“From what happened here this morning,” Blaine agreed, “I rather doubt they would have.”
“They say you are a paranormal. . . .”
“Parry is the word,” Blaine told him. “No need to dress it up.”
“And you are really one?”
“Father, I am at a loss to understand your interest.”
“Just academic,” said Father Flanagan. “I can assure you, purely academic. Something that is of interest to me personally. You are as safe with me as if you were in confessional.”
“There was a day,” said Blaine, “when science was deeply suspect as the hidden foes of all religious truth. We have the same thing here.”
“But the people,” said Father Flanagan, “are afraid again. They close and bar their doors. They do not go out of night. They have hex signs — hex signs, mind you, instead of the blessed crucifix — hanging on their gates and the gables of their houses. They whisper of things which have been dead and dust since the Middle Ages. They tremble in the smoky chimney corners of their minds. They have lost much of their ancient faith. They go through all the rituals, of course, but I see it in their faces, I sense it in their talk, I glimpse it in their minds. They have lost the simple art of faith.”
“No, Father, I don’t think they have. They’re just very troubled people.”
“The entire world is troubled,” said Father Flanagan.
And that was right, Blaine told himself — the entire world was troubled. For it had lost a cultural hero and had not been able to acquire another for all that it had tried. It had lost an anchor which had held it against the winds of illogic and unreason and it was now adrift upon an ocean for which there was no chart.
At one time science had served as the cultural hero. It had logic and reason and an ultimate precision that probed down into the atom and out to the farther edge of space. It spawned gadgets by the millions for the comfort of its worshipers and it placed the hand and eye of Man upon the entire universe, by proxy. It was something you could trust in, for it was the sum of human wisdom among many other things.
But principally it was translated into machines and machine technology, for science was an abstract, but machines were something that anyone could see.
Then there came the day when Man, for all his wondrous machines, for all his famed technology, had been driven back from space, had been whipped howling from the heavens back to the den of Earth. And that day the cultural god of science had shone a bit less brightly, had died a little in the people’s minds.
And that other day, when Man had gone to the stars without the benefit of machines, the worship of technology had died for good and all. Machines and technology and science itself still existed, still were in daily use, still were of vast importance, but they no longer formed a cult.
For while Fishhook used machines, they were not machines as such — not machines that could be accepted by the common mass of mankind. For they had no pistons and no wheels, no gears, no shafts, no levers, not a single button — they had nothing of the component parts of a commonplace machine. They were strange and alien and they had no common touch.
So Man had lost his cultural hero and since his nature was so fashioned that he must have some abstract hero-worship, because he must always have an ideal and a goal, a vacuum was created that screamed aloud for filling.
Paranormal kinetics, for all its strangeness, for all its alien concept, filled the bill exactly. For here, finally, were all the crackpot cults completely justified; here, at last, was the promise of ultimate wish-fulfillment; here was something exotic enough, or that could be made exotic, to satisfy the depth of human emotion such as a mere machine never had been able.
Here, so help us God, was magic!
So the world went off on a magic jag.
The pendulum had swung too far, as always, and now was swinging back, and the horror of intolerance had been loosed upon the land.
So Man once again was without a cultural hero, but had acquired instead a neosuperstition that went howling through the dark of a second Middle Ages.
“I have puzzled much upon the matter,” said Father Flanagan. “It is something which naturally must concern even so unworthy a servant of the Church as I. For whatever may concern the souls and the minds of men is of interest to the Church and to the Holy Father. It has been the historic position of Rome that we must so concern ourselves.”
Blaine bowed slightly in recognition of the sincerity of the man, but there was a fleck of bitterness in his voice when he answered: “So you’ve come to study me. You are here to question me.”
There was sadness in the old priest’s voice. “I prayed you would not see it in this light. I have failed, I see. I came to you as to someone who could help me and, through me, the Church. For, my son, the Church at times needs help. It is not too proud to say so, for all that it has been charged, through all its history, with excessive pride. You are a man, an intelligent man, who is a part of this thing which serves to puzzle us. I thought that you might help me.”
Blaine sat silent, and the priest sat looking at him, a humble man who sought a favor, and yet with a sense of inner strength one could not help but feel.
“I would not mind,” said Blaine. “Not that I think for a moment it would do any good. You’re a part of what is in this town.”
“Not so, my son. We neither sanction nor condemn. We do not have facts enough.”
“I’ll tell you about myself,” said Blaine, “if that is what you want to know. I am a traveler. My job is to go out to the stars. I climb into a machine — well, not exactly a machine, rather it’s a symbolic contrivance that helps me free my mind, that possibly even gives my mind a kick in the right direction. And it helps with the navigation — Look, Father, this is hard to say in simple, common terms. It sounds like gibberish.”
“I am following you with no difficulty.”
“Well, this navigation. That’s another funny thing. There are factors involved that there is no way to put one’s tongue to them. In science it would be mathematics, but it’s not actually mathematics. It’s a way of getting there, of knowing where you’re going.”
“Magic?”
“Hell, no — pardon me, Father. No, it isn’t magic. Once you understand it, once you get the feel of it, it is clear and simple and it becomes a part of you. It is as natural as breathing and as easy as falling off a log. I would imagine—”
“I would think,” said Father Flanagan, “that it is unnecessary to go into the mechanics of it. Could you tell me how it feels to be on another star?”
“Why,” Blaine told him, “no different than sitting here with you. At first — the first few times, that is — you feel obscenely naked, with just your mind and not your body. . . .”
“And your mind wanders all about?”
“Well, no. It could, of course, but it doesn’t. Usually you stuff yourself inside the machine you took along with you.”
“Machine?”
“A monitoring contraption. It picks up all the data, gets it down on tape. You get the entire picture. Not just what you see yourself — although it’s not actually seeing; it’s sensing — but you get it all, everything that can possibly be caught. In theory, and largely in practice, the machine picks up the data, and the mind is there for interpretation only.”
“And what do you see?”
Blaine laughed. “Father, that would take longer than either of us have.”
“Nothing like on Earth?”
“Not often, for there are not too many Earth-like planets. Proportionately, that is. There are, in fact, quite a lot in number. But we’re not limited to Earth-like planets. We can go anywhere it is possible for the machine to function, and the way those machines are engineered, that means almost anywhere. . . .”