Vickers shook his head. "I don't really know anything much," he admitted. "I know there's a mutant organization. One that must have started years ago, one that had something to do with kicking the human race out of the rut you talked about that night back in Cliffwood. And the organization has gone underground, back here on the other worlds, because its operations were getting too widespread and too significant to escape attention. You've got factories working, turning out the mutant gadgets you're using to wreck the industry of the old world. I saw one of those. Run by robots. Tell me, do the robots run it or…"
Flanders chuckled. "The robots run it. We just tell them what we want."
"Then there's this business of listening to the stars."
"We've gotten many good ideas that way," said Flanders. "Not all of us can do it. Just some of us, who are natural telepaths. And as I told you that night we talked, not all the ideas are ones that we can use. Sometimes we just get a hint of something and we go on from there."
"And where are you headed? Where do you intend to go?"
"That's one that I can't answer. There are so many new possibilities being added all the time, so many new directions opening out. We're close to many great discoveries. For one thing, immortality. There is one listener…"
"You mean," asked Vickers, "everlasting life?"
"Why not'?"
Of course, thought Vickers, why not? If you had everlasting razor blades and everlasting light bulbs, why not everlasting life? Why not shoot the works?
"And androids?" he asked. "Where would an android like myself fit it? Surely, an android can't be too important."
"We have a job for you," said Flanders. "Crawford is your job."
"What do I do with Crawford?"
"You stop him."
Vickers laughed. "Me? You know what's back of Craw ford?"
"I know what's back of you."
"Tell me," Vickers said.
"Hunch — the highest, most developed hunch ability that ever has been registered in a human being. The highest eve registered and the most unsuspected, the least used of any we have ever known."
"Wait a minute. You're forgetting that I'm not a human being."
"Once you were," said Flanders. "You will be again. Before we took your life…"
"Took my life!"
"The life essence," said Flanders, "the mind, the thoughts and impressions and reactions that made up Jay Vickers — the real Jay Vickers — aged eighteen. Like pouring water from one vessel to another. We poured you from your body into an android body and we've kept and guarded your body against the day we can pour it back again."
Vickers came half out of his chair.
Flanders waved a hand at him. "Sit down. You were going to ask me why."
"And you're going to answer me," said Vickers.
"Certainly I will answer you. When you were eighteen you were not aware of the ability you had. There was no way to make you aware of it. It would have done no good to tell you or to attempt to train you, for you had to grow into it. We figured it would take fifteen years and it took more than twenty and you aren't even yet as aware as you should be."
"But I could have…"
"Yes," said Flanders, "you could have grown aware of it is your own body, except that there is another factor — inherent memory. Your genes carry the inherent memory factor, another mutation that occurs as infrequently as our telepathic listeners. Before Jay Vickers started fathering children we wanted him to be entirely aware of his hunch ability."
Vickers remembered how he had speculated on the possibility of inherent memory, lying on the corn shuck mattress in the loft of Andrews' house. Inherent memory, memory passed on from father to son. His father had known about inherent memory, so he had guessed it, too. He had known about it, or at least he'd remembered it when the time had come for him to know about it, when he was growing — he groped for the word — aware.
"So that is it," said Vickers. "You want me to put the hunch on Crawford and you want to have my children because they will have hunch, too."
Flanders nodded. "I think we understand one another _now_."
"Yes," said Vickers. "I am sure we do. First of all, you want me to stop Crawford. That is quite an order. What if I put a price on it?"
"We have a price," said Flanders. "A most attractive price. I think it will interest you."
"Try me."
"You asked about Kathleen Preston. You asked if there were such a person and I can tell that there is. How old were you when you knew her, by the way?"
"Eighteen."
Flanders nodded idly. "A very fine age to be." He looked at Vickers. "Don't you agree?"
"It seemed so then."
"You were in love with her," said Flanders.
"I was in love with her."
"And she in love with you."
"I think so," Vickers said. "I can't be sure — thinking of it now, I can't be sure, of course. But I think she was."
"You may be assured that she was in love with you."
"You will tell me where she is?"
"No," said Flanders. "I won't."
"But, you…"
"When your job is done, you'll go back to eighteen again."
"And that's the price," said Vickers. "That's the pay I get. To be given back a body that was mine to start with. To be eighteen again."
"It is attractive to you?"
"Yes, I guess so," Vickers said. "But don't you see, Flanders. The dream of eighteen is gone. It has been killed in a forty-year-old android body. It's not just the physical eighteen — it's something else than that. It's the years ahead and the promise of those years and the wild, impractical dreaming of those years and the love that walks beside you in the spring of life."
"Eighteen," said Flanders. "Eighteen and a good chance at immortality and Kathleen Preston, herself seventeen again."
"Kathleen?"
Flanders nodded.
"Just like it was before," said Vickers. "But it won't be the same, Flanders. There is something wrong. Something that has slipped away."
"Just like it was before," insisted Flanders. "As if all these years had never been."
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
So he was a mutant, after all, in the guise of android, and once he had stopped Crawford, he'd be an eighteen-year-old mutant in love with a seventeen-year-old mutant and there was just a possibility that before they died the listener might pin down immortality. And if that were so, then he and Kathleen would walk enchanted valleys forever and forever and they'd have mutant children who would have terrific hunch and all of them would live a life such as the old pagan gods of Earth would look upon with envy.
He threw back the covers and got out of bed and walked to the window. Standing there, he looked down the moonlit enchanted valley where he'd walked that day of long ago and he saw that the valley was an empty place and would stay empty no matter what he did.
He had carried the dream for more than twenty years and now that the dream was coming true, he saw that it was tarnished with all the time between, that there was no going back to that day in 1956, that a man never can go back to a thing he once has left.
You could not wipe out the years of living, you could not pile them neatly in a corner and walk away and leave them. They could be wiped from out your mind and they would be forgotten, but not forever, and the day would come when they'd break through again. And once they'd found you out you'd know that you had lived not one lie, but two.