Seranimu hugged her to him in a fit of remorse. If he hadn’t lost control of himself, he might have convinced Flanagan. As it was, he had let jealousy override his judgment. Stupid, fool jealousy—for what reason? Because Korisu sometimes thought of Pimo in the same, innocently admiring way he himself often thought of Anisel. He heaved deeply.
“Now there is this letter from Flanagan’s lawyers. Do you see what they charge me with? Felonious destruction of property, that’s what! To the tune of three thousand, two hundred and seventeen shrilr!” Pimo began to cry. “We’ll lose everything—the TV, the reprofax, the few rags of clothes I have… Even that no-good percolator!”
Seranimu squeezed her tightly in his arms and comforted her. A light of battle glinted in his eyes.
“I—I was so proud of you!” she wept. “Really I was! I—I thought something would come of it, if you—if you—”
She broke down, burying her face against his broad chest.
“We cannot avoid the law,” he said heavily. “We’ll have to pay up and face ruin, unless…”
“Unless what, lover?” Pimo straightened, dashed tears from her eyes.
“Unless we go someplace where the law cannot reach!”
“You mean…” There were stars in Pimo’s eyes.
He nodded, his lips set firmly together in an odd little half smile of triumph.
“Another world!” breathed Pimo, awe-struck.
“A free world—an uninhabited world,” said Seranimu. “There are many such in the galaxy. The starships turn up two or three every decade and unload reprofax machines for transmitting whole populations to them. But they travel so slowly—less than the speed of light. Moving people to the new worlds they discover doesn’t begin to take the pressure off our population. We’ll find our own world!”
The fragile idea beckoned like a gleaming star, bursting with the light and promise of an expanding nova…
* * * *
It was their dreamworld, all right. Just what both of them had always wanted. They stood in the sunset in a grassy glade, beside a purling stream. Out of sight, a waterfall made music on the still, evening air. Trees arched filmy branches over, their heads. The sky was blue and rose, golden and aqua. Not a creature of intelligence roamed the whole, broad surface of this unknown world. Only animals, birds, flowers, brawling creeks and broad rivers, oceans and inlets…
They went back to Zingu to pack their things.
“The TV,” said Pimo. “We must take that.”
“We won’t need it,” said Seranimu. “We’ll never be bored again. Anyway, all TV programs are local rebroadcasts. We could never receive any. But the reprofax, by all means. It contains its own power, and it will let us keep in touch. We can have Korisu and Anisel over from time to time for a hand of prej. Korisu, poor fellow! What a beating he gave me!”
“And what a beating I will give you again,” threatened Korisu from the doorway, “if you don’t take Anisel and me with you, wherever you are going. I’ve been standing here, listening to you plot. I have overheard you before, too.”
“Korisu!” cried Seranimu. “I thought you would rather stick here in the mud…”
Korisu wagged his head. “I have had my eyes opened somewhat, friend Seranimu, thanks to you. You beat something into my head, too. And I beg you now, for myself and Anisel, take us along. We have been talking it over…”
It was a strain on Seranimu’s psychic strength to teleport the four of them, including their possessions, to the new world far away across the galaxy. But he was glad for the extra effort. Korisu and Anisel would be a great help building a home in that distant place.
The idyll began in the glade among the trees, where he and Pimo had stood within sound of the musical waterfall. They had got tents and pitched them, and their belongings were all neatly stowed away, and they had little to think or talk about save the wonderful peace and freedom of their new way of life.
The reprofax, too bulky to occupy either of the tents, stood to one side, under the trees.
“We have been here two weeks,” said Seranimu one evening. “I think we should have some news from home—see if our disappearance has caused any kind of a stir.”
He turned on the reprofax and readied himself to dial for their home facsimile newspapers from Morfors. The machine warmed slowly. As Seranimu started to reach for the dials, the machine began to buzz and the screen flooded with light, announcing, Incoming Transmission.
He stepped back, astonished, calling to Korisu and the others. Who could be transmitting to them on this unknown world? And why? They could only wait and see. The machine could not even be turned off with a transmission coming through.
The reprofax hummed louder with a sudden surge of power. A man stepped off the platform and came toward them.
“Good evening, Seranimu,” said Flanagan of Home Study Mind Power, Inc., Earth.
Before Seranimu could gather his startled wits, a horde of Earthmen poured out of the machine, one after another, and scattered around the clearing.
Seranimu gulped. “This is arrest!”
Flanagan beamed, humming under his breath, as he strolled past them with a nod. He peered this way and that among the trees, looked up at the sky, and shouted directions in his own language to the other Earthmen. He smiled at Seranimu and his companions. “Any native population here?”
“Only—only animals,” stammered Seranimu.
“Wonderful!” beamed Flanagan. He was a totally different fellow from the Flanagan Seranimu had met upon Earth. Physically the same, yes; but how changed! “Simply wonderful! This will lighten the pressure on Zingu by a great deal.”
Seranimu and the others just stared. Flanagan stopped pacing. “I’m afraid,” he said, “I owe you an apology, as well as an explanation. What you have done, Seranimu, is the end result of your training with Home Study Mind Power. We planned it this way all along. You know how slow the starships are at turning up new worlds to take care of our extra people. Well, it has been Mind Power’s aim to speed the process; to train qualifiable psi experts in teleportation—”
“You didn’t say that the last time I saw you!” cried Seranimu.
Flanagan smiled, waved one hand in a deprecatory gesture. “Forget it, Seranimu, and forgive me, if you can. That was an act I put on, to guarantee success on your part. Don’t you understand? I couldn’t have treated you otherwise without grave danger to your psi abilities. It took us a long time to work out the correct psychological approach with successful students.”
He sat down on the grass. Seranimu followed his example gratefully. He felt as if his knees wouldn’t have supported him much longer.
“You see,” Flanagan went on, “we of Earth undertook Home Study Mind Power with the purpose in mind to develop psi faculties to the point where teleportation would become a feasible method of transporting masses of population to new, uncrowded homes. We had nothing definite to go on…just a long history of claims to psi events. If teleportation was possible at all, we thought, we could turn up the talent by establishing a school and offering a correspondence course. The ability predicated the desire to take such a course, you see. Anybody who had such a latent talent, believing he could learn through an established course of instruction, would bring it out in himself to a usable degree.
“At the same time, we heaped encouragement on those who showed promise, much to our later embarrassment. We didn’t understand at first that the psi faculty is a survival characteristic. Ordinarily, the psi faculty shows itself only at times of stress in the individual’s career, and is seldom recognized for what it is. Under conditions of recognition and encouragement, the psi faculty simply folds up. You don’t need it to survive under such conditions.”
“I don’t understand,” said Seranimu. “Pimo encouraged me.”
“Not at f
irst,” she broke in. “I made you work to show me.”
Flanagan laughed. “That is exactly what I made you do. Subconsciously, you succeeded in order to survive in the affections of your wife. Then you went all out to survive in my esteem. I made you fail by closing my mind to your probe, by nullifying your effort when your tried to levitate me—”
Seranimu flushed. “You knew about that!”
“Of course,” said Flanagan serenely. “I am a psi expert of sorts, myself. But you moved too fast for me when you teleported your friend all the way from Zingu. You had me in a sweat when you did that. It was fortunate I could turn your act to my own ends. By threatening to sue you for damages, I put you again under the pressure of survival. You came through admirably, in just the way I intended you should. This is the first planet that has been opened up psi-consciously for Zingu. Your government will appreciate—”
Seranimu winced at the word “government. That means…?”
“No more government job for you, Seranimu,” smiled Flanagan. “Now that you have come through the worst, your psi faculty is set permanently. That’s the way it always is. There are others worlds for you to find, after we have started this one on the road to settlement. Korisu will have his work cut out for him here, too. We will send in men and materials—a complete civilization—by reprofax.”
“Suppose we hadn’t brought the reprofax?” breathed Seranimu. “I could have decided against it, as I did against the TV, and then you would never have found us.”
Flanagan chuckled, deep in his chest. “I can’t teleport, nor do a lot of the things you can do, Seranimu. But there is one thing I’m no slouch at—a talent that accounts for my position with Home Study Mind Power, and which guaranteed that you would take the reprofax with you!”
“What is that?”
Flanagan favored him with a teasing smile.
“Remember ‘Lesson Fifteen’?”
Seranimu remembered.
“You put that idea in my mind when I was fighting Korisu?”
Flanagan nodded, grinning.
“My field, Seranimu, is telepathic command!”
ESCAPE TO EARTH
Originally published in Science Fiction Quarterly, November 1957.
CHAPTER 1
The platinum-haired man in black cutaway and cloak crouched, and I watched his finger tighten on the trigger of his revolver. The girl lighted full red lips and golden eyes with a smile, tossed flaming hair over bare shoulders.
The weapon bucked and slammed. Kettle drums rolled, crashed to a climax; the audience held its breath. Behind the G-string clad girl, incandescent light bulbs shattered, unheard above the pistol shots and drums. The bullets rang in a steel catch basin.
Coleman the Great turned, bowed smiling toward the audience. Cleo Parker, his assistant, waved gaily; then, lightning crackled and thunder rolled. Blue smoke gushed from the stage. The smoke lifted. Coleman stood where Cleo Parker had been, and Cleo occupied Coleman’s place. They ran laughing to center stage and held each other’s hands aloft, while the audience roared.
The curtain came down on the last act of the performance of the world’s greatest illusionist.
“Yah, I get it,” said the man next to me, as the audience rose. “Them’s blanks he’s got in the gun, see; and them lights behind the girl, they’re wired, see; so they explode when somebody backstage pushes a button. Makes it look like he’s shootin’ right through her—see?”
“Yeah,” said a querulous female voice in the rounded tones of wadded gum. “But how about them changing places like that, huh?”
“Simple, kid.” The man chuckled, pleased with his own perspicuity. “Real simple! They got doubles, see, that come out under cover of the smoke!”
“Gee, Gerald,” the woman said admiringly, “you oughta be a magician! They sure can’t put nothin’ over on you!”
I wasn’t sure it was that simple. For just a moment, as Coleman had fired, I had seemed to see something—an opalescent veil that dimmed the view of flesh and blue-sequined G-string. Or, had my eyes, under the percussion of instruments and the hammering of the pistol, deceived me?
I’m not the kind of person who watches a magic act to find out if I can see through the illusion; I don’t want to watch a magician that clumsy. I want to be mystified, entertained. Only another magician should care how the tricks are done.
As for Coleman and mystification, he still had the experts guessing, though there were millions like friend Gerald, who thought they had every trick figured. In fact, Gerald’s thumbnail sketch hadn’t impressed me at all.
Coleman had them still wondering in Europe, and I’d heard he had even shown the Indian fakirs a thing or two, by not only imitating their rope trick, but fashioning a few improvements on it.
In three years, Coleman the Great had climbed from the abysm of nonentity to the glittering heights of theater; he was box office. For the past two years, Cleo Parker, his beautiful, red-haired, tawny-eyed assistant, had scaled the precipices of audience approval with him.
I hadn’t missed a performance while the show was in town. Not because I’m a devotee of stage magic, but because of Cleo. I was mad about Cleo. I’d been in love with her for a long time, in spite of what she had done to me three years ago.
The whole thing, of course, began and ended with Cleo. It happened to be a very busy season in the advertising business; my position at the agency, as account executive, always hectic, was suffering a siege of particular confusion. But that’s advertising.
The first time I noticed the showbills, I was on my way to the office one cold, blowy morning with a spate of rain in it. I had just parked my machine at the downtown ’copter park and was walking to Eighteenth and Raleigh.
The bills had gone up the night before—there were six of them, all the same. Each showed a headshot of Coleman the Great. He looked as if he was in his early thirties. He had long, platinum-colored hair that swept back from a clean, wide forehead. His eyes were gray and cold, with that penetrating look of the professional wizard. His nose was thin, slightly flaring at the nostrils. The lips were neither full nor bloodless, but firm; the jaw sternly modeled.
“Take a look, boy!” I told myself. “There, but for Fate, soars yourself, Gil Bradley…”
For, under that massive headshot of Coleman was a full figure display of Cleo Parker in her G-string—beautiful, talented, and her name in letters six inches high. Big red letters. Even without the letters, I would have known her—by the go-to-hell smile on her full mouth, the light in her golden eyes, the flaming mop of hair…
If the closest I would ever see Cleo again was a seat down front, I’d revel in it, for Cleo Parker was the greatest cardiac stimulant ever devised in the history of man.
Much as I wanted to go backstage and see Cleo face-to-face, I was afraid to. I doubted that she wanted to see me again. Some people seem to get a lot out of me in a short time, after which I seem to become persona non grata. That’s how it had been with Cleo.
And so, I was really shaken up when Cleo called me on the videophone. My name’s in the book.
“Gil!” said her image from the screen. I just looked into her golden eyes and felt myself swimming there, speechless. Viewed even this close, by the uncomplimentary video scanner, her skin was without flaw or blemish.
“Didn’t you know I was in town?” she laughed.
“Know it! Kid, I haven’t missed a show!” My voice was husky.
“Good boy!” A shadow gathered in her tawny eyes. “Gil… I didn’t call to rake over…old times!” I’d swear she’d been about to say “dead ashes.” Old times—that sounded better. “I…we want to see you, Gil. Important. Can you come over?”
I looked at the clock. It was 12:30 A.M. I had just got in myself a half hour and two shots of rye ago. I signified assent.
“The Carlton…” She gave me the room number. “As soon as you can.”
That would be tonight. She nodded, broke the connection. My head was whirling.
The atomic jets on the ’copter blades rumbled, cutting a circle of flame overhead. I flew low, under the drenching scud, practically on instruments. The wipers clicked and squealed, and water gushed on the windshield. Pretty soon, I made out the smoky flare of downtown neons.
I set down in the ’copter park and went out through the variety section of the supermarket, which was open all night. The grocery section was locked and dark, but the bar and the restaurant were still doing business.
I thought longingly of stopping in for a quick one but resisted.
Cleo wasn’t alone at the hotel. Three tall, blond young men were in the room when she let me in. They were pleasant, even affable—nothing sinister about them, but they gave me the heebie-jeebies. Who wants an audience at an unexpected reunion?
Cleo introduced me briefly. “These are Willie, Tom and Joe,” she said. I could see there was something on her mind, and it wasn’t old times.
If the trio had other names, Cleo didn’t mention them, and I never found them out. She nodded them toward the door, and they went out.
She strode nervously back and forth with that lean-hipped, long-legged gait I knew so well. Her skirt, strictly formal, swished about her ankles. At every third step, she drew explosively on a long, filter-tipped cigarette, making it pop. She talked urbanities—so nice to see me again, et cetera—insincere. I stood, holding my hat so that it dripped on the hotel’s rug instead of my new, hundred-and-twenty-five-buck topcoat.
“Sit down and collect yourself,” I said.
She flashed me a grateful look, as if the idea of relaxing hadn’t occurred to her. I tipped my head toward the door. “Bodyguard?”
The 7th Golden Age of Weird Fiction MEGAPACK®: Manly Banister Page 50
