The Flying Eyes (8 page)

Linc turned away. “At least we know one answer. It can be caged. So it must be a being unto itself. A living, separate eye.”

“It looks pretty harmless, all of a sudden,” Wes commented. “I expected some try at retaliation, but it just sits there.”

“Fascinating,” Myers mumbled. He was watching the Eye intently.

Linc sat down. He had done it. He had formed a plan of action against the Eyes and carried it through successfully. And judging by the Eye's new docility, he felt the study of it wouldn't be hard.

“I guess we make a decent team after all,” Wes was saying. “The three of us—Ichabod, you and me. Only, Ichabod deserves the medal. There wouldn't have been any you and me without him.”

Linc was about to answer when Myers' strange movements caught his eye. The technician was standing before the cage, intent on it one moment, then he stiffened so quickly that his head jerked backward on his shoulders. He stood like a steel man for a count of three, and went limp. Before Linc could reach him, he was walking for the door; walking like a dead man, a zombie.

Linc spun him around, but there was no sense in his eyes, no vibrant life in his body. Linc let him go, and Myers opened the outside door, and proceeded across the grounds toward the open fields.

Linc turned to find Wes staring at him in pale shock.

The thing in the cage sat unmoving, barely blinking, and utterly blank. But it wasn't harmless. It was as deadly and dangerous as ever, and now all its danger was caged inside the lab, inside this tiny room.

Linc threw the tarp over the cage, covering the stare and the danger with it. It wasn't so easy, after all. Before they could even begin to study the thing, they had to find some way to resist its hypnotic power.

“We'd better report Myers,” Wes said.

Linc nodded. “And then go home. I don't want to hear Collins' accusations—not tonight. They'd probably be justified this time.”

“Are you blaming yourself for Myers, too?”

“No. Just for the stupidity of thinking that, caged, the Eye would suddenly lose its ability to hypnotize.”

“Courage and the will to try are not stupidity,” Wes corrected him. “Even if it comes to nothing, no one can take the credit of trying away from us. Go get Ichabod and put him in the car. I'll tell Iverson about Myers and meet you outside. Our friend here,” he indicated the cage, “can just cool his eyeball till morning.”

CHAPTER EIGHT

Wes broiled the steaks, for once leaving Linc alone in the living room with Kelly. She was nervous, constantly busy with something. Linc mixed cocktails and put one into her hand.

“Relax, Kel,” he said.

“I can't. It's been an awful day.” She asked, unexpectedly, “Linc, do you think I should get a gun?”

“Why?”

“To protect myself. You're not at home all day, so you don't realize what's going on. I'm not safe in my apartment. Even the soldiers can't stop the looting. If I had a gun, I'd feel more secure.”

“You mean that people are looting private homes?”

“All over town.”

“But that wouldn't include your apartment,” he said. “You have no silver, no furs, nothing to be looted.”

“They're not after jewels. They're after food. People are hungry, and they're afraid to go to the markets because if they did, that would make a crowd, and the Eyes would come after them. In order to get food, they have to rob private houses. Yours is a good target. You have a big freezer. You're loaded with meat.”

“Do you actually mean that you'd shoot a man who came to steal a piece of beef? That you'd shoot him over a bit of meat?”

“What else could I do?”

“Give it to him, of course.”

“Would you empty your freezer to every man who came to your door?” She was incredulous.

“I would. I wouldn't shoot him! I'd talk to him and—”

“You don't understand. These men aren't reasonable. You can't talk to them. They come armed, and you can't hold conversations with them. They scare me to death, Linc. They haven't hit my apartment yet, but they've been all over the neighborhood. You look out of your window and see your neighbors, people you've known for years, and wonder which one of them it will be? Which one of them will break into your kitchen and steal the little food you have, and kill you if you don't give it over willingly? The world has gone crazy and there's no place safe.”

Kelly had changed. The sureness had left her gaze; the belligerence, the “don't touch me” attitude, was replaced with a softer, more pliant expression. He felt more the man with her, and less the best available flunky.

Her hand reached out to close over his, and her grasp was slightly desperate, and awfully willing. She was turning to him, not to Wes.

“I have such faith in you,” she said. “You're a strong person—a sure person. Will you keep your eye on me a little?”

“I thought I was doing that.”

“You haven't been. You haven't called me, you haven't once checked on me to see if I was even alive.”

“I was sure you were all right, or I would have been on your doorstep all the time. You know that.”

“Do I?” Her face was near and soft.

This was his moment, and he started to take it, then drew back. She was offering the comfort she had refused before, but now he was too keyed up to take it. He said, breaking the new mood she was building, “Hasn't Wes called you either?”

“Once,” she admitted. “But Wes is different. In this danger, Wes isn't you, and can never be you. You'll be the winner, the safe one.”

He drew back. “And is that why you've come to me like this? Because you think I'm your best protection?”

She stiffened again. “That's a terrible thing to say. Maybe the danger has opened my eyes. Didn't you even consider that?”

He had changed her pliant mood to anger again. Always anger between them. “I'm sorry. I didn't mean that. I jump at things because I'm jumpy inside. Can we call a truce?”

“Not a truce. A whole treaty. Kelly promises not to fly off at everything Lincoln Hosier mistakenly says, and Linc promises not to doubt Kelly Adams' motives. Agreed?”

“Agreed,” he smiled. It was new and good, this warmth between them.

“Soup's on,” Wes called from the kitchen. “Get in here, you two, or Ichabod and I will eat it all ourselves.”

“That man and his dog,” Linc grunted as he got to his feet. “I sometimes think he believes Ichabod to be more human than I am.”

“Ichabod is master of the world,” Kelly laughed. “Of Wes' world, anyway. Our trouble is, we're not little, spotted dogs.”

* * * *

Night was dark around the windows, and Linc awoke screaming. He thrashed his arms, beating back the nightmare monsters that pursued him, then sat bolt upright.

The sleeping pill hadn't worked. Nothing, it seemed, could chase the Eyes from his mind, awake or sleeping. They had come after him in his dreams, sailing, hovering, brushing him with their lashes, and he had fought up out of the stupor, nullifying the drug to gain consciousness. Now he couldn't close his eyes again; not when there were other Eyes waiting on the near side of oblivion.

He drew on his robe and went into the hall, not wanting to wake Wes. But Wes popped his head out of his door. “Going down for coffee?” Wes asked.

“Couldn't you sleep either?”

“Not too well. And those last few howls of yours finished what I did manage. Let's have something to eat.”

Wes started the coffee, and cut two pieces of pie. The click of Ichabod's feet on the linoleum announced the dog's arrival, and Wes opened the refrigerator to get some meat. The animal wolfed it down greedily.

“If we don't stop these middle-of-the-night parleys, Ichabod's going to get too fat,” Wes said.

“This parley wasn't planned. It just couldn't be helped.”

“Your trouble is, you expect an answer to pop right up in front of you. You've always worked that way. Nobody is as fast as you are with a direct solution, but this time is different, Linc. You're not dealing with men and man-made crises. You're dealing with something alien. You can't expect to find an answer out of your store of experience this time. So quit pushing yourself.”

“How can I quit pushing?” Linc asked loudly. “We went out and risked our lives to catch that Eye, and now we can't even get near it. I'm not used to being so indecisive, and it's eating holes in me. I'd like to march into that room and stand up to that thing and face it out—but I don't think I could do it.”

“With your strong will, you just might.”

“No. Myers made it back from the fight, remember—he was strong enough not to give in that day. But it still got him. Caged, it got him, where free it couldn't. Yet will power should have something to do with it, if it's hypnosis as we know hypnosis. If the Eyes haven't got a special force that we can't even imagine, then a strong will should be able to withstand their pull. You think that, and hope with it, and then you come right back to the fact that if you're wrong, you're also a zombie.

“The crisis point comes when you stare straight at them. If you avoid their gaze and are strong enough, they're less able to reach you. But we're supposed to study that thing, so how can we avoid its gaze?”

Wes was quiet, then he murmured the thoughts that were at the heart of his own worry. “What do you suppose they do with the people they take, Linc? After they go into that hole, what do they do with them? Why do they want them?”

Linc shook his head. “Hendricks came back out of the hole. He was all right, except for being in a trance. But you can bet they do something with them, and that Hendricks was an exception because of his special abilities with the reactor. I haven't even been able to guess why they wanted the reactor blown.”

Ichabod whined under his breath, begging for more meat. “We might have found out firsthand what the Eyes do, if it hadn't been for you, old fellow,” Wes patted the dog. “You jarred us back to our senses just in time.”

“Just in time,” Linc echoed, and his tone jumped from desperation to eagerness. “Just in time! Don't you see the possibilities that fact open up? A man can be brought back from the edge if there's someone there to bring him back.”

“And how does that help us?”

“It's all based on one big ‘IF.' If an Eye can only hypnotize by having the person look directly at it, then why couldn't two people team up and defeat it, just as Ichabod did yesterday? One of us could look at the thing, study the thing, while the other man kept his attention off of it and only concentrated on his partner.”

“I see. And at the first sign of trance in the partner, the man could pull him away, jar him out of it. But such short moments of study wouldn't get us anywhere. We need prolonged time.”

Linc sat back again, deflated. It had sounded good—now it didn't. Then he brightened a bit. “Isn't it possible that with experience and practice we could learn to fight off the hypnosis? Learn what it takes to stand against it and not be hypnotized? If that were so, then we could have our prolonged time for study.”

Wes made no comment.

“What do you think?” Linc asked. He had again come up with something and he ached to try it, but it depended on Wes.

“It would be dangerous,” Wes said. “If it doesn't work, then it means that one of us will definitely be taken by the Eye.”

“Yes?”

“I see,” Wes sighed this time. “You've found another possibility, and you're hot on it. So—I guess we try it out.”

Linc lit into his pie so his gratitude wouldn't show blatantly. Wes was willing to help him. Wes was his only confederate, and Wes knew it, and dangerous or not, foolish or not, Wes was willing to help. At this moment, and in this place, he realized something he should have known long ago, but something that had needed crisis to show him; that Wes was a once-in-a-lifetime friend; that Lincoln Hosier was not a man unto himself, after all; that he needed loyalty and friendship as much as the next man, and that accepting it wasn't a weakness, but a goodness.

* * * *

The little lab room was charged with high-voltage tension. Linc was almost ready to reach for the tarpaulin and uncover the monster that hovered beneath it. He had insisted in being the first to try, letting Wes be his back guard, to pull him away to safety.

“Are you ready?” Linc asked.

“Any time you are.”

“Then come close to me, and remember—not one glance at the Eye. Not even a peek.”

Wes' hand came out and gripped Linc's arm strongly. Linc could feel the warm exhalation of his friend's breath hitting his cheek.

“I'm going to do it now,” Linc said.

He reached for the tarp, paused to gather himself against the storm of battle he expected, and raised the cloth.

The Eye was open. It rolled its watery blueness to focus on him, and then it was still, staring. The gaze of it was newly malevolent, newly evil this morning, and Linc held himself from recoiling. He breathed deeply and evenly, keeping his store of oxygen high, and stared back into the great iris, looking for a soul, looking for sense. All of his wits were collected into a ball inside him, a ball that made up his will not to succumb, and he stared back with a dare, a challenge to the hideous thing to take him.

But nothing happened.

His mind was calm, yet swirling slightly with mental effort. The swirls were just at the edge of consciousness, but close enough so that he was aware of them. Swirls and shadows, and misty visions that wanted to come through and be recognized. He breathed deeply again and set them sailing off. He didn't want them. He wanted a meeting of mentalities, not shadows. He forced his own conscious thoughts to the foreground and concentrated on those alone.

Still nothing happened. He was too tense, trying too hard. He couldn't succeed this way. He was blocking the contact through his own great effort. He had to relax, to be more pliant, if he was even to approach his goal.

The shadows and swirlings were coming back and he must relax and look at them and sort them out. He gave way now, accepting them back, ready to make use of them, more comfortable with the relaxing. There was only himself and the blue of the Eye.

And then the world tilted and went out of kilter and he was falling sideways. The Eye was disappearing and he had to flail his arms to catch himself. A hardness clutched at him and he fell against it. A smell of shaving lotion hit his nose and he pushed on through to full awareness.

He looked up, and there was Wes' face, peering anxiously into his, searching for the sense in his eyes as he had searched in the monstrous one.

“Linc?” Wes was calling his name. “Do you hear me?”

“I hear,” Linc answered. “I hear, friend.”

He let Wes help him to a chair and set him down. He shivered once, and covered his face with his hands, shutting away the last of the shadows. When he glanced up again, he was smiling.

“It worked,” he said softly. “It worked—I was almost gone, but you pulled me back in time.” As he started to explain, jubilation mingled with relief. “And I learned, Wes. Now I know what to resist. The shadows and the swirls of smoke and the obscure visions that you want to grasp and see—those are the things to resist. The call to relax—that is a great thing to resist.” Wes was still watching him soberly. “Be jubilant!” Linc stood and grasped Wes' shoulders. “We've won! We've found the way. With practice, we can grow strong enough to stand alone, and break through to the truth. Don't you see?”

Wes' lips parted slightly, then his quick smile broke through his concern. “Anything you say, Linc. I think you actually run the world.”