"Still, there's talk of marching orders coming any day now—complete mobilization."
"Yes, but against what?" The woman's voice had a faint overtone of hysteria. "That's what I keep asking myself at practice whenever I look through the slit and depress the trigger of the new gun—not knowing what it is that the gun will shoot or how it really works. I keep asking myself, over and over, what's going to be out there instead of the neat little target—what it is I'm going to kill. Until sometimes I think I'm going crazy. Oh Burk, there's something I've got to tell you, though I promised not to. I heard it yesterday—I mustn't tell who told me. It's that there's really a way of escape to that happier world we all dream of, if only you know how to concentrate your mind—"
"Sh!"
This time it was Thorn's eavesdropping that precipitated the warning.
He managed to listen in on many similar, smaller fragments of talk.
Gradually a change came over his mood—a complete change. His curiosity was not satisfied, but it was quenched. Oh, he had guessed several things from what he had heard, all right—in particular, that the "new kind of inspection" was designed to uncover displaced minds like his own, and that the "way of escape" was the one the other Thorn had taken—but this knowledge no longer lured him on. The fever of demoniac excitement had waned as swiftly as drunkenness, and left as sickening a depression in its wake. Normal human emotions were re-asserting themselves—a shrinking from the ominous strangeness of this distorted world, and an aching, unreasoning, mountingly frantic desire to get back to familiar faces and scenes.
Bitter regret began to torture him for having deserted Clawly and his home-world because of the pressure of a purely personal moral problem. No knowing what confusions and dangers the other Thorn might weave for an unsuspecting Clawly. And upon Clawly alone, now that he was gone, the safety of the home-world depended. True, if most of the displacing minds from this world were only those of oppressed individuals seeking escape, they would constitute no immediate unified danger. But if the shadowy, autocratic "they" were contemplating an invasion—that would be a very different matter.
The avenue, now skirting some sort of barren hillside, had become hateful to him. It was like a treadmill, and the glaring lights prevented any extended glimpse of the surrounding landscape. He would probably have left it soon in any case, even without sight of the jam-up ahead, where some sort of inspection of all walkers seemed to be going on. As it was, that sight decided him. He edged over to the side, waited for what he thought was a good opportunity, and ducked through the hedge.
Some minutes later, panting from concentrated exertion, his clothes muddied and grass-stained, he came out on the hilltop. The darkness and the familiar stars were a relief. He looked around.