Rafe and Kendricks betrayed considerable contempt when I greeted my foster-parents affectionately. They were already old, and I was saddened to see it; their fur graying, their prehensile toes and fingers crooked with a rheumatic complaint of some sort, their reddish eyes bleared and rheumy. They welcomed me, and made arrangements for the others in my party to be housed in an abandoned house nearby ... they had insisted that I, of course, must return to their roof, and Kyla, of course, had to stay with me.

"Couldn't we camp on the ground instead?" Kendricks asked, eying the flimsy shelter with distaste.

"It would offend our hosts," I said firmly. I saw nothing wrong with it.

Roofed with woven bark, carpeted with moss which was planted on the floor, the place was abandoned, somewhat a bit musty, but weathertight and seemed comfortable to me.

The first thing to be done was to despatch a messenger to the Old One, begging the favor of an audience with him. That done, (by one of my foster-brothers), we settled down to a meal of buds, honey, insects and birds eggs! It tasted good to me, with the familiarity of food eaten in childhood, but among the others, only Kyla ate with appet.i.te and Regis Hastur with interested curiosity.

After the demands of hospitality had been satisfied, my foster-parents asked the names of my party, and I introduced them one by one. When I named Regis Hastur, it reduced them to brief silence, and then to an outcry; gently but firmly, they insisted that their home was unworthy to shelter the son of a Hastur, and that he must be fittingly entertained at the Royal Nest of the Old One.

There was no gracious way for Regis to protest, and when the messenger returned, he prepared to accompany him. But before leaving, he drew me aside:

"I don't much like leaving the rest of you--"

"You'll be safe enough."

"It's not that I'm worried about, Dr. Allison."

"Call me Jason," I corrected angrily. Regis said, with a little tightening of his mouth, "That's it. You'll have to be Dr. Allison tomorrow when you tell the Old One about your mission. But you have to be the Jason he knows, too."

"So--?"

"I wish I needn't leave here. I wish you were--going to stay with the men who know you only as Jason, instead of being alone--or only with Kyla."

There was something odd in his face, and I wondered at it. Could he--a Hastur--be jealous of Kyla? Jealous of _me_? It had never occurred to me that he might be somehow attracted to Kyla. I tried to pa.s.s it off lightly:

"Kyla might divert me."

Regis said without emphasis, "Yet she brought Dr. Allison back once before." Then, surprisingly, he laughed. "Or maybe you're right. Maybe Kyla will--scare away Dr. Allison if he shows up."

The coals of the dying fire laid strange tints of color on Kyla's face and shoulders and the wispy waves of her dark hair. Now that we were alone, I felt constrained.

"Can't you sleep, Jason?"

I shook my head. "Better sleep while you can." I felt that this night of all nights I dared not close my eyes or when I woke I would have vanished into the Jay Allison I hated. For a moment I saw the room with his eyes; to him it would not seem cosy and clean, but--habituated to white sterile tile, Terran rooms and corridors--dirty and unsanitary as any beast's den.

Kyla said broodingly, "You're a strange man, Jason. What sort of man are you--in Terra's world?"

I laughed, but there was no mirth in it. Suddenly I had to tell her the whole truth:

"Kyla, the man you know as me doesn't exist. I was created for this one specific task. Once it's finished, so am I."

She started, her eyes widening. "I've heard tales of--of the Terrans and their sciences--that they make men who aren't real, men of metal--not bone and flesh--"

Before the dawning of that naive horror I quickly held out my bandaged hand, took her fingers in mine and ran them over it. "Is this metal? No, no, Kyla. But the man you know as Jason--I won't be him, I'll be someone different--" How could I explain a subsidiary personality to Kyla, when I didn't understand it myself?

She kept my fingers in hers softly and said, "I saw--someone else--looking from your eyes at me once. A ghost."

I shook my head savagely. "To the Terrans, I'm the ghost!"

"Poor ghost," she whispered.

Her pity stung. I didn't want it.

"What I don't remember I can't regret. Probably I won't even remember you." But I lied. I knew that although I forgot everything else, unregretting because unremembered, I could not bear to lose this girl, that my ghost would walk restless forever if I forgot her. I looked across the fire at Kyla, cross-legged in the faint light--only a few coals in the brazier. She had removed her s.e.xless outer clothing, and wore some clinging garment, as simple as a child's smock and curiously appealing. There was still a little ridge of bandage visible beneath it and a random memory, not mine, remarked in the back corners of my brain that with the cut improperly sutured there would be a visible scar.

_Visible to whom?_

She reached out an appealing hand. "Jason! Jason--?"

My self-possession deserted me. I felt as if I stood, small and reeling, under a great empty echoing chamber which was Jay Allison's mind, and that the roof was about to fall in on me. Kyla's image flickered in and out of focus, first infinitely gentle and appealing, then--as if seen at the wrong end of a telescope--far away and sharply incised and as remote and undesirable as any bug underneath a lens.

Her hands closed on my shoulders. I put out a groping hand to push her away.

"Jason," she implored, "don't--go away from me like that! Talk to me, tell me!"

But her words reached me through emptiness.... I knew important things might hang on tomorrow's meeting, Jason alone could come through that meeting, where the Terrans for some reason put him through this h.e.l.l and d.a.m.nation and torture ... oh, yes ... the trailmen's fever.

Jay Allison pushed the girl's hand away and scowled savagely, trying to collect his thoughts and concentrate them on what he must say and do, to convince the trailmen of their duty toward the rest of the planet. As if they--not even human--could have a sense of duty!

With an unaccustomed surge of emotion, he wished he were with the others. Kendricks, now. Jay knew, precisely, why Forth had sent the big, reliable s.p.a.ceman at his back. And that handsome, arrogant Darkovan--where was he? Jay looked at the girl in puzzlement; he didn't want to reveal that he wasn't quite sure of what he was saying or doing, or that he had little memory of what Jason had been up to.

He started to ask, "Where did the Hastur kid go?" before a vagrant logical thought told him that such an important guest would have been lodged with the Old One. Then a wave of despair hit him; Jay realized he did not even speak the trailmen's language, that it had slipped from his thoughts completely.

[Ill.u.s.tration: She felt a touch of panic. He was leaving her again.]

"You--" he fished desperately for the girl's name, "Kyla. You don't speak the trailmen's language, do you?"

"A few words. No more. Why?" She had withdrawn into a corner of the tiny room--still not far from him--and he wondered remotely what his d.a.m.ned alter ego had been up to. With Jason, there was no telling. Jay raised his eyes with a melancholy smile.

"Sit down, child. You needn't be frightened."

"I'm--I'm trying to understand--" the girl touched him again, evidently trying to conquer her terror. "It isn't easy--when you turn into someone else under my eyes--" Jay saw that she was shaking in real fright.

He said wearily, "I'm not going to--to turn into a bat and fly away. I'm just a poor devil of a doctor who's gotten himself into one unholy mess." There was no reason, he was thinking, to take out his own misery and despair by shouting at this poor kid. G.o.d knew what she'd been through with his irresponsible other self--Forth had admitted that that d.a.m.ned "Jason" personality was a blend of all the undesirable traits he'd fought to smother all his life. By an effort of will he kept himself from pulling away from her hand on his shoulder.

"Jason, don't--slip away like that! _Think!_ Try to keep hold on _yourself_!"

Jay propped his head in his hands, trying to make sense of that.

Certainly in the dim light she could not be too conscious of subtle changes of expression. She evidently thought she was talking to Jason.

She didn't seem to be overly intelligent.