He stood and looked at the room and tried to reconstruct it, not as he had known it less than sixty seconds before, but as he first had seen it twenty years ago.
Or was it fantasy—conditioned fantasy? Had he ever actually stood in this room before? Had there ever been a Kathleen Preston? And if there had been, had Jay Vickers ever loved her or had she ever loved Jay Vickers?
He knew that a Vickers family, a poor farm family, had lived not more than a mile from where he stood. He thought of them—the mother, courageous in her ragged dress and drab sweater; the father with the pitiful little shelf of books beside his bed and how he used to sit in faded overalls and too-big shirt, reading the books in the dim yellowness of the kerosene lamp; the son, a helter-skelter sort of kid who had too much imagination and once went to fairyland.
Masquerade, he thought, a bitter masquerade, a listening post set out to spy out the talk of enemies. But it had been their job and they had done it well. They had watched their son grow into a youth and known by the manner of his growing that he was no throwback, but truly one of them.
And now they waited, those two who had posed as lonely farmer folk for all the anxious years, fitting themselves into an ordinary niche which was never meant for such as they, against the day when they could take their rightful place in the society which they had given up to stand outpost duty for the big brick house standing proudly on its hill.
He could not turn his back on them and now there was no need to turn his back on them, for there was nothing else.
He walked across the dining room and along the hall that led to the closed front door and he left behind him a trail of footprints in the dust.
Outside the door, he knew, was nothing—not Ann, nor Kathleen, nor any place for him—nothing but the cold knife-edge of duty to a life he had not chosen.
XLI
HE had his moments of doubt while he drove across the country, savoring the goodness of the things he saw and heard and smelled—the little villages sleeping in the depth of summer with their bicycles and canted coaster wagons; the friendly bumbling of the great transport trucks on the highways; the way the girl behind the counter smiled at you when you stopped at a roadside eating place.
There was nothing wrong, he told himself, nothing wrong with the little villages or the trucks or the girl who smiled at you when you asked for a cup of coffee. Man’s world was pleasant and fruitful, a good place in which to live.
The mutants and their plans seemed like a nightmare snatched from some lurid Sunday supplement and he wondered, as he drove along, why he didn’t simply pull off the road and let the car stay sitting there while he walked off into this good life he saw on every hand. Surely there was some place within it for a man like him; somewhere, here in the flat corn lands where the little villages clung to every crossroad, that a man could find peace and security.
But he saw reluctantly it was not peace and security he sought for himself alone. Just a place to hide from the threat one could sense in the air. In wanting to leave his car beside the road and walk away, he was responding to the same bone-deep fear as the Pretentionists when they escaped emotionally to some other time and place. It was the urge to flee.
The trouble was that even here, in the agricultural heart of the continent, one could feel secure only if one never read a paper or listened to a broadcast and did not talk with people. For the signposts of fear, of the eternal running from the threat of insecurity, could be found on every doorstep and in every home and at every corner.
HE read the papers and the news was bad. He listened to the radio and the commentators were talking about a new and deeper crisis than the world had ever faced. He listened to the people talking in the lobbies of the hotels where he spent the nights or in the eating places where he stopped along the road. They would talk and shake their heads and one could see that they were worried.
They said: “What I can’t understand is how things could change so quick. Here, just a week or two ago, it looked like the East and West would band together against this mutant business. At last they had something they could fight together instead of fighting one another, but now they’re back at it again and it is worse than ever.”
They said: “If you ask me, it’s the Commies that stirred up this mutant business. You mark my word, they’re at the bottom of it.”
They said: “It just don’t seem possible. Here we sit tonight a million miles from war with everything calm and peaceful. And tomorrow . . .”
And tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.
They said: “If it was up to me, I’d get in touch with the mutants. They got stuff up their sleeve that would blow these Commies plumb to hell.”
They said: “We never should have demobilized at the end of World War II. We should have hit them then. We could’ve knocked them off in a month or two.”
They said: “The hell of it is that you never know. No one ever tells you anything and when they do, it’s wrong.”
They said: “I wouldn’t horse around with them a single damn minute. I’d load up some bombs and I’d let them have it.”
He listened to them and there was no talk of compromise or understanding. There was no hope in all the talk that war could be averted. “If not this time,” they said, “it’ll come in five years, or ten, so let’s get it over with. You got to hit them first. In a war like this, there ain’t any second chance. It’s either them or us . . .”
And it was then that he understood that even here, in the heartland of the nation, in the farms and little villages, in the roadside eating places, there was a boiling hate. That was the measure of the culture that had been built upon the Earth—a culture founded on a hatred and a terrible pride and a suspicion of everyone who did not talk the same language or eat the same food or dress the same as everyone else did.
IT was a mechanical culture of clanking machines, a technological world that could provide creature comfort, but not human justice or security. It was a culture that had worked in metals, that had delved into the atom, that had mastered chemicals and had built a complicated and dangerous gadgetry. It had concentrated upon the technological and had ignored the spiritual so that a man might punch a button and destroy a distant city without knowing, or even caring, about the lives and habits, the thoughts and hopes and beliefs of the people that he killed.
Underneath the sleek technological surface, one could hear the warning rumble of machines. The gears and sprockets, the driving chain, the generator, without the brake of human understanding, were racing on to disaster.
He drove and ate and drove again. He ate and slept and drove. He watched the cornfields and the reddening apples in the orchards and heard the song of mower and smelled the scent of clover and he looked into the sky and felt the terrible fear that hung high there and he knew that Flanders had been right, that, to survive, Man must mutate and that the survival mutation must win before the storm of hate would break.
But it was not only news of approaching war which filled the columns of the daily press and spurred the news commentators into word-frothed quarter hours.
There was still the mutant menace and the continuing exhortations to the people to keep a watch for mutants. There were riots and lynchings and gadget shops burned.
And something else:
A creeping whisper that spread across the land, that was talked over at the drugstore corners and at the dusty crossroads and in the shadowed night spots of the bigger cities—the whisper that there was another world, a brand-new world where one could start his life again, where one would escape from the thousands of years of accumulated mistakes.
The press at first was wary of the rumor, then printed cautious stories with very restrained headlines and the commentators seemed at first to be just as wary, but finally took the plunge. In a day or two, the news of the other world and of the strange, starry-eyed people who had talked to someone else (always someone else) and claimed they had come from there ranked with the news of approaching war and with ha
tred of the mutants.
You could feel the world on edge, like the sudden, strident ringing of a telephone in the dead of night.
XLII
CLIFFWOOD after dark had the smell and feel of home as Vickers drove along its streets and felt the lump of loss come into his throat. It had been here that he had thought to settle down and spend his years in writing.
His house was here and the furniture and the manuscript and the crudely carpentered shelf that held his books, but it was his home no longer, and now could never be again. And that wasn’t all, he thought. The Earth, the original human earth—the earth with the capital “E”—was his home no more.
He’d go and see Eb first and after he had seen Eb, he’d go to his own house and get the manuscript.
He could give the manuscript to Ann; she would keep it safely for him.
On second thought, he’d have to find some other place, for he didn’t want to see Ann—although that was not precisely the truth. He did want to see her, but knew he shouldn’t, now that there lay between them the knowledge that he and she were part of a single life.
He pulled the car to a stop in front of Eb’s house and sat there for a moment looking at it, wondering at the neatness of the house and yard. Eb lived alone without wife or child, and it was not usual that a man alone would keep a place so tidy.
He’d spend just a minute with Eb, would tell him what had happened, what was going on, make arrangements to keep in touch with him, and learn from him whatever news might be worth knowing.
He closed the car door and went across the walk, fumbling at the latch of the gate that opened to the yard. Moonlight came down through the trees and splotched the walk with light. He followed it to the porch, and now, for the first time, he noticed that there were no lights burning in the house.
He rapped on the door, knowing from poker sessions and other infrequent visits that Eb had no doorbell.
There was no answer. He waited and finally rapped again and then turned from the door and went down the walk. Maybe Eb was still down at the garage, putting in some overtime on an urgent repair job, or he might be down at the tavern, having a quick one with the boys.
He’d sit out in the car and wait for Eb. It probably wouldn’t be safe to go down into the village business section where he’d be recognized.
A voice asked, “You looking for Eb?”
VICKERS spun around toward the voice. It was the next door neighbor, he saw, standing at the fence.
“Yes,” said Vickers. “I was looking for him.”
He was trying to remember who lived next to Eb. Someone he knew, someone who might recognize him?
“I’m an old friend of his,” Vickers added. “Just passing through. Thought I’d stop and say hello.”
The man had stepped through a break in the fence and was coming across the lawn.
“How well did you know Eb?”
“Not too well,” said Vickers. “Haven’t seen him in ten or fifteen years. We used to be kids together.”
“Eb is dead,” the neighbor said.
“Dead!”
The neighbor spat. “He was one of those damned mutants.”
“No,” protested Vickers. “No, he couldn’t be!”
“He was. We had another one, but he got away. We always had a suspicion Eb might have tipped him off.”
And in the bitterness and hatred of the neighbor’s words, Vickers felt the sheer terror of the strange dog cornered by the local pack.
The mob killed Eb and they would kill him if they knew he had returned to town. And in just a little while they’d know, for any minute now the neighbor would recognize him—now he knew finally who the neighbor was, the beefy individual who worked at the meat counter in the town’s one chain store. His name was—It didn’t really matter.
“Seems to me,” the neighbor said, “I’ve seen you somewhere.”
“You must be mistaken. I’ve never been East before.”
“Your voice . . .”
Vickers struck with all the power he had, starting the first down low and bringing it up in a vicious arc, twisting his body to line it up behind the blow, to put the weight of his body behind it.
He hit the man in the face and the impact of flesh on flesh, of bone on bone, made a whiplike sound and the man went down.
JAY VICKERS did not wait.
He went racing for the gate. He almost tore the car door from its hinges getting in. He thumbed the starter savagely and trod down on the gas and the car leaped down the street, spraying the bushes with gravel thrown by its frightened wheels.
His arm was numb from the force of the blow he’d struck. When he held his hand down in front of the lighted dash panel, he saw that his knuckles were lacerated and slowly dripping blood.
He had a few minutes’ start, for once the neighbor was on his feet, once he could reach a phone, they’d begin hunting him, screaming through the night on whining tires, with shotgun and rope and rifle.
He had to get away. Now he was on his own. Eb was dead, shot down or strung up or kicked to death, and Eb had been his contact.
Now there was no one but himself and Ann.
And Ann, God willing, didn’t even know that she was a mutant.
He struck the main highway and swung down the valley.
There was an old abandoned road some ten miles down the highway, he remembered. A man could duck a car in there and wait until it was safe to double back again, although doubling back probably wouldn’t be too safe.
Maybe it would be better to take to the hills and hide out until the hunt blew over.
No, he told himself, there was nothing safe.
And he had no time to waste.
He had to get to Crawford, had to head Crawford off the best way that he could. And he had to do it alone.
THE abandoned road was there, halfway up a long, steep hill. He wheeled the car into it and bumped along it for a hundred feet or so, then got out and walked back hastily to the road.
Hidden behind a clump of trees, he watched cars go screaming past, but there was no way to know if any of them might be hunting him.
Then a rickety old truck came slowly up the hill, engine howling with the climb.
He watched it, an idea growing in his mind.
When it came abreast, he saw that it was closed in the back with a high end gate.
He went out into the traffic lane and raced after it, caught up with it and leaped. His fingers gripped the top of the end gate and he heaved himself clear of the road, scrambled up and clambered over the boxes stacked inside the truck.
He huddled there, staring out at the road behind him.
A hunted animal, he thought; hunted. by men who once had been his friends.
After ten miles or so, someone stopped the truck.
A voice asked: “You see anyone up the road? Walking, maybe?”
“Hell, no,” the truck driver said. “I ain’t seen a soul.”
“We’re looking for a mutant. Figure he must have ditched his car.”
“I thought we had all of them cleaned out.”
“Not all. Maybe he took to the hills. If he did, we’ve got him—unless he disappears the way they always do when they’re warned.”
“Your truck’ll be stopped again,” another voice said. “We phoned ahead both ways. They got road blocks set up.”
“I’ll keep my eyes peeled,” the driver replied.
“You got a gun?”
“No.”
“Well, keep watching, anyway.”
When the truck rolled on, Vickers saw the two men standing in the road. The moonlight glinted harshly on their rifles.
He set to work cautiously, moving some of the boxes, making himself a hideout.
He needn’t have bothered.
The truck was stopped at three other road blocks. At none of them did anyone do more than flash a light inside the truck. They seemed convinced that they wouldn’t find a mutant as easily as finding him hidden among crates.
Nor would they, for Vickers would have vanished to Earth No. 2 the instant they closed in. But he was glad he didn’t have to.
This was the quickest way to get to Ann Carter.
HE knew what he would find, but he went there just the same, because it was the only place he could think of where he might establish contact. But the huge show window was broken and the miniature house that had stood on display was smashed as utterly as if it had stood in a cyclone’s path.
The mob had done its work.
He stood in front of the gaping window and stared at the wreckage of the model house and remembered the day that he and Ann had stopped there on their way to the bus station. The house, he recalled, had had a flying ducks weather vane and a sundial had stood in the yard and there had been a car standing in the driveway, but the car had disappeared completely. Dragged out into the street, probably, and smashed as his own car had been in that little Illinois town.
He turned away from the window and walked slowly down the street. It had been foolish to go to the show room, he told himself, but there had been a slim chance—as he knew all his chances were.
He turned a corner and there, in a dusty square across the street, a good-sized crowd had gathered and was listening to someone who had climbed a park bench and was talking to them.
Idly, Vickers walked across the street, stopped opposite the crowd.
The man on the park bench had taken off his coat and rolled up his sleeves and loosened his tie. He talked almost conversationally, yet his words carried clear across the park to where Vickers stood.
“When the bombs come,” asked the man, “what will happen then? They say don’t be afraid. They say stay on your jobs and don’t be afraid. But what will they do when the bombs arrive? Will they help you then?”
He paused and the crowd was tense, tense in a terrible silence. You could feel the knotted muscles that clamped the jaws tight shut and the hand that squeezed the heart until the body turned all cold. And you could sense, the fear—
The Complete Serials Page 55
