He nodded.
“So you see,” she said, “we’ve got Lucas, plus what I know about broadcast power—and you. Once we get on the island we ought to be able to find Ab with no trouble.”
“No trouble,” he said, a little ironically. She stared at him.
“Why, what sort of trouble do you think we’ll run into?”
“A lot,” he said. “Assuming we can get ashore without being spotted, it’s still an island full of shadow-projecting thugs. Lucas is vulnerable to the proper sort of broadcast power beamed at him—”
“I told you no one knew—”
“Except Ab,” he reminded her. “But Ab’s supposed to be already on that island. Maybe he’s told someone there just what’ll knock out Lucas. In any case he knows as much about broadcast power as you do, and then some. He can probably tell just what sort of mistake you’d be likely to make about it.”
“But Ab wouldn’t—” She checked herself.
“Maybe he’s changed,” Rafe said. “Maybe he’s been changed. Remember, he wasn’t taken from your house. According to Lucas, he left under his own power, and maybe willingly.”
“Lucas said Ab was sad to go—that he hated the men who came to get him!”
“But he went anyway,” said Rafe.
“What makes you think anything could change Ab?” she demanded. “What could?”
“Remember,” he said, “How Shaitan told you to love and worship him? You almost did.”
He had turned his face to the stars beyond the windshield of the aircraft, so that his eyes would not be on her when he said that. There was a little moment of silence before she answered.
“He was hypnotic, that’s all,” she said in a tight voice. “That wouldn’t work on Ab. He’s a lot stronger-willed than I am.”
“It almost worked on me,” said Rafe, “when I was choking Shaitan there at the throne. Besides, it wasn’t hypnosis he was using.“
“It wasn’t?” He turned to look at her again. She was staring at him.
“I know something about hypnosis,” he said.
“But then . . . what was it?”
He felt a tightness inside himself.
“Black magic, maybe,” he said.
“Black—” Her eyes, wide already, widened further. “You don’t mean that!”
“Yes,” he said, “I do.”
“But Shaitan himself said your weakness was you refused to believe in anything supernatural.”
“He was wrong,” Rafe said. “I’m ready to believe in anything that works.”
“If it works on you!” Her voice was close to fury.
“No,” he said. “If it works anywhere in the universe I can see, touch, feel, or smell.” He looked at her for a second, but her face did not relax. “Shaitan wasn’t what made me think there might be some truth in something like black magic. I’d come to that conclusion before I ever started down from the Project on the Moon. In fact, that conclusion was one of the things that brought me here.”
“You came down”—the words seemed to catch on her own unwillingness to say them—“because you thought there was something supernatural about what was happening here on Earth?”
“Yes,” he said. “But supernatural in a special sense. Open your mind to the possibility, Gaby. Just suppose there’s actually an unreal element in the universe—only, our western civilization’s tried to deny it, as part of the development of our physical technology.”
“I’ll suppose it if you like,” Gaby said. “But that’s all I’ll do.”
“All right,” Rafe replied. “Next, remember something else. Our technological civilization assumes its own fund of knowledge is growing all the time, continually expanding into new areas of ignorance, building more and more complicated tools for discovering what’s unknown. With that going on and supposing that somewhere there actually is an unreal area of the supernatural waiting to be discovered, doesn’t it seem inevitable that sooner or later technology itself would build instruments that would bring us face to face with the unreal, whether we wanted to confront it or not?”
She was still watching him when he had finished saying this. After a second or two she spoke.
“How can you know about something like this?”
“I know there’s physical and psychological harm being done,” he said, “mass harm to the whole population of Earth, and I can’t find any real instruments causing it. So I’m operating on the theory that the instruments are unreal. If they are, then it’s going to take a different sort of battle to destroy them.”
“If it’s true— it’s true,” she said, “what can you do? What could anyone do to destroy them?”
“You can break the point off a spear, or snap the string of a bow,” he said, “and that makes them pretty harmless as weapons.”
“I don’t follow you.” She was frowning.
“Destroy the focal point of any instrument’s effectiveness,” he said, “and the effectiveness is largely lost. That gives you time to handle the situation the instrument was causing.”
“The focal point—” She stiffened. “We did that—with Shaitan.”
He shook his head slowly.
“I don’t think so,” he said.
“You think there’s some kind of focal point for something supernatural—”
“Unreal,” he corrected her.
“Unreal, that hasn’t been touched yet?” she said. “You think it’s ahead of us—on Havn?”
“That’s my hunch,” he answered. “But it’s a pretty strong hunch. From the moment I landed on Earth until now, I’ve come pretty much in a straight line for this island. I think Shaitan may have been closer to the truth than he realized when he said I’d been called—but to Havn, not to him.”
“Called—” she began, and checked herself angrily, then went on. “I don’t mean to keep sounding like a parrot every time you say something. But you don’t mean called?”
“Maybe ‘drawn’ would be a better word,” Rafe said.
“By what? Why?”
“Assuming there’s an area of existence where unreal laws apply,” he said, “those laws will still have to have some sort of structure—a physics of unreality. And part of that physics may deal with a balance of forces. If I’m a plus force in the unreal area, and somewhere on that island there’s a negative force, then maybe it and I are being drawn into contact.”
“But isn’t that just another assumption?” Gaby demanded. “First you assume that you’re plus and something else is minus; then you go and add on an assumption that just because of that, the two of you have to come together. Why? Even if you’re right about this plus-negative business, why do you and whatever it is have to come into contact? And why now, instead of last week, last month, or two years ago?”
“It’s all assumptions,” he said. “But I’m doing the best with what I’ve got to work with. But to answer you—I’ve got to come into contact with the opposite pole now to restore the balance I broke by deliberately coming down to Earth. As long as I was still on the Moon, I was one pole of a situation in balance. The real and unaffected forces were concentrated around me, the unreal and affected around the other pole on Earth. When I came to Earth, too, I invaded the territory of my opposite force. I destroyed the balance. That balance has to be restored, either by my going back to the Moon—and it’s probably too late for that now—or by a meeting between myself and my opposite force, in which one of us cancels the other out.”
She sat looking at him. He looked back. After a little while, it became evident that neither one of them had more to say in that particular conversation.
“How are we going to get ashore on the island without being found out?” Gaby asked at last in hardly more than a whisper.
“I don’t think we can,” he said. “I’m not going to try. You’d better rest if you can. We’ll probably be there in a matter of a few hours, the way we’re traveling now.”
She glanced at the instrument panel. The aircraft had climb
ed gradually and was now at sixty thousand feet, traveling at fourteen hundred miles an hour, still in a southwesterly direction.
She nodded, curled up in her seat, and closed her eyes.
Rafe sat back in his own seat, letting his muscles go limp. But he did not close his eyes. Instead he stared out at the black firmament, with its pattern of stars that seemed to change only at the pace of a snail’s crawl, as the five-place aircraft flung itself around the curve of the Earth at more than twice the speed of sound.
* * *
15
The earlier pattern of stars which Rafe had gazed at over the British Isles had given way to an equatorial one before the aircraft began automatically to descend. It came down into a night of Caribbean softness, onto a dark body of land the full extent of which could not be seen, and which seemed utterly lightless from the angle of their approach. They landed with a crackling of branches, followed by silence.
In her seat, in the little glow of light from the instrument panel, Gaby still slept. Rafe reached out, opened the door on his side of the aircraft, and stepped down onto what felt like sand. The dark shape of coniferlike trees surrounded him. He turned back to the open doorway of the craft to speak to Lucas.
“I’m going to look around,” he said softly. “Stay with Gaby—”
But even as he spoke, Lucas was slipping out the open door and was abruptly lost in the darkness.
“Lucas!” Rafe called in a harsh whisper. “Lucas!”
He stood still, waiting. The branches of the Surrounding trees creaked against one another in the warm, damp breeze moving through the night, but the wolf did not answer or return.
After a minute, Rafe closed the door of the plane and went quietly over the sand, and between the trees, toward a lighter patch of ground a little way off that looked like it might be an open space. He reached it a few seconds later and looked around him. To his right the tree shapes thinned out to give a faintly moonlit view of a stretch of beach, and now that he was a little away from the sounds the tree branches made in the wind, his ears were filled by the faintly hissing sounds of a gentle surf. They had come down near the edge of the island, in an apparently deserted part of it—and this, thought Rafe, was odd. It would be reasonable to expect the autopilot to set the aircraft down at some regular landing area and close to whatever buildings there were on Havn.
Unless there had been necessary some specific correction of the autopilot, which Shaitan had either riot known about or had deliberately not told him. Possibly the autopilot had been programmed to put them down in an area which deliberately labeled them as unauthorized intruders. Or perhaps the landing here was part of the supernatural, the unreal—
Swiftly, almost before the thought had fully formed in his mind, he spun about. He ran back through the trees to the place where he had left the aircraft.
It was gone.
Anger at himself boiled up in him. It would be no trick to make the aircraft disappear. It was quiet enough in operation to take off without being heard, while he stood listening to the sound of the surf. But what more simple-minded way to isolate unauthorized visitors than to have an incoming aircraft make a momentary, false landing in an out-of-the-way corner of the island, and wait until those within it stepped out, before lifting and flying on in to its actual destination? Visitors who knew what to expect would need only to stay aboard the craft until it took off again for the real landing spot.
Now, here he was, effectively separated from Gaby. And Lucas? It was still not clear what had made the wolf leave the craft and refuse to return when called.
Maybe, thought Rafe grimly, the secret of the power broadcast wavelength on which Lucas could be controlled was indeed known, and the wolf had been commanded to leave. It was unlikely anything else would have taken him away from Gaby. No one else could call Lucas and have him come regardless. Wait a minute, Rafe thought. Of course.
There was one person. Ab himself. If Ab had called the wolf, Lucas would have gone without hesitation. There was the choice. A power broadcast or Ab. No other reason—
Rafe checked himself in mid-thought, with a feeling of self-disgust. He had forgotten the most obvious possible reason for Lucas’s vanishing. Ab had told the wolf earlier to stay out of sight when strangers were around. Lucas could have smelled or heard something that sent him into hiding. In fact, this was the most sensible explanation for the wolf’s actions. What, thought Rafe, was wrong with him—not to have realized this at once?
The night wind was suddenly cold on his damp face. Without hesitating, he turned and ran, half bent over to stay below the lower limbs of the trees. He ran blindly through the grove until breathlessness slowed him, and he stopped. Standing among the half-seen trees, with his heart pounding against his chest wall, he tried to take hold of the realization that had erupted in him as he stood where the aircraft had landed itself not many minutes before. It was ridiculous that he had not realized it from the moment he set foot on the sand of the island, but his very slowness in recognizing what was happening to him was proof of the happening itself.
Twice, now, he had worked his way to an obvious conclusion as clumsily and painfully as a mathematics illiterate counting on his fingers.
Something was paralyzing his mental process, slowing him down to a fraction of his ordinary capabilities. Standing in the tropical night with the perspiration rolling down his face and soaking his shirt to his body, Rafe tried to sense what was affecting him.
But there seemed to be nothing. The palpable touch of a power broadcast upon his mind, with which he had become familiar, was not noticeable here. Even the obvious distortion of his emotions that Shaitan had attempted upon him was not perceptible. Rafe felt perfectly normal. It was only the recent, abstract evidence of the slowness of his reasoning processes that gave any clue of a change in him.
Alone, separated from Lucas and Gaby, and in unknown territory, with this crippling effect clogging his mind, what could he do?
Slowly, so slowly that he swore inwardly at himself, came the obvious answer.
He went to the calculus of his under-mind.
Abruptly he was free. He was like a man conscious only of being soaked, who dodges into the shelter of a building and only then, when he turns and looks out the window, notices that the thunderstorm’s rain clouds are in passage and the sky is clearing behind them.
From his under-mind, he could look at his upper mental processes and see them slowed and clumsy, as if by the action of a heavy drug. It was another refinement of the power-broadcast side effects he was experiencing, nothing more, but a side effect that was its own reinforcement. On the other hand—Rafe smiled to himself a little—it had driven him to take refuge in his under-mind, ,and his under-mind was possibly better suited than his upper mental centers to protect him now. That part of his control center was closer to the old feral instincts, and he thought instinctively, like the hunted animal that he would be shortly—if he was not already.
Reaching out with his under-mind now, he felt for Lucas the way he had felt for the wolf when he had been on the aircraft that had taken Gaby and himself as prisoners to the mountain stronghold. For a moment there was nothing, and then the feel of Lucas’s presence came to him—but no indication of where the wolf might be in body.
“Lucas?” Rafe called with the back of his mind.
Lucas did not answer. Rafe waited, then called again. He called several times, but no response came. The feeling came strongly to him that the wolf was aware of being summoned, but that something else was occupying him with an importance that left him no time or energy to spare in answering Rafe.
Rafe put Lucas from his mind. Whatever was holding the attention of the wolf was enough to make him useless as a source of aid. Rafe was on his own. As he faced this fact, his under-mind came smoothly to grips with the situation, and he began to move—not running now, but walking swiftly and making an effort to study and memorize the terrain as he went.
One thing was clear. He would be
sought for first around the area where the aircraft had originally landed. The more space he put between himself and that location, the more time and space he would pick up in which to plan and operate. He was traveling parallel to the beach, but only as a means of keeping his sense of direction. After about twelve minutes of this he saw what he had been looking for—a hill rising inland from the water’s edge to some farther height of land. He turned his back to the surf and began to climb the slope.
It took him about ten minutes to reach the top of the hill. The summit was almost treeless, and from there he had a good view of the bulk of the island stretching away below him, dark in contrast to the more reflective surface of the surrounding ocean. He saw what he had climbed up there to find. Less than a mile away, the beach curved inward into a small bay or lagoon, with the faint, broken white line of surf barely visible across the narrow mouth of its opening to the sea. On the inner curve of that bay a sprinkling of fireflylike lights picked out the shape of what was either one large, many-level building or a close cluster of buildings.
At the same time he saw something else from the height of his point of observation—a brightening line along the eastern horizon that was the first sign of dawn. He turned back to look at the cluster of firefly lights in the lower darkness of the bay. The sea wind was on his right cheek, and he could use that to guide him—though it was unlikely, at such a short distance, that he could miss his way, even if he cut directly through the wild growth of the island instead of following the shore around to the buildings.
He made up his mind and plunged ahead down the farther slope of his hill on a direct line for the lights he had seen.
He went quickly, but this was the tropics and dawn came fast. Long before he got close enough to see the buildings beyond a strip of tailored lawn, through the wild conifers and some low, scrubby palms, it was all but full daylight.
When he halted at last, still hidden within a clump of the conifers, at the edge of the neatly mown grass, he saw that the buildings he had looked at were, indeed, all connected into one large establishment. No one was in sight, however. It was possible at this early hour that most of them were still sleeping.