Gordon R. Dickson (32 page)

So, I told myself all this through
something like a year and a half following the time storm; and in the telling I
skirted the grey edge of insanity, because I could not stand myself as I now
knew myself to be. It was a grim trick of fate that had sent me into life
lacking the one necessary, invisible part that would have made me human, rather
than some flesh and blood robot. Inside my mind, I pounded on walls, screaming
at the unfairness of circumstances, that had taken me out of a situation where
I had not known what an emotional cripple I was and brought me face to face
with the fact of it.

For that was what had happened.
Beginning with my mental explosion, when I had found out that Swannee was
gone—dead and gone, gone forever—there had been a string of small
confrontations. A series of little turns which gradually turned me about one
hundred and eighty degrees, until at last I saw myself full-on in the mirror of
my mind and stared at the metal bones shining through my plastic skin, the glow
of the light bulbs artificially illuminating the polished caverns of my
eyesockets. It was then I realized what had been going on in my unconscious all
along.

Only Swannee had known me for the
essentially nonhuman I was. Her reaction to that had been a sort of proof that
I was human; but with all hope of finding her gone, I ran the risk of being
recognized. At first, I had believed that the two with me—the crazy girl and
the insane cat—were no threat to my secret. No one could expect me to have to
prove myself to them. But then had come Marie and the unrecognized, but
nagging, suspicion that she sensed the lack in me. Then Bill, another real
person to watch me and draw conclusions. Then Porniarsk, who, perhaps, was too
alienly knowledgeable; and after him, the experimentals, who, by definition,
must also be creatures without souls, so that at any moment any one of the
other people, the real people, might say to themselves—
look at the way he
acts with Sunday! Doesn't that strike you as being like the way you'd expect
the experimentals to respond to any affection or kindness?

But the greatest danger had come
from the girl outgrowing her craziness after all. She had known me too long;
and she had known Sunday. There had been signs in her to show that she knew me
better than I had thought she did. I wanted to keep her around; but unless I
did something, she would be the very one who would watch me with Sunday and put
two and two together-after which she would have no use for me, and I would lose
her forever.

Of course, Tek had threatened to
take her away anyway, which would have solved things in a way I did not want.
But deep inside me, I knew Tek was no match for me. He had never really been a
threat. There were a dozen ways in which I could have eliminated him from the
situation, right down to following him and the girl, killing him and bringing
her back by force. No, Sunday had been the one to eliminate, and now I had
taken care of him. Sitting around by myself as the days and nights went past, I
mourned—not for him, but for the bitterness of having to face what I was, when
I had been so successful at hiding it from myself before.

The others were very patient with
me. I would have shot me, dug a grave, tumbled myself in and got rid of the
extra mouth to feed, the extra clothes to wash. But they were different. So
they endured me, letting me roam around as I liked, only coming to collect me
when it was time for a meal or bedtime; and I had the privacy I wanted.

Or at least, I had it for a long
time. But then my isolation began to be invaded. I don't know when I first
became conscious of it; perhaps I had been seeing his dark, lean figure around,
but ignoring it for some time. But the day came when I noticed the Old Man
sitting watching me, hunkered down in the shade of a boulder (it was summer
again by that time) about thirty yards off along the hillside where I sat by
myself.

I remember wondering then how he had
gotten loose. In the back of my mind, he had been still chained up, all this
time, in the station. Possibly, I thought, they had turned him loose some time
since to go back down with his fellow experimentals. I did not want to come out
of my grey fog to the effort of asking any of the others about him, so I
decided to ignore him. He was simply sitting, watching me; and his limited
mind, I thought, should get tired of that after a while, and I would be rid of
him.

I decided to ignore him.

But he did not grow tired of
watching and go away. Gradually, I began to be aware that he would always be
around somewhere close, even if he was not plainly visible. Not only would he
be there, but after some weeks, it became obvious that he was gradually
lessening the distance at which he sat from me.

I had no idea what he was after; but
I wanted him gone. I wanted to be left alone, even by imitation subhumans. One
day-he was now in the habit of sitting less than twenty feet from me—I let one
hand that was hidden from him by my body drop casually on a stone about the
size of a medium hen's egg, gathered it in, and waited. Sometime later, when I
thought I saw his attention distracted for a moment—as it turned out I was
wrong—I scooped it up and threw it at him as hard as I could.

He lifted a hand and caught it
before it reached him.

The catch he made was so effortless
that I never tried to throw another thing at him. Nothing except his arm had
moved, not even his shoulder. His long, skinny arm had simply lifted and let
the stone fly into the palm of it. Then he had dropped it, discarding it with a
disinterested opening of his fingers; and all the while, his eyes had stayed
unmoving on mine.

Sour fury boiled in me at that; and
it was enough to bring me partway back to life. My first reaction was that I
would tell Bill or one of the others to take him away and chain him up again.
But then, it struck me that if I betrayed the fact that I was no longer pretty
much out of things, the others would want me to come back to being human with
them again-which would put me once more on the way to having my secret
discovered.

I decided I would have to get rid of
the Old Man myself; and I began to plot how to do it. Eventually, I worked out
a simple, but effective, plan. I would take one of the handguns when no one was
looking and hide it in my shirt until I had a shot at him that a blind man
could not miss. Then when the others came to find out who had fired, I would
tell them he had made threats of attacking me for some time now; and finally, I
had been forced to kill him in self-defense.

The business of getting the gun was
simple enough. The handguns and most of the rifles were still kept in the
motorhome where I lived with the girl, Marie and little Wendy. I helped myself
to a Snubnose .32 revolver the morning after I had concocted my scheme and
tucked it inside my shirt into the waistband of my slacks. The shirt was loose
enough so that it hid any outlines that might have shown through. Then I went
about my daily business of leaving the others as soon as I had eaten breakfast
and going off to sit among the rocks of the hillside about half a mile from
camp.

I had been tempted to go even
farther than usual from the camp —far enough so that the sound of my shot could
not be heard. But, now that I had made up my mind to kill the Old Man, I was
afraid of doing anything out of the ordinary that might make him suspicious.
Therefore, I went to my usual place and sat down in the morning sunlight.
Shortly I spotted him, squatting less than thirty yards off in a patch of
shadow.

I sat where I was, ostensibly
ignoring him. After a little while, I made an excuse to glance in his direction
and saw that he was a good deal closer than before—perhaps half the distance.
It was curious, but I had never been able to actually catch him in the process
of moving. Whenever I looked, he was always seated and still, as if he had been
there for several hours.

The morning wore on. He came
close—but close was still not close enough. He was less than fifteen feet from
me at last and would come no closer, but he was off to my left side behind me,
so that I would have to turn about to face him and pull the gun at the same
time—two movements that, I was sure, would startle him into leaping for
protection behind one of the large boulders that were all around us.

That particular day ended with
nothing happening. I sat. He sat. The only difference from the many days we had
spent, together but apart, before was that for the first time, my mind was not
concentrated on my inner fog, but on stealthily observing him and calculating
the possibility of luring him within certain range of my weapon.

However, he did not cooperate. The
next day, it was the same thing. The next day, again the same. I finally
realized that he was either too wary or too diffident to approach me except
from an oblique angle. I would have to resign myself to waiting until he came almost
close enough to be touched, or otherwise put himself in some other completely
vulnerable position.

I consoled myself with the fact that
all I needed was patience. He would be bound to come close eventually, since
every day he inched a little nearer. In fact, it took him nearly three weeks
before he did come near enough to provide the target I wanted; and in those
three weeks, something strange began to happen to me. I found myself actually
enjoying the situation we were both in. I was still trapped in my own miseries
like a fly in a forest of flypaper, but at the moment, I was navigating between
the sticky strands under the impetus of the excitement of the hunt. I was
reminded one day of a poem I had not thought of for years, or read since I was
a boy, by Rudyard Kipling and called "The Ballad Of Boh Da Thon." It
was about a bandit who had been chased by an English army unit weeks on end,
and it had a pair of lines that applied nicely to the Old Man and me:

And sure if pursuit in possession
ends, the Boh and his trackers were best of friends....

For the first time I found myself
beginning to like the Old Man, if for no other reason than that he was giving
me something to want.

However, the day finally came in
which—glancing out of the corners of my eyes—I felt, rather than saw, him
squatting almost within the reach of one of my arms and certainly within the
reach of one of his.

There was no way I could miss with
the revolver or he could dodge, at this distance. But, strangely enough, now
that I had him exactly where I wanted him, I was more than ever fearful of
frightening him off, of missing him somehow. I was as shy as a kid on his first
date. I wanted to turn and look at him; but it took all my will to do so. For a
long time I could not manage to turn my head towards him at all. Then, as the
sun began to climb higher in the sky, I began to swivel my head on my neck so
slowly that it felt like the movement a stone statue might make over centuries.
When the sun was directly over our heads, I was still not looking squarely at
him, although now I was conscious of his dark shape as a sort of cloud, or
presence, at the corner of my left eye.

All this time I had been sliding my
hand gradually in between the two lowest buttons of my shirt. I slid it in
until my cold fingers lay flat on the warm skin of my belly, and the tips of
those same fingers touched the hard curve of the polished butt of the revolver.

It was now noon, lunchtime; but I
was afraid of breaking the spell. So I continued to sit without going back to
camp, and the Old Man continued to sit, and the sun moved on while the slow,
agonizing, almost involuntary turning of my neck continued. I was like someone
under a spell or curse. I began to be afraid that the day would end, and I
would have not turned enough to catch his eyes with my own, to hold his
attention for the seconds I would need to draw the gun and shoot him.
Strangely, in this moment, I had finally lost all connection with my reason for
killing him. It was simply something to which I was committed, as a tightrope
walker might be committed to cross a narrow wire stretched from one cliff to
another.

Then—I don't know why—but there was
an abrupt snapping of the tension. Suddenly, I was free to turn my head as
swiftly as I wanted.

I turned and looked directly at him.

It was a shock. I had completely
forgotten that I had never looked closely into his features before. The
black-haired anthropoid face, with something of the immutable sadness of the
gorilla, looked back at me. It looked back at me from as close a distance as
the features of some human companion might face me across a table in a
restaurant. But the Old Man's face was all black fur, red nostrils, yellow
teeth and yellower eyes—eyes as yellow as Sunday's had been.

For a moment, those eyes froze me.
They placed a new paralysis upon my soul, one that, for a moment, I did not
believe I could throw off. Then, with a fierce effort, I told myself that this
was not Sunday or anything like him; and I felt my hand reaching automatically
for the revolver.

My fingers closed upon the butt. I
pulled it loose from the pressure of the waistband of my pants—and all the time
I was looking directly into his face, which did not alter its expression, but
gazed steadily back at me.

It was a moment outside of time. We
were caught together in a tableau, flies in amber both of us, frozen and
incapable of move-merit—except for that gun-hand of mine which continued to
move with a life of its own, closing about the gun butt and lifting it to clear
the muzzle toward the face before me. There was something inevitable about its
movements. I could have felt no more trapped by circumstances if I had been
tied down in the path of a juggernaut.