The Lost Perception (5 page)

Forsythe withdrew from his sightless isolation long enough to remind, “Next week’s Thanksgiving. You promised you’d spend it with us.”

“I’ll be here,” Gregson confirmed. “Enos Cromley—he’s the farmer who lives a couple of miles down this road, isn’t he?”

“Right If you’d call him a farmer. Has the most run-down place in the area. Figures, though. Jumped on the agricultural bandwagon just after NE. Used to be caretaker at the Wilson Hunting Lodge.”

The grass was still dew-spangled the next morning when Gregson verticaled toward the almost obliterated bull’s-eye in front of Enos Cromley’s farmhouse. Even before he touched down, however, he sensed that the place was deserted. Nevertheless, after hallooing several times he entered cautiously.

The rooms were sparsely furnished, with a considerable film of dust over everything. But the hallway and kitchen lights were burning, suggesting that an unpaid electricity bill had not yet resulted in meter cut-off.

In the kitchen he found abundant evidence of a struggle—overturned furniture and charred streaks left by laser beams on the walls and ceiling. By the table there was a crumpled newspaper that might have been cast aside in anger. When he straightened it out, he saw that it was open on the page with the “aliens-among-us” story.

And glinting in the early sunlight that was spilling in through the open back door was a single, long, false fingernail—conclusive justification for his hunch to come to Cromley’s place.

Back at the hopper, he contacted Special Agents Operations and recounted what had happened. He reported his intentions of pushing on to Wilson Hunting Lodge on foot and described its nearby location. Then he requested a detail of International Guardsmen to meet him there as soon as possible.

After acknowledging his instructions, the operations officer added, “Whatever you’ve got on the fire will have to be wrapped up as soon as possible. You just received special orders from Radcliff in England. He’s set up a special agents briefing in London Monday morning.”

“There’s been a break on this thing?”

“I wouldn’t know. Radcliff can be secretive as hell.”

At the hunting lodge a half hour later, Gregson advanced carefully through the underbrush on the caretaker’s shack, from whose chimney was curling a shaft of smoke.

He heard the twig snap behind him. But, before he could draw his laser pistol, something with the punch of a horse’s hoof exploded against his temple and he fell into a pit of blackness.

Regaining consciousness, he sagged forward. But a stout hand landed on his chest and shoved him erect in the chair.

He opened his eyes and stared into the tube of his own laser pistol, wielded by a stocky man of about forty-five with black hair graying at the temples. Beside him was a much smaller and considerably older person who was going through Gregson’s wallet.

“Nothing in here except a New York hopper license,” the latter said. “Name’s Gregson—Arthur. He’s thirty-one.”

“We’ll find out whatever we need to know,” the other vowed, seizing Gregson’s lapel.

“Who are you? What are you doing here?”

Gregson shook his head to clear it. “I saw the story in the
Clarion.
I believed what was in it and—”

Whap!
He caught the stout man’s knuckles across his cheek.

“Won’t do. All the way from New York you see the story and hightail it out here.”

“I was passing through Stroudsburg.”

“Why did you leave your hopper over at the farm and walk here, through the woods rather than by the road?”

“No place to vertical down.”

Whap!
More knuckles snapped his head sideways.

“There’s a whole field outside.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“Then how’d you know enough about this place to look for Cromley here?”

“You Cromley?”

Whap!
The knuckles were formed into a fist this time. And Gregson licked blood from his lips.

“He’s Cromley.” The interrogator flicked the pistol in the older man’s direction.

Gregson addressed the latter directly. “You said in print what I suspected all along. You claimed you needed help. I wanted to help—up until now, anyway.”

“That was a mistake,” Cromley said. “They told me I shouldn’t have done it—speak with Doc Holt, I mean. I brought us too far out into the open. I…”

“Shut up!” the stout man ordered. Then, to Gregson, “Once more—who are you? Who sent you here? What do you want?”

“I want to help.” And, inspirationally, Gregson added, “I want to do anything I can to get the Security Bureau off our backs before it’s too late.”

Cromley and the other man exchanged uncertain stares.

But, just then, from elsewhere in the shack anxious footsteps bore down on the room where the interrogation was in progress. And a voice pitched high with alarm shouted out:

“He’s from the Security Bureau! He’s a special agent!”

The interrogator turned vehemently on Gregson as the man appeared in the doorway.

Wearing a robe and slippers, he was. unmistakably a Valorian, even to the detail of fingertips that were bluntly rounded in the absence of their false nails.

The man with the laser pistol raised it in Gregson’s face.

But the Valorian shouted, “No—wait! He’s the one the Forsythe girl said was…”

Then his slight, severe features tensed with fear as he exclaimed, “Oh, God! I’ve been zylphing in the wrong direction! They’re coming! They’re here!”

Instantly melting the window pane before it, a heavy laser beam sliced into the room, fatally piercing the chest of the man who was threatening Gregson.

Two other beams, focused at stun intensity, splashed full upon Cromley and the Valorian and they collapsed.

Moments later several International Guardsmen were spilling into the shack, led by the supervisor of Special Agents Operations.

“Sort of a melodramatic rescue, wouldn’t you say?” the latter observed, staring at the unconscious Valorian.

But Gregson was numbly silent. Why had
Helen’s
name been mentioned by the alien?

And how did the Valorian know who he was? Or that the Guardsmen were just outside the shack?

“I
thought
this situation might call for the stealthy approach technique,” the supervisor quipped. “You all right?”

Gregson rubbed his bruised cheek. “I’d like to be in on the questioning of these two.”

“Sorry. Orders are to take all prisoners straight to quarantine.”

Jangling on its night table, the comviewer brought Gregson upright in bed. But it was a moment before he recognized his Mount Royal Hotel room in London and remembered the special agents briefing scheduled for Monday morning.

He flicked the switch and Wellford’s face materialized on the screen. “Sorry to barge in like this, but I should think you would be up and around by now, even though it is Sunday.”

“What time is it?”

“Fair on to noon. And I’m sitting anxiously on your note inviting me to Simpson’s for Yorkshire pudding. Shall we get cracking?”

“Be right down.”

Wellford drew back skeptically. “I suppose that translates into about half an hour’s worth of objective time. Incidentally, I’ve only just read the fact sheet on your exploits yesterday. I knew one of us was about due to take a Valorian in tow.”

After the Englishman had switched off, Gregson’s thoughts stalled on the incidents at the hunting lodge and he couldn’t suppress the echo of the alien’s blurting out, “He’s the one the
Forsythe girl
said was…”

Helen a cell member? Persuaded to work with the Valorians, as Cromley had been—the man with Cromley—the would-be assassin Wellford had captured in Manhattan? Or had he only imagined hearing her name mentioned in the shack?

He could only hope Cromley and the alien wouldn’t implicate her under interrogation. If he, himself, got back to Pennsylvania soon enough, he might find some way of questioning her without triggering the vicious conditioned-response mechanism.

The cab bore Gregson and Wellford swiftly along Oxford Street, its progress abetted by the dearth of vehicles that had become England’s lot with the devastation of its industrial potential in ’95.

Of all the Western population centers, Gregson mused, London had taken the brunt of the Soviet missile counterattack. Three hydrogen devices had unleashed their fury in the greater metropolitan area. Ground-level detonation of the warheads, however, had mainly spared the central city from irreparable damage.

True to the British sense of tradition, that section was restored before reconstruction spread into the environs. But the Thames River had been stripped of its riparian integrity, such that in many spots the watercourse sent coves and bays ranging far beyond its old banks and feeding many potholes where the bodies of persons recently gone Screamie were occasionally washed ashore.

“I said,” Wellford began again, realizing he hadn’t yet caught Gregson’s attention, “you’ve arrived in time to help me celebrate. Yesterday I was supposed to buy the Screamie package. Either I didn’t, or I’m the most unperturbed Screamer you’ve ever encountered.”

Gregson grimaced. “Going Screamie is nothing to joke about.”

“I should hope not. But then, Lady Sheffington
is.”

“Who’s Lady Sheffington?”

“In due time you’ll find out. Meanwhile, I was fairly fascinated by this morning’s fact sheet on your experiences. But I’m afraid you may not have been the first to bag a live Valorian.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Tomorrow’s briefing. From the grapevine I’ve managed to gather the impression that Radcliff has already successfully interrogated a Valorian and is ready to disseminate results and conclusions.”

At Trafalgar Square, even the sparse traffic in Pall Mall East had slowed to a halt. Gregson rolled up the cab window, trying to shut out the piercing shrieks of a hypodermic siren coming from the base of Nelson’s Column.

The Screamer alarm had frightened the pigeons into wheeling flight that took them well out over Cockspur Street. Just when it appeared the birds would settle, the sharp, clanging bell of the Security Bureau Pickup Squad car, bearing along Whitehall, set them off again.

“Let’s walk,” Wellford proposed. “Simpson’s is close by. Anyway, I have a score to settle with Lady Sheffington in the Strand.”

Afoot, Gregson hugged the parapet overlooking the Square, ignoring the silent, apprehensive crowd that had gathered there. But when the squad car screeched to a halt in Cockspur across the square he couldn’t avoid staring towards the nearest recumbent bronze lion.

Someone had placed the Screamer, as though in sacrifice to an idol, alongside the forepaws of the massive animal. It was a child—six at the most. His pale, bare calves trembled in unconscious reflex as terror bored in beneath the too-shallow pall of sedative.

But at least he wasn’t screaming.

Emergency pickup personnel charged onto the scene, placed the boy on a litter and bore him swiftly back to the squad car. The vehicle raced away, surrendering Trafalgar Square to somber silence, and the crowd drifted dispiritedly off.

As Gregson headed into the Strand, he looked back. The Square was deserted, its stillness disturbed only by the pigeons that strutted in the shadow of a Lord Nelson who brooded over the horror that had gripped the heart of London on a quiet Sunday afternoon.

Lady Sheffington, Wellford explained as they neared the building with gaudy lettering splashed across its façade, was indeed not a member of the peerage. If the “Lady” hadn’t been capriciously bestowed at christening, then it had been surreptitiously assumed, he ventured.

Gregson read some of the gold-leaf streamers: “Fortunes Told,” “Know Thy Destiny and Be Prepared,” “Is There a Screamie Package in Your Future?”

“It was Lady Sheffington who predicted you’d go Screamie?” he asked.

Wellford nodded. “Now she must refund my money.” Then he anticipated the next question. “No. I don’t normally waste my time on soothsayers. I was just curious over the fact that three of them whom I know of happen to be ex-Screamers. Moreover, they’re all credited with amazingly accurate predictions, as is this one.”

Lady Sheffington was stumpy and coarse-faced, with a commensurate voice. Even in her thick-carpeted office she was reluctant to part with a brace of slender furs, wrapped several times around her neck and ludicrously accenting her stoutness. Her breath was acrid with stale gin whose stimulating effects had established her rigid grin as a permanent fixture.

“Back for your money, eh?” she chuckled, glancing at Wellford.

“I don’t appear to be screaming, do IT”

“You will be when you read your receipt, dearie. Says ‘on the predicted date, give or take three days.’” She laughed raucously.

Wellford was amused. “You don’t often miscalculate, do you?”

“Oh, I’ve been known to miss before, I ’ave.”

“You weren’t perhaps a Screamer yourself at one time?”

“Me—a Screamer?” She snickered. “H’aint never screamed in my life, ducky. ’Less you’d count that night in Chelsea with that nice, dear boy with the wavy ’air. Only, ’e wasn’t no gentleman.”

Then her face relaxed from its almost changeless grin. “All right, bunny. I was a Screamer. But I don’t talk about it. See?”

She loosed a halting, snorting laugh, then stared soberly at Gregson. “Want a reading, pet? ’Ave one on the ’ouse: Let’s say if I was you I wouldn’t go counting on no turkey dinner. And on a farm with a blind bloke h’ain’t no place to be when the Screamie package is finally delivered.”

Gregson started. Then he glanced suspiciously at Wellford. The gag, though evidently painstakingly prepared, had been a crude one. But he laughed it off. They’d pulled even cruder ones on each other before.

Monday morning’s Security Bureau briefing was apparently destined to get off to a late start. Gregson and Wellford found seats in the third row and watched scores of special agents from most of the world’s civilized nations file into the auditorium.

A few minutes later Radcliff strode onstage, supervised a pair of attendants as they positioned the recording cameras, then glanced at his watch. Staring at the audience, his eyes fell on Gregson. He waved, then returned to the wings.

“Quite an imposing figure, that Radcliff,” Wellford offered.

“Has a pair of shoulders like a stripling,” Gregson agreed.

“If I should ever go Screamie, as Lady Sheffington predicts, I could only hope that I come out of it half as well as our director.”

“Radcliff—an ex-Screamer?” Gregson said dubiously.

“Of, but of course. Didn’t you know? One of the earlier barrier hurdlers. Class of ’86, as I understand it.”

“I didn’t know that.” But at least it did explain why Radcliff had been a dedicated, compelling force in the movement that had enormously expanded the Security Bureau’s isolation institute network. He had undoubtedly been motivated by compassion for those who would otherwise have to fight the Screamies alone and unattended.

The Englishman laughed. “You appear as surprised to learn our director was a Screamer as I was to find out the governor of New York had gone through the isolation routine. Perhaps we ought to get together sometimes and compare notes further.”

“Yes, we’ll have to,” Gregson said indifferently, hoping to discourage the subject.

“The President of Italy, too, belonged to the club at one time.”

Gregson had already been aware of that. And, even though Wellford seemed to be moving persistently toward a point, he didn’t appreciate the other’s harping on the matter of plague victims.

“All right,” he said impatiently, “so a lot of former Screamers are prominent people today. We’ve already agreed that those who pass the barrier successfully are best qualified to assume responsibility.”

“True…” the other admitted tentatively.

Gregson remembered that Governor Armister, in his campaign, had made a forceful case for ex-Screamer leadership when he had said: “Conditions are in a frightful mess. People who’ve developed immunity to the plague by going through the mill, as I did, are good risks—in business, politics, or what have you.”

Or, again, in a more emotional appeal for votes: “We have this awful barrier we call the Screamies. On one side, like frightened sheep in a corral, we have the vast, miserable majority of the human race. On the other side—a handful of ex-Screamers. Isn’t it logical that those who have already successfully crossed the barrier should shoulder the burdens of preserving our conventional world, of supervising the continuity of our institutions?”

Wellford broke into Gregson’s reflections. “I’ve just fed you some leading suggestions. I’d hoped you would sift through them and arrive at the same conclusions I did.”

Annoyed at the other’s insistence, Gregson looked away. “They went over my head.”

Wellford came directly to his point. “Why should ex-Screamers be prime targets for assassination by the Valorian-human cells?”

Displaying a critical frown, Gregson said, “Your suggestions apparently went over your own head too. If the Valorians are hellbent on conquest, they can advance their cause best by sowing confusion, by knocking off authority wherever they find it.”

The auditorium had finally filled and Radcliff strode back onstage, the determined thuds of his heels gaveling order among the assembly. He mounted the dais and stared out at his special agents.

“Our purpose here,” he said in a firm, powerful voice, “is one of enlightenment. I am most gratified to say that we have learned all we need to know to map our campaign against the Valorians.”

Here and there a turbaned Oriental or robed African aimed a translingual pickup horn at the stage.

“We shall be as brief as possible,” the director went on. “First, you have all received fact sheets on the Gregson contact in Pennsylvania. After I am through, I shall call him up here for a question and answer session so that you may wring him dry of any details that might strike you as being especially important.

“In connection with Gregson’s experience, I must say that he has contributed as much to our understanding of the alien threat as anyone among us. He has suggested that the large cities, our centers of authority, are not the proper places to search for Valorians, although they will occasionally show up there on aggressive missions.”

There was a noise behind the curtain. Annoyed, he glanced over his shoulder and cleared his throat.

“Now let’s consider the experience of another of our agents—Eric Friedmann in Bavaria. Friedmann?”

A tall, slender Nordic stood up in the rear of the auditorium.

“Since we have not yet distributed a fact sheet on your encounter,” Radcliff proposed, “suppose you tell us briefly what happened.”

The man spoke gutturally, tersely. “We received a spot report from Security Bureau Air Transport on a Sunburst plane that had been observed landing south of Munich. We arrived in time to see its occupants drive off in a car. We chased them. But they turned off the road and drove across a field of weeds. When we tried to follow, we learned that the field was filled with stumps. We wrecked our car.”

“Yet, the Valorians got through the field without difficulty?”

“Yes.” The German sat down.

Radcliff took a sip of water. “Back to Gregson in New York. You should all be familiar with the fact sheet on his experiences in the Manhattan alley. He reported that, in struggling with the alien, he accidentally injected himself with his own hypo.”

The director paused, then said, “Gentlemen, I propose that the Valorian car Friedmann was following didn’t
actually
turn off the road. He only
imagined
it did. And I further suggest that Gregson didn’t struggle with the alien in the alley. Rather, the Valorian caused Gregson to
imagine
the struggle and to inject himself.”

Against a general murmur of surprise, Wellford whispered, “I’ll be damned!”

“For you see, gentlemen,” Radcliff continued soberly, “the Valorians are more than merely persuasive. They are spinners of hallucinations, experts at hypnotic illusion. To learn that much cost us one Valorian prisoner who escaped from our stockade.”

Astonished, Wellford straightened in his chair and exclaimed, “Aliens with a whammy!”

Dabbing perspiration on his forehead, Radcliff drank a full glass of water.

“As to why the Valorians are here,” he said more softly, “… if we didn’t know, we could readily guess. They are planning, of course, to take over, with a minimum expenditure of effort, materiel and personnel. We suspect that they were somehow responsible for our Nuclear Exchange. We have every reason to believe that they, themselves, brought the Screamies to Earth to facilitate conquest without direct aggression.”