HIGHWAYS IN HIDING

GEORGE O. SMITH

Copyright 1956 by George O. Smith
Highways in Hiding is based upon material originally copyrighted by Greenleaf Publishing Co., 1955.

All rights reserved
Library of Congress Catalog Card No.: 56-10457
Printed in the U.S.A.
Cover painting by Roy G. Krenkel

A LANCER BOOK, 1967
LANCER BOOKS, INC., 185 MADISON AVENUE, NEW YORK, N.Y. 10016

[Transcriber's note: This is a rule 6 clearance. PG has not been able to find a U.S. copyright renewal.]

For my drinking uncle
DON
and, of course
MARIAN

CONTENTS

[Historical Note]
[STALEMATE]
[I]
[II]
[III]
[IV]
[V]
[VI]
[VII]
[VIII]
[IX]
[X]
[XI]
[XII]
[XIII]
[XIV]
[XV]
[XVI]
[XVII]
[XVIII]
[XIX]
[XX]
[XXI]
[XXII]
[XXIII]
[XXIV]
[XXV]

Historical Note

In the founding days of Rhine Institute the need arose for a new punctuation mark which would indicate on the printed page that the passage was of mental origin, just as the familiar quotation marks indicate that the words between them were of verbal origin. Accordingly, the symbol # was chosen, primarily because it appears on every typewriter.

Up to the present time, the use of the symbol # to indicate directed mental communication has been restricted to technical papers, term theses, and scholarly treatises by professors, scholars, and students of telepathy.

Here, for the first time in any popular work, the symbol # is used to signify that the passage between the marks was mental communication.

Steve Cornell, M. Ing.

STALEMATE

Macklin said, "Please put that weapon down, Mr. Cornell. Let's not add attempted murder to your other crimes."

"Don't force me to it, then," I told him.

But I knew I couldn't do it. I hated them all. I wanted the whole Highways in Hiding rolled up like an old discarded carpet, with every Mekstrom on Earth rolled up in it. But I couldn't pull the trigger. The survivors would have enough savvy to clean up the mess before our bodies got cold, and the Highways crowd would be doing business at the same old stand. Without, I might add, the minor nuisance that people call Steve Cornell.

What I really wanted was to find Catherine.

And then it came to me that what I really wanted second of all was to possess a body of Mekstrom Flesh, to be a physical superman....

I

I came up out of the blackness just enough to know that I was no longer pinned down by a couple of tons of wrecked automobile. I floated on soft sheets with only a light blanket over me.

I hurt all over like a hundred and sixty pounds of boil. My right arm was numb and my left thigh was aching. Breathing felt like being stabbed with rapiers and the skin of my face felt stretched tight. There was a bandage over my eyes and the place was as quiet as the grave. But I knew that I was not in any grave because my nose was working just barely well enough to register the unmistakable pungent odor that only goes with hospitals.

I tried my sense of perception, but like any delicate and critical sense, perception was one of the first to go. I could not dig out beyond a few inches. I could sense the bed and the white sheets and that was all.

Some brave soul had hauled me out of that crack-up before the fuel tank went up in the fire. I hope that whoever he was, he'd had enough sense to haul Catherine out of the mess first. The thought of living without Catherine was too dark to bear, and so I just let the blackness close down over me again because it cut out all pain, both physical and mental.

The next time I awoke there was light and a pleasant male voice saying, "Steve Cornell. Steve, can you hear me?"

I tried to answer but no sound came out. Not even a hoarse croak.

The voice went on, "Don't try to talk, Steve. Just think it."

#Catherine?# I thought sharply, because most medicos are telepath, not perceptive.

"Catherine is all right," he replied.

#Can I see her?#

"Lord no!" he said quickly. "You'd scare her half to death the way you look right now."

#How bad off am I?#

"You're a mess, Steve. Broken ribs, compound fracture of the left tibia, broken humerus. Scars, mars, abrasions, some flashburn and post-accident shock. And if you're interested, not a trace of Mekstrom's Disease."

#Mekstrom's Disease—?# was my thought of horror.

"Forget it, Steve. I always check for it because it's been my specialty. Don't worry."

#Okay. So how long have I been here?#

"Eight days."

#Eight days? Couldn't you do the usual job?#

"You were pretty badly ground up, Steve. That's what took the time. Now, suppose you tell me what happened?"

#Catherine and I were eloping. Just like most other couples do since Rhine Institute made it difficult to find personal privacy. Then we cracked up.#

"What did it?" asked the doctor. "Perceptives like you usually sense danger before you can see it."

#Catherine called my attention to a peculiar road sign, and I sent my perception back to take another dig. We hit the fallen limb of a tree and went over and over. You know the rest.#

"Bad," said the doctor. "But what kind of a sign would call your interest so deep that you didn't at least see the limb, even if you were perceiving the sign?"

#Peculiar sign,# I thought. Ornamental wrought iron gizmo with curlicues and a little decorative circle that sort of looks like the Boy Scout tenderfoot badge suspended on three spokes. One of the spokes were broken away; I got involved because I was trying to guess whether it had been shot away by some vandal who missed the central design. Then—blooie!#

"It's really too bad, Steve. But you'll be all right in a while."

#Thanks, doctor. Doctor? Doctor—?#

"Sorry, Steve. I forget that everybody is not telepath like I am. I'm James Thorndyke."

Much later I began to wake up again, and with better clarity of mind, I found that I could extend my esper as far as the wall and through the door by a few inches. It was strictly hospital all right; sere white and stainless steel as far as my esper could reach.

In my room was a nurse, rustling in starched white. I tried to speak, croaked once, and then paused to form my voice.

"Can—I see—How is—? Where is?" I stopped again, because the nurse was probably as esper as I was and required a full sentence to get the thought behind it. Only a telepath like the doctor could have followed my jumbled ideas. But the nurse was good. She tried:

"Mr. Cornell? You're awake!"

"Look—nurse—"

"Take it easy. I'm Miss Farrow. I'll get the doctor."

"No—wait. I've been here eight days—?"

"But you were badly hurt, you know."

"But the doctor. He said that she was here, too."

"Don't worry about it, Mr. Cornell."

"But he said that she was not badly hurt."

"She wasn't."

"Then why was—is—she here so long?"

Miss Farrow laughed cheerfully. "Your Christine is in fine shape. She is still here because she wouldn't leave until you were well out of danger. Now stop fretting. You'll see her soon enough."

Her laugh was light but strained. It sounded off-key because it was as off-key as a ten-yard-strip of baldfaced perjury. She left in a hurry and I was able to esper as far as outside the door, where she leaned back against the wood and began to cry. She was hating herself because she had blown her lines and she knew that I knew it.

And Catherine had never been in this hospital, because if she had been brought in with me, the nurse would have known the right name.

Not that it mattered to me now, but Miss Farrow was no esper or she'd have dug my belongings and found Catherine's name on the license. Miss Farrow was a telepath; I'd not called my girl by name, only by an affectionate mental image.

II

I was fighting my body upright when Doctor Thorndyke came running. "Easy, Steve," he said with a quiet gesture. He pushed me gently back down in the bed with hands that were as soft as a mother's, but as firm as the kind that tie bow knots in half-inch bars. "Easy," he repeated soothingly.

"Catherine?" I croaked pleadingly.

Thorndyke fingered the call button in some code or other before he answered me. "Steve," he said honestly, "you can't be kept in ignorance forever. We hoped it would be a little longer, when you were stronger—"

"Stop beating around!" I yelled. At least it felt like I was yelling, but maybe it was only my mind welling.

"Easy, Steve. You've had a rough time. Shock—" The door opened and a nurse came in with a hypo all loaded, its needle buried in a fluff of cotton. Thorndyke eyed it professionally and took it; the nurse faded quietly from the room. "Take it easy, Steve. This will—"

"No! Not until I know—"

"Easy," he repeated. He held the needle up before my eyes. "Steve," he said, "I don't know whether you have enough esper training to dig the contents of this needle, but if you haven't, will you please trust me? This contains a neurohypnotic. It won't put you under. It will leave you as wide awake as you are now, but it will disconnect your running gear and keep you from blowing a fuse." Then with swift deftness that amazed me, the doctor slid the needle into my arm and let me have the full load.

I was feeling the excitement rise in me because something was wrong, but I could also feel the stuff going to work. Within half a minute I was in a chilled-off frame of mind that was capable of recognizing the facts but not caring much one way or the other.

When he saw the stuff taking hold, Thorndyke asked, "Steve, just who is Catherine?"

The shock almost cut through the drug. My mind whirled with all the things that Catherine was to me, and the doctor followed it every bit of the way.

"Steve, you've been under an accident shock. There was no Catherine with you. There was no one with you at all. Understand that and accept it. No one. You were alone. Do you understand?"

I shook my head. I sounded to myself like an actor reading the script of a play for the first time. I wanted to pound on the table and add the vigor of physical violence to my hoarse voice, but all I could do was to reply in a calm voice:

"Catherine was with me. We were—" I let it trail off because Thorndyke knew very well what we were doing. We were eloping in the new definition of the word. Rhine Institute and its associated studies had changed a lot of customs; a couple intending to commit matrimony today were inclined to take off quietly and disappear from their usual haunts until they'd managed to get intimately acquainted with one another. Elopement was a means of finding some personal privacy.

We should have stayed at home and faced the crude jokes that haven't changed since Pithecanthropus first discovered that sex was funny. But our mutual desire to find some privacy in this modern fish-bowl had put me in the hospital and Catherine—where—?

"Steve, listen to me!"

"Yeah?"

"I know you espers. You're sensitive, maybe more so than telepaths. More imagination—"

This was for the birds in my estimation. Among the customs that Rhine has changed was the old argument as to whether women or men were smarter. Now the big argument was whether espers or telepaths could get along better with the rest of the world.

Thorndyke laughed at my objections and went on: "You're in accident shock. You piled up your car. You begin to imagine how terrible it would have been if your Catherine had been with you. Next you carefully build up in your subconscious mind a whole and complete story, so well put together that to you it seems to be fact."

But, #—how could anyone have taken a look at the scene of the accident and not seen traces of woman? My woman.#

"We looked," he said in answer to my unspoken question. "There was not a trace, Steve."

#Fingerprints?#

"You'd been dating her."

#Naturally!#

Thorndyke nodded quietly. "There were a lot of her prints on the remains of your car. But no one could begin to put a date on them, or tell how recent was the latest, due to the fire. Then we made a door to door canvas of the neighborhood to be sure she hadn't wandered off in a daze and shock. Not even a footprint. Nary a trace." He shook his head unhappily. "I suppose you're going to ask about that travelling bag you claim to have put in the trunk beside your own. There was no trace of any travelling bag."

"Doctor," I asked pointedly, "if we weren't together, suppose you tell me first why I had a marriage license in my pocket; second, how come I made a date with the Reverend Towle in Midtown; and third, why did I bother to reserve the bridal suite in the Reignoir Hotel in Westlake? Or was I nuts a long time before this accident. Maybe," I added, "after making reservations, I had to go out and pile myself up as an excuse for not turning up with a bride."

"I—all I can say is that there was not a trace of woman in that accident."

"You've been digging in my mind. Did you dig her telephone number?"

He looked at me blankly.

"And you found what, when you tried to call her?"

"I—er—"

"Her landlady told you that Miss Lewis was not in her apartment because Miss Lewis was on her honeymoon, operating under the name of Mrs. Steve Cornell. That about it?"

"All right. So now you know."

"Then where the hell is she, Doc?" The drug was not as all-powerful as it had been and I was beginning to feel excitement again.

"We don't know, Steve."

"How about the guy that hauled me out of that wreck? What does he say?"

"He was there when we arrived. The car had been hauled off you by block and tackle. By the time we got there the tackle had been burned and the car was back down again in a crumpled mass. He is a farmer by the name of Harrison. He had one of his older sons with him, a man about twenty-four, named Phillip. They both swore later that there was no woman in that car nor a trace of one."

"Oh, he did, did he?"

Dr. Thorndyke shook his head slowly and then said very gently. "Steve, there's no predicting what a man's mind will do in a case of shock. I've seen 'em come up with a completely false identity, all the way back to childhood. Now, let's take your case once more. Among the other incredible items—"

"Incredible?" I roared.

"Easy. Hear me out. After all, am I to believe your unsubstantiated story or the evidence of a whole raft of witnesses, the police detail, the accident squad, and the guys who hauled you out of a burning car before it blew up? As I was saying, how can we credit much of your tale when you raved about one man lifting the car and the other hauling you out from underneath?"

I shrugged. "That's obviously a mistaken impression. No one could—"

"So when you admit that one hunk of your story is mistaken—"

"That doesn't prove the rest is false!"

"The police have been tracking this affair hard," said the doctor slowly. "They've gotten nowhere. Tell me, did anyone see you leave that apartment with Miss Lewis?"

"No," I said slowly. "No one that knew us."

Thorndyke shook his head unhappily. "That's why we have to assume that you are in post-accident shock."

I snorted angrily. "Then explain the license, the date with the reverend, the hotel reservation?"

Thorndyke said quietly, "Hear me out, Steve. This is not my own idea alone, but the combined ideas of a number of people who have studied the human mind—"

"In other words, I'm nuts?"

"No. Shock."

"Shock?"

He nodded very slowly. "Let's put it this way. Let's assume that you wanted this marriage with Miss Lewis. You made preparations, furnished an apartment, got a license, made a date with a preacher, reserved a honeymoon suite, and bought flowers for the bride. You take off from work, arrive at her door, only to find that Miss Lewis has taken off for parts unknown. Maybe she left you a letter—"

"Letter!"

"Hear me out, Steve. You arrive at her apartment and find her gone. You read a letter from her saying that she cannot marry you. This is a rather deep shock to you and you can't face it. Know what happens?"

"I blow my brains out along a country road at ninety miles per hour."

"Please, this is serious."

"It sounds incredibly stupid to me."

"You're rejecting it in the same way you rejected the fact that Miss Lewis ran away rather than marry you."

"Do go on, Doctor."

"You drive along the same road you'd planned to take, but the frustration and shock pile up to put you in an accident-prone frame of mind. You then pile up, not consciously, but as soon as you come upon something like that tree limb which can be used to make an accident authentic."

"Oh, sure."

Thorndyke eyed me soberly. "Steve," he asked me in a brittle voice, "you won't try to convince me that any esper will let physical danger of that sort get close enough to—"

"I've told you how it happened. My attention was on that busted sign!"

"Fine. More evidence to the fact that Miss Lewis was with you? Now listen to me. In accident-shock you'd not remember anything that your mind didn't want you to recall. Failure is a hard thing to take. So now you can blame your misfortune on that accident."

"So now you tell me how you justify the fact that Catherine told landladies, friends, bosses, and all the rest that she was going to marry me a good long time before I was ready to be verbal about my plans?"

"I—"

"Suppose I've succeeded in bribing everybody to perjure themselves. Maybe we all had it in for Catherine, and did her in?"

Thorndyke shrugged. "I don't know," he said. "I really don't know, Steve. I wish I did."

"That makes two of us," I grunted. "Hasn't anybody thought of arresting me for kidnapping, suspicion of murder, reckless driving and cluttering up the highway with junk?"

"Yes," he said quietly. "The police were most thorough. They had two of their top men look into you."

"What did they find?" I asked angrily. No man likes to have his mind turned inside out and laid out flat so that all the little wheels, cables and levers are open to the public gaze. On the other hand, since I was not only innocent of any crime but as baffled as the rest of them, I'd have gone to them willingly to let them dig, to see if they could dig past my conscious mind into the real truth.

"They found that your story was substantially an honest one."

"Then why all this balderdash about shock, rejection, and so on?"

He shook his head. "None of us are supermen," he said simply. "Your story was honest, you weren't lying. You believe every word of it. You saw it, you went through it. That doesn't prove your story true."

"Now see here—"

"It does prove one thing; that you, Steve Cornell, did not have any malicious, premeditated plans against Catherine Lewis. They've checked everything from hell to breakfast, and so far all we can do is make long-distance guesses as to what happened."

I snorted in my disgust. "That's a telepath for you. Everything so neatly laid out in rows of slats like a snow fence. Me—I'm going to consult a scholar and have him really dig me deep."

Thorndyke shook his head. "They had their top men, Steve. Scholar Redfern and Scholar Berks. Both of them Rhine Scholars, magna cum laude."

I blinked as I always do when I am flabbergasted. I've known a lot of doctors of this and that, from medicine to languages. I've even known a scholar or two, but none of them intimately. But when a doctor of psi is invited to take his scholarte at Rhine, that's it, brother; I pass.

Thorndyke smiled. "You weren't too bad yourself, Steve. Ran twelfth in your class at Illinois, didn't you?"

I nodded glumly. "I forgot to cover the facts. They'd called all the bright boys out and collected them under one special-study roof. I majored in mechanical ingenuity not psi. Hoped to get a D. Ing. out of it, at least, but had to stop. Partly because I'm not ingenious enough and partly because I ran out of cash."

Doctor Thorndyke nodded. "I know how it is," he said. I realized that he was leading me away from the main subject gently, but I couldn't see how to lead him back without starting another verbal hassle. He had me cold. He could dig my mind and get the best way to lead me away, while I couldn't read his. I gave up. It felt better, too, getting my mind off this completely baffling puzzle even for a moment. He caught my thoughts but his face didn't twitch a bit as he picked up his narrative smoothly:

"I didn't make it either," he said unhappily. "I'm psi and good. But I'm telepath and not esper. I weasled my way through pre-med and medical by main force and awkwardness, so to speak." He grinned at me sheepishly. "I'm not much different than you or any other psi. The espers all think that perception is superior to the ability to read minds, and vice versa. I was going to show 'em that a telepath can make Scholar of Medicine. So I 'pathed my way through med by reading the minds of my fellows, who were all good espers. I got so good that I could read the mind of an esper watching me do a delicate dissecting job, and move my hands according to his perception. I could diagnose the deep ills with the best of them—so long as there was an esper in the place."

"So what tripped you up?"

"Telepaths make out best dealing with people. Espers do better with things."

"Isn't medicine a field that deals with people?"

He shook his head. "Not when a headache means spinal tumor, or indigestion, or a bad cold. 'Doctor,' says the patient, 'I've a bad ache along my left side just below the ribs,' and after you diagnose, it turns out to be acute appendicitis. You see, Steve, the patient doesn't know what's wrong with him. Only the symptoms. A telepath can follow the patient's symptoms perfectly, but it takes an esper to dig in his guts and perceive the tumor that's pressing on the spine or the striae on his liver."

"Yeah."

"So I flopped on a couple of tests that the rest of the class sailed through, just because I was not fast enough to read their minds and put my own ability to work. It made 'em suspicious and so here I am, a mere doctor instead of a scholar."

"There are fields for you, I'm sure."

He nodded. "Two. Psychiatry and psychology, neither of which I have any love for. And medical research, where the ability to grasp another doctor or scholar's plan, ideas and theories is slightly more important than the ability to dig esper into the experiments."

"Don't see that," I said with a shake of my head.

"Well, Steve, let's take Mekstrom's Disease, for instance."

"Let's take something simple. What I know about Mekstrom's Disease could be carved on the head of a pin with a blunt butter knife."

"Let's take Mekstrom's. That's my chance to make Scholar of Medicine, Steve, if I can come up with an answer to one of the minor questions. I'll be in the clinical laboratory where the only cases present are those rare cases of Mekstrom's. The other doctors, espers every one of them, and the scholars over them, will dig the man's body right down to the last cell, looking and combing—you know some of the better espers can actually dig into the constituency of a cell?—but I'll be the doctor who can collect all their information, correlate it, and maybe come up with an answer."

"You picked a dilly," I told him.

It was a real one, all right. Otto Mekstrom had been a mechanic-tech at White Sands Space Station during the first flight to Venus, Mars and Moon round-trip with landings. About two weeks after the ship came home, Otto Mekstrom's left fingertips began to grow hard. The hardening crawled up slowly until his hand was like a rock. They studied him and worked over him and took all sorts of samples and made all sorts of tests until Otto's forearm was as hard as his hand. Then they amputated at the shoulder.

But by that time, Otto Mekstrom's toes on both feet were getting solid and his other hand was beginning to show signs of the same. On one side of the creepline the flesh was soft and normal, but on the other it was all you could do to poke a sharp needle into the skin. Poor Otto ended up a basket case, just in time to have the damned stuff start all over again at the stumps of his arms and legs. He died when hardening reached his vitals.

Since that day, some twenty-odd years ago, there had been about thirty cases a year turn up. All fatal, despite amputations and everything else known to modern medical science. God alone knew how many unfortunate human beings took to suicide without contacting the big Medical Research Center at Marion, Indiana.

Well, if Thorndyke could uncover something, no one could claim that a telepath had no place in medicine. I wished him luck.

I did not see Thorndyke again in that hospital. They released me the next day and then I had nothing to do but to chew my fingernails and wonder what had happened to Catherine.

III

I'd rather not go into the next week and a half in detail. I became known as the bridegroom who lost his bride, and between the veiled accusations and the half-covered snickers, life was pretty miserable. I talked to the police a couple-three times, first as a citizen asking for information and ending up as a complainant against party or parties unknown. The latter got me nowhere. Apparently the police had more lines out than the Grand Bank fishing fleet and were getting no more nibbles than they'd get in the Dead Sea. They admitted it; the day had gone when the police gave out news reports that an arrest was expected hourly, meaning that they were baffled. The police, with their fine collection of psi boys, were willing to admit when they were really baffled. I talked to telepaths who could tell me what I'd had for breakfast on the day I'd entered pre-school classes, and espers who could sense the color of the clothing I wore yesterday. I've a poor color-esper, primitive so to speak. These guys were good, but no matter how good they were, Catherine Lewis had vanished as neatly as Ambrose Bierce.

I even read Charles Fort, although I have no belief in the supernatural, and rather faint faith in the Hereafter. And people who enter the Hereafter leave their remains behind for evidence.

Having to face Catherine's mother and father, who came East to see me, made me a complete mental wreck.

It is harder than you think to face the parents of a woman you loved, and find that all you can tell them is that somehow you fouled your drive, cracked up, and lost their daughter. Not even dead-for-sure. Death, I think, we all could have faced. But this uncertainty was something that gnawed at the soul's roots and left it rotting.

To stand there and watch the tears in the eyes of a woman as she asks you, "But can't you remember, son?" is a little too much, and I don't care to go into details.

The upshot of it was, after about ten days of lying awake nights and wondering where she was and why. Watching her eyes peer out of a metal casting at me from a position sidewise of my head. Nightmares, either the one about us turning over and over and over, or Mrs. Lewis pleading with me only to tell her the truth. Then having the police inform me that they were marking this case down as "unexplained." I gave up. I finally swore that I was going to find her and return with her, or I was going to join her in whatever strange, unknown world she had entered.

The first thing I did was to go back to the hospital in the hope that Dr. Thorndyke might be able to add something. In my unconscious ramblings there might be something that fell into a pattern if it could be pieced together.

But this was a failure, too. The hospital super was sorry, but Dr. Thorndyke had left for the Medical Research Center a couple of days before. Nor could I get in touch with him because he had a six-week interim vacation and planned a long, slow jaunt through Yellowstone, with neither schedule nor forwarding addresses.

I was standing there on the steps hoping to wave down a cruising coptercab when the door opened and a woman came out. I turned to look and she recognized me. It was Miss Farrow, my former nurse.

"Why, Mr. Cornell, what are you doing back here?"

"Mostly looking for Thorndyke. He's not here."

"I know. Isn't it wonderful, though? He'll get his chance to study for his scholarte now."

I nodded glumly. "Yeah," I said. It probably sounded resentful, but it is hard to show cheer over the good fortune of someone else when your own world has come unglued.

"Still hoping," she said. It was a statement and not a question.

I nodded slowly. "I'm hoping," I said. "Someone has the answer to this puzzle. I'll have to find it myself. Everyone else has given up."

"I wish you luck," said Miss Farrow with a smile. "You certainly have the determination."

I grunted. "It's about all I have. What I need is training. Here I am, a mechanical engineer, about to tackle the job of a professional detective and tracer of missing persons. About all I know about the job is what I have read. One gets the idea that these writers must know something of the job, the way they write about it. But once you're faced with it yourself, you realize that the writer has planted his own clues."

Miss Farrow nodded. "One thing," she suggested, "have you talked to the people who got you out from under your car yet?"

"No, I haven't. The police talked to them and claimed they knew nothing. I doubt that I can ask them anything that the police have not satisfied themselves about."

Miss Farrow looked up at me sidewise. "You won't find anything by asking people who have never heard of you."

"I suppose not."

A coptercab came along at that moment, and probably sensing my intention, he gave his horn a tap. I'd have liked to talk longer with Miss Farrow, but a cab was what I wanted, so with a wave I took it and she went on down the steps to her own business.

I had to pause long enough to buy a new car, but a few hours afterward I was rolling along that same highway with my esper extended as far as I could in all directions. I was driving slowly, this time both alert and ready.

I went past the scene of the accident slowly and shut my mind off as I saw the black-burned patch. The block was still hanging from an overhead branch, and the rope that had burned off was still dangling, about two feet of it, looped through the pulleys and ending in a tapered, burned end.

I turned left into a driveway toward the home of the Harrisons and went along a winding dirt road, growing more and more conscious of a dead area ahead of me.

It was not a real dead zone, because I could still penetrate some of the region. But as far as really digging any of the details of the rambling Harrison house, I could get more from my eyesight than from any sense of perception. But even if they couldn't find a really dead area, the Harrisons had done very well in finding one that made my sense of perception ineffective. It was sort of like looking through a light fog, and the closer I got to the house the thicker it became.

Just about the point where the dead area was first beginning to make its effect tell, I came upon a tall, browned man of about twenty-four who had been probing into the interior of a tractor up to the time he heard my car. He waved, and I stopped.

"Mr. Harrison?"

"I'm Phillip. And you are Mr. Cornell."

"Call me Steve like everybody else," I said. "How'd you guess?"

"Recognized you," he said with a grin. "I'm the guy that pulled you out."

"Thanks," I said, offering a hand.

He chuckled. "Steve, consider the hand taken and shook, because I've enough grime to muss up a regiment."

"It won't bother me," I said.

"Thanks, but it's still a gesture, and I appreciate it, but let's be sensible. I know you can wash, but let's shake later. What can I do for you?"

"I'd like a first-hand account, Phil."

"Not much to tell. Dad and I were pulling stumps over about a thousand feet from the wreck. We heard the racket. I am esper enough to dig that distance with clarity, so we knew we'd better bring along the block and tackle. The tractor wouldn't go through. So we came on the double, Dad rigged the tackle and hoisted and I took a running dive, grabbed and hauled you out before the whole thing went Whoosh! We were both lucky, Steve."

I grunted a bit but managed to nod with a smile.

"I suppose you know that I'm still trying to find my fiancée?"

"I'd heard tell," he said. He looked at me sharply. I'm a total blank as a telepath, like all espers, but I could tell what he was thinking.

"Everybody is convinced that Catherine was not with me," I admitted. "But I'm not. I know she was."

He shook his head slowly. "As soon as we heard the screech of brakes and rubber we esped the place," he said quietly. "We dug you, of course. But no one else. Even if she'd jumped as soon as that tree limb came into view, she could not have run far enough to be out of range. As for removing a bag, she'd have had to wait until the slam-bang was over to get it out, and by the time your car was finished rolling, Dad and I were on the way with help. She was not there, Steve."

#You're a goddam liar!#

Phillip Harrison did not move a muscle. He was blank telepathically. I was esping the muscles in his stomach, under his loose clothing, for that first tensing sign of anger, but nothing showed. He had not been reading my mind.

I smiled thinly at Phil Harrison and shrugged.

He smiled back sympathetically, but behind it I could see that he was wishing that I'd stop harping on a dead subject. "I sincerely wish I could be of help," he said. In that he was sincere. But somewhere, someone was not, and I wanted to find out who it was.

The impasse looked as though it might go on forever unless I turned away and left. I had no desire to leave. Not that Phil could help me, but even though this was a dead end, I was loath to leave the place because it was the last place where I had been close to Catherine.

The silence between us must have been a bit strained at this point, but luckily we had an interruption. I perceived motion, turned and caught sight of a woman coming along the road toward us.

"My sister," said Phil. "Marian."

Marian Harrison was quite a girl; if I'd not been emotionally tied to Catherine Lewis, I'd have been happy to invite myself in. Marian was almost as tall as I am, a dark, brown-haired woman with eyes of a startling, electricity colored blue. She was about twenty-two, young and healthy. Her skin was tanned toast brown so that the bright blue eyes fairly sparked out at you. Her red mouth made a pleasing blend with the tan of her skin and her teeth gleamed white against the dark when she smiled.

Insultingly, I made some complimentary but impolite mental observations about her figure, but Marion did not appear to notice. She was no telepath.

"You're Mr. Cornell," she said, "I remembered you," she said quietly. "Please believe us, Mr. Cornell, when we extend our sympathy."

"Thanks," I said glumly. "Please understand me, Miss Harrison. I appreciate your sympathy, but what I need is action and information and answers. Once I get those, the sympathy won't be needed."

"Of course I understand," she replied instantly. "We are all aware that sympathy is a poor substitute. All the world grieving with you doesn't turn a stitch to help you out of your trouble. All we can do is to wish, with you, that it hadn't happened."

"That's the point," I said helplessly. "I don't even know what happened."

"That makes it even worse," she said softly. Marian had a pleasant voice, throaty and low, that sounded intimate even when talking about something pragmatic. "I wish we could help you, Steve."

"I wish someone could."

She nodded. "They asked me about it, too, even though I was not present until afterward. They asked me," she said thoughtfully, "about the mental attitude of a woman running off to get married. I told them that I couldn't speak for your woman, but that I might be able to speak for me, putting myself in the same circumstances."

She paused a moment, and her brother turned idly back to his tractor and fitted a small end wrench to a bolt-head and gave it a twist. He seemed to think that as long as Marian and I were talking, he could well afford to get along with his work. I agreed with him. I wanted information, but I did not expect the entire world to stop progress to help me. He spun the bolt and started on another, lost in his job while Marian went on:

"I told them that your story was authentic—the one about the bridal nightgown." A very slight color came under the deep tan. "I told them that I have one, too, still in its wrapper, and that someday I'd be planning marriage and packing a go-away bag with the gown shaken out and then packed neatly. I told them that I'd be doing the same thing no matter whether we were having a formal church wedding with a four-alarm reception and all the trimmings or a quiet elopement such as you were. I told them that it was the essentials that count, not the trimmings and the tinsel. My questioner's remark was to the effect that either you were telling the truth, or that you had esped a woman about to marry and identified her actions with your own wishes."

"I know which," I said with a sour smile. "It was both."

Marian nodded. "Then they asked me if it were probable that a woman would take this step completely unprepared and I laughed at them. I told them that long before Rhine, women were putting their nuptial affairs in order about the time the gentleman was beginning to view marriage with an attitude slightly less than loathing, and that by the time he popped the question, she'd been practicing writing her name as 'Mrs.' and picking out the china-ware and prospective names for the children, and that if any woman had ever been so stunned by a proposal of marriage that she'd take off without so much as a toothbrush, no one in history had ever heard of her."

"Then you begin to agree with me?"

She shrugged. "Please," she said in that low voice, "don't ask me my opinion of your veracity. You believe it, but all the evidence lies against you. There was not a shred of woman-trace anywhere along your course, from the point along the road where you first caught sight of the limb that threw you to the place where you piled up. Nor was there a trace anywhere in a vast circle—almost a half mile they searched—from the crack-up. They had doctors of psi digging for footprints, shreds of clothing, everything. Not a trace."

"But where did she go?" I cried, and when I say 'cried' I mean just that.

Marian shook her head very slowly. "Steve," she said in a voice so low that I could hardly hear her over the faint shrill of bolts being unscrewed by her brother, "so far as we know, she was never here. Why don't you forget her—"

I looked at her. She stood there, poised and a bit tensed as though she were trying to force some feeling of affectionate kinhood across the gap that separated us, as though she wanted to give me both physical and mental comfort despite the fact that we were strangers on a ten-minute first-meeting. There was distress in her face.

"Forget her—?" I ground out. "I'd rather die!"

"Oh Steve—no!" One hand went to her throat and the other came out to fasten around my forearm. Her grip was hard.

I stood there wondering what to do next. Marian's grip on my arm relaxed and she stepped back.

I pulled myself together. "I'm sorry," I told her honestly. "I'm putting you through a set of emotional hurdles by bringing my problems here. I'd better take them away."

She nodded very slowly. "Please go. But please come back once you get yourself squared away, no matter how. We'd all like to see you when you aren't all tied up inside."

Phil looked up from the guts of the tractor. "Take it easy, Steve," he said. "And remember that you do have friends here."

Blindly I turned from them and stumbled back to my car. They were a pair of very fine people, firm, upright. Marian's grip on my arm had been no weaker than her sympathy, and Phil's less-emotional approach to my trouble was no less deep, actually. It was as strong as his good right arm, loosening the head bolts of a tractor engine with a small adjustable wrench.

I'd be back. I wanted to see them again. I wanted to go back there with Catherine and introduce them to her. But I was definitely going to go back.

I was quite a way toward home before I realized that I had not met the old man. I bet myself that Father Harrison was quite the firm, active patriarch.

IV

The days dragged slowly. I faced each morning hopefully at first, but as the days dragged on and on, I began to feel that each morning was opening another day of futility, to be barely borne until it was time to flop down in weariness. I faced the night in loneliness and in anger at my own inability to do something productive.

I pestered the police until they escorted me to the door and told me that if I came again, they'd take me to another kind of door and loose thereafter the key. I shrugged and left disconsolately, because by that time I had been able to esp, page by page, the entire file that dealt with the case of "Missing Person: Lewis, Catherine," stamped "Inactive, but not Closed."

I hated the words.

But as the days dragged out, one after another, with no respite and no hope, my raw nervous system began to heal. It was probably a case of numbness; you maul your thumb with a hammer and it will hurt just so long before it stops.

I was numb for a long time. I remember night after night, lying awake and staring into the darkness at the wall I knew was beside me, and I hated my esper because I wanted to project my mind out across some unknown space to reach for Catherine's mind. If we'd both been telepaths we could cross the universe to touch each other with that affectionate tenderness that mated telepaths always claim they have.

Instead I found myself more aware of a clouded-veil perception of Marian Harrison as she took my arm and looked into my face on that day when I admitted that I found little worth living for.

I knew what that meant—nothing. It was a case of my subconscious mind pointing out that the available present was more desirable than the unavailable not-present. At first I resented my apparent inconstancy in forming an esper projection of Marian Harrison when I was trying to project my blank telepathic inadequacy to Catherine. But as the weeks faded into the past, the shock and the frustration began to pale and I found Marian's projective image less and less an unwanted intrusion and more and more pleasant.

I had two deeply depressed spells in those six weeks. At the end of the fourth week I received a small carton containing some of my personal junk that had been in Catherine's apartment. A man can't date his girl for weeks without dropping a few things like a cigarette lighter, a tie clip, one odd cuff-link, some papers, a few letters, some books, and stuff both valuable and worthless that had turned up as gifts for one reason or another. It was a shock to get this box and its arrival bounced me deep into a doldrum-period of three or four days.

Then at the end of the sixth week I received a card from Dr. Thorndyke. It contained a lithograph in stereo of some scene in Yellowstone other than Old Faithful blowing its stack.

On the message side was a cryptic note:

Steve: I just drove along that road in the right side of the picture. It reminded me of yours, so I'm writing because I want to know how you are making out. I'll be at the Med-Center in a couple of weeks, you can write me there.

Jim Thorndyke.

I turned the postcard over and eyed it critically. Then I got it. Along the roadside was a tall ornamental standard of wrought iron. The same design as the road signs along that fatal highway of mine.

I sat there with a magnifying glass on the roadsign; its stereo image standing up alongside the road in full color and solidity. It took me back to that moment when Catherine had wriggled against my side, thrilling me with her warmth and eagerness.

That put me down a few days, too.

Another month passed. I'd come out of my shell quite a bit in the meantime. I now felt that I could walk in a bar and have a drink without wondering whether all the other people in the place were pointing at me. I'd cut myself off from all my previous friends, and I'd made no new friends in the weeks gone by. But I was getting more and more lonely and consequently more and more inclined to speak to people and want friends.

The accident had paled from its original horror; the vital scene returned only infrequently. Catherine was assuming the position of a lost love rather than a sweetheart expected to return soon. I remembered the warmth of her arms and the eagerness of her kiss in a nostalgic way and my mind, especially when in a doze, would play me tricks. I would recall Catherine, but when she came into my arms, I'd be holding Marian, brown and tawny, with her electric blue eyes and her vibrant nature.

But I did nothing about it. I knew that once I had asked Marian Harrison for a date I would be emotionally involved. And then if—no, when—Catherine turned up I would be torn between desires.

I would wake up and call myself all sorts of a fool. I had seen Marian for a total of perhaps fifteen minutes—in the company of her brother.

But eventually dreaming loses its sting just as futile waiting and searching does, and I awoke one morning in a long and involved debate between my id and my conscience. I decided at that moment that I would take that highway out and pay a visit to the Harrison farm. I was salving my slightly rusty conscience by telling myself that it was because I had never paid my respects to Father Harrison, but not too deep inside I knew that if Father were missing and Daughter were present I'd enjoy my visit to the farm with more relish.

But my id took a licking because the doorbell rang about nine o'clock that morning and when I dug the doorstep I came up with two gentlemen wearing gold badges in leather folders in their jacket pockets.

I opened the door because I couldn't have played absent to a team consisting of one esper and one telepath. They both knew I was home.

"Mr. Cornell, we'll waste no time. We want to know how well you know Doctor James Thorndyke."

I didn't blink at the bluntness of it. It is standard technique when an esper-telepath team go investigating. The telepath knew all about me, including the fact that I'd dug their wallets and identification cards, badges and the serial numbers of the nasty little automatics they carried. The idea was to drive the important question hard and first; it being impossible to not-think the several quick answers that pop through your mind. What I knew about Thorndyke was sketchy enough but they got it all because I didn't have any reason for covering up. I let them know that, too.

Finally, #That's about all,# I thought. #Now—why?#

The telepath half of the team answered. "Normally we wouldn't answer, Mr. Cornell, unless you said it aloud. But we don't mind letting you know which of us is the telepath this time. To answer, you are the last person to have received any message from Thorndyke."

"I—what?"

"That postcard. It was the last contact Thorndyke made with anyone. He has disappeared."

"But—"

"Thorndyke was due to arrive at The Medical Research Center in Marion, Indiana, three weeks ago. We've been tracking him ever since he failed to turn up. We've been able to retrace his meanderings very well up to a certain point in Yellowstone. There the trail stops. He had a telephoned reservation to a small hotel; there he dropped out of sight. Now, Mr. Cornell, may I see that postcard?"

"Certainly." I got it for them. The esper took it over to the window and eyed it in the light, and as he did that I went over to stand beside him and together we espered that postcard until I thought the edges would start to curl. But if there were any codes, concealed writings or any other form of hidden meaning or message in or on that card, I didn't dig any.

I gave up. I'm no trained investigator. But I knew that Thorndyke was fairly well acquainted with the depth of my perceptive sense, and he would not have concealed anything too deep for me.

Then the esper shook his head. He handed me the card. "Not a trace."

The telepath nodded. He looked at me and smiled sort of thin and strained. "We're naturally interested in you, Mr. Cornell. This seems to be the second disappearance. And you know nothing about either."

"I know," I said slowly. The puzzle began to go around and around in my head again, all the way back to that gleaming road and the crack-up.

"We'll probably be back, Mr. Cornell. You don't mind?"

"Look," I told them rather firmly, "if this puzzle can be unwound, I'll be one of the happiest men on the planet. If I can do anything to help, just say the word."

They left after that and so did I. I was still going to pay my visit to the Harrison farm. Another wild goose chase, but somewhere along this cockeyed row there was an angle. Honest people who are healthy and fairly happy with good prospects ahead of them do not just drop out of sight without a trace.

A couple of hours later I was making a good pace along the highway again. It was getting familiar to me.

I could not avoid letting my perceptive sense rest on the sign as I drove past. Not long enough to put me in danger, but long enough to discover to my surprise that someone had taken the trouble to repair the broken spoke. Someone must have been a perfectionist. The break was so slight that it seemed like calling in a mechanic because the ashtray in the car is full.

Then I noticed other changes that time had caused.

The burned scar was fading in a growth of tall weeds. The limb of the tree that hung out over the scene, from which block and tackle had hung, was beginning to lose its smoke-blackened appearance. The block was gone from the limb.

Give us a year, I thought, and the only remaining scar will be the one on my mind, and even that will be fading.

I turned into the drive, wound around the homestead road, and pulled up in front of the big, rambling house.

It looked bleak. The front lawn was a bit shaggy and there were some wisps of paper on the front porch. The venetian blinds were down and slatted shut behind closed windows. Since it was summer by now, the closed windows and the tight door, neither of which had flyscreens installed, quickly gave the fact away. The Harrisons were gone.

Another disappearance?

I turned quickly and drove to the nearest town and went to the post office.

"I'm looking for the Harrison family," I told the man behind the wicket.

"Why, they moved several weeks ago."

"Moved?" I asked with a blank-sounding voice.

The clerk nodded. Then he leaned forward and said in a confidential whisper, "Heard a rumor that the girl got a touch of that spacemen's disease."

"Mekstrom's?" I blurted.

The clerk looked at me as if I'd shouted a dirty word. "She was a fine girl," he said softly. "It's a shame."

I nodded and he went into the back files. I tried to dig alone behind him, but the files were in a small dead area in the rear of the building. I swore under my breath although I'd expected to find files in dead areas. Just as Rhine Institute was opened, the Government combed the countryside for dead or cloudy areas for their secret and confidential files. There had been one mad claim-staking rush with the Government about six feet ahead of the rest of the general public, business and the underworld.

He came back with a sorrowful look. "They left a concealed address," he said.

I felt like flashing a twenty at him like a private eye did in the old tough-books, but I knew it wouldn't work. Rhine also made it impossible for a public official to take a bribe. So instead, I tried to look distressed.

"This is extremely important. I'd say it was a matter of life and death."

"I'm sorry. A concealed forwarding address is still concealed. If you must get in touch with them, you might drop them a letter to be forwarded. Then if they care to answer, they'll reply to your home."

"Later," I told him. "I'll probably be back to mail it direct from here."

He waved at the writing desk. I nodded and left.

I drove back to the ex-Harrison Farm slowly, thinking it over. Wondering. People did not just go around catching Mekstrom's Disease, from what little I knew of it. And somehow the idea of Marian Harrison withering away or becoming a basket case, or maybe taking the painless way out was a thought that my mind kept avoiding except for occasional flashes of horror.

I drove in toward the farmhouse again and parked in front of the verandah. I was not sure of why I was there except that I wanted to wander through it to see what I could find before I went back to the post-office to write that card or letter.

The back of the house was locked with an old-fashioned slide bolt that was turned with what they used to call an "E" key. I shrugged, oiled my conscience and found a bit of bent wire. Probing a lock like that would have been easy for a total blank; with esper I lifted the simple keepers and slid back the bolt almost as swiftly as if I had used a proper key.

This was no case of disappearance. In every one of the fourteen rooms were the unmistakable signs of a deliberate removal. Discarded stuff was mixed with the odds and ends of packing case materials, a scattered collection of temporary nails, a half-finished but never used box filled with old clothing.

I pawed through this but found nothing, even though I separated it from the rest to help my esper dig it without interference.

I roamed the house slowly letting my perception wander from point to point. I tried to time-dig the place but that was futile. I didn't have enough perception.

I caught only one response. It was in one of the upper bedrooms. But then as I stopped in the room where Marian had slept, I began again to doubt my senses. It could have been esper, but it was more likely that I'd caught the dying traces of perfume.

Then I suddenly realized that the entire premises were clear to me!

An esper map of the world looked sort of like a mottled sky, with bright places and cloudy patches strewn in disorder across it. A mottled sky, except that the psi-pattern usually does not change. But this house had been in a murky area, if not dead. Now it was clear.

I left the house and went to the big combination barn and garage. It was as unsatisfying as the house had been. Phillip Harrison, or someone, had had a workshop out there. I found the bench and a small table where bolt-holes, oil marks, and other traces said that there had been one of those big combination woodworking machines there, the kind that combines circular saw, drill, lathe, planer, router, dado, and does everything. There had been some metal-working stuff there, too, but nothing as elaborate as the woodshop. Mostly things like hacksaws and an electric drill, and a circular scar where a blowtorch had been sitting.

I don't know why I kept on standing there esping the abandoned set-up. Maybe it was because my esper dug the fact that there was something there that I should know about, but which was so minute or remote that the impression did not come through. I stood there puzzled at my own reluctance to leave until something satisfied that almost imperceptible impression.

Idly I leaned down and picked up a bit of metal from the floor and fumbled it in my hand nervously. I looked around the place with my eyes and saw nothing. I gave the whole garage a thorough scanning with my esper and got zero for my trouble.

Finally I snarled at myself for being an imbecile, and left.

Everyone has done what I did, time and time again. I do not recall anything of my walk back to the car, lost in a whirl of thoughts, ideas, plans and questions. I would probably have driven all the way back to my apartment with my mind in that whirligig, driving by habit and training, but I was shaken out of it because I could not start my car by poking that bit of metal in the lock. It did not fit.

I laughed, a bit ashamed of my preoccupation, and flung the bit of metal into the grass, poked my key in the lock—

And then I was out pawing the grass for that piece of metal.

For the small piece of metal I had found on the floor of the abandoned workshop was the spoke of that road sign that had been missing when Catherine and I cracked up!

I drove out along the highway and stopped near one of the standards. I esped the sign, compared my impression against my eyesight. I made sure.

That bit of metal, a half inch long and a bit under a quarter inch in diameter, with both ends faintly broken-ragged, was identical in size and shape to the unbroken spokes in the sign!

Then I noticed something else. The trefoil ornament in the middle did not look the same as I recalled them. I took Thorndyke's card out of my pocket and looked at the stereo. I compared the picture against the real thing before me and I knew that I was right.

The trefoil gizmo was a take-off on the fleur-de-lis or the Boy Scout Tenderfoot badge, or the design they use to signify North on a compass. But the lower flare of the leaves was wider than any of the more familiar emblems; almost as wide as the top. It took a comparison to tell the difference between one of them right-side-up and another one upside-down. One assumes for this design that the larger foils are supposed to be up. If that were so, then the ones along that road out there in or near Yellowstone were right-side-up, while the ones along my familiar highway were upside-down.

I goaded myself. #Memory, have these things been turned or were they always upside-down?#

The last thing I did as I turned off the highway was to stop and let my esper dig that design once more. I covered the design itself, let my perception roam along the spokes, and then around the circlet that supported the spokes that held the trefoil emblem.

Oh, it was not obvious. It was designed in, so to speak. If I were asked even today for my professional opinion I would have to admit that the way the circlet snapped into the rest of the ornamental scrollwork was a matter of good assembly design, and not a design deliberately created so that the emblem could be turned upside down.

In fact, if it had not been for that tiny, broken spoke I found on the floor of the Harrison garage, never in a million years would I have considered these road signs significant.

At the post office I wrote a letter to Phillip Harrison:

Dear Phil:

I was by your old place today and was sorry to find that you had moved. I'd like to get in touch with you again. If I may ask, please send me your forwarding address. I'll keep it concealed if you like, or I'll reply through the post office, concealed forward.

As an item of interest, did you know that your house has lost its deadness? A medium-equipped esper can dig it with ease. Have you ever heard of the psi-pattern changing before?

Ah, and another item, that road sign with the busted spoke has been replaced. You must be a bum shot, not to hit that curlicue in the middle. I found the spoke you hit on the floor of your garage, if you'd like it for a souvenir of one close miss.

Please write and let me know how things are going. Rumor has it that Marian contracted Mekstrom's and if you will pardon my mentioning a delicate subject, I am doing so because I really want to help if I am able. After all, no matter how lightly you hold it, I still owe you my life. This is a debt I do not intend to forget.

Sincerely,

Steve Cornell.

V

I did not go to the police.

They were sick of my face and already considering me a candidate for the paranoid ward. All I would have to do is go roaring into the station to tell them that I had uncovered some deep plot where the underground was using ornamental road signs to conceal their own network of roads and directions, and that the disappearance of Catherine Lewis, Dr. Thorndyke and the removal of the Harrisons were all tied together.

Instead, I closed my apartment and told everyone that I was going to take a long, rambling tourist jaunt to settle my nerves; that I thought getting away from the scene might finish the job that time and rest had started.

Then I started to drive. I drove for several days, not attempting to pace off miles, but covering a lot of aimless-direction territory. I was just as likely to spend four hours going North on one highway, and then take the next four coming back South on a parallel highway, and sometimes I even came back to the original starting place. After a week I had come no farther West than across that sliver of West Virginia into Eastern Ohio. And in Eastern Ohio I saw some more of the now familiar and suspicious road signs.

The emblem was right side up, and the signs looked as though they had not been up long.

I followed that road for seventy-five miles, and as I went the signs kept getting newer and newer until I finally came to a truck loaded with pipe, hardware, and ornamental ironwork. Leading the truck was one of those iron mole things.

I watched the automatic gear hoist one of the old pipe and white and black enamel roadsigns up by its roots, and place it on a truck full of discards. I watched the mole drive a corkscrew blade into the ground with a roaring of engine and bucking of the truck. It paused, pulled upward to bring out the screw and its load of dirt, stones and gravel. The crew placed one of the new signs in the cradle and I watched the machine set the sign upright, pour the concrete, tamp down the earth, and then move along down the road.

There was little point in asking questions of the crew, so I just took off and drove to Columbus as hard as I could make it.

Shined, cleaned, polished, and very conservatively dressed, I presented myself to the State Commissioner of Roads and Highways. I toyed briefly with the idea of representing myself as a minor official from some distant state like Alaska or the Virgin Islands, inquiring about these signs for official reasons. But then I knew that if I bumped into a hot telepath I'd be in the soup. On the other hand, mere curiosity on the part of a citizen, well oiled with compliments, would get me at the very least a polite answer.

The Commissioner's fifth-under-secretary bucked me down the hall; another office bucked me upstairs. A third buck-around brought me to the Department of Highways Marking and Road Maps.

A sub-secretary finally admitted that he might be able to help me. His name was Houghton. But whether he was telepath or esper did not matter because the Commission building was constructed right in the middle of a dead area.

I still played it straight. I told him I was a citizen of New York, interested in the new road signs, Ohio was to be commended, et cetera.

"I'm glad you feel that way," he said beaming.

"I presume these signs cost quite a bit more than the stark, black and white enamel jobs?"

"On the contrary," he said with pride. "They might, but mass-production methods brought the cost down. You see, the enamel jobs, while we buy several thousand of the plates for any highway, must be set up, stamped out, enamelled, and so on. The new signs are all made in one plant as they are needed; I don't suppose you know, but the highway number and any other information is put on the plate from loose, snap-in letters. That means we can buy so many thousand of this or that letter or number, and the necessary base plates and put them together as needed. They admitted that they were still running at a loss, but if they could get enough states interested, they'd eventually come out even, and maybe they could reduce the cost. Why, they even have a contingent-clause in the contract stating that if the cost were lowered, they would make a rebate to cover it. That's so the first users will not bide their time instead of buying now."

He went on and on and on like any bureaucrat. I was glad we were in a dead area because he'd have thrown me out of his office for what I was thinking.

Eventually Mr. Houghton ran down and I left.

I toyed around with the idea of barging in on the main office of the company but I figured that might be too much like poking my head into a hornet's nest.

I pocketed the card he gave me from the company, and I studied the ink-fresh road map, which he had proudly supplied. It pointed out in a replica panel of the fancy signs, that the State of Ohio was beautifying their highways with these new signs at no increased cost to the taxpayer, and that the dates in green on the various highways here and there gave the dates when the new signs would be installed. The bottom of the panel gave the Road Commissioner's name in boldface with Houghton's name below in slightly smaller print.

I smiled. Usually I get mad at signs that proclaim that such and such a tunnel is being created by Mayor So-and-so, as if the good mayor were out there with a shovel and hoe digging the tunnel. But this sort of thing would have been a worthy cause if it hadn't been for the sinister side.

I selected a highway that had been completed toward Cincinnati and made my way there with no waste of time.

The road was new and it was another beaut. The signs led me on, mile after mile and sign after sign.

I did not know what I was following, and I was not sure I knew what I was looking for. But I was on the trail of something and a bit of activity, both mental and physical, after weeks of blank-wall frustration made my spirits rise and my mental equipment sharper. The radio in the car was yangling with hillbilly songs, the only thing you can pick up in Ohio, but I didn't care. I was looking for something significant.

I found it late in the afternoon about half-way between Dayton and Cincinnati. One of the spokes was missing.

Fifty yards ahead was a crossroad.

I hauled in with a whine of rubber and brakes, and sat there trying to reason out my next move by logic. Do I turn with the missing spoke, or do I turn with the one that is not missing?

Memory came to my aid. The "ten o'clock" spoke had been missing back there near the Harrison farm. The Harrisons had lived on the left side of the highway. One follows the missing spoke. Here the "two o'clock" spoke was missing, so I turned to the right along the crossroad until I came to another sign that was complete.

Then, wondering, I U-turned and drove back across the main highway and drove for about five miles watching the signs as I went. The ones on my right had that trefoil emblem upside down. The ones on my left were right side up. The difference was so small that only someone who knew the significance would distinguish one from the other. So far as I could reason out, it meant that what I sought was in the other direction. When the emblem was upside down I was going away from, and when right side up, I was going toward.

Away from or toward what?

I U-turned again and started following the signs.

Twenty miles beyond the main highway where I'd seen the sign that announced the turn, I came upon another missing spoke. This indicated a turn to the left, and so I slowed down until I came upon a homestead road leading off toward a farmhouse.

I turned, determined to make like a man lost and hoping that I'd not bump into a telepath.

A few hundred yards in from the main road I came upon a girl who was walking briskly toward me. I stopped. She looked at me with a quizzical smile and asked me if she could be of any help.

Brashly, I nodded. "I'm looking for some old friends of mine," I said. "Haven't seen them for years. Named Harrison."

She smiled up at me. "I don't know of any Harrison around here." Her voice had the Ohio twang.

"No?"

"Just where do they live?"

I eyed her carefully, hoping my glance did not look like a wolf eyeing a lamb. "Well, they gave me some crude directions. Said I was to turn at the main highway onto this road and come about twenty miles and stop on the left side when I came upon one of those new road signs where someone had shot one of the spokes out."

"Spokes? Left side—" She mumbled the words and was apparently mulling the idea around in her mind. She was not more than about seventeen, sun-tanned and animal-alive from living in the open. I wondered about her. As far as I was concerned, she was part and parcel of this whole mysterious affair. No matter what she said or did, it was an obvious fact that the hidden road sign directions pointed to this farm. And since no one at seventeen can be kept in complete ignorance of the business of the parents, she must be aware of some of the ramifications.

After some thought she said, "No, I don't know of any Harrisons."

I grunted. I was really making the least of this, now that I'd arrived.

"Your folks at home?" I asked.

"Yes," she replied.

"I think I'll drop in and ask them, too."

She shrugged. "Go ahead," she said with the noncommittal attitude of youth. "You didn't happen to notice whether the mailbox flag was up, did you?"

I hadn't, but I espied back quickly and said, "No, it isn't."

"Then the mailman hasn't been to deliver," she said. "Mind if I ride back to the house with you, mister?"

"Hop in."

She smiled brightly and got in quickly. I took off down the road toward the house at an easy pace. She seemed interested in the car, and finally said, "I've never been in a car like this before. New?"

"Few weeks," I responded.

"Fast?"

"If you want to make it go fast. She'll take this rocky road at fifty, if anyone wants to be so foolish."

"Let's see."

I laughed. "Nobody but an idiot would tackle a road like this at fifty."

"I like to go fast. My brother takes it at sixty."

That, so far as I was concerned, was youthful exaggeration. I was busy telling her all the perils of fast driving when a rabbit came barrelling out of the bushes along one side and streaked across in front of me.

I twitched the wheel. The car went out of the narrow road and up on the shoulder, tilting quite a bit. Beyond the rabbit I swung back into the road, but not before the youngster had grabbed my arm to keep from being tossed all over the front seat.

Her grip was like a hydraulic vise. My arm went numb and my fingers went limp on the wheel. I struggled with my left hand to spin the wheel to keep on the narrow, winding road and my foot hit the brake to bring the car down, but fast.

Taking a deep breath as we stopped, I shook my right hand by holding it in my left at the wrist. I was a mass of tingling pins and needles because she had grabbed me just above the elbow. It felt as though it would have taken only a trifle more to pinch my arm off and leave me with a bloody stump.

"Sorry, mister," she said breathlessly, her eyes wide open. Her face was white around the corners of the mouth and at the edges of her nose. The whiteness of the flesh under the deep tan gave her a completely frightened look, far more than the shake-up could have produced.

I reached over and took her hand. "That's a mighty powerful grip you—"

The flesh of her hand was hard and solid. Not the meaty solidity of good tone, fine training and excellent health. It was the solidity of a—all I could think of at the time was a green cucumber. I squeezed a bit and the flesh gave way only a trifle. I rubbed my thumb over her palm and found it solid-hard instead of soft and yielding.

I wondered.

I had never seen a case of Mekstrom's Disease—before.

I looked down at the hand and said, "Young lady, do you realize that you have an advanced case of Mekstrom's Disease?"

She eyed me coldly. "Now," she said in a hard voice. "I know you'll come in."

Something in my make-up objects violently to being ordered around by a slip of a girl. I balance off at about one-sixty. I guessed her at about two-thirds of that, say one-ten or thereabouts—

"One-eight," she said levelly.

#A telepath!#

"Yes," she replied calmly. "And I don't mind letting you know it, so you'll not try anything stupid."

#I'm getting the heck out of here!#

"No, you're not. You are coming in with me."

"Like heck!" I exploded.

"Don't be silly. You'll come in. Or shall I lay one along your jaw and carry you?"

I had to try something, anything, to get free. Yet—

"Now you're being un-bright," she told me insolently. "You should know that you can't plan any surprise move with a telepath. And if you try a frontal attack I'll belt you so cold they'll have to put you in the oven for a week."

I just let her ramble for a few seconds because when she was rattling this way she couldn't put her entire mental attention on my thoughts. So while she was yaking it off, I had an idea that felt as though it might work.

She shut up like a clam when she realized that her mouthing had given me a chance to think, and I went into high gear with my perception:

#Not bad—for a kid. Growing up fast. Been playing hookey from momma, leaving off your panties like the big girls do. I can tell by the elastic cord marks you had 'em on not long ago.#

Seventeeners have a lot more modesty than they like to admit. She was stunned by my cold-blooded catalog of her body just long enough for me to make a quick lunge across her lap to the door handle on her side.

I flipped it over and gave her a shove at the same time. She went bottom over appetite in a sprawl that would have jarred the teeth loose in a normal body and might have cracked a few bones. But she landed on the back of her neck, rolled and came to her feet like a cat.

I didn't wait to close the door. I just tromped on the go-pedal and the car leaped forward with a jerk that slammed the door for me. I roared forward and left her just as she was making another grab.

How I hoped to get out of there I did not know. All I wanted was momentary freedom to think. I turned this way and that to follow the road until I came to the house. I left the road, circled the house with the turbine screaming like a banshee and the car taking the corners on the outside wheels. I skidded into a turn like a racing driver and ironed my wheels out flat on the takeaway, rounded another corner and turned back into the road again going the other way.

She was standing there waiting for me as I pelted past at a good sixty, and she reached out one girder-strong arm, latched onto the frame of the open window on my side, and swung onto the half-inch trim along the bottom of the car-body like a switchman hooking a freight car.

She reached for the steering wheel with her free hand.

I knew what was to happen next. She'd casually haul and I'd go off the road into a tree or pile up in a ditch, and while the smoke was clearing out of my mind, she'd be untangling me from the wreck and carting me over her shoulder, without a scratch to show for her adventure.

I yanked the wheel—whip! whap!—cutting an arc. I slammed past a tree, missing it by half an inch. I wiped her off the side of the car like a mailbag is clipped from the fast express by the catch-hook.

I heard a cry of "Whoof!" as her body hit the trunk of the tree. But as I regained the road and went racing on to safety, I saw in the rear view mirror that she had bounced off the tree, sprawled a bit, caught her balance, and was standing in the middle of the road, shaking her small but very dangerous fist at my tail license plate.

I didn't stop driving at one-ten until I was above Dayton again. Then I paused along the road to take stock.

Stock? What the hell did I know, really?

I'd uncovered and confirmed the fact that there was some secret organization that had a program that included their own highway system, concealed within the confines of the United States. I was almost certain by this time that they had been the prime movers in the disappearance of Catherine and Dr. Thorndyke. They—

I suddenly re-lived the big crack-up.

Willingly now, no longer rejecting the memory, I followed my recollection as Catherine and I went along that highway at a happy pace. With care I recalled every detail of Catherine, watching the road through my mind and eyes, how she'd mentioned the case of the missing spoke, and how I'd projected back to perceive that which I had not been conscious of.

Reminding myself that it was past, I went through it again, deliberately. The fallen limb that blocked the road, my own horror as the wheels hit it. The struggle to regain control of the careening car.

As a man watching a motion picture, I watched the sky and the earth turn over and over, and I heard my voice mouthing wordless shouts of fear. Catherine's cry of pain and fright came, and I listened as my mind reconstructed it this time without wincing. Then the final crash, the horrid wave of pain and the sear of the flash-fire. I went through my own horror and self condemnation, and my concern over Catherine. I didn't shut if off. I waded through it.

Now I remembered something else.

Something that any normal, sensible mind would reject as an hallucination. Beyond any shadow of a doubt there had been no time for a man to rig a block and tackle on a tree above a burning automobile in time to get the trapped victims out alive. And even more certain it was that no normal man of fifty would have had enough strength to lift a car by its front bumper while his son made a rush into the flames.

That tackle had been rigged and burned afterward. But who would reject a block and tackle in favor of an impossibly strong man? No, with the tackle in sight, the recollection of a man lifting that overturned automobile like a weight lifter pressing up a bar bell would be buried in any mind as a rank hallucination. Then one more item came driving home hard. So hard that I almost jumped when the idea crossed my mind.

Both Catherine and Dr. Thorndyke had been telepaths.

A telepath close to any member of his underground outfit would divine their purpose, come to know their organization, and begin to grasp the fundamentals of their program. Such a person would be dangerous.

On the other hand, an esper such as myself could be turned aside with bland remarks and a convincing attitude. I knew that I had no way of telling lie from truth and that made my problem a lot more difficult.

From the facts that I did have, something smelled of overripe seafood. Government and charities were pouring scads of dough into a joint called the Medical Research Center. To hear the scholars of medicine tell it, Mekstrom's Disease was about the last human frailty that hadn't been licked to a standstill. They boasted that if a victim of practically anything had enough life left in him to crawl to a telephone and use it, his life could be saved. They grafted well. I'd heard tales of things like fingers, and I know they were experimenting on hands, arms and legs with some success. But when it came to Mekstrom's they were stopped cold. Therefore the Medical Research Center received a walloping batch of money for that alone; all the money that used to go to the various heart, lung, spine and cancer funds. It added up well.

But the Medical Research Center seemed unaware that some group had solved their basic problem.

From the books I've read I am well aware of one of the fundamental principles of running an underground: Keep it underground! The Commie menace in these United States might have won out in the middle of the century if they'd been able to stay a secret organization. So the Highways in Hiding could stay underground and be an efficient organization only until someone smoked them out.

That one was going to be me.

But I needed an aide-de-camp. Especially and specifically I needed a trained telepath, one who would listen to my tale and not instantly howl for the nut-hatch attendants. The F.B.I. were all trained investigators and they used esper-telepath teams all the time. One dug the joint while the other dug the inhabitant, which covered the situation to a faretheewell.

It would take time to come up with a possible helper. So I spent the next hour driving toward Chicago, and by the time I'd crossed the Ohio-Indiana line and hit Richmond, I had a plan laid out. I placed a call to New York and within a few minutes I was talking to Nurse Farrow.

I'll not go into detail because there was a lot of mish-mash that is not particularly interesting and a lot more that covered my tracks since I'd parted company with her on the steps of the hospital. I did not, of course, mention my real purpose over the telephone and Miss Farrow could not read my mind from New York.

The upshot of the deal was that I felt that I needed a nurse for a while, not that I was ill, but that I felt a bit woozy now and then because I hadn't learned to slow down. I worked too fast and too long and my condition was not up to it yet. This Miss Farrow allowed as being quite possible. I repeated my offer to pay her at the going prices for registered nurses with a one-month guarantee, paid in advance. That softened her quite a bit. Then I added that I'd videograph her a check large enough to cover the works plus a round trip ticket. She should come out and have a look, and if she weren't satisfied, she could return without digging into her own pocket. All she'd lose was one day, and it might be a bit of a vacation if she enjoyed flying in a jetliner at sixty thousand feet.

The accumulation of offers finally sold her and she agreed to arrange a leave of absence. She'd meet me in the morning of the day-after-tomorrow, at Central Airport in Chicago.

I videographed the check and then took off again, confident that I'd be able to sell her on the idea of being the telepath half of my amateur investigation team.

Then because I needed some direct information, I turned West and crossed the line into Indiana, heading toward Marion. So far I had a lot of well-placed suspicions, but until I was certain, I could do no more than postulate ideas. I had to know definitely how to identify Mekstrom's Disease, or at least the infected flesh. I have a fairly good recall; all I needed now was to have someone point to a Case and say flatly that this was a case of Mekstrom's Disease. Then I'd know whether what I'd seen in Ohio was actually one hundred percent Mekstrom.

VI

I walked into the front office with a lot of self-assurance. The Medical Center was a big, rambling place with a lot of spread-out one- and two-story buildings that looked so much like "Hospital" that no one in the world would have mistaken them for anything else. The main building was by the road, the rest spread out behind as far as I could see; beyond my esper range even though the whole business was set in one of the clearest psi areas that I'd even been in.

I was only mildly worried about telepaths. In the first place, the only thing I had to hide was my conviction about a secret organization and how part of it functioned. In the second place, the chances were good that few, if any, telepaths were working there, if the case of Dr. Thorndyke carried any weight. That there were some telepaths, I did not doubt, but these would not be among the high-powered help.

So I sailed in and faced the receptionist, who was a good-looking chemical-type blonde with a pale skin, lovely complexion and figure to match. She greeted me with a glacial calm and asked my business.

Brazenly I lied. "I'm a freelance writer and I'm looking for material."

"Have you an assignment?" she asked without a trace of interest in the answer.

"Not this time. I'm strictly freelance. I like it better this way because I can write whatever I like."

Her glacial air melted a bit at the inference that my writing had not been in vain. "Where have you been published?" she asked.

I made a fast stab in the dark, aiming in a direction that looked safe. "Last article was one on the latest archeological findings in Assyria. Got my source material direct from the Oriental Institute in Chicago."

"Too bad I missed it," she said, looking regretful. I had to grin, I'd carefully avoided giving the name of the publication and the supposed date. She went on, "I suppose you would not be happy with the usual press release?"

"Handouts contain material, all right, but they're so confounded trite and impersonal. People prefer to read anecdotes about the people rather than a listing of facts and figures."

She nodded at that. "Just a moment," she said. Then she addressed her telephone in a voice that I couldn't hear. When she finished, she smiled in a warmish-type manner as if to indicate that she'd gone all out in my behalf and that I'd be a heel to forget it. I nodded back and tried to match the tooth-paste-ad smile. Then the door opened and a man came in briskly.

He was a tall man, as straight as a ramrod, with a firm jaw and a close-clipped moustache. He had an air like a thin-man's Captain Bligh. When he spoke, his voice was as clipped and precise as his moustache; in fact it was so precise that it seemed almost mechanical.

"I am Dr. Lyon Sprague," he clipped. "What may I do for you?"

"I'm Steve Cornell," I said. "I'm here after source material for a magazine article about Mekstrom's Disease. I'd prefer not to take my material from a handout."

"Do you hope to get more?" he demanded.

"I usually do. I've seen your handouts; I could get as much by taking last year's medical encyclopedia. Far too dry, too uninteresting, too impersonal."

"Just exactly what do you have in mind?"

I eyed him with speculation. Here was not a man who would take kindly to imaginative conjecture. So Dr. Lyon Sprague was not the man I'd like to talk to. With an inward smile, I said, "I have a rather new idea about Mekstrom's that I'd like to discuss with the right party."

He looked down at me, although our eyes were on the same level. "I doubt that any layman could possibly come up with an idea that has not been most thoroughly discussed here among the research staff."

"In cold words you feel that no untrained lunk has a right to have an idea."

He froze. "I did not say that."

"You implied, at least, that suggestions from outsiders were not welcome. I begin to understand why the Medical Center has failed to get anywhere with Mekstrom's in the past twenty years."

"What do you mean?" he snapped.

"Merely that it is the duty of all scientists to listen to every suggestion and to discard it only after it has been shown wrong."

"Such as—?" he said coldly, with a curl of his eyebrows.

"Well, just for instance, suppose some way were found to keep a victim alive during the vital period, so that he would end up a complete Mekstrom Human."

"The idea is utterly fantastic. We have no time for such idle speculation. There is too much foggy thinking in the world already. Why, only last week we had a Velikovsky Adherent tell us that Mekstrom's had been predicted in the Bible. There are still people reporting flying saucers, you know. We have no time for foolish notions or utter nonsense."

"May I quote you?"

"Of course not," he snapped stiffly. "I'm merely pointing out that non-medical persons cannot have the grasp—"

The door opened again and a second man entered. The new arrival had pleasant blue eyes, a van dyke beard, and a good-natured air of self-confidence and competence. "May I cut in?" he said to Dr. Sprague.

"Certainly. Mr. Cornell, this is Scholar Phelps, Director of the Center. Scholar Phelps, this is Mr. Steve Cornell, a gentleman of the press," he added in a tone of voice that made the identification a sort of nasty name. "Mr. Cornell has an odd theory about Mekstrom's Disease that he intends to publish unless we can convince him that it is not possible."

"Odd theory?" asked Scholar Phelps with some interest. "Well, if Mr. Cornell can come up with something new, I'll be most happy to hear him out."

Dr. Lyon Sprague decamped with alacrity. Scholar Phelps smiled after him, then turned to me and said, "Dr. Sprague is a diligent worker, businesslike and well-informed, but he lacks the imagination and the sense of humor that makes a man brilliant in research. Unfortunately, Dr. Sprague cannot abide anything that is not laid out as neat as an interlocking tile floor. Now, Mr. Cornell, how about this theory of yours?"

"First," I replied, "I'd like to know how come you turn up in the nick of time."

He laughed good-naturedly. "We always send Dr. Sprague out to interview visitors. If the visitor can be turned away easily, all is well and quiet. Dr. Sprague can do the job with ease. But if the visitor, like yourself, Mr. Cornell, proposes something that distresses the good Dr. Sprague and will not be loftily dismissed, Dr. Sprague's blood pressure goes up. We all keep a bit of esper on his nervous system and when the fuse begins to blow, we come out and effect a double rescue."

I laughed with him. Apparently the Medical Center staff enjoyed needling Dr. Sprague. "Scholar Phelps, before I get into my theory, I'd like to know more about Mekstrom's Disease. I may not be able to use it in my article, but any background material works well with writers of fact articles."

"You're quite right. What would you like to know?"

"I've heard, too many times, that no one knows anything at all about Mekstrom's. This is unbelievable, considering that you folks have been working on it for some twenty years."

He nodded. "We have some, but it's precious little."

"It seems to me that you could analyze the flesh—"

He smiled. "We have. The state of analytical chemistry is well advanced. We could, I think, take a dry scraping out of the cauldron used by MacBeth's witches, and determine whether Shakespeare had reported the formula correctly. Now, young man, if you think that something is added to the human flesh to make it Mekstrom's Flesh, you are wrong. Standard analysis shows that the flesh is composed of exactly the same chemicals that normal flesh contains, in the same proportion. Nothing is added, as, for instance, in the case of calcification."

"Then what is the difference?"

"The difference lies in the structure. By X-ray crystallographic method, we have determined that Mekstrom's Flesh is a micro-crystalline formation, interlocked tightly." Scholar Phelps looked at me thoughtfully. "Do you know much about crystallography?"

As a mechanical engineer I did, but as a writer of magazine articles I felt I should profess some ignorance, so I merely said that I knew a little about the subject.

"Well, Mr. Cornell, you may know that in the field of solid geometry there are only five possible regular polyhedrons. Like the laws of topology that state that no more than four colors need be used to print a map on a flat surface, or that no more than seven colors are required to print separate patches on a toroid, the laws of solid geometry prove that no more than five regular polyhedrons are possible. Now in crystallography there are only thirty-two possible classes of crystal lattice construction. Of these only thirty have ever been discovered in nature. Yet we know how the other two would appear if they did emerge in natural formation."

I knew it all right but I made scribblings in my notebooks as if the idea were of interest. Scholar Phelps waited patiently until I'd made the notation.

"Now, Mr. Cornell, here comes the shock. Mekstrom's Flesh is one of the other two classes."

This was news to me and I blinked.

Then his face faded into a solemn expression. "Unfortunately," he said in a low voice, "knowing how a crystal should form does not help us much in forming one to that class. We have no real control over the arrangement of atoms in a crystal lattice. We can prevent the crystal formation, we can control the size of the crystal as it forms. But we cannot change the crystal into some other class."

"I suppose it's sort of like baking a cake. Once the ingredients are mixed, the cake can be big or small or shaped to fit the pan, or you can spoil it complete. But if you mix devil's food, it either comes out devil's food or nothing."

"An amusing analogy and rather correct. However I prefer the one used years ago by Dr. Willy Ley, who observed that analysis is fine, but you can't learn how a locomotive is built by melting it down and analyzing the mess."

Then he went on again. "To get back to Mekstrom's Disease and what we know about it. We know that the crawl goes at about a sixty-fourth of an inch per hour. If, for instance, you turned up here with a trace on your right middle finger, the entire first joint would be Mekstrom's Flesh in approximately three days. Within two weeks your entire middle finger would be solid. Without anesthesia we could take a saw and cut off a bit for our research."

"No feeling?"

"None whatever. The joints knit together, the arteries become as hard as steel tubing and the heart cannot function properly—not that the heart cares about minor conditions such as the arteries in the extremities, but as the Mekstrom infection crawls up the arm toward the shoulder the larger arteries become solid and then the heart cannot drive the blood through them in its accustomed fashion. It gets like an advanced case of arteriosclerosis. Eventually the infection reaches and immobilizes the shoulder; this takes about ninety days. By this time, the other extremities have also become infected and the crawl is coming up all four limbs."

He looked at me very solemnly at that. "The rest is not pretty. Death comes shortly after that. I can almost say that he is blessed who catches Mekstrom's in the left hand for them the infection reaches the heart before it reaches other parts. Those whose initial infection is in the toes are particularly cursed, because the infection reaches the lower parts of the body. I believe you can imagine the result, elimination is prevented because of the stoppage of peristalsis. Death comes of autointoxication, which is slow and painful."

I shuddered at the idea. The thought of death has always bothered me. The idea of looking at a hand and knowing that I was going to die by the calendar seemed particularly horrible.

Taking the bit between my teeth, I said, "Scholar Phelps, I've been wondering whether you and your Center have ever considered treating Mekstrom's by helping it?"

"Helping it?" he asked.

"Sure. Consider what a man might be if he were Mekstrom's all the way through."

He nodded. "You would have a physical superman," he said. "Steel-strong muscles driving steel-hard flesh covered by a near impenetrable skin. Perhaps such a man would be free of all minor pains and ills. Imagine a normal bacterium trying to bore into flesh as hard as concrete. Mekstrom Flesh tends to be acid-resistant as well as tough physically. It is not beyond the imagination to believe that your Mekstrom Superman might live three times our frail four-score and ten. But—"

Here he paused.

"Not to pull down your house of cards, this idea is not a new one. Some years ago we invited a brilliant young doctor here to study for his scholarate. The unfortunate fellow arrived with the first traces of Mekstrom's in his right middle toe. We placed about a hundred of our most brilliant researchers under his guidance, and he decided to take this particular angle of study. He failed; for all his efforts, he did not stay his death by a single hour. From that time to the present we have maintained one group on this part of the problem."

It occurred to me at that moment that if I turned up with a trace of Mekstrom's I'd be seeking out the Highways in Hiding rather than the Medical Center. That fast thought brought a second: Suppose that Dr. Thorndyke learned that he had a trace, or rather, the Highways found it out. What better way to augment their medical staff than to approach the victim with a proposition: You help us, work with us, and we will save your life.

That, of course, led to the next idea: That if the Highways in Hiding had any honest motive, they'd not be hidden in the first place and they'd have taken their cure to the Medical Center in the second. Well, I had a bit of something listed against them, so I decided to let my bombshell drop.

"Scholar Phelps," I said quietly, "one of the reasons I am here is that I have fairly good evidence that the cure for Mekstrom's Disease does exist, and that it produces people of ultrahard bodies and superhuman strength."

He smiled at me with the same tolerant air that father uses on the offspring who comes up with one of the standard juvenile plans for perpetual motion.

"What do you consider good evidence?"

"Suppose I claimed to have seen it myself."

"Then I would say that you had misinterpreted your evidence," he replied calmly. "The flying saucer enthusiasts still insist that the things they see are piloted by little green men from Venus, even though we have been there and found Venus to be absolutely uninhabited by anything higher than slugs, grubs, and little globby animals like Tellurian leeches."

"But—"

"This, too, is an old story," he told me with a whimsical smile. "It goes with the standard routine about a secret organization that is intending to take over the Earth. The outline has been popular ever since Charles Fort. Now—er—just tell me what you saw."

I concocted a tale that was about thirty-three percent true and the rest partly distorted. It covered my hitting a girl in Ohio with my car, hard enough to clobber her. But when I stopped to help her, she got up and ran away unhurt. She hadn't left a trace of blood although the front fender of the car was badly smashed.

He nodded solemnly. "Such things happen," he said. "The human body is really quite durable; now and then comes the lucky happenstance when the fearful accident does no more than raise a slight bruise. I've read the story of the man whose parachute did not open and who lived to return it to the factory in person, according to the old joke. But now, Mr. Cornell, have you ever considered the utter impossibility of running any sort of secret organization in this world of today. Even before Rhine it was difficult. You'll be adding to your tale next—some sort of secret sign, maybe a form of fraternity grip, or perhaps even a world-wide system of local clubs and hangouts, all aimed at some dire purpose."

I squirmed nervously for a bit. Scholar Phelps was too close to the truth to make me like it, because he was scoffing. He went right on making me nervous.

"Now before we get too deep, I only want to ask about the probable motives of such an organization. You grant them superhuman strength, perhaps extreme longevity. If they wanted to take over the Earth, couldn't they do it by a show of force? Or are they mild-mannered supermen, only quietly interested in overrunning the human race and waiting out the inevitable decline of normal homo sapiens? You're not endowing them with extraterrestrial origin, are you?"

I shook my head unhappily.

"Good. That shows some logic, Mr. Cornell. After all, we know now that while we could live on Mars or Venus with a lot of home-sent aid, we'd be most uncomfortable there. We could not live a minute on any planet of our solar system without artificial help."

"I might point out that our hypothetical superman might be able to stand a lot of rough treatment," I blurted.

"Oh, this I'll grant if your tale held any water at all. But let's forget this fruitless conjecture and take a look at the utter impossibility of running such an organization. Even planting all of their secret hangouts in dead areas and never going into urban centers, they'd still find some telepath or esper on their trail. Perhaps a team. Let's go back a step and consider, even without psi training, how long such an outfit could function. It would run until the first specimen had an automobile accident on, say Times Square; or until one of them walked—or ran—out of the fire following a jetliner crash."

He then spared me with a cold eye. "Write it as fiction, Mr. Cornell. But leave my name out of it. I thought you were after facts."

"I am. But the better fact articles always use a bit of speculation to liven it up."

"Well," he grunted, "one such fanciful suggestion is the possibility of such an underground outfit being able to develop a 'cure' while we cannot. We, who have had the best of brains and money for twenty years."

I nodded, and while I did not agree with Phelps, I knew that to insist was to insult him to his face, and get myself tossed out.

"You do seem to have quite a set-up here," I said, off-hand.

At this point Phelps offered to show me around the place, and I accepted. Medical Center was far larger than I had believed at first; it spread beyond my esper range into the hills beyond the main plant. The buildings were arranged in a haphazard-looking pattern out in the back section; I say "looking" because only a psi-trained person can dig a pattern. The wide-open psi area did not extend for miles. Behind the main buildings it closed down into the usual mottled pattern and the medical buildings had been placed in the open areas. Dwellings and dormitories were in the dark places. A nice set-up.

I did not meet any of the patients, but Phelps let me stand in the corridor outside a couple of rooms and use my esper on the flesh. It was both distressing and instructive.

He explained, "The usual thing after someone visits this way, is that the visitor goes out itching. In medical circles this is a form of what we call 'Sophomore's Syndrome.' Ever heard of it?"

I nodded. "That's during the first years at pre-med. Knowing all too little of medicine, every disease they study produces the same symptoms that the student finds in himself. Until tomorrow, when they study the next. Then the symptoms in the student change."

"Right. So in order to prevent 'Sophomore's Syndrome' among visitors we usually let them study the real thing. Also," he added seriously, "we'd like to have as many people as possible recognize the real thing as early as possible. Even though we can't do anything for them at the present time, someday we will."

He stopped before a closed door. "In here is a girl of eighteen, doomed to die in a month." His voice trailed off as he tapped on the door of the room.

I froze. A few beads of cold sweat ran down my spine, and I fought myself into a state of nervous calmness. I put the observation away, buried it as deep as I could, tried to think around it, and so far as I knew, succeeded.

The tap of Scholar Phelps' finger against the door panel was the rap-rap-rap sound characteristic of hard-tanned leather tapping wood.

Scholar Phelps was a Mekstrom!

I paid only surface attention to the rest of my visit. I thanked my personal gods that esper training had also given me the ability to dissemble. It was impossible to not think of something but it is possible to keep the mind so busy with surface thoughts that the underlying idea does not come through the interference.

Eventually I managed to leave the Medical Center without exciting anyone, and when I left I took off like a skyrocket for Chicago.

VII

Nurse Gloria Farrow waved at me from the ramp of the jetliner, and I ran forward to collect her baggage. She eyed me curiously but said no more than the usual greetings and indication of which bag was hers.

I knew that she was reading my mind like a psychologist all the time, and I let her know that I wanted her to. I let my mind merely ramble on with the usual pile of irrelevancies that the mind uses to fill in blank spaces. It came up with a couple of notions here and there but nothing definite. Miss Farrow followed me to my car without saying a word, and let me install her luggage in the trunk.

Then, for the first time, she spoke: "Steve Cornell, you're as healthy as I am."

"I admit it."

"Then what is this all about? You don't need a nurse!"

"I need a competent witness, Miss Farrow."

"For what?" She looked puzzled. "Suppose you stay right here and start explaining."

"You'll listen to the bitter end?"

"I've two hours before the next plane goes back. You'll have that time to convince me—or else. Okay?"

"That's a deal." I fumbled around for a beginning, and then I decided to start right at the beginning, whether it sounded cockeyed or not.

Giving information to a telepath is the easiest thing in the world. While I started at the beginning, I fumbled and finally ended up by going back and forth in a haphazard manner, but Miss Farrow managed to insert the trivia in the right chronological order so that when I finished, she nodded with interest.

I posed the question: #Am I nuts?#

"No, Steve," she replied solemnly. "I don't think so. You've managed to accept data which is obviously mingled truth and falsehood, and you've managed to question the validity of all of it."

I grunted. "How about the crazy man who questions his own sanity, using this personal question as proof of his sanity since real nuts know they're sane?"

"No nut can think that deep into complication. What I mean is that they cannot even question their own sanity in the first premise of postulated argument. But forget that, what I wanted to know is where you intend to go from here."

I shook my head unhappily. "When I called you I had it all laid out like a roadmap. I was going to show you proof and use you as an impartial observer to convince someone else. Then we'd go to the Medical Center and hand it to them on a platter. Since then I've had a shock that I can't get over, or plan beyond. Scholar Phelps is a Mekstrom. That means that the guy knows what gives with Mekstrom's Disease and yet he is running an outfit that professes to be helpless in the face of this disease. For all we know Phelps may be the head of the Highways in Hiding, an organization strictly for profit of some sort at the expense of the public welfare."

"You're certain that Phelps is a Mekstrom?"

"Not absolutely positive. I had to close my mind because there might be a telepath on tap. But I can tell you that nobody with normal flesh-type fingers ever made that solid rap."

"A fingernail?"

I shook my head at her. "That's a click. With an ear at all you'd note the difference."

"I'll accept it for the moment. But lacking your original plan, what are you going to do now?"

"I'm not sure beyond showing you the facts. Maybe I should call up that F.B.I. team that called on me after Thorndyke's disappearance and put it in their laps."

"Good idea. But why would Scholar Phelps be lying? And beyond your basic suspicions, what can you prove?"

"Very little. I admit that my evidence is extremely thin. I saw Phillip Harrison turning head bolts on a tractor engine with a small end wrench. It should require a crossbar socket and a lot of muscle. Next is the girl in Ohio who should be a bloody mess from the way she was treated. Instead she got up and tried to chase me. Then answer me a puzzler: Did the Harrisons move because Marian caught Mekstrom's, or did they move because they felt that I was too close to discovering their secret? The Highway was relocated after that, you'll recall."

"It sounds frightfully complicated, Steve."

"You bet it does," I grunted. "So next I meet a guy who is supposed to know all the answers; a man dedicated to the public welfare, medicine, and the ideal of Service. A man sworn to the Hippocratic Oath. Or," I went on bitterly, "is it the Hypocritic Oath?"

"Steve, please—"

"Please, Hell!" I stormed. "Why is he quietly sitting there in Mekstrom hide while he is overtly grieving over the painful death of his fellow man?"

"I wouldn't know."

"Well, I'm tired of being pushed around," I growled.

"Pushed around?" she asked quietly.

With a trace of scorn, I said, "Miss Farrow, I can see two possible answers. Either I am being pushed around for some deliberate reason, or I'm too smart, too cagey and too dangerous for them to handle directly. It takes only about eight weeks for me to reluctantly abandon the second in favor of the first."

"But what makes you think you are being pushed?" she wanted to know.

"You can't tell me that I am so important that they couldn't erase me as easily as they did Catherine and Dr. Thorndyke. And now that his name comes up, let's ask why any doctor who once met a casual patient would go to the bother of sending a postcard with a message on it that is certain to cause me unhappiness. He's also the guy who nudged me by calling my attention to my so-called 'shock hallucination' about Father Harrison lifting my car while Phillip Harrison raced into the fire to make the rescue. Add it up," I told her sharply. "Next he is invited to Medical Center to study Mekstrom's. Only instead of landing there, he sends me a postcard with one of the Highways in the picture, after which he disappears."

Miss Farrow nodded thoughtfully. "It is all tied up with your Highways and your Mekstrom People."

"That isn't all," I said. "How come the Harrisons moved so abruptly?"

"You're posing questions that I can't answer," complained Miss Farrow. "And I'm not one hundred percent convinced that you are right."

"You are here, and if you take a look at what I'll show you, you'll be convinced. We'll put it this way, to start: Something cockeyed is going on. Now, one more thing I can add, and this is the part that confuses me: Everything that has been done seems to point to me. So far as I can see they are operating just as though they want me to start a big hassle that will end up by getting the Highways out of their Hiding."

"Why on earth would they be doing that?" she wanted to know.

"I don't have the foggiest notion. But I do have that feeling and there is evidence pointing that way. They've let me in on things that normally they'd be able to conceal from a highly trained telepath. So I intend to go along with them, because somewhere at the bottom of it all we'll find the answer."

She nodded agreement.

Now I started up the car, saying, "I'm going to find us one of the Highways in Hiding, and we'll follow it to one of the way stations. Then you'll see for yourself that there is something definitely fishy going on."

"This I'd like to see," she replied quietly. Almost too quietly. I took a dig at her as I turned the car out through a tight corner of the lot onto the road. She was sitting there with a noncommittal expression on her face and I wondered why. She replied to my thought: "Steve, you must face one thing. Anything you firmly believe will necessarily pass across your mind as fact. So forgive me if I hold a few small doubts until I have a chance to survey some of the evidence at first hand."

"Sure," I told her. "The first bit won't be hard."

I drove eagerly across Illinois into Iowa watching for road signs. I knew that once I convinced someone else, it would be easier to convince a third, and a fourth, and a fiftieth until the entire world was out on the warpath. We drove all day, stopping for chow now and then, behaving like a couple out on a vacation tour. We stopped in a small town along about midnight and found a hotel without having come upon any of the hidden highways.

We met at breakfast, talked our ideas over mildly, and took off again. We crossed into Nebraska about noon and continued to meander until late in the afternoon when we came upon our first giveaway road sign.

"There," I told her triumphantly.

She nodded. "I see the sign, Steve. That much I knew. Now all you have to do is to show me the trial-blazes up in that emblem."

"Unless they've changed their method," I told her, "this one leads West, slightly south of." I stopped the car not many yards from the sign and went over it with my sense of perception. #You'll note the ease with which the emblem could be turned upside down,# I interjected. #Note the similar width of the top and bottom trefoil, so that only a trained and interested observer can tell the difference.#

I drove along until we saw one on the other side of the road and we stopped again, giving the sign a thorough going over. #Note that the signs leading away from the direction are upside down,# I went on. I didn't say a word, I was using every ounce of energy in running my perception over the sign and commenting on its various odds and ends.

#Now,# I finished, #we'll drive along this Highway in Hiding until we come to some intersection or hideout. Then you'll be convinced.#

She was silent.

We took off along that road rather fast and we followed it for miles, passing sign after sign with its emblem turned up along the right side of the road and turned upside-down when the sign was on the left.

Eventually we came to a crossing highway, and at that I pointed triumphantly. "Note the missing spoke!" I said with considerable enthusiasm. "Now, Miss Farrow, we shall first turn against it for a few miles and then we shall U-turn and come back along the cross highway with it."

"I'm beginning to be convinced, Steve."

We turned North against the sign and went forty or fifty miles, just to be sure. The signs were all against us. Eventually I turned into a gas station and filled the carte up to the scuppers. As we turned back South, I asked her, "Any more comment?"

She shook her head. "Not yet."

I nodded. "If you want, we'll take a jaunt along our original course."

"By all means."

"In other words you are more than willing to be convinced?"

"Yes," she said simply. She went silent then and I wondered what she was thinking about, but she didn't bother to tell me.

Eventually we came back to the crossroad, and with a feeling of having been successful, I continued South with a confidence that I had not felt before. We stopped for dinner in a small town, ate hastily but well, and then had a very mild debate.

"Shall we have a drink and relax for a moment?"

"I'd like it," she replied honestly. "But somehow I doubt that I could relax."

"I know. But it does seem like a good idea to take it easy for a half hour. It might even be better if we stopped over and took off again in the morning."

"Steve," she told me, "the only way I could relax or go to sleep would be to take on a roaring load so that I'd pass out cold. I'd rather not because I'd get up tomorrow with a most colossal hangover. Frankly, I'm excited and I'd prefer to follow this thing to a finish."

"It's a deal," I said. "We'll go until we have to stop."

It was about eight o'clock when we hit the road again.

By nine-forty-five we'd covered something better than two hundred miles, followed another intersection turn according to the missing spoke, and were heading well toward the upper right-hand corner of Colorado on the road map.

At ten o'clock plus a few minutes we came upon the roadsign that pointed the way to a ranch-type house set prettily on the top of a small knoll several hundred yards back from the main road. I stopped briefly a few hundred feet from the lead-in road and asked Miss Farrow:

"What's your telepath range? You've never told me."

She replied instantly, "Intense concentration directed at me is about a half mile. Superficial thinking that might include me or my personality as a by-thought about five hundred yards. To pick up a thought that has nothing to do with me or my interests, not much more than a couple of hundred feet. Things that are definitely none of my business close down to forty or fifty feet."

That was about the average for a person with a bit of psi training either in telepathy or in esper; it matched mine fairly well, excepting that part about things that were none of my business. She meant thoughts and not things. I had always had a hard time differentiating between things that were none of my damned business, although I do find it more difficult to dig the contents of a letter between two unknown parties at a given distance than it is to dig a letter written or addressed to a person I know. Things are, by and large, a lot less personal than thoughts, if I'm saying anything new.

"Well," I told her, "this is it. We're going to go in close enough for you to take a 'pathic look-around. Keep your mind sensitive. If you dig any danger, yell out. I'm going to extend my esper as far as I can and if I suddenly take off like a startled spacecraft, it's because I have uncovered something disagreeable. But keep your mind on them and not me, because I'm relying on you to keep posted on their mental angle."

Miss Farrow nodded. "It's hard to remember that other people haven't the ability to make contact mentally. It's like a normal man talking to a blind man and referring constantly to visible things because he doesn't understand. I'll try to remember."

"I'm going to back in," I said. "Then if trouble turns up, I'll have an advantage. As soon as they feel our minds coming in at them, they'll know that we're not in there for their health. So here we go!"

"I'm a good actor," she said. "No matter what I say, I'm with you all the way!"

I yanked the car forward, and angled back. I hit the road easily and started backing along the driveway at a rather fast speed with my eyes half-closed to give my esper sense the full benefit of my concentration along the road. When I was not concentrating on how I was going to turn the wheel at the next curve I thought, #I hope these folks know the best way to get to Colorado Springs from here. Dammit, we're lost!#

Miss Farrow squeezed my arm gently, letting me know that she was thinking the same general thoughts.

Suddenly she said, "It's a dead area, Steve."

It was a dead area, all right. My perception came to a barrier that made it fade from full perception to not being able to perceive anything in a matter of yards. It always gives me an eerie feeling when I approach a dead area and find that I can see a building clearly and not be able to cast my perception beyond a few feet.

I kept on backing up into the fringe of that dead area until I was deep within the edge and it took all my concentration to perceive the road a few feet ahead of my rear wheels so that I could steer. I was inching now, coming back like a blind man feeling his way. We were within about forty feet of the ranch house when Miss Farrow yelped:

"They're surrounding us, Steve!"

My hands whipped into action and my heavy right foot came down on the gas-pedal. The car shuddered, howled like a wounded banshee, and then leaped forward with a roar.

A man sprang out of the bushes and stood in front of the car like a statue with his hand held up. Miss Farrow screamed something unintelligible and clutched at my arm frantically. I threw her hand off with a snarl, kept my foot rammed down hard and hit the man dead center. The car bucked and I heard metal crumple angrily. We lurched, bounced viciously twice as my wheels passed over his floundering body, and then we were racing like complete idiots along a road that should not have been covered at more than twenty. The main road came into sight and I sliced the car around with a screech of the rear tires, controlled the deliberate skid with some fancy wheel-work and some fast digging of the surrounding dangers.

Then we were tearing along the broad and beautifully clear concrete with the speedometer needle running into the one-fifteen region.

"Steve," said Miss Farrow breathlessly, "That man you hit—"

In a hard voice I said, "He was getting to his feet when I drove out of range."

"I know," she said in a whimper. "I was in his mind. He was not hurt! God! Steve—what are we up against?" Her voice rose to a wail.

"I don't know, exactly," I said. "But I know what we're going to do."

"But Steve—what can we do?"

"Alone or together, very little. But we can bring one person more out along these Highways and then convince a fourth and a fifth and a fiftieth and a thousandth. By then we'll be shoved back off the stage while the big wheels grind painfully slow but exceedingly meticulous."

"That'll take time."

"Certainly. But we've got a start. Look how long it took getting a start in the first place."

"But what is their purpose?" she asked.

"That I can't say. I can't say a lot of things, like how, and why and wherefore. But I know that now we have a front tooth in this affair we're not going to let go." I thought for a moment. "I could use Thorndyke; he'd be the next guy to convince if we could find him. Or maybe Catherine, if we could find her. The next best thing is to get hold of that F.B.I. Team that called on me. There's a pair of cold-blooded characters that seem willing to sift through a million tons of ash to find one valuable cinder. They'll listen. I—"

Miss Farrow looked at her watch; I dug it as she made the gesture. #Eleven o'clock.#

"Going to call?" she asked.

"No," I said. "It's too late. It's one in New York now and the F.B.I. Team wouldn't be ready for a fast job at this hour."

"So?"

"I have no intention of placing a 'When you are ready' call to a number identified with the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Not when a full eight hours must elapse between the call and a reply. Too much can happen to us in the meantime. But if I call in the morning, we can probably take care of ourselves well enough until they arrive if we stay in some place that is positively teeming with citizens. Sensible?"

"Sounds reasonable, Steve."

I let the matter drop at that; I put the go-pedal down to the floor and fractured a lot of speed laws until we came to Denver.

We made Denver just before midnight and drove around until we located a hotel that filled our needs. It was large, which would prevent overt operations on the part of the 'enemy' and it was a dead area, which would prevent one of them from reading our minds while we slept, and so enable them to lay counterplans against us.

The bellhop gave us a knowing leer as we registered separately, but I was content to let him think what he wanted. Better that he get the wrong idea about us than the right one. He fiddled around in Miss Farrow's room on the ninth, bucking for a big tip—not for good service, but for leaving us alone, which he did by demonstrating how big a nuisance he could be if not properly rewarded. But finally he got tired of his drawer-opening and lamp-testing and towel-stacking, and escorted me up to the twelfth. I led him out with a five spot clutched in his fist and the leer even stronger.

If he expected me to race downstairs as soon as he was out of ear-shot, he was mistaken, for I hit the sack like the proverbial ton of crushed mortar. It had been literally weeks since I'd had a pleasant, restful sleep that was not broken by fitful dreams and worry-insomnia. Now that we had something solid to work on, I could look forward to some concrete action instead of merely feeling pushed around.

VIII

I'd put in for an eight o'clock call, but my sleep had been so sound and perfect that I was all slept out by seven-thirty. I was anxious to get going so I dressed and shaved in a hurry and cancelled the eight o'clock call. Then I asked the operator to connect me with 913.

A gruff, angry male voice snarled out of the earpiece at me. I began to apologize profusely but the other guy slammed the phone down on the hook hard enough to make my ear ring.

I jiggled my hook angrily and when the operator answered I told her that she'd miscued. She listened to my complaint and then replied in a pettish tone, "But I did ring 913, sir. I'll try again."

I wanted to tell her to just try, that there was no 'again' about it, but I didn't. I tried to dig through the murk to her switchboard but I couldn't dig a foot through this area. I waited impatiently until she re-made the connections at her switchboard and I heard the burring of the phone as the other end rang. Then the same mad-bull-rage voice delivered a number of pointed comments about people who ring up honest citizens in the middle of the night; and he hung up again in the middle of my apology. I got irked again and demanded that the operator connect me with the registration clerk. To him I told my troubles.

"One moment, sir," he said. A half minute later he returned with, "Sorry, sir. There is no Farrow registered. Could I have mis-heard you?"

"No, goddammit," I snarled. "It's Farrow. F as in Frank; A as in Arthur; Double R as in Robert Robert; O as in Oliver; and W as in Washington. I saw her register, I went with her and the bellhop to her room, Number 913, and saw her installed. Then the same 'hop took me up to my room in 1224 on the Twelfth."

There was another moment of silence. Then he said, "You're Mr. Cornell. Registered in Room 1224 last night approximately four minutes after midnight."

"I know all about me. I was there and did it myself. And if I registered at four after midnight, Miss Farrow must have registered about two after midnight because the ink was still wet on her card when I wrote my name. We came in together, we were travelling together. Now, what gives?"

"I wouldn't know, sir. We have no guest named Farrow."

"See here," I snapped, "did you ever have a guest named Farrow?"

"Not in the records I have available at this desk. Perhaps in the past there may have been—"

"Forget the past. What about the character in 913?"

The registration clerk returned and informed me coldly, "Room 913 has been occupied by a Mr. Horace Westfield for over three months, Mr. Cornell. There is no mistake." His voice sounded professionally sympathetic, and I knew that he would forget my troubles as soon as his telephone was put back on its hook.

"Forget it," I snapped and hung up angrily. Then I went towards the elevators, walking in a sort of dream-like daze. There was a cold lump of something concrete hard beginning to form in the pit of my stomach. Wetness ran down my spine and a drop of sweat dropped from my armpit and hit my body a few inches above my belt like a pellet of icy hail. My face felt cold but when I wiped it with the palm of a shaking hand I found it beaded with an oily sweat. Everything seemed unreally horrifying.

"Nine," I told the elevator operator in a voice that sounded far away and hoarse.

I wondered whether this might not be a very vivid dream, and maybe if I went all the way back to my room, took a short nap, and got up to start all over again, I would awaken to honest reality.

The elevator stopped at Nine and I walked the corridor that was familiar from last night. I rapped on the door of Room 913.

The door opened and a big stubble-faced gorilla gazed out and snarled at me: "Are you the persistent character?"

"Look," I said patiently, "last night a woman friend of mine registered at this hotel and I accompanied her to this door. Number 913. Now—"

A long apelike arm came out and caught me by the coat lapels. He hauled and I went in fast. His breath was sour and his eyes were bloodshot and he was angry all the way through. His other hand caught me by the seat of the pants and he danced me into the room like a jumping jack.

"Friend," he ground out, "Take a look. There ain't no woman in this room, see?"

He whirled, carrying me off my feet. He took a lunging step forward and hurled me onto the bed, where I carried the springs deep down, to bounce up and off and forward to come up flat against the far wall. I landed sort of spread-eagle flat and seemed to hang there before I slid down the wall to the floor with a meaty-sounding Whump! Then before I could collect my wits or myself, he came over the bed in one long leap and had me hauled upright by the coat lapels again. The other hand was cocked back level with his shoulder it looked the size of a twenty-five pound sack of flour and was probably as hard as set cement.

Steve, I told myself, this time you're in for it!

"All right," I said as apologetically as I knew how, "so I've made a bad mistake. I apologize. I'll also admit that you could wipe up the hotel with me. But do you have to prove it?"

Mr. Horace Westfield's mental processes were not slow, cumbersome, and crude. He was as fast and hard on his mental feet as he was on his physical feet. He made some remarks about my intelligence, my upbringing, my parentage and its legal status, and my unwillingness to face a superior enemy. During this catalog of my virtueless existence, he gandy-walked me to the door and opened it. He concluded his lecture by suggesting that in the future I accept anything that any registration clerk said as God-Stated Truth, and if I then held any doubts I should take them to the police. Then he hurled me out of the room by just sort of shoving me away. I sailed across the hall on my toes, backward, and slapped my frame flat again, and once more I hung against the wall until the kinetic energy had spent itself. Then I landed on wobbly ankles as the door to Room 913 came closed with a violent slam.

I cursed the habit of building hotels in dead areas, although I admitted that I'd steer clear of any hotel in a clear area myself. But I didn't need a clear area nor a sense of perception to inform me that Room 913 was absolutely and totally devoid of any remote sign of female habitation. In fact, I gathered the impression that for all of his brute strength and virile masculinity, Mr. Horace Westfield hadn't entertained a woman in that room since he'd been there.

There was one other certainty: It was impossible for any agency short of sheer fairyland magic to have produced overnight a room that displayed its long-term occupancy by a not-too-immaculate character. That distinctive sour smell takes a long time to permeate the furnishings of any decent hotel; I wondered why a joint as well kept as this one would put up with a bird as careless of his person as Mr. Horace Westfield.

So I came to the reluctant conclusion that Room 913 was not occupied by Nurse Farrow, but I was not yet convinced that she was totally missing from the premises.

Instead of taking the elevator, I took to the stairs and tried the eighth. My perception was not too good for much in this murk, but I was mentally sensitive to Nurse Farrow and if I could get close enough to her, I might be able to perceive some trace of her even through the deadness. I put my forehead against the door of Room 813 and drew a blank. I could dig no farther than the inside of the door. If Farrow were in 813, I couldn't dig a trace of her. So I went to 713 and tried there.

I was determined to try every -13th room on every floor, but as I was standing with my forehead against the door to Room 413, someone came up behind me quietly and asked in a rough voice: "Just what do you think you're doing, Mister?"

His dress indicated housedick, but of course I couldn't dig the license in his wallet any more than he could read my mental, #None of your business, flatfoot!# I said, "I'm looking for a friend."

"You'd better come with me," he said flatly. "There's been complaints."

"Yeah?" I growled. "Maybe I made one of them myself."

"Want to start something?" he snapped.

I shrugged and he smiled. It was a stony smile, humorless as a crevasse in a rock-face. He kept that professional-type smile on his face until we reached the manager's office. The manager was out, but one of the assistant managers was in his desk. The little sign on the desk said "Henry Walton. Assistant Manager."

Mr. Walton said, coldly, "What seems to be the trouble, Mr. Cornell?"

I decided to play it just as though I were back at the beginning again. "Last night," I explained very carefully, "I checked into this hotel. I was accompanied by a woman companion. A registered nurse. Miss Gloria Farrow. She registered first, and we were taken by one of your bellboys to Rooms 913 and 1224 respectively. I went with Miss Farrow to 913 and saw her enter. Then the bellhop escorted me to 1224 and left me for the night. This morning I can find no trace of Miss Farrow anywhere in this fleabag."

He bristled at the derogatory title but he covered it quickly. "Please be assured that no one connected with this hotel has any intention of confusing you, Mr. Cornell."

"I'm tired of playing games," I snapped. "I'll accept your statement so far as the management goes, but someone is guilty of fouling up your registration lists."

"That's rather harsh," he replied coldly. "Falsifying or tampering with hotel registration lists is illegal. What you've just said amounts to libel or slander, you know."

"Not if it's true."

I half expected Henry Walton to backwater fast, but instead, he merely eyed me with the same expression of distaste that he might have used upon finding half of a fuzzy caterpillar in his green salad. As cold as a cake of carbon dioxide snow, he said, "Can you prove this, Mr. Cornell?"

"Your night crew—"

"You've given us a bit of trouble this morning," he informed me. "So I've taken the liberty of calling in the night crew for you." He pressed a button and a bunch came in and lined up as if for formal inspection. "Boys," said Walton quietly, "suppose you tell us what you know about Mr. Cornell's arrival here last night."

They nodded their heads in unison.

"Wait a minute," I snapped. "I want a reliable witness to listen to this. In fact, if I could, I'd like to have their stories made under oath."

"You'd like to register a formal charge? Perhaps of kidnapping, or maybe illegal restraint?"

"Just get me an impartial witness," I told him sourly.

"Very well." He picked up his telephone and spoke into it. We waited a few minutes, and finally a very prim young woman came in. She was followed by a uniformed policeman. She was carrying one of those sub-miniature silent typewriters which she set up on its little stand with a few efficient motions.

"Miss Mason is our certified public stenographer," he said. "Officer, I'll want your signature on her copy when we're finished. This is a simple routine matter, but it must be legal to the satisfaction of Mr. Cornell. Now, boys, go ahead and explain. Give your name and position first for Miss Mason's record."

It was then that I noticed that the night crew had arranged themselves in chronological order. The elderly gent spoke first. He'd been the night doorman but now he was stripped of his admiral's gold braid and he looked just like any other sleepy man of middle age.

"George Comstock," he announced. "Doorman. As soon as I saw the car angling out of traffic, I pressed the call-button for a bell boy. Peter Wright came out and was standing in readiness by the time Mr. Cornell's car came to a stop by the curb. Johnny Olson was out next, and after Peter had taken Mr. Cornell's bag, Johnny got into Mr. Cornell's car and took off for the hotel garage—"

Walton interrupted. "Let each man tell what he did himself. No prompting, please."

"Well, then, you've heard my part in it. Johnny Olson took off in Mr. Cornell's car and Peter Wright took off with Mr. Cornell's bag, and Mr. Cornell followed Peter."

The next man in line, at a nod from the assistant manager, stepped forward about a half a pace and said, "I'm Johnny Olson. I followed Peter Wright out of the door and after Peter had collected Mr. Cornell's bag, I got in Mr. Cornell's car and took it to the hotel garage."

The third was Peter Wright, the bellhop. "I carried his bag to the desk and waited until he registered. Then we went up to Room 1224. I opened the door, lit the lights, opened the window, and stuff. Mr. Cornell tipped me five bucks and I left him there. Alone."

"I'm Thomas Boothe, the elevator operator. I took Mr. Cornell and Peter Wright to the Twelfth. Peter said I should wait because he wouldn't be long, and so I waited on the Twelfth until Peter got back. That's all."

"I'm Doris Caspary, the night telephone operator. Mr. Cornell called me about fifteen minutes after twelve and asked me to put him down for a call at eight o'clock this morning. Then he called at about seven thirty and said that he was already awake and not to bother."

Henry Walton said, "That's about it, Mr. Cornell."

"But—"

The policeman looked puzzled. "What is the meaning of all this? If I'm to witness any statements like these, I'll have to know what for."

Walton looked at me. I couldn't afford not to answer. Wearily I said, "Last night I came in here with a woman companion and we registered in separate rooms. She went into 913 and I waited until she was installed and then went to my own room on the Twelfth. This morning there is no trace of her."

I went on to tell him a few more details, but the more I told him the more he lifted his eyebrows.

"Done any drinking?" he asked me curtly.

"No."

"Certain?"

"Absolutely."

Walton looked at his crew. They burst into a chorus of, "Well, he was steady on his feet," and "He didn't seem under the influence," and a lot of other statements, all generally indicating that for all they knew I could have been gassed to the ears, but one of those rare guys who don't show it.

The policeman smiled thinly. "Just why was this registered nurse travelling with you?"

I gave them the excuse-type statement; the one about the accident and that I felt that I was still a bit on the rocky side and so forth. About all I did for that was to convince the policeman that I was not a stable character. His attitude seemed to indicate that any man travelling with a nurse must either be physically sick or maybe mentally out of tune.

Then with a sudden thought, I whirled on Johnny Olson. "Will you get my car?" I asked him. He nodded after a nod from Walton. I said, "There's plenty of evidence in my car. In the meantime, let's face one thing, officer. I've been accused of spinning a yarn. I'd hardly be demanding witnesses if I weren't telling the truth. I was standing beside Miss Farrow when she signed the register, complete with the R.N. title. It's too bad that hotels have taken to using card files instead of the old registration book. Cards are so easy to misplace—"

Walton cut in angrily. "If that's an accusation, I'm inclined to see that you make it in a court of law."

The policeman looked calm. "I'd take it easy, Mr. Cornell. Your story is not corroborated. But the employees of the hotel bear one another out. And from the record, it would appear that you were under the eyes of at least two of them from the moment your car slowed down in front of the main entrance up to the time that you were escorted to your room."

"I object to being accused of complicity in a kidnapping," put in the assistant manager.

"I object to being accused of mental incompetence," I snapped. "Why do we stand around accusing people back and forth when there's evidence if you'll only uncover it."

We stood there glaring at one another. The air grew tense. The only ones in the place who did not have chips on their shoulders were the policeman and the certified stenographer, who was clicking her silent keys in lightning manner, taking down every comment as it was uttered.

Eventually Olson returned, to put an end to the thick silence. "Y'car's outside," he told me angrily.

"Fine," I said. "Now we'll go outside and take a look. You'll find plenty of traces of Miss Farrow's having been there. Officer—are you telepath or perceptive?"

"Perceptive," he said. "But not in here."

"How far out does this damned dead area extend?" I asked Walton.

"About half way across the sidewalk."

"Okay. So let's all go."

We traipsed out to the curb. Miss Mason brought her little silent along, slipping the stand high up so that she could type from an erect position. We lined up along the curb and I looked into my car with a triumphant feeling.

And then that cold chill congealed my spine again. My car was clean and shining. It had been washed and buffed and polished until it looked as new as the day I picked it out on the salesroom floor.

Walton looked blank, and I whipped a thought at him: #Damned telepath!#

He nodded perceptibly and said smoothly, "I'm rather sorry we couldn't find any fingerprints. Because now, you see," and here he turned to the policeman and went on, "Mr. Cornell will now accuse us of having washed his car to destroy the evidence. However, you'll find that as a general policy of the hotel, the car-washing is performed as a standard service. In fact, if any guest parks his car in our garage and his car is not rendered spick and span, someone is going to get fired for negligence."

So that was that. I took a fast look around, because I knew that I had to get out of there fast. If I remained to carry on any more argument, I'd be tapped for being a nuisance and jugged.

I had no doubt at all that the whole hotel staff were all involved in Nurse Farrow's disappearance. But they'd done their job in such a way that if the question were pushed hard, I would end up answering formal charges, the topmost of which might be murder and concealment of the body.

I could do nothing by sitting in jail. This was the time to get out first and worry about Farrow later.

So I opened the car door and slipped in. I fiddled with the so-called glove compartment and opened it; the maps were all neatly stacked and all the flub had been cleaned out. I fumbled inside and dropped a couple of road maps to the floor, and while I was down picking them up I turned the ignition key which Olson had left plugged in the lock.

I took off with a jerk and howl of tires.

There was the sudden shrill of a police whistle but it was stopped after one brief blast. As I turned the corner, I caught a fast backwards dig at them. They were filing back into the hotel. I did not believe that the policeman was part of the conspiracy, but I was willing to bet that Walton was going to slip the policeman a box of fine cigars as a reward for having helped them to get rid of a very embarrassing screwball.

IX

I put a lot of miles between me and my recent adventure before I stopped to take stock. The answer to the mess was still obscure, but the elimination of Nurse Farrow fell into the pattern very neatly.

Alone, I was no problem. So long as my actions were restricted to meandering up and down the highways and byways, peering into nooks and crannies and crying, "Catherine," in a plaintive voice, no one cared. But when I teamed up with a telepath, they moved in with the efficiency of a well-run machine and extracted the disturbing element. In fact, their machinations had been so smooth that I was beginning to believe that my 'Discoveries' were really an assortment of unimportant facts shown to me deliberately for some reason of their own.

The only snag in the latter theory was the fact of our accident. Assuming that I had to get involved in the mess, there were easier ways to introduce me than by planning a bad crack-up that could have been fatal, even granting the close proximity of the Harrison tribe to come to the rescue. The accident had to be an accident in the dictionary definition of the word itself. Under the circumstances, a planned accident could only be accepted under an entirely different set of conditions. For instance, let's assume that Catherine was a Mekstrom and I was about to disclose the fact. Then she or they could plan such an accident, knowing that she could walk out of the wreck with her hair barely mussed, leaving me dead for sure.

But Catherine was not a Mekstrom. I'd been close enough to that satin skin to know that the body beneath it was soft and yielding.

Yet the facts as they stood did not throw out my theory. It merely had to be revised. Catherine was no Mekstrom, but if the Harrisons had detected the faintest traces of an incipient Mekstrom infection, they could very well have taken her in. I fumed at the idea. I could almost visualize them pointing out her infection and then informing her bluntly that she could either swear in with them and be cured or she could die alone and miserably.

This could easily explain her disappearance. Naturally, being what they were, they cared nothing for me or any other non-Mekstrom. I was no menace. Not until I teamed up with a telepath, and they knew what to do about that.

Completely angry, I decided that it was time that I made a noise like an erupting volcano. With plans forming, I took off again towards Yellowstone, pausing only long enough at Fort Collins to buy some armament.

Colorado is still a part of the United States where a man can go into a store and buy a gun over the counter just like any other tool. I picked out a Bonanza .375 because it is small enough to fit the hip pocket, light because of the new alloys so it wouldn't unballast me, and mostly because it packs enough wallop to stop a charging hippo. I did not know whether it would drill all the way through a Mekstrom hide, but the impact would at least set any target back on the seat of his pants.

Then I drove into Wyoming and made my way to Yellowstone, and one day I was driving along the same road that had been pictured in Dr. Thorndyke's postcard. I drove along it boldly, loaded for bear, and watching the Highway signs that led me nicely toward my goal.

Eventually I came to the inevitable missing spoke. It pointed to a ranch-type establishment that lay sprawled out in a billow of dead area. I eyed it warily and kept on driving because my plans did not include marching up to the front door like a rug peddler.

Instead, I went on to the next town, some twenty miles away, which I reached about dark. I stopped for a leisurely dinner, saw a moving picture at the drive-in, killed a few at the bar, and started back to the way station about midnight.

The name, dug from the mailbox, was Macklin.

Again I did not turn in. I parked the car down the highway by about three miles, figuring that only a psi of doctor's degree would be able to dig anything at that distance. I counted on there being no such mental giant in this out of the way place.

I made my way back toward the ranch house across the fields and among the rolling rock. I extended my perception as far as I could; I made myself sensitive to danger and covered the ground foot by foot, digging for traps, alarm lines, photocell trips, and parties who might be lying in wait for me.

I encountered no sign of any trip or trap all the way to the fringe of the dead zone.

The possibility that they knew of my presence and were comfortably awaiting me deep within the zone occurred to me, and so I was very cautious as I cased the layout and decided to make my entry at the point where the irregular boundary of the dead area was closest to the house itself.

I entered and became completely psi-blind. Starlight cast just enough light so that I could see to walk without falling into a chuck hole or stumbling over something, but beyond a few yards everything lost shape and became a murky blob. The night was dead silent except for an occasional hiss of wind through the brush.

Esperwise I was not covering much more than my eyes could see. I stepped deeper into the zone and lost another yard of perception. I kept probing at the murk, sort of like poking a finger at a hanging blanket. It moved if I dug hard enough in any direction, but as soon as I released the pressure, the murk moved right back where it was before.

I crouched and took a few more steps into the zone, got to a place where I could begin to see the outlines of the house itself.

Dark, silent, it looked uninhabited. I wished that there had been a college course in housebreaking, prowling and second-story operations. I went at it very slowly. I took my sweet time crossing the boards of the back verandah, even though the short hair on the back of my neck was beginning to prickle from nervousness. I was also scared. At any given moment, they had the legal right to open a window, poke out a field-piece, and blow me into bloody ribbons where I stood.

The zone was really a dead one. My esper range was no more than about six inches from my forehead; a motion picture of Steve Cornell sounding out the border of a window with his forehead would have looked funny, it was not funny at the time. But I found that the sash was not locked and that the flyscreen could be unshipped from the outside.

I entered a dining room. Inside, it was blacker than pitch.

I crossed the dining room by sheer feel and instinct and managed to get to the hallway without making any racket. At this point I stopped and asked myself what the heck I thought I was trying to do. I had to admit that I had no plan in definite form. I was just prowling the joint to see what information I might be able to pick up.

Down the hall I found a library. I'd been told that you tell what kind of people folks are by inspecting their library, and so I conned the book titles by running my head along a row of books.

The books in the library indicated to me that this was a family of some size with rather broad tastes. There was everything from science fiction to Shakespeare, everything from philosophy to adventure. A short row of kid's books. A bible. Encyclopedia Brittanica (Published in Chicago), in fifty-four volumes, but there were no places that were worn that might give me an idea as to any special interest.

The living room was also blank of any evidence of anything out or the ordinary. I turned away and stood in the hallway, blocked by indecision. I was a fool, I kept telling myself, because I did not have any experience in casing a joint, and what I knew had been studied out of old-time detective tales. Even if the inhabitants of the place were to let me go at it in broad daylight, I'm not too sure that I'd do a good job of finding something of interest except for sheer luck.

But on the other hand, I'd gotten nowhere by dodging and ducking. I was in no mood to run quivering in fear. I was more inclined to emit a bellow just to see what would happen next.

So instead of sneaking quietly away, I found the stairs and started to go up very slowly.

It occurred to me at about the third step that I must be right. Anybody with any sense wouldn't keep anything dangerous in their downstairs library. It would be too much like a safe-cracker storing his nitro in the liquor cabinet or the murderer who hangs his weapon over the mantelpiece.

Yet everybody kept some sort of records, or had things in their homes that were not shown to visiting firemen. And if it weren't on the second floor, then it might be in the cellar. If I weren't caught first, I'd prowl the whole damned place, inch by inch—avoiding if possible those rooms in which people slept.

The fifth step squeaked ever so faintly, but it sounded like someone pulling a spike out of a packing case made of green wood. I froze, half aching for some perceptive range so that I could dig any sign of danger, and half remembering that if it weren't for the dead area, I'd not be this far. I'd have been frightened to try it in a clear zone.

Eventually I went on up, and as my head came above the level of the floor, everything became psi-clear once more.

Here was as neat a bit of home planning as I have ever seen. Just below the level of the second floor, their dead area faded out, so that the top floor was clean, bright, and clear as day. I paused, startled at it, and spent a few moments digging outside. The dead area billowed above the rooftop out of my range; from what little I could survey of the dark psi area, it must have been shaped sort of like an angel-food cake, except that the central hole did not go all the way down. Only to the first-floor level. It was a wonderful set-up for a home; privacy was granted on the first floor and from the road and all the surrounding territory, but on the second floor there was plenty of pleasant esperclear space for the close-knit family and friends. Their dead area was shaped in the ideal form for any ideal home.

Then I stopped complimenting the architect and went on about my business, because there, directly in front of my nose, I could dig the familiar impression of a medical office.

I went the rest of the way up the stairs and into the medical office. There was no mistake. The usual cabinets full of instruments, a laboratory examination table, shelves of little bottles, and along one wall was a library of medical books. All it needed was a sign on the door: 'S. P. Macklin, MSch' to make it standard.

At the end of the library was a set of looseleaf notebooks, and I pulled the more recent of them out and held it up to my face. I did not dare snap on a light, so I had to go it esper.

Even in the clear area, this told me very little. Esper is not like eyesight, any more than you can hear printed words or perhaps carry on a conversation by watching the wiggly green line on an oscilloscope. I wished it was. Instead, esper gives you a grasp of materials and shapes and things in position with regard to other things. It is sort of like seeing something simultaneously from all sides, if you can imagine such a sensation. So instead of being able to esper-read the journal, I had to take it letter by letter by digging the shape of the ink on the page with respect to the paper and the other letters, and since the guy's handwriting was atrocious, I could get no more than if the thing were written in Latin. If it had been typewritten, or with a stylized hand, it would have been far less difficult; or if it had been any of my damned business I could have dug it easily. But as it was——

"Looking for something, Mr. Cornell?" asked a cool voice that dripped with acid sarcasm. At the same instant, the lights went on.

I whirled, clutched at my hip pocket, and dropped to my knees at the same time. The sights of my .375 centered in the middle of a silk-covered midriff.

She stood there indolently, disdainful of the cannon that was aimed at her. She was not armed; I'd have caught the esper warning of danger if she'd come at me with a weapon of some sort, even though I was preoccupied with the bookful of evidence.

I stood up and faced her and let my esper run lightly over her body. She was another Mekstrom, which did not surprise me a bit.

"I seem to have found what I was looking for," I said.

Her laugh was scornful but not loud. "You're welcome, Mr. Cornell."

#Telepath?#

"Yes, and a good one."

#Who else is awake?#

"Just me, so far," she replied quietly. "But I'll be glad to call out—"

#Keep it quiet, Sister Macklin.#

"Stop thinking like an idiot, Mr. Cornell. Quiet or not, you'll not leave this house until I permit you to go."

I let my esper roam quickly through the house. An elderly couple slept in the front bedroom. A man slept alone in the room beside them; a pair of young boys slept in an over-and-under bunk in the room across the hall. The next room must have been hers, the bed was tumbled but empty. The room next to the medical office contained a man trussed in traction splints, white bandages, and literally festooned with those little hanging bottles that contain everything from blood plasma to food and water, right on down to lubrication for the joints. I tried to dig his face under the swath of bandage but I couldn't make out much more than the fact that it was a face and that the face was half Mekstrom Flesh.

"He is a Mekstrom Patient," said Miss Macklin quietly. "At this stage, he is unconscious."

I sort of sneered at her. "Good friend of yours, no doubt."

"Not particularly," she said. "Let's say that he is a poor victim that would die if we hadn't found his infection early." The tone and expression of her voice made me seethe; she sounded as though she felt herself to be a real benefactor to the human race, and that she and her outfit would do the same for any other poor guy that caught Mekstrom's—providing they learned about this unfortunate occurrence in time.

"We would, Mr. Cornell."

"Bah-loney," I grunted.

"Why dispute my word?" she asked in the same tone of innocent honesty.

I eyed her angrily and I felt my hand tighten on the revolver. "I've a reason to become suspicious," I told her in a voice that I hoped was as mild-mannered as her own. "Because three people have disappeared in the past half-year without a trace, but under circumstances that put me in the middle. All of them, somehow, seem to be involved with your hidden road sign system and Mekstrom's Disease."

"That's unfortunate," she said quietly.

I had to grab myself to keep from yelling, "Unfortunate?" and managed to muffle it down to a mere voice-volume sound. "People dying of Mekstrom's because you're keeping this cure a secret and I'm batted from pillar to post because—" I gave up on that because I really did not know why.

"It's unfortunate that you had to become involved," she said firmly. "Because you—"

"It's unfortunate for everybody," I snapped, "because I'm going to bust you all wide open!"

"I'm afraid not. You see, in order to do that you'll have to get out of here and that I will not permit."

I grunted. "Miss Macklin, you Mekstroms have hard bodies, but do you think your hide will stop a slug from this?"

"You'll never know. You see, Mr. Cornell, you do not have the cold, brittle, determined guts that you'd need to pull that trigger."

"No?"

"Pull it," she said. "Or do you agree, now that you're of age, that you can't bluff a telepath."

I eyed her sourly because she was right. She held that strength that lies in weakness; I could not pull that trigger and fire a .375 inch slug into that slender, silk-covered midriff. And opposite that, Miss Macklin also had a strength that was strength itself. She could hold me aloft with one hand kicking and squirming while she was twisting my arms and legs off with her other hand.

She held all the big cards of her sex, too. I couldn't slug her with my fist, even though I knew that I'd only break my hand without even bruising her. I was in an awkward situation and I knew it. If she'd been a normal woman I could have shrugged my way past her and left, but she was determined not to let me leave without a lot of physical violence. Violence committed on a woman gets the man in dutch no matter how justified he is.

Yet in my own weakness there was a strength; there was another way out and I took it. Abruptly and without forethought.

X

Shifting my aim slightly, I pulled the trigger. The .375 Bonanza went off with a sound like an atom bomb in a telephone booth, and the slug whiffed between her arm and her body and drilled a crater in the plaster behind her.

The roar stunned her stiff. The color drained from her face and she swayed uncertainly. I found time enough to observe that while her body was as hard as chromium, her nervous system was still human and sensitive enough to make her faint from a sudden shock. She caught herself, and stood there stiff and white with one delicate (but steel-hard) hand up against her throat.

Then I dug the household. They were piling out of the hay like a bunch of trained firemen answering a still alarm. They arrived in all stages of nightdress in the following order:

The man, about twenty-two or three, who skidded into the room on dead gallop and put on brakes with a screech as he caught sight of the .375 with its thin wisp of blue vapor still trailing out of the muzzle.

The twins, aged about fourteen, who might have turned to run if they'd not been frightened stiff at the sight of the cannon in my fist.

Father and then Mother Macklin, who came in briskly but without panic.

Mr. Macklin said, crisply, "May I have an explanation, Mr. Cornell?"

"I'm a cornered rat," I said thickly. "And so I'm scared. I want out of here in one piece. I'm so scared that if I'm intercepted, I may get panicky, and if I do someone is likely to get hurt. Understand?"

"Perfectly," said Mr. Macklin calmly.

"Are you going to let him get away with this?" snapped the eldest son.

"Fred, a nervous man with a revolver is very dangerous. Especially one who lacks the rudimentary training in the simpler forms of burglary."

I couldn't help but admire the older gentleman's bland self-confidence. "Young man," he said to me, "You've made a bad mistake."

"No I haven't," I snapped. "I've been on the trail of something concrete for a long time, and now that I've found it I'm not going to let it go easily." I waved the .375 and they all cringed but Mr. Macklin.

He said, "Please put that weapon down, Mr. Cornell. Let's not add attempted murder to your other crimes."

"Don't force me to it, then. Get out of my way and let me go."

He smiled. "I don't have to be telepath to tell you that you won't pull that trigger until you're sorely driven," he replied calmly. He was so right that it made me mad. He added, "also, you've got four shells left since you carry the firearm on an empty chamber. Not used to guns, are you, Mr. Cornell?"

Well, I wasn't used to wearing a gun. Now that he mentioned it, I remembered that it was impossible to fire the shell under the hammer by any means except by pulling the trigger.

What he was telling me meant that even if I made a careful but bloody sweep of it with my four shells, there would be two of them left, and even the twins were more than capable of taking me apart inch by inch once my revolver was empty.

"Seems to be an impasse, Mr. Cornell," he said with an amused smile.

"You bland-mannered bunch of—"

"Ah now, please," he said abruptly. "My wife is not accustomed to such language, nor is my daughter, although my son and the twins probably know enough definitions to make them angry. This is an impasse, Mr. Cornell, and it behooves all of us to be extremely polite to one another. For one wrong move and you'll fire; this will mean complete chaos for all of us. One wrong word from you and someone of us will take offense, which will be equally fatal. Now, let's all stand quietly and talk this over."

"What's to talk over?" I demanded.

"A truce. Or call it an armistice."

"Do go on."

He looked at his family, and I followed his gaze. Miss Macklin was leaning against the wall with a look of concentrated interest. Her elder brother Fred was standing alert and ready but not quite poised for a leap. Mrs. Macklin had a motherly-looking smile on her face which for some unknown reason she was aiming at me in a disarming manner. The twins were standing close together, both of them puzzled-looking. I wondered whether they were esper or telepath (twins are always the same when they're identical, and opposite when fraternal). The thing that really bothered me was their attitude They all seemed to look at me as though I were a poor misguided individual who had unwittingly tromped on their toes after having fallen in among bad company. They reminded me of the Harrisons, who looked and sounded so sympathetic when I'd gone out there seeking Catherine.

A fine bunch to trust! First they swipe my girl and erase all traces of her; then when I go looking they offer me help and sympathy for my distress. The right hand giveth and the left hand taketh away, yeah!

I hated them all, yet I am not a hero-type. I wanted the whole Highways in Hiding rolled up like an old discarded corridor carpet, with every Mekstrom on Earth rolled up in it. But even if I'd been filled to the scuppers with self-abnegation in favor of my fellow man, I could not have pulled the trigger and started the shambles. For instead of blowing the whole thing wide open because of a batch of bodies, the survivors would have enough savvy to clean up the mess before our bodies got cold, and the old Highways crowd would be doing business at the same old stand. Without, I might add, without the minor nuisance that people call Steve Cornell.

What I really wanted was to find Catherine.

And then it came to me that what I really wanted second of all was to possess a body of Mekstrom Flesh, to be a physical superman.

"Suppose," said Miss Macklin unexpectedly, "that it is impossible?"

"Impossible?" I roared. "What have you got that I haven't got?"

"Mekstrom's Disease," replied Miss Macklin quietly.

"Fine," I sneered. "So how do I go out and get it?"

"You'll get it naturally—or not at all," she said.

"Now see here—" I started off, but Mr. Macklin stopped me with an upraised hand.

"Mr. Cornell," he said, "we are in the very awkward position of trying to convince a man that his preconceived notion is incorrect. We can produce no direct evidence to support our statement. All we can do is to tell you that so far as we know, and as much as we know about Mekstrom's Disease, no one has ever contracted the infection artificially."

"And how can I believe you?"

"That's our awkward position. We cannot show you anything that will support our statement. We can profess the attitudes of honesty, truth, honor, good-will, altruism, and every other word that means the same thing. We can talk until doomsday and nothing will be said."

"So where is all this getting us?" I asked.

"I hope it is beginning to cause your mind to doubt the preconceived notion," he said. "Ask yourself why any outfit such as ours would deliberately show you evidence."

"I have it and it does not make sense."

He smiled. "Precisely. It does not."

Fred Macklin interrupted, "Look, Dad, why are we bothering with all this guff?"

"Because I have hopes that Mr. Cornell can be made to see our point, to join, as it were, our side."

"Fat chance," I snapped.

"Please, I'm your elder and not at all inclined to waste my time. You came here seeking information and you shall have it. You will not believe it, but it will, I hope, fill in some blank spots after you have had a chance to compare, sort, and use your own logic on the problem. As a mechanical engineer, you are familiar with the line of reasoning that we non-engineering people call Occam's Razor?"

"The law of least reaction," I said automatically.

"The what?" asked Mrs. Macklin.

Miss Macklin said, "I'll read it from Mr. Cornell's mind, mother. The law of least reaction can be demonstrated by the following: If a bucket of mixed wood-shavings and gasoline are heated, there is a calculable probability that the gasoline will catch fire first because the gasoline is easier—least reaction—to set on fire."

"Right," I said. "But how does this apply to me?"

Mr. Macklin took up the podium again: "For one thing, your assumption regarding Catherine is correct. At the time of the accident she was found to have Mekstrom's Disease in its earliest form. The Harrisons did take her in to save her life. Now, dropping that side of the long story, we must follow your troubles. The accident, to a certain group of persons, was a fortunate one. It placed under their medical care a man—you—in whose mind could be planted a certain mild curiosity about a peculiar road sign and other evidences. The upshot of this was that you took off on a tour of investigation."

That sounded logical, but there were a lot of questions that had open, ragged ends flying loose.

Mr. Macklin went on: "Let's diverge for the moment. Mr. Cornell, what is your reaction to Mekstrom's Disease at this point?"

That was easy. It was a curse to the human race, excepting that some outfit knew how to cure it. Once cured, it made a physical superman of the so-called victim. What stuck in my craw was the number of unfortunate people who caught it and died painfully—or by their own hand in horror—without the sign of aid or assistance.

He nodded when I'd gone about half-way through my conclusions and before I got mentally violent about them.

"Mr. Cornell, you've expressed your own doom at certain hands. You feel that the human race could benefit by exploitation of Mekstrom's Disease."

"It could, if everybody helped out and worked together."

"Everybody?" he asked with a sly look. I yearned again for the ability of a telepath, and I knew that the reason why I was running around loose was because I was only an esper and therefore incapable of learning the truth directly. I stood there like a totem pole and tried to think.

Eventually it occurred to me. Just as there are people who cannot stand dictatorships, there are others who cannot abide democracy; in any aggregation like the human race there will be the warped souls who feel superior to the rest of humanity. They welcome dictatorships providing they can be among the dictators and if they are not included, they fight until the other dictatorship is deposed so that they can take over.

"True," said Mr. Macklin, "And yet, if they declared their intentions, how long would they last?"

"Not very long. Not until they had enough power to make it stick," I said.

"And above all, not until they have the power to grant this blessing to those whose minds agree with theirs. So now, Mr. Cornell, I'll make a statement that you can accept as a mere collection of words, to be used in your arguments with yourself: We'll assume two groups, one working to set up a hierarchy of Mekstroms in which the rest of the human race will become hewers of wood and drawers of water. Contrasting that group is another group who feels that no man or even a congress of men are capable of picking and choosing the individual who is to be granted the body of the physical superman. We cannot hope to watch the watchers, Mr. Cornell, and we will not have on our conscience the weight of having to select A over B as being more desirable. Enough of this! You'll have to argue it out by yourself later."

"Later?" grunted Fred Macklin. "You're not going to—"

"I certainly am," said his father firmly. "Mr. Cornell may yet be the agency whereby we succeed in winning out." He spoke to me again. "Neither group dares to come into the open, Mr. Cornell. We cannot accuse the other group of anything nefarious, any more than they dare to accuse us. Their mode of attack is to coerce you into exposing us for a group of undercover operators who are making supermen."

"Look," I asked him, "why not admit it? You've got nothing sinister in mind."

"Think of all the millions of people who have not had schooling beyond the preparatory grades," he said. "People of latent psi ability instead of trained practice, or those poor souls who have no psi ability worth mentioning. Do you know the history of the Rhine Institute, Mr. Cornell?"

"Only vaguely."

"In the early days of Rhine's work at Duke University, there were many scoffers. The scoffers and detractors, naturally enough, were those people who had the least amount of psi ability. Admitting that at the time all psi ability was latent, they still had less of it. But after Rhine's death, his associates managed to prove his theories and eventually worked out a system of training that would develop the psi ability. Then, Mr. Cornell, those who are blessed with a high ability in telepathy or perception—the common term of esper is a misnomer, you know, because there's nothing extra-sensory about perception—found themselves being suspected and hated by those who had not this delicate sense. It took forty of fifty years before common public acceptance got around to looking at telepathy and perception in the same light as they saw a musician with a trained ear or an artist with a trained eye. Psi is a talent that everybody has to some degree, and today this is accepted with very little angry jealousy.

"But now," he went on thoughtfully, "consider what would happen if we made a public announcement that we could cure Mekstrom's Disease by making a physical superman out of the poor victim. Our main enemy would then stand up righteously and howl that we are concealing the secret; he would be believed. We would be tracked down and persecuted, eventually wiped out, while he sat behind his position and went on picking and choosing victims whose attitude parallel his own."

"And who is the character?" I demanded. I knew. But I wanted him to say it aloud.

He shook his head. "I'll not say it," he said. "Because I will not accuse him aloud, any more than he dares to tell you flatly that we are an underground organization that must be rooted out. He knows about our highways and our way stations and our cure, because he uses the same cure. He can hide behind his position so long as he makes no direct accusation. You know the law, Mr. Cornell."

Yes, I knew the law. So long as the accuser came into court with a completely clean mind, he was safe. But Scholar Phelps could hardly make the accusation, nor could he supply the tiniest smidgin of direct evidence to me. For in my accusation I'd implicate him as an accessory-accuser and then he would be called upon to supply not only evidence but a clear, clean, and open mind. In shorter words, the old stunt of pointing loudly to someone else as a dodge for covering up your own crime was a lost art in this present-day world of telepathic competence. The law, of course, insisted that no man could be convicted for what he was thinking, but only upon direct evidence of action. But a crooked-thinking witness found himself in deep trouble anyway, even though crooked thinking was in itself no crime.

"Now for one more time," said Mr. Macklin. "Consider a medical person who cannot qualify because he is a telepath and not a perceptive. His very soul was devoted to being a scholar of medicine like his father and his grandfather, but his telepath ability does not allow him to be the full scholar. A doctor he can be. But he can never achieve the final training, again the ultimate degree. Such a man overcompensates and becomes the frustrate; a ripe disciple for the superman theory."

"Dr. Thorndyke!" I blurted.

His face was as blank, as noncommittal as a bronze bust; I could neither detect affirmation nor negation in it. He was playing it flat; I'd never get any evidence from him, either.

"So now, Mr. Cornell, I have given you food for thought. I've made no direct statements; nothing that you could point to. I've defended myself as any man will do, but only by protestations of innocence. Therefore I suggest that you take your artillery and vacate the premises."

I remembered the Bonanza .375 that was hanging in my hand. Shamefacedly I slipped it back in my hip pocket. "But look, sir—"

"Please leave, Mr. Cornell. Any more I cannot say without laying us wide open for trouble. I am sorry for you, it is no joy being a pawn. But I hope that your pawn-ship will work for our side, and I hope that you will come through it safely. Now, please leave us quietly."

I shrugged. I left. And as I was leaving, Miss Macklin touched my arm and said in a soft voice: "I hope you find your Catherine, Steve. And I hope that someday you'll be able to join her."

I nodded dumbly. It was not until I was all the way back to my car that I remembered that her last statement was something similar to wishing me a case of measles so that I'd be afterward immune from them.

XI

As the miles separated me from the Macklins, my mind kept whirling around in a tight circle. I had a lot of the bits, but none of them seemed to lock together very tight. And unhappily, too many of the bits that fit together were hunks that I did not like.

I knew the futility of being non-telepath. Had Mr. Macklin given me the truth or was I being sold another shoddy bill of goods? Or had he spun me a yarn just to get me out of his house without a riot? Of course, there had been a riot, and he'd been expecting it. If nothing else, it proved that I was a valuable bit of material, for some undisclosed reason.

I had to grin. I didn't know the reason, but whatever reason they had, it must gripe the devil out of them to be unable to erase me.

Then the grin faded. No one had told me about Catherine. They'd neatly avoided the subject. Well, since I'd taken off on this still hunt to find Catherine, I'd continue looking, even though every corner I looked into turned out to be the hiding place for another bunch of mad spooks.

My mind took another tack: Admitting that neither side could rub me out without losing, why in heck didn't they just collect me and put me in a cage? Dammit, if I had an organization as well oiled as either of them, I could collect the President right out of the New White House and put him in a cage along with the King of England, the Shah of Persia, and the Dali Lama to make a fourth for bridge.

This was one of those questions that cannot be answered by the application of logic, reasoning, or by applying either experience or knowledge. I did not know, nor understand. And the only way I would ever find out was to locate someone who was willing to tell.

Then it occurred to me that—aside from my one experience in housebreaking—that I'd been playing according to the rules. I'm pretty much a law-abiding citizen. Yet it did seem to me that I learned more during those times when the rules, if not broken, at least were bent rather sharply. So I decided to try my hand at busting a couple of rather high-level rules.

There was a way to track down Catherine.

So I gassed up the buggy, turned the nose East, and took off like a man with a purpose in mind. En route, I laid out my course. Along that course there turned out to be seven Way Stations, according to the Highway signs. Three of them were along U.S. 12 on the way from Yellowstone to Chicago. One of them was between Chicago and Hammond, Indiana. There was another to the south of Sandusky, Ohio, one was somewhere south of Erie, Pa., and the last was in the vicinity of Newark. There were a lot of the Highways themselves, leading into and out of my main route—as well as along it.

But I ignored them all, and nobody gave me a rough time.

Eventually I walked into my apartment. It was musty, dusty, and lonesome. Some of Catherine's things were still on the table where I'd dropped them; they looked up at me mutely until I covered them with the walloping pile of mail that had arrived in my long absence. I got a bottle of beer and began to go through the mail, wastebasketing the advertisements, piling the magazines neatly, and filing some offers of jobs (Which reminded me that I was still an engineer and that my funds wouldn't last indefinitely) and went on through the mail until I came to a letter—The Letter.

Dear Mr. Cornell:

We're glad to hear from you. We moved, not because Marian caught Mekstrom's, but because the dead area shifted and left us sort of living in a fish-bowl, psi-wise.

Everybody is hale and hearty here and we all wish you the best.

Please do not think for a moment that you owe us anything. We'd rather be free of your so-called debt. We regret that Catherine was not with you, maybe the accident might not have happened. But we do all think that we stand as an association with a very unhappy period in your life, and that it will be better for you if you try to forget that we exist. This is a hard thing to say, Steve, but really, all we can do for you is to remind you of your troubles.

Therefore with love from all of us, we'd like to make this a sincerely sympathetic and final—

Farewell, Philip Harrison.

I grunted unhappily. It was a nice-sounding letter, but it did not ring true, somehow. I sat there digging it for hidden meanings, but none came. I didn't care. In fact, I didn't really expect any more than this. If they'd not written me at all, I'd still have done what I did. I sat down and wrote Phillip Harrison another letter:

Dear Philip:

I received your letter today, as I returned from an extended trip through the west. I'm glad to hear that Marian is not suffering from Mekstrom's Disease. I am told that it is fatal to the—uninitiated.

However, I hope to see you soon.

Regards, Steve Cornell.

That, I thought, should do it!

Then to help me and my esper, I located a tiny silk handkerchief of Catherine's, one she'd left after one of her visits. I slipped it into the envelope and slapped a stamp and a notation on the envelope that this letter was to be forwarded to Phillip Harrison. I dropped it in the box about eleven that night, but I didn't bother trying to follow it until the morning.

Ultimately it was picked up and taken to the local post office, and from there it went to the clearing station at Pennsylvania Station at 34th St., where I hung around the mail-baggage section until I attracted the attention of a policeman.

"Looking for something, Mr. Cornell?"

"Not particularly," I told the telepath cop. "Why?"

"You've been digging every mailbag that comes out of there."

"Am I?" I asked ingeniously.

"Can it Buster, or we'll let you dig your way out of a jail."

"You can't arrest a man for thinking."

"I'll be happy to make it loitering," he said sharply.

"I've a train ticket."

"Use it, then."

"Sure. At train time I'll use it."

"Which train?" he asked me sourly. "You've missed three already."

"I'm waiting for a special train, officer."

"Then please go and wait in the bar, Mr. Cornell."

"Okay. I'm sorry I caused you any trouble, but I've a bit of a personal problem. It isn't illegal."

"Anything that involves taking a perceptive dig at the U.S. Mail is illegal," said the policeman. "Personal or not, it's out. So either you stop digging or else."

I left. There was no sense in arguing with the cop. I'd just end up short. So I went to the bar and I found out why he'd recommended it. It was in a faintly-dead area, hazy enough to prevent me from taking a squint at the baggage section. I had a couple of fast ones, but I couldn't stand the suspense of not knowing when my letter might take off without me.

Since I'd also pushed my loitering-luck I gave up. The only thing I could hope for was that the sealed forwarding address had been made out at that little town near the Harrisons and hadn't been moved. So I went and took a train that carried no mail.

It made my life hard. I had to wander around that tank town for hours, keeping a blanket-watch on the post office for either the income or the outgo of my precious hunk of mail. I caught some hard eyes from the local yokels but eventually I discovered that my luck was with me.

A fast train whiffled through the town and they baggage-hooked a mailbag off the car at about a hundred and fifty per. I found out that the next stop of that train was Albany. I'd have been out of luck if I'd hoped to ride with the bag.

Then came another period of haunting that dinky post office (I've mentioned before that it was in a dead area, so I couldn't watch the insides, only the exits) until at long last I perceived my favorite bit of mail emerging in another bag. It was carted to the railroad station and hung up on another pick-up hook. I bought a ticket back to New York and sat on a bench near the hook, probing into the bag as hard as my sense of perception could dig.

I cursed the whole world. The bag was merely labelled "Forwarding Mail" in letters that could be seen at ninety feet. My own letter, of course, I could read very well, to every dotted 'i' and crossed 't' and the stitching in Catherine's little kerchief. But I could not make out the address printed on the form that was pasted across the front of the letter itself.

As I sat there trying to probe that sealed address, a fast train came along and scooped the bag off the hook.

I caught the next train. I swore and I squirmed and I groaned because that train stopped at every wide spot in the road, paused to take on milk, swap cars, and generally tried to see how long it could take to make a run of some forty miles. This was Fate. Naturally, any train that stopped at my rattle burg would also stop at every other point along the road where some pioneer had stopped to toss a beer bottle off of his covered wagon.

At long last I returned to Pennsylvania Station just in time to perceive my letter being loaded on a conveyor for LaGuardia.

Then the same damned policeman collared me.

"This is it," he said.

"Now see here, officer. I—"

"Will you come quietly, Mr. Cornell? Or shall I put the big arm on you?"

"For what?"

"You've been violating the 'Disclosure' section of the Federal Communications Act, and I know it."

"Now look, officer, I said this was not illegal."

"I'm not an idiot, Cornell!" I noted uncomfortably that he had dropped the formal address. "You have been trailing a specific piece of mail with the express purpose of finding out where it is going. Since its destination is a sealed forwarding address, your attempt to determine this destination is a violation of the act." He eyed me coldly as if to dare me to deny it. "Now," he finished, "Shall I read you chapter and verse?"

He had me cold. The 'Disclosure' Act was an old ruling that any transmission must not be used for the benefit of any handler. When Rhine came along, 'Disclosure' Act was extended to everything.

"Look officer, it's my girl," hoping that would make a difference.

"I know that," he told me flatly. "Which is why I'm not running you in. I'm just telling you to lay off. Your girl went away and left you a sealed forwarding address. Maybe she doesn't want to see you again."

"She's sick," I said.

"Maybe her family thinks you made her sick. Now stop it and go away. And if I ever find you trying to dig the mail again, you'll dig iron bars. Now scat!"

He urged me towards the outside of the station like a sheep-dog hazing his flock. I took a cab to LaGuardia, even though it was not as fast as the subway. I was glad to be out of his presence.

I connected with my letter again at LaGuardia. It was being loaded aboard a DC-16 headed for Chicago, Denver, Los Angeles, Hawaii, and Manila. I didn't know how far it was going so I bought a ticket for the route with my travel card and I got aboard just ahead of the closing door.

My bit of mail was in the compartment below me, and in the hour travel time to Chicago, I found out that Chicago was the destination for the mailbag, although the superscript on the letter was still hazy.

I followed the bag off the plane at Chicago and stopped long enough to cancel the rest of my ticket. There was no use wasting the money for the unused fare from Chicago to Manila. I rode into the city in a combination bus-truck less than six feet from my little point-of-interest. During the ride I managed to dig the superscript.

It forwarded the letter to Ladysmith, Wisconsin, and from there to a rural route that I couldn't understand although I got the number.

Then I went back to Midway Airport and found to my disgust that the Chicago Airport did not have a bar. I dug into this oddity for a moment until I found out that the Chicago Airport was built on Public School Property and that according to law, they couldn't sell anything harder than soda pop within three hundred feet of public school property, no matter who rented it. So I dawdled in the bar across Cicero Avenue until plane time, and took an old propeller-driven Convair to Eau Claire on a daisy-clipping ride that stopped at every wide spot on the course. From Eau Claire the mail bag took off in the antediluvian Convair but I took off by train because the bag was scheduled to be dropped by guided glider into Ladysmith.

At Ladysmith I rented a car, checked the rural routes, and took off about the same time as my significant hunk of mail.

Nine miles from Ladysmith is a flagstop called Bruce, and not far from Bruce there is a body of water slightly larger than a duck pond called Caley Lake.

A backroad, decorated with ornamental metal signs, led me from Bruce, Wisconsin, to Caley Lake, where the road signs showed a missing spoke.

I turned in, feeling like Ferdinand Magellan must have felt when he finally made his passage through the Strait to discover the open sea that lay beyond the New World. I had done a fine job of tailing and I wanted someone to pin a leather medal on me. The side road wound in and out for a few hundred yards, and then I saw Phillip Harrison.

He was poking a long tool into the guts of an automatic pump, built to lift water from a deep well into a water tower about forty feet tall. He did not notice my arrival until I stopped my rented car beside him and said:

"Being a mechanical engineer and an esper, Phil, I can tell you that you have a—"

"A worn gasket seal," he said. "It doesn't take an esper engineer to figure it out. How the heck did you find us?"