Breakthrough, p.8
Breakthrough, page 8
She laughed. ‘You were having an argument with yourself. It was awfully funny really. I kept wanting to join in.’
The more fantastic it became, the more convinced was I that what she was telling me was nothing less than the truth. But never had truth appeared to me less pure or less simple. Nor could I get over the way in which she seemed to have accepted the situation. Even admitting that she’d had longer to become acquainted with it than I had, the calmness she was displaying as she unreeled one incredibility after another left me floundering. I began to appreciate what she’d meant by ‘aloneness’. To have toted round on my own the sort of burden that she was carrying with such apparent ease would have driven me gibbering to Harley Street, and I told her as much.
‘But it’s all right now,’ she assured me. ‘Now we both know.’
‘But what do we know?’ I demanded. ’That we’ve got some fantastic psychic cord joining us together like a couple of Siamese twins? Why it’s—indecent I ’
She laughed. ‘I promise I won’t come unless you want me.’
’That’s all very well, but how will I know whether you’re there or not? It strikes me we’re on a strictly one-way line. I don’t recall ever having dropped in on you—asleep or awake.’
‘Maybe you have and you’ve forgotten.’
’Is it the kind of thing I’d be likely to forget? As far as I can see, this is an altogether one-sided game. And what’s more, no one asked me if I wanted to play.’
‘No one asked me either,’ she pointed out. ‘And I’m not even sure what the game is.’
‘Well, I can tell you one of the rules,’ I said sternly. ’From now on you knock before you come in. Is that clear?’
She nodded submissively.
‘And as soon as Doctor Dumpkenhoffer gets back we’re going to present ourselves before him hand in hand, and we’re going to ask him to do something quick.’
’Oh, no,’ she said.
‘What do you mean, “Oh, no”?’
‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I can’t stop you going to him if you want to, but not with me. Not yet, anyway.’
‘But why on earth not?’
She frowned. ‘I don’t feel he’s ready for us.’
‘But that’s absurd! Why, more than a month ago he wanted me to try to persuade you to go to him.’
She just shook her head stubbornly.
’Oh, come now, Miss Bernstein,’ I said. ‘Be reasonable.’
‘I am being reasonable,’ she insisted hotly. ‘It’s you who’re not. What harm can it do to wait for a bit?’
Nothing I could say would shift her; her feminine mind was made up and that was that. Finally, I’m afraid, I rather lost patience, and the end was that we drove back to the University in frigid silence. She didn’t even hold on to me.
I set her down at the gates and was about to say something in a belated attempt to smooth things over when she ducked her head and scampered away without even so much as a ’thank you’. Thinking some pretty harsh thoughts, I turned the scooter round and headed for my digs.
TEN
What had exasperated me beyond endurance was that the girl had not been able to offer me one single logical reason for her reluctance to consult Dumps. It was all very well for her to go on repeating, ‘He’s not ready for us yet’, but she couldn’t even begin to explain what she meant by ‘ready’. The nearest she’d come to it was a vague ‘ready to understand’ which had almost driven me to pull out my hair by the roots.
‘And how will you know when he achieves this sublime state?’ I’d demanded sarcastically. ‘You’ll feel it, I suppose?’ It was her calm ‘Yes, of course,’ that had triggered off the terminal explosion of my irritation.
The truth was that I was worried to hell. As Dumps had said on the occasion of discovering Miss Bernstein’s extraordinary results, ‘What’s good for fairy stories is not good for science.’ Well, admittedly I was no scientist, but, on the other hand, I’d long outgrown the desire to believe in fairies. What I needed was a large dose of Keats’
‘Negative Capability’ that is ‘it’hen a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason Unfortunately that useful commodity can’t be bought over the counter at the local Boots; you either have it or you don’t. Miss Bernstein apparently had it in abundance, but there was no way that I could see in which she might pass on a little of hers to me. Or was there?
The thought struck me so unexpectedly that I all but swerved into the kerb. I dismissed it immediately. It was too fantastic—impossible. And yet this whole business was impossible. If I could believe only half of what had happened to date it meant I was already so far beyond the pale of reason as to be virtually lost to sight of all sane, rational human beings. So what had I to lose? My self-respect? I couldn’t even raise a smile at that one. My sanity? Well, 78 what was sanity, anyway? Was Blake sane? Eminently so. Lawrence? I couldn’t deny it. Van Gogh? Hadn’t I just finished reading his Letters to Theo? Well, then, if it came to the crunch, wasn’t it better to be sane with them than sane with C. P. Snow? I steered my scooter into the garage, cut the engine, and sat there in the gloom and pondered.
I began by making a rapid mental review of everything exceptionable that had happened to me from that first fortuitous meeting with Dumps right up to the last words I’d exchanged with Miss Bernstein, and I couldn’t make head or tail of it anywhere. Still unsatisfied, I trailed back to the beginning again, and suddenly, wham! it hit me. What if that meeting with Dumps hadn’t been fortuitous? I took a deep breath, and it seemed to me that the very foundations of the garage rocked. ‘Start thinking crazy,’ I muttered, ‘and you really will end up in the booby hatch.’ But the damage was already done; the dyke breached. Viewed from that lunatic tangent, a pattern—albeit a fantastic one—did seem to emerge: a sort of nebulous triangle with Dumps, Miss Bernstein and myself as its three corners. I wondered how she had come to get involved in the tests, anyway. Was that also purely fortuitous? It seemed likely enough on the face of it, but then it had seemed likely enough that Dumps and I should just happen to get into conversation and that he should just happen to invite me along to the Department and that I should just happen to be on hand when he was running her cards through the checker and that I should-
My train of thought rocked to a halt. The vital piece of information that I’d somehow overlooked in my first run through snapped into place. I had been the one to suggest he should run her previous cards through against that day’s tape. Without my being on hand, the likelihood was that he would never have discovered her fantastic power of precognition. Yet what on earth had made me suggest it? I strained to recall the details of the occasion and, try as I might, I could remember nothing more than the fact that I’d made the suggestion. As far as I knew, I’d intended it as a joke. But for some reason they hadn’t taken it as a joke. And with startling vividness I found myself remembering how I had suddenly sensed that they wanted me to insist on their making that check. ‘Curiouser and curiouser,’ I muttered.
I climbed off my scooter and let myself into the house through the side door. Everyone seemed to have gone to bed, so I helped myself to a glass of milk and a couple of biscuits from the larder and carried them upstairs to my room. Then I lowered myself on to the divan and prepared to follow the trail to its farthest limits. The trouble was that though I could trace—or thought I could trace—a possible connection between some of the events, I couldn’t discover anything that could pass muster as a reason for them. All the ones I could find seemed wholly impossible, and the most impossible of all was that someone (or something!) wished to alert Dumps to Miss Bernstein’s extraordinary talents. But even supposing that were so, I reasoned, why was she now so adamant in refusing to have anything to do with him? And where on earth did I fit in? The more I considered it, the more it appeared to me like one of those trick photographs which you tip different ways to get different pictures. Yet, paradoxically, the very fact that I sensed I’d found some sort of coherent pattern in the puzzle—even though the discovery demanded the total suspension of all my rational beliefs—seemed to give me a modicum of comfort. It lasted just up until I took the fatal step farther and started to consider some of the implications underlying the uncanny relation between Miss Bernstein and myself.
I suppose my difficulty lay chiefly in my belief that, for the first part at any rate, I had the backing of Dumps’ credence. He had at least appeared to accept the possibility of Miss Bernstein’s precognitive powers. What he had been unable to swallow was not the type of phenomenon but its degree. Beyond that, on into the fantastic hinterland to which she had introduced me today, I guessed he would not venture. Yet, for all I knew, his experience as a professional parapsychologist might conceivably have led him up against the 80 kind of thing that was happening to me. Nevertheless, my conviction grew that here I was going to be on my own. After all, hadn’t Miss Bernstein told me that his reaction to her showing him those pictures and recounting her recurrent dream had been to confess that he ‘didn’t know what to make of it’? If that had happened to her story, what in God’s name would he make of mine? ‘She’s right,’ I said, ‘I can’t go to him.’ But my reasons were not hers: I simply couldn’t face the prospect of the incredulous guffaw which my story would surely evoke.
Well, then, if not to Dumps, where was I to go? I chewed a biscuit, sipped at my milk and, very, very gingerly began to explore the fringes of the idea that had nearly thrown me off my scooter on the way home. Put quite simply it was this: if she could enter my mind at will, why couldn’t I enter hers? I could appreciate the moral objections, but I confess that, at that moment, they didn’t rank very large. My problem was simply that I didn’t know how to set about doing it. It was all very well to hang about receptively hoping that she’d come winging home to roost, but I knew enough about her by now to realize that after our last interview she wouldn’t even consider trying it. The initial move would have to come from my side, of that I was quite sure.
I drained off my milk, set the empty glass down on the floor beside the divan, stretched myself out comfortably at full length and thatched my hands behind my head. After about thirty seconds of this I got up again, went across to the bookshelf and looked up ‘Meditation’ in the dictionary. ‘Meditate’, I read, ‘v.t. & i. Plan mentally, design: (intr.) exercise the mind in (esp. religious) contemplation (on, upon, subject). Hence or Cogn. meditation.’ ‘Telepathy’, my next shot, was even less helpful, but it did mention ‘emotional influence’. ‘Very well,’ I said, ‘we will now endeavour to contemplate the subject emotionally.’
I took off my jacket and shoes, lay down again and began thinking hard about Miss Bernstein. I found it surprisingly easy. I closed my eyes and found myself recalling her face as it had looked that morning just as she was about to burst into tears. The vision made me feel such a heel that I promptly switched to her as she had appeared in the evening. It soon occurred to me that a man could well travel a great deal farther and fare far worse. Floating there in magnificent isolation in my mind’s eye, there could be no question but that she had much to offer. So far, so good; emotional contact indubitably established, but where did one go from there? It was at this point that I realized I didn’t even know where she lived. In one of the hostels probably, but which one? Perhaps it wasn’t important.
Flicking forward in memory, I reached the moment when she’d got off my scooter and scampered away through the gates, but this time, instead of irritably revving up my motor and roaring off, I tried to follow her. I visualized her scurrying over the lawns to one of the hostels, slowing down as she reached the door, pushing it open and then trotting up the stairs. Never having been inside one of the women’s hostels, I was forced to restrict myself to a minimum of stage scenery. I got her to pause outside a door in a long corridor of similar doors and then to turn the handle and go in. Meanwhile I cunningly transferred myself to the other side of the door, arriving just in time to see her coming in.
She closed the door behind her and stood, panting a little, with her back resting against the panels. By a touch of delicate inspiration I had her raise her hand to her breast to still the beating of her heart. Finally, she walked forward to the window and looked out—naturally towards the gates. She stood there for at least a minute with her forehead resting against the glass and the mist of her breath coming and going on the windowpane, then she sighed, turned away and began getting herself ready for bed.
While she was thus occupied I browsed round the room, thumbed mentally through a few of her books—mostly rather dull geographical tomes—and picked up the copy of Seers and Sayers that happened to be lying conveniently open on the table by the window. By the time I was through admiring my own wit and wisdom she was in her nightdress —no, pyjamas—and had slipped into bed. I put down the 8a book and moved across to her. Her eyes opened wide and looked up into mine. ‘Miss Bernstein,’ I addressed her tenderly, ‘I owe you an apology. I behaved like a pig.’ ’That’s all right, Mr. Haverill,’ she replied. ‘It wasn’t your fault. You were naturally overwrought.’
‘You understand then? But of course, I knew you would.’ She smiled at me trustfully and whispered, ‘Don’t you think perhaps you ought to go now?’ I sighed. ‘Very well, Miss Bernstein, I daresay you know best. Sleep well.’ ‘Good night, Mr. Haverill.’ She turned on her side, dragged down one of the ears of her pillow and closed her eyes. I mentally clicked out the light, contemplated giving her a chaste kiss, decided against it and slowly, reluctantly opened my eyes. ’O.K.,’ I said, ‘so you’re a washout as a telepath, but it was good fun, wasn’t it?’ And with that I, too, got undressed and climbed into bed.
ELEVEN
If this were a work of Science-Fiction I daresay events would at this point begin to move towards a rapid and theatrical climax in which Miss Bernstein, Doctor Dumpkenhoffer and I all found ourselves abducted, dragged on board an interstellar cruiser and winging our way via a hyperspace time-warp en route for Alpha Centauri or the Andromeda nebula. The truth, which in its own prosaic way seems to me just as unbelievable, is that nothing happened at all.
Any ideas I might have been fostering about a more intimate relation developing between Miss Bernstein and myself were scotched the very next morning by a letter from the girl I was already engaged to in all but name. She informed me in four highly hysterical pages that she was certain she was pregnant and wanted to know what I was going to do about it.
The alarms and excursions occasioned by this unwelcome piece of news effectively prevented me from hunting out Miss Bernstein and making a formal apology for our quarrel. By the time the crisis had proved to be the false alarm it was, the students had already gone down for the long Vac. I made a few desultory enquiries concerning Miss Bernstein’s whereabouts, but apart from learning her home address, I could discover nothing definite. Someone seemed vaguely of the opinion that she might be joining one of the archaeological parties, but further research revealed that the don who had the list of names had gone up to Durham and was not expected back till the beginning of the following week. It was a case of either shrugging or writing to her, and I elected to shrug.
My own holiday plans had been knocked totally awry by the row I had had with the aforementioned girl friend. The final scene had been so ridiculous, histrionic and unedifying that when my self-esteem had recovered from the mauling it had received I considered myself lucky to have escaped so lightly. I took myself off to the family mansion in deepest Wales and consoled myself by composing a trenchant monograph on the prose style of certain Elizabethan divines, in which I devoted special attention to the sermons of John Knox.
Once again, as it had after the revelation of those E.S.P. tests, normality seemed to make a redoubled effort to reassert itself; in fact my only concession towards openly acknowledging what had taken place was that one day, when I happened to be in Aberystwyth, I went into the public library and looked up John Martin in the Encyclopaedia of English Art. I discovered that he was known to his contemporaries as ‘Mad Martin’ and, after having been hailed for a time as a genius, he had suffered almost complete eclipse and was now remembered chiefly for his series of mezzotint illustrations to Paradise Lost. Since there was no mention of any biography of him, I had to be content with that. An attempt to unearth something about the temple of Hyphasis proved even less rewarding. I could find no mention of it at all. So I returned, without noticeable reluctance, to the denunciations of John Knox while the summer we had been waiting for since 1959 flaunted itself up and down the valley and August slid imperceptibly into September.
It was not long before the events of the previous term began to seem as remote and insubstantial as the dream of a dream. That they had happened I did not attempt to deny, but they seemed to have happened to a different me—some self with which I had only the very haziest sense of identification. I had long since abandoned any attempt to reason my way out of the labyrinth, and so, almost without realizing it, had perhaps actually succeeded in gaining a measure of Negative Capability.
That this reconciliation with the inexplicable was by no means wholly illusory was proved when, at lunchtime one day in the middle of September, I received a picture postcard from Malta. The message did not prevaricate: 7 must reach you. Please let me. If I don’t hear from you by the 12th I’ll take it you agree. R.B.’ The date of the earlier postmark was September 2nd; it had been forwarded from the University on the 10th; today was the 12th. A cable might still reach her, but, even in the act of acknowledging this, I knew one would never be sent. A curious sense of fatalism seemed to have settled upon me. I gazed out of the window, down the valley to where a faint mist of spray hovered over the invisible waterfall, and I accepted with a conviction deeper than thought, that this was what I had been waiting for—that I wanted it to happen. With a faint sigh I propped the card against the jug of flowers on the lunch table and resumed my interrupted meal.
