Assignment's End Part 4

She gave him a disappointed look. "I thought you'd have guessed by now the relation between ourselves and those people in the clippings. You had another seizure in the 'copter, didn't you?"

He stared, too disconcerted to answer.

"You saw four faces this time," she went on, "where you had seen none before. And you recognized one."

"It was Ellis, the chemist," Alcorn said. And with a numb premonition of the truth, he quietly asked, "How did you know that?"

"You were broadcasting it like a beacon. We're both in the last stages of the change. Now that our conditioning is lifting, we're reverting to our original telepathic nature. That's how _they_ found you and me, as they found Ellis and the others--by tracking down our communication auras."

He said slowly, "Those four--why were they mobbed and killed?"

"Because the change caught them too suddenly for escape," she said. "And because, in our natural state, we are incompatible with Man."

"With Man," he repeated. "And what does that make us? Supermen or monsters?"

"You're still blinded by your conditioning," she answered, "or you'd see that we're neither, that we're not even native to this planet. I don't know a great deal more than that myself--I haven't remembered it all yet, because the change isn't complete...."

She broke off and, with both hands above the fireplace, gripped the rough stone of the mantelpiece. Her tilted green eyes burned with a contradictory play of emotions; the soft planes of her face seemed to s.h.i.+ft and alter, seeking an impossible balance between ecstasy and terror and a tearing, intolerable agony.

"I'm learning the rest ... now," she whispered. "Sooner than ... I thought."

He sensed the change that possessed her, the struggling of new emotions, the shattering of imposed concepts and conditionings and their realigning to shape a new personality, a new person. He knew from that moment that she had been right, and that what he had feared from the beginning of his first seizure was about to happen to him.

She closed her eyes briefly. When she opened them again, Alcorn drew back. Then resentment flared in him and he was suddenly furious, at the alteration of status that left him on the defensive.

He remembered the clippings and understood something of the frustrated rage that must have gripped the howling mobs when they killed the two ministers and the Nevada doctor and the Girl Scout leader.

Janice Wynn straightened from the fireplace, her head tilted as if she were listening to some sound beyond range of his own hearing.

"Someone is coming," she said. Her voice had changed as much as her face; her eyes watched him with a remote yet curiously intimate compa.s.sion. "Not our people. It isn't time for them yet."

She was at the cabin door before he realized that she had moved.

"Stay here," she ordered. "Don't open the door for anyone. For _anyone_, do you hear?"

She was gone into the outside darkness.

Alcorn felt it himself then, the indefinable certainty of approach. A turbo-copter, then another, slanting down toward his hideaway, two speeding machines filled with grimly intent men--Jaffers' agents.

The 'copters landed about a hundred yards away from the cabin. There was a dragging silence and then a booming, amplified voice.

"Alcorn, come out!"

He stood fast, feeling above their tension the swift progress of Janice Wynn through the darkness toward them. She was close to the nearer machine when he felt a sudden veering of her attention, followed the direction of her probing, and sensed another 'copter angling down out of the night.

Her mental order was as urgent as a shout: _Let no one in. No one!_

She moved on. The pilot of the third 'copter was only beginning to a.s.sume ident.i.ty to Alcorn's sharpened senses when Janice Wynn drew within effective reach of the nearer grounded machine.

The amplified voice was calling again: "Come out, Alcorn, or we'll have to--"

It broke off short in a scream. There was a flurry of shots, a white flash in the darkness and a concussion that shook the cabin.

He felt Janice turn and run purposefully through the darkness toward the second 'copter.

The third machine was dropping in for landing when he identified its pilot.

"Kitty!" he breathed. "Dear G.o.d, Kitty!"

She was at the door, the terror and tenderness of her crying overwhelming his flinching perception. "Philip, let me in! Philip darling, are you all right?"

She was inside and in his arms before he could prevent it.

She clung to him frantically until the effect of his presence calmed her. The terror went out of her eyes slowly, but the tears glistening on her cheeks contradicted her smile of relief.

"Thank G.o.d you're safe, Philip! When I heard on the visinews about Dr.

Hagen--"

Janice Wynn's silent command was violent in Alcorn's head. _Put her out quickly! Do you want her there when your own change comes?_

He caught Kitty's hands and drew her toward the door.

"You can't stay here, Kitty. There's no time to explain. I'll call later and tell you everything."

She showed her hurt beneath the placidity his gift imposed upon her. "If I must, Philip. But--"

He threw open the door. "Don't argue, Kitty. For G.o.d's sake, go!"

The blast of the second turbo-copter's explosion might have precipitated the seizure that took him just then.

The polar plain sprang up about him, more terribly cold and stark than ever, its cl.u.s.tering buildings and metal machines standing out in such clear perspective that he was certain he could have put out a hand and touched them.

But the people were faceless no longer, except for one that knelt before the group in a tense att.i.tude. Janice Wynn stood over that one while its features filled in slowly, line by line, growing more and more familiar as the face neared ident.i.ty.

By the time Alcorn realized that it was his own face, the change was fully upon him.

A vast icy wind roared in his ears. A force seized and flung him, distorted and disoriented, to infinity. There was darkness and terror and then a chorus of calm voices calling rea.s.surance. Pain gripped him, and panic, and finally an ecstasy of remembering that was beyond imagining.

Dimly, he heard Kitty's screaming. Something struck him furiously on the shoulder and he felt his distant physical body struggle automatically for balance.

A second blow caught him on the temple and he fell heavily, his new awareness flickering toward unconsciousness. There was a confusion of voices about him and Kitty's raw shrilling died away.

He lay still, secure in the certainty that he was no longer alone.

Mind after mind brushed his, lightly, yet more warming than any clasping of hands, and with each touch, he identified and embraced an old friend whose regard was dearer than his own life. He knew who they were. He was one of them--again.