The Dancers of Noyo by Margaret St. Clair

accelerated well.
     
                  "Thanks. Thanks a million," I said when I had got my breath back. Through the rear window I could see the two men standing in the road, looking sore and glum.
     
                  "That's OK," the rancher said, waving his pipe (he was smoking, which shows how square he was). "I don't like those people. Anybody they're chasing must be all right"
     
                  "Thanks," I said again. We were silent. I wondered whether I was wise to be going south. Had the idea that I could deal with the Noyo Dancer by invoking some dreamy convenant been accurate? Probably not; and yet I was convinced that my experiences as Bennet held the key to getting rid of the Dancers' tyranny.
     
                  I was to forget this intuition, and remember it only later. Yet it was truthful and accurate.
     
    -
     

Chapter VIII
     
                  The artist's house bothered me. I had scarcely crossed the threshold when I began to feel uneasy, so that I found myself sniffing and turning my head from side to side, trying to locate the source of my distress.
     
                  The artist—he said his name was Farnsworth—had picked me up just above Mendocino town after the rancher, who had grown a little too inquisitive, had turned off for his cousin's place. I had been glad of the lift, for no sooner had I parted from the rancher than I began to feel a sort of shudder, like the aura of epilepsy, between my shoulders. It hadn't happened before, but I knew immediately what it meant. I was in for another extra-life.
     
                  "Life" isn't quite the word, for I was pretty sure I wasn't going to be human this time. A tree, a clod, something marine—anyhow, something pretty far down in the vital scale. What was left of my ego was itching with fear. I hoped the company of another person might help ward off an experience that I knew I couldn't return from. I got into Farnsworth's Mercedes eagerly.
     
                  He was a slim man in his middle-thirties, with slim well-drawn eyebrows and a fine-featured, smooth, flesh-less face. His hands were big. We went bumping along past the town (the highway around Mendocino town has been blown up several times by dynamiters who didn't approve of quite so much concrete on a scenic route), and when we got to the southern outskirts Farnsworth asked me if I'd like to come up to his place for a drink. I accepted this offer eagerly too, since I dreaded being alone. Farnsworth was not the most pleasant companion in the world; but the extra-life I feared hadn't materialized. With him, I had stayed myself.
     
                  We drove up a glittering driveway and stopped between two Monterey pines in front of a low redwood shack. "Like my drive?" Farnsworth said as we got out. "It's made of ground-up glass bottles. I do them in a tumbling barrel myself."
     
                  "Fine idea," I said, fighting down the desire to start dancing along the strip of glittering glass. "Good ecology. " ... Well, it was better fighting down the wish to dance than it would have been feeling my roots wandering around looking for water or my shell being forced open by a knife.
     
                  We went into the house. As I said before, it made me uneasy, and I didn't like the artist much better than his house, though he exuded kindliness and goodwill. He reminded me of somebody, but I couldn't think who. Finally I placed it. He reminded me of the e-nun-ci-at-or at Russian Gulch.
     
                  When he came back with the drinks—red wine from the Italian-Swiss colony at Asti near Cloverdale—I said, "Excuse me, uhn , but are you, uhn , having what they call the chemical conscience?" I was so apologetic because I was, in essence, accusing him of being at least a murderer; the "chemical conscience" has never been administered for anything