“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.”