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.