Gwyneth, rising on tiptoes to more nearly approximate his height, balanced herself with one hand on his shoulder; she reached out to touch his pinked sensitive nose with the ball of her thumb.
“We have the same trouble, huh?”
Robin swallowed and thoughtfully bit his lower lip.
She stroked his nose kiddingly and dropped the hand, but she did it with a languid, wistful slowness, keeping light fingertip contact all the way to his beltline. Then she put both hands in her own front pockets, thumbs showing.
“Give me a shot at being a friend?” she said.
In response to the blue uncertainty of Robin’s smile Gwyneth lowered her eyes submissively, willing to wait him out.
At the two o’clock staff meeting Gwyneth said, “I think, despite Robin’s problems, we’ve already developed a relationship that can only improve with time.” She looked around the table and added, “He’s taking me to dinner tonight.”
The four men and two women in the conference room smiled at her.
The dinner wasn’t a success. Robin was docile, not giving. Gwyn knocked herself out to jolly him and sometimes he smiled, but she’d find him looking at her as if he couldn’t convince himself that she really existed. She’d never encountered this much reserve in any male, regardless of age; Robin’s attitude perplexed and ultimately defeated her. He withdrew completely then, and threw up high walls.
For a week and a half afterward Robin deliberately avoided contact with her. He slept much of every day and prowled nights. He had the run of the campus, and Staff stayed tactfully out of his way. Gwyn spotted him early one morning, just before daybreak, huddled high and dry on a rock in the middle of the swimming lake. She wondered how he got there without getting wet. He spent long nocturnal hours in the Faculty library, turning the pages of rare books that made up a part of the six-thousand-volume occult collection. Most often he studied maps. He caught a cold and was plagued with a low-grade fever and his appetite didn’t improve. One side of his face swelled up from poison oak. He looked and felt miserable.
Analysis of the films made of Robin while he slept showed he was leaving the body for four and five hours at a time.
“Apparently trying to arrange a meeting with his father in the astral,” said Newvine, the Faculty psychiatrist and den mother, a transvestite whose nickname was “Granny Sigmund.”
“And not having any luck,” a co-worker commented.
“He’s been studying all those detailed maps of Equatorial Africa,” Gwyneth said. “He could be looking for the body. He needs to be convinced it happened.”
“I doubt there is a body,” said an Englishman named Saltmarsh, who was on loan from the University of London’s Council for Psychical Investigation. “Bloody mercenaries would have chucked the lot of them into a roadside ditch. Wouldn’t be much left by now, would there? Rags and a rather cloudy odor.”
Gwyn made a face. “For God’s sake, they must have buried the poor man! But Robin is going to go bats pursuing his father’s ghost, or his earthly remains. I’ve got to divert him somehow, it’s getting critical. I’m afraid Robin will induce a psychopathological condition we can’t handle without resorting to the phenothiazines. And drugs may very well close valuable pathemic channels.”
“May I make a suggestion?” Granny Sig said. The transvestite was a vast figure with Kerry Blue hair and little round glasses perched on apple cheeks. She laughed a lot, shaking and reddening without ever uttering more than a wheeze of sound.
“I wish you would, Granny Sig. I had him in the palm of my hand, practically, but—”
“I’ve studied your excellent resume of your first attempts to befriend Robin. You possess a rare flaw, my dear. That flaw is flawlessness. You are brilliant in several fields of study, physically vital and competent at all types of games. You have this maddening ability to pick up expertise in areas that actually don’t interest you very much. You can tune your ’57 DeSoto like a fine watch, explain role-reversal among coyotes, discuss ballistics with a sharp-shooter and list six plausible ways Johnny Bench can break out of his current batting slump. You have social graces and a funny bone. You also possess an intimidating sexual confidence. Gwyneth Charles is a creature of so many parts that trying to explain her to the uninitiated leaves one in the despairing position of the blind men in the parable who tried to describe the elephant.”
“Gee whiz, I’ve loved hearing all this; however—”
The transvestite shook and trembled with internal laughter, turning the color of a thrombosed vein.
“I have seen you, operating at perhaps half power, demoralize a roomful of excellent men of our acquaintance. Just think of the impact you must have had on that thirteen-year-old boy.”
Gwyneth chewed her underlip. “He’s no ordinary—”
“We are speaking of emotional capacity. For the moment think of him solely as a sexual being. Genitally he is in a splendid state of development. We have filmed him masturbating to a climax. We may assume that from the wealth of pornographic material available to all growing boys he has adequate technical information. By his own admission he has not experienced sexual intercourse. More importantly, he’s had little contact with pubescent females. His most profound sexual experience to date involved the lactating breast of a mother-surrogate with whom he strongly empathized.”
“I bet I know where you’re going with that.”
“Yes. Your long-range plan for Robin is not without the possibility of considerable danger—”
“Not again, Doctor!”
“But since you are committed to this course of action, I urge you to re-think your strategy.”
“What you’re trying to say is, I hustled him to the brink too fast. But I wasn’t working at it—”
“Oh, my dear, two overt contacts within an hour! And you revealed no corresponding areas of vulnerability to which he could respond. Consider his adolescent daydreams: who is he mooning over as he pounds his peenie? Last month’s centerfold girl? The saucy sprite selling deodorant on TV? That mountain wench on whom he was severely fixated? It doesn’t matter, they are safely removed from the reality of the act as he commits it. I’m certain that he doesn’t think of you; perhaps he makes a conscious effort not to. Because you are much too immediate and larger than life, and more woman than he can possibly cope with. Showing him even a portion of your superb derriere was a terribly intimidating, not a provocative act. A blow to his burgeoning sexuality. He may want you, it would be inhuman of him not to want you, but he feels unequal to the task, which could have repercussions.”
“You mean I might have driven him into the clutches of Ken or Bart?” Gwyneth said sarcastically, but she had flushed to the roots of her hair. Several of those in the room were having a hard time containing snickers.
Granny Sig smiled peaceably.
“Oh, I’m sure there’s sufficient time to restore his confidence. But another bit of advice? Don’t fuss, over him. Let him make a fuss over you, for a change.”
“Ah-hum,” Gwyn said, enlightened.
Robin was unaware that the campus of Psi Faculty was as tightly guarded as any facility at Langley or Fort Meade. He saw no helmeted police with packs of vicious dogs; there were no checkpoints protected by machine guns. Visible security measures included warning signs, a few floodlights at night, some not very formidable gates across access roads. These were tended by dyspeptic middle-aged men with pot bellies who were armed with nothing more lethal than a clipboard.
He occasionally ran into the only active daytime security patrol, two men in faded Forest Service green who chewed toothpicks and prowled the back woods in a pickup with a big German shepherd who rode in the truck bed. The shepherd woofed and ranted and bared his teeth when anyone approached, just as he’d been taught. But nobody had figured out a way to keep him from wagging his tail at the same time; obviously it killed him not to be liked. Robin also saw pipe-smoking government employees ruminating over soil samples and seedlings; he saw logging cre
ws and maintenance men and meteorologists from the weather station on a bald bluff overlooking Lake Celeste. They liked to strip to the waist and throw a Frisbee around during their lunch break. At intervals he saw a helicopter in an otherwise empty sky. Nobody followed him or showed unusual interest in his presence. If he wanted to get on Gwyn’s trail bike and ramble for miles he could do so.
He had absolute freedom, and he was totally a captive. Even before Robin’s advent part of the MORG reservation had been used to experiment with new types of protective sensors and hardware. The security system that monitored several square miles of campus and woodland was based at the meteorological station, which was a blind. It contained surveillance and tracking devices adapted from all the latest cameras and telescopes which the NSA crammed into its spy satellites. The woods were gridded with sensors and honeycombed with sector control bunkers. Each team of operators had at their disposal arsenals which could handle any sort of intrusion. By pushing buttons they could soak the night sky with burning magnesium, destroy bridges or create lethal pitfalls in the winding roads. They could gas every living thing on a two-acre plot in a matter of seconds. Fields were sown with pop-up land mines that contained enough metal fragments to shred an elephant. Heat-seeking missiles awaited low-flying jets.
More canines, monstrous cousins of the tail-wagger in the pickup truck, were available at a nearby farm. Nice old men who scratched their bellies and yawned a lot could kill you in ten different ways if you aroused their suspicions. Ken and Bart, who looked after the house so well, were a particularly murderous team. Ken liked the long silent stalk and the sudden knife; Bart, who had an almost mystical grasp of anatomy, killed inventively with whatever came to hand.
The 250 cc. engine of the trail bike could be blown by remote control if Robin exceeded certain limits of exploration. His every moment in the house was photographed at eight frames per second, with conventional lenses and infrared film.
After three weeks the men assigned to plotting and anticipating his every move began to see a pattern of dependability emerging; he was getting used to his new home, settling into a routine. He made no real overtures to Gwyn, but he became more talkative around Ken and Bart. Near the time of her twenty-ninth birthday Gwyn planned to spend several days with an old beau, a novelist, who was in residence at Yaddo, the artists’ colony down the road in Saratoga Springs. Prior to departure she said nothing about her trip to Robin, but she left him a brief cheery note.
It was immediately evident that he was shocked by her absence. A couple of times he went into Gwyneth’s apartment, which was on the third floor near his own bedroom, just to look around. He read and reread the handwritten note. He borrowed a Swiss Army knife from Ken, who had quite a collection, and walked the woods searching for pieces of basswood to whittle into figures. He began to eat all of the sandwiches that Bart packed for his day-long odysseys instead of throwing them away after a bite or two. Hour after hour he worked feverishly at his woodcarvings, broke many of them in dissatisfaction, started anew. He cut his fingers several times, covering the damage with Band-Aids.
Granny Sig had Ken and Bart down to her shop on the quad for a consultation.
“His level of prescience has been very low due to emotional trauma. Now that he’s showing signs of recovery, we must be very careful around him. If Robin knew the extent of our protective arrangements, he would be upset and frightened. Later the security precautions will make no difference to him; if anything he’ll be flattered knowing it’s all for his sake. Right now we wouldn’t want to alert him to any of the bloody truth about your misspent lives, my dears.”
“He actually reads minds?” Ken said uneasily.
Granny Sig laughed and laughed, sounding like a broken bellows.
“That’s a serious misapprehension. One of his remarkable talents is the phenomenon of psychometry. And all that is—well, someday we may actually know how the mind transcends time and space; ‘reality’ as we know it. For now let me say that there is a bioplasmic universe, and in that universe is a record of every human impulse, word and deed—from lives past and lives to come. Robin, by touching you, or something that belongs to you, makes a connection between the timeless world and the physical world, what clairvoyants call a ‘vision.’ He culls from your past or future—which is all one, anyway, part of the huge collective consciousness.”
Ken said, “Do you suppose he’ll read anything off that knife I gave him? It was practically new, I never used it.”
“Not to worry, then.”
“Won’t he get a lot of wrong vibes from Gwyn?” Bart asked.
“We pondered that problem at length. All I can say is, Gwyneth is not in possession of any single piece of information that could betray her. She will never have to lie to him. Shortly we will stage a set-piece for the ultimate benefit of their relationship, but Gwyn won’t know about it in advance; she’ll have to improvise, responding to opportunities as they happen. And, as the boy falls deeply in love with her, he will soon be no more perceptive about Gwyn than he is about himself. Clairvoyants are notoriously unable to divine their own fortunes.”
It was raining lightly and getting dark when Robin made his way home that afternoon on the bike, skirting a cove of Lake Celeste. He wasn’t looking for it, but through the tamarack and the spruce he couldn’t miss Gwyn’s car parked on a flat promontory; it was one of her “thinking places,” where she would gaze uninterruptedly for hours at the perfect reflection of the trees on the face of the water. The car was a red and white DeSoto, twenty years old but beautifully maintained; she had referred to it proudly as “one of the really great, tacky, tail-fin, park-n’grope Dee-troit honeywagons.”
She was home a day early from Saratoga Springs. He wondered why. He skidded to a stop and looked down at the car. Headlights winked on and off twice in the settling gloom.
Robin took a slippery needled trail down to the lake shore, pulling up next to the DeSoto. Gwyneth was slumped behind the wheel. She didn’t look at him but raised a hand in wan salute.
He killed the bike engine and put the kick-stand down, but he didn’t get off.
“Thought I heard my old banger,” Gwyn said. “How’ve you been?”
“Okay.”
She sat up and eased the door open and got out. She took a tender deep breath, looked at him and through him.
“You said you wouldn’t be back before—”
“Tomorrow, but alas the reunion ended today. Once again I couldn’t stay the route with good old Vic.”
Gwyn smiled somberly, wiped the mist of rain from her forehead and walked down to the edge of the lake. She was barefoot. She walked stiffly, as if her left side hurt. She stood for a few minutes with her feet in the cold water. Robin wandered around and scuffed at rocks. Gwyn came back.
“We’re getting wet,” she, said.
“What happened to your side?”
“What? Oh, I … bruised it. Hurts. Kind of.”
“Your mouth is cut.”
“Where? Here, you mean. So it’s cut, okay.”
“How come?”
“Oh, shut up, Robin,” Gwyn said mildly. Then she lifted her hands, palms up, a gesture of apology. She winced. “Sorry. I got hit a couple of whacks, that’s all. The ribs are the worst this time. I’ve learned not to stick around for the full cycle. Tears and recriminations were on tomorrow’s schedule, if I stayed out of the hospital. Vic is stalwart and charming for a day, he drinks for a day, he becomes incomparably … compulsively … destructive.”
“Why would he hit you?”
“I can’t explain that very well. It’s not because he doesn’t like me.”
“Oh.”
“Throw the bike in the car and I’ll drive us home.”
He would have liked to ask more questions; it made him edgy and angry to think that she had been hurt. But Gwyn wasn’t angry, she just looked very sad; her lips moved soundlessly a couple of times as she drove, as if she were now phrasing all the things she wished she c
ould have said to Vic.
Then, catching Robin looking at her, she smiled and leaned over and pounded a chummy fist on one knee.
“I’ll be okay.”
“Not if you hang around what’s-his-name,” Robin said a bit fiercely. “But it’s over. All over. Finally.”
“How long did you—”
They had reached a wide place where three unpaved roads intersected. Two muddy sedans were parked there. A man in a hat and a pale trench coat was getting out of one car and into the other. He looked up, briefly, just as the DeSoto’s headlights flared on his face.
Robin was staring through the rainy window. He bucked as if touched by a live wire.
“MY DAD.”
“What?” Gwyneth said, startled from her despondent reverie. She looked back but she didn’t stop. Robin had rolled down the window, saw only taillights vivid in the slash rain as the sedans went divergent ways.
“Gwyn! Stop! Go back! I saw DAD.”
“Oh, no, Robin—”
“Please!” he shrieked at her, lunging dementedly to grab the steering wheel. Gwyn rode the brake on the slick clayed surface; the DeSoto swapped ends and slid a hundred feet.
“Robin!”
She fought him off with one hand and tried to control the skid; the car crashed into a springy alder thicket overgrowing the road and stopped.
Robin threw open the door on his side, fell out, bounded up and ran back down the road.
The cars had disappeared. Robin fell headlong again as Gwyn restarted the engine, delicately gained traction and followed. She caught up to Robin standing dejectedly near the place where he’d seen the man.
Raining harder now, rain thudding on the car top.
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