To Ride Pegasus

by Anne McCaffrey

  “You sent one in?” Daffyd began riffling through the tapes.

  “It should be on your desk. It’d better be on your desk.”

  Daffyd found the purple-backed City Admin tape and waved it at her.

  “It is. Lester Welch had first crack at me.”

  “And he didn’t mention our tape?” She made an exasperated noise. “Look, Dave, listen to it now because, believe me, it’s more important than Greenfield even if Lester doesn’t think so.”

  “Is that a precog, Pat?”

  “You tell me it’s my condition,” she said, suddenly angry, “the way Julian does or a vitamin deficiency like my OB and I’ll resign.” The anger as suddenly drained from her face. “God, don’t I just wish I could!”

  “Pat, d’you want a few weeks relief?”

  Daffyd op Owen caught the shifting emotions on her face: sullen resentment giving way to hope, instantly replaced by resignation. “Don’t, Dave.”

  “I wouldn’t and you know it. I can send out a may-day …”

  “And overwork some other poor Talent?” Pat’s chin lifted. “I’ll be all right Dave. Honest! It’s just that … well, hell, listen to the report. And remember, it’s a pan-ethnic problem this year.”

  “This year?” Another loaded phrase. Daffyd op Owen inserted the City Admin tape and his concern over the Greenfield proposal faded to insignificance as he recognized the more imminent danger of a disturbed City. He began to wonder who else had thought to save their dear Director trouble by not reporting the grim facts he now heard. Because if the Correlation Staff had slipped up on reading precogs, he’d downgrade the lot.

  Brief, violent inter-ethnic quarrels over contract employment during the winter had been mediated but, within the City’s ethnic sectors, the truce had been uneasy: each segment certain that another had received what plums existed. (Most of the spot employment during the winter had been make-work, paid for by funds pared from other pressing needs to give the proud their sop.) Most of the agitation could be traced to a young Pan-Slavic leader, Vsevolod Roznine. The report noted that Roznine was more feared than popular with his constituents and, although several attempts had been made to cool or placate the agitator, he had neatly avoided the traps. The report dosed with the note that Roznine might have latent Talent. However, the only mental contact made had been so distasteful to the Talent that he had broken it off before he could implant any suggestion to go to the Center for testing.

  “The man’s public mind is a sewer,” was the final comment.

  Daffyd op Owen made a steeple of his fingers and, twirling his swivel chair, gazed out his window to the-orderly grounds below. He felt unaccountably depressed yet he could be justifiably proud of what Talent in general and Eastern American Center in particular had been able to accomplish in the past decades. Op Owen could appreciate, and it was no precog, how much more had to be done on numerous levels: public, private, civic, clinical, military, spatial, and most important, inner. No matter what the dominant Talent, precog, telepath, teleport, kinetic, empathic, the Talented were still very human people, above and beyond their special gifts which so often complicated adjustment therapy.

  They had professional immunity at long last, for all registered Talents. Another giant step forward. They had had acceptance on a commercial level for many years where Talent could steadily show profit to management. Since the first body-Talents had been able to point out assassins in crowds (even before precogs were accepted and acted on by key personnel), they’d been accepted by intelligent people. But the suspicious were the majority and they still had to be convinced that the Talented were not dangerously different.

  He’d ruminated on this many times and it wasn’t solving the other pressing problems before him. A city torn by the very ethnic strife that had once been hailed as a bonding compromise to the late twentieth century’s lack of basic life-style values: summer was a-coming and, despite advances in weather controls, a hot dry spell which could cut the power available for city air-conditioning would only produce riot-breeding conditions.

  So far, no major precogs of disasters had been recorded and for such a large unit as Jerhattan, a trouble precog was statistically more probable than one dealing with a small number of people or a single citizen. Scant reassurance, however.

  And thank god, Talent was pan-ethnic, thought Daffyd. He didn’t have to worry about that ugly head rising against the Center.

  He did tape an All-Talent alert on the city’s climate. The great minds would now have a single thought. Perhaps they’d also have an answer.

  When he picked Sally Iselin up at nine at the Clinic door, she gave him a quick appraising look. Then her anxious-puppy expression changed to a radiant smile.

  “I knew it. I knew it.” And she all but war-danced a circle as she inspected his costume.

  “What?” he asked, turning to keep her face in view.

  “You dressed just right. How’d you know? I’m sure I didn’t clue you. Are you positive you’re not a precog, too, Daffyd?”

  “I’d rather not be.”

  Her vivacity faded instantly. She put a hand out aborting the sympathetic gesture before she actually made a contact. He touched her fingers lightly in reassurance.

  “Not to worry. I just had a tedious day. Felt like wearing glad threads.”

  Sally’s eyes crinkled and her mouth tilted up as she cocked her head to one side. “You are indeed joyous,” she said saucily as her glance took in his royal blue black-trimmed coverall.

  “Look who’s talking,” and Daffyd grinned down at Sally in lime green and black swing tunic and matching high boots. Sally’s puppy charm was a tonic and he wondered, as he often did in her company, why he didn’t make more opportunities to enjoy it.

  As he put a helping hand under her elbow to assist her up to the passenger side of the two-spot copter, she gave him a startled sideways glance. He caught the echo of mental astonishment before she started to chatter about the day’s hopeful applicants.

  “They come, Daffyd, swearing oaths that they’d had this or that perception Dorotea dosen’t tap a one. We go through the routine but even with maximum perceptol, they come over dead dumb and stone blind.”

  Sally was a compulsive talker but Daffyd became aware that her present garrulity was a shield. He wondered what Sally would need to obscure. Propriety prohibited his making a quick probe but undoubtedly there’d be clues later on. Sally was entirely too open to be devious for very long.

  She directed him to Sector K, northwest of the Center, where the worn hills struggled up from old swamplands: not a salubrious area despite reclamation and renovation efforts. There were still ruins of early twentieth-century factories and it was by one such structure, a sprawling half-glass and brick affair, that Sally directed him to land.

  “The place seems popular enough,” Daffyd said as he had to circle several times to find a site for the copter.

  Sally winced, eyeing the ranks of city-crawlers and the presence of both private and public transport copters. “Doesn’t take long, does it, for the masses to latch onto a new thrill!”

  “Oh? This is new?” He’d caught the worry tone of her thoughts. “Crowd bad for the project?”

  “I don’t know.” She was more than worried. “I just don’t know. It’s just that …” She broke off, firmly pressing her lips together.

  They stood in a short queue for billets, paying a credit apiece to get in.

  “Milking the golden cow,” Sally said with uncharacteristic bitternness as they passed the billets in at massive sliding doors which separated the outer hall from the vast factory space beyond.

  “Guarding it, too,” Daffyd said, noting the strong-arm types in meshed duty-alls.

  “That might make more sense than you’d guess,” Sally said in a very dark voice. Her mind was practically shouting “trouble.”

  “Will we need assistance?” he asked her, estimating how many empathic Talents might be needed to control a crowd this size.

>   Sally didn’t answer. She was looking around the enormous open area which was filling rapidly. It didn’t require Talent to appreciate the aura of excited anticipation that emanated from the audience. The hall was by no means full yet; half the tables were still empty, but most of the couches of the inner circles were occupied. Daffyd had never seen such an assortment of styles, ages and conditions of furnishings.

  “They must have been scouring the Sector,” Sally said. Then she indicated a table on the outer rim: a table, Daffyd noticed, which was convenient to one of the luminescent exit doors.

  They were barely seated, Daffyd on Queen Anne, Sally on Swedish tubular, before a waiter inquired their pleasure.

  “What’s available?” Sally asked, simulating bored indifference. Daffyd was surprised that she felt the need to dissemble.

  “You name it,” replied the concessionaire, impatient. His tables were filling up.

  Sally “told” Daffyd that this, too, was an innovation.

  “Try something simple, schatzie,” Daffyd said, managing the verbal slurs of their assumed roles. “The Medboard warned you and I’m not copting you to the drain-brain again this month.”

  Sally affected petulance, then with dutiful resignation, asked for a mild caffeine. Daffyd, in character, asked for an esoteric blend.

  “Nor am I copting you!”

  “Make it two milds and bring the pot.”

  As the conman left Daffyd leaned towards Sally. “Is this area disaffected?”

  She wrinkled her nose. “We get a lot of hopefuls from this Sector.”

  Sound had come on, more frequency drone than actual note. The dim Lights on the girders were beginning to fade completely, and ground spots lit up, adding their eerie moiety to the ambience. Sally looked toward the half-circle of stage which had remained semi-lit. The aura of expectation, of voracious emotional appetite increased perceptibly. Sally shivered and folded her arms across her breasts but Daffyd sensed that the created atmosphere irritated more than distressed her.

  She shifted in her chair nervously when the waiter appeared with cups and the pot. He served them disdain-fully—he didn’t make as much commission from the milder brews—and hurried off, grimacing thanks for the carefully generous gratuity.

  The auditorium was almost full now and the conversational murmur impinged on Daffyd’s senses as the snarl of the unfed. Yes, the climate of the city was very uncertain indeed. He could feel the tension building rapidly now, with so many feeding it. He noticed the muscle boys spreading through the tables and couches, and he worried harder. The psychology of a crowd was theoretically understood but there was always that gap between theory and reality—that dangerous gap which could be bridged by the most insignificant event—when crowd exploded into Riot Daffyd and Sally were far too familiar with the “tone” of Riot to be very comfortable in a pregnant situation.

  In fact, Daffyd was leaning across the table to warn Sally that they might have to leave when the lighting of the stage area altered and a girl stepped into the center. She wore a white caftan-type unadorned robe and carried an old-fashioned twelve-string guitar. It had no umbilical amplifier which surprised Daffyd as much as the girl’s regal poise and simple appearance.

  A camouflaged hand deposited a three-legged stool and the girl took her place on it without a backward glance.

  Daffyd frowned at the darkness above the stage, wondering where the sound amplification was hidden. She couldn’t possibly hope to reach and hold this crowd without electronic boosting of some kind.

  Then Daffyd saw the relieved and pleased smile on Sally’s face.

  The girl settled herself, tossed back her mane of tawny hair and, without taking any notice of the audience, began to play softly. There was no need for mechanical amplification of that delicate sound. For the first note fell into a voracious silence, the most effective conductor.

  No—and Daffyd sat up straight—every nerve in his body aware of a subtle, incredible pulse that picked up the gentle melody and expanded it—telepathically!

  And this, too, was what Sally had hoped he’d feel, what she’d brought him here to confirm. He saw the happy triumph in her eyes. The girl’s voice, a warm lyric soprano, intensified the pulse, “sounded” off the echo as she fed the multitude with a tender ethnic admonition to love one another. And … everyone did.

  Daffyd listened and “listened,” stunned physically and emotionally by the unusual experience: unusual even for a man whose life had been dedicated to the concept of unusual mental powers. On an intellectual plane, he was incredulous. He couldn’t deduce how she was effecting this total rapport, this augmented pulse. It was not mechanical, of that he was certain. Why this sensation of “echo”?

  The girl would have to be a broadcasting empath: an intelligent empath, unlike poor Harold Orley who hadn’t any intellect at all. This young woman was consciously choosing and directing the emotion she broadcast … Wait! That was it … she was consciously directing the emotions … at whom? Not the individual minds of the listeners: they were responding but they could not account for the “generation” of emotion that enveloped everyone. There had to be sensitive minds to generate emotion like that and these people were parapsychically dead. Yet she was manipulating them in some way, using some method that was non-electrical and non-sonic.

  The girl continued with a more complicated tune from some early nineteenth-century religious minority which had settled in the eastern United States. And the “message” of the song was a soothing statement of acceptance. She was deliberately taking the audience out of the technocratic trap, transferring than to less complex days, lulling them into a mood of even greater receptivity. Nor was Daffyd immune to the charged atmosphere … except for that part of his brain which could not perceive how she was effecting this deft, mass control.

  The singer finished that song and plucked the strings idly, chording into a different key. The third song, while no more intense than the first two, was a rollicking happy ballad, a spirit-lifter, a work doer.

  She was preparing her audience, Daffyd realized, deftly and carefully. He began to relax, or rather, the intellect which had been alerted, responded to the beguiling charm of her performance.

  Daffyd was suddenly frightened. A deep pang, covered in a flash, overladen with worry that was lyric-inspired. Only it wasn’t. Sally had felt the pang, too, glancing nervously around her. The rest of the audience didn’t seem to catch alarm: they were in the young singer’s complete thrall, caught up in the illusion of unpressured times and ways.

  The fear was the singer’s and it was not part of her song, Daffyd concluded, because he could detect no other influence, no newcomer in the hall, no change of lighting or aura. Sally was concentrating on the girl, too.

  Why would she be frightened? She had the audience in the palm of her hand. She could turn them in any direction she chose to: she could …

  Her song ended and, in a fluid movement she rose, propped her guitar against the stool and casually disappeared into the shadowy rear of the stage.

  Sally turned anxious eyes to Daffyd, and they shared the same knowledge. She’s the one who’s frightened. She’s leaving.

  And that’s the most dangerous thing she could do, Daffyd “told” Sally.

  No one in the audience moved and Daffyd didn’t dare. The lighting altered subtly, brighter now, and people began to shake off the deep entrancement, reaching for cigarettes or drinks, starting soft conversation.

  “They don’t know she’s not coming back. When they do …”

  Daffyd signalled to Sally. It was imperative they leave: they couldn’t risk the psychic distortion of a riot and, once this crowd discovered that the singer wasn’t returning, their contentment would turn to sour savage resentment. Caution governed Daffyd. They couldn’t just leave. But they had to …

  He reached across the table casually and deftly tipped the caffeine pot over.

  “Of all the stupid jerks,” Sally cried, irritably, getting to her feet and
holding her flared skirt from her.

  Daffyd rose, too, with many apologies. They received mildly irritated glances from nearby couples whose pleasant mood was disrupted. As Daffyd and Sally moved toward the main door, Sally kept up a running diatribe as to her escort’s awkwardnesses and failings. They reached the sliding doors. The aura generated by the singer was fainter in the lobby and the close knot of men by the box office window interrupted their discussion to stare suspiciously at Daffyd and Sally.

  “I can’t sit around in this damp dress,” Sally said in a nasal whine. “It’ll stain and you know it’s only this week’s issue.”

  “Hon-love, it’ll dry in a few moments. It was only …”

  “You would be clumsy and right now …”

  “Let’s just stand outside a bit. It’s warmer. You’ll dry off and we won’t miss any of the singing.”

  “If you make me miss any of Amalda’s songs, I’ll never, never forgive you …”

  With such drivel they got out the main entrance. But not before Daffyd experienced a wash of such frightful lewd thoughts that he hastily closed off all awareness.

  “Sally, how many minorities did you notice represented there?”

  “Too many, in view of your memorandum this morning. Daffyd, I’m scared. And it’s not Amalda’s fear this time!”

  “I’m calling Frank Gillings.”

  Sally pulled from him. “I’ll find the girl. She’s got to have protection …”

  “Can you find her?”

  “I’m not sure. But I’ve got to try. Once that crowd realizes she’s left …”

  Sally turned to the right, toward the rear of the factory, slipping past the little city crawlers until she was out of Daffyd’s sight. He made for his copter and opened the emergency channel to the Center.