The Dark Door | Page 7

given Scott enough evidence to free himself from integrator control altogether, if he gives it any thought. But I suppose you realize that."
"Nonsense," Dr. Webber retorted. "He had enough information to do that when we first started. I'm no more worried now than I was then. I'm sure he doesn't know enough about the psycho-integrator to be able voluntarily to control the patient-operator relationship to any degree. Oh, no, he's safe enough. But you've missed the whole point of that little interview." Dr. Webber grinned at Manelli.
"I'm afraid I have. It looked to me like useless bravado."
"The persecution, man, the persecution! He's shifted his sights! Before that interview, the not-men were torturing him, remember? Because they were afraid he would report his findings to me, of course. But now it's I that's against him." The grin widened. "You see where that leads?"
"You're talking almost as though you believed this story about a different sort of people among us."
Dr. Webber shrugged. "Perhaps I do."
"Oh, come now, George."
Dr. Webber's eyebrows went up and the grin disappeared from his face.
"Harry Scott believes it, Frank. We mustn't forget that, or miss its significance. Before Harry started this investigation of his, he wouldn't have paid any attention to such nonsense. But he believes it now."
"But Harry Scott is insane. You said it yourself."
"Ah, yes," said Dr. Webber. "Insane. Just like the others who started to get somewhere along those lines of investigation. Try to analyze the growing incidence of insanity in the population and you yourself go insane. You've got to be crazy to be a psychiatrist. It's an old joke, but it isn't very funny any more. And it's too much for coincidence.
"And then consider the nature of the insanity--a full-blown paranoia--oh, it's amazing. A cunning organization of men who are not-men, a regular fairy story, all straight from Harry Scott's agile young mind. But now it's we who are persecuting him, and he still believes his fairy tale."
"So?"
Dr. Webber's eyes flashed angrily. "It's too neat, Frank. It's clever, and it's powerful, whatever we've run up against. But I think we've got an ace in the hole. We have Harry Scott."
"And you really think he'll lead us somewhere?"
Dr. Webber laughed. "That door I spoke of that Harry peeked through, I think he'll go back to it again. I think he's started to open that door already. And this time I'm going to follow him through."

4
It seemed incredible, yet Harry Scott knew he had not been mistaken. It had been Dr. Webber's face he had seen, a face no one could forget, an unmistakable face. And that meant that it had been Dr. Webber who had been persecuting him.
But why? He had been going to report to Webber when he had run into that golden field in the rooming-house hallway. And suddenly things had changed.
Harry felt a chill reaching to his fingers and toes. Yes, something had changed, all right. The attack on him had suddenly become butcherous, cruel, sneaking into his mind somehow to use his most dreaded nightmares against him. There was no telling what new horrors might be waiting for him. But he knew that he would lose his mind unless he could find an escape.
He was on his feet, his heart pounding. He had to get out of here, wherever he was. He had to get back to town, back to the city, back to where people were. If he could find a place to hide, a place where he could rest, he could try to think his way out of this ridiculous maze, or at least try to understand it.
He wrenched at the door to the passageway, started through, and smashed face-up against a solid brick wall.
He cried out and jumped back from the wall. Blood trickled from his nose. The door was walled up, the mortar dry and hard.
Frantically, he glanced around the room. There were no other doors, only the row of tiny windows around the ceiling of the room, pale, ghostly squares of light.
He pulled the chair over to the windows, peered out through the cobwebbed openings to the corridor beyond.
It was not the same hallway as before, but an old, dirty building corridor, incredibly aged, with bricks sagging away from the walls. At the end he could see stairs, and even the faintest hint of sunlight coming from above.
Wildly, he tore at the masonry of the window, chipping away at the soggy mortar with his fingers until he could squeeze through the opening. He fell to the floor of the corridor outside.
It was much colder and the silence was no longer so intense. He seemed to feel, rather than hear, the surging power, the rumble of many machines, the little, almost palpable vibrations from far above him.
He started in a dead run down the musty corridor