More Than Human

He sat up. She moved cautiously. He said, ‘You must be cramped up in knots.’

‘It’s all right,’ she said. ‘I liked to see you sleep like that.’

‘Let’s go back to town.’

‘Not yet. It’s my turn, Hip. I have a lot to tell you.’

He touched her. ‘You’re cold. Won’t it wait?’

‘No – oh, no! You’ve got to know everything before he… before we’re found.’

‘He? Who’s he?’

She was quiet a long time. Hip almost spoke and then thought better of it. And when she did talk, she seemed so far from answering his question that he almost interrupted; but again he quelled it, letting her lead matters in her own way, in her own time.

She said, ‘You found something in a field; you had your hands on it just long enough to know what it was, what it could mean to you and to the world. And then the man who was with you, the soldier, made you lose it. Why do you suppose he did that?’

‘He was a clumsy, brainless bastard.’

She made no immediate comment but went on, ‘The medical officer then sent in to you, a Major, looked exactly like that Pfc to you.’

‘They proved otherwise.’

He was close enough to her to feel the slight movement in the dark as she nodded. ‘Proof: the men who said they were with him in a plane all afternoon. Now, you had a sheaf of files which showed a perturbation of some sort which affected proximity fuses over a certain area. What happened to them?’

‘I don’t know. My room was locked, as far as I know, from the time I left that day until they went to search it.’

‘Did it ever occur to you that those three things – the missing Pfc, the missing files, and the resemblance of the Major to the Pfc – were the things which discredited you?’

‘That goes without saying. I think if I could’ve straightened out any one or any two of those three things, I wouldn’t have wound up with that obsession.’

‘All right. Now think about this. You stumbled and grubbed through seven years, working your way closer and closer to regaining what you had lost. You traced the man who built it and you were just about to find him. But something happened.’

‘My fault. I bumped into Thompson and went crazy.’

She put her hand on his shoulder. ‘Suppose it wasn’t carelessness that made that Pfc pull the lever. Suppose it was done on purpose.’

He could not have been more shocked if she had fired a flashbulb in his face. The light was as sudden, as blinding, as that. When he could, he said, ‘Why didn’t I ever think of that?’

‘You weren’t allowed to think of it,’ she said bitterly.

‘What do you mean, I wasn’t – ‘

‘Please. Not yet,’ she said. ‘Now, just suppose for a moment that someone did this to you. Can you reason out who it was – why he did it – how he did it?’

‘No,’ he said immediately. ‘Eliminating the world’s first and only anti-gravity generator makes no sense at all. Picking on me to persecute and doing it through such an elaborate method means even less. And as to method, why, he’d have to be able to reach into locked rooms, hypnotize witnesses and read minds!’

‘He did,’ said Janie. ‘He can.’

‘Janie – who?’

‘Who made the generator?’

He leaped to his feet and released a shout that went rolling down and across the dark field.

‘Hip!’

‘Don’t mind me,’ he said, shaken. ‘I just realized that the only one who would dare to destroy that machine is someone who could make another if he wanted it. Which means that – oh, my God! – the soldier and the half-wit, and maybe Thompson – yes, Thompson: he’s the one made me get jailed when I was just about to find him again – they’re all the same! – Why didn’t I ever think of that before?’

‘I told you. You weren’t allowed.’

He sank down again. In the east, dawn hung over the hills like the loom of a hidden city. He looked at it, recognizing it as the day he had chosen to end his long, obsessive search and he thought of Janie’s terror when he had determined to go headlong into the presence of this – this monster – without his sanity, without his memory, without arms or information.

‘You’ll have to tell me, Janie. All of it.’

She told him – all of it. She told him of Lone, of Bonnie and Beanie and of herself; Miss Kew and Miriam, both dead now, and Gerry. She told how they had moved, after Miss Kew was killed, back into the woods, where the old Kew mansion hid and brooded, and how for a time they were very close. And then…

‘Gerry got ambitious for a while and decided to go through college, which he did. It was easy. Everything was easy. He’s pretty unremarkable looking when he hides those eyes of his behind glasses, you know; people don’t notice. He went through medical school too, and psych.’

‘You mean he really is a psychiatrist?’ asked Hip.

‘He is not. He just qualifies by the book. There’s quite a difference. He hid in crowds; he falsified all sorts of records to get into school. He was never caught at it because all he had to do with anyone who was investigating him was to give them a small charge of that eye of his and they’d forget. He never failed any exam as long as there was a men’s room he could go to.’

‘A what? Men’s room?’