The Sex Life of the Gods
... I wore a blue uniform with yellow stripes on the legs and my name
was Lors, or Lars. The natives, horrible monsters, were in a state of
revolution ... they killed my driver. I was alone and they were all
around me..."
"Science fiction," she cooed and stroked his hair. "I think it's a good
sign. All you ever read, for relaxation, was science fiction. Your dream
was probably a story you once read and your mind put you in the hero's
place."
He sat up and looked at her. "Did I cry out?"
"You were mumbling. I couldn't hear what you said. Then you began
sobbing and thrashing about."
Nick ran his fingers through his hair and over the back of his neck, the
reality of the dream almost too much for him. It wasn't an ordinary
nightmare where he would be running, with a huge monster panting in
pursuit. This was frightening. Like a memory. Like some damned fantastic
memory.
He stood up and patted her shoulder. "Go back to sleep, Beth," he told
her gently. "I'm going downstairs."
"Shall I turn on a light?"
"No. It might cause the neighbors to wonder." He walked to the door of
the bedroom. "The moon is bright enough."
He walked into the hall, feeling his way in the dark places, and down
the stairs into the living room. As he sat in the chair near the window,
he thought about the dream. It bothered him, because it was unlike a
dream; it had the weird consistency and logic of a memory, yet seemed
almost supernatural ... Hell, what kind of thing had huge, yellow eyes
and stood nine feet tall? What sort of a world had a violet sky and
grey-green rocks? The whole damned thing had the scent of a Walt Disney
movie, the colors vivid and sharp, the landscape seemingly done by a
watercolor brush.
_Thista._
Apparently it was some kind of planet and he hoped that Beth was right.
Would it be possible for a man to get so confused via a crack on the
head, that he believed he had lived through the literature he'd once
read? What would he dream about next? _Macbeth?_ _Treasure Island?_
Christ, what a world!
If he could get to a doctor, a headshrinker, it might all be ironed out.
They would get things squared away in a short while, but hell ...
suppose I'm Public Enemy Number One, or something. Thirteen months! In
thirteen months kings have been broken, dynasties crushed ... What had
happened to him in the thirteen months that he had been out of touch?
One thing he was sure of; he hadn't been laying around. In a stretch of
time like that, he had worked, eaten, slept, loved ... Maybe he had
married again! An almost comical thought, compared to the possibility
that he could be a killer, a bank robber; there were a million things
he could have done.
A psychologist? Nope. That was out of the question, until he knew more
about Nicholas Danson. And learning more about himself would be a real
problem. The cabin that Beth had spoken of would probably show him
nothing. After a period of a year, there would be damned little trail
left to hunt along. There would be almost nothing. Whatever had been
there, would have probably been sifted through by the guy, the
detective, Nolan Brice. Brice! Of all the friends for him to have, he
had to be saddled to Brice! He'd have to be real careful where that
character was concerned because the slightest slip would set the cop on
his trail like a blood hound.
The crackup? Now there was something. He would always be stuck with the
question of how he had managed to get out of that mangled mass of metal
with merely cuts and bruises. But he could chalk that up to dumb luck,
or something. The thing that worried him was had he left a clue that
could trace him here? He had burned the flying suit ... he had tried to
cover it up to Andy ... A lot of things about the smashed aircraft
bothered him. Things like the flying suit; it had been made of strange
material; but hell, he'd burned that thing. There would be no problem
with that.
Almost without realizing it, he found himself staring at the car that
was parked on the other side of the street. The streetlight gleamed on
the black paint of the Chevrolet sedan and he thought of what Andy had
told him earlier about the men who had been interested in finding him.
Looking at the car much closer, he could see the two men sitting in it.
The knot of fear returned to his stomach when he saw the light shining
on the driver's blond hair.
The men from Andy's gas station!
"Nick?"
It was Beth. She had followed him down and he could see her framed in
the doorway at the foot of the stairs. She had slipped into a nightgown
that, in the moonlight, was more alluring than if she had been nude. She
started to speak, but he hissed at her for silence.
"Come here, Beth," he instructed, "and don't put on a light."
Her bare feet whispered on the rug as she came to his side in obvious
bewilderment. He pointed out the car and the two men, telling her about
how they had inquired after him at the gas station. She listened
quietly.
"What do they want?" She asked, when he'd finished.
She was sitting on the arm of the chair, leaning against him to study
the car. The soft pressure of her breasts was disturbing and conjured up
memories of early in the evening.
"What do they want?" She asked again.
"I don't know. That's something I have to find out. Listen, give me a
minute to get to the upstairs window. Then snap on the light and move
around. They're probably looking for me and I want to give them the
impression I'm not here."
"All right, Nick."
He got up and threaded his way to the stairs and up to kneel before the
bedroom window that fronted on the street. Through the gap in the
curtains, he could see the car plainly. The light snapped on downstairs.
For a moment, nothing happened; the men merely sat in the car and
watched the house. Finally the car began moving down the street with its
lights out. Then, out of range, the driver flicked on the lights and the
car disappeared. The downstairs light snapped off and a moment later
Beth came into the room.
"Nick?"
"Here."
"Perhaps they saw the crash..." she began, but he cut her off short.
"No one saw me crash."
"I mean, later," she explained. "After all, a wrecked car on a highway
would..."
"Car? Beth, I didn't crack up in a car. I crashed on a wooded mountain
in a private plane."
"Oh, darling, don't be silly! You've never been in a plane in your
life."
In the darkness of the room, Nick could only stare in stunned amazement
at the moonlit outline of his wife.
CHAPTER FIVE
Detective Lieutenant Nolan Brice stood in the brush near the wrecked
aircraft, watching the men move about in the light of several spotlights
that had been set up by the National Guardsmen who had roped off the
area. The thick blackness of the surrounding forest, plus a glance at
his watch, told him that dawn wasn't too far away. FAA investigator
Dickson, a thin, stringy ex-pilot stepped around the scrambled bits of
wreckage and offered a light to the dead cigarette in Nolan's mouth.
"Thanks," Brice said and blew the smoke to the night. "What d'you make
of it, Mister Dickson?"
Dickson shrugged and pushed his snap-brim hat back with a blunt
forefinger. "Dunno. It's pretty dark to see much, but it's no private
plane."
"Why do you say that?"
"No wings, no tail assembly. Of course, it's hard to tell in the dark.
When it gets light enough, we'll know the story; but I don't know of any
private plane that looks like that one. Then too, the Army is holding
the news boys at bay. I think those two government fellows are playing
this one close to their chests."
Brice nodded and dragged on the cigarette, but he said nothing about the
speed of the thing. "Any bodies?"
Dickson shook his head. "The thing is pretty well burned, and the
bodies, if there are any to be found, could be all over the area. We did
find a kind of flying suit, though, badly burned and torn."
"Just the suit? No one in it?"
Dickson looked perplexed. "Bothers you huh? Me too. I can't figure out
why a pilot would carry something like that as an extra. Oh, well, it'll
all come out when we really start investigating."
"How long does a thing like that take?"
Dickson shrugged. "A couple of days, a week. Even a few months. It's
hard to say."
Brice nodded, took a final drag on the cigarette and tossed it toward
the wreck, watching the red ash burst near the wreck. Dickson had
wandered off to the far side of the crash-made clearing. Hell, Brice
thought, I'd better get that butt. Leaving a thing like that around here
could get me in trouble. They'd think it was part of the crash.
When he walked over to retrieve the butt, he saw the light from the
flood glinting on a small gold object. He picked it up and found that he
had someone's watch. The crystal had been smashed, likely in the crash,
and the hands were stopped at 4:15. The expansion band watch dispelled
his hunch that the pilot of the plane had been a Russian, or something;
it was a Bulova, and he didn't think Russians had them. But what cinched
the whole thing was on the under side of the face, in the light of the
spots, he could read: "To Nick, Love, Beth."
And suddenly, it was there! He knew the watch. He knew it as well as he
knew his own. Hell, he had picked it up at the jeweler's shop in
Everett, two years before, when Beth hadn't been able to get into town
and wanted to surprise Nick with it! Stunned and puzzled, Brice dropped
the watch into his pocket and decided not to say anything to Cartwell
and Morgan. Maybe it would cost him, later, but he couldn't tell them -
not until he had a better picture of what the hell was going on.
He lit another cigarette and stood there thinking about the watch. How
had it gotten here? Nick didn't know how to fly a plane, and even if he
had studied the art, could he fly an aircraft that cleared a speed of
two thousand miles per hour? Hell no! Nor had the watch been there, in
the weather, all this time.
Of course, Nick could have hocked the damned thing in some town when he
needed money, and by some quirk of fate it had been brought back to the
same area it had left over a year before. That was possible, but Brice
didn't believe it. It just didn't fit.
"Seen enough?"
Brice turned and saw Cartwell standing behind him. How long has he been
there, he wondered, and forced a grin. The stocky built blond grinned
back at him.
"Thought you might want a cup of coffee," he said.
"Where the hell will you get coffee out here?"
Cartwell waved an arm toward the foot of the hills. "A farm down there.
They wake up early around here. Sam conned the farmer's wife into making
coffee for the boys. Want some?"
"Might as well. We have a few minutes - in fact, we have a lot of time,
before daylight."
"Getting tired?" Cartwell asked, as they started down the hill past the
ring of soldiers.
"A little. More like anxious to find out what the tale is on that
wreck."
"You've been talking to Dickson, I see."
Brice nodded. "Yeah. Well, one thing we know. It's apparently some kind
of experimental aircraft ... like a rocket, or something. And, if it
isn't one of ours..." Brice left it hang and Cartwell didn't pick it up.
For a few minutes they walked in silence through the dew splattered
forests, homing in on the glow of yellow lights that winked at them
through the branches. Finally they reached the rutted, dirt road that
twisted along the stream bed toward the framed shape of the farm house.
Cartwell broke the silence as they neared the place.
"Don't talk much about the wreck around these people, Nolan. They're
nice folks, but simple natured. They plant by the phases of the moon and
the biggest event in their lives is going to the state fair. They're