Wild Talent

by Wilson Tucker

  Bixby-twelve.

  That sounded as though it were a code name, but if Bixby used it, it must serve. He signed the note, Bixby-twelve. And folded it, inserted it in the envelope the railroad happily provided, affixed the stamp he had bought and hesitated again. Who should he send it to? Who would Bixby have sent it to?

  There was no answer.

  Paul wrote:

  The President

  White House

  Washington, D.C.

  And dropped it in the mailbox, liberally covered with his fingerprints.

  He stayed two more full days at the Fair before his eight dollars were spent.

  III.

  1941

  Paul Breen was twenty years old, had a satisfactory and comparatively easy job and was earning thirty-seven dollars a week when he made a shocking discovery about himself. The discovery came about as something of an accident and proved to be only the forerunner of what was to come. It helped to explain many things, once it was firmly grasped and understood. Paul found that he possessed a special faculty which other people apparently did not have.

  The dictionary termed. it telepathy, but the brief paragraph in the dictionary did little to explain it.

  At fifteen he had found his first steady job in a movie house, ushering during the after school hours and on weekends. The memory of the Chicago theater usher did occur to him, but his duties did not call for similar work. In the small town where he lived patrons rarely fell asleep in the theater; if they did, they were gently awakened and sent home when the last show was over for the night. Not many weeks on the job had passed before Paul was convinced that he was working in the wrong end of the theater—the projectionist in the film booth had a much better job.

  He promptly put in his application, filed a duplicate application with the union when he found that to be necessary, and just before his sixteenth birthday he was admitted as an apprentice. For the first few weeks all he was allowed to do was to listen and watch; Illinois had a law prohibiting minors under sixteen from operating machinery. At the end of those weeks his knowledge of the projection apparatus was astonishing. Paul felt the questions coming. The projectionist questioned him about the knowledge; wanting to know if he had operated machines elsewhere. He said that he had watched the school instructors handling the smaller machines there and had obtained the rest from the projectionist himself, listening and watching. This literal truth, coming as unintended flattery, was accepted as satisfactory. The apprentice was marked as bright.

  The apprenticeship was ended after two years and his first salaried job was in the same theater; his teacher quit the projection booth to take a managing position. Paul was the projectionist, the envy of scores of local youths of the same age, and was earning thirty-seven dollars a week. He promptly bought a used car.

  The uncanny sense of knowing things continued.

  The accident leading to his discovery of himself came in his twentieth year, in the projection booth, during the showing of what was billed as a horror movie. Nineteen hundred and forty-one was a year in which the second-rate horror movie vogue was in full swing. Bela Lugosi made horror movies, Lon Chaney, Jr., made horror movies, Lionel Atwill made horror movies, Boris Karloff made horror movies, and a host of lesser satellites made horror movies. Paul’s theater, fondly referred to as “The Bat Roost” by the local citizenry, played them all. The occasion of awakening was a special midnight show on Halloween (two dollars extra in overtime pay for the projectionist), and the picture portrayed Boris Karloff playing merry hell with the police authorities, meanwhile luring pretty maidens from the safety of their homes by sheer mindpower. Also in the cast was a know-it-all college professor who claimed Karloff was using mental telepathy, a claim which was scorned by the police until near the end of the last reel.

  Paul was fascinated.

  Karloff lurked in the hedge beside the road, reading the minds of those sent out to catch him and thus thwarting their plans. Karloff crouched in the shrubbery outside the bedrooms of beautiful girls, listening with his mind while the maid said good night and left the room, left the damsel alone to his sinister purposes. Karloff hid in an adjoining office in the city hall, mentally knowing the traps set for him by the police in a near-by room. Karloff did everything by mental telepathy—by reading minds. He was finally captured when the hero donned a metal helmet which cut off all thought—choked off any telltale emanations which he might vibrate—and approached the villain from behind, quietly and mentally silent.

  Paul Breen rejected that last as fantastic, but the remainder of the novel idea stayed with him. He lay awake that night thinking about it, weighing it, and scrap by scrap the various unexplainable occurrences in his own life made themselves known to him.

  He had got along very well with his aunt, during those years he had stayed with her, because he always seemed to know in advance what she would and wouldn’t like; he always seemed to know her next question and had a proper and satisfactory answer ready when she spoke. He had known a full week before her death that something was wrong with her, that something about her facial image seemed to be fading. And the teachers at school—school was a breeze because in both the oral and written examinations he was ready with more information than could be found in the textbooks. Additionally, school was sometimes embarrassing in a mysterious fashion when his answers were too advanced for his grade or his age—although the teacher knew what he was talking about. The expression on the teacher’s face would indicate that the very same information was on the tip of his or her tongue, but would remain there unsaid. The girl across the street—she would have little to do with him after the first few evening dates, despite his magical connection with the theater and free passes for herself. He anticipated the girl’s wishes a little too quickly for her serenity and comfort, saw through her subterfuges and evasions.

  Mental telepathy.

  He had picked up a working knowledge of projection equipment in a remarkably short time, by listening carefully to the projectionist’s explanations, by grasping at things implied but not said, by following the man’s swift fingers as he worked with film and machinery, and by knowing just what should be done next—and then having the satisfaction of seeing the man do it.

  There had been a national election the previous year; a presidential candidate was running for a third term in office, something that had never successfully been done before and something that the townspeople said would not be done successfully this time. Paul had accurately predicted to himself the outcome of that third term attempt.

  But even before all that, much before . . .

  The eager, teen-age desire to visit Chicago’s Fair and the raising of the needed money in money-tight times. Each and every man he had approached on the subject of work needed something done. There had been occasions when the possibility of a job might be there for the asking, but for some reason he hadn’t investigated, hadn’t asked if a job existed. There had been no turndowns; he avoided all possibilities of a turndown and unerringly picked those who had odd jobs to offer. Two months, seven dollars and fifty cents, and the trip to the Fair. A railroad detective had approached him as he waited for a freight in the yards; Paul had known he was a detective although he couldn’t recall seeing one before, had known the general tenor of the questioning . . . although that could have been easily guessed by the dialogue heard in many gangster movies. He had quickly found the black thread on which the paper clown danced, quickly found the confederate who was jiggling the thread. And he had quickly guessed the two of them were constantly alert, constantly fearful of the police. He had known the Chicago patrolman would stop and question him when he first glimpsed the officer almost a block away.

  It had been amusing to watch that other usher making his slow rounds, waking the sleepers; amusing to fool the man by turning to stare at him while he was looking to see if Paul was asleep. But there had come a moment shortly afterward when the strange sense of knowing deserted him. He had lost his way after emerging
from the theater.

  Abruptly there flashed in his memory the glaring picture of a man sagging to his knees in an alleyway.

  Mr. Bixby.

  Bixby had never told him his name, had not spoken to him at all except for those quick, urgent warnings to get away—to run from the danger as fast as possible. But he had tarried a few moments because Bixby was a G-man and his childhood ambition, long nursed and cherished, was to become just that—a government secret agent. Bixby suddenly represented a bond-brother, and he paused to help him. In that pausing, seeing and sensing the man’s agony, he had learned without spoken words the entire momentary drama being played in the alley. Learned more—learned a fragment of Bixby’s background, learned the code name Bixby habitually signed to his communications with his superiors, learned the names and the upstairs location of the men who had trapped and shot him. And then suddenly there was something else, two parts of the same pattern fitting together to form a whole . . .

  A blackness had seemed to settle over Bixby’s face as he died, a blackness that suggested something was fading from view. A blackness that terrorized the boy. The same faint blackness that had been present about his aunt’s face, the same unexplainable fading when she died.

  Mental telepathy.

  Paul was still awake when his bedroom window revealed the coming dawn in the eastern sky.

  “You sick or something?”

  “No,” Paul said. “Why?”

  “I heard you tossing and turning up there all night.” The landlady sat across the breakfast table from him, watching him eat. “I thought maybe you was sick.”

  “Nothing wrong. Maybe it was too much coffee.”

  “You shouldn’t drink coffee that late, going to bed on a coffee stomach is bad for you. You should drink milk. Now you keep that in mind.”

  “I will, thanks.” He hesitated, unsure of himself. “What is mental telepathy?”

  The landlady moved her glasses higher on the bridge of her nose and stirred sugar into her third or fourth morning cup of coffee.

  “What is what?”

  “Mental telepathy.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I don’t know. It was in the picture last night. I thought maybe you’d know.”

  “Pfff—pictures! Sickness, maybe.”

  “No, I don’t think so. It has something to do with mind-power, controlling other people.”

  “Well I don’t know and that’s for sure. Still sounds like sickness to me; you know, sickness words. Why don’t you go down to the library and see?”

  “That’s an idea!” He wondered why he hadn’t thought of that himself. “They must have it.”

  The public library was an old-fashioned, two-story brick building, enscrolled with much useless ornamentation, pigeon droppings, and a large gray cornerstone bearing the names of every city official even remotely connected with the erection of the building: the mayor of that bygone day, the various members of the city council, the man who had donated the plot of ground, his wife in whose name it had been donated, the superintendent of parks, the superintendent of streets, the architect, the construction firm, and just incidentally the chairman of the library board.

  Inside, Paul still hesitated to broach the subject; he disliked the idea of making a fool of himself if mental telepathy proved to be a fiction, a device concocted for the motion pictures. The sight of a large dictionary on a table by the librarian’s desk solved his dilemma. He opened it.

  TELEPATHY (noun). The supposed communication of one mind with another at a distance other than normal sensory means; thought transference. (Word coined about 1886 from the Greek to express power of mental communication.)

  Thus armed, Paul put his question to the librarian. She seemed not in the least startled nor even slightly moved by the request, but instead asked him to wait and disappeared among the shelves behind her. Several minutes later she reappeared with three dusty books in her hands and handed them over to Paul. Curiously, he turned them about to read the titles on the spines. Two were by Joseph Banks Rhine, Extra-Sensory Perception and New Frontiers of the Mind. The last was by a Dr. William Roy, Studies in Psychokinesis.

  The librarian regarded him for a moment and thought to add, “I believe we have some fiction dealing with the subject. Would you like some of those?”

  Paul glanced down at the volumes in his hands. “How many can I take out at once?”

  “Four.” She had followed his glance. “You may keep those for two weeks, and then renew them for another two if you wish. There is a two-week limit on fiction, however.”

  “Just one, then,” Paul decided. “I’d like these three and one of fiction.” He suggested, “A new one.”

  He read the novel first, slowly and carefully and searching for implications concealed between the lines, read it first because it had to be returned the soonest and because it was obviously lighter reading, an easier approach to a strange and puzzling phenomenon. The Time Masters was a romantic thriller in which a man and woman practiced mental telepathy by physical contact; holding hands, a kiss, a warm embrace. When the couple were in such intimate physical contact they were able to read one another’s thoughts at will, able to plumb the depths of the other’s mind. When the contact was broken the thought transference ended.

  But Paul had not touched Bixby, had seldom touched his aunt. When he was smaller of course he usually kissed her good night; as he grew older those kisses were reserved to those perfunctory occasions when either of them left home for a time. He could recall no thought transferences occurring between them. So the novel did not provide the answer he sought; nevertheless, still groping for what may have been hinted at but not said, he wrote a note to the author addressed in care of the publisher. The note briefly and politely asked for the author’s views on the subject and did the author know of any such occurrence? He wisely said nothing about himself.

  Paul next turned to the two volumes by Rhine and made the shocking discovery of himself.

  Mental telepathy existed.

  Several forms of the phenomenon existed, had been mathematically proven to exist in spite of the fact that it apparently violated many natural laws of science. Rhine, a parapsychologist at Duke University, through several years of experimentation had developed a system which reduced vague and haphazard results to a mathematical process based on the laws of statistics. Employing a deck of cards bearing five symbols, Rhine—with the co-operation of selected subjects—demonstrated that the degree of success in naming the correct sequence of cards was so high as to be outside the bounds of pure chance, so high as to be improbable. He came to the conclusion that the subjects were able to perceive the symbols on the cards without seeing those symbols—and then proved his conclusion. From there, the experiments advanced beyond playing cards.

  Persons seated in another room were able to know the thoughts or conversations of the experimenters; some could copy on paper a message being written by another student in a separate room, others could reproduce a symbol or rough picture by similar concentration. But in all of Rhine’s experiments under the best of laboratory conditions it was evident that a high degree of co-operation was necessary between the subjects, that one must concentrate while the others attempted to perceive the object under consideration.

  Paul, unwittingly, had found it much easier than that. The willing concentration and co-operation on the part of the second party had never been necessary; he apparently knew their thoughts and moods without their being the wiser, apparently sensed their questions as they formulated them. More, he had known of the existence of things without direct mental contact—how else explain the jobs he easily found, as a boy of thirteen seeking funds?

  Another technical term opened still wider speculations: extra-sensory perception, abbreviated to ESP. ESP embraced not Only telepathy but other undreamed powers of the human mind: clairvoyance, precognition, telekinesis, and teleportation. The volumes of Rhine and Roy explained them all, after another quick trip to the dictionar
y at the library. Clairvoyance was the ability to see or know things not readily visible to the normal eye or necessarily known to the normal mind—his locating the men with work to be done, the quick absorption of projection techniques. Precognition was to know in advance of something about to occur—his realization that the Chicago usher was standing at his shoulder ready to shake him awake, the advance knowledge that the presidential candidate would win a third term. Telekinesis was the incredible power to move an inanimate object without touching it—Roy suggested that a paperweight might be pushed from the desk and caused to fall to the floor, merely by willing it to do so. Teleportation was a most startling form of transportation, moving one’s self over a great distance by will power.

  When the four weeks had expired, Paul returned the books to the library and attempted to purchase the volume by Roy; it was by far the most valuable to him of the three, suggesting the most astonishing theories and concepts. The librarian would have none of it, but did offer to look up the price and help him order it. She found the book to be still in print, and Paul dispatched the order. It cost him seven dollars, but he thought the sum well spent.

  Thereafter the evenings in the projection booth saw more attention devoted to the book than the film. He summoned the nerve to attempt practice of what he learned and would stand for long minutes at the tiny porthole overlooking the auditorium, staring at the backs of people’s heads. Nothing happened so far as he could discern. He could not perceive their thoughts, could not guess what they might do next. In mild despair he turned back to the book.

  He was deeply engrossed in it one evening, reading through it for the second time, when the film broke in the projector with a snapping, tearing sound. Paul flung the book onto the workbench and leaped for the machine to slam shut the dowser, aware of the ever-present threat of fire. He flicked off the motor switch and applied the brake, was already pulling the damaged film from the projector when he heard—or sensed—the manager rapidly climbing the stairway behind him. The man burst into the booth with the nervous, staccato manner of distraught managers everywhere when a breakdown has occurred.