“What trial?” Jones commented brutally. “Three days from now you’re going to release me.” Thin face twitching, his voice cold and bleak, he continued thoughtfully, “From now on you’re going to be telling a certain parable. I’ll tell it, now; pay attention. An Irishman hears that the banks are failing. He runs into the bank where he keeps his money and demands every cent of it. ‘Yes sir,’ the teller says politely. ‘Do you want it in cash or in the form of a check?” The Irishman replies: “Well, if you have it, I don’t want it. But if you haven’t got it, I must have it immediately.’”
There was an uncomfortable silence. Pearson looked puzzled; he glanced at Cussick. “Am I going to tell that?” he asked doubtfully. “What’s it mean?”
“It means,” Cussick said, “that nobody’s fooling anybody.”
Jones smiled in appreciation.
“Am I to infer,” Pearson said, his face turning dark and ugly, “that you think we can’t do anything to you?”
“I don’t think,” Jones answered smugly. “I don’t have to. That’s the point. Do you want my prophecies in cash or in the form of a check? Take your choice.”
Thoroughly bewildered, Pearson moved away. “I can’t understand him,” he muttered. “He’s a crackpot; he’s out of his mind.”
“No,” Senior Political Instructor Kaminski said. He had been standing nearby, intently listening. “You’re an odd person, Jones,” he said to the bony-shanked man standing nervously by the chair. “What I can’t understand is this. With your ability, why were you fooling around in that carnival? Why were you wasting your time?”
Jones’ answer surprised them all. Its candor, its naked honesty, was a shock. “Because I’m scared,” he said. “I don’t know what to do. And the awful part is—“ He swallowed noisily. “I don’t have any choice.”
CHAPTER FIVE
IN KAMINSKI’S office the four of them sat around the desk, smoking, and dully hearing the distant mutter of police guns on their way to the staging area.
“To me,” Jones said hoarsely, “this is the past. Right now, with you three, here in this building, this is a year ago. It’s not so much like I can see the future; it’s more that I’ve got one foot stuck in the past. I can’t shake it loose. I’m retarded; I’m reliving one year of my life forever.” He shuddered. “Over and over again. Everything I do, everything I say, hear, experience, I have to grind over twice.” He raised his voice, sharp and anguished, without hope. “I’m living the same life two times!”
“In other words,” Cussick said slowly, “for you, the future is static. Knowing about it doesn’t make it possible for you to change it.”
Jones laughed icily. “Change it? It’s totally fixed. It’s more fixed, more permanent, than this wall.” Furiously, he slammed his open palm against the wall behind him. “You think I’ve some kind of emancipation. Don’t kid yourself… the less you know about the future the better off you are. You’ve got a nice illusion; you think you have free will.”
“But not you.”
“No,” Jones agreed bitterly. “I’m trudging along the steps I trudged a year ago. I can’t alter a single one of them. This conversation—I know it by heart. Nothing new can come into it; nothing can be left out.”
After a moment Pearson spoke up. “When I was a kid,” he reflected, “I used to go to movies twice. The second time, it gave me an advantage over the rest of the audience… I liked it. I could holler out the dialogue a split second before the actors. It gave me a sense of power.”
“Sure,” Jones agreed. “When I was a kid I liked it, too. But I’m not a kid any more. I want to live like everybody else—an ordinary life. I didn’t ask for this; it wasn’t my idea.”
“It’s a valuable talent,” Kaminski said shrewdly. “As Pearson says, a man who can shout out the dialogue a split second ahead of time has real power. He’s a whole notch above the rest of the crowd.”
“The thing I remember,” Pearson said, “is the contempt I felt for all the rapt faces. The fools—staring, simpering, giggling, being afraid, believing in it, wondering how it would come out. And I knew. It made me disgusted. That’s partly why I shouted it out.”
Jones didn’t comment. Brooding, he sat hunched over in his chair, eyes fixed on the floor.
“How would you like a job?” Kaminski inquired dryly. “Senior Political Instructor to the Senior Political Instructor.”
“No thanks.”
“You could be a lot of help,” Pearson pointed out. “You could aid reconstruction. You could help us unify ourselves and our resources. You could make an important difference.”
Jones shot him an exasperated glare. “There’s only one issue of importance. This reconstruction—“ He waved his thin, bony hand impatiently. “You’re wasting your time… it’s the drifters that matter.”
“Why?” Cussick demanded.
“Because there’s a whole universe! You spend your time rebuilding this planet—my God, we could have a million planets. New planets, untouched planets. Systems of them. Endless resources… and you sit around trying to re-melt old scrap. Pack rats, misers, hoarding and fingering your miserable pile.” Disgusted, he turned away. “We’re over-populated. We’re under-nourished. One more habitable world would solve all that.”
“Like Mars?” Cussick inquired softly. “Like Venus? Dead, empty, hostile worlds.”
“I don’t mean those.”
“What do you mean, then? We’ve got scouts crawling all around the system. Show us one place we can live.”
“Not here.” Angrily, Jones dismissed the solar system. “I mean out there. Centaurus. Or Sirius. Any of them.”
“Are they necessarily any better?”
“Intersystem colonization is possible,” Jones answered, “Why do you think the drifters are here? It’s obvious—they’re settling. They’re doing what we should be doing: they’re out searching for habitable planets. They may have come millions of light years.”
“Your answer isn’t good enough,” Kaminski pronounced.
“It’s good enough for me,” Jones said.
“I know.” Kaminski nodded, troubled. “That’s what worries me.”
Curiously, Pearson asked: “Do you know anything more about the drifters? Who shows up in the next year?”
Across Jones’ face settled a stark, impassioned glaze. “That’s why I’m a minister,” he said harshly.
The three secret-servicemen waited, but there was nothing more. Drifters was a key word with Jones; visibly, the word triggered off something deep and basic inside him. Something that made his gaunt face writhe. A core of blazing fervor had floated to the surface.
“You don’t particularly like them,” Cussick observed.
“Like them?” Jones looked ready to explode. “Drifters? Alien life-forms coming here, settling on our planets?” His voice rose to a shrill, hysterical screech. “Can’t you see what’s happening? How long do you think they’ll leave us alone? Eight dead worlds—nothing but rock. And Earth: the only useful one. Don’t you see? They’re preparing to attack us; they’re using Mars and Venus as bases. It’s Earth they’re after; who’d want those empty wastes?”
“Maybe they do,” Pearson suggested uneasily. “As you said, they’re alien life forms. Maybe to them Earth is nothing. Maybe they need totally different living-conditions.”
Eying Jones intently, Kaminski said: “Every life form has its own typical needs… what’s a ruined waste to us is a fertile valley to something else. Isn’t that so?”
“Earth is the only fertile planet,” Jones repeated, with absolute conviction. “They want Earth. That’s what they’re here for.”
Silence.
So that was it. There it stood, the terrifying specter they all dreaded. This was what they existed to destroy; this was what they had been set up to catch—before it was too big to catch. It stood before them; sat, rather. Jones had again seated himself; now he sat smoking jerkily, thin face distorted, a dark vein in his forehead pulsing. Behind his glasses his furiously-bright eyes had filmed over, cloudy with passion. Tangled hair, ragged black beard, a rumpled man with elongated arms, skinny legs… a man with infinite power. A man with infinite hatred.
“You really hate them,” Cussick said wonderingly.
Mutely, Jones nodded.
“But you don’t know anything about them, do you?”
“They’re there,” Jones said brittlely. “They’re all around us. Encircling us. Closing in. Can’t you see their plans? Coming across space, century after century… working out their schemes, landing first on Pluto, on Mercury, coming closer all the time. Nearer to the prize: setting up bases for attack.”
“Attack,” Kaminski repeated softly, cunningly. “You know this? You have proof? Or is this just a wild idea?”
“Six months from this date,” Jones stated, his voice pinched and metallic, “the first drifter will land on Earth.”
“Our scouts have landed on all the planets,” Kaminski pointed out, but his silky assurance was gone. “Does that mean we’re invading them?”
“We’re there,” Jones said, “because those planets are ours. We’re looking them over.” Raising his eyes, he finished: “And that’s what the drifters are doing. They’re looking over Earth. Right now, they’re looking us over. Can’t you feel their eyes on us? Filthy, loathsome, alien, insect eyes…”