Louis Charbonneau

“ Ahead of me the pounding surf beckoned. I felt the unwanted constriction of fear but I felt something more—human pride and defiance.
It was chill and damp and dark as a mine on the beach. The heavy mist was moist against my face. I stood facing the pulsations of the alien mind and slowly, like the curtain rising on a play, the mist began to lift. With a fog's capriciousness, it rose above my head and stopped to hang suspended over the beach, revealing now the white curve of sand, the black swell of waves, the dim gray shapes of trailers, but still blotting out the hills rising beyond. ”

“ This was not the alien. This was a weaker mind, helpless to resist the command which drove him to kill just as I was helpless in his terrible embrace. Here was a weapon I had not counted on, an ultimate weapon beyond resistance—
The pain grew savage. I seemed to hear a cracking of bones yielding and I thought I could not bear the pain. A stifled, breathless cry broke through my locked jaws. Consciousness began to slip away from me and the trailer seemed to tip slowly like a ship listing.
"There is no pain, no sickness, no evil beyond the power of the mind to control." ”

“ While Freemen blissfully pursued their endless pleasure, the wall made their camp a prison.
Waiting for total darkness, Hendley let his reflections range beyond the wall to the bleak prospect of the endless desert. Would he find food and water in that wasteland? Would he lose himself in its vastness without ever finding his way to the nearest city? Angrily he brushed aside his doubts. Frightening as the desert might be, it could be no more terrible than a meaningless freedom. ”

“ Listening, I felt a creeping contraction of horror as if I had touched something cold and alien. My God, what did they mean? They believed that I must be—human. And what were they?
"I would like to return with you—to assist in your expedition." The bright young mind spoke.
"Your task is to find the human who speaks with his thoughts and destroy him. If he is able to hear us he is dangerous. Once we are here in force it will not matter. But now——"
The horror expanded in my mind, a revulsion exaggerated now by a consciousness of danger, of menace that was suddenly close and real. ”

“ The main orchestration was supplied by human voices erupting in every range of pitch and intensity. Behind these could be heard the whine and sigh of a computer band. And, bursting up through a center stairwell around which wound a circular escalator, to crash against Hendley's ears like a solid wave, came an instrumental thunder of party noises: the explosion of falling glass, the shudder of the overloaded stairway straining with its burden, the shifting of a hundred feet, shrieks and shouts and trills of laughter. ”

“ She held herself stiff with anger, her small fists clenched, but even the rigidity of her body could not change the curving softness of breast and hip and thigh to which the pale green tissue of her dress clung. Confronting her in the small room, I felt the same quick surge of desire, the same overpowering response to her beauty that had swept over me the night before when her physical presence had seemed to dominate the confined space of my own trailer. I had never reacted to a woman so immediately and so forcefully. ”

“ And I felt the anger growing in me, active and violent, a deep revulsion and a raging hatred for the alien things to whom human beings were simply inferior organisms to be possessed and used, discarded or destroyed. Looking down at Laurie, at this young and slim and beautiful woman, at the vivid red hair spilling over white quivering shoulders, I knew that what I felt for her was not love but something equally important, sympathy and compassion and a strong affection that could easily, under other circumstances, erupt into desire and need. ”

“ And suddenly Hendley knew what he was going to say. In a flash of insight he saw behind the shallow façade of fatherly wisdom before him. Here was only another man trapped by the system, another button-pusher who knew only the answers fed to him by his computer, a man too eager to be sure and safe, too anxious to have everything come out right and gain new tax credits for him. He had only to be told something he could understand—something that would fall into a familiar pattern. ”

“ She had been too quick to throw herself at me in my trailer the night before, I had argued, too ready to provide me with an alibi when the police came. Now I knew that I had simply been deceiving myself. I had eliminated her from suspicion even before I tasted the human passion of her lips. I was going to her now because I needed her. I wanted to hold her and to lose myself in her, to forget fear and threats and self-tormenting doubts of my own sanity in the intense oblivion of love.
The westbound freeway reached the intersection of the automatic ocean causeway. ”

“ Reaching the cleared strip, he peered toward the wall. A robot—silent, impassive, tirelessly observant—sat exactly across the way.
Hendley plunged back among the trees. Running blindly, indifferent to the branches which stung and scratched his face and arms, he covered another thirty yards, this time without his makeshift ladder. He slowed his pace, stole forward another ten paces, then approached the clearing. The robot-guard was ahead of him. Its silent posture on top of the wall seemed to mock the labored heaving of Hendley's chest, the clamorous protest in his mind. ”

“ This wasn't like the dream, I thought, unable to disguise a quick surge of relief. Everything had been clear in the dream. I walked on slowly, cautiously, feeling the damp cold steal through the fabric of my coverall and jacket. And at last, winking at me from a flat hollow of the beach, I saw the sign: BEACHCOMBER TRAILER LODGE.
I stopped. Trying to open my mind to every impulse, I stood motionless, thinking of nothing, waiting and listening. There was only the steady, rhythmic roll and crash of the ocean beating against the edge of the land. ”

“ The whole life of the Organization, all human pursuit, rested on the base of freedom's desirability, its ultimate satisfactions. The suggestion that it could give rise to a kind of anarchy, that Freemen would seek to dispel boredom and ennui with barbarous acts of violence, left Hendley with an uneasy feeling, as if a firm surface had quite illogically, unaccountably, turned spongy and uncertain underfoot. ”

“ I stumbled back into the trailer. Dropping onto the couch under the long window, I lay motionless, my eyes open and unseeing, fixed on some distant point beyond the ceiling. My mind turned over sluggishly. With careful logic I tried to examine all the facts. Like a policeman, I thought, investigating a crime. A reported crime. You check each suspect, eliminating them one by one. When the list is limited that's not hard. I had done that. None of my four suspects was capable of the monstrous plot I had imagined. None had super-human powers. So there were no suspects. ”

“ Hendley remembered one discussion forum for his group a week before. He had been sitting between RED-498, his Assigned, the woman he was soon to contract with, and a short, fat man in the yellow coverall of a 2-Dayman. The round man had constantly been rising to demand the floor, grabbing his seat mike and shouting so loudly that his words over the loudspeaker were distorted and often incomprehensible. His round, full face had a squinty look, the triangle of eyes and nose being squeezed close together like a cluster of dots in the center of a circle. ”