Darker Than You Think (27 page)

But
he couldn't help feeling sick.

CHAPTER
ELEVEN

As
a Saber-Tooth Slays—

Barbee
went back to the noisy city room—there was nothing else to do.
He didn't want to think any more about April Bell, and he sought
relief from all the cruel perplexities that leered from the shadows
of his mind in his old anodynes: hard work and raw whisky.

He
got out the Walraven file again and hammered out a feature article on
the boyhood hardships of "Clarendon's First Citizen," numb
to the sordid facts that had to be omitted. He went out to cover a
stop-Walraven meeting of indignant citizens, and put tongue in cheek
to write it up the way Grady said Troy wanted it written, as a
sinister gathering of the evil henchmen of unspecified interests.

He
was afraid to go home.

He
tried not to let his thoughts dwell upon the reasons, but he loitered
about the newsroom until the third edition went to press, and then
stopped to have a few drinks with some of the gang in the bar across
the street.

Somehow,
he was afraid to go to sleep. It was long past midnight, and he was
reeling with whisky and fatigue, when he tiptoed down the creaking
hall and let himself into his little apartment in the gloomy old
house on Bread Street.

He
hated the place suddenly, with all its vague musty smells and the
faded, dingy wall paper and the cheap, ugly furniture. He hated his
job on the
Star
and
the cynical dishonesties of his article on Walraven. He hated Preston
Troy. He hated April Bell, and he hated himself.

He
felt tired and lonely and bitter, and suddenly
very sorry for himself. He couldn't do the lying stuff that Troy
demanded of him, and yet he knew he lacked the fortitude to quit. It
was Dr. Mondrick who had killed his pride and confidence, he thought
bitterly, years ago when that gruff old scientist abruptly shattered
his planned career in anthropology and refused to state a reason. Or
was that idle blame-laying, and the fatal fault a part of himself?
Anyhow, his life was wrecked and squandered. He could see no
future—and he was afraid to sleep.

He
dawdled in the bathroom, and tilted up the bottle on the chiffonier
to drain the last gulp of whisky. With the vague hope that it might
somehow explain his dream, he took one of his old textbooks from the
shelves and tried to read the chapter on lycanthropy.

The
book cataloged the queerly universal primitive beliefs that human
beings could change into dangerous carnivorous animals. He skimmed
the list of human wolves and bears and jaguars, human tigers and
alligators and sharks, human cats and human leopards and human
hyenas. The were-tigers of Malaysia, he read, were believed
invulnerable in the transformed state—but the careful,
objective language of the academic authority seemed very dull and dry
beside the remembered reality of his dream. His eyes began to blur
and ache. He laid the book aside and crawled reluctantly into bed.

A
were-tiger, it occurred to him, would make a peculiarly satisfactory
transformation. Enviously, he recalled the tawny ferocity of the
Clarendon tiger—the reconstructed saber-tooth he had seen the
freshmen carrying down University Avenue that morning. Dozing, he
dwelt wistfully upon the deadly power of that extinct predator,
lingering longingly upon each remembered detail of its ferocious
claws and the terrible, cruel snarl of its white saber-fangs. And all
his dread of sleep was changed into burning eagerness.

This
time it was easier. The flow of change was scarcely painful. He
sprang to the floor beside his bed, landing in that awkwardly narrow
space with a catlike, silent ease. Curiously he turned to look back
at the slumbering form between the sheets, a gaunt, shrunken thing,
deathly pale and still.

For
a moment he stood wondering how that feeble, ugly husk could ever
have been a dwelling for all the splendor of raw power that he felt
within him now. But the odors of the room were foul to him, the rank
smells of moldering books and neglected laundry and stale tobacco and
spilled whisky; and the narrow walls too close for his magnificent
dimensions.

He
squeezed into the shrunken front room, and padded across it to the
door—his new eyes saw everything in the room with a wonderful
clarity, even by the faint light that seeped under the drawn blinds
from the street lamp on the corner. He fumbled with his huge paw for
the key in the lock—and then remembered the art April Bell had
taught him.

Nothing
anywhere was absolute, and only probabilities were real. His free
mind was a moving pattern, an eternal complex of mental energy that
grasped atoms and electrons by the linkage of probability to be its
vehicle and its tools. That mental web could ride the wind, and slip
through wood or common metal— the only barrier was lethal
silver.

He
made the effort he remembered. The door grew misty. The metal of
screws and lock and hinges appeared and dissolved again. He slipped
through the opening and padded carefully down the hall past the slow
breath-sounds of Mrs. Sadowski's other tenants.

The
street door yielded also. A late drunk weaving uncertainly up the
sidewalk outside brushed against his tawny coat and peered through
him vacantly, hiccoughed once, and staggered happily on. He stalked
out into the evil reeks of burned rubber and dropped cigarettes on
the pavement and trotted away toward the Trojan Arms.

April
Bell came down to meet him beside the tiny, ice-rimmed lake in the
little park across the street. This time she wasn't wolf, but woman.
He knew, however, as soon as he saw her slip out through the unopened
front door of the apartment-hotel, that she had left her real body
sleeping behind. She was entirely nude, and her hair fell in loose
red waves to her white breasts.

"You
must be strong, Will, to take such a shape!" Admiration warmed
her velvet voice and danced in her limpid greenish eyes. She came to
meet him, and her tall body felt smooth and cool against his fur. She
scratched playfully behind his ears, and he made a deep pleased purr.

"I'm
glad you're so powerful," she whispered. "Because I'm still
not feeling well—your old friend Quain nearly killed me with
that clever trap in his study. And I was just about to try to call
you, Will. You see, we have another job to do tonight." He
lashed his tail in sudden dim alarm. "Another?" He thought
of blind Rowena Mondrick falling on the pavement as she chased him
with her silver blade in that other dream. He growled softly at the
woman beside him. "I don't want another job."

"Nor
did I." She tickled him below the ears. "But I just found
out that Rex Chittum drove out of town an hour ago in Sam Quain's
car. He was working with Quain all day at the Foundation, and now
I've found out that he has arranged to broadcast tomorrow from the
radio station at State College. I'm afraid he's planning to finish
that scientific announcement that old Mondrick started at the
airport." Her low voice was a crystal melody. "We must stop
him, Will." "Not Rex!" Barbee protested sharply. "Rex
is an old, good friend—" His scalp tingled to her cool,
caressing fingers. "All your old, good friends are human beings,
Will,"
she purred. "They are enemies of the Child of Night, cunning and
ruthless and strong. They are grasping every resource of science to
seek us out and strike us down. We must use the few feeble weapons in
our hands."

She
chucked him lightly under his mighty jaw. "Surely you see that,
Will?"

He
nodded his massive head, yielding to her inexorable logic. For this
was life, with the white frost crisp beneath his huge pads and the
woman's soft hand brushing sparks from his tawny coat. The world in
which Rex Chittum once had been his friend was now no more than a dim
nightmare of bitter compromise and deadly frustration. Recalling the
desperate eagerness for escape that had shaped his flow into the
saber-tooth's form, he growled again in glad relief.

"Then
let's go," she urged, and he let her leap astride him. She was
no burden to his new and boundless strength. He carried her back down
Main to Center Street, and out past the yellow-blinking signal at the
corner of the campus, and on toward the mountain road.

They
passed dark sleeping houses beside the highway. Once a dog began to
howl impotently behind them. The moon was down and the clear sky
frosted with the autumn constellations. Even by the colorless light
of the stars, however, Barbee could see everything distinctly—every
rock and bush beside the road, every shining wire strung on the
striding telephone poles.

"Faster,
Will!" April's smooth legs clung to his racing body. She leaned
forward, her breasts against his striped coat, her loose red hair
flying in the wind, calling eagerly into his flattened ear. "We
must catch them on Sardis Hill."

He
stretched out his stride, rejoicing in his boundless power. He
exulted in the clean chill of the air, the fresh odors of earth and
life that passed his nostrils, and the warm burden of the girl. This
was life. April Bell had awakened him out of a cold, walking death.
Remembering that frail and ugly husk he had left sleeping in his
room, he shuddered as he ran. "Faster!" urged the girl.

The
dark plain and the first foothills beyond flowed back around them
like a drifting cloud. He found a limit, however, even to the
saber-tooth's power. As the road wound up the dark, tree-dotted
flanks of the higher foothills, his pounding heart began to ache.

"I
know this country," he gasped. "Sam Quain's father used to
have a little ranch up here before he died. I used to come out here
to ride and hunt with Sam. And this is the road we took—the
four Muleteers, Sam called us—when we rescued the Clarendon
tiger from State. We rolled boulders on the road to stop the Indians
while we changed a tire on Sardis Hill."

His
mighty flanks heaved to his labored breathing.

"It
must be twenty miles ahead," he wheezed. "The grades are
steep—I'm afraid we can't get there."

"The
grades are steeper for your old friend's car," the urgent girl
called back. "And there's a reason we must catch him on Sardis
Hill—or let him go unharmed."

"What
reason?" he breathed.

"We're
never quite so powerful as we feel in this free state," she
whispered in the rushing wind. "Because our usual bodies are
left behind, and our moving mind complexes can draw only upon the
chance energies that they happen to grasp from the atoms of the air
or other substances we possess, by the linkage of probability. All
our power lies in that control of probability, and we must strike
where it will serve."

He
shook his immense sleek head, impatient with the intricacies of her
explanation. The involved paradoxes of mathematical physics had
always baffled him; now he felt content with the saber-tooth's
surging might, without troubling to analyze the atomic structure of
power.

"What
probability?" he said.

"I
think Rex Chittum is quite safe from us," whispered the girl on
his back, "so long as he is driving carefully along a straight,
level road—Quain must have briefed him and armed him against
us, and the probability of any harm to him is too slight for us to
grasp.

"So
go faster!" Her slim cool fingers clutched his tawny fur. "We
must catch him on Sardis Hill, because the probability of his death
will be far greater when he starts down that double curve—I've
a sense for such things, and I can tell. The man's afraid. He'll
drive too fast, in spite of all Quain told him."

The
girl lay flat upon his wide, striped shoulders.