It made my life hard. I had to wander around that tank town for hours, keeping a blanket-watch on the post office for either the income or the outgo of my precious hunk of mail. I caught some hard eyes from the local yokels but eventually I discovered that my luck was with me.
A fast train whiffled through the town and they baggage-hooked a mailbag off the car at about a hundred and fifty per. I found out that the next stop of that train was Albany. I’d have been out of luck if I’d hoped to ride with the bag.
Then came another period of haunting that dinky post office (I’ve mentioned before that it was in a dead area, so I couldn’t watch the insides, only the exits) until at long last I perceived my favorite bit of mail emerging in another bag. It was carted to the railroad station and hung up on another pick-up hook. I bought a ticket back to New York and sat on a bench near the hook, probing into the bag as hard as my sense of perception could dig.
I cursed the whole world. The bag was merely labelled “Forwarding Mail” in letters that could be seen at ninety feet. My own letter, of course, I could read very well, to every dotted ‘i’ and crossed ‘t’ and the stitching in Catherine’s little kerchief. But I could not make out the address printed on the form that was pasted across the front of the letter itself.
As I sat there trying to probe that sealed address, a fast train came along and scooped the bag off the hook.
I caught the next train. I swore and I squirmed and I groaned because that train stopped at every wide spot in the road, paused to take on milk, swap cars, and generally tried to see how long it could take to make a run of some forty miles. This was Fate. Naturally, any train that stopped at my rattle burg would also stop at every other point along the road where some pioneer had stopped to toss a beer bottle off of his covered wagon.
At long last I returned to Pennsylvania Station just in time to perceive my letter being loaded on a conveyor for LaGuardia.
Then the same damned policeman collared me.
“This is it,” he said.
“Now see here, officer. I—”
“Will you come quietly, Mr. Cornell? Or shall I put the big arm on you?”
“For what?”
“You’ve been violating the ‘Disclosure’ section of the Federal Communications Act, and I know it.”
“Now look, officer, I said this was not illegal.”
“I’m not an idiot, Cornell!” I noted uncomfortably that he had dropped the formal address. “You have been trailing a specific piece of mail with the express purpose of finding out where it is going. Since its destination is a sealed forwarding address, your attempt to determine this destination is a violation of the act.” He eyed me coldly as if to dare me to deny it. “Now,” he finished, “Shall I read you chapter and verse?”
He had me cold. The ‘Disclosure’ Act was an old ruling that any transmission must not be used for the benefit of any handler. When Rhine came along, ‘Disclosure’ Act was extended to everything.
“Look officer, it’s my girl,” hoping that would make a difference.
“I know that,” he told me flatly. “Which is why I’m not running you in. I’m just telling you to lay off. Your girl went away and left you a sealed forwarding address. Maybe she doesn’t want to see you again.”
“She’s sick,” I said.
“Maybe her family thinks you made her sick. Now stop it and go away. And if I ever find you trying to dig the mail again, you’ll dig iron bars. Now scat!”
He urged me towards the outside of the station like a sheep-dog hazing his flock. I took a cab to LaGuardia, even though it was not as fast as the subway. I was glad to be out of his presence.
I connected with my letter again at LaGuardia. It was being loaded aboard a DC-16 headed for Chicago, Denver, Los Angeles, Hawaii, and Manila. I didn’t know how far it was going so I bought a ticket for the route with my travel card and I got aboard just ahead of the closing door.
My bit of mail was in the compartment below me, and in the hour travel time to Chicago, I found out that Chicago was the destination for the mailbag, although the superscript on the letter was still hazy.
I followed the bag off the plane at Chicago and stopped long enough to cancel the rest of my ticket. There was no use wasting the money for the unused fare from Chicago to Manila. I rode into the city in a combination bus-truck less than six feet from my little point-of-interest. During the ride I managed to dig the superscript.
It forwarded the letter to Ladysmith, Wisconsin, and from there to a rural route that I couldn’t understand although I got the number.
Then I went back to Midway Airport and found to my disgust that the Chicago Airport did not have a bar. I dug into this oddity for a moment until I found out that the Chicago Airport was built on Public School Property and that according to law, they couldn’t sell anything harder than soda pop within three hundred feet of public school property, no matter who rented it. So I dawdled in the bar across Cicero Avenue until plane time, and took an old propeller-driven Convair to Eau Claire on a daisy-clipping ride that stopped at every wide spot on the course. From Eau Claire the mail bag took off in the antediluvian Convair but I took off by train because the bag was scheduled to be dropped by guided glider into Ladysmith.
At Ladysmith I rented a car, checked the rural routes, and took off about the same time as my significant hunk of mail.
Nine miles from Ladysmith is a flagstop called Bruce, and not far from Bruce there is a body of water slightly larger than a duck pond called Caley Lake.
A backroad, decorated with ornamental metal signs, led me from Bruce, Wisconsin, to Caley Lake, where the road signs showed a missing spoke.
I turned in, feeling like Ferdinand Magellan must have felt when he finally made his passage through the Strait to discover the open sea that lay beyond the New World. I had done a fine job of tailing and I wanted someone to pin a leather medal on me. The side road wound in and out for a few hundred yards, and then I saw Phillip Harrison.
He was poking a long tool into the guts of an automatic pump, built to lift water from a deep well into a water tower about forty feet tall. He did not notice my arrival until I stopped my rented car beside him and said:
“Being a mechanical engineer and an esper, Phil, I can tell you that you have a—”
“A worn gasket seal,” he said. “It doesn’t take an esper engineer to figure it out. How the heck did you find us?”
“Out in your mailbox there is a letter,” I told him. “I came with it.”
He eyed me humorously. “How much postage did you cost? Or did you come second class mail?”
I was not sure that I cared for the inference, but Phillip was kidding me by the half-smile on his face. I asked, “Phil, please tell me—what is going on?”
His half-smile faded. He shook his head unhappily as he said, “Why can’t you leave well-enough alone?”
My feelings welled up and I blew my scalp. “Let well enough alone?” I roared. “I’m pushed from pillar to post by everybody. You steal my girl. I’m in hokus with the cops, and then you tell me that I’m to stay—”
“Up the proverbial estuary lacking the customary means of locomotion,” he finished with a smile.
I couldn’t see the humor in it. “Yeah,” I drawled humorlessly.
“You realize that you’re probably as big a liability with us as you were trying to find us?”
I grunted. “I could always blow my brains out.”
“That’s no solution and you know it.”
“Then give me an alternative.”
Phillip shrugged. “Now that you’re here, you’re here. It’s obvious that you know too much, Steve. You should have left well enough alone.”
“I didn’t know well enough. Besides, I couldn’t have been pushed better if someone had slipped me—” I stopped, stunned at the idea and then I went on in a falter, “—a post-hypnotic suggestion.”
“Steve, you’d better come in and meet Marian. Maybe that’s what happened.”
“Marian?” I said hollowly.
“She’s a high-grade telepath. Master of psi, no less.”
My mind went red as I remembered how I’d catalogued her physical charms on our first meeting in an effort to find out whether she were esper or telepath. Marian had fine control; her mind must have positively seethed at my invasion of her privacy. I did not want to meet Marian face to face right now, but there wasn’t a thing I could do about it.
Phillip left his pump and waved for me to follow. He took off in his jeep and I trailed him to the farmhouse. We went through a dim area that was almost the ideal shape for a home. The ring was not complete, but the open part faced the fields behind the house so that good privacy was ensured for all practical purposes.
On the steps of the verandah stood Marian.
Sight of her was enough to make me forget my self-accusation of a few moments ago. She stood tall and lissome, the picture of slender, robust health.
“Come in, Steve,” she said, holding out her hand. I took it. Her grip was firm and hard, but it was gentle. I knew that she could have pulped my hand if she squeezed hard.
“I’m very happy to see that rumor is wrong and that you’re not—suffering—from Mekstrom’s Disease,” I told her.
“So now you know, Steve. Too bad.”
“Why?”
“Because it adds a load to all of us. Even you.” She looked at me thoughtfully for a moment, then said, “Well, come on in and relax, Steve. We’ll talk it out.”
We all went inside.
On a divan in the living room, covered by a light blanket, resting in a very light snooze, was a woman. Her face was turned away from me, but the hair and the line of the figure and the—
#Catherine!#
She turned and sat up at once, alive and shocked awake. She rubbed the sleep from her eyes with swift knuckles and then looked over her hands at me.
“Steve!” she cried, and all the world and the soul of her was in the throb of her voice.
* * *
XII
Catherine took one unsteady step towards me and then came forward with a rush. She hurled herself into my arms, pressed herself against me, held me tight.
It was like being attacked by a bulldozer.
Phillip stayed my back against her headlong rush or I would have been thrown back out through the door, across the verandah, and into the middle of the yard. The strength of her crushed my chest and wrenched my spine. Her lips crushed mine. I began to black out from the physical hunger of a woman who did not know the extent of her new-found body. All that Catherine remembered was that once she held me to the end of her strength and yearned for more. To hold me that way now meant—death.
Her body was the same slenderness, but the warm softness was gone. It was a flesh-warm waist of flexible steel. I was being held by a statue of bronze, animated by some monster servo-mechanism. This was no woman.
Phillip and Marian pried her away from me before she broke my back. Phillip led her away, whispering softly in her ear. Marian carried me to the divan and let me down on my face gently. Her hands were gentle as she pressed the air back into my lungs and soothed away the awful wrench in my spine. Gradually I came alive again, but there was pain left that made me gasp at every breath.
Then the physical hurt went away, leaving only the mental pain; the horror of knowing that the girl that I loved could never hold me in her arms. I shuddered. All that I wanted out of this life was marriage with Catherine, and now that I had found her again, I had to face the fact that the first embrace would kill me.
I cursed my fate just as any invalid has cursed the malady that makes him a responsibility and a burden to his partner instead of a joy and helpmeet. Like the helpless, I didn’t want it; I hadn’t asked for it; nor had I earned it. Yet all I could do was to rail against the unfairness of the unwarranted punishment.
Without knowing that I was asking, I cried out, “But why?” in a plaintive voice.
In a gentle tone, Marian replied: “Steve, you cannot blame yourself. Catherine was lost to you before you met her at her apartment that evening. What she thought to be a callous on her small toe was really the initial infection of Mekstrom’s Disease. We’re all psi-sensitive to Mekstrom’s Disease, Steve. So when you cracked up and Dad and Phil went on the dead run to help, they caught a perception of it. Naturally we had to help her.”
I must have looked bitter.
“Look, Steve,” said Phillip slowly. “You wouldn’t have wanted us not to help? After all, would you want Catherine to stay with you? So that you could watch her die at the rate of a sixty-fourth of an inch each hour?”
“Hell,” I snarled, “Someone might have let me know.”
Phillip shook his head. “We couldn’t Steve. You’ve got to understand our viewpoint.”
“To heck with your viewpoint!” I roared angrily. “Has anybody ever stopped to consider mine?” I did not give a hoot that they could wind me around a doorknob and tuck my feet in the keyhole. Sure, I was grateful for their aid to Catherine. But why didn’t someone stop to think of the poor benighted case who was in the accident ward? The bird that had been traipsing all over hell’s footstool trying to get a line on his lost sweetheart. I’d been through the grinder; questioned by the F.B.I., suspected by the police; and I’d been the guy who’d been asked by a grieving, elderly couple, “But can’t you remember, son?” Them and their stinking point of view!
“Easy, Steve,” warned Phillip Harrison.
“Easy nothing! What possible justification have you for putting me through my jumps?”
“Look, Steve. We’re in a precarious position. We’re fighting a battle against an unscrupulous enemy, an undercover battle, Steve. If we could get something on Phelps, we’d expose him and his Medical Center like that. Conversely, if we slip a millimeter, Phelps will clip us so hard that the sky will ring. He—damn him—has the Government on his side. We can’t afford to look suspicious.”
“Couldn’t you have taken me in too?”
He shook his head sadly. “No,” he said. “There was a bad accident, you know. The authorities have every right to insist that each and every automobile on the highway be occupied by a minimum of one driver. They also believe that for every accident there must be a victim, even though the damage is no more than a bad case of fright.”
I could hardly argue with that. Changing the subject, I asked, “but what about the others who just drop out of sight?”
“We see to it that plausible letters of explanation are written.”
“So who wrote me?” I demanded hotly.
He looked at me pointedly. “If we’d known about Catherine before, she’d have—disappeared—leaving you a trite letter. But no one could think of a letter to explain her disappearance from an accident, Steve.”
“Oh fine.”
“Well, you’d still prefer to find her alive, wouldn’t you?”
“Couldn’t someone tell me?”
“And have you radiating the fact like a broadcasting station?”
“Why couldn’t I have joined her—you—?”
He shook his head in the same way that a man shakes it when he is trying to explain why two plus two are four and not maybe five or three and a half. “Steve,” he said, “You haven’t got Mekstroms’ Disease.”
“How do I get it?” I demanded hotly.
“Nobody knows,” he said unhappily. “If we did, we’d be providing the rest of the human race with indestructible bodies as fast as we could spread it and take care of them.”
“But couldn’t I have been told something?” I pleaded. I must have sounded like a hurt kitten.
Marian put her hand on my arm. “Steve,” she said, “You’d have been smoothed over, maybe brought in to work for us in some dead area. But then you turned up acting dangerously for all of us.”
“Who—me?”
“By the time you came out for your visit, you were dangerous to us.”
“What do you mean?”
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“Let me find out. Relax, will you Steve? I’d like to read you deep. Catherine, you come in with me.”
“What are we looking for?”
“Traces of post-hypnotic suggestion. It’ll be hard to find because there will be only traces of a plan, all put in so that it looks like natural, logical reasoning.”
Catherine looked doubtful. “When would they have the chance?” she asked.
“Thorndyke. In the hospital.”
Catherine nodded and I relaxed. At the beginning I was very reluctant. I didn’t mind Catherine digging into the dark and dusty corners of my mind, but Marian Harrison bothered me.
“Think of the accident, Steve,” she said.
Then I managed to lull my reluctant mind by remembering that she was trying to help me. I relaxed mentally and physically and regressed back to the day of the accident. I found it hard even then to go through the love-play and sweet seriousness that went on between Catherine and me, knowing that Marian Harrison was a sort of mental spectator. But I fought down my reticence and went on with it.
I practically re-lived the accident. It was easier now that I’d found Catherine again. It was like a cleansing bath. I began to enjoy it. So I went on with my life and adventures right up to the present. Having come to the end, I stopped.
Marian looked at Catherine. “Did you get it?”
Silence. More silence. Then, “It seems dim. Almost incredulous—that it could be—” with a trail-off into thought again.
Phillip snorted. “Make with the chin-music, you two. The rest of us aren’t telepaths, you know.”
“Sorry,” said Marian. “It’s sort of complicated and hard to figure, you know. What seems to be the case is sort of like this,” she went on in an uncertain tone, “We can’t find any direct evidence of anything like hypnotic suggestion. The urge to follow what you call the Highways in Hiding is rather high for a mere bump of curiosity, but nothing definite. I think you were probably urged very gently. Catherine objects, saying that it would take a brilliant psycho-telepath to do a job delicate enough to produce the urge without showing the traces of the operation.”
Highways in Hiding (1956) Page 11