Mack Reynolds - Earth Unaware

Ed opened the door, stepped in and navigated a few yards down an entry way to what was obviously a living room cum library. He was astonished by the layout. The room could have been a movie set depicting a home of yesteryear. There were some prints that Ed vaguely recognized from way back, but they certainly had no faintest resemblance to the current Surrealistic-Revival School that was currently in. You’d think that the owner had hung the things for… well, possibly because he liked them. You could get a reputation as a twitch awfully quick doing that sort of thing. And the chairs, tables, furniture. Right from an antique shop, several decades out of style.

A voice said, “Hi, friend. Come to see about Manny Levy for that swami show?”

Ed Wonder looked at his host, bringing his mind from his surprise at the bizarre room the other affected. “Swami?” he said blankly.

“The fire walker. You called a couple of days ago about a fire walker. What’s the matter with you, Little Ed? Remember me… Jim Westbrook? Sometimes panelist on the Far Out Hour, at a going rate of fifty dollars per appearance, cash in advance.”

Ed Wonder shook his head. “Listen,” he said. “Where’ve you been the last twenty-four hours?”

“Right here.”

“In this house?”

“Of course. I’ve been doing some concentrated work.”

“Haven’t you turned your TV set on?”

“I haven’t got a TV set.”

Ed Wonder stared at him as though the offbeat engineer had gone mad. “You haven’t got a TV set? Everybody’s got a TV set. How do you tune in on…”

Jim Westbrook said patiently, “I suppose if something came up I wanted to follow, I could wander over to some neighbor’s or friend’s. But, offhand, I can’t think of any such programs coming up for the past several years.”

Ed Wonder closed his eyes in pain. He opened them and said, “I don’t have time to go into it now, but, well, what do you do with your free time, listen to radio, go to the movies?”

“I don’t have any free time,” the other told him reasonably. “I get my rhabdomancy jobs once or twice a week. Then down in the cellar I’ve got my darkroom, electronics shop, woodworking shop, and I’m working up a small machine shop operation. Besides—”

“All right,” Ed said. “That’s enough. Already you sound like triplets.”

“Sit down and relax,” Jim said easily.

Ed looked around the room. He grimaced before sinking into one of the prehistoric-looking overstuffed chairs. Surprisingly, it was comfortable, no matter how kooky so far as style was concerned. It must have gone back to at least the 1950s.

“Listen, Jim, the swami who walks on coals is out—at least temporarily. You’ll find out why, later. Just now, I don’t have time to go into the detail I suspect you’d demand. What I came over to ask you is this. Are miracles possible?”

Jim Westbrook dropped into the chair opposite his guest, his face alert. “What kind of miracles?”

“Something effecting, well, everybody. Say, a universal curse.”

The engineer pursed his lips. “You know, one of the difficulties with these subjects is our terminology. Use a term such as miracle, or curse, or magic, and intellectual hackles immediately go up, as conditioned. But without getting into semantics, to answer your question, yes. There would seem to have been miracles, and, if so, there probably still are, or, at least could be.”

Ed held up a hand. “Now, wait a minute. Name just one.”

“You can have a dozen if you want. Moses parting the waters. Jesus feeding the multitudes with a few fish and seven loaves of bread.”

Ed said, in disappointment, “It’s debated whether or not either of them ever lived.”

Jim Westbrook shrugged. “The Moslems are just as convinced that Mohammed performed various miracles, and nobody would deny his historicity. Or take Saint Teresa, of Avila. She could evidently levitate. I suppose that would come under the head of miracle, or magic, to most of her contemporaries and most of ours. I just object to the terms. I thing that levitation is a, well, normal attribute of some persons. The fact that it is poorly understood doesn’t make it a miracle when someone such as, say, Saint Dunstan, the Archbishop of Canterbury, performs the act. Or, offhand, among others I can think of who could levitate were Saints Philip Benitas, Bernard Ptolomei, Dominic, Francis Xavier and Albert of Sicily. Then there was Savonarola, who was seen floating a couple of feet or so off his dungeon cell floor just before they burned him to death.”

“All of them religious fanatics,” Ed complained. “I don’t trust their witnesses. A fanatic religious crank can see anything when he’s keyed up. I’m an old hand, what with my program.”

His host twisted his mouth. “Well, then there was D. D. Home. His witnesses were far from religious cranks when they saw him float out of a window and then return through another one, ten stories off the ground. And Mrs. Guppy and the Reverend Stainton Moses, all fairly recent and all well checked upon by figures of prominence in the scientific world.”

Ed Wonder was unhappy. He rubbed the end of his nose with his left forefinger. He felt an urge to scratch his now nonexistent mustache.

Jim Westbrook looked at him, eyebrows slightly raised, waiting for the next.

Just to say something, Ed made a sweeping gesture to encompass the room. “What’re you trying to put over with this kooky room, Jim?” When the engineer didn’t seem to get the question, he added, “All this out of date furniture, no autobar, no TV, primitive art, if you can call it art, on the walls.”

Jim Westbrook said wryly, “Velazquez and Murillo weren’t exactly Cro-Magnon cavewall painters, Little Ed.”

“Yeah, but what do your friends think about all this twitchy layout?”

Westbrook considered him, his mouth twisted slightly in sour humor. “I don’t have a great many friends, real friends, these days, Little Ed. Those I do have, usually agree with me. They think this room is comfortable, which is the basic thing, and utilitarian, which is next. Beyond that…” he laughed “…at least some of them prefer Velazquez to the Surrealistic-Revival agonies of Jackson Salvadore.”

It came to Ed in a quick surprise that the heavy-set, alert engineer across from him didn’t particularly like Ed Wonder. It came as a surprise, because Ed had known the other for some years and had always got along with him. He’d had him on the Far Out Hour several times, since the man had a bent for offbeat subjects and seemed to be an authority on everything from parapsychology to space travel. Above all, he had a mischievous love of baiting scientific conventional wisdom and was a veritable Charles Fort in finding material with which to butcher the sacred cow.

He had always thought of Jim Westbrook as a friend, and only now did he know the other didn’t reciprocate. Before thought, he blurted, “Jim, why do you dislike me?”

The other’s eyebrows went up again and he held his silence for a long moment. Finally he said slowly, “It’s not the sort of question people usually ask, Little Ed. When they do, they seldom really want it answered.”

“No. Tell me.” Those words came out too, without volition.

Jim Westbrook leaned back in his chair. “All right, friend. The fact is I don’t dislike you. I’m neutral. You know what? You’re a stereotype, like practically everybody else. We’re becoming a nation of stereotypes. Everybody is a stereotype. Why in the world should all girls want to look like the current sex symbol, Brigitte Loren? But they do. The short and the fat and the tall. And all ambitious young businessmen want to look exactly the same, in their Brooks Brothers suits. They’re scared to death not to look exactly the same. They want to conform to the point where conformity becomes ludicrous. What in the hell has happened to our civilization? Remember when we had the term individuality? Rugged individualism? Now we’re frightened not to look exactly like the man next door looks, not to live in the identically same sort of house, drive the same kind of car.”