Jerome recalled the events at the lake, leached-out images on a fuzzy screen. “The gun.”
“That was merely a physical restraint. Others before you have accidentally learned too much about Dorrinian operations on Earth, forcing us to silence them. The method we use is the transference of the personality of a Dorrinian volunteer into the body of the Terran. But, even for a supertelepath, it is difficult to focus a kald lens on one individual at interplanetary distances. Normally it takes several hours, but the process can be compressed into one hour or less if the target kald is immobile in an unpopulated area of Earth. That is why Movik held you so long at gunpoint—he was waiting for the transference to be effected.”
“Unfortunately, he waited too long.”
“When you are ready I want you to tell me exactly what happened to him.”
“Don’t you know?” Jerome said, feeling that he was somehow straying away from a vastly more important point. “Can’t you read my mind?”
“Not really. My telepathic faculties are not very well developed. There is something about another firearm…a duel…”
“We were out on the lake in my rowboat,” Jerome said, still locked in an unnatural calmness while the silent clamour echoed through lower levels of his mind. “A man at the side of the lake shot Pitman with a rifle. He tried to kill me as well, but I…I managed to bring him down.”
An unreadable expression appeared on Conforden’s face. “What did this man look like?”
“Ugly. Mean.” Jerome visualized the pallid face, the pike-mouthed smile. “I couldn’t look him straight in the eye.”
“It was the Prince himself,” Conforden said slowly. “You were lucky to get away with your life.”
“That’s the impression I…” Jerome paused as sluggish connections were finally completed in his mind. “How did I get away? I tried to talk all this out with Pitman. I told him this transference business was no different than murder in my eyes, but he didn’t have time to answer me.”
“It is a reciprocal process,” Conforden said. “When a transfer is completed the Terran and Dorrinian exchange bodies.”
“I should have guessed,” Jerome said resignedly, and when he raised his hands he saw at once that they belonged to a stranger.
CHAPTER 6
The period of adjustment was uneven.
There were times when all Jerome could do was gaze into a mirror and make random movements with his head and limbs. Occasionally the movements would be rapid and unpremeditated, as though the image in the glass might be tricked into making a slow response and thus betray an elaborate practical joke.
His new face stared back at him all the while, preoccupied and solemn. It was a comparatively youthful face, more square of chin than the one he had always known, and with a black stubble of beard which contrasted with his former sparseness of facial hair. The features were regular, if unremarkable, and had he been able to think in such terms he would have felt he had done quite well out of the exchange. It was, he sensed, the kind of face which would have found favour with Anne Kruger—but she was part of another existence and her sexual preferences were now a matter of complete indifference to him.
As the drugs migrated from his system he experienced mood swings, alternating between outrage and passive acceptance of all that had happened. And between spells of drowsiness he tried to recall and assimilate his first long interview with Pirt Sull Conforden. With hindsight he understood that his confrontation with the man from the filling station—the man referred to by the Dorrinians as Prince Belzor—had involved an unseen third party. It had also been even more dangerous than he had realized at the time.
The body Jerome now inhabited had belonged to a Dorrinian supertelepath called Orkra Rell Blamene, who had volunteered to make the transfer which was necessary to silence Jerome. It appeared that the Dorrinians on Mercury had been aware that Pitman was in trouble, but had been left ignorant of the circumstances because of the difficulty of mental communication over interplanetary distances. Mortally wounded, rapidly approaching dissolution, Pitman had been unable to send any kind of warning about what had happened to him. And as a result Blamene had arrived on Earth, had assumed Jerome’s physical form, just in time to be overwhelmed by the awesome powers of the Prince.
“Are you quite certain that’s what happened?” Jerome had asked, while still lost in a chemical fog. “The man I shot looked like he was dying.”
“That particular body was dying, but Prince Belzor cannot be killed so easily,” Conforden had replied. “We know that Blamene survived the transfer by less than a minute. He would have been extremely vulnerable at that point, and it is almost certain that the Prince, needing a new incarnation, simply displaced him.”
Later, with the partial return of acuity, Jerome had brooded on the new levels of meaning invested for him in the term “displaced’. The mundane word now had dark associations. It conjured up visions of the bizarre scene at Parson’s Lake…the alien superman slumped against a tree, incapacitated and hideously wounded…requiring a fresh vehicle for his inhuman personality…fixing that single remaining eye, that evil eye (the evil eye!) upon the fleeing figure of Jerome/Blamene…effortlessly and mercilessly compelling that figure to halt, to stand still, to submit to…displacement.
Having admitted the reality of displacement, Jerome was forced to go further and acknowledge the disquieting idea that his own familiar body now housed an alien being. Millions of kilometres away, back on Earth, there was a man who appeared to be Rayner Jerome, who was possibly living in Rayner Jerome’s house, who was accepted by Rayner Jerome’s colleagues—but who was in fact an interloper from another world. The thought was intensely distasteful to Jerome, filling him with helpless resentment. His body had been a troublesome organic machine, marred by faults and threatening the final breakdown, but it had been his. Displacement was a supremely unnatural event, and Jerome did not have the emotional repertoire to deal with it and all its implications, but he knew that nobody should ever have been violated the way he had been violated. The deed had a sulphurous tang of evil about it, one which was intensified in his drug-shadowed mind by the mystery which surrounded the Dorrinians.
In spite of all he had garnered from Pitman and Conforden, when it came to understanding their racial motivations he felt rather like an ancient Greek pondering on the meaning of lightning flashes over Mount Olympus. The Dorrinians had God-like powers, that much was certain, but was there something genuinely Manichean in the battle they were conducting on Earth? Jerome believed he had rid himself of all traces of religious conviction, and yet his fuddled consciousness insisted on building fantasy edifices out of puns, quasi-facts and wild associations, many of them connected with the satanic figure of the man from the filling station—Prince…Prince of Darkness…Belzor…Beelzebub…helios…heliac…Hell…
He had been told that the surreptitious invasion of Earth, the invasion of privacy, had been going on for more than three millennia. What was the point of it all?
Was it possible that occasional rents in the Dorrinian veil of secrecy had linked them to the terrible spectacle of the fire death and had been the genesis of certain elements in Terran mythologies and religions?
And why were the other members of the Dorrinian race engaged in a deadly struggle with the Prince?