to find out what that change is or I'm done for. I feel that."

Obligingly, the psychiatrist said, "Describe your experience."

Talking about it made perspiration stand out on Alcorn's forehead. "First I'm seized with a sudden sense of abnormally sharpened perception, as if I were on the point of becoming aware of a great many things beyond my immediate awareness. I can feel the emotions of people about me and I have the conviction that, in another moment, I shall be able to feel their thoughts as well.

"Then I seem to be standing alone on a frozen arctic plain, a polar wasteland that should be utterly deserted, but isn't. I've no actual sensations of touch or hearing, yet the scene is visually sharp in every detail.

"There's a small village of corrugated sheet-metal houses just ahead, the sort that engineers on location might raise, and the streets between are packed with snow. Machines loaded with metal boxes crawl up and down those streets, but I've never seen their drivers. Until this morning, I never saw any people at all on the plain."

Dr. Hagen rattled his paper and nodded agreeably. "Go on. What are these people like?"

"I can't tell you that," Alcorn said, "because their images were not complete. There seems to be a sort of relationship between them and myself—a threatening one—but I can't guess what it may be. I can't even tell you what racial type they belong to, because they have no faces."

He crushed out his cigarette and took a deep breath, getting to the worst of it. "I have a distinct conviction during each of these seizures that the people I see are not ordinary human beings, that they're as different from me as I am from everyone else, though not in the same way. It's the difference that makes me uneasy. I can feel the urgency and the resolution in them, as if they were determined to do—or had resigned themselves to doing—something desperately important. And then I know somehow that each of them has made some kind of decision recently, a decision that is responsible for his being what he is and where he is, and that I'll have to make a similar one when the time comes. And the worst of it is that I know no matter which way my choice falls, I'm going to be hideously unhappy."

The psychiatrist asked tranquilly, "You can't guess what choice it is that you must make, or its alternative?"

"I can't. And that's the hell of it—not knowing."

 Prev. P 5/20 next