The following night I worked late, correcting a batch of the
interminable freshman themes. I didn't have any night classes, but the
offices were bright for the lecturers who did. I found it difficult
to concentrate on the semi-adolescent exercises in expository
composition even though the office was quiet and almost empty most
of the evening. Near the bottom of the pile of papers I came across
one theme that jolted me. It was called "How to Conduct a Seance." It
was a juvenile and jocular approach to the subject, and I had never
placed much credence myself in preternatural events and influences—or
in extra-sensory powers. But now I found myself feeling defensive,
resenting the spoofing tone of the student's theme. Wasn't anything
possible? How much did we really know? Wasn't the wisest philosopher
actually as ignorant as this nineteen-year-old?
I wondered if a man could have unusual perceptions, strange mental
powers, for twenty-seven years without knowing it. Wouldn't a talent
for thought transference or for hearing the mental communications of
others make itself known early? Or would it be necessary to have two
sensitive people involved, sender and receiver? Could you be a telepath
without knowing it simply because you had never encountered another?
And I remembered the incident, distant in time and dim in memory, which
I had refused to recall during the disturbing recent months. In itself,
the experience, though startling at the time, was not unique. At least
you hear about similar things happening to a great many ordinary
people. You hear about it—but you brush off the story as coincidence
or as the product of an over-active imagination.
I have mentioned my father. Until I was eighteen, I never knew who he
was or that he was alive. My mother had always talked about him as if
he had been killed the year I was born, during the brief Chino-American
war of 1963. After I had the extraordinary vision, she told me the
truth, her story muffled by tears long contained.
Ernest Cameron was a well-known physicist. He was married and had two
children. If my mother can be believed, his was an unhappy marriage,
but one which he did not feel justified in renouncing. During part
of 1962 he was in New Mexico working with the army on atomic field
weapons, the kind that did a hell of a lot of damage in a confined
area, what they used to call "clean" bombs in those days before all
atomic weapons were outlawed. My mother was at that time a woman in her
early twenties living in Albuquerque.
She met Ernest Cameron when he was on a weekend leave. They fell in
love, suddenly, catastrophically. Their passionate affair lasted for
nine days. Then, as the threat of war intensified in Asia, he was
abruptly transferred overseas. My mother never saw him again, but she
was already carrying the infinitesimal germ of life that grew into the
son he never knew. Me. Paul Cameron.
My mother always loved him. She moved to Los Angeles and took the name
of Mrs. Rose Cameron, wanting me to bear my father's name. For eighteen
years after I was born, she posed as a widow. The role was never
questioned.
It was the vision which forced her to tell me who I really was—and who
my father was. It happened on a clear sunny afternoon. I was in the
yard outside our small trailer. Having just graduated from high school,
I was taking a week's vacation before hunting for a job. I was sitting
on a canvas chair, idly enjoying the summer sun and thinking wistfully
about my hopes of going to college, when it happened.
I saw him. A sandy-haired, middle-aged man with bent, rounded shoulders
and a tired walk. Preoccupied, his eyes on the ground, he stepped off
a curb and started across a street I had never seen in my life. I sat
in the canvas chair, staring at the familiar setting of the crowded
trailer court, and the picture of the sandy-haired man was superimposed
on the reality before me, equally clear and vivid. When I saw the truck
hurtling toward him, the illusion was so graphic that I cried out in
alarm. The man looked up at the last moment of his life, soft gray eyes
widening in blank surprise, without fear, as if he had not had time to
bring his mind back from some distant point of reflection to this time
and place of life and death. He had stepped out from behind a parked
car. The truckdriver, seeing him too late, tried to swerve. There was
a terrifyingly slow sequence of brakes screeching, rubber scraping off
in black streaks on the pavement, big trailer lurching sideways—and
the final sickening violence of impact, of smashed bones and flesh and
blood.
I stood trembling beside the overturned canvas chair amid the familiar
cluster of trailers and covered patios and cement walks and hotly
glittering parked cars, and I knew that the echo of a final scream of
pain had broken from my own lips. My mother was standing in the doorway
of our trailer, her mouth open, one hand at her breast in fright,
staring at me.
She ran down the steps. "Paul! My God, Paul, what happened?"
Slowly, dazedly, I looked around me. A couple of children were watching
me in owlish wonder; a man had stopped some thirty yards away, staring
at me over his shoulder; the woman in the next-door trailer was frozen
at her window; even the birds were silent in the trees overhead. The
whole world around me seemed to be arrested, waiting for me to come
back to it.
My gaze shifted to my mother's face. I moved and the scene came alive
again, like a motion picture that has been momentarily stopped and then
resumes, the figures jumping into motion to complete the half-finished
gesture, the interrupted phrase.
"I don't know," I said slowly. "I don't know."
I lit a cigarette and opened a can of beer and took a long cool drink,
all the while trying to organize the confusion in my mind, trying to
understand what had happened to me. My mother kept pressing me to
explain what had made me cry out, and I had an impulse to assure her
that it had just been a dream. It was several minutes before I felt
capable of trying to put into words what I had seen. I still felt oddly
detached, as if I had been away on a long trip and had only just got
back so that I hadn't had time to unpack or re-orient myself to the old
familiar setting.
I told her the story without softening its raw edges, quietly and
dispassionately, trusting in a mother's willingness to believe that
her son was neither a liar nor a madman. When I had finished I looked
at her expectantly, even a little apprehensively. In the telling, the
story had begun to sound fantastic. For the first time, I thought that
maybe I had actually fallen asleep in the sun without realizing it
and been awakened by the nightmare. But my mother's reaction was so
startling that I forgot my doubts.
For several seconds, she stared at me in silence. Without warning her
eyes filmed over and a tear spilled through her lashes to trickle down
her cheek. In dumb fascination, I watched the slow progression of that
single tear down her weathered skin.
She spoke in a strained whisper. "Would you describe him again?"
At first I didn't know what she meant. Then, puzzled, I described the
man of the vision. I could see him very clearly. Sandy hair thinning
over a high forehead. Soft gray eyes mirroring a compassionate
intelligence. A thin, high-bridged nose. A wide, responsive mouth,
curving slightly in a pensive smile. Stooped shoulders that made him
look slighter and shorter than he was, though my impression was that he
was taller than average.
It was only when the portrait was complete that I realized that,
except for the bent shoulders and the thinning hair, I had been
describing myself.
My mother looked away, covering her face with her hands. I saw her
shoulders quiver. A suspicion nibbled at the fringe of my mind,
rejected instantly with a spasm of horror.
"Mom! What is it? Who was he?"
I was shocked by the agony of pain in her eyes.
"Oh, Paul!"
I put my hands quickly on her shoulders and shook her gently. "Tell
me," I said. "You've got to tell me."
"I can't!"
I was young but I felt very mature and protective and able to take
anything. "You don't have to hide anything from me," I said.
Haltingly, she told me about my father and about the brief days she
had known him, the short interval of love on which she had built a
lonely life. She pleaded with me to feel no bitterness toward the man
who was my father. He had given her all he could—love, tenderness,
understanding, even a child. She believed that he had really loved her
and she had never blamed him for staying away from her. It was the only
thing for him to do. She revealed that he had sent her letters in the
first months after he left her. She had written at last to tell him
that it was better if she dropped out of his life completely. She had
not told him about the child.
When she had finished, I felt only pity and love for this woman who had
suffered loneliness for the better part of a lifetime in exchange for
a love held only for an instant, who had shielded even her bastard son
from the truth that might hurt him, who had lived with her memories and
her illusion of a life that was, in its own small way, complete.
Anger and bitterness came later. Shame. A feeling that I had been
cheated, tricked into believing that I was normal, that I had had a
real father just like everyone else. Hatred of the man for the loyalty
he had given to another woman. And at last, when the hot flame of
anger had burnt itself out, a lasting sense that I was different, I was
an outsider.
That night, when my mother's tears had dried and she finally slept with
the exhaustion of someone relieved at last of a terrible burden of
secrecy, I lay in darkness with my new sense of isolation and my mind
returned to the inexplicable vision which had triggered my mother's
confession. I wondered what kind of dream could come when one sat with
his eyes open in broad daylight, fully conscious. Yet it must have
been a dream. The man of the vision was surely someone I had seen, or
a projected image of myself, a man whose appearance had made my mother
believe I was describing her lover of long ago. Was Ernest Cameron
still alive? What would he do or say if the son he didn't know existed
should suddenly appear one day to confront him?
I was never to find out. Less than a month later, investigators, easily
backtracking along my mother's trail from Albuquerque to Los Angeles,
traced her to our modest trailer court. She had been left half of
an estate valued at over thirty thousand dollars by one Dr. Ernest
Cameron, recently deceased, professor of physics at the University
of Illinois, a widower with two married children who had divided the
remaining half of his estate. In his will, re-written after his legal
wife's death, Dr. Cameron had revealed the love he had kept secret for
almost twenty years.
He had died of injuries suffered in a traffic accident on June 16,
1982. The day of my vision.
Now, nine years later, remembering that extraordinary circumstance
as I sat alone in the small bright office, I thought how easily my
mother and I had covered up the fearful evidence of the unknown. Almost
by deliberate scheme, it seemed, we had failed to investigate the
details of my father's death. There was no escaping the fact that I
did appear to have dreamed of his accident, but my mother, who was a
religious woman, found satisfaction in the belief that God had worked
in one of His strange and unquestionable ways. And I found refuge in
a recollection of the vision so blurred and hedged with qualifications
that I was finally able to believe in coincidence, in a casual dream
which had not really mirrored the reality of death occurring thousands
of miles away, but had simply reflected some buried fear of violence of
my own in a world in which accidental violence was commonplace. Ernest
Cameron's death became important only because it brought my mother and
me closer together and because it provided the means with which I was
able to go to college.
Was I able now fully to believe in my own clairvoyance? Was the earlier
vision a symptom of the extra-sensory powers which I was only now
discovering in other ways? I had to believe in it. At the same time I
was afraid to.
For in my recent dream of violence, I was the victim.
It was ten o'clock that night when I left the massive Liberal Arts
Building and started slowly across the sprawling campus. The night
classes were over and many of the lights had already gone out. There
was a continuous cough and mutter of cars starting and roaring away.
Clusters of students drifted by in heated conversation. Couples
loitered in the deep shadows of trees or strolled hand in hand with
intimate whisper of word and gurgle of laughter. I felt exhausted.
I wandered toward the modern area of stores and restaurants and bars
which bordered the campus. I didn't feel like returning to my empty
trailer in the hills. At that moment, I keenly regretted the strange
compulsion which had kept me from forming close friendships with
my colleagues at the university. Perhaps subconsciously I had been
avoiding exposure to disillusion or disappointment, but in so doing I
had created for myself a lonely place apart.
My path took me past the Science Building. On the first floor there
was one panel of windows glowing with light. Most of the building was
dark. I stopped for a minute, thinking of Dr. Jonas Temple, the revered
geophysicist who was working behind those windows. They were too high
to permit me to see into his offices or his laboratories but I knew
he would be there. The old man's capacity for work was legendary.
And in the past eighteen months those lighted windows had seemed to
symbolize man's growing knowledge of life, not only on earth, but in
the limitless space in which we whirled. And specifically, of course,
on Mars, for Dr. Temple was the man who had directed the exhaustive
program of analysis and study of the dead relics of life brought
back from the red planet. Like everyone at the university I had been
privileged to enter those offices and to stare in wonder at the rows of
curious mineral and fossil formations behind the glass doors of their
special cabinets. From these, piece by piece, Dr. Temple and his staff
were slowly tracing the pattern of Martian evolution.
This night, however, he was probably more concerned with the
preparations for the new Martian flight scheduled to begin sometime
this month. What lists would he have drawn of things which should be
brought back—to reveal what new secrets of the universe?
Once again the world's magnificent adventure made my own private
problem seem petty and insignificant. What did it matter in the
fantastic wilderness of space and time, one man's personal quarrel with
a mind on the edge of anarchy?
I started across the campus again. While standing still I had allowed
the October night's chill to penetrate the thin fabric of my coverall.
Now my steps quickened. The Dugout, a popular off-campus coffee shop,
was nearby, and the thought of steaming hot coffee made me swing toward
it.
I was near the edge of the campus when the voice spoke—abrupt,
shockingly strong, so real to my ear that I looked around quickly to
see who had spoken.
"Is it safe to communicate?"
No one was near me. What I was hearing was in my own mind, a soundless
emanation of thought.
"Yes, but softly. We must not be detected now when the time is so
close."
I stood rigid at the rim of the dark campus, my whole body taut and
quivering, my mind a clean slate upon which the voices wrote. Two of
them. There was an individual quality to the thoughts, an inflection
and timber of the mind as unmistakable as the personal tone of a human
voice, yet oddly sexless and unemotional. The first one I had heard was
more tentative in his vibrations, less in control of his power, giving
the impression that he was younger; the second was older, heavier, more
authoritative in his strength.
"You are comfortable?" the second voice asked.
"Yes."
"The new body is healthy?"
"Completely."
I began to move, sensing in a way I couldn't comprehend the direction
from which the thoughts were coming. I stumbled along the side street
which led to the Dugout, tracking the bodiless pulsations as an animal
trails a scent.
The older one spoke again. "You had no difficulty with the parents?"
"They suspected nothing."
The voices were closer now, but I was alone on the street except for
a couple ambling along the shadowed sidewalk a block away. And why
would they have to communicate with their minds when they walked arm in
arm? I didn't question the actual existence of the voices in my mind.
At that moment I believed in them as naturally and unquestioningly
as I accepted vocal speech. They were there. I heard them. Even the
meaningless question about a "new body" did not make me wonder if the
voices were hallucinatory. To talk of bodies as if they could be shed
like garments and new ones tried for fit and comfort was nonsense, but
I had no thought of making sense of the words I had heard. I wanted
only to find their source.
And suddenly I was standing in front of the Dugout staring through the
steam-clouded windows. The place was almost empty.
"What is it that you wish me to do?" The young one, calm,
matter-of-fact in its subservience. It? He or she? I had no way of
telling.
"You have a job—an important one."
There was no doubting the fact that they were inside the Dugout. The
sense of mental presence was overpowering, as if one were in a corner
of a dark closet listening to two strangers who had huddled in the tiny
space and closed the door to whisper confidentially.
"Have you heard—"
I opened the door. Four students in a booth against the wall turned to
stare at me. There was a sudden, total silence.
Instinct made me walk casually to the counter, where I slipped onto a
stool so placed that I would be able to see the booths along the right
wall without deliberately or obviously turning my head. Lois, the
waitress who was on night duty at the Dugout, sauntered toward me along
the narrow aisle behind the counter.
"What'll you have, Mr. Cameron?"
"Coffee, Lois."
"Coming right up!"
It never occurred to me to consider Lois as a possible agent of
the thoughts I had heard. She was a student who had been working a
part-time evening shift in the Dugout for almost two full semesters.
She was more notable for the ripeness of breast and hip than for any
indication of unusual mental capacities. I was surprised that she was
still in school and not already married to one of the students who were
always flirting with her across the counter. Her blonde, buxom beauty
and open friendliness went better with children and home cooking than
books and short order food.
The place was unusually quiet. At first I saw no one but Lois and
the four students together in a front booth. Two of them I had
recognized—Mike Boyle, who had been an All-Coast tackle the previous
season and might make All-American this year, and Laurie Hendricks,
a disturbing redhead who sat in the front row of my eleven o'clock
sophomore English class. The other boy's blond crewcut and immature
good looks seemed faintly familiar, probably because they were typical
of so many students. The second girl, who sat next to Mike Boyle, was
small and pretty and brunette. I had never seen her before.
All four looked much too normal, as they returned to their animated
talk, to be part of the weird experience which had brought me there.
They had given me only a casual glance. They seemed to be genuinely
ignoring me as I sipped my coffee, trying to study the group without
seeming to.
The next thought came without warning from the back of the room. "Have
you heard anything else of the listener?"
I swallowed a deep hot draught of coffee, scalding my throat. Bending
low over the counter, I struggled to keep from choking and coughing.
The cup rattled in the saucer as I set it down.
I knew that I was the listener.
"Whispers. Nothing I could be sure of."
The question had come from the back, the answer was closer. I was
convinced that the reply came from one of the four students in the
booth not more than fifteen feet away from me.
Then I saw a hand move at the table of the last booth near the rear of
the restaurant. A man's hand stirring coffee absently. He sat with his
back toward me, concealed behind the high back of the booth. His was
the older, heavier mental voice.
"He must be found," the man's thought came.
"Could it be—a foreign intruder? Perhaps even one of us who—"
"No. Soon we will be many—when I come back. But now we are the only
ones. He must be human."
"But he speaks with the mind."
"That is not so strange. It is only strange that many do not do so, as
we do."
Listening, I felt a creeping contraction of horror as if I had touched
something cold and alien. My God, what did they mean? They believed
that I must be—human. And what were they?
"I would like to return with you—to assist in your expedition." The
bright young mind spoke.
"Your task is to find the human who speaks with his thoughts and
destroy him. If he is able to hear us he is dangerous. Once we are here
in force it will not matter. But now——"
The horror expanded in my mind, a revulsion exaggerated now by a
consciousness of danger, of menace that was suddenly close and real.
While they were hunting me, the listener, I had stumbled right into
their midst. Who they were or what I did not know, but they held power
in their minds beyond the scope of my imagination. And if they learned
that I was—
"When do you go?" the youthful one asked.
"Soon now. The launching will be in the final week of this month,
depending on suitable conditions."
"You will be able to effect the transfer?"
"There will be no difficulty in the actual change. I have already
picked out the human in the space colony. He is young and strong but
mentally very susceptible. Already he is under my control. I have only
to find the right moment alone with him. However, since this body I now
inhabit must be presumed dead when I leave it, and there will be no
visible remains, it will be necessary for me to devise an accident in
which the body would naturally be consumed or lost. Drowning may prove
most suitable."
Drowning! My recurrent nightmare came back to me in a rush. I felt the
blood drain from my face. My head felt light and faintly dizzy.
"I do not fully understand about the body," the young one thought.
"It is a superb instrument," the other replied, "but unfortunately
not as dense in its material structure as those we are accustomed to
inhabit. You will find that your energies will draw excessively on the
body's matter. You must take great care to maintain constant control
over the body shell to keep it from disintegrating too rapidly. At the
same time the vital organs must not be damaged. In time, perhaps, these
human bodies may adapt to our needs more satisfactorily. Until then
periodic changes will be needed. I have conserved my present form only
because it was vital to our plans."
"When will you make the exchange?"
"At the last possible moment—when close physical examination is no
longer likely and when it is too late for the launching to be delayed."
"You might require my services when you have to take over the ship—"
"No! It is vital that you remain behind. You must understand that I
might not return. Anything could happen in space. If I should fail
to come back, it is still possible that others of us will be brought
to earth on other ships. If the humans are more careful than before,
our brothers might never escape. It will be up to you to effect their
release."
"Yes, that is clear."
Suddenly I put my hands over my ears, pressing my palms hard against
my skull as if the barrier of bone and tissue might cut off the
bewildering voices that stole into my brain. This was not real, not
possible! This was madness. Not aliens from outer space, plotting to
take over the space ships and use them to bring back hordes of aliens.
Not beings who could possess and use human bodies. I couldn't believe
in these.
"Mr. Cameron?"
"What?" I looked up, startled and frightened, into the wondering blue
eyes of the blonde waitress.
"More coffee?"
"Oh. Yes. Yes, please."
My voice cracked. The hand that spooned sugar into the cup shook. My
body was seized by momentary spasms. Fear. Fear that demoralized body
and mind.
Then I realized that the strange voices were silent. But there was a
suspenseful quality to the silence, an indefinable tension of waiting.
Had I done something to betray myself? Had the lash of fear been
audible?
Slowly my gaze swung toward the booth in the back of the room. The
man had withdrawn further out of sight. Even his hand was no longer
visible. I forced myself to glance at the booth where the students
were still talking, low-voiced, the steady murmur split by wedges
of laughter. Laurie Hendricks' eyes met mine in a brief instant of
recognition. She was smiling and her green eyes were speculative. At
that moment, the blond youth spoke to her and she turned toward him,
red mouth opening in laughter.
I looked away. Several yards down the counter Lois was busily wiping
an imaginary spot on the gleaming surface. I lit a cigarette with a
painstaking effort at steadiness and sat staring at the curl of steam
rising from the coffee to blend with the denser cloud of cigarette
smoke.
And something probed at my brain. My reaction was instinctive, like a
turtle withdrawing under its shell with surprising speed. I froze my
mind, shutting off all thought. I was nothing. I was blankness. I was
neither thought nor emotion nor awareness. The eerie mental sensation
came again, like a child's stick prodding the turtle's shell to see
if it would move or to find a soft, vulnerable spot in the protective
casing. A thought probing at my brain, trying to force an entry, but
there was no opening.
The tentative pressure ceased. For a moment there was silence except
for the murmuring at the nearby booth and the clatter of dishes as Lois
piled them into a steel sink. Slowly I allowed awareness to return.
"All right." The older one was communicating again.
"What happened?"
"I was not certain. For a moment I thought——" The message broke off.
"I must leave."
"When shall we speak again?"
"We must avoid all contact unless absolutely necessary. There is too
much risk of detection. We should never be together again in the same
place until the listener is found."
"What shall I do when I find him?"
There was a brief pause. I found myself tense as I waited for the
reply, my hands clenching painfully.
"It must look like an accident."
Laughter erupted from the booth nearby, raucous and free, the young gay
laughter of a normal, healthy world. I had the sudden, bitter feeling
that I had left this world forever and its laughter was rude and
jarring on my nerves, a bizarre punctuation to the sentence of death I
had just heard pronounced on myself.
Then the students were pushing out of their booth, moving toward the
door, passing near me.
"Hi, Mr. Cameron!" Laurie Hendricks called.
I nodded. My throat was constricted, unable to open for speech. The
group spilled out onto the sidewalk and I felt a stab of alarm. One of
them was an alien—but what could I do? How could I find out which one?
Should I follow them or the man in the booth?
I shot a glance toward the rear booth. I caught a fleeting glimpse of
a dark gray suit as the man disappeared down the narrow corridor which
led to the restrooms.
And to a rear exit.
I stumbled to my feet, throwing a coin onto the counter. For a second I
was caught in the dilemma of divided choice. Then I strode decisively
through the restaurant toward the back hall. When I reached it it was
empty. I whirled and raced to the front door.
The four students were across the street strolling onto the campus
grounds. I trotted after them. They seemed oblivious of me. I could see
the small dark-haired girl clinging to Mike Boyle's arm. The blond boy
spoke confidentially in Laurie Hendrick's ear. I stopped on the far
side of the street, hesitating, watching them walk slowly across the
green lawn. I couldn't follow them closely without being seen. I would
have to keep at a distance.
I glanced back toward the Dugout. A man stood on the sidewalk to the
left of the restaurant in the shadow of a store front. Even though I
couldn't see his face I could feel the impact of his eyes. He had not
been there when I came out of the Dugout. My scalp prickled. I started
at the shadowy figure. For a moment neither of us moved.
What I did then was incredibly foolish, and yet it was not a
consciously deliberate act, not even a careless impulse. Rather I spoke
to myself, voicing the question that filled my mind but unconsciously
projecting it toward the unknown man who watched me across the street.
"Who are you?"
Afterwards I could not be sure what happened, but in that split second
as the thought was directed toward the dark figure I seemed to catch a
quick reaction of startled surprise. I was immediately shocked by my
own stupidity. I had betrayed myself. Now they knew who I was.
And at that moment I saw the headlights of a car speeding toward me
along the near side of the street, its lights bouncing as the car rode
over a bump. Something held me there on the sidewalk close to the curb
as the car approached swiftly. And suddenly it was very close, the eyes
of its headlights holding my gaze hypnotized, the hum of its engine
swelling in my ears.
"Now! Into the street!"
The command struck my mind with the force of a blow. I tottered
forward, tripping clumsily over the curb. I had an awareness of
struggling feebly, of trying to control rubbery limbs with a mind that
was weak and confused, of flailing my arms wildly at the air.
"In front of the car! Fall!"
And I flung myself forward into the blinding glare of the onrushing
headlights. There was a tearing screech of brakes, a scream that seemed
far away, and a massive blur of metal brushing by me as I fell.
