The words didn't reach her. For a moment longer I knelt beside her trembling body on the sand, tasting the bitterness of her fear of me. Of me! I knew there was nothing I could say that would wipe away the memory of the dreadful whiplash of my own projected thoughts.
I stood up. She shrank further away from me. I turned to stare at the blackened crystal fragment, at the shapeless heap of dust beside it, washed now by the incoming tide. I felt no sense of triumph. In the end it was not I who had won. The alien had been destroyed by an ordinary, frightened human being.
The thought startled me. I confronted it with growing wonder. I had used the phrase automatically: an ordinary human being. And what was I? A thing to be feared. A step beyond.
I too was an alien mind.
In that moment I was conscious of a new aloneness. For years, I had known an isolation from the world around me. I had walked apart, and the sense of exile had walked with me, not understood, beyond any experience that would have allowed me to understand it. And now I knew at last the thing which made me different, like the impulse which had driven the first feeble-legged creature from the sea to walk apart upon the land.
I turned back to Laurie. For a moment longer I stared at her. Slowly, I bent to pick up the gun she had dropped. The movement made me wince as pain shot through me from the stiff, scorched fingers of my left hand. They felt as if the flame still burned upon them. They smelled of smoking flesh. I set my teeth against the pain. Without a word, I turned my back on the girl's frightened eyes and walked back down the slope of the beach.
The blackened crystal glittered wet. I picked it up. A dead piece of rock. Frozen matter. Nothing. I took it with me. It seemed fitting that the two aliens should meet once more, the one who had died—and the one who lived.
24
All the offices in the Science building were dark. The corridors glowed with a glassy, empty brightness. Behind me the campus was dark and deserted. I tried the main doors. They were locked. I had started to turn away when a thought struck me. I stared at the lock. Concentrating on it, I tried to see the naked mechanism. I thought of a key turning, of the tumblers dropping, of the click of the opening lock. Sweat broke out on my forehead. I bent the full weight of my mind upon the resisting sliver of metal. It clicked.
For a moment I leaned against the door. I was near a state of total exhaustion. The pain in my hand now was almost unbearable. I had wrapped a handkerchief around it. Charred flesh had stuck to the cloth.