"Will you arrange with her foreman for Annie Malasek to come to my
office right now?" I asked. Sara is flippant when things are going along
all right, but she knows when to buckle down and do what she's asked.
She gave me no personal reactions to this request.
Yes, Annie Malasek would be a good one. If anybody in the plant believed
There Are Mysteries, it would be Annie. Further, she was exaggeratedly
loyal to me. She believed I was responsible for turning her little
Jennie, the little girl who'd started all this poltergeist trouble, into
a Good Little Girl. In this instance, I had no qualms about taking
advantage of that loyalty.
* * * * *
While I waited for her I called the lieutenant at his hotel. He was in.
Yes, the Swami was also in. They'd just returned. Yes, the Swami was
ranting and raving about leaving Los Angeles at once. He had said he
absolutely would have nothing more to do with us here at Computer
Research. I told Lieutenant Murphy to scare him with tales of the
secret, underground working of Army Intelligence, to quiet him down. And
I scared the lieutenant a little by pointing out that holding a civilian
against his will without the proper writ was tantamount to kidnapping.
So if the Army didn't want trouble with the Civil Courts, all brought
about because the lieutenant didn't know how to handle his man--
The lieutenant became immediately anxious to cooeperate with me. So then
I soothed him. I told him that, naturally, the Swami was unhappy. He was
used to Swami-ing, and out here he had been stifled, frustrated. What he
needed was some credulous women to catch their breath at his
awe-inspiring insight and gaze with fearful rapture into his eyes. The
lieutenant didn't know where he could find any women like that. I told
him, dryly, that I would furnish some.
Annie was more than cooeperative. Sure, the whole plant was buzzing about
that foreign-looking Swami who had been seen coming in and out of my
office. Sure, a lot of the Girls believed in seances.
"Why? Don't you, Mr. Kennedy?" she asked curiously.
I said I wasn't sure, and she clucked her tongue in sympathy. It must be
terrible not to be sure, so ... well, it must be just terrible. And I
was such a kind man, too. I didn't quite get the connection, until I
remembered there are some patterns which believe a human being would be
incapable of being kind unless through hope of reward or fear of
punishment.
But when I asked her to go to the hotel and persuade the Swami to give
her a reading, she was reluctant. I thought my plan was going to be
frustrated, but it turned out that her reluctance was only because she
did not have a thing to wear, going into a high-toned place like that.
Sara wasn't the right size, but one of the older girls in the outer
office would lend Annie some clothes if I would let her go see the
Swami, too. It developed that her own teacher was a guest of Los Angeles
County for a while, purely on a trumped-up charge, you understand, Mr.
Kennedy. Not that she was a cop hater or anything like that. She was
perfectly aware of what a fine and splendid job those noble boys in blue
did for us all, but--
In my own office! Well, you never knew.
Yet, what was the difference between her and me? We were both trying to
get hold of and benefit by psi effects, weren't we? So I didn't comment.
Instead, I found myself much farther ahead with my tentative plans than
I'd anticipated at this stage.
Yes, my interviewer's teacher had quite a large following, and now they
were all at loose ends. If the Swami were willing, she could provide a
large and ready-made audience for him. She would be glad to talk to him
about it.
Annie hurriedly said that she would be glad to talk to him about it,
too; that she could get up a large audience, too. So, even before it got
started, I had my rival factions at work. I egged them both on, and
promised that I'd get Army Intelligence to work with the local boys in
blue to hold off making any raids.
Annie told me again what a kind man I was. My interviewer spoke up
quickly and said how glad she was to find an opportunity for expressing
how grateful she was for the privilege of working right in the same
department with such an understanding, really intellectually developed
adult. She eyed Annie sidelong, as if to gauge the effects of her
attempts to set me up on a pedestal, out of Annie's reach.
I hoped I wouldn't start believing either one of them. I hoped I wasn't
as inaccurate in my estimates of people as was my interviewer. I
wondered if she were really qualified for the job she held. Then I
realized this was a contest between two women and I, a mere male, was
simply being used as the pawn. Well, that worked both ways. In a fair
bargain both sides receive satisfaction. I felt a little easier about my
tactical maneuvers.
But the development of rivalry between factions of the audience gave me
an additional idea. Perhaps that's what the Swami really needed, a
little rivalry. Perhaps he was being a little too hard to crack because
he knew he was the only egg in the basket.
I called Old Stone Face and told him what I planned. He responded that
it was up to me. He'd stepped in and got things under way for me, got
things going, now it was my job to keep them going. It looked as if he
were edging out from under--or maybe he really believed that.
Before I settled into the day's regular routine, I wired General
Sanfordwaithe, and told him that if he had any more prospects ready
would he please ship me one at once, via air mail, special delivery.
* * * * *
The recital hall, hired for the Swami's Los Angeles debut, was large
enough to accommodate all the family friends and relatives of any little
Maribel who, having mastered "Daffodils In May," for four fingers, was
being given to the World. It had the usual small stage equipped with
pull-back curtains to give a dramatic flourish, or to shut off from view
the effects of any sudden nervous catastrophe brought about by stage
fright.
I got there, purposely a little late, in hopes the house lights would
already be dimmed and everything in progress; but about a hundred and
fifty people were milling around outside on the walk and in the
corridors. Both factions had really been busy.
Most of them were women, but, to my intense relief, there were a few
men. Some of these were only husbands, but a few of the men wore a look
which said they'd been far away for a long time. Somehow I got the
impression that instead of looking into a crystal ball, they would be
more inclined to look out of one.
It was a little disconcerting to realize that no one noticed me, or
seemed to think I was any different from anybody else. I supposed I
should be thankful that I wasn't attracting any attention. I saw my
interviewer amid a group of Older Girls. She winked at me roguishly, and
patted her heavy handbag significantly. As per instructions, she was
carrying a couple of the Auerbach cylinders.
I found myself staring in perplexity for a full minute at another woman,
before I realized it was Annie. I had never seen her before, except
dressed in factory blue jeans, man's blue shirt, and a bandanna wrapped
around her head. Her companion, probably another of the factory
assemblers, nudged her and pointed, not too subtly, in my direction.
Annie saw me then, and lit up with a big smile. She started toward me,
hesitated when I frowned and shook my head, flushed with the thought
that I didn't want to speak to her in public; then got a flash of better
sense than that. She, too, gave me a conspiratorial wink and patted her
handbag.
My confederates were doing nicely.
Almost immediately thereafter a horse-faced, mustached old gal started
rounding people up in a honey sweet, pear shaped voice; and herded them
into the auditorium. I chose one of the wooden folding chairs in the
back row.
A heavy jowled old gal came out in front of the closed curtains and gave
a little introductory talk about how lucky we all were that the Swami
had consented to visit with us. There was the usual warning to anyone
who was not of the esoteric that we must not expect too much, that
sometimes nothing at all happened, that true believers did not attend
just to see effects. She reminded us kittenishly that the guides were
capricious, and that we must all help by merging ourselves in the great
flowing currents of absolute infinity.
She finally faltered, realized she was probably saying all the things
the Swami would want to say--in the manner of people who introduce
speakers everywhere--and with a girlish little flourish she waved at
someone off stage.
The house lights dimmed. The curtains swirled up and back.
* * * * *
The Swami was doing all right for himself. He was seated behind a small
table in the center of the stage. A pale violet light diffused through a
huge crystal ball on the table, and threw his dark features into sharp
relief. It gave an astonishingly remote and inscrutable wisdom to his
features. In the pale light, and at this distance, his turban looked
quite clean.
He began to speak slowly and sonorously. A hush settled over the
audience, and gradually I felt myself merging with the mass reaction of
the rest. As I listened, I got the feeling that what he was saying was
of tremendous importance, that somehow his words contained great and
revealing wonders--or would contain them if I were only sufficiently
advanced to comprehend their true meanings. The man was good, he knew
his trade. All men search for truth at one level or another. I began to
realize why such a proportionate few choose the cold and impersonal
laboratory. Perhaps if there were a way to put science to music--
The Swami talked on for about twenty minutes, and then I noticed his
voice had grown deeper and deeper in tone, and suddenly, without any
apparent transition, we all knew it was not really the Swami's voice we
were hearing. And then he began to tell members of the audience little
intimate things about themselves, things which only they should know.
He was good at this, too. He had mastered the trick of making universals
sound like specifics. I could do the same thing. The patterns of
people's lives have multiple similarities. To a far greater extent than
generally realized the same things happen to everyone. The idea was to
take some of the lesser known ones and word them so they seemed to apply
to one isolated individual.
For instance, I could tell a fellow about when he was a little boy there
was a little girl in a red dress with blond pigtails who used to scrap
with him and tattle things about him to her mother. If he were inclined
to be credulous, this was second sight I had. But it is a universal.
What average boy didn't, at one time or another, know a little girl with
blond pigtails? What blond little girl didn't occasionally wear a red
dress? What little girl didn't tattle to her mother about the naughty
things the boys were doing?
[Illustration]
The Swami did that for a while. The audience was leaning forward in a
rapture of ecstasy. First the organ tones of his voice soothed and
softened. The phrases which should mean something if only you had the
comprehension. The universals applied as specifics. He had his audience
in the palm of his hand. He didn't need his crystal ball to tell him
that.
But he wanted it to be complete. Most of the responses had been from
women. He gave them the generalities which didn't sound like
generalities. They confirmed with specifics. But most were women. He
wanted the men, too. He began to concentrate on the men. He made it
easy.
"I have a message," he said. "From ... now let me get it right ... from
R. S. It is for a man in this audience. Will the man who knew R. S.
acknowledge?"
There was a silence. And that was such an easy one, too. I hadn't
planned to participate, but, on impulse, since none of the other men
were cooperating, I spoke up.
"Robert Smith!" I exclaimed. "Good old Bob!"
Several of the women sitting near me looked at me and beamed their
approval. One of the husbands scowled at me.
"I can tell by your tone," the Swami said, and apparently he hadn't
recognized my tone, "that you have forgiven him. That is the message. He
wants you to know that he is happy. He is much wiser now. He knows now
that he was wrong."
One of the women reached over and patted me on the shoulder, giving me
motherly encouragement.
But the Swami had no more messages for men. He was smart enough to know
where to stop. He'd tried one of the simplest come-ons, and there had
been too much of a pause. It had almost not come off.
I wondered who good old Bob Smith was? Surely, among the thousands of
applicants I'd interviewed, there must have been a number of them. And,
being applicants, of course some of them had been wrong.
The Swami's tones, giving one message after another--faster and faster
now, not waiting for acknowledgment or confirmation--began to sink into
a whisper. His speech became ragged, heavy. The words became
indistinguishable. About his head there began to float a pale,
luminescent sphere. There was a subdued gasp from the audience and then
complete stillness. As though, unbreathing, in the depths of a tomb,
they watched the sphere. It bobbed about, over the Swami's head and
around him. At times it seemed as if about to float off stage, but it
came back. It swirled out over the audience, but not too far, and never
at such an angle that the long, flexible dull black wire supporting it
would be silhouetted against the glowing crystal ball.
Then it happened. There was a gasp, a smothered scream. And over at one
side of the auditorium a dark object began bobbing about in the air up
near the ceiling. It swerved and swooped. The Swami's luminescent sphere
jerked to a sudden stop. The Swami sat with open mouth and stared at the
dark object which he was not controlling.
The dark object was not confined to any dull black wire. It went where
it willed. It went too high and brushed against the ceiling.
There was a sudden shower of coins to the floor. A compact hit the floor
with a flat spat. A handkerchief floated down more slowly.
"My purse!" a woman gasped. I recognized my interviewer's voice. Her
purse contained two Auerbach cylinders, and they were having themselves
a ball.
In alarm, I looked quickly at the stage, hoping the Swami wasn't astute
enough to catch on. But he was gone. The audience, watching the bobbing
purse, hadn't realized it as yet. And they were delayed in realizing it
by a diversion from the other side of the auditorium.
"I can't hold it down any longer, Mr. Kennedy!" a woman gasped out.
"It's taking me up into the air!"
"Hold on, Annie!" I shouted back. "I'm coming!"
* * * * *
A chastened and subdued Swami sat in my office the following morning,
and this time he was inclined to be cooeperative. More, he was looking to
me for guidance, understanding, and didn't mind acknowledging my
ascendancy. And, with the lieutenant left in the outer office, he didn't
have any face to preserve.
Later, last night, he'd learned the truth of what happened after he had
run away in a panic. I'd left a call at the hotel for the lieutenant.
When the lieutenant had got him calmed down and returned my call, I'd
instructed the lieutenant to tell the Swami about the Auerbach
cylinders; to tell the Swami he was not a fake after all.
The Swami had obviously spent a sleepless night. It is a terrible thing
to have spent years perfecting the art of fakery, and then to realize
you needn't have faked at all. More terrible, he had swallowed some of
his own medicine, and was overcome with fear of the forces which he had
been commanding. All through the night he had shivered in fear of some
instant and horrible retaliation. For him it was still a case of There
Are Mysteries.
And it was of no comfort to his state of mind right now that the four
cylinders we had finally captured last night were, at this moment,
bobbing about in my office, swooping and swerving around in the upper
part of the room, like bats trying to find some opening. I was giving
him the full treatment! The first two cylinders, down on the floor, were
pressing up against my closed door, like frightened little things trying
to escape a room of horror.
The Swami's face was twitching, and his long fingers kept twining
themselves into King's X symbols. But he was sitting it out. He was
swallowing some of the hair of the dog that bit him. I had to give him A
for that.
"I've been trying to build up a concept of the framework wherein psi
seems to function," I told him casually, just as if it were all a
formularized laboratory procedure. "I had to pull last night's stunt to
prove something."
He tore his eyes away from the cylinders which were over exploring one
corner of the ceiling, and looked at me.
"Let's go to electricity," I said speculatively. "Not that we know psi
and electricity have anything in common, other than some similar
analogies, but we don't know they don't. Both of them may be just
different manifestations of the same thing. We don't really know why a
magnetized core, turning inside a coil of copper wire, generates
electricity.
"Oh we've got some phrases," I acknowledged. "We've got a whole
structure of phrases, and when you listen to them they sound as if they
ought to mean something--like the phrases you were using last night.
Everybody assumes they do mean something to the pundits. So, since it is
human to want to be a pundit, we repeat these phrases over and over, and
call them explanations. Yet we do know what happens, even if we do just
theorize about why. We know how to wrap something around something and
get electricity.
"Take the induction coil," I said. "We feed a low-voltage current into
one end, and we draw off a high-voltage current from the other. But
anyone who wants, any time, can disprove the whole principle of the
induction coil. All you have to do is wrap your core with a
nonconductor, say nylon thread, and presto, nothing comes out. You see,
it doesn't work; and anybody who claims it does is a faker and a liar.
That's what happens when science tries to investigate psi by the
standard methods.
"You surround a psi-gifted individual with nonbelievers, and probably
nothing will come out of it. Surround him with true believers; and it
all seems to act like an induction coil. Things happen. Yet even when
things do happen, it is usually impossible to prove it.
"Take yourself, Swami. And this is significant. First we have the north
point effect. Then those two little beggars trying to get out the door.
Then the ones which are bobbing around up there. Without the cylinders
there would have been no way to know that anything had happened at all.
"Now, about this psi framework. It isn't something you can turn on and
off, at will. We don't know enough yet for that. Aside from some
believers and those individuals who do seem to attract psi forces, we
don't know, yet, what to wrap around what. So, here's what you're to do:
You're to keep a supply of these cylinders near you at all times. If any
psi effects happen, they'll record it. Fair enough?
"Now," I said with finality. "I have anticipated that you might refuse.
But you're not the only person who has psi ability. I've wired General
Sanfordwaithe to send me another fellow; one who will cooeperate."
The Swami thought it over. Here he was with a suite in a good hotel;
with an army lieutenant to look after his earthly needs; on the payroll
of a respectable company; with a ready-made flock of believers; and no
fear of the bunco squad. He had never had it so good. The side money,
for private readings alone, should be substantial.
Further, and he watched me narrowly, I didn't seem to be afraid of the
cylinders. It was probably this which gave the clincher.
"I'll cooeperate," he agreed meekly.
* * * * *
For three days there was nothing. The Swami seemed cooeperative enough.
He called me a couple times a day and reported that the cylinders just
lay around his room. I didn't know what to tell him. I recommended he
read biographies of famous mediums. I recommended fasting, and
breathing, and contemplating self. He seemed dubious, but said he'd try
it.
On the morning of the third day, Sara called me on the intercom and told
me there was another Army lieutenant in her office, and another charac
... another gentleman. I opened my door and went out to Sara's office to
greet them. My first glimpse told me Sara had been right the first time.
He was a character.
The new lieutenant was no more than the standard output from the same
production line as Lieutenant Murphy, but the wizened little old man he
had in tow was from a different and much rarer matrix. As fast as I had
moved, I was none too soon. The character reached over and tilted up
Sara's chin as I was coming through the door.
"Now you're a healthy young wench," he said with a leer. "What are you
doing tonight, baby?" The guy was at least eighty years old.
"Hey, you, pop!" I exclaimed in anger. "Be your age!"
He turned around and looked me up and down.
"I'm younger, that way, than you are, right now!" he snapped.
A disturbance in the outer office kept me from thinking up a retort.
There were some subdued screams, some scuffling of heavy shoes, the
sounds of some running feet as applicants got away. The outer door to
Sara's office was flung open.
Framed in the doorway, breast high, floated the Swami!
* * * * *
He was sitting, cross-legged, on a hotel bathmat. From both front
corners, where they had been attached by loops of twine, there peeked
Auerbach cylinders. Two more rear cylinders were grasped in Lieutenant
Murphy's strong hands. He was propelling the Swami along, mid air, in
Atlantic City Boardwalk style.
The Swami looked down at us with aloof disdain, then his eyes focused on
the old man. His glance wavered; he threw a startled and fearful look at
the cylinders holding up his bathmat. They did not fall. A vast relief
overspread his face, and he drew himself erect with more disdain than
ever. The old man was not so aloof.
"Harry Glotz!" he exclaimed. "Why you ... you faker! What are you doing
in that getup?"
The Swami took a casual turn about the room, leaning to one side on his
magic carpet as if banking an airplane.
"Peasant!" He spat the word out and motioned grandly toward the door.
Lieutenant Murphy pushed him through.
"Why, that no good bum!" the old man shouted at me. "That no-good from
nowhere! I'll fix him! Thinks he's something, does he? I'll show him!
Anything he can do I can do better!"
His rage got the better of him. He rushed through the door, shaking both
fists above his white head, shouting imprecations, threats, and pleading
to be shown how the trick was done, all in the same breath. The new
lieutenant cast a stricken look at us and then sped after his charge.
"Looks as if we're finally in production," I said to Sara.
"That's only the second one," she said mournfully. "When you get all six
of them, this joint's sure going to be jumping!"
I looked out of her window at the steel and concrete walls of the
factory. They were solid, real, secure; they were a symbol of reality,
the old reality a man could understand.
"I hope you don't mean that literally, Sara," I answered dubiously.