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Title: The Girl in His Mind
Author: Robert F. Young
Illustrator: Jack Gaughan
John Pederson
Release Date: August 18, 2016 [EBook #52845]
Language: English
*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE GIRL IN HIS MIND ***
Produced by Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online
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THE GIRL IN HIS MIND
By ROBERT F. YOUNG
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Worlds of Tomorrow April 1963
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
Every man's mind is a universe with countless
places in which he can hide--even from himself!
The dance that the chocoletto girl was performing was an expurgated
version of the kylee sex ritual which the Louave maidens of Dubhe 7
practiced on the eve of their betrothal. Expurgated or not, however,
it was still on the lascivious side. The G-string that constituted
the chocoletto girl's entire costume put her but one degree above the
nakedness which the original dance demanded. Nathan Blake's voice was
slightly thick when he summoned the waiter who was hovering in the
shadows at the back of the room. "Is she free?" he asked.
"I do not know, mensakin. Perhaps."
Blake resumed watching. The girl's movements were a delicate blend of
love and lust. Her face accompanied her body, eyes half-lidded one
moment to match the languid motion of her limbs, wide and feral the
next to match the furious bump and grind of her hips. For a chocoletto
she was light-skinned--more bronze, really, than brown. But then,
the word "chocoletto", coined by the early beche-la-mer traders, was
misleading, and few of the natives of Dubhe 4's southern-most continent
lived up to it completely.
She was beautiful too. Her high-cheekboned face was striking--the eyes
dark-brown and wide-apart, the mouth sensuous, the teeth showing in a
vivid white line between the half-parted purple lips. And her body was
splendid. Blake had never seen anyone quite like her.
He beckoned to her when the dance was over and, after slipping into
a white thigh-length tunic, she joined him at his table. She ordered
Martian wine in a liquid voice, and sipped it with a finesse that
belied her cannibalistic forebears. "You wish a night?" she asked.
Blake nodded. "If you are free."
"Three thousand quandoes."
He did not haggle, but counted out the amount and handed it to her. She
slipped the bills into a thigh sheath-purse, told him her hut number
and stood up to leave. "I will meet you there in an hour," she said.
* * * * *
Her hut was as good a place to wait for her as any. After buying a
bottle of native whiskey at the bar, Blake went out into the Dubhe 4
night and made his way through the labyrinthine alleys of the native
sector. In common with all chocoletto huts, Eldoria's was uncared for
on the outside, and gave a false impression of poverty. He expected to
find the usual hanger-on waiting in the anteroom, and looked forward to
booting him out into the alley. Instead he found a young girl--
A human girl.
He paused in the doorway. The girl was sitting cross-legged on a small
mat, a book open on her lap. Xenophon's _Anabasis_. Her hair made him
think of the copper-colored sunrises of Norma 9 and her eyes reminded
him of the blue tarns of Fornax 6. "Come in," she said.
After closing the door, he sat down opposite her on the guest mat.
Behind her, a gaudy arras hid the hut's other room. "You are here to
wait for Eldoria?" she asked.
Blake nodded. "And you?"
She laughed. "I am here because I live here," she said.
He tried to assimilate the information, but could not. Perceiving his
difficulty, the girl went on, "My parents indentured themselves to the
Great Starway Cartel and were assigned to the rubber plantations of
Dubhe 4. They died of yellow-water dysentery before their indenture ran
out, and in accordance with Interstellar Law I was auctioned off along
with the rest of their possessions. Eldoria bought me."
Five years as a roving psycheye had hardened Blake to commercial
colonization practices; nevertheless, he found the present example of
man's inhumanity to man sickening.
"How old are you?" Blake asked.
"Fourteen."
"And what are you going to be when you grow up?"
"Probably I shall be a psychiatrist. Eldoria is sending me to the
mission school now, and afterward she is going to put me through an
institute of higher learning. And when I come of age, she is going to
give me my freedom."
"I see," Blake said. He indicated the book on her lap. "Homework?"
She shook her head. "In addition to my courses at the mission school, I
am studying the humanities."
"Xenophon," Blake said. "And I suppose Plato too."
"And Homer and Virgil and Aeschylus and Euripides and all the rest of
them. When I grow up I shall be a most well-educated person."
"I'm sure you will be," Blake said, looking at the arras.
"My name is Deirdre."
"Nathan," Blake said. "Nathan Blake."
"Eldoria will be arriving soon. I must go and prepare her dais."
* * * * *
She got up, parted the arras, and slipped into the next room. Shame
flamed in Blake's cheeks, and for a moment he considered leaving; then
he remembered Eldoria's dance, and he went right on sitting where he
was.
Presently the girl returned, and not long afterward the cloying scent
of native incense crept beneath the arras and permeated the anteroom.
She sat sideways on the mat this time, and he caught her face in
profile. There was a suggestion of saintliness in the line of the nose
and chin, a suggestion made all the more poignant by the slender column
of the neck. He shifted uncomfortably on the guest mat. She had taken
up the _Anabasis_ again, and silence was pounding silent fists upon the
walls.
He was relieved when Eldoria finally arrived. She ushered him into
the next room immediately. It was slightly larger than the anteroom,
and much more richly appointed. A thick carpet the color of Martian
waterways lay upon the floor, contrasting pleasantly with the golden
tapestries that adorned all four walls. The sleeping dais was oval
and took up nearly half the floor space. It was strewn with scarlet
cushions.
Blake sat down upon it. Nervously he watched Eldoria slip out of her
white street robe, his eyes moving back and forth from her smooth dark
skin to the arras. The incense thickened around him.
She noticed the back-and-forth movement of his eyes. "You need not fear
the little one," she said, laying her hand upon his knee. "She will not
enter."
"It's not that so much," Blake said.
"What?" The warm bronze shoulder was touching his....
He rose up once in the night, thinking to find his hotel bed. His next
awakening was in the grayness of dawn, and he got up and dressed and
moved silently to the doorway. The girl slept just without the arras on
a thin sleeping-mat, and he had to step over her to gain the anteroom.
In sleep, a strand of her copper-colored hair had tumbled down across
her forehead and lay like a lovely flower upon the virginal whiteness
of her skin. There was something saintly about her quiet face.
When he reached the alley he began to run, and he did not stop running
till the chocoletto sector was far behind him.
* * * * *
The hill was a memory-image and Aldebaran 12 rain-country hills were
notoriously steep. Blake was breathing hard when he reached the crest.
Before him lay a memory-image of a section of Deneb 1 wasteland. The
image extended for no more than half a mile, but Blake was annoyed
that he should have remembered even that much of the wretched terrain.
Ideally, a man's mind-country should have been comprised only of the
places and times he wanted to remember. Practically, however, that was
far from being the case.
He glanced back down into the rain-pocked valley that he had just
crossed. The rain and the mist made for poor visibility. He could only
faintly distinguish the three figures of his pursuers. The trio seemed
a little closer now.
Ever since he had first set foot into his mind, some ten hours ago,
they had been on his trail, but for some reason he had been unable
to bring himself to go back and find out who they were and what they
wanted. Hence he was as vexed with himself as he was with them.
After resting for a few minutes, he descended the hill and started
across the Deneb 1 wasteland. It was a remarkably detailed
materialization, and his quarry's footprints stood out clearly in the
duplicated sand.
Sabrina York did not even know the rudiments of the art of throwing
off a mind-tracker. It would have done her but little good if she
had, for twelve years as a psycheye had taught Blake all the tricks.
Probably she had taken it for granted that the mere act of hiding out
in her tracker's mind was in itself a sufficient guarantee of her
safety. After all, she had no way of knowing that he had discovered her
presence.
Mind-country was as temporally inconsecutive as it was topographically
incongruous, so Blake was not surprised when the Deneb 1 wasteland gave
way to an expanse of boyhood meadow. Near the meadow was the house
where Blake had lived at a much later date. In reality, the places were
as far apart in miles as they were in years, but here in the country
of his mind they existed side by side, surrounded by heterogeneous
landscapes from all over the civilized sector of the galaxy and by the
sharply demarcated spectra of a hundred different suns. A few of the
suns were in the patchwork sky--Sirius, for example, and its twinkling
dwarf companion. Most of them, however, were present only in their
remembered radiance. To add to the confusion, scattered night memories
interrupted the hodge-podge horizon with columns of darkness, and here
and there the gray column of a dawn or dusk memory showed.
The house was flanked on one side by a section of a New Earth spaceport
and on the other by an excerpt of an Ex-earth city-block. Behind it
flowed a brief blue stretch of Martian waterway.
Sabrina's footsteps led up to the front door, and the door itself was
ajar. Perhaps she was still inside. Perhaps she was watching him even
now through one of the remembered windows. He scanned them with a
professional eye, but saw no sign of her.
Warily he stepped inside, adjusting the temperature of his all-weather
jacket to the remembered air-conditioning. His father was sitting in
the living room, smoking, and watching 3V. He had no awareness of
Blake. At Blake's entry he went right on smoking and watching as though
the door had neither opened nor closed. He would go right on smoking
and watching till Blake died and the conglomeration of place-times
that constituted Blake's mind-world ceased to be. Ironically, he was
watching nothing. The 3V program that had been in progress at the time
of the unconscious materialization had failed to come through.
* * * * *
The memory was a treasured one--the old man had perished in a 'copter
crash several years ago--and for a long while Blake did not move.
He had never been in his own mind before. Consequently he was more
affected than he might otherwise have been. Finally, stirring himself,
he walked out into the kitchen. On a shelf above the sink stood a gaily
colored box of his mother's favorite detergent with a full-length
drawing of Vera Velvetskin, the company's blond and chic visual symbol,
on the front. His mother was standing before the huge automatic range,
preparing a meal she had served twenty-three years ago. He regarded her
with moist eyes. She had died a dozen years before his father, but the
wound that her death had caused had never healed. He wanted to go up
behind her and touch her shoulder and say, "What's for supper, mom?"
but he knew it would do no good. For her he had no reality, not only
because he was far in her future, but because in his mind-world she was
a mortal and he, a god--a picayune god, perhaps, but a real one.
As he was about to turn away, the name-plate on the range caught his
eye, and thinking that he had read the two words wrong, he stepped
closer so that he could see them more clearly. No, he had made no
mistake: the first word was "Sabrina", and the second was "York".
He stepped back. Odd that a kitchen range should have the same name as
his quarry. But perhaps not unduly so. Giving appliances human names
had been common practice for centuries. Even a name like "Sabrina
York", while certainly not run-of-the-mill, was bound to be duplicated
in real life. Nevertheless a feeling of uneasiness accompanied him when
he left the kitchen and climbed the stairs to the second floor.
He went through each room systematically, but saw no sign of Sabrina
York. He lingered for some time in his own room, wistfully watching his
fifteen-year-old self lolling on the bed with a dog-eared copy of _The
Galaxy Boys and the Secret of the Crab Nebula_, then he stepped back
out into the hall and started to descend the stairs.
At the head of the stairs a narrow window looked out over the front
yard and thence out over the meadow. He glanced absently through the
panes, and came to an abrupt halt. His three pursuers were wading
through the long meadow grass less than a quarter of a mile away--not
close enough as yet for him to be able to make out their faces, but
close enough for him to be able to see that two of them were wearing
dresses and that the third had on a blue skirt and blouse, and a kepi
to match. He gasped. It simply hadn't occurred to him that his pursuers
might be women. To his consternation he discovered that he was even
more loath to go back and accost them than he had been before. He
actually had an impulse to flee.
He controlled it and descended the stairs with exaggerated slowness,
leaving the house by way of the back door. He picked up Sabrina's trail
in the back yard and followed it down to the Martian waterway and
thence along the bank to where the waterway ended and a campus began.
Not the campus of the university which he had visited two days ago to
attend his protegee's graduation. It was not a place-time that he cared
to revisit, nor a moment that he cared to relive, but Sabrina's trail
led straight across the artificially stunted grass toward the little
bench where he and Deirdre Eldoria had come to talk after the ceremony
was over. He had no choice.
* * * * *
The bench stood beneath a towering American elm whose feathery branches
traced green arabesques against the blue June sky. A set of footprints
slightly deeper than its predecessors indicated that Sabrina had
paused by the trunk. Despite himself Blake paused there too. Pain
tightened his throat when he looked at Deirdre's delicate profile
and copper-colored hair, intensified when he lowered his eyes to the
remembered blueness of her graduation dress. The diamond brooch that he
had given her as a graduation present, and which she had proudly pinned
upon her bodice for the whole wide world to see, made him want to
cry. His self-image of two weeks ago shocked him. There were lines on
the face that did not as yet exist, and the brown hair was shot with
streaks of gray that had yet to come into being. Lord, he must have
been feeling old to have pictured himself like that!
Deirdre was speaking. "Yes," she was saying, "at nine o'clock. And I
should very much like for you to come."
Blake Past shook his head. "Proms aren't for parents. You know that
as well as I do. That young man you were talking with a few minutes
ago--he's the one who should take you. He'd give his right arm for the
chance."
"I'll thank you not to imply that you're my father. One would think
from the way you talk that you are centuries old!"
"I'm thirty-eight," Blake Past said, "and while I may not be your
father, I'm certainly old enough to be. That young man--"
A pink flush of anger climbed into Deirdre Eldoria's girlish cheeks.
"What right has _he_ got to take me! Did _he_ scrimp and go without
in order to put me through high school and college? Has _he_ booked
passage for me to New Earth and paid my tuition to Trevor University?"
"Please," Blake Past said, desperation deepening his voice. "You're
only making everything worse. After majoring in Trevorism, you
certainly ought to realize by now that there was nothing noble about my
buying you after Eldoria died. I only did it to ease my conscience--"
"What do _you_ know about conscience?" Deirdre demanded. "Conscience
is a much more complex mechanism than most laymen realize. Guilt
feelings aren't reliable criteria. They can stem from false
causes--from ridiculous things like a person's inability to accept
himself for what he is." Abruptly she dropped the subject. "Don't you
realize, Nate," she went on a little desperately, "that I'm leaving
tomorrow and that we won't see each other again for years and years?"
"I'll come to New Earth to visit you," Blake said. "Venus is only a few
days distant on the new ships."
She stood up. "You won't come--I know you won't." She stamped her foot.
"And you won't come to the prom either. I know that too. I knew it all
along. Sometimes I'm tempted to--" Abruptly she broke off. "Very well
then," she went on, "I'll say good-by now then."
Blake Past stood up too. "No, not yet. I'll walk back to the sorority
house with you."
She tossed her head, but the sadness in her tarn-blue eyes belied her
hauteur. "If you wish," she said.
* * * * *
Blake Present watched them set out side by side toward the remembered
halls of learning that showed in the distance. There had been other
people present on the campus that afternoon, but as they had failed to
register on Blake Past's mind, they did not exist for Blake Present.
All that existed for Blake Present were the diminishing figures of the
girl and the man, and the pain that was constricting his throat.
Wretchedly he turned away. As he did so he saw the three shadows lying
at his feet and knew that his pursuers had at last caught up to him.
His first reaction when he faced them was amazement. His next reaction
was shock. His third was fear.
His amazement resulted from recognition. One of the three women arrayed
before him was Miss Stoddart, his boyhood Sunday-school teacher.
Standing next to her in a familiar blue uniform was Officer Finch,
the police woman who had maintained law and order in the collective
elementary school he had attended. Standing next to Officer Finch was
blond and chic Vera Velvetskin, whose picture he had seen on box after
countless box of his mother's favorite detergent.
His shock resulted from the expressions on the three faces. Neither
Miss Stoddart nor Officer Finch ever particularly liked him, but they
had never particularly disliked him either. This Miss Stoddart and this
Officer Finch disliked him, though. They hated him. They hated him so
much that their hatred had thinned out their faces and darkened their
eyes. More shocking yet, Vera Velvetskin, who had never existed save
in some copywriter's mind, hated him too. In fact, judging from the
greater thinness of her face and the more pronounced darkness of her
eyes, she hated him even more than Miss Stoddart and Officer Finch did.
His fear resulted from the realization that his mind-world contained
phenomena it had no right to contain--not if he was nearly as
well-adjusted as he considered himself to be. The three women standing
before him definitely were not memory-images. They were too vivid, for
one thing. For another, they were aware of him. What were they, then?
And what were they doing in his mind?
He asked the two questions aloud.
Three arms were raised and three forefingers were pointed accusingly at
his chest. Three pairs of eyes burned darkly. "You ask us that?" Miss
Stoddart said. "Callous creature who did a maiden's innocence affront!"
said Officer Finch. "And sought sanctuary in ill-fitting robes of
righteousness!" said Vera Velvetskin. The three faces moved together,
blurred and seemed to blend into one. The three voices were raised in
unison: "You know who we are, Nathan Blake. _You_ know who we are!"
Blake stared at them open-mouthed. Then he turned and fled.
* * * * *
It had taken man a long time to discover that he was a god in his
own right and that he too was capable of creating universes. Trivial
universes, to be sure, when compared with the grandeur and scope of the
objective one, and peopled with ghosts instead of human beings; but
universes nonetheless.
The discovery came about quite by accident. After projecting himself
into a patient's memory one day, a psychologist named Trevor suddenly
found himself clinging to the slope of a traumatically distorted
mountain. His patient was beside him.
The mountain proved to be an unconscious memory-image out of the
patient's boyhood, and its country proved to be the country of the
patient's mind. After many trials and errors, Trevor managed to get
both himself and his patient back to the objective world, and not long
afterward he was able to duplicate the feat on another case.
The next logical step was to enter his own mind, and this he also
succeeded in doing.
It was inevitable that Trevor should write a book about his discovery
and set about founding a new school of psychology. It was equally
inevitable that he should acquire enemies as well as disciples.
However, as the years passed and the new therapy which he devised cured
more and more psychoses, the ranks of his disciples swelled and those
of his enemies shrank. When, shortly before his death, he published a
paper explaining how anyone could enter his or her own mind-world at
will, his niche in the Freudian hall of fame was assured.
The method employed an ability that had been evolving in the human mind
for millennia--the ability to project oneself into a past moment--or,
to use Trevor's term, a past "place-time." Considerable practice was
required before the first transition could be achieved, but once it
was achieved, successive transitions became progressively easier.
Entering another person's mind-world was of course a more difficult
undertaking, and could be achieved only after an intensive study of
a certain moment in that person's past. In order to return to the
objective world, it was necessary in both cases to locate the most
recently materialized place-time and take one step beyond it.
By their very nature, mind-countries were confusing. They existed on
a plane of reality that bore no apparent relationship to the plane
of the so-called objective universe. In fact, so far as was known,
this secondary--or subjective--reality was connected to so-called
true reality only through the awareness of the various creators. In
addition, these countries had no outward shape in the ordinary sense of
the word, and while most countries contained certain parallel images,
these images were subject to the interpretation of the individual
creator. As a result they were seldom identical.
* * * * *
It was inevitable that sooner or later some criminal would hit upon
the idea of hiding out in his own mind-world till the statute of
limitations that applied to his particular crime ran out, and it was
equally inevitable that others should follow suit. Society's answer was
the psyche-police, and the psyche-police hadn't been in action very
long before the first private psycheye appeared.
Blake was one of a long line of such operators.
So far as he knew, the present case represented the first time a
criminal had ever hidden out in the pursuer's mind. It would have been
a superb stratagem indeed if, shortly after her entry, Sabrina York
had not betrayed her presence. For her point of entry she had used
the place-time materialization of the little office Blake had opened
on Ex-earth at the beginning of his career. Unaccountably she had
ransacked it before moving into a co-terminous memory-image.
Even this action wouldn't have given her away, however, if the office
hadn't constituted a sentimental memory. Whenever Blake accepted a case
he invariably thought of the bleak and lonely little room with its
thin-gauge steel desk and battered filing cabinets, and when he had
done so after accepting his case--or was it before? He couldn't quite
remember--the mental picture that had come into his mind had revealed
open drawers, scattered papers and a general air of disarray.
He had suspected the truth immediately, and when he had seen the
woman's handkerchief with the initials "SB" embroidered on it lying
by one of the filing cabinets he had known definitely that his quarry
was hiding out in his mind. Retiring to his bachelor quarters, he had
entered at the same place-time and set off in pursuit.
Her only advantage lost, Sabrina York was now at his mercy. Unless
she discovered his presence and was able to locate his most recently
materialized place-time before he over-took her, her capture was
assured.
Only two things bothered Blake. The little office was far in his past,
and it was unlikely that anyone save the few intimate acquaintances
whom he had told about it were aware that it had ever existed. How,
then, had a total stranger such as Sabrina York learned enough about it
to enable her to use it as a point of entry?
The other thing that bothered him was of a much more urgent nature.
He had been in enough minds and he had read enough on the subject
of Trevorism to know that people were sometimes capable of creating
beings considerably higher on the scale of mind-country evolution
than ordinary memory-ghosts. One woman whom he had apprehended in her
own mind had created a walking-talking Virgin Mary who watched over
her wherever she went. And once, after tracking down an ex-enlisted
man, he had found his quarry holed up in the memory-image of an army
barracks with a ten-star general waiting on him hand and foot. But
these, and other, similar, cases, had to do with mal-adjusted people,
and moreover, the super-image in each instance had been an image that
the person involved had _wanted_ to create. Therefore, even assuming
that Blake was less well-adjusted than he considered himself to be, why
had he created three such malevolent super-images as Miss Stoddart,
Officer Finch, and Vera Velvetskin?
* * * * *
They followed him off the campus into a vicarious memory-image of
Walden Pond, Thoreau's shack, and the encompassing woods. Judging from
the ecstatic "oh's" and "ah's" they kept giving voice to, the place
delighted them. Once, glancing back over his shoulder, he saw them
standing in front of Thoreau's shack, looking at it as though it were a
doll's house. Not far away, Thoreau was sitting in under a tall pine,
gazing up into the branches at a bird that had come through only as a
vague blur of beak and feathers.
Blake went on. Presently the Walden Pond memory-image gave way to a
memory-image of an English park which the ex-Earth government had set
aside as a memorial to the English poets and which had impressed Blake
sufficiently when he had visited it in his youth to have found a place
for itself in the country of his mind. It consisted of reconstructions
of famous dwellings out of the lives of the poets, among them, a
dwelling out of the life of a poet who was not in the strictest sense
of the word English at all--the birthplace of Robert Burns. Oddly
enough, it was Burns's birthplace that had impressed Blake most. Now
the little cottage stood out in much more vivid detail than any of the
other famous dwellings.
Sabrina York must have been attracted to the place, for her footprints
showed that she had turned in at the gate, walked up the little path
and let herself in the door.
They also showed that she had left by the same route, so there was no
reason for Blake to linger. As a matter of fact, the fascination that
had brought the place into being had been replaced by an illogical
repugnance. But repugnance can sometimes be as compelling a force as
fascination, and Blake not only lingered but went inside as well.
He remembered the living room distinctly--the flagstone floor, the huge
grill-fronted hearth, the deeply recessed window, the rack of cups and
platters on the wall; the empty straight-backed chair standing sternly
in a corner, the bare wooden table--
He paused just within the doorway. The chair was no longer empty, the
table no longer bare.
A man sat on the former and a bottle of wine stood on the latter.
Moreover, the room showed signs of having been lived in for a long
time. The floor was covered with tracked-in dirt and the walls were
blackened from smoke. The grill-work of the hearth was begrimed with
grease.
* * * * *
Whatever else he might be the man sitting at the table was not an
image out of the past. He was too vividly real. He was around Blake's
age, and about Blake's height and build. However, he was given to
fat. His paunch contrasted jarringly with Blake's trim waist. His
vaguely familiar face was swollen--probably from the wine he had
drunk--and his too-full cheeks were well on the way to becoming jowls.
His bloodshot eyes were underscored with shadows, and his clothing
consisted of odds and ends out of Blake's past: a tattered, too-tight
pullover with the letter "L" on the front, a pair of ragged red-plaid
hunting breeches and a pair of cracked riding-boots.
Blake advanced across the room and picked up the bottle. One sniff told
him that it came from a memory-image of a Martian wine-cellar. He set
the bottle back down. "Who are you?" he demanded.
The man looked up at him sardonically. "Call me Smith," he said. "If I
told you who I really am, you wouldn't believe me."
"What are you doing in my mind?"
"You should know the answer to that one. You put me here."
Blake stared "Why, I've never even seen you before!"
"Granted," Smith said. "But you used to know me. As a matter of fact,
you and I used to get along together famously." He reached around and
got a cup off the wall-rack. "Pull up a chair and have a drink. I've
been expecting you."
Bewildered, Blake sat but shoved the cup aside. "I don't drink," he
said.
"That's right," Smith said. "Stupid of me to forget." He took a swig
out of the bottle, set it back down. "Let's see, it's been seven years
now. Right?"
"How the devil did you know?"
Smith sighed. "Who should know better than I? Who indeed? But I guess
I can't kick too much. You certainly materialized enough of the stuff
in your--shall we say 'wilder'?--days." He shook his head. "No, I can't
say I've suffered in that respect."
Comprehension came to Blake then. He had heard of the parasites who
lived in other person's minds, but this was the first time he had ever
happened to run across one. "Why, you're nothing but a mind-comber," he
said. "I should have guessed!"
Smith looked hurt. "You do me a grave injustice, friend. A very grave
injustice. And after my being so considerate of this cottage and using
the back door and everything! The young lady who stopped by a little
while ago was much more understanding than you are."
"You talked with her then?" Blake asked. He suppressed a shudder. For
some reason it horrified him that his quarry should be aware that so
despicable a creature inhabited his mind. "What--what does she look
like?"
"_You_ know what she looks like."
"But I don't. I took the case on such short notice that I didn't have a
chance to get a picture or even a description of her."
Smith regarded him shrewdly. "What did she do?"
"She murdered her father," Blake said.
Smith guffawed. "I should have known it would be something like that.
Ties in perfectly. By the way, what's her name?"
"Sabrina York--not that it's any of your business."
"Oh, but it is my business--as much my business as yours. As a matter
of fact, I'm going to help you find her."
Blake stood up. "No, you're not," he said. "You're going to get out of
my mind and you're going to stay out--"
He paused as a knock sounded on the door. Smith answered it, and a
moment later Miss Stoddart, Officer Finch and Vera Velvetskin filed
into the room and arrayed themselves before Blake. Again three arms
were raised; again three forefingers were pointed accusingly at his
chest. "Wretched creature!" said Miss Stoddart. "Consorting with so
foul a fiend!" said Officer Finch. "And in so vile a den of iniquity!"
said Vera Velvetskin.
* * * * *
For a while Smith just stood there staring at the three visitors. Then
he turned toward Blake. "Well, I'll be damned!" he said. "You really
do have an overactive conscience, don't you!" He faced the three women
again. "Get off his back, you creeps! Can't you see he's got enough
troubles without you dogging his footsteps?" He opened the door. "Out,
all of you, before I throw you out!"
Three frightened looks settled on the three thin faces, but neither
Miss Stoddart nor Officer Finch nor Vera Velvetskin made a move in
the direction of the door till Smith advanced upon them with lowering
countenance. Then they fairly scampered from the room. Officer Finch
was the last in line, and Smith helped her along with the toe of one
of Blake's cracked boots. The shriek she emitted coincided with the
slamming of the door.
Smith leaned weakly against the door and began to laugh. "Shut up,"
Blake said, "and tell me who they are!"
Tears were rolling down Smith's blotchy cheeks. "_You_ know who they
are. You created them, didn't you? The skinny one is the one who told
you about Moses in the bulrushes and the husky one is the one who saw
to it that you didn't step out of line in school and the one with the
nice shape is the one you associate with the immaculateness of your
mother's kitchen sink. Spiritual virtue, civil virtue--and physical
virtue!"
"But why did I create them?" Blake demanded. "And why are they
following me around like a bunch of vindictive harpies?"
"There!" Smith said. "You almost had it. Not harpies, though--Furies.
Erinyes. Tisiphone, Megaera, Alecto. You created them because you
wanted to punish yourself. You created them because you can't accept
yourself for what you are. You created them because even after putting
me in exile you're still conscience-crazy, and they're following you
around and bugging you because you want them to follow you around and
bug you--because you want to be reminded of what a heel you think you
are! You always were a Puritan in wolfs clothing, Blake."
The remark angered Blake to the extent that it dispelled his amazement.
He shoved Smith away from the door and opened it. "All that may be,"
he said, "and maybe I did know you once upon a time. But don't let me
find you here when I get back. Understand?" He paused in the doorway,
frowning. "Tell me one more thing, though. Why Burns's birthplace? Why
should a memory-image like this appeal to a mind-comber?"
Smith grinned. "Bobby Burns has always fascinated me--just as he has
you. Or should I say 'us'?" The grin turned into a leer, and he picked
up the bottle and waved it back and forth like a baton--
My love, she's but a lassie yet,
My love, she's but a lassie yet;
We'll let her stand a year or twa,
She'll no be half sae saucy yet;
I rue the day I sought her O!
I rue the day I sought her O!
Wha gets her needs na say he's woo'd,
But he may say he has bought her O.
Furious, Blake strode down the path. Smith's taunting laughter sounding
in his wake.
The three Erinyes were waiting for him at the gate, and fell in behind
him when he turned down the lane. He lost Sabrina's trail in front of
the farmhouse where Coleridge wrote _Kubla Khan_, picked it up again
opposite the Mitre Tavern. Presently it veered right, passed between
Milton's birthplace and Stratford-on-Avon, and entered a night-image.
He was halfway down a dim-lit street, the Erinyes just behind him,
before he realized where he was.
* * * * *
Disciplined trees stood at attention along two suburban strips of
lawn. Beyond them, half-remembered houses showed. One of them stood
out vividly--a round, modernesque affair surrounded by a quarter-acre
of grass and shrubs and flowers. It was the house he had rented while
Deirdre Eldoria was attending high school. It was a house he had hoped
never to see again.
He was seeing it now, though, and he was going to see it at much closer
quarters, for Sabrina's footprints led straight across the remembered
lawn to the very doorstep. She had not gone in, however, he discovered
presently; instead, she had forsaken the door for a concave picture
window through which bright light streamed out onto the grass. The
depth of a pair of her footprints showed that she had stood there for a
long time, peeking into his past. Despite himself, Blake peeked too. So
did the three Erinyes.
The room was a far cry from the one he had just left. The hearth
was built of meticulously mortared red bricks. The thick rug was a
two-dimensional garden of multicolored flowers. There were exquisite
tables and flower-petal stools. There were deep chairs that begged to
be sat in. A sybaritic sofa occupied an entire wall.
On the sofa sat a man and a girl. The man was himself at the age of
thirty-four. The girl was Deirdre Eldoria at the age of seventeen.
Blake Past was helping her with her lessons. The moment was a composite
of a hundred similar scenes. Now she raised her eyes from the book
on her lap, and Blake Past caught her girlish profile ... and Blake
Present, standing in the soft and scented darkness of the remembered
spring night with the three Erinyes breathing down the back of his
neck, caught it too, and both Blakes knew pain. Now she returned
her attention to the book, and Blake Past leaned forward in order
to read the passage that she was in doubt about. And as he did so,
her copper-colored hair touched his cheek and the warm tingle of the
contact traveled down through the years to Blake Present.
Overcome by the poignancy of the moment, he stepped back from the
window, colliding with the three Erinyes as he did so. They moved a
little distance away, arrayed themselves, and started to raise their
right arms. "Oh, can it!" Blake said disgustedly. In the darkness
behind him, someone laughed. "_My love, she's but a lassie yet_," Smith
sang in a cracked baritone. "_We'll let her stand a year or twa,
she'll no be half sae saucy yet!_"
Blake whirled, and flashed his light into the shadows. The light picked
up Smith's retreating figure. "Get out of my mind!" Blake shouted. "Do
you hear me? Get out of my mind!"
Laughter danced in the darkness, silence ensued. Turning back toward
the window, Blake saw that Blake Past and Deirdre Yesterday were
leaving the living room. He watched them come out the front door, walk
around the corner of the house and start down a starlit garden path.
Forsaking Sabrina's trail, he followed them along the path, the Erinyes
at his heels, and watched them sit down on a little white bench beside
a rose-riotous trellis. As he watched, Blake Past broke one of the
roses free and pinned it in Deirdre's cupreous hair.
Blake Present plunged away from the moment and picked up Sabrina's
trail again. _Why did I sit there beside her?_ he demanded silently
of the remembered stars. _Sit there beside her like her lover when
the roses were in bloom? Father-protector--father-fool! I slept with
her mistress, and I would have been her Naoise! Within earshot of her
conched ear I lay with her black whore-mother, and when the satyr in me
was replete I stepped over her thin child's body and ran away!_
Behind him in the night, the Erinyes hissed and murmured to each other
gloatingly.
* * * * *
Sabrina's trail had been erratic before. Now it became even more so.
It approached this boundary and that, only to veer off in another
direction. Sometimes it doubled back upon itself, and each time
Blake was able to cut down on her lead. He should have been elated.
Strangely, however, he was not. Instead, a feeling of uneasiness
afflicted him, increasing as the distance between them shrank.
At length, after detouring around an impassable memory-image of deep
space, the trail extended into what at first appeared to be a vast
woodland park. It was not a park, though. It was a Dubhe 4 rubber
plantation. Blake groaned. Did he have to relive this sequence too?
Apparently he did. Sabrina's footprints were deep and undeniable in
the soft earth. They pointed unerringly in the remembered direction.
Had she discovered that he was following her? Was she deliberately
torturing him by making him back-track along a mental trail that he
wanted desperately to avoid? It would certainly seem so.
He forced himself to move forward among the gray ghosts of trees. He
crossed a shallow, scum-covered stream, leaping from rock to rock, and
afterward climbed a hill. Hearing a loud splash behind him, he turned
and looked back.
Miss Stoddart, in trying to cross the stream, had lost her balance
and fallen in, and Officer Finch and Vera Velvetskin were trying to
help her to her feet. As he watched, they too lost their balance and
joined their companion in the greenish water. There followed a period
of hysterical floundering, after which the trio waded dripping and
bedraggled to the bank.
Blake would have laughed, had not the place-time oppressed him.
Descending the opposite slope of the hill, he entered a wide valley.
Presently he glimpsed the buildings of the Great Starway Cartel
processing plant through the trees.
The overseer's bungalow was visible just to the left, and it was toward
this latter structure that Sabrina's footprints pointed. The original
clearing had swarmed with chocolettos. Blake's, however, did not. In
his single-mindedness of six years ago he had had eyes for only two
people--the overseer and Deirdre.
Stepping into the clearing, he saw the man now--the bearded bestial
face, the long arms, the large and hairy hands--and he saw the
fifteen-year old girl lying on the ground where the man had thrown her
after she had slapped his face. After a moment he saw himself of six
years ago step out of the grove of rubber trees and advance white-faced
into the scene.
"No!" the girl lying on the ground cried. "He'll kill you!"
Blake Past ignored her. The overseer had drawn a knife. Now the knife
flashed, and a streak of crimson appeared on Blake Past's arm. The
knife flashed again, but this time it described a large arc and landed
a dozen feet away. Now the overseer's throat was between Blake Past's
hands, and the bearded face was changing colors. It grew green first,
then blue. Blake Past shook the man several times before letting him
slip to the ground. He dropped a handful of _quandoe_-notes on the
heaving chest.
"That's what you paid for her," he said. He withdrew a paper from his
breast pocket, unfolded it and held it before the gasping overseer's
eyes. "Sign it," he said, handing it to him.
* * * * *
The overseer did so, lying on his side. Blake Past pocketed the paper
and helped the girl to her feet. The tarn-blue eyes were wide in the
thin child's face. "Eldoria died," she blurted. "They--"
Blake Past nodded. "I know. But they can't sell you any more. I own you
now."
"I am glad," the girl said. "I knew from the first moment I saw you
that you were noble. I shall like being your slave, and I will serve
you very faithfully."
Blake Past looked away. Blake Present lowered his eyes. "Can you walk?"
Blake Past asked.
"Oh, yes. I am very strong."
She took a step forward, swayed and would have fallen, had not Blake
Past caught her. "I--I guess I am not quite as strong as I thought,"
she said. "But I shall recuperate swiftly. Why did you come back,
_mensakin_ Blake?"
"I came back to buy you from Eldoria," Blake Past said. He did not add
that the memory of her saintly face as he had seen it when he stepped
over her had lasted a whole year, or that his dreams of her had made a
mockery of his sleep. "When I found out that Eldoria had died and that
you had been sold again, I came directly here."
"You will not be sorry. I will make you an excellent slave."
"I didn't buy you for that reason. I bought you to give you your--"
"There is one request I would like to make, however," the girl
interrupted. "I would like to take 'Eldoria' as my surname. She was
very kind to me, and I would like to repay her in some way."
"Very well," Blake Past said. "'Deirdre Eldoria' it will be, then."
He picked her up and carried her into the grove. Blake Present watched
them till they disappeared among the trees. He knew where Blake Past
was taking her--had taken her. Back to the settlement, and from there
to the spaceport, and thence to Ex-earth. Ex-earth and high school,
then college--
She had never been his slave, though. He had been hers.
* * * * *
Sabrina's trail circled back into the grove and left the place-time by
a different route. Immediately it became erratic again. It was evident
to Blake that she was searching for a particular memory-image and that
she was having trouble finding it. Perhaps she knew of some moment in
his past where she would be safe even from him.
When he stepped into the little Dubhe 4 settlement he instinctively
assumed that it was on the same chronological plane as the plantation
place-time. However, the darkness that instantly enclosed him and the
stars that sprang to life in the sky apprised him that such could not
possibly be the case. This was the Dubhe 4 settlement of seven years
ago. This was the night he had sat in the chocoletto cafe and watched
Eldoria dance--the night he had kept a tryst with her in her hut; the
night he had first seen Deirdre.
But why had Sabrina come here? Where in this wretched little
memory-image did she expect to find sanctuary?
Suddenly he knew. Eldoria's hut. He would rather die than enter it
again, and somehow Sabrina must have discovered his attitude. Probably
even now she was within those four remembered walls, laughing at him.
Anger kindled in him. The effrontery of her! Daring to pre-empt a
moment that belonged solely to him! He would enter the hut if it killed
him. If he had to, he would tear down its walls and banish its memory
forever from the country of his mind.
With the aid of his pocket torch, he found her footprints in the dust.
He followed them down the street, the three Erinyes tagging doggedly
along behind him. The trail, erratic no longer, led straight to the
labyrinthine alleys of the native sector and thence along the shortest
route to Eldoria's hut. For a person who had never been to Dubhe 4,
Sabrina York certainly knew her way around.
Maybe, though, she had been to Dubhe 4. He knew very little about her.
He knew nothing at all, in fact, save that she had murdered her father.
He did not even know how she had murdered him, or why. Abruptly Blake
shoved the matter from his mind. It wasn't his business to know how or
why she had done the deed. It was his business to find and apprehend
her.
Presently, in the darkness before him, he made out a motionless
white-robed figure. He approached it warily, found to his consternation
that it was frozen in the act of taking a step forward. He shone his
light into the face. It was dark bronze in hue. The eyes were wide
apart, and the teeth showed in a vivid white line between half-parted
purple lips. Eldoria, on her way to keep her tryst with him....
But why didn't she move on? Suddenly Blake knew. In treating a patient,
Trevorite psychologists sometimes froze certain place-times in his past
in order to study them in greater detail. The girl in Blake's mind had
either frozen the Dubhe 4 place-time herself, then, or had hired a
professional to do the job.
Clearly she had something up her sleeve about which Blake knew nothing.
He went on, not quite so confidently now. He had proceeded less than a
dozen steps when he saw the brooch. It was lying in the dust just to
the left of one of Sabrina's footprints, and it threw back the light
of the torch in glittering shards that hurt his eyes. Disbelievingly,
he picked it up. The Erinyes clustered around him to see what he had
found. They were still wet and dishelved and reeked of the piercing
odor of decayed algae. They looked anything but happy.
Blake turned the brooch over in the palm of his hand. The inscription
on the back leaped up and smote him right between the eyes, and he
staggered and nearly fell. _To Deirdre Eldoria_, he read, _from Nathan
Blake._
He stood there numbly for a long while, not thinking--unable to think.
Finally he slipped the brooch into his pocket and moved on.
* * * * *
He was trembling when he reached the door of Eldoria's hut. The
footprints led straight up to the threshold and came to an end.
Diffidently he touched the primitive knob, turned it and pushed the
door open. He stepped inside and closed the door in the faces of the
three Erinyes. The remembered anteroom seemed smaller and more sordid
than the original, but he knew that it was really no different. He had
remembered it accurately enough. It was he who was different, not the
room.
Opposite the door, Deirdre Yesterday sat immobile before the arras.
Equally immobile, Blake Past sat facing her. Deirdre Yesterday's lips
were parted in the midst of uttering a soundless word. The _Anabasis_
lay open on her lap.
Blake Present found it difficult to breathe. The difficulty stemmed
from a physical as well as an emotional source. Someone was burning
incense.
He wiped his forehead. Then, bracing himself, he walked over to the
arras, parted it and stepped into the inner room.
The inner room was empty.
A small notebook lay upon the dais among the scattered scarlet
cushions. Near it was a faint depression in the foamy coverlet. Blake
picked up the notebook. The first page contained a hastily written
message:
_Nate dearest, I've lost my nerve, and by the time you read this I
shall have run away. Please forgive me for disobeying you. I wanted
desperately to fulfill your wishes by going to New Earth and
attending Trevor University, and now I shall, because sitting here
in this little room I have faced at last the very real possibility
that you really do not love me. I had hoped that by entering your
mind and leading you back through our moments together to the
moment when we met and by freezing that moment and letting you find
me in this room, you would be shocked into associating me with
Eldoria rather than with the naive little girl sitting outside the
arras--with sex, rather than with saintliness; that I could bring
you to understand that the little-girl image you have of me is as
unrealistic as the father-image you have of yourself. But the
passing moments have made me realize that all this while I have
been deluding myself with false hopes and that I am merely
hopelessly in love with a man who does not regard me as a woman at
all, who--_
* * * * *
Here the message broke off as abruptly as it had begun. There was a
mist before Blake's eyes, and he could not swallow. He bent down and
felt the depression in the coverlet. It was still warm. There had been
no footprints leading _away_ from the hut, he remembered.
Straightening, he surveyed the golden tapestries that adorned the
room's four walls. It was not at all difficult to pick out the one
behind which she was standing. It was difficult, though, to go over and
raise it. Her face was pale, and the khaki hiking suit she was wearing
made it seem all the more so. She stepped out of her hiding place, and
he let the tapestry fall into place behind her.
She would not meet his eyes. "In another moment I would have been
gone," she said. "Oh, Nate, why did you come so soon!"
Suddenly the arras parted, and Smith stepped into the room. Without
pausing, he advanced across the resilient carpet, shoved Blake aside
and took Deirdre into his arms. He grasped her hair, pulled her head
back and bent his evil face toward hers.
Outraged, Blake seized the man's shoulder, spun him around and struck
him in the mouth. Instantly his own mouth went numb, and he tasted
blood.
He knew who Smith was then.
Glancing into Deirdre's eyes, he saw that she knew too, and realized
that she had known all along.
He had read of the personality-splits that sometimes occurred when
there was an acute conflict between the Puritan and satyr, or the good
and evil, components of the psyche. But never having previously run
across a real-life example he had failed to tumble to the truth when he
had entered Burns's birthplace cottage and seen Smith sitting at the
table.
When such splits occurred, the stronger component took over completely
and the weaker component was exiled to the country of the mind. In
Blake's case, the Puritan component had been the stronger, and the
satyr component the weaker. Hence the latter had had to go. Smith,
therefore, was but another aspect of himself--a flesh-and-blood alter
ego who was overplaying his role in an attempt to force Blake into a
response that would make the two of them one again.
Knowing who Smith was supplied Blake with the answer to who Sabrina
York was.
Unconsciously he had been aware all along of Smith's presence in the
English park image. When he discovered that Deirdre had entered his
mind he had been so utterly horrified over the prospect of her running
into his depraved alter ego that he had unconsciously concealed her
presence from himself by supplying her with a fictitious identity. She
had deliberately ransacked the little office and left her handkerchief
behind in the process in order to apprise him of her whereabouts and to
induce him to follow her, but he had rejected the initials "D. E." on
her handkerchief and substituted the initials of the first name that
came into his mind--Sabrina York. Next he had needed a logical reason
to go after her and bring her back. His profession had supplied part of
it, and his father-complex had supplied the other.
In entering his mind instead of going to New Earth, Deirdre had
disobeyed him and thus, after a fashion, had symbolically destroyed
him. Hence "Sabrina York" had become the murderer of her father, and
Blake had set out in pursuit of her in his capacity as a psycheye.
Deirdre had been careful to leave a clear trail, and the reason she had
dropped her brooch was to assure him that he was on the right track.
Smith was wiping his mouth and grinning at the same time. Now he
advanced upon the girl again. Twenty years fell from Blake's shoulders
as he shoved the man aside. The column of Deirdre's neck was strong and
shapely. Her breasts were in full and virginal bloom. _Who is she that
looketh forth as the morning, fair as the moon, clear as the sun, and
terrible as an army with banners?_ Hungrily Blake took her in his arms.
When, a long time later, he released her, Smith had disappeared.
* * * * *
The three Erinyes were standing forlornly in the street when Blake and
Deirdre left the hut. The hatred had vanished from their faces and they
were looking at each other as though they had just lost their last
friend. Certainly they had lost their _raison d'etre_. Blake sighed.
Having created them, he was responsible for their welfare. Now that
they were unemployed it was up to him to do something about it.
Deirdre was regarding them with wide eyes. "Eumenides yet!" she gasped.
"Oh, Nate, if you aren't the darndest!"
Blushing, Blake took her arm and beckoned to the Erinyes to follow
him. He led the way cross-country to the Walden Pond image. Thoreau
was still sitting under the tall pine, gazing raptly up at the blurred
bird. The sunlight was warm and benign. Blake almost wished he could
remain there himself. He had always been partial to Walden Pond.
He faced the three Erinyes.
He left them planning their new way of life.
Being human, he would probably have need of them again.
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