The Road to Amber (45 page)

Legionellosis or
Legionnaires’ disease
received its name in 1976 when pneumonia broke out among people attending an American Legion convention in Philadelphia. The reference suggests that Zelazny thought he was exposed but remained unaffected. The poem alludes to John Donne’s poem “Meditation XVII”—“never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.” A
missive
is a letter;
datelining
is dating a news story or using a datebook for appointments;
doxies
are prostitutes;
black-tie
birds are penguins.
Lake Havasu
is a resort city in Arizona, site of “the world-famous
London Bridge
.” Learning that the old bridge faced destruction to make way for a new one, Lake Havasu City purchased it from the City of London in 1968, disassembled it, and rebuilt it in Arizona.

“T
ell me about Pan Rudo,” Hannah said.

“Now I’m talking early fifties,” Croyd answered. “That may be too far back for whatever you’re after.”

She shook her head.

“I want to hear about it,” she told him.

He clapped his hands together abrupdy, squashing a darting moth.

“Okay,” he said. “I was around twenty years old at the time. But I’d been infected with the wild card virus when I was going on fourteen—so I’d had plenty of experience with it. Too much, it seemed. It still depressed me a lot in those days. I got to thinking about it, and I decided that since I couldn’t change the condition maybe I could change my attitude toward it somehow, come to better terms with it. I read a lot of pop psychology books—about making friends with yourself and getting well-adjusted and all that—but they didn’t do me any good. So one morning I saw a piece about this guy in the
Times
. He was chairing a local conference. Kind of interesting. Neuropsychiatrist. He’d actually known Freud, studied with him for a while. Then he was at the Jungian Institute in Switzerland for a time. Got back to physiology then. He was involved with a group doing
dauerschlaf
research while he was in Zurich. Ever hear of it?”

“Can’t say that I have,” she said.

He took a swallow of beer, moving his left foot to crush a pawing beetle.

“The theory behind
dauerschlaf
is that the body and the mind heal themselves better and faster while a person is asleep than when he’s awake,” he said. “They were experimenting with the treatment of drug withdrawal, psychological disorders, TB, and other stuff by putting people to sleep for long periods of time, using hypnosis and drugs. They’d induce artificial comas to promote healing. He wasn’t into that much when I met him, but I’d learned of it earlier, because of my condition—and the connection intrigued me. I checked him out in the phone book, called, got his secretary, made an appointment. He had a cancellation for later that week, and she gave me that one.”

Croyd took a quick swallow.

“It was a rainy Thursday afternoon in March of 1951 then, that I first met Pan Rudo—”

“Do you recall the date as well?” Hannah asked.

“Afraid not.”

“How is it that you recall the year, the month, and the day so readily?”

“I count days after I wake up,” he replied, “to keep track of how far along I am in my waking cycle. It gives me an idea of how much rationality I have left, so I can make plans for things I want to get done. When the days dwindle down to a precious few I avoid my friends and try to get off somewhere by myself so nobody gets hurt. Now, I woke up on Sunday, I came across the article two days later, I got the appointment for two days after that. That makes it a Thursday. And I tend to remember the months when things happen, because my picture of a year is kind of a jagged thing based on seasons. This piece was spring and rainy—March.”

He took a drink of beer. He swatted another moth.

“Damn bugs!” he muttered. “Can’t stand bugs.”

“And the year?” she said. “How can you be sure it was 1951?”

“Because it was in the fall of the following year, 1952, that they tested the hydrogen bomb in the Pacific.”

“Oh,” she said, brow furrowing slightly. “Sure. Go ahead.”

“So I went to see him the year before the hydrogen bomb got tested,” he continued. “They were working on it then, you know. They’d decided to go ahead on it back in ‘48.”

“Yes, I know,” she said.

“A mathematician named Stan Ulam cracked the equations for Teller. Speaking of mathematicians, did you know that Tom Lehrer was a Manhattan Project mathematician? He wrote some great songs—”

“What happened when you got to Dr. Rudo’s office?”

“Right,” he responded. “Like I said, it was raining, and this trench coat I had on was dripping wet when I came into his reception area, and there was a pretty oriental rug on the floor. Looked as if it had silk in it, even. The receptionist hurried around her desk to help me, saying she’d hang it in their rest room rather than have it on a brass coat tree near the door which looked as if it held her own coat as well as the doctor’s.

“I reached out and caught hold of all the water on the coat and the rug with my mind, and I removed it. I wasn’t sure what to do with it then, so I held it in between places. You know what I’m talking about? You hear about Aces and Jokers who can teleport things—I’ve had the power a number of times myself—making things disappear in one place and reappear in another without seeming to pass through intervening space. But did you ever wonder where something is when it’s in between places? I think about things like that a lot. Now I wasn’t sure of my range yet—although it seemed I could send smaller objects farther off than larger ones—and wasn’t sure how much water I’d just picked up, so couldn’t say for certain that I could send it all outside his sixth-floor window and let it fall down onto Park. I had been experimenting this time, though, with hiding things in between places—at first just to see whether it could be done—and I learned that it could. I’d learned that I could make things disappear in one place and not appear in another for a while—though I felt a kind of pressure in my mind and body while I was doing it. So I just held my water and smiled.

“‘No need,’ I told her. ‘See? It’s okay.’”

She stared at the thing as if it were alive, even running a hand over it, to make sure. Then she hung it on the tree.

“‘Won’t you have a seat for a moment, Mr. Crenson?’ she said. I’ll let Dr. Rudo know you’re here.’

“She moved toward the intercom on her desk, and I was about to ask her where that rest room was—so I could get rid of my water—when an inner door opened and Dr. Rudo came into the reception area. He was a six-footer, blond and blue-eyed, who put on a professional smile and extended his hand as he came up to me.

“‘Mr. Crenson,’ he said. ‘It is good to meet you. I am Pan Rudo. Won’t you come into my office?’ His voice was rich and resonant, his teeth very white.

“‘Thanks,’ I said.

“He held the door for me and I entered the next room. It was brighter than I’d thought it might be, with a few pastoral watercolors bearing his signature and architectural etchings signed by others on the walls, another oriental rug on the floor, lots of reds and blues in it. A large aquarium occupied a table to the left of the door, bright fish darting and drifting within it, a chain of bubbles rising along a rear corner.

“‘Have a seat,’ he told me, his speech slightly accented—German, and maybe something else—and he gestured toward a big, comfortable-looking leather chair facing his desk.

“I took the chair. He moved around the desk and seated himself. He smiled again, picking up a pencil and rolling it between his hands.

“‘Everybody who comes here has problems,’ he began, maintaining eye-contact.

“I nodded.

“‘I’m no exception, I guess,’ I told him. ‘It’s hard to know how to begin, though.’

“‘There are certain broad categories most people’s problems fall into,’ he said. ‘Family, the people you work with…’

“‘No problems there,’ I said. The pressure of holding the water was bothering me, and I looked around for a suitable container into which I might deposit it. A metal wastebasket would have been fine, but I couldn’t see one anywhere about.

“‘Money? Sex?’ he suggested.

“‘No, I’ve got plenty of money, and I get laid pretty regular,’ I said, wondering whether I could move it beyond his window and let it go. Only, it was even farther away than the one in the reception area.

“I shifted in the chair and checked out the other side of the room.

“‘Mr. Crenson, is something bothering you—I mean something physical—right now?’ he asked.

“‘Yeah,’ I admitted, ‘I’m having trouble holding my water.’

“‘There is a rest room outside,’ he said, beginning to rise. ‘I’ll show you—’

“‘Not that way. I mean, like this water is sort of—in my head, I guess.’

“He froze. He stared at me.

“‘I’m afraid I don’t understand exactly what you mean,’ he said then. ‘Water—in your head?’

“I grinned.

“‘Well, yes and no,’ I said. ‘I was speaking sort of figuratively. I mean, there’s this water from my coat and I’m holding it with my mind and it’s getting to be sort of a strain. So I should put it somewhere. Maybe I
will
just take it to that rest room and dump it there, if you’ll show me—’

“‘Mr. Crenson, do you know what a defense mechanism is?’ he asked.

“‘Sure, I’ve been doing my homework. It’s something you do or say or think to keep from doing or saying or thinking something else you really want to but for some reason are afraid to. Oh, you think that’s what this is. No, it’s real water, and I’m carrying it and can make it be anywhere I want it to be inside of about a ten-foot radius from where I am right now—I think.’

“He smiled.

“‘Then why don’t you deposit it in the fish tank?’ he said. ‘And we can get on with our conversation.’

“‘That’s not a bad idea,’ I said. ‘It’s pretty full, though.’

“‘That’s all right,’ he said.

“So I moved the water into the tank. Immediately, the thing over-flowed. Dr. Rudo’s eyes widened as he watched the water run down the sides and spill onto the floor. Then he gave me a strange look and reached out and worked his intercom.

“‘Mrs. Weiler, would you come in here a moment?’ he said. ‘And bring a mop and a pail? We’ve had a small accident. Thank you.’

“Then he lowered himself back into his chair and studied me for several seconds.

“‘Perhaps you should begin by telling me how you did what you just did,’ he said.

“‘It’s kind of long and involved,’ I said. ‘On the other hand, it’s also the cause of the problem I came to see you about.’

“‘Take your time,’ he told me.

“‘It was back in September of ‘46,’ I began, ‘the day Jetboy died…’

“Mrs. Weiler came in a couple of minutes later and was about to mop the wet area. I beat her to it and transported it all from the floor into the bucket. She stepped back and stared after the splash occurred.

“‘Just take it away,’ Dr. Rudo told her. ‘Then phone everyone who has an appointment this afternoon. Cancel all of them.

“‘Go ahead, Mr. Crenson, the whole story, please,’ he said then, after she’d left.

“So I told him what it was like, and the thing that made my case different from all the others—how I fear sleeping more than anything else, and the things I do to postpone it. He questioned me at great length about the sleeping; and that was the first time I can remember hearing the word
dauerschlaf.
He seemed taken by my case and its parallels to an experimental European therapy technique he’d apparently once had something to do with. Also, as it turned out, he had heard of my case; and from the way he quoted medical journals, it seemed he’d read every important paper published on the wild card virus.

“I talked all afternoon. I told him about my family and old Bentley and the second-story work I used to do. I told him about my transformations, about my friends, about some of the scrapes I’d been involved in. I found myself starting to like the guy. I’d never really talked that way to anybody before. He seemed fascinated by the jokers and aces, by the different manifestations of the wild card virus I’d seen. Got me to talking about them at some length, shaking his head at my descriptions of some of the worst joker cases I’ve known. Even got into a long philosophical discussion with me as to what I thought it might be doing to the whole human race. I told him that not too many nats dated jokers, if it was the genetic angle he was thinking about, but he just kept shaking his head and said that wasn’t the point, that their existing at all was like a cancer on human life in general, that you had to think of it sociologically as well as biologically. I allowed as he could have a point, but that it seemed one of those ‘So what?’ points. The situation was already in place, and the real questions involved what you were going to do about it. He agreed with me then, saying that he hoped it would be soon.