“Quiet,” said the man, steering him over toward the edge of the concourse. “Not a sound. You’ll be all right.”
Harry felt a tremor pass through his mind, the barest touching of mental fingertips, a recognition that sent a surge of eager blood through his heart.
He stopped short, facing the man. “I’m being followed,” he gasped. “You can’t take me anywhere you don’t want Webber to follow, or you’ll be in terrible danger.”
The stranger shrugged and smiled briefly. “You’re not here. You’re in a psycho-integrator. It can hurt you, if you let it. But it can’t hurt me.” He stepped up his pace slightly, and in a moment they turned abruptly into a darkened cul-de-sac.
Suddenly, they were moving through the wall of the building into the brilliantly lit lobby of the tall building. Harry gasped, but the stranger led him without a sound toward the elevator, stepped aboard with him, and sped upward, the silence broken only by the whish-whish-whish of the passing floors. Finally they stepped out into a quiet corridor and down through a small office door.
A man sat behind the desk in the office, his face quiet, his eyes very wide and dark. He hardly glanced at Harry, but turned his eyes to the other man.
“Set?” he asked.
“Couldn’t miss now.”
The man nodded and looked at last at Harry. “You’re upset,” he murmured. “What’s bothering you?”
“Webber,” said Harry hoarsely. “He’s following me here. He’ll spot you. I tried to warn you before I came, but I couldn’t.”
The man at the desk smiled. “Webber again, eh? Our old friend Webber. That’s all right. Webber’s at the end of his tether. There’s nothing he can do to stop us. He’s trying to attack with force, and he fails to realize that time and thought are on our side. The time when force would have succeeded against us is long past. But now there are many of us, almost as many as not.”
Harry stared shrewdly at the man behind the desk. “Then why are you so afraid of Webber?” he asked.
“Afraid?”
“You know you are. Long ago you threatened me, if I reported to him. You watched me, played with me. Why are you afraid of him?”
The man sighed. “Webber is premature. We are stalling for time, that’s all. We wait. We have grown from so very few, back in the 1940s and 50s, but the time for quiet usurpation of power has not quite arrived. But men like Webber force our hand, discover us, try to expose us.”
Harry Scott’s face was white, his hands shaking. “And what do you do to them?”
“We—deal with them.”
“And those like me?”
The man smiled lopsidedly. “Those like Paulus and Wineberg and the rest—they’re happy, really, like little children. But one like you is so much more useful.” He pointed almost apologetically to the small screen on his desk.
Harry looked at it, realization dawning. He watched the huge, broad-shouldered figure moving down the hallway toward the door.
“Webber was dangerous to you?”
“Unbelievably dangerous. So dangerous we would use any means to trap him.”
Suddenly the door burst open and there stood Webber, a triumphant Webber, face flushed, eyes wide, as he stared at the man behind the desk.
The man smiled back and said, “Come on in, George. We’ve been waiting for you.”
Webber stepped through the door. “Manelli, you fool!”
There was a blinding flash as he crossed the threshold. A faint crackle of sound reached Harry’s ears; then the world blacked out….
It might have been minutes, or hours, or days. The man who had been behind the desk was leaning over Harry, smiling down at him, gently bandaging the trephine wounds at his temples.
“Gently,” he said, as Harry tried to sit up. “Don’t try to move. You’ve been through a rough time.”
Harry peered up at him. “You’re—not Dr. Webber.”
“No. I’m Dr. Manelli. Dr. Webber’s been called away—an accident. He’ll be some time recovering. I’ll be taking care of you.”
Vaguely, Harry was aware that something was peculiar, something not quite as it should be. The answer slowly dawned on him.
“The statistical analysis!” he exclaimed. “I was supposed to get some data from Dr. Webber about an analysis, something about rising insanity rates.”
Dr. Manelli looked blank. “Insanity rates? You must be mistaken. You were brought here for an immunity examination, nothing more. But you can check with Dr. Webber, when he gets back.”
6
George Webber sat in the little room, trembling, listening, his eyes wide in the thick, misty darkness. He knew it would be a matter of time now. He couldn’t run much farther. He hadn’t seen them, true. Oh, they had been very clever, but they thought they were dealing with a fool, and they weren’t. He knew they’d been following him; he’d known it for a long time now.
It was just as he had been telling the man downstairs the night before: they were everywhere—your neighbor upstairs, the butcher on the corner, your own son or daughter, maybe even the man you were talking to —everywhere!
And of course he had to warn as many people as he possibly could before they caught him, throttled him off, as they had threatened to if he talked to anyone.
If only the people would listen to him when he told them how cleverly it was all planned, how it would only be a matter of months, maybe only weeks or days before the change would happen, and the world would be quietly, silently taken over by the other people, the different people who could walk through walls and think in impossibly complex channels. And no one would know the difference, because business would go on as usual.
He shivered, sinking down lower on the bed. If only people would listen to him—
It wouldn’t be long now. He had heard the stealthy footsteps on the landing below his room some time ago. This was the night they had chosen to make good their threats, to choke off his dangerous voice once and for all. There were footsteps on the stairs now, growing louder.
Wildly he glanced around the room as the steps moved down the hall toward his door. He rushed to the window, threw up the sash and screamed hoarsely to the silent street below: “Look out! They’re here, all around us! They’re planning to take over! Look out! Look out!”
The door burst open and there were two men moving toward him, grim-faced, dressed in white; tall, strong men with sad faces and strong arms.
One was saying, “Better come quietly, mister. No need to wake up the whole town.”
NAUDSONCE
by H. Beam Piper
Bishop Berkeley’s famous question about the sound of a falling tree may have no standing in Science. But there is a highly interesting question about “sound” that Science needs to consider….
