One and Wonder (37 page)

I sat up, adjusting myself mentally. He pinched my arm. “Sure—you're awake. I'd like you to tell me just what you did—but not now. I'll ring you at your office.”

I saw an assistant taking the bowl off Craswell's head.

Craswell blinked, turned his head, saw me. Half a dozen expressions, none of them pleasant, chased over his face.

He heaved upright, pushed aside the assistant.

“You lousy bum,” he shouted. “I'll murder you!”

I just got clear before Steve and one of the others grabbed his arms.

“Let me get at him—I'll tear him open!”

“I warned you,” Steve panted. “Get out, quick.” I was on my way. Marsham Craswell in a nightshirt may not have been quite so impressive physically as the bronzed gladiator of his dreams, but he was still passably muscular.

That was last night. Steve rang this morning.

“Cured,” he said triumphantly. “Sane as you are. Said he realized he'd been overworking, and he's going to take things easier—give himself a rest from fantasy and write something else. He doesn't remember a thing about his dream-coma—but he had a curious feeling that he'd still like to do something unpleasant to a certain guy who was in the next bed to him when he woke up. He doesn't know why, and I haven't told him. But better keep clear.”

“The feeling is mutual,” I said. “I don't like his line in monsters. What's he going to write now—love stories?”

Steve laughed. “No. He's got a sudden craze for Westerns. Started talking this morning about the sociological and historical significance of the Colt revolver. He jotted down the title of his first yarn—'Six-Gun Rule.’ Hey—is that based on something you pulled on him in his dream?”

I told him.

So Marsham Craswell's as sane as me, huh? I wouldn't take bets.

Three hours ago, I was on my way to the latest heavyweight match at Madison Square Garden when I was buttonholed by an off-duty policeman.

Michael O'Faolin, the biggest, toughest, nicest cop I know. “Pete, m'boy,” he said. “I had the strangest dream last night. I was helpin’ yez out of a bit of a hole, and when it was all over, you said, in gratitude it may have been, that yez might have a couple of spare tickets for the fight this very night, and I was wondering whether it could have been a sort of telepathy like, and—”

I grabbed the corner of the bar doorway to steady myself. Mike was still jabbering on when I fumbled for my own tickets and said: “I'm not feeling too well, Mike. You go. I'll pick my stuff up from the other sheets. Don't think about it, Mike. Just put it down to the luck of the Irish.”

I went back to the bar and thought hard into a large whisky, which is the next best thing to a crystal ball for providing a focus of concentration. “Telepathy, huh?”

No, said the whisky. Coincidence. Forget it. Yet there's something in
telepathy. Subconscious telepathy—two dreaming minds in rapport. But I wasn't dreaming. I was just tagging along in someone else's dream. Minds are particularly receptive in sleep. Premonitions and what-have-you. But I wasn't sleeping either. Six and four makes minus ten, strike three—you're out. You're nuts, said the whisky.

I decided to find myself a better-quality crystal ball. A Scotch in a crystal glass at Cevali's club.

So I hailed a Purple Cab. There was something reminiscent about the back of the driver's head. I refused to think about it. Until the pay-off.

“Dollar-fifty,” he growled, then leaned out. “Say—ain't I seen you some place?”

“I'm around,” I said, in a voice that squeezed with reluctance past my larynx. “Didn't you drive me out to Pentagon yesterday?”

“Yeah, that's it,” he said. Square unshaven jaw, low forehead, dirty red hair straggling under his cap. “Yeah—but there's something else about your pan. I took a sleep between cruises last night and had a daffy dream. You seemed to come into it. And I got the screwiest idea you already owe me a dollar-fifty.”

For a moment, I toyed with the idea of telling him to go to hell. But the roadway wasn't green sand. It looked too solid to open up. So I said, “Here's five,” and staggered into Cevali's.

I looked into a whisky glass until my brain began to clear, then I phoned Steve Blakiston and talked. “It's the implications,” I said finally. “I'm driving myself bats trying to figure out what would have happened if I'd conjured up a few score of my acquaintances. Would they all have dreamed the same dream if they'd been asleep?”

“Too diffuse,” said Steve, apparently through a mouthful of sandwich. “That would be like trying to broadcast on dozens of wavelengths simultaneously with the same transmitter. Your brain was an integral part of that machine, occupying the same position in the circuit as a complexus of recording instruments, keyed in place with Craswell's brain—until the pick-up frequency was raised. What happened then I imagined purely as an induction process. It was—as far as the Craswell hook-up was concerned, but—”

I couldn't stand the juicy champing noises any longer, and said: “Swallow it before you choke.” The guy lives on sandwiches.

His voice cleared. “Don't you see what we've got? During the amplification of the cerebral currents, there was a backsurge through the tubes and the machine became a transmitter. These two guys were sleeping, their unconscious minds wide open and acting as receivers; you'd seen them during the day, envisaged them vividly—and got tuned in, disturbing their minds and giving them dreams. Ever heard of sympathetic dreams? Ever dreamed of someone you haven't seen for years, and the
next day he looks you up? Now we can do it deliberately—mechanically assisted dream telepathy, the waves reinforced and transmitted electronically! Come on over. We've got to experiment some more.”

“Sometimes,” I said, “I sleep. That's what I intend to do now—without mechanical assistance. So long.”

A nightcap was indicated. I wandered back to the club bar. I should have gone home.

She hipped her way to the microphone in front of the band, five-foot ten of dream wrapped up in a white, glove-tight gown. An oval-faced, green-eyed brunette with a tiny, delightful mole on her left cheek. The gown was a little exiguous about the upper regions, perhaps, but not as whistle-worthy as the outfit Craswell had dreamed on her.

Backstage, I got a double shot of ice from those green eyes. Yes, she knew Mr. Craswell slightly. No, she wasn't asleep around midnight last night. And would I be so good as to inform her what business it was of mine? College type, ultra. How they do drift into the entertainment business. Not that I mind.

When I asked about the refrigeration, she said: “It's merely that I have no particular desire to know you, Mr. Parnell.”

“Why?”

“I'm hardly accountable to you for my preferences.” She frowned as if trying to recall something, added: “In any case—I don't know. I just don't like you. Now if you'll pardon me, I have another number to sing—”

“But, please . . . let me explain—”

“Explain what?”

She had me there. I stumble-tongued, and got a back view of the gown.

How can you apologize to a girl when she doesn't even know that you owe her an apology? She hadn't been asleep, so she couldn't have dreamed about the skirt incident. And if she had—she was Craswell's dream, not mine. But through some aberration a trickle of thought-waves from Blakiston's machine had planted an unreasonable antipathy to me in her subconscious mind. And it would need a psychiatrist to dig it out. Or—

I phoned Steve from the club office. He was still chewing. I said: “I've got some intensive thinking to do—into that machine of yours. I'll be right over.

She was leaving the microphone as I passed the band on my way out. I looked at her hard as she came up, getting every detail fixed.

“What time do you go to bed?” I asked.

I saw the slap coming and ducked.

I said: “I can wait. I'll be seeing you. Happy dreams.”

The story is as I remembered it, though I had not realized it was such a parody, and I did not remember the followup where real people had been touched by the reverse surge of telepathy. That fills it out somewhat. The essence remains: lucid dreaming, becoming increasingly real.

—Piers

WHEREVER YOU MAY BE

James Gunn

May 1953

I remember this as sheer fun, with a winsome girl, a somewhat unscrupulous man, psi powers galore, and a really neat conclusion. He conspires to evoke her mental powers, succeeds, but then there's hell to pay. I remember a string of sausages plunging down the décolletage of a buxom waitress. Quite different in mood from James Gunn's other story here, “Breaking Point,” but worthy in its own way. Psi powers are one of the staples of the science fiction genre, and this is a good job of showing them.

—Piers

Matt refused to believe it. Vacant incredulity paralyzed him for a moment as he stared after the fleeing, bounding tire. Then, with a sudden release, he sprinted after it.

“Stop!” he yelled futilely. “Stop, damn it!”

With what seemed like sadistic glee, the tire bounced high in the air and landed, going faster than ever. Matt pounded down the hot dusty road for a hundred yards before he pulled up even with it. He knocked it over on its side. The tire lay there, spinning and frustrate, like a turtle on its back. Matt glared at it suspiciously. Sweat trickled down his neck.

A tinkling of little silver bells. Laughter? Matt looked up quickly, angrily. The woods were thin along the top of this Ozark ridge. Descending to the lake, sparkling cool and blue far below, they grew thicker, but the only one near was the young girl shuffling through the dust several hundred yards beyond the crippled car. And her head was bent down to watch her way.

Matt shrugged and wiped the sweat from his forehead with his shirt sleeve. A late June afternoon in southern Missouri was too hot for this kind of work, for any kind of work. Matt wondered if it had been a mistake.

In shimmering heat waves and a slowly settling haze of red dust, he righted the tire and began to roll it back toward the green Ford with one bare metal wheel drum pointing upward at a slight angle. The tire rolled easily, as if it repented its brief dash for freedom, but it was a dirty job and Matt‘s hands and clothes were soiled red when he reached the car.

With one hand clutching the tire, Matt studied the road for a moment. He could have sworn that he had stopped on one of the few level stretches in these hills, but the tire had straightened up from the side of the car and started rolling as if the car were parked on a steep incline.

Matt reflected bitterly on the luck that had turned a slow leak into a flat only twenty-five miles from the cabin. It couldn't have happened on the highway, ten miles back, where he'd have been able to pull into a service station. No, it had to wait until he couldn't get out of this rutted cow track. The tire's escapade had been only the most recent of a series of annoyances and irritations to which bruised shins and scraped knuckles were painful affidavits.

He sighed. After all, he had wanted isolation. Guy's offer of a hunting cabin in which to finish his thesis had seemed like a godsend at the time, but now Matt wasn't so certain. If this was a fair sample, Matt was beginning to see how much of his time would be wasted just on the problems of existence.

Cautiously, Matt rolled the tire to the rear of the car, laid it carefully on its side, and completed pulling the spare from the trunk. Warily, he maneuvered the spare to the left rear wheel, knelt, lifted it, fitted it over the bolts, and stepped back. He sighed again, but this time with relief.

Kling-ng! Klang! Rattle!

Matt hastily looked down. His foot was at least two inches from the hub cap, but it was rocking now, empty. Matt saw the last nut roll under the car.

Matt’s swearing was vigorous, systematic, and exhaustive. It concerned itself chiefly with the perversity of inanimate objects.

There was something about machines and the things they made which was basically alien to the human spirit. They might disguise themselves for a time as willing slaves, but eventually, inevitably, they turned against their masters. At the psychological moment, they rebelled.

Or perhaps it was the difference in people. For some people, things always went wrong—their cakes fell; their lumber split; their golf balls sliced into the rough. Others established a mysterious sympathy with their tools.

Luck? Skill? Coordination? Experience?

It was, he felt, something more conscious and malignant.

Matt remembered a near-disastrous brush with chemistry; he had barely passed qualitative analysis. For him the tests had been worse than useless. Faithfully he had gone through every step of the endless ritual: precipitate, filter, dissolve, precipitate . . . And then he would take his painfully secured, neatly written results to—what was his name?—Wads-worth, and the little chemistry professor would study his analysis and look up, frowning.

“Didn't you find any whatyoumaycallit oxide?” he would ask.

“Whatyoumaycallit oxide?” Startled. “Oh, there wasn't any whatyoumaycallit oxide.”

And Wadsworth would make a simple test and, sure enough, there would be the whatyoumaycallit oxide.

There was the inexplicably misshapen gear Matt had made on the milling machine, the drafting pen that would not draw a smooth line no matter how much he sanded the point . . .

It had convinced Matt that his hands were too clumsy to belong to an engineer. He had transferred his ambitions to a field where tools were less tangible. Now he wondered.

Kobolds? Accident prones?

Some time he would have to write it up. It would make a good paper for the
Journal of—

Laughter! This time there was no possible doubt. It came from right behind him.

Matt whirled, The girl stood there, hugging her ribs to keep the laughter
in. She was a young little thing, not much over five feet tall, in a shapeless, faded blue dress. Her feet were small and bare and dirty. Her hair, in long braids, was mouse-colored. Her pale face was saved from plainness only by her large, blue eyes.

Matt flushed. “What the devil are you laughing at?”

“You!” she got out between chuckles. “Whyn't you get a horse?”

“Did that remark just arrive here?”

He swallowed his irritation, turned, and got down on his hands and knees to peer under the car. One by one he gathered up the nuts, but the last one, inevitably, was out of reach. Sweating, he crawled all the way under.

When he came out, the girl was still there. “What are you waiting for?” he asked bitingly.

“Nothin’.” But she stood with her feet planted firmly in the red dust.

Kibitzers annoyed Matt, but he couldn't think of anything to do about it. He twirled the nuts onto the bolts and tightened them up, his neck itching. It might have been the effect of sweat and dust, but he was not going to give the girl the satisfaction of seeing him rub it. That annoyed him even more. He tapped the hub cap into place and stood up.

“Why don't you go home?” he asked sourly.

“Cain't,” she said.

He went to the rear of the car and released the jack. “Why not?”

“I run away.” Her voice was quietly tragic.

Matt turned to look at her. Her blue eyes were large and moist. As he watched, a single tear gathered and traced a muddy path down her cheek.

Matt hardened his heart. “Tough.” He picked up the flat and stuffed it into the trunk and slammed the lid. The sun was getting lower, and on this forgotten lane to nowhere it might take him the better part of an hour to drive the twenty-five miles.

He slid into the driver's seat and punched the starter button. After one last look at the forlorn little figure in the middle of the road, he shook his head savagely and let in the clutch.

“Mister! Hey, mister!”

He slammed on the brakes and stuck his head out the window. “Now what do you want?”

“Nothin,” she said mournfully. “Only you forgot your jack.”

Matt jammed the gear shift into reverse and backed up rapidly. Silently, he got out, picked up the jack, opened the trunk, tossed in the jack, slammed the lid. But as he brushed past her again, he hesitated. “Where are you going?”

“No place,” she said.

“What do you mean ‘no place'? Don't you have any relatives?” She shook her head. “Friends?” he asked hopefully. She shook her head again.
“All right, then, go on home!”

He slid into the car and banged the door. She was not his concern. The car jerked into motion. No doubt she would go home when she got hungry enough. He shifted into second, grinding the gears. Even if she didn't, someone would take her in. After all, he was no welfare agency.

He grudgingly slowed, then angrily backed up and skidded to a stop beside the girl.

“Get in,” he said.

Trying to keep the car out of the ruts was trouble enough, but the girl jumped up and down on the seat beside him, squealing happily.

“Careful of those notes,” he said, indicating the bulging manila folders on the seat between them. “There's over a year's work in those.”

Her eyes were wide as she watched him place the folders in the back seat on top of the portable typewriter that rested between the twenty-pound sack of flour and the case of eggs.

“A year’s work?” she echoed wonderingly.

“Notes. For the thesis I'm going to write.”

“You write stories?”

“A research paper I have to do to get my degree.” He glanced at her blank expression and then looked back at the road. “It's called,” he said with a nasty superior smile, ‘“The Psychodynamics of Witchcraft, with Special Reference to the Salem Trials of 1692.”’

“Oh,” she said wisely. “Witches.” As if she knew all about witches.

Matt felt unreasonably annoyed. “All right, where do you live?”

She stopped bouncing and got very quiet. “I cain't go home.”

“Why not?” he demanded. “And don't tell me ‘I run away,”’ he imitated nasally.

“Paw'd beat me again. He'd purty nigh skin me alive, I guess.”

“You mean he
hits you?”

“He don't use his fists—not often. He uses his belt mostly. Look.” She pulled up the hem of her dress and the leg of a pair of baggy drawers that appeared to be made from some kind of sacking.

Matt looked quickly and glanced away. Across the back of one thigh was an ugly dark bruise. But the leg seemed unusually well rounded for a girl so small and young. Matt frowned thoughtfully. Did girls in the hills
mature
that early?

He cleared his throat. “Why does he do that?”

“He's just mean.”

“He must have some reason.”

“Well,” she said thoughtfully, “he beats me when he's drunk ‘cause he's drunk, and he beats me when he's sober ‘cause he ain't drunk. That covers it mostly.”

“But what does he say?”

She glanced at him shyly. “Oh, I cain't repeat it.”

“I mean what does he want you to do?”

“Oh, that!” She brooded over it. “He thinks I ought to get married. He wants me to catch some strong young feller who'll do the work when he moves in with us. A gal don't bring in no money, he says, leastwise not a good one. That kind only eats and wants things.”

“Married?” Matt said. “But you're much too young to get married.”

She glanced at him out of the corner of her eye. “I'm sixteen,” she said. “Most girls my age got a couple of young ‘uns. One, anyways.

Matt looked at her sharply. Sixteen? It seemed impossible. The dress was shapeless enough to hide almost anything—but sixteen! Then he remembered the thigh.

She frowned. “Get married, get married! You'd think I didn't want to get married. ‘Tain't my fault no feller wants me.”

“I can't understand that,” Matt said sarcastically.

She smiled at him. “You're nice.”

She looked almost pretty when she smiled. For a hill girl.

“What seems to be the trouble?” Matt asked hurriedly.

“Partly Paw,” she said. “No one'd want to have him around. But mostly I guess I'm just unlucky.” She sighed. “One feller I went with purty near a year. He busted his leg. Another nigh drownded when he fell in the lake. Don't seem right they should blame me, even if we did have words.”

“Blame you?”

She nodded vigorously. “Them as don't hate me say it's courtin’ disaster ‘stead of a gal. The others weren't so nice. Fellers stopped comin’. One of ‘em said he'd rather marry up with a catamount. You married, Mister— Mister—?”

“Matthew Wright. No, I'm not married.”

She nodded thoughtfully. “Wright. Abigail Wright. That's purty.”

“Abigail
Wright?”

“Did I say that? Now, ain't that funny? My name's Jenkins.”

Matt gulped. “You're going home,” he said with unshakable conviction. “You can tell me how to get there or you can climb out of the car right now.”

“But Paw—”

“Where the devil did you think I was taking you?”

“Wherever you're going,” she said, wide-eyed.

“For God's sake, you can't go with me! It wouldn't be decent.”

“Why not?” she asked innocently.

In silence, Matt began to apply the brakes.

“All right,” she sighed. She wore an expression the early Christians
must have worn before they were marched into the arena. “Turn right at the next crossroad.”