“Where to?”
“The country somewhere,” she whispered in her tiny voice. “Hurry, please. It’s going to be real bad this time.”
Melting snow in advance, he drove across the highway into the lane leading away from the city and suburbs. The robo-grid drove for him then while he stroked her forehead and kissed her cheeks, her ears, her neck . . .
Ten minutes later, they were cruising down a ramp, and the red eye winked at him as if to say he must now caress the controls. Somewhere in the bowels of the car a buzzer bleeped for the same reason. He turned left along a secondary route that was not nearly so well cleaned as the superhighway. Drifts were clawing at the macadam, choking it to half its normal width in many places. He held the accelerator down and kept the Champion moving.
She was moaning . . .
This looked bad. She was rapidly reaching the critical point: the moment when the psychic powers reached maximal point of tolerance and exploded violently and deadly. Laurie was an Esper, but it did her no good, for she could not control the power. She could not siphon it off until it reached the critical point, and once it had reached the critical point, there were only moments left to get rid of it.
He was glad he had had the melting bars installed. Someday all cars, he thought, would have them. Then the snow plows and heating coils would both be obsolete. The bars burned away the crystals, evaporating some, melting some and leaving them behind to freeze into ice as the night wind roared in and covered the road in their wake.
“A little further yet,” he said.
She whimpered something . . .
He risked a glance away from the road, was shocked—as always—by the white fish-belly color of her beautiful face. It always reminded him of the dead. It always frightened him. “Hold on.”
The car skidded sideways without warning. He grabbed desperately at the wheel, then remembered to let the car follow the direction of the slide. They lodged in a drift, and it took the melting bars a few minutes to free them. He went another mile without seeing any houses and—therefore—turned abruptly across what appeared to be a wheat field, flat and snow covered. The bars were burning at full capacity. He took it slow, melting his way toward the edge of the forest which began where the field sloped upward and continued over the rise and into the distance. When they reached the forest’s perimeter, he braked, stopped, shut off the lights. They would not be seen from the highway against the black backdrop of trees.
He sat with her at the side of a tree, sat on the snow with her. She had reached the critical point.
“Okay,” he said. “There is no one here.”
She whimpered again . . .
Her breath rushed out . . .
The snow began to melt around them . . . In two minutes there was a four-foot circle of bare earth. Then there was mud. Then boiling mud . . .
“I remember watt papered parlors
With a grandfather clock that chimed
Like a voice saying I’ll give you
A dollar for a dime.
“I recall sun-bleached kitchens
On a then late afternoon,
A hundred thousand fragrances,
My mother’s tasting spoon . . .”
He flipped off the recording machine, rewound the tape, removed and packaged it. That was Saturday’s show—aired on one hundred and two FM radio stations. Fifteen minutes of poetry and commentary, recital and rebuttal. He was a little bitter about it. He wondered how many really listened and how many only laughed. He suspected that many of the gentler arts were not designed for the mass media. But then, it brought pennies for bread, pennies for lard.
“Frank—” Laurie came into the den, all sweet-smiling in a dress covered with large red apples on a straw background, a red band dipping in and out of her dark hair. “Have you seen this morning’s paper?”
He couldn’t have missed the headline: HALLUCINO-CHILD BELIEVED TO BE IN AREA. And below that: POLICE BEGIN SEARCH. It told all about the field near Crockerton where the snow had been vaporized, the earth boiled and glazed, the trees splintered and charred. It told how there was only one thing that could have done all that. And they were searching for the hallucino-child.