“That was Andy,” she said.
He didn’t get it for a moment.
Then he thought, ‘So it wasn’t Andy who died. It was Mary. Or, rather, she stopped living. She stuck to the telephones when Andy started to get used to the psych-phones.’
She was a casualty, too.
“Let’s get back to the beer-garden,” Tenning said.
“Gladly. Come on.”
It didn’t take long. But there was somebody waiting at their table, the heavy-browed man Tenning had encountered on the steps of the Star building. He had a purple welt on his jaw.
Tenning’s insides coalesced coldly. He poised, hesitating, and then glanced around quickly.
“I’m all alone,” the man said. “Look, don’t start anything. I forgot to give you this.” He slapped a leatheroid folder on the table.
“You’re not taking me back,” Tenning said. Unconsciously he had gone into a crouch, Mary behind him, instinct flooding his bloodstream with violence.
“No. You left a week or so too soon, but it doesn’t matter. Good luck.” The man smiled, got up, and went out, leaving Tenning helplessly shaken.
Mary opened the folder.
“A friend of yours?”
“N-no.”
“He must be. To leave you this?”
“What is it?” Tenning still looked after the heavy-browed man.
“Token-currency,” she said. “And plenty of it. You can buy me a drink now.”
He snatched the folder.
“Money? That’s what—heck! I can fight them now! I can splash the truth all over the country! See if I don’t—”
SHAN purred on the lap of the red-haired.
“Tenning is the only one who’s escaped so far, Jerry,” the man said, gently tickling the cat’s jaw. “And that wouldn’t have happened if we hadn’t been reconverting. Doesn’t matter, anyhow, of course. He was due for a discharge in a week or so. You might look over his records some day when you have time. Tenning’s an interesting nonentity of the more troublesome sort.”
“There’s a lot I’m still vague about,” the other man said. “My background’s geopolitical. I’m not a physicist. The doppelgangers—”
“That’s a matter for the technicians. You’re specially qualified for administrative work, with psychological angles. Right now you’re getting a bird’s-eye view of the whole works—a sort of apprenticeship.
“The doppelgangers, though—well, the double concept’s interesting. Not terribly important, but interesting. When the Double first goes out, the psychic cord between the two is very strong. That’s why we have to keep the Original in custody—among other reasons.
“After a certain period the Double seems to acquire enough personality of his own to go on alone, and the Original’s released. He’s harmless by then, anyhow.”
“He wouldn’t have been, at first?”
“Oh, no. Not Tenning’s type. He’s one of the dangerous group. Not creative, but influential. You see, the creators and the technicians were with us from the start. They saw this was the only possible safe solution.
“But the Tennings, the fellows with a little talent and a lot of aggressiveness—imagine what damage he might have done in nineteen forty-five, yawping his emotional reactions over the air. Undisciplined, immature emotions, veering in all directions.
“It’s normal, of course—everybody was veering in nineteen forty-five. That was what we had to put a stop to, before chaos set in. Tenning was one of the unfortunate in-betweens, guys with too much influence to run around free, and too little intelligence to come in constructively with us.
“We couldn’t reason with his kind. We couldn’t even tell him the truth. Tenning Duplicate has done a lot of good—under control. All our key men have. We need guys like Tenning to steer people in the right direction.”
“Under control,” Jerry said.
THE red-haired man laughed. “We’re not the bosses. Don’t start out with that idea even in the back of your mind, Jerry. People with dictator impulses are reconditioned—fast. Here’s the answer—we could never be bosses in this set-up, even if we wanted to be. The change is taking place too slowly.
“That was our whole concept, of course, and the very slowness of the thing is the check and balance system that works on us. The minute any of us got dictatorship impulses, we’d have to change the social set-up.
“And the people won’t accept quick change. They’ve had enough of that. There’d be chaos, and one lone dictator wouldn’t stand a chance. He’d have too many opponents. All we’re working for—and don’t you forget it, Jerry—is to focus the veering. That’s job enough for any organization right now.”
“What about Tenning? Now that he’s free, he’s harmless?”
“Perfectly harmless. Mellhorn gave him token-money enough to cover the transition period, and he’ll adjust like everyone else—if he can.”
“Pretty hard on him, isn’t it, tossed out into a strange world?”
“It’s not that strange. He’ll learn. That is, he’ll learn now if he ever would have. I’m not so sure. Some just don’t adjust. It takes a certain flexibility and self-confidence to be able to make changes as your environment changes.
“People like Tenning—I don’t know. It’s a funny thing, Jerry, there’s a whole new class sinking to the bottom of the social setup now. People who can’t or won’t adapt to the new things. It happens after every major social upheaval, of course, but this time we’re getting a new group of misfits.
“In the long run, a much higher percentage benefits, of course. It’s too bad about the maladjusted group, but there isn’t much we can do. I don’t know about Tenning. We’ll keep an eye on him, help if we can.
“But these men with half a talent and a taste for public adulation have got a bad weak spot to begin with. I hope he makes out all right. I hope he does.”
* * * * *
“I don’t get it, Dave,” Mary said. “Whom do you want to fight?”
He gripped the leatheroid folder savagely.
“The big boys, the ones who built the psych-phones and started this screwy system of Fish decern seventh. All this—this stuff. You ought to know.”
“But what do you want?” she asked. “What do you think you’re fighting for?”
He looked at her. And, in the warm dimness of the air, the wave of the future stirred as an alien quickening that he sensed very dimly, and hated.
“I’ll fight,” he promised. “I’ll—stop all this.”
He swung around and went out. The waiter paused at Mary’s table.
“Highball,” she said.
He sent a questioning glance after Tenning.
“One?”
“Just one.”
“He isn’t coming back?”
She didn’t answer for a moment as she listened to the off-beat rhythm of the music that had gone on beyond her.
“Not tonight,” she said. “But he’ll be back. There’s nothing out there for him. Not any more. Sure, he’ll be back—some day.”
I AM EDEN
In a fabulous Brazilian Valley, Jim Ferguson and Dr. Cairns battle against walking rocks and cannibal plants in their strange quest of a mysterious and fascinating girl goddess!
CHAPTER I
Haunted Dutchman
A WARM wind blew down the brown waters of the Parima. It picked up the sweet, clinging scent of honeysuckle and carried it across the open veranda. Watching the Dutchman’s face, Ferguson felt a queer crawling unease.
Groot’s nostrils twitched. He put out a thick hand beaded with diamonds of perspiration and lifted his glass. But he did not gulp the gin this time. He inhaled deeply, his eyes closed, and once a tiny shudder rippled across his pulpy, big torso.
“De smell was dere, too,” Groot said. “De sina-sina trees—dey have big, nasty t’oms—perhaps dey were de worst. But all de flowers watched. And dey smelled.”
Ferguson let his dark gaze slide toward the bambo screens at the ba
ck of the porch. He thought he saw a faint movement there, and moved his hand surreptitiously in warning. The motion stopped. Luckily Groot was too drunk to be suspicious, or he might have heard the heavy breathing behind the screens.
“The flowers smelled,” Ferguson prompted. “You must have got used to smells in the Amazon, though.”
Groot put down the glass and mopped his swarthy face.
“Dere are sins and sins,” he said. “I have broken my share of de commandments, ja. But dis was different. All along I was afraid, and de feeling got worse on de way back. De doctor had his scientific zeal; he could look at her as a specimen. Yet he was troubled too. Me—I could feel de way de forest stopped when we caught her.”
“Indio?” Ferguson suggested. Groot made a gesture of scorn.
“De Indios! Oh, no—it was not de brown savages. I know dem. Dey could not frighten me so I sweated and felt my insides try to crawl down into my shoes. It was like de way life stops when you stab a man. Only it did not quite stop.”
Again the perfumed wind crossed the veranda; again Groot shivered. Ferguson refilled the Dutchman’s glass.
“T’anks. Look, now—you are a scientist. I sun not one. I just bum around Brazil, making a few reis here, a few dere. I am not educated. But I am not superstitious either. Dis talk about haunted parts of de forest—well, I have gone to such places, and dere is nothing. Only de Indians do not talk about dis place, and dey do not go dere. Twenty years ago dey did. Suddenly something happened.” He moved nervously. “I do not want to talk about it or think about it. I am afraid, I have a feeling I should go back and try to help dat girl. Dis sin lies heavy on my soul, you see.”
He lurched to his feet. “I go to my hammock now. No more gin, no. I have had enough.”
FERGUSON was silent. Groot walked carefully to the steps. There he turned. “De rocks shook,” he said. “I felt de ground crawl under, my feet. And de flowers—”
He stopped, chewing his lip. Shaking his head, he shrugged and stepped off the veranda. Jim Ferguson watched the bulky figure disappear in the direction of the settlement. He finished his gin and scowled, distracted by the overpoweringly sweet scent of the madreselva, the river honeysuckle, that lined the Parima’s banks. Finally he rubbed his unshaven jaw and called:
“Come on out. You make enough noise to scare the Dutchman away, and then go to sleep when he’s gone. Afraid I’ll go after the stuff without you?”
Tom Parry came from behind the screens, a thin, wiry, sneering man with a knife-scar across one cheek.
“Maybe,” he said. “I never trust gentlemen. It’s a habit with me.”
“I’m flattered,” Ferguson said, pouring himself another drink. “Where’s Sampson?”
“Here,” Sampson said, following Parry. He was a squat, dark man who spoke little but apparently heard everything. He drew back a chair and sat down, reaching for the bottle.
Parry’s gray eyes were on Ferguson. “Well?”
Ferguson grinned. “Well what? We won’t get any more information out of Groot. He just repeats himself now.”
Parry grimaced. “What are we waiting for then?”
“Nothing. We can go up river tomorrow, if you want.”
‘What about the lead suits?”
Ferguson shrugged. “Dr. Cairns has a couple. He must have known what to expect. Lead-impregnated cloth—it’s significant. But now we won’t have to wait. It would take weeks to get down to Manaos and back, and somebody might ask questions. We’ll use Cairns’ lead suits.”
“That’ll protect us from the radium?”
“Yes,” Ferguson said, grinning again. “It won’t protect us against other emanations, though—there may be some mighty peculiar radiations in Groot’s haunted forest.”
“There’s radium, anyhow,” Sampson said curtly;
“Yeah,” Parry agreed. “If Groot doesn’t lead us to the place, I figure the girl will. What’s the Dutchman afraid of—ghosts?”
“His conscience,” Ferguson said. “Everybody’s got an Achilles heel somewhere. Mine didn’t happen to be the same kind, but—”
Parry said maliciously, “That’s why you’re floating around Brazil, with a couple of crooks like us, instead of being a big-shot metallurgist in New York, isn’t it?”
The barb did not sting. Ferguson turned his quiet, dark gaze on Parry.
“That’s right,” he agreed. “It’s lucky for you that I know radium when I see it.”
“Ten grand,” Sampson said. Parry grunted “We can get ten million. Besides, Groot gave the stuff to the local padre to keep for him. It’s safer than a bank in this neck of the woods. We daren’t touch it.”
It was safe, yes. Ferguson had warned the priest to keep the radioactive ore in its leaden casket. Why Groot hadn’t continued down river to Manaos or Rio was something to ponder. It was almost, Ferguson thought, as though some intangible cord still bound the Dutchman to that strange, fantastic part of the forest where he had found—what he found.
Ferguson sighed and watched the slow, roiling flow of the river. Up there, somewhere, was Dr. Andrew Cairns, possessor of a secret that Groot could not disclose. For the Dutchman had suffered an emotional shock that partook of psychic trauma; he had stumbled over the threshold of the unknown, and for a little while he had walked in an alien place. A place where the ground crawled beneath his feet, and the rocks shook, and the flowers watched.
No man can ever shut the door completely on the past. Though Ferguson had been drifting for five years now, without ambition and without hope, something of the old driving curiosity came back now. The radium deposit Groot described would be worth a rather incredible amount, but the money took second place in Jim Ferguson’s mind to the boundless mystery he sensed up river. Rudderless, he moved before a familiar wind that blew toward the shores of a haunting conundrum.
And from upstream the hot wind of Brazil blew steadily, moist with the sickly flower-fragrance.
“We’ll have our guns,” Ferguson said suddenly.
SURPRISED, Parry stared at him. “Sure. Why? Getting worried?”
“I don’t know,” Ferguson whispered, feeling again the sickly unease Groot’s words had brought. “Could be, Parry. Could be. You see, Groot hasn’t told us everything he saw or—sensed. I’m no psychologist, but I could tell that. Part of his mind, out there, wouldn’t let him see some of the things that happened. And as long as those things didn’t impinge on him personally, he could ignore them.”
Parry was puzzled.
“I don’t get it.”
Ferguson nodded toward the blue, hazed ramparts of the Serra Pacaranua, a veiled wall above and beyond the jungle.
“If those mountains got up and walked past us and disappeared beyond the horizon, it would be so absolutely unthinkable that your mind might not let you admit that you saw it. Because if you did realize that mountains walked, you’d be apt to go crazy. An automatic defense mechanism of the subconscious.”
“Mountains walking!” Sampson mouthed contemptuously. “The gin’s talking.”
Yet Parry’s gray gaze held steady, a little wary.
“What d’you think Groot saw up there?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” Ferguson said. “I don’t know. Maybe—mountains walking . . .”
* * * * *
Five days by canoa, three afoot, and they were at their destination, in the foothills of Serra Pacaranua’s mighty peaks. Groot came with them. Ferguson thought the Dutchman’s conscience had forced him to return. Groot spoke seldom now. His heavy face was perceptibly thinner, and nervous tension made him jumpy. Oddly, the same subtle ailment had set its stamp on Dr. Andrew Cairns—which made Ferguson’s thoughts turn in new directions.
Cairns had occupied the wreckage of an experimental station that had once existed here. Native labor had rebuilt it, and the result was better than Ferguson would have expected. But a heavy silence hung over the compound; the usual soft chatter of the Indios wasn’t audible. Parry felt that, too, and
loosened the pistol at his belt. Sampson trudged doggedly ahead, a blocky, unimaginative figure! feeling nothing of the subtle currents of strain that surrounded the clearing. And sweat was pouring down the Dutchman’s face.
The door opened; a tall, gray-haired man in dungarees and singlet stood on the threshold, a rifle held at the ready. He relaxed at sight of them, Ferguson thought, but the strained wariness did not entirely vanish.
He waited quietly as the little group marched forward.
“Doctor Cairns,” Groot said hesitantly. “I have come back—dere was something—”
A look passed between the two men. Cairns said, “She’s still here, Jan.”
“Dere has been—no trouble, Doctor?” Cairns studied Groot. Abruptly he slung the rifle so that its muzzle pointed at the ground. “Come inside,” he said. “It’s cooler. Bring your friends, Jan—and introduce us.” The interior was shadowed and as cool as could be expected. Cairns indicated chairs and busied himself getting drinks. Ferguson followed Groot’s gaze and saw a heavy door with a business-like hasp and padlock newly afixed to it.
“No ice,” Cairns said. “There was a generator here twenty years ago, but the Indios dismantled it long ago. Incidentally, they ran away last week, Jan.”
“So. Well—dis is Mr. Ferguson. Mr. Parry and Mr. Sampson. Dey—dey asked me to guide dem—” Groot stumbled.
Mild amusement showed in the doctor’s eyes. “I suppose I was too generous. If I hadn’t given you that radium sample—but I felt you’d earned it—”
“You’ve guessed it, Doctor,” Parry said. “Do you mind telling me if there’s more radium where that came from?”
“There is more. And I haven’t staked out a claim.”
“Why not?” Sampson asked.
Cairns didn’t answer. The Dutchman stabbed a hairy finger toward the locked door.
“Is she in dere?”
Cairns nodded. “Yes, Jan. I’ve been giving her hypnotics ever since you left. She’s been unconscious.”
“She?” Ferguson said. “I’m a little curious. Who is she?”
CAIRNS reached out a long arm and picked up a flat metal case. He opened it, revealing a medical kit—a professional man’s kit.
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