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Show 290 father. Where they were coming from was as deep a mystery as what they could mean. There was no question about their nature. They were not thoughts, they involved no contraction of his cognitive muscles. He was hearing them, as surely as he was hearing Sorenson's asthmatic snoring or the scrattle of mice in the walls, but not through his ears. The voices were intracranial, but he could not guess by what means they got there. At times he felt as though he were helplessly eavesdropping on someone else's conversation, but this illusion was shattered when he heard his own name pronounced by one of them one night when he was nearly asleep. His eyes snapped open and he felt sweat form in the small of his back. Unfortunately he missed the rest of the sentence in his confusion, but a few nights later, easing around the brown edge of sleep, he heard it again. It was one of the female voices, sounding impatient. "Lorin, do you have to have cups in the Ovaltine?" It happened again the next night: "Lorin, did you get the camber from the mezzanine?" The next few occasions were eavesdropping again, and then nothing at all for a few days, during which the discussion with the Klines had proceeded to Third Nephi in the Book of Mormon, and then, just as he was ready to believe the series was past, he received a frontal assault: "Lorin, the girl is emotional, and I'd rather she took salad than otherwise." This was a new direction. For the first time the message, however obliquely, could be said to have an applicability. The girl was undoubtedly Alice, and though he would not himself have characterized her as emotional, and though he could not make out if he were being warned or encouraged, it was a relief to have some rationale at last. On their next visit to the Klines Lorin arranged to let Sorenson do most of the talking while he watched Alice to see if she did or said anything he would call emotional. |