The Lost Perception (4 page)

Wellford herded a shock of blond hair back into place along his precise part, then called attention to the livid puffiness beneath his left eye.

“Crafty and capable,” he added pointedly. “The one you selected for me to chase didn’t quite go along with the Marquis of Queensberry rules.”

“So we both came back empty-handed?”

“Indeed not. I had mine quite full—until the Guardsmen relieved me of my burden.”

Gregson bounded from the cot. “You mean we have him—here?”

Wellford nodded. “Radcliff and his special interrogators have been giving him a good going over for a couple of hours now. As a matter of fact, I just got buzzed by the director. He wants to see us in his office as soon as you’ve restored starch to your legs.”

Long after Gregson and Wellford had drawn up before his desk and recounted their experiences of the chase, Security Bureau Director Radcliff continued to pace before his window overlooking the East River. His face was creased with concern.

Finally he said, “You’re to be commended for a good job.”

“But—” Gregson began apologetically.

“I know. The Valorian escaped. But don’t feel badly about that. I’m sure your report will fill in broad gaps in our data on the aliens. Only this morning an almost identical incident was reported in Bavaria. But the agent in that case somehow turned a laser pistol on himself instead. So, you see, you were lucky.”

“What have we learned from our prisoner?”

“Not very much thus far, I’m afraid. He went incoherent during questioning. It’s almost as though he had been conditioned to react irrationally under such circumstances.”

“May we have a shot at him?” Wellford inquired.

Radcliff shook his head. “He’s no longer here. I thought it wise to set up undisclosed detention facilities for whatever prisoners we happen to take.”

“But,” the Englishman protested, “we’re quite curious. And we think we’re entitled to whatever information is acquired, inasmuch as it will doubtless help us along…”

“True. And as soon as we can squeeze some rational pattern or even some useful information out of our collective effort, we’ll pass it promptly along. Meanwhile, perhaps you’d care to hear some of what your captive had to say.”

He crossed over to a recorder on his desk. “I’ll spot-play portions of the stuff and remind you that all of it is as irrational as what you’ll hear.”

The recording blared into the room, hurling out vehement invective.

“That’s our bounder,” Wellford observed, amused. “It’s practically all he had to say to me too.”

Radcliff skipped along the tape and settled next on:

“They’re good, I tell you! The Valorians are good! You know they are! They’re here to save us! You’ve got to stop persecuting them! You’ve got
—”

Then more curses and vilification, all shouted out in a desperate, ranting voice.

Radcliff cut off the recorder. “See what we’re up against? The man actually believes his Valorians are benevolent.”

“He’s absolutely demented,” Wellford declared.

“Did he say anything else about the plague?” Gregson asked.

“Only that the Valorians, if given the chance, will lift the epidemic. But consider this, Greg: In the wake of the Valorian whom you chased this morning,
three persons went Screamie.”

After a moment Radcliff added, “I think it’s obvious that there is a definite connection between the Valorians and the plague—despite the fact that the epidemic broke out fourteen years before we became aware of the aliens’ presence.”

A week later, as November winds strengthened fall’s desolate grip on Manhattan and laced the East River with scudding whitecaps, Gregson settled down under a siege of frustrated inactivity, made even more tedious by Wellford’s sudden transfer to the Security Bureau’s London office.

It was a period during which the Valorians seemed to have withdrawn to the unfathomable depths of space from which they had come, relinquishing Earth to its alternate agony of the Screamie epidemic.

Prompt reaction by the Secretariat Building’s defenses to the assassination attempt had, of course, vividly demonstrated that Security Bureau Headquarters would not be caught unaware. And, in the interest of underscoring that point, the International Guard detail had been tripled while considerable heavy armament had been installed in the abandoned upper levels.

That bureau headquarters had been fortified inconspicuously, Gregson supposed, was a matter of political prudence. For Congress was even now considering special legislation that would double United States appropriations to the international agency. And it just wouldn’t be wise to present American taxpayers with the image of a Security Bureau growing in resources and heavily braced against no apparent physical threat—an armed enclave.

Gregson’s secretary appeared in the doorway. “There’s an urgent call on the comviewer—from Pennsylvania.”

He flicked the switch and the frightened, tear-streaked face of a young, blond woman sprang onto the screen.

“Helen! What is it?”

“Oh Greg! It’s Uncle Bill! He’s just gone Screamie! I cant teach him! And we can’t get the Pickup Squad out here!”

“Hasn’t he injected himself?”

“No. He doesn’t have his hypo. And I can’t get one to him!”

She turned to race from the room as her hand came up to snap off the comviewer switch. Just before the screen went dead, Gregson could hear Forsythe screaming in the background.

Twice he tried to call back. But there was no answer. Then he dialed the Monroe County Isolation Institute several tunes before getting a response. He reported the seizure.

By then his secretary was back in the doorway. “I’ve had Air Transport roll out a hopper. But Operations says regardless of the emergency, you’ll have to skirt the metropolitan area.”

Once airborne, however, he sent the craft winging recklessly over Manhattan, above the bombed-out industrial section of New Jersey and on towards Pennsylvania.

Bill Forsythe—a Screamer—unable to get help. And Gregson could only wonder to what extent he, himself, might be responsible. Even before the accident aboard Vega Jumpoff, Gregson had indulged the old man’s desire to remain on as a satellite engineer long after his reflexes had dulled.

And, after the accident, he had insisted that they invest together in the East Pennsylvania farm. It had seemed like a good idea at the time.

But now Forsythe was a Screamer. And, in the seclusion of the farm, his niece was somehow powerless to administer the injection that might save his life.

Within another ten minutes, Gregson crossed the state line and abruptly altered his course for the Monroe Isolation Institute outside Stroudsburg.

At the reception desk, however, there was no record of admission on a William Forsythe. Yes, another attendant assured him, the institute had responded to his call and had dispatched a Pickup Squad car. As a matter of fact, it should be at the farm by now. No, there was no comviewer available for him to use.

Verticaling back into the sharp, bright Pennsylvania morning, he thought of Helen for the first time and,didn’t quite see how she would manage—with this latest blow compounding all the other tragedies that had befallen her.

It wasn’t enough that her fiancé had been felled by the plague three years earlier and had taken the suicide route. Less than a year later, her immediate family had been caught in the nuclear blast which had buried Cleveland under an arm of Lake Erie. With her uncle now gone Screamie, what would she do?

Two months ago Gregson would have readily produced the solution to her dilemma. But not now—not after he had already taken his first, irrevocable steps along the Screamie road.

Above the farm, he verticaled precipitately down to the bull’s-eye and cut his jets.

Leaping out, he inhaled, but without the usual sense of appreciation, air spiced with the musk of livestock and the vigorous fragrances of harvest.

He sprinted to the house and paused in the kitchen doorway, ready to shout out for Helen.

But Bill was there—seated next to the table, his right foot immersed in a pan of steaming water.

“Greg?” the old man said, casting about for further sound.

“You’re
all right!”

“You wouldn’t say that if you were in my place.”

Forsythe shifted his foot painfully. He was a smallish man with a salubrious complexion that set off his thick crop of white hair. In his rotundity, there was the persuasive suggestion of jollity. But, with his face set in a grimace, he didn’t seem to be very jovially disposed at the moment.

“What happened?” Gregson demanded.

Helen drew up in the hallway and glanced down at the floor. She had repaired the damage to her face and, despite puffed eyes, was as subtly attractive as Gregson had last remembered her.

“You see, it was like this…” she began.

Forsythe snorted and, with pretended severity, said, “You’re entitled to the first ten swats, Greg. Then you can hold her for me.”

She came into the room, carrying herself with a grace and poise that seemed anomalous to the farmhouse setting.

“But, BUI…” she protested.

Her uncle relented with an exaggerated gesture of concession. “On second thought, I don’t suppose I can shift the blame. After all, I guess I
was
bellowing like a wounded elephant—and with the shower going full blast so I couldn’t hear how Helen was reacting.”

Finally Gregson felt his tension subsiding. “What
did
happen?”

“Slipped in the shower stall. Sheared off an ingrown toe-nail.”

“I tried to call you back as soon as he quieted down,” Helen explained, smoothing out her skirt over well-proportioned thighs.

“Believe me,” Forsythe added facetiously, “I was ready to run her down and administer those ten swats without assistance,
if.
only I had my eyesight.”

Bill, of course, would never recover his vision. That had been the verdict after months of surgery to relieve his concussions.

Gregson called headquarters and reported he wouldn’t be back for the rest of the day, but that they could expect him Saturday morning. Then Helen prepared a lunch of ham steaks and French fries, desultorily chatting with him all the while. It was apparent she was talking around his protracted absence from the farm. And he welcomed her indirection, for he didn’t care to be pressed into an explanation.

Later, she put on a heavy-knit sweater that seemed to accentuate the trimness of her hips while its turned-up collar imparted an almost adolescent youthfulness to her rather attractive face. If Gregson hadn’t known better, he might have suspected that her subsequent suggestion of a stroll in the pasture was part of a calculated design.

He agreed to the walk. But he firmly set himself against any sentimental involvement.

And if he should seem cool as a result of his resolve, he’d simply have to hope she wouldn’t be hurt.

They stayed close to the fence, talking about insignificant things while she stooped occasionally to draw a bull-grass stalk out of its sheath and twist it absently in her fingers.

She came to her point abruptly. “Bill and I were hoping you’d decide to come out to the farm permanently.”

“Someday, perhaps I will,” he said noncommittally. Until two months ago he would have sprung upon her suggestion. But not now.

“Things are going to be different,” she went on. “Reconstruction’s pretty much in hand all over. Market lines are being restored. And the demand for food is becoming orderly. Profitable too. Why, we haven’t had a single crop raid this fall.” .

They paused beneath a tree and she leaned back, resting her head against its bole while the wind drifted strands of her blond hair against dark bark.

“Yes,” he agreed. “It’ll pay off—if Bill can hire some help.”

She reached out and touched his arm importunately. “Why don’t you quit the Security Bureau? You don’t really belong there. And it’s dangerous work.”

He stared into her face. How would she know?

“The bureau discharges the most important function in the world today,” he said stiffly, covering over the real reason why he wouldn’t allow their conversation to become more intimate.

“Some say it’s assuming too many functions—that it has a high potential for tyranny, controlling almost everything as it does.”

“They don’t know what they’re talking about. We’ve got a world-wide plague on our hands, so we use world-wide authority to fight it. Assumption of that responsibility naturally calls into play other forms of necessary control.”

She sighed, then smiled. “Oh, let’s forget about the bureau. I was only trying to lead up to—well, an answer to your question.”

Unprepared for this thrust, he tried not to meet her anxious eyes.

“Arthur Gregson!” she exclaimed with feigned exasperation. “A year ago you asked me to marry you. I said you were just sorry for me. Six months ago, you asked again. I thanked you for .being generous and sweet. In August you asked once more. I said, ‘Perhaps—someday—when I’m ready.’ Well…” she spread her arms, “… I’m ready.”

All along he had feared something like this—ever since his first Screamie seizure. He could only lower his head.

Her smile drained off and she glanced away. “Seems it’s my turn to be rejected.”

He had hurt her, he saw. And, of incidental importance, he was feeling the pain almost as much as she. He seized her impulsively and kissed her, but regretted at once that she would misinterpret the gesture.

Which she promptly did when she drew back and sprightly asked, “Then you
will
leave the bureau?”

After a moment he shook his head resolutely.

Her eyebrows drew together. “But I don’t understand.”

And he would never explain—not about the Screamies. “There’s too much important bureau business to take care of.”

“And when it’s over?”

There was no point in dragging it out. If he broke off completely, she might perhaps not even hear about his being committed to an isolation institute when it happened.

“It won’t be over—not for a long while.”

“Greg, is there somebody else?”

Leaving it at that, he simply turned and headed back for the house.

Judging from her reticence at supper, he concluded that he had succeeded in discouraging her. It was an achievement which filled him with despair, though, and he was still glumly silent as he sat with Bill in the living room later that evening.

“Things in New York?” Forsythe said in his casual manner of leaving the front end of sentences open.

“Pure hell. Scarcities, shortages, long lines. Screamers dropping all over. Pickup Squad cars everywhere. You don’t know how lucky you have it here.”

“Done a lot of thinking about the Screamies lately, Greg. Maybe it isn’t a disease after all.”

“What else
could
it be?”

“Don’t know. Used to think they were awful—the Screamies. People shouting themselves to death with ‘lights’ in their head.” He let out a frustrated breath. “Damn! I’d give my right arm to see a light—any kind of light!”

Gregson thought of his own seizures, of the mercy killings, the pitchfork murder on
Via del Fori Imperiali.
And he wanted to shout Forsythe down on the utter stupidity of his selfish statement.

But his resentment and pity he buried in a three-week-old edition of the
Monroe County Clarion.
And a four-column italicized headline at the top of page two caught his attention:

It was of course, tongue in cheek—a carbon copy of many similar stories that had given vent to editorial humor over the past two years, when any occasion was seized upon to lighten grim reports on ’95’s Nuclear Exchange, the Screamies and reconstruction.

The writer had stepped off from, a recent local resurrection of rumors stemming from the
Nina’s
reports. He had polled opinion and written whimsically on backwoods superstitions.

Gregson was about to cast the article aside when he encountered an observation solicited from an Enos Cromley, farmer who, coincidentally, lived not too far from Forsythe’s place.

Cromley claimed to “have it from the horse’s mouth.” The aliens were most positively among us. He had spoken with them. They wanted to save humanity from a fate worse than the Screamies and Nuclear Exchange. And they had asked the farmer to find others who would help them.

Gregson came rigidly erect in the chair. One—there were, of course, aliens-among-us.

Two—they had somehow drawn a number of helpless humans into conspiracy with them.

Consequently, there must be some system whereby humans were approached by aliens.

Again, one—alien-human cells would not necessarily be located in the cities or close to points they intended to attack. Too risky. Chances for detection too favorable. Two—rural regions
near
those targets would present optimum opportunity for recruitment and preparation.

“Bill, Doc Holt edits the
Clarion,
doesn’t he?”

“Used to. All by himself. Practically a one-man operation.”

“Used to?”

Forsythe nodded “Up until a couple of weeks ago. Sold out to Secondary Publications. Got a good price, I understand. Packed up his wife and belongings and took off.”

Secondary Publications—a public service instrument of the Security Bureau’s Communications Division, Gregson recalled. Another instance of the bureau’s tireless effort to hold civilization together. Many news media were folding up, depriving local communities of their right to be informed. So the bureau was stepping in to hold the pieces together until private journalistic enterprise could resume its obligations.