Highways in Hiding

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HIGHWAYS IN HIDING

GEORGE O. SMITH

A LANCER BOOK 1967

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_

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_

_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.

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