The Man in the Tree

by Damon Knight

  "He had a shock," Pongo said.

  Montoya bent over the old man. "I'm the doctor. How are you feeling?"

  "Feeling!" said Cooley, and looked up. His cheeks were still wet with tears. "I'm feeling fine!" He began to laugh, his face contorted as if in pain.

  "Will you wait outside while I examine him, please?" Montoya opened his bag.

  They stood in the corridor. It was clean and bright. The dry, cool air had a flowery scent of antiseptic. After a long time the door opened and Montoya stepped out, carrying his bag. "I gave him a tranquilizer," he said. "I don't know yet if he should be hospitalized or not." He gave Gene an appraising glance. "You're a pituitary giant, aren't you?"

  "Yes."

  "Are you in the circus?"

  "No. Retired."

  "I want your name and address." He took out a black notebook. When he had finished writing, he said to Pongo, "And yours."

  "It's the same."

  Montoya put the notebook away. "Mr. Anderson, this man told me he was cured just now of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. He does not show any sign of that disease. Did he seem confused or delusional to you?"

  "No. He had it, and I cured him."

  Montoya's eyebrows went up. "You cured him? How did you do that?"

  "I put my hands on him."

  "You are telling me that you cured this man by laying on of hands."

  "Yes."

  "Mr. Anderson, I find that very hard to believe."

  "I know."

  Montoya took out his wallet. "Here is my card. I am going now, but I think someone should stay with him for a little while. If there is any problem, call me."

  "All right. Thank you, Doctor."

  Montoya nodded stiffly and walked away toward the elevator. When he was gone, Gene opened the door and they went in.

  Cooley was standing at the window with his hands clasped together, squeezing hard enough to turn his fingers pink and yellow. He looked up; his face was no longer contorted, but his eyes were red.

  "You all right now?" Gene asked.

  "Sure," said Cooley in a low voice.

  "Are you hungry?"

  "No." After a moment Cooley added, "Just leave me the hell alone, will you?"

  Gene's eyes were still bright, but his expression had changed. "Pongo, wait for me in the Monster," he said.

  Pongo stepped out; the door closed behind him. He listened a moment, then walked down the stairs.

  "Is everything all right?" the desk clerk asked.

  "Sure."

  "Do you know how long Mr. McIver will be staying?"

  "Beats me."

  Pongo walked out to the parking lot, got into the mobile home, lighted a cigar, and waited.

  In a few minutes he saw Gene coming toward him. The giant climbed in, sat down in the chair beside the driver's seat.

  "What did you do?" Pongo asked.

  "I talked to him. I told him I wasn't expecting any gratitude, but if he ever tried anything like that again, I would probably kill him. After a while he cried again -- different kind of crying, not so much anger. I think he's going to be okay." He leaned over and hugged Pongo for a moment. "Let's go home."

  Pongo started the engine and maneuvered the motor home out of the lot. "You could have killed him, in the lobby, but you cured him instead. How come?"

  "I didn't know I was going to do it. I didn't know I could do it. It was -- " Gene hesitated. "It felt just like a big hand pushing me in the back."

  Chapter Twenty-four

  All the rest of that week, the household was in a state of tension. Pongo had told the others briefly what had happened at the Costa Brava Motel; Gene would not discuss it. Irma stayed in her room Tuesday morning and let messages pile up in the answering machine. Margaret broke a pencil and threw the pieces at the wall.

  On Thursday Gene and Pongo went into Tampa again in the morning and did not come back until mid-afternoon; Irma and Margaret had cold turkey sandwiches for lunch.

  That afternoon, at Gene's direction, Irma called Cliff Guthrie, Nirmal Coomaraswami, and Stan Salomon, and invited them for the weekend. On Friday, Gene and Pongo went into Tampa again. That afternoon, after the others had arrived, the gate signal rang. Irma said, "Yes -- Oh, Mike!"

  "Yes, it's me, luv. Can I come in?"

  Wilcox entered beaming a few moments later. Irma hugged him and introduced the others. "You didn't bring Nan?"

  "No, she's getting married actually. How is everyone?"

  "Frantic," said Irma. "Gene has some big secret that he won't tell anybody about. I'm glad you're here."

  Pongo came in a little after three. "Gene's in his room," he announced. "Says he won't be down for dinner, but he wants to see everybody in the dining room at nine o'clock."

  "Pongo, what's going on?" Irma said. "This is too much."

  "He went into the hospital and stayed two hours. That's all I know." Pongo got a slab of beef out of the refrigerator and began doing things to it.

  At dinner, Cliff Guthrie said, "Nirmal, you look kind of tired. Is everything okay?"

  "Well, it is not really okay. Some things I don't like are happening at the university. A good friend of mine, you probably don't know him,, but he is quite well known in his field, and he happens to be gay. The university dismissed him this week for moral turpitude."

  Linck nodded. "These swings in attitude are a very effective way of weeding out deviants," he said. "The door opens, people come out of the closet; then it shuts, and they are outside. What will your friend do now?"

  "I don't know. He probably cannot get another job teaching. I have another friend who is gay, a philology professor; he was fired in November, and the last I heard he was tending a bar in Detroit."

  "I don't think there has ever been an administration in this country that I have disliked so much," Linck said. "They are militarist; they are bigoted, and they are very ignorant. This adventurism in Central America and Africa -- that is only the beginning."

  "How long would you say we've got before the world blows itself to hell?" Salomon asked.

  Linck shrugged. "On days when I am optimistic, I think we may last as much as thirty years. By then I will be eighty-four, and it won't so much matter to me. But if there is any advance warning, I think I will try to get out of the northern hemisphere."

  "Why the northern hemisphere?" said Wilcox.

  "Because if the Soviets and the West bomb each other, they are capable of making the northern hemisphere uninhabitable. I will go to Bolivia, probably. My first choice would be Australia, but there are too many military installations there. Bolivia is an unimportant little country."

  "I have heard people talk like this before," said Coomaraswami, "and it is really bizarre, because people are saying, well, the world is going to be destroyed by atomic war, and they all agree, yes, it is going to be destroyed, and then they talk about something else. It is like people going down a river on a raft, and they say, tomorrow morning we will all go over the falls and be killed, and then they play pinochle or something."

  "What should they do instead?" Margaret asked.

  "Well, I think they should at least talk about some ways of getting off the raft."

  "Suppose you were the President -- what would you do?"

  "Probably I could not do anything; the problem is global."

  "If you were God, then?"

  "Well, if I were God," said Coomaraswami, "I think I could make some very good improvements just by changing the rules a little bit. For instance, I could change the rate of radioactive decay so that an atomic explosion would not be possible. Or I could do something even simpler, I could change the rules in such a way that there would be no transparent solids in nature."

  "How would that be an improvement?"

  "Well, think about it. If there were no transparent solids, then you could not have windshields in cars or airplanes, and you would not be able to travel very fast. We could not have modern bombers or fighter planes. People would have to travel less and stay
closer to home; then they would mind their own business more. Also we would not have cameras or telescopes, and that would keep us from killing each other at long distance."

  "We wouldn't have eyeglasses, either, or windows."

  Coomaraswami shrugged. "No, well, then it would be more of an advantage to have good eyesight, and therefore there would not be so much myopia and astigmatism. And people got along very well without glass in their windows for thousands of years."

  Gene paused outside the dining room. His throat was dry, and that was absurd, because it was his house, his friends and companions, and yet he felt that he was about to attempt something ultimately perilous. That was where the excitement came from. It was one thing to solve a problem in a daydream, and it was another to translate it into reality. For that, he needed to persuade other people -- real, living people, the people he had never understood. Would they be indifferent? Incredulous? Would they laugh7

  Their heads turned as he walked in and took his seat; he could tell by their expressions that they saw him as somehow changed, as a new enigma. That was good.

  Mike Wilcox was sitting between Margaret and Nirmal; he raised his hand slightly in greeting.

  "Hello, Mike. When did you get here?"

  "Just this afternoon. I'm not sure I'm meant to be here actually -- I didn't know there was going to be a meeting."

  Gene pulled his chair out and sat down. "It's all right, I want you to hear this. Has anyone told you that I healed a man named Cooley, Monday afternoon in Tampa?"

  "Well, Irma did say something. I can't quite follow it."

  "He had amyotrophic lateral sclerosis -- Lou Gehrig's disease. I healed him by touching him. I know how this sounds, but reserve your judgment. The doctor who looked at him afterward is named Montoya. I got hold of him Wednesday and talked him into taking me through the intensive-care unit at Tampa General; He didn't want to do it, but I put some pressure on through the head of the fund-raising committee; I'm one of their heavy donors. He took me in there Thursday morning. It was an awful place -- I had no idea. It's one big room partitioned off with portable screens -- people yelling in pain, blood on the nurses' uniforms, blood on the floor, just a madhouse. Anyhow, we went down the row. I healed an old man with a massively bleeding ulcer, and a woman dying of cancer, and a girl with a crushed larynx. I'm getting follow-up x-rays, but I know I did it. I healed them. Yesterday I went in and tried it again. I healed three patients; that seems to be about my limit -- after that I feel as if I'd been running uphill."

  There was a silence.

  "Had you ever done this before?" Salomon asked.

  "I'm not sure. I remember once in Greece, a friend of mine hurt his toe. He was barefoot, and he tripped and hit the doorsill. He thought his big toe was broken, and I looked at it and touched it, and it was all right. I didn't think anything about it then -- just thought he'd made a fuss over nothing. The only time I ever tried to heal anybody was years before that, in New York, when my best friend was dying of a heart attack. I couldn't do it; I didn't know enough. If I had, I could have saved him. There were things I could have done -- open the airway, chest massage, mouth-to-mouth breathing. It wouldn't have taken a miracle, just somebody being there who knew the right thing to do. But I didn't know. After that, I never tried again, until Cooley."

  Wilcox cleared his throat. "I'm not sure if this means anything," he said, "but you remember looking at Nan's leg, before we left? Well, when I got her home, she went down to start her physical therapy the next day, and when they took off the brace, the knee was completely mobile -- not a thing wrong with it. They told her to go home and not be a nuisance."

  "So. Maybe I healed her too. If so, I wasn't aware of it." Gene folded his hands on the table and leaned forward. "Now I've got to demonstrate something, because I want you to believe me. Pongo and Irma have already seen this, the rest of you haven't. Nirmal, will you hand me something from your wallet -- something you think would be hard to duplicate?"

  "Hard to duplicate?"

  "Yes. Not a pack of cigarettes, not a coin. Something one-of-a-kind. Don't worry, I'll give it back,"

  "I am not worried, but I am confused. Will this do?" Coomaraswami handed over a credit card with a broken corner.

  "Sure. Now watch." Gene laid the card on the table, covered it with his big hand for a moment. His hand moved sideways across the table. When he lifted it, there were two credit cards. He handed them to Salomon, who stared at them a moment before passing them to Coomaraswami. Margaret and Cliff Guthrie got up to look over his shoulder. Both credit cards had the same embossed twelve-digit number, both said "N. K. COOMARASWAMI" on the front; both had the lower right-hand corner broken in the same way.

  "May I see?" said Wilcox. He took the two credit cards and looked at them closely.

  "Mike, could you do that?"

  "Yes, with a little preparation."

  "Could you do it the way I did -- not knowing in advance what Nirmal would give me?"

  "Oh, yes. Not at all difficult."

  Gene sighed, "All right," he said. He reached into his pocket, took out a little cloth bag with a drawstring and slid it down the table. The others stood up to see better as Wilcox opened the bag and drew out an oblong bar of bright gold. On the surface of the bar was the embossed legend, "CREDIT SUISSE, 500g GOLD, 999.9."

  "Have you ever seen one of those before?" Gene asked.

  "No, never. My lord, that's heavy. What's it worth?"

  "About seven thousand dollars, I suppose. I haven't followed the market lately. Have you got a penknife?"

  "A knife? Yes."

  "Scratch your initials in it, or any symbol you like. Pongo, will you get a grocery bag from the kitchen?"

  "Aha," said Wilcox good-humoredly. He took a knife out of his pocket, opened it, and carved the initials "MBW" on the bar.

  Pongo came back and handed him a brown paper bag. "Examine it, please," said Gene. Wilcox turned the bag over in his hands, opened it, and peered in.

  "Now put the bar in the bag. Take it out again. Now fold the top of the bag and hold it with both hands. Raise the bag a little, so it doesn't touch the table." Wilcox followed instructions, watching Gene with a glint of amusement in his eyes.

  Gene stood up. He walked down the table until he was behind Wilcox; then he reached over and lightly touched the side of the brown paper bag. The bag dipped suddenly in Wilcox's hands and hit the table with a solid thump.

  Wilcox had turned pale. He opened the bag and looked in, then drew out a gold bar and laid it beside the first. They gleamed in the middle of the table, each one with the same initials scratched in it.

  After a moment Wilcox looked up. "I'll give you a thousand dollars if you'll teach me that trick," he said.

  Gene sat down again. "Mike, if I can do this, what do I need your money for? Haven't you ever asked yourself how I got so rich?"

  "Well, I did wonder -- "

  "I bought diamonds and copied them, just the way I copied that gold bar, and sold them to Piet's firm in Amsterdam."

  Linck was nodding. "lt's true. Millions of dollars' worth, over a period of years. It was very profitable to us."

  "I still think it is a trick," said Coomaraswami, laughing weakly.

  "Why?"

  "Because it is impossible,"

  "Have you ever heard of the 'many-worlds' explanation of quantum physics?"

  "Yes, of course. That is Hugh Everett's theory. He says that when two things can happen, at the particle level, both things do happen, and so you get a kind of splitting of reality into two separate worlds. It is a very interesting theory."

  "And it's true, I've known it all my life. I can see into those other worlds, a little bit; I can reach in and turn them, I haven't created anything, I've just taken that gold bar from another world and moved it into this one. And I now know that I can heal people the same way."

  He went on, "This is what I've been waiting for. A couple of years ago, in Japan, I woke up one morning and realized I w
as almost forty years old, and I had a power that I'd never done anything with except to kill people and make myself rich. So I came back here and built this house. I wanted a place where I could sit still for a while and get things straight in my head, and I wanted a place where I could spend the rest of my life in reasonable comfort, if I couldn't figure out anything better to do."

  "And now you know what you want to do?" Irma asked..

  "Irma, I knew what I wanted to do before -- I just didn't see how to do it."