HE held her close and thought: Ann’s one of the telepaths, one of those who can go out to the stars.
“What are we, Jay?” she asked. “Tell me what we are.”
The telephone shrieked at them.
“Later,” he said. “It’s not so terribly frightening. In some ways it’s wonderful. I came back because I loved you, Ann. I tried to stay away, but I couldn’t. Because it isn’t right . . .”
“It’s right,” she almost sang. “Oh. Jay, it’s the Tightest thing there ever was. I prayed that you would come back to me again. When I knew there was something wrong, I was afraid you wouldn’t—that you might not be able to, that something awful might have happened to you. I prayed and the prayer was wrong because prayer was strange to me and I felt hypocritical and awful . . .”
THE ringing was a persistent snarl.
“The phone,” she said.
He let her go and she walked to the davenport and sat down and took the receiver out of its cradle, while he stood and looked at the room and tried to bring it and Ann into focus with his memory.
“It’s for you,” she said.
“For me?”
“Yes. Did anyone know you were coming here?”
He shook his head, but took the receiver and stood with it in his hand, trying to guess who might be calling him and why. Wondering, he knew that he was scared, felt the sweat break out beneath his armpits and trickle down his ribs, because it could only be one person on the phone.
A voice-said: “This is the Neanderthaler, Vickers.”
“Club and all?” asked Vickers. “Break out your spear,” said Crawford. “We have a bone to chew.”
“At your office?”
“There’s a cab outside. It is waiting for you.”
“How long have you been tracking me?”
Crawford chuckled. “Ever since Chicago. We have the country plastered with our analyzers.”
“Picking up much stuff?”
“A few strays here and there.”
“Still confident about that secret weapon?”
“Sure, I’m confident, but . . .”
“Go ahead. You’re talking to a friend.”
“I have to hand it to you, Vickers. Get over here fast.”
He hung up. Vickers took the receiver down from his ear and stared at it a moment, then placed it in the cradle.
“That was Crawford,” he said to Ann. “He wants to talk to me.”
“Is everything all right, Jay?”
“Fine.”
“You’ll come back?”
“Well, of course.”
“You know what you are doing?”
“Oh, yes,” said Vickers. “I know what I’m doing now.”
XLV
CRAWFORD motioned to the chair beside the desk. Vickers saw with a start that it was the same chair he’d sat in when he’d come to the office, only weeks ago, with Ann.
“It’s nice seeing you again,” said Crawford. “I’m glad we can get together.”
“Your plans must be going well,” Vickers said. “You are more affable than when I saw you last.”
“I’m always affable. Worried and afraid sometimes, but always affable.”
“You haven’t picked up Ann Carter.”
Crawford shook his head. “There’s no reason to. Not yet.”
“But you’re watching her.”
“We’re watching all of you. The few that are left.”
“Any time we want to, we can come unwatched.”
“I don’t doubt it,” Crawford admitted, “but why do you stick around? If I were a mutant, I wouldn’t.”
“Because we have you licked and you’re the one who knows it,” said Vickers, wishing he were half as confident as he hoped he sounded.
“We can start a war. All we have to do is lift a finger and the shooting begins.”
“You won’t start it.”
“You played your hand too hard. You’re pushing us into war against our will as a last defense.”
“You mean the other world idea?”
“Exactly,” Crawford said.
He sat and stared at Vickers with the pale blue bullet eyes peering out unemotionally from the rolls of flesh.
“What do you think we’ll do?” he asked. “Stand still and let you steamroller us? You tried the gadgets and we stopped them with, I admit, rather violent methods. So you tried an approach, a sort of religion, a piece of park bench fanaticism—tell me, Vickers, what do you call this business?”
“The blunt truth,” said Vickers.
“No matter what it is, it’s good. Too good. It’ll take a war to stop it.”
“You’d call it subversive, I suppose.”
“It is subversive,” Crawford said. “Already, just a few days since it started, it has shown results. People quitting their jobs, walking away from their homes, throwing away their money. Poverty, they said, that was the key to the other world. What kind of gag have you cooked up, Vickers?”
“What happens to these people? The ones who quit their jobs and threw away their money—have you kept a check on what happens to them?”
CRAWFORD leaned forward in his chair. “That’s the thing that scares us. Those people disappeared before we could round them up.”
“They went to the other world,” said Vickers.
“I don’t know where they went, but I know what will happen if we let it continue. Our workers will leave us, a few at first and then more and more . . .”
“If you want to turn on that war, start reaching for the button.”
“We won’t let you do this to us,” Crawford said. “We will stop you somehow. I told you about the analyzers. Well, they’re everywhere. In railroad terminals, bus depots, hotel lobbies, eating joints . . .”
“I thought as much. That’s how you picked me up.”
“I warned you once before. Don’t despise us because we’re merely human. With an organization of world industry, you can do a lot of things and do them awfully fast.”
“You outsmart yourself,” said Vickers. “You’ve found out a lot of things from those analyzers that you didn’t want to know.”
“Like what?”
“A lot of your industrialists and bankers and the others who are in your organization are really the mutants you are fighting.”
“I said I had to hand it to you. Would you mind telling me how you planted them?”
“We didn’t plant them, Crawford.”
“You didn’t . . .”
“Let’s take it from the start,” said Vickers. “Let me ask you what a mutant is.”
“Why, I suppose he’s an ordinary man who has some extra talents, an understanding of certain things that the rest of us can’t grasp.”
“And suppose a man were a mutant and didn’t know he was, but regarded himself as an ordinary man, what then? Where would he wind up? Doctor, lawyer, beggarman, thief? He’d wind up at the top of the heap. He’d be an eminent doctor or a smart attorney or an artist or a highly successful editor or writer. He might also be an industrialist or banker.”
The blue bullets of the eyes stared out from Crawford’s face.
“You,” said Vickers, “have been heading up one of the finest group of mutants in the world today, men we couldn’t touch because they were tied too closely to the normal world.”
“I know I have.”
“And what are you going to do about it, Crawford?”
“Not a single thing. I’m not going to tell them.”
“Then I will.”
“No, you won’t,” said Crawford. “Because you, personally, are washed up. How do you think you’ve lived this long in spite of all the analyzers we have? I’ve let you, that’s how.”
“You claimed you wanted to make a deal.”
“Not any more. You were an asset once. You’re a danger now.”
“You’re throwing me to the wolves?”
“That’s just what I’m doing. Good day, Mr. Vickers. It was nice knowing y
ou.”
Vickers rose from the chair. “I’ll see you again.”
“That,” said Crawford, “is something I doubt.”
XLVI
GOING down the lift, Vickers thought furiously.
It would take Crawford a little while to spread the word that he was unprotected, that anyone could pot him like a sitting duck.
If it had only been himself, it would have been an easy matter, but Ann was involved.
Ann, without a doubt, would become fair game, too, for now the chips were down and Crawford wasn’t the kind of man who would play according to rules.
Vickers had to reach Ann.
Reach and tell her fast, keep her from asking questions and make her understand.
At the ground floor, he stepped out with the other passengers and as he walked away, he saw the operator leave the elevator open and dash for a phone booth.
Reporting me, he thought. There was an analyzer on the elevator and it made some sort of a signal that would go undetected to anyone but the operator. And there were other analyzers everywhere, Crawford had said, in railroad terminals and bus stations and eating places—anywhere that a man might go.
Once one of the analyzers spotted a mutant, the word would be called in somewhere—to an exterminator squad, perhaps—and they would hunt the mutant down. Maybe they spotted him with portable analyzers, or maybe there were other ways to spot him, and once they spotted him, it would be all over.
All over because the mutant would not know, because he would have no warning of the death that tracked him. Given a moment’s notice, a moment to concentrate, he could disappear, as the mutants had disappeared at will when Crawford’s men had tried to track them down for interview and parley.
What was it Crawford had said? “You ring the bell and wait. You sit in a room and wait.”
But now the mutants seldom had a chance since they had no warning.
Except that always before, when Jay Vickers had been spotted, he’d been known as one of the few who were not to be molested—he and Ann and maybe one or two others.
But now it would be different. He was only another mutant, a hunted rat, just like all the others.
HE reached the sidewalk outside the building and stood for a moment, looking up and down the street.
A cab, he thought, but there would be an analyzer in it. There would be analyzers everywhere. There must be one at Ann’s apartment building. How else could Crawford have known so quickly that he had arrived there?
There was no way he could duck the analyzers, no way to hide or prevent them from knowing where he might be going.
He stepped to the sidewalk’s edge and hailed a cruising cab. It drew up and he stepped inside and gave the driver the address.
The man threw a startled backward look at him.
“You won’t be in any trouble,” said Vickers, “as long as you don’t try anything.”
“It’s all right, chum,” the driver nervously told him. “I won’t try a thing.”
“That’s just fine,” said Vickers. “Now let’s go.”
He watched the blocks slide by, keeping an eye on the driver, watching for any motions that might be signals that there was a mutant in the taxi. The man made none and Vickers gradually relaxed.
A thought struck him. What if they had gone immediately to Ann’s apartment and had found her there and were waiting for him now?
It was a risk, he decided, that he’d have to take a chance on.
THE cab stopped in front of the building and Vickers leaped out. The driver gunned the car, not waiting for the fare.
Vickers ran toward the door, ignored the elevator, and went pounding up the stairs.
He reached Ann’s door and seized the knob and turned it, but the door was locked. He rang the bell and nothing happened. He rang it again and again. Then he backed to the opposite wall and hurled his body forward across the corridor, smashing at the door. He felt it give as the hinges were loosened. He backed up again. The third try and the door ripped away and sent him sprawling.
“Ann!” he shouted, leaping up.
There was no answer.
He went running through the rooms and found no one there.
He stood for a moment, sweat breaking out on him.
Ann was gone! There was little time left to them and Ann was gone!
He plunged out the door and went tearing down the stairs.
When he reached the sidewalk, the cars were pulling up, three of them, one behind the other, and there were two more across the street.
Men were piling out of it, men who carried guns.
He tried to swing around to get back into the door again and bumped into someone. It was Ann, arms filled with shopping bags, and from one of the bags, he saw, protruded the leafy top of a bunch of celery.
“Jay,” she said, “what’s going on? Who are all these men?”
“Quick,” he ordered, “get into my mind. The way you did the others. The way you know how people think.”
“But . . .”
“Quick!”
He felt her come into his mind, groping for his thoughts, fastening onto them.
Something hit the stone wall of the building just above their heads and went twisting skyward with a shriek of tortured metal.
“Hang on,” he said. “We’re getting out of here.”
He closed his eyes and willed himself to the other earth, with all the urgency and will he could muster. He felt the tremor of Ann’s mind and then he slipped and fell. He hit his head on something hard and stars wheeled inside his skull and something tore at his hand and something else fell on top of him.
WHEN the stars cleared away, he heard the sound of wind blowing in the trees and there were no buildings.
He lay flat upon his back, at the foot of a gray granite boulder. A bag of groceries, with the top of a bunch of celery sticking out of it, lay upon his stomach.
He sat up.
“Ann,” he called.
“Here I am,” she said.
“You all right?”
“Physically, yes, but not mentally. What happened? Where did we go to?”
“We fell off that boulder,” Vickers told her.
He stood up and reached down a hand to help her to her feet.
“But the boulder, Jay! Where I live?”
“We’re in the second world,” said Vickers.
They stood together and looked across the land—wild, desolate, wooded, with scattered rocks and granite ledges sticking from the hill slopes.
“The second world,” repeated Ann dazedly. “That crazy stuff that’s been in the papers?”
Vickers nodded gravely. “There’s nothing crazy about it, Ann. It exists.”
“I’ll take your word for it.” She paused to grow practical. “Well, we brought our dinner with us. Help me pick up these groceries.”
Vickers got down on hands and knees to chase down the potatoes that had escaped from the sack. It had split wide open in the tumble from the boulder.
XLVII
IT was Manhattan as it must have appeared before the white man came, finally to build upon it the Man-made half-wonder, half-monstrosity. But now it was a world unspoiled.
“And yet,” said Vickers, “there must be something here. The mutants would have to have some sort of supply depot to store the stuff they’d want to funnel to New York.”
“And if they haven’t?”
He looked at her and grinned wryly. “How are you at travel?”
“All the way to Chicago?”
“Farther than Chicago,” he told her. “On foot. Although we might rig up a raft when we hit a westward-flowing river.”
“There’d be other mutant centers.”
“I suppose there would be, but we might not be lucky enough to stumble on one of them.”
She shook her head at him. “This is all so strange.”
“Not strange,” he said. “Just sudden. If we’d had the time, I’d have explained—prepared you—but we di
dn’t.”
“Jay, they were shooting at us.”
Vickers nodded grimly. “They play for keeps.”
“But they’re human beings, Jay. Just like us.”
“Not like us,” said Vickers. “Only human. That’s the trouble with them. Being human in this day isn’t quite enough.” He tossed two or three pieces of wood on the campfire.
“Come on, let’s go,” he said. “But it’s getting dark.”
“If there’s anything on the island, we’ll spot it by the lights. Just up on that hill. If we don’t see anything, we’ll come back. When morning comes, we can look again.”
“Jay,” she said, “in lots of ways, it’s just like a picnic.”
“I’m no good at riddles. Tell me why it’s like a picnic.”
“Why, the fire and eating in the open and . . .”
“Forget it,” Vickers stated. “We’re not on any picnic.”
HE moved ahead and she followed close behind him, threading their way between the thickets and the boulders. Night hawks skimmed the air above them in graceful, insect-catching swoops. From somewhere far off came the wickering of a coon. A few lightning bugs flashed on and off, dancing in the bushes.
They climbed the hill, not very high, but fairly steep, and when they reached the top they saw the lights, far down toward the island’s tip.
“There it is,” said Vickers. “I figured they would have to be here.”
“It’s a long way off. Will we have to walk it?”
“Maybe not.”
“But how . . .”
“And you a telepath.”
She shook her head. “I don’t understand.”
“Go on and try,” said Vickers. “Just want to talk to someone down there.”
The Complete Serials Page 57