Ballroom of the Skies

Twelve

Dake went to the room. He found clothes that would fit him. He set the diorama on automatic control to give him an approximation of day and night. Food was brought at regular intervals. There was a projector, micro-books, music. He exercised to keep himself fit.

Stay there until called.

He had detected a warmth, a friendliness in her before. It had disappeared. He felt put-upon, neglected. And he was indignant.

At times he would drop both screens and listen, almost trembling with the effort to be receptive. He would get merely the vague awareness of others somewhere near him. No thoughts ever came through.

One evening she tapped lightly at the door, came in, unasked, and sat down.

“Are you getting impatient?”

“I’m bored.”

“The other night you made a detailed illusion of me, and had me sit and talk nicely to you for a time. I’m flattered, Dake.”

“I didn’t know I’d be spied on here.”

“We’re all very interested in you. We’re interested in all fresh new dewy-eyed Stage Ones.”

“You’ve changed, Karen.”

“Karen Voss? That was a hypno-fix. A nice cover story. You can call me Karen if it will make you feel more at ease.”

“Thank you,” he said with grave dignity.

She laughed at him and he flushed. He said, “I learned enough to know that you made a considerable sacrifice for me.”

Her eyes changed for a moment. She made a vague gesture. “It is everyone’s duty to recruit. Material is scarce, you know. It always has been. You were my little gesture, so Merman has made me your house mother. Rather unfair, I think. Stage Ones are dull.”

“I had an old friend. I met him at Training T. He kept talking about an ultimate answer. Does giving any ultimate answer come under the heading of responsibilities of the house mother?”

“It helped you, Dake. You’re not quite as stuffy.”

“I’m getting damn sick of mystery.”

“We’ll take a walk. Come on. See the great world outside. Now see if you can remember the lobby well enough to shift to it. Wait a moment. I’ll check with Johnny to see if we have any strangers around.” She paused a moment. “It’s all right.”

He made the lobby as quickly as he could. Yet she was there ahead of him, smiling at him.

“See what we have, Johnny?” she said, taking Dake’s arm.

“In spite of all wagers to the contrary,” Johnny said. Welcome home.

Thanks.

“I sometimes think you Ones are the worst snobs of all,” Karen said. “I’ll have to orient you, Dake. A June evening. 1978. That article you published last year made quite a stir. Don’t walk so fast! But you repudiated it. So all the excitement died down, and people forgot about it in the excitement of George Fahdi’s assassination. You were convicted of a Disservice and sentenced to ten years of hard labor. The lovely Patrice was in a nursing home and couldn’t bribe you out of it. A poor little Stage One had a hideous time keeping the illusion of you going through the quick trial, sentence and shipment. As soon as you were in the labor camp, he quit, of course, so now you’re a fugitive from justice. But they aren’t going to hunt too hard. Martin bribed the right people.”

“You’re going too quickly, Karen. I don’t...”

“Don’t try. We’ll just have a little stroll.”

He held his screens firm, so that there was no possibility of her catching any fragment of his plan. He casually slipped his hand into his pocket, built up a powerful visualization of the hotel room where he had last stayed in New York. He worked the small wheels with his thumbnail. The shift to the hotel room was instantaneous. A puffy white-haired man in a dressing gown gaped at him. “How did you get in here, sir?” A pretty vacant-eyed girl wearing very little of anything came to the bathroom door and stared at him.

“Wrong room,” Dake said. “Sorry.”

“Couldn’t you knock, dammit?”

“Sorry,” Dake said. He moved to the door, unlocked it, hurried out into the corridor.

He went down the hallway, conscious of his conspicuous height. He went down the stairs and out into the warm June evening. He was painfully aware of how the months of Training T had heightened all his perceptions. Sounds seemed too loud, impressions too vivid. The world was a swarming mass of lurid, confusing detail. He had to get away from it, get away to some quiet place where he could think and plan.

He went to another hotel, gave illusion money to the clerk, pocketed his real change, tipped the bellhop with some of it. The room was small, depressingly dingy. He turned off the lights, put a chair over by the window and sat in it, looking out at the skyline.

Funny how this was supposed to be home, yet he felt a strangeness here. As though he were no longer a part of it. He remembered his original resolve, that resolve that had never weakened — learn everything you can and come home and use it to expose them. Let the guy in the street know that he was being pushed around.

And the men in the street would ask WHY?

Dake did not know why. The thing seemed planless. Another extension of the games field.

Now be coherent with yourself. Collate the data. Set up an operating plan. Through the use of illusion you could land a space ship in New Times Square, march a goggle-headed crew of Martians down Broadway. That, perhaps, would start men thinking about interference — on an extra-terrestrial basis.

“You’re a hard man to find,” Karen said, behind him.

He turned quickly, almost relieved at momentarily escaping the necessity of making a plan.

She said, “That illusion with the money did it. I caught the direction of that. You can’t use anything you’ve learned, Dake, without it being detectable.”

The meager light of the night city touched her face, her cool alien eyes. She looked at him with that remote speculation of an entomologist awaiting an emergence from the cocoon.

He tried to project, to probe her mind. The screen was like metallic rock.

“All your tricks,” he said, almost incoherently. “All your dirty little inhuman devices. They—”

“All our tricks, Dake.”

“Not mine. I didn’t ask for it. I went along with it. No choice at all.” He stood up, towering over her, his back to the light. “Now the tricks make me ashamed. They make me a... mutation. They destroy the meaning of being a man.”

“How noble!”

“You can’t trace me if I don’t use them, can you?”

“Can a man will himself to stop using his arms?”

He half turned from her to conceal the hand he slipped into his pocket. He thought of a ruse. Phone booths have a cookie-cutter similarity. He visualized quickly, flipping the wheels, feeling the surge of sickening nothingness, the sudden recapitulation of himself staring at the black phone a foot from his eyes. He stepped out of the booth, saw that he was in the hotel lobby downstairs, that the Pack B had selected the most immediate target visualization.

He walked out onto the street. Just as he tried to lose himself in the crowd, the thought arrowed faintly into his mind. Dake! Run and we will kill you. We will have to. If you can hear me, come back.

His stride faltered for a moment, and then he moved on to lose himself in the crowd. He instinctively hunched his shoulders, walked with knees slightly bent to reduce his towering height.

Learn what they can give you and use it against them. He had spent his life fighting. The equation was clear. The logic was impeccable. If they had the abilities he had learned, then they could put an end to the conflict on earth. They did not. Thus they were unfriendly to mankind. And man would have to know and learn. Man would have to recognize the enemy within the gates.

He remembered the one who had injured Karen, injured that previous, more understandable Karen. They seemed to fight among themselves, but with grotesquely gallant little rules. So Earth was an extension of the games field. A place where you could be aware of your own superiority. Make the silly little creatures jump. They had made him jump, had killed Branson, had driven Patrice mad. They were like cruel children let loose in a zoo with loaded rifles.

A slow-moving prowl car slid a spotlight beam across him, went on. He could hear the metallic chatter of its radio. There would be danger from two sources. According to Karen, Martin Merman had arranged it so that the authorities would not be too eager to recapture him after his supposed escape. Merman could easily reverse that. His great height made him feel naked on the streets. He knew that through his newly acquired talent of control, of illusioning, or para-voice, he could make any attempt to take him a heartbreaking matter to any federal officer. But his escape attempts would, as Karen had told him, enable them to find him easily. As long as he used none of his new abilities, they could only recognize him visually, and confirm it by projecting against the first screen in his mind.

The faces of the people on the night streets depressed him. The months on Training T seemed to have given him a heightened susceptibility to mood. He could feel the waves of tension, and despair, and aimless discontent. Cold taffy faces and metronome eyes and life-broken mouths. An animal walking the city, with the tired inviting flex and clench of buttocks, with soupy opacity of eye. He walked through futility, drowning in it. And then, slowly, began to see other things. Small things. A young boy with a rapt, dedicated face, eyes of a stricken angel, looking upward at one of the pre-war buildings, at the simple perfect beauty of structural integrity. A couple, hand in hand, who would have been alone on the busiest street in the world. An old man shuffling along — the light slanting against a face that had been twisted and torn and broken by life, leaving nothing but a look of calm and peace, a look in which there was that beauty which is sometimes the by-product of torture. Pride made his eyes smart. Try to smash them utterly, and there was always something left in the ruins. Something priceless, eternal.

As he walked, wondering where he should hide, he remembered a column in a lighter vein that he had done long ago, in, it seemed, someone else’s lifetime. Dr. Oliver Krindle, psychiatrist, whose hobby was psychic research. He remembered Krindle as one of those rare, warm men not damaged by too much knowledge of the human soul. The column had been about Krindle’s endless and skeptical effort to track down psychic phenomena, about the two incidents out of all those years which Krindle felt did not lend themselves to any satisfactory explanation — except the obvious one that the persons reporting them lied.

He looked up Krindle’s address in a phone book, walked fifteen blocks to the narrow lightless street. He had remembered that Krindle lived alone over his office. He remembered the good and ancient brandy Krindle had served, making a ceremony of the little ritual. Brandy in a room lined with books — as though Krindle had found some special way to preserve the good things in a world in which good things were no longer understood.

There was a dim light in the hallway. He pressed the button, heard a distant ringing. Across the street, shirt-sleeved men and weary women sat on front steps, their voices slow in the warm night, their laughter oddly dreary.

Dr. Oliver Krindle came down the stairs. Dake saw the thick naked ankles, the worn slippers, the battered robe, the deceptive face of a shaven Santa. Krindle turned on the light over the door and peered through, then made a great rattling of chains and bolts.

“Come in, Lorin. Come in! Damn careful these days. Hoodlums, cretins. Violence for its own sake. That’s the kind that frightens you. For profit, that is understandable. Too many people like to look at blood. Maybe it’s always been that way. Come on up. I’ve been listening to music. Choral stuff tonight. Lots of voices in my room, eh?”

Dake followed the man up the stairs, to the quiet room he remembered. Dr. Krindle waved him to a chair, said, “I’ll start this one again from the beginning. No one is in too much of a hurry for this, Lorin.” He turned on the player again.

Dake leaned back in the chair, let the music sweep over him like a vast warm tide. Krindle moved slowly, making two drinks, setting one down at Dake’s elbow. The music was a rich sanity, a reaffirmation of faith in man, a denial of the things he had learned.

The music stopped and Krindle turned it off. They sat in the silence for a time. Ice tinkled in Dake’s glass as he raised it to his lips.

“I have read about you, Lorin. You’ve been busy. Disservice, sentence, escape. I knew you would be a fugitive someday. I did not know when or how.”

“But you knew why?”

“Of course. You meet environment in too direct a manner. So your environment is embarrassed. It doesn’t like defects pointed out. So it destroys you.”

“Martyr?”

“Yes. Without purpose. Your defeat does not add impetus to any creed or group or movement. The solitary man. The flaw, possibly, is in believing too much in yourself. If that is a flaw. I don’t know. Once upon a time I told myself I would never compromise. Oh, I was young and brave. Now I look back on life. A life of listening to the anxious daydreams of neurotic women. Little minds so shallow that they present but one surface, Lorin.”

“What is normalcy, Oliver? Stability?”

“It doesn’t exist. Just a convenient line you draw. Everybody overlaps that line at some point, and deviates widely at another. Add up all the aspects of an individual, and you can only classify him as an individual. No two men have ever been mentally sick or mentally well in the same way — with the exception of physiological mental illness. We are all, unfortunately, unique. How simple my profession would be if I could type people, safely and accurately!”

“Suppose it were your function to drive a man mad. How would you go about it?”

“First I would change your terminology. How would I go about creating a mental illness? The classic way is to present him with an insoluble problem, and make it necessary for survival for him to solve that problem. The rat in a maze with no exit.”

“Suppose you could make his senses give him... nonsense messages.”

“Wouldn’t that be another aspect of the same classic problem, Dake Lorin? To survive, it is necessary to be able to trust what your eyes and ears and touch and smell tell you. If the data they present to the brain are patently impossible, then the subject has a classic problem. I must trust my senses in order to survive. My senses cannot be trusted. What do I do? But aren’t you thinking of a result rather than a cause. A patient will hallucinate when he can no longer stand the sane messages his senses give him. A wife is unfaithful. So he hears a voice coming out of the fireplace. It says to kill her.”

“What happens if the cart is before the horse?”

“Will he kill her, you mean? That depends on how dependent he is on his ears and eyes and sense of touch. Roughly, I would say the more meager the intelligence, the more likely the patient is to obey a false message. What have your false messages been?”

Dake studied his thick hard knuckles. “I looked into a mirror. The left side of my face was a naked skull. I touched it. It was hard and cold. Two persons with me saw it, too. One went mad and one fainted.”

“I would say that you had subconsciously recognized the duality of your life, recognized a death wish.”

“If two others saw it?”

“Once I had a patient who resented the way people on the street would stop and pet his three-headed purple dog. It followed him everywhere.”

“Suppose I told you, Oliver, that I can make you stand up against your will, pick up that record off the turntable and break it on the hearth.”

“Perhaps you could, if I were willing to submit to hypnosis.”

“Suppose I tell you that I can create a... three-headed purple dog right here and that you will be able to see it. Or tell you that I can project words into your mind, so that you can know what I am saying without my speaking.”

Oliver Krindle took a slow sip of his drink. “I would say that you have had much strain lately. You were trying to help the world. The world destroyed your effectiveness. You cannot admit that you are ineffective. The struggle is too important to you. You compensate by endowing yourself with strange psychic gifts which seem to restore your effectiveness.”

“Why have you always been interested in psychic research?”

“For the same reason that a man who is trying to grow an orchard will be interested in a thick dark woods next door.”

“Then you believe, Oliver, that there is much that you do not know.”

“Do I look that arrogant? Of course there is much I do not know.”

“Have you ever wondered if all the mystery in our world might come from one special source?”

“God, Martians, Irish visions?”

“What if the world we know is a test tube? A culture dish? A continuous bacterial conflict?”

Oliver half closed his eyes. “Interesting from a speculative point of view. But it has been done too many times before. Show me the agency.”

“I’m one of them.”

Oliver opened his eyes wide. “It would please me, Dake Lorin, if you would stay here tonight.”

“I’m one of them, but I don’t want to be one of them. They’re after me. They’ll kill me, and mankind will never know what... opposes it. I can’t demonstrate talents, because they are sensitive to that. They can find me.”

“Lorin, I...”

Dake leaned forward. “Shut up a minute. I’m going to take a chance. But I am going to make it very quick. You’ll have to get whatever you can get from it in a very few seconds.”

“Have you thought what you would do if your... mysterious powers fail?”

“That’s why I came here. If they fail, I’ve been mad for months on end. But they won’t fail. Do you see that corner of the table, directly under the lamp. There is nothing there, Oliver, is there?”

“Of course not, but...”

“And you are resisting any attempt at hypnosis, are you not?”

“Yes, but...”

“Watch the corner of the table,” Dake said softly. He did the simplest illusion he could think of. A featureless white cube, about three inches on a side. He let it remain there on the corner of the table for no longer than two seconds, and then erased it utterly.

He had watched the cube. He turned his eyes to Oliver Krindle’s face. Under the cheerful red cheeks the flesh tone had gone chalky gray. The glass trembled violently as he lifted it to his lips. Some of the drink sloshed out onto the ancient dressing gown. The glass chattered as he set it back down on the broad arm of his chair.

“I may not have much time, Oliver. They may come for me. I want you to know...”

“One of the most startling demonstrations of hypnosis,” Krindle said, too loudly, “that I have ever seen.”

“I came to you because of all the men I know, you are the most likely to react to this in a sane and competent manner.”

Krindle chuckled, too loudly, artificially. “Sometimes the sick mind can perform startling things, Lorin. Think of the cataleptic trance, for example. Think of the classic sign of the stigmata, induced through auto-hypnosis. You startled me for a moment, but I can readily understand that it is nothing but the manifestation of...”

Dake felt a faint warning touch against his mind. He stood up quickly. “There’s no time left now, Oliver. Watch my lips.” I do not speak but you can hear my words.

His fingertips worked the tiny wheels quickly. As the moment of nothingness weakened him, he saw Oliver still sitting there, eyes bulging glassily. The phone booth was dark. He stepped quickly out into the dark tiled corridor of a locked office building. A car rumbled by outside. He stood, holding his breath, waiting for some faint touch of awareness against his mind. There was nothing. He went up the dark metal treads of the stairs. He found a doctor’s office. The door was locked. He chinned himself on the top of the frame, looked through the transom. The room was faintly lighted by the reflection of the city against the night sky. He visualized the interior and then, barely in time, realized how this would be a mistake. He broke the door lock, stretched out on a couch in the inner office. He was exhausted, and sleep came before he could plan the next day.