Telempath

by Spider Robinson

  I made a final sending approximating (Q.E.D.) or (There you go). We exchanged the extrasensory equivalent of a smile, and broke contact.

  But it seemed to me, as the next few miles put themselves behind me, that I had not entirely left the undermind, and that from that day forth, a part of me never would.

  Five days’ travel had brought us to New York. It didn’t seem to smell as bad as I remembered. My Musky honor guard left me at the Broadway entrance to Columbia and vanished among the rooftops, all thirty-four of them, each in a different direction. Before I was halfway to Butler, Gowan and Wendell came running to meet me, both obviously excited and elated. We embraced. It was a moment of strong emotion, but of course I had to try and ground it out.

  “You,” I growled at Gowan, the moment we untangled ourselves. “Was it you sicked those animated farts on me?”

  “Eh?” He blinked. “Well, yes. I asked the Zephyr Name to find you and bring you back at all costs—when you didn’t arrive back here soon after I did I thought your escape had gone sour. I was half-afraid you were dead. Did I do wrong?”

  “The damned things wouldn’t let me hang around long enough to spring Alia. Jordan snatched us both from Fresh Start.”

  “Oh, no!” We took turns explaining to Wendell who Alia was, and his face too became sad. I brought them both up to date.

  “Well, what’s done is done,” I told Gowan at last. “You probably saved my life. While I’m here I can pick up some things I need to spring Alia from that hole in the ground. Hell, there’s even a chance that pucker-faced clown actually let her go. He did promise, once—maybe he stood in a draft and caught a bad case of honor.”

  Gowan made the terrible face that meant he had something unpleasant to say. “Isham—I hope so.”

  “Huh? What do you mean?”

  “I hope Alia is all right where she is—because you must not leave. Not soon, at any rate. There is work for you here.”

  “Now, listen…”

  “Hear me out. Or better yet, hear me in—it’s chilly out.” He turned and headed for Butler. I followed, in angry confusion. Didn’t he understand that Alia was in danger? By damn, if he tried to stop me with those Zephyrs again, I’d load up with Musky-shot and…

  Fight my way through my brothers? Shut up, old son—your stupidity is showing.

  We entered Butler. A large piece of equipment stood in the lobby—the alpha-feedback amplifier and transmitter that Wendell and I had used both to train our undermind and to broadcast it like a beacon. But it was changed almost beyond recognition. It had been built onto, to such an enormous extent that its own four wheels were no longer adequate to support it. It rested now on a large pallet with two fixed and two free wheels, surrounded by auxiliary devices bound to it with a forest of cables. Its omnidirectional antenna had been replaced by a tweeterlike horn, and there were other changes I vaguely perceived but was not equipped to recognize. In all it only slightly resembled the machine I had first seen Wendell using to communicate with Muskies, from my sickroom window, about a thousand years earlier.

  “I bet it gets FM and police band now, huh, doc?” I said, examining it and feeling my composure return.

  “Don’t make light of it, Isham,” Wendell said almost paternally. “Michael has improved immeasurably on my work, and in a very short time.”

  “I wasn’t making light,” I protested. “I’m really impressed.”

  “Exactly what you are, my boy,” Gowan said jovially. “Impressed—in the old sense of the word. ‘Drafted,’ as it was described more recently.”

  “What for?”

  “To use this Frankensteinian gizmo that Wendell and I have made to talk with the High Muskies.”

  “Huh? You mean you can get through to them with that contraption?”

  “No, I mean we can reach them with that contraption. We can knock on their figurative door. It is my devout hope that you can ‘get through to’ them.”

  “Why me? What makes you think I can do it if you can’t?”

  “Because you’re unique, Isham.” Wendell put in excitedly.

  “I know that—but I don’t see how it’ll help in this case.”

  “Eh?”

  “Skip it—I want to know what you mean.”

  “What Wendell means, Isham,” Gowan said cheerfully, “is that you are, so far as is known, humanity’s best telepath.”

  “What?”

  “Yep. Oh, you’re only an apprentice yet. But I believe training and practice will make you the world’s most efficient communicator—at least on the psychic band.”

  Inside me, something was careening and shifting like unstowed cargo in a storm-tossed vessel; yet I hadn’t moved a muscle. “What the hell gives you that idea?” I asked almost angrily.

  “The EEG built into that alpha-feedback machine of Wendell’s,” Gowan returned calmly. “The two of you were using a device you had found, not made, and you never fully explored its potential. It monitored your brainwave patterns and fed you a visual cue—soft light—when you attained a consistent state of alpha wave production—the doorway to the undermind. But at the same time the machine was recording your brainwaves—and you never thought to examine the EEG tapes.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “Okay. Pardon me if I get pedantic—the lecture habit is hard to break. Alpha waves are one kind or pattern of electrical activity produced by the human brain, lying between either eight and twelve or seven and thirteen cycles per second depending on which authority you subscribe to. It’s a subtle energy, measured in microvolts. It wasn’t discovered until 1929, and very little was done with it until the seventies and eighties, when the spiritual renaissance hit the Pre-Exodus world. Virtually everyone produces alpha naturally: Rosenberg’s researches indicated that only about eight percent of people produced no alpha in normal waking state. The key, however, is in amplitude.

  “The average untrained human’s alpha production measures about ten or fifteen microvolts. With careful and intensive training, it can peak as high as sixty microvolts. In the late seventies, recordings were made of Zen masters who registered as high as a hundred microvolts, though only in surges, and only in near-cataleptic meditative trance.

  “I can show you recordings of your own alpha, made by you on that infernal machine there, that peak at a hundred and twenty-seven microvolts, and average ninety-eight.”

  From assassin to Zen master in one easy lesson. There you go.

  “That’s nice,” I said weakly.

  “Nice? It’s essential!” Wendell burst out. “Thanks to Michael’s timely arrival and unceasing labor, we now have a functioning EM carrier wave which a High Musky could follow down to us, hand over hand as it were.”

  “Ordinary Muskies come down the thing like a homesick water buffalo down a viaduct,” Gowan put in.

  “But we have been unable to contact a High Musky, or induce one to follow the carrier wave to us,” Wendell went on. “The lesser Muskies seem to assure us that it can be done, that a High Musky could reach us by such means—but none have.”

  “There’s a bunch of folks we need to speak with, ten stories up,” Gowan interrupted again, “and so we keep slapping a ladder against the side of the building. What we need is somebody with enough lungpower to shout ‘Hey! Come on down!’—and be heard. I haven’t got the psychic lungs for it, and neither does Wendell.”

  “That’s why you must stay,” Wendell continued. “It’s essential that…”

  “Whoa!” I said, “Hold off the vaudeville cross-talk act for a minute and let me get a word in edgewise. Why me? Why can’t the lower Muskies pass along a message by riding our EM wave up?”

  “Beats me,” Gowan said cheerfully, “but they refuse. Maybe they’re reluctant to disturb the boss. Maybe their language lacks the necessary concepts. Maybe there’s some sort of taboo involved. All I know is, they can’t or won’t extend a dinner invitation upstairs for us. We’ve been trying for days.”

  “What makes you thin
k I could?”

  “You’re the only one we have left. What you’ve told me about the political situation up north makes it even more imperative that we end the damned war now! Before the last two factions left in the nation destroy each other in a stupid, useless ideological wrangle.

  “If we can get through to the High Muskies we can offer them the deal you failed to sell to the Council—and if they buy it, you and I can sell it to Krishnamurti—because I’ll stuff it down his throat with a history text. We’re gambling that the High Muskies can talk with one another—because we haven’t the time to wait for a worldwide congress—and we’re gambling that they’re psychologically equipped to make racial policy in agreement, and we’re gambling that their social structure allows them to put it across. Not to mention the gamble that the idea of peaceful coexistence will appeal to them.

  “But most of all we’re gambling on you.”

  “But why?” I cried for what seemed the thousandth time. “Because I have a gift for relaxed thinking? That’s all alpha is, you know—the characteristic pattern of meditative thought. It’s not telepathy, any more than closing your eyes is sleeping.”

  “Yes, but that’s a good analogy,” Gowan insisted, “—because closing your eyes, while not essential, is a big help. I cite studies by Krippner and Ullman, Stanford and Levin, the Dream Laboratories at Maimonides in Brooklyn and the Paranormal Activities Department of Columbia, all of which indicated a close connection between alpha production and paranormal sensitivity. None but the last of these studies dealt with telepathy as such—Rhine-card guessing was their main focus—but even earlier studies by Kamiya and by Budzynski and Stoyva showed that alpha production, and particularly alpha training by feedback, caused subjects to experience marked increases in empathy. And you know perhaps better than I, Isham, that what Muskies do is closer to empathy than it is to telepathy.”

  “About sixty-forty,” I corrected absently. My mind was humming like a cable under strain.

  “Wendell tells me you’ve had infinitely more success with undermind communication than he has…”

  “More depth,” Wendell interrupted.

  “…despite the fact that he’s had a twenty-year head start and a damned sight more motivation. Hadn’t the significance of that struck you?”

  “I guess I just thought I smoked more dope,” I mumbled without thinking. The notion had been largely subconscious.

  “Don’t forget that idea,” Gowan suggested. “Someday the researchers picking over your brain may get five hundred pages of speculation out of it. The correlation between use of mild psychedelics and alpha-proficiency is one of the things that was under study at Columbia when the Exodus intervened—but I suspect that in future days our best ambassadors will be those offspring of old hippie stock who haven’t rebelled against their parents’ life-styles. God knows not many kids at Fresh Start smoke the stuff, the way Krishnamurti discourages it…you being of course exempt by virtue of parentage. However, Isham, I’d also credit the fact that you’re trained in Eastern philosophy, in meditative disciplines—thanks to me—and I’ll mention it to any researchers I meet.

  “All this, of course, assumes that the human race will survive long enough to produce either researchers or ambassadors, which is by no means certain. But if you feel you must go back north to pull Alia out of the hole, it will be certain, in my mind…that we are, god forgive the cliché, doomed.”

  “Something I forgot to tell you, Dr. Mike.”

  “Please, Isham—you’re a grownup now. Michael, or Mike. What’s the forgot?”

  “Alia’s pregnant, Mike.”

  His face went expressionless. “Oh my god. Yours, of course? Of course. Well, I suppose we can get along without you after all—there’s a trick with hypothalamus-induced feedback training I’ve been meaning to try…” His thoughts were already leaving the here and now.

  “You misunderstand me. I want my baby to grow up. When do we start?”

  He grinned. “Five minutes ago.” Something about the grin said he was proud of me. Well, so was I—but there was a terrible knot in my heart that seemed to be seriously interfering with its function.

  I’m sorry, my beloved—no man can escape his weird.

  Four hours later we were outside, under a starry sky, gathered near a fire that leaped and crackled.

  “Well,” I said, breaking a long silence, “I wonder if the folks back home miss the truck, Mike.”

  “Your father insisted we have no more than one internal combustion vehicle running specifically so we wouldn’t get dependent on them. I’m sure the fuel will be put to good use.”

  “Cut with lemon juice and sugar,” I guessed wistfully.

  Wendell reached into a brand-new (from his point of view) U.S. Army field jacket and produced a long green bottle. It bore a handmade white label whose only legend was four crude Xs—a classical touch I admired. It gurgled pleasantly.

  “I have a little tonic of my own, here,” he said diffidently, “which you gentlemen might find tolerable. It’s an excellent vintage: two weeks old.”

  “I’ll drink to that,” Gowan and I simultaneously said, and we did. I don’t want to use a lot of clichés about the potency of Carlson’s moonshine—I won’t claim smoke came out of our ears, or that our fillings melted, or any of that. But I will say that if you poured some across an itching back, the stuff would scratch it. I must admit that Gowan outdid me. His eyes watered too, but his nose didn’t run and he was able to talk in almost no time. “Smooth,” he croaked. “What do you call this stuff?”

  Wendell recovered the bottle, took a staggering long swallow, and smiled like an angel.

  “Boozo,” he said placidly.

  Before long we were agreeing, just like they all do, that the stuff grew on you once the scar tissue had formed on your tongue, and not long after that I discovered I was feeling better. Alcohol is a drug I use only seldom; in consequence I appreciate it. Alcoholism, Shorty always used to say, is what happens when good liquor falls into the hands of amateurs.

  But it came to me, while I scratched some overlooked electrode-paste from my arm, that the peace I was feeling was only partly drug-induced. It occurred to me that although I had scavenged marijuana as well as food on the way to New York, I hadn’t felt the need to smoke any lately. I spoke of this to Wendell and Mike. “Right now my woman and unborn child are in Jordan’s hands, Fresh Start is in danger of mob violence, and I can’t seem to get a High Musky on the phone. And yet I’m sitting here in relative tranquillity, and my fingernails are long enough to need clipping. Where’s that at?”

  “A number of possible explanations,” Gowan said. His lean features took well to firelight; it struck gold from his Van Dyke, and made his nose lordly. “For one thing, alpha-feedback training is said to reduce anxiety, to allow you to adapt to and tolerate anxiety-producing situations. Your unique talent for communication is more than a parlor trick, you know. It carries over into your life, one influencing the other. To me your calm is a sure sign that we will succeed tomorrow. This afternoon was only the first try—you can’t expect instant success.

  “Another possibility is that you’ve burned out your adrenals. So much has happened to you lately that by now you must have learned that anxiety is pragmatically unsound.” That rang a bell. “Or it could be that you’re too fatigued to worry.”

  “I favor another possibility,” Wendell put in. “It involves the ability to appreciate the inevitable. You know in your heart that you’re doing the best you can for Alia, Fresh Start, and the High Muskies—so you’ve put away fear and uncertainty.”

  “‘There was nothing more I could do, so I took a nap,’” Gowan quoted thoughtfully. “I believe you’ve hit it, Wendell. He’s grown up.”

  “Thanks, fellas,” I said dryly, but I confess I was proud. “If I’m so smart why won’t a High Musky talk to me?”

  “Now don’t go spoiling your tranquillity,” Gowan mocked, and then paused, “Isham…I’ve got only one sug
gestion. There was a man called Stephen Gaskin, once—for all I know he’s still alive in Tennessee—who wrote a mighty book called Monday Night Class. I haven’t read it in over twenty years, but one part comes back to me now.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Stephen suggested that if telepathy ever got to be popular, people were going to find out that they had to shovel out the Communications Room before they could get anywhere.”

  “I don’t get you.”

  “The Communications Room, he said, was the subconscious.”

  “Oh.”

  Wendell got warily to his feet and tossed another few pieces of chair on the fire. “In twenty years of cold winters I haven’t made a dent in the supply of chairs Columbia has to offer,” he said reflectively. “I imagine I never will. I’m going to bed, gentlemen.”

  “Good night.”

  “Good night, Wendell.”

  He left, whistling a tune I didn’t recognize. A silence ensued.

  “How do you shovel out your subconscious, Doct…Mike?”

  “Well, actually, it’s more a matter of opening it up than anything else. Shit decomposes in the presence of air and sunlight. The Catholics used to have a very effective custom called confession.”

  I thought about it. “I still feel confusion about Dad,” I said at last. “No—about the idea of killing in general. I know I tried to kill Jordan for what seemed to me to be totally righteous reasons—and yet Alia made me realize, hours later, that it was just that killer ape that lives in the back of my brain. Hey, I’ll bet that’s why I had so much trouble getting to the undermind, that one time I tried to get the Zephyrs to kill Jordan for me. I never thought of that.”

  “It’s hard to be relaxed when you’re thinking of murder,” Gowan agreed.

  “Dammit, Mike, I made a conscious decision, a few years back, to let you drift out of my life and let Collaci drift in. He taught me everything there is to know about killing—and it’s about everything I know. I think I made a bum decision. Thanks for giving me a line on a new profession.”