Dark Benediction by Walter M. Miller Read Free Book Online Page B

it rang again. "Hello?"
    " Mrs. Waverly, you were calling me?" A man's voice. His voice!
    "The operator found you rather quickly." It was the only thing she could think of saying.
    "No, no. I knew you were calling. In fact, I hoped you into it."
    "Hoped me? Now look here, Mr. Grearly, I—"
    "You were trying to explain our phenomenon in terms of insanity rather than telepathy. I didn't want you to do that, and so I hoped you into calling me."
    Lisa was coldly speechless.
    " What phenomenon are you talking about?" she asked after a few dazed seconds.
    " Still repressing it? Listen, I can share your mind any time I want to, now that I understand where and who you are. You might as well face the fact. And it can work both ways, if you let it. Up to now, you've been—well, keeping your mind's eye closed, so to speak."
    Her scalp was crawling. The whole thing had become intensely disgusting to her.
    " I don't know what you're up to, Mr. Grearly, but I wish you'd stop it. I admit something strange is going on, but your explanation is ridiculous—offensive, even."
    He was silent for a long time, then "I wonder if the first man-ape found his prehensile thumb ridiculous. I wonder if he thought using his hands for grasping was offensive."
    " What are you trying to say?"
    " That I think we're mutants. We're not the first ones. I had this same experience when I was in Boston once. There must he one of us there, too, but suddenly I got the feeling that he had committed suicide. I never saw him. We're probably the first ones to discover each other."
    "Boston? If what you say is true, what would distance have to do with it?"
    "Well, if telepathy exists, it certainly involves transfer of energy from one point to another. What kind of energy, I don't know. Possibly electromagnetic in character. Out it seems likely that it would obey the inverse square law, like radiant energy forms. I came to town about three weeks ago. I didn't feel you until I got close."
    "There is a connection," she thought. She had been wondering about the increased anxiety of the past three weeks.
    "I don't know what you're talking about," she evaded icily, though. "I'm no mutant. I don't believe in telepathy. I'm not insane. Now let me alone."
    She slammed the telephone in its cradle and started to walk away.
    Evidently he was angry, for she was suddenly communicating with him again.
     
    She reeled dizzily and clutched at the wall, because she was in two places at once, and the two settings merged in her mind to become a blur, like a double exposure. She was in her own hallway, and she was also in an office, looking at a calculator keyboard, hearing glassware rattling from across a corridor, aware of the smell of formaldehyde. There was a chart on the wall behind the desk and it was covered with strange tracery—schematics of some neural arcs. The office of the psychophysics lab. She closed her eyes, and her own hallway disappeared.
    She felt anger—his anger.
    "We've got to face this thing. If this is s new direction for human evolution, then we'd better study it and see what to do about it. I knew I was different and I became a psychophysicist to find out why. I haven't been able to measure much, but now with Lisa's help ..."
    She tried to shut him out. She opened her eyes and summoned her strength and tried to force him away. She stared at the bright doorway, but the tracery of neural arcs still remained. She fought him, but his mind lingered in hers.
    "... perhaps we can get to the bottom of it. I know my encephalograph recordings are abnormal, and now I can check them against hers. A few correlations will help. I'm glad to know about her soft fontanel. I wondered about mine. Now 1 think that underneath that fontanel lies a pattern of specialized neural—"
    She sagged to the floor of the hall and babbled aloud "Hickory Dickory Dock, the mouse ran up the clock. The clock struck one—"
    Slowly he withdrew. The laboratory office faded from her vision. His