The Girl in His Mind. Robert F. Young
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have remembered even that much of the wretched terrain. Ideally, a man’s mind-country should have been comprised only of the places and times he wanted to remember. Practically, however, that was far from being the case.
He glanced back down into the rain-pocked valley that he had just crossed. The rain and the mist made for poor visibility. He could only faintly distinguish the three figures of his pursuers. The trio seemed a little closer now.
*
Ever since he had first set foot into his mind, some ten hours ago, they had been on his trail, but for some reason he had been unable to bring himself to go back and find out who they were and what they wanted. Hence he was as vexed with himself as he was with them.
After resting for a few minutes, he descended the hill and started across the Deneb 1 wasteland. It was a remarkably detailed materialization, and his quarry’s footprints stood out clearly in the duplicated sand.
Sabrina York did not even know the rudiments of the art of throwing off a mind-tracker. It would have done her but little good if she had, for twelve years as a psycheye had taught Blake all the tricks. Probably she had taken it for granted that the mere act of hiding out in her tracker’s mind was in itself a sufficient guarantee of her safety. After all, she had no way of knowing that he had discovered her presence.
Mind-country was as temporally inconsecutive as it was topographically incongruous, so Blake was not surprised when the Deneb 1 wasteland gave way to an expanse of boyhood meadow. Near the meadow was the house where Blake had lived at a much later date. In reality, the places were as far apart in miles as they were in years, but here in the country of his mind they existed side by side, surrounded by heterogeneous landscapes from all over the civilized sector of the galaxy and by the sharply demarcated spectra of a hundred different suns. A few of the suns were in the patchwork sky—Sirius, for example, and its twinkling dwarf companion. Most of them, however, were present only in their remembered radiance. To add to the confusion, scattered night memories interrupted the hodge-podge horizon with columns of darkness, and here and there the gray column of a dawn or dusk memory showed.
The house was flanked on one side by a section of a New Earth spaceport and on the other by an excerpt of an Ex-earth city-block. Behind it flowed a brief blue stretch of Martian waterway.
Sabrina’s footsteps led up to the front door, and the door itself was ajar. Perhaps she was still inside. Perhaps she was watching him even now through one of the remembered windows. He scanned them with a professional eye, but saw no sign of her.
Warily he stepped inside, adjusting the temperature of his all-weather jacket to the remembered air-conditioning. His father was sitting in the living room, smoking, and watching 3V. He had no awareness of Blake. At Blake’s entry he went right on smoking and watching as though the door had neither opened nor closed. He would go right on smoking and watching till Blake died and the conglomeration of place-times that constituted Blake’s mind-world ceased to be. Ironically, he was watching nothing. The 3V program that had been in progress at the time of the unconscious materialization had failed to come through.
*
The memory was a treasured one—the old man had perished in a ‘copter crash several years ago—and for a long while Blake did not move. He had never been in his own mind before. Consequently he was more affected than he might otherwise have been. Finally, stirring himself, he walked out into the kitchen. On a shelf above the sink stood a gaily colored box of his mother’s favorite detergent with a full-length drawing of Vera Velvetskin, the company’s blond and chic visual symbol, on the front. His mother was standing before the huge automatic range, preparing a meal she had served twenty-three years ago. He regarded her with moist eyes. She had died a dozen years before his father, but the wound that her death had caused had never healed. He wanted to go up behind her and touch her shoulder and say, “What’s for supper, mom?” but he knew it would do no good. For her he had no reality, not only because he was far in her future, but because in his mind-world she was a mortal and he, a god—a picayune god, perhaps, but a real one.
As he was about to turn away, the name-plate on the range caught his eye, and thinking that he had read the two words wrong, he stepped closer so that he could see them more clearly. No, he had made no mistake: the first word was “Sabrina,” and the second was “York.”
He stepped back. Odd that a kitchen range should have the same name as his quarry. But perhaps not unduly so. Giving appliances human names had been common practice for centuries. Even a name like “Sabrina York,” while certainly not run-of-the-mill, was bound to be duplicated in real life. Nevertheless a feeling of uneasiness accompanied him when he left the kitchen and climbed the stairs to the second floor.
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