‘You sent me a message. My name is Andrew Blake.’
Wilson leaned back in his chair and stared at him.
‘Well, I’ll be damned,’ he finally said. ‘I never thought I’d see you. I thought you were gone for good.’
Blake shook his head, bewildered.
‘Have you seen the morning paper?’ Wilson asked.
‘No,’ said Blake. ‘I haven’t.’
The man reached for a folded copy that lay on the corner of his desk and flicked it open, facing it towards Blake.
The banner screamed:
IS MAN FROM THE STARS A WEREWOLF?
The read-out said:
HUNT STILL GOES ON FOR BLAKE
Plastered underneath the banner, Blake saw, was a picture of himself.
Blake felt his face freezing, fought to keep it frozen, betraying no expression.
Within his brain he felt Quester stirring frantically.
-No! No! He screamed at Quester. Let me handle this. Quester quieted down.
‘It’s interesting,’ Blake said to Wilson. ‘Thanks for showing me. Have they got around to posting a reward?’
Wilson flicked his wrist to fold the paper, put it back on the corner of his desk.
‘All you have to do,’ said Blake, ‘is dial the phone. The number of the hospital is…’
Wilson raised his hand. ‘It’s no concern of mine,’ he said. ‘I don’t care what you are.’
‘Even if I were a werewolf.’
‘Even if you were,’ said Wilson. ‘You can turn around and leave if that should be your wish and I’ll go back to work. But if you want to stay, there are a couple of questions I am supposed to ask you and if you can answer them…’
‘Questions?’
‘Yes. Just two simple questions.’
Blake hesitated.
‘I am acting,’ Wilson told him, ‘for a client. For a client who died a century and a half ago. This is a matter which has been handed down, generation after generation, within the fabric of this law firm. My great-grandfather was the man who accepted the responsibility of carrying out the request of the client.’
Blake shook his head, trying to shake the fog out of his brain. There was something terribly wrong here. He had known it the moment he had seen the town.
‘All right,’ he said. ‘Go ahead and ask your questions.’
Wilson pulled a desk drawer open, took out two envelopes. One he laid aside, the other one he opened, taking out a sheet of paper that crackled when he unfolded it.
The attorney held the sheet in front of him, squinting closely at it.
‘All right, Mr Blake.’ he said. ‘First question: What was the name of your first grade teacher?’
‘Why, her name was,’ said Blake, ‘her name was…’
He groped blindly for the answer and all at once he had it.
‘Her name was Jones,’ he said. ‘Miss Jones. Ada Jones, I think. It was so long ago.’
But it was, somehow, not so long ago. Even as he said how long ago it was, he suddenly could see her in his mind. Prim, old-maidish, with a fuzzy hairdo and a stern set to her mouth. And she’d worn a purple blouse. How could he have forgotten that purple blouse she wore?
‘OK,’ said Wilson. ‘What did you and Charley Breen do to Deacon Watson’s water melons?’
‘Why,’ said Blake, ‘we – say, how did you find out about that one?’
‘Never mind,’ said Wilson. ‘Just go ahead and answer.’
‘Well,’ said Blake, ‘I guess it was a dirty trick. We both felt badly after we had done it. We never told anyone. Charley stole a hypodermic from his father – his old man was a doctor, I suppose you know.’
‘I don’t know a thing,’ said Wilson.
‘Well, we took this syringe and we had a jar of kerosene and we gave each of the melons a squirt of kerosene. We poked the needle through the rind. Not much, you understand. Just enough so the melons would have a funny taste.’
Wilson laid down the paper and picked up the other envelope.
‘You passed the test,’ he said. ‘I guess that this is yours.’
He handed the envelope to Blake.
Blake took it and saw that there was writing on its face -the words formed in the shaky penmanship of the very old, the ink faded to a faint, dull brown.
The writing said:
To The Man Who Has My Mind
And underneath that line a signature:
Theodore Roberts
Blake’s hand shook and he let it fall straight to his side, still clutching the envelope, and he tried to hold it stiff and straight so it would stop its shaking.
For now he knew – now he knew again, now it was all there, all the things he had forgotten, all the old identities and faces.
‘That is me,’ he said, forcing his stiff lips to move. ‘That was me. Teddy Roberts. I am not Andrew Blake.’
28
He came to the great iron gates, which were locked, went through the postern gate and found the gravel path that went winding up the rise. Below him lay the town of Willow Grove and here, all about him, their places marked by the canted, moss-grown stones, hemmed in by the pines and the ancient fence of iron, lay all those old ones who had been young when he had been a boy.
‘Follow the path to the left,” Wilson had told him. ‘You’ll find the family plot halfway up the hill, just to the right. But Theodore, you know, is not really dead. He’s in the Mind Bank and he’s in you as well. It’s just his body up there. I don’t understand.’
‘Nor do I,’ said Blake, ‘but I feel I have to go.’
And so he’d gone, climbing the steep, rough road, seldom used, to the cemetery gates. And as he climbed the hill he thought that, of all the town, the cemetery looked the most familiar to him. The pine trees, inside the iron fence, were larger and taller than he’d remembered them and, if possible, even in the full light of the day, were darker and more sombre than he had thought they’d be. But the wind, moaning through their heavy needles, played a dirge that came straight out of boyhood memories.
Theodore, the letter had been signed. But it had not been Theodore, rather it was Teddy. Little Teddy Roberts, and later on, still Teddy Roberts, young physicist out of Caltech and MIT, before whom the universe had lain a bright and shining mechanism that cried for understanding. The Theodore would come later – Dr Theodore Roberts, an old and weighty man, with slow step and ponderous voice, and with his hair turned white. And that was a man, Blake told himself, he had never known and would never know. For the mind he carried, the mind that had been impressed upon his synthetic brain, inside his synthetic body, had been the mind of Teddy Roberts.
Now all he needed to do to talk with Teddy Roberts was to pick up a phone and dial the Mind Bank number and identify himself. And then, with a little wait, perhaps, there would be a voice and behind the voice the mind of Theodore Roberts. But not the voice of the man himself, for the voice had been lost in death; nor the mind of Teddy Roberts, but the older, wiser, more steady mind that had grown from the mind of Teddy Roberts. It would do no good, be thought; it would be a stranger talking. Or would it? For it had been Theodore, not Teddy, who had written him the letter, a man writing from his deep old age, the feeble, shaky hand spelling out the greeting and the message.
Could the mind be man? Or was the mind a lonely thing that stood apart from man? How much of man was mind, how much was the body? And how much of humanity did he, himself, represent when he resided as a simple human notion inside of Quester’s body – how much less, perhaps, inside of Thinker’s body? For Thinker was a being from far outside the human concept, a biological engine that converted energy, with senses that did not entirely correspond with the human sense, with a logic-instinct-wisdom that took the place of mind.
Inside the postern gate he halted and stood in the deep shadow of the pines. The air was heavy with the scent of evergreen and the wind was moaning and far up the hill a man was working among the moss-grown slabs of granite, the sun flashing on the tool he used as he laboured in the quietness of the morning light.
The chapel stood beside the gate, the ancient clapboard whiteness of its walls shining in the green shadows of the pines, its steeple stretching upwards, trying, but failing, to match the tallness of the trees. Through the open door, Blake glimpsed the soft glow of lights within.
Walking slowly, Blake went past the chapel and started up the walk. Beneath his feet the gravel grated as it shifted. Halfway up the hill and to the right. And when be got there he’d find the marker that proclaimed quietly to the world that the body of Theodore Roberts lay in the earth beneath.