by Jerry Sohl
“How—how old are you?” Martin asked hesitantly.
“Twenty-three.”
“Really?”
“What difference does it make how old I am there? It is the here and now that counts. I am twenty-three here. I was born here just like you. For all I know I may never go back because I have fallen in love with you and because of the things I’ve done. You heard what Father said.”
“Superwoman loving Inferiorman.”
“Don’t say that, darling. It’s not true.”
“Not true?”
“I could not have brought you back if you had been just like other men. When you were annihilated and I started to bring you back you helped me. No other that I know among your numbers could have done that. What do you suppose I see in you, anyway?”
Martin opened his mouth to say something, but her cool fingers stopped him.
“Don’t deny it, Martin,” she said. “You know what I mean. You’ve felt it and thought about it, for I’ve seen it in your mind. You have a unique ability to penetrate others, to judge correctly their emotions, whether or not they will be receptive to what you have to suggest. You secretly pride yourself on this ability to see beneath the surface.
“In your mind I saw that at one time in your life you mentioned this ability to someone only to have that person shy away from you. You learned then to say nothing about it again. You learned it was wiser to pretend you were no different from anyone else.”
“Lots of people have that ability,” he said. “I’m not alone.”
“Lots of people think they have it, Martin. But yours is the only true case I’ve seen. It is because of this thing that I find it possible to love you.”
He studied her, wondering whether to believe her or not. “Are you trying to tell me I am like your people?”
She shook her head. “Not at all. You are merely an example of what your people will be like in the near future. If we are still here they will begin learning how to communicate with each other mentally. I knew you were different when you penetrated our minds to some extent. You didn’t trust us—you knew something was odd about us as no one else has. You haven’t trained this thing you have, otherwise you might have learned what we were right away. If trained, this talent would surprise you. You have to listen hard with your mind, Martin; you have to project your thoughts and work hard at it. You might conceivably be able to move a ball on a table if you’d think about it hard enough. You certainly could do it with practice.”
“All right,” Martin said. “I’ll admit I’ve thought about my intuition about people. Once I got a set of ESP cards and surprised myself with my high score. I’ve had it since I was a boy and I just thought I was lucky, that’s all. But let’s get back to you. Why are you and your father and brother on my plane?”
“There are many of us among you as human beings,” she explained. “We are born, live and die just as you people do. It’s a tour of duty to us. My mother, for example, asked to return to our plane and she died as a human so she could go back. That is where my father went each night when he visited the laboratory. We all took turns going back. We merely vanished for the time we were gone.
“You saw Bobby doing what you thought were magic tricks. Bobby is really a child. He had been warned not to make any display of that kind. But, as I say, he’s still a child, comparatively speaking. When he did that bit of telekinesis, we all felt it and tried to get to him but you saw him and he stopped before we could do anything about it.”
“I felt a cold wind then,” Martin said. “I felt the same thing when your father disappeared.” He laughed. “I guess there must be something in what you say about me.”
“Of course there is. To go on, though. There are many of us in high places—and low places. It is up to us to shift public opinion, to incite wars and riots, to inflame hatreds. Many of our people have been the world’s martyrs—and the world’s most hated men.”
“Hitler, I suppose?”
“One of the most recent, yes,” she said. “There have been many in history. Genghis Khan, Hannibal, many emperors and kings. But not always. When one of us was not at the head of the government, when the time was ripe we merely dominated the individual who was.”
“As you did me?”
“Worse, darling. I just suggested things to you, but we enslaved these others. You ought to read your history. There are many events which puzzle scholars but which are logical if thought of in terms of mental enslavement.
“You asked about what father and I were doing. We three—I’m including Bobby—are the earthly counterparts of our family. Actually, I have several brothers and sisters, in addition to my mother, on the other plane. Father was directed to solve certain biological problems for the advancement of your people, which he did. But someone of you thought of research on regeneration—you see? Your people are thinking more and more on their own.
“But we just could not allow regeneration. So Dad was worked into the position of heading up the project to stall it. Others, besides your Forrest Killian, discovered what Dad was doing. They have been annihilated in one way or another, for if regeneration were allowed there are too many other things you would discover too soon. Then there would be few casualties in battle. Since the growth of our group depends upon the release of concentrated thought force through the sudden death of thousands, we couldn’t allow it. Now does that explain it all for you?”
Chapter 12
Though it was a chilly night and Martin had only his suit coat to protect him, he opened the door of the car and stepped out on the soft ground, closing the car door behind him. He had to be alone. He had to escape those eyes of hers for a little while; the enormity of the thing she had told him had caused his head to ache.
He looked around the clearing. Thirty feet away there were trees, black giants reaching upward, their branches against the star-strewn sky like black lace in the heavens. There were bushes there, too, and more bushes and trees beyond them.
I could run, he thought. I could run to where the trees are and then beyond into the bushes. I could keep running and never look back and I’d never see her again. Then I could forget her and escape all this.
He leaned against the car and looked deep into the sky. He knew he could never do that. I guess I love you, Virginia, he said to himself. Else why do I stay? But why did you have to turn out this way? Why are you someone strange, someone from another world who says she loves me? Why couldn’t you be a cute young thing without a brain in your head and I would have to take care of you? Or a secretary. A college girl, or maybe even a widow with kids.
Because you are not an ordinary man. The thought startled him and he wondered for a moment whether or not she had sent it to him, but then he knew she had not. Perhaps he was no ordinary man. Perhaps that is why he had never known a girl he could love before. He had been looking for someone—someone with ethereal eyes—someone who now sat in the car against which he was leaning.
Perhaps Virginia had asked herself the same question. “Why did I have to fall in love with a mortal man?” she might have asked herself. Perhaps her subconscious had given her the same answer.
Then there was the knowledge of all that she had said. The first man and woman from Capella, coming here to be catalysts in the accelerated development of the species they chose because it resembled their ancient forebears more than any other living thing on earth at that time.
So man hadn’t been so smart after all. As a captive civilization and with his new intelligence he was able to survive better than the animals who suddenly had become lesser animals. Man was to become a creature of invention and quick progress, thanks to the Capellans. But why thank the Capellans? They gave the spark of knowledge to men and watched it grow as Virginia said, in a garden, only to cut him down, decimate him so the cultivated thought force would be released and caught by the Capellans, bloodthirsty creatures from out of space who stood around waiting for men to grow to maturity so they could annihilate them and gleeful
ly sop up the thought force so released....
No, I mustn’t think of it that way. Virginia is right. We, with our slaughter of cattle, are doing the same thing, although it is to the nourishment of our bodies and not our brains primarily. If the intelligence levels are in the same ratio, there is no reason to look at it with revulsion. It is the survival of the fittest, Nature’s oldest game, still going on with man being the beast of the forest and the Capellans the superior people, the hunters.
He shivered as the night air penetrated the suit coat. Then he felt a hand on his shoulder and he turned to see Virginia standing beside him, her eyes bright, her expression concerned.
“I’m all right,” he said quietly. “I just wanted to think.”
She stood there, not taking her hand away, and they both looked at the sky.
“Between those trees just ahead of us,” she said, pointing to a star-filled space between two tall elms, “is Capella. It is in the constellation Auriga, almost on a level with the Pleiades at this time of the year.”
He looked to where she was pointing in the eastern sky, saw a bright star near others in the constellation.
“It is a yellow star,” she said. “It is like your sun in that respect, but it is not a dwarf. It is a giant star, fully a hundred times as big as your sun. One of the planets circling it will eventually be the home of the Capellans now on Earth. It is where my people want to be.”
“What will happen to Earth men when the Capellans leave?”
“They will revert back to primitive ways,” Virginia said gravely. “They haven’t really progressed very far. It is only our presence that keeps them ahead of their time. It will be like turning off a radio broadcasting station; the radio set then responds only to local electrical disturbances.”
“When are the Capellans going to leave?”
Virginia shrugged. “Who knows? Tomorrow? A hundred years from now? None of us knows. We have been waiting for word for years.”
“What is going to happen to us? You and me?”
“Do you love me?” She looked up at him.
He took her in his arms. “I will always love you.”
“Then we will have each other.”
He kissed her tenderly. “Aren’t you afraid?”
“Not with you.”
“But if your people are as powerful as you say, they should have no difficulty finding us.”
“There are no more emanations to guide them,” she said. “I am no longer protecting you with a force-field envelope. I have blocked off that part of me that is alien to you; I have lost my Capellan identity voluntarily. I am now only a woman. To my own people I would now appear as one of you.”
“But couldn’t one of these Capellans be floating around us right now?”
She smiled. “I could sense one and so could you if you thought much about it.”
“No more miracles, then?”
“We’re on our own. If I violate the rules and interfere with the natural workings of your society again it will be like a beacon light to them. We’d be discovered at once.”
“They all know about us, do you think?”
“I doubt there is a Capellan who doesn’t. They’ll be watching for us everywhere. All we have to do is be careful. You will learn to identify them by intuition, I will tell you which persons are Capellans if you are in doubt. Until you learn to sense them as you wondered about Dad, Bobby and me, I suggest we stay together as much as possible.”
“I won’t let you out of my sight,” he said, grinning. “But will they do anything? Can they read our thoughts?”
“That is interfering in your society. They can’t and won’t do it unless you are asleep or nearly asleep and then only in an emergency, such as back at Park Hill.”
“They know who we are, what we look like.”
She nodded. “I’m afraid they do.”
“What will they do if we’re found out?”
“I don’t know. We must stop them from finding us. They are prone to error just as human beings are. They cannot penetrate a disguise, for example, unless they suspect it is a disguise.”
“Well, that’s something.” He looked at her blonde hair. “You could dye your hair. I could get a crew cut and start smoking a pipe.”
“That’s a start. But where are we going to go?”
“I know an abandoned cabin in the Wasatch Mountains near Salt Lake City. Think we could make it? We could get a different car. Police are probably looking for this one.”
“You’re the boss,” she said, punching him playfully in the arm. “It’s about time you took over.”
They sat in the clearing through the last dark hours of the morning, occasionally starting the motor and heater to keep warm in the encroaching chill of the predawn October day.
They used the time by logically examining their chances of reaching the cabin Martin remembered in Utah.
“When I was in the army in nineteen forty-three, I was stationed near Great Salt Lake taking overseas training,” Martin explained. “I discovered this cabin on one of the long marches our unit made near there. It was an overnight bivouac and, after the tents had been pitched, I went on an exploration tour of the area near the camp. Everybody laughed at me. ‘Haven’t you had enough hiking today?’ they asked. One guy said, ‘He’s found a home, Martin has. He’s bucking for something.’
“I guess I was a character to them for I liked to hike. I found this cabin in a small ravine. It was empty and forlorn looking. Probably a relic from gold-rush days.”
“Maybe some early Mormon hunter built it,” Virginia said.
“Could be.” He looked at her and said, “It’s not much, Virginia. Hand-hewn logs. Small windows. I don’t think there’s a nail in it anywhere. Maybe it isn’t even there any more.”
“I don’t care. We’ll make it our home for a while—if we make it—if it’s still there.”
“We can’t stay around here.”
Martin examined the contents of his pockets: Travelers Checks, about twenty-five dollars in cash, identification, initialed cigarette lighter, cigarettes. Virginia had nothing.
They decided to cash the Travelers Checks, then Martin could burn his identification papers, throw away his cigarette lighter. They could not afford to take a chance.
“When I do that it will be like starting a new life,” he said. “Good-bye, Martin Enders, hello—who?”
“Hmmm.” Virginia pursed her lips. “I like Steve. It has a masculine ring. We’ll have to call you Steve—Steve Miller. That’s not an unusual name. There must be thousands of Steve Millers in the world today. Do you like it?”
“It’s all right. Now I’ll have to pick one for you. Let’s see. How about Dorothy?”
She shook her head emphatically. “It can’t be Dorothy. That was my mother’s name.”
“Nancy?”
“So-so.”
“Last name?”
“Miller, of course.”
“Of course.” He squeezed her hand.
“It was only yesterday in the washroom that I nearly hit Dr Merrill, you had me so souped up against him,” Martin said as the first faint light of day appeared.
“It seems it ought to be a week ago.”
“And I thought you would remain in the trance I had you in until the danger was over,” Virginia said. “But I knew something would happen. I just felt it.”
“Yesterday I was pretending to work for National Scene magazine doing a story about a research scientist in a government project while I was really investigating this same man for the Counter-Intelligence Corps and General Deems. Today what am I?”
“It’s my fault,” she said softly. “I feel it is somehow. There should have been something I could have done, but there wasn’t. Dad knew about you and hoped to discourage you without arousing suspicion, but you wouldn’t discourage. When he learned you had seen Bobby, he wanted to be sure you didn’t know too much, so you had to come to live with us so he could watch you and you could be convince
d Bobby was just a normal boy and that somehow you only imagined what you had seen him do. But when he learned about your connection with General Deems and when he discovered Dr. Merrill had been talking to you about Forrest Killian, then it was too late.”
“I wish I had known,” he said. “Then I could have avoided it—or could I have?”
“No, in any case. If you had known you would have done something aggressive and it would have ended the same way, only sooner. Forrest Killian was aggressive.”
“Were you in love with Forrest Killian?”
She laughed. “Of course not.” Then she became grave. “I just didn’t like what was happening to him. He was a likable fellow but he, too, entered the trap from which there was no exit. There have been others. I’d rather not talk about them.”
Martin turned the ignition key Virginia had taken the precaution of creating earlier, stepped on the starter. “I only wish there were some way to combat the Capellans,” he said. “I feel as if I’m running away when I might be doing something.”
“I’m sure you would try to escape a firing squad,” she said. “Believe me, they don’t care about Martin Enders. You were annihilated once; you could be disposed of as easily again. I might not be around to bring you back the next time.”
“I’d still like to talk to the fellows at National Scene.”
“They’d laugh at you.”
“And General Deems. He ought to know.”
“He’d laugh, too. Don’t you see, darling? They wouldn’t believe you and by the time you got around to proving anything you’d be dead.”
“But there must be a way to defeat them!”
“Why defeat them? The Capellans are a benign influence. With them gone, so would be man’s reasoning power. If it weren’t for them, man wouldn’t be where he is. If they chose to do so, they could send man back to Neanderthal days any time.”
“But I can’t accept letting them continue the wars, the plagues, the killing for their selfish purpose of self-perpetuation. After all, man has a right to his own natural evolution without this needless bloodshed caused by the Capellans.”
