they had been the ones who hunted and tortured him for so long. And now he knew how far he had been wrong. For the face of the shadowy man, the man behind the nightmare he was living, was the face of Dr. George Webber.
“You’re a fool,” said Dr. Manelli sharply, as he turned away from the sleeping figure on the bed to face the older man. “Of all the ridiculous things, to let him connect you with this!” The young doctor turned abruptly and sank down in a chair, glowering at Dr. Webber. “You haven’t gotten to first base yet, but you’ve just given Scott enough evidence to free himself from integrator control altogether, if he gives it any thought. But I suppose you realize that.”
“Nonsense,” Dr. Webber retorted. “He had enough information to do that when we first started. I’m no more worried now than I was then. I’m sure he doesn’t know enough about the psycho-integrator to be able voluntarily to control the patient-operator relationship to any degree. Oh, no, he’s safe enough. But you’ve missed the whole point of that little interview.” Dr. Webber grinned at Manelli.
“I’m afraid I have. It looked to me like useless bravado.”
“The persecution, man, the persecution! He’s shifted his sights! Before that interview, the not-men were torturing him, remember? Because they were afraid he would report his findings to me, of course. But now it’s I that’s against him.” The grin widened. “You see where that leads?”
“You’re talking almost as though you believed this story about a different sort of people among us.”
Dr. Webber shrugged. “Perhaps I do.”
“Oh, come now, George.”
Dr. Webber’s eyebrows went up and the grin disappeared from his face.
“Harry Scott believes it, Frank. We mustn’t forget that, or miss its significance. Before Harry started this investigation of his, he wouldn’t have paid any attention to such nonsense. But he believes it now.”
“But Harry Scott is insane. You said it yourself.”
“Ah, yes,” said Dr. Webber. “Insane. Just like the others who started to get somewhere along those lines of investigation. Try to analyze the growing incidence of insanity in the population and you yourself go insane. You’ve got to be crazy to be a psychiatrist. It’s an old joke, but it isn’t very funny any more. And it’s too much for coincidence.
“And then consider the nature of the insanity—a full-blown paranoia—oh, it’s amazing. A cunning organization of men who are not-men, a regular fairy story, all straight from Harry Scott’s agile young mind. But now it’s we who are persecuting him, and he still believes his fairy tale.”
“So?”
Dr. Webber’s eyes flashed angrily. “It’s too neat, Frank. It’s clever, and it’s powerful, whatever we’ve run up against. But I think we’ve got an ace in the hole. We have Harry Scott.”
“And you really think he’ll lead us somewhere?”
Dr. Webber laughed. “That door I spoke of that Harry peeked through, I think he’ll go back to it again. I think he’s started to open that door already. And this time I’m going to follow him through.”
4
It seemed incredible, yet Harry Scott knew he had not been mistaken. It had been Dr. Webber’s face he had seen, a face no one could forget, an unmistakable face. And that meant that it had been Dr. Webber who had been persecuting him.
But why? He had been going to report to Webber when he had run into that golden field in the rooming- house hallway. And suddenly things had changed.
Harry felt a chill reaching to his fingers and toes. Yes, something had changed, all right. The attack on him had suddenly become butcherous, cruel, sneaking into his mind somehow to use his most dreaded nightmares against him. There was no telling what new horrors might be waiting for him. But he knew that he would lose his mind unless he could find an escape.
He was on his feet, his heart pounding. He had to get out of here, wherever he was. He had to get back to town, back to the city, back to where people were. If he could find a place to hide, a place where he could rest, he could try to think his way out of this ridiculous maze, or at least try to understand it.
He wrenched at the door to the passageway, started through, and smashed face-up against a solid brick wall.
He cried out and jumped back from the wall. Blood trickled from his nose. The door was walled up, the mortar dry and hard.
Frantically, he glanced around the room. There were no other doors, only the row of tiny windows around the ceiling of the room, pale, ghostly squares of light.
He pulled the chair over to the windows, peered out through the cobwebbed openings to the corridor beyond.
It was not the same hallway as before, but an old, dirty building corridor, incredibly aged, with bricks sagging away from the walls. At the end he could see stairs, and even the faintest hint of sunlight coming from above.
Wildly, he tore at the masonry of the window, chipping away at the soggy mortar with his fingers until he could squeeze through the opening. He fell to the floor of the corridor outside.
It was much colder and the silence was no longer so intense. He seemed to feel, rather than hear, the surging power, the rumble of many machines, the little, almost palpable vibrations from far above him.
He started in a dead run down the musty corridor to the stairs and began to climb them, almost stumbling over himself in his eagerness.
After several flights, the brick walls gave way to cleaner plastic, and suddenly a brightly lighted corridor stretched before him.
Panting from the climb, Harry ran down the corridor to the end, wrenched open a door, and looked out anxiously.
He was almost stunned by the bright light. At first he couldn’t orient himself as he stared down at the metal ramp, the moving strips of glowing metal carrying the throngs of people, sliding along the thoroughfare before him, unaware of him watching, unaware of any change from the usual. The towering buildings before him rose to unbelievable heights, bathed in ever-changing rainbow colors, and he felt his pulse thumping in his temples as he gaped.
He was in the New City, of that there was no doubt. This was the part of the great metropolis which had been built again since the devastating war that had nearly wiped the city from the Earth a decade before. These were the moving streets, the beautiful residential apartments, following the modern neo-functional patterns and participational design which had completely altered the pattern of city living. The Old City still remained, of course —the slums, the tenements, the skid-rows of the metropolis—but this was the teeming heart of the city, a new home for men to live in.
And this was the stronghold where the not-men could be found, too. The thought cut through Harry’s mind, sending a tremor up his spine. He had found them here; he had uncovered his first clues here, and discovered them; and even now his mind was filled with the horrible, paralyzing fear he had felt that first night when he had made the discovery. Yet he knew now that he dared not go back where he had come from.
At least he could understand why the not-men might have feared and persecuted him, but he could not understand the horrible assault that Dr. Webber had unleashed. And somehow he found Dr. Webber’s attack infinitely more frightening.
He seemed to be safe here, though, at least for the moment.
Quickly he moved down onto the nearest moving sidewalk heading toward the living section of the New City. He knew where he could go there, where he could lock himself in, a place where he could think, possibly find a way to fight off Dr. Webber’s attack of nightmares.
He settled back on a bench on the moving sidewalk, watching the city slide past him for several minutes before he noticed the curious shadow-form which seemed to whisk out of his field of vision every time he looked.
