by Eric Flint
After thirty seconds of silence, he began to frown. "Not again!" he thought; then, wearily, "Well, maybe she's over at her boy friend's."
He started the motor and presently drew up at the curb opposite Strather's apartment. A quick check established that the lanky redhead was there—but alone.
The young man was awake and in an angry state. As Gloge listened in, Vince savagely picked up the phone and dialed what must have been Barbara's number, for presently he slammed the receiver down and muttered, "Doesn't she know I've got to go to work tonight? Where can that girl be?"
That, in rising alarm, was a question which Gloge asked himself as the evening wore on. He returned to the vicinity of Barbara's boarding house. Until eleven P.M. the phone in her room rang periodically, testifying to Vince's concern.
When it had not rung for an hour, Gloge presumed that Strather had gone off to night duty. It was not a fact that could be left to surmise. He drove back to Vince's apartment. No sounds came from it.
Gloge accordingly returned to the street where Barbara lived.
He was tired now, so he rigged up an alarm system that would buzz him if Barbara entered her room; then, wearily, he crawled onto the cot in the back of the van and quickly fell into a deep sleep.
Earlier, as Barbara sat in her office a few minutes before closing time, she swayed and almost blacked out.
Greatly alarmed, she emerged from her office and reported the feeling to Helen Wendell. She did not question the logic of seeking the help of Hammond's blonde aide.
The secretary was sympathetic, and promptly took her in to John Hammond. By this time Barbara had experienced several more brief blackouts. So she was grateful when Hammond unlocked the door behind his desk, led her through a luxurious living room and into what he called the "spare bedroom."
She undressed, slipped under the sheets and promptly went to sleep. Thus, subtly, she was captured.
During the evening, Hammond and Helen Wendell took turns looking in on her.
At midnight, the Special Servicing expert reported that the life range indicator was working properly and he himself checked the body of the sleeping girl. "I get nine two," he said. "Who is she? New arrival?"
The silence that greeted his remark abruptly startled him. "You mean she's an Earther?"
"At least," said Helen Wendell after the man had departed, "there's been no further change."
Hammond said, "Too bad she's above the hypnotizable stage. Mere conditioning is actually a sorry substitute for what we need here—truth."
"What are you going to do?"
Hammond did not make up his mind about that until after daybreak.
"Since nine two is no real threat to us," he said then, "we merely return to routine and keep aware that maybe somebody is doing something that we don't know about. Perhaps we might even use a little ESP on her occasionally."
"Here—at Alpha?"
Hammond stared thoughtfully at his beautiful aide. Normally, he trusted her reactions in such matters.
She must have sensed what he was thinking, for she said quickly, "The last time we used extended perception, about 1800 Earthers tuned in on us. Of course, they thought of it merely as their imagination, but some of them compared notes. It was talked about for weeks, and some awfully important things were close to being revealed."
"We-l-l-l, okay, let's be aware of her then."
"All right. On that basis I'll wake her up."
As soon as she was in her office, Barbara phoned Vince. There was no answer. Which was not surprising. If he had worked the night shift, he would be dead to the world. She hung up and checked with the photo lab, and was much relieved when the night work list showed that Vince had signed in and out.
As she sat at her desk that morning, Barbara felt extremely grateful to Hammond and his secretary for having been so helpful to her. But she was also slightly guilty. She suspected that she had been affected again by the injection that Gloge had given her.
It was disconcerting to have been so strongly affected. "But I feel all right now!" she thought as she typed away at the pile of work Helen Wendell had put in her basket. Yet her mind was astir with plans. At ten o'clock, Helen sent her out with the usual morning briefcase full of memos and reports.
Elsewhere—
Gloge had awakened shortly after seven. Still no Barbara. Baffled, he shaved with his electric razor, drove to a nearby business thoroughfare and ate breakfast.
He next went back to the street where Strather lived. A quick check established that the man was home. Gloge triggered his second charge of gas—and a few minutes later was in the apartment.
The young man had changed again to his pajamas, and he lay stretched out once more on the settee in his living room. If anything, the angry expression on his face was more pronounced.
Gloge, needle in hand, hesitated. He was not happy with this subject. Yet he realized that there was no turning back at this stage. Without further pause, holding the point almost against Strather's body, he squeezed the trigger.
There was no visible reaction.
As he headed for his office at Research Alpha, Gloge's thought was on the girl. Her absence was unfortunate. He had hoped to inject the serum into his two subjects at approximately the same time. Evidently that was not going to happen.
VI
A few minutes after he returned to his office, Dr. Gloge's phone rang. His door was open, and he heard his secretary answer. The woman looked up over the receiver.
"It's for you, Doctor. That girl who worked here for a while—Barbara Ellington."
The shock that went through Gloge must have shown as disapproval, for the woman said hastily, "Shall I tell her you're not in?"
Gloge quivered with uncertainty. "No." He paused; then, "I'll take the call in here."
When he heard the clear, bell-like voice of the girl, Dr. Gloge felt tensely ready for anything.
"What is it, Barbara?" he asked.
"I'm supposed to bring some papers over to you," her voice trilled in its alive, vital way. "I'm to give them to you only, so I wanted to make sure you would be there."
. . . Opportunity!
It seemed to Gloge that he couldn't have asked for a more favorable turn. His other subject would now come to his office where he could fire the second injection into her and deal personally with any reaction.
As it developed, there was no reaction that he could detect. She had turned away after delivering the papers to him, and that was when he fired the needle gun. It was a perfect shot. The girl neither jumped nor swung about; she simply kept going toward the door, opened it, and went through.
Barbara did not return to Hammond's office. She expected a strong physiological disturbance from the second injection, and she wanted to be in the privacy of her own room when it happened. It had cost her an effort not to react in front of Gloge.
So she stayed in her bedroom, waited as long as she thought wise, and then phoned and told Helen Wendell that she was not well.
Helen said sympathetically, "Well, I suppose it was to be expected after the bad night you had."
Barbara answered quickly, "I began to have dizzy spells and nausea. I panicked and rushed home."
"You're home now?"
"Yes."
"I'll tell Mr. Hammond."
Barbara hung up, unhappy with those final words. But there was no way to stop his learning about her condition. She had a feeling she was in danger of losing her job. And it was too soon. Later, after the experiment, it wouldn't matter, she thought uneasily.
Perhaps she had better take the "normal" precautions of an employee. "After all," she thought, "I probably show symptoms." She called her doctor and made an appointment for the following day. Barbara replaced the receiver feeling a strange glee. "I ought to be in foul shape by tomorrow," she thought, "from the second injection."
What Hammond did when he returned to his office late that afternoon was to sit in thought for a while after Helen reported to him Barbara's s
ituation.
Then:
"It doesn't add up, Helen. I should have asked you before. Have you examined her file?"
The blonde young woman smiled gravely. "I can tell you everything that's in it, right from the top of my head. After all, I security-checked her. What do you want to know?"
"You mean there's nothing?"
"Nothing that I could find."
Hammond hesitated no longer. He was accustomed to trusting Helen Wendell. Abruptly he threw up his hands. "All right. She's got the whole weekend to be sick in. Call me when she comes in to work again. Did that report arrive from New Brasilia?"
"It was sent to Manila Center."
"Are you serious? Let me talk to Ramon. There must be a reason!" Quickly he was absorbed in his new tasks.
Barbara slept. When she awakened her clock said twelve after seven.
It was daylight, early morning. She found that out in a sensational fashion. She went outside and looked . . . without moving from the bed!
There she was lying in her bedroom; and there she was out in the street.
Simultaneously.
Involuntarily, she held her breath. Slowly, the outside scene faded, and she was back in the bed, wholly indoors.
With a gasp, she started breathing again.
By cautious experimentation, she discovered that her perception extended about a hundred yards.
And that was all she learned. Something in her brain acted like an invisible eye stalk that could reach through walls and bring back visual images to the light-interpretation centers. The ability remained completely stable.
Presently she became aware that a small black van was parked down the street and that Dr. Gloge was in it. She realized that he had an instrument with an earplug with which he seemed to be listening in on her.
His face was intent, his small eyes narrowed. Something of the determination of this little, bald-headed scientist seeped through to her, and Barbara suddenly felt uneasy. She sensed remorselessness, an impersonal quality that was entirely different from her own light-hearted participation in his experiment.
To Gloge—she realized suddenly—his subjects were like inanimate objects.
In human terms the viciousness of it was infinite.
As she continued to perceive him, Gloge shut off his instruments, started the motor of his car and drove off.
Since Vince was again on the night shift, presumably Gloge was heading home.
She phoned Vince's apartment to make sure; when there was no answer, she called the photo lab.
"No, Strather didn't come in last night," the administrative assistant of that department told her.
Barbara replaced the receiver unhappily, recalling that Vince had not responded well to the first shot. She suspected that the biologist had given him his second shot also, and that he was not responding favorably to it either.
She dressed and drove over to his apartment. As she came near, she could see him inside, so when he showed no sign of replying to her ring, she let herself in with her key—and found him on the living room couch, tossing and turning. He looked feverish. She felt his forehead; it was dry and hot to the touch.
He stirred and opened his eyes, looked up with his sick brown eyes into her bright blue ones. She thought unhappily: "I'm so well and he's so ill. What can be wrong?"
Aloud, anxiously, she said, "You need a doctor, Vince. What's the name of that man who gave you a checkup last year?"
"I'll be all right," he mumbled. He sank back to sleep.
Sitting there on the settee beside him, Barbara felt something in her lungs. Her instant, amazed thought was: "Gas!" But she was too slow.
She must have blacked out instantly—because her next awareness was of lying on the floor, and of Gloge bending over her.
The scientist was calm, efficient, seemed satisfied. Barbara caught his thought: "She'll be all right."
She realized that he was stepping past her to Vince. "Hmmm!" Gloge seemed critical and unhappy. "Still not good. Let's see if tranquilizer will help him."
He made the injection, then straightened, and there was a strange, hard thought in his mind: "By Monday night, it'll be time for the third injection and I'll have to decide what to do."
So clear was the thought that came from him, it was almost as if he spoke aloud. What his thought said was that he intended to kill them both, if either failed to develop as he desired.
Shocked, Barbara held herself very still; and at that moment an entirely different growth process occurred in her.
It began with a veritable flood of suppressed information suddenly rising to the surface of her mind.
. . . About the reality of what people were like . . . the dupes, the malingerers and the weaklings on the one hand, and, on the other, the angry and the distorted, the worldly wise and the cynics. She recognized that there were well-meaning people in the world who were strong, but she was more aware of the destructive at this instant . . . by the million, the swindlers and betrayers—all self-justified, she saw now. But she realized also that they had misread their own bitter experiences. Because they were greedy and lustful and had lost their fear of punishment, earthly or unearthly; because they resented being thwarted in their slightest whim; because—
A forgotten scene flashed into her mind from her own past, of a minor executive in her first job, who had fired her when she refused to come up to his apartment.
All her life, she had been taught and she had tried not to be aware of such things. But now, at some level of neural computation, she permitted all that data to be calculated into the main stream of her awareness.
The process was still going on a few minutes later when Gloge departed as silently as he had come.
After he had left, Barbara tried to get up and was surprised that she could not even open her eyes. The realization that her body was still unconscious presently enthralled her.
What a marvelous ability!
As time passed, it began to be disconcerting. She thought: "I'm really quite helpless." It was early afternoon before she was finally able to move. She got up, subdued and thoughtful, warmed a can of soup for Vince and herself and forced him to drink it from a cup.
Immediately after, he stretched out again on the couch and fell asleep. Barbara left the apartment to keep her appointment with her own doctor.
As she drove, she could feel a stirring inside her. More change? She decided it was. Perhaps there would be many such between now and Monday. Yet her intuition was that she would not be able to dominate this situation with the changes from the first and second shots only.
"Somehow," she thought, "I've got to get that third shot."
VII
At noon Monday, after he had dictated some letters to a girl from the steno pool, Hammond came out of his office.
"What's the word from Nine-two?"
Helen looked up with her flashing smile. "Barbara?"
"Yes."
"Her doctor called in this morning at her request. He said he saw her Saturday. She appears to have a mild temperature, is subject to dizzy spells, and a variety of unmentionable ailments like diarrhea. However, there's one unexpected thing, the doctor said—evidently his own comment. Interested?"
"Of course."
"He said that in his opinion Barbara has had a major personality change since he last checked her about a year ago."
Hammond shook his head slowly. "Merely confirms our own observation. Well, keep me in touch."
But about four o'clock, when the long distance screen was finally silent, he buzzed Helen Wendell. "I can't get that girl out of my mind. It's premonition level stuff, so I can't ignore it. Phone Barbara."
She called to him a minute later: "Sorry, there's no answer."
"Bring her file to me," said Hammond. "I've got to assure myself I'm not missing something in this unusual matter."
As he scanned the typed pages a few minutes later, he came presently to the photograph of Vince Strather. He uttered an exclamation.
> "What is it?" Helen asked.
He told her what had happened the previous week between Dr. Gloge and Vince Strather.
He finished, "Of course, I didn't connect Barbara with that young man. But this is his picture. Get Gloge's file."
"Apparently the change started when his sister died two months ago," Helen Wendell said presently. "One of those sudden and dangerous shifts in personal motivation." She added ruefully, "I should have watched him on that. The death of a near relative has often proved important."
