DRIVER
503
grandfather. Just what they hoped to accomplish he w.as forbidden
to say. But the general aim, I might as well know, was to save man–
kind from annihilation.
I shot him a startled look; he was smiling. Beneath his tanned
cheeks the young color danced.
"You've seen the newspapers," said Sandy. "The end gets nearer
and nearer. Nobody else is really trying to stop it."
Casting about for a badly-needed plausible touch at this point, it
occurs to me to mention his "hypnotic voice." It was nothing of the
sort, rather a boyish, matter-of-fact voice, yet I hesitate to put forth
any
serious
explanation for what was happening. My early im–
pression of him had vanished. In a strange apprehensive sleepiness
I found myself hanging upon his words. I thought of the "missions"
of my own youth, the awakenings I dreamed of bringing to my
fellow man. Rooted behind my steering-wheel of white, sun-warmed
plastic, I had a glimmering of how those others would have reacted,
as I did now, half with the drowsy numbness of Muriel's favorite
poet, half with a heart shocked by its sudden pounding.
He talked the entire hour. Of that crazy quilt only scraps come
back today. Good and Evil existed, pitted against one another. He,
Sandy, had seen an angel routed by Lucifer in the New York Subway.
The beautiful white yarn of vapor-trails was being used to entangle
us all by statesmen, adult impersonators, lurching from one trouble–
spot to the next. Their explosions in the press and on TV caused
a kind of horrible psychic fallout in people's living rooms. Forces in
the next world were fighting to reach us with messages rarely heard,
almost never heeded. The resurrection of the body was at hand; we
were no longer to be slaves of- personality? nationality? His exact
word escapes me; no matter. We had reached the town. The Princess
might or might not see fit to tell me more. Sandy had already implied
-with a touch of condescension which, in my increasingly pliable
state, turned my very bones to wax-that I had been chosen from
among thousands to help them through this stage of their mission.
"A lot depends on what she thinks of you," he said earnestly.
We parked in front of a willow-shaded Tourist Home. From
the car I watched Sandy leap up the steps to the porch and into the
house without knocking. A fly lit on my face. I could not have
driven away.
