“You got one right out of fifty-two… not bad,” I said.
“We went right through the deck and I named every card for her,” Cranston said. “As she turned them up—every card; not one mistake.”
I didn’t believe him, of course. These stories are a dime a dozen in the study of ESP, so I’m told. None of them pan out. But I was curious why he was telling this story. Was it the old village bachelor, the nobody, the man existing on a sister’s charity trying to appear important?
“So you named every card for her,” I said. “You ever figure the odds against that?”
“I had a professor over at the State College do it for me once,” Cranston said. “I forget how much it was. He said it was impossible such a thing was chance.”
“Impossible,” I agreed not trying to disguise my disbelief. “What did Olna think of this?”
“She thought it was a trick—parlor magic, you know.”
“She was wearing glasses and you saw the cards reflected in them, isn’t that it?” I asked.
“She doesn’t wear glasses to this day,” Cranston said.
“Then you saw them reflected in her eyes,” I said.
“She was sitting in shadows about ten feet away,” he said. “She only had the light from the study door to see the cards. She had to hold them toward the firelight from the fireplace for me to see them. No, it wasn’t anything like that. Besides, I had my eyes closed some of the time. I just kind of saw those cards… this place in my mind that I found. I didn’t have to hesitate or guess. I knew every time.”
“Well, that’s very interesting,” I said, and I opened the Scientific Quarterly. “Perhaps you should be back at Duke helping Dr. Rhine.”
“You can bet I was excited,” he said, ignoring my attempt to end the conversation. “This famous doctor had said humans could do this thing, and here I was proving it.”
“Yes,” I said. “Perhaps you should write Dr. Rhine and tell him.”
“I told Olna to shuffle the cards and we’d try it again,” Cranston said, his voice beginning to sound slightly desperate. “She didn’t seem too eager, but she did it. I did notice her hands were trembling.”
“You frightened the poor child with your parlor magic,” I said.
He sighed and sat there in silence for a moment staring at the waters of the Sound. The tug was chugging off with its boom of logs. I found myself suddenly feeling very sorry for this pitiful little man. He had never been more than fifty miles from the village, I do believe. He lived a life bounded by that old house on the ridge, the weekly card games at the Grange and an occasional trip to the store for groceries. I don’t even believe they had television. His sister was reputed to be a real old-fashioned harridan on the subject.
“Did you name all the cards again?” I asked, trying to sound interested.
“Without one mistake,” he said. “I had that place in my mind firmly located by then. I could find my way to it every time.”
“And Olna wanted to know how you were doing it,” I said.
He swallowed. “No. I think she… felt how I was doing it. We hadn’t gone through more’ fifteen cards that second time when she threw the deck onto the floor. She sat there shivering and staring at me. Suddenly, she called me some name—I never did rightly hear it straights—and she leaped up and ran out of the house. It happened so fast! She was out the back door before I was on my feet. I ran out after her but she was gone. We found out later she hitched a ride on the bread truck and went straight home to Port Orchard. She never came back.”
“That’s too bad,” I said. “The one person whose mind you could read and she ran out on you.”
“She never came back,” he said, and I swear his voice had tears in it. “Everyone thought… you know, that I’d made improper advances. My sister was pretty mad. Olna’s brother came for her things the next day. He threatened to whoomp me if I ever set foot on…”
Cranston broke off, turning to stare up the gravel road that comes into the village from the hill farms to the west. A tall woman in a green dress that ended half way between knees and ankles had just turned the corner by the burned-out stump and was making for the post office. She. walked with her head down so you could see part of the top of her head where the yellow hair was braided and wound tight like a crown. She was a big woman with a good figure and a healthy swing to her stride.
“I heard her brother was sick,” Cranston said.
I glanced at Cranston and the look on his face—sad and distant—answered my unspoke question.
“That’s Olna,” I said. I began to feel excitement. I didn’t believe his fool story, still…
“She doesn’t come down here very often,” Cranston said. “But with her brother sick, I’d hoped…”
She turned off onto the post office path and the corner of the building hid her from us. We heard the door open on the other side and a low mumble of conversation in the building. Presently, the door opened once more and the woman came around the corner, taking the path that passed in front of us toward the store down by the highway. She still had her head bent, but now she was reading a letter.
As she passed in front of us no more than six feet away, Cranston said: “Olna?”
Her head whipped around and she stopped with one foot ahead of the other. I swear I’ve never seen more terror in a person’s face. She just stared frozen at Cranston.
“I’m sorry about your sister’s boy,” Cranston said, and then added: “If I were you, I’d suggest she take the boy to one of those specialists in Minneapolis. They do wonders with plastic surgery nowadays and…”
“You!” she screamed. Her right hand came up with the index and little fingers pointed at Cranston in a warding-of-evil sign that I’d thought died out in the middle ages. “You stay out of my head… you… you cottys!”
Her words broke the spell. She picked up her skirts and fled down the path toward the highway. The last we saw of her was a running figure that sped around the corner by the garage.
I tried to find something to say, but nothing came. Cottys, that was the Danuan Pan who seduced virgins by capturing their minds, but I’d never realized that the Norse carried that legend around.
“Her sister just wrote her in that letter,” Cranston said, “that the youngest boy was badly scalded by a kettle tipped off the stove. Just happened day before yesterday. That’s an airmail letter. Don’t get many of them here.”
“Are you trying to tell me you read that letter through her eyes?” I demanded.
“I never lost that place I found,” he said. “Lord knows I tried to lose it often enough. Especially after she married Gus Bills.”
Excitement boiled in me. The possibilities…
“Look,” I said, “I’ll write to Duke University myself. We can…”
“Don’t you dare!” he snapped. “It’s bad enough every man in the valley knows this about us. Oh, I know they mostly don’t believe… but the chance…” He shook his head. “I’ll not stand in her way if she finds a suitable man to…”
“But, man,” I said. “If you…”
“You believe me now, don’t you?” he said, and his voice had a sly twist I didn’t like.
“Well,” I said, “I’d like to see this examined by people who…”
“Make it a sideshow,” he said. “Stories in the Sunday papers. Whole world’d know.”
“But if…”
“She won’t have me!” he barked. “Don’t you understand? She’ll never lose me, but she won’t have me. Even when she went on the train back to Minneapolis… the week after she ran out of our house…”
His voice trailed off.
“But think of what this could mean to…”
“There’s the only woman I ever loved,” Cranston said. “Only woman I ever could’ve married… she thinks I’m the devil himself!” He turned and glared at me. “You think I want to expose that? I’d reach into my head with a bailing hook and tear that place out of my mind first!”
r /> And with that he bounced to his feet and took off up the path that led toward the road to the ridge.
Operation Syndrome
Honolulu is quiet, the dead buried, the rubble of buildings cleaned away. A salvage barge rocks in the Pacific swell off Diamond Head. Divers follow a bubble trail down into the green water to the wreck of the Stateside skytrain. The Scramble Syndrome did this. Ashore, in converted barracks, psychologists work fruitlessly in the aftermath of insanity. This is where the Scramble Syndrome started: one minute the city was peaceful; a clock tick later the city was mad.
In forty days—nine cities infected.
The twentieth century’s Black Plague.
SEATTLE
First a ringing in the ears, fluting up to a whistle. The whistle became the warning blast of a nightmare train roaring clackety-clack, clackety-clack across his dream.
A psychoanalyst might have enjoyed the dream as a clinical study. This psychoanalyst was not studying the dream; he was having it. He clutched the sheet around his neck, twisted silently on the bed, drawing his knees under his chin.
The train whistle modulated into the contralto of an expensive chanteuse singing “Insane Crazy Blues.” The dream carried vibrations of fear and wildness.
“A million dollars don’t mean a thing—”
Hoarse voice riding over clarion brass, bumping of drums, clarinet squealing like an angry horse.
A dark-skinned singer with electric-blue eyes and dressed in black stepped away from a red backdrop. She opened her arms to an unseen audience. The singer, the backdrop lurched into motion, revolving faster and faster and faster until it merged into a pinpoint of red light. The red light dilated to the bell mouth of a trumpet sustaining a minor note.
The music shrilled; it was a knife cutting his brain.
Dr. Eric Ladde awoke. He breathed rapidly; he oozed perspiration. Still he heard the singer, the music.
I’m dreaming that I’m awake, he thought.
He peeled off the top sheet, slipped his feet out, put them on the warm floor. Presently, he stood up, walked to the window, looked down on the moontrail shimmering across Lake Washington. He touched the sound switch beside the window and now he could hear the night—crickets, spring peepers at the lakeshore, the far hum of a skytrain.
The singing remained.
He swayed, gripped at the windowsill.
Scramble Syndrome—
He turned, examined the bedside newstape: no mention of Seattle. Perhaps he was safe—illness. But the music inside his head was no illness.
He made a desperate clutch for self-control, shook his head, banged his ear with the palm of his hand. The singing persisted. He looked to the bedside clock—1:05 A.M., Friday, May 14, 1999.
Inside his head the music stopped. But now— Applause! A roar of clapping, cries, stamping of feet. Eric rubbed his head.
I’m not insane… I’m not insane—
He slipped into his dressing gown, went into the kitchen cubicle of his bachelor residence. He drank water, yawned, held his breath—anything to drive away the noise, now a chicken-haggle of talking, clinking, slithering of feet.
He made himself a highball, splashed the drink at the back of his throat. The sounds inside his head turned off. Eric looked at the empty glass in his hand, shook his head.
A new specific for insanity—alcohol! He smiled wryly. And every day I tell my patients that drinking is no solution. He tasted a bitter thought: Maybe I should have joined that therapy team, not stayed here trying to create a machine to cure the insane. If only they hadn’t laughed at me—
He moved a fibreboard box to make room beside the sink, put down his glass. A notebook protruded from the box, sitting atop a mound of electronic parts. He picked up the notebook, stared at his own familiar block printing on the cover: Amanti Teleprobe—Test Book IX.
They laughed at the old doctor, too, he thought. Laughed him right into an asylum. Maybe that’s where I’m headed—along with everyone else in the world.
He opened the notebook, traced his finger along the diagram of his latest experimental circuit. The teleprobe in his basement laboratory still carried the wiring, partially dismantled.
What was wrong with it?
He closed the notebook, tossed it back into the box. His thoughts hunted through the theories stored in his mind, the knowledge saved from a thousand failures. Fatigue and despondency pulled at him. Yet, he knew that the things Freud, Jung, Adler and all the others had sought in dreams and mannerisms hovered just beyond his awareness in an electronic tracer circuit.
He wandered back into his study-bedroom, crawled into the bed. He practiced yoga breathing until sleep washed over him. The singer, the train, the whistle did not return.
Morning lighted the bedroom. He awoke, trailing fragments of his nightmare into consciousness, aware that his appointment book was blank until ten o’clock. The bedside newstape offered a long selection of stories, most headed “Scramble Syndrome.” He punched code letters for eight items, flipped the machine to audio and listened to the news while dressing.
Memory of his nightmare nagged at him. He wondered, “How many people awake in the night, asking themselves, ‘Is it my turn now?’”
He selected a mauve cape, drew it over his white coveralls. Retrieving the notebook from the box in the kitchen, he stepped out into the chill spring morning. He turned up the temperature adjustment of his coveralls. The unitube whisked him to the Elliott Bay waterfront. He ate at a seafood restaurant, the teleprobe notebook open beside his plate. After breakfast, he found an empty bench outside facing the bay, sat down, opened the notebook. He found himself reluctant to study the diagrams, stared out at the bay.
Mists curled from the gray water, obscuring the opposite shore. Somewhere in the drift a purse-seiner sounded its hooter. Echoes bounced off the buildings behind him. Early workers hurried past, voices stilled: thin look of faces, hunted glances—the uniform of fear. Coldness from the bench seeped through his clothing. He shivered, drew a deep breath of the salt air. The breeze off the bay carried essence of seaweed, harmonic on the dominant bitter musk of a city’s effluvia. Seagulls haggled over a morsel in the tide rip. The papers on his lap fluttered. He held them down with one hand, watching the people.
I’m procrastinating, he thought. It’s a luxury my profession can ill afford nowadays.
A woman in a red fur cape approached, her sandals tapping a swift rhythm on the concrete. Her cape billowed behind in a puff of breeze.
He looked up to her face framed in dark hair. Every muscle in his body locked. She was the woman of his nightmare down to the minutest detail! His eyes followed her. She saw him staring, looked away, walked past.
Eric fumbled his papers together, closed the notebook and ran after her. He caught up, matched his steps to hers, still staring, unthinking. She looked at him, flushed, looked away.
“Go away or I’ll call a cop!”
“Please, I have to talk to you.”
“I said go away.” She increased her pace; he matched it.
“Please forgive me, but I dreamed about you last night. You see—”
She stared straight ahead.
“I’ve been told that one before! Go away!”
“But you don’t understand.”
She stopped, turned and faced him, shaking with anger. “But I do understand! You saw my show last night! You’ve dreamed about me!” She wagged her head. “Miss Lanai, I must get to know you!”
Eric shook his head. “But I’ve never even heard of you or seen you before.”
“Well! I’m not accustomed to being insulted either!” She whirled, walked away briskly, the red cape flowing out behind her. Again he caught up with her.
“Please—”
“I’ll scream!”
“I’m a psychoanalyst.”
She hesitated, slowed, stopped. A puzzled expression flowed over her face. “Well, that’s a new approach.”
He took advantage of her interest. ??
?I really did dream about you. It was most disturbing. I couldn’t shut it off.”
Something in his voice, his manner— She laughed, “A real dream was bound to show up some day.”
“I’m Dr. Eric Ladde.”
She glanced at the caduceus over his breast pocket. “I’m Colleen Lanai; I sing.”
He winced. “I know.”
“I thought you’d never heard of me.”
“You sang in my dream.”
“Oh.” A pause. “Are you really a psychoanalyst?”
He slipped a card from his breast pocket; handed it to her. She looked at it.
“What does ‘Teleprobe Diagnosis’ mean?”
“That’s an instrument I use.”
She returned the card, linked an arm through his, set an easy, strolling pace. “All right, doctor. You tell me about your dream and I’ll tell you about my headaches. Fair exchange?” She peered up at him from under thick eyelashes.
“Do you have headaches?”
“Terrible headaches.” She shook her head.
Eric looked down at her. Some of the nightmare unreality returned. He thought, What am I doing here? One doesn’t dream about a strange face and then meet her in the flesh the next day. The next thing I know the whole world of my unconscious will come alive.
“Could it be this Syndrome thing?” she asked. “Ever since we were in Los Angeles I’ve—” She chewed at her lip.
He stared at her. “You were in Los Angeles?”
“We got out just a few hours before that… before—” She shuddered. “Doctor, what’s it like to be crazy?”
He hesitated. “It’s no different from being sane—for the person involved.” He looked out at the mist lifting from the bay. “The Syndrome appears similar to other forms of insanity. It’s as though something pushed people over their lunacy thresholds. It’s strange; there’s a rather well-denned radius of about sixty miles which it saturated. Atlanta and Los Angeles, for instance, and Lawton, had quite sharp lines of demarcation: people on one side of a street got it; people on the other side didn’t. We suspect there’s a contamination period during which—” He paused, looked down at her, smiled. “And all you asked was a simple question. This is my lecture personality. I wouldn’t worry too much about those headaches; probably diet, change of climate, maybe your eyes. Why don’t you get a complete physical?”