He dozed, then woke a little later and listened. There was an air of tension in the room, a whisper of something gone sharply wrong. Jeff forced himself up on his elbow, tried to peer through the darkness. Something had happened just before he awoke. He listened to the deathly stillness in the room.
And then he knew what it was. The breathing in the next room had stopped.
He lay back, his heart pounding, listening to the rasping of his own breath, fear and despair rising up to new heights in his mind. Death had come, then. One man who would never see the payoff he so eagerly awaited. Jeff had felt death pass over the room, and he knew, instinctively, that the entire unit would know it too without a single word passing from a single mouth. For the sense of death was a tangible thing here, moving with silent, imponderable footfalls from room to room.
For the first time, Jeff felt a kinship, a depth of understanding to share with the Mercy Men. And there was a depth of fear, deep down, which he knew now that he must share with them too. Painfully, he rolled over on his side and stared into the darkness for long minutes before he fell into fitful sleep.
CHAPTER NINE
A voice was talking across the room, a muffled, mysterious rumble of up-and-down sounds. Slowly Jeff dragged his mind out of the clinging depths of nightmare, back to the stuffy, dimly lit room. How long had he slept? And how late was it now? The soft voices across the room gave no clue, and his aching mind was too tired to care any more. He just lay in the dim light, every muscle aching, his mind returning again and again to the nightmare he had been reliving for the thousandth time.
It had been horribly sharp this time, clear as noonday: the same subject as always, the same face, the same horrible knowledge, and the same soul-wrenching hatred welling up and bubbling over in his mind. Always it was hatred without plan or form, pure, disorganized animal fury. But this time the dream had been more coherent, clearer, more unmistakable and vicious.
He had been walking down the street in the heart of the city. Yes, it was mid-morning. The sun's heat was unbearable already, and his jacket and shirt were damp. What was he doing that morning? Was he on his way to the survey depot with some information on the next Mars run? It didn't really matter. But he turned into the building and then it hit him.
It was like the shock that had struck him in the testing room, he thought. He had run into the man bodily. Stepping back to beg his pardon, he saw the man's face. That's where the dream went wild, just as his mind had gone wild on that sunny morning so long ago. He saw the man turn and run like the wind, snaking into the flowing stream of people on the street. Jeff followed, shouting, his fists and legs churning through the masses of people. He screamed in hoarse, maddened despair as he saw the figure vanish before his eyes.