Joan got ready for bed that night with a feeling of vague depression. The exhilaration of entertaining the newspaper boys had worn off. Ben had proposed supper and dancing to mark their last night of private life, but it had not been a success. To start with, they had blown a tire while coming down a steep curve on Beachwood Drive, and Phil’s gray sedan had rolled ove r and over. They would have all been seriously injured had it not been for the automatic body control which they possessed.
When Phil examined the wreck, he expressed puzzlement as to its cause. “Those tires were perfectly all right, he maintained. “I had examined them all the way through this morning.” But he insisted on continuing with their evening of relaxation.
The floor show seemed dull, the jokes crude and callous after the light, sensitive humor they had learned to enjoy through association with Master Ling. The ponies in the chorus were young and beautiful. Joan had enjoyed watching them, but she made the mistake of reaching out to touch their minds. The incongruity of the vapid, insensitive spirits she found —almost every instance—added to her malaise.
She was relieved when the floor show ended and Ben asked her to dance. Both of the men were good dancers, especially Coburn, and she fitted herself into his arms contentedly. Her pleasure didn’t last; a drunken couple bumped into them repeatedly. The man was quarrelsome, the woman shrilly vitriolic. Joan asked her escorts to take her home.
These things bothered her as she prepared for bed. Joan, who had never known acute physical fear in her life, feared just one thing—the corrosive, dirty emotions of the poor in spirit. Malice, envy, spite, the snide insults of twisted, petty minds; these things could hurt her, just by being in her presence, even if she were not the direct object of the attack. She was not yet sufficiently mature to have acquired a smooth armor of indifference to the opinions of the unworthy.
After a summer in the company of men of good will, the incident with the drunken couple dismayed her. She felt dirtied by the contact. Worse still, she felt an outlander, a stranger in a strange land.
She awakened sometime in the night with the sense of loneliness increased to overwhelming proportions. She was acutely aware of the three- million-odd living beings around her, but the whole city seemed alive only with malignant entities, jealous of her, anxious to drag her down to their own ignoble status. This attack on her spirit, this attempt to despoil the sanctity of her inner being, assumed an almost corporate nature. It seemed to her that it was nibbling at the edges of her mind, snuffling at her defences.
Terrified, she called out to Ben and Phil. There was no answer; her mind could not find them.
The filthy thing that threatened her was aware of her failure; she could feel it leer. In open panic she called to the Senior.
No answer. This time the thing spoke—”That way, too, is closed.”
As hysteria claimed her, as her last defences crumbled, she was caught in the arms of a stronger spirit, whose calm, untroubled goodness encysted her against the evil thing that stalked her.
“Ling!” she cried, “Master Ling!” before racking sobs claimed her.
She felt the quiet, reassuring humor of his smile while the fingers of his mind reached out and smoothed away the tensions of her fear. Presently she slept.
His mind stayed with her all through the night, and talked with her, until she awakened..Ben and Phil listened to her account of the previous night with worried faces. “That settles it, Phil decided. “We’ve been too careless. From now on until this thing is finished, we stay in rapport day and night, awake and asleep. As a matter of fact, I had a bad time of it myself last night, though nothing equal to what happened to Joan.”
“So did I, Phil. What happened to you?”
“Nothing very much—just a long series of nightmares in which I kept losing confidence in my ability to do any of the things we learned on Shasta. What about you?”