“I’m a new man, all right,” he said to them.
For the first time since he had met them, Miles saw one of them shake his head. It was the shorter alien.
“No,” said the shorter alien. Neither of them was smiling back. “You’re not a new man. You’re Everyman.”
5
He had been puzzling over the point at which he wished to arrive first on his return to Earth, but at the last minute it proved to be no trouble whatsoever. Like the point of a compass needle drawn toward the magnetic north, he found himself suddenly on the steps of the dormitory where Marie lived. It was night about him. On the street running through the campus the streetlights were lit, and the headlights of cars flickered past through the high shrubbery that shielded the dormitory grounds from the street itself. On each side of the row of glass doors that gave entrance to the building, a tall lamp glowed yellowly. He walked up and through the doors into the lobby.
As he entered, he saw that the lounge beyond the desk was empty. He went to the desk itself. On duty was the same small girl with dark glasses and a pointed face who had been on duty the last time he had called here for Marie. She glanced at him for a second as he came in, then quickly glanced away again, down at her desk below the counter, where some textbooks and a notebook were spread out. She kept her eyes on the textbooks as he came up. He stopped at the counter and leaned over it.
“I know it must be late,” he said. “But this is a sort of emergency. Would you ring Marie Bourtel’s room for me, please?”
She did not answer, and she did not move. He saw her profile, just a couple of feet from him, bent rigidly above an open textbook. There was a faint shine on her forehead as of perspiration—and suddenly he realized that she was following directions. She was ignoring him, even to the point of not looking at him or replying to him when he spoke directly to her.
He sighed, a little heavily. All at once, he seemed to sense the quality of her fear. It came through to him like the faint rapid beating of a bird’s heart, felt as the bird is held in the hand. It occurred to him that he could probably turn and go up the stairs to Marie’s room. Then he had a better thought. He looked at the board of numbers that hung beyond the little clerk, with a hook beneath each number and keys on some of the hooks. Above each hook was a name. He sought out Marie’s name, noted that the hook held no key, and looked for the number below the hook. Marie’s room number jumped at him. It was forty-six. That would mean she was on the fourth floor. Now that he stopped to think of it, he remembered her mentioning she was on the fourth floor.
He concentrated on the hook and closed his eyes for a second. When he opened them, he stood in darkness in a small room. The blind on the single window was drawn nearly all the way. Below it the window had been raised a little, and the white curtains waved sleepily in the soft inrush of cool night air. The girls in the dormitory were normally assigned two to a room, but Marie, as a counselor, had a room to herself. Looking about, he saw her now, a still figure under the covers of the bed in one corner of the room.
He walked softly over toward her and looked down at her sleeping face. She slept on her side, her pale features in profile against the white pillow and her hair spread out behind them upon it. One hand was up on the pillow beside her face.
“Marie,” he said softly.
She did not awaken. He repeated her name a little louder.
This time she stirred. Her hand drew back down under the covers, but her eyes did not open. He reached out one hand to the switch of the bedside lamp on the small table only a foot or so from her face. Then he changed his mind, and his hand drew back. To waken her to the sudden glare of the lamp seemed too much of a shock.
He looked over at the slight rectangle below the shade where the window was open. An inspiration came over him. He thought of the light, the pale light coming in through that opening, as gathering and strengthening in the room, and as he watched, it built up around them. Either that—or his eyes became accustomed to the dimness—he was not quite sure which.
“Marie,” he said, bending over and murmuring directly into her ear.
She stirred again, and this time her eyes blinked and then sleepily opened. For a moment they stared at him without recognition, and then they flew wide.
Her head lifted, and her mouth opened. For a moment he thought that she had not recognized him after alclass="underline" that she had taken him for some intruder and was about to scream. But before he could put his hand over her mouth, fearful eyes filled with the shadow of the darkened room.
“Miles…” she whispered on a long slow breath.
“Marie,” he said. He bent over and kissed her. And her arms went up and around his neck, at first softly and then fiercely holding him. For a moment they clung together, and then he drew back, loosening her arms but holding her hands with his own hands as he sat down on the edge of the bed.
“Marie,” he whispered. “Never mind what you’ve been hearing people on Earth should do. Talk to me.”
“Yes, Miles,” she said, and her mouth curved in a slow, oddly tender smile. “You came here to me,” she said.
“I had to accept, Marie,” he said. “I had to agree to do what they asked.”
“I know,” she murmured, looking at him through the dimness. “Oh, Miles! You came to me!”
“I had to see you first,” Miles said, still holding her hands. “I wanted you to know all about it, before I”—he hesitated—“went ahead.”
She lay looking at him in the faint but pervasive light from the slightly opened window which he had increased.
“What’re you going to do now?” she asked him.
“I don’t know,” he said. “What I’m supposed to do, I guess. Roam around the world and see if I pick up some kind of charge from the people I meet and see.”
Her hands tightened on his.
“How long will you do that?” she asked softly.
“I don’t know,” he answered. “The aliens said I’d know when I was ready. According to them, I don’t think it’s supposed to take too long. They kept talking about the fact that time was precious.”
“Maybe you shouldn’t be here talking with me then,” she said, but her hands held as tightly to him as ever.
“Maybe not,” he echoed. And strangely, once he had said it, the feeling of urgency began to grow inside him, as if somewhere within himself he contained the knowledge that time indeed was precious: the knowledge that he must not waste it, as he was wasting it now.
“I guess I’ve got to go,” he said. He released his fingers from her grip, which held tightly for a second more and then let him go.
“But you’ll come back?” she asked, as he stood up beside the bed. He saw her face, by the trick of the shadow in the room seeming to lie far below him instead of merely an arm’s length away.
“I’ll come back,” he answered.
“I don’t mean before you leave,” she said quickly. “I mean afterward. You’ll come back safely?”
“I’ll come back safely, all right,” he said. And with the words a strange, bright, animallike anger seemed to kindle inside him, a deep, white-hot atavistic fury, a determination that he would come back—in spite of anything.
He bent over and kissed her once more, then released the arms she had locked around his neck and stood erect again.
“Good-bye,” he said and willed himself to be back once more on the sidewalk before the dormitory.
Instantly he was there.
He turned and walked off a little from the light of the entrance into the shadow of the Norway pines lining the driveway. He wondered what to do first. Where to go? With all the world to choose from, he found himself confused by the countless number of places he might visit. Finally, he threw it all from his mind and chose at random. He had never been to Japan. He thought of Tokyo.