Don’t try to use the car, Crawford’s note had read. And that was foolish, too, for there was no reason why he should not use the car. No reason other than Crawford’s saying so. And who was Crawford? An enemy? Perhaps, although at times he didn’t act like one. A man who was afraid of the defeat that he felt sure would come, more fearful, seemingly, of the commission of defeat than of defeat itself.
Reason once again.
No reason why he should not use the car. But he was faintly uneasy, using it.
No reason why he should have stopped at the Preston house and still, in his heart, he felt he had somehow failed by not stopping there.
No reason to believe Ann Carter was a mutant, and yet he was sure she was.
He drove through the morning, with the fog rising from all the little streams he crossed, with the flush of sun against the eastern sky, with, finally, boys and dogs going after cows, and the first traffic on the road.
He suddenly realized that he was hungry and a little sleepy, but he couldn’t stop to sleep. He had to keep on going. When it became dangerous to drive, he would have to sleep, but not until then, and then not for long.
But he’d have to stop somewhere to eat. At the next town he came to, if it had an eating place that was open, he would stop and eat. Perhaps a cup or two of coffee would chase away the sleep.
XXVI
THE town was large and there were eating places and people on the street, the six o’clock factory workers on the way to their seven o’clock jobs.
He picked out a restaurant that didn’t look too bad, that had less of the cockroach look about it than some of the others, and slowed to a crawl, looking for a parking place. He found one a block away.
He parked and got out, locked the door. Standing on the sidewalk, he sniffed the morning. It still was fresh, with the deceptive coolness of a summer morning.
He’d have breakfast, he told himself, take his time eating it, give himself a chance to relax, to let some of the road fatigue drop from his bones.
MAYBE he’d ought to call Ann again. This morning he might catch her in. He’d feel safer if she knew and if she were in hiding. Perhaps instead of just meeting him at the place where they sold the houses, she should go there and explain to them what the situation was and they might help her. But to explain that to Ann would take too long. He had to tell her fast and she had to go on faith.
He went back down the street and turned in at the restaurant door. There were tables, but no one seemed to be using them. All the eaters were bellied up to the counter. There were a few stools still left and Vickers took one.
On the left side of him, a husky workman in faded shirt and bulging overalls was noisily slurping up a bowl of oatmeal, head bent close above the bowl, shoveling the cereal into his mouth with a rapidly moving spoon that dipped and lifted, dipped and lifted, almost as if the man were attempting to establish a siphoning flow of the food into his mouth. On the other side sat a man in blue slacks and white shirt with a neat black bow. He wore glasses and he read a paper and he was, from the look of him, a bookkeeper or something of the sort, a man handy with a column of figures and very smug about it.
A waitress came and mopped the counter in front of Vickers with a wet cloth.
“What’ll you have?” she asked impersonally, running the question together into a single word.
“Stack of cakes,” said Vickers, “with a side of ham.”
“Coffee?”
“Coffee.”
The breakfast came and he ate it, hurriedly at first, stuffing his mouth with great forkfuls of syrup-dripping cakes, with generous cuts of ham, then more slowly as the bite of hunger was appeased.
The overalled man got up and left. A girl with drooping eyelids took his place. Some weary secretary, Vickers thought, with only an hour or two of sleep after a night out.
He was almost through eating when he heard the shouting in the street outside, then the sound of running feet.
The girl beside him swung around on her stool and looked out the window.
“Everybody’s running,” she said. “I wonder what’s the trouble.”
A man stopped outside the door and yelled, “They found one of them Forever cars!”
EVERYBODY leaped from the stools and surged toward the door. Vickers followed slowly.
They’d found a Forever car, the shouting man had said. The only one they could have found was the one Vickers had parked just up the street.
They had tipped the car over and rolled it out into the middle of the road. They were ringed around it, shouting and shaking their fists. Someone threw a brick or stone at it and the sound of the object striking its metal boomed through the early morning street like a cannon shot.
Someone picked up whatever had been thrown and heaved it through the door of a hardware store. Reaching in through the broken glass, someone else unlocked the door. Men streamed in and came out again, carrying mauls and axes.
The crowd drew back to give them elbow room. The mauls and axes flashed in the slanted sunlight. They struck and struck again. Glass shattered with a crunching sound, then came the metallic clanging and denting.
Vickers stood beside the restaurant door, sick in the pit of his stomach, his brain frozen with what later might be fear, but which now was no more than astonishment and blind befuddlement.
Crawford had written: Don’t try to use that cars of yours.
This was what he’d meant.
Crawford had known what would happen to any Forever car found parked upon the street.
Crawford had known and tried to warn him.
Friend or foe?
Vickers reached out a hand and put it, palm flat, against the rough brick of the building.
The touch of the brick, the roughness of it, told him that this was happening, that it was no dream, that he actually stood here, in front of a restaurant in which he had just eaten breakfast, and saw a mob, mad with hate, smashing up his car.
The people finally know. They’ve been told about the mutants.
And they hate the mutants.
Of course they hate them, because the existence of the mutants makes them second-class humans, because they are Neanderthalers suddenly invaded by a bow and arrow people.
He turned and went back into the restaurant, ready to leap and run if someone should suddenly shout behind him, if a finger tapped his shoulder.
The bespectacled man with the black bow tie had left the paper beside his plate. Vickers picked it up, walked steadily on, down the length of counter. He pushed open the swinging door that led into the kitchen. There was no one there. He walked through the kitchen rapidly, let himself out the rear door into an alley.
He went down the alley, found another narrow one between two buildings, leading to an opposite street. He took it, crossed the street when he came to it, followed another alleyway between two buildings that led to another alley.
“They’ll fight,” Crawford had said, sitting in the hotel room the night before, his big body filling the chair to overflowing. “They’ll fight with what they have.”
So now they were fighting, striking with what they had. They had picked up their club and were fighting back.
He found a park and walking through it, came across a bench shielded from the street by a clump of bushes. He sat down and unfolded the paper he had taken from the restaurant, turned its pages back until he found the front page.
And there the story was.
XXVII
THE headline said: WE ARE BEING TAKEN OVER!
The drop read: PLOT SUPER BY MEN REVEALED.
And the deck: Superhuman Race Among Us; Mystery of Everlasting Razor Blades Solved. And the story:
WASHINGTON (Special)—The greatest danger the human race has faced in all the years of its existence—a danger which may reduce all of us to slavery—was revealed today in a joint announcement by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the military chiefs of staff and the Washington office of the International Bureau of Economics
.
The joint announcement was made at a news conference called by President Humphrey.
Simultaneous announcements were made in all the other major capitals of the world—London, Moscow, Paris, Madrid, Rome, Cairo, Peking and a dozen other cities.
The announcement revealed that a new race of human beings, called mutants, has developed, and is banded together in an attempt to win domination over the entire world.
A mutant, in the sense in which it is here used, is a human being who has undergone a sudden variation, the child differing from the parent, as opposed to the gradual change by which the human race has evolved to its present form. The variation, in this case, has not been noticeably physical; that is, a mutant is indistinguishable, so far as the eye is concerned, from any other human. The variation has been mental, with the mutant possessing certain skills which the normal human does not have—certain “wild talents,” the announcement said.
(See adjoining column for full explanation of mutancy.)
The announcement (full text in column 4) said that. the mutants had embarked upon a campaign to destroy the economic system of the world through the manufacture of certain items, such as the everlasting razor blade, the everlasting light bulb, the Forever car, the new prefabricated houses and the items generally sold in the so-called “gadget shops.”
The mutant group, it was revealed, has been under investigation by various governmental and independent agencies for several years and the findings, when correlated, showed unmistakably that a definite campaign was under way to take over the entire world. The formal announcement of the situation, it was said, was delayed until there could be no doubt concerning the authenticity of the reports.
The announcement called upon the citizenry of the world to join in the fight to circumvent the plot At the same time it pleaded for a normal continuation of all activity and advised against hysteria.
“There is no occasion for apprehension,” the announcement said. “Certain countermeasures are being taken.” There was no hint as to what any of these countermeasures might be. When the reporter attempted to question the spokesman concerning them, he was told that this was restricted information.
To aid the world governments in their campaign against the intentions of the mutants, the announcement said that every citizen should take these steps:
1—Keep your head. Do not give way to hysteria.
2—Refrain from using any mutant-manufactured items.
3—to buy any mutant-manufactured items. Persuade others against their use or purchase.
4—inform the FBI of any suspicious circumstances which might have a bearing upon the situation.
The announcement said that first suspicions of any attempt at domina-
(Continued on Page 11)
Vickers did not turn to Page 11. Instead, he studied the rest of the front page.
There was the story which explained mutation and the complete text of the announcement. There was a signed article by some professor of biology, discussing the probable effects of mutation and its hypothetical causes.
There were a half a dozen bulletins. They read:
NEW YORK (AP) —Mobs today swept through the city armed with axes and iron bars. They swarmed into gadget shops, destroying the merchandise, smashing the fixtures. Apparently no one was found in any of the shops. One man was killed, but it was not believed he was connected with a gadget shop.
WASHINGTON (UP) —A mob early today attacked and killed a man driving a Forever car. The car was smashed.
LONDON (INS)—The government today threw a heavy guard around several housing development projects containing a number of the prefabricated houses attributed to mutant manufacture.
“The people who purchased these houses,” said an explanation accompanying the order, “purchased them in good faith. They are in no way connected or to be connected with the conspiracy. The guards were ordered to protect these innocent people and their neighbors against any misdirected public violence.”
St. Malo, France (Reuters)—The body of a man was found hanging from a lamp post at dawn today. A placard with the crude lettering of “Mutant” was pinned to his shirt front.
VICKERS let the paper fall from his hand. It made a ragged tent upon the ground.
He stared out across the park. Morning traffic was flowing by on the roadway a block away. A boy came along a walk, bouncing a ball as he walked. A few pigeons circled down through the trees and strutted on the grass, cooing absently.
Normal, he thought. A normal morning, with people going to work and kids out playing and the pigeons strutting on the grass.
But underneath it was a current of savagery. Behind it all, behind the facade of civilization, the present was crouching in the cave, lying in ambush against the coming of the future. Lying in wait for himself and Ann and Horton Flanders.
Thank God, he thought, that no one had thought to connect him with the car. Perhaps, later on, someone would. Someone might remember seeing him get out of the car. Perhaps someone would fasten suspicion upon the man who, of all of them, had not run out of the restaurant and joined the mob around the car.
But for the moment he was safe. How long he would remain safe was another matter.
Now what?
He considered it.
Steal a car and continue his trip?
He didn’t know how to steal a car; he would probably bungle it.
But there was something else—something that needed doing right away.
He had to get the top.
He had left it in the car and he’d have to get it back.
But why risk his neck to get the top?
It didn’t make much sense. Come to think of it, it made no sense at all. Still, he knew he had to do it.
Crawford’s warning about not driving the car hadn’t made sense, either, at the time he read it He had disregarded it and felt uneasy about disregarding it, had known, against all logic, that he was wrong in not paying it attention. And in this particular case, at least, logic had been wrong and his feeling—his hunch, his premonition, his intuition, call it what you would—had been right.
He had wondered, he remembered, if there might not be a certain sense which would outweigh logic and reason, if within his brain a man might not have another ability, a divining faculty, which would outdate the old tools of logic and of reason.
Maybe that was the sense that told him, without reason, without logic, that he must get back the top.
THE street had been blocked to traffic and the police were standing by, although there was little need of them, it seemed, for the crowd was orderly. The car lay in the middle of the street, battered and dented, with its wheels sticking into the air, like a dead cow in a cornfield. Its glass was shattered and strewed about the pavement, crunching under the feet of the milling crowd. Its tires were knocked off and the wheels were bent and people stood around and stared at it.
Vickers mingled with the crowd, moving nearer to the car. The front door, he saw, had somehow been smashed open and was wedged against the pavement. There was just a chance, he told himself, that the top might still be there.
If it was, he would have to figure out some way to get it. Maybe he could get down on his knees and pretend he was simply curious about the instrument panel or the controls. He’d tell his neighbors about how the control panel differed from that of an ordinary car and maybe he could hook in a hand and sneak out the top and hide it underneath his coat without any of them knowing.
He shuffled about the wreck, gaping at it in what he hoped was an idly curious fashion as he talked a little with his neighbors, the usual banal comments of the onlooker.
He worked his way around until he was beside the door and squatted down and looked inside the car and he couldn’t see the top. He stayed there, squatting and looking, craning his neck, and he told his nearest neighbor about the control panel and wondered about the shift, though all the time he was looking for the top.
But there wasn’t any top.
>
He got up again and milled with the crowd, watching the pavement, because the top might have fallen from the car and rolled away from it. Maybe it had rolled into the gutter and was lying there. He searched the gutters on both sides of the streets, and covered the pavement, but there was no top.
So the top was gone—gone before he could try it out, and now he’d never know if it could take him into fairyland.
Twice he had gone into fairyland—once when he was a child and again when he had walked a certain valley with a girl named Kathleen Preston. He had walked with her in an enchanted valley that could have been nothing else but another fairyland, and after that he had gone back to see her and had been told that she had gone away, and he had turned from the door and trudged across the porch.
“Now wait!” he said. Had he turned from the door and trudged across the porch?
HE tried to remember and, A dimly, he saw it all again, the soft-voiced man who had told him that Kathleen was gone and then had said, “But won’t you come in, lad? I have something you should see.”
He had gone in and stood in the mighty hall, filled with heavy shadow, with its paintings on the wall and the massive stairs winding up to the other stories and the man had said—
What had he said?
Or had it ever happened?
Why did an experience like this, an incident that he should have remembered without fail, come back to him after all the years of not knowing, as the lost memory of his boyhood venture into fairyland had come back to him after so long?
And was it true or wasn’t it?
There was no way that he could judge.
He turned away and walked down the street, past the policeman who leaned against a building and swung his club, smiling at the crowd.
In a vacant lot, a group of boys were playing and he stopped to watch them. Once he had played like that, without thought of time or destiny, with the thought of nothing but happy hours of sunshine and the delight that bubbled up with living, for the day always ran on forever.
The Complete Serials Page 47