“That’s right,” he said. “That’s the way it works.”
“But you mean just that helped you break in at one school after another when you were young?”
“Just that,” he told her. “If you stop to think of it, it’s the one thing that helps at any age. Strength doesn’t when you’re growing up, because there are always older, bigger, and stronger people to handle. But if you’re fast, you can run rings around and duck away from the older ones. As a matter of fact I was strong, too, for my age. But that didn’t pay off until I was about three-quarters grown. In the early years it was just the reflexes—and the mind.”
“You had a good mind?”
“Yes,” he said, and smiled again. This time without savagery. “I taught myself to read when I was three. That’s the way it was around my father’s house. No matter how big a place we had at the time, there was never enough room for all the books. He was a fast reader himself—those were the days before they began to think of speed-reading as something everybody ought to be able to do—and until I was twelve I couldn’t keep up with him. He got himself new books faster than I could read them.”
“He’s dead now?”
“He and my mother, yes. Plane crash.”
“Oh, no! While you were still young?”
“While I was at the university.”
“Do you look like your father?” she asked. “Or your mother?”
The question surprised him.
“I don’t know—my father, I think people used to say,” he answered. “To tell you the truth, I can’t remember. Want me to try to dig out the old memories?”
She shook her hair back over her shoulders.
“It’s not important.” She looked at him obliquely, almost challengingly. “You can’t always win.”
“No,” he said. “You saw me get knifed. If I get lazy or careless, or let myself get boxed in by too much to handle at any one instant, I can lose like anyone else. But if I stay alert—and most of all, keep looking ahead so that I never let the odds get too great against me—I shouldn’t lose.”
“But you say Thebom Shankar—or anyway, all this talk about the Old Man of the Mountain—is getting to you?”
“That’s right,” he said thoughtfully, and drank from the cooling coffee in his cup. “I picked up a new trick on the way to that place in the mountains. I think maybe I learned something about it from Lucas. It’s a new way of thinking that makes it easier to throw off a broadcast effect—any broadcast effect. It and my dreams and hallucinations tie together, somehow. I don’t know just how, but there’s a connection there. I can feel it.”
Gaby frowned. The summer sun was lost for a minute behind a fast-drifting cloud, and a brief darkness came to chill them as they sat by the fire.
“I don’t follow you,” she said.
“I mean—” He roused himself from some new thoughts that had attracted him. “All these strange things have to fit together because none of them were there before the broadcasts as far as we know. If they fit together, then there’s some kind of purpose deliberately at work—and it could be we’re up against someone who’s also not in the habit of losing.”
“Another winner like you?”
“Possibly worse,” he said. “Maybe a group like me.” He stared into the flickering flames of the small fire. “Though it’s hard to believe. It’s hard to believe”—his tone was thoughtful, his mind half elsewhere—“even in one more like me.”
“Why?” asked the voice of Martin, and looking over, Rafe saw the other man lying still in the bedroll, eyes open and gazing at him.
“Because,” said Rafe slowly, “there’s a polarization here. Call my orientation positive—that is, I’ve spent most of my life helping to push the rest of the world along the way it was going when I came along. The Project and my own part in it, for example. If there were another like me around, with positive orientation, we’d know about him, because he’d be doing the same thing I’ve been doing. That means that if there’s even one other as capable as I am in existence and the world doesn’t know about him, then his orientation ought to be negative—counter to the normal drive of the race.”
“You mean he’d be evil,” said Gaby.
He glanced at her.
“Good and evil are tag words,” he said. “But use them if you want. The point is, we’re opposed. And something else if he exists. I never suspected anyone like him could be. Even now I’m having a hard time believing it. So the chances are he never suspected the existence of somebody like me, either, and he’s having as hard a time believing in it now.”
“Your being on the Project was common knowledge,” said Martin.
“But was what I am actually common knowledge?” Rafe answered him. “Nobody knew that. Forgive me—but nobody knows it even now, not even you two. The only one who could really understand what I am would be someone like me.”
Martin lay there for a long moment looking at him.
“The world,” the Project Head said at last, “is full of men and women right now who’re scared to death of the Old Man of the Mountain. No one’s scared of you, Rafe. I’m sorry; I don’t believe you’re as good as you say you are.”
“I believe,” said Gaby, leaning forward, her eyes fixed on Rafe. “I believe you.”
“Think what you’re saying,” Martin said to her. “You’re agreeing with him that your brother couldn’t be Thebom Shankar because he knew your brother and knows your brother was inferior to him.”
“That could be,” said Gaby. But for a second her voice was uncertain. Then it firmed again. “No, I believe in Rafe. I know there’s evil in the world. If Thebom Shankar is the center point for it, then there has to be a center point of good opposing that. And Rafe’s the only person I’ve seen who could be that.”
Martin looked at her with an expression somewhere between dismay and alarm.
“You keep talking about good and evil,” he said. “You’re drifting right back into the superstitious part of it. Nothing’s ever going to convince me there’s anything supernatural bound up in any of this.” He turned to Rafe. “Rafe, you don’t think anything like that?”
“No. Not in simple terms,” said Rafe. “But you know, historically, there’s always been a war between the two major impulses of man—to go with his society and fellow man, or to go against it and go his own way. You could call the first good and the second evil if you like.”
“There,” said Martin to Gaby, in a tone of relief. “You heard him. ‘Good’ and ‘evil’ are just convenience words to use in thinking about this business.”
“I didn’t say that,” said Rafe. Martin looked sharply back at him.
“We may be up against something that hasn’t been possible to us before because we hadn’t reached the necessary technological level,” said Rafe. “Our technology may just now, finally, have built a stage where the impulses of pure good and pure evil can fight it out.”
“But there’s no such thing!” Martin heaved himself up out of the blankets onto his feet. “No human being’s either pure good or pure evil—”
“There are human beings who’re willing to play the parts,” said Rafe. “There’ve always been some people willing to try being saints or grand masters. There’s always been another group ready to try witchcraft or Satanism.”
“Sick, crippled people, with no real effect on the world around them. The people who played at Satanism and evil, I mean,” said Martin.
“Did you ever hear of Aleister Crowley, the so-called Great Beast?” put in Gaby unexpectedly.
Martin frowned.
“Crowley . . . oh, the man around the beginning of the twentieth century who crucified toads and called himself ‘The Wickedest Man in the World’?” he said. “He died broke and a drug addict, didn’t he?”
“But while he lived, he did affect a number of people in the world immediately around him,” Gaby said. “And he wasn’t unique. I remember Ab said once, ‘There’s always a Crowley in the world, s
omewhere.’”
“Did he?” Rafe asked. “When?”
“When?” She looked puzzled. “I don’t remember exactly. Some months ago. I don’t remember how the subject came up. We were in the lab, though . . . . Wait!”
Her face paled suddenly. She turned to Rafe, almost appealingly.
“He’d just had a phone call—I don’t know who to. You remember my telling you how he admitted talking to the Old Man on the phone one night? You don’t think—”
“When? When did your brother say he’d talked to Shankar?” broke in Martin sharply.
“He didn’t say Shankar, he just agreed when Gaby kidded him about talking to the Old Man,” Rafe answered. “Don’t let your imagination carry you away, Martin. Gaby, don’t worry. Whatever we’re up against, it’s a lot bigger than a Crowley.”
“But why would Ab say something like that?”
“We’ll have to find out. And we will. Meanwhile don’t worry about it.”
“Meanwhile?” Martin echoed.
“For the next couple of days, at least,” said Rafe. He looked back at the aircraft. “In a couple of days I ought to be ready to move. Then we’ll drop you off wherever you want to be dropped, Martin. But Gaby and I, and Lucas, will be getting on to that destination near London we were supposed to be sent to. I’m eager to find out just who’s waiting for us there.”
* * *
11
Martin shook his head.
“No,” he said. “I want to go with you.”
It was three days later, and their aircraft was droning southeastward at fifty feet of altitude above the tops of the scalloped gray waves of the North Atlantic, Rafe having flown the craft as far northward as the Arctic Circle to avoid the regular aircraft routes and come almost down to sea level to get under radar observation. The sun was just setting, and they were less than twenty minutes from the Hebrides and the North Channel to the Irish Sea.
“It won’t do you any good,” Gaby said. “The broadcast’ll be on and it’ll put you out. Whatever we run into there, you’ll sleep through it. Unless they catch us again—and then you’ll get caught, too, without a chance to do anything to help yourself.”
“No,” Martin repeated. “I’m staying with you. I want to settle this thing now, one way or another—no matter what happens.”
“All right, then,” said Rafe, from the controls.
“Besides”—Martin smiled a little—“I might just be useful. I’m still head of the Project— what you yourself called one of the three men who run the world, Rafe.”
“They were ready to kill you along with everyone else, back in that mountain hideaway,” Rafe said.
The slow-descending July sun of these northern latitudes was still an orange line on the horizon as they flew in at last over the west coast of England somewhere close above Blackpool. But Martin already sat slumped in his seat, his eyes closed, his head forward upon lax neck muscles. The power broadcast was on.
Once past the coastline, the interior of the country was almost lightless. If it had not been for the autopilot holding a constant altitude, now of six hundred feet, and for the green-lighted autopilot map on which a crawling red dot showed their position above an area thick with place names, Rafe and Gaby might have felt themselves back above the Canadian north woods at nightfall. To the west the sky was still reddishly light, but below them was only a dark obscurity.
Lucas growled.
Rafe and Gaby, sitting side by side now in the two pilot seats of the craft, turned about to look at Lucas. The wolf sat on the seat next to the unconscious Martin, and his long jaws were slightly parted. They could hear his breathing now, hoarsening on the exhale to near growls.
“What is it, Lucas?” Gaby asked.
“Ab,” said Lucas.
“What about Ab? Are we near Ab now?”
“No. Far. Ab’s angry,” said the wolf. “Ab’s worrying. About you, Gabrielle.”
“About me—”
“Lucas!” Rafe broke in. “Does Ab know where we are? Where Gaby is?”
“No,” growled Lucas. “He doesn’t know. He knows you’re not home any more. So he worries.”
Gaby looked at Rafe, then back at the wolf.
“Lucas,” she said. “You must know where Ab is. Can’t you tell us?”
Lucas’s half-breathed growls ceased. He licked his jaws with a long tongue, then lowered his head slowly, slowly until his nose almost touched Gaby’s bare forearm where it lay along the back of the seat as she sat turned to face him. A whine came from his throat, and he licked at Gaby’s wrist, apologetically.
“No,” he said.
“You don’t know?” Gaby said. “You really don’t know?”
Lucas whined again and his tongue licked at Gaby’s wrist.
“Don’t know,” he said. “Ab’s there for me—not there for you. No use. No use.”
He shoved his nose under Gaby’s hand.
“Never mind . . . never mind.” She stroked the rough hair between his ears. “It’s all right, Lucas. I just had to ask. But it’s all right. Never mind now.”
He licked at her hand again and slowly sat upright once more on the seat. Gaby turned back to the instruments, and Rafe turned back with her. For a long moment as they flew on over darkness she said nothing. Then she spoke.
“Ab must not want me to know.”
“That’s possible,” said Rafe.
She turned sharply to him.
“You think there’s some other possibility?” Her voice challenged him.
“Remember I found my way back to Lucas in the woods?” Rafe asked. “I told you I discovered something new on the way to that place in the mountain. I found I could feel Lucas—with the back part of my mind. The only thing is, to me he felt as if he were right in front of me when he was actually hundreds or thousands of miles away. I asked Lucas if he could feel me the same way. He said he could. I asked him if he could feel Ab, and he said he could. I think he actually can feel Ab, but either Ab’s everywhere at once to him, just like Lucas was to me, or else Lucas hasn’t got what’s needed in that artificial speech center Ab and you gave him, to describe Ab’s location when he feels Ab.”
She stared at him for a long moment. Then she turned about in the seat and reached back once more to stroke the wolf.
“Lucas,” she said gently. “Lucas . . .”
Eyes on the instruments in front of him, Rafe heard even over the engine’s humming the noise of the wolf’s tongue rasping on Gaby’s hand.
“We’re almost there,” Rafe said. “We’d better start getting ready.”
“How far away are we now?” Gaby asked.
“A little under ten miles,” said Rafe. “Actually, sixteen kilometers. I’m guessing that in a part of the world with this much air traffic, they wouldn’t want to risk ground control from more than a minimum distance—but that minimum distance can’t be much less than fifteen kilometers for safety purposes. Dressed and ready?”
“All but my outer clothes.”
She scrambled back over the seat as Rafe locked the autopilot on a small village churchyard some six hundred meters ahead in the darkness below. A moment later, Gaby slid over the back of the pilot’s seat beside him, wearing the black waterproof jacket and slacks of an immersion suit from the same emergency locker of the plane that had supplied hard bread and coffee and blankets back in the Canadian north woods. She handed him a similar suit.
“Dress,” she said. “I’ll watch the autopilot.”
He struggled to pull the suit on over his other clothes. It was not only waterproof but dead black, which would be useful to them on the ground below. A slight jar announced that the craft had set itself down in the churchyard, and in the same second, a white light on the instrument panel gave the same information.
“Give me a hand with Martin,” Rafe said.
Together they got the unconscious man into an immersion suit and out of the plane. They laid him on the grass, with a tall and somewhat leaning head
stone between him and the night breeze, which was damp and cool on their hands and faces after the drier night of the Canadian summer. Rafe stepped back into the craft to set the autopilot for automatic flight, then stepped out again, closing the door behind him.
“All right,” he said to Gaby and Lucas. “We’ve got half an hour to find some transportation.”
It took them almost the full half hour to do it, and they were forced to break open some garage doors and jump the ignition wires of an ancient panel delivery truck—but they were waiting in the vehicle, by the churchyard, when the aircraft once more rose into the night sky and flew eastward at the four-hundred-meter altitude and the crawling, ten-kilometer-per-hour pace for which Rafe had set the autopilot.
Looking up was markedly different from looking down into unrelieved darkness. The black silhouette of the low-flying, slow-moving craft was plainly visible against the clear, star-filled sky in which a quarter moon was now beginning to show. Rafe drove, and Gaby kept her eyes on the craft while he concentrated on the road. Even at that they almost lost their flying quarry twice when its path altered abruptly and it flew away from the road below on which they were following, out across open fields.
The first time this happened Rafe quickly came upon an intersection that allowed him to change the truck’s direction and follow. The second time he merely swung the wheel, tore through a fence that screamed with the protest of wire stretched and broken on the sides of the truck, and followed across a meadow area until he could break through a second fence to pick up a road again.
Finally, a little way before them, they saw the craft halt for a second and then descend vertically behind some trees fronting the narrow road they were now on. Rafe brought the panel truck to a halt.
“On foot from here,” he said.
He and Gaby, with Lucas, left the truck pulled off the road, half in a ditch, and took to the field nearby, making a circle to come up behind the area where the plane had come down. The destination was obviously some large, old house, protected by trees and hedges and also enclosed a fair amount of open ground or lawn. From the back, the protective belt of trees was thicker, but the upper roofs of the house still loomed blackly above them. They came forward to the trees, and encountered a tall lilac hedge, which Rafe went forward to examine cautiously alone. After a second, he came back to Gaby and Lucas.