Walter Miller - Dark Benediction

“Why?”

“Because…” He paused. Lisa felt his urge to explain his urgency, felt him suppress it, felt for a moment his loneliness in the awareness of his uniqueness and the way it isolated him from humanity.

“You must be doing new work,” the girl offered, “if you feel the lack of such a theoretical approach. I just can’t imagine an invariantive approach to psychology—or an all defining set of laws for it, either. Why do you need such a psychological ‘Relativity’?”

He hesitated, frowning down at his plate, watching a fly crawl around its rim. “I’m interested in—in the quantitative aspects of nerve impulses. I—I suspect that there is such a thing as neural resonance.”

She laughed politely and shook her head. “I’ll stick to my empirical data-gathering, thank you.”

She felt him thinking:

“She could understand, if I could show her data. But my data is all subjective, experimental, personal. I share it with that Waverly woman, but she is only a social thinker, analytically shallow, refusing even to recognize facts. Why did it have to be her? She’s flighty, emotional, and in a cultural rut. If she doesn’t conform, she thinks she’s nuts. But then at least she’s a woman—and if this is really a mutation, we’ll have to arrange for some children…”

Lisa gasped and sat bolt upright. Her shock revealed her presence to him, and he dropped his fork with a clatter.

“Lisa!”

She wrenched herself free of him abruptly. She angrily stalked about the house, slamming doors and muttering her rage. The nerve! The maddening, presumptuous, ill-mannered, self-centered, overly educated boor!

Arrange for some children indeed! An impossible situation!

As her anger gathered momentum, she contacted him again—like a snake striking. Thought was thunder out of a dark cloud.

“I’m decent and I’m respectable, Mr. Grearly! I have a husband and three fine children and I love them, and you can go to hell! I never want to see you again or have you prowling around my mind. Get out and STAY out. And if you ever bother me again—I’ll—I’ll kill you.”

He was outdoors, striding across the campus alone. She saw the gray buildings, immersed in twilight, felt the wind on his face, hated him. He was thinking nothing, letting himself follow her angry flow of thought. When she finished, his thoughts began like the passionate pleading of a poem.

He was imagining a human race with telepathic abilities, in near-perfect communication with one another. So many of the world’s troubles could be traced to imperfect communication of ideas, to misunderstandings.

Then he thought briefly of Sarah—the nondescript laboratory girl he had taken to dinner—and Lisa realized he was in love with Sarah. There were sadness and resentment here. He couldn’t have Sarah now, not if he were to be certain of perpetuating the mutant characteristic. The Waverly woman ought to be good for three or four children yet, before she reached middle age.

Lisa stood transfixed by shock. Then he was thinking directly to her.

“ I’m sorry. You’re a beautiful, intelligent woman—but I don’t love you. We’re not alike. But I’m stuck with you and you’re stuck with me, because I’ve decided it’s going to be that way. I can’t convince you since your thinking habits are already fixed, so I won’t even try. I’m sorry it has to be against your will, but in any event it has to be. And now that I know what you’re like, I don’t dare wait—for fear you’ll do something to mess things up.”

“No!” she screamed, watching the scenery that moved past his field of vision.

He had left the campus and was walking up the street—toward her neighborhood. He was walking with the briskness of purpose. He was coming to her house.

“Call the police!” she thought, and tried to dissolve him out of her mind.

But this time he followed, clung to her thoughts, would not let her go. It was like two flashlight beams playing over a wall, one trying to escape, the other following its frantic circle of brightness.

She staggered, groped her way toward the hall, which was confused with a superimposed image of a sidewalk and a street. A phantom automobile came out of the hall wall, drove through her and vanished. Double exposures. He stared at a street light and it blinded her. At last she found the phone, but he was laughing at her.

“Eight seven six five twenty-one Mary had a little lamb seven seven sixty-seven yesterday was May March April…”

He was deliberately filling her mind with confusion. She fumbled at the directory, trying to find the police, but he thought a confused jumble of numbers and symbols, and they scampered across the page, blurring the lines.

She whimpered and groped at the phone-dial, trying to get the operator, but he was doing something with his fingertips, and she couldn’t get the feel of the dial.

On her third try, it finally worked.

“Information,” said a pleasant impersonal voice.

She had to get the police! She had to say

“Pease porridge hot, pease porridge cold, pease porridge in the pot, nine days pretty pony parrot played peacefully plentiwise pease porridge…”

He was jamming her speech centers with gibberish, and she blurted nonsense syllables into the mouthpiece.

“You’ll have to speak more distinctly, madam. I can’t understand you.”

“Poress, Policer…”

“The police? Just a moment.”

A series of jumbled sounds and visions clouded her mind. Then a masculine voice rumbled, “Desk, Sergeant Harris.”

She found a clear path through the confusion and gasped, “Three-oh-oh-three Willow Drive—’mergency come quick—man going to—”

“Three-oh-oh-three Willow. Check. We’ll have a car right over there.”

She hung up quickly—or tried to—but she couldn’t find the cradle. Then her vision cleared, and she screamed. She wasn’t in the hall at all!

The telephone was an eggbeater!

His voice came through her trapped panic.

“You might as well give in,” he told her with a note of sadness. “ I know how to mess you up like that, you see. And you haven’t learned to retaliate yet. We’re going to cooperate with this evolutionary trend, whether you like it or not—but it would be more pleasant if you agree to it.”

“No!”

“All right, but I’m coming anyway. I hoped it wouldn’t be like this. I wanted to convince you gradually. Now I know that it’s impossible.”

He was still ten blocks away. She had a few minutes in which to escape. She bolted for the door. A black shadow-shape loomed up in the twilight, flung its arms wide, and emitted an apelike roar.

She yelped and darted back, fleeing frantically for the front. A boa constrictor lay coiled in the hall; it slithered toward her. She screamed again and raced to-ward the stairway.

She made it to the top and looked back. The living room was filling slowly with murky water. She rushed shrieking into the bedroom and bolted the door.

She smelled smoke. Her dress was on fire! The flames licked up, searing her skin.

She tore at it madly, and got it off, but her slip was afire. She ripped it away, scooped up the flaming clothing on a transom hook, opened the screen, and dropped them out the window. Flames still licked about her, and she rolled up in the bed-clothing to snuff them out.

Quiet laughter.

“New syndrome,” he called to her pleasantly. “ The patient confuses someone else’s fantasy with her own reality. Not schizophrenia—duophrenia, maybe?”

She lay sobbing in hysterical desperation. He was just down the street now, coming rapidly up the walk. A car whisked slowly past. He felt her terrified despair and pitied her. The torment ceased.