To Ride Pegasus

Sound had come on, more frequency drone than actual note. The dim lights on the girders were beginning to fade completely, and ground spots lit up, adding their eerie moiety to the ambience. Sally looked toward the half-circle of stage which had remained semi-lit. The aura of expectation, of voracious emotional appetite increased perceptibly. Sally shivered and folded her arms across her breasts but Daffyd sensed that the created atmosphere irritated more than distressed her.

She shifted in her chair nervously when the waiter appeared with cups and the pot. He served them disdainfully-he didn’t make as much commission from the milder brews-and hurried off, grimacing thanks for the carefully generous gratuity.

The auditorium was almost full now and the conversational murmur impinged on

Daffyd’s senses as the snarl of the unfed. Yes, the climate of the city was very uncertain indeed. He could feel the tension building rapidly now, with so many feeding it. He noticed the muscle boys spreading through the tables and couches, and he worried harder. The psychology of a crowd was theoretically understood but there was always that gap between theory and reality-that dangerous gap which could be bridged by the most insignificant event-when crowd exploded into

Riot. Daffyd and Sally were far too familiar with the “tone” of Riot to be very comfortable in a pregnant situation.

In fact, Daffyd was leaning across the table to warn Sally that they might have to leave when the lighting of the stage area altered and a girl stepped into the center. She wore a white caftan-type unadorned robe and carried an old-fashioned twelve-string guitar. It had no umbilical amplifier which surprised Daffyd as much as the girl’s regal poise and simple appearance.

A camouflaged hand deposited a three-legged stool and the girl took her place on it without a backward glance.

Daffyd frowned at the darkness above the stage, wondering where the sound amplification was hidden. She couldn’t possibly hope to reach and hold this crowd without electronic boosting of some kind.

Then Daffyd saw the relieved and pleased smile on Sally’s face.

The girl settled herself, tossed back her mane of tawny hair and, without taking any notice of the audience, began to play softly. There was no need for mechanical amplification of that delicate sound. For the first note fell into a voracious silence, the most effective conductor.

No-and Daffyd sat up straight-every nerve in his body aware of a subtle, incredible pulse that picked up the gentle melody and expanded it-telepathically!

And this, too, was what Sally had hoped he’d feel, what she’d brought him here to confirm. He saw the happy triumph in her eyes. The girl’s voice, a warm lyric soprano, intensified the pulse, “sounded” off the echo as she fed the multitude with a tender ethnic admonition to love one another. And…everyone did.

Daffyd listened and “listened,” stunned physically and emotionally by the unusual experience: unusual even for a man whose life had been dedicated to the concept of unusual mental powers. On an intellectual plane, he was incredulous.

He couldn’t deduce how she was effecting this total rapport, this augmented pulse. It was not mechanical, of that he was certain. Why this sensation of “echo”?

The girl would have to be a broadcasting empath: an intelligent empath, unlike poor Harold Orley who hadn’t any intellect at all. This young woman was consciously choosing and directing the emotion she broadcast…Wait! That was it…she was consciously directing the emotions…at whom? Not the individual minds of the listeners: they were responding but they could not account for the “generation” of emotion that enveloped everyone. There had to be sensitive minds to generate emotion like that and these people were parapsychically dead. Yet she was manipulating them in some way, using some method that was non-electrical and non-sonic.

The girl continued with a more complicated tune from some early nineteenth century religious minority which had settled in the eastern United States. And the “message” of the song was a soothing statement of acceptance.

She was deliberately taking the audience out of the technocratic trap, transferring them to less complex days, lulling them into a mood of even greater receptivity. Nor was Daffyd immune to the charged atmosphere…except for that part of his brain which could not perceive how she was effecting this deft, mass control.

The singer finished that song and plucked the strings idly, chording into a different key. The third song, while no more intense than the first two, was a rollicking happy ballad, a spirit-lifter, a work doer.

She was preparing her audience, Daffyd realized, deftly and carefully. He began to relax, or rather, the intellect which had been alerted, responded to the beguiling charm of her performance.

Daffyd was suddenly frightened. A deep pang, covered in a flash, overladen with worry that was lyric-inspired. Only it wasn’t. Sally had felt the pang, too, glancing nervously around her. The rest of the audience didn’t seem to catch alarm: they were in the young singer’s complete thrall, caught up in the illusion of unpressured times and ways.