The Lost Perception (8 page)

No longer did he feel presumptuous in even touching her.

But when he pinned her against the bark and kissed her, she responded coolly and turned her face aside almost immediately.

“Turnabout on top of turnabout,” he observed, puzzled. “Two years ago you accepted, right here on this spot.”

Distantly, she said, “And you rejected.”

“And now it’s your turn again?”

She bit her lip and nodded.

“But I don’t understand. I’m not going back to the bureau.”

“The bureau wasn’t the only thing between us then, was it?” she asked thoughtfully. “You remembered Philip, didn’t you? And you didn’t want me to have another prospective husband go Screamie.”

He couldn’t deny it.

Her eyes focused on the distance. “First there was Philip. And then you. And now…”

“And now?”

She shrugged. “I don’t want to take the chance.”

“I’ve
been
through the barrier!”

“But / haven’t. You ever think what it might be like—having children under plague conditions? God, it would be awful going Screamie while you’re pregnant. Or having your own child screech himself to death in your arms.”

Against both logic and emotion he was powerless to argue.

The hopper, heralded by the roar of its jets, swooped low over the hedgerow, zoomed back into the sky to position itself over the bull’s-eye, then verticaled swiftly down.

Helen welcomed the interruption. “A visitor! Come on, I’ll race you back to the landing area!”

He was proud of the fact that he beat her by half a block as he drew up in front of the lean young man with the Security Bureau Medical Corps arm band who stood beside the craft.

“You Arthur Gregson?” the doctor asked.

When Gregson nodded, he added, “How’re you feeling? All right, I’d say, judging from that furlong sprint. I’m Horace Miles.”

Gregson introduced Helen and asked, “You on bureau business?”

“I’m supposed to give you a physical. But from what I’ve seen so far, it’ll be superficial. Any trouble with Screamie seizures?”

“Not in over a month. Why?”

“Hm-m-m.” Miles accompanied them toward the house. “De-isolation six weeks ago, and no relapses over the last four. Full recovery response, I’d say. Radcliff will be glad to hear that.”

“I hadn’t planned on going back to the bureau. I don’t owe them anything.”

“Of course not,” Miles readily agreed. “You did more than your share during the initial Valorian operations. But Radcliff asked me to pass on this message: The work you, and only you, can do now will be even more vital than what you’ve already done.”

“What is it?”

“Can’t say. I’m just an MD entrusted with a message. But I hear tell you’re needed to help bring an end to the Screamies. Radcliff expects to see you at his office Monday.”

An hour later, after they had seen Miles off at the bull’s-eye, Helen said dejectedly, “I suppose you’ll be leaving Monday.”

“I wouldn’t be endowed with human curiosity if I didn’t And if I can stop just a single person from going through what I did, that trip will be worth the effort”

She watched the craft disappear over the hedgerow, then looked down at her hands. “I wasn’t going to tell you this—not now. I was going to pick a time when I could be sure there’d be no chance of a relapse. But, since you’re leaving day after tomorrow…”

He seized her shoulders. “What is it, Helen?”

“I know why Bill’s so quiet and withdrawn, why he’s secluded most of the time. I found a supply of sedative vials in his room.”

“You mean…?”

“Quietly, without complaining, without even uttering a sound, he’s going Screamie.”

It wasn’t until Sunday night, under pressure of Monday morning’s departure, that Gregson decided he could no longer put off his confrontation with Forsythe.

There was no doubt that Bill was doggedly trying to fight off the disease. That morning Gregson had watched from the kitchen while Forsythe had leaned against the barn and suddenly lowered his face into his hands, shuddering violently. It was obvious, then, that the nuclear fires of hell were raging in his brain.

Still, all that day, Gregson had procrastinated, not knowing how to approach him on the subject. And it wasn’t until late in the evening that Helen led him upstairs and into Forsythe’s room.

She turned on the table light, gently folded back the covers and eased the sleeve of Forsythe’s nightshirt up along his arm, exposing an area of livid flesh mottled with hypodermic punctures.

“He’s been injecting himself with a diluted solution for weeks!” she exclaimed.

Forsythe snorted himself awake. “Greg? Helen?”

“Yes, Bill—Helen and I are here.”

“Then you know. But I don’t suppose I had much of a chance of hiding it, did I?”

“I’m going to call the Pickup Squad.”

Forsythe reached for his robe. “Not until I start screaming and can’t stop. Until now, though, I’ve been doing all right”

“I thought I was too,” Gregson reminded. “But the roof caved in on my seventh attack.”

“Seventh? Hell, I’ve had seventy. Still going strong.” Forsythe sat on the edge of the bed. “Figure you have to learn’ how to turn the stuff on and off before you can see what it’s all about.”

“And what do you
suppose
it’s all about?”

“Helen told you, and then me—two years ago. A sixth sense.”

“I didn’t say that,” Helen protested. “I just said that talking about a sixth sense was one of the tricks Kavorba used to confuse me.”

“And I don’t believe he was trying to confuse you. I say he was just trying to tell you, in terms he could only hope you would understand, what the Screamies
really
are.”

“And what’s that?” Gregson asked.

“As I said, something basic, natural—a new form of perception.”

Gregson wondered whether the other’s mind had been affected by his resistance to the disease.

“Hell,” Forsythe went on, “the Security Bureau itself just admitted the plague might be caused by ‘radiation from space.’”

“But bombardment of the brain by some sort of radiation is a long way from a new form of perception.”

“Is it?” Forsythe laughed dryly. “What is
any
form of perception except excitation of a specially sensitive area?”

Gregson saw now that he could readily discount everything the old man was saying, for Forsythe had evidently convinced himself the Screamies were something to be accommodated.

Helen dropped into a chair. “You mean you’re going through all this just because of what that Valorian told me two years ago?”

Forsythe shook his head vigorously. “For reasons of my own. Consider an entire world that’s never known light, even though its inhabitants all have eyes. Let’s take the case of Mr. X. He’s gotten along on four senses. But he turns a corner and somebody throws a hundred-candlepower beam in his face. What do you suppose happens?”

“I… I don’t know,” Helen said. “I suppose it frightens him.”

“It
scares living hell
out of him! Unless be can learn to close his eyes and keep them shut against this strange, roaring, burning silence, he’ll go insane, die of terror or kill himself.”

Gregson gripped the bedstead. “Really, Bill—we’re not interested in your attempt to explain the plague. We’re just determined to see you get the proper attention.”

“That’s right, Bill,” Helen said earnestly.

“But I’m going to be all right! I just want more time to experiment. Don’t you understand? I can explain
so
many things now!”

Helen shook her head. “You’re only rationalizing. Now that you’ve gotten the Screamies, you’re trying to convince yourself they aren’t all that bad.”

Forsythe snorted. “Don’t drag out your psychiatric couch for me, young lady. What’s the main symptom of a Screamie seizure, besides intense pain?”

When there was no answer, he supplied his own: “Hallucinations. And isn’t it odd that, sooner or later, you begin imagining those hallucinations are grotesque, twisted representations of the things about you?”

“Bill,” Gregson pleaded, “let me call the isolation institute.”

“Don’t you understand?” the other went on, undiscouraged. “That’s the way it would
have to be
if you were bumping heads with a new form of perception? At first you wouldn’t recognize your surroundings as perceived through a new sense. Take a congenitally blind person who suddenly starts seeing. He’d have to learn to identify a waterfall by the way it looks, rather than by the way it sounds.”

Gregson could see there was no hope of quietening him now.

“Greg!” the other said tensely. “I can even tell you what the sixth sense will be Eke! Look at your hands. You can see a wealth of detail—lines and creases, hair, coloration, the whorls of your fingertips. That’s infinitely more than you would perceive through feeling the hand, or ‘listening’ to it with a bat’s sonar system.

“Now, can’t you imagine how much more refined a perception our sixth sense would permit? It would be as superior to seeing as seeing is to hearing or feeling. We’d be aware of infinitesimal detail, of special relationships between things, perhaps even of cosmic and microcosmic principles that we can’t begin to understand now.”

Gregson looked down at his hands finally. But not because Forsythe had asked him to.

Rather, it was an expression of sympathetic understanding. For now he knew that Bill desperately
wanted
the Screamies to be a new means of perception, because he needed
something
to compensate for his insufferable blindness.

“Think what it would mean in terms of communication,” the old man entreated. “Merely by exchanging glances, you and Helen know a lot about what each other is thinking. When we can interpret sixth-sense impressions, we might ‘see’ deep into one another’s thoughts!”

He evoked only an impatient sigh from Helen.

But he continued, almost desperately, “It would be like
seeing
into the future! If a sighted person in a world of the blind sees robbers lying in ambush ahead, he can ‘predict’ he’ll be waylaid when he reaches the spot!”

In the ensuing silence, he called out hopefully, “Greg?”

“Over here, Bill,” Gregson said compassionately after a while.

“You said that woman in London accurately
predicted
your seizure. Doesn’t that suggest anything at all—that she might have been using some of her sixth-sense powers without even realizing it?”

Gregson knew then that Forsythe had built his whole case on that one coincidence. “Bill, you’ve got a head start toward being the one in every thousand who survives the Screamies. I showed the same ability to fight off the initial attacks. And I made it safely over the barrier. You’ve got to let us bring you to the institute.”

“Only way you’ll take me there,” the other said adamantly, “is kicking and screaming—literally.”

Later that night, while Helen served Gregson coffee in the kitchen, she asked, “What are we going to do?”

“I don’t know. I wouldn’t have wanted anyone dragging me to an institute against my wishes.”

“But it’s more than that! He’s
obsessed
with the idea of a sixth sense!”

“Not really obsessed. It’s just something for him to cling to at the moment.”

“You’re going to New York tomorrow?”

“I have to.”

“What am / going to do?”

“Just stand by with a sedation kit until I get back.”

Her face brightened. “How long will that be?”

“Right away. I’m telling the bureau I can’t go back to work for them no matter what the job is.”

From the window of Security Bureau Director Weldon Radcliff s outer office in the Secretariat Building, Manhattan impressed Gregson as not having changed appreciably during the two years of his absence.

Apparently no additional headway had been made in reconstruction. Those buildings which had stood gaunt and gutted against the skyline in 1997 were, for the most part, still gaunt and gutted. There were fewer persons in the streets below and, proportionately, less traffic.

But now there were the ululations of many hypodermic sirens, all blending into an ominous undertone, which was a derisive and relentless reminder of the horror that lurked everywhere.

He turned his attention to a commotion at the corner of East Avenue and Forty-Second Street, where a line of pickets, bearing crudely lettered placards, had come marching into view. Emblazoned in bright red and deep black characters, the posters were legible even from Gregson’s distance:

Gregson watched an Army truck jolt to a halt at the corner and disgorge a contingent of United States Militia. Clad in ill-fitting and occasionally torn fatigues, the soldiers vividly contrasted the flawlessly unformed Guardsmen who protected the Secretariat Building.

Adjusting masks, the militiamen hurled tear bombs, then began rounding up the demonstrators and herding them into the truck.

A sedate, elderly receptionist called to Gregson from across the room, then ushered him into the office of the director.

Heavy set shoulders hunched low over the desk, Radcliff sat there swiftly signing one form after another.

Gregson approached. But he was altogether unprepared for the jarring
thud
that exploded behind him as the receptionist slammed the door on her way out.

In the next instant his startled mind, stripped of its defenses, was again laid bare to the scorching, blinding radiance of the Screamies. But he quickly restored his composure and locked out all the horrors of the attack.

Radcliff looked up and smiled. “Don’t hold that against Miss Ashley. It was a test. And apparently your control is excellent”

“Thanks,” Gregson said stiffly. “I really needed that”

Radcliff came around the desk, hand extended. “Welcome back to the grind. We have plenty of work cut out for you.”

“Sorry. But all I’m interested in is a heavy dose of quiet life—and my own problems.”

“I think you’ll change your mind.”

Gregson accepted a chair. “Hear anything about Wellford?”

“That British agent? The one who went Screamie just before you did? He was released from isolation six months ago.”

Then Ken had made it safely through the barrier too! “Where is he? I’d like to get in touch with him.”

“If you do, you’d better take along a battalion of Guardsmen and some heavy artillery. He’s been collected by one of the remaining Valorian cells. Four months ago, I believe.”

Gregson shook his head incredulously. “Not Wellford!”

“Afraid so. That’s what put us on to the fact that the aliens would rather condition an ex-Screamer than a pre-Screamer—so they don’t have to worry about their puppets becoming plague casualties.”

“But I thought the Valorian threat was over.”

“It is, for all practical purposes. Oh, there’re a few cells here and there. But every tune we close in on one, the others scatter. We’re changing tactics though. We’re going to try for a grand slam—knock them out all at once with nuclear stuff the next time we pin down their locations.”

“Of course you’re going to get Wellford back first”

“We’re working on that now.”

“I’d like to get in on it.”

“Can’t be spared. We need you for something more vital.” Radcliff paused, then said tensely, “Greg—I think we can put an end to the Screamies! We may finally have the answer.”

“Based on the idea that they’re caused by radiation from space?”

The director nodded.

He reached into his drawer and placed on the desk top a small metal box equipped with a single, knurled knob. There was a recessed red bulb in its face.

“This,” he said, “should prove to be the solution—if its limited effect can be built up sufficiently to give universal coverage.”

Gregson bent anxiously forward. “What is it?”

“It’s a suppressor. It can cancel out—over a small range—the radiation which has nearly ruined our civiliation during the past sixteen years.” Radcliff turned the knob and the crimson bulb cast its soft glow into the room.

“I don’t feel anything,” Gregson said.

“Of course not. But… well, here’s a demonstration.”

He touched a button on his desk and drapes were drawn across the windows. A panel opened in the wall to his left, unveiling a projector which cast its picture across the room.

The scene was in one of the wards of an isolation institute. Radcliff turned the volume up and his office was filled with desperate, coarse cries as scores of Screamers writhed against their bed straps.

The director himself appeared on the screen and paused to display the same metal box that was now on his desk. He turned its knob and the suppressor’s recessed pilot bulb flared into brilliance.

All the patients in the nearest beds instantly ceased struggling, as though a curtain had dropped over their terror and pain. They turned to stare in bewilderment at Radcliff, who was now walking along the aisle.

Their astonishment was no more than that felt by Gregson himself as he watched the incredible demonstration. There
was
a way to stop the Screamies! As Radcliff proceeded along the rows of beds, it was as though he were the center of a sphere of calm that was washing over the Screamers, releasing them temporarily from their torment Behind nun, the patients were being engulfed once more by their agony.

The director switched off his projector. “What do you say?”

Gregson thought of his two years of isolation, of Forsythe and the millions of others who were following in his wake. “It’s
tremendous!
You’ve got to let everybody know about this!”