He had suspected the truth immediately, and when he had seen the
woman's handkerchief with the initials "SB" embroidered on it lying
by one of the filing cabinets he had known definitely that his quarry
was hiding out in his mind. Retiring to his bachelor quarters, he had
entered at the same place-time and set off in pursuit.
Her only advantage lost, Sabrina York was now at his mercy. Unless
she discovered his presence and was able to locate his most recently
materialized place-time before he over-took her, her capture was
assured.
Only two things bothered Blake. The little office was far in his past,
and it was unlikely that anyone save the few intimate acquaintances
whom he had told about it were aware that it had ever existed. How,
then, had a total stranger such as Sabrina York learned enough about it
to enable her to use it as a point of entry?
The other thing that bothered him was of a much more urgent nature.
He had been in enough minds and he had read enough on the subject
of Trevorism to know that people were sometimes capable of creating
beings considerably higher on the scale of mind-country evolution
than ordinary memory-ghosts. One woman whom he had apprehended in her
own mind had created a walking-talking Virgin Mary who watched over
her wherever she went. And once, after tracking down an ex-enlisted
man, he had found his quarry holed up in the memory-image of an army
barracks with a ten-star general waiting on him hand and foot. But
these, and other, similar, cases, had to do with mal-adjusted people,
and moreover, the super-image in each instance had been an image that
the person involved had _wanted_ to create. Therefore, even assuming
that Blake was less well-adjusted than he considered himself to be, why
had he created three such malevolent super-images as Miss Stoddart,
Officer Finch, and Vera Velvetskin?
* * * * *
They followed him off the campus into a vicarious memory-image of
Walden Pond, Thoreau's shack, and the encompassing woods. Judging from
the ecstatic "oh's" and "ah's" they kept giving voice to, the place
delighted them. Once, glancing back over his shoulder, he saw them
standing in front of Thoreau's shack, looking at it as though it were a
doll's house. Not far away, Thoreau was sitting in under a tall pine,
gazing up into the branches at a bird that had come through only as a
vague blur of beak and feathers.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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