Authors: Anne McCaffrey
“I know what you mean, hoping to win the wager loses a friend.”
“I can see horizons wider than mortality but I cannot always see the sparrow fall.”
“So young op Owen will be your successor?” George Honner was in a very testy mood that morning.
“Yes, but of course, not for some time yet …”
“You’ve got it all foreseen, have you?”
“Certainly the basic problems …”
“Ha! I thought you’d already solved the basic problems …”
“By no means, my friend,” and Henry’s laugh was mirthless. “I’ve had the easy part. No, really. The establishment of the Center—and others in time in strategic parts of the globe … is only the first bit: scarcely the worst.
“Once we’d elevated parapsychic Talents to a demonstrable, scientific basis, it was only a question of some decent organizational effort to make us self-sufficient and independent. We did dodge the governmental attempt to take control because we operate more efficiently as a private agency and because you could imagine the tax payers’ shrieks about funding tea-leaf readers? Funding was no real problem once we could prove Talent. Training, now … that is a long term program. We’ve got to develop more efficient techniques in recognizing and training Talent and that takes Talented personnel. Getting industry and the government to accept our workers was child’s play with what we can offer.” Then Henry sighed. “The suspicions of the general public can’t be totally allayed but with the help of a discreet PR program, people can become accustomed to the Talented.
“No, George, some of our biggest problems are yet to be solved. The knottiest one is establishing legal protection for Talent. Without that, all we’ve carefully built could be wiped away in legal fees, damages and law suits … particularly against the precogs. Oh, I see that we’ll get professional immunity sooner or later. I’m greedy. I want it sooner. And that’s why a telepath like Dai op Owen is required as Director. He’s more sensitive to the immediate situation. By God, the times I’ve wished I were a telepath …”
George snorted.
“It’s easier for a man who can delve into thoughts, not the future. That’s assured.”
“Ha!” Light flittered from George Henner’s sunken eyes. “Not yet. You’ve three days, four hours and five minutes to go.”
“No,” Henry replied gently, “no, old friend,
you’ve
three days, four hours and five minutes to go. And I shall miss you.”
“Ha to that as well! See any new signs of decay?” George jerked his head this way and that.
Henry shook his head slowly. “I will miss you, you old bastard.”
“Will you? Will you when I defy your prediction and you and your Talents are thrown out into the mass noise again?”
Henry summoned a laugh. “Then why haven’t you died long ago?”
George glared at him. “I intend to make you sweat, Henry Darrow. Sweat Bleed. Die a little.”
“And you wonder I want a telepath as a Director?” He gripped George firmly by the shoulder and gave him an affectionate shake. “Play the enemy if it pleases you: if the choler makes the blood continue to run in your veins. You’re more our friend than enemy. And I know it.”
“Ha! You are nervous. You’re worried that you’re wrong. That this time you’re wrong! I’ll prove you wrong if it’s the last thing I do.”
Henry cocked his head at George, grinning ironically. “You may at that, you old bastard. I’ve never claimed infallibility, George. And you’ve heard me state time and again that fore-knowledge of the future can alter it …”
“Cop out! Rationalization!” Henner shook with triumph. “You’re admitting defeat! Ha!”
“Have I made your day, George? Fair enough! I’ve got to go placate that tax man again. See you later.”
“Don’t waste your time with him. He’s stupid. No way they can tax the Talents with the structure
I
helped you build. And don’t miss the party! The Death Party!”
“Christ Hank,” Gus Molnar complained to Darrow, “he’s had me checking him over on the hour all day! And then that gaggle of ‘impartial physician witnesses’ check on
me.” Molnar ran his hand nervously through his long fair hair, his eyes restless with anxiety and irritation. “And suddenly he won’t let Molly out of his sight. Said her healing hands would turn the trick. Give him the minute he needs. Goddamn old bastard!”
“Cool it, Gus. It’s what he needed to keep him alive.” Henry chuckled and straightened his tunic jacket, poked at his softly tied scarf.
Gus made a disgusted noise in his throat. “You’re so damned sure?”
“Not at all. Unfortunately.”
“Unfortunately? With the future of the Center at stake on one man’s heart beat?”
“I’ve seen that we do get the property. I regret that it has to be validated by the death of an old and valued friend. I could almost wish that he does live past the appointed minute …”
“Minute …” Molnar corrected him. “Bastard’s got a huge alarm clock rigged, to the Greenwich-mean-time minute!”
“C’mon, Gus. Let’s go to the wake and cheer the corpse on!”
“My God, Darrow, how do you do it?”
The Death Party was assembling, reluctantly, in the vault-roofed lounge of the Beechwoods mansion. George had invited a select few to be “in at the death.”
Indeed, as he said himself, he had outlasted most of his contemporaries find those three represented today were more enemies than friends. George quipped that business enemies had a reputation of being in at the death. He was dressed in his Vietnam campaign battle dress, remarking that he’d cheated Him then as a twenty-year old, so it behooved him to keep the appointment now suitably attired. Most of those present were Talents or connected with the Center. Young Daffyd op Owen was present. So were LEO Commissioner Mailer, trying hard not to look uncomfortable, Governor Lawson, several Senators, representatives from four charitable organizations (probably
benefiting under the will, Henry decided when he saw the guest list), and the four physicians who’d been chosen at random from the AMA directory by George and flown into Jerhattan for the event. That was George’s way of solving any medical question. With a touch of ghoulish humor, George had decreed—not that he didn’t trust the Talents implicitly, but one had to protect oneself—that the autopsy would be performed on his corpse immediately after death had been assumed.
The party consequently generated little joviality despite the abundance of liquor and exotic foods on the sideboard. George ate sparingly, drank slowly. Anything he consumed these days, he complained, tasted sour or flat or insipid and caused heartburn.
Conversations were conducted in sepulchral tones and languished easily. The occasional laugh was quickly suppressed. Only Henry Darrow contrived to look at ease though Molly knew, by the way he rubbed his thumb and index finger together constantly, that he was in a highly nervous condition. She didn’t dare touch him since she was not a whit less distraught herself, and would only double Henry’s tension. The person who was suffering most was young Daffyd op Owen. She had become very fond of the sensitive young man and wished that he didn’t have to be present. He’d not had time to learn to shield himself, certainly not in such an emotionally loaded situation as this. Daffyd was visibly sweating, yet gamely trying to simulate proper party behavior as he chatted with another young Talent, a precog named Mara Canning.
As the appointed time drew nearer, any semblance of normality dwindled: efforts to keep party talk going faltered. Everyone had one eye on the clock and the other on George Henner.
“You’re supposed to be happy,” George Henner complained when the current silence remained unbroken for sixty-four seconds. “My death means you’re all safely ensconced here.” His scowl was ambiguous. Then he
pointed a finger at Henry. “So tell me, Hank, if you lose the wager, where will you go? I …” and he laughed hollowly, “or my executors expect you to vacate the premises … immediately.”
“And we will I’ve assembled every telekinetic we’ve got … and a flock of physical muscle men. We can clear the premises in an hour, I’m told. You will grant us that much time?”
Henner grunted, then brightly asked where the new Center would be located.
“I’ve a site upstate seventy miles: woods, a small lake, very pastoral. The disadvantage being the distance to commute. You know what copter traffic is like over the City and the Talents are contracted to be at work on time … no matter what.”
Henner’s chair had been wired to monitor his life-systems, and the results were broadcast on a screen visible anywhere in the room. George glanced up at it incuriously.
“All systems still go?” he asked, swinging around to the nearest medical man who, startled, nodded “Three minutes and counting, Henry?”
“George, may I remind you that this excitement is bad for you?” Henry said.
“Excitement bad for me? Goddamn you, Darrow, it’s kept me alive months past the estimate those jokers gave me. You’ve kept me alive, damn your eyes.”
“Damn ’em?” Henry laughed. “That was the point, George, and you’ve admitted it before impartial witnesses, too.”
Henner pursed his thin, bloodless lips, glaring at various people in the room, unsatisfied with his present victim’s reactions and unable to vent his feelings on anyone better suited than Henry. His restless, probing glance fell briefly on Molly.
“Having to leave here will put your program back, won’t it?”
Henry shrugged. “For this decade, perhaps yes. The new location will be too far for prospective Talents in the
subbie class to come for the test. We can have mobile units … once we have the personnel. Trouble is the units have to be especially constructed …”
“Yes, yes, you’ve told me all that.” George flounced around in his chair, seeking a new or comfortable position as well as another victim. But he returned to Henry. “You’ll be sorry you’ve kept me alive. In exactly two minutes and four seconds …”
“No, George, I won’t ever be sorry for your life. Only sorry for your death.”
“I can believe that!”
“Indeed you can!” cried Molly, unable to bear George’s taunting acrimony.
“Molly …” George’s voice entreated her and she instinctively stepped toward him, her hands outstretched to give the comfort which had often eased him. But he leaned away, suddenly suspicious even of her. Her hands flew to her mouth as the rebuff wounded her. But his reaction broke Henry’s tight control.
“Damn it, George, she only wants to help.”
“Help me? Live? Or die!?”
Molly began to cry, turning towards the wall. But Henry took her in his arms, for once the comforter.
“Molly didn’t deserve that from you, George. The wager was with me!”
“He didn’t mean it that way, Henry,” said young op Owen, the words bursting from his lips, as if he’d been holding back for some time the desire to speak out.
Henner nodded, his face flushed with what Dai op Owen afterwards said was remorse. But the monitors began flashing warning signals.
“Hell, Molly,” George began in a choked voice, “I don’t distrust
you.”
Then the death alarm went off. “Ha! The appointed minute … And I’m alive! You’re wrong, Henry Darrow. You and all your tea-leaf, table-tipping crystal-gazing …”
At precisely 9:00:30, George Henner’s heart gave a massive contraction and stopped. Cameras on the dead
man recorded that his hand raised slightly, towards Henry and Molly before the dead body collapsed.
Accustomed as they were to the death processes, the physicians in attendance were held motionless by the dramatic circumstances. Gus Molnar reacted first, hand moving towards the adrenalin syringe.
“No!” cried Dai op Owen, stepping forward, his hand outstretched “He wants to die. He doesn’t want to win the wager.”
“My God,” cried one of the physicians, pointing to the screen. “Look at the Goosegg. It’s gone wild. The mind’s still alive … No. Consciousness has gone. But God, look at the graph.”
“Let him go. He wants to go,” Daffyd op Owen was saying.
Molnar looked first towards Henry whose face was expressionless, then at the other physicians staring at the monitor readings.
“That means the brain’s dead, doesn’t it?” asked LEO Commissioner Mailer, pointing to the Goosegg graph now scribing straight lifeless lines.
Two of the medical men nodded.
“Then he’s dead,” said Mailer, glancing towards the Governor who nodded accord. “I’d say you won the bet, Darrow.”
“The wager said ‘minute’, I trust, not second?” asked one of the Senators.
“He shouldn’t’ve excited himself like that,” a doctor muttered. “This party was a mistake. Of course we weren’t consulted on that. But it set up circumstances which would obviously result in overstimulation, certain death for a man in Henner’s condition.”
“Or, there’s the voodoo element in this,” another physician said without rancor. “Tell a victim often enough that he’ll be dead at such and such a time and the subconscious takes over and kills the man.”
“Not in this instance,” said Gus Molnar, loudly and belligerently. “And there’s ample medical substantiation,
including your own remarks” he added, pointing at the voodoo adherent, “that the stimulation provided by the original bet kept George Henner alive long past his own medical men’s estimate. The bet did not cause his death, it caused his life.”
No one ventured to refute that statement.
“I believe,” spoke up one of the attorneys present, “that the autopsy was to be performed immediately?”
As if on cue, two men appeared from the hallway, wheeling a stretcher. Silently they approached, their passage unimpeded as guests stepped aside hastily. The body was laid on the stretcher in silence. But, as the men took their positions to leave, Molly broke from Henry’s embrace. With gentle fingers, she closed the dead man’s eyes. The tears streamed down her face as she kissed George on the forehead. The stretcher glided out of the room. No one spoke until the last sound of footsteps in the hall was gone.
“Mr. Darrow,” said the attorney, his voice sounding abnormally loud after the requiem silence, “I was enjoined by Mr. Henner to make a few announcements at this time usually reserved until several days hence. I was to tell you that this was one wager he didn’t wish to win and hoped he wouldn’t: no matter what indication he gave to the contrary. He said that you were sportsman enough, Mr. Darrow, to appreciate the fact that he had to try to win.” The attorney turned to the physician who had brought up the voodoo insinuation. “He also ordered me to counteract any attempt to bring charges resulting from a misinterpretation of today’s sad occasion. He empowered me to say that he had implicit trust in the integrity of all members of the Parapsychic Center. We,” and he gestured towards his colleagues, “are to be the executors of Mr. Henner’s estate, the bulk of which, excluding a few behests and excluding these grounds now the irrevocable property of the North American Center for Parapsychic Talents, is to go into a Trust Fund, providing legal assistance to anyone registered with the Center who may be
imprisoned or charged with damages or lawsuits following the professional use of their Talent, until such time as specific laws are promulgated to give the Talents professional immunity.” The lawyer gave Henry a wry grin. “He said, and I quote, ‘If you ride a winged horse, you’d better have a wide net when you fall. And that takes money!’