Caquer shrugged.
“Maybe it was because I missed Skidder’s talk on the televis,” he suggested. “Of course it wasn’t Skidder at all, it was Deem in another guise and wearing the helmet. And maybe he deliberately left me out, because he was having a psychopathic kind of fun out of my trying to investigate the murders of two Willem Deems. It’s hard to figure. Perhaps I was slightly cracked from the strain, and it might have been that for that reason I was partially resistant to the group hypnosis.”
“You think he really intended to try to rule all of Callisto, Rod?” asked the girl.
“We’ll never know, for sure, just how far he wanted, or expected to go later. At first, he was just experimenting with the powers of hypnosis, through the wheel. That first night, he sent people out of their houses into the streets, and then sent them back and made them forget it. Just a test, undoubtedly.”
Caquer paused and frowned thoughtfully.
“He was undoubtedly psychopathic, though, and we don’t dare even guess what all his plans were,” he continued. “You understand how the goggles worked to neutralize the wheel, don’t you, Icicle?”
“I think so. That was brilliant, Rod. It’s like when you take a moving picture of a turning wheel, isn’t it? If the camera synchronizes with the turning of the wheel, so that each successive picture shows it after a complete revolution, then it looks like it’s standing still when you show the movie.”
Caquer nodded.
“That’s it on the head,” he said. “Just luck I had access to those goggles, though. For just a second I could see a man wearing a helmet up there on the balcony-but that was all I had to know.”
“But Rod, when you rushed out on the balcony, you didn’t have the goggles on any more. Couldn’t he have stopped you, by hypnosis?”
“Well, he didn’t. I guess there wasn’t time for him to take over control of me. He did flash an illusion at me. It wasn’t either Barr Maxon or Willem Deem I saw standing there at the last minute. It was you, Jane.”
“I?”
“Yep, you. I guess he knew I’m in love with you, and that’s the first thing flashed into his mind; that I wouldn’t dare use the sword if I thought it was you standing there. But I knew it wasn’t you, in spite of the evidence of my eyes, so I swung it.”
He shuddered slightly, remembering the will power he had needed to bring that sword down.
“The worst of it was that I saw you standing there like I’ve always wanted to see you-with your arms out toward me, and looking at me as though you loved me.”
“Like this, Rod?”
And he was not too dumb to get the idea, that time.
The Angelic Angelworm
CHARLIE WILLS shut off the alarm clock and kept right on moving, swinging his feet out of bed and sticking them into his slippers as he reached for a cigarette. Once the cigarette was lighted, he let himself relax a moment, sitting on the side of the bed.
He still had time, he figured, to sit there and smoke himself awake. He had fifteen minutes before Pete Johnson would call to take him fishing. And twelve minutes was enough time to wash his face and throw on his old clothes.
It seemed funny to get up at five o’clock, but he felt swell. Golly, even with the sun not up yet and the sky a dull pastel through the window, he felt great. Because there was only a week and a half to wait now.
Less than a week and a half, really, because it was ten days. Or-come to think of it-a bit more than ten days from this hour in the morning. But call it ten days, anyway. If he could go back to sleep again now, darn it; when he woke up it would be that much closer to the time of the wedding. Yes, it was swell to sleep when you were looking forward to something. Time flies by and you don’t even hear the rustle of its wings.
But no-he couldn’t go back to sleep. He’d promised Pete he’d be ready at five-fifteen, and if he wasn’t, Pete would sit out front in his car and honk the horn, and wake the neighbors.
And the three minutes’ grace were up, so he tamped out the cigarette and reached for the clothes on the chair.
He began to whistle softly: “I’m going to marry Yum Yum, Yum Yum” from “The Mikado.” And tried-in the interests of being ready in time-to keep his eyes off the silver-framed picture of Jane on the bureau.
He must be just about the luckiest guy on earth. Or anywhere else, for that matter, if there was anywhere else.
Jane Pemberton, with soft brown hair that had little wavelets in it and felt like silk-no, nicer than silk-and with the cute go-to-hell tilt to her nose, with long graceful sun-tanned legs, with…damnit, with everything that it was possible for a girl to have, and more. And the miracle that she loved him was so fresh that he still felt a bit dazed.
Ten days in a daze, and then-
His eye fell on the dial of the clock, and he jumped. It was ten minutes after five, and he still sat there holding the first sock. Hurriedly, he finished dressing. Just in time! It was almost five-fifteen on the head as he slid into his corduroy jacket, grabbed his fishing tackle, and tiptoed down the stairs and outside into the cool dawn.
Pete’s car wasn’t there yet.
Well, that was all right. It’d give him a few minutes to rustle up some worms, and that would save time later on. Of course he couldn’t really dig in Mrs. Grady’s lawn, but there was a bare area of border around the flower bed along the front porch, and it wouldn’t matter if he turned over a bit of the dirt there.
He took his jackknife out and knelt down beside the flower bed. Ran the blade a couple of inches in the ground and turned over a clod of it. Yes there were worms all right. There was a nice big juicy one that ought to be tempting to any fish.
Charlie reached out to pick it up.
And that was when it happened.
His fingertips came together, but there wasn’t a worm between them, because something had happened to the worm. When he’d reached out for it, it had been a quite ordinary-looking angleworm. A three-inch juicy, slippery, wriggling angleworm. ,It most definitely had not had a pair of wings. Nor a-
It was quite impossible, of course, and he was dreaming or seeing things, but there it was.
Fluttering upward in a graceful slow spiral that seemed utterly effortless. Flying past Charlie’s face with wings that were shimmery-white, and not at all like buttery-wings or bird wings, but like-
Up and up it circled, now above Charlie’s head, now level with the roof of the house, then a mere white-somehow a shining white-speck against the gray sky. And after it was out of sight, Charlie’s eyes still looked upward.
He didn’t hear Pete Johnson’s car pull in at the curb, but Pete’s cheerful hail of “Hey!” caught his attention, and he saw that Pete was getting out of the car and coming up the walk.
Grinning. “Can we get some worms here, before we start?” Pete asked. Then: ” ‘Smatter? Think you see a German bomber? And don’t you know never to look up with your mouth open like you were doing when I pulled up? Remember that pigeons…say, is something the matter? You look white as a sheet.”
Charlie discovered that his mouth was still open, and he closed it. Then he opened it to say something, but couldn’t think of anything to say-or rather, of any way to say it, and he closed his mouth again.
He looked back upward, but there wasn’t anything in sight any more, and he looked down at the earth of the flower bed, and it looked like ordinary earth.
“Charlie!” Pete’s voice sounded seriously concerned now. “Snap out of it! Are you all right?”
Again Charlie opened his mouth, and closed it. Then he said weakly, “Hello, Pete.”