Blake was one of a long line of such operators.
So far as he knew, the present case represented the first time a criminal had ever hidden out in the pursuer's mind. It would have been a superb stratagem indeed if, shortly after her entry, Sabrina York had not betrayed her presence. For her point of entry she had used the place-time materialization of the little office Blake had opened on Ex-earth at the beginning of his career. Unaccountably she had ransacked it before moving into a co-terminous memory-image.
Even this action wouldn't have given her away, however, if the office hadn't constituted a sentimental memory. Whenever Blake accepted a case he invariably thought of the bleak and lonely little room with its thin-gauge steel desk and battered filing cabinets, and when he had done so after accepting his case—or was it before? He couldn't quite remember—the mental picture that had come into his mind had revealed open drawers, scattered papers and a general air of disarray.
He had suspected the truth immediately, and when he had seen the woman's handkerchief with the initials "SB" embroidered on it lying by one of the filing cabinets he had known definitely that his quarry was hiding out in his mind. Retiring to his bachelor quarters, he had entered at the same place-time and set off in pursuit.
Her only advantage lost, Sabrina York was now at his mercy. Unless she discovered his presence and was able to locate his most recently materialized place-time before he over-took her, her capture was assured.
Only two things bothered Blake. The little office was far in his past, and it was unlikely that anyone save the few intimate acquaintances whom he had told about it were aware that it had ever existed. How, then, had a total stranger such as Sabrina York learned enough about it to enable her to use it as a point of entry?
The other thing that bothered him was of a much more urgent nature. He had been in enough minds and he had read enough on the subject of Trevorism to know that people were sometimes capable of creating beings considerably higher on the scale of mind-country evolution than ordinary memory-ghosts. One woman whom he had apprehended in her own mind had created a walking-talking Virgin Mary who watched over her wherever she went. And once, after tracking down an ex-enlisted man, he had found his quarry holed up in the memory-image of an army barracks with a ten-star general waiting on him hand and foot. But these, and other, similar, cases, had to do with mal-adjusted people, and moreover, the super-image in each instance had been an image that the person involved had wanted to create. Therefore, even assuming that Blake was less well-adjusted than he considered himself to be, why had he created three such malevolent super-images as Miss Stoddart, Officer Finch, and Vera Velvetskin?
They followed him off the campus into a vicarious memory-image of Walden Pond, Thoreau's shack, and the encompassing woods. Judging from the ecstatic "oh's" and "ah's" they kept giving voice to, the place delighted them. Once, glancing back over his shoulder, he saw them standing in front of Thoreau's shack, looking at it as though it were a doll's house. Not far away, Thoreau was sitting in under a tall pine, gazing up into the branches at a bird that had come through only as a vague blur of beak and feathers.
Blake went on. Presently the Walden Pond memory-image gave way to a memory-image of an English park which the ex-Earth government had set aside as a memorial to the English poets and which had impressed Blake sufficiently when he had visited it in his youth to have found a place for itself in the country of his mind. It consisted of reconstructions of famous dwellings out of the lives of the poets, among them, a dwelling out of the life of a poet who was not in the strictest sense of the word English at all—the birthplace of Robert Burns. Oddly enough, it was Burns's birthplace that had impressed Blake most. Now the little cottage stood out in much more vivid detail than any of the other famous dwellings.