DOES THE INNER world lie inside the mind?
Or out there in the world of things, nested on objects or fields?
A good question, posed by Fritz Leiber's Dr. Dragonet, and solved perhaps, with a draught of his psionic elixir.
I SHIFTED my borrowed Hillman Minx into double low to help the brave but under-engined little dear scrabble up the last steep-shooting stretch of asphalted road to Dr. Hugo Dragonet’s house, perched like an angular flying saucer about to take off from one of the highest pinnacles in the eastern end of the Santa Monica Mountains — a pinnacle overlooking Hollywood, downtown Los Angeles, Griffith Park, Forest Lawn Cemetery, and North Hollywood in the San Fernando Valley.
My heart was thudding like the engine of the Minx — not with overexertion, but excitement. Nineteen minutes ago the Enigmatic Engineer — of psychology and everything else, including wealth-winning cinematic devices — had said to me, “Arthur, I’ve discovered a drug that is to mescalin and LSD as they are to weak coffee. Come up and try it.” Then Dr. Dragonet’s voice, dry as Rhine wine, had broken off and bang had gone down his phone.
Sirens silent, an LA police car and black-and-white truck hurtled past me by all of three inches, almost scaring my Minx into the ditch. At first I thought their target was the Greater Cosmic Fellowship, and I shuddered to think what that might let loose on the world — if one could believe Dr. Dragonet’s assertions about the GCF, which would have frightened a Communist or Birchite pea-green alike.
But the two police vehicles shot past the gilded gate in the Fellowship’s white wall. Drawing up in the turn-around by the Doctor’s house, they spewed out bluecoats and also brown-britches, who poured into the shrubbery beyond the house.
My thoughts whizzed: My phone tapped… the Doctor’s brazen invitation… a raid by LA’s unsleeping Narcotics Squad, which has no respect for great secret scientists or any other kind.
My Minx wouldn’t whizz. In the nearest view window of Dr. Dragonet’s cantilevered dwelling, in front of the tightly drawn pale drapes, I made out the Doctor’s black cat peering down at the police.
I thought: I hope you’re playing lookout, Impet, and doing a right job of it. Snarl the alarm, girl! Fizz, “Fuzz!”
The last two cops carried great nets trailing from iron hoops five feet across. I wondered dismally how Dr. Dragonet’s erect lank silver-topped form would look hanging acutely bent in the mesh of one of them. Very dignified and intensely menacing, I decided impartially.
UNAIDED by the redoubling of my heartbeat, my Minx painfully crawled to the foot of the steps leading up to the cantilevered terrace-porch. Setting the brakes with a swipe of one hand and snatching up with the other my innocent-looking cane — which I have taken to carrying ever since my adventures with Dr. Dragonet began to go deep — I jumped out and raced up the steep steps toward a cloud-flecked blue sky, blown clear of smog for once by a steady west wind, and — here I slowed a bit, I couldn’t help it — toward a very pretty pair of slim black-stockinged legs swinging coquettishly from the edge of the terrace still well above me.
I’d never met legs like that at any previous session with Dr. Dragonet. But then I’d never known much about his private affairs. In fact, I’d never thought of the old boy having any.
I resumed speed and soon, three steps from the top, I was looking straight into the dark eyes of the most delicious girl I’ve ever encountered. She had a slim pale face, humorous sensuous lips, and long black hair hanging sleekly yet unconfined. She was wearing black leotards and a black velvet cape which draped casually from her shoulders across the dull black flagstones of the terrace.
“Why the haste, my hearty?” she asked me tranquilly, sitting there and swinging her legs.
I pictured her in a net — or rather explaining to one of LA’s hanging judges how she had been cajoled into smoking super-marijuana by a lewd and sinister pseudo-scientist old enough to be her grandfather, almost.
“I’m Arthur Gray,” I informed her somewhat breathlessly, eager to create a sensation with my police raid news.
“And I’m Eduina Capasombrio.”
Just then I saw it approaching her stealthily yet ripple-swift across the half-roofed, sun-bright, shadow-dark terrace — and wondered for a split second if I’d already been somehow dosed, maybe by spray, with the Doctor’s new drug. Then for another split instant I thought it was Impet, magnified by some illusion to thrice Impet’s height at the shoulder and thirty times the housecat’s mass. But this narrow black feline had eyes of blue fire and fangs with a steely glitter and its black pelt alternately shimmered and blurred as it moved.
I whipped my sword out of its cane-sheath and thrust it fast over Eduina’s shoulder, at least an inch outside her close-fitting ear, just as the creature pounced.
The blade hit something and jarred, an electric shock traveled up my sword-arm, then everything went black before my eyes as if I were about to faint from excitement or fear.
I squinched my eyes and shook my head sharply. My power of sight came back. I stared around the terrace wildly, numb arm posing the sword for another lunge. But the black leopard was gone.
“Arthur, that was very uncool,” Eduina informed me severely, “to go stab at a poor panting animal after the police and every idiot he-man with a gun have been hunting him across the hills for a week or more.
“Except coming so near my ear with your skimevitch,” she added with a note of consolation. “That was cool, Arthur.” She’d still not moved, though her legs were still swinging.
At once the memory came back to me, making sense of the police nets, of the black leopard that had escaped from a private zoo near Tarzana and been pacing back and forth across the bottom of the front page of the LA Times for ten days, far below the black jungle treetops of the second-coming headlines about the illegal Soviet bomb-test.
“It didn’t look one bit worn and weary to me,” I said, still scanning shiveringly for the beast, which had really reminded me of one I’d read about in a science-fiction story — a lordly creature of evil with electricity for blood. “It looked all spruced up, as if it had come to take you to dinner — to be the meat course.”
Eduina lightly shook her head. “Probably just wanted sympathy — or his horoscope cast. I’d want my Cat Stars read in his situation.”
“Are there Cat Stars?” I asked.
“There are Dog Stars, aren’t there?” she responded wide-eyed. I didn’t quite know how to take some of her remarks and reactions. Kids change so fast these days that a ten-year age-gap sometimes seems like ten generations. With Eduina, I felt like I was blundering in the dark. Delightful dark, though, even better than iced Irish coffee.
THERE came low shouts, two gunshots, then a thrashing of underbrush from the other side of the terrace. I gave Eduina my free hand as she scrambled up. We ran across and looked down from the unrailed edge.
Twenty feet below, the police were tramping back to their cars. Two of them carried, in a double-over net between them, a sad sweaty-looking black leopard. Its fur was dusty too, but its chest was heaving and I could see no sign of blood. Evidently my sword, if it had ever really hit that leopard, had done no great damage and the police gunshots had been only for scare-effect. The Los Angeles police are good efficient guys, really — the amateurs wouldn’t have been satisfied until they’d blown the creature to bits.
I noticed that the police had left behind them in the shrubs a small black suitcase. Or perhaps someone else had dropped it there first.
Alone I wouldn’t have been noticed, but girls like Eduina are stare-o-magnetic.
“We got him safe and sound, miss,” one of them called up. “You can quit worrying now.” Although my attention was still wholly on the netted leopard, I was tempted to call back, “I do not think worrying is one of the young lady’s skills,” but just then the same cop called up, “What’s that weapon you got there, fellow?”
”A long shish-kebab skewer,” I assured him, guiltily making sure my hand hid the silver-knobbed grip. Sword canes are decidedly illegal and although the LA police are often good guys, they are always sticklers. I was still studying the captured leopard, very doubtfully now.
There was a loud hist! behind us. I spun around. It was only Earl, the Doctor’s sturdy butler and precision machinist, beckoning us from the porch door.
But I had already made up my mind. The black leopard the police had netted was not my black leopard and never had been,
Little Impet, peering around Karl’s thick ankles, seemed to agree with me, for the black house-cat scanned about fiercely, then sprang back with a spitting hiss of her own.
I was glad myself we were leaving the terrace. Now that the sun was dropping out of sight and the west wind humming higher, the place had turned eerie.
Protectively — well, that was a bit of my reason — I shifted my free arm to Eduina’s waist. Even through the velvet cape it felt remarkably slim and supple.
The big living room with its thick tight-drawn drapes was so dark I couldn’t see anything clearly. I was annoyed at Karl for closing the door tightly behind us, then remembered what might be lurking outside and stopped feeling irked. Realizing other advantages of the darkness, I shifted my arm to the same position under Eduina’s cloak. She didn’t mind or maybe didn’t notice. She was a very cool girl, truly.
THERE was a pale shape stretched above the center of the floor — on a low dark couch, I guessed. Or maybe floating there. Around it was a circle of eight motionless, weirdly hunched forms. I wondered if they were having drugged visions and perhaps drugged shape-changes, supposing the Doctor’s experiment had already begun.
I started to ask, but Eduina breathed at my ear a shh that was almost a kiss, while from the pale shape there came a sweet monotonous voice saying:
“It’s a blue blue planet, not from oceans, but from great prairies of blue grass reaching almost to the poles and dotted here and there with tiny lakes. Dipping closer, I can see herds of unicorns and tricorns cropping the blue savannas. Now, closer still, I see bands of slim elvish folk. Their naked skins are pale blue. They ride the unicorn, they pound a bluish grain to flour, they study the stars through telescopes with lenses of water and mirrors of liquid mercury curved by force fields. They dance to pipes and sleep or they meditate alone under their fiery moon… ”
For a moment I could see the blue scene hovering before my eyes — so sharply that I wondered if there could be visions contagious like diseases and delusions — although the edges of my mind and feelings were still busy with my rather loony guesses about a drug-orgy and with my black leopard, the deadly one… and with Eduina, of course.
As the sweet voice died away, the living room lights came up softly. I looked at the pale figure lying in the center of the room — on a low couch, as I’d guessed — and my heart jumped about a yard away from Eduina and hung there for several seconds.
The pale figure was a long girl in an umbelted white flannel dress that covered her from neck to pink toes. Her tranced face had the lines but not the fullness of that of a Greek goddess. Her long hair outspread was a pale golden sunburst.
The eight weirdly hunched forms dissolved into eight of the Doctor’s angularly asymmetric but comfortably cushioned chairs with five superficially normal-looking occupants. The three chairs to my left were empty. The next two held grasshopper-thin restless Professor Seibold and, clerical collar indenting his jowls, plump Father Minturn — two highly intelligent men I’d met before at the Doctor’s sessions on those occasions when he’d wanted a thorough materialistic scientist and a thoughtful Man of God among his observers.
Next to the priest reclined a very tall, very thin nun in black flowing habit and a visored and veiled wimple which completely concealed her features. Not so normal-looking, that one, I had to admit.
The figure beyond that — just to my right — made my heart sink: a handsome crophaired sun-tanned suavely muscled young man in rather close-fitting sports jacket, slacks, and suede shoes, all dazzling white; his gaze was bored yet sensuous, raptorial yet veiled — oh, every-boys knows Jay Astar, the newest and most successful Brando-surrogate and homegrown Mastroianni to hit stereo, cinema, and TV.
My jealous and pessimistic mind instantly decided that Eduina and the blonde had to be starlets who had come to this session along with “Jastar”. Such offbeat beauties could only be his girls. My spirits sank.
Why would the Doctor have him here? But then the Doctor rather liked film folks, the old fool.
A LANK figure straightened briskly up from the only chair I couldn’t see into, the one in front of me, and turned to face me with a supple unrigid military erectness. At times Dr. Hugo Dragonet looks remarkably like a Prussian or Czarist officer, or diplomat perhaps. His silvery hair was crewcut, his wrinkle-netted eyes gleamed with youth, the other lines of his long face were cynical-genial.
”Arthur!” he said, smiling warmly. Then the smile thinned a trifle. “Stop smooching my niece!”
I tried brazenly to hang onto her, but Eduina unhooked herself from my arm with a full turn that swirled her velvet cape away from her black-fitted body.
Dr. Dragonet’s eyes twinkled. “Eduina, Mister Arthur Gray,” he said formally. ”Arthur, Señorita Eduina Capasombrio.”
I bowed peevishly. My pessimistic mind — which at my birth had declared a cold war against my optimistic feelings — slightly redeployed its thoughts about Eduina: she wasn’t the girl Jastar had brought, but the one he had come here to fascinate and lay claim to, probably had already done so. And the blonde too, of course. Who can win against stereo stars?
Dr. Dragonet might prove my ally, of course. I could even imagine him saying “Stop necking my niece,” to Jastar too. But he was an old man, lost in his experiments and inventions.
Eduina went up to him. “Dear Uncle Hugo,” she said softly. He bowed to her and as she pressed a kiss on his forehead, she looked sidewise at me with a peculiarly sly smile. By some chance his lips quirked at the same moment. Was Uncle Hugo really so old? Then she swirled down into the empty chair next his.
To fill the conversational pause, but mostly because I was really curious, I asked, “Was the other young woman actually seeing or clairvoying a scene on another planet? And is she under the influence of — ” I hesitated.
“Of my new drug? Yes,” he finished for me. “As to your first question, it’s rather improbable she was getting anything interplanetary or interstellar. More likely something from her subconscious, or from the subconscious mind of one of us. Some forgotten fairytale, perhaps.
“However, there's this to be said for your suggestion,” he went on. “Whenever I ask the young lady where her vision is coming from, she points toward the constellation Cygnus — the Swan or Northern Cross, as you know — whether it happens to be below or, as now, above the horizon, or night or day at the time. As far as I know, she has no knowledge of field astronomy. It’s a suggestive circumstance, though really nothing to build on.”
I nodded. Quite restrained for Dr. Dragonet, I thought, remembering the black goggles with which he had let us glimpse the glow of mentality diffusing from the galaxy and with which he had (so he claimed!) discovered the Greater Cosmic Fellowship to be a secret outpost — peaceful, he hoped, he told us — of black giant centipedal Martians* — a good example of the stranger denizens of Hollywood, if you can believe the Doctor.
* "The Goggles of Dr. Dragonet", FANTASTIC, July 1961
The memory gave me a start. I wondered if my black leopard could be some creature or projection of the Martians.
The priest and the professor were looking at me peculiarly. I realized I was still holding my naked swordcane. Karl silently handed me its sheath.
Eduina began chattily to tell her uncle about the eruption of police and the capture of the escaped leopard. I waited for her to finish, intending to add my theory — conviction, rather — that there had been two black leopards.
MEANWHILE the fair-haired girl sat up on the couch, resting her chin in her hand. Her eyes were open now, but her classic face was still dreamy. She wasn't so long after all — it had been that white dress.
Jay Astar looked at her loosely draped form with a cool appraisal I found infuriating.
The two other men in the circle had begun to talk about the Siberian explosion that had us on the brink of war. Professor Seibold was claiming it had been a giant underground atomic test-blast which had got out of control and vented in spite of all Soviet precautions and secrecy measures. Father Minturn supported the minority guess that it had been an enemy atomic rocket, aimed at Krasnoyarsk and overshooting north. A Chinese rocket, perhaps, or — who dared say?
Palm outthrust protestingly, Dr. Dragonet called briskly, “Ladies, gentlemen, enough of these trivia! Roxane! - bring the psionic elixir!”
I looked toward the girl in white as he called “Roxane!” but she didn't react… and then from the next room came a third young lady bearing a tray with crystal-gleaming goblets and two bottles. She too was slim, wearing a blue suit and wraparound blue sun-glasses which somehow reminded me of the blue planet I’d heard described. Really, the girl in white should have been wearing them.
The third girl had dark red hair bobbed rather long. Beneath the masking glasses her lips were curved in an impudent, knowing smile. She wore blue net stockings.
Again my heart did that delightful devastating business of jumping a yard away from Eduina, or this time as much as two.
The newcomer set the tray down on a high taboret beside Dr. Dragonet’s chair. Smiling compassionately at me, the Doctor said, “Arthur! Let me introduce you to my nieces Mademoiselle Roxane Rougecheveu — ” He indicated the redhead, who sketched a curtsy “ — and to Frauline Blondine Haarlang — ” The girl in white nodded vaguely “ — who belong respectively to the French and German branches of the Dragonet family, through the maternal line, just as Señorita Capasombrio does to the Spanish.
“Oh, by the way, Blondine,” he called to the girl in white, “if you see any more of the blue planet, don’t hesitate to break in on us, no matter what we’re discussing.” She gave another vague nod.
The redhead sat down in the farther of the remaining chairs and I in the remaining one — in the exact spot where my heart still vacillated midway between Eduina and Roxane, which was a good thing for my physiological integrity. Bad to have one’s anatomic and amatory hearts in different places.
Working with skilled rapidity, Dr. Dragonet poured a pale yellow wine into seven of the goblets, then using a pipette, added to each exactly three-drops of a colorless fluid from a glass-stoppered crystal bottle.
Gradually all eyes, even the lazy ones of Jastar, became fixed on the Doctor and his speeding hands. As he worked, he began to speak, quite casually.
“One of life’s most fascinating problems, which science refuses to tackle, or shrugs off as ‘metaphysics’, is the hook-up between the mind and the world.”
I thought, Oh nuts, a lecture on philosophy — when I want to hear about blue planets and black leopards and golden elixirs.
FLARING his nostrils at me, as if he’d caught my thoughts, the Doctor continued, “To put it simply, where in the brain — or elsewhere! — is the space of my — or your — consciousness? Where is that clearcut shining scene which each sighted man or woman sees outspread before him while he wakes, or shimmering strangely in dreams?” He tapped the silver-lawned side of his skull. “Is it inside here?” He swept five outstretched fingers in front of him. “Or is it… out there?”
I thought, Say, maybe this applies. Was my black leopard a living thing… out there? Or was it a projection from my mind? — or from someone else’s mind! True, my sword had bent and my arm had been shocked. Yet the black leopard had had that glimmering appearance of a projection and the super-realness one associates with fever-visions rather than reality. And something had momentarily blacked out my vision, too.
Professor Seibold muttered to himself, intending to be overheard, I’m sure, “To try to measure pictures in the mind against the great world of matter, as if they were two maps which could be fitted to each other — naive!” Dr. Dragonet caught it. He said, smiling, “When I was a child, I decided to be naive — which incidentally means ‘natural’ — forever. It’s paid off — in fun and money too. Now to explore the problem.” He lifted one finger. “First, is the space of consciousness in the brain? That would analyze down only to a pattern of firing neurons or lec-tric fields, not the vivid theater-like scene itself.”
He held up two lingers. “Or is the space of consciousness in another set of dimensions altogether? But that means there are at least two worlds, the world of things and the inner one — which offends against science’s Law of Parsimony: the need to find the simplest explanation possible, to avoid assuming one more factor than necessary.”
“I go for simplicity myself,” Jay Astar observed, that rough sonorous voice of his ringing out for the first time, but it was hard to tell whether he was talking about scientific assumptions, or styles of acting, or clothes maybe — or at any rate I told myself that. I glanced to see if Eduina or Roxane were hanging onto the words of the white-clad male love-god. They didn't seem to be.
Dr. Dragonet continued, “Actually the second explanation involves a gigantic offense against the Law of Parsimony, for if each conscious being has an inner world approximating even to a small degree the world of things, then we are assuming trillions upon trillions of separate worlds — a vast unnecessary multiplication of structures.”
POROFESSOR Seibold snorted, - “You’re just hanging sense data on a pre-Kantian space-time framework.”
“Do you dig this?” I whispered experimentally to Eduina. She nodded curtly without looking at me. From Roxane’s direction I heard a very faint chuckle. I cursed myself and concentrated.
“Or — ” Dr. Dragonet went on, three fingers in the air, his eyes gleaming over his pipette, to the top of which his thumb was clamped to check its drip — “does the inner world lie out there in the world of things? — like paint on a house, or make-up on a woman’s face, or wrappings of finest tissue on a box. De Broglie has said that each electron extends, however tenuously, to the ends of the universe. Why not the conscious mind? What if all our inner worlds lie out there, nested on objects and on fields, clothing with color and feeling the skeleton world of things?”
“More 200-year-old British metaphysics!” the professor jeered.
But, “Perhaps forming together one single great diversified communal mind, Doctor?” the tall veiled black nun across the circle from me observed in a harsh mechanic whisper which made me shiver. There was a faint dry rustling as she leaned forward. Jay Astar, sitting on her left, looked at her sharply.
Dr. Dragonet nodded. “Perhaps, Sister Marcia.”
“The Mind of God,” Father Minturn murmured on her right.
Dr. Dragonet frowned. “God — a word,” he said harshly, “yet not altogether inacceptible. The communal mind would of course have within it a multitude of foci — our individualities. Not a Trinity, but almost an Infinity.”
“Bits of mind strewn about,” Eduina observed. “You make it sound like ectoplasm, Uncle Hugo.” From my other side Roxane chuckled. The Doctor made a face at them.
Professor Seibold was angrily waving his hand. “I can see the stars,” he asserted emphatically, but only for a moment mystifyingly. “How can bits of my consciousness lie that far out — hundreds and billions of light years away?”
The Doctor replied quietly, “Aristotle had an insight which we’ve neglected and derided: that vision goes out from the eye to the object and then returns to the eye. Perhaps consciousness operates that way, moving instantaneously or almost so, even though physical vision doesn’t. Modern investigations suggest that psi- or esp-forces move at velocities at least far greater than light.”
“But what I see in the stars happened hundreds and billions of years ago!” Professor Seibold rapped back. “The stars have moved since — they and the mind bits would not be congruent!”
“Most of the stars haven’t moved far,” the Doctor countered. “The discongruence would not be great and since we’ve hardly begun to log psi-observations we wouldn’t have detected it just as the apparent movement of the stars with the seasons was indetectable to the ancients and medievals, so that they decided all the stars were set in one vast crystal sphere at the outer limits of the cosmos.”
“You talk of psi-forces and forces of consciousness,” the thin professor hammered on. “If they're forces, why haven’t we detected them, I ask you, sir?”
“They are too feeble for our instruments to pick up,” the Doctor retorted. “Psi-forces may be basic, yet so weak under most terrestrial conditions as to be almost indiscoverable — just as the basic force of gravity itself might never be discovered in a feathery world of free fall. Besides, most of us haven’t the right instruments. The gravito-electric and gravito-magnetic spectra exist in theory, but they’ve never been observed in practice — with the exception of Ehrenfels experiment and one other." **
** "The Goggles of Dr. Dragonet"
“Hugo,” I cut in. “Would it ever be possible for the parts of the inner world which lie in the world of things to… well… operate independently?” I was thinking of my black leopard.
“There we enter a more speculative realm,” the Doctor said thoughtfully. “But yes, Arthur, some of my most recent trials of the elixir have indicated to me that under certain conditions the contents of the subconscious mind of a highly repressed, highly energized person — a person with powerful drives — might be projected into the world of things, there taking individualized form, possibly animal, like some of Jung’s archetypes, and operating for a while independently, with powers to move about and help or harm.”
“This is preposterous! I ask you what — ” Professor Seibold burst out contentiously, but at that moment Blondine Haarlang began to speak from her central position on the low couch, her eyes again closed, her voice a pleasant yet imperious monotone:
“Great black and silver spaceships are orbiting now around the blue planet. Boats land from the spaceships and discharge beings in great helmets and protective suits — perhaps the air is poisonous to them. They are humanoid but I cannot see their faces. They begin to explore and to test the direction of the wind. The elvish folk hide from them in the deep blue grass.”
Although the room was light now, I again had the illusion that the scene Blondine was describing was hovering between me and her. For a brief moment it was frighteningly realistic: I could see the heavy-suited trampers through the grass and I peered in vain to glimpse their faces. I asked myself if it were remotely conceivable that her consciousness, traveling some unknown superhighway, had gone out to a planet circling a star in the Northern Cross. On impulse I asked, ”Where’s the blue planet, Frauline Haarlang?”
Without opening her eyes, she pointed toward me, which was east — I know my directions in Dragonet’s house — then raised her hand halfway overhead before she dropped it. That would be right for the Northern Cross at this time of summer.
“I think it’s time we drank the elixir — before our speculations get too far out without its help,” Dr. Dragonet said, grimacing apologetically at Professor Seibold. “Roxane, pass around the goblets!”
The professor frowned, grasping his goblet when it came as if it were a ceremonial mace. “I have further objections,” he said, “but I’ll reserve them.”
I sniffed at mine, detecting no odor but that of Riesling. Some of the others sniffed too. I noted that Sister Marcia, the black nun, was holding her goblet close to her narrow chest in short black-gloved fingers.
When Roxane came to him, Dr. Dragonet waved her on. “The bartender should never drink,” he quipped. “Besides, I have acquired a residual sensitivity from repeated doses.”
He dropped his hand to the side of his chair and the lights very slowly began to dim. He said, “Cortisone is the best medical analogy I can find for my psychic or psionic elixir — which incidentally is extracted from the pineal glands of a strain of rhesus monkeys which have undergone certain stresses and been injected with various lesser drugs. Little has been discovered about the pineal’s function in a century of research — but if the function is psionic, what orthodox researcher is going to discover that? — or go out on a limb about it if he does?” He shrugged.
“Cortisone makes tissues more permeable, so that healing substances can reach their targets more readily. It weakens the walls between cell and cell.
“My psionic elixir weakens the walls between the cells of the mind, between the conscious and Hie unconscious and all the other areas, many of them unmapped, unknown, unexplored.
“To an even greater degree it weakens the walls between mind and mind, between minds that are near and minds that are far, between minds that are almost alike and minds that are unutterably divergent. Indicating that we are not lonely little forts of mind, solitary ‘T’-machines, but instead we are points or rather foci in a great continuum of feeling.”
THE room had darkened considerably from the Doctor’s rheostat, but I could still see faces, most of them with gazes fixed on his sardonic-lined yet now almost sorcerous one. Between myself and the Doctor, Eduina: a humorous “cool” girl, yet ageless-seeming now, a sphinx. To my left Roxane, her smile made enigmatic by her blue wraparound glasses. To her left, Professor Seibold: suspicious, hostile, rigidly poised — yet I could see his chest move with his rapid breathing. Then Father Minturn: benign, calm, perhaps too calm. Then the inscrutable black-veiled Sister Marcia. Then Jay Astar, lazily smiling, another calm one — but perhaps his hand was shaking slightly, for mow he casually steadied his goblet against his white-trousered knee. And so back around the circle to Dr. Dragonet. In the shadows behind him was a dark blocky form — Karl.
And in the center of the circle, Blondine. She faced me rather than the Doctor, but she was not looking directly at me, but somewhat over my head. And her gaze seemed to go far beyond, through the wall, out into space, perhaps to her blue planet.
My heart skipped a beat as a black shape leaped to the back of Father Seibold’s chair. Impet. The black housecat silently settled down there behind the cleric’s head, though I doubt he was aware of her presence. She directed her slit-eyed gaze at Sister Marcia.
I thought about what the Doctor had said about subconscious minds being projected in animal form, and I shivered at the idea while I tried to reject it. I wondered about the subconscious drives of those around me.
The Doctor said, “We will drink one by one, around the circle, clockwise. That way the effects will be more interesting, particularly to those who drink first. I will point each time to the person who is to drink and snap my fingers to tell them when.”
The forefinger of his right hand aimed at me and then the mid-finger slipped off the thumb and struck the groove between bent ring-finger and palm with a solid click.
The gazes shifted to me. I felt flustered — and a little resentful that the Doctor had made me the first to take the plunge into the unknown. For the first time I wondered if this drug were safe, had been tested enough — or, contrariwise, if it were only three drops of water. I glanced around quickly — why the devil should the gathering shadows pick this time to remind me of the black leopard the police hadn't netted? My left hand touched my sword-cane by the side of my chair.
I was taking too long, I knew, making Eduina and Roxane think me timid.
Then I realized I had drained the goblet and was carefully setting it on the floor.
The Riesling's mild astringent sting was pleasant in my throat. There was no other taste.
LONG moments passed. I leaned back. I no longer worried about black leopards or what others thought of me. I was feeling relaxed and at home, as if some age-old stricture was being loosened. I wasn’t even bothered that the drug was having no particular effect on me. Why did human beings go around tense and unhappy, thinking everything mattered so much? They missed the real juice of life.
I looked at Blondine, since that was easiest. The room was almost black new, but the Doctor must have switched a soft spotlight on her, perhaps to give us a common focal point, for her complexion glowed. I lost myself in her face. I’d always thought it was jewel-juggling or tiffany-flattery when a poet spoke of a girl having lips like rubies or rose-petals, cheeks like mother-of-pearl faintly shot with pink, eyes like sapphires, hair like a cloud of the finest gold wires. Now I realized that — funny! — it could be literally true.
Roxane chuckled. I was glad she appreciated my point.
“Do you notice any effects, Arthur?”
“The colors are richer,” I heard myself tell Dr. Dragonet.
“Colors are richer,” he repeated quietly. “In fully fifty percent of cases that is the first reaction of LSD or any of the mind-enlarging drugs, including my elixir. I suggest this is because they — and especially my elixir — open the mind of the drug-taker to the minds of those around him, so that he sees things not only through his own eyes, but also through those of others, which since we all see things and even colors differently, has an inevitable enriching effect. Incidentally, this would explain why mind-enlarging drugs have their greatest effect when taken in company, their least when taken alone.”
Midway in this statement, he had clicked his fingers and I knew that Roxane had drunk. I agreed with what he said, in an idle sort of way, but continued to watch Blondine. Now it seemed that the light on her was moonlight — the Doctor has full-spectrum illumination in his house — for her lips had gone toward grape or amethyst, the mother-of-pearl or opal of her cheeks was faintly violet, the sapphire of her eyes more intense, the gold of her hair paler but with a note of turquoise or, no, jade. It might not be moonlight, but a scene undersea, with Blondine a jewel-scaled mermaid.
“Roxane,” I said, “there’s more green in those wrap-around glasses than I’d have guessed.”
Only then did I realize the implication of what I had said. Not that it much surprised me. Meanwhile there had come another resonant click: signal for Professor Seibold to drink.
“Oui,” Roxane replied softly. “And you, monsieur, have an exalted vision of girls. Expensive too.”
“Hugo,” I observed, “you’ve got almost too much light on Blondine.”
“Young man,” Father Minturn answered for him, “the room is nearly pitch dark.”
I NOTED that except for Blondine the room was, well, moderately dark. I continued to watch her face. Gradually a discordant, almost angry note came into it. Not anything obvious. She was still beautiful, but it was as if her face had been dissected by almost invisible cuts into its parts — forehead, eyes, nose, etc. — like a subtly cubistic painting. After a bit I began also to see, faintly, a red network beneath her skin and then, more faintly still, a silvery one: blood vessels and nerves.
It occurred to me that Professor Seibold was making his contribution to the image — and that if this was the way a materialist saw the world and pretty girls, I didn’t want any more than the sample.
At the same time the image was getting a surreal appearance, suggestive of Piccaso, which puzzled me, since I hadn’t thought the professor was consciously art-minded, only analytic.
I suppose there must have been another click a while back, though I hadn’t heard it, for a palely glowing tone came into Blondine’s face, soothing the discords, brushing them over with a moonlight like Roxane’s but milkier, so that the face acquired an additional quality like that of a china statue. This must be coming from Father Minturn, the idealizer, the spiritualizer.
But the Picasso-look was stronger than ever. The image of Blondine was appearing to me both full-face and, at the same time, in complete profile.
Then I realized that Roxane and I were seeing her full face, while Seibold and Minturn, sitting a quarter way around the circle from us, were viewing her profile. It was as simple as that.
All the varied images still added up to a girl’s face. The totality, though strange, was still beautiful.
There was still another click. This time I heard it and I watched Sister Marcia’s goblet creep up under her heavy black veil — which I still couldn’t see through, although the light came up on her as I watched her, as it did on everything I watched.
There was an odd prolonged sipping or sucking sound, barely audible, and the goblet came out empty.
Just then Blondine began to speak again, a note of agitation rippling the sweet monotony.
“The helmeted invaders are firing the blue grass with flamethrowers! Towering red-yellow walls, smoke-topped, rush with the wind across the great savannas or creep against it. The elvish folk crouch unresisting in their grassy hollows, eyes shut, emaciated from privation or from intense thought.”
I began to get a vision of that too — there were ghostly flames between us — but just then all my attention was engulfed by another change taking place in Blondine’s hair and form. It was an image of her back — Sister Marcia sat across the circle from me — but it was an image which broke up the gold of her hair and the white of her dress into a checkerboard of large dots, like a very coarse-grained newspaper reproduction.
It was Blondine as seen through an insect’s eyes, or possibly an arachnid’s or chilopod’s.
At the same time I found myself salivating and thinking, to my horror, that Blondine would be good to eat. The only reassuring thing about the impulse this thought gave me was that it seemed to be strictly inhibited.
I ASKED myself if Dr. Dragonet might conceivably have smuggled into our group one of the giant centipedal Martians from the Greater Cosmic Fellowship. I found this difficult to accept, as I had actually never seen one of the beasts myself and, to tell truth, half doubted all his stories about them. But if it were so, he was on closer terms with them than he’d ever told me — and of course the black-nun disguise a brilliant one. Mars — Sister Marcia — oh Good Lord!
Eduina’s hand tugged gently at my elbow. I leaned toward her. She whispered in my ear, “Arthur I think you know that Uncle is an ardent de-segregationist. Just keep that in mind.”
In my excitement I must have missed another click, for now I heard Jay Astar say lazily, “This’ll be only my second drink today. Just another touch of wine and Doc’s good old Elixir,” and I saw him drain his goblet.
“Jastar and I had a session this morning,” the Doctor explained casually, though with a hint of annoyance.
I felt a stab of jealousy that the stereo star should be deeper in the Doctor’s secrets than I.
Eduina and I were still leaning together. Impulsively I whispered, “Has that big white ape from the underside of the Panhandle ever made a pass at you?”
“Dozens,” she assured me impatiently, as though I should have known the answer to that one. “I brush him off as gently as I can, he’s such a child. My heart’s still mostly with the family — you know, Uncle Hugo.”
“Child gorilla?” I asked, still whispering, of course. “Another of those poor panting leopards?”
She shrugged, then quirked me a quick smile.
At that happy (to me) moment, Blondine burst out more agitatedly with: “I’ve looked into the helmet of one of the destroyers! They’re a cat-people, black-furred!”
There was a flurry of small movements around the circle, touched off by the intensity of her voice, I suppose — or perhaps others here knew about the second black leopard. I know I started to think about it again — first the wild notion that Blondine had materialized on earth one of the cat-people invading the blue planet, then Dr. Dragonet’s suggestion about a subconscious mind on the loose in animal form. Whose would it be, I wondered? Professor Seibold had shown constant irritation and a half repressed anger — that might be indicative. Yet the milky calm of Father Minturn’s mind might be an even stronger sign of murky unconscious depths. Eduina dressed like a black leopard — that could be a clue; while Sister Marcia… there were simply too many hints! Why, even I… So far the elixir had given me no sight of my own unconscious mind, as the Doctor had said it would. Did that mean my subconscious had gone out of me? True, I had struck at the leopard, but would I know my own subconscious mind if I met it? Would anybody?
THE room seemed to have grown darker now, although Blondine’s strange image still was bright, and I began to catch movements in the shadows behind the chairs — movements which stopped as soon as I looked straight at them. I wanted to call for real lights.
There was a click — signal for Eduina to drink. We’d be finished soon, I thought hopefully.
I returned to Blondine's image. Jastar’s drinking seemed to have added nothing to it at all. Nothing rich in that mind, I told myself with a certain satisfaction.
Or perhaps the effects of the elixir were wearing off for me. Even the quintuple-exposure of Blondine was beginning to darken.
Yet at the same time I began to feel a growing tension and I sensed again the illusion — or reality — of movement in the shadows by the walls, as if some sinuous black beast were pacing there. Half rising, I openly peered around the room — even behind my chair, I have to admit. I didn’t see any slinking animal either, but it could have been hiding behind one of the chairs.
The tension continued to grow. Sister Marcia was leaning forward now, looking taller and thinner than ever. Father Minium’s hands made fat white blobs where they gripped the arms of his chair. Professor Seibold was writhing his narrow shoulders and jogging his right knee very fast, like a chess player with a minute in which to make twenty moves. Roxane no longer smiled below her wrap-around glasses. Eduina had slipped off her cloak and was holding it over her left arm. Dr. Dragonet was sitting very erect, his gaze switching quickly from side to side. Only Jay Astar leaned back, serene — or just stupid.
I was leaning forward myself now, my left hand gripping my sword cane, my right hand on-its hilt.
Her soft fur bristling, Impet came erect behind Father Minturn’s shoulders with a spitting hiss. The plump priest threw himself forward on the floor. I didn’t blame him one bit.
At first I was sure Impet was hissing at Sister Marcia. Then I saw that the target of the cat’s alarm and anger lay beyond. Out of the shadow behind Jay Astar’s chair there rose a narrow, high-domed, shimmering black muzzle with ears like silky spear points, eyes that were pulsing blue sparks, fangs that gleamed like steel.
Eduina sprang to the seat of her chair. Stamping on its arm and waving her black cloak forward, she shouted at the top of her voice at the black apparition, ”Gato! Hey, gato!”
She was citing the black leopard as if it were a bull; she was calling, “Hey, cat!”
The leopard vaulted over Jastar and his chair in one enormous bound — a great curving brushstroke of glimmering black against the lesser darkness. But I had snatched my sword from its sheath and now I lunged high.
A dazzling blue flicker ran along the blade. Lightning flashed in the room, showing the pictures on the walls.
The blade bent double and broke. I felt twice the shock I had on the terrace, but my vision didn’t go. I drew back to thrust again with my numb hand, not knowing even if it still held the broken sword.
THE black leopard came weaving forward again, then turned abruptly and sprang sideways, out of range of my defense, at Roxane.
An instant earlier Sister Marcia had launched herself forward, seeming to lengthen almost impossibly, in a long arc of her own, her black habit streaming. She dove over Father Minturn and Blondine, whose image had dimmed almost to darkness now, and met the leopard in midair. They dropped to the floor together and for a moment there was a scuffling and a horrid dry rustling, then sudden silence, broken almost immediately by our frantic voices.
The darkness was now complete.
“Keep quiet and keep your places!” Dr. Dragonet commanded.
A few moments later enough lights for an operating theater came on. They showed us all on our feet, with one exception.
Sister Marcia was standing like a slightly disheveled black pillar beside the door, half open now, to the terrace.
There was no sight of the black leopard anywhere.
In that mechanical voice, so chillingly suggestive of a voder rather than speech from a living throat, the black nun said, “I must return to my devotions. Thank you, Doctor, for an interesting session. Good night, friends.”
Taking mincing steps and ducking her head to miss the lintel, which would have cleared my own head by two feet, she rustled from the room.
I wanted to ask her, “Do subconscious minds taste good, Sister?”
Professor Seibold wiped his forehead and gave of with an inelegant, unscientific “Whew!” The one of us remaining in his chair, so quiet he might be a stereo still of himself, or dead, was Jay Astar. But when the Doctor lightly shook his shoulder, he came to with a headshake and a “Huh?” and then said in a voice from which most of the glamorous resonance was gone, “How’d the session go, Doc? I must of fell asleep, though I never thought I’d even relax, let alone nap. That Black Sister’s starched underthings kept rustling like one of the big centipedes we had down in my grand-daddy’s house in Old Mississip.” “I heard nothing,” Father Minturn said, a shade loftily. “But then I don’t listen for such things.”
Jay stood up shakily. “Gee, I feel awful weak on my pins. Like I was empty inside.”
The Doctor steadied him, saying, “Karl will drive you home.” Then, “I think we’d all be better for a breath of fresh air.” He indicated the terrace.
I wanted to go beside Eduina to compliment her on her technique as a torero — or gatero! — and maybe fish for a compliment back on my own showing as a matador — or gatador — but she was chattering excitedly with Roxane. Father Minturn followed, half supporting Jastar, and behind them went Professor Seibold and Blondine. Dr. Dragonet gently held me back and as we drifted after them, he leaned his head and told me confidentially, “I suspected it was dastard unconscious mind all along. I like the film colony — I make my living off them! — but some of the newcomers are so single-mindedly ambitious and pushing that they’re a public danger. They need their teeth — I mean their drives — drawn and I look upon it as a sort of civic duty to do so. Now he’ll be a hollow man for months.”
“Won't it ruin his career?” I asked, not too concerned.
”No. Most actors are only lay figures — puppets. His directors will position him properly and use a needle spot to make his eyes gleam and re-resonate his voice with an echo chamber and maybe use collodion to twist his mouth into the smirk his fans love, until something of his old energy returns.”
I asked, “Would being rejected by just one girl fill a man like Jastar with such seething resentments?”
He looked at me sharply. “So Eduina’s been telling you things? Yes, of course, the littler the big man, the more sensitive he is to slights.”
“What do you think would have happened, Doctor, if the leopard had reached Eduina or Roxane?”
He shrugged. “Perhaps nothing. Perhaps a mild electric shock. I think she’d have had her face scratched off: Jay has — or had — a very strong feminine component, completely repressed.”
“One more thing, Doctor. Is Sister Marcia really — ” I began, but we were on the terrace now, near the others, and he lightly squeezed my arm for silence.
“Some creatures, even highly intelligent ones, feed on the body electricity of emotion as well as on flesh,” he whispered briskly. “That's all I can tell you.”
Now we were all under the stars, bright in the wind-swept sky. Automatically my gaze went up to Cygnus, that great five-starred swan winging high through the dark. Blondine looked up and then the others too, as she said tranquilly, “A terrible cold radiates from the pale blue dreaming elvish folk. The great fires in the blue grass shrink and flicker and die. The helmeted invaders rush back to their boats, but some of them are frozen in their tracks and shattered by their hurtling comrades — their heat vanished like neutrinos or spectrons. The boats take off and then the spaceships that brought them. But — ” there was a catch in her voice “ — the elvish folk crouch frozen too. Forever frozen, unless…
At that instant, from a point in the heavens between Cygnus and Lyra, there came a tiny flash of blue light which lasted perhaps a second. The blue was the same shade as the grass of Blondine’s planet. Real light, I asked myself, or the reflected gleam of consciousness? I had no way of knowing, but murmurs told me the others had seen it too.
“It didn’t even come from Cygnus,” Professor Seibold protested, possibly in some last-ditch inner defense of his materialism.
”No,” the Doctor agreed. “Perhaps the star towing Blondine’s planet has moved that far during the millennia it takes its physical light to reach us. Your own point, professor.”
“Doctor,” I asked, “do you think there’s any possible connection between the black felinoids invading the blue planet and our own black leopard?”
He shrugged thoughtfully. “It is one of those grand coincidences, or congruences, which we’ll only begin to understand when we’ve seriously studied the innumerable fields of psionics for fifty years or so.”
We asked Blondine questions but, “I don’t see anything any more. It’s over,” was all she would answer.
I joined Eduina and Roxane. The latter, with a grin, drifted away toward the Doctor, who was calling, “Karl! Better get the car out.”
JUST then a siren sounded far off and came weaving up through the hills. We all stopped to listen to it — a little apprehensively, I imagine. Even the Doctor’s elixir leaves one a shade jittery.
I scanned around. Below us, the lawns and flowerbeds and and gilt domed buildings of the Greater Cosmic Fellowship were dark, except for the tiny golden flame of one peace candle burning steadily.
Presently there was no doubt of the siren’s destination, for it grew very loud and high white headlights came hurtling with it up the road. A squeal of brakes, a clatter of footsteps, and then three uniformed policemen and two detectives had run up the stairway onto the black-flagged terrace.
“Any of you here found a little black suitcase, sealed?” the first detective breathlessly demanded of us.
Karl stepped out of the shadows and handed him the suitcase I’d earlier seen lying in the bushes.
The first detective grabbed it, examined the seals closely, breathed a “Thank God,” and then — although the other detective was signing him to be quiet — burst out with, “You people have saved our bacon! This suitcase has got in it the biggest haul of heroin we ever made in a single raid! When they went to get the leopard, some boob grabbed it up, thinking it was a case of teargas bombs, and then lost it here. We owe you a vote of thanks!”
The second detective pulled him toward the stairs.
Heroin, I thought contemptuously — and breathed a prayer for all poor thrill-seekers hooked on mind-darkening drugs instead of mind-enlarging ones — and administered without the benefit of Dr. Dragonet.
Karl helped Jastar down the stairs after the police. Professor Seibold followed with Father Minturn. Roxane, Blondine, and the Doctor went inside. I was alone with Eduina.
“Darling,” I began, turning to her, “as a gatero you were magnificent — ”
She interrupted me with, “Verbal compliments are un-cool, Arthur.”
I put my arms on her shoulders and drew her to me.
“Arthur!” Dr. Dragonet’s voice came sharply from the doorway. “I told you not to smooch my niece. Come inside, Eduina.”
I tightened my hands on her shoulders, but she shook her head slightly, brushed her lips against mine, and drew away from me with a smile.
I thought, as she crossed the terrace, Damn the man! Aren’t two nieces enough for him?