«I hope so. I certainly hope so.» J was not one for physical demonstrations of emotion, but he placed his hand on Richard's shoulder.

Captain Ralston called, «What now, sir?»

J answered, «Set a course for the USA. We proceed as planned.»

Richard tried to stand, but fell back into his seat. «I'd like to stay up and chat but… «

J said, «You'd better get back in your bunk.»

Zoe gently pushed past J's elbow, saying, «Here now, Dick. Let me help you.» She did not quite succeed in keeping her voice steady and impersonal.

Chapter 9

«May I smoke, Dr. Colby?»

«By all means, sir.»

J lit his pipe and thoughtfully puffed it into life, staring out the tall window over the green garden city of Berkeley to the sailboat-dotted bay and the Golden Gate Bridge beyond. The afternoon sun was bright in an almost cloudless sky that seemed after the gray overcasts of London, unnaturally blue.

J began, «You've examined him?»

«Yes.»

«What do you think?»

«The prognosis is favorable, certainly more favorable than it was in the case of poor Dexter. Your Richard Blade would seem to be perfectly normal except for one thing.»

«What's that?»

«He's living in the past, or to be more exact, he appears to have lost a span of ten years or more.»

«Lost?»

«Forgotten. Repressed. In his own mind he is a much younger man than he really is, a man who has never visited the X dimensions, full of the confidence of his training and his successful career in British intelligence. He is a man in love with and engaged to a Zoe Cornwall, a Zoe Cornwall who was never married to Reginald Smythe-Evans, never lost her children, never was widowed.»

J turned to face the man. «But Dr. Colby, he seemed to remember everything on the plane, even the Ngaa.»

«He remembers nothing of what happened on the plane. After all, he killed three of his own organization's men with his bare hands. That can't be an easy thing to face. And the Ngaa is what drove him into amnesia in the first place. At present Ngaa is no more to him than a meaningless word.»

J stood, back to the window, studying the psychiatrist, thinking, Can I trust the judgment of this fellow?

Had he not devoted himself to psychology, Dr. Saxton Colby could have been a actor. He had an actor's deep, carrying voice, an actor's high cheekbones and expressive lean face, an actor's lithe and graceful body, an actor's shock of long disheveled iron-gray hair. J knew, from a cursory study of Colby's dossier at Copra House, that he had been raised in a theatrical family, and that his father had been a famous Shakespearean performer.

J had known actors, including a few of the more famous film stars. They were a self-centered lot at best, yet here was a man who had broken with that world to devote himself to studying and helping others. Yes, I think I can trust him..

Colby leaned back in his leather-upholstered swivel chair, looking up at J calmly, confidently, slacks-clad long legs crossed, white short-sleeved sport shirt open at the throat. «One progresses, as they say, two steps forward and one step back,» he said.

J began to pace the room, puffing moodily. «If only we had more to go on.»

«It would be easier,» Dr. Colby agreed. «At first glance Dexter and Blade would appear to be the only recorded cases of this particular syndrome.»

J halted in midstride. «What do you mean, 'At first glance?' «

Colby had swiveled to follow J's movements across the large room. «You are familiar with the work of the American student of the unusual, Charles Fort?»

«Yes, as a matter of fact. I've read his book Wild Talents, and couldn't help but notice the similarity between his 'Fortean Events' and the things that the Ngaa has been doing.»

«Then you understand the implications. The Ngaa has invaded our universe many times in the past and may continue in the future. I've studied the Ngaa. I think I've studied this being more than any other living man, and in my studies I've found that others have gone before me, attempting to uncover the true nature of the creature, if one can call it a creature. Charles Fort was not the only one, by any means. Some of them have, I think, come much closer than he did.»

«Who, for example?»

Colby searched through the piles of papers and books on his desk and came up with a sheaf of papers. «I don't know who wrote this pamphlet, but I suspect it was a turn-of-the-century occultist named DeCastries.»

J took the copy and examined it. It was perhaps twenty pages long, on eight and a half by eleven sheets. The title caught his eye. «Megapolisomancy.» J raised a questioning eyebrow.

«DeCastries had a theory that what we call hauntings or Fortean events were caused by some sort of paramental beings that were attracted by large cities, that somehow fed off the life energies of the masses of people jammed together there. I think he had at least part of the truth. The Ngaa seems to like big cities, but it has been known to function outside them.»

«Where did you get this thing?» J was leafing through it, reading a line here, a line there.

«I joined an occultist society called the Rosicrucian Order. Their world headquarters is just south of here, in San Jose. I worked my way up from level to level until I reached the point where they would allow me to read the books they keep in their restricted library, books they won't show the general public or even the novices, though I should tell you the books they do let the novices see are quite amazing. I found a great deal, there in the restricted stacks, but this was so interesting I took the liberty of copying the more relevant passages.»

J read aloud, «'Gargantuan tombs or monstrous vertical coffins of living humanity, a breeding ground for the worst of paramental entities.' Just the sort of hocus-pocus one would expect to find in the library of some lunatic fringe secret society.»

«Laugh if you will,» Colby said soberly, «but if you look into the matter you'll find that so-called lunatic fringe occultist secret societies have had a hand in every major political upheaval in history. There were Masons in the American Revolution, Rosicrucians in the French Revolution, the Vril Society backing Hitler. There was Rasputin, the Compte de St. Germaine, so many others. Surely you, of all people, are aware that there are things that are not told to the ordinary man in the street.»

«Hmm. Yes. You have a point.» J sat down across the desk from Colby and began idly fishing around in the pile of books and papers. «All the same, here's something more my style.» He picked up a paperback copy of The Star Rover, by Jack London.

«Ah yes,» Colby said. «London's last major work. As you may recall, it is about a man who can travel freely through space and time, as freely as our friend Richard Blade.»

«What are you trying to tell me?»

«London was a friend of DeCastries, and the center of a literary coterie that included the poet George Sterling and the fiction writers Ambrose Bierce and Clark Ashton Smith, the same coterie that founded, in 1909, the prestigious California Writers Club. There were others in the group whose reputations have been less lasting, who have been unjustly eclipsed by the more famous members. Nora May French, for example. And there was some sort of scandal about the founding of the California Writers Club that all writers on the subject hint at but none explain. DeCastries, Bierce, Smith, London, French, Sterling… They knew something, J! They knew something about the X dimensions, and they knew something about the Ngaa.»

«What makes you so sure?»

«It runs like an obsessive undercurrent through the work of all them, now hidden, now openly revealed. Ambrose Bierce writes about invisible beings in his 'The Damned Thing,' London takes up the same theme in 'The Shadow and the Flash,' and Smith repeats it in 'The Double Shadow.' And all of them wrote of other worlds, exactly the sort of worlds Richard Blade has so often visited. Have you read 'Poseidonis' by Smith? 'Before Adam' by London? 'Wine of Wizardry' by George Sterling?»