment he considered leaving; then
he remembered Eldoria's dance, and he went right on sitting where he
was.
Presently the girl returned, and not long afterward the cloying scent
of native incense crept beneath the arras and permeated the anteroom.
She sat sideways on the mat this time, and he caught her face in
profile. There was a suggestion of saintliness in the line of the nose
and chin, a suggestion made all the more poignant by the slender column
of the neck. He shifted uncomfortably on the guest mat. She had taken
up the _Anabasis_ again, and silence was pounding silent fists upon the
walls.
He was relieved when Eldoria finally arrived. She ushered him into
the next room immediately. It was slightly larger than the anteroom,
and much more richly appointed. A thick carpet the color of Martian
waterways lay upon the floor, contrasting pleasantly with the golden
tapestries that adorned all four walls. The sleeping dais was oval
and took up nearly half the floor space. It was strewn with scarlet
cushions.
Blake sat down upon it. Nervously he watched Eldoria slip out of her
white street robe, his eyes moving back and forth from her smooth dark
skin to the arras. The incense thickened around him.
She noticed the back-and-forth movement of his eyes. "You need not fear
the little one," she said, laying her hand upon his knee. "She will not
enter."
"It's not that so much," Blake said.
"What?" The warm bronze shoulder was touching his....
He rose up once in the night, thinking to find his hotel bed. His next
awakening was in the grayness of dawn, and he got up and dressed and
moved silently to the doorway. The girl slept just without the arras on
a thin sleeping-mat, and he had to step over her to gain the anteroom.
In sleep, a strand of her copper-colored hair had tumbled down across
her forehead and lay like a lovely flower upon the virginal whiteness
of her skin. There was something saintly about her quiet face.
When he reached the alley he began to run, and he did not stop running
till the chocoletto sector was far behind him.
* * * * *
The hill was a memory-image and Aldebaran 12 rain-country hills were
notoriously steep. Blake was breathing hard when he reached the crest.
Before him lay a memory-image of a section of Deneb 1 wasteland. The
image extended for no more than half a mile, but Blake was annoyed
that he should have remembered even that much of the wretched terrain.
Ideally, a man's mind-country should have been comprised only of the
places and times he wanted to remember. Practically, however, that was
far from being the case.
He glanced back down into the rain-pocked valley that he had just
crossed. The rain and the mist made for poor visibility. He could only
faintly distinguish the three figures of his pursuers. The trio seemed
a little closer now.
Ever since he had first set foot into his mind, some ten hours ago,
they had been on his trail, but for some reason he had been unable
to bring himself to go back and find out who they were and what they
wanted. Hence he was as vexed with himself as he was with them.
After resting for a few minutes, he descended the hill and started
across the Deneb 1 wasteland. It was a remarkably detailed
materialization, and his quarry's footprints stood out clearly in the
duplicated sand.
Sabrina York did not even know the rudiments of the art of throwing
off a mind-tracker. It would have done her but little good if she
had, for twelve years as a psycheye had taught Blake all the tricks.
Probably she had taken it for granted that the mere act of hiding out
in her tracker's mind was in itself a sufficient guarantee of her
safety. After all, she had no way of knowing that he had discovered her
presence.
Mind-country was as temporally inconsecutive as it was topographically
incongruous, so Blake was not surprised when the Deneb 1 wasteland gave
way to an expanse of boyhood meadow. Near the meadow was the house
where Blake had lived at a much later date. In reality, the places were
as far apart in miles as they were in years, but here in the country
of his mind they existed side by side, surrounded by heterogeneous
landscapes from all over the civilized sector of the galaxy and by the
sharply demarcated spectra of a hundred different suns. A few of the
suns were in the patchwork sky--Sirius, for example, and its twinkling
dwarf companion. Most of them, however, were present only in their
remembered radiance. To add to the confusion, scattered night memories
interrupted the hodge-podge horizon with columns of darkness, and here
and there the gray column of a dawn or dusk memory showed.
The house was flanked on one side by a section of a New Earth spaceport
and on the other by an excerpt of an Ex-earth city-block. Behind it
flowed a brief blue stretch of Martian waterway.
Sabrina's footsteps led up to the front door, and the door itself was
ajar. Perhaps she was still inside. Perhaps she was watching him even
now through one of the remembered windows. He scanned them with a
professional eye, but saw no sign of her.
Warily he stepped inside, adjusting the temperature of his all-weather
jacket to the remembered air-conditioning. His father was sitting in
the living room, smoking, and watching 3V. He had no awareness of
Blake. At Blake's entry he went right on smoking and watching as though
the door had neither opened nor closed. He would go right on smoking
and watching till Blake died and the conglomeration of place-times
that constituted Blake's mind-world ceased to be. Ironically, he was
watching nothing. The 3V program that had been in progress at the time
of the unconscious materialization had failed to come through.
* * * * *
The memory was a treasured one--the old man had perished in a 'copter
crash several years ago--and for a long while Blake did not move.
He had never been in his own mind before. Consequently he was more
affected than he might otherwise have been. Finally, stirring himself,
he walked out into the kitchen. On a shelf above the sink stood a gaily
colored box of his mother's favorite detergent with a full-length
drawing of Vera Velvetskin, the company's blond and chic visual symbol,
on the front. His mother was standing before the huge automatic range,
preparing a meal she had served twenty-three years ago. He regarded her
with moist eyes. She had died a dozen years before his father, but the
wound that her death had caused had never healed. He wanted to go up
behind her and touch her shoulder and say, "What's for supper, mom?"
but he knew it would do no good. For her he had no reality, not only
because he was far in her future, but because in his mind-world she was
a mortal and he, a god--a picayune god, perhaps, but a real one.
As he was about to turn away, the name-plate on the range caught his
eye, and thinking that he had read the two words wrong, he stepped
closer so that he could see them more clearly. No, he had made no
mistake: the first word was "Sabrina", and the second was "York".
He stepped back. Odd that a kitchen range should have the same name as
his quarry. But perhaps not unduly so. Giving appliances human names
had been common practice for centuries. Even a name like "Sabrina
York", while certainly not run-of-the-mill, was bound to be duplicated
in real life. Nevertheless a feeling of uneasiness accompanied him when
he left the kitchen and climbed the stairs to the second floor.
He went through each room systematically, but saw no sign of Sabrina
York. He lingered for some time in his own room, wistfully watching his
fifteen-year-old self lolling on the bed with a dog-eared copy of _The
Galaxy Boys and the Secret of the Crab Nebula_, then he stepped back
out into the hall and started to descend the stairs.
At the head of the stairs a narrow window looked out over the front
yard and thence out over the meadow. He glanced absently through the
panes, and came to an abrupt halt. His three pursuers were wading
through the long meadow grass less than a quarter of a mile away--not
close enough as yet for him to be able to make out their faces, but
close enough for him to be able to see that two of them were wearing
dresses and that the third had on a blue skirt and blouse, and a kepi
to match. He gasped. It simply hadn't occurred to him that his pursuers
might be women. To his consternation he discovered that he was even
more loath to go back and accost them than he had been before. He
actually had an impulse to flee.
He controlled it and descended the stairs with exaggerated slowness,
leaving the house by way of the back door. He picked up Sabrina's trail
in the back yard and followed it down to the Martian waterway and
thence along the bank to where the waterway ended and a campus began.
Not the campus of the university which he had visited two days ago to
attend his protegee's graduation. It was not a place-time that he cared
to revisit, nor a moment that he cared to relive, but Sabrina's trail
led straight across the artificially stunted grass toward the little
bench where he and Deirdre Eldoria had come to talk after the ceremony
was over. He had no choice.
* * * * *
The bench stood beneath a towering American elm whose feathery branches
traced green arabesques against the blue June sky. A set of footprints
slightly deeper than its predecessors indicated that Sabrina had
paused by the trunk. Despite himself Blake paused there too. Pain
tightened his throat when he looked at Deirdre's delicate profile
and copper-colored hair, intensified when he lowered his eyes to the
remembered blueness of her graduation dress. The diamond brooch that he
had given her as a graduation present, and which she had proudly pinned
upon her bodice for the whole wide world to see, made him want to
cry. His self-image of two weeks ago shocked him. There were lines on
the face that did not as yet exist, and the brown hair was shot with
streaks of gray that had yet to come into being. Lord, he must have
been feeling old to have pictured himself like that!
Deirdre was speaking. "Yes," she was saying, "at nine o'clock. And I
should very much like for you to come."
Blake Past shook his head. "Proms aren't for parents. You know that
as well as I do. That young man you were talking with a few minutes
ago--he's the one who should take you. He'd give his right arm for the
chance."
"I'll thank you not to imply that you're my father. One would think
from the way you talk that you are centuries old!"
"I'm thirty-eight," Blake Past said, "and while I may not be your
father, I'm certainly old enough to be. That young man--"
A pink flush of anger climbed into Deirdre Eldoria's girlish cheeks.
"What right has _he_ got to take me! Did _he_ scrimp and go without
in order to put me through high school and college? Has _he_ booked
passage for me to New Earth and paid my tuition to Trevor University?"
"Please," Blake Past said, desperation deepening his voice. "You're
only making everything worse. After majoring in Trevorism, you
certainly ought to realize by now that there was nothing noble about my
buying you after Eldoria died. I only did it to ease my conscience--"
"What do _you_ know about conscience?" Deirdre demanded. "Conscience
is a much more complex mechanism than most laymen realize. Guilt
feelings aren't reliable criteria. They can stem from false
causes--from ridiculous things like a person's inability to accept
himself for what he is." Abruptly she dropped the subject. "Don't you
realize, Nate," she went on a little desperately, "that I'm leaving
tomorrow and that we won't see each other again for years and years?"
"I'll come to New Earth to visit you," Blake said. "Venus is only a few
days distant on the new ships."
She stood up. "You won't come--I know you won't." She stamped her foot.
"And you won't come to the prom either. I know that too. I knew it all
along. Sometimes I'm tempted to--" Abruptly she broke off. "Very well
then," she went on, "I'll say good-by now then."
Blake Past stood up too. "No, not yet. I'll walk back to the sorority
house with you."
She tossed her head, but the sadness in her tarn-blue eyes belied her
hauteur. "If you wish," she said.
* * * * *
Blake Present watched them set out side by side toward the remembered
halls of learning that showed in the distance. There had been other
people present on the campus that afternoon, but as they had failed to
register on Blake Past's mind, they did not exist for Blake Present.
All that existed for Blake Present were the diminishing figures of the
girl and the man, and the pain that was constricting his throat.
Wretchedly he turned away. As he did so he saw the three shadows lying
at his feet and knew that his pursuers had at last caught up to him.
His first reaction when he faced them was amazement. His next reaction
was shock. His third was fear.
His amazement resulted from recognition. One of the three women arrayed
before him was Miss Stoddart, his boyhood Sunday-school teacher.
Standing next to her in a familiar blue uniform was Officer Finch,
the police woman who had maintained law and order in the collective
elementary school he had attended. Standing next to Officer Finch was
blond and chic Vera Velvetskin, whose picture he had seen on box after
countless box of his mother's favorite detergent.
His shock resulted from the expressions on the three faces. Neither
Miss Stoddart nor Officer Finch ever particularly liked him, but they
had never particularly disliked him either. This Miss Stoddart and this
Officer Finch disliked him, though. They hated him. They hated him so
much that their hatred had thinned out their faces and darkened their
eyes. More shocking yet, Vera Velvetskin, who had never existed save
in some copywriter's mind, hated him too. In fact, judging from the
greater thinness of her face and the more pronounced darkness of her
eyes, she hated him even more than Miss Stoddart and Officer Finch did.
His fear resulted from the realization that his mind-world contained
phenomena it had no right to contain--not if he was nearly as
well-adjusted as he considered himself to be. The three women standing
before him definitely were not memory-images. They were too vivid, for
one thing. For another, they were aware of him. What were they, then?
And what were they doing in his mind?
He asked the two questions aloud.
Three arms were raised and three forefingers were pointed accusingly at
his chest. Three pairs of eyes burned darkly. "You ask us that?" Miss
Stoddart said. "Callous creature who did a maiden's innocence affront!"
said Officer Finch. "And sought sanctuary in ill-fitting robes of
righteousness!" said Vera Velvetskin. The three faces moved together,
blurred and seemed to blend into one. The three voices were raised in
unison: "You know who we are, Nathan Blake. _You_ know who we are!"
Blake stared at them open-mouthed. Then he turned and fled.
* * * * *
It had taken man a long time to discover that he was a god in his
own right and that he too was capable of creating universes. Trivial
universes, to be sure, when compared with the grandeur and scope of the
objective one, and peopled with ghosts instead of human beings; but
universes nonetheless.
The discovery came about quite by accident. After projecting himself
into a patient's memory one day, a psychologist named Trevor suddenly
found himself clinging to the slope of a traumatically distorted
mountain. His patient was beside him.
The mountain proved to be an unconscious memory-image out of the
patient's boyhood, and its country proved to be the country of the
patient's mind. After many trials and errors, Trevor managed to get
both himself and his patient back to the objective world, and not long
afterward he was able to duplicate the feat on another case.
The next logical step was to enter his own mind, and this he also
succeeded in doing.
It was inevitable that Trevor should write a book about his discovery
and set about founding a new school of psychology. It was equally
inevitable that he should acquire enemies as well as disciples.
However, as the years passed and the new therapy which he devised cured
more and more psychoses, the ranks of his disciples swelled and those
of his enemies shrank. When, shortly before his death, he published a
paper explaining how anyone could enter his or her own mind-world at
will, his niche in the Freudian hall of fame was assured.
The method employed an ability that had been evolving in the human mind
for millennia--the ability to project oneself into a past moment--or,
to use Trevor's term, a past "place-time." Considerable practice was
required before the first transition could be achieved, but once it
was achieved, successive transitions became progressively easier.
Entering another person's mind-world was of course a more difficult
undertaking, and could be achieved only after an intensive study of
a certain moment in that person's past. In order to return to the
objective world, it was necessary in both cases to locate the most
recently materialized place-time and take one step beyond it.
By their very nature, mind-countries were confusing. They existed on
a plane of reality that bore no apparent relationship to the plane
of the so-called objective universe. In fact, so far as was known,
this secondary--or subjective--reality was connected to so-called
true reality only through the awareness of the various creators. In
addition, these countries had no outward shape in the ordinary sense of
the word, and while most countries contained certain parallel images,
these images were subject to the interpretation of the individual
creator. As a result they were seldom identical.
* * * * *
It was inevitable that sooner or later some criminal would hit upon
the idea of hiding out in his own mind-world till the statute of
limitations that applied to his particular crime ran out, and it was
equally inevitable that others should follow suit. Society's answer was
the psyche-police, and the psyche-police hadn't been in action very
long before the first private psycheye appeared.
Blake was one of a long line of such operators.
So far as he knew, the present case represented the first time a
criminal had ever hidden out in the pursuer's mind. It would have been
a superb stratagem indeed if, shortly after her entry, Sabrina York
had not betrayed her presence. For her point of entry she had used
the place-time materialization of the little office Blake had opened
on Ex-earth at the beginning of his career. Unaccountably she had
ransacked it before moving into a co-terminous memory-image.
Even this action wouldn't have given her away, however, if the office
hadn't constituted a sentimental memory. Whenever Blake accepted a case
he invariably thought of the bleak and lonely little room with its
thin-gauge steel desk and battered filing cabinets, and when he had
done so after accepting his case--or was it before? He couldn't quite
remember--the mental picture that had come into his mind had revealed
open drawers, scattered papers and a general air of disarray.
He had suspected the truth immediately, and when he had seen the
woman's handkerchief with the initials "SB" embroidered on it lying
by one of the filing cabinets he had known definitely that his quarry
was hiding out in his mind. Retiring to his bachelor quarters, he had
entered at the same place-time and set off in pursuit.
Her only advantage lost, Sabrina York was now at his mercy. Unless
she discovered his presence and was able to locate his most recently
materialized place-time before he over-took her, her capture was
assured.
Only two things bothered Blake. The little office was far in his past,
and it was unlikely that anyone save the few intimate acquaintances
whom he had told about it were aware that it had ever existed. How,
then, had a total stranger such as Sabrina York learned enough about it
to enable her to use it as a point of entry?
The other thing that bothered him was of a much more urgent nature.
He had been in enough minds and he had read enough on the subject
of Trevorism to know that people were sometimes capable of creating
beings considerably higher on the scale of mind-country evolution
than ordinary memory-ghosts. One woman whom he had apprehended in her
own mind had created a walking-talking Virgin Mary who watched over
her wherever she went. And once, after tracking down an ex-enlisted
man, he had found his quarry holed up in the memory-image of an army
barracks with a ten-star general waiting on him hand and foot. But
these, and other, similar, cases, had to do with mal-adjusted people,
and moreover, the super-image in each instance had been an image that
the person involved had _wanted_ to create. Therefore, even assuming
that Blake was less well-adjusted than he considered himself to be, why
had he created three such malevolent super-images as Miss Stoddart,
Officer Finch, and Vera Velvetskin?
* * * * *
They followed him off the campus into a vicarious memory-image of
Walden Pond, Thoreau's shack, and the encompassing woods. Judging from
the ecstatic "oh's" and "ah's" they kept giving voice to, the place
delighted them. Once, glancing back over his shoulder, he saw them
standing in front of Thoreau's shack, looking at it as though it were a
doll's house. Not far away, Thoreau was sitting in under a tall pine,
gazing up into the branches at a bird that had come through only as a
vague blur of beak and feathers.
Blake went on. Presently the Walden Pond memory-image gave way to a
memory-image of an English park which the ex-Earth government had set
aside as a memorial to the English poets and which had impressed Blake
sufficiently when he had visited it in his youth to have found a place
for itself in the country of his mind. It consisted of reconstructions
of famous dwellings out of the lives of the poets, among them, a
dwelling out of the life of a poet who was not in the strictest sense
of the word English at all--the birthplace of Robert Burns. Oddly
enough, it was Burns's birthplace that had impressed Blake most. Now
the little cottage stood out in much more vivid detail than any of the
other famous dwellings.
Sabrina York must have been attracted to the place, for her footprints
showed that she had turned in at the gate, walked up the little path
and let herself in the door.
They also showed that she had left by the same route, so there was no
reason for Blake to linger. As a matter of fact, the fascination that
had brought the place into being had been replaced by an illogical
repugnance. But repugnance can sometimes be as compelling a force as
fascination, and Blake not only lingered but went inside as well.
He remembered the living room distinctly--the flagstone floor, the huge
grill-fronted hearth, the deeply recessed window, the rack of cups and
platters on the wall; the empty straight-backed chair standing sternly
in a corner, the bare wooden table--
He paused just within the doorway. The chair was no longer empty, the
table no longer bare.
A man sat on the former and a bottle of wine stood on the latter.
Moreover, the room showed signs of having been lived in for a long
time. The floor was covered with tracked-in dirt and the walls were
blackened from smoke. The grill-work of the hearth was begrimed with
grease.
* * * * *
Whatever else he might be the man sitting at the table was not an
image out of the past. He was too vividly real. He was around Blake's
age, and about Blake's height and build. However, he was given to
fat. His paunch contrasted jarringly with Blake's trim waist. His
vaguely familiar face was swollen--probably from the wine he had
drunk--and his too-full cheeks were well on the way to becoming jowls.
His bloodshot eyes were underscored with shadows, and his clothing
consisted of odds and ends out of Blake's past: a tattered, too-tight
pullover with the letter "L" on the front, a pair of ragged red-plaid
hunting breeches and a pair of cracked riding-boots.
Blake advanced across the room and picked up the bottle. One sniff told
him that it came from a memory-image of a Martian wine-cellar. He set
the bottle back down. "Who are you?" he demanded.
The man looked up at him sardonically. "Call me Smith," he said. "If I
told you who I really am, you wouldn't believe me."
"What are you doing in my mind?"
"You should know the answer to that one. You put me here."