by Farris, John
"What's wrong?" Peter said, not opening his eyes.
"Peter, I tried . . . to tell you about the computer. I got hold of the access code . . . and . . ."
He looked up at her for a solemn long time, his expression not changing.
"Peter. The computer says . . . that Robin is dead."
She couldn't bear watching him; nor could she look away. The only immediate change was a slow hardening, a quiet shift of his eyes away from her face, as if suddenly he couldn't stand the sight of her. In the old days, she thought with a distinct chill, bearers of bad news were killed. There was a change in the rhythm of his breathing, a rasp in the throat. He threw his legs over the side and left the bed. He put on old warm clothes with a rigid intensity, walked downstairs, walked out of the house. Hester followed part way, going as far as the porch with the rust-red blanket around her. There she stood shivering and watching as Peter, desperately willed, thrust himself across the decayed dunes against a gray snow-flecked sky. She watched until he disappeared, wondering, now that so necessary a part of him had died, if he would ever come back.
Chapter Seven
After young Dr. Newbold Jr. changed the dressings on her leg during his 8 A.M. rounds, Irene Cameron McCurdy prepared to go visiting.
Her hairdresser had made the trip up to Washington Heights yesterday to get Irene in shape for New Year's; Irene had slept sitting up in her hospital bed to preserve the hair set. In the no-nonsense morning light that flooded her eighth-floor hospital room, Irene studied the mirrored tint job and found the color garish but acceptable; Hedy had been forced to work with limited facilities. Irene used a lot of base to overcome that blotchy postoperative look, considered the splendor of the lapis lazuli lounging pajamas which she wore and did her eyes to match.
A nurse's aide helped her out of bed and into the wheelchair. The leg was agonizing but Irene managed to smile. She'd been through a similar vein-stripping operation on the left leg two years ago, so she knew how to handle a wheelchair, even with the propped-up leg straight out in front of her.
Irene chose from a suitcase so many of her enameled, shield-like bracelets and rings that she looked, from the elbows down, intimidating and gladiatorial. From another suitcase she took several items and packed them away in a tote. The big scrapbook she wedged between her good leg and the chair frame. Then she was on her way down the hall, with a cheerful word for each of her friends on the floor.
She stopped in front of the room which she had discreetly reconnoitered the night before. The door was open a few inches. Irene leaned out of the chair and knocked. No reply. Unlikely the child was sleeping, because no one slept around here much after eight, what with medical rounds and breakfast and the Puerto Rican scut workers who talked very loudly always—but then, Irene supposed, if you grew up in such large families, apparently it was necessary to clamor for attention . . . she pushed the door open and smiled broadly at Gillian, who was sitting up in bed wearing white headphones, listening to music and making notes on a score.
"May I come in?" Irene asked, doing a busy burlesque pantomime. She didn't wait for a signal from Gillian but went rolling right up to bedside. What a beauty this girl was! Irene thought, with a touch of proprietary envy. Her illness had left her with a dusky ring around each eye and obviously fever had burned away pounds and pounds, but they could recover so quickly at that age.
"HELLO, IT'S GILLIAN, ISN'T IT? I'M IRENE CAMERON MCCURDY FROM JUST DOWN—"
Gillian smiled gamely at the intrusion and took off her headphones, dialing out the music.
"—down the hall. All by yourself this morning? I had such a nice chat with your grandmother yesterday evening, I was hoping I'd see her again."
"Min had to get back to Palm Springs, there's some sort of huge charity thing she's been working on for a year."
"She told me so much about you, I just had to meet you at the first opportunity. I think we have quite a lot in common."
"Oh."
"Not that I can lay claim to being gifted, although I've always been sure that I have just a little more ESP than the average person—"
Irene was watching Gillian closely. This was one very well-brought-up young lady who had been taught early never to reveal her feelings to strangers, but Gillian's reaction was that of someone who expected to be handed a rattlesnake fangs first. Irene shifted course and nodded wisely.
"I know, I know, dear. Right now you'd rather not talk about it because you feel you've talked too much, but I promise I haven't breathed a word to anyone."
"Mrs. McCurdy, I don't think I—"
"Irene and I want you to know that you can trust me! At a time like this—when you've virtually been born again—you need someone who really believes, and cares. That's why I'm here. I'm an authority on. . . Irene looked hard at someone passing in the hall outside and wheeled herself tight against the bed, where she was eye-to-eye with Gillian. "Psychic phenomena," she said. She opened her tote and pulled out a well-thumbed paperback book, which she handed to Gillian. "Here's my biography of Peter Hurkos."
Gillian looked at the photograph of a much younger Irene Cameron McCurdy on the back of the book.
"Who's Peter Hurkos?"
"A man who had a very serious accident years ago. He fell off a ladder while painting a house and nearly killed himself. But when he woke up in the hospital, he discovered to his amazement that he'd become clairvoyant. He could literally see incidents from the past, and the future, of perfect strangers!"
Irene smiled encouragingly at the frowning Gillian. "It was almost as if Hurkos—now get this—could tune into some huge cosmic television set. He saw his own child in danger in a burning room, he saw . . . but it's all there in my book. I urge you to read it. His clairvoyance was a direct result of the concussion he suffered; in your case it must have been the abnormally high fever."
"What did my grandmother say to you, Mrs. McCurdy?"
"Gillian, Gillian, now you mustn't upset yourself. Min told me how you described the funeral of her friend, and in such exquisite detail, and then there was the nurse whose car was vandalized, and the other nurse, that lovely Jamaican girl who was on days with you. She didn't know she was pregnant until you told her. Oh, so many little incidents only a true clairvoyant could reveal—and I'll bet there's lots more you haven't mentioned!" Gillian looked steadfastly out the window. "I think you must be one of the very special New People. More and more are coming through all the time."
"Mrs. McCurdy—"
"Eye-rene."
"Yes, ma'am. I . . . it was probably just dreaming, that's what it seemed like, and I don't . . . want to say any more about it."
Irene said sympathetically, "Doesn't it help, though, to be assured that you're not alone in the world? Of course it's all new and baffling, poor Peter Hurkos was convinced he was losing his mind . . ."
Bad choice of words, and Irene knew it. She opened her scrapbook.
"I think you're right not to say any more until you have it all straight in your own mind that something truly wonderful has happened. Oh, I mean it! And you have so much company, children just your own age. This charming little South African girl who sees underground water as a shimmering cloud, and all the tots who are bending silverware and moving pendulums at a glance, doing really phenomenal things pk-wise; now look at this, would you just skim through this story, Gillian?"
Irene referred her to a lengthy newspaper article about Japanese children, ages five to fifteen, who were performing spectacular feats of telekinesis under scientifically controlled conditions.
"There must be literally hundreds of them, all second generation post-Bomb, and doesn't that give us something to think about. Well, pk is interesting, but the most significant talent is psychometry. If you'd like, we could work on just a couple of . . . experiments."
"No," Gillian said. "No." And she looked to be at the point of tears. "Whatever it is . . . it'll probably just go away. I don't even want to think about it. And right now I have to learn this
music." She closed the scrapbook, put it and the paperback about the psychic within reach of Irene, and picked up her headphones. Irene, unfazed, left the books where they were.
"Why don't you keep these for a while? And that scrapbook is just the recent tip of the iceberg, I have tons of research material. Now I'll be in 819, Gillian, whenever you have a question or two."
Gillian settled back without comment, turning the volume up.
Irene smiled and wheeled herself away from the bed. She left Gillian's door partly closed as she had found it and continued up the hall to her own room, fizzing with energy and excitement, forgetting about her aching leg. It hadn't gone quite as well as she'd expected; obviously Gillian was going to resist the fact that she was part of a miracle . . . an unprecedented transitional stage in the growth of mankind! Irene liked that phrasing so much she jotted it down as quickly as she could. Then she sat gazing out her windows at the towers of the George Washington Bridge a few blocks away.
More like a naturalist than an occultist, Irene had waited and watched nearly twenty years for the first puzzling and tantalizing signs of the New People to become manifest, and now at last they were popping up like wildflowers after a spring rain. But what a lot of luck to come of a dismal trip to the hospital! There were so many fascinating questions to be answered, but Irene knew very well she had to be careful with Gillian, who would not remain in the hospital many more days. She had to win the girl's confidence, establish herself as a worthy guide for the emerging psychic. In retrospect Gillian seemed frightened—perhaps a bad experience already? Gillian was not just another entertaining mover and shaker, a parlor poltergeist and a threat to cutlery everywhere, she was a cosmic visionary with access to the timeless flow of life itself, the secrets of being and becoming. Properly nourished and motivated, she would speak for the universe.
Irene made another note, and when she looked up she was aware of her own face in the window glass. But she was not dismayed, as she often was, by the evidence of years, nor was she reminded of Cocteau's glum metaphor: "Look at yourself all your life in a mirror, and you'll see death at work like bees in a glass hive." Today Irene Cameron McCurdy had heard—however faintly—the music of the spheres, and she was enthralled.
Gillian always had had a substantial gift for aural and visual mimicry: at the age of six she could do her mother's hand gestures to perfection, and nowadays even though she might go for a while without seeing or hearing Streisand, she could re-create Streisand with puckish accuracy almost on demand. Doncha think I'm pretty? Ya don't have to give me ya ansa right way, why doncha think about it f' three uh four munts? As she listened through headphones to flute, piano and cello, the mild pressure of words forming in her mind was not too much of a distraction at first; it was a little like listening to the radio late at night, hearing a fitful voice suppressed by a stronger signal. Automatically she went to work on the voice, although it was so far away in time she couldn't remember whose voice it was.
I'm not near enough, Gilliam Need help to
No.
More like: Gil-yan.
She felt a tingle of satisfaction of getting the boyish inflection right; still she couldn't visualize him. He'd sort of popped in out of nowhere. But somehow in achieving the voice she had allowed his faint words—her tingle changed perceptibly to a chill—to come much more powerfully, accompanied by the reality of a—mind—that could just push aside the music and make difficult any mental effort other than awareness of him.
Yes, he was real, and now he moved in like a storm front; Gillian tried to blank him, by increasing the volume of Vox Balaenae and concentrating on the score in front of her.
A painful, thrusting urgency: No, don't, Gillian! I want to Visit. Keep working. Try to see—
She felt especially uncomfortable as she silently mimicked the voice, her throat muscles working hard because of abrupt downshiftings to a sturdy baritone. How sweet—his voice was changing! Gillian sensed that she had it perfectly, but she was afraid of further accommodation. She would not visualize as he wanted because it could mean an apocalypse of the mind, the dreadful shadow-shows of childhood screaming forth from the subconscious. Gillian tried to switch to someone else. The chesty contralto of Irene Cameron McCurdy was still very much with her, a little practice and she could do a pretty fair McCurdy—but this boy just wouldn't let her go.
Need help to come all the way through to you. New games, Gil-yan. Want to teach you all the new games.
Gillian snatched off the headphones and got out of bed too quickly, which resulted in dizziness and a loss of balance. She clung to the foot of the bed, bit her lower lip with a sharp canine tooth until the pain brought tears but stilled her panic.
The dreamy glimpses of life and death and secrets she could tolerate because they happened so effortlessly and involved her not at all; but this was different. Gillian felt thin-skinned to the point of invisibility and in danger of dispossession. It gave her the shakes. They came rattling up from her cold knees, they hurt her bones and set the blood to throbbing in her throat and temples. If she could just get out of this goddamned hospital . . . the phone was ringing.
"Gillian? Are you crying?"
"Oh, Larue! No, I'm just . . . I'm so bored, I want to go home. I'm glad you called."
It was blissful then to curl up in the chair by the phone and talk about school and music and friends, and make plans for a ballet and a concert; laughter, the one imperative in Gillian's life, came easily when she had Larue's ear. She had never been more passionate about the familiar and ordinary things of the day, but even as they chatted Gillian felt a pang or two, a puzzling sense of incompleteness or loss, like the slowly fading aftermath of some of the hopeless crushes she'd had in her life.
Chapter Eight
The four Cabinet-level visitors to the underground complex at Bradbury, Maryland, gathered in a leather-paneled Regency drawing room following their tour of the operations facility. When they had been provided with cigars and cognac, a skinny bearded former ad man named Braintree took over the indoctrination.
He showed them a clip from a National Geographic Society television documentary on the human body, first shown over the Public Broadcasting System on October 28, 1975. In a laboratory experiment in biofeedback training a young man with electrodes attached to his head controlled the movement of a toy train with his alpha waves—the very low-voltage wave energy was transformed into electricity which powered the train.
"A commonplace experiment," Braintree said. "With a little practice any of us could learn to do it. No unusual mental powers are required." The screen went blank. An assistant wheeled a cloth-draped cart toward Braintree. He removed the cloth, revealing an assortment of sculptures made from metal alloys. The largest was a cube eight inches on a side, with a deep groove in one surface; another looked like a mottled doughnut and the third could have been a badly tooled cogwheel.
"These simple psychotronic machines are derived from Models created by Robert Pavlita, a Czechoslovakian textile designer who claims that his inspiration was the journals of a fifteenth-century alchemist."
The visitors were getting restless. A gentle-looking academician named Byron Todfield grinned wryly and blew smoke rings at the ceilings; a JCS Old Warrior and a Statesman, a vicarish figure charged with consequence, looked disgusted. The fourth visitor, Boyd Huckle, who was more valuable to the Chief Executive than his frontal lobes, appeared to be half asleep as cigar ash drifted down to dull the shine on one of his three-hundred-dollars-a-pair cowboy boots.
"We may suspect," Braintree continued, "that Mr. Pavlita is having his little joke, but there is no denying the efficiency of his machines. Each has the property of accumulating energy from human beings, at which point they act as generators, releasing that energy to perform various tasks. This one—" and he indicated the cube, "—will drive a small electric motor for several minutes. The cogwheel dramatically increases plant growth. The doughnut kills insects placed within its circle."
&
nbsp; "Electrostatic energy?" asked the Old Warrior.
"No, sir, because static electricity won't work under water—but this generator will. Water even enhances the effect. Nor is it magnetic energy or temperature changes, or anything we understand at the moment. The shape of each machine seems to dictate the work it can do. For instance—film, please."
The room darkened slightly and they viewed a 35-millimeter movie shot by a professional, in color, under excellent lighting conditions.
"This was made a year and a half ago in the physics department at Kazakh State University in the USSR," Braintree explained. "The subject is Petr K. Woronov, a well-known theoretical physicist who does not pretend to have psychic ability."
The film showed a small windowless room empty except for a table made of clear acrylic. There was a cordless electric fan at one end of the table. Woronov, a round-shouldered elderly man wearing a pinstripe suit and a shirt open at the throat, approached the table carrying a psychotronic machine much like the cube which Braintree had exhibited to the group from Washington. Woronov placed the machine at the opposite end of the transparent table and stepped back about four feet, where he stared at his machine. Within a few seconds the fan blades began to turn; they became a pink blur as the fan oscillated smoothly. White numerals appeared on the screen: 1.2 X 10-3 dynes. The force required to make the fan blades turn. The camera zoomed in. The film ended. "That was Woronov, all right," said Todfield, whose profession was Intelligence. "And the camera always lies."
