"How could it be a bad thing?"
"Well, I have a picture in my mind of the world Gene wants -- fewer people, not so many big cities. And I think it may be a world in which it is not possible to do physics."
"Come in, Mike."
Wilcox sat down and crossed his legs nervously. Gene was in his outsize black leather armchair; between them was a table with a coffeepot, cups, sugar.
"Coffee?"
"No, thanks. You know, all this has more or less knocked my pins out from under me. I mean, all my life I've been going on the assumption that magic is a highly specialized form of deception. Now I have to get used to the idea that there really is a sort of magic."
"There isn't anything magical about it," Gene said.
"Well, if you say not. Anyhow, I'm curious about something. What's your limit, I mean in size? Could you make an elephant appear, for instance?"
"No. I think the limit is somewhere around my own size, and I haven't even got very close to that. Why do you mention elephants?"
"Just something that crossed my mind. I'd like to talk about these meetings of yours. Stop me if I speak out of turn. I suppose you've never spoken in public before? Are you nervy about it?"
"Yes, a little."
"How long will your speech run?"
"About an hour."
"Pardon me, but that's not enough. When people come to a meeting, or the theater or whatever, they expect to be entertained or jawed at for two hours, more or less."
"I don't think I can make it last that long."
"No, that's what I'm getting at. There's got to be something else to fill up the evening, and my idea is to use magic. I can get some really spectacular illusions from New York if you say the word. An hour of magic, an hour of lecture -- do the healing, and there you are."
"What sort of illusions?"
"The famous glass box on wheels, for one. I take it money is no object?"
"Right."
"Well, I know a man who will rent us one if we make him an offer he can't refuse. I can get his stage crew as well. It will pack the customers in, I promise you."
Gene said, "Mike, I'm grateful, but if we use fake magic, won't people think I'm a fake too?"
"Not with the healing. We could make a point of that, in fact -- the contrast. Anyhow, it's quite likely that some people will call you a fake, whatever you do. The point is, the people who're seen you won't believe that, and people who haven't seen you will come because they're curious."
"Come in, Cliff. Coffee?"
"No, thanks."
"Cliff, there's one good reason why this can't be a church. I want to thank you for that suggestion; I know you were thinking of what's best for me and putting aside your own religious feelings. But we can't do that, because a church can only grow at the expense of other churches. We can't get three billion people in ten years that way. This has to be a movement that anybody can belong to, Christian, Jew, Moslem, whatever."
"That's right. I wasn't thinking."
"And I hope I can say what I have to say without tearing down anybody's religious beliefs. If you catch me doing that, tell me."
"I will. But I'll tell you one thing."
"Yes?"
"If I had a choice between you and the Baptist Church, I'd follow you."
"What's the matter, Cliff? What happened?"
Guthrie had a curious look on his face. "He touched me on the forehead," he said.
"Coffee, Piet?"
"Yes, please." Linck sat down, took out a cigar, and settled himself comfortably. "There are some practical details that I want to discuss with you, and then I have a frivolous question."
"Good."
"Practical things first. You realize that you are going to need a large number of professional people of very high caliber. The best place to recruit them would be New York. If you wish, I'll go there and talk to some headhunters, do some preliminary interviews."
"Yes, Piet. Thank you."
Linck waved his cigar. "I have nothing else to do. I have to go back to Amsterdam for a week or so in July or August, otherwise I am free. Now for the frivolous question. Frivolous is not the right word, perhaps, but it is just something I'm curious about. Don't answer if you would rather not. Have you ever had what people call a religious experience?"
"Funny you should ask," Gene said. "Years ago, When I left home, something did happen. I was eleven at the time. Out in eastern Oregon one night I hitched a ride with an old man who got suspicious of me and left me off on a dirt road in the middle of nowhere. It was getting late, and it was cold. I didn't know where I was. I started walking down that road and I came to a forest. It wasn't like any other forest I've ever seen. Tall pines and little twisted junipers, spaced pretty widely apart, growing in white sand. That place scared me, it was so quiet. There wasn't a sound, no insects, no birds, nothing. Then it began to rain, and in a funny way that made it easier to take, because of the sound. I walked into the forest a little way, out of sight of the road, and lay down curled up around the trunk of one of those trees, and went to sleep there.
"Sometime just after dawn I woke up and the rain had stopped, the place was deathly still again. And then -- this is the hard part. I don't know how to explain it. I felt, I sensed, that there was somebody up there, and then I heard a voice. Not a voice, but a -- I don't know what. Telling me something. It was a word, or maybe a number -- some number too big to grasp. Just the one thing, the big voice that wasn't a voice. And I heard what it said, and I couldn't understand it. Not because the voice wasn't speaking clearly, but because my head was too small for what it was saying."
He shifted in his chair. "That was all. I started walking again, and got to another road, hitched another ride, and I wound up in San Francisco."
"And you've never gone back there?"
"No. I don't know if it would be worse if I went back and it happened again, or if it didn't -- if nothing happened. I know where that place is -- I looked it up later. It's called the Lost Forest, in eastern Oregon. It's a place that shouldn't be there, because those are Ponderosa pines, growing in sand, in a place that never gets more than about six inches of rainfall a year."
"And you still don't know what the voice was trying to say to you?"
"I know. But I don't know what it is that I know. My head still isn't big enough."
"Irma, I've got to talk to you."
"Come in the pantry, honey. What is it, did he touch you on the forehead too?"
"Yes, but that's not it. He told me he's going to need a personal secretary, and an appointments secretary, and a press secretary, and at least two office managers, one for here and one for downtown, and he asked me to choose."
Irma cocked an ironic eyebrow at her. "You want me to guess?"
Margaret picked up a cocktail napkin and began to shred it. "Irma, I know I should have said I wanted to be an office manager. But then somebody else would have been with him all the time."
"I understand," Irma said~ "Isn't it hell?"
Chapter Twenty-six
From the St. Petersburg Times:
"An Evening of Magic and Mystery," presented Friday through Sunday at the Sherman Theatre, is a puzzling mixture of entertainment and propaganda.
At the Friday performance, stage illusions, offered by a magician who called himself the Astounding Willy, dominated the earlier part of the evening. Ghostly heads floated out over the audience, there were showers of rose petals, and many things appeared and vanished, including cards, coins, pigeons, and the magician himself.