The Visible Man and Other Stories Read online

  The Visible Man

  GEORGE ROWAN’S ONLY chance of escape came to him like a benediction, sudden and unlooked for, on the road between Newburyport and Boston.

  They were on old Route 1, the Newburyport Turnpike, and there was not another car in sight. The fully automated Route 95 guideway was just a few miles west of here, running almost parallel to Route 1, but for reasons of his own the sheriff had preferred to take the old secondary road, even though he had to drive the car himself and couldn’t possibly get up to guideway speeds. Perhaps he simply enjoyed manual driving. Perhaps it was some old State regulation, now solidified into tradition, that prohibited the transportation of prisoners on automated roads. Perhaps it was just some more of the expected psychological torture, taking the slowest possible route so that Rowan would have time to build up a greater charge of fear and dreadful anticipation for what awaited him in Boston.

  For Rowan, the trip had already become interminable. His memory of the jail in Newburyport, of his crime, of his hasty trial, of his past life—all had become hazy and indistinct. It seemed as if he had been riding forever, on the road, going to Boston for the execution of his sentence. Only that was real and vivid: the slight swaying motion of the car, the seat upholstery sticking uncomfortably to his sweat-soaked back, the ridged rubber mat under his feet. The countryside they drove through was flat and empty, trees, meadows, cultivated fields, little streams, sometimes a boarded-up gas station or a long-abandoned roadside stand. The sky was a flat, washed-out blue, and the sunlight was thick and dusty. Occasionally they would bump over a pothole or a stretch of frost-buckled pavement—the State didn’t spend much anymore to keep up the secondary roads. The car’s electric engine made no sound at all, and the interior of the car was close and hot with the windows rolled up.

  Rowan found himself reluctantly watching the little motions of the steering wheel, apparently turning all by itself, driverless. That made him shiver. He knew intellectually, of course, that he was sitting on the front seat between the sheriff and the deputy, but he couldn’t see them. He could hear them breathing, and occasionally the deputy’s arm would brush against his own, but, for Rowan, they were invisible.

  He knew why they were invisible, but that didn’t make it any less spooky. When the State’s analysis computers had gone down into his mind and found the memories that proved him guilty, they had also, as a matter of course, implanted a very deep and very specific hypnotic injunction: from now on, George Rowan would not be able to see any other living creature. Apparently the injunction had not included trees and other kinds of vegetation, but it had covered animals and birds and people. He assumed that when he “saw” through invisible people—as he now “saw” the portions of the car that should have been blocked from sight by the sheriffs body—it was because his subconscious mind was extrapolating, creating a logical extension of the view from other visual data in order to comply with the spirit of the injunction. Nothing must be allowed to spoil the illusion. Nor could Rowan break it, although he knew what it was and how it had been created. It was too strong, and planted too deep. He was “blind” in a special and insidious way.

  There were a number of apparently sound reasons for doing this to convicted criminals. It made it almost impossible for a prisoner to escape or to resist his captors, for one thing, and the State psychologists also claimed that the resultant sense of supernatural isolation would engender an identity crisis in the prisoner, and so help contribute to his rehabilitation. Totally “blinding” the prisoners would accomplish both objectives in a more logical way. But the State administrators had been growing increasingly perverse over the years, and they chose the cruelest way. How much more terrible a thing this was than total blindness—to make the victim live in a sunlit empty world, haunted by ghosts and voices, pushed and punished by unseen forces, never knowing who was with him or what they were about to do to him. So the State men inflicted this on prisoners because it was cruel and they enjoyed it, just as they would enjoy torturing Rowan in Boston, driving him insane again and again in the name of psychological rehabilitation.

  At that moment, past Topsfield but not yet up to the Putnamville Reservoir, their right front tire blew out.

  They went into a terrifying spin. The world dissolved into a whirling blur, and bursts of sunlight jabbed Rowan’s face like a strobe light as they spun. The car hit the guardrail, spun out into the middle of the road again, spun back to hit the guardrail a second time. In the midst of the roar and the clatter and impact, Rowan had time to think that it would be better for him if he was killed in the crash, and time to realize that in spite of everything he did not want to die. Then the car was spinning out into the road, spinning back again. This time there was no guardrail to catch it. The car went careening off the road, fishtailing and losing momentum as it plowed through the deep soft loam of the shoulder, and dived into a shallow ditch.

  The dashboard leaped up and whammed into Rowan, but he managed to catch the blow on his arms and shoulders; the impact beat him black-and-blue, but did no lasting damage. In the same instant, as he was hitting the dashboard, he saw the windshield above the driver’s seat star and shatter, and the invisible deputy was thrown heavily against him. The car recoiled from the impact, slid a foot or two sideways, and canted to the left. Everything was still for a heartbeat, and then the car groaned and settled, canting over even more. The noise of the springs died away.

  There was a strangely peaceful silence.

  The car was resting head down at a forty-five-degree angle, listing badly to the left but not quite turned all the way over on its side. Rowan took a deep, shaky breath and decided that he was alive. The sheriff might not be. He was still invisible to Rowan, but it was obvious that he had been thrown partially through the windshield. Rowan had ended up leaning against the sheriff’s hip, and if his hips were at a level with the steering wheel then the rest of his body had to be protruding through the windshield. And there was blood on the glass. From the feel of it, the deputy seemed to be slumped over with his head almost in Rowan’s lap, stirring feebly, stunned but still alive. No conscious cogitation went on in Rowan’s mind, but as the deputy pushed against him and tried to sit up, Rowan raised his manacled hands and smashed them down on what he hoped was the deputy’s head. The first blow hit something soft, and the deputy began struggling weakly, but the second blow bit bone. The deputy stopped fighting. Rowan struck him again, and he stopped moving at all.

  Rowan sat quietly for a second, his breath hissing harshly in his throat, and then patted the deputy with his hands until he touched a jingly metal object. As he lifted it away from the deputy, it became visible for him, and yes, it was a key ring. He used one of the keys to unlock his handcuffs, and spent another few seconds searching the deputy for a gun; he didn’t find one, and decided that he couldn’t afford to waste any more time. He climbed over the deputy, rolled the side window down, and pulled himself up out of the car.

  He jumped down to the ground, lost his footing on the grassy slope, and went to his knees. For a moment, he remained kneeling, blinking in the raw hot sunlight, dirt under his fingers. Everything had happened too fast; only now, this instant with the sun in his face, did it become real for him—he was outside, he was free, he had a chance. Hope and terror exploded inside Rowan. He rose into a crouch, scanning his surroundings with a sudden feral intensity. Then he scrambled up the incline. At the top of the slope he paused only long enough to make sure no cars were coming before he dashed across the road and slid down into another ditch in an avalanche of dust and scree. A man-high expanse of grass and wildflowers stretched away from the road on this side. It closed over Rowan like the sea.

  At first, he ran flat-out, fast as he could go, the high grass whipping around him, wild with fear and exhilaration. He kept running until his breath was gone and he was staggering rather than sprinting, and then a root snagged his foot and the ground reached up to catch him, smack, like an outfielder catching a fly ball. He lay spread-ea
gled, flat on his face against the damp earth, gasping for air while everything seemed slowly to spin, the resin-smelling grass tickling his nose, tiny furtive insects scampering invisibly across his hands. When he could breathe again, he found that some of his panic had also gone. He sat up. He’d been leaving a trail like a goddamned elephant; he’d have to start being a little slier. If he trampled the grass and left a flattened wake behind him, it would be like a giant arrow pointing the way he had gone. He wouldn’t last an hour that way before the cops ran him down. He set off at a diagonal to his former path, picking his way with care, forcing himself to be slow. This way, perhaps he had a chance. More than he’d had a while ago, at least.

  Rowan reached a stand of scrub woods and pushed his pace up to a fast trot, taking a few more headers as the terrain got rougher. Every time the tree branches moved in the wind all the patterns of light and darkness would flow and reform, and he kept mistaking shadow for ground. Once he dropped four feet down a concealed embankment. He kept up the pace. If he broke an ankle he was finished, but he couldn’t afford to slow down either. They’d almost certainly catch him if they fielded a search party anytime soon. But Route 1 was infrequently patroled, that was in his favor, and the Boston people wouldn’t miss the sheriff for a while yet. If only he could get even an hour’s lead—

  After a few minutes, the woods began to die away into a region of small isolated trees and high bramble thickets. Rowan slid down a final bluff and found himself in someone’s alfalfa field. His second wind was long gone, and now every breath brought him a stab of pain in his side. He began to work his way around the field, skirting the outermost furrow. He walked slowly and painfully. Sweat had dried uncomfortably on his skin, making him itch, and his clothes were full of burrs and stickers. On the horizon, he could just make out the peaked roof of a farm building, thumbnail-small from here, gray tile glinting in the sun. A thin column of smoke rose black from a chimney, making a long lazy line across the sky. Rowan was halfway across the field, his shoes filling with loam at every step, when a dog began to bark in the distance.

  Rowan walked faster, but the barking became louder and closer. A goddamn watchdog then, definitely coming after him. He faced around, at bay, too beat-out to run for the tree line.

  The barking swelled into an angry challenging roar, and then cut off, ominous and abrupt. Impossible to tell which way it was coming in at him, he thought, and at that same instant felt a flash of searing pain as his pants leg was torn away by something invisible. Rowan cursed and kicked out wildly. His foot scored a solid hit on something, and the dog yelped. Rowan kicked out again, missed completely, and had to do a lurching gracestep to recover his balance. Pawprints appeared in the soft loam as the dog danced back out of range. Rowan realized that if he kept near the furrow he’d be able to track the dog’s movements in the loam. So when a line of pawprints came rushing directly in toward him like the wake of a torpedo, he judged his distance carefully and then lashed out with all his strength. His foot hit something with the clean, solid whump of a dropkicked football. The dog yelped again. It was apparently lifted off its feet by the impact and sent rolling across the top of the furrow—at least, that was how Rowan interpreted the sudden flattening of alfalfa and scattering of loam. Rowan started walking again, with great deliberation. Judging by the sound, the dog continued to trace snarling figure-eights around him at a safe distance, but it did not attack again.

  Rowan scrambled up into the scrub brush on the far side of the field and started off again, limping slightly, unwilling to take time to tend to the bite. If only he dared to rest. All his instincts told him to go to ground, find a sheltered spot in the deep woods and hide. But that would never work. They’d fly over the nearby forested areas with infrared heat sensors and spot him at once—there were no animals the size of a man left in the Massachusetts woods, any large trace would unequivocally be the fugitive. No, he would have to go to a town, where his heat-trace would be lost among those of other people. But the towns were the very place where he’d be the most helpless, and the most exposed.

  He crossed another cultivated field—seeing only a tractor moving far away across acres of soughing green-and-yellow grain—and then the ground began to turn porous and swampy, water oozing up to fill his footprints as soon as he had made them. At last he was faced with an actual stretch of marshland, miles of reeds and cat-o’-nine-tails interlaced with gleaming fingers of water. He was forced to turn more to the east to skirt it. Walking by the edge of the marsh, he could hear the whining of millions of mosquitoes, but could see none of them, even when they bit him. Occasionally there would be a splash and a little gout of water alongside him as he passed—frogs hopping off the bank to get out of his way, he assumed. Other unseen things rustled through the reeds around him. On the larger ponds, he could see the surface of the water wrinkle into a crumped leaf pattern as waterbirds landed or took off, but he couldn’t see the birds themselves. The air was full of invisible wings. Rowan found all of this so uncanny that he detoured, shivering, far enough to the north to get away from the marsh entirely. The ground began to rise again. There were cuts in the sides of hillocks here, and planed-off places, evidence of recent road-building. He pushed through a weed-choked scrub woodlot, and found himself on a bluff overlooking one of those strange suburban housing developments that seem to sprout up out of nowhere in the rural areas of Massachusetts, unconnected with anything and with no viable reason for existence.

  Rowan’s throat went dry. This would be the first major hurdle. He descended the bluff.

  At least there didn’t seem to be anybody around, Rowan thought, and then grimaced at his own fatigue-engendered stupidity. There could be a crowd within ten feet of him, or a posse armed to the teeth, and he’d never know it until the first shot went home. He started walking slowly along a sidewalk, heading for the crossroads he could see on the other side of the housing development. This seemed to be a fairly new complex. The lawns were still smears of ugly red clay, surrounded by hopeful little string fences that were somehow supposed to keep birds from eating the newly-planted grass seeds, and there had not yet been time for the basements to fill up with marshwater or the paint to peel off in the bitter sea wind. Maybe most people had gone to work, leaving only a few housepersons here and there, and maybe they would stay inside. His foot struck something.

  “Hey!” said a voice, at the level of his elbow.

  Rowan froze.

  “Hey, mister,” the voice said, reproachfully, “you knocked over all my soldiers.”

  A child. Rowan forced himself to think. “I’m sorry, son,” he said.

  “The whole army!”

  “I didn’t see you,” Rowan said, truthfully, “I’m sorry I messed up your army.”

  Suspicious silence from the boy.

  “I wasn’t thinking about where I was going,” Rowan said. That got a huhn sound out of the boy, who didn’t sound entirely mollified. The boy must have stood up then, as some of the toy soldiers he’d been touching became visible for Rowan, varicolored plastic figures lying askew on the sidewalk. Rowan hesitated, and then asked, “Which one of those roads leads to Hamilton?”

  “That one.”

  Wonderful. “The paved one?” Rowan asked cannily, and when the boy didn’t answer he pointed and said, “That one there?”

  “Uh-huh,” the boy said. The tone of puzzled suspicion was back in the child’s voice. There was something odd about this grownup. The boy didn’t respond when Rowan thanked him, but from the little scraping noises Rowan heard he guessed that the boy had sat down and begun to move his soldiers about again. The child had lost interest in Rowan. There was something odd about all grownups, and Rowan wasn’t unusual enough to provoke more than a mild passing wonderment.

  Rowan started off again. “You stepped on my fort!” the child wailed instantly. Ignoring him, Rowan kept walking. He maintained a brisk pace, keeping close to the curb and hoping that anyone coming up the sidewalk in the opposite direction
would have room to pass him without contact. In this fashion, he managed to make it through the development without further incident, and onto the road that led, hopefully, to Hamilton. Surely a search party would be out after him by now; if he didn’t find a town to lose himself in, he’d be finished. There were no sidewalks here, and no traffic on this one-lane back road, and if he kept to the center of it the chances of colliding with someone out for a stroll were remote. He walked as fast as he could without actually breaking into a suspicion-provoking run.

  When the housing development was hidden by a curve, he increased his pace to a fast trot. He could be jogging, couldn’t he? And besides, there was no help for it: his time was running out. The road began to climb, winding among small rolling hillocks, and the forest closed down on either side. Once a dog came down from some house set back in the trees, and yapped after him for a few hundred yards, but didn’t attack. About ten minutes after the dog gave up the chase, he came upon another house, this one set back from the road and climbing partway up a low hillside. There was a bicycle lying next to the road on the wide front lawn. Someone might be watching from the house, but Rowan decided that he’d have to take that chance. He walked casually over to the bicycle, set it upright in the road, mounted it, and rode unhurriedly away until the house was out of sight. Then he began to pump.

  The bicycle was too small for him, but not small enough to make the proposition impossible. It wobbled some, but he sent it whizzing along as fast as he was physically able to peddle. It rattled and creaked in protest, but it held together. Somehow he also managed to keep the thing upright and stay on top of it. The bicycle wasn’t a racer, but Rowan was a powerful man, and more important, a desperate man, and he got it up to a pretty respectable clip. He could cover twice the ground now that he could on foot, and he felt a thrill of real hope. Rowan peddled through the hills for a while, and then the country began to level out. Here the road intersected a somewhat larger secondary road, two lanes instead of one.