“It filtered in while I was on my honeymoon. I didn’t particularly care, not at the time.”
Lighting his pipe, Pearson said: “We ought to buy up this fellow. But he says he’s not for sale.”
“This really is it, isn’t it? He’s not a fake.”
“No, he’s not a fake. And the whole damn system is based on the theory that he has to be a fake. Hoff never took this into account; this spellbinder is telling the truth.” Taking hold of Cussick’s arm he led him through the circle of police. “Come on over and say hello. Maybe he’ll remember you.”
Jones watched rigidly, as the two men made their way toward him. He recognized Cussick; there was no ambiguity in his expression.
“Hello,” Cussick said. Jones got slowly to his feet and they faced each other. Presently Jones put out his hand, and they shook. “How have you been?”
“Fine,” Jones replied noncommittally.
“You knew about me, that day. You knew I was in Secpol.”
“No,” Jones disagreed. “As a matter of fact I didn’t.”
“But you knew you’d be here,” Cussick said, surprised. “You must have seen this room, this meeting.”
“I didn’t recognize you. You looked different, then. You don’t realize how much you’ve changed in the last seven months. All I knew was that somewhere along the line a contact was made with me.” He spoke dispassionately, but tensely. A muscle in his cheek twitched. “You’ve lost weight . . . but sitting around behind a desk hasn’t improved your posture.”
“What are you doing these days?” Cussick asked. “You’re not with the carnival?”
“I’m a minister of the Honorable Church of God,” Jones said, with a wry spasm.
“You look pretty seedy for a minister.”
Jones shrugged. “It doesn’t pay very well. Right now, not too many people are interested.” He added, “But they will be.”
“You know, of course,” Pearson broke in, “that this whole interview is being taped. Everything you say is going to be played back at the trial.”
“What trial?” Jones commented brutally. “Three days from now you’re going to release me.” Thin face twitching, his voice cold and bleak, he continued thoughtfully, “From now on you’re going to be telling a certain parable. I’ll tell it, now; pay attention. An Irishman hears that the banks are failing. He runs into the bank where he keeps his money and demands every cent of it. ‘Yes sir,’ the teller says politely. ‘Do you want it in cash or in the form of a check?’ The Irishman replies: ‘Well, if you have it, I don’t want it. But if you haven’t got it, I must have it immediately.’”
There was an uncomfortable silence. Pearson looked puzzled; he glanced at Cussick. “Am I going to tell that?” he asked doubtfully. “What’s it mean?”
“It means,” Cussick said, “that nobody’s fooling anybody.”
Jones smiled in appreciation.
“Am I to infer,” Pearson said, his face turning dark and ugly, “that you think we can’t do anything to you?”
“I don’t think,” Jones answered smugly. “I don’t have to. That’s the point. Do you want my prophecies in cash or in the form of a check? Take your choice.”
Thoroughly bewildered, Pearson moved away. “I can’t understand him,” he muttered. “He’s a crackpot; he’s out of his mind.”
“No,” Senior Political Instructor Kaminski said. He had been standing nearby, intently listening. “You’re an odd person, Jones,” he said to the bony-shanked man standing nervously by the chair. “What I can’t understand is this. With your ability, why were you fooling around in that carnival? Why were you wasting your time?”
Jones’ answer surprised them all. Its candor, its naked honesty, was a shock. “Because I’m scared,” he said. “I don’t know what to do. And the awful part is—” He swallowed noisily. “I don’t have any choice.”
5
IN KAMINSKI’S OFFICE the four of them sat around the desk, smoking, and dully hearing the distant mutter of police guns on their way to the staging area.
“To me,” Jones said hoarsely, “this is the past. Right now, with you three, here in this building, this is a year ago. It’s not so much like I can see the future; it’s more that I’ve got one foot stuck in the past. I can’t shake it loose. I’m retarded; I’m reliving one year of my life forever.” He shuddered. “Over and over again. Everything I do, everything I say, hear, experience, I have to grind over twice.” He raised his voice, sharp and anguished, without hope. “I’m living the same life two times!”
“In other words,” Cussick said slowly, “for you, the future is static. Knowing about it doesn’t make it possible for you to change it.”
Jones laughed icily. “Change it? It’s totally fixed. It’s more fixed, more permanent, than this wall.” Furiously, he slammed his open palm against the wall behind him. “You think I’ve some kind of emancipation. Don’t kid yourself . . . the less you know about the future the better off you are. You’ve got a nice illusion; you think you have free will.”
“But not you.”
“No,” Jones agreed bitterly. “I’m trudging along the steps I trudged a year ago. I can’t alter a single one of them. This conversation—I know it by heart. Nothing new can come into it; nothing can be left out.”
After a moment Pearson spoke up. “When I was a kid,” he reflected, “I used to go to movies twice. The second time, it gave me an advantage over the rest of the audience . . . I liked it. I could holler out the dialogue a split second before the actors. It gave me a sense of power.”
“Sure,” Jones agreed. “When I was a kid I liked it, too. But I’m not a kid anymore. I want to live like everybody else—an ordinary life. I didn’t ask for this; it wasn’t my idea.”
“It’s a valuable talent,” Kaminski said shrewdly. “As Pearson says, a man who can shout out the dialogue a split second ahead of time has real power. He’s a whole notch above the rest of the crowd.”
“The thing I remember,” Pearson said, “is the contempt I felt for all the rapt faces. The fools—staring, simpering, giggling, being afraid, believing in it, wondering how it would come out. And I knew. It made me disgusted. That’s partly why I shouted it out.”
Jones didn’t comment. Brooding, he sat hunched over in his chair, eyes fixed on the floor.
“How would you like a job?” Kaminski inquired dryly. “Senior Political Instructor to the Senior Political Instructor.”
“No thanks.”
“You could be a lot of help,” Pearson pointed out. “You could aid reconstruction. You could help us unify ourselves and our resources. You could make an important difference.”
Jones shot him an exasperated glare. “There’s only one issue of importance. This reconstruction—” He waved his thin, bony hand impatiently. “You’re wasting your time . . . it’s the drifters that matter.”
“Why?” Cussick demanded.
“Because there’s a whole universe! You spend your time rebuilding this planet—my God, we could have a million planets. New planets, untouched planets. Systems of them. Endless resources . . . and you sit around trying to remelt old scrap. Pack rats, misers, boarding and fingering your miserable pile.” Disgusted, he turned away. “We’re over-populated. We’re undernourished. One more habitable world would solve all that.”
“Like Mars?” Cussick inquired softly. “Like Venus? Dead, empty, hostile worlds.”
“I don’t mean those.”
“What do you mean, then? We’ve got scouts crawling all around the system. Show us one place we can live.”
“Not here.” Angrily, Jones dismissed the solar system. “I mean out there. Centaurus. Or Sirius. Any of them.”
“Are they necessarily any better?”
“Intersystem colonization is possible,” Jones answered. “Why do you think the drifters are here? It’s obvious—they’re settling. They’re doing what we should be doing: they’re out searching for habitable planets. They may have come mill
ions of light years.”
“Your answer isn’t good enough,” Kaminski pronounced.
“It’s good enough for me,” Jones said.
“I know.” Kaminski nodded, troubled. “That’s what worries me.”
Curiously, Pearson asked: “Do you know anything more about the drifters? Who shows up in the next year?”
Across Jones’ face settled a stark, impassioned glaze. “That’s why I’m a minister,” he said harshly.
The three secret-servicemen waited, but there was nothing more. Drifters was a key word with Jones; visibly, the word triggered off something deep and basic inside him. Something that made his gaunt face writhe. A core of blazing fervor had floated to the surface.
“You don’t particularly like them,” Cussick observed.
“Like them?” Jones looked ready to explode. “Drifters? Alien life-forms coming here, settling on our planets?” His voice rose to a shrill, hysterical screech. “Can’t you see what’s happening? How long do you think they’ll leave us alone? Eight dead worlds—nothing but rock. And Earth: the only useful one. Don’t you see? They’re preparing to attack us; they’re using Mars and Venus as bases. It’s Earth they’re after; who’d want those empty wastes?”
“Maybe they do,” Pearson suggested uneasily. “As you said, they’re alien life-forms. Maybe to them Earth is nothing. Maybe they need totally different living-conditions.”
Eying Jones intently, Kaminski said: “Every life-form has its own typical needs . . . what’s a ruined waste to us is a fertile valley to something else. Isn’t that so?”
“Earth is the only fertile planet,” Jones repeated, with absolute conviction. “They want Earth. That’s what they’re here for.”
Silence.
So that was it. There it stood, the terrifying spectre they all dreaded. This was what they existed to destroy; this was what they had been set up to catch—before it was too big to catch. It stood before them; sat, rather. Jones had again seated himself; now he sat smoking jerkily, thin face distorted, a dark vein in his forehead pulsing. Behind his glasses his furiously-bright eyes had filmed over, cloudy with passion. Tangled hair, ragged black beard, a rumpled man with elongated arms, skinny legs . . . a man with infinite power. A man with infinite hatred.
“You really hate them,” Cussick said wonderingly.
Mutely, Jones nodded.
“But you don’t know anything about them, do you?”
“They’re there,” Jones said brittlely. “They’re all around us. Encircling us. Closing in. Can’t you see their plans? Coming across space, century after century . . . working out their schemes, landing first on Pluto, on Mercury, coming closer all the time. Nearer to the prize: setting up bases for attack.”
“Attack,” Kaminski repeated softly, cunningly. “You know this? You have proof? Or is this just a wild idea?”
“Six months from this date,” Jones stated, his voice pinched and metallic, “the first drifter will land on Earth.”
“Our scouts have landed on all the planets,” Kaminski pointed out, but his silky assurance was gone. “Does that mean we’re invading them?”
“We’re there,” Jones said, “because those planets are ours. We’re looking them over.” Raising his eyes, he finished: “And that’s what the drifters are doing. They’re looking over Earth. Right now, they’re looking us over. Can’t you feel their eyes on us? Filthy, loathsome, alien, insect eyes . . .”
Horrified, Cussick said: “He’s pathological.”
“Can you see this?” Kaminski pursued.
“I know it.”
“But you see it? You see an invasion? Destruction? Drifters taking over Earth?”
“Within a year,” Jones stated, “there’ll be drifters landing everywhere. Every day of the week. Ten here, twenty there. Hordes of them. All identical. Mindless hordes of filthy alien beings.”
With an effort, Pearson said: “Sitting next to us in busses, I take it. Wanting to marry our daughters—right?”
Jones must have anticipated the remark; a second before Pearson spoke, the man’s face went chalk-white, and he gripped convulsively at the arms of his chair. Fighting with himself, struggling to keep control, he answered between his teeth: “People aren’t going to stand for it, friend. I can see that. There’s going to be burnings. Those drifters are dry, friend. They burn well. There’s going to be lots of cleaning up to do.”
Kaminski swore softly, furiously. “Let me out of here,” he began saying, to nobody in particular. “I can’t stand it.”
“Take it easy,” Pearson said sharply.
“No, I can’t stand it.” Futilely, Kaminski paced around in a circle. “There’s nothing we can do! We can’t touch him—he really sees these things. He’s safe from us—and he knows it.”
It was early night. Cussick and Pearson stood together in the dark corridor of the top floor of the police offices. A few paces away a dispatch carrier waited, his face bland beneath his steel helmet.
“Well,” Pearson began. He shivered. “This hall is cold. Why don’t you and your wife come over to my place for dinner? We can talk, sit around, discuss things.”
Cussick said: “Thanks, I’d like to. You haven’t met Nina.”
“I understand you were on leave. Honeymoon?”
“Sort of. We’ve got a nice little place in Copenhagen . . . we had started painting it.”
“How’d you find a place?”
“Nina’s family put their shoulder to the wheel.”
“Your wife’s not in Security, is she?”
“No. Art and idealism.”
“What’s she think about you being a cop?”
“She doesn’t like it. She wonders if it’s necessary. The new tyranny.” Ironically, Cussick added: “After all, absolutists are dying out. In a few more years—”
“Do you think Hitler was a precog?” Pearson asked suddenly.
“Yes, I do. Not as developed as Jones, of course. Dreams, hunches, intuitions. The future was fixed for him, too. And he took long chances. I think Jones will begin taking long chances, too. Now that he’s beginning to understand what he’s here on Earth for.”
In Pearson’s hand was a flat document. Idly, he tapped it against his fingers. “You know what crazy notion entered my mind? I was going down there where they’re holding him, down in that room. I was going to pry open his jaws and drop an A-pellet down his throat. Blow his carcass to fragments. But then I got to thinking.”
“He can’t be killed,” Cussick said.
“He can be killed. But he can’t be taken by surprise. To kill Jones would mean bottling him up from all sides. He’s got a one-year jump on us. He’ll die; he’s mortal. Hitler died, finally. But Hitler slithered away from a lot of bullets and poisons and bombs in his time. It’ll take a closing ring to do it . . . a room with no doors. And you can tell by the look on his face that there’s still a door.”
He called the dispatch carrier over.
“Deliver this personally. You know where—downramp at 45A. Where they’ve got that skinny dried-up hick.”
The carrier saluted, accepted the document, and trotted briskly off.
“You think he believes all that?” Pearson wondered. “About the drifters?”
“We’ll never know. He’s got something big, there. Naturally, they’re going to land; they propel themselves randomly, don’t they?”
“As a matter of fact,” Pearson said, “one has landed already.”
“Alive?”
“Dead. Research is working on it. Apparently the secret will stay kept—until the next one.”
“Can they tell anything about it?”
“Quite a bit. It’s a gigantic, single-celled organism using empty space as a culture medium. It drifts, using some kind of vague propulsion mechanism. It’s absolutely harmless. It’s an amoeba. It’s twenty feet wide. It’s got some kind of tough rind to keep out the cold. This is no sinister invasion; these poor goddamn things just wander mindlessly around.�
�
“What do they eat?”
“They don’t. They just go on until they die. There’s no feeding mechanism, no digestive process, no excretion, no reproductive apparatus. They’re incomplete.”
“Odd.”
“Apparently, we’ve run into a swarm of them. Sure, they’ve started falling. They’ll hit here and there, burst apart, smack into cars, flatten themselves out in fields. Foul up lakes and streams. They’ll be a pest. They’ll stink and flop. More likely, just lie quietly dying. Baking away in the sun . . . heat killed this one: baked it to a crisp. And meanwhile, people will have something to think about.”
“Especially when Jones gets started.”
“If it wasn’t Jones, it’d be somebody else. But Jones has that talent, that advantage. He can call the shots.”
“That document was his release papers, wasn’t it?”
“That’s right,” Pearson said. “He’s free. Until we can think up a new law, he’s a free man. To do as he pleases.”
6
IN THE TINY, white-gleaming, ascetic police cell, Jones stood swabbing the inside of his mouth with Dr. Sherrif’s Special Throat Tonic. The tonic was bitter and unpleasant. He rolled it from cheek to cheek, held it in the upper portion of his trachea for a moment, and then spat it into the porcelain washbowl.
Without comment, the two uniformed policemen, one at each end of the chamber, watched. Jones paid no attention to them; peering into the mirror over the bowl, he scrupulously combed his hair. Then he rubbed the side of his thumb over his teeth. He wanted to be in shape; in an hour he was going to be involved in important matters.
For a moment he tried to remember what came immediately ahead. The release notice was due, or so he thought. It was so long ago; one whole year had passed and details had blurred. Vaguely, he had memory of a cop entering with something, a paper of some kind. That was it: that was the release. And after that came a speech.
The speech was still clear in his mind; he hadn’t forgotten it. Annoyance came, as he thought about it. Giving the same words again, repeating the same gestures. The old mechanical actions . . . stale events, dry and dusty, sagging under the smothering blanket of dull age.
The World Jones Made Page 4