Highways in Hiding

Highways in Hiding, by George
Oliver Smith

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Title: Highways in Hiding
Author: George Oliver Smith
Release Date: February 6, 2007 [EBook #20519]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
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HIGHWAYS IN HIDING
GEORGE O. SMITH

A LANCER BOOK 1967
Copyright 1956 by George O. Smith Highways in Hiding is based upon
material originally copyrighted by Greenleaf Publishing Co., 1955.
All rights reserved
Library of Congress Catalog Card No.: 56-10457 Printed in the U.S.A.
Cover painting by Roy G. Krenkel
LANCER BOOKS, INC., 185 MADISON AVENUE, NEW YORK,
N.Y. 10016
[Transcriber's note: This is a rule 6 clearance. PG has not been able to
find a U.S. copyright renewal.]

For my drinking uncle DON and, of course MARIAN

Historical Note
In the founding days of Rhine Institute the need arose for a new
punctuation mark which would indicate on the printed page that the
passage was of mental origin, just as the familiar quotation marks
indicate that the words between them were of verbal origin.
Accordingly, the symbol # was chosen, primarily because it appears on
every typewriter.
Up to the present time, the use of the symbol # to indicate directed
mental communication has been restricted to technical papers, term
theses, and scholarly treatises by professors, scholars, and students of
telepathy.
Here, for the first time in any popular work, the symbol # is used to
signify that the passage between the marks was mental communication.

Steve Cornell, M. Ing.

STALEMATE
Macklin said, "Please put that weapon down, Mr. Cornell. Let's not add
attempted murder to your other crimes."
"Don't force me to it, then," I told him.
But I knew I couldn't do it. I hated them all. I wanted the whole
Highways in Hiding rolled up like an old discarded carpet, with every
Mekstrom on Earth rolled up in it. But I couldn't pull the trigger. The
survivors would have enough savvy to clean up the mess before our
bodies got cold, and the Highways crowd would be doing business at
the same old stand. Without, I might add, the minor nuisance that
people call Steve Cornell.
What I really wanted was to find Catherine.
And then it came to me that what I really wanted second of all was to
possess a body of Mekstrom Flesh, to be a physical superman....

I
I came up out of the blackness just enough to know that I was no longer
pinned down by a couple of tons of wrecked automobile. I floated on
soft sheets with only a light blanket over me.
I hurt all over like a hundred and sixty pounds of boil. My right arm
was numb and my left thigh was aching. Breathing felt like being
stabbed with rapiers and the skin of my face felt stretched tight. There
was a bandage over my eyes and the place was as quiet as the grave.
But I knew that I was not in any grave because my nose was working
just barely well enough to register the unmistakable pungent odor that
only goes with hospitals.

I tried my sense of perception, but like any delicate and critical sense,
perception was one of the first to go. I could not dig out beyond a few
inches. I could sense the bed and the white sheets and that was all.
Some brave soul had hauled me out of that crack-up before the fuel
tank went up in the fire. I hope that whoever he was, he'd had enough
sense to haul Catherine out of the mess first. The thought of living
without Catherine was too dark to bear, and so I just let the blackness
close down over me again because it cut out all pain, both physical and
mental.
The next time I awoke there was light and a pleasant male voice saying,
"Steve Cornell. Steve, can you hear me?"
I tried to answer but no sound came out. Not even a hoarse croak.
The voice went on, "Don't try to talk, Steve. Just think it."
#Catherine?# I thought sharply, because most medicos are telepath, not
perceptive.
"Catherine is all right," he replied.
#Can I see her?#
"Lord no!" he said quickly. "You'd scare her half to death the way you
look right now."
#How bad off am I?#
"You're a mess, Steve. Broken