Time Thieves

away, he stopped, his ghastly white face expressionless. He nodded and said, “Good evening, Mr. Mullion.”
        
        He had the voice of a television newscaster. If he had been gravel-throated, rough and mean, he would not have been so frightening. This voice was unsettling.
        
        “Don't be frightened, Mr. Mullion.”
        
        “Why shouldn't I be?”
        
        “It isn't going to hurt.”
        
        “What isn't?”
        
        “Whatever we decide to do with you, Mr. Mullion.” Smooth voice, cool voice, its tones fatherly and reassuring. “We will make it just as painless as possible.”
        
        The stranger's face remained expressionless.
        
        Pete felt the white, spherical mind entering his own mental perimeters once again, slowly swelling until it threatened to completely dominate him. The thread behind it had become a string; the string swiftly grew into a cord; the cord became a taut cable. From his distant control perch, the eyeless being had begun to exert more influence with the stranger in dark clothes. In turn, it was using the stranger's mind to influence Peter Mullion as well. Now, relentlessly, images of contentment and peace poured across Pete's consciousness, spilling over all the sharp edges of his fear and coating them.
        
        The stranger did not smile. Neither did he frown. Indeed, at such close range, under such trying circumstances, his face looked far more like a clever rubber mask than like human flesh. Though it was exceedingly well executed, the mask's age lines and laugh lines looked unreal, as though sculpted in minutes rather than years.
        
        The eyeless creature, working from its distant lair, began to radiate a desire for sleep, along with the images of comfort and contentment. Pete felt heavy, as if boulders lay across his shoulders. He was capped with exhaustion, jacketed in weariness. He wanted to drop to the pavement, curl up and sleep, sleep…
        
        But his fascination with the blandness of the stranger's face made him hold on just a moment longer-just long enough to reach out and grab at the man's forehead, along his hairline, in search of the mask's edges. He could not find an edge. But in a second, he felt the flesh give more than flesh ought to. His fingernails slit it, tearing it from hairline to eyebrows.
        
        The emanations of sleep ceased.
        
        The stranger stepped back, reaching up to touch the wound. There was no blood whatsoever. But beneath the plastic flesh, there was the dull sheen of burnished steel, smooth and featureless.
        

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    VIII
        
        
        It did not occur to him that he might have any other option but flight. Turning away from the thing in front of him, taking advantage of the confusion which he had caused, he leaped over a low, well-trimmed hedge, onto the lawn of an enormous, many-gabled Victorian house. The street would have been too open; here, shadows already half concealed him.
        
        He turned and looked back. The stranger had disappeared; he was not on the sidewalk, and he had not come in pursuit. Perhaps he had circled half the block to the alleyway, with a mind toward cutting off Pete's escape at that point. But that seemed unlikely, for it would have been easier to make a direct pursuit.
        
        Then the thing had gone for help. Its false face had been damaged, increasing its risk of discovery by other citizens. It had gone back to get repaired and to send reinforcements.
        
        Back where?
        
        That question froze him. He stood in the shadows, breathing heavily, listening to the night sounds, trying to imagine where the thing had come from. There was only one logical source: the eyeless, toothless creature sitting before the bank of controls, the beast from his dreams.
        
        Cautiously, he continued across the lawn, his indecision broken. He kept to the shrubbery and the shadows by the house and reached a walk that lead to a garage and, then, to the alleyway in the middle of the block. He paused by the wall of the garage and looked both ways down the side street. Finding both directions deserted, he chose to go left, where there were more operable street-lamps. Until he had ascertained a bit more of the change in his circumstances, he did not want to return to the house. The house would be