Ballroom of the Skies (19 page)

And he had them all lounge against the bridge rail and look down and yell with thin, hollow, obscene laughter.

Dake turned back. The mate had gone over the rail again, on the opposite side of the sea serpent. The captain stood with his eyes closed tightly. Dake heard the ripe fruit plop of seamen going over the side, dropping into the blue sea. Several tried to lower a boat, and the lines fouled, and they went over the side.

He dispersed the illusions, seeing at once that he had
gone too far. They were swimming west, away from horror, toward the faint smoky line of coast. He could control the nearest ones, but his control was not expert enough for the complicated task of swimming. Each time he would release them to avoid drowning them, they would turn like automatons and swim away from the ship. They were dwindling astern, out of his range. The captain had fallen. His face was bluish. He died as Dake was trying to revive him. Dake ran to the wheel, tried to bring the ship around. Midway in the long arc the muted thud of driving power faltered, stopped. The ship coasted, powerless. The heads had dwindled astern. He found the captain’s glass and steadied it. Even as he watched, powerless to help, he saw them going under, one by one. Their initial frenzy had exhausted them. The bright head of the mate, bright against the blue sea, was the last to go. And the sea was empty. He went over the ship from end to end, carefully. A cat sat on the galley table, mincingly cleaning its paws. The engine room was empty. He and the cat shared the ship. It rolled in the ground swell, and dishes clinked. Food cooled at the long table. A wisp of smoke rose from the last fragment of a cigarette. He had overestimated their capacity to absorb horror. He dragged the captain to his cabin, tumbled him into his bunk, straightened out the dead limbs. He found the ship’s safe ajar. He crammed his pockets with cash, pried fouled lines loose and managed to awkwardly lower a boat. He slid down a line and boarded it. The cranky motor started at last. He moved in numbness, in consciousness of the unpremeditated murder of twenty-one men. He thought of the one who, as he was sinking, turned and made a sign of the cross toward the devil’s ship.

Blue water sparkled and danced. The boat chugged obediently toward the smear of land against the west horizon. Closer in he came on private fishing boats and gave them a wide berth. He turned south, away from an area of summer camps, away from the bright specks of colorful beach costumes, and at last found a place where he could land unobserved. The ship was out of sight,
miles off the beach. This would give the world another mystery of the sea, another Marie Celeste, as inexplicable as the original. And all he had learned, through twenty-one deaths, was that it was far too easy to overestimate the capacity of man to accept horror, particularly horror that dances in the bright sunlight.

He drove the bow against coarse sand, leaped ashore and abandoned the boat, striking up across rough dunes, finding a narrow road. He turned north, walking along the shoulder, clad in the ill-fitting work clothes he had borrowed aboard the ship. Cars passed him. He found that he was near Poverty Beach, just north of Cape May. He walked to Wildwood. By mid-afternoon he was in Atlantic City. He bought clothing in a shoddy ersatz wool, waited for alterations. At nightfall he was on a crowded bus just entering the city limits of Philadelphia. Regret was a dull ache within him. If only he had been more restrained … perhaps it would have all been possible. A slow indoctrination of the men aboard the ship. Teach them the nature of the enemy.

But if Krindle had been unable to accept it, could he ever have gotten the men aboard the ship to accept it? Who would accept it? He recognized the blindness of the instinct that had taken him toward Philadelphia, toward Patrice. The inexplicable had broken her. Perhaps an explanation would heal her. She would be anxious to be healed. She had accepted the world as a jungle, believing only in her own strength. When her strength had failed her, she had no other resource. Nothing else in which she believed.

The danger, he knew, was that “they” would anticipate his need to see Patrice, would be waiting for him. Though he recognized the danger, he knew at the same time that there was nothing personal in their attitude. Perhaps they had found that some people identified themselves so closely with the known world that even, after training, they were incapable of accepting an assignment that was—in essence—merely a wry and confusing game with no discernible purpose or rules. A children’s game where all were blindfolded except the agents themselves.

As night came the streets of Philadelphia began to fill with the pleasure seekers. Electronics had played the rudest of all jokes on the people of the United States. By 1955 television had developed from an interesting drug into a vast obsession. Most children had had almost five years of it. It was not necessary to develop any resource of self-amusement, any intellectual curiosity. It was only necessary to sit and watch and be amused. The electronics industry met the vast challenge of millions of home sets, hundreds of stations. The war diverted the capacity of the electronics industry into military channels, and decimated technician personnel. One by one the stations began to fail, unable to replace essential parts. By hundreds, and then by thousands, the home sets became silent. After the war, amid economic exhaustion, there was a short period of resurgence, with stations re-activated, with home service available in meager amount. But it slowly tapered off again into the increasing silence. The triditoriums cornered the small capacity of the electronics industry. A few channels were still active in major cities, but there were no more networks. Just individual stations showing old films, over and over and over again.

In millions of front rooms there was a cubical object of polished wood and white lightless tube. But the resources of the individual to amuse himself without commercial assistance had been sadly weakened, weakened by the years of the glowing tube. So they went out onto the streets at night to escape the silent homes, to escape the doom of sitting in silence, with nothing to say to each other. There had to be some answer to boredom, and the answer became fleng and prono and tridi and violence. Ten-minute divorces and gangs of child thugs. Yet it couldn’t be criticized too bravely or too loudly. Criticism was a Disservice to the State.

Telecast of India had made a survey to determine whether it was economically feasible to re-activate the industry in the United States. But with the breakdown of transportation, the decline of the technician class, the trend toward regional self-sufficiency, there were no longer commercial sponsors able to afford the high cost
of network television. And Telecast of India was not concerned with any project which would fail to show a profit.

Dake walked tall and alone through the brawling night streets. Large areas of the city were in darkness again. He tried to telephone Patrice. It was a half hour before the call went through to the right number. He heard the distant ringing of her phone. He hung up after ten rings. At last he remembered the name of one of her lawyers, and found his home phone listing.

The lawyer was hesitant about giving her address. Dake identified himself as a Mr. Ronson from Acapulco, phoning about a hotel investment Miss Togelson had been considering.

“I suppose you could talk to her, Mr. Ronson. But she is taking no interest in business matters these days. We’re handling her investments for her.”

“She was very interested in this property.”

“If she is still interested, we’d be very pleased. It’s most difficult to please a client who … gives us no clue as to her wishes. She is at Glendon Farms, Mr. Ronson. It’s a private convalescent home outside of Wilmington. But you won’t be able to contact her tonight. Visiting hours are, I believe, in the afternoon.”

Dake thanked him, hung up. He ate from a sense of duty, not hunger, and found a cheap hotel room. He lay on the bed in the darkened room and thought of his motives in trying to see Patrice. To find just one person who would accept, who would believe, who could be made to look at the shape of the enemy.…

To have suffered those incredible alterations was to become desolately lonely. He had never been particularly dependent on emotional attachments. But to have the certain knowledge that to human man he was an object of fear and dread, and to extra-human man a rebel to be immediately eliminated—it gave him a sense of apartness that shocked him, it was so unexpected. He knew that he could go down into the streets and find a woman and bring her back to this room. Yet any such intimacy would be a farce. A gesture as strangely indecent as those photographs showing a cat and a canary in precarious comradeship.
He could go to a bar, and force himself into some group, and talk all night, without ever saying anything.

He knew, then, that the only true intimacy of the spirit was that intimacy possible only with those who had been trained as he had been trained. Only with those who had learned to focus and direct that incredible energy of the brain cells. With all untrained humans he would be a civilized man who had gone to live among savages. He could go native, but it would be a denial of his abilities. He would take to that savage tribe a knowledge of customs and abilities beyond their power to conceive, let along understand. And never would he be able to forget the thought of waste, of dispersal of power, of abnegation of destiny.

The closest friendship he had ever experienced had been with Watkins during the brief training period. In trust and friendship they had lowered screens, permitting an exchange of thought subject to no semantic distortion. It had been easier, more relaxing, to use speech rather than para-voice, but in any particularly difficult concept, where there was a misunderstanding, para-voice had been available. The thought changed itself into the words the listener would have used to express the exact shade of meaning.

Maybe, he thought, the agents are right. If a man could not accept the implications of training, he might be better off dead. Death could be no greater loneliness than this knowledge that you were forever cut off from other minds attuned to yours in a way that, once experienced, became forever necessary.

But he could not reconcile himself to defeat. The answer was clear. Make Patrice understand, and she would divert all her resources to the task of making the world see what was happening, what apparently had been happening for years without end. Perhaps untrained man could find a way to fight them, to keep them from toying like careless children with the destiny of man. But the first job was to expose.

He thought of the heads of swimming men, tiny against
the wide flat sea. He thought of those who would be waiting, in delicate awareness, for some indicative display of his new abilities, then using that detectable emanation to track him down, with an objective, functional mercilessness.

And he was honest enough with himself to wonder if he would have revolted against them if Karen had met him with the warmth he had expected of her.

A nurse with a heavy, placid face met him at the door
of Patrice’s cottage on the fenced grounds of Glendon Farms and took his visitor’s card and asked him politely to follow her. Her starched uniform rustled, blinding white in the sunshine.

There was a long slope behind the cottage, down to a small formal garden. Patrice lay on a dark blue blanket spread on the tailored grass. She wore a brief black sun-suit.

The nurse paused with him, out of earshot, and said, “Please don’t say anything to disturb or excite her. If you see her beginning to get nervous, call me. I’ll wait here.”

Dake walked down to her. Patrice was face down, her back deep gold in the sunlight. He sat on his heels beside the blanket and said, “Patrice?”

She turned quickly, raising herself on her elbows, a sheaf of the bright hair masking her eye for a moment before she threw it back with a toss of her head.

“Dake, darling,” she said warmly. “How good to see you!”

“You look well, Patrice.”

“I’m very well, dear.”

He studied her curiously. There was something subtly wrong about her face, about her expression. A bland childishness. Her mouth and eyes were soft, but something had gone, utterly. He saw what it was. There was no firmness, no resolution, no strength of will or character left.

“Patrice,” he said uneasily, “do you remember the … last time we saw each other?”

“That night when I got sick? They told me you were there, dear. Was I too awful?”

“No. I mean, you weren’t really sick, Patrice. You just saw something you couldn’t explain to yourself. But I could explain it to you.”

She glanced up to where the nurse stood fifty feet away, guardian white against the green of the clipped grass.

She said in a low tone, “Don’t let her know that I wasn’t really sick. They’re doing this for the money.”

“What do you mean?”

She gave him a childish smile. “Don’t be dull. If they find out I know what their little game is, they’ll kill me. You certainly know that.” Her voice was perfectly calm, matter-of-fact.

“What … do you plan to do?”

“Oh, there are too many of them! I can’t do anything. You know that! But I have to let them all think I believe them. They give me warnings, you know. They put electricity in my head, and keep telling me it’s going to help me, but it’s just a warning about how they’ll kill me if I don’t do exactly what they say. Now you’re in here and they won’t let you out either. Because now you know, and you could tell about what they’re doing. You were silly to come here, Dake, dear. Terribly silly. There are too many of them.”

“Patrice, I …”

She sat up all the way and her voice became shrill, and her eyes were filled with sharp excitement. “Run, Dake! Run before the men come!”

The nurse came quickly down the lawn. Dake stood up and backed away from Patrice. The nurse said, “Now lie down and get some more sun, Patrice. That’s a good girl.”

Patrice smiled at her and stretched out obediently. She yawned and closed her eyes, said in a sleepy mumble, “ ’Bye, Dake, darling.”