“Forty-five this last February,” Colin reminded her with a sigh. Not an old man by any standard, but somehow the future he’d been planning to live in hadn’t been here when he reached it. How could anyone who’d been present on V-E Day have predicted that this was what would happen to the unscathed industrial giant among the Allied Powers? And it had happened so fast … could anyone have predicted this frenzied self-destructive collapse on that day not so long ago when all the world was cheering?
No. But somewhere, out there, there were people who had worked toward it, and who now celebrated their dark victory. Since Kennedy’s assassination, Colin read the daily papers with increasing dread, searching for the dead hand of the Armanenschaft in every new outbreak of chaos. Were its members behind these tides of social collapse—or was he the only one who saw the collapse? Perhaps these social upheavals were the pangs of a joyous birth instead … .
“Colin? Hello?” Alison broke into his thoughts, and Colin realized how far he’d drifted.
“Sorry, Alison. I was woolgathering,” he admitted.
“You must have been!” she said, laughing. “But I’ll do my best to anchor you to the Earth Plane. How’s Claire?”
“She and Peter are both doing well—he’s been promoted, and they’re on the same shift most of the time, now. I saw her last week, and she told me she was thinking of listing with an agency and switching to temp work. I believe they’re thinking of starting a family, once things settle down.”
“What a waste,” Alison said gently. “Don’t frown at me so, Colin—I have to say it. You know as well as I do that a gift like Claire’s is rare. And you also know that a woman with a husband doesn’t have any freedom—any life—of her own. She’s always looking after him.”
“Someone has to,” Colin offered diffidently. “We men are the most incapable of creatures, left to ourselves.”
Alison snorted eloquently.
“And it was Claire’s choice,” Colin reminded his friend. “Both to marry, and to set aside the Path for this lifetime. She has other things to learn, and other ways of learning them.”
“We never stop learning,” Alison admitted. “And you’re certainly doing well with young Ashwell—there may be something to that boy, with time. But I think you might have exercised more influence on Claire than you did, all but flinging her into Moffat’s arms.”
“There we must agree to disagree, Alison,” Colin said firmly. “Claire is not my disciple; she has not come to me to have her feet set upon the Path once more. But we won’t spoil such a lovely day with such an old argument. Tell me about Simon—what have you and he been doing? I’ve read your monograph, by the way; you must be very proud of your disciple. A Natural History of the Poltergeist? Ambitious.”
Alison smiled as the gentle barb struck home. “Oh, Simon is a jewel! And his exoteric career is doing so well, too—I dread the thought of his music taking him completely away from me, though I suppose it will at some point. But we had a lovely time—in Ohio, of all places! Fascinating haunted house: poltergeists, mediumship, apportation, all the classic manifestations. Simon’s working up my notes, but I’m not sure if we’ll publish, at least not for a few years yet. The family involved has two young children, and the last thing they need right now is more publicity. But Simon will be here soon—why not ask him about it? You know he’d love to tell you all about it.”
“And behold: speak the name, and the Disciple appears!” Simon cried genially, opening the garden’s back gate and stepping through it. Now that he was of legal age and in control of the fortune he’d earned as a child, Simon had bought a condominium in one of the new high-rise buildings going up all over the Twin Peaks area, but he was still a frequent guest in Alison’s house.
“Simon!” Alison rose to her feet to receive a kiss upon the cheek, and Colin rose also, to shake his hand. Simon had a powerful grip, but forbore to use it in petty contests of strength.
In the last several years Simon Anstey had changed from an intense, self-conscious, teenager to a graceful, self-possessed young man. He’d grown several inches and filled out through the chest and shoulders, fulfilling the early promise of physical power his body had held. Recently, Colin knew, Simon had tried his hand at conducting, in addition to composing and performing, and a conductor must have as much physical presence as any Olympic athlete.
“Colin—it’s great to see you again; it’s been far too long. I hear you’ve been—what’s the phrase?—‘assisting the police with their inquiries’?” He grinned impishly, and Colin found himself smiling in return.
“Something of the sort. The police often consult specialists, and Claire and I have been able to be of some help to them on a few occasions.”
“Small potatoes,” Simon said, not unkindly. He sat down at the table and accepted a glass of the white wine Alison was drinking. “The two of you ought to devote some time to the kind of two-legged jackals the police can’t touch. I understand that the Rhodes Group makes rather a specialty of it.”
“Simon,” Alison said chidingly.
“Well, it’s true, Alison. And you remember what happened in Ohio—the moment the first dish flew, the Kenyons were besieged by every sort of witchdoctor, fake exorcist, ghost-breaker, and I don’t know what. They came out of the woodwork, and none of them had any more occult power than that cat!”
Simon gestured at the white cat sunning itself on the stone wall. As if it had taken offense at his gesture, it leaped from the wall and vanished in a flirt of plumy tail.
“But they certainly wanted enough money for their services,” Simon went on. “Thousands of dollars—for what boiled down to a few fake mystic passes and lighting a few sticks of incense. Someone should sic the Better Business Bureau on them! And there are people like them everywhere—here, in fact.”
“Unfortunately,” Colin said, “there aren’t any regulating agencies for psychics, let alone for parapsychologists. It’s a young field—something I constantly seem to be telling my students—which means that accrediting programs are few and far between.”
“There’s that place out in New York. Near where you used to live, Colin—you’ve heard of it?” Alison asked. She frowned, summoning the name into memory. “The Bidney Institute,” she said. “They’re affiliated with a small college; don’t they offer a degree?”
“I know they offer a prize … one million dollars to the first person who can prove the existence of psychic powers. I don’t think the prize is ever going to be claimed,” Colin said.
“Amateur table-tippers with a steamer trunk full of juju,” Simon sneered. “You can’t quantify the occult and reduce it to a book full of charts and graphs.”
“Maybe not,” Colin said gently, more amused than otherwise by Simon’s sulkiness. “But the occult isn’t parapsychology, any more than parapsychology is the occult. It’s the fact that people have gotten the two of them tangled together for so many years that’s caused all the trouble. Now we finally have the chance to separate them.”
“Oh, well spoken, Colin!” Alison applauded. “And if anyone can do it, I think you will.”
Even Simon smiled, a little crookedly. “Good luck, Colin—you’ll need it, especially these days. Ever hear of somebody named Thorne Blackburn?”
Thorne Blackburn, it seemed, was another low-rent messiah with a cult following who had invaded the Bay Area and set up shop in the Haight-Ashbury. He claimed, according to Simon, to be a god—among other things—and supported himself and his ragtag followers with public displays of magic.
“That’s the disgusting thing,” Simon said. “Apparently somewhere this jerk managed to get some real training. He didn’t know what to do with it though, or maybe he just wanted to put on a show: it’s all muddled up with stage illusionism and rock music. It’s a carnival sideshow!”
“Everything is, lately.” Alison sighed. “Lunacy may be the only logical response when our own government is firebombing women and children overseas. How did we come to this in t
wenty years?” she asked, the direction of her thoughts a despairing echo of Colin’s own.
“You still believe that the U.S. government wears the white hats, don’t you, Alison?” Simon said, with odd gentleness. “Us—Them—it’s really all the same. Government is by its very nature corrupt.”
“If that’s true, we don’t need to help it along,” Alison said tartly, and the talk had turned to politics and then to less weighty matters.
Colin didn’t think about Thorne Blackburn again for several days.
The school term had ended the month before, and Colin was teaching only one summer session this year, a three-week course on the history of the occult that started at the end of June. It was a graduate course, and Colin had pushed very hard for its inclusion in the curriculum, over the protests of the trustees.
Perhaps the incidence was on the rise, or perhaps knowing Claire was what had made him aware of it, but more and more, Colin realized that people with problems—problems which, though real, were outside the scope of conventional science—were being funneled into inappropriate treatment by professionals in psychology or medicine. Even with the best of intentions, these professionals were unable to treat the problems these people came to them to solve. It was psychiatry’s fault as much as anyone’s—psychiatry had gone from being a fashionable adjunct to being one of life’s necessities since the fifties, as if not only the pursuit but the attainment of happiness had now become an inalienable right.
But psychiatry couldn’t talk a poltergeist out of existence, any more than medical science could give its victim a pill to banish the symptoms of possession by a “noisy spirit.” Not everybody who heard voices was suffering from a treatable psychological abnormality; not every report of telepathy or precognition was an indicator of a disturbed mental state—though the people who had been told all their lives that such things did not exist were likely to be understandably upset when the Unseen came barging into their lives.
If only the professionals who would see these people were willing to entertain the possibility of more explanations than the ones entombed in their textbooks, much good could be done in the world. A summer lecture course was a small beginning, but at least it was a beginning. And a number of those signed up for his course might do great things with their lives, things that might reconcile the painful breach that had been forced between Science and Belief in this century.
Since he would be teaching over the summer, Colin had not closed up his offices and even kept to his regular office hours. The campus had been closed by antiwar demonstrations for so much of the year that Colin felt that the students who were still here to get an education—as opposed to those whose purpose seemed to be ending the war, for example—ought to get the chance to see something of their professors. On the streets of America today, an entire generation was opting out of rationalism as a basis for their decisions, or so it sometimes seemed to Colin. At least it was Sproul and Bancroft that had been the usual focus of the students’ attention, and not Tolman Hall.
The sword-in-stone letter opener that Alison had given him as an office- warming present gleamed on the corner of his desk. There was a more prosaic reason for Colin to keep office hours today. He was meeting Claire for lunch—it was her day off—and it was easiest for her to meet with him on campus, combining that with her errands at local shops.
He took a moment to breathe a silent prayer of thanks that Peter Moffat had made detective before he might have had to take part in some of the brawls the Berkeley campus had seen over the last year and a half. There’d been no permanent injuries on either side, but Colin had found the passions that ran so high on both sides deeply disturbing.
This is how it starts, the road to fascism and genocide. You know that. This is how it always starts, and then it ends, not with a bang, but with a whimper … .
The sound of the knock at his door, though soft, was jarring.
“Professor? May I come in?” Jonathan Ashwell said.
The painfully clean-cut young student Colin had met four years before was hard to discern in the man who—with unchanged deference—entered Colin’s office. The sportcoat and khakis had been replaced by tattered bell-bottomed blue jeans sewn with daisies, flags, peace signs, and other symbols Colin didn’t even recognize. Jonathan was wearing a T-shirt that had once been white, but now had been hand-tie-dyed in Day-Glo neon colors. Around his neck he wore a number of seed-bead necklaces and medallions, and pinned to his painted denim jacket was a small green button with the logo: “Vietnik.” There was an Army surplus backpack slung over one shoulder.
His hair was long now, straggling over his shoulders and accompanied by the inevitable sideburns and mustache, and he was wearing a pair of wire-rimmed glasses with octagonal lavender lenses. He was holding a slip of paper in his hand.
“Of course, Jonathan. What can I do for you?” Colin asked. He’d become inured to student fashions long ago.
“Sign my drop-slip?” Jonathan said hesitantly, sliding the paper in his hand across the desk. “I’ve changed my mind. I’m dropping out.”
As he came closer, Colin caught an almost overpowering whiff of strawberry; the rage for scented oils having kept pace with the penchant for smoking marijuana, which had an intense and distinctive scent.
“You’re dropping the course?” Colin asked in bewilderment.
Jonathan had only one more semester to go before collecting his Master’s and had already been accepted into the doctoral program. He’d been one of the most vocal supporters of Colin’s desire to publicize what Colin called science’s dark twin—the occult—and an endlessly inventive, questing mind.
“But why?” Colin asked.
“It’s nothing to do with you, Professor,” Jonathan said guiltily. “But it’s, you know, like—”
Colin resisted the temptation to demand that the young man speak English; Jonathan was almost painfully sincere in his inarticulateness.
“I’ve just always known there was, like, something more. Something bigger. Something that would make sense out of this whole mixed-up crazy world, you know? And with what Alison said, about how we all have to be soldiers for the Light—but it’s hard to be sure what to do, you know? But now I think I know.”
And so once again Colin MacLaren heard the name of Thorne Blackburn. It seemed that Jonathan had attended an antiwar rally in Golden Gate Park a few weeks before, and Blackburn had been one of the speakers.
“And it was like … I’d been waiting all my life to hear what he had to say. I’m going to join his group and work with him to bring the New Aeon.”
If Jonathan had been Colin’s disciple, Colin might simply have forbidden him to do these things, but Jonathan had always been too passionate about finding his own answers to accept the discipline of a Magickal Lodge. He’d gone with grasshopper facility from one store of knowledge to the next, seeking, always seeking … .
And now his search had come to this.
“Jonathan, I’ll sign your drop-slip if you really want me to, but I beg you to reconsider. You can’t just abandon everything you’ve worked toward for years to follow some street-person who thinks he might have the Answer,” Colin said, almost pleading.
“They followed Jesus,” Jonathan said with the same apologetic serenity.
“Surely you’re not comparing this … Thorne Blackburn to Jesus?” Colin demanded, scandalized.
“Why not?” Jonathan said. “Jesus didn’t come to give us the Answer. He came to give us the questions. It’s been two thousand years—why shouldn’t someone else have more questions for us? But I know this comes as a shock, Professor. Why don’t you come and meet him? You’ll see what a great mind he has. I’ve told Thorne all about you, too, and he says he’d like to meet you.”
I’ll just bet, Colin thought to himself. His work with Claire had gained him a quiet but well-founded reputation as debunker, and one who did not suffer charlatans gladly.
“Look, Jonathan. I admit this comes as a bit of a shock to m
e, and it seems to be rather a sudden decision on your part. You’ve got at least another week before you need to drop these summer courses; why not give it a few more days and see what you think then?”
Jonathan’s face lost its comfortable smile.
“I thought that you, at least, would understand, Professor MacLaren,” he said, in hurt tones. “I know that you know there’s more to the world than just this … military-industrial complex. And Thorne, he says it’s time for the Old Aeon to end, for us to summon the Gods to earth once more and end the rift between us. And I can help him. It takes money to do the things he wants to do, and I’ve got my grandfather’s trust fund—”
Colin listened in growing horror as Jonathan blithely outlined his plans to drop out of school and subsidize what he called an “underground newspaper,” signing over his inheritance to do so. Only a fundamental belief in freedom and years of dealing with what sounded like similar blue-sky notions allowed Colin to remain silent.
He already realized that talking to Jonathan would do no good at all, but in the end, he wasn’t even able to coax the young man to wait a few days before making such a life-changing decision, let alone keep him from dropping Colin’s course. Unfortunately, Colin was in no sense standing in loco parentis to the young man—he had no right to withhold his consent in a matter that was, in essence, a formality. He signed the form, and allowed Jonathan to extract a promise from Colin to come to San Francisco to see Thorne Blackburn perform.
When Jonathan left, Colin suddenly felt very old.
Alison had said once in passing that these days San Francisco reminded her a bit of Berlin in the thirties, but were things really that bad? The fabled decadence of Berlin before the Nazis had taken power had been the fever of an infected wound. Was this country really in that much trouble?
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