Highways in Hiding

G >> George Oliver Smith >> Highways in Hiding

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18

So I gassed up the buggy, turned the nose East, and took off like a man
with a purpose in mind. En route, I laid out my course. Along that
course there turned out to be seven Way Stations, according to the
Highway signs. Three of them were along U.S. 12 on the way from
Yellowstone to Chicago. One of them was between Chicago and Hammond,
Indiana. There was another to the south of Sandusky, Ohio, one was
somewhere south of Erie, Pa., and the last was in the vicinity of
Newark. There were a lot of the Highways themselves, leading into and
out of my main route--as well as along it.

But I ignored them all, and nobody gave me a rough time.

Eventually I walked into my apartment. It was musty, dusty, and
lonesome. Some of Catherine's things were still on the table where I'd
dropped them; they looked up at me mutely until I covered them with the
walloping pile of mail that had arrived in my long absence. I got a
bottle of beer and began to go through the mail, wastebasketing the
advertisements, piling the magazines neatly, and filing some offers of
jobs (Which reminded me that I was still an engineer and that my funds
wouldn't last indefinitely) and went on through the mail until I came to
a letter--The Letter.

_Dear Mr. Cornell:_

_We're glad to hear from you. We moved, not because Marian caught
Mekstrom's, but because the dead area shifted and left us sort of
living in a fish-bowl, psi-wise._

_Everybody is hale and hearty here and we all wish you the best._

_Please do not think for a moment that you owe us anything. We'd
rather be free of your so-called debt. We regret that Catherine was
not with you, maybe the accident might not have happened. But we do
all think that we stand as an association with a very unhappy
period in your life, and that it will be better for you if you try
to forget that we exist. This is a hard thing to say, Steve, but
really, all we can do for you is to remind you of your troubles._

_Therefore with love from all of us, we'd like to make this a
sincerely sympathetic and final--_

_Farewell, Philip Harrison._

I grunted unhappily. It was a nice-sounding letter, but it did not ring
true, somehow. I sat there digging it for hidden meanings, but none
came. I didn't care. In fact, I didn't really expect any more than this.
If they'd not written me at all, I'd still have done what I did. I sat
down and wrote Phillip Harrison another letter:

_Dear Philip:_

_I received your letter today, as I returned from an extended trip
through the west. I'm glad to hear that Marian is not suffering
from Mekstrom's Disease. I am told that it is fatal to
the--uninitiated._

_However, I hope to see you soon._

_Regards, Steve Cornell._

_That_, I thought, _should do it!_

Then to help me and my esper, I located a tiny silk handkerchief of
Catherine's, one she'd left after one of her visits. I slipped it into
the envelope and slapped a stamp and a notation on the envelope that
this letter was to be forwarded to Phillip Harrison. I dropped it in the
box about eleven that night, but I didn't bother trying to follow it
until the morning.

Ultimately it was picked up and taken to the local post office, and from
there it went to the clearing station at Pennsylvania Station at 34th
St., where I hung around the mail-baggage section until I attracted the
attention of a policeman.

"Looking for something, Mr. Cornell?"

"Not particularly," I told the telepath cop. "Why?"

"You've been digging every mailbag that comes out of there."

"Am I?" I asked ingeniously.

"Can it Buster, or we'll let you dig your way out of a jail."

"You can't arrest a man for thinking."

"I'll be happy to make it loitering," he said sharply.

"I've a train ticket."

"Use it, then."

"Sure. At train time I'll use it."

"Which train?" he asked me sourly. "You've missed three already."

"I'm waiting for a special train, officer."

"Then please go and wait in the bar, Mr. Cornell."

"Okay. I'm sorry I caused you any trouble, but I've a bit of a personal
problem. It isn't illegal."

"Anything that involves taking a perceptive dig at the U.S. Mail is
illegal," said the policeman. "Personal or not, it's out. So either you
stop digging or else."

I left. There was no sense in arguing with the cop. I'd just end up
short. So I went to the bar and I found out why he'd recommended it. It
was in a faintly-dead area, hazy enough to prevent me from taking a
squint at the baggage section. I had a couple of fast ones, but I
couldn't stand the suspense of not knowing when my letter might take off
without me.

Since I'd also pushed my loitering-luck I gave up. The only thing I
could hope for was that the sealed forwarding address had been made out
at that little town near the Harrisons and hadn't been moved. So I went
and took a train that carried no mail.

It made my life hard. I had to wander around that tank town for hours,
keeping a blanket-watch on the post office for either the income or the
outgo of my precious hunk of mail. I caught some hard eyes from the
local yokels but eventually I discovered that my luck was with me.

A fast train whiffled through the town and they baggage-hooked a mailbag
off the car at about a hundred and fifty per. I found out that the next
stop of that train was Albany. I'd have been out of luck if I'd hoped to
ride with the bag.

Then came another period of haunting that dinky post office (I've
mentioned before that it was in a dead area, so I couldn't watch the
insides, only the exits) until at long last I perceived my favorite bit
of mail emerging in another bag. It was carted to the railroad station
and hung up on another pick-up hook. I bought a ticket back to New York
and sat on a bench near the hook, probing into the bag as hard as my
sense of perception could dig.

I cursed the whole world. The bag was merely labelled "Forwarding Mail"
in letters that could be seen at ninety feet. My own letter, of course,
I could read very well, to every dotted 'i' and crossed 't' and the
stitching in Catherine's little kerchief. But I could not make out the
address printed on the form that was pasted across the front of the
letter itself.

As I sat there trying to probe that sealed address, a fast train came
along and scooped the bag off the hook.

I caught the next train. I swore and I squirmed and I groaned because
that train stopped at every wide spot in the road, paused to take on
milk, swap cars, and generally tried to see how long it could take to
make a run of some forty miles. This was Fate. Naturally, any train that
stopped at my rattle burg would also stop at every other point along the
road where some pioneer had stopped to toss a beer bottle off of his
covered wagon.

At long last I returned to Pennsylvania Station just in time to perceive
my letter being loaded on a conveyor for LaGuardia.

Then the same damned policeman collared me.

"This is it," he said.

"Now see here, officer. I--"

"Will you come quietly, Mr. Cornell? Or shall I put the big arm on you?"

"For what?"

"You've been violating the 'Disclosure' section of the Federal
Communications Act, and I know it."

"Now look, officer, I said this was not illegal."

"I'm not an idiot, Cornell!" I noted uncomfortably that he had dropped
the formal address. "You have been trailing a specific piece of mail
with the express purpose of finding out where it is going. Since its
destination is a sealed forwarding address, your attempt to determine
this destination is a violation of the act." He eyed me coldly as if to
dare me to deny it. "Now," he finished, "Shall I read you chapter and
verse?"

He had me cold. The 'Disclosure' Act was an old ruling that any
transmission must not be used for the benefit of any handler. When Rhine
came along, 'Disclosure' Act was extended to everything.

"Look officer, it's my girl," hoping that would make a difference.

"I know that," he told me flatly. "Which is why I'm not running you in.
I'm just telling you to lay off. Your girl went away and left you a
sealed forwarding address. Maybe she doesn't want to see you again."

"She's sick," I said.

"Maybe her family thinks you made her sick. Now stop it and go away. And
if I ever find you trying to dig the mail again, you'll dig iron bars.
Now scat!"

He urged me towards the outside of the station like a sheep-dog hazing
his flock. I took a cab to LaGuardia, even though it was not as fast as
the subway. I was glad to be out of his presence.

I connected with my letter again at LaGuardia. It was being loaded
aboard a DC-16 headed for Chicago, Denver, Los Angeles, Hawaii, and
Manila. I didn't know how far it was going so I bought a ticket for the
route with my travel card and I got aboard just ahead of the closing
door.

My bit of mail was in the compartment below me, and in the hour travel
time to Chicago, I found out that Chicago was the destination for the
mailbag, although the superscript on the letter was still hazy.

I followed the bag off the plane at Chicago and stopped long enough to
cancel the rest of my ticket. There was no use wasting the money for the
unused fare from Chicago to Manila. I rode into the city in a
combination bus-truck less than six feet from my little
point-of-interest. During the ride I managed to dig the superscript.

It forwarded the letter to Ladysmith, Wisconsin, and from there to a
rural route that I couldn't understand although I got the number.

Then I went back to Midway Airport and found to my disgust that the
Chicago Airport did not have a bar. I dug into this oddity for a moment
until I found out that the Chicago Airport was built on Public School
Property and that according to law, they couldn't sell anything harder
than soda pop within three hundred feet of public school property, no
matter who rented it. So I dawdled in the bar across Cicero Avenue until
plane time, and took an old propeller-driven Convair to Eau Claire on a
daisy-clipping ride that stopped at every wide spot on the course. From
Eau Claire the mail bag took off in the antediluvian Convair but I took
off by train because the bag was scheduled to be dropped by guided
glider into Ladysmith.

At Ladysmith I rented a car, checked the rural routes, and took off
about the same time as my significant hunk of mail.

Nine miles from Ladysmith is a flagstop called Bruce, and not far from
Bruce there is a body of water slightly larger than a duck pond called
Caley Lake.

A backroad, decorated with ornamental metal signs, led me from Bruce,
Wisconsin, to Caley Lake, where the road signs showed a missing spoke.

I turned in, feeling like Ferdinand Magellan must have felt when he
finally made his passage through the Strait to discover the open sea
that lay beyond the New World. I had done a fine job of tailing and I
wanted someone to pin a leather medal on me. The side road wound in and
out for a few hundred yards, and then I saw Phillip Harrison.

He was poking a long tool into the guts of an automatic pump, built to
lift water from a deep well into a water tower about forty feet tall. He
did not notice my arrival until I stopped my rented car beside him and
said:

"Being a mechanical engineer and an esper, Phil, I can tell you that you
have a--"

"A worn gasket seal," he said. "It doesn't take an esper engineer to
figure it out. How the heck did you find us?"

"Out in your mailbox there is a letter," I told him. "I came with it."

He eyed me humorously. "How much postage did you cost? Or did you come
second class mail?"

I was not sure that I cared for the inference, but Phillip was kidding
me by the half-smile on his face. I asked, "Phil, please tell me--what
is going on?"

His half-smile faded. He shook his head unhappily as he said, "Why can't
you leave well-enough alone?"

My feelings welled up and I blew my scalp. "Let well enough alone?" I
roared. "I'm pushed from pillar to post by everybody. You steal my girl.
I'm in hokus with the cops, and then you tell me that I'm to stay--"

"Up the proverbial estuary lacking the customary means of locomotion,"
he finished with a smile.

I couldn't see the humor in it. "Yeah," I drawled humorlessly.

"You realize that you're probably as big a liability with us as you were
trying to find us?"

I grunted. "I could always blow my brains out."

"That's no solution and you know it."

"Then give me an alternative."

Phillip shrugged. "Now that you're here, you're here. It's obvious that
you know too much, Steve. You should have left well enough alone."

"I didn't know well enough. Besides, I couldn't have been pushed better
if someone had slipped me--" I stopped, stunned at the idea and then I
went on in a falter, "--a post-hypnotic suggestion."

"Steve, you'd better come in and meet Marian. Maybe that's what
happened."

"Marian?" I said hollowly.

"She's a high-grade telepath. Master of psi, no less."

My mind went red as I remembered how I'd catalogued her physical charms
on our first meeting in an effort to find out whether she were esper or
telepath. Marian had fine control; her mind must have positively seethed
at my invasion of her privacy. I did not want to meet Marian face to
face right now, but there wasn't a thing I could do about it.

Phillip left his pump and waved for me to follow. He took off in his
jeep and I trailed him to the farmhouse. We went through a dim area that
was almost the ideal shape for a home. The ring was not complete, but
the open part faced the fields behind the house so that good privacy was
ensured for all practical purposes.

On the steps of the verandah stood Marian.

Sight of her was enough to make me forget my self-accusation of a few
moments ago. She stood tall and lissome, the picture of slender, robust
health.

"Come in, Steve," she said, holding out her hand. I took it. Her grip
was firm and hard, but it was gentle. I knew that she could have pulped
my hand if she squeezed hard.

"I'm very happy to see that rumor is wrong and that you're
not--suffering--from Mekstrom's Disease," I told her.

"So now you know, Steve. Too bad."

"Why?"

"Because it adds a load to all of us. Even you." She looked at me
thoughtfully for a moment, then said, "Well, come on in and relax,
Steve. We'll talk it out."

We all went inside.

On a divan in the living room, covered by a light blanket, resting in a
very light snooze, was a woman. Her face was turned away from me, but
the hair and the line of the figure and the--

#Catherine!#

She turned and sat up at once, alive and shocked awake. She rubbed the
sleep from her eyes with swift knuckles and then looked over her hands
at me.

"Steve!" she cried, and all the world and the soul of her was in the
throb of her voice.

XII

Catherine took one unsteady step towards me and then came forward with a
rush. She hurled herself into my arms, pressed herself against me, held
me tight.

It was like being attacked by a bulldozer.

Phillip stayed my back against her headlong rush or I would have been
thrown back out through the door, across the verandah, and into the
middle of the yard. The strength of her crushed my chest and wrenched my
spine. Her lips crushed mine. I began to black out from the physical
hunger of a woman who did not know the extent of her new-found body. All
that Catherine remembered was that once she held me to the end of her
strength and yearned for more. To hold me that way now meant--death.

Her body was the same slenderness, but the warm softness was gone. It
was a flesh-warm waist of flexible steel. I was being held by a statue
of bronze, animated by some monster servo-mechanism. This was no woman.

Phillip and Marian pried her away from me before she broke my back.
Phillip led her away, whispering softly in her ear. Marian carried me to
the divan and let me down on my face gently. Her hands were gentle as
she pressed the air back into my lungs and soothed away the awful wrench
in my spine. Gradually I came alive again, but there was pain left that
made me gasp at every breath.

Then the physical hurt went away, leaving only the mental pain; the
horror of knowing that the girl that I loved could never hold me in her
arms. I shuddered. All that I wanted out of this life was marriage with
Catherine, and now that I had found her again, I had to face the fact
that the first embrace would kill me.

I cursed my fate just as any invalid has cursed the malady that makes
him a responsibility and a burden to his partner instead of a joy and
helpmeet. Like the helpless, I didn't want it; I hadn't asked for it;
nor had I earned it. Yet all I could do was to rail against the
unfairness of the unwarranted punishment.

Without knowing that I was asking, I cried out, "But why?" in a
plaintive voice.

In a gentle tone, Marian replied: "Steve, you cannot blame yourself.
Catherine was lost to you before you met her at her apartment that
evening. What she thought to be a callous on her small toe was really
the initial infection of Mekstrom's Disease. We're all psi-sensitive to
Mekstrom's Disease, Steve. So when you cracked up and Dad and Phil went
on the dead run to help, they caught a perception of it. Naturally we
had to help her."

I must have looked bitter.

"Look, Steve," said Phillip slowly. "You wouldn't have wanted us not to
help? After all, would you want Catherine to stay with you? So that you
could watch her die at the rate of a sixty-fourth of an inch each hour?"

"Hell," I snarled, "Someone might have let me know."

Phillip shook his head. "We couldn't Steve. You've got to understand our
viewpoint."

"To heck with your viewpoint!" I roared angrily. "Has anybody ever
stopped to consider mine?" I did not give a hoot that they could wind me
around a doorknob and tuck my feet in the keyhole. Sure, I was grateful
for their aid to Catherine. But why didn't someone stop to think of the
poor benighted case who was in the accident ward? The bird that had been
traipsing all over hell's footstool trying to get a line on his lost
sweetheart. I'd been through the grinder; questioned by the F.B.I.,
suspected by the police; and I'd been the guy who'd been asked by a
grieving, elderly couple, "But can't you remember, son?" Them and their
stinking point of view!

"Easy, Steve," warned Phillip Harrison.

"Easy nothing! What possible justification have you for putting me
through my jumps?"

"Look, Steve. We're in a precarious position. We're fighting a battle
against an unscrupulous enemy, an undercover battle, Steve. If we could
get something on Phelps, we'd expose him and his Medical Center like
that. Conversely, if we slip a millimeter, Phelps will clip us so hard
that the sky will ring. He--damn him--has the Government on his side. We
can't afford to look suspicious."

"Couldn't you have taken me in too?"

He shook his head sadly. "No," he said. "There was a bad accident, you
know. The authorities have every right to insist that each and every
automobile on the highway be occupied by a minimum of one driver. They
also believe that for every accident there must be a victim, even though
the damage is no more than a bad case of fright."

I could hardly argue with that. Changing the subject, I asked, "but what
about the others who just drop out of sight?"

"We see to it that plausible letters of explanation are written."

"So who wrote me?" I demanded hotly.

He looked at me pointedly. "If we'd known about Catherine before, she'd
have--disappeared--leaving you a trite letter. But no one could think of
a letter to explain her disappearance from an accident, Steve."

"Oh fine."

"Well, you'd still prefer to find her alive, wouldn't you?"

"Couldn't someone tell me?"

"And have you radiating the fact like a broadcasting station?"

"Why couldn't I have joined her--you--?"

He shook his head in the same way that a man shakes it when he is trying
to explain _why_ two plus two are four and not maybe five or three and a
half. "Steve," he said, "You haven't got Mekstroms' Disease."

"How do I get it?" I demanded hotly.

"Nobody knows," he said unhappily. "If we did, we'd be providing the
rest of the human race with indestructible bodies as fast as we could
spread it and take care of them."

"But couldn't I have been told _something_?" I pleaded. I must have
sounded like a hurt kitten.

Marian put her hand on my arm. "Steve," she said, "You'd have been
smoothed over, maybe brought in to work for us in some dead area. But
then you turned up acting dangerously for all of us."

"Who--me?"

"By the time you came out for your visit, you were dangerous to us."

"What do you mean?"

"Let me find out. Relax, will you Steve? I'd like to read you deep.
Catherine, you come in with me."

"What are we looking for?"

"Traces of post-hypnotic suggestion. It'll be hard to find because there
will be only traces of a plan, all put in so that it looks like natural,
logical reasoning."

Catherine looked doubtful. "When would they have the chance?" she asked.

"Thorndyke. In the hospital."

Catherine nodded and I relaxed. At the beginning I was very reluctant. I
didn't mind Catherine digging into the dark and dusty corners of my
mind, but Marian Harrison bothered me.

"Think of the accident, Steve," she said.

Then I managed to lull my reluctant mind by remembering that she was
trying to help me. I relaxed mentally and physically and regressed back
to the day of the accident. I found it hard even then to go through the
love-play and sweet seriousness that went on between Catherine and me,
knowing that Marian Harrison was a sort of mental spectator. But I
fought down my reticence and went on with it.

I practically re-lived the accident. It was easier now that I'd found
Catherine again. It was like a cleansing bath. I began to enjoy it. So I
went on with my life and adventures right up to the present. Having come
to the end, I stopped.

Marian looked at Catherine. "Did you get it?"

Silence. More silence. Then, "It seems dim. Almost incredulous--that it
could be--" with a trail-off into thought again.

Phillip snorted. "Make with the chin-music, you two. The rest of us
aren't telepaths, you know."

"Sorry," said Marian. "It's sort of complicated and hard to figure, you
know. What seems to be the case is sort of like this," she went on in an
uncertain tone, "We can't find any direct evidence of anything like
hypnotic suggestion. The urge to follow what you call the Highways in
Hiding is rather high for a mere bump of curiosity, but nothing
definite. I think you were probably urged very gently. Catherine
objects, saying that it would take a brilliant psycho-telepath to do a
job delicate enough to produce the urge without showing the traces of
the operation."

"Someone of scholar grade in both psychology and telepathy," said
Catherine.

I thought it over for a moment. "It seems to me that whoever did it--if
it was done--was well aware that a good part of this urge would be
generated by Catherine's total and unexplicable disappearance. You'd
have saved yourselves a lot of trouble--and saved me a lot of heartache
if you'd let me know something. God! Haven't you any feelings?"

Catherine looked at me from hurt eyes. "Steve," she said quietly, "A
billion girls have sworn that they'd rather die than live without their
one and only. I swore it too. But when your life's end is shown to you
on a microscope slide, love becomes less important. What should I do?
Just die? Painfully?"

That was handing it to me on a platter. It hurt but I am not
chuckleheaded enough to insist that she come with me to die instead of
leaving me and living. What really hurt was not knowing.

"Steve," said Marian. "You know that we couldn't have told you the
truth."

"Yeah," I agreed disconsolately.

"Let's suppose that Catherine wrote you a letter telling you that she
was alive and safe, but that she'd reconsidered the marriage. You were
to forget her and all that. What happens next?"

Unhappily I told him. "I'd not have believed it."

Phillip nodded. "Next would have been a telepath-esper team. Maybe a
perceptive with a temporal sense who could retrace that letter back to
the point of origin, teamed up with a telepath strong enough to drill a
hole through the dead area that surrounds New Washington. Why, even
before Rhine Institute, it was sheer folly for a runaway to write a
letter. What would it be now?"

I nodded. What he said was true, but it did not ease the hurt.

"Then on the other hand," he went on in a more cheerful vein, "Let's
take another look at us and you, Steve. Tell me, fellow, where are you
now?"

I looked up at him. Phillip was smiling in a knowing-superior sort of
manner. I looked at Marian. She was half-smiling. Catherine looked
satisfied. I got it.

"Yeah. I'm here."

"You're here without having any letters, without leaving any broad trail
of suspicion upon yourself. You've not disappeared, Steve. You've been
a-running up and down the country all on your own decision. Where you go
and what you do is your own business and nobody is going to set up a hue
and cry after you. Sure, it took a lot longer this way. But it was a lot
safer." He grinned wide then as he went on, "And if you'd like to take
some comfort out of it, just remember that you've shown yourself to be
quite capable, filled with dogged determination, and ultimately
successful."

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18