Alternating Currents

by Frederik Pohl

  ‘Don’t call me a diabolist,’ he said sharply. ‘You’re lucky I’m not. You come across one of them boy, and he’ll eat you up. Sprinkled with the rosemary and garlic out of your suitcase and washed down with the jug of holy water. Simple magic, that’s all I do.’

  ‘Oh?’ Perhaps he was telling the truth; I couldn’t be sure. It was to some extent a disquieting thought - perhaps I had been treading on the thin edge of danger - but, after all, he was nothing to fear. He had said so himself. I shrugged. ‘ It makes no difference,’ I said. ‘I’ve got you. I won’t make any threats, but by the laws and the powers, I have a claim on you.’

  Astonishingly, he laughed a little, and the muscles of his scalp twitched his woolly black hair into alarming shapes. ‘ Sure you have a claim. You’re entitled to one of my spells. Well, why not? What’s your pleasure? Card-reading, love potions, the gift of tongues ? The power to turn into an animal ? You only get one thing; name it. What do you want ?’

  I said levelly, ‘ Revenge.’

  He glanced at me in momentary alarm. ‘Bad revenge - killing, you mean. No. Can’t do it. I’d get in trouble.’ I made a gesture towards the bag, but, though he gulped and sweat showed brightly on his brow, he shook his head. ‘Nothing doing,’ he said. ‘ I don’t care what you’ve got in that bag, there isn’t anything you can do bad enough to make me use the arts to do someone harm. No.’

  ‘ But I’ve been humiliated!’ I cried. ‘ I’m a scientist - one of the greatest anthropologists alive, a fellow of the Museum, the author of three fundamental texts. And, because I had the wit to see what was clear before my eyes, because I said in public that magic is not superstition and not nonsense, I’ve been deprived of everything I’ve earned in thirty years. I must have revenge!’

  He snapped his fingers. ‘Sure,’ he said in recognition. ‘I know who you are. Ehrlich, something like that, is that your name? I saw in the papers. Well, I can’t say I’m sorry you got in trouble. I’ve got enough headaches now, without any more people suspecting that people like me really do exist.’

  I stared at him, aghast. The callousness of the lay public towards the gathering of data and its dissemination has always horrified me . . . though I suppose that, on this particular subject, he was scarcely a layman. But it was irrelevant. I said, ‘What you want makes no difference. I want revenge. I can compel you to give me the means to it.’

  He shook his head.

  I said angrily. ‘Are you trying to tell me that you don’t know any harmful spells ?’

  ‘Of course I do, real harmful. But I can’t use them. That’s black magic. I can’t show you how, either. Law of Equivalences: if I show you how, it’s the same thing as doing it myself.’

  I thought quickly, wondering if he was lying. It was hard to believe that I had come so far, and this was the end of my plans. I said, ‘Perhaps I’ll keep going until I find a diabolist.’

  He chuckled.

  ‘Well,’ I said in annoyance, ‘what else can I do? I am not a man to take this sort of thing lying down. I’ve suffered; Brandon must suffer too. I’ve been laughed at; I’ve been made to resign from the Museum; I’ve seen my life’s work thrown down the drain. Brandon did it. I can’t let him go on enjoying life.’

  ‘Oh,’ he said easily, ‘you don’t have to let him enjoy life. Nothing lethal, of course. But how about hives, for instance ? Three sentences and one pass of the hands, that’s all you need for hives. Or raise a plague of insects wherever he goes. Or you can scare him out of a year’s growth, if you like - I’ve got a pretty good spell for raising ghosts. One word and an amulet; I’ve even got the amulet right here. Or you can make him fall in love with the first person to pass by. Take your pick.’

  It wasn’t what I had had in mind, of course. Still -

  ‘Tell me more,’ I said.

  He nodded and rubbed his hands. ‘Glad to see you being reasonable,’ he said. ‘How about getting rid of that stuff first?’ I set the bag outside the door. When I came back he was sprawled carelessly on the couch, worrying the cork out of a bottle of California wine. ‘ Magic’s thirsty work,’ he said apologetically. ‘I thought we might have a little drink.’

  From my point of view, it was a good development. On second thought, I could improve on it. I sent him for a bucket of spring water, and showed him the trick the water-witch had taught me of transforming the water into sidecars. From then on, things proceeded well, though I have some qualms still about the tiny blue ghosts of long-gone water-bugs and mice we conjured up for practice, and released upon the countryside. But he assured me they would cause no trouble.

  He had to go to the spring for another bucket before we were through, but after all water is cheap.

  ~ * ~

  Perhaps he became drunker than he planned, for he let slip a piece of information which I think he had meant to keep secret: the ghost-raising spell was infallible; it worked every time. With it, you could touch a mouldered bone and create before you the wraith of the being whose articulation had comprised the bone. Or you could touch a living, breathing creature, and evoke the ghost of it.

  And once the ghost was evoked, the creature, perforce, was dead.

  Of course, murder was not what I had in mind for Brandon, not quite. The offence had been great enough, but on the long trip back to the city I had leisure to reflect on my friend’s fear of the consequences of lethal magic, and to decide that I needn’t go that far. Brandon was a pompous fraud, but if I could make his life its own punishment by means of harassment, there was no need to risk unknown penalties.

  Besides, in a way - and now that the means of retaliation was at hand - I rather liked Brandon. I felt cheerful and mellow; it was more of a practical joke that I wanted to play on him than a condign punishment.

  I got back to the city Sunday night, but waited until late Monday to go to the Museum. Brandon’s work habits were well known to me; at closing time on the first day of the week, he would inevitably be in his office.

  I came in through the subway entrance where the crowds are heaviest. The guard didn’t see me, sparing me the need for telling him a lie. I went directly to the Hall of African Mammals and waited in the shadows there until the floor guard was out of sight. There was an exhibit room that had been ‘temporarily closed’ as far back as I can remember, and I still had the key that opened its door.

  By half-past five the Museum was deserted except for a rare guard, a few tiresome old scholars like Brandon, mooning over their journals - and me. When I opened the door of my hiding-place, it was full dark. Only the stairwell lights were visible.

  Brandon’s office is in the Paleontology wing on the third floor. I crept out of the exhibit room towards the stairwell, but before I reached it a thought occurred to me and I acted on it.

  If you have been in the Museum, you’ve seen Leo. He is not the largest African lion on record, but he is nine feet from nose to knobbed tail, and no one passes his pedestal at the entrance to the Hall of African Mammals without at least one quiver at the back of the neck. As quietly as I could, I dragged the night guard’s chair over to Leo’s pedestal, stepped up on it, and went through the ritual of power. My friend had given me the necessary amulet, an apple-sized tangle of woven willow; I touched Leo with it on his stuffed flank and said the word I had learned.

  There was a flicker, and at once, like a chrysalid leaving its cocoon, a pale bluish lion-shape slipped out of the embalmed figure and leaped noiselessly to the floor. The ghost of Leo stood immobile for a long second, his enormous nostrils testing heaven knows what impalpable atmosphere for scents. Then the jaws gaped, and with a sense that had nothing to do with my ears I heard, or thought I heard, his majestic roar.

  I confess that for a moment I was breathing hard. My friend had said very positively that the wraiths could neither touch or harm me, or anyone else . . . but when the lion-ghost saw me, and charged, paws flailing and jaws dripping incorporeal foam, it took a major effort of will to hold m
y ground. Leo went through me with no more effect than a probably imaginary chill. He spun round, batted at me with a substanceless paw, roared another of those soundless roars, and then blinked and laid back his ears, like a housecat caught misconducting itself under a bed.

  I exulted, and ignored him as I headed for the stairwell. The Akely group of elephants tempted me for a moment, but I passed them by.

  But on the third floor temptation grew stronger. Just off the stairwell I entered the halls I had helped to arrange, sturdy glass cases with their tablets and stones recording the times the world has forgotten. I nodded at the Jonas fragment, for it was that, with its clear story of Nilotic wizardry that I had translated and Brandon sneered at as a fable, which had led to the break. Too bad, I thought to myself, that the stone itself had never had a life, so that I could evoke it to be the unarguable refutation of everything Brandon had said. . . .

  And realized, of course, that though the stone was hopeless, the hall was littered with objects which were not. Beyond the stone’s case, for instance, was the sarcophagus of the Boy Pharaoh, lid standing next the case, mummy slim and erect inside it. They were plainly visible in the half-light; though the glass case was locked, I still had on my key ring the means to open it.

  It was, I thought, worth taking a moment. I looked around carefully, but, though I did see something move behind me, on examination it turned out to be nothing but the lion-ghost gliding restlessly down the hall away from me, long tail lashing. I almost chuckled aloud as I thought of him finding his way out into the Park, and the newspaper headlines, and the statements for the Press the ‘ authorities’ would have to make.

  But, for the moment, I had several other things on my mind. I lifted the mummy out; a patch of shoulder, the colour of clay and the texture of canvas, was bare. I touched it with the woven willow and whispered the word.

  There was a faint, unheard rustle, and I became aware that I was not alone. It took a second for the bluish figure of the Boy to show itself - but at last there it was, cat-eyed, hawk-nosed, eyes open and looking at me. There was an emptiness in them, a vacuum where there should have been expression, which I found horrible to look at; I do not think that it was because the ghost was a ghost, but because of the incredible ages that had gone while this thing lay mouldering in the flesh and God knows where in the spirit, before I recalled it with the spell.

  The boy opened his thin lips and spoke imperiously; in my mind I heard the words, but of course they meant nothing. I know modern Egyptian well enough, but there was no single sound in what the Pharaoh said that I recognized; and of course there were no phonemes in the ancient alphabet I had learned to translate. He said something again; then snarled, spat at me, turned and walked off. I let him go. When the Boy ruled Egypt he was eleven. The greatest good fortune the Egyptians ever had was that he never reached twelve.

  I watched the slight, stiff figure stride imperiously away. Then I opened the door to Brandon’s office.

  He stared at me like Joan staring at the White Lady. ‘ Ehrlich!’ he gasped.

  ‘Of course,’ I said. ‘Did you think I would go quietly away and die? I have something to show you, Brandon.’

  On his desk was a conjur bag from the Gold Coast; I shook its contents out of it, discarded the herbs and the rocks, picked up the knucklebones for prophesying. ‘Magic,’ I told Brandon in echo of his own words, ‘is ninety per cent lies and ten per cent half-understood science. There is no truth in superstition. There are no ghosts. Therefore: Watch.’

  I will say for the man that he didn’t scare. Now, thinking back, I must have seemed a dangerous figure to him, appearing at his door in a menacing manner at a suspicious time; but he sat watching me with all the poise of a freshman observing a demonstration of the precession of the pendulum. I touched the dry bones with the amulet and whispered, barely whispered, the word of power.

  There was a surging of forces, and in the room with us was a wizened, irritable-looking blackman, no taller than my shoulder, as ugly a wraith as any I had seen. I turned to Brandon.’ Would you care to comment ?’ I asked formally.

  Brandon’s hands were shaking, but he pursed his lips and touched his fingers together before he spoke. ‘These are not controlled conditions,’ he said. ‘But still - yes, Ehrlich, I may have been too hasty. If I owe you an apology I will give it. I will listen to anything you care to say.’ And he poured a glass of water from the carafe on his desk; and the only thing that showed he was in the least upset was that the glass filled and overflowed and the water ran across the desk and drenched his trousers before he took his eyes off the furious Bantu wraith. ‘Sorry,’ he said absently. ‘What are you going to do about him?’

  ‘Forget him,’ I said. ‘He will go away. Listen - can you hear him talking ?’ In my mind was a clacking, lip-smacking chant of anger that matched the little spectre’s gesticulations. He was jumping up and down around us, whirling about with his arms outstretched. ‘Interesting sight,’ I said. ‘I suppose he is trying to exorcise us, which is curious enough under the circumstances.’

  ‘Can you get rid of him? That noise is driving me insane,’ Brandon complained. ‘No? Then let’s step outside and leave him here. I want to hear about this.’

  I shrugged, and followed him outside. The Little Bantu shouted soundlessly after us, but did not follow. We walked a few yards down the hall, as far as the entrance to the Hall of Reptiles, before the guttural yells died away from our inner ears; by which time Brandon had completely recovered his composure and I was losing mine. The taste of revenge was nothing like as sweet in the realization as it had been in the hope. With little enthusiasm I answered his questions, told him of what I had done after he had, in his obstinacy, driven me to throw my written resignation in his face. I told him how certain I had been that practitioners of magic were abroad in the world; how I had deduced that they would read magazines of witchcraft and the occult; how I had most laboriously tracked down an adept whose spells could not be explained away. ‘ I came back here,’ I finished moodily, ‘to make you eat your words, Brandon. But now - well, I don’t know where to go from here. I suppose I shall write a paper for the Journal.’

  ‘And this spell,’ Brandon persisted, ‘it works on anything? Any corpse, or fragment of skeleton, or anything that was once alive? It never fails?’

  ‘Never. Here - I’ll show you.’ I beckoned him to follow me into the Hall of Reptiles. All around us were memories of the saurian time before man, the fencelike giant lizard bones, the thick-jawed creatures from the earth’s early fresh-water oceans, the enormous murderers that stalked the ferny swamps a hundred million years ago. ‘Let’s see,’ I meditated, ‘suppose we try something small. This one, for instance.’

  I gently lifted the cover off a little rabbit-sized lizard skeleton and touched it with the amulet. Once more, below Brandon’s threshold of hearing. I whispered the word; and under my hands a bluish cloud swirled into the shape of a clumsy puppy of a reptile, frightened red glints in its agate eyes. The mindless trifle shuddered and flinched as it caught sight of us, and scurried off into the shadows.

  Brandon’s composure was gone again. ‘Good God,’ he said. ‘Ehrlich, do you realize what you’ve got here? What a tool for the paleontologists! They’ve been guessing and deducing and imagining what these things looked like - and probably guessing all wrong. Now you can show them!’

  He was right, of course; there was no need to guess about the long-vanished envelopes of the skeletons they had so laboriously disinterred, when a touch and a word could bring them back, But - ‘ Of course,’ I said coldly. ‘ Perhaps I shall, in due course. But really, Brandon, can you imagine that I have any desire to help the paleontologists with their problems ?’

  He gasped, ‘Ehrlich! What is this? What about the search for scientific truth ?’

  I laughed in his face, though I must confess that still I was not enjoying my triumph. I sneered, ‘The search for scientific truth took a holiday when I f
irst came to you to discuss this subject. I am not sure that I care to co-operate now that I am in a position to make my own terms.’

  He said rigidly. ‘You want your job back. You shall have it.’

  ‘No, Brandon,’ I told him, ‘bribery won’t help you. The job is of no importance to me, you see. After all, I expect I can earn a living in another way, if I choose. Television, perhaps ? A turn on the vaudeville stage, if there still is a vaudeville stage - Professor Ehrlich and his Glamorous Ghosts? Cleopatra, Helen and Astarte, brought back before your eyes. I can do it, you know. Given a single fragment of a body, I can bring back its ghost as easily as I bring this one.’ And perhaps not entirely sanely - I was in a state not far from hysteria, I think - I thrust the amulet against the broad rib-cage of the Museum’s best brontosaur, and watched the bluish spirit of the beast sluggishly drag off down the hall.