They had to patch me and rehydrate me for three days before they could even think about putting my new liver in. In the old days they would have kept me sedated the whole time, but, of course, they kept waking me up every couple of hours for some feedback training on monitoring my hepatic flows. I hated it, because it was all sickness and
pain and nagging from Dr. Morius and the nurses and I could have wished for the old days back again, except, of course, that in the old days I would have died.
But by the fourth day I hardly hurt at all, except when I moved, and they were letting me take my fluids by mouth instead of the other way.
I realized I was going to be alive for a while, and looked-upon my surroundings, and found them good.
There’s no such thing as a season in the Spindle, but the Quackery is all sentimental about tradition and ties with the Mother Planet. They were playing scenes of fleecy white clouds on the wall panels, and the air from the ventilator ducts smelled of green leaves and lilac.
“Happy spring,” I said to Dr. Morius.
“Shut up,” he said, shifting a couple of the needles that pincushioned my abdomen and watching the tell-tales. “Um.” He pursed his lips, pulled out a couple of needles, and said:
“Well, let’s see, Walthers. We’ve taken out the splenovenal shunt. Your new liver is functioning well, although you’re not flushing wastes through as fast as you ought to. We’ve got your ion levels back up to something like a human being, and most of your tissues have a little moisture in them again. Altogether,” he scratched his head, “yes, in general, I would say you’re alive, so presumably the operation was a success.”
“Don’t be a funny doctor,” I said. “When do I get out of here?”
“Like right now?” he asked thoughtfully. “We could use the bed. Got a lot of paying patients coming in.”
Now, one of the advantages of having blood in my brain instead of the poison soup it had been living on was that I could think reasonably clearly. So I knew right away that he was kidding me; I wouldn’t have been there if I hadn’t been a paying patient, one way or another, and though I couldn’t imagine how, I was willing to wait a while to find out.
Anyway, I was more interested in getting out. They packed me up in wetsheets and rolled me through the Spindle to Sub Vastra’s place. Dorrie was there before me, and the third of Vastra’s house fussed over us both, lamb broth and that flat hard bread they like, before tucking us in for a good long rest. There was only the one bed, but Dorrie didn’t seem to mind, and anyway at that point the question was academic. Later on, not so academic. After a couple of days of that I was up and as good as I ever was.
By then I had found out who paid my bill at the Quackery. For about a minute I had hoped it was me, quickly filthy rich from the spoils of our tunnel, but I knew that was impossible. We could have made money only on the sly, and we were both too near dead when we got back to the Spindle to conceal anything.
So the military had moved in and taken everything, but they had shown they had a heart. Atrophied and flinty, but a heart. They’d gone into the dig while I was still getting glucose enemas in my sleep, and had been pleased enough with what they’d found. I even tried to get Sergeant Littleknees a finder’s fee. Not much, to be sure. But enough to save my life. It turned out to be enough to pay off the loosely secured checks I’d written to finance the expedition, and surgical fee and hospital costs, and just about enough left over to put a down payment on a Heechee hut of our own.
For a while it bothered me that they wouldn’t tell me what they’d found. I even tried to get Sergeant Littleknees drunk when she was in the Spindle on furlough. But Dorrie was right there, and how drunk can you get one girl when another girl is right there watching you? Probably Eve Littleknees didn’t know anyhow. Probably no one did except
a few weapons specialists. But it had to be something, because of the cash award, and most of all because they didn’t prosecute for trespass on the military reservation. And so we get along, the two of us. Or three of us.
Dorrie turned out to be good at selling fire pearls to the Terry tourists, especially when her pregnancy began to show. She kept us in eating money until the high season started, and by then I found I was a sort of celebrity, which I parlayed into a bank loan and a new airbody, and so we’re doing well enough. I’ve promised that I’ll marry her if our kid turns out to be a boy, but as a matter of fact I’m going to do it anyway. She was a great help, especially with my own private project back there at the dig. She couldn’t have known what I wanted to bring back Cochenour’s body for, but she didn’t argue, and sick and wretched as she was, she helped me get it into the airbody lock.
Actually, I wanted it very much.
It’s not actually a
new
liver, of course. Probably it’s not even secondhand. Heaven knows where Cochenour bought it, but I’m sure it wasn’t original equipment with him. But it works. And bastard though he was, I kind of liked him in a way, and I don’t mind at all the fact that I’ve got a part of him with me always.
In his long career, Frederik Pohl has been interviewed a number of times, especially on radio. In the course of his public career he has met both those who do magic and those who debunk it. He has written stories in which someone is fooled or tricked for some reason, and some in which a trickster is himself tricked.
The protagonist of “The Things That Happen” is a mentalist and a very, very good one. There are always those, however, who doubt the truth of such powers. When such antagonists meet, interesting things are bound to happen, as they do in this subtly twisted tale from 1985.
When I do a college date all I promise is to give a forty-minute talk with half an hour additional for “discussion.” That’s in the contract. There isn’t a word about bending any spoons, or reading minds, or saying what somebody has in his pocket. I never say I’ll do anything at all, outside of talk for a while. Sometimes I don’t. I’ve got my memorized BAPS, or Basic All-Purpose Speech, which tells them how I don’t understand my gifts, and how sometimes they work and sometimes they don’t, and how maybe (I make a joke out of it) there’s some truth to what somebody told me, that superior beings from the planet Clarion keep interfering with my gifts. Then I tell them a bunch of funny little stories about Johnny Carson and Merv Griffin and various celebrities I’ve appeared with … and then, after I’ve said thank-you-very-much to let them know it’s time to applaud, when some of them start yelling out, “Stop my watch for me, Hans!” I’ll just shake my head. “Not tonight, please,” I say. “I just don’t feel a thing, please.” And I let them hiss.
Fritzl didn’t like that. He said if they hissed too often there wouldn’t be any more college dates, but then I got really tired of what Fritzl said. Besides, there hadn’t been that many college lecture dates lately anyway.
In fact, the whole paranormal powers business had been really slow for me lately, which was why I let Fritzl talk me into this enterprise. I didn’t want to. But he kept on saying, “Fifty. Thousand. Dollars.” the way he did, and I couldn’t hold out.
We did it carefully. First he staked the office out for a couple of days, and then I turned up cold one early afternoon. The guy and the woman were out to lunch, and the bookkeeper was filling in for the usual receptionist while she had her lunch. Perfect timing. I walked in the door, big grin, a little apologetic. “I’d like to see Dr. Smith or Miss Baker, please. My name is Hans Geissen. Oh, they’re not? Well, I’ll just wait, if you don’t mind.” And I didn’t give the woman much of a chance to mind, because I was off
rubbernecking around the walls before she answered. I was careful not to give her any reason to worry about me. There was a railing that divided Them from Us, and I stayed on the unprivileged side. But I didn’t sit down. I walked around the waiting room, looking at the scrolls and the certificates and the portraits. There was a Doctor of Divinity sheepskin made out to the Reverend Samuel Shipperton Smith, from some denominational college in Hobart, Tasmania. There was a portrait of a skinny woman in Grecian robes, with a Grecian hairdo and holding a Grecian kind of lyre or harp or whatever they are. The Honorable Miss Gwendoline Stella Baker was the name on the gold plate on the frame.
There’s always plenty of interesting stuff in a waiting room, if you know how to look for it. What you don’t want is for anyone to see you looking at it, so as I passed the coffee table by the orange plastic-covered couch I picked up a copy of
People
and paged it slowly as I wandered. I didn’t overdo it. When I thought I’d done enough I sat down with the magazine in my lap and read it assiduously, looking up not at all, until the changing of the guard. When the real receptionist came back from her Burger King hold-the-lettuce Whopper and the two of them whispered over me I didn’t raise my head. The bookkeeper scuttled away. The receptionist took her seat and immediately began a whispery phone conversation. Time passed. I let it pass. When, half an hour later, she disappeared into a private office in response to a faint murmur, I was when she came out just where she had left me when she went in. “Mr. Geissen?” she said.
I looked up, blinking a couple of times as though trying to remember what I was doing there.
“Dr. Smith and Miss Baker will see you in just a few minutes in the conference room.”
“Oh, thank you,” I said. “I’ll be ready.” But the fact was that I already was.
“You got by the people at S.R.L,” Fritzl said, “you got by the people at M.LT., you got by Carson and ‘Good Morning America’ and the ‘Today’ show. You can handle these two people.”
“Naturally I can handle them,” I said. “It isn’t a question of
handling
them. It’s a question of what you can go to jail for.”
“You just don’t make any claims, stupid,” he said. The way he talked to me!
“Of course I don’t make any claims.” I never did. I always said these things weren’t under my control. I didn’t promise a thing. I stayed on the move, sure, and if I got a chance to get away with it I’d turn your watch back or unzip your fly, and when your ballpoint pen breaks I’m just as surprised as you are. But if I don’t get any chances, well, then I just give you the shamefaced grin that says some days are like that. “Get me a drink,” I said, and got up and went over to the window. We were staying in the Plaza. A suite. Not a very big suite, but do you know how much even the little ones cost? But you can’t be at the Y.M.C.A. when you want to do the “Today” show.
He brought me my Campari and black cherry soda, and along with it a bracelet. I always wear a lot of jewelry; this one was intertwined snakes, and it fit right in, but I hadn’t asked for it. “What now?” I asked.
He said, “Try to bend it.” I couldn’t. “Stainless steel, silver-plated,” he said. “You want to bend a ten-penny spike, just stick it in there and push hard. It’ll bend.”
“Maybe,” I said. I don’t like to bend anything stronger than spoons, because it’s hard to do it without grunting and straining.
“No maybe. And it’s magnetic, for in case you want to do a compass …” Hell, I had six different ways of doing the compass effect already, all of them good. The best is this little plastic marble with a magnet inside that I hold in my mouth. You’ve seen me do the compass on television? I just lean over it, concentrating, and the needle spins all around the card? Mostly I use the marble, and if I think some wise guy is going to look in my mouth afterward all I have to do is swallow it. Only they cost thirty bucks each, and it’s kind of undignified to have to look for them afterward. “ … when you go to see this guy Smith and his
schatzi
,” he explained, but I’d already figured out what he was up to.
“I didn’t say I’d do that,” I said.
“No, stupid, you didn’t say that,” he mimicked me, “but you don’t got no choice, believe me.”
“We’re not doing so bad,” I said.
“We are doing
schrecklich
,” he said. “Go see these two
shtunkers.
Let them tell you what a great psychic you are. Let them give you that fifty thousand dollar prize, then come back here and we split it up and head for some other country. Australia, maybe. We ain’t ever done Australia.”
“And what if I don’t like Australia?”
“Machts nicht
, kiddo. This place we used up. Only when you see them don’t screw it up, okay?”
I said huffily, “I never screw it up! I’ve been doing this a long time, Fritzl.” And he looked at me with those big, brown, hostile Kraut eyes.
“That’s what bothers me, stupid. You’re getting sloppy.”
But I wasn’t sloppy with the Reverend, or with the Honorable Miss either. She wasn’t wearing her Grecian robes. She was wearing a three-piece gray wool pantsuit that looked like she’d bought it by mail order and forgotten her size. I told them my name, bashful and polite, and the Honorable Miss sniffed and said, “Oh, yes, Geissen. You’re the show-business one. We’ve heard of you. I suppose you’ve come about the prize.”
I have to say Fritzl had had a good idea about that. I was not surprised to hear that they’d heard of me—hell, crazies watch television, too—and I was ready with surprise and indignation. “Prize? I’m not looking for anything from you. I came because—” I pulled the clipping out of my pocket—“somebody sent me this classified ad.” FREE TEST was the headline, and then it went on to say that anyone who thought he might have ESP or clairvoyance or any other paranormal experience could come to this office to be tested.
“And you want to be tested?” asked the Reverend Doctor. His voice was hostile. So was his body stance; he was sitting, tightly clutching his belly, erect on the far side of the conference table.
I shrugged. “I don’t know if I’m a fake or not,” I said.
Looks passed between them. I waited. “Get the file,” said Smith, and the Honorable Miss rose to pluck a folder out of a cabinet. She pawed through it, extracted a sheet and handed it to him. He looked it over, nodded and passed it to me.
I had seen it before. It was a report that I knew well.
From
Preliminary Notes on H.G
., by Gerard T. K. Shapman,
Journ. Amer. Parapsych.,
Vol. VIII No. 3 Pg. 262:
I first encountered the subject H.G. as an undergraduate in August, 1970. A number
of incidents suggested latent noumetic talents but, in the absence of rigorous controls and a statistical base for analyses, I was unable to make a satisfactory assessment. However, three incidents from that era are worthy of recording.
1. H.G.’s early ability to manipulate objects at a distance (“telekinesis”
1
) was displayed in a laboratory experiment in which I was present at all times. Nevertheless, six connections in a transformer system were displaced.
2
I had set up and tested the connections myself. The room was locked and empty until H.G. entered it in my company. He was under my constant observation until I discovered the displaced connections. There was only one door, which was secured by a deadfall bolt lock. The windows were barred. There was no possibility, or evidence, of any intrusion.
3
Significantly, the telekinetic effects were exerted in a manner which seriously and adversely affected H.G.’s laboratory credits; causing him to fail the course. (Similar observations have been made by others. Cf., Renfrew,
4
Bayreuth,
5
and others.)
2. In the second instance, H.G. was able to describe the contents of a closed box
6
to which he had no possibility of previous access. There were no visual, auditory, olfactory or tactile clues. Although his description was not exact in detail it was inarguably correct in principle.
3. In the third instance, from a distance of more than 3,000 miles (4800 km.) he referred to my new wife by her personal nickname in a letter mailed to me from Germany after our marriage. He had never met her. The letter was in response to a notice in the alumni magazine,
Tech Times,
7
which gave only her actual name, not in the least like the “pet name,” by which I called her, which he had never heard.
All of these, and other, incidents were suggestive but, of course, by no means conclusive. However, when in the following year H.G. was discharged from the United States Army and returned to the Cambridge area I asked him to participate in a series of rigorous tests which established conclusively that he possessed paranormal powers to a previously unknown degree.
“Ah, yes. The M.I.T. tests,” I said. “I was working as a French Fry Man in the McDonald’s at Harvard Square when Dr. Shapman came in for a Big Mac and vanilla shake.”
“Tests have been faked,” said suspicious old Sam Smith, looking skinny and mean.
I threw myself abjectly on the ground and licked his shoes—I don’t mean literally. “I know that,” I said. “I don’t blame you if you don’t believe them.”
“What about believing you, Geissen?” asked the old lady. “Do you think you’re a trustworthy witness?”
“Not at all,” I said, and squeezed out a tear—I do mean literally. I’ve always been able to cry whenever I wanted to. “I don’t even know what happens, Miss Baker. No. I shouldn’t have come here. I’ll go—”
Smith let me get as far as standing up, crossing the room, putting my hand on the doorknob. Then he said, voice like a rusty oven door, “We don’t go by belief, Geissen. We go by evidence.”
“And it’s true,” said Miss Baker judgmatically, “that this Dr. Shapman was not as big a fool as most.”
But about that I couldn’t agree with her.
I’d known Shapman a long time, since I was a sophomore at M.I.T., the year before I dropped out. He was my physics prof. He was also into psychic phenomena, though he
didn’t bring it into his classes, and some of the other guys tried to ass-kiss him by bragging about the dreams they’d had that foretold when their fathers would run off the road coming home from a party, stuff like that. I didn’t bother. I listened to the gossip, mostly about how he was being given a hard time by those other faculty types Minsky and Lettvin and so on. Shapman got cut up by them, but he had tenure. And nobody could say he was crooked. He and his mother were in it together, I guess she turned him on to it. They’d been members of the Society for Psychical Research, fooled around with Rhine cards, all that stuff. Never got far until they got me, and then you never saw such happy people.