CORPUS EARTHLING

Louis Charbonneau

A Zenith Original

Zenith Books, Inc.
Rockville Centre, New York

[Transcriber's Note: Extensive research did not uncover any
evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]

I stared appraisingly at the redhead curled up on my couch. Even she, Laurie Hendricks, might be one of them—one of the things from outer space.

She noticed me watching her. She smiled knowingly, and stretched, catlike, her body straining against the smooth coverall.

She walked over to where I stood and pressed against me. "Let's see what you can teach me, professor," she said softly.

My last thought was: This girl is flesh and blood and human—she must be human! And then everything was blotted out in the crimson sensation of that incredible kiss....

1

It came again—the dream within a dream, the alien mind within the ailing mind. Drowning in the treacherous whirlpool near the shores of sleep, I fought to reach the firm reality of consciousness, of awakening, but I was sucked back and slowly sank beneath the surface into the horror of the dream....

I stood on a lonely stretch of beach in a blue night, the sand glistening white against the inky darkness of sky and water. Waves rolled and tumbled toward me in noisy confusion. Beyond the apron of sand were the small, black beetle-shapes of a cluster of house trailers. But my eyes were focused on the figure which stood far up the beach, and an unknown terror crawled like a furry, many-legged animal down the nape of my neck.

"No!" The wind snatched the single cry of protest from my lips and tore it into thin shreds of sound.

And the alien mind spoke in my ear, in my mind but not of it, a whispered insinuation. "Drown!" it urged. "Drown!"

I didn't move. My legs seemed to have grown into the sand like the trunks of trees. The voice spoke again in my mind, louder, more compelling.

"Walk! Now! Into the water!"

I stood resisting the terrifying power of the voice. The figure up the beach seemed closer, blurred by the cold wind that brought tears to my eyes. I stood rooted and my body bent as if a gale tugged and pulled at it. My legs began to tremble uncontrollably. The command hammered at me with a relentless pressure, filling my mind, blotting out all consciousness save for the drumming words, overwhelming in their brutal strength.

And one foot moved. I took a step. Awkwardly, stiffly, like a rusty robot lifting its leg. I struggled to force my body to obey the protest of my own will. No! Stop! Don't move! But the cry of resistance was obliterated by the command that swelled within my brain.

"Walk! Walk! Walk!"

Feet dragged resisting in the soft sand. Then there was the packed wet surface, dark footprints, and the cold spray against my face, the water swirling around my ankles, receding rapidly away from me down the wet brown slope. I stumbled after it, impelled by the irresistible force, each step a painful conflict that racked my body. I flung a wild glance toward the figure on the beach. Closer now, much closer. Moving in for the kill. And I felt anger, raging helpless anger mixed with the terror.

A breaker cracked like a whip ahead of me. The foaming tail of the wave tumbled and crashed around me, washing above my knees. For a single moment, I braked to a stop. I could feel the fabric of my suit plastered wet against my legs.

I fought again and lost.

Walk. Drown. One step, then another. The water waist-high, dragging against my thighs, a numbing cold. A breaker rising, trembling at its crest, smashing down to drive me off my feet, tumbling me helplessly in the churning violence.

"Up! On your feet! Walk!"

Eyelids heavy and wet, the salt taste on my tongue. The cold, bone deep. Staggering, half falling, dragging myself forward against the pull of the water. Another breaker, and I fell face forward into it. My whole body was numb and wet and shivering, and the chill penetrated my brain where the voice pounded at me with its relentless power, shattering my will, dominating me as if I were a simple-minded child, driving me onward step by step. Another wave broke over me, lifting me off my feet and slamming me back, the water filling eyes and nose and mouth as I went under. I swallowed water and came up choking with a heavy pain in my chest.

"Drown! Drown!"

The voice spoke pitilessly and I staggered forward once more. And at last I was beyond the line of the breakers, out where the water rose with a slow heaviness, building high behind me. And there was a new strength in the deep pull of the water flowing out to sea. Another step, another, still one more. And I tried to ask why, but my brain would not function. The water rose above my head and I went down, down, sinking into the cold black waters.

The voice was triumphant, exulting, reaching through the tumultuous sea to the numbness of my brain. "Now drown! Give yourself to the water! Die!"

In the last moment panic came—the body retching, trying to disgorge the deadly water, the mind recoiling from the black abyss that beckoned, now so near, so tempting. And I tried to push up from the bottom of the sea, but the water was a thick, impenetrable wall toppling down upon me. I could see a layer of light near the surface and I strained frantically to reach it, to grope beyond it toward the life-giving air. The alien mind which had driven me under was now—

The mind was silent.

I woke shivering in my bed. The sheets were damp with sweat. I lay rigid, unable to move. The panic drained out slowly. I thought of nothing, staring dully at the sleek surface of the plastic ceiling overhead. When at last the terror had ebbed away, I felt empty and cold and spent, as if all strength and sinew had rushed out through the opening where the fear had gone.

A dream, I told myself. Only a dream. But the feeble reassurance carried no conviction. The barrier against thought which I had erected gave way, and the chill knowledge of what was happening to me spilled through the breach to strike with sickening impact.

I was going mad.

2

I rose slowly. The muscles of arms and legs and shoulders felt stiff and sore, as if they had actually been tested and strained in the ordeal of which I had dreamt. I glanced at the luminous clock face built into the wall just to the left of the bedroom telescreen. It was after three in the morning.

The floor of the trailer creaked gently as I plodded barefoot into the tiny kitchenette. The creak always gave me the impression that the trailer was moving, like a ship that groans protestingly even as it rides with no apparent sway on smooth waters. I pressed the coffee button and then, because I was too tired to move into the living area when I would only have to come back in a minute, I stood beside the sink, staring at the glowing red button as if hypnotized by it. I couldn't shake off the depression brought by the recurrence of the dream.

The red button blinked off, a green one flared, and a coffee cup dropped into the slot beneath the spout from which coffee poured in a hot black stream. I added a sugar pill and carried the cup into the living room.

This was a small room about seven feet wide and ten feet long. All of the furniture was built in—a sofa across the narrow wall under the picture window, two flanking plastic chairs on pedestal bases, a coffee table and a desk with its contour pedestal stool. Cramped quarters, but they were comfortable enough for one. The kitchenette in the center of the trailer had a small dining area. Beyond it were the bath, utility closets, and the small bedroom. I had never completely got over my luck in finding a place so close to the university.

Particularly one with a view.

I pressed the wall button and the draperies parted slowly and silently across the picture window to frame a panoramic view of the west basin of the San Fernando Valley. It was a clear moonlit night. The trailer community I lived in was on a knoll above Mulholland Drive near the crest of the Santa Monica mountains. Behind me, at the southern foot of the hills, were the massive buildings of the University of California at Los Angeles. My trailer faced northwest. In the distance I could see the glow which was always visible over the spaceport of the Western Space Command, though I could not now make out the bullet-shaped noses of the shuttle rockets pointing skyward, dominant landmarks which could easily be seen in the daytime projecting above an intervening ridge of hills at the far western end of the valley. The ever-present glow came from the atomic reactor factory where the power plants were produced for the interplanetary space ships. These days the bullet-nosed rockets were thundering skyward daily, carrying parts to the space station where the interplanetary ships were being assembled.

Thinking of the coming moment less than a month away when man would be leaving on his second flight to Mars, I felt some of my depression lifting. The good hot coffee had quieted the quivering muscles in my stomach. I lit a cigarette and inhaled deeply.

At last I permitted my mind to return to the dream. It was the third time I had experienced it, the same dream in every detail, with its latent death wish, its peculiar delusion of extraordinary mental powers, its mysterious unknown enemy, its strange water fear. The terrifying reality of the dream, coupled with the unshakable conviction that it was in some way a portent, only partly explained why it left me so shaken.

For the dream was not the only symptom I had had. There were also the voices—and the clear sense of someone plotting against me. Sometimes the voices were extraordinarily vivid, whispering in my ear with as much clarity as if I were wearing earphones and tuning in a broadcast. I would stand at the window overlooking the valley, or even in my cubicle of an office at the university, and I would hear the meaningless fragments of thought—phrases, words and half-words jumping into my mind with an eerie suddenness, bringing the peculiar sensation that the thoughts in my own mind were being formed by someone else. For over a year I had heard the elusive voices, but it was only recently that I had begun to entertain the delusion that they were plotting against me.

"Someone is listening."

That startling declaration had chilled my mind a little over a month ago. There had been an immediate impression of total silence, of waiting in a mental vacuum, and I had found myself holding my breath, my mind blank in readiness. But there had been nothing else—only the waiting silence.

In the weeks that followed, the references to the listener—to me, I was sure—had been numerous. And I had sensed a deep animosity toward me in the voices that spoke to me unknowingly. They were trying to locate me. Who they were, I had no idea. But they were hunting me coldly and methodically.

In the dream they caught me.

Psychology was not my field. I taught English literature at the university and I was more familiar with Dostoyevsky's probing of the human mind than Jung's or Freud's. But after I started hearing the voices, I did some intensive reading on abnormal psychology. I even quizzed friends in the psychology department, being careful not to discuss my symptoms with them openly.

The research had been frightening. I had found nothing in the literature of psychology that exactly duplicated my symptoms—but I learned that minds, like fingerprints, always had their individual twists. And there were many parallels to my particular pattern, cases of multiple personality in which one identity had spoken to the other as a clear voice in the mind—and had even tried to "murder" his fellow. The conflict of personalities often expressed itself in dreams in which the unconscious mind cleverly dramatized the conflict in bizarre terms. The fact that the enemy on the beach was unrecognizable was even a typical factor.

I knew that I should have treatment while there was still time—before I did something dangerous. It was not beyond the area of possibility that I would try to kill myself as the dream suggested. And yet—

I believed in the voices. Reason said they could not exist. Logic argued that they were products of my own ailing mind. But my belief in them was a barrier that prevented me from seeking treatment at once. I kept searching for explanations of the voices. I kept thinking of them as completely foreign to me. I built up a flimsy case for the actual existence of beings who were telepathic, who communicated by direct thought transference. They were engaged in some melodramatic plot. Against whom? Me, of course. But only because I was a menace. I was able to hear them. I was a threat to some kind of monstrous plot that was far bigger than me, far more important than my life.

I found it easier to demolish these theories than to construct them; nevertheless I clung to them with a desperate hope. For either there were real voices, there were real enemies, or I was insane.

These brooding reflections were interrupted by a splash of light that fell across the narrow strip of lawn outside my trailer. I crossed quickly to the side window and peered through the vertical plastic blinds. When I saw the source of the light I relaxed, smiling faintly. For a moment I continued to stare at the curtained bedroom window of the adjoining trailer. This time I could see nothing clearly, only a blurred shadow of movement. It was enough to recreate a vivid picture. A moment later, light glowed at the front of the trailer, but again the blinds cut me off from my neighbor.

With a slight feeling of embarrassment I turned away, remembering the guilt I had felt a few nights before when my new neighbor had forgotten to draw her bedroom curtains closed. There is something especially stimulating in seeing a beautiful woman when she isn't aware of being observed. And in this case nothing had prepared me for the golden grace of the girl's figure.

She had moved into the adjoining trailer only two weeks before. Trailer life is of necessity fairly intimate and I had met her briefly a number of times. She was not the kind of girl you particularly notice. I had got the impression that she was painfully shy. The first time I met her, the day after she moved in, I said hello casually. She blurted a reply, stammered a name I didn't catch when I introduced myself, whirled, and fled into her trailer. I failed to get a clear impression of what she looked like. Young. Slender. Taller than average. Blonde. Not a real yellow or a striking white-blonde, but fair. Large, frightened eyes whose color I hadn't caught. And that's all. Nothing that would enable me to recognize her on the street.

During the days that followed, she avoided close contact. My first instinctive suspicion of any newcomer, a reaction to the knowledge that I was being hunted by an unknown enemy, quickly evaporated. I exchanged greetings with the girl a couple of times, but she didn't invite conversation and passed on quickly. I concluded that she would probably misinterpret any friendly overtures I made and I dismissed her as a timid soul who wanted to be left alone. I wasn't interested.

Until that midnight glimpse through the bedroom window. Glancing out, I had been startled by the extraordinary sight of the girl in the act of pulling a nightgown over her head. Too surprised to move, I stopped to gape at her. The gown was a pale iridescent green against the honey tones of her skin. For several seconds she stood completely revealed, her arms raised, small breasts pulled tautly erect, her body bathed in soft light. Then she lowered her arms and took a step forward which placed her out of my line of sight. I became rudely aware of what I was doing. Chagrined, I told myself to stop acting like a peeping Tom, but I couldn't erase that golden image from my memory. It gave me a restless night.

Now, with a somewhat rueful smile, I turned out the lights in the front of my trailer and went back to the small bedroom. I felt a return attack of nerves at the prospect of going to sleep again. Perchance to dream. Ay, there's the rub. For in that sleep of sleeps what dreams may come....

I forced myself to turn out the light and lie on the narrow bed. After a while my eyes began to ache from the effort of staring at the ceiling. Don't think about it, I told myself. You've never had the dream twice in one night. You can think about it tomorrow. In the daylight. Think of the girl next door. You forgot all about your troubles when you glanced out the window.

Maybe sex is your whole problem. How would a psychoanalyst interpret your dream? The faceless enemy is obvious. That means it's someone very close to you, someone you hate but shouldn't hate—or someone for whom you feel a forbidden love. And what about the water symbol?

But there was no one very close to me, no one it could have been. My mother was dead. Over two years. And I had never known my father, the man from Los Alamitos who had been my mother's lover for a week in Albuquerque and had left his seed in her.

And that was an answer, of course. The bastard son. What was the ratio of insanity among bastards? Higher than normal? I would have to look it up.

I shut the thought out of my mind. For a long while, I stared at the dim whiteness of the plastic ceiling. And then the picture of a shy, fair-haired girl with firm, uplifted breasts stole into my thoughts. The tension slid away from me. The horror of the dream was forgotten.

It's funny, the tricks your mind can play on you.

3

The following night I worked late, correcting a batch of the interminable freshman themes. I didn't have any night classes, but the offices were bright for the lecturers who did. I found it difficult to concentrate on the semi-adolescent exercises in expository composition even though the office was quiet and almost empty most of the evening. Near the bottom of the pile of papers I came across one theme that jolted me. It was called "How to Conduct a Seance." It was a juvenile and jocular approach to the subject, and I had never placed much credence myself in preternatural events and influences—or in extra-sensory powers. But now I found myself feeling defensive, resenting the spoofing tone of the student's theme. Wasn't anything possible? How much did we really know? Wasn't the wisest philosopher actually as ignorant as this nineteen-year-old?

I wondered if a man could have unusual perceptions, strange mental powers, for twenty-seven years without knowing it. Wouldn't a talent for thought transference or for hearing the mental communications of others make itself known early? Or would it be necessary to have two sensitive people involved, sender and receiver? Could you be a telepath without knowing it simply because you had never encountered another?

And I remembered the incident, distant in time and dim in memory, which I had refused to recall during the disturbing recent months. In itself, the experience, though startling at the time, was not unique. At least you hear about similar things happening to a great many ordinary people. You hear about it—but you brush off the story as coincidence or as the product of an over-active imagination.

I have mentioned my father. Until I was eighteen, I never knew who he was or that he was alive. My mother had always talked about him as if he had been killed the year I was born, during the brief Chino-American war of 1963. After I had the extraordinary vision, she told me the truth, her story muffled by tears long contained.

Ernest Cameron was a well-known physicist. He was married and had two children. If my mother can be believed, his was an unhappy marriage, but one which he did not feel justified in renouncing. During part of 1962 he was in New Mexico working with the army on atomic field weapons, the kind that did a hell of a lot of damage in a confined area, what they used to call "clean" bombs in those days before all atomic weapons were outlawed. My mother was at that time a woman in her early twenties living in Albuquerque.

She met Ernest Cameron when he was on a weekend leave. They fell in love, suddenly, catastrophically. Their passionate affair lasted for nine days. Then, as the threat of war intensified in Asia, he was abruptly transferred overseas. My mother never saw him again, but she was already carrying the infinitesimal germ of life that grew into the son he never knew. Me. Paul Cameron.

My mother always loved him. She moved to Los Angeles and took the name of Mrs. Rose Cameron, wanting me to bear my father's name. For eighteen years after I was born, she posed as a widow. The role was never questioned.

It was the vision which forced her to tell me who I really was—and who my father was. It happened on a clear sunny afternoon. I was in the yard outside our small trailer. Having just graduated from high school, I was taking a week's vacation before hunting for a job. I was sitting on a canvas chair, idly enjoying the summer sun and thinking wistfully about my hopes of going to college, when it happened.

I saw him. A sandy-haired, middle-aged man with bent, rounded shoulders and a tired walk. Preoccupied, his eyes on the ground, he stepped off a curb and started across a street I had never seen in my life. I sat in the canvas chair, staring at the familiar setting of the crowded trailer court, and the picture of the sandy-haired man was superimposed on the reality before me, equally clear and vivid. When I saw the truck hurtling toward him, the illusion was so graphic that I cried out in alarm. The man looked up at the last moment of his life, soft gray eyes widening in blank surprise, without fear, as if he had not had time to bring his mind back from some distant point of reflection to this time and place of life and death. He had stepped out from behind a parked car. The truckdriver, seeing him too late, tried to swerve. There was a terrifyingly slow sequence of brakes screeching, rubber scraping off in black streaks on the pavement, big trailer lurching sideways—and the final sickening violence of impact, of smashed bones and flesh and blood.

I stood trembling beside the overturned canvas chair amid the familiar cluster of trailers and covered patios and cement walks and hotly glittering parked cars, and I knew that the echo of a final scream of pain had broken from my own lips. My mother was standing in the doorway of our trailer, her mouth open, one hand at her breast in fright, staring at me.

She ran down the steps. "Paul! My God, Paul, what happened?"

Slowly, dazedly, I looked around me. A couple of children were watching me in owlish wonder; a man had stopped some thirty yards away, staring at me over his shoulder; the woman in the next-door trailer was frozen at her window; even the birds were silent in the trees overhead. The whole world around me seemed to be arrested, waiting for me to come back to it.

My gaze shifted to my mother's face. I moved and the scene came alive again, like a motion picture that has been momentarily stopped and then resumes, the figures jumping into motion to complete the half-finished gesture, the interrupted phrase.

"I don't know," I said slowly. "I don't know."

I lit a cigarette and opened a can of beer and took a long cool drink, all the while trying to organize the confusion in my mind, trying to understand what had happened to me. My mother kept pressing me to explain what had made me cry out, and I had an impulse to assure her that it had just been a dream. It was several minutes before I felt capable of trying to put into words what I had seen. I still felt oddly detached, as if I had been away on a long trip and had only just got back so that I hadn't had time to unpack or re-orient myself to the old familiar setting.

I told her the story without softening its raw edges, quietly and dispassionately, trusting in a mother's willingness to believe that her son was neither a liar nor a madman. When I had finished I looked at her expectantly, even a little apprehensively. In the telling, the story had begun to sound fantastic. For the first time, I thought that maybe I had actually fallen asleep in the sun without realizing it and been awakened by the nightmare. But my mother's reaction was so startling that I forgot my doubts.

For several seconds, she stared at me in silence. Without warning her eyes filmed over and a tear spilled through her lashes to trickle down her cheek. In dumb fascination, I watched the slow progression of that single tear down her weathered skin.

She spoke in a strained whisper. "Would you describe him again?"

At first I didn't know what she meant. Then, puzzled, I described the man of the vision. I could see him very clearly. Sandy hair thinning over a high forehead. Soft gray eyes mirroring a compassionate intelligence. A thin, high-bridged nose. A wide, responsive mouth, curving slightly in a pensive smile. Stooped shoulders that made him look slighter and shorter than he was, though my impression was that he was taller than average.

It was only when the portrait was complete that I realized that, except for the bent shoulders and the thinning hair, I had been describing myself.

My mother looked away, covering her face with her hands. I saw her shoulders quiver. A suspicion nibbled at the fringe of my mind, rejected instantly with a spasm of horror.

"Mom! What is it? Who was he?"

I was shocked by the agony of pain in her eyes.

"Oh, Paul!"

I put my hands quickly on her shoulders and shook her gently. "Tell me," I said. "You've got to tell me."

"I can't!"

I was young but I felt very mature and protective and able to take anything. "You don't have to hide anything from me," I said.

Haltingly, she told me about my father and about the brief days she had known him, the short interval of love on which she had built a lonely life. She pleaded with me to feel no bitterness toward the man who was my father. He had given her all he could—love, tenderness, understanding, even a child. She believed that he had really loved her and she had never blamed him for staying away from her. It was the only thing for him to do. She revealed that he had sent her letters in the first months after he left her. She had written at last to tell him that it was better if she dropped out of his life completely. She had not told him about the child.

When she had finished, I felt only pity and love for this woman who had suffered loneliness for the better part of a lifetime in exchange for a love held only for an instant, who had shielded even her bastard son from the truth that might hurt him, who had lived with her memories and her illusion of a life that was, in its own small way, complete.

Anger and bitterness came later. Shame. A feeling that I had been cheated, tricked into believing that I was normal, that I had had a real father just like everyone else. Hatred of the man for the loyalty he had given to another woman. And at last, when the hot flame of anger had burnt itself out, a lasting sense that I was different, I was an outsider.

That night, when my mother's tears had dried and she finally slept with the exhaustion of someone relieved at last of a terrible burden of secrecy, I lay in darkness with my new sense of isolation and my mind returned to the inexplicable vision which had triggered my mother's confession. I wondered what kind of dream could come when one sat with his eyes open in broad daylight, fully conscious. Yet it must have been a dream. The man of the vision was surely someone I had seen, or a projected image of myself, a man whose appearance had made my mother believe I was describing her lover of long ago. Was Ernest Cameron still alive? What would he do or say if the son he didn't know existed should suddenly appear one day to confront him?

I was never to find out. Less than a month later, investigators, easily backtracking along my mother's trail from Albuquerque to Los Angeles, traced her to our modest trailer court. She had been left half of an estate valued at over thirty thousand dollars by one Dr. Ernest Cameron, recently deceased, professor of physics at the University of Illinois, a widower with two married children who had divided the remaining half of his estate. In his will, re-written after his legal wife's death, Dr. Cameron had revealed the love he had kept secret for almost twenty years.

He had died of injuries suffered in a traffic accident on June 16, 1982. The day of my vision.

Now, nine years later, remembering that extraordinary circumstance as I sat alone in the small bright office, I thought how easily my mother and I had covered up the fearful evidence of the unknown. Almost by deliberate scheme, it seemed, we had failed to investigate the details of my father's death. There was no escaping the fact that I did appear to have dreamed of his accident, but my mother, who was a religious woman, found satisfaction in the belief that God had worked in one of His strange and unquestionable ways. And I found refuge in a recollection of the vision so blurred and hedged with qualifications that I was finally able to believe in coincidence, in a casual dream which had not really mirrored the reality of death occurring thousands of miles away, but had simply reflected some buried fear of violence of my own in a world in which accidental violence was commonplace. Ernest Cameron's death became important only because it brought my mother and me closer together and because it provided the means with which I was able to go to college.

Was I able now fully to believe in my own clairvoyance? Was the earlier vision a symptom of the extra-sensory powers which I was only now discovering in other ways? I had to believe in it. At the same time I was afraid to.

For in my recent dream of violence, I was the victim.

It was ten o'clock that night when I left the massive Liberal Arts Building and started slowly across the sprawling campus. The night classes were over and many of the lights had already gone out. There was a continuous cough and mutter of cars starting and roaring away. Clusters of students drifted by in heated conversation. Couples loitered in the deep shadows of trees or strolled hand in hand with intimate whisper of word and gurgle of laughter. I felt exhausted.

I wandered toward the modern area of stores and restaurants and bars which bordered the campus. I didn't feel like returning to my empty trailer in the hills. At that moment, I keenly regretted the strange compulsion which had kept me from forming close friendships with my colleagues at the university. Perhaps subconsciously I had been avoiding exposure to disillusion or disappointment, but in so doing I had created for myself a lonely place apart.

My path took me past the Science Building. On the first floor there was one panel of windows glowing with light. Most of the building was dark. I stopped for a minute, thinking of Dr. Jonas Temple, the revered geophysicist who was working behind those windows. They were too high to permit me to see into his offices or his laboratories but I knew he would be there. The old man's capacity for work was legendary. And in the past eighteen months those lighted windows had seemed to symbolize man's growing knowledge of life, not only on earth, but in the limitless space in which we whirled. And specifically, of course, on Mars, for Dr. Temple was the man who had directed the exhaustive program of analysis and study of the dead relics of life brought back from the red planet. Like everyone at the university I had been privileged to enter those offices and to stare in wonder at the rows of curious mineral and fossil formations behind the glass doors of their special cabinets. From these, piece by piece, Dr. Temple and his staff were slowly tracing the pattern of Martian evolution.

This night, however, he was probably more concerned with the preparations for the new Martian flight scheduled to begin sometime this month. What lists would he have drawn of things which should be brought back—to reveal what new secrets of the universe?

Once again the world's magnificent adventure made my own private problem seem petty and insignificant. What did it matter in the fantastic wilderness of space and time, one man's personal quarrel with a mind on the edge of anarchy?

I started across the campus again. While standing still I had allowed the October night's chill to penetrate the thin fabric of my coverall. Now my steps quickened. The Dugout, a popular off-campus coffee shop, was nearby, and the thought of steaming hot coffee made me swing toward it.

I was near the edge of the campus when the voice spoke—abrupt, shockingly strong, so real to my ear that I looked around quickly to see who had spoken.

"Is it safe to communicate?"

No one was near me. What I was hearing was in my own mind, a soundless emanation of thought.

"Yes, but softly. We must not be detected now when the time is so close."

I stood rigid at the rim of the dark campus, my whole body taut and quivering, my mind a clean slate upon which the voices wrote. Two of them. There was an individual quality to the thoughts, an inflection and timber of the mind as unmistakable as the personal tone of a human voice, yet oddly sexless and unemotional. The first one I had heard was more tentative in his vibrations, less in control of his power, giving the impression that he was younger; the second was older, heavier, more authoritative in his strength.

"You are comfortable?" the second voice asked.

"Yes."

"The new body is healthy?"

"Completely."

I began to move, sensing in a way I couldn't comprehend the direction from which the thoughts were coming. I stumbled along the side street which led to the Dugout, tracking the bodiless pulsations as an animal trails a scent.

The older one spoke again. "You had no difficulty with the parents?"

"They suspected nothing."

The voices were closer now, but I was alone on the street except for a couple ambling along the shadowed sidewalk a block away. And why would they have to communicate with their minds when they walked arm in arm? I didn't question the actual existence of the voices in my mind. At that moment I believed in them as naturally and unquestioningly as I accepted vocal speech. They were there. I heard them. Even the meaningless question about a "new body" did not make me wonder if the voices were hallucinatory. To talk of bodies as if they could be shed like garments and new ones tried for fit and comfort was nonsense, but I had no thought of making sense of the words I had heard. I wanted only to find their source.

And suddenly I was standing in front of the Dugout staring through the steam-clouded windows. The place was almost empty.

"What is it that you wish me to do?" The young one, calm, matter-of-fact in its subservience. It? He or she? I had no way of telling.

"You have a job—an important one."

There was no doubting the fact that they were inside the Dugout. The sense of mental presence was overpowering, as if one were in a corner of a dark closet listening to two strangers who had huddled in the tiny space and closed the door to whisper confidentially.

"Have you heard—"

I opened the door. Four students in a booth against the wall turned to stare at me. There was a sudden, total silence.

Instinct made me walk casually to the counter, where I slipped onto a stool so placed that I would be able to see the booths along the right wall without deliberately or obviously turning my head. Lois, the waitress who was on night duty at the Dugout, sauntered toward me along the narrow aisle behind the counter.

"What'll you have, Mr. Cameron?"

"Coffee, Lois."

"Coming right up!"

It never occurred to me to consider Lois as a possible agent of the thoughts I had heard. She was a student who had been working a part-time evening shift in the Dugout for almost two full semesters. She was more notable for the ripeness of breast and hip than for any indication of unusual mental capacities. I was surprised that she was still in school and not already married to one of the students who were always flirting with her across the counter. Her blonde, buxom beauty and open friendliness went better with children and home cooking than books and short order food.

The place was unusually quiet. At first I saw no one but Lois and the four students together in a front booth. Two of them I had recognized—Mike Boyle, who had been an All-Coast tackle the previous season and might make All-American this year, and Laurie Hendricks, a disturbing redhead who sat in the front row of my eleven o'clock sophomore English class. The other boy's blond crewcut and immature good looks seemed faintly familiar, probably because they were typical of so many students. The second girl, who sat next to Mike Boyle, was small and pretty and brunette. I had never seen her before.

All four looked much too normal, as they returned to their animated talk, to be part of the weird experience which had brought me there. They had given me only a casual glance. They seemed to be genuinely ignoring me as I sipped my coffee, trying to study the group without seeming to.

The next thought came without warning from the back of the room. "Have you heard anything else of the listener?"

I swallowed a deep hot draught of coffee, scalding my throat. Bending low over the counter, I struggled to keep from choking and coughing. The cup rattled in the saucer as I set it down.

I knew that I was the listener.

"Whispers. Nothing I could be sure of."

The question had come from the back, the answer was closer. I was convinced that the reply came from one of the four students in the booth not more than fifteen feet away from me.

Then I saw a hand move at the table of the last booth near the rear of the restaurant. A man's hand stirring coffee absently. He sat with his back toward me, concealed behind the high back of the booth. His was the older, heavier mental voice.

"He must be found," the man's thought came.

"Could it be—a foreign intruder? Perhaps even one of us who—"

"No. Soon we will be many—when I come back. But now we are the only ones. He must be human."

"But he speaks with the mind."

"That is not so strange. It is only strange that many do not do so, as we do."

Listening, I felt a creeping contraction of horror as if I had touched something cold and alien. My God, what did they mean? They believed that I must be—human. And what were they?

"I would like to return with you—to assist in your expedition." The bright young mind spoke.

"Your task is to find the human who speaks with his thoughts and destroy him. If he is able to hear us he is dangerous. Once we are here in force it will not matter. But now——"

The horror expanded in my mind, a revulsion exaggerated now by a consciousness of danger, of menace that was suddenly close and real. While they were hunting me, the listener, I had stumbled right into their midst. Who they were or what I did not know, but they held power in their minds beyond the scope of my imagination. And if they learned that I was—

"When do you go?" the youthful one asked.

"Soon now. The launching will be in the final week of this month, depending on suitable conditions."

"You will be able to effect the transfer?"

"There will be no difficulty in the actual change. I have already picked out the human in the space colony. He is young and strong but mentally very susceptible. Already he is under my control. I have only to find the right moment alone with him. However, since this body I now inhabit must be presumed dead when I leave it, and there will be no visible remains, it will be necessary for me to devise an accident in which the body would naturally be consumed or lost. Drowning may prove most suitable."

Drowning! My recurrent nightmare came back to me in a rush. I felt the blood drain from my face. My head felt light and faintly dizzy.

"I do not fully understand about the body," the young one thought.

"It is a superb instrument," the other replied, "but unfortunately not as dense in its material structure as those we are accustomed to inhabit. You will find that your energies will draw excessively on the body's matter. You must take great care to maintain constant control over the body shell to keep it from disintegrating too rapidly. At the same time the vital organs must not be damaged. In time, perhaps, these human bodies may adapt to our needs more satisfactorily. Until then periodic changes will be needed. I have conserved my present form only because it was vital to our plans."

"When will you make the exchange?"

"At the last possible moment—when close physical examination is no longer likely and when it is too late for the launching to be delayed."

"You might require my services when you have to take over the ship—"

"No! It is vital that you remain behind. You must understand that I might not return. Anything could happen in space. If I should fail to come back, it is still possible that others of us will be brought to earth on other ships. If the humans are more careful than before, our brothers might never escape. It will be up to you to effect their release."

"Yes, that is clear."

Suddenly I put my hands over my ears, pressing my palms hard against my skull as if the barrier of bone and tissue might cut off the bewildering voices that stole into my brain. This was not real, not possible! This was madness. Not aliens from outer space, plotting to take over the space ships and use them to bring back hordes of aliens. Not beings who could possess and use human bodies. I couldn't believe in these.

"Mr. Cameron?"

"What?" I looked up, startled and frightened, into the wondering blue eyes of the blonde waitress.

"More coffee?"

"Oh. Yes. Yes, please."

My voice cracked. The hand that spooned sugar into the cup shook. My body was seized by momentary spasms. Fear. Fear that demoralized body and mind.

Then I realized that the strange voices were silent. But there was a suspenseful quality to the silence, an indefinable tension of waiting. Had I done something to betray myself? Had the lash of fear been audible?

Slowly my gaze swung toward the booth in the back of the room. The man had withdrawn further out of sight. Even his hand was no longer visible. I forced myself to glance at the booth where the students were still talking, low-voiced, the steady murmur split by wedges of laughter. Laurie Hendricks' eyes met mine in a brief instant of recognition. She was smiling and her green eyes were speculative. At that moment, the blond youth spoke to her and she turned toward him, red mouth opening in laughter.

I looked away. Several yards down the counter Lois was busily wiping an imaginary spot on the gleaming surface. I lit a cigarette with a painstaking effort at steadiness and sat staring at the curl of steam rising from the coffee to blend with the denser cloud of cigarette smoke.

And something probed at my brain. My reaction was instinctive, like a turtle withdrawing under its shell with surprising speed. I froze my mind, shutting off all thought. I was nothing. I was blankness. I was neither thought nor emotion nor awareness. The eerie mental sensation came again, like a child's stick prodding the turtle's shell to see if it would move or to find a soft, vulnerable spot in the protective casing. A thought probing at my brain, trying to force an entry, but there was no opening.

The tentative pressure ceased. For a moment there was silence except for the murmuring at the nearby booth and the clatter of dishes as Lois piled them into a steel sink. Slowly I allowed awareness to return.

"All right." The older one was communicating again.

"What happened?"

"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?

I shot a glance toward the rear booth. I caught a fleeting glimpse of a dark gray suit as the man disappeared down the narrow corridor which led to the restrooms.

And to a rear exit.

I stumbled to my feet, throwing a coin onto the counter. For a second I was caught in the dilemma of divided choice. Then I strode decisively through the restaurant toward the back hall. When I reached it it was empty. I whirled and raced to the front door.

The four students were across the street strolling onto the campus grounds. I trotted after them. They seemed oblivious of me. I could see the small dark-haired girl clinging to Mike Boyle's arm. The blond boy spoke confidentially in Laurie Hendrick's ear. I stopped on the far side of the street, hesitating, watching them walk slowly across the green lawn. I couldn't follow them closely without being seen. I would have to keep at a distance.

I glanced back toward the Dugout. A man stood on the sidewalk to the left of the restaurant in the shadow of a store front. Even though I couldn't see his face I could feel the impact of his eyes. He had not been there when I came out of the Dugout. My scalp prickled. I started at the shadowy figure. For a moment neither of us moved.

What I did then was incredibly foolish, and yet it was not a consciously deliberate act, not even a careless impulse. Rather I spoke to myself, voicing the question that filled my mind but unconsciously projecting it toward the unknown man who watched me across the street.

"Who are you?"

Afterwards I could not be sure what happened, but in that split second as the thought was directed toward the dark figure I seemed to catch a quick reaction of startled surprise. I was immediately shocked by my own stupidity. I had betrayed myself. Now they knew who I was.

And at that moment I saw the headlights of a car speeding toward me along the near side of the street, its lights bouncing as the car rode over a bump. Something held me there on the sidewalk close to the curb as the car approached swiftly. And suddenly it was very close, the eyes of its headlights holding my gaze hypnotized, the hum of its engine swelling in my ears.

"Now! Into the street!"

The command struck my mind with the force of a blow. I tottered forward, tripping clumsily over the curb. I had an awareness of struggling feebly, of trying to control rubbery limbs with a mind that was weak and confused, of flailing my arms wildly at the air.

"In front of the car! Fall!"

And I flung myself forward into the blinding glare of the onrushing headlights. There was a tearing screech of brakes, a scream that seemed far away, and a massive blur of metal brushing by me as I fell.

4

I seem to be swimming up through thick layers of black asphalt. There were voices, angry and frightened, but they would never find me down here under the surface.

"It wasn't my fault, dammit! He jumped right in front of me."

"You were going too fast."

"I tell you he was trying to kill himself! It wasn't my fault!"

"You're lucky he wasn't killed."

I opened my eyes. A ring of faces stared down at me. Eyes and mouths round and big and open. For a moment I gazed at them numbly without feeling or thought. The numbness began to fade and I felt the tickling sensation of returning fear. All of the faces showed concern or anxiety. One was the face of a stranger. The driver of the car, I thought. And one of the faces was a mask behind which hid a thing incomprehensible and terrible.

"Mr. Cameron! Are you all right?"

I looked into the large green eyes of Laurie Hendricks. They were remarkably beautiful eyes, framed by thick dark lashes, their color deep and vivid. Now they were very wide and troubled. The smooth plane of her forehead was faintly creased with worry and her lips were parted over even white teeth. She was someone I had never really seen before. I had been abstractedly aware of red hair and a pair of slim calves crossed and a figure that strained a sweater—but I had never clearly seen the person.

Was she the one?

"You okay, professor?"

My eyes shifted to Mike Boyle and I had a quick impression of his massive, powerful body towering over me.

"Yes, I—I think so."

I stared at each of them—Laurie, Boyle, the blond youth, the little brunette with small, demure features, the red-faced stranger who appeared to be more angry than concerned. The memory of the car's fender brushing past me as I fell returned so vividly that a reaction hit me. I had to fight down the impulse to get away, to run, to limp, to hobble, even to crawl, just so that I could be away from the thing that watched me, luring behind anxious human eyes.

"What the hell did you do that for?" It was the stranger speaking, the driver of the car.

"I—I tripped."

"Jesus Christ, you could have got killed!"

"Yes. I'm sorry."

I sat up. Hands reached down to help me and I flinched at their touch. I moved my legs and felt along my arms and ribs. Nothing seemed to be broken. There were no sharp pains, only a mass of aches blending into one. I had been very lucky. The next time they would make sure that I wouldn't escape.

Mike Boyle put a meaty hand under my arm and lifted me to my feet with the casual ease of an adult hoisting a child in the air. Could all that muscle hide a super brain?

I steeled myself to peer across the street at the spot where the man had stood watching me. The sidewalk was empty.

"You been drinking, Mr. Cameron?" the blond boy asked with a grin.

I smiled stiffly. "Coffee. I can't explain what happened. I just lost my balance and fell. It was almost as if someone had pushed me."

I watched the boy's eyes closely but they betrayed no reaction.

"Well, I can't stand around here all night," the red-faced man said belligerently, making the statement a challenge. "I guess you're not hurt."

"No. I don't think so. The car just missed me."

"Maybe you better get his name, Mr. Cameron," the blond youth suggested.

"Yeah, you might have internal injuries or something," Mike Boyle put in.

"What the hell does he need my name for?"

I suddenly wondered if I should so quickly dismiss the stranger from suspicion. Hadn't his car appeared rather fortuitously? And hadn't he been racing too fast?

"Yes, I'd better have your name," I said.

"Now, wait a minute, if you think you're going to sue me—"

"I have no intention of sueing, but I'd better have your name. You do have insurance, I suppose?"

"Yeah, but—"

"Do you want me to get a cop, Mr. Cameron," the blond boy asked aggressively.

I looked at the red-faced stranger. "I don't think that will be necessary."

The suggestion of bringing the police into the affair convinced the man. He fished out his driver's license. Laurie Hendricks found a pencil in her purse and wrote out the name and address. Albert Harrison, Trailer G12, 444 San Rafael Road. I got the name of his insurance company and told him that was all I needed. Then he insisted on having my name and address. I hesitated, glancing at the four listening students. Then I realized that it didn't matter. They could easily find out where I lived through the school. I was even conveniently listed in the telephone directory.

Harrison finally marched off in a bad temper, obviously afraid that I would discover some non-existent injuries the following day. I was reasonably convinced that he was innocent, but it was just as well to know his name. And to know where to find him.

"Are you sure you're feeling all right, Mr. Cameron?"

Laurie Hendricks had moved close to me. As she spoke she rested a hand lightly on my arm and raised those incredible green eyes to meet mine. I felt the bold collision of our stares. Her fingers burned through the sleeve of my jacket, and I caught the subtle drift of the flower fragrance she wore.

"Yes," I said slowly. "Thanks for helping."

"We could drive you home," Mike Boyle offered without enthusiasm. "I've got my car."

"That won't be necessary."

And suddenly I looked at the slender girl standing beside Boyle, realizing that she was the only one of the group who had not said a word. She was watching me with curious interest. Catching my gaze she smiled.

"Yes, we'd be glad to drive you. Mike wouldn't mind."

She looked up at the big football player and slipped her hand under his arm with a slight suggestion of possessiveness. Ordinarily the gesture would have made me smile. Even now it caused my quick suspicion to evaporate.

And I realized that I couldn't really believe that any of these four normal young people could be anything but what they seemed. To think otherwise was absurd—and yet I had heard one of them instructed to kill me.

Or had I?

And all of the tormenting doubt and fear of the past months returned. Could I have imagined everything—the voices, the attempt to kill me, the mysterious beings from outer space? Was all that an elaborate concoction of a diseased mind?

There was nothing imaginary about the fall in front of the speeding car. But what if there were no enemies except those in my own mind? The meaning of this possibility was harrowingly clear. For then I had tried to kill myself.

I saw the blond boy's feet shifting in evident impatience. I surveyed the group once more and my eyes lingered on Laurie Hendricks' upturned face, on the soft shimmer of her bright red hair.

"You kids go on," I said. "I'm all right now."

I turned and walked away, not looking back.

5

It was a bright morning. Through the high windows of the classroom came soft sunlight filtered through the delicate fiberglass grillwork that faced the entire west side of the building. I looked down at the peaceful campus, the slowly moving streams of students, the expanse of cool green grass, the solid impressiveness of nearby buildings. In the distance I could see a section of the practice football field and I thought of Mike Boyle, driving his huge shoulder into a tackling dummy, sweating and grunting, thick thighs driving powerfully. A monstrous youth, all right. But an unearthly monster? Hardly.

I heard the restless movement in the room behind me and I wrenched my thoughts back to the lecture.

"Why is Beowulf called an epic?" I asked rhetorically, turning. "Because of its scope. Because of the greatness of its hero. Because it expresses the whole struggle and aspiration and point of view of its people. Its action is on a grand scale. Its emotions are deep and powerful. This is not the twentieth century story of a housewife who has a petty little affair with a mediocre man she meets in the super market. This is big. This is important. It has to do with the vital issues of life. It has greatness. Victory is a triumph over a formidable enemy of the people. Defeat is death, and even in the manner of dying there is majesty and heroism." I paused, letting my eyes rove over the room, using the teacher's trick of focusing on the last row and thus seeming to be looking at all of the students in between. Their faces were all turned toward me in a semblance of respectful attention. A boy in the third row was sleeping with his eyes half open. "And the manner of the writing is in keeping with the heroic action," I went on, letting my gaze move forward to the front row, to the shock of flaming red hair and a pair of carelessly crossed legs sleekly clad in spun plastisheen. "It is powerful, strongly rhythmic, eloquent."

I smiled. Laurie Hendricks seemed to sigh, and the slight movement brought my attention to her breasts, softly outlined under a lemon-colored sweater.

"Of course it loses much in translation," I added. There was a respectful titter of amusement from the class. The old prof, I thought, with his academic jokes. Even at twenty-seven, in my fourth year of teaching, I had fallen into the habit of repeating the same jokes each semester. Laurie Hendricks smiled warmly at me and I found myself reacting to the moist red curve of her lips, liking the fact that she had been amused.

During the long, relatively sleepless night, my faith in the validity of my mind's impressions had wavered badly. I had ranged from an angry conviction that everything I had heard was real and true, through all the stages of argument and doubt, down to a dismal hopelessness, an acknowledgment that alien minds and macabre plots were grotesque splinters off my peculiar branch of insanity.

Looking now at Laurie Hendricks, I found myself reluctant to believe that she was anything but an unusually beautiful girl who was giving every indication of being more than ordinarily interested in me. The accidental circumstance of the previous night's meeting had created a new relationship between us without a word being spoken this morning. She was no longer just another anonymous student. And I strongly suspected that I was no longer to her just another stuffy instructor.

I turned abruptly toward the sleeping boy in the third row. "Mr. Carbo," I said sharply. "Mr. Carbo!"

His head came up with a snap. His eyes were still dull with sleep. "Huh?"

"Mr. Carbo, are you with us?"

The class laughed, warming to a situation in which someone else is made to look a little ridiculous.

"Mr. Carbo, what do you think of Beowulf's technique in handling the dragon?"

"I don't think I understand, sir," the boy said lamely.

"You have read the assignment I suppose."

"Yes, sir."

"Did anything strike you about the fight?"

"Well, I thought it was kind of bloodthirsty, sir."

"The Anglo-Saxons were a bloodthirsty people," I said. "They didn't have television or movies or synthetic-participation sports to let them drain off some of their violence. Even their literature was more like a battle cry than a civilized catharsis of emotions."

"Yes, sir."

"I'm glad you agree, Mr. Carbo." I felt that I was being rather hard on him, but you were expected to make a goat out of the guilty student who slept or talked or failed to study. It was standard teaching procedure and not without its value in keeping the class on its toes.

I let him off the hook, turning to address the class as a whole. "You know how boxers will waste the first round feeling each other out, testing the other's reactions? Did you notice anything similar in Beowulf's approach to battle?"

"Yeah," a student called from the back of the room. "He lets the dragon gobble up a couple of the other guys."

"Right!" I said with exaggerated enthusiasm. "Miss Hendricks, would you read that passage for us?"

She looked startled. As she hunted for the place there was a general thud and rustle of textbooks being hastily opened. Laurie Hendricks coughed and began to read. Her voice was low, hesitant, pleasantly husky. The passage she read told in gory detail how the ancient hero had watched as the dragon entered the mead hall, had waited, feigning sleep, studying the enemy's movements, even though this involved a rather grim death for some of Beowulf's companions in arms. As I listened, I thought of the younger alien the night before, standing among the students on the campus and watching while the other flung me into the street in front of the racing car. I heard the words of the centuries-old epic and a detached portion of my mind told me that, unlike the mighty Anglo-Saxon warrior, I couldn't wait out the enemy. I already knew how he worked. If I waited there would be another accident. I had to find the enemy before he or she had a chance to attack.

Laurie Hendricks finished reading and glanced up questioningly from the text. I nodded to indicate that that was enough. My gaze held hers.

"The point I'm making," I said, "is that the attitude toward life was so different from ours. Unless you understand and accept that difference you can't respond to the literature of the people at that time. Their view of the universe was alien to anything we know. Human life was cheap. To stay alive was a constant struggle. Life didn't last very long—"

The bell rang to signal the end of the lecture. I held up my hand, stilling the immediate mass movement out of the seats.

"I have to talk to you individually about your term papers," I said quickly, ignoring the general groan. "I'll set up individual appointments. If the students in the—first row—will stay a few minutes I'll start with them."

I nodded and the class burst into a confusion of noise and movement. The students in the first row lingered. I sat behind the desk in the front of the room and waved the initial student forward. Carefully I drew up a time schedule of office appointments. As I had hoped, Laurie Hendricks waited until the last. We were alone in the classroom when she uncurled from her seat and swayed toward the desk. The soft curve of her mouth was provocative.

"You don't look any the worse for wear, Professor."

I smiled faintly. "I'm only an instructor, Miss Hendricks, not a professor. And I feel fine, thanks to you and your friends."

"We just picked you up and dusted you off."

There was a brief, awkward silence. Our eyes met appraisingly. She leaned a firmly rounded hip against the edge of the desk.

"I'd like to thank your friends personally," I said at last. "Would you give me their names?"

"Sure—but you don't have to thank them."

"I'd like to. I know Mike Boyle, of course—but who was the girl with him?"

"That's Helen Darrow. She's a physics major. She and Mike are going steady now."

I looked surprised. The girl hadn't seemed like the kind who would be majoring in physics. And that fact didn't go along with a co-ed's worshipful admiration of a brawny football star.

"They're a funny couple," Laurie Hendricks said, patting her red hair with graceful fingers. "But sometimes a man and a woman can clink together when you'd least expect it."

I smiled. "And who was your boy friend?"

"My boy fr—oh, you mean Bob. That's Bob Jenkins. But we're just friends, Professor."

I wished that she would ease off a little on the steam she was generating. Her invitation was too open, too sudden. I felt a tickling wariness inside as I looked into the green eyes.

"Did you have something in mind for me, Professor?" she asked, her voice almost purring. "I mean, about the term paper."