Jake Ingram set his jaw. “No, lady — I made a promise and I’m sticking to it. Go pack up. I’ll wait.” He didn’t like the way the girl looked.
“Oh, come now, officer!” Quinn French said. “Don’t be dull about this.”
“I made a promise,” Jake said.
He was standing up as he said it. And all of a sudden he was sitting down, peering through his own windshield, the speedometer needle on sixty-five, the Port Isabelle lighthouse not far ahead.
The car swerved dangerously and he brought it under control and parked on the shoulder of the road. He had a bad case of the shakes and his head hurt. Once he had blacked out years before on Mexican tequila. But even then there were disordered impressions in his mind that he couldn’t quite sort out. But this had been a clean-cut thing, frightening in its completeness.
He lit a cigarette with shaking fingers. For a moment he was firm in his resolve to turn around and head back there.
No, better think the sun had done it. For if they had done it somehow the most obvious thing in the world would be their ability to do it again. If they could make a man drive his own car they could make him pull his own gun and blow the top of his own head off.
He shrugged. The little lady had told him to go back and leave her there.
The bottle in the glove compartment was hot to the touch and the whisky was so warm as to be nauseous. But he choked down three hefty swallows. It make him feel better — but not good. His pride and his confidence had come always from his strong body and stubborn mind. He could trust in them. He wondered if he would ever feel really good, really confident again.
He badly needed an excuse to pistol-whip somebody.
Quinn and Jerry dragged a table out into the shade of the house and they ate there. Martha had no hunger. She studied Fran across the table from her with the strange idea that there was something subtly wrong. Everything had gone wrong.
She was afraid. And for the first time she began to wonder if she were losing her mind.
The woman across the table could not possibly be the drooling, chattering thing from the moonlight beach. Could not possibly be — yet if she was there was something wrong in the head of Martha Kaynan.
She looked at Fran’s hands and at her face, at the pattern of freckles the sun had brought out. She looked for the freckle on the left cheek — the one she had noticed the day before — the one shaped oddly like an hour glass.
Her fork clattered on the edge of the dish. “You’re not Fran Raymond!” Martha whispered aloud. “Thank God you’re not! Because if you should be that would mean I’m going mad — and I don’t want to be mad. Does anyone?”
“Darling!” Quinn said. “You’re upset. Horribly upset! Of course that’s Fran!”
“Freckles don’t change overnight, Quinn,” she said gayly. “They never do. And Fran is dead, isn’t she? Who killed her, Quinn? Did you or did Jerry?”
“Please, Martha,” Jerry said with a pained expression.
She looked around at the three of them. Her eyes were wide. “I just happened to think. Isn’t this stupid of me! Just as stupid as can be! If this woman isn’t Fran Raymond maybe the other one wasn’t. And that means that you’re not Jerry and you’re not Quinn. I should have guessed that a long time ago. Who are you? Where do you come from?”
They all studied her quite solemnly. She looked into their eyes and saw the eyes of cold cruel strangers.
Amro said, in his own tongue, to Drael, the agent who had replaced Faven, “They did a careless job. She has detected you.”
Drael shrugged. “There wasn’t much time, you know. And they blamed you for giving them so little time. I wish you were wearing this face. The tissues are raw and there is constant pain.”
“What are you saying?” Martha demanded. “Tell me who you are. Tell me!”
Amro glanced at Massio. Massio shrugged. “Tell her if you want to, if you think you can explain it. But remember that if you tell her it will be up to you to see that she doesn’t sneak off again.”
Amro looked at Martha. “Quinn and Fran are dead. Jerry is still alive, I believe. You are quite right. We are — strangers.”
Martha sat huddled in her chair, like a punished child. “Why? Why would a thing like that be done?”
“This is your world, Martha. It isn’t ours.”
She laughed wildly. “Oh, come now! Tell me about the Martians. Show me your space-ships!”
“You’ll have a chance to see them but they won’t come from your Mars,” Massio said. “They’ll come from Strada.” He laid his hand on the table palm down. “Strada,” he said. He flipped it over. “And Earth. Peculiarly enough we seem to be very close neighbors of yours. But we have found our way through.”
She stood up and her chair fell over. “I’m going and — tell everyone.”
Quinn smiled. “From what I have learned of this place, Martha, they would just lock you up. And if anyone should come to investigate we are a chemist and his wife on vacation with a house guest. They can take our fingerprints. They’ll match, you know. I think you’d best go inside and lie down.”
She walked into the house like a wooden doll. She had wanted to walk around to the cars but her footsteps carried her inside the house, into the bedroom, over to the bed. Amro stood up. “Watch her,” he said. “It’s time I reported on last night.”
The dark oblong formed in the sunlight as he reached it. Without altering his stride he walked through it and was gone.
Drael glanced at Massio. “He is an odd one.”
“He wasn’t until he came here. Now he is very — odd. He says strange things. We talked last night. He talked treason to me, pausing every few minutes to say that it was just speculation, of course. Just idle talk.”
“Tell me what he said.”
Massio shrugged. “That it is possible that the conflict between the League and the Center is pointless. That the individual is important. That power might be a myth. Is that enough?”
“More than enough!”
“This Earthgirl fascinates him. She has misled him. He smashed Faven’s mind because Faven wanted to hurt the girl. Amro has turned weak. And so I reported him last night after we talked. I don’t think he’ll be back.”
“Will you be in charge here?”
“I think so.”
“What will you do about the girl? If they don’t want attention attracted to this place she could be a problem.”
“Right. She can’t disappear and she can’t be killed. That’s where Faven was in error. But there is a better and an easier way. In her mental condition a much easier way.”
Drael smiled. “Clever, Massio! And so obvious that I didn’t guess it. Take her to their nearest town and break her mind as you release her.”
“It disturbs me,” he said, “that this thing could happen to Amro.”
“I have heard of similar instances. One of the female agents brought in at the same time I was tried to desert to the League. The man she was covering caught her fancy.”
“What did they do to her?”
“They solved it neatly by getting the right sort of information to the man in question and then permitting her to desert. She couldn’t make him believe her, of course. Quite a disappointing way to die, I should say.”
Chapter VI
Jest
Amro and Lofta stood before the Chief. He appeared to pay little attention to Lofta’s report. When Lofta had finished, the Chief said, “Go. Leave the agent here with me.”
“But I—” The Chief gave Lofta a long, frosty look. Lofta left hurriedly.