Blaine walked steadily forward until he reached the desk.
“You are Finn,” he said.
“Lambert Finn,” said the man in a hollow voice, the tone of an accomplished orator who never can quite stop being an orator even when at rest.
Blaine brought his hands out of his pockets and rested his knuckles on the desk. He saw Finn looking at the blood and dirt.
“Your name,” said Finn, “is Shepherd Blaine and I know all about you.”
“Including that someday I intend to kill you?”
“Including that,” said Finn. “Or at least a suspicion of it.”
“But not tonight,” said Blaine, “because I want to see your face tomorrow. I want to see if you can take it as well as dish it out.”
“And that’s why you came to see me? That’s what you have to tell me?”
“It’s a funny thing,” Blaine told him, “but at this particular moment, I can think of no other reason. I actually can’t tell why I bothered to come up.”
“To make a bargain, maybe?”
“I hadn’t thought of that. There’s nothing that I want that you can give me.”
“Perhaps not, Mr. Blaine, but you have something that I want. Something for which I’d pay most handsomely.”
Blaine stared at him, not answering.
“You were in on the deal with the star machine,” said Finn. “You could provide the aims and motives. You could connect up the pieces. You could tell the story. It would be good evidence.”
Blaine chuckled at him. “You had me once,” he said. “You let me get away.”
“It was that sniveling doctor,” Finn said ferociously. “He was concerned there would be a rumpus and his hospital would somehow get bad publicity.”
“You should pick your people better, Finn.”
Finn growled. “You haven’t answered me.”
“About the deal, you mean? It would come high. It would come awfully high.”
“I am prepared to pay,” said Finn. “And you need the money. You are running naked with Fishhook at your heels.”
“Just an hour ago,” Blaine told him, “Fishhook had me trussed up for the kill.”
“So you got away,” Finn said, nodding. “Maybe the next time, too. And the time after that as well. But Fishhook never quits. As the situation stands, you haven’t got a chance.”
“Me especially, you mean? Or just anyone? How about yourself?”
“You especially,” said Finn. “You know a Harriet Quimby?”
“Very well,” said Blaine.
“She,” Finn said, levelly, “is a Fishhook spy.”
“You’re staring mad!” yelled Blaine.
“Stop and think of it,” said Finn. “I think you will agree.”
They stood looking at one another across the space of desk, and the silence was a live thing, a third presence in the room.
The red thought rose up inside Blaine’s brain: Why not kill him now?
For the killing would come easy. He was an easy man to hate. Not on principle alone, but personally, clear down to his guts.
All one had to do was think of the hate that rode throughout the land. All one had to do was close one’s eyes and see the slowly turning body, half masked by the leaves; the deserted camp with the propped-up quilts for shelters and the fish for dinner laid out in the pan; the flame-scarred chimney stark against the sky.
He half lifted his hands off the table, then put them down again.
Then he did a thing quite involuntarily, without thinking of it, without a second’s planning or an instant’s thought. And even as he did it, he knew it was not he who did it, but the other one, the lurker in the skull.
For he could not have done it. He could not have thought of doing it. No human being could.
Blaine said, very calmly: “I trade with you my mind.”
TWENTY-SEVEN
The moon rode high above the knobby bluffs that hemmed in the river valley, and down in the valley a dismal owl was hooting and chuckling to himself in between the hoots. The chuckling of the owl carried clearly in the sharp night air that held the hint of frost.
Blaine halted at the edge of the clump of scraggly cedars that hugged the ground like gnarled and bent old men, and stood tense and listening. But there was nothing except the chuckling of the owl and the faint sound of the stubborn leaves still clinging to a cottonwood downhill from him, and another sound so faint that one wondered if one really heard it — the remote and faery murmur which was the voice of the mighty river flowing stolidly below the face of the moonlit bluffs.
Blaine lowered himself and squatted close against the ground, huddling against the tumbled darkness of the cowering cedars and told himself again that there was no follower, that no one hunted him. Not Fishhook, for with the burning of the Post the way to Fishhook was temporarily closed. And not Lambert Finn. Right at this moment, Finn would be the last to hunt him.
Blaine squatted there, remembering, without a trace of pity in him, the look that had come into Finn’s eyes when he’d traded minds with him — the glassy stare of terror at this impertinent defilement, at this deliberate befoulment of the mighty preacher and great prophet who had cloaked his hate with a mantle that was not quite religion, but as close to it as Finn had dared to push it.
“What have you done!” he’d cried in cold and stony horror. “What have you done to me!”
For he had felt the biting chill of alienness and the great inhumanity and he’d tasted of the hatred that came from Blaine himself.
“Thing!” Blaine had told him. “You’re nothing but a thing! You’re no longer Finn. You’re only partly human. You are a part of me and a part of something that I found five thousand light-years out. And I hope you choke on it.”
Finn had opened up his mouth, then had closed it like a trap.
“Now I must leave,” Blaine had said to him, “and just so there’s no misunderstanding, perhaps you should come along. With an arm about my shoulder as if we were long-lost brothers. You’ll talk to me like a valued and an ancient friend, for if you fail to do this, I’ll manage to make it known exactly what you are.”
Finn had hesitated.
“Exactly what you are,” said Blaine again. “With all of those reporters hearing every word I say.”
That had been enough for Finn — more than enough for him.
For here was a man, thought Blaine, who could not afford to be attainted with any magic mumbo jumbo even if it worked. Here was the strait-laced, ruthless, stone-jawed reformer who thought of himself as the guardian of the moral values of the entire human race and there must be no hint of scandal, no whisper of suspicion.
So the two of them had gone down the corridor and down the stairs and across the lobby, arm in arm, and talking, with the reporters watching them as they walked along.
They’d gone down into the street, with the burning Post still red against the sky, and had walked along the sidewalk, as if they moved aside for some final word.
Then Blaine had slipped into an alley and had run, heading toward the east, toward the river bluffs.
And here he was, he thought, on the lam again, and without a single plan — just running once again. Although, in between his runnings, he’d struck a blow or two — he’d stopped Finn in his tracks. He’d robbed him of his horrible example of the perfidy of the parries and of the danger in them; he had diluted a mind that never again, no matter what Finn did, could be as narrow and as egomaniac as it had been before.
He squatted listening, and the night was empty except for the river and the owl and the leaves on the cottonwood.
He came slowly to his feet and as he did there was another sound, a howling that had the sound of teeth in it, and for an instant he stood paralyzed and cold. Out of the centuries the sound struck a chord of involuntary fear — out of the caves and beyond the caves to that other day when man had lived in terror of the night.
It was a dog, he told himself, or perhaps a prairie wolf. For there were no werewolves. He knew there were no werewolves.