“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.”
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.”