Dr. Hagen rattled his paper and nodded agreeably. "Go on. What are these people like?"
"I can't tell you that," Alcorn said, "because their images were not complete. There seems to be a sort of relationship between them and myself—a threatening one—but I can't guess what it may be. I can't even tell you what racial type they belong to, because they have no faces."
He crushed out his cigarette and took a deep breath, getting to the worst of it. "I have a distinct conviction during each of these seizures that the people I see are not ordinary human beings, that they're as different from me as I am from everyone else, though not in the same way. It's the difference that makes me uneasy. I can feel the urgency and the resolution in them, as if they were determined to do—or had resigned themselves to doing—something desperately important. And then I know somehow that each of them has made some kind of decision recently, a decision that is responsible for his being what he is and where he is, and that I'll have to make a similar one when the time comes. And the worst of it is that I know no matter which way my choice falls, I'm going to be hideously unhappy."
The psychiatrist asked tranquilly, "You can't guess what choice it is that you must make, or its alternative?"
"I can't. And that's the hell of it—not knowing."
The icy chill of the polar plain touched him and with it came a deeper cold that had not been a part of the dream. At that instant, he might have identified its source, but was afraid to.
"My fear has some relation to whatever it is these people are about to do," he said. "I just realized that. But that doesn't help, because I've no idea what it is."
He glanced at his strap watch, and the time made him stand up before the little psychiatrist could speak again. The hour was 15:57, and he saw in dismay that his 16:00 appointment with Sean O'Donnell and the Irradiated Foods tycoon would be late.
"I don't expect an immediate opinion," he said. "You couldn't reach one as long as I'm here. Add up what I've told you, and if it makes any sort of sense you can radophone me tonight at 19:00. If my apartment doesn't answer, relay the call to my cabin in the Catskills—I've kept the location a secret, for privacy's sake, but the number is on alternate listing."
He paused briefly at the door, touched with an uncharacteristic flash of sour humor. "And telestat your bill to me. If I asked for it now, you'd probably charge nothing."