14
I sat in the little aluminum car for a long time. I don't know how long. The numbness slowly left my chest and arms and face, clearing the way for a thousand jabbing needles of pain. But the emotional numbness, the dull apathy, remained.
A fight shouldn't wreck you like this, I thought. At twenty-seven you aren't exactly an old man. Weren't you supposed to reach your physical peak at that age?
Why had I felt no real anger? The unemotional, automatic resistance during the fight was abnormal. My feeling now of being drained and empty was disproportionate. A reaction to the weeks of strain, perhaps, with the physical beating I had taken providing the finishing blows.
Or did it go deeper than that? My reaction to Laurie was not normal either. The emotional pendulum was swinging far too wide at both ends of its arc. I was not a kid any more, not an unstable adolescent. Kissing a young and beautiful girl was not a unique, soul-shattering experience. The moment's passion with Laurie had meant too much. Granted she was no ordinary girl, and in my self-imposed isolation I had not been leading what could be called a full and satisfying sex life. Yet neither of these facts seemed to account fully for the highly charged, volatile reaction I had had to her on the two occasions we had been alone for a few minutes.
Could she be exercising some unnatural influence?
As I examined the thought a feeling of disgust welled up in me. It won't work, I thought dully, the revulsion itself a gray, listless emotion. Laurie is dangerous only if you're afraid of love, timid in the face of a strong relationship. She is not a monster. Nor is Jenkins. He had his opportunity right there on the beach in the darkness. It would have been easy for him to use the brutal force of a super-mind instead of awkward fists. He could have done it before Laurie heard the sounds of fighting and came out. It could have been done as it was in the dream. "Drown! Drown yourself!" And no one would have known how or why it happened.
No. Not Jenkins, not Laurie, not Helen Darrow or Mike Boyle. It had to be one of these and it was none of them. So I could no longer hide behind my bizarre delusion. There were no aliens. There was no enemy but the one who hid inside me. Myself.
And yet—there was one fact which was not imaginary. Lois Worthington had died. She had seen the man in the back booth, I had tried to reach her, and she had been brutally murdered. This fact was all too real. And the vision I had had so long ago of my father's death, that could not be dismissed or explained away now. That too had happened. At the time I was able to believe in coincidence. No longer.
Moreover, if the aliens existed only as part of an elaborate delusion of persecution, if whispered voices were hallucinations, there should have been accompanying symptoms before this, evidence of a greater deterioration of my thinking. But nothing else had changed. The world looked the same to me. I didn't even have to look far for a plausible explanation of my abrupt swings from apathy to extreme emotionalism. This instability could logically be accounted for by the unnatural pressures of fear and worry.