Free The Lost Perception by Daniel F. Galouye Page A

enough to throw Helen into a, violent fit of conditioned behavior.
    “Well?” Forsythe repeated, proudly fondling the wheel.
    “Good job,” Gregson said, but without enthusiasm. “You must have been practicing a long time.”
*  *  *
    Forsythe went to bed early after supper, while Gregson stoked the open hearth fire in the living room and settled down before it with a brandy. In the kitchen, Helen busied herself with preliminary preparations for the next day’s Thanksgiving meal.
    He was there but a few minutes, however, when she appeared in the doorway, her eyes casting about indecisively. She came and sat beside him on the divan and the fire’s reflections, playing upon her gossamer flaxen hair, crowned her head with a crimson halo.
    Gregson rose, placed his brandy on the table and unobtrusively opened his self-injection kit in case she would need precipitate quietening. He couldn’t delay the confrontation any longer.
    As he hesitated, though, she stared into the flames and said, “Greg—about that cell at the hunting lodge. I… You didn’t get all the cell members in that raid.”
    He waited, hopeful that she would remain rational as long as it didn’t appear he was trying to force information out of her.
    “There was someone else—hidden in the attic. He was supposed to be on lookout while Kavorba slept. He…”
    “Kavorba?”
    “Kavorba was the Valorian leader of the cell. The man in the attic remained hidden when the Guardsmen attacked. Later—just before he left Pennsylvania—he said Kavorba mentioned me in front of you. And I knew you must have realized I was—a member of that cell too.”
    Suddenly she was crying into her hands and Gregson knew now there would be no need for the hypodermic. He made her drink the brandy and she told him how she had been contacted by the cell more than a month earlier, how Enos Cromley and the Valorian had played upon her fears as a means of using her to get through to Gregson.
    Cromley had passed Forsythe’s place frequently and had stopped often to talk with her in the fields or out in the yard. At first, she was amused by the man’s aliens-among-us obsession. She had even laughed when he warned her that the Security Bureau was the only force preventing the Valorians from helping Earth and that Gregson was in danger because he worked for the bureau.
    “I didn’t know then,” she explained, still trembling, “that they regarded me as a means, of reaching you. I suppose they wanted to get their hands on someone from the bureau.”
    “Where did you meet the Valorian?”
    Helen had been walking in the woods behind the farm when she encountered Cromley and Kavorba. They tried to pierce her shield of amused incredulity and convince her that the latter was an alien.
    “He was so persuasive. Most of what he said didn’t make sense. But he was so sincere—and so tired and helpless and troubled.”
    “What were some of the things he told you?” “That they wanted to save Earth.” The salvation gimmick again. “From the Screamies?” She nodded. “But more so from the Security Bureau—before the bureau could destroy them, and us too.” “And you believed him?”
    “Oh, Greg! I didn’t know, until yesterday’s tricast, how they operated; that they could confuse and persuade, make you believe things that aren’t true. At one point Kavorba even told me the Screamies weren’t a disease at all, but another means of perception.” “A… what?”
    “A sixth sense. A new way of seeing things. He said the Screamies were something we’d all go through eventually.” “It didn’t occur to you that he might be lying?” She shook her head in a gesture of self-derision. “He showed me. He said he was… hyperperceptive, but that he couldn’t use the faculty very well here. He told me what I was thinking. He said that if I scratched the ground where I was standing I would find a root, forking twice within six inches. But I didn’t know he could make