Time Exposures

by Wilson Tucker

  Arthur Jackson was key man on the project

  The shock of that nearly showed on my face, but the man before me was too overwrought to see my face. He was still protesting his undying love for his wife.

  Like hell you do! You’re lying, Arthur Jackson, and you don’t love her—not any more, you don’t. Fear has got you by the heart and jealousy by the guts. Hatred is tearing your fine intelligence right out of your skull. Your wife has left you behind like a ship sailing from a pier, and if you ever get Marie Jackson in your gunsight, you’re a widower.

  “All right,” I said aloud, “I’ll take the case. I’ll try to find Mrs. Jackson for you.”

  The relief and gratitude on his face and in his mind was a physical thing. “I knew you would,” he cut loose on me. “The paper said you were a miracle man, they said you could find absolutely anybody, they said—”

  I cut him short. “A lot of eyewash. I happen to be as far advanced in my field as you are in yours. The newspaper writers add the fancy touches.”

  “But you do have a remarkable record.”

  “I do. And doubtless you do too. If you’ll leave your address and telephone number with the girl, I’ll have something to report in a few days. The retainer fee is thirty dollars.”

  He left. And in a short while I closed my office.

  I spotted Marie Jackson in the hotel lobby.

  I felt old and tired, washed up, like a horse put to pasture or a general put on the pension list. It was almost finished—my thirty year job was as good as done. There remained only the necessary steps to close the case: make absolutely sure the woman was the one I had been seeking, and after that to mail in my report, and the job was ended. I would be on my own.

  Marie Jackson came out of the elevator dressed for the street. She was a knock-out! Tall, as beautiful as a storybook queen, magnificent breasts and long, striking legs. She paused by the lobby newsstand, but didn’t look at the papers. Dusk had fallen. Marie Jackson was searching the sidewalk outside the hotel for her husband. He wasn’t there of course as he was at home waiting for my call. She seemed surprised at his absence and walked out regally through the door which was held open for her. Without a glance she struck off down the street.

  I followed her, marvelling that a jealous husband had put me on the trail, but I still had that empty feeling now that the trail was nearly ended.

  We hadn’t gone many blocks through the brightly-lighted district before I stumbled onto something else, something that I had been half-expecting. Her husband had put it in a very literal way. He had said: “She sucks my mind of knowledge like a bat sucks blood.” Marie Jackson was doing that now. She reached out to touch the minds of those around her seeking knowledge.

  Sometimes she paused here and there, not long and not often, to sweep across their minds like my eyes swept her attractive figure.

  She kept this up for the better part of three hours, going up and down streets, in and out of the park, on crowded busses, in a theater lobby, always searching, touching briefly and going on. She was finding nothing she didn’t already know. I finally got tired of it and I had what I wanted for my report.

  We passed a drugstore which had a pay phone. I went in and called Arthur Jackson.

  “Did you find her?” he cried out immediately. “What did she say? Will she come back? Can I see her?”

  “Hold on a minute,” I choked him off. “I’ve found her, yes, but I haven’t caught up with her yet. I must see her do this ‘blank-out’ act, and then I’ll close in. You’ve got to help me.”

  He was all eagerness to help.

  “Get a cab,” I instructed him. “Cruise down Charlotte Avenue past those two theaters. She’s mixing with the crowd. I want you to think of her— I said think. Think hard. Think about finding her there on the street. She’ll know you’re coming, and she’ll get away from the crowd. When she’s in a safe place she’ll pull the act. I’ll be watching.”

  He agreed, and I left the drugstore. A minute or so later and I would have run into her as I came out the door. She had turned and was coming back along the block. I struck out ahead of her, letting her follow me. I saw to it that she did not touch my thoughts.

  This should be interesting. I hoped that Marie Jackson wouldn’t disappoint me now that the chase was at an end, hoped she was fast enough to protect herself. I couldn’t afford to have anything happen to her now, couldn’t let that silly ass of a husband put an end to her. The Cro-Magnon men in their age had taken adequate care of the Neanderthal, yes, but wasn’t it safe to assume that every once in a while the brute force struck first, and fatally?

  I came to the mouth of an alley and paused. The alley was fairly dark and was deserted except for a pair of scavenger cats midway down. A large telephone pole, which held some kind of transformer in a locked, square case, promised sanctuary. I slid into the alley and lodged myself behind the pole, and waited.

  Marie Jackson passed the mouth of the alley, still continuing her search. A part of her consciousness flicked past me, touched the cats briefly, evoking a snarling yowl. She passed from sight but I kept a careful contact, alert to flash a warning if she somehow missed her oncoming husband. She didn’t. It was a distinct pleasure to watch her glide into action.

  While Arthur Jackson’s cab was still three minutes away she caught his thought. She also saw he packed a gun.

  She suddenly stopped, glanced casually around, and again saw the mouth of the alley. Retracing her steps without visible hurry she gained the alley and turned into its concealing darkness. Then she did it ... disappeared! ... “blanked out” as her husband called it. I was the only one watching. It was smooth. I found myself wishing I knew how it was done.

  I kept her spotted by her thoughts, and thus pin-pointed her against a brick wall. She was completely invisible to the naked eye, mine or any other, but she had grown foolishly careless. She failed to hide her thoughts, and in the darkness of that alleyway the mental aura stood out like a neon glow. She stood with her back to the wall and waited for her husband, concealed from him but not from me. She did not fully protect herself by all the means at her command, and the Boss would want to know that and would be surprised when my report came in.

  The cab crept slowly along the street, past the mouth of the alley and moved on out of our field of view. Marie Jackson watched it quietly. Her husband was leaning out the window, searching for her among the crowds on the sidewalk. He was looking for Marie—and for me. The crazy fool was looking for me! He supposed that when he saw me, she would be not far ahead.

  Damn his rotten soul, he betrayed me to the woman!

  She jerked around and moved away from the wall, puzzled and alarmed at this new element. Marie stepped to the alley entrance to search, stared up and down the street seeking me. Her thoughts were a chaotic frenzy and for seconds she defeated her own purpose, trying to find me by sight alone.

  Damn Arthur Jackson and his weak mind, damn that stupid moron for revealing me. She flashed after him, caught his memory and scoured it for my description. Getting that, she again searched the street for me, in vain.

  It was then that she began to think, to use her brain. She stopped trying to find me by sight alone and fell back on her mental powers. I blanked my mind, thought nothing, waited to see what she might do. My instructions had been not to reveal my presence, my mission, if at all possible. If for any reason I should be caught, I was on my own and had to get out the best way I could. I either ended my search and mailed in a report, or I ended my search and was prevented from mailing in a report. Either way, my success was obviously clear.

  Marie had her back to the wall, thinking, analyzing. It had finally struck home and was like a bolt of lightning to her. She suddenly realized I was not to be found among that crowd on the street, that I was somewhere else not in sight. I was not in sight, and yet I was there. Her husband’s anxious, fearful mind told her all that.

  Belatedly that smashed home to her and she did what she should have been
doing all along. She closed up her mind to outsiders and shut off that tell-tale glow of mental activity. She vanished from me.

  I did nothing, I thought nothing. I waited motionless behind the telephone pole, concealed from her sight and from her prying mind. She could not catch me unless she caught my thought, or unless she moved deeper into the alley and came abreast of the pole. We were two invisible bodies in the darkness, two tightly-wrapped minds hiding our heads from each other. I knew where I was but I no longer knew where she might be.

  Then the stinking cats loused it up. I had forgotten the cats and did not realize they were so near. They had worked their way up the alley. Her unseen presence frightened them and my quite visible body behind the pole annoyed them. I offered them a tangible means of expressing their nerves, so the nearest one arched its back, hissed, then clawed at me. It might as well have flashed a light on me.

  I was done unless I acted fast, and the only defense I knew was a fast offense.

  Without speaking aloud, I said, "Hello, Marie.”

  There was no answer.

  I sent another thought. “Come on out, I see you.”

  That did it. “You can’t!” she flashed at me, and the thought revealed her position and also the fact that she was frightened ... of me!

  “Oh, but I can. You’re there, against the wall.”

  After a short silence, she asked, “Who are you?”

  Who was I? I stared at her in concealed astonishment.

  What the hell, did she expect me to come right out and admit the truth? Did she expect me to give myself away so readily? Yes, she apparently did, so I answered and lied to her.

  “I’m another, Marie, another like yourself.” I directed a pointed thought toward the starry heavens, hiding from her the false base of the thought. "From up there.”

  Even her responding gasp reached me on the mental line.

  She was frightened, damned frightened and her reaction plainly revealed it. It puzzled me— I was the expendable who was supposed to get away from one of them the best way I could should I be caught, and yet she was frightened of me! It didn’t make sense. I waited for her to reply.

  To all inward and outward appearance I was exactly like herself. If she could walk the earth in the guise of a human, as Brigham had suspected the visitors could, then she had no reason to believe that I was not doing the same. If she could probe into minds, could skim the intelligences of earthlings, then it was quite apparent to her that I was doing the same, here and now. We had looked into each other’s minds and had seen only what was open for display, so it should have followed that we were both of the same kind, both of the same origin. Yet she was scared of me.

  Brigham was the boss, the man I sent my reports to. I had seen him just once when my job was explained to me. He gave me a sum of money and instructed me as to the search, only he’d supposed it would be in the form of a man and I had automatically accepted the supposition. Yet it was a woman, calling herself Marie Jackson.

  “Marie ...” I questioned,

  “What do you want?”

  “That was a dirty trick to play on your husband.”

  She said again, “Who are you?”

  “My name is Evans,” I said patiently, and quickly covered up with, “here on this world I am called Evans. And you are Marie Jackson.”

  “What are you going to do?” she asked fearfully, and I realized something else that she had attempted to hide, but failed. She really meant, what was I going to do to her! Me! An ordinary mortal watchdog, endowed with only one super-human power, telepathy. And now that I had caught an other-worldly visitor, one of the suspected interlopers from a neighboring planet, what was I going to do to her? I’m damned if it made sense.

  I slipped, I let my mind-shield loosen without my realizing it, and I thought to myself, I wish Brigham were here.

  “Brigham!” she cried out instantly.

  I tightened up again, instantly alert. She knew his name all right. The familiarity was in her tone and mind.

  “What about Brigham?” I demanded.

  “Do you ... do you know him?”

  “Yes,” I admitted cautiously.

  “Brigham,” she persisted, “in Washington? Gray hair, left ear partly torn away? Brigham, who offered a job—?”

  “Jehosophat!” I was astounded. “Not you too?”

  She stepped away from the wall, the fear vanishing. “Yes. Are you one of Brigham’s agents, too?”

  And there it was. In the next few seconds in that dark alley, while the betraying cats scuttled away to safety, the beginning of it came out. We were both working for the same man, both watching for the same thing, and each of us had mistaken the other for an alien.

  It was a ridiculous situation and yet had apparently come about because Brigham simply followed secret government procedure when hiring his agents, and had not informed either one there was already another in the field. I asked her if she wanted a drink, which she did, and we left the alley.

  We were sitting in a small, cozy booth in the darkened rear of a cocktail lounge, a place well away from the theater district. Now, of all times, we had no desire for her husband to find us.

  “Why did you marry him?” I asked her.

  “Why, to keep watch, of course.” She frowned. “Where else but near his laboratories would they be found?”

  "I’ve never found one yet,” I admitted.

  "Nor have I. Do you suppose we ever shall?”

  I shrugged. "Brigham thinks so, and there is every evidence of it. Especially since the papers began reporting these ‘flying saucers.’ If Brigham is right, sooner or later one of those aliens will turn up in a vital spot and we’ll have him.”

  “I don’t like it,” she replied, and lapsed into telepathy. The place was noisy despite its quiet location. "I accepted the job because it seemed the best thing to do, but I don’t like it. It frightens me.”

  I sought her hand, and held it.

  "It’s funny,” I said, “how Brigham tried to make me believe he was an individual, hiring me on his own initiative and out of his own pocket, just to investigate a pet theory of his.”

  “I caught that, too!” Marie answered. “And all the time I glimpsed in his mind just who was putting up the money, who was actually beginning the investigation. Do you suppose he forgot we could read his mind?”

  “One of those idiotic lapses,” I laughed. Thirty years ago Brigham had put the proposition up to me and asked me if I wanted the job. He was, he claimed, just an old man who held the fantastic notion that beings from other planets were visiting Earth—he offered the books of Charles Fort as partial proof, and offered a pile of other, unpublished evidence as the remainder of the proof. He asked me to look upon him as a scientist who was conducting a laboratory experiment, asked me to search the Earth for proof. If I found such proof then his theory was proven.

  He gave me a sum of money, which he said was all he could afford, and a postal address to which I was to make monthly reports. The reports in themselves were to be simple things, and so for thirty years I had been mailing one letter a month, a letter which contained but one word: “No.” I had faithfully carried out his mission, because I saw behind his words, behind his carefully fabricated story about it being an old man’s whim.

  Brigham was a secret presidential agent.

  I saw past Brigham as he talked. Behind him I saw a thoroughly alarmed president and a cabinet member, and a third party who was partly visible as a Secret Service Agent. I saw that the money for my investigation had come from a private and confidential fund maintained by the president and accountable to no one but him. When I had looked into Brigham’s mind and realized that all four of them took the interplanetary threat seriously, I began to believe. I accepted the job, I listened to the instructions, I took the money and left Brigham’s house, and I’ve been reporting to someone ever since.

  The president had died, long ago, back near the beginning of my thirty-year task. The cabinet member w
as shuffled somewhere into the discard and I had no idea where he might be now. I had not been back to see Brigham, and did not know if Brigham still personally directed the search or if he too had died and another was carrying on in his place. Brigham had still been there ten years ago when Marie came, when she married Arthur Jackson and settled down near the Manhattan Project. Brigham might still be there for all either of us knew.

  Meanwhile I had grown up in the job, had come to believe in it completely, and was constantly on the alert for evidence that an alien walked the Earth, that someone or some thing from the nearer planets was among us, watching and waiting. Waiting for the birth of interplanetary travel, in all likelihood.

  We sat there, Marie and I, comparing notes. It was curious the way her own progress was comparable to mine. She knew no more of Brigham and the people behind him than I did, had no other memories of him different than my own. She knew as much—or as little—about the entire picture as I knew, and could add no original touch of her own. Her job, she told me, had come to her in the exact manner as mine had.

  Marie’s warm and lovely body was touching mine, and with a detached corner of my mind I envied those years Arthur Jackson had lived with her. There was really no sane reason to envy the past, I told myself. Marie was mine, now. Jackson had wanted an equal as a mate, someone who matched his own intelligence. Until now, this moment, I had been certain I’d never find my mate—for where else on Earth lived another telepath?

  Suddenly I felt an outside warmth stealing over me, and realized for the first time how a mental blush might feel. 1 stared at the girl. The blush was sweeping into her cheeks.

  “Sorry,” I apologized. “I’ll have to learn to keep such thoughts to myself.”