When he entered, Janice Wynn was standing at the window, watching the soundless rush of traffic in the street below. She was dark, not pretty in any conventional sense, but charged with a controlled vitality that made physical beauty unimportant.
Her face was anything but serene, the complex of emotions in her tilted green eyes far removed from the ready placidity he had learned to expect. There was an unmistakable impression of driving urgency—the same urgency, Alcorn thought, that he had felt in the people of his waking dream.
"You're one," he said. His face felt stiff. "After all these years, I've found another one like—"
"Like yourself," she said. "But it's I who have found you. Did you really think you were unique, Philip Alcorn?"
He tried to answer and couldn't. The meeting he had dreamed of all his life had come about with precisely the electric suddenness he had imagined, but he felt none of the elation he had anticipated. He felt, instead, a sudden panic.
For behind Mulhall's secretary, he had a shutter-swift glimpse of the frozen plain, starkly clear with its huddle of metal buildings and its faceless people clustered on the snow-packed street.
Janice Wynn gave him no time to flounder for control. "You're the last," she said. "And the most stubborn of the lot. You're lucky that we could find you in the little time we have left."
Alcorn said hoarsely, "I don't know what you mean."
She looked more disappointed than surprised. "You've no inkling yet? I've known most of the truth for days, though I still haven't made the change. Your conditioning must have been too thorough or—"
She caught the shift of Alcorn's glance toward the window and turned quickly. The man in gray was watching them intently from the office across the street.