“Look here!” I burst out. “You’ve grown worse ever since that accident back when you were a kid! You’ve let it feed on your mind! You can’t go on fooling yourself!” I got up.
“Steve!” Susan rose, too, her cheeks reddening. “You won’t help with talk like that! Sit down.” She pressed against my chest. Then she turned rapidly to Tinsley. “Bill, if what you say should be true, if all of your plans, your insect-proofing your house, your silence in the presence of Their small winged creatures your campaign, your ant pastes and pitifully small insect sprays, should really mean something, why are you still alive?”
“Why?” shouted Tinsley. “Because I’ve worked alone.”
“But if there is a They, Bill, They have known of you for a month now, because Steve and I have told them, haven’t we Steve and yet you live. Isn’t that proof that you must be wrong.”
“You told them? You fool!” Tinsley’s eyes showed white and furious. “No, you didn’t, I made Steve promise!”
“Listen to me.” Susan’s voice shook him, as she might shake a small boy by the scruff of his neck. “Listen, before you scream. Will you agree to an experiment?”
“What kind of experiment?”
“From new on, all of your plans will be aboveboard, in the open. If nothing happens to you, in the next eight weeks, then you’ll have to agree that your fears are baseless.”
“But they’ll kill me!”
“Listen! Steve and I will stake our lives on it, Bill. If you die, Steve and I’ll die with you. I value my life greatly, Bill, and Steve values his. We don’t believe in your horrors, and we want to get you out of this.”
Tinsley hung his head and looked at the floor. “I don’t know. I don’t know.”
“Eight weeks, Bill. You can go on the rest of your life, if you wish, manufacturing insecticides, but for God’s sake don’t have a nervous breakdown over it. The very fact of your living should be some sort of proof that They bear you no ill-will, and have left you intact?”
Tinsley had to admit to that. But he was reluctant to give in. He murmured almost to himself. “This is the beginning of the campaign. It might take a thousand years, but in the end we can liberate ourselves.”
“You can be liberated in eight weeks, Bill, don’t you see? If we can prove that insects are blameless? For the next eight weeks, carry on your campaign, advertise it in weekly magazines and papers, thrust it to the hilt, tell everyone, so that if you should die, the world will be left behind. Then, when the eight weeks are up, you’ll be liberated and free, and won’t that feel good to you, Bill, after all these years?”
Something happened then that startled us. Buzzing over our heads, a fly came by. It had been in the room with us all the time, and yet I had sworn that, earlier, I had seen none. Tinsley began to shiver.
I didn’t know what I was doing, I seemed to react mechanically to some inner drive. I grabbed at the air and caught the tight buzzing in a cupped hand. Then I crushed it hard, staring at Bill and Susan. Their faces were chalky.
“I got it,” I said crazily. “I got the damned thing, and I don’t know why.”
I opened my hand. The fly dropped to the floor. I stepped on it as I had seen Bill often step on them, and my body was cold for no reason. Susan stared at me as if she’d lost her last friend.
“What am I saying?” I cried. “I don’t believe a damn word of all this filth!”
It was dark outside the thick-glassed window. Tinsley managed to light a cigarette and then, because all three of us were in a strange state of nerves, offered to let us have rooms in the house for the night. Susan said she would stay if: “You promise to give the eight-week trial a chance.”
“You’d risk your life on it?” Bill couldn’t make Susan out.
Susan nodded gravely. “We’ll be joking about it next year.”
Bill said, “All right. The eight-week trial it is.”
My room, upstairs, had a fine view of the spreading country hills. Susan stayed in the room next to mine, and Bill slept across the hall. Lying in bed I heard the crickets chirping outside my window, and I could barely bear the sound.
I closed the window.
Later in the night I got no sleep so I began imagining that a mosquito was soaring freely about in the dark of my room. Finally, I robed myself and fumbled down to the kitchen, not actually hungry, but wanting something to do to stop my nervousness. I found Susan bending over the refrigerator trays, selecting food.
We looked at one another. We handed plates of stuff to the table and sat stiffly down. The world was unreal to us. Somehow, being around Tinsley made the universe insecure and misty underfoot. Susan, for all her training and mind-culture, was still a woman, and deep under, women are superstitious.
To top it all, we were about to plunge our knives into the half-shattered carcass of a chicken when a fly landed upon it.
We sat looking at the fly for five minutes. The fly walked around on the chicken, flew up, circled, and came back to promenade a drumstick.
We put the chicken back in the icebox, joking very quietly about it, talked uneasily for awhile, and returned upstairs, where we shut our doors and felt alone. I climbed into bed and began having bad dreams before I shut my eyes. My wrist-watch set up an abominable loud clicking in the blackness, and it had clicked several thousand times when I heard the scream.
I don’t mind hearing a woman scream occasionally, but a man’s scream is so strange, and is heard so rarely, that when it finally comes, it turns your blood into an arctic torrent. The screaming seemed to be borne all through the house and it seemed I heard some frantic words babbled that sounded like, “Now I know why They let me live!”
I pulled the door wide in time to see Tinsley running down the hall, his clothing drenched and soaked, his body wet from head to foot. He turned when he saw me, and cried out. “Stay away from me, oh, God, Steve, don’t touch me, or it’ll happen to you, too! I was wrong! I was wrong, yes, but near the truth, too, so very near!”
Before I could prevent him, he had descended the stairs and slammed the door below. Susan suddenly stood beside me. “He’s gone mad for certain this time, Steve, we’ve got to stop him.”
A noise from the bathroom drew my attention. Peering in, I turned off the shower which was steaming hot, drumming insistently, scaldingly, on the yellow tiles.
Bill’s car thundered into life, a jerking of gears, and the car careened down the road at an insane speed.
“We’ve got to follow him,” insisted Susan. “He’ll kill himself! He’s trying to run away from something. Where’s your car?”
We ran to my car through a cold wind, under very cold stars, climbed in, warmed the motor, and were off, bewildered and breathless. “Which way?” I shouted.
“He went east, I’m certain.”
“East it is, then.” I poked up the speed and muttered, “Oh, Bill, you idiot, you fool. Slow down. Come back. Wait for me, you nut.” I felt Susan’s arm creep through my elbow and hold tight. She whispered, “Faster!” and I said, “We’re going sixty now, and there are some bad turns coming!”
The night had gotten into us; the talk of insects, the wind, the roaring of the tires over hard concrete, the beating of our frightened hearts. “There!” Susan pointed. I saw a gash of light cutting through the hills a mile away. “More speed, Steve!”
More speed. Aching foot pressing out the miles, motor thundering, stars wheeling crazily overhead, lights cutting the dark away into dismembered sections. And in my mind I saw Tinsley again, in the hall, drenched to the skin. He had been standing under the hot, scalding shower! Why? Why?
“Bill, stop, you idiot! Stop driving! Where are you going, what are you running away from, Bill?”
We were catching up with him now. We drew closer, yard by yard, bit by bit, around curves where gravity yanked at us and tried to smash us against huge granite bulwarks of earth, over hills and down into night-filled valleys, over streams and bridges, around curves again.
“He’s only about six hundred yards ahead, now,” said Susan.
“We’ll get him,” I twisted the wheel. “So help me God, we’ll get to him!”
Then, quite unexpectedly, it happened.
Tinsley’s car slowed down. It slowed and crept along the road. We were on a straight length of concrete that continued for a mile in a firm line, no curves or hills. His car slowed to a crawling, puttering pace.
By the time we pulled up in back of him, Tinsley’s roadster was going three miles an hour, just poking along at a pace like a man walking, its lights glaring.
“Steve—” Susan’s fingernails cut my wrist, tight, hard. “Something’s—wrong.”
I knew it. I honked the horn. Silence. I honked again and it was a lonely, blatant sound in the darkness and the emptiness. I parked the car. Tinsley’s car moved on like a metal snail ahead
