Barthold grinned tiredly. “Why don’t you ask Hawkes?”
There was a sound behind Commager like the sloshing of water in the bottom of a boat. Then he had spun around and was on his feet, his hair bristling.
HAWKES stood swaying in the moonlight, twenty feet away. Water ran from his clothes to the rocks among which he stood. Water had smeared his hair down over his face. And the left side of his head looked horribly flattened.
He took a step forward, and then came on in a swaying rush.
For a long instant of time, Commager only stared. Hawkes was dead; quite obviously, even now as he moved, he was dead—so he hadn’t come climbing back up the rocks out of the sweeping tug of the waves! He—
He was gone.
Commager walked over to the point where he had seen Hawkes. The rocks were dry. He went back to Barthold, his lips still stiff with horror.
“Tell me what this was!” he said hoarsely. “Or I’ll kill you now!”
Barthold was still grinning, his eyes open and wickedly alert. “A picture I let you look at—but, you see, you learn too fast! You’re a natural. You wouldn’t believe a picture now, and the old mind couldn’t do anything else to you. But there are others working for us—and now—”
There was a rumbling and a grinding and a rushing sound overhead. Commager leaped back, his eyes darting up. He heard Lex Barthold screaming.
The whole upper cliff-side was moving, sliding downward. A gray-black, turning, almost vertical wave of broken rock dropping toward them . . .
X
PEOPLE like us,” Jean Bohart remarked, with an air of moody discovery, “are really pretty lucky!”
Commager went “Hm?” drowsily. Then he lifted his head to look at her. She stood beside the Sweet Susan’s lashed wheel, shaded blue eyes gazing at him from under the brim of her yachting cap, hands clasped behind her. “What brought that to mind?” he inquired.
“I was thinking about my troubles,” she said. “Then I started thinking they weren’t really so bad! Comparatively—”
She was keeping her voice light. Commager sat up from where he’d stretched himself out beside the cabin, gathering his thoughts back out of the aimless diffusion of sleep. “Ready to talk about your troubles now?”
Jean shook her head. “Not yet.” She frowned. “There’s something about them I want to figure out by myself first—and I’m not quite done.” The frown vanished. “If you’ve finished your nap, you might look around and see what a grand morning it is! That’s what I meant by being lucky.” They were off Dana Point, he saw, so he’d slept a full hour since Jean had taken them out of the Newport Beach harbor. The Sweet Susan was running smoothly southward, through the Pacific’s long smooth swells. Now that he was sitting up, the wind streamed cool about his head and neck and shoulders.
He said, “Yes, I guess we’re lucky.”
Jean grinned. “And since I’ve got you awake, I’ll catch a nap myself! Not that I spent the night boozing and brawling.”
Commager smiled at her. “Any time you feel like putting in a night like that, give me a ring.” Superficially, in her white slacks and thin sweater, Jean Bohart looked fresh as a daisy; only the tautness about her mouth and a controlled rigidity in the way she stood suggested that the “trouble” might be close to a complete emotional disaster.
He’d thought earlier that he would have liked to get out of this jaunt if he could; now he felt guilty and a little alarmed.
HE MOVED over near the wheel while she lay down on the bench, pulling a pillow under her head and settling back with the cap-brim down over her eyes. He could tell that the muscles of the slim straight body weren’t actually going to relax. But she would pretend now to be asleep and Commager let his thoughts shift away from Jean, promising himself to give her his full attention as soon as she was ready to talk.
There were a few problems of his own to be considered, though at the moment he had the sense of a truce, a lull. Last night, he had shaken the Guides badly; he had killed two of their members. But there were at least three left, and he hadn’t crippled their power to act.
The truce, if it was that, was due in part to their fear of his reaction and in part to an entirely different kind of restraint—a restraint which he believed was self-imposed.
The reason he believed it was that he was now aware of being under a similar restraint himself. He thought he knew why it was an inescapable limitation, but impersonally he could agree with Paylar’s opinion that, from the Guides’ point of view, he should have been destroyed as soon as they became aware of him.
Left to himself—if in curiosity he had begun to investigate psi—he would have discovered the limitation quickly enough and abided by it. Even so, it appeared to permit an enormously extended range of effective activity. And Barthold had implied a conflict between an “old mind” and a “new mind.”
It sounded like an esoteric classification of varying degrees of human psi potential—an ascendant individual “new mind” threatening the entrenched and experienced but more limited older group, which compensated for its limitation by bringing functioning members of the “new mind” under its control or repressing or diverting their developing abilities.
He, apparently, was a “natural of the new mind.” He couldn’t be permanently controlled. To the older group he represented an intolerable threat.
SOME ONE, last night, had thrown a few thousand tons of stone at him! And he had deflected that missile from its course. Not by very much, but just enough to keep it clear of the frantically scrambling figure of himself, scuttling up the cliff path like a scared beetle.
He had done it—how?
Trying to restructure the action, Commager knew that the process itself hadn’t been a conscious one. But it had been symbolized in his awareness by a cluster of pictures that took in the whole event simultaneously.
A visualization of himself and the long thundering of the rocks, the sideward distortion of their line of fall, and a final picture again of himself as he reached the top of the cliff unharmed.
It had all been there, in a momentary, timeless swirling of possibilities against the background of rock and shadow, the tilted, turning sky and moonlight glittering on racing waters.
Then, in an instant, the pattern had been set, decided on; and the event solidified into reality with the final thudding crash. Barthold lay buried under the rocks and perhaps, down in the water, the body of Hawkes also had been caught and covered.
He hadn’t tried to save Barthold. Instead, automatically, he had flung out another kind of awareness, a flashing search for the mind that had struck at him. And he had been prepared, in a way he couldn’t have described now, to strike back.
He “found” three of them; the one who had acted and two who merely observed. Almost, not quite, he knew where they were. But they were alert. It was as if something, barely glimpsed, had been flicked out of his sight, leaving a lifeless black emptiness for him to grope through if he chose.
Commager didn’t choose to do any blind groping. He wasn’t sure enough of himself for that.
THE LIMITATION that he—and, apparently, they—didn’t dare to violate had to do with the preservation of appearances. It was a line of thought he didn’t want to follow too far just now. But it seemed that the reality he knew and lived in was a framework of appearances, tough and durable normally but capable of being distorted into possibly chaotic variations.
The penalty seemed to be that to the degree one distorted the framework, he remained distorted himself. The smooth flow of appearances was quickly re-established, but the miracle-worker found himself left somehow outside. Commager suspected that he stayed outside.
He suspected also that a really significant distortion of appearances would thrust the life and mind that caused it so far out that, for all practical purposes, it ceased to exist.
He wasn’t tempted to test the theory. Its apparent proof was that reality, by and large, did remain intact, while those who played aroun
d too consistently with even minor infringements notoriously failed to thrive.
To let a pair of dice briefly defy the laws of chance probably did no harm to anyone, but when you aimed and launched the side of a cliff as a missile of murder, you were very careful that the result was a rock-slide and not a miracle!
You didn’t—ever—disturb the world of reality . . .
WHAT HE had to fear from them, if they broke the truce, was the ambush, the thing done secretly under the appearance of a natural series of events. It left an unpleasantly large number of possibilities open, but until something new happened, he couldn’t know that they weren’t ready to call it a draw. So far, his spontaneous reactions had been entirely effective; the obvious damage was all on the other side.
But since the damage wasn’t all obvious, he had no present intention of forcing a showdown. “Natural” or not, he might be either not quite good enough at that kind of game, or much too good.
But meanwhile—Commager looked thoughtfully at Jean Bohart. She had fallen asleep finally, but she wasn’t sleeping comfortably. Her mouth moved fretfully, and she made small whimpering sounds from time to time, almost like a puppy that is dreaming badly. If he’d become a miracle-worker on a small scale, Commager thought, if he’d already pushed himself to some degree beyond the normal limits of reality, he might as well get some use out of what he couldn’t undo.
Looking at her, it wasn’t too difficult to imagine the rigidities and tensions that kept Jean from finding any real physical rest. Nor—a step farther—was it hard to get a picture of her emotional disturbances shaping themselves into a scurrying and shifting dream-torment.
Carefully, Commager took hold of the two concepts. He waited until he could no longer be quite sure whether it was he or Jean who was really experiencing these things; and then, as he had done yesterday with the pain in his own body, he let dreams and tensions ebb away and cease to be.
In spite of everything else that had happened, he was still amazed, a few moments later, to realize that his experiment in therapy had been a complete success.
XI
CLEAR BLUE bowl of the sky above. Black-blue choppy water of the Pacific all about.
The Sweet Susan drifted, throttled down and almost stationary. Near the kelp beds two miles to the south, eight other boats gradually changed their relative positions. In the north-east, toward which the Sweet Susan slowly moved, the dark jaws of the Bay opened out, still too far off to make out the scars of last night’s rock-slide.
Jean had slept steadily for over an hour, and Commager had two lines trailing under superficial observation. Not even a mackerel had taken any interest so far, which probably wasn’t due to the sinister influence of the Guides, but to the fact that the deep drop outside the Bay simply wasn’t a very good fishing area.
Unconcerned about that, he’d been sitting there for some while, in a drowsy, sun-bright daydream composed of an awareness of physical well-being, his odd certainty that the truce still held, and enjoyment of the coincidence that the Sun was getting hotter to the exact degree that the breeze got brisker in compensation. For the hour, under such circumstances, the life of an unambitious, healthy animal seemed to be about as much as anybody reasonably could ask for.
He came out of it with a sort of frightened start. He had heard Jean stirring on the bench behind him. Now she yawned, just audibly, and sat up, and he knew she was looking at him.
Commager couldn’t have said what kept him from turning his head. There was a momentary questioning alarm in him, which stiffened into cold watchfulness as Jean got up and went into the cabin. There had been another little shift in the values of reality while he was off-guard, he thought. Something was a shade wrong again, a shade otherwise than it had been an hour or so ago. But he didn’t yet know what it was.
IN A MINUTE or so Jean came out again, and he guessed she’d changed into her swimsuit. He heard her come up behind him, and then a pair of smooth arms were laid lightly across his shoulders and a voice, from a point a little above and behind his head, inquired, “Had any luck, Alan? The Sun got a bit too hot for me.”
It shocked him completely because it was Lona who touched him and spoke.
It was also, of course, Jean Bohart—and there was no longer any question that she’d served as the model for his imaginary woman. It had been out of just such scraps of illusion as this—voice sounds and touches, distorted seconds in time—that he’d built up that self-deception.
How he had been reached in the first place to get him started on the construction was something he couldn’t yet recall, but the purpose was also completely obvious.
Five years ago, Lex Barthold had said, they’d taken him under control.
To divert a mind from a direction you didn’t want it to follow, you gave it a delusion to stare at.
You drenched the delusion in violently unpleasant emotions, which kept the mind from any closer investigation of the disturbance—
Apparently, they’d expected the treatment to be effective for the rest of his lifetime. But when Ira reported on the minor sensation Commager had created in a Las Vegas club, they’d come alert to the fact that his developing psi abilities hadn’t been permanently stunted. And then a majority of them had been afraid to attempt to kill a “natural.”
Unconsciously, he’d resisted the next maneuver—drastic as it had been—to throw him into a delusive tizzy.
Then he’d begun to strike back at them.
It wasn’t really surprising, he thought, that they’d become a little desperate. And they might have known of that dice game before Ira told them about it. Ira had been their means of contacting him directly.
As Jean had been the means of keeping the primary delusion reinforced and alive.
“NO LUCK, so far!” he told her, somewhat carefully. The momentary shock of recognition had faded, but some of the feeling he’d wasted on the delusion seemed to have transferred itself back to the model now! It didn’t really surprise him, and it wasn’t an unpleasant sensation; but, for a moment, at least, he didn’t want it to show in his voice. “Did you get caught up on your sleep?”
It might have showed in his voice, because she moved away from him and leaned over the side of the boat, looking at the lines. “Uh-huh!” she said casually. “I feel fine now! Better than I have in a long time, as a matter of fact.”
Commager regarded her speculatively. The easy grace of her body confirmed what she said; the tensions were gone. He patted himself mentally on the back. Commager the Healer!
“Alan?”
“Yes?” he said.
“I’m leaving Ira.” Her face flushed a little. “To be more exact about it, Ira’s leaving me! For that MacDonald woman you met Sunday!”
Commager said softly that he’d be damned. His thoughts were racing as she went on, “He told me yesterday morning. It jolted my vanity, all right! But the funny thing is, you know, that as soon as I got over that, I found I actually didn’t care. It was really a relief. Isn’t that funny?”
He didn’t think it was funny. It was a little too pat.
“FOR FIVE years,” she said, turning to face him, “I thought I loved that guy. And now I find I never did!” She shook her head. “I don’t get it, Alan. How can anyone be so crazy?”
“What are you going to do?” he asked.
She stared at him for a moment, looking appealing, hurt and lovely. If he put his hand out to her now, she’d be in his arms.
“I’m going to Florida for a few months. Ira can settle it any way he wants to.”
So that was the way it had been, Commager thought in astounded fury. He was the one they’d wanted to hold down, but it wasn’t only his life they’d twisted and distorted to do it. They’d used Jean just as ruthlessly. And, perhaps, Ira—
For five years, he could have had his imaginary woman. She’d been within his reach in reality.
And, now that delusions were not working so well any more, they threw the reality at him!
Only now it was a little too late. He’d changed too far to be able to accept their gift.
“Jean,” he said.
“Yes, Alan?”
“You’re going to stop thinking for a while now,” he told her gently. “You’re going to just stand there for a while and not be aware of anything that happens.”
A puzzled frown formed on her face as he started to speak, but it smoothed out again, and then she went on looking placidly at him. Perhaps her eyes had dulled a trifle.
THIS TIME, it didn’t surprise Commager at all. Out beyond the Sweet Susan, he saw something like a faint haze beginning to shape itself over the moving surface of the water. He grinned a little.
Slowly and deliberately, he framed the cold thought in his mind: Do what you can for yourselves! The truce is over!
Their response was an instantaneous one. A long swell rose up behind the Sweet Susan, lifted the boat, passing beneath it, and dropped it again. The Sweet Susan was still rising as Commager picked up Jean Bohart and set her down beside the bench near the wheel; and it slapped down in a smash of spray as he cut the lashings of the wheel with the emergency knife and pulled out the throttle.
He glanced around. The haze was a thick fog about them, brilliant white against the blue of the sky overhead, while they ran through its wet, gray shade. The boat shuddered sideways behind the big swell, water roiling about it. Suddenly, with a kind of horror, Commager understood what was there.
He had seen pictures of it, or rather of a part of it, cast up on the coast years before: a housesized chunk of rotten, oddly coarse-grained flesh, hurriedly disposed of and never identified. The drifted remnant of a nameless phenomenon of the Pacific deeps.
The phenomenon itself was underneath them now!
STILL TOO far down to have done more than briefly convulse the surface as it turned, it was rising toward the boat. A thing of icy, incredible pressures, it was disrupted and dying as it rose, incapable of understanding the impulse that had forced it from the dark ocean up toward the coast hours before. But it was certain that, in the bright glare above it, it would find and destroy the cause of its pain.
Complete Short Fiction (Jerry eBooks) Page 55