Ballroom of the Skies

Eleven

School was getting harder all the time. That darn Miss Crowe. Always making it tough just before vacation. All the kids were excited about the Chinese invading Korea. He wished he’d been a Marine in Korea. Patrols. Fire fights.

That darn Miss Crowe. “Children, we are going to study projection.” She wrote it on the board, spelling it as she wrote. “Now you all know what electricity is.” She stepped to the front seats and tapped Joey on the head. She made that funny smile, like when she thinks her jokes are funny, and said, “Joseph’s head is full of electricity. It’s what he thinks with.” The whole class laughed and Joey got red as a beet.

“But Joseph’s electrical field is unorganized. Think of one of those big signs overlooking the Common. Now those signs spell out words. All the light bulbs light at once to spell out a word. If all those little light bulbs were flickering, going on and off without any order at all, we couldn’t read the word, could we? Sometimes Joseph, by accident, makes all the little bulbs light at once, usually when he’s very excited or upset, and then we can sometimes see his thoughts, not clearly of course, but enough to know for a split second what he is thinking. It happens so seldom, however, that we never recognize it as true projection. We call it a hunch, or a good guess. In projection we will all learn first how to make the words clear. And after we have made the words clear, then we will learn how to project real images. We’ll project dogs and cats and new toys and everything we can imagine.”

“A red bike?” Dake said without thinking.

Miss Crowe looked at him. “Yes, a red bike, Dake. But I shouldn’t advise you to try and ride it.” Everybody laughed at him and he got as red as Joey had been.

Maralyn, who was always asking questions and bringing junk to Miss Crowe, stuck her hand up.

“Yes, dear?”

“Miss Crowe, if all that goes on in somebody’s head, how can somebody else see it?”

“It isn’t exactly seeing, Maralyn. Joseph has energy in his brain. Projection is a case of learning to focus that energy. And because each of us uses the same sort of energy to do our thinking, Joseph can learn to focus it so strongly that he actually does our thinking for us.”

“Suppose I don’t want him doing my thinking for me,” Maralyn said with contempt.

“As we are learning projection, dear, we will also learn how to close our minds against it.”

Maralyn sat down, flouncing a little in the seat. Dake hated her.

Miss Crowe went back to her desk. Joey looked happy to have her stop tapping his head. It seemed to make him nervous.

“Now, class, this will be a little demonstration to show you what we will be able to do, every one of us, before summer vacation.”

Dake liked that part. She just sat there looking at the class, and, gosh, she put songs in your head, and band music, and she made some poems, and then a whole lot of puppies came running in through the closed doors, and bright-colored birds flew around and made a heck of a racket. It was really keen the way she could do that.

But after that first day, the fun was all gone. It got dull and hard. Standing up there like a goof and trying to give the whole class some dopey word. Miss Crowe would write it on a piece of paper, write a lot of things on pieces of paper and you drew out your piece and it was always some dopey word. House, farm, cow, seashell, road, lamp, doctor. Never good words like bike, pirate, sloop, robber, pistol.

You had to practice at home, too, and Mother and Daddy could do it so much easier and better than you could that you felt like you’d never learn anything. He guessed it was important stuff, all right. Miss Crowe had cut out all the other subjects, and it was nothing but that projection, projection, all day long. She kept saying you had to learn it when your mind was young, or something.

Christmas came, and no red bike because it was too dangerous. There were skis, but it turned warm and there wasn’t any snow. He horsed around with Joey most of the vacation and they projected stuff at each other, and he worked at trying to make a bike he could see, even if he couldn’t ride it, like Miss Crowe said.

He got so he could make some stuff, but not a good bike. One afternoon he made a real sharp red bike, right in his room, but he couldn’t hold on to it. It got shimmery and went away and he couldn’t bring it back.

When school started again the whole class got so they could do the words loud and clear. Then there were little sentences. Kid stuff. I see the horse. The horse sees me. My uncle owns a cat. It has kittens. It sleeps in the barn. That Maralyn was a pain. She projected words so sharp they hurt your head and you wished there was some way you could put your fingers in your ears to stop the racket.

Next they got hard words. You want to do cat and you can think of a cat all right, but a word like thought or religion or doubt — it was tough to think of ways to put it across. But finally they all got that. And then they had to take turns going further and further down the hall and doing the hard sentences. Maralyn was the only one who could go way out in the school yard by the swings and still make you hear. It was pretty faint and you had to strain for it, but she could do it.

Next came learning how to shut it out. In order to push out the words you had to sort of brace yourself against a sort of imaginary membrane in your mind. Miss Crowe called that the “first screen.” Finally they all got the trick of being able to sort of get that membrane around in front of your thoughts. You had to kind of slide through it and then hold it up in the way, and it blocked out all the projection. It sure was a relief to be able to stop hearing that screamy noise Maralyn could put in your head.

Miss Crowe said that because her mind was stronger, she could project right through your screen if she really poured on the coal, but that would hurt you and the screen would have to heal up before you could project or receive or anything. She said that she had four screens she could put up, one behind the other. She said that with all of them down, she could catch projections even when the person wasn’t trying to project, provided they didn’t have any screen up. She said that when they had all learned how to project and receive selectively, and could make images, and knew how to use the second screen, then they could all be called Stage One. To get to be a Stage Two like her and use all screens you had to really work at it. Gee, it looked as if school would last the rest of his life.

But it got to be sort of fun when they got so they could make the images. Illusions, Miss Crowe sometimes called them. It turned out Joey was better at it than Maralyn, and that sure scalded Maralyn. Joey had an animal book home, and one day he about startled Miss Crowe out of her wits by having a giant sloth hanging from the transom over the door to the classroom. Dake worked on the red bike until he could make it with no trouble. After a while it got dull, making the bike, so he made other things. But working on the bike had helped. He could make things almost as good as Joey could. Joey got in bad trouble, though, with Miss Crowe. He got his hands on a medical book with illustrations, and he kept making little tiny naked women running around when Miss Crowe wasn’t looking, and Maralyn told on him. Miss Crowe said if he kept acting up, she’d burst his first screen and give him a long rest until he learned how to use his new skill. Her nose always got white when she got mad.

Dake made a great big dog that followed him around and only disappeared when he forgot it. Once in his room he made a boy that looked just like him, exactly, and that scared him a little. But it gave him new ideas. Once on the way home with Joey, he saw Maralyn and so he made a duplicate of her standing right in front of her, only Maralyn had her head under her arm. Maralyn went screaming into her house and told Miss Crowe the next day, and he got the word, just as Joey had. Then she gave the whole class a big dull lecture about misusing your talents and all that sort of thing. He and Joey could talk easy to each other in that para-voice, but it was funny how it seemed quieter and nicer to really talk, and say the words.

The big test came right before summer vacation, and each one of them had to go all alone up to the principal’s office. A lot of funny-looking people were sitting around. Dake was pretty nervous. He had to talk in para-voice to each one of them separately, and then to the whole group and then to any two of them. Then he was told to screen himself and they pushed at the screen. They pushed so hard it hurt badly, but he didn’t yell, and they didn’t break the screen. He guessed they were just testing to see how strong it was. He had the feeling they could bust through in a minute if they wanted to. Next they made him lift the first screen and they pushed on the second one. He wasn’t so sure of how to use the second one, and it was a different kind of pain, not quite as sharp, but worse somehow. Then he had to illusion up a bunch of stuff. From a list. It was pretty hard stuff. A little full moon the size of an apple, and a life-size army jeep, and his father and mother. They gave him a chance to fix up the illusions a little when they didn’t look quite right. The jeep was the worst, because he couldn’t remember how the front end was supposed to look, so it stayed a little bit misty until he put a Chevy front end on it.

They told him he’d passed and the big brown-looking man shook hands with him and he walked out to go back to the class. But he walked out into a long shining black corridor that he’d never seen before.

There was a funny twisty feeling in his brain and suddenly he remembered where he was. The room, the shell collection, the red bike he didn’t get. They were all twenty-six long years ago. Joey had been dead for years. Maralyn had married Vic Hudson and gone to live in Australia. He desperately resented being drawn back up into life, out of the best years, the long golden endless years.

The big brown man took his arm.

“You did as well as I expected you to, Dake.”

“Was it all...”

“Illusion? Of course. We find that if we regress the student to the happiest time of his life, before the world began to disappoint him, it increases his speed of receptivity. You’ve spent a great many weeks meeting each day with one of our better instructors and illusionists.”

Dake felt as though the illusion of the lost years had somehow healed him, made him stronger and more certain.

“And now I have the abilities of a Stage One?”

“Just the mental abilities. There are some physical skills to learn.”

“It seems to me like a crazy contradiction. You teach me something that, if you taught it to... everyone on earth, all the bad things would be erased. Hate, fear. No more conflict.”

The man continued to walk him down the featureless corridor. “Quite true,” he said mildly.

“Why isn’t this knowledge used for good?”

“This answer may seem very indirect to you. But it is an answer. I am a failure. Too mild. Too sympathetic. I bleed from the heart too often, Dake. So I’m better off here.”

“Indirect? It doesn’t mean anything.”

“Don’t be impatient. You’ve graduated to one of the huts near the game fields. We’ve seen the last of you here... until next time.”

“Where do I go?”

“Just go out that door. The instruction beam will pick you up. You’ll find that you’ll walk to exactly where you are supposed to go.”

Dake walked across a field of spongy aqua-colored grass. He turned and looked back, saw the low black buildings, the grotesquely enormous trees, the metallic plain beyond with its intensely orderly arrangement of cubes. The brown man stood in the black doorway.

Good luck!

Dake lifted an arm, turned and went on, feeling only a complete certainty that he was headed in the right direction.

The huts ringed the enormous game fields. They were of the same featureless black of the larger buildings so far away that the big trees over them were on the far horizon. The huts were set far apart. There was a single communal building. The guiding influence led him directly to the communal building. On the far side of the game fields was a small group, too far away for him to see what they were doing. There were more of the violet-eyed non-human clerks in the communal building. They had a grotesque and peculiar grace of their own. The influence over him was not as strong as when he had first reported. His acceptance was not as automatic. And their attitude was different. They seemed servile, humble, over-courteous as several small objects were handed to him.

If it would please you, these objects should be taken to your hut. We cannot approach the huts or we would take them.

Which hut?

They all made thin sounds of pain, cringing before him.

Too strong, too strong. The words were sweet-singing in his brain. One of them moved carefully around him to the door, pointed. That one, Earthling. Then you must join the others.

He crossed to the hut, carrying the odd objects in his hands. The interior was stark. Bed, table, chair. He placed the objects on the table, fingered them curiously, joined the group at the far side of the game fields.

He counted them as he approached. Eleven. Some turned and looked toward him. He stopped abruptly as a stone-faced middle-aged woman appeared directly in front of him. Her expression was wise, sardonic, half-amused.

“Lorin, I see. Consider yourself a straggler. No one seems to organize things properly anymore. Where is the Gypsy girl?”

“I haven’t any idea.”

“Meet your fellow sufferers.”

She gave the names quickly as Dake faced the group. His glance moved across one lean tough masculine face, moved quickly back to it “Tommy! Good Lord, I...” He took two steps toward the familiar man and then stopped suddenly, wary. He glanced toward the stone-faced woman who had called herself Marina.

“No, I’m not an illusion,” Tommy said in his slow familiar drawl. He approached Dake, gripped his hand strongly. “Satisfy you?”

Marina said, “You may take a break, Watkins. Go off and gabble with your long-lost Dake Lorin.”

They walked apart from the others. Dake covered his confusion by saying, “How long? Not since the war, is it? Last I heard you left the city desk and went to Florida to run some jerkwater newspaper, Tommy. I envied you. It seemed to be a good answer.”

Are you thinking I have any answers to... all this?

Dake stared at him. I was hoping as much.

And I’m hoping you have some answers. I don’t know where we are, how we got here, or whether you happen to be a figment of my diseased imagination.

Tommy dropped to the springy odd-colored grass and spoke aloud. “Nobody else in the... ah... class has the vaguest idea. See, we’ve got a couple of Chinese, and a Malay, and a pair of Austrians. But no language problems, chum, in para-voice. Sentence construction comes through a little strange sometimes. We do a lot of chatting. So I can tell you just what happened to you, Dake. You got mixed up in something-or-other, and so many weird things were beginning to happen you thought you were going off your rocker. So finally you found yourself in New York or Madrid where they slapped you in a gray box and you tumbled out here, and these characters began to teach you stuff that’s patently impossible. Oh, we have long discussions. Many of them about reality. Big question. Are we really here?”

Dake sat near him. “How did you get here?”

“Started to do a series on a guy doing some fantastic work in agriculture. I began to get the weird idea somebody was guiding him. Steering his mind for him. Clues led to a racketeer named Miguel Lamer in New York. Went to see Larner. He nearly drove me crazy. Almost, but not quite. So here I am.”

“Mine is about the same. I’ll tell you about it later. Right now, Tommy, what do we know? Somehow we got onto a different planet. We’ve run into a culture and a technology far superior to ours. They’re training us to raise hell on earth.”

“I go along with that, Dake. On the surface, an evil pitch. Underneath, I... don’t know. There is something... terribly important that we don’t know yet. When we know it, it will somehow explain everything. Ever dream you have discovered the ultimate answer to everything and wake up with it just on the edge of your mind?”

“What goes on here, at this place?”

“You get your hut and they organize your day like it was a YMCA summer camp. Do this, do that. A few physical skills. And mostly mental skills. They stretch hell out of your brain. Memory, analysis, and so on. Things come back in a funny way. I can replay from memory every chess game I ever played and every bridge hand I ever held. A year ago that would have been a crazy thought. Right now we’re struggling with something called a Pack B.”

“What’s that?”

“Something you’ll have to experience for yourself, baby. Another thing. Have you ever had such an almost overpowering feeling of physical well-being?”

“I hadn’t thought of it. I... guess not.”

“Has air ever smelled as good, or food tasted as good? Every day seems like Saturday.”

“You sound happy here. What have you done, Tommy? Found a home?”

Tommy gave him a bland look. “Maybe. I’m waiting for the great revelation. We all are.” He stood up, looked soberly down at Dake for a moment. “Here is one clue to think over. We see quite a few people around who never came off earth. They’re all manlike. Just funny variations here and there. All in the same general form, however. And, Dake, listen. Every single one of them treats us as though we were all little tin Jesuses. Come on. Join the group. Marina’s ready to howl.”

They rejoined the group. Marina formed them into a hollow circle. Practice in cooperative illusion, she said. Marina created the illusion — an exceptionally lovely girl who strolled around and around inside the formal circle. At any moment, just as the girl walked in front of you, Marina might cancel the illusion. It was up to the nearest student to re-create her so quickly and perfectly that there was barely any hiatus of nothingness. Dake was clumsy the first time. He saw that it had to be done in such a way that the stride was unbroken. The second time it happened directly in front of him he did better. A second girl joined the first and they walked hand in hand. And then a third. Marina made their costumes more intricate. She made them walk faster. It became an exhausting exercise in hair-trigger reflexes, in memorization and visualization of all details. After over an hour of it, Dake felt as though his head would burst.

There was food, and rest, and another session. Mass illusion this time. Create as many people as you can, to the outermost limitations of your resources, bearing in mind constantly that each individual thus created had to be remembered and concentrated on in toto or the illusion would become evanescent. At first Dake could handle no more than six. By the end of the session he had more than doubled it, and was rewarded with Marina’s sour smile.

There were variations on those games day after day. At night the alien stars would pinpoint the sky with brightness. He spent the rare leisure hours with his friend, Watkins. They guessed and pondered and found no rational answer.

Apprehensive beings were brought to the game fields. They were not quite human when examined closely. They did not seem so much frightened as awed. And, using them as subjects, Marina taught the class the fundamentals of control. It required a more massive concentration of energy than para-voice, or illusioning, and it was most difficult to give proper neural directions. Even Marina could cause only an approximation of a normal walk, and balance was difficult to maintain. The controlled beings often fell onto the soft turf. Range was slowly increased, and when the class was adept, they were permitted to practice control on each other, being careful always to take both screens out of the way before accepting control. Dake found that he did not like the feeling of psychic nakedness that came when neither of his two mental screens protected him. After he had run Tommy awkwardly into the side of a hut when trying to control him through the door, Tommy had rubbed his bruised nose and said, “As a superman, kid, you’re a waste of time.”

It gave them a new description of their abilities. The supermen. The endowed ones. The little gods who would, they hoped, walk the earth. The best daydreams were about what could be done with the new abilities.

Tommy said, “Nobody has ever been able to get my brother-in-law off the bottle. I’m going to give that boy such a roomful of snakes and little pink elephants that he’ll gag whenever he sees a liquor advertisement.”

Dake said, “I’m going to control every Pak-Indian I meet. Make them drop to their knees before the Great Lorin.”

“Seriously, Dake, what are we going to do with all these... talents?”

“We don’t have to earn a living. Just control the cashier and have him hand you the money. Or give him an illusion of a few thousand rupees for deposit. He’ll mark the book and when you walk out of the bank it will disappear out of the drawer.”

“You have larceny in your heart.”

“Tommy, I keep remembering a brown-haired girl named Karen Voss. I know now that she was trained here. Most of the things she bewildered me with, I think I could do. But she helped me get out of a bad spot, and somebody stronger than she has ripped her screens.”

“Gives me a headache to think about it.”

“Think a minute. Was the person who damaged her trained somewhere else? Are there two groups raising hell with each other? Is earth a battlefield? If so, we’re just a couple of likely recruits.”

“I’m not fighting anyone else’s war,” Tommy said firmly. “I had a dandy of my own once.”

The next day, control was dropped and instruction in the Pack B’s began again. Dake quickly learned the sequence of the control wheels and how to use them. Visualization was something else again. A hundred times he tried. A hundred times he tried to cover a distance of ten feet, and each time felt the sickening sensation of negative mass, and each time achieved plus mass in the exact place where he had started. Marina explained that the visualization of the intended destination had to be far stronger than the visualization required for illusioning. He would memorize each blade of grass, each irregularity of the earth, step back and try again. Tommy suddenly learned how. He was ecstatic with this new sense of freedom. He was obnoxiously ecstatic. He flicked about, endlessly, pausing only to wave derisively toward where Dake stood and struggled.

Dake tried again and again and again. And another failure. He was about to try again when he suddenly realized that he had covered the distance. He backed up and tried again. Slowly he discovered that the strength of the visualization was actually more important than the exactness of it. He set off after Tommy, slowly improving his skill.

For days the class played a mad game of tag around the huge game fields. Then they were taken into open country and permitted to use the full range of the Pack B. There were races across empty miles of landscape where the high trees formed the only reference points. They learned that you could visualize the face of a friend as though it were a yard in front of you, and then make the shift. If the friend was within range of your Pack B, you would suddenly appear in front of him. The sequence of days was confused. New skills, new abilities, and something else, too. A group pride.

In one of her rare informative moods Marina said, “Selection has to be a trial by fire. If you can be broken, you will break. None of you did. And thus we can be assured that you will not break in quite another way — that you will not begin to think that these new powers set you apart from mankind, that you will not misuse them for personal gain. We are called Earthling. It is a good title.”

There was a day of pageant, of intense competition. The illusions were watched by vast crowds, who made sighing sounds of approval.

After the crowds had gone, Marina said, “There is nothing more I can teach you. There is only one last thing for you to learn. Those who are already on tour must instruct you in that. We will see you here twice again before you are... ready.”

They went back to the long low black buildings of first instruction. They did not plod across the fields in the gray dusk. They flicked across the flat plains, appearing, disappearing, appearing further on. They projected to each other, writing the questioning words bright in each other’s minds.

They were given rooms. In the middle of the night Dake was awakened. The clothes he had arrived in were waiting. He dressed on command, and was taken to the place of the cubes/Hard pain struck him. He clambered through the orifice into the rock cavern. He walked up the slanting glow of the tunnel and into Miguel Larner’s dioramic garden. It was late afternoon. Karen sat alone, and she smiled at him.

He went to her quickly. He tried to project to her, to ask her if she was well. He felt the projected thought strike screens rigidly drawn, rebound as though from metal. The rebuff angered him.

“I suppose I report to Miguel,” he said.

“He’s gone, Dake. It was a very impressive funeral.”

“Dead!”

“An illusion was buried. Miguel has... gone. He finished what he had to do. Martin Merman is in charge.”

“Do I report to him?”

“He’s not here. What gives you the idea you have to report to anybody?”

“I thought...”

“Go to the same room you were in before. Stay there until called.”