Al was silent.
Burkhalter reached into the young mind. Al tried to twist free and escape, but his father’s strong hands gripped him. Instinct, not reasoning, on the boy’s part, for minds can touch over long distances.
He did not like to do this, for increased sensibility had gone with sensitivity, and violations are always violations. But ruthlessness was required. Burkhalter searched. Sometimes he threw key words violently at Al, and surges of memory pulsed up in response.
In the end, sick and nauseated, Burkhalter let Al go and sat alone on the bench, watching the red light the on the snowy peaks. The whiteness was red-stained. But it was not too late. The man was a fool, had been a fool from the beginning, or he would have known the impossibility of attempting such a thing as this.
The conditioning had only begun. Al could be reconditioned. Burkhalter’s eyes hardened. And would be. And would be. But not yet, not until the immediate furious anger had given place to sympathy and understanding.
Not yet.
He went into the house, spoke briefly to Ethel, and televised the dozen Baldies who worked with him in the Publishing Center. Not all of them had families, but none was missing when, half an hour later, they met in the back room of the Pagan Tavern downtown. Sam Shane had caught a fragment of Burkhalter’s knowledge, and all of them read his emotions. Welded into a sympathetic unit by their telepathic sense, they waited till Burkhalter was ready.
Then he told them. It didn’t take long, via thought. He told them about the Japanese jewel-tree with its glittering gadgets, a shining lure. He told them of racial paranoia and propaganda. And that the most effective propaganda was sugar-coated, disguised so that the motive was hidden.
A Green Man, hairless, heroic—symbolic of a Baldy.
And wild, exciting adventures, the lure to catch the young fish whose plastic minds were impressionable enough to be led along the roads of dangerous madness. Adult Baldies could listen, but they did not; young telepaths had a higher threshold of mental receptivity, and adults do not read the books of their children except to reassure themselves that there is nothing harmful in the pages. And no adult would bother to listen to the Green Man mindcast. Most of them had accepted it as the original daydream of their own children.
“I did,” Shane put in. “My girls—”
“Trace it back,” Burkhalter said. “I did.”
The dozen minds reached out on the higher frequency, the children’s wavelength, and something jerked away front them, startled and apprehensive.
“He’s the one,” Shane nodded.
They did not need to speak. They went out of the Pagan Tavern in a compact, ominous group, and crossed the street to the general store. The door was locked. Two of the men burst it open with their shoulders.
They went through the dark store and into a back room where a man was standing beside an overturned chair. His bald skull gleamed in an overhead light. His mouth worked impotently.
His thought pleaded with them—was driven back by an implacable deadly wall.
Burkhalter took out his dagger. Other slivers of steel glittered for a little while—
And were quenched.
Venning’s scream had long since stopped, but his dying thought of agony lingered within Burkhalter’s mind as he walked homeward. The wigless Baldy had not been insane, no. But he had been paranoidal.
What he had tried to conceal, at the last, was quite shocking. A tremendous, tyrannical egotism, and a furious hatred of nontelepaths. A feeling of self-justification that was, perhaps, insane. And—we are the future! The Baldies! God made us to rule lesser men!
Burkhalter sucked in his breath, shivering. The mutation had not been entirely successful. One group had adjusted, the Baldies who wore wigs and had become fitted to their environment. One group had been insane, and could be discounted; they were in asylums.
But the middle group were merely paranoid. They were not insane, and they were not sane. They wore no wigs.
Like Venning.
And Venning had sought disciples. His attempt had been foredoomed to failure, but he had been one man.
One Baldy—paranoid.
There were others, many others.
Ahead, nestled into the dark hillside, was the pale blotch that marked Burkhalter’s home. He sent his thought ahead, and it touched Ethel’s and paused very briefly to reassure her.
Then it thrust on, and went into the sleeping mind of a little boy who, confused and miserable, had finally cried himself to sleep. There were only dreams in that mind now, a little discolored, a little stained, but they could be cleansed. And would be.
THE END.
BEFORE I WAKE . . .
Brighter grew the vision that Pete saw of a land of beauty across the Seven Seas, and dimmer, more shadowy grew the ugly world he lived in . . . And all the while they called to him to come back, come back before it was too late!
THIS is the story of a boy named Pete Coutinho, who had a spell put on him. Some people might have called it a curse. I don’t know. It depends on a lot of things, on whether you’ve got gipsy blood, like old Beatriz Sousa, who learned a lot about magic from the wild gitana tribe in the mountains beyond Lisbon, and whether you’re satisfied with a fisherman’s life in Cabrillo.
Not that a fisherman’s life is a bad one, far from it. By day you go out in the boats that rock smoothly across the blue Gulf waters, and at night you can listen to music and drink wine at the Shore Haven or the Castle or any of the other taverns on Front Street. What more do you want? What more is there?
And what does any sensible man, or any sensible boy, want with that sorcerous sort of glamor that can make everything incredibly bright and shining, deepening colors till they hurt, while wild music swings down from stars that have turned strange and alive? Pete shouldn’t have wanted that, I suppose, but he did, and probably that’s why there happened to him—what did happen. And the trouble began long before the actual magic started working.
Pedro Ignacio da Silva Coutinho, with a name far too long for his thin, wiry, fourteen-year old body, used to sit on the wharf, looking out at the bright blue-green Gulf water and thinking about what lay beyond that turquoise plain. He heard the men talking about Tampico and the Isle of Pines and such, and those names always held magic for him. Later on, when he got his growth, he intended to go to those places, and he knew what they’d look like.
The Isle of Pines was Circe’s isle, with white marble columns here and there in the dark green, and pirates would be dueling with a flash of clashing swords and a flash of recklessly smiling white teeth. The Gulf, like the Caribbean, is haunted by the ghosts of the old buccaneers. Tampico, to Pete, wasn’t the industrial shipping port his father knew. It had palaces and parrots of many colors, and winding White roads. It was an Arabian Nights city, with robed magicians wandering the streets, benign most of the time, but with gnarled hands like, tree-roots that could weave spells.
Manoel, his father, could have told him a different story, for Manoel had shipped once under sail, in the old days, before he settled down to a fisherman’s life in Cabrillo. But Manoel didn’t talk a great deal. Men talk to men, not to boys, and that was why Pete didn’t learn as much as he might have from the sun-browned Portuguese who went out with the fishing fleets. He got his knowledge out of books, and strange books they were, and strange knowledge.
Up on the hill, in a little white house, lived Dr. Manning, who had been a fixture there for decades. Dr. Manning spent his days puttering around in his garden and writing an interminable autobiography that would never be published. He liked Pete because the boy was quiet, and very often Pete could be found squatting cross-legged in some corner of the little house, turning over the pages of Manning’s books. He dipped into them, tasting briefly, racing on, but always pausing over the colored plates by Rackham and Syme and John R. Neill, with their revelations of a world that was too bright and fascinating to be real.
And at first he knew it wasn’t real. But the day-dre
ams grew and grew, as they will when a boy spends the lazy days idling in hot tropical sunlight by the canals with no one to talk to who thinks the thoughts he thinks. And pretty soon they were real, after all. There was an enormous map Dr. Manning had on the wall, and Pete would stand before it and trace Imaginary voyages to the ports that fitted those glamorous pictures Rackham and Neill had painted.
Yes, they were real, finally.
Cartagena and Cocos, Clipperton Island and Campeche; he chased them down the alphabet he’d unwillingly learned at. school, and they were all enchanted places. Clipperton was the haven of old ships. It couldn’t be really an island, just hundreds and hundreds of the great Yankee clippers, with sails like white clouds, rails thronged with sailormen who hadn’t died for good.
Not that Pete had any illusions about death. He’d seen dead men, and he knew that something goes out of a man—the soul goes out—when the lips slacken and the eyes stare emptily. Still and all, they could come back to life in Campeche and Cocos and in thunder-haunted Paramaribo, where dragons lived. But Paramaribo dragons could be killed by arrows dipped in the shining venom of the upas tree, which grew in a certain grove he’d discovered in a day-dream.
Then he found the toad. He was trailing his father, Manoel, one time, to make certain the old man didn’t get too drunk and fall in one of the canals. It was Saturday night, when all good fishermen drink as much as they can hold, sometimes a little more. And Pete, a slim, silent watcher, would follow his father, darting through the shadows, ready to catch the unsteady figure if it lurched too close to the dark waters, or to yell for help if he couldn’t.
Pete was thinking about a certain town he’d heard of named Juba, where there were—he could see them now—huge sleek black figures on golden thrones, and leopard skins, and he could hear the rolling of drums deep inside his head. His bare feet scuffed the dust through shafts of light that angled out from the windows, and discordant music came faintly from the Shore Haven down the road. Manoel had stopped and was kicking at something on the ground. It moved a little, and Manoel pursued it.
Pete edged closer, his eyes alert and curious. A small dark blotch hopped laboriously away from the drunken man’s feet. Pete might have let his father crush the toad, but somehow he didn’t, though he was no kinder than the average boy. It was Manoel’s drunkenness that made Pete run forward. It was an idea, half-formulated in his mind, that a drunken giant could stamp out life into oblivion, and, maybe, that up in the starry sky were bigger giants who might get drunk sometime and send their feet crashing down on men. Well, Pete had funny ideas.
The important thing is that he ran in behind his father, sent the old man sprawling with a quick shove, and snatched up the toad. It was a cool, smooth weight in his hand. Manoel was yelling and cursing and trying to rise, but he thought that a coast guard patrol had run him down and tiger sharks were coming in fast, smelling the blood. Pretty soon he discovered the blood was only red wine, from the broken bottle in his pocket, and that distressed him so much he just sat there in the road and cried.
But Pete ran home with the cool, firm body of the toad-breathing calmly in his hand. He didn’t go into the shack where his mother was boiling strong coffee for Manoel’s return. He circled it and went into the back yard, where he’d made a tiny garden by the fence. It would be nice to tell about how Pete loved flowers and had a bed of roses and fuchsias glowing amid the squalid surroundings, but as a matter of fact Pete grew corn, squash and tomatoes. Manoel would have disapproved of roses and clouted Pete across the head for growing them.
THERE were some rocks piled up near the garden, and Pete put the toad among them. And it was a funny thing, but Pete stayed right there,-crouching on his knees, looking at the toad for a long time. There are little lights in a toad’s eyes that flicker like lights in a jewel. And maybe there was something more in this toad’s eyes.
You’ll say it was dark in the back yard and Pete couldn’t even see the toad. But the fact is he did see it, all right, and old Beatriz, the gitana, who knew more than she should have known about witches, might have explained a little. You see, a witch has to have a familiar, some little animal like a cat or a toad. He helps her, somehow. When the witch dies the familiar is suppose to die too, but sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes, if it’s absorbed enough magic, it lives on. Maybe this toad found its way south from Salem, from the days when Cotton Mather was hanging witches. Or maybe Lafitte had a Creole girl who called on the Black Man in the pirate-haven of Barataria. The Gulf is full of ghosts and memories, and one of those ghosts might very well be that of a woman with warlock blood who’d come from Europe a long time ago, and died on the new continent.
And possibly her familiar didn’t know the way home. There’s not much room for magic in America now, but once there was room.
If you’re thinking, the toad talked to Pete in a voice he could hear, you’re on the wrong track. I’m not saying something out of the ordinary didn’t happen. It’s possible that the toad looked into Pete’s mind with its tiny, cool, quiet mind, and asked a question or two, and it’s also possible that a little magic started working there In that dark, fish-smelling back yard, with the tin-pan music of Cabrillo’s bars murmuring through the night. But I’m not saying it’s so, either.
All that happened was that Pete went into the house and got slapped for leaving Manoel. Margarida, a short, fat woman with worried dark eyes, said that Manoel would certainly fall into a canal and be eaten by barracuda, and Manoel’s family, including Pete, all his five brothers and sisters, and Margarida herself, would starve miserably. She worked it out in great detail, gesturing wildly. Then the coffee boiled over, and she rushed to save it and then gave Pete a cup.
Pete drank it and grinned at Gregorio, who was trying to sharpen a gaff with all the dexterity of his six-year-old hands.
“The father will be okay, minha mae,” he told Margarida. “He is not so drunk.”
“Pedrinho, Manoel is not young any more. You must go out on the boats yourself someday soon.”
“Good!” Pete said, thinking rapturously of Campeche and Tampico. Perhaps Tampico did not really have magicians, after all, but the truth would be even more glamorous. Margarida looked at the boy and bit her lip. Well—basta, apron-strings have to be cut some day. It was not as if the boy were not always talking about sailing the Caribbean.
“Put the crianga to bed, Pedrinho,” she ordered, turning to the stove. So Pete collected Cypriano Jose, a chuckling, fat baby, and herded Gregorio before him into the next room.
In the dark, by the rock pile, the toad sat quietly, staring into the shadows with eyes that glittered like strange jewels.
For awhile that night Pete lay awake, his mind racing with vivid pictures of ships driving majestically through the oceans of the world. Someday he’d be on his way to Cartagena and Juba, Juba where heavy golden bracelets shone against satiny black skin, where great processions moved with palanquins and purple banners to the clash of cymbals and the mutter of drums. Cocos and Campeche and the Isle of Pines, where red-sashed pirates grinned in their beards and sang bloody songs. Tampico, where turbanned men called up afrits and jinn, and sleeping princesses lay in palaces of pearl. Clipperton of the white sails, Belom, where each white house had a bell-tower and the sweet chimes sang out forever in the peaceful valley.
Pete slept.
And then, somehow, the bed was revolving slowly. In Pete a dim excitement rose, and a consciousness that something was about to happen. As he slipped sidewise into mid-air he glimpsed rolling water below, and instinctively brought his hands together and straightened his knees. He cut the surface in a clean dive. Down and down he went, while his vision cleared and he saw, through a rush of bubbles, a clear, blue-green light.
He went slower and slower, turning his hands to slant to the surface, but not rising very fast. He had been holding his breath. Now, as a barracuda came nosing toward him through a forest of wavering weeds, fear made him kick out convulsively and he sucked in a gas
p. He expected strangling water to gush into his lungs, but there was no discomfort at all. He might have been breathing air.
The barracuda swam up after him. One of his flailing hands struck the fish, and it darted away. Pete saw its torpedo body dwindling down the long, blue-green vista. Hanging there, automatically treading water, he began to realize what lay around and beneath him.
This was the southern sea. The colors that fade when coral is drawn out of its element were garishly bright here, intricate and lovely labyrinths on the bottom. Among the coral, fish went darting, and overhead a sea-bat, a devilfish, flapped slow wings past, its stingaree tail trailing. Morays coiled by, opening their incredible, wolfish mouths at him, and many-limbed crabs scuttled sidewise over the rocks and little sandy plateaus of the bottom. Groves of seaweed and great fans of colored sponges swung with hypnotic motion, and schools of tiny striped fish went flashing in and out among them, moving all together as if with a single mind.
Pete swam down. From a cavern among the brown and purple rocks an octopus looked at him out of huge, alien eyes. Its tentacles hung and quivered. Pete swam away, hovering over an expanse, of pale sand where the light from above shimmered and ran in rippling waves, his own shadow hanging spread-eagled below him. In and out of it many little creatures went scuttling busily on their underwater errands. Life here was painted in three dimensions, and there was no gravity. There was only beauty and strangeness and a hint of terror that sent pleasurable excitement thrilling through Pete’s blood.
He swam upward, broke the surface, shaking water from his eyes and hair. The air was as easy to breathe as the water. He rode lightly on the rise and fall of smooth waves, looking about him. A forested shore lay half a mile away, across a blue, sunlit sea, and mountains rose behind the dark slopes. The ocean lay empty except for . . . yes, it was there, a clipper ship, sails furled, masts swaying back and forth as the vessel rocked in the trough of the waves. Its clean, sweet lines made Pete’s throat ache. He could imagine her under sail, leaning forward into the waves, white canvas straining in great billowing curves, and the sharp bowsprit with its gilded girl’s image driving into the spray.
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