Assignment's End
Page 2
youare an intelligent and conscientious man, Mr. Alcorn, else you would nothave contented yourself with your comparatively minor job. But yourprofession as claims adjustor must impose a considerable strain uponyour nervous organization. Add to this that you are a bachelor at theage of thirty-three and the natural conclusion--"
In spite of his mood, Alcorn laughed. "Wrong tack--remember my gift!Besides, I'm engaged to be married next month and I'm quite happy withthe prospect. This trouble of mine is something entirely different. It'stied in somehow with my talent for soothing and it scares me."
He could have added that Jaffers' hardly veiled threat on his lifedisturbed him as well, but saw no point in wasting time on the onedanger he understood perfectly.
"This vision," Alcorn said, "and the sensory sharpness and conviction ofdisaster that come with it--it's no ordinary hallucination. It's as realas my peculiar talent and represents a very real danger. It's workingsome sort of change in me that I don't like and I've got to find outwhat that change is or I'm done for. I _feel_ that."
Obligingly, the psychiatrist said, "Describe your experience."
Talking about it made perspiration stand out on Alcorn's forehead."First I'm seized with a sudden sense of abnormally sharpenedperception, as if I were on the point of becoming aware of a great manythings beyond my immediate awareness. I can feel the emotions of peopleabout me and I have the conviction that, in another moment, I shall beable to feel their thoughts as well.
"Then I seem to be standing alone on a frozen arctic plain, a polarwasteland that should be utterly deserted, but isn't. I've no actualsensations of touch or hearing, yet the scene is visually sharp in everydetail.
"There's a small village of corrugated sheet-metal houses just ahead,the sort that engineers on location might raise, and the streets betweenare packed with snow. Machines loaded with metal boxes crawl up and downthose streets, but I've never seen their drivers. Until this morning, Inever saw any people at all on the plain."
Dr. Hagen rattled his paper and nodded agreeably. "Go on. What are thesepeople like?"
"I can't tell you that," Alcorn said, "because their images were notcomplete. There seems to be a sort of relationship between them andmyself--a threatening one--but I can't guess what it may be. I can'teven tell you what racial type they belong to, because they have nofaces."
He crushed out his cigarette and took a deep breath, getting to theworst of it. "I have a distinct conviction during each of these seizuresthat the people I see are not ordinary human beings, that they're asdifferent from me as I am from everyone else, though not in the sameway. It's the difference that makes me uneasy. I can feel the urgencyand the resolution in them, as if they were determined to do--or hadresigned themselves to doing--something desperately important. And thenI know somehow that each of them has made some kind of decisionrecently, a decision that is responsible for his being what he is andwhere he is, and that I'll have to make a similar one when the timecomes. And the worst of it is that I know no matter which way my choicefalls, I'm going to be hideously unhappy."
The psychiatrist asked tranquilly, "You can't guess what choice it isthat you must make, or its alternative?"
"I can't. And that's the hell of it--not knowing."
The icy chill of the polar plain touched him and with it came a deepercold that had not been a part of the dream. At that instant, he mighthave identified its source, but was afraid to.
"My fear has some relation to whatever it is these people are about todo," he said. "I just realized that. But that doesn't help, because I'veno idea what it is."
He glanced at his strap watch, and the time made him stand up before thelittle psychiatrist could speak again. The hour was 15:57, and he saw indismay that his 16:00 appointment with Sean O'Donnell and the IrradiatedFoods tycoon would be late.
"I don't expect an immediate opinion," he said. "You couldn't reach oneas long as I'm here. Add up what I've told you, and if it makes any sortof sense you can radophone me tonight at 19:00. If my apartment doesn'tanswer, relay the call to my cabin in the Catskills--I've kept thelocation a secret, for privacy's sake, but the number is on alternatelisting."
He paused briefly at the door, touched with an uncharacteristic flash ofsour humor. "And telestat your bill to me. If I asked for it now, you'dprobably charge nothing."
* * * * *
The mood vanished as soon as he was outside and saw the gray-suitedJaffers operative waiting with stolid patience on the ramp of adepartment store across the street.
The shock of reminder brought on a giddy recurrence of hishallucination.
The polar plain yawned before him. The silent machines crept over theirsnow-packed ways, the faceless people stood in frozen groups.
He emerged from the seizure, shaken and sweating, to find that theJaffers man had crossed the street and was waiting a safe distancebehind. Alcorn fought down a panic desire to run away blindly onlybecause Kitty would be waiting for him at Consolidated--Kitty, hisbulwark of reassurance.
The gray-suited man was a deliberate hundred feet behind him when heboarded a tube-car.
Kitty was not in his office and there was no time to ring for her.
Instead, he went through the long accounting room beyond, answeringautomatically the smiles of a suddenly genial staff and headed forO'Donnell's office.
He saw at once that he was too late.
The CA manager's door was open and O'Donnell and Mulhall of IrradiatedFoods were emerging. Both wore street jackets and both men had theunmistakable air of euphoric calm that came within seconds of Alcorn'sapproach.
O'Donnell gave Alcorn his familiar long-lipped grin, looking, with histhin gentle face and neat brush of ermine-white hair, like anaristocratic Irish saint.
"You missed a pleasant meeting," O'Donnell said. "I've just signed arefund release to Charlie here, and a pleasure it was."
The awareness that they had been calmed before he'd arrived left Alcornspeechless.
"Really shouldn't have accepted," Mulhall said sheepishly. Mulhall was abig, solid man, bald and paunchy and, when his normal instincts werecontrolled, an argumentative tyrant. "Niggling technicality, I say.Shouldn't have taken a refund, but Sean here insisted."
They laughed together, like children sharing a joke.
"The claim was justified," O'Donnell said firmly. "Once Charlie'ssecretary explained the case, there was no doubt."
Mulhall grinned at Alcorn. "Remarkable girl, Janice Wynn. She's waitingin Sean's office. Wants to meet you, Philip."
They went toward the lift with their arms about each other, sharing anall-too-brief moment of companionship.
* * * * *
Alcorn hesitated in front of the closed door of O'Donnell's office.
When he entered, Janice Wynn was standing at the window, watching thesoundless rush of traffic in the street below. She was dark, not prettyin any conventional sense, but charged with a controlled vitality thatmade physical beauty unimportant.
Her face was anything but serene, the complex of emotions in her tiltedgreen eyes far removed from the ready placidity he had learned toexpect. There was an unmistakable impression of driving urgency--thesame urgency, Alcorn thought, that he had felt in the people of hiswaking dream.
"You're one," he said. His face felt stiff. "After all these years, I'vefound another one like--"
"Like yourself," she said. "But it's I who have found _you_. Did youreally think you were unique, Philip Alcorn?"
He tried to answer and couldn't. The meeting he had dreamed of all hislife had come about with precisely the electric suddenness he hadimagined, but he felt none of the elation he had anticipated. He felt,instead, a sudden panic.
For behind Mulhall's secretary, he had a shutter-swift glimpse of thefrozen plain, starkly clear with its huddle of metal buildings and itsfaceless people clustered on the snow-packed street.
Janice Wynn gave him no time to flounder for control. "You're the last,"she said. "An
d the most stubborn of the lot. You're lucky that we couldfind you in the little time we have left."
Alcorn said hoarsely, "I don't know what you mean."
She looked more disappointed than surprised. "You've no inkling _yet_?I've known most of the truth for days, though I still haven't made thechange. Your conditioning must have been too thorough or--"
She caught the shift of Alcorn's glance toward the window and turnedquickly. The man in gray was watching them intently from the officeacross the street.
"You're under surveillance!" she