Chapter VII

The paper he’d found kept the other passengers on the bus from seeing him, but he was too deep in his own thoughts to read it. His eyes roamed back to the story of the cop-killing monster--a seemingly harmless florist in Brooklyn who’d suddenly gone berserk and rushed down the streets with a knife; he’d been wrong in thinking that concerned him. And he’d been wrong in thinking anyone would try to kill him on sight. The reward notice and picture were in front of his eyes--but it was a reward for information, and there was a huge box that proclaimed he was not a criminal and must not be harmed, or even allowed to know he was recognized.

The new facts only confused the issue. He twisted about in his mind, trying to explain why the young man had left him to drift down, and gone rushing into the apartment. He was ready for the collecting--and he’d been left uncollected!

The girl had said there were no aliens. Now he wondered. She had known more than he’d found from her--she’d known his brand of cigarettes, even. And there had been that shopping list, with the lipstick on it--the same type he now remembered her using. He’d known her before--and not just as a little girl. That tied him in with Meinzer, who was a mystery in himself.

He puzzled over it. The things that had happened to him had always been preceded by violent emotion, instead of followed by it. Usually, it had been fear--but sometimes some other emotion, as had been the case just before he was suddenly shifted to the Moon. Whenever he seemed on the verge of discovering something or emotionally upset, it hit at him. Did that mean he was only susceptible to the phenomena when off balance? It still didn’t account for the fact that some of the things hadn’t directly affected him, at all.

The more he knew, the less he knew.

He got off the bus and headed for the warehouse. This time, he had to wait before he could see a chance to dart under the trailer and into the entrance. He noticed that the gray sedan was parked nearby.

He darted in.

They were still there! He heard Ellen’s voice, sounding as if she had been crying, and then an answer from the other. He felt his way carefully over the rubble, working as close as he could. Now, if he sprang the few feet...

“ ... must be a time-jump,” the man’s voice said, doubtfully. “I tell you, Ellen, those damned fools were firing at him, up there in the air, while you were still with him in the apartment. That’s an angle on this psi factor stuff we hadn’t expected.”

The voice stopped for a moment. Then it picked up again. “Drat it! I wish you hadn’t called the F. B. I. on him--they got rattled when he came out looking like a saint in a halo and jumped fifty feet up to float around. Some fool started shooting, and the rest joined in.”

“I had to--he was talking about alien monsters. I thought he was going crazy, Dan. I couldn’t tell him anything--I promised him I wouldn’t, and I kept my promise. But I thought enough of them might catch him, somehow ... Dan, can’t we find him now? He needs us!”

Hawkes lay frozen. He tried to move forward, but his body was tensed, waiting for more. If something happened now...

“Alien monsters?” Dan’s voice grew bitter. “It is alien--and a monster. This psi factor...”

The words blurred, and seemed to echo and re-echo inside Hawkes’ head. That made twice he’d heard them mention the psi factor--the strange ability a few human minds had to perform seeming miracles. Men who had it could make dice roll the way they wanted. Young girls sometimes had it before puberty, and could throw heavy objects around a room without touching them; they did not even know they were the cause of the motion, but blamed it on poltergeists. Other men caused strange accidents--fires, for instance--the old salamander legend!

There’d been a piece of paper--psi equals alpha, the psi factor was the beginning of infinity for mankind. But it had been wrong. He’d changed that, on the other side. It should have read psi equals omega, the absolute end.

He gasped hoarsely, and heard their startled voices stop, while the flashlight beam swung around, to pick him out in the darkness. He felt Ellen and her younger brother, Dan, pulling him forward into the little cave with them, and he heard their voices questioning him. But his head was spinning madly under the sudden flood of memories that the missing key word had suddenly brought back.

The letter from Professor Meinzer had been about his paper on poltergeists which the old man had seen before publication. He’d been doing research on the psi factor for the government, and he needed a mathematician--even one who proved something which he knew wasn’t true, provided the mathematics could handle his theories.

Hawkes’ head was suddenly brimming with mental images of the seven months, while he worked on the mathematics to tie down the strange pattern of brain waves the old professor had found in the minds of those who had the mysterious psi factor. Dan had worked with them, in the little cluttered apartment, building the apparatus they needed. It was through Dan that Ellen was hired, as a general assistant and secretary.

There had been only the four of them, working in deepest secrecy in the three rooms which the government had felt were more suitable to maintain complete security than any deeply buried laboratory could have been. Ellen made a pretense of living there, and it was a neighborhood where no landlady worried about the men who went to a girl’s place, provided everything was quiet.

They’d succeeded, too--they had found the tiny bundle of cells that controlled the psi factor, and learned to stimulate them by artificial wave trains and hypnosis. But the small group in the top division of the government to whom they were responsible had demanded more proof.

Hawkes had treated himself secretly, not knowing that Meinzer had done the same two days before. And both had learned the same thing. The wild talents appeared, but they couldn’t be controlled. Meinzer hadn’t found security in the hospital, hard as he’d tried to find it. He’d gotten up in the middle of the night and walked through the solid wall, unable to stop until he was back with the group.