Astounding Science Fiction Stories Vol 1

by Anthology

  Jaffers would find him without difficulty, now that he knew what to look for. And there was the progressive reality of his visions--for he had ceased to think of them any more as hallucinations. The coming of Janice Wynn and the inexorable sharpening of his awareness proved that reality beyond doubt.

  He found the twin-notched peak that landmarked his cabin. The cool of night and the mountain quiet, when he climbed out, were a tonic to his abraded nerves. There was a nostalgic calling of night-birds, the clean breath of pines and, from some tangled rocky slope, the faint pervading perfume of wild honeysuckle.

  He had not guessed how sharp his awareness had become until he realized that someone was waiting for him inside the cabin.

  * * * * *

  He halted outside, feeling like a man just recovering vision after a long blindness. Janice Wynn was in the cabin and she was alone. He knew that as certainly as if he had seen her walk in.

  When he went in, she was standing before the wide cold mouth of the cabin's fireplace. She wore the same quiet suit she had worn in O'Donnell's office, and her tilted green eyes were at once relieved and anxious.

  "I was afraid you might have lost your head and run away," she said. "It's good you didn't. There wouldn't have been time to find you again--the change is too close on us both."

  "Change?"

  She gave him a disappointed look. "I thought you'd have guessed by now the relation between ourselves and those people in the clippings. You had another seizure in the 'copter, didn't you?"

  He stared, too disconcerted to answer.

  "You saw four faces this time," she went on, "where you had seen none before. And you recognized one."

  "It was Ellis, the chemist," Alcorn said. And with a numb premonition of the truth, he quietly asked, "How did you know that?"

  "You were broadcasting it like a beacon. We're both in the last stages of the change. Now that our conditioning is lifting, we're reverting to our original telepathic nature. That's how they found you and me, as they found Ellis and the others--by tracking down our communication auras."

  He said slowly, "Those four--why were they mobbed and killed?"

  "Because the change caught them too suddenly for escape," she said. "And because, in our natural state, we are incompatible with Man."

  "With Man," he repeated. "And what does that make us? Supermen or monsters?"

  "You're still blinded by your conditioning," she answered, "or you'd see that we're neither, that we're not even native to this planet. I don't know a great deal more than that myself--I haven't remembered it all yet, because the change isn't complete...."

  She broke off and, with both hands above the fireplace, gripped the rough stone of the mantelpiece. Her tilted green eyes burned with a contradictory play of emotions; the soft planes of her face seemed to shift and alter, seeking an impossible balance between ecstasy and terror and a tearing, intolerable agony.

  "I'm learning the rest ... now," she whispered. "Sooner than ... I thought."

  He sensed the change that possessed her, the struggling of new emotions, the shattering of imposed concepts and conditionings and their realigning to shape a new personality, a new person. He knew from that moment that she had been right, and that what he had feared from the beginning of his first seizure was about to happen to him.

  She closed her eyes briefly. When she opened them again, Alcorn drew back. Then resentment flared in him and he was suddenly furious, at the alteration of status that left him on the defensive.

  He remembered the clippings and understood something of the frustrated rage that must have gripped the howling mobs when they killed the two ministers and the Nevada doctor and the Girl Scout leader.

  Janice Wynn straightened from the fireplace, her head tilted as if she were listening to some sound beyond range of his own hearing.

  "Someone is coming," she said. Her voice had changed as much as her face; her eyes watched him with a remote yet curiously intimate compassion. "Not our people. It isn't time for them yet."

  She was at the cabin door before he realized that she had moved.

  "Stay here," she ordered. "Don't open the door for anyone. For anyone, do you hear?"

  She was gone into the outside darkness.

  Alcorn felt it himself then, the indefinable certainty of approach. A turbo-copter, then another, slanting down toward his hideaway, two speeding machines filled with grimly intent men--Jaffers' agents.

  The 'copters landed about a hundred yards away from the cabin. There was a dragging silence and then a booming, amplified voice.

  "Alcorn, come out!"

  He stood fast, feeling above their tension the swift progress of Janice Wynn through the darkness toward them. She was close to the nearer machine when he felt a sudden veering of her attention, followed the direction of her probing, and sensed another 'copter angling down out of the night.

  Her mental order was as urgent as a shout: Let no one in. No one!

  She moved on. The pilot of the third 'copter was only beginning to assume identity to Alcorn's sharpened senses when Janice Wynn drew within effective reach of the nearer grounded machine.

  The amplified voice was calling again: "Come out, Alcorn, or we'll have to--"

  It broke off short in a scream. There was a flurry of shots, a white flash in the darkness and a concussion that shook the cabin.

  He felt Janice turn and run purposefully through the darkness toward the second 'copter.

  The third machine was dropping in for landing when he identified its pilot.

  "Kitty!" he breathed. "Dear God, Kitty!"

  She was at the door, the terror and tenderness of her crying overwhelming his flinching perception. "Philip, let me in! Philip darling, are you all right?"

  She was inside and in his arms before he could prevent it.

  She clung to him frantically until the effect of his presence calmed her. The terror went out of her eyes slowly, but the tears glistening on her cheeks contradicted her smile of relief.

  "Thank God you're safe, Philip! When I heard on the visinews about Dr. Hagen--"

  Janice Wynn's silent command was violent in Alcorn's head. Put her out quickly! Do you want her there when your own change comes?

  He caught Kitty's hands and drew her toward the door.

  "You can't stay here, Kitty. There's no time to explain. I'll call later and tell you everything."

  She showed her hurt beneath the placidity his gift imposed upon her. "If I must, Philip. But--"

  He threw open the door. "Don't argue, Kitty. For God's sake, go!"

  * * * * *

  The blast of the second turbo-copter's explosion might have precipitated the seizure that took him just then.

  The polar plain sprang up about him, more terribly cold and stark than ever, its clustering buildings and metal machines standing out in such clear perspective that he was certain he could have put out a hand and touched them.

  But the people were faceless no longer, except for one that knelt before the group in a tense attitude. Janice Wynn stood over that one while its features filled in slowly, line by line, growing more and more familiar as the face neared identity.

  By the time Alcorn realized that it was his own face, the change was fully upon him.

  A vast icy wind roared in his ears. A force seized and flung him, distorted and disoriented, to infinity. There was darkness and terror and then a chorus of calm voices calling reassurance. Pain gripped him, and panic, and finally an ecstasy of remembering that was beyond imagining.

  Dimly, he heard Kitty's screaming. Something struck him furiously on the shoulder and he felt his distant physical body struggle automatically for balance.

  A second blow caught him on the temple and he fell heavily, his new awareness flickering toward unconsciousness. There was a confusion of voices about him and Kitty's raw shrilling died away.

  He lay still, secure in the certainty that he was no longer alone.

  Mind after mind brushed his, lightly, yet more
warming than any clasping of hands, and with each touch, he identified and embraced an old friend whose regard was dearer than his own life. He knew who they were. He was one of them--again.

  It's over, Janice Wynn's voice said gently. Do you remember me now, Filrinn?

  Janeen, he said. He stood up slowly.

  Her green eyes stirred with an emotion that matched his own. It was incredible that he could ever have forgotten--no matter how thoroughly he had absorbed the protective conditioning--the unity between himself and Janeen.

  I remember, he said. The wonder of it still dazed him. It's good to be myself again.

  She sighed. It's good to know why they sent me, instead of one of the others, to bring you back. You remember that?

  "I remember," he said aloud, as if he needed to say the words to make it true. "We were together before this assignment for two hundred of these people's years. We'll be together again for hundreds more, now that we're free to go--for when will we ever find another world that needs attention as this one needed it?"

  * * * * *

  He saw the Earthgirl then, curled limply on the cabin's sofa.

  Her stillness left him alarmed, surprised and ashamed that he should so readily have forgotten an obligation.

  Her dishevelment, and the heavy brass fireplace poker on the rug beside the couch, told him the story at once.

  You came just in time, Janeen. Poor Kitty! You didn't hurt her?

  Janeen shook her head. Of course not, Filrinn. I caught her mind before the shock of your change could derange it and--conditioned her. She'll sleep until we've gone, and tomorrow Philip Alcorn will be no more than a pale memory.

  Either my conditioning still lingers or my empathetic index is too high ... I'd like her to know the truth about us, Janeen, before we go.

  He knelt beside the couch and smoothed the fair, tousled hair back from the Earthgirl's quiet face.

  "I'm sorry it had to be like this, Kitty," he said. He spoke aloud, but his mind touched hers below the level of consciousness. He felt the slow, bewildered surge of response. "It'll help you to forget, perhaps, if you know that we came here from a star system you'll never hear of in your lifetime, to study your people and to see what we could do to help them.

  "Alike in form, we are so far apart in nature that you could not have borne our real presence, so we buried our real selves under a mask of conditioning as deeply as we buried our ship under the ice of your planet's pole. After ten years of study, our conditioning was to lift slowly, so that we would realize who and what we were. But you are more like us than we had thought, and with some of us, the conditioning was too strong to break.

  "It may help to know that your likeness to us will bring our people together again when the time is right, that your children's children may meet us on equal terms."

  He lifted her from the couch and carried her to her 'copter. He set the machine's controls to automatic and stepped back.

  "Good-by, Kitty," he said.

  Janeen was waiting for him in the cabin.

  The auxiliary shuttle is on its way to pick us up, Filrinn. We'll be gone within the hour.

  They stood together, linking their minds, sharing an ecstasy in the meshing of identities that was greater than any physical fulfillment.

  But we have that, too, Janeen said for his ears alone. And then, to the calm, smiling faces that lingered in the background of their mingled consciousness: Leave us.

  The faces withdrew and left them--like children just grown to awareness of their own marvelous gifts--alone.

  * * *

  Contents

  CLEAN BREAK

  By Roger Dee

  A veteran veterinarian might have vamoosed--but Watts had to help any sick animal....

  Nothing more exciting ever happened to Oliver Watts than being rejected by his draft board for a punctured eardrum until, deferring as usual to the superior judgment of his Aunt Katisha and of Glenna--his elder and militantly spinster sister--he put away his lifelong dream and took up, at the age of twenty-five, the practice of veterinary medicine.

  The relinquished dream was Oliver's ambition, cherished since childhood, to become some day a hunter and trainer of jungle animals. It had been discouraged firmly and at length by his Aunt Katisha, who maintained that the skin of the last male Watts was not to be risked in a pursuit so perilous; and his Aunt Katisha won. He would do far better, Oliver realized finally, to resign himself to the quiet suburban life of Landsdale, Florida, and to perpetuate the Watts line by marrying some worthy and practical local girl. The quiet life, it developed, was that of a D. V. M.; the worthy and practical girl, Miss Orella Simms of Tampa, to whom he was now engaged.

  To put it plainly, Oliver was until the moment of his Great Opportunity a good-humored stooge with a cowlick and a sense of responsibility, whose invariable cue was family obligation and whose crowning virtue was docility. He was maneuvered into becoming a D. V. M. (though to tell the truth the profession suited him well enough, being the nearest possible approach to realizing his ambition) solely because the veterinary college in Tampa was near enough to Landsdale for commuting and because his later practice could be carried on under the guiding aegis of his personal matriarchy. The virtuous, and vapid, Orella Simms became his fiancee by the same tactics and for the same reasons.

  Oliver had considered rebellion, of course, but common sense discouraged the idea. He had no intimates outside his family nor any experience with the world beyond Landsdale and Tampa, and his fledgling self-confidence invariably bogged down in a welter of introspective apprehensions when he thought of running away. Where would he go, and to whom could he turn in emergency?

  Such was the character and condition of Oliver Watts when his newly undertaken practice of veterinary medicine threw him into the company of "Mr. Thomas Furnay" and of a girl whose name, as nearly as it can be rendered into English, was Perrl-high-C-trill-and-A-above. Their advent brought Oliver face to face for the first time in his sedentary life with High Adventure--with adventure so high, as a matter of fact, that it took him literally and bodily out of this humdrum world.

  * * * * *

  The initial step was taken when Mr. Furnay, known to Landsdale as a wealthy and eccentric old recluse who had recently leased a walled property on Federal Route 27 that had once been the winter retreat of a Prohibition-era gangster, was driven by emergency to call upon Oliver for professional service. Mr. Furnay usually kept very much to himself behind his iron-grilled gates and his miles of stuccoed wall; but it happened that in pursuit of his business (whose true nature would have confounded Landsdale to its insular core) he had just bought up the entire menagerie of an expiring circus billed as Skadarian Brothers, and it was the sudden illness of one of his newly acquired animals that forced him to breach his isolation.

  Mr. Furnay called at the Watts place in his town car, driven by a small, dark and taciturn chauffeur named Bivins. He found Oliver at work in his neatly ordered clinic at the rear of the big house, busily spooning cod-liver oil into a trussed and thoroughly outraged chow named Champ.

  "I have a sick animal," Mr. Furnay stated tersely. He was a slight man with a moderately long and wrinkled face, a Panama hat two sizes too large and a voice that had, in spite of its excellent diction, a jarring timbre and definitely foreign flavor.

  Oliver blinked, surprised and a little dismayed that Fate should have sent him so early in his career a known and patently captious millionaire. Bivins, waiting in visored and putteed impassivity to reopen the door for his master, was silently impressive; the town car, parked on the crushed shell driveway outside, glittered splendidly in the late afternoon sunshine.

  "I'll be happy to call later in the day," Oliver said. He removed the padded block that had held Champ's jaws apart, and narrowly missed losing a finger as the infuriated chow snapped at his hand. "My aunt and sister are bringing my fiancee down from Tampa for dinner this evening, and I can't leave the clinic until they get here. Someone might call for his pet." />
  Mr. Furnay protested his extremity of need. "The animal suffers periodic convulsions," he said. "It may be dangerously ill!"

  Oliver unstrapped Champ from his detention frame and dodged with practiced skill when the chow tried to bite him on the thigh. He had taken it for granted--having heard none of the gossip concerning Mr. Furnay's recent purchase of the Skadarian Brothers' menagerie--that the sick animal in question was a dog or cat or perhaps a saddle horse, and the bald description of its symptoms startled him more than Champ's predictable bid for revenge.

  "Convulsions? What sort of animal is it, Mr. Furnay?"

  "A polar bear," said Mr. Furnay.

  "Polar bear!" echoed Oliver, and in his shock of surprise he dropped a detaining strap and let Champ loose.

  * * * * *

  The dog sprang across the room--without a breath of warning, as chows will--and bit Bivins on the leg just above his puttee. The chauffeur screamed in a high and peculiarly raucous voice and jerked away, jabbering in a vowelless and totally unfamiliar foreign tongue. Mr. Furnay said something sharply in the same grating language; Bivins whipped out a handkerchief, pressed it over the tear in his whipcords and went quickly out to the car.

  Oliver collared the snarling Champ and returned him to his cage, where the dog pressed bristling against the bars and stared at Mr. Furnay hungrily with wicked, muddy eyes.

  Mr. Furnay's shocked voice said, behind Oliver, "What a ghastly world, where even the pets...."

  He broke off sharply as Oliver turned from the cage.

  "I'm truly sorry, Mr. Furnay," Oliver apologized. "If there's anything I can do ... a dressing for Bivins' leg--"

  Mr. Furnay gathered himself with an effort. "It is nothing, a scratch that will heal quickly. But my bear--you will come to see him at once?"

  At another time, the thought of absenting himself without due notice to his Aunt Katisha and Glenna would have prompted Oliver to refuse; but the present moment called more for diplomacy than for convention. Better to suffer matriarchal displeasure, he thought, than to risk a damage suit by a millionaire.