"Just where do they live?"
I eyed her carefully, hoping my glance did not look like a wolf eyeing a lamb. "Well, they gave me some crude directions. Said I was to turn at the main highway onto this road and come about twenty miles and stop on the left side when I came upon one of those new road signs where someone had shot one of the spokes out."
"Spokes? Left side--" She mumbled the words and was apparently mulling the idea around in her mind. She was not more than about seventeen, sun-tanned and animal-alive from living in the open. I wondered about her. As far as I was concerned, she was part and parcel of this whole mysterious affair. No matter what she said or did, it was an obvious fact that the hidden road sign directions pointed to this farm. And since no one at seventeen can be kept in complete ignorance of the business of the parents, she must be aware of some of the ramifications.
After some thought she said, "No, I don"t know of any Harrisons."
I grunted. I was really making the least of this, now that I"d arrived.
"Your folks at home?" I asked.
"Yes," she replied.
"I think I"ll drop in and ask them, too."
She shrugged. "Go ahead," she said with the noncommittal att.i.tude of youth. "You didn"t happen to notice whether the mailbox flag was up, did you?"
I hadn"t, but I espied back quickly and said, "No, it isn"t."
"Then the mailman hasn"t been to deliver," she said. "Mind if I ride back to the house with you, mister?"
"Hop in."
She smiled brightly and got in quickly. I took off down the road toward the house at an easy pace. She seemed interested in the car, and finally said, "I"ve never been in a car like this before. New?"
"Few weeks," I responded.
"Fast?"
"If you want to make it go fast. She"ll take this rocky road at fifty, if anyone wants to be so foolish."
"Let"s see."
I laughed. "n.o.body but an idiot would tackle a road like this at fifty."
"I like to go fast. My brother takes it at sixty."
That, so far as I was concerned, was youthful exaggeration. I was busy telling her all the perils of fast driving when a rabbit came barrelling out of the bushes along one side and streaked across in front of me.
I twitched the wheel. The car went out of the narrow road and up on the shoulder, tilting quite a bit. Beyond the rabbit I swung back into the road, but not before the youngster had grabbed my arm to keep from being tossed all over the front seat.
Her grip was like a hydraulic vise. My arm went numb and my fingers went limp on the wheel. I struggled with my left hand to spin the wheel to keep on the narrow, winding road and my foot hit the brake to bring the car down, but fast.
Taking a deep breath as we stopped, I shook my right hand by holding it in my left at the wrist. I was a ma.s.s of tingling pins and needles because she had grabbed me just above the elbow. It felt as though it would have taken only a trifle more to pinch my arm off and leave me with a b.l.o.o.d.y stump.
"Sorry, mister," she said breathlessly, her eyes wide open. Her face was white around the corners of the mouth and at the edges of her nose. The whiteness of the flesh under the deep tan gave her a completely frightened look, far more than the shake-up could have produced.
I reached over and took her hand. "That"s a mighty powerful grip you--"
The flesh of her hand was hard and solid. Not the meaty solidity of good tone, fine training and excellent health. It was the solidity of a--all I could think of at the time was a green cuc.u.mber. I squeezed a bit and the flesh gave way only a trifle. I rubbed my thumb over her palm and found it solid-hard instead of soft and yielding.
I wondered.
I had never seen a case of Mekstrom"s Disease--before.
I looked down at the hand and said, "Young lady, do you realize that you have an advanced case of Mekstrom"s Disease?"
She eyed me coldly. "Now," she said in a hard voice. "I know you"ll come in."
Something in my make-up objects violently to being ordered around by a slip of a girl. I balance off at about one-sixty. I guessed her at about two-thirds of that, say one-ten or thereabouts--
"One-eight," she said levelly.
#A telepath!#
"Yes," she replied calmly. "And I don"t mind letting you know it, so you"ll not try anything stupid."
#I"m getting the heck out of here!#
"No, you"re not. You are coming in with me."
"Like heck!" I exploded.
"Don"t be silly. You"ll come in. Or shall I lay one along your jaw and carry you?"
I had to try something, anything, to get free. Yet--
"Now you"re being un-bright," she told me insolently. "You should know that you can"t plan any surprise move with a telepath. And if you try a frontal attack I"ll belt you so cold they"ll have to put you in the oven for a week."
I just let her ramble for a few seconds because when she was rattling this way she couldn"t put her entire mental attention on my thoughts. So while she was yaking it off, I had an idea that felt as though it might work.
She shut up like a clam when she realized that her mouthing had given me a chance to think, and I went into high gear with my perception:
#Not bad--for a kid. Growing up fast. Been playing hookey from momma, leaving off your panties like the big girls do. I can tell by the elastic cord marks you had "em on not long ago.#
Seventeeners have a lot more modesty than they like to admit. She was stunned by my cold-blooded catalog of her body just long enough for me to make a quick lunge across her lap to the door handle on her side.
I flipped it over and gave her a shove at the same time. She went bottom over appet.i.te in a sprawl that would have jarred the teeth loose in a normal body and might have cracked a few bones. But she landed on the back of her neck, rolled and came to her feet like a cat.
I didn"t wait to close the door. I just tromped on the go-pedal and the car leaped forward with a jerk that slammed the door for me. I roared forward and left her just as she was making another grab.
How I hoped to get out of there I did not know. All I wanted was momentary freedom to think. I turned this way and that to follow the road until I came to the house. I left the road, circled the house with the turbine screaming like a banshee and the car taking the corners on the outside wheels. I skidded into a turn like a racing driver and ironed my wheels out flat on the takeaway, rounded another corner and turned back into the road again going the other way.
She was standing there waiting for me as I pelted past at a good sixty, and she reached out one girder-strong arm, latched onto the frame of the open window on my side, and swung onto the half-inch trim along the bottom of the car-body like a switchman hooking a freight car.
She reached for the steering wheel with her free hand.
I knew what was to happen next. She"d casually haul and I"d go off the road into a tree or pile up in a ditch, and while the smoke was clearing out of my mind, she"d be untangling me from the wreck and carting me over her shoulder, without a scratch to show for her adventure.