WASHINGTON (UP) — A mob early today attacked and killed a man driving a Forever car. The car was smashed.
LONDON (INS) — The government today threw heavy guards around several housing development projects containing a number of the prefabricated houses attributed to mutant manufacture.
"The people who purchased these houses," said an explanation accompanying the order, "purchased them in good faith. They are in no way connected or to be connected with the conspiracy. The guards were ordered to protect these innocent people and their neighbors against any misdirected public violence."
The fourth:
ST. MALO, FRANCE (Reuters) — The body of a man was found hanging from a lamp post at dawn today. A placard with the crude lettering of «Mutant» was pinned to his shirt front.
Vickers let the paper fall from his hand. It made a ragged tent upon the ground.
He stared out across the park. Morning traffic was flowing by on the roadway a block away. A boy came along a walk, bouncing a ball as he walked. A few pigeons circled down through the trees and strutted on the grass, cooing gently.
Normal, he thought. A normal human morning, with people going to work and kids out playing and the pigeons strutting on the grass.
But underneath it a current of savagery. Behind it all, behind the fa‡ade of civilization, the present was crouching in the cave, lying in ambush against the coming of the future. Lying in wait for himself and Ann and Horton Flanders.
Thank God that no one had thought to connect him with the car. Perhaps, later on, someone would. Perhaps someone would remember seeing him get out of the car. Perhaps someone would fasten suspicion upon the man who, of all of them, had not run out of the restaurant and joined the mob around the car.
But for the moment he was safe. How long he would remain safe was another matter.
Now what?
He considered it.
Steal a car and continue his trip?
He didn't know how to steal a car; he would probably bungle
But there was something else — something else that needed doing right away.
He had to get the top.
He had left it in the car and he'd have to get it back.
But why risk his neck to get the top?
It didn't make much sense. Come to think of it, it made no sense at all. Still, he knew that he had to do it.
Crawford's warning about not driving the car hadn't made sense either at the time he read it. He had disregarded it and had felt uneasy about disregarding it, had known, against all logic, that he was wrong in not paying it attention. And in this particular case, at least, logic had been wrong and his feeling — his hunch, his premonition, his intuition, call it what you would
— had been right.
He had wondered, he remembered, if there might not be a certain sense which would outweigh logic and reason, if within his brain a man might not have another faculty, a divining faculty, which would outdate the old tools of logic and of reason. Maybe that was what it was. Maybe that was one of the wild talents that the mutants had.
Maybe that was the sense that told him, without reason, without logic, that he must get back the top.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
THE street had been blocked to traffic and the police were standing by, although there was little need of them, it seemed, for the crowd was orderly. The car lay in the middle of the Street, battered and dented, with its wheels sticking into the air, like a dead cow in a cornfield. Its glass was shattered and strewed about the pavement, crunching under the feet of the milling crowd. Its tires were knocked off and the wheels were bent and people stood around and stared at it.
Vickers mingled with the crowd, moving nearer to the car. The front door, he saw, had somehow been smashed open and was wedged against the pavement and there was just a chance, he told himself, the top might still be there.
If it was, he would have to figure out some way to get it. Maybe he could get down on his knees and pretend that he was simply curious about the instrument panel or the controls. He'd tell his neighbors about how the control panel differed from that of an ordinary car and maybe he could hook in a hand and sneak out the top and hide it under his coat without any of them knowing.
He shuffled about the wreck, gaping at it in what he hoped was an idly curious fashion and he talked a little with his neighbors, the usual banal comments of the onlooker.
He worked his way around until he was beside the door and squatted down and looked inside the car and he couldn't see the top. He stayed there, squatting and looking, craning his neck, and he told his nearest neighbor about the control panel and wondered about the shift, but all the time he was looking for the top.
But there wasn't any top.
He got up again and milled with the crowd, watching the pavement, because the top might have fallen from the car and rolled away from it. Maybe it had rolled into the gutter and was lying there. He searched the gutters, on both sides of the streets, and covered the pavement and there was no top.
So the top was gone — gone before he could try it out, and now he'd never know if it could take him into fairyland.
Twice he had gone into fairyland — once when he was a child and again when he had walked a certain valley with a girl named Kathleen Preston. He had walked with her in an enchanted valley that could have been nothing else but another fairyland and after that he had gone back to see her and had been told that she had gone away and he had turned away from the door and trudged across the porch.
Now wait, he said to himself. _Had_ he actually turned from the door and trudged across the porch?
He tried to remember and, dimly, he saw it all again, the soft-voiced man who had told him that Kathleen was gone and then had said, "But won't you come in, lad. I have something you should see."
He had gone in and stood in the mighty hall, filled with heavy shadow, with its paintings on the wall and the massive stairs winding up to the other stories and the man had said — What had he said?
Or had it ever happened?
Why did an experience like this, an incident that he should have remembered without fail, come back to him after all the years of not knowing, as the lost memory of his boyhood venture into fairyland had come back to him after so long?
And it was true or wasn't it?
There was, he told himself, no way that he could judge He turned away and walked down the street, past the man who leaned against a building and swung his club, at the crowd.
In a vacant lot a group of boys were playing and he to watch them, Once he had played like that; without the time or destiny, with the thought of nothing but happy hours of sunshine and the gurgle of delight that bubbled up with living. Time had been non-existent and purpose was for a moment only, or at the most, an hour. Each day had run on forever and there had been no end to living.
There was one little fellow who sat apart from all the others and he held something in his lap and was turning it around, admiring it, happy in the possession of a wondrous toy.
Suddenly he tossed it in the air and caught it and the sun flashed on its many colors and Vickers, seeing what it was, skipped a breath or two.
It was the missing top!
He left the sidewalk and sauntered across the lot.
The playing boys did not notice him, or rather, they ignored him, after the manner of the playing youngsters for whom the adult does not exist, or is no more than a shadowy personage out of some unreal and unsatisfactory world.
Vickers stood above the boy who held the top.
"Hello, son."
"Hello, yourself."
"What you got?"
"I found it," said the boy.
"It's a pretty thing," said Vickers. "I'd like to buy it from you.
"It ain't for sale."
"I'd pay quite a bit," said Vickers. The boy looked up with interest. "Enough for a new bicycle?"