Ballroom of the Skies

He remembered one of the very ancient moving pictures to which Darwin Branson had taken him. Old pictures fascinated Darwin. He remembered the one where a tramp was given a legitimate check for one million dollars. An uncertified check. He had a fortune in his hand, and no one could accept the reality of it. Just a bum with a delusion of grandeur. In the end, he had had to tear it up, or go crazy.

And he remembered a particularly infuriating incident of his youth. One summer he had gone surf casting near Marblehead, alone on the gray dawn beach, using borrowed equipment, heaving the cut bait out as far as he could, retrieving it slowly, the surf smashing against his thighs. He was using hundred-pound test line. Suddenly a massive tug had yanked him off balance, nearly yanking the rod out of his hands. He clung desperately, thinking of the cost of replacing rod, reel and line. He had floundered in the surf and the reel had locked somehow. He wanted to brace himself and break the line, but he was yanked forward again, yanked off his feet, towed straight out with ominous speed and power. He saw at once that he would have to let the rod and reel go and swim back, or risk being drowned. Then he discovered what had locked the reel. The end of his water-soaked sweater had caught fast in the reel. He tried to rip it loose and it would not give. He had yelled in panic at the empty seascape. He was moving faster than any human could swim. The monster at the other end of the line swam steadily out, and then miraculously made a long slow turn and headed in again. It was evidently its intention to scrape the hook off on the rocks near shore. Dake at last slammed into the rocks painfully, and the line parted in that instant. He floundered to shore and sat, bleeding, panting.

It had been an exciting experience... until he tried to tell someone about it, experienced the blank incredulous stare, the roar of laughter. There was no proof. Nothing but wet clothes and gouged hands. You just took a tumble in the surf and thought a fish yanked on the line, boy. There’s nothing in here to tow you around like that.

No one had believed him. Ever.

No one had believed in the bum with a million dollars.

No one would believe in the powers he had acquired.

And he could not use them and remain alive. Unless...

In late afternoon he found what he wanted. A twenty-five-year-old rust bucket of a War II Liberty ship, under Panama registry, which meant, of course, Brazilian control. They signed him on as a deck hand, looking only at his powerful frame, not at the lack of identification. At dusk they wallowed slowly by the shattered stub of the Statue of Liberty, heading for Jacksonville, Havana, Port au Prince, Rio. He knew that ten thousand yards was the ultimate limit of the Pack B. He knew that there had to be some limit to the space over which they could detect the psychic radiations of any extra-human application of mental force. At no time did he doubt that they would kill him if they could. It is more difficult to lie in the mind than with the lips. He wanted a chance to think. He wanted labor that would exhaust his body. He had the vague, unformed idea of taking an isolated group of people, such as the crew of the ship, and somehow forcing them to believe in what he would tell them.

The captain was a remote little man with a twitching face and two fingers missing on each hand. His name was Ryeson. The first officer ran the ship. He was a round muscular Dutchman with tangerine hair, radiation scars on his face and throat, and his name was Hagger. It was a sullen ship, a floating monument to slovenliness, dirt, unidentifiable stenches. They worked long into the night battening hatches under the incomprehensible cursings of the first officer, under the roll of the ship lights, driving wedges, lashing the canvas tight.

The next morning, cramped from the short narrow bunk, Dake was put to work by Hagger chipping paint. He and the other green hand were so elected. The other man was a professorial-looking citizen in his late thirties, with the long slow tremblings of alcoholism complicated by prono addiction. His name was Green and he had nothing to say. His reflexes were so uncoordinated that he kept hurting himself, though there was not enough strength in his blows to damage himself severely.

Dake stripped to the waist and let the June sun darken his back as he worked. As he worked monotonously he tried to organize some plan. There was one alternative. To hide for the rest of his life. Never use the new skills. Work in far places, keep quiet, let the knowledge eventually die with him. That was a remarkably unsatisfying solution. He wondered how Watkins had accepted his return to Earth. Watkins would, he guessed, conform to whatever had been asked of him, expected of him. Somewhere along the line Watkins had lost the intense need to revolt.

So lost was he in thought that he stopped working for a time, squatting on his heels, looking squinch-eyed out across the blue sea. A heavy kick in the shoulder rolled him across the greasy deck. He jumped up and faced an irate first officer.