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had been respected members of their littlecommunities until the day--the date was less than a week old--theircongregations rose up en masse and tore them limb from limb.
The remaining two of the second group had died in different fashions. Adoctor in a Nevada mining hamlet, making a late call, had been set uponby the patient's family, knocked unconscious and shot. A Girl Scoutleader in Mississippi had been thrown over a cliff by her young charges.
* * * * *
A morbid and pointless collection of horrors, Alcorn thought, until hesaw the parallel that related them.
The circumstances were strikingly similar in every case except that thefour who disappeared were urbanites, while the murdered ones were allmembers of small and comparatively isolated communities. Not one of theeight had been over thirty-five; each had been well-liked; none waswealthy, yet all were in comfortable circumstances from vocations thatdepended upon good will.
A further similarity built up in Alcorn's subconscious, but diedunconsidered because at that moment the quarterstaff bout on the screenended and a brazen-voiced announcer gave the time.
It was 18:30. Dr. Hagen was to call him at his apartment at 19:00.
Alcorn, mulling over the cryptic half-knowledge gained from theclippings, wondered what the little psychiatrist might make of it. Hagenwas capable in his field; even with so little to work on, he mightpossibly come up with the right answer.
Alcorn decided that he could not run from a danger until he knew whatthe hazard was. He might as well face the issue squarely now and be donewith it.
The Jaffers operative, on his ninth drink, had relaxed into a smilingstupor. Alcorn left him snoring in the booth and headed for the publicradophone unit beyond the end of the bar. He could not be in hisapartment to take Dr. Hagen's call, but he could anticipate it.
The telescreen announcer's voice stopped him short. "_Have you seen thisman? Sought by police for the murder earlier this evening of Dr. BernardHagen, prominent psychiatrist, he is thought to be at large somewhere indowntown...._"
The screen showed an enlarged full-face photograph of Alcorn.
* * * * *
He was responsible for Hagen's death. But who had wanted the knowledgeof Alcorn's gift--or the suppression of that knowledge--badly enough tokill the psychiatrist for it?
Jaffers, or the faceless people behind Janice Wynn?
It had to be Jaffers, he decided, eliminating a possible source ofopposition and at the same stroke placing himself still further on thedefensive.
Slowly, he became aware that the joy-bar had fallen quiet, that everyonein the place was watching him with a sort of intent sympathy. Thebartender left his place and came toward him, his heavy face a study inconcern.
"We know you couldn't have done it," the man said. The sway of Alcorn'spresence held him hypnotized. "Can we help?"
Alcorn's only thought was of flight. "Have you a turbo-copter?"
"On the roof," the bartender said. "It's yours."
Alcorn took him along to unlock the controls. On the roof landing, acool evening wind was blowing. There was a dim thin sickle of moon and apale haze of stars, a wraithlike scattering of small white clouds thatdrifted in the reflected spectrum of the city's multicolored glow.
He sat in the turbo-copter with a feeling of incredulous unreality. Thevast and shining breadth of the city was spread about him like amonstrous alien puzzle, a light-shot maze without meaning. Where, inthat suddenly foreign tangle, could he go?
He set the 'copter off at random, knowing that its owner would have thepolice on his heels the moment he recovered volition. Alcorn was stilltrying to settle upon a course when a seizure fell upon him again.
First he had seen the city as something alien; now he felt it, aclamorous surf-roar of conflicting individual emotions, an unresolvedant-hill scurrying of hates and hopes and endless frustrations.
Then he was on the polar plain. The pit and scaffolding were the same,but the enigmatic groupings of people on the streets had changed. Fourof them had faces now. Three were unfamiliar, but the fourth herecognized as Ellis, the research chemist who had disappeared from hislaboratory in New York City.
* * * * *
By the time Alcorn was composed, he discovered that he had chosen acourse without conscious intent. Dark, open country fled past beneath,pricked here and there with racing points of light that marked the mainartery of northward surface traffic. Familiar mountain shapes loomedahead, indicating where he was bound.
He was heading, lemminglike, for his cabin in the Catskills.
The knowledge made him wonder if he could trust the instinct that haddecided him. Jaffers might or might not know of the cabin; certainlyJanice Wynn knew, for she had said she would pick him up there at 21:00.
Kitty, when he failed to call her as he had promised, would know at oncewhere he had gone, and would either radophone him or come to himquickly.
He frowned unhappily over the possibilities, caught between an eagernessto see Kitty and a dread of having her involved in his trouble. Heconsidered taking Kitty and fleeing in his borrowed turbo-copter to someisolated place where the two of them might make a fresh start, and gaveup the idea at once as worse than impractical.
Jaffers would find him without difficulty, now that he knew what to lookfor. And there was the progressive reality of his visions--for he hadceased to think of them any more as hallucinations. The coming of JaniceWynn and the inexorable sharpening of his awareness proved that realitybeyond doubt.
He found the twin-notched peak that landmarked his cabin. The cool ofnight and the mountain quiet, when he climbed out, were a tonic to hisabraded nerves. There was a nostalgic calling of night-birds, the cleanbreath of pines and, from some tangled rocky slope, the faint pervadingperfume of wild honeysuckle.
He had not guessed how sharp his awareness had become until he realizedthat someone was waiting for him inside the cabin.
* * * * *
He halted outside, feeling like a man just recovering vision after along blindness. Janice Wynn was in the cabin and she was alone. He knewthat as certainly as if he had seen her walk in.
When he went in, she was standing before the wide cold mouth of thecabin's fireplace. She wore the same quiet suit she had worn inO'Donnell's office, and her tilted green eyes were at once relieved andanxious.
"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 youagain--the change is too close on us both."
"Change?"
She gave him a disappointed look. "I thought you'd have guessed by nowthe relation between ourselves and those people in the clippings. Youhad 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 nonebefore. And you recognized one."
"It was Ellis, the chemist," Alcorn said. And with a numb premonition ofthe truth, he quietly asked, "How did you know that?"
"You were broadcasting it like a beacon. We're both in the last stagesof the change. Now that our conditioning is lifting, we're reverting toour original telepathic nature. That's how _they_ found you and me, asthey found Ellis and the others--by tracking down our communicationauras."
He said slowly, "Those four--why were they mobbed and killed?"
"Because the change caught them too suddenly for escape," she said. "Andbecause, in our natural state, we are incompatible with Man."
"With Man," he repeated. "And what does that make us? Supermen ormonsters?"
"You're still blinded by your conditioning," she answered, "or you'd seethat we're neither, that we're not even native to this planet. I don'tknow a great deal more than that myself--I haven't remembered it allyet, because the change isn't complete...."
She broke off and, with both hands above the fireplace, gripped therough stone of the mantelpiece. Her
tilted green eyes burned with acontradictory play of emotions; the soft planes of her face seemed toshift and alter, seeking an impossible balance between ecstasy andterror and a tearing, intolerable agony.
"I'm learning the rest ... now," she whispered. "Sooner than ... Ithought."
He sensed the change that possessed her, the struggling of new emotions,the shattering of imposed concepts and conditionings and theirrealigning to shape a new personality, a new person. He knew from thatmoment that she had been right, and that what he had feared from thebeginning of his first seizure was about to happen to him.
She closed her eyes briefly. When she opened them again, Alcorn drewback. Then resentment flared in him and he was suddenly furious, at thealteration of status that left him on the defensive.
He remembered