Jensen Fontaine said, “Come with me, young man.” He led the way to a staircase and ascended it, wordlessly. He led the way down a hall, wordlessly. Around a corner, past a half dozen doors, wordlessly. He opened a door and preceded Ed Wonder through it.
Helen Jensen was in bed, her hair every which way on the pillow, her face pale, and her eyes on the wild side. There were two medical looking coves and a nurse starched Prussian stiff in attendance.
Jensen Fontaine blurted, “Out!”
One of the doctors said smoothly, “I would suggest, Mr. Fontaine that your daughter be given a long rest and complete change of scene. Her hysteria is…”
“Out. All of you,” Fontaine snapped, tossing his head at the trio of medicos.
Three sets of eyebrows went up, but all had evidently had contact with the Fontaine personality before. They gathered up odds and ends and beat a retreat.
Helen said, “Hello, Little Ed.”
Ed Wonder opened his mouth but before even greetings came forth, Jensen Fontaine’s blast chopped him to silence.
“Helen!”
“Yes, Daddy…”
“You get out of that bed. Suppose the newspapers got this. A curse! A hex! My daughter with two of the best diagnosticians and psychiatrists in Ultra-New York in attendance because she’s been hexed. Get out of that bed. What would this do to my name? What would it do to the society if the word went out that prominent members believed in witches?”
He spun violently, glared at Ed Wonder, for some unknown reason, and charged out of the room as though on the way to storm Little Round Top.
Ed looked after him. “How can a man who can’t weigh more than a hundred pounds make that much noise?” he said. He looked down at Helen. “What in the devil’s wrong?”
“I itch. Not right now. Like an allergy, or something.”
He looked at her for a long moment, as though he had put a dime in a slot machine and nothing had come out.
Finally he said, “When do you itch?”
“If I put on makeup. Even the slightest touch of lipstick. Or if I do up my hair any way except combed straight down to my shoulders or done in braids. Or if I put on anything except the simplest clothes I’ve got. No silk. Not even in my underthings. I simply start itching. It started really last night, but I didn’t realize it. Little Ed, I’m scared. It works. That old goat’s curse is working on me.”
Ed Wonder stared down at her. “Don’t be a twitch.”
She stared back at him, defiantly.
He had never seen Helen Fontaine before, save last night, in other than the height of heights, fashionwise. Every pore in place. It came to him now that she possibly looked better this way. Possibly when she got to be the age of Mary Malone, the screen and TV star, she’d need civilization’s contributions to aid nature’s gifts. But in her mid-twenties…
Helen said, “You were there.”
“Sure I was there. So old Tubber waved his arms around a little, got red in the face and slapped a hex on you. And you believed him.”
“I believed him because it worked.” she flared back.
“Don’t be a kook, Helen! Curses don’t work unless the person who has one laid on him believes it will work. Anybody knows that.”
“Fine! But in this case it worked without my believing in it. Do you think I believe in curses?”
“Yes.”
“Well, maybe I do now. But I didn’t then. And let me tell you something else, Little Ed Wonder. That chubby daughter of his, and those followers in the audience. They believe in the power, as they call it, too. They’ve seen him do it before. Remember how scared his daughter was when she heard him speaking in wrath?”
“They’re a bunch of twitches.”
“All right, all right. Go on. Get out. I’m getting up and getting dressed. But I’m going to dress in the simplest things I’ve got, understand?”
“I’ll see you later,” Ed told her, not doing very well at keeping disgust from his voice.
“The later the better,” she snapped back.
He had to get hopping on this program for the Friday after next. On his way past Dolly’s desk to his own he said to her, “Get me Jim Westbrook. And put a little snap into it, eh?”
“Who?” Dolly said. He still couldn’t get used to her well scrubbed face and her cotton print, not to speak of the Little Dutch girl hairdo.
“Jim Westbrook. We’ve had him on the program several times. He’s in the book as James C. Westbrook.”
He sat down at his desk and fumbled his key into the top drawer. Something was nagging him about Dolly’s down-on-the-farm getup, but he couldn’t put his finger on it. Something that should be very obvious, but didn’t come through. He shook his head to switch subjects and brought forth the letter from the swami. He scanned it again. Confound it, this was the sort of character he could really project over TV. His program demanded TV. Half the kooks he had on as guests needed to be seen to be appreciated.
The phone buzzed and he picked it up.
It said, “Little Ed? Jim Westbrook here.”
“Yeah, hi Jim. Listen, I’ve got this Hindu twitch who calls himself Swami Respa Rammal. Claims he can walk on burning coals. Is there any chance he can?”
Over the phone Jim Westbrook said slowly, “With a name like that, friend, he sounds like a phony. A respa is a sort of Tibetian neophyte lama who indures fantastic cold as part of his training for full lamahood. And Rammal is a Moslem name, rather than Hindu. And he wouldn’t call himself a swami, either. That’s the wrong word. A swami is simply a Hindu religious teacher. Comes from the Sanskrit word svamin, meaning master.”
“All right, all right,” Ed Wonder said. “Phony name or not, is it possible that he can walk on burning coals?”
“It’s been done, friend.”
Ed was incredulous. “At 800 degrees Fahrenheit?”
“That’s a little better than the melting point of steel,” Jim told him, “but it’s been done.”
“When, and by whom?”
“Well, right offhand I can’t reel off names and dates but there’re two types of this fire-walking. The first takes place over coals and embers and the second over hot stones. The Hindus do it and so do various cults in the South Seas. For that matter, every year in Northern Greece and Southern Bulgaria they have a day on which they traditionally walk on hot coals. The British Society for Psychical Research and the London Council for Psychical Investigation both looked into it, witnessed it, and even had some of their members try it. Some succeeded…”
“And…” Ed prompted.
“Some burned the hell out of their feet.”
Ed thought about it. He said finally, “Look Jim, do you know anybody with some nice scientific sounding handle who disagrees with you? Suppose we made this a four way panel. Me, the swami, you, who agrees it can be done, and this scientist who claims it can’t. Possibly we can stretch it over two programs. The first one we’ll interview the swami and argue it around. Then during the next week we’ll have him perform, and we’ll report on the experiment the following program.”
Jim Westbrook said, “Come to think of it, I had an argument with Manny Levy a year or two back on the very subject.”
“Who?”
“Doctor Manfred Levy, down in Ultra-New York. He’s a big wig in popularization of science, several books to his credit. On top of that, he’s got a German accent you could chin yourself on. Makes him sound very scientific.”
Ed said, “Do you think you could get him to act as a panelist on my show?”
“Sure we could get him—at your top rates.”
“Not for free, eh? Not just for the fun of it? My budget’s running low for this quarter.”
Jim Westbrook laughed. “You don’t know Manny, friend.”