Nisher tried to ask about twenty questions at the same time. Ogun interrupted. “Let me try to explain, since you have so little time among us. You come from an age of sexual repression and rebelliousness. To you this must appear a spectacle of unbridled license. For us it is no more than a normal expression of affection and solidarity.”
“So you’ve solved the problem of sex!” Nisher said.
“More or less by accident,” Ogun told him. “We were really trying to abolish war before it obliterated us. But to get rid of war, we had to change the psychological base upon which it rests. Repressed sexuality was found to be the greatest single factor. Once this was recognized and the information widely disseminated, a universal plebiscite was held. It was agreed that human sexual mores were to be modified and reprogrammed for the good of the entire human race. Biological engineering and special clinics—all on a voluntary basis, of course—took care of that. Divorced from aggression and possessiveness, sex today is a mixture of aesthetics and sociability.”
Nisher was about to ask Ogun how that affected marriage and the family when he noticed that Ogun was smiling at an attractive blonde and edging over in her direction. “Hey, Ogun!” Nisher said. “Don’t leave me now!”
The old man looked surprised. “My dear fellow, I wasn’t going to exclude you. Quite the contrary, I want to include you. We all do.”
Nisher saw that a lot of people had stopped. They were looking at him, smiling.
“Now wait a minute,” he said, automatically taking up the cockroach posture.
But by then a woman had hold of his leg, and another was snuggling up under his armpit, and somebody else was pinching his Fingers. Nisher got a little hysterical and shouted at Ogun, “Why are they doing this?”
“It is a spontaneous demonstration of our great pleasure at the novelty and poignancy of your presence. It happens whenever a man from the past appears among us. We feel so sorry for him and what he has to go back to, we want to share with him, share all the love we have. And so this happens.”
Nisher felt as though he were in the middle of a Cinemascope mob scene set in ancient Rome, or maybe Babylon. The street was crowded with people as far as the eye could see, and they were all making it with one another and on top of one another and around and under and over and in between. But what really got to Nisher was the feeling that the crowd gave off. It went completely beyond sex. It felt like a pure ocean of love, compassion, and understanding. He saw Ogun’s face receding in a wave of bodies and called out, “How far does this thing go?”
“Visitors from the past always send out big vibrations,” Ogun shouted back. “This will probably go all the way.”
All the way? Nisher couldn’t figure out what he was talking about. Then he got it and said, almost reverently, “Do you mean—planet-wide?”
Ogun grinned, then he was gone. Nisher saw the way it had to be—this group of people loving one another and pulling more and more people into it as the vibes got stronger and stronger until everybody in the world was in on it. To Nisher this was definitely Utopia. He knew he had to figure out some way of bringing this message back to his own time, some way to convince people. Then he looked up and saw that he was on Central Park South, in front of the Plaza.
“I suppose the transition was just too much for you?” Miles asked.
Nisher smiled. His eyelids were drooping. The Valium rush was passing, and he was coming down fast.
“I guess I just freaked out,” Nisher said. “I thought I could explain it to everyone. I thought I could just grab people and make them give up their hangups, that I could show them how their bodies were shaped for love. But I went at it too hysterically, of course; I scared them. And then the cops grabbed me.”
“How do you feel now?” Miles asked.
“I’m tired and disappointed, and I’ve come back to my senses, if that’s what you want to call it. Maybe it was all an hallucination. That doesn’t matter. What counts is that I’m back and in my own day and age, when we still have wars and energy crises and sexual hangups, and nothing I can do will change that.”
“You seem to have made a very rapid adjustment,” Miles said.
“Hell, yes. No one ever accused Leonard Nisher of being a slow adjuster.”
“You sound good to me,” Miles said. “But I would like you to stay here for a few days. This is not a punishment, you understand. It is genuinely meant as an assistance to you.”
“Okay, doc,” Nisher said drowsily. “How long must I stay?”
“Perhaps no more than a day or two. I’ll release you as soon as I’m satisfied with your condition.”
“Fair enough,” Nisher mumbled. And then he fell asleep. Miles told the orderlies to stand by, and alerted the psychiatric nurse. Then he went to his nearby apartment to get some rest.
Nisher’s story haunted Miles as he broiled a steak for his lunch. It couldn’t be true, of course. But suppose, just suppose, it had actually happened. What if the future had achieved a state of polymorphous-perverse sexuality? There was, after all, a fair amount of evidence that space-time anomalies did exist.
Abruptly he decided to visit his patient again. He left his apartment and went back to the hospital, hurrying now, impelled by a strange sense of urgency.
There was no one at the reception desk on Wing Two. The policeman normally stationed in the corridor was missing. Miles ran down the hall. Leonard’s door was open, and Miles peered in.
Someone had folded Leonard’s cot and leaned it against the wall. That left just enough room on the floor for two aides (one a former guard for the Detroit Lions), a psychiatric nurse named Norma, two student nurses, a policeman, and a middle-aged woman from Denver who had been visiting a relative.
“Where is Leonard?” cried Miles.
“That guy musta hypnotized me,” the policeman said, struggling into his trousers.
“He preached a message of love,” said the woman from Denver, wrapping herself in Leonard’s wet pack.
“Where is he?” Miles shouted.
White curtains flapped at the open window. Miles stared out into the darkness. Nisher had escaped. His mind inflamed by his brief vision of the future, he was sure to be preaching his message of love up and down the country. He could be anywhere, Miles thought. How on earth can I find him? How can I join him?
WILD TALENTS, INC.
Glancing at his watch, Waverley saw that he still had ten minutes before the reporters were due. “Now then,” he said in his best interviewing voice, “what can I do for you, sir?”
The man on the other side of the desk looked startled for a moment, as though unaccustomed to being addressed as sir. Then he grinned, suddenly and startlingly.
“This is the place, isn’t it?” he asked. “The place of refuge?”
Waverley looked intently at the thin, bright-eyed man. “This is Wild Talents, Incorporated,” he said. “We’re interested in any supernormal powers.”
“I knew that,” the man said, nodding vigorously. “That’s why I escaped. I know you’ll save me from them.” He glanced fearfully over his shoulder.
“We’ll see,” Waverley said diplomatically, settling back in his chair. His young organization seemed to hold an irresistible fascination for the lunatic fringe. As soon as he had announced his interest in psi functions and the like, an unending stream of psychotics and quacks had beaten a path to his door.
But Waverley didn’t bar even the obvious ones. Ridiculously enough, you sometimes found a genuine psi among the riffraff, a diamond in the rubbish. So—