Ring Around the Sun

CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

HE rang the bell and waited. When he heard her footsteps coming across the floor he knew that he should turn from the door and run. He had no right to come here and he knew he shouldn't have — he should have done first things first and there was no reason why he should see her at all, for the dream of her was dead as the dream of Kathleen.

But he had had to come, literally _had_ to. He had paused twice before the door of the apartment building and then had turned around and gone away again. This time he had not turned back, could not turn back, but had gone in and now here he was, before her door, listening to the sound of footsteps coming towards him.

And what, he wondered wildly, would he say to her when the door was opened? What would he do then? Go in as if nothing at all had happened, as if he were the same person and she the same person as they had been the last time they had met?

Should he tell her she was a mutant and, more than that, an android, a manufactured woman?

The door came open and she was a woman, as lovely as he remembered her, and she reached out a hand and drew him in and closed the door behind them and stood with her back against it.

"Jay," she said. "Jay Vickers."

He tried to speak, but he couldn't. He only stood there looking at her and thinking: It can't be true. It's a lie. It simply isn't true.

"What happened, Jay? You said that you would call me."

He held out his arms, fighting not to, and she made a quick, almost desperate motion and was in them. He held her close against him and it was as if the two of them stood in the final consolation of a misery which each had believed the other did not know.

"I thought at first you were just a little crazy," she told him. "Remembering some of the things you said over the phone from that Wisconsin town, I was almost sure there was something wrong with you — that you'd gone a little off the beam. Then I got to remembering things, strange little things you had done or said or written and…"

"Take it easy, Ann," he said. "You don't need to tell me."

"Jay, have you ever wondered if you were quite human? If there might not be something in you that wasn't quite the usual pattern — something unhuman?"

"Yes," he said. "I've often wondered that."

"I'm sure you aren't. Not quite human, I mean. And that's all right. Because I'm not human, either."

He held her closer then. Feeling her arms around him, he knew finally that here were the two of them, clinging to one another, two wan souls lost and friendless in a sea of humanity. Neither of them had anyone but the other. Even if there were no love between them they still must be as one and stand against the world.

The telephone buzzed at them from its place upon the end table and they scarcely heard it.

"I love you, Ann," he said, and a part of his brain that was not a part of him, but a cold, detached observer that stood off to one side, reminded him that he had known he could not love her, that it was impossible and immoral and preposterous to love someone who might be closer than a sister, whose life surely had once been a part of his life and once again would blend with his life into another personality that might be unaware of them.

"I remembered," Ann told him in a vague and distant voice. "And I haven't got it straight. Maybe you can help me get it straight."

He asked, lips stiff with apprehension: "What did you remember, Ann?"

"A walk I had with someone. I've tried, but I can't recall his name, although I'd know his face, after all these years. We walked down a valley, from a big brick house that stood up on a hill at the valley's head. We walked down the valley and it was springtime because the wild crab apple blossoms were in bloom and there were singing birds and the funny thing about that walk is that I know I never took it, but I remember it. How can you remember something, Jay, when you know it never happened?"

"I don't know," said Vickers. "Imagination, maybe. Something that you read somewhere."

But this was it, he knew. This was the proof of what he had suspected.

There were three of them, Flanders had said, three androids made out of one human life. The three of them had to be himself and Flanders and Ann Carter. For Ann remembered the enchanted valley as he remembered it — but because he was a man he had walked with a woman by the name of Kathleen Preston, and since Ann was a woman, she had walked with a man whose name she could not recall. And when and if she did recall it, of course it would be wrong. For if he had walked with anyone, it had not been with a girl named Kathleen Preston, but a girl with some other name.

"And that's not all," said Ann. "I know what other people think. I…"

"Please, Ann," he said.

"I try not to know what they think, now that I realize that I can do it. Although I know now that I've been doing it, more or less unconsciously, all the time for years. Anticipating what people were about to say. Getting the jump on them. Knowing their objections before they even spoke them. Knowing what would appeal to them. I've been a good business woman, Jay, and that may be why I am. I can get into other people's minds. I did just the other day. When I first suspected that I could do it, I tried deliberately, just to see if I could or was imagining it. It wasn't easy, and I'm not very good at it yet. But I could do it! Jay, I could…"

He held her close and thought: Ann's one of the telepaths, one of those who can go out to the stars.

"What are we, Jay?" she asked. "Tell me what we are."

The telephone shrieked at them.

"Later," he said. "It's not so terribly bad. In some ways it's wonderful. I came back because I loved you, Ann. I tried to stay away, but I couldn't stay. Because it isn't right…"

"It's right," she said. "Oh, Jay, it's the rightest thing there ever was. I prayed that you would come back to me again. When I knew there was something wrong, I was afraid you wouldn't — that you might not be able to, that something awful might have happened to you. I prayed and the prayer was wrong because prayer was strange to me and I felt hypocritical and awful…"

The ringing was a persistent snarl.

"The phone," she said.

He let her go and she walked to the davenport and sat down and took the receiver out of its cradle, while he stood and looked at the room and tried to bring it and Ann into the focus with his memory of them.

"It's for you," she said.

"For me?"

"Yes, the phone. Did anyone know that you were coming here?"

He shook his head, but walked forward and took the receiver and stood with it in his hand, balancing it, trying to guess who might be calling hen and why they might be calling.

Suddenly, he knew that he was frightened, felt the sweat break out beneath his armpits because he knew that it could only be one person at the other end of the phone.

A voice said: "This is the Neanderthaler, Vickers."

"Club and all?" asked Vickers.

"Club and all," said Crawford. "We have a bone to chew."

"At your office?"

"There's a cab outside. It is waiting for you."

Vickers laughed and it was a more vicious sound than he intended it to be. "How long have you been tracking me?"

Crawford chuckled. "Ever since Chicago. We have the country plastered with our analyzers."

"Picking up much stuff?"

"A few strays here and there."

"Still confident about that secret weapon?"

"Sure, I'm confident, but…"

"Go ahead," said Vickers. "You're talking to a friend."

"I have to hand it to you, Vickers. I really got to hand it to you. But get over here fast."

He hung up. Vickers took the receiver down from his ear and stared at it a moment, then placed it in the cradle.

"That was Crawford," he said to Ann. "He wants to talk to me."

"Is everything all right, Jay?"

"Everything's all right."

"You'll come back?"

"I'll come back," said Vickers.

"You know what you are doing?"

"Now I do," said Vickers. "I know what I'm doing now."