Cranston pushed back his visored painter’s cap and glanced toward the green waters of the Sound where a tug was nursing a boom of logs out from the tidal basin.
“Oh, she was pretty then, Olna was,” he said presently. “Her hair was like silvered gold. And her skin—it was like you could look right into it.”
“You were sweet on her,” I said.
“Daft is the word,” he said. “And she didn’t mind me one bit, either … at first there.”
Again, he fell silent. He tugged once at his cap visor. Presently, he said: “I was trying to remember if it was my idea or hers. It was mine. Olna had the deck of cards still in her hands. And I said to her, ‘Olna, you shuffle the deck. Don’t let me see the cards.’ Yes, that’s how it was. I said for her to shuffle the deck and take one card at a time off the top and see if I could guess what it was.
“There was a lot of talk going around just then about this fellow at Duke University, this doctor, I forget his name, who had these cards people guessed. I think that’s what put the notion in my mind.”
Cranston fell silent a moment and I swear he looked younger for an instant—especially around the eyes.
“So you shuffled the cards,” I said, interested in spite of myself. “What then?”
“Eh? Oh … she said: ‘Yah, see if you can guess diss vun.’ She had a thick accent, Olna. Would’ve thought she’d been born in the old country instead of over by Port Orchard. Well, she took that first card and looked at it. Lord, how pretty she was bending to catch the light from the study door. And you know, I knew the instant she saw it what it was—the jack of clubs. It was as though I saw it in my mind somewhere … not exactly seeing, but I knew. So I just blurted out what it was.”
“You got one right out of fifty-two … not bad,” I said.
“We went right through the deck and I named every card for her,” Cranston said. “As she turned them up—every card; not one mistake.”
I didn’t believe him, of course. These stories are a dime a dozen in the study of ESP, so I’m told. None of them pan out. But I was curious why he was telling this story. Was it the old village bachelor, the nobody, the man existing on a sister’s charity trying to appear important?
“So you named every card for her,” I said. “You ever figure the odds against that?”
“I had a professor over at the State College do it for me once,” Cranston said. “I forget how much it was. He said it was impossible such a thing was chance.”
“Impossible,” I agreed not trying to disguise my disbelief. “What did Olna think of this?”
“She thought it was a trick—parlor magic, you know.”
“She was wearing glasses and you saw the cards reflected in them, isn’t that it?” I asked.
“She doesn’t wear glasses to this day,” Cranston said.
“Then you saw them reflected in her eyes,” I said.
“She was sitting in shadows about ten feet away,” he said. “She only had the light from the study door to see the cards. She had to hold them toward the firelight from the fireplace for me to see them. No, it wasn’t anything like that. Besides, I had my eyes closed some of the time. I just kind of saw those cards … this place in my mind that I found. I didn’t have to hesitate or guess. I knew every time.”
“Well, that’s very interesting,” I said, and I opened the Scientific Quarterly. “Perhaps you should be back at Duke helping Dr. Rhine.”
“You can bet I was excited,” he said, ignoring my attempt to end the conversation. “This famous doctor had said humans could do this thing, and here I was proving it.”
“Yes,” I said. “Perhaps you should write Dr. Rhine and tell him.”
“I told Olna to shuffle the cards and we’d try it again,” Cranston said, his voice beginning to sound slightly desperate. “She didn’t seem too eager, but she did it. I did notice her hands were trembling.”
“You frightened the poor child with your parlor magic,” I said.
He sighed and sat there in silence for a moment staring at the waters of the Sound. The tug was chugging off with its boom of logs. I found myself suddenly feeling very sorry for this pitiful little man. He had never been more than fifty miles from the village, I do believe. He lived a life bounded by that old house on the ridge, the weekly card games at the Grange and an occasional trip to the store for groceries. I don’t even believe they had television. His sister was reputed to be a real old-fashioned harridan on the subject.
“Did you name all the cards again?” I asked, trying to sound interested.
“Without one mistake,” he said. “I had that place in my mind firmly located by then. I could find my way to it every time.”
“And Olna wanted to know how you were doing it,” I said.
He swallowed. “No. I think she … felt how I was doing it. We hadn’t gone through more’ fifteen cards that second time when she threw the deck onto the floor. She sat there shivering and staring at me. Suddenly, she called me some name—I never did rightly hear it straights—and she leaped up and ran out of the house. It happened so fast! She was out the back door before I was on my feet. I ran out after her but she was gone. We found out later she hitched a ride on the bread truck and went straight home to Port Orchard. She never came back.”
“That’s too bad,” I said. “The one person whose mind you could read and she ran out on you.”
“She never came back,” he said, and I swear his voice had tears in it. “Everyone thought … you know, that I’d made improper advances. My sister was pretty mad. Olna’s brother came for her things the next day. He threatened to whoomp me if I ever set foot on…”
Cranston broke off, turning to stare up the gravel road that comes into the village from the hill farms to the west. A tall woman in a green dress that ended half way between knees and ankles had just turned the corner by the burned-out stump and was making for the post office. She walked with her head down so you could see part of the top of her head where the yellow hair was braided and wound tight like a crown. She was a big woman with a good figure and a healthy swing to her stride.
“I heard her brother was sick,” Cranston said.
I glanced at Cranston and the look on his face—sad and distant—answered my unspoke question.
“That’s Olna,” I said. I began to feel excitement. I didn’t believe his fool story, still …
“She doesn’t come down here very often,” Cranston said. “But with her brother sick, I’d hoped…”
She turned off onto the post office path and the corner of the building hid her from us. We heard the door open on the other side and a low mumble of conversation in the building. Presently, the door opened once more and the woman came around the corner, taking the path that passed in front of us toward the store down by the highway. She still had her head bent, but now she was reading a letter.
As she passed in front of us no more than six feet away, Cranston said: “Olna?”
Her head whipped around and she stopped with one foot ahead of the other. I swear I’ve never seen more terror in a person’s face. She just stared frozen at Cranston.
“I’m sorry about your sister’s boy,” Cranston said, and then added: “If I were you, I’d suggest she take the boy to one of those specialists in Minneapolis. They do wonders with plastic surgery nowadays and…”
“You!” she screamed. Her right hand came up with the index and little fingers pointed at Cranston in a warding-of-evil sign that I’d thought died out in the middle ages. “You stay out of my head … you … you cottys!”
Her words broke the spell. She picked up her skirts and fled down the path toward the highway. The last we saw of her was a running figure that sped around the corner by the garage.
I tried to find something to say, but nothing came. Cottys, that was the Danuan Pan who seduced virgins by capturing their minds, but I’d never realized that the Norse carried that legend around.
“Her sister just wrote her in that letter,” Cran
ston said, “that the youngest boy was badly scalded by a kettle tipped off the stove. Just happened day before yesterday. That’s an airmail letter. Don’t get many of them here.”
“Are you trying to tell me you read that letter through her eyes?” I demanded.
“I never lost that place I found,” he said. “Lord knows I tried to lose it often enough. Especially after she married Gus Bills.”
Excitement boiled in me. The possibilities …
“Look,” I said. “I’ll write to Duke University myself. We can…”
“Don’t you dare!” he snapped. “It’s bad enough every man in the valley knows this about us. Oh, I know they mostly don’t believe … but the chance…” He shook his head. “I’ll not stand in her way if she finds a suitable man to…”
“But, man,” I said. “If you…”
“You believe me now, don’t you?” he said, and his voice had a sly twist I didn’t like.
“Well,” I said, “I’d like to see this examined by people who…”
“Make it a sideshow,” he said. “Stories in the Sunday papers. Whole world’d know.”
“But if…”
“She won’t have me!” he barked. “Don’t you understand? She’ll never lose me, but she won’t have me. Even when she went on the train back to Minneapolis … the week after she ran out of our house…”
His voice trailed off.
“But think of what this could mean to…”
“There’s the only woman I ever loved,” Cranston said. “Only woman I ever could’ve married … she thinks I’m the devil himself!” He turned and glared at me. “You think I want to expose that? I’d reach into my head with a bailing hook and tear that place out of my mind first!”
And with that he bounced to his feet and took off up the path that led toward the road to the ridge.
DEATH OF A CITY
It was such a beautiful city, Bjska thought. An observer’s eyes could not avoid the overwhelming beauty. As the City Doctor called to treat the city, Bjska found the beauty heartbreaking. He found his thoughts drawn again and again to the individuals who called this place home, two hundred and forty-one thousand humans who now faced the prospect of homeless lives.
Bjska stared across open water at the city from the wooded peninsula that protected the inner harbor. The low light of late afternoon cast a ruddy glow on the scene. His eyes probed for flaws, but from this distance not even the tastefully applied patches could be seen.
Why was I chosen for this? he asked himself. Then: If the damn fools had only built an ugly city!
Immediately, he rejected this thought. It made as much sense as to ask why Mieri, the intern who stood near the ornithopter behind him, personified such feminine beauty. Such things happened. It was the task of a City Doctor to recognize inescapable facts and put them in their proper context.
Bjska continued to study the city, striving for the objective/subjective synthesis that his calling demanded. The city’s builders had grafted their ideas onto the hills below the mountains with such a profound emotional sense of harmony that no trick of the eye could reject their creation. Against a backdrop of snow peaks and forests, the builders had rightly said: “The vertical threatens a man; it puts danger above him. A man cannot relax and achieve human balance in a vertical setting.”
Thus, they had built a city whose very rightness might condemn it. Had they even suspected what they had created? Bjska thought it unlikely.
How could the builders have missed it? he asked himself.
Even as the question appeared in his mind, he put it down. It served no purpose for him to cry out against the circumstances that said he must make this decision. The City Doctor was here on behalf of the species, a representative of all humans together. He must act for them.
The city presented an appearance of awesome solidity that Bjska knew to be false. It could be destroyed quite easily. He had but to give the order, certifying his decision with his official seal. People would rage against fate, but they would obey. Families would be broken and scattered. The name of this place would be erased from all but the City Doctors’ records. The natural landscape would be restored and there would remain no visible sign that a city such as this one had stood here. In time, only the builders of cities would remember this place, and that as a warning.
Behind him, Mieri cleared her throat. She would speak out soon, Bjska realized. She had been patient, but they were past the boundaries of patience. He resisted an impulse to turn and feast his eyes upon her beauty as a change from the cityscape. That was the problem. There would be so little change in trading one prospect of beauty for another.
While Mieri fidgeted he continued to delay. Was there no alternative? Mieri had left her own pleadings unvoiced, but Bjska had heard them in every word she uttered. This was Mieri’s own city. She had been born here—beauty born in beauty. Where was the medical point of entry in this city?
Bjska allowed his frustration to escape in a sigh.
The city played its horizontal lines across the hills with an architecture that opened outward, that expanded, that condemned no human within its limits to a containerized existence. The choice of where every element should stand had been made with masterful awareness of the human psyche. Where things that grew without man’s interference should grow, there they were. Where structures would amplify existing forms, there stood the required structures … precisely! Every expectation of the human senses had been met. And it was in this very conformity to human demands that the cancerous flaw arose.
Bjska shook his head sadly. If conformity were the definition of artistic survival …
As he had anticipated, Mieri moved closer behind him, said, “Sometimes when I see it from out here I think my city is too beautiful. Words choke in my throat. I long for words to describe it and there are none.” Her voice rang with musical softness in the quiet evening air.
Bjska thought: My city! She had said it and not heard herself saying it. A City Doctor could have no city.
He said, “Many have tried and failed. Even photographs fall short of the reality. A supreme holopaint artist might capture it, but only for a fleeting moment.”
“I wish every human in the universe could see my city,” Mieri said.
“I do not share that wish,” Bjska said. And he wondered if this bald statement was enough to shock her into the required state of awareness. She wanted to be a City Doctor? Let her stretch into the inner world as well as the outer.
He sensed her weighing his words. Beauty could play such a vitalizing role in human life that the intellect tended to overlook its devitalizing possibilities. If beauty could not be ignored, was that not indiscreet? The fault was blatancy. There was something demandingly immodest about the way this city gilded its hills, adding dimension to the peaks behind it. One saw the city and did not see it.
Mieri knew this! Bjska told himself. She knew it as she knew that Bjska loved her. Why not? Most men who saw her loved her and desired her. Why had she no lovers then? And why had her city no immigrants? Had she ever put both of these questions to herself, setting them in tension against each other? It was the sort of thing a City Doctor must do. The species knew the source of its creative energy. The Second Law made the source plain.
He said, “Mieri, why does a City Doctor have such awesome powers? I can have the memories of whole populations obliterated, selectively erased, or have individuals thus treated. I can even cause death. You aspire to such powers. Why do we have them?”
She said, “To make sure that the species faces up to Infinity.”
He shook his head sadly. A rote answer! She gave him a rote answer when he’d demanded personal insight!
The awareness that had made Bjska a City Doctor pervaded him. Knowledge out of his most ancient past told him the builders of this city had succeeded too well. Call it chance or fate. It was akin to the genetic moment that had produced Mieri’s compelling beauty—the red-gold hair, the green eyes, the female proportio
ns applied with such exactitude that a male might feast his senses, but never invest his flesh. There existed a creative peak that alarmed the flesh. Bjska stood securely in his own stolid, round-faced ugliness, knowing this thing. Mieri must find that inner warmth that spoke with chemical insistence of latent wrinkles and aging.
What would Mieri do if her city died before its time?
If she was ever to be a City Doctor, she must be made to understand this lesson of the flesh and the spirit.
He said, “Do you imagine there’s a city more beautiful in the entire world?”
She thought she heard bantering in his voice and wondered: Is he teasing? It was a shocking thought. City Doctors might joke to keep their own sanity in balance, but at such a time as this … with so much at stake …
“There must be a city more beautiful somewhere,” she said.
“Where?”
She took a deep breath to put down profound disquiet. “Are you making fun of my city?” she demanded. “How can you? It’s a sick city and you know it!” She felt her lips quiver, moisture at the corners of her eyes. She experienced both fear and shame. She loved her city, but it was sick. The outbreaks of vandalism, the lack of creativity here, the departure of the best people, the blind violence from random elements of its citizenry when they moved to other settings. All had been traced back here. The sickness had its focus in her city. That was why a City Doctor had come. She had worked hard to have that doctor be Bjska, her old teacher, and more than the honor of working with him once more had been involved. She had felt a personal need.
“I’m sorry,” Bjska said. “This is the city where you were born and I understand your concern. I am the teacher now. I wish to share my thought processes with you. What is it we must do most carefully as we diagnose?”
She looked across the water at the city, feeling the coolness of onrushing nightfall, seeing the lights begin to wink on, the softness of low structures and blended greenery, the pastel colors and harmony. Her senses demanded more than this, however. You did not diagnose a city just by its appearance. Why had Bjska brought her here? The condition of a city’s inhabitants represented a major concern. Transient individuals, always tenants on the land, were the single moving cells. Only the species owned land, owned cities. A City Doctor was hired by the species. In effect, he diagnosed the species. They told him the imprint of the setting. It had been a gigantic step toward Infinity when the species had recognized that settings might contribute to its illnesses.
The Collected Stories of Frank Herbert Page 85