"I was not certain. For a moment I thought——" The message broke off. "I must leave."
"When shall we speak again?"
"We must avoid all contact unless absolutely necessary. There is too much risk of detection. We should never be together again in the same place until the listener is found."
"What shall I do when I find him?"
There was a brief pause. I found myself tense as I waited for the reply, my hands clenching painfully.
"It must look like an accident."
Laughter erupted from the booth nearby, raucous and free, the young gay laughter of a normal, healthy world. I had the sudden, bitter feeling that I had left this world forever and its laughter was rude and jarring on my nerves, a bizarre punctuation to the sentence of death I had just heard pronounced on myself.
Then the students were pushing out of their booth, moving toward the door, passing near me.
"Hi, Mr. Cameron!" Laurie Hendricks called.
I nodded. My throat was constricted, unable to open for speech. The group spilled out onto the sidewalk and I felt a stab of alarm. One of them was an alien—but what could I do? How could I find out which one? Should I follow them or the man in the booth?