CHAPTER II

I lay in the warm bed and for a long time I tried to think of something that I knew I should recall, and at last, after hours of waking and dozing and waking again, I had it; it was the fact that I was not dead. When I knew this for certain I was extremely surprised, in the weak fashion of the very ill. I slept once more, and when I woke again I was stronger and more in command of my mind. I was still a little astonished that I was alive. Then I began to wonder whether I was blind. The knowledge that I would not know about this for some days was intolerable. I yelled angrily, and a cool hand was laid across my lips.

"Gently, Will, gently," said the loveliest voice in England.

Then I knew that I could bear the uncertainty till doomsday, if I must.

"Hello, Marion," I said, brushing the hand with my dry lips. "What time is it?"

"Middle of the afternoon, Will. You've been asleep a long while. It's Tuesday."

"Tuesday. Good Lord, nearly forty-eight hours!"

"Do your eyes hurt?"

"Not much."

"Thank John for that."

"Where is he?"

"Here," said the physician's voice. "We're all here but the Colonel."

"He's in London," said Marion Black, "buying supplies."

"Is Johnson here?"

"Yes, sir," said the respectful voice of the pale-faced old man. "Very much at sea, if you'll allow me, Mister Chester."

"They haven't told you, Johnson?" I asked incredulously. "You must think us all mad!"

"No, sir," said he promptly, "I give you my word I don't, sir. Had it been one or two of you, why then I might fancy you'd gone off your respective rockers, as you might say, sir; but six of you—that's different."

"What do you think, then, Johnson?"

"I think there's something big going on, sir," said the old man. "Something fearfully big. With poor young Mister Exeter blind, and you a-lying here like this—what
is
it, sir? They told me you were the proper one to explain."

"Johnson," I said, grinning, "that's the first time I ever heard your voice express anything but well-bred deference."

Johnson coughed and, I imagine, looked at the floor with embarrassment. "Very strange circumstances, sir," he said.

"I shan't keep you in suspense, Johnson, although these callous people have. Are you prepared to hear a nightmare of a yarn?"

"Are you prepared to tell it?" growled John Baringer.

"Oh, yes. I seem to have had a good bit of rest lately." I drank from a glass that Marion put to my mouth, and said, "You remember Jerry Wolfe?"

"Of course, sir."

"You were there the day he came back to the Gloucester Club and was murdered, weren't you?" I knew he had been, but I was feeling my way into the story.

"Yes, sir. I brought him and Mister Talbot here a bottle of Scotch. I saw him killed."

"He told Alec—" Alec Talbot was the chap with one arm; he'd left the other in Europe somewhere, during the latter days of the war—"he told Alec a tale that day, Johnson. It's a wild, incredible, super-fantastic tale. No sane man would believe a word of it."

"No, sir."

"But we six believe it, Johnson."

"Yes, sir. I gather it has something to do with this—"

"This madness of ours. It does. You see, Jerry Wolfe was nearly blinded in India when a Tower musket was discharged athwart his eyes. The bandages were removed as he was coming home, and he found he could see ... could see rather more than most of us can."

"Yes, sir," said the dignified voice. "May I ask what he could see, sir?"

"He could see into Hell," said Alec Talbot quietly.

"He could see that certain people are not—people," I went on. "Let me try to explain that. He discovered that there are among us many aliens of another race, perhaps from another dimension, or from another planet, or—who knows? He thought they were out of a different dimension, because he could see silvery lines behind them which he believed to be that dimension's scenery, as it were. Each of these aliens, these usurpers, as he called them, had stolen a human body, and was using it as a focal point of entrance into our world. Do you follow me?"

"With some difficulty, sir."

"Drop the 'sir', Johnson. We're all plain human beings together in this."

"Yes, sir."

"Well, he could see these alien creatures, but within them, or behind them, he could also see the human bodies they were occupying; the bodies which to everyone else appeared to be quite normal men and women. The bodies apparently didn't contain a human soul or mind or whatever you want to call it, but were only puppets for the interlopers. He sat in Charing Cross Station and made notes on them, at one stage of his adventures, and he decided that they were entering this world by usurping the bodies of newly-born children, children of unions between two of them or between one of them and a regular human. See?"

"Vaguely, sir."

"He figured out that after a few of them got into our dimension, through some fluke or other, they found that they could spawn puppet-humans who would become vehicles for others of their breed. They come 'in' by route of birth. Perhaps, Jerry thought, a freak accident generations ago let just one of them into our world, and he put his foot in the door. Now there are multitudes of them here. What was the ratio Jerry calculated, Alec?"

"About seven to six in our favor," said Alec Talbot. "Of course, that was figured within an hour or so at Charing Cross Station. He didn't have a chance to make a real survey. They got him first."

"Yes, they got him. He was so shocked by his discovery that he didn't cover up fast enough, and they found out he could see them. They harried him all over half of England, and finally they tracked him down at the club and shot his guts out."

"He died in my arms," said Alec without expression.

"But Mister Wolfe was shot by men from Scotland Yard and bobbies, sir," protested Johnson.

"That's what they seemed to be, Johnson, to you. Jerry could see them truly. He knew they were the usurpers, using the husks of human beings as points of contact between our dimension and theirs."

Johnson coughed politely. "And this is the story he told Mister Talbot?"

"It is."

"And you all believe it?"

"We do. Partly because it tallies up with a lot of queer things, partly because it explains a lot of others. But mainly because we all knew Jerry Wolfe, and he was as sane and decent a fellow as ever breathed tobacco smoke."

"Yes, sir."

"He couldn't see all of their dimension, you understand. It was only where one of them had taken over a human body that the veil was thin enough to be pierced by his blast-warped sight. There was a sort of field of force or something around them, and he could see the beasts and their nearby background of silver lines that ran at an angle of about forty-five degrees. That was all. He killed the human parts of three or four of them, and although he couldn't touch the other-dimensional folk with his bullets, when their human puppets died they were relegated to their own world again. They faded out and vanished, he said. Their point of contact was obliterated."

"I see, sir. I begin to get the picture. These foreigners—" I could not help smiling at the word—"have been infiltrating our island by some means, using our bodies, you might say, as disguises. A dirty bit of business, sir, if I may say so."

"Very dirty, Johnson. Because if nothing is done to stop them, eventually they'll have our whole world to themselves."

Johnson evidently thought this over for a moment. I could hear everyone breathing heavily in the silence. Then, "What do they want with it, sir?" he asked.

"Lord knows. Jerry never asked 'em."

"Ah. It gives one pause, sir."

"It damned well does. It's given us so much pause—the six of us—that we've decided to devote our lives to fighting the usurpers. That's why we're doing this huggermugger business, Johnson. We're duplicating Jerry Wolfe's experience, trying to get our eyesight warped or marred or shifted, or whatever the phrase ought to be, as his was. So we can see 'em, and combat 'em, and send 'em home to their silver-lined wastelands."

"And that's what happened—"

"To Geoff Exeter. Yes. We did the same thing with him that you saw two nights ago with me in the chair. Unfortunately—there's a feeble word!—we bungled somehow. And Geoff is blind."

"You get used to it," said Geoff Exeter cheerfully. "It's in a good cause. Better cause than we fought the Nazis for if Jerry Wolfe was right."

"We're banking that he was. We're betting our eyes or our lives, Johnson, that he was right."

"If you'll forgive me, sir, it seems a terribly long chance to take. He might have been addled in the head, or drunk; or if he was right, you may all lose your eyes and never acquire his strange vision."

"We're relying on old Jerry," said Alec Talbot. "You see, at least three of us were at loose ends, with nothing to make of our lives, and our hearts full of bitterness and frustration. It's given us an aim in life. It's given us life itself, by heaven! We drew lots, Geoff and Will and I; Geoff got first try, Will the second, and I lost. I'm to be the third one. Before he was murdered, Jerry told me who was all right and who wasn't. He'd seen a few chaps he knew—Will and Geoff and the doctor here, Marion and Colonel Bedford. He bequeathed me their names. I rounded them up and beat them with Jerry's yarn until they began to feel a horrid truth in it. Then just a few days ago I remembered that you'd been our waiter at the Club that night, and he'd sat easy and safe in your presence; so we knew you were human too."

"I'm sure I'm very gratified, sir. But what can I do?"

"We don't know. We don't know what any of us can do. But we were only six. Johnson—six against half a world. We grasped at you like a drowning man at a—"

"Straw," said Marion. "Really, Alec, your similes stun me!"

"I was going to say 'bottle of whisky'," growled Alec.

"Do you get the whole picture now, Johnson?" I asked.

"I think so, sir. Just one thing...."

"What's that?"

"Well, sir, what do these aliens look like? I mean, if you can see them?"

"Like obscene nightmares," I said. "Like demons down under the sea. Like anything and everything you can conjure up that's evil and strange and full of hellishness."

"Oh. Quite so, sir," said Johnson woodenly.

"Jerry talked of toads, of sharks and dragons, weird tree-shapes and amoebae, but he made it clear that those were only far-fetched similes." Alec's voice was low; he was remembering his friend, haggard and gray in the face, a ghastly ghost of the man he had once been. I broke in.

"Yes, Johnson, they're a fearful horde. If Jerry was right, they're overrunning us in a manner far more subtle and deadly than any invader ever did before. Which is why we must take these desperate measures. Are you with us?"

"Of course, sir," said the old waiter.

"Why?" asked the skeptical Doctor Baringer. "Why so quick to leap at this fantastic story, Johnson? I've got into the affair over my head, but I'm still not sure I believe in it."

"Well, sir, you might say I'm in just about the same position as Mister Exeter and Mister Talbot and Mister Chester. I'm an old soldier, much too old to be of any use in a regular war any longer; and I still fret for the days of bivouac and battle. If you'll pardon the liberty, sir, I must agree with you that it's a rum go, a very rum go. But if it's true, then I may be of some slight use in the world after all."

"You were a soldier, Johnson?" I asked.

"Sergeant, Boer War, sir. I fought at the siege of Ladysmith and a dozen other engagements."

"I thought the Boer War was a million years ago," said Marion Black.

"Very nearly, miss," said Johnson with a dry chuckle.

"Welcome to the ranks, Sergeant Johnson," said Alec Talbot.

I started to say something, but suddenly was very weary, so instead I went to sleep.