Horrified, Cussick said: “He’s pathological.”
“Can you see this?” Kaminski pursued.
“I know it.”
“But you see it? You see an invasion? Destruction? Drifters taking over Earth?”
“Within a year,” Jones stated, “there’ll be drifters landing everywhere. Every day of the week. Ten here, twenty there. Hordes of them. All identical. Mindless hordes of filthy alien beings.”
With an effort, Pearson said: “Sitting next to us in busses, I take it. Wanting to marry our daughters—right?”
Jones must have anticipated the remark; a second before Pearson spoke, the man’s face went chalk-white, and he gripped convulsively at the arms of his chair. Fighting with himself, struggling to keep control, he answered between his teeth: “People aren’t going to stand for it, friend. I can see that. There’s going to be burnings. Those drifters are dry, friend. They burn well. There’s going to be lots of cleaning up to do.”
Kaminski swore softly, furiously. “Let me out of here,” he began saying, to nobody in particular. “I can’t stand it.”
“Take it easy,” Pearson said sharply.
“No, I can’t stand it.” Futilely, Kaminski paced around in a circle. “There’s nothing we can do! We can’t touch him—he really sees these things. He’s safe from us—and he knows it.”
It was early night. Cussick and Pearson stood together in the dark corridor of the top floor of the police offices. A few paces away a dispatch carrier waited, his face bland beneath his steel helmet.
“Well,” Pearson began. He shivered. “This hall is cold. Why don’t you and your wife come over to my place for dinner? We can talk, sit around, discuss things.”
Cussick said: “Thanks, I’d like to. You haven’t met Nina.”
“I understand you were on leave. Honeymoon?”
“Sort of. We’ve got a nice little place in Copenhagen… we had started painting it.”
“How’d you find a place?”
“Nina’s family put their shoulder to the wheel.”
“Your wife’s not in Security, is she?”
“No. Art and idealism.”
“What’s she think about you being a cop?”
“She doesn’t like it. She wonders if it’s necessary. The new tyranny.” Ironically, Cussick added: “After all, absolutists are dying out. In a few more years—“
“Do you think Hitler was a precog?” Pearson asked suddenly.
“Yes, I do. Not as developed as Jones, of course. Dreams, hunches, intuitions. The future was fixed for him, too. And he took long chances. I think Jones will begin taking long chances, too. Now that he’s beginning to understand what he’s here on Earth for.”
In Pearson’s hand was a flat document. Idly, he tapped it against his fingers. “You know what crazy notion entered my mind? I was going down there where they’re holding him, down in that room. I was going to pry open his jaws and drop an A-pellet down his throat. Blow his carcass to fragments. But then I got to thinking.”
“He can’t be killed,” Cussick said.
“He can be killed. But he can’t be taken by surprise. To kill Jones would mean bottling him up from all sides. He’s got a one-year jump on us. He’ll die; he’s mortal. Hitler died, finally. But Hitler slithered away from a lot of bullets and poisons and bombs in his time. It’ll take a closing ring to do it… a room with no doors. And you can tell by the look on his face that there’s still a door.”
He called the dispatch carrier over.
“Deliver this personally. You know where—downramp at 45A. Where they’ve got that skinny dried-up hick.”
The carrier saluted, accepted the document, and trotted briskly off.
“You think he believes all that?” Pearson wondered. “About the drifters?”
“Well never know. He’s got something big, there. Naturally, they’re going to land; they propel themselves randomly, don’t they?”
“As a matter of fact,” Pearson said, “one has landed already.”
“Alive?”
“Dead. Research is working on it. Apparently the secret will stay kept—until the next one.”
“Can they tell anything about it?”
“Quite a bit. It’s a gigantic, single-celled organism using empty space as a culture medium. It drifts, using some land of vague propulsion mechanism. It’s absolutely harmless. It’s an amoeba. It’s twenty feet wide. It’s got some kind of tough rind to keep out the cold. This is no sinister invasion; these poor god damn things just wander mindlessly around.”
“What do they eat?”
“They don’t. They just go on until they die. There’s no feeding mechanism, no digestive process, no excretion, no reproductive apparatus. They’re incomplete.”
“Odd.”
“Apparently, we’ve run into a swarm of them. Sure, they’ve started falling. They’ll hit here and there, burst apart, smack into cars, flatten themselves out in fields. Foul up lakes and streams. They’ll be a pest. They’ll stink and flop. More likely, just lie quietly dying. Baking away in the sun… heat killed this one: baked it to a crisp. And meanwhile, people will have something to think about.”
“Especially when Jones gets started.”
“If it wasn’t Jones, it’d be somebody else. But Jones has that talent, that advantage. He can call the shots.”
“That document was his release papers, wasn’t it?”
“That’s right,” Pearson said. “He’s free. Until we can think up a new law, he’s a free man. To do as he pleases.”
CHAPTER SIX
IN THE TINY, white-gleaming, ascetic police cell, Jones stood swabbing the inside of his mouth with Dr. Sherrif’s Special Throat Tonic. The tonic was bitter and unpleasant. He rolled it from cheek to cheek, held it in the upper portion of his trachea for a moment, and then spat it into the porcelain washbowl.
Without comment, the two uniformed policemen, one at each end of the chamber, watched. Jones paid no attention to them; peering into the mirror over the bowl, he scrupulously combed his hair. Then he rubbed the side of his thumb over his teeth. He wanted to be in shape; in an hour he was going to be involved in important matters.
For a moment he tried to remember what came immediately ahead. The release notice was due, or so he thought. It was so long ago; one whole year had passed and details had blurred. Vaguely, he had memory of a cop entering with something, a paper of some kind. That was it: that was the release. And after that came a speech.
The speech was still clear in his mind; he hadn’t forgotten it. Annoyance came, as he thought about it. Giving the same words again, repeating the same gestures. The old mechanical actions… stale events, dry and dusty, sagging under the smothering blanket of dull age.
And meanwhile, the living wave flashed on.
He was a man with his eyes in the present and his body in the past. Even now, as he stood examining his grubby clothes, smoothing his hair, rubbing his gums, even as he stood here in the antiseptic police cell, his senses were glued tight on another scene, a world that still danced with vitality, a world that hadn’t become stale. Much had happened in the next year. And as he scraped peevishly at his bearded chin, plucking at an old rash, the wave uncovered new moments, new excitements and events.
The wave of the future was washing up incredible shells for him to examine.
Impatiently, he strode to the door of the chamber and peered out. That was what he hated; that was the loathsome thing. The molasses of time: it couldn’t be hurried. On it dragged, with weary, elephantine steps. Nothing could urge it faster: it was monstrous and deaf. Already, he had exhausted the next year; he was totally tired of it. But it was going to take place anyhow. Whether he liked it or not—and he didn’t—he was going to have to relive each inch of it, re-experience in body what he had long ago known in mind.
Such had been happening all his life. The misphasing had always existed. Until he was nine years old, he had imagined that every human being endured duplication of all waking instants. At nine, he had lived out eighteen years. He was exhausted, disgusted, and fatalistic. At nine and a half years, he discovered that he was the only individual so burdened. From then on, his resignation rapidly became raging impatience.
He was born in Colorado, August 11, 1977. The war was still in progress, but it had bypassed the American Middle West. The war had not bypassed Greeley, Colorado; it had never come there. No war could reach into every town, to every living human being. The farm which his family maintained continued almost as usual; a self-sufficient economic unit, it carried on with its stagnant routine, ignorant of and indifferent to the crisis of mankind.
First memories were bizarre. Later, he had attempted to untangle them. The languid foetus had entertained impressions of a notyet world; as he crouched curled up in his mother’s bloated womb, a phantasmagoria, incomprehensible and vivid, had swirled around him. Simultaneously, he had lain in the bright sunshine of a Colorado autumn and dreamed quietly in the black moist sack, the dripping all-provider. He had known birth terror before he was conceived; by the time the embryo was a month old, the trauma was long in the past. The actual event of birth was of no significance to him; as he was swung suspended from the doctor’s fist, he had already been in the world one full year.