Truth to tell, from the first I have despaired of my ability to help Mr. Kinkaid back to the present, if indeed he is trying to return. My mind is not only untutored in this new field; I feel that it lacks the power of concentration necessary for accomplishment in science. Mr Kinkaid was unwise in placing so much reliance in me. While I am sorry for him, I do not reproach myself, for I feel that his poor judgment, due, no doubt, to his emotional state, rather than my inadequacy, is at fault.
Although the same natural caution which kept me from approaching the police at the time of these occurrences has prevented my relating them to anyone subsequently, I have felt it only just to leave a record of such interesting events for such as may care to read it when neither I nor the Company can be embarrassed by my connection with something which was so sensationally misinterpreted in the press of another day.
“Born 1920 on Isle of Dogs, Thames, London, England, of clever organic chemist and daughter of master printer,” says Mr. Phillips’s terse autobiography. “Raised with fatherly hope of being scientist in cool, clean laboratory, ignoring outside world. Wicked Uncle gave me typewriter at fifteen, so decided to be journalist instead, God help me, and have done little since but nursemaid myriad cares of world—time off, but not enough time to write science fiction…”
What time he gets, he uses to advantage, though. If you like this one, you may also want to look up his earlier “Field Study,” a thought-provoking piece about what might be called psychosomatic medicine.
The Warning by Peter Phillips
He was an expensive man. Walls of concrete, walls of brick, barriers of steel, of compacted hydrocarbons, more steel, then miles of wasteland isolated him and his helpers from the world.
Outside the perimeter of wire, men in uniforms guarded with their little weapons the Biggest Weapon of All, although its vital factors existed, as yet, only in the brain of the expensive man.
One night, the expensive man sent all his helpers away, on one pretext or another, beyond the far perimeter of barbed wire. Although the theories in his brain might account for the deaths of many thousands of people he had never known, he had no desire to risk the lives of those he did know in an initial experiment.
On video screens and through loud-speakers, some of his trusted assistants watched and heard him enter the underground chamber from which he would conduct the experiment by remote control. Beside them stood cursing government men saying: “He had no right to do this… Supposing anything happens to him…”
At midnight, halfway through the experiment, it happened. Concrete, brick, steel, compacted hydrocarbons flowered into dust in the center of the forbidden area. And despite the protection of his shelter, most of the expensive man died.
Later, men in plain clothes guarded what was left of him.
The wake had been going on for two years now.
The four security men sat in turn in a corner of the silent room. They sat there for six hours each. From noon to six, from six to midnight, midnight to six, six to noon.
At first, they had looked at the dead thing on the bed and wondered how it felt to be dead and buried in your own body.
Now they read detective novels and smoked or looked through the double-paned windows at the silent traffic in the street below.
They were not callous. But speculation and pity had been exhausted early in the two-year vigil.
Yet they still tiptoed into the room when their shift began. On this day, Johnson settled his broad backside in the just vacated chair and opened a paperback.
A nurse glanced over from the bed where she was checking the circulation pump.
She said, “Talkative, aren’t you?”
He shrugged and switched his eyes to the thing on the bed.
“He can’t hear,” said the nurse thinly. “He can’t hear or see or speak or feel. He’s dead. Why don’t you let him die?”
Johnson regarded her in silence for a moment. Then he got up, grasped her wrist gently, led her to the door.
When she had gone, white-faced but unprotesting, he took up the wall phone: “Nurse Byers has cracked.”
The superintendent, who was a good neurosurgeon, came in with the new nurse and instructed her in the simple duties. She had already been screened psychologically and for security.
Johnson strolled outside with the super for a few moments.
Dr. MacIntyre said, “You’re a tough egg, Bert. What do you think about?”
“My kids, my roses and whodunit. I’ve quit thinking about—him. He’s like a sealed package of goods or a safe. I’m just looking after it until you figure a way to open it without busting what’s inside.”
“It may be a long wait.” MacIntyre flexed his short powerful surgeon’s fingers, white and crinkled from constant aseptic washing. “Techniques are developing all the time. But the central nervous system isn’t a kid’s constructor set. It may be years before we have the know-how to open your prize package.”
“Why our package?”
“Isn’t it? If he was my private patient, instead of a possession of the government, I’d have eased him out of it long ago; given him the quietus and let his soul go a-roaming. You were scared that Nurse Byers might do just that. She was the tenth we’ve had on this case.”
Johnson’s eyes were green and clear. He looked intently at the surgeon as they reached a branching corridor. He was paid to be suspicious.
MacIntyre’s smile was tinged with a sneer. “No, I’m not a nurse. I shan’t crack, Bert. I want to know what’s inside the package too. But—excuse the dramatics—I also wanted to know how it feels to be the jailer of a soul.”
Johnson said, “I’m doing a job. Maybe I don’t like it. But don’t spring poetry on me.”
Johnson went back to the silent room and his chair in the corner and his paperback mystery.
A background thought, holding the indirect vision of an intense purple flare, a microsecond of agony, a red stream of numbers and symbols and a terrible fear, came into his mind and was suppressed before it made contact with the higher centers.
Johnson thought about his kids, his roses and whodunit; and the living part of the dead thing on the bed sent a cry of frustration and despair into the lonely well of the universe.
It would have to be a child. The grown mind was calloused, stultified, guarded by a censor. Wordless thoughts from outside were suppressed as intrusive, impossible fancies.
The ten woman-minds had been more receptive, but their reactions had been of compassion, not understanding.
(So there could be compassion without understanding?)
They had seen his pictures of death and flame not as a warning, but as a plea for release from personal agony. And one by one, just as he had a good grasp on the tendrils of their intuition, they had been taken out of range before he could correct the impressions; before he could show them the relationship between certain mathematical symbols and a thing which must not be done.
It was not telepathy as he had once understood it, because its range seemed limited. Whatever it was, he knew his ability had grown. But still he could not verbalize. Only pictorial communication was possible.
A line of symbols, a flame girdling a great globe—ridiculously like the papier-mâché globe that had adorned a classroom in his grade school—then back to the symbols, with a black, negating cross over them.
That part was now automatic: sending, sending, sending into the blackness, like the radar marker and the radio buoy he’d developed during the war, before his mathematic genius had been conscripted for nuclear research; before that solo, secret, empiric probe, based on a half-understood question, had given him the dreaded answer and killed his body in the same second.
Time. How long had he been dead?
How long had it been since that strangely tortured milligram of matter had erupted—how long would it be before someone else made a hell-inspired guess and tortured a larger quantity of matter in the same way, to send an unquenchable flame circling the world?
A pool of neurons, trained and specialized over the unfeeling years, whirled and sent forth the automatic signal of agony and warning in elementary pictures.
Johnson blinked at a page of his thriller. Black spots formed a vague cross on the print and there was a slight red haze. Liver trouble. Or maybe he was reading too much.
He glanced at the new nurse. There was a moistness in her eyes as she looked at the thing on the bed but her hands were steady as she check-charted the blood-surrogate composition on the meters.
A looker, too. The uniform didn’t flatten all her curves.
Eyes off, Bert Johnson. Wonder what Marie’s fixing for dinner?
It would have to be a child, a half-formed mind, open and innocent. He must drive the warning in, scribe the formula and the negating cross on the tender cells. As the child grew, it would seek understanding of the symbols. It would qualify for a hearing on this matter—
A dream of years, when the hot flame (he would not fool himself) might come at any moment.
What fools spoke of verbal telepathy—
Out, further out, to find a child, to tell a child, to plant a guide and an urgent ferment in the mind of a child. Extend the range, each beating cell crying for surcease from the effort.
The energy spent in holding back the final darkness would be dissipated. It would mean death. The barrier would go and the blackness beyond would whelm in.
The eleventh nurse took the metabolism charts to Dr. MacIntyre.
He looked at them and wondered if the thing on the bed was willing itself to death.
“Thanks, Tommy,” said the shoeshine customer at the stand opposite the Washington hospital. Pocket the coin, face the new pair of brogues, get a shine, get a good shine, like the sun that shimmered on the trees down the further avenue and gave people blue-black shadows.
Like the hurtful shine that kept coming into his brain, burning there without sense or purpose.
Flip and slap that sliding cloth in a rhythm counterpointing the beat at the back of his brain.
Delta doo over hexta how
Two three square and nullity now
Infinity marker strike three and out
Line over curve and two dots round about
Finagle the eight-hall and splinter your cue
A canter in Cantor evolved by a Jew
A terrible zero a light you can’t see
A zero a zero a zerozerozerozerozero—
“You don’t look good,” said the pair of brogues kindly.
“Don’ feel good,” he said, knuckling his eyes. He wanted to turn around and look at a window in the hospital over the way, but that would be crazy too.
Put the brogues together, let them merge; see the feet inside them boil and surge; see the red-hot sun come sweeping down, burning Maggie and Ma and crippled Lemuel, houses and earth melting like candy on a stove.
Tenement on fire.
Must go home. Ma can’t get Lem down them stairs alone.
It’s hurting my head.
Driving hard into that unprotected mind at the limit of range. It’s killing me. Let the child grow up, God, and warn. Stay the fires until the child grows up. Done my best and it’s finished me.
I’m going, God. Or I’m coming—
The metabolism meter suddenly registered zero.
The hell with the stand. Must get home. Ma needs me. Tenement on fire. Run. Cross here for downtown. Can get in front of that truck—
NO
It was just in front of the casualty entrance to the hospital. After they’d set the leg and the anesthetic had worn off, a nurse heard his rambling and thought she recognized some Greek symbols.
She brought a doctor. He listened and shrugged. “Some kid rhyme,” he said. “Don’t you recognize him? It’s Tommy. Runs a shoeshine stand at the corner. He’s forty-five, but he’s got the arrested mentality of a child of seven. He’ll never grow up.”
One could hardly expect to get clear through a hook about psychic powers, without meeting a ghost somewhere along the way. And if a ghost there must he, I can think of none I’d rather meet than one of Anthony Boucher’s creations.
Whether Mr. Boucher is writing about werewolves, demons or haunts, he has repeatedly demonstrated a sure hand and a light touch with all matters supernatural.
The author, in addition to writing two major review columns, one of science fantasy and one of mysteries, is editor of the magazine Fantasy and Science Fiction.
The Ghost of Me by Anthony Boucher
I gave my reflection hell. I was sleepy, of course. And I still didn’t know what noise had waked me; but I told it what I thought of mysterious figures that lurked across the room from you and eventually turned out to be your own image. I did a good job, too; I touched depths of my vocabulary which even the complications of the Votruba case hadn’t sounded.
Then I was wide awake and gasping. Throughout all my invective, the reflection had not once moved its lips. I groped behind me for the patient’s chair and sat down fast. The reflection remained standing.
Now it was I. There was no doubt of that. Every feature was exactly similar, even down to the scar over my right eyebrow from the time a bunch of us painted Baltimore a mite too thoroughly. But this should have tipped me off from the start: the scar was on the right, not on the left where I’ve always seen it in a mirror’s reversal.
“Who are you?” I asked. It was not precisely a brilliant conversational opening, but it was the one thing I had to know or start baying the moon.
“Who are you?” it asked right back.
Maybe you’ve come across those cockeyed mirrors which, by some trick arrangement of lenses, show you not the reversed mirror image but your actual appearance, as though you were outside and looking at yourself? Well, this was like that—exactly, detailedly me, but facing me right way round and unreversed. And it stood when I sat down.
“Look,” I protested. “Isn’t it enough to be a madhouse mirror? Do you have to be an echo, too?”
“Tell me who you are,” it insisted quietly. “I think I must be confused.”
I hadn’t quite plumbed my vocabulary before; I found a couple of fresh words now. “You think you’re confused? And what in the name of order and reason do you think I am?”
“That’s what I asked you,” it replied. “What are you? Because there must be a mistake somewhere.”
“All right,” I agreed. “If you want to play games. I’ll tell you what I am, if you’ll do the same. You chase me and I’ll chase you. I’m John Adams. I’m a doctor. I got a Rockefeller grant to establish a clinic to study occupational disease among Pennsylvania cement workers—”
“—I’m working on a variation of the Zupperheim theory with excellent results, I smoke Camels, and I’m a registered Democrat but not quite a New Dealer,” it concluded, with the gloomiest frown I’ve ever heard of outside a Russian novel.
My own forehead was not parchment-smooth. “That’s all true enough. But how do you know it? And now that I’ve told you I’m John Adams, will you kindly kick through with your half of the bargain?”
“That’s just the trouble,” it murmured reluctantly. “There must be a terrible mistake somewhere. I’ve heard of such things, of course, but I certainly never expected it to happen to me.”
I don’t have all the patience that a medical man really needs. This time, when I said, “WHO ARE YOU?” it was a wild and ringing shout.
“Well, you see—” it said. “I hardly know how to put this—” it began again. “To be blunt about it,” it finally blurted out, “I’m the ghost of John Adams.”
I was glad I was sitting down. And I understood now why old Hasenfuss always recommended arms on the patient’s chair to give him something to grab when you deliver the verdict. I grabbed now, and grabbed plenty hard.
“You’re the—”
“I’m the ghost—”
“—the ghost of—”
“—of John Adams.”
“But”—I held
onto the chair even tighter—“I am John Adams.”
“I know,” my ghost said. “That’s what’s so annoying.”
I said nothing. That was far too impressive an understatement to bear comment. I groped in the pocket of my dressing gown and found cigarettes. “Do you smoke?” I asked.
“Of course. If John Adams smokes, naturally I do.”
I extended the pack.
He shook his head. “I’ll have to dematerialize it. Put one on the table.”
I obeyed and watched curiously. A hand that was not quite a hand but more a thin pointing shape stretched out and touched the cigarette.
It lingered a moment, then came away holding a white cylinder. The cigarette was still on the table.
I lit it and puffed hard. “Tastes just like any other Camel.”
“Of course. I took only the nonmaterial part. You wouldn’t miss that any more than you miss… well, me.”
“You mean you’re smoking the ghost of a cigarette?”
“You can put it that way.”
For the first five puffs it wasn’t easy to get the cigarette into my mouth. My hand was more apt to steer it at nose or ear. But with the sixth puff I began to feel as normal and self-possessed as any man talking with his own ghost. I even got argumentative.
“This isn’t possible,” I protested. “You won’t even come into existence until after I’m dead.”
“Certainly,” my ghost agreed politely. “But you see, you are dead.”
“Now look. That’s nonsense. Even supernaturally. Because if I were dead… well, if I were dead, I’d be my own ghost. I’d be you. There wouldn’t be two of us.”
“I am glad that I had a clear and logical mind when I was alive. I didn’t know but that might have come later; it sometimes does. But this way we can understand each other. What I meant is this : Where I come from, of course I am dead; or if you prefer, you are dead. It means the same thing. Also I am alive and also I am not yet born. You see, I come from outside of time. You follow?”
Beyond the Barriers of Space and Time Page 26