Quinn sat up and stretched. “He isn’t back, eh?”
“No. I’m frightened, Quinn.”
“And I’m starved. Come on, cookie. Start rattling pots and pans out there. And don’t look. I’m going to take a fast dip.”
They sat on opposite sides of the small table for breakfast. He lit two cigarettes when they had finished, handed one of them over to her.
“We’ve got to report it, Quinn. Maybe we should have reported it last night.”
“Honey, how many people have wandered by here since you and Jerry have been living here?”
“Why — no one!”
“Are you beginning to get the idea?”
“What are you trying to say, Quinn?”
He shrugged. “Jerry wandered off. Okay. Nobody knows when, do they? So why worry? You can run in for groceries every few days and work him into the conversation. Martha won’t get here for four days. Old Jerry wandered off the night before Martha arrived.”
She shivered. “No. We can’t do that, Quinn.”
“Okay. Fill the area up with cops.”
“But if he died or something and they find him they’ll know that he was gone longer than that.”
“There’s risks to everything pleasant, honeybun.”
“Quinn, I can’t—”
“Sorry, baby. I guessed wrong. I thought you had nerve.”
“Well — all right, Quinn. But if there’s trouble you’ll stand by me?”
“What did you expect?”
The horror of it was that nobody seemed to notice him. It was a table made of cool metal, so curved that his head and feet were lower than his middle. It gave him a vulnerable feeling. He could not forget the inhuman strength of the man who had placed him on the table, shoved his feet into the stirrups, his arms into the hinged tubes that now clamped them firmly from wrist to elbow.
Of course it was some kind of psychology they were using. The childish business of pretending to be too busy to pay any attention to him. After the bite of the needle in the side of his throat most of the discomfort went away. Of could he could not roll his head from side to side. He could not even control his breathing or swallow or make a sound.
He tried to think. It was a big room. He got that impression during those violent seconds when he had been placed on the table. The equipment was strange. He could see a little of it at his left. Hinged arms like the things dentists had, only too big, of course. More psychology. Make him think that they were going to cut him up.
It would all be over as soon as he explained that he had nothing to do with the top secret work at the chemical company. They could check easily.
He could hear them moving around. In a small mirror-like surface of one of the elbow joints almost above him he could see the fattened distorted image of his face — but nothing else.
He realized with shame that he had acted like a child when that — that force had pulled him through the upright into the glowing corridor. Well, who wouldn’t? Right on a stretch of deserted beach!
Jerry wished they’d hurry up and start the questions.
Almost as though in answer to his wish a hand reached across his face and pulled a piece of equipment forward so that it was over his face. It was a bowllike object lined with round objects like lenses. It was lowered carefully and centered. There was a sharp metallic click from the apparatus and then it was lifted and swung back out of the way.
He grinned inside his mind. “A thing like that isn’t going to bother me,” he thought.
They were talking to each other, several of them. He puzzled over the sounds. The language was thick with R and L sounds, with the vowels given a guttural coughing emphasis. Not Russian — he’d heard Russian — though it might be a Russian dialect. It sounded the way he thought Arabic must sound without ever having heard any.
They adjusted something on the head of the table, on either side of him, close to his ears. The sudden blue light dazzled him. He blinked, the only voluntary physical movement left to him. In the dim backwoods of his mind a child was playing on the wooden steps of a porch in Youngstown, Ohio.
The child’s impressions came to him and he realized with sudden shock that this child was himself. Yet he could not halt the progress of recall and it was almost total recall, bringing back even such details as the bars of the crib, the flaw in the windowpane, the soiled pink rabbit with the ear missing.
They were touching his head. He looked up and saw his image in the polished elbow. No, it was some sort of trick. They couldn’t do that! They couldn’t cut back that great flap of scalp while he was conscious. Then he felt the tiny teeth and saw the great circle of bone cut free, saw it pulled gently away, baring the moist greyness.
Silently he screamed and screamed.
The ovoid black mass, jellyfish slick, was fastened over the naked brain and the silver wire ran through it, winding slowly on the spindle. The fat black little machine chirped and clucked and clattered and memory went on despite his every effort to turn his mind to other things.
Panic was a thing that ran with frightened pattering feet around and around the walls of his mind. He could neither see nor feel the others who, with quick skill, flayed him quite completely, fitted his body into a rubber-like sack, tight around the throat, filled with warm circulating saline solution.
They did the head last and by that time Jerry Raymond was beyond focusing on his reflection in the mirrored surface above him. All he knew was that suddenly it was impossible for him to close his eyes.
The pump tubes were inserted in nostrils and the mouth was sealed. They removed the rubberized sack and placed him in one of the deep vats that lined the far end of the room. The liquid was dark and settled unknowing to the bottom. The shining wire emerged endlessly from the surface of the dark fluid and the pump tubes pulsed in the cadence of breathing where they entered the fluid.
Down in the unknown wetness the soul of Jerry Raymond screamed while he remembered and remembered and remembered, hearing no longer the busy chirping and clucking of the thing that sucked at his brain.
The technician pressure-hosed the skin, dried it under warm air and walked out with it over his arm. It looked like a Halloween suit that had been made a bit too cleverly.
Chapter III
Scream
Fran and Quinn French were stretched out on the sand in the full heat of the noon sun. Quinn’s brown shoulders glistened with sweat and from time to time Fran carefully greased her long slim legs.
The sun softened and melted some of the tension and apprehension that was in her. “Martha arrives this morning,” she said.
“You say that the same way you’d say the world comes to an end in the morning.”
“Well — doesn’t it?”
“Good girl!”
“Quinn, sometimes you sound as though you were trying to be all clipped and British. What sort of a pose is that?”
She saw the annoyance on his face as he propped himself up on one elbow. “Now we start to get critical, do we? A plan to make parting easier?”
“I just wondered why you did it,” she pouted. “I’d think you’d want to know about mannerisms that make you sound — well, a little phony.”
His eyes were cool as he smiled at her. “We’re a couple of phonies, you and I, my love. You picture yourself as a splendid warm passionate woman, a victim of your own warmth. Wise up, honey. You’re as selfish as they come.”
“You’re the type to end this in a dirty way, aren’t you, darling.”
She sat up. He reached up lazily and slapped her hard. “Keep a polite tongue in your pretty mouth, trollop.”
The tears of anger squeezed out of her eyes. “You... you—”