‘Horatio Alger – what is that?’
‘I guess you’d call it a serial. It goes on and on. Horatio Alger is the man who wrote it. He wrote a lot of books, back in the early part of the twentieth century, maybe before that. The critics then thought they were trashy books and I suppose they were. But a lot of people read them and that apparently meant that they had some sort of human appeal. They told all about how a poor boy makes good against terrific odds.’
‘It sounds sort of corny to me,’ said the senator.
‘I suppose it does. But the producers and the writers have taken those trashy stories and turned them into social documents, with a good bit of satire laced into the story. And they have done a marvellous job of recreating the background, the most of it I suppose is the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth. And not just the physical background, but the moral and social background. It was a barbarous age, you know. There are human situations in it that make your blood run cold…’
The phone beeped at them and the vision panel blinked. The senator hoisted himself from the chair and crossed the room.
Elaine settled more comfortably in her chair. Five minutes more to go before the programme would come on. And it would be nice to have the senator join her in watching. She hoped that nothing happened to prevent him joining her. Like that phone call, for instance. She flipped the pages of the magazine. Back of her she heard the mumbled voices of the conversation.
The senator came back.
‘I’ll have to go out for a while,’ he said.
‘You’ll miss Horatio.’
He shook his head. ‘I’ll catch it some other time. That was Ed Winston, down at St Barnabas’.
‘The hospital. Anything wrong?’
‘No one hurt. No one ill. If that is what you mean. But Winston seemed upset. Said he had to see me. Wouldn’t tell me what was going on.’
‘You won’t stay out too long. Get back early if you can. With these hearings, you need sleep.’
‘I’ll do my best.’ he said.
She went to the front door with him, helped him with his cloak, then came back into the living-room.
The hospital, she thought. She didn’t like the sound of it. What could the senator possibly have to do with a hospital? Hospitals made her edgy. She had gone to that very hospital just this afternoon and she hadn’t wanted to, but she was glad she had. That poor guy, she thought, is really in a jam. Not knowing who he is, not knowing what he is.
She went into the dimensino booth and sat down in a chair, the curving screen, glinting in front of her and on either side. She pressed the buttons and turned the dial and the screen began its preliminary flicker.
Strange, she thought, how her mother could get excited about an ancient piece of film – an old flat, two-dimensional entertainment medium that most people had forgotten ever had existed. And the worst of it, she thought wryly, was that people who professed to see something of great value in the old-time things also professed a great contempt for modern entertainment as devoid of all art. In a few hundred years, perhaps, when new entertainment mediums had evolved, the old dimensino would be rediscovered as an ancient art that had not been properly appreciated at the time it flourished.
The screen quit its flickering and she seemed to stand in a downtown street.
A voice said: ‘…no one yet can give an explanation of what happened here less than an hour ago. There are conflicting reports and no two stories absolutely check. The hospital is beginning to calm down now, but for a time there was pandemonium. There are reports that one of the patients is missing, but the reports can’t be confirmed. Most accounts agree that some animal, some say it was a wolf, went raging through the corridors, attacking everyone who stood in its way. One story is that the wolf, if wolf it was, had arms that sprouted from its shoulders. The police, when they arrived, fired at something, spraying the reception room with bullets…’
Elaine caught her breath. St Barnabas! This was St. Barnabas. She had gone there to see Andrew Blake and her father now was on his way there – and what was going on?
She half rose from her chair, then sat down again. There was nothing she could do or should do. The senator would be able to look out for himself; he always had. And whatever had been in the hospital now was gone, or apparently it was. If she waited just a little while, she’d see her father get out of the car and walk up the stairs.
She stood and shivered in the chill wind that was sweeping down the street.
18
The footsteps sounded near, slipping and sliding on the shards of stone that lay outside the cave mouth. A beam of light speared into the cave.
Thinker pulled himself tighter and denser and reduced his field. The field might betray him, he knew, but he could not reduce it much farther, even so, for it was a part of him and he could not exist without it. Especially not here, not at this moment, with the chill of the atmosphere sucking hungrily at his energy.
We must be ourselves, he thought. I, myself, and Quester quester’s self and Changer changer’s self. We cannot be more or less than we are and we cannot change except through the process of long, slow evolution, but in the millennia to come might it not be possible that the three would meld as one, that there would not be three separate minds, but one mind only? And that mind would have emotion, which I do not have, which I can recognize, but cannot understand, and the hard, cold, impersonal logic which is mine, but not my companions’, and the keen sharp sensitivity which is Quester’s, but is neither mine nor Changer’s. Blind chance alone that put the three of us together, that put our minds inside a mass of matter which can be made a body – what were the odds that such a happening could have come about? Blind chance or destiny? What was destiny? Was there destiny? Could there be some great, overriding universal plan and was this happening which had put the three of them together one part of that plan, a necessary step before the plan could reach that remote conclusion towards which it always moved?
The human was crawling closer, the loose rock sliding underneath his feet, his hands clawing at the ground to hold himself against the downhill pull of gravity, the lighted flashlight in one fist bobbing and bouncing so that it threw an erratic arch of light.
He got one elbow over the lip of the cave and hoisted himself upward so that his head was level with the opening.
He gasped and yelled.
‘Hey, Bob, this cave has a funny smell. There’s been something in here. Just a while ago.’
Thinker expanded his field, pushing it outwards violently. It hit the man like a plunging fist. It knocked his elbow loose from the lip of rock and hurled him outwards and away. He twisted and plunged downwards. He screamed once, a shriek of terror pushed out of his lungs. Then his body thumped and slid. Thinker could sense its sliding, taking with it rocks that bounced and clicked, trash wood that slithered and rattled. The slithering and the clicking stopped and from the slope below came the sound of splashing.
Thrashing bodies went plunging down the slope, lights bobbing back and forth, sweeping across brush and shiny tree trunks.
Voices cried out:
‘Bob, something happened to Harry!’
‘Yeah, I heard him yell.’
‘He’s down there in the creek. I heard him hit the water.’
The plunging bodies kept on going past, going down the hill in braking rushes. Half a dozen lights bobbed madly at the bottom of the slope and several of the humans were wading in the stream. From farther off came other shouts.
Something stirred questioningly inside Thinker’s mind.
-Yes, he asked, what is it?
-What do we do now? growled Quester. You heard what he yelled. They’re all excited now, but one of them will remember. There’ll be some of them coming up here. They may start shooting at us.
-I agree, said Changer. They’ll investigate. The man who fell…
-Fell! said Thinker, witheringly. I pushed him.
-All right, then. The man you pushed tipped them off.
He smelled Quester, maybe.
-I don’t stink, said Quester.
-That’s ridiculous, said Thinker. I would suspect all three of us have distinctive body odours. Your body form was there long enough to contaminate the cave.
-It might have been your body odour, said Quester. Don’t forget…