The rest of my search was fruitless. I didn't let myself dwell on the futility of the weapons I had. If I did that I wouldn't go out. I would cower in a corner of the trailer with my panic and wait for them to come after me. It was better to face them in the open and with what protection the darkness of night might afford.
I slipped on a coverall, shoes and a light windproof jacket. I turned out all the lights and stood by the door in the living room. It crossed my mind that I might never be returning to these small rooms. The thought left me strangely unmoved. I opened the door quietly and stepped out into the cold and the darkness.
Walking along the road toward the elevated station, I glanced back once. A light shone yellow and misty, its rays radiating like a stain in the dark mist. I stopped, thinking that I had failed to turn off all the lights. Checking back in my mind I remembered the total darkness the moment before I stepped out of the trailer. This light, then, had just gone on. It wasn't from one of my rooms.
The girl next door was awake, once again aware of everything I was doing. It was uncanny. I was convinced that I hadn't made enough noise to awaken her. Unless she had been lying wide-eyed and sleepless, listening. But why? With a shrug of impatience, I turned away from the puzzle and hurried along the deserted road toward the station.
I stepped up to the landing platform cautiously. One slim tube of light ran overhead, dimmed now by the curling mist. There was no one else on the platform. I checked the night schedule listed on the board and saw that a local beach train was due in seven minutes. I was in luck. There wouldn't be another beach local for forty minutes after this one. I pressed the night pickup light and saw its red warning glow a quarter-mile away down the monorail.
A feeling of tension increased as the minutes ticked by. Little could happen to me here on this platform except for that one split-second when the train would slide in front of me, and it was unlikely that there was any danger. They wouldn't go to all the trouble of pretending to lure me to the beach if they wanted to kill me in my own back yard. Nevertheless I kept far back from the edge of the platform, and when I first heard the rush of the approaching train, the muscles tightened involuntarily in my chest and arms.
Then the serpentine column of the train slid swiftly into the station, braking fast, and I saw the warm glow of the lighted interior, the familiar sight of passengers dozing or staring out the windows. I stepped into the train and, seconds later, while I walked toward a seat at the rear of the car, the train was once more speeding away over the ridge of the hills, the momentum of its plunge hardly detectible inside the car.
There were very few travelers at this time of night. It was too early for the night shifts to be getting out, too late for revelers to be coming home. There were a half-dozen people in my car but none of them paid any attention to me after the first curious glance. I felt the tension easing in my body.
Most of the time, the thick early morning mist hid the sleeping city that lay at the foot of the hills. Occasionally I caught glimpses of light patterns far below through open patches in the fog. But generally there were no landmarks visible, not even the familiar yawning canyons or the sculptured back of the hills, and I kept getting a peculiar feeling of isolation, of rushing through a void. I thought of the men who had cruised through the infinite emptiness of space between Earth and Mars, little dreaming on their return that they brought two stowaways. How had the aliens concealed themselves? Dr. Temple's logical arguments meant little now. Somewhere there was a flaw, a crack in the wall of checks and precautions through which the aliens had slipped. I knew that I had been driven by a compulsion to face the inevitable decisive clash with the enemy. I had had to come in answer to Laurie's plea, knowing that I was probably walking into a trap. Choice really hadn't played a part in my decision. This was the inescapable moment toward which I had been compelled by everything that had happened to me—not just in the recent crowded days but in the months I had listened to the whispered voices in my mind and wondered, in the nights when I had awakened shivering from the dream.
Yes. The dream. This too I had to face. The smashing waves, the dominating voice. For an instant, remembering, I felt again the weight of hopelessness. Just as quickly I rejected it. The dream need not have been clairvoyant. It could have been a subconscious projection of my fear of the voices I had heard—and my tormenting doubt that the voices existed. No. I couldn't think about the dream. And this time the aliens would not be confronting a dumbly acquiescent, frightened animal. They were not invincible. This time the clash might be a little more equal. Unless—