The smell of the sea hung in the air, and the taste of salt.
Joan continued to watch the leaf while the breeze grew colder and stronger, rising and falling with a great rushing sound, like someone breathing in her ear. Still she stood motionless, one hand resting on the smooth metal sill of the window, the other by her side.
Still she watched the leaf as the last fragments of daylight departed and the wind, growing stronger with each moment, rushed in her face and played in her hair.
An hour passed.
Two.
The leaf danced wildly to unheard music, tossing, twisting, swirling its cape in the darkness, seeming to sense that it had an audience.
At midnight Joan was still standing there, watching the leaf.
All night long she watched, and all night long the leaf danced for her with frantic abandon in the gale.
At dawn the wind slackened and the leaf drooped.
One brief weary turn, like a bow, and it fell, zigzagging downward to lose itself in the multitude of other leaves on the ground below. Joan’s eyes followed it, then lost it.
The sun came up.
Joan sighed. She suddenly realized that she felt cold. Her skin had turned blue and was covered with goosebumps. Her teeth began to chatter and she shivered and rubbed herself vigorously, trying to get warm. Joan Hiashi had returned to normality, if by normality one meant this leafless world in which humans normally live.
Percy X stared stupidly at his bandaged left hand. He had cut it himself, smashed a drinking glass and attacked himself with one of the fragments; the sharp pain had dragged him back from that sucking void into which he had followed Joan, the void that drew her in and had almost drawn him in after her. He had realized with sudden terror that his whole personality had begun dissolving, evaporating, and he had tried to break his telepathic contact with her but had been unable to, at least not until he had cut himself.
Now he cautiously entered her mind again—and found himself a stranger there. Everything had been moved about. He withdrew again, icy sweat breaking out on his forehead.
All at once he sensed someone coming. Guards.
The door unlocked and opened; one of the guards leaned in and said in a bored voice, 'Come along now, buddy. Make it fast.”
Presently, with a guard on each side, he made his way briskly down a long corridor, past endless processions of locked doors. I wonder where they’re taking me, he mused—and scanned their minds to find out. They were taking him to Joan, on orders from Balkani. But why had Balkani given such orders? On a whim, most likely; on a drug-induced impulse. Still, Percy felt uneasy. Even Balkani’s whims seemed to have some enigmatic, almost un natural, purpose.
To his amazement he found the door to her cell unlocked; in fact it hung slightly ajar.
“A visitor for you Miss Hiashi,” one of the guards announced.
Joan, who had been lying on her bunk gazing blankly at the ceiling, sat up and smiled. “Hello, Percy.”
The change in her could be seen at once. A certain air of seriousness, of maturity, that he had never perceived before.
The guard closed the door, leaving the two of them alone.
“You look like a sleepwalker,” he said presently.
“I’m awake for the first time in my life. Sit down. I have something to say to you.”
Cautiously, he seated himself at the foot of the bunk.
Joan said, “I have always told everyone, including myself, that the thing that came first with me was my career in TV. But that was a lie, even though it was a lie I convinced myself I believed in. There have been times when I’ve told myself I was in love with one man or another. You, for one. But that wasn’t true either. I threw away my career when I went into the mountains looking for you, and I’ve goofed up every love affair I’ve ever had, one way or another. Time and again, when success in one project or another was almost in my possession, I did some damn fool thing that ruined everything for me. Now I know that the one thing I’ve always feared most, deep down inside, was to succeed, to get the things I thought I wanted. I’ve always thought that people were against me, or that I had bad luck, but my real enemy was me. All my life, whenever I’ve tried to get something, the same demonic figure has stepped into my path and commanded me to halt, the same relentless phantom with my face. Doctor Balkani gave me a knife and let me kill that phantom. She screamed, Percy; she screamed for hours as I slowly cut her to pieces, as I washed myself clean of her. Now she’s dead and if I feel anything for her it’s a kind of loneliness. I’m all alone now that Joan Hiashi is dead.”
“You’re psychotic,” Percy said sharply. “Because of the suffering you underwent; I know: I stayed in contact with you.”
“I’m not insane, Percy. And Balkani is only helping me to find what I’ve always wanted, all that time I pretended I wanted fame and prestige and money and you. He’s given me the courage to see—”
“He’s given you mental and spiritual death. “Oblivion,” Joan said.
“Can’t you see what he’s done to you?”
“Who, God?” Joan asked in a far-away voice. “No, Balkani!”
‘ ‘Doctor Balkani is my friend. If I have an enemy it must be God.”
He grabbed her by the arm, yanked her toward him. “I know what you experienced; don’t you understand? Because of my talent I was there in the water and silence with you—you’re not telling me anything I didn’t go through myself. What I’m telling
you is that—” He broke off, tried to think it out. “You felt love for me; I did also, for you. What wasn’t real about that?’’ He clutched her arm, squeezing fiercely. “Answer me—”
“What do you see,” Joan said, “when you look at me? A little Japanese doll; isn’t that right? I don’t blame you for that. I gave myself to you for a plaything and you played with me. What could be more natural? But I’m more than a doll. I really am tall, Percy; tall as a mountain. I’m tired of hunching down.”
“Nobody is asking you to hunch down.” He tightened his grip on her arm.
“You’re a telepath; you read men’s minds. But you don’t understand them. Doctor Balkani does not read minds, but he understands completely. How do you explain that, Percy X? I know why it is.” She smiled her strange, distant smile. “Balkani has read one mind down to its darkest depths. His own mind. Because he understands himself completely he doesn’t need telepathy to understand others. Don’t be fooled by the fact that he takes drugs; if you saw yourself the way you really are, as he sees himself, you’d need drugs, too, to stand it. You might even kill yourself. Because we are all monsters, Percy. Demons from hell—foul, filthy, perverted and evil.” She spoke these words calmly, without a particle of emotion.
Percy said, “Stop talking like that.”
Carefully, she removed Percy X’s hands from her arm. “From now on I say what I wish. I’ve spoken to you honestly for the first time and you’ve acted as if I were insane; psychotic, as you put it. Okay. I ex-
pected that. I see that in order to be clear I must also be cruel. I’ve been trying to explain, all this time, that I don’t need you any more, Percy. Or anyone else.”
Late at night, after the last customer had left the fortune-telling parlor, Paul Rivers and Ed Newkom opened the crates which had arrived by rocket freight earlier in the day.
“Weapons, eh?” Ed said with satisfaction. “Something to fight our way into Balkani’s—”
“Not exactly,” Paul Rivers said, removing armfuls of plastic-foam padding from the foremost crate.
A robot lay in the crate. And, in the other crate, there would be a second robot. Both based on prototypes which Balkani himself had designed during the war. And now remodeled, Paul Rivers said to himself, to serve my own purposes.
“And what’s this?” Ed demanded. “A high- frequency transmitter?”
“No, a sensory distorter.” This, too, had been one of Balkani’s inventions, dating back to the pre-war Bureau of Psychedelic Research. “We’ll test these items out tonight, to make certain they work. Then contact Percy X and spring him as soon as we can.
Dawn had almost come when Percy X, lying sleepless on his cot in his cell, heard the voice of Paul Rivers speak within his mind.
“Tomorrow, Percy.”
But how? Percy thought.
