Modus Vivendi by John Berryman (chrysanthemum read aloud txt) 📕

not."

"What then?" Keys demanded.

"I'm Grand Master of the Manhattan Chapter," I told him. "And you, like every Psi who is made aware of the existence of the Lodge, are now subject to my orders."

"Not me," Elmer said. "You ain't got the Stigma."

I fired a lift at an ashtray on the table beside him, and it sailed in an arc toward the kitchen and crashed against the wall. My TK was certainly a lot better than it had been in the morning. Well, I'd spent an hour or so warming up before they had come in.

"Who hasn't got the Stigma?" I said.

He looked at Keys. "You didn't do that," he said. "You couldn't!"

Keys was openmouthed. "What a bruiser!" he marveled.

"So I've got the Stigma, Elmer," I said quietly. "Now why won't you do what I tell you?"

"Ah don't do what anybody tells me!"

"What do you hate and fear the most?" I asked him.

"Snakes, ah reckon," he decided.

"Show him a snake, Mary," I said. Her face twisted in indecision. I rammed a lift in under her heart—I know it hurt her. "Show him!" I snapped.

Elmer didn't jump more than three feet. Mary gave all of us the same hallucination. Her first try was a pretty sad kind of a snake, but it was bigger than the nine-by-twelve rug it squirmed on, and was making right for Elmer's legs, hissing in a horrible fashion.

"Enough," I said. "That's how, Elmer. And if that doesn't trouble you, how about this?" I gave him a sample of what TK means when it's clamped on the mitral valve. A heart attack is no joking matter, and just before he hit the deck I eased off.

"Now," I said, "will you do what I tell you, or do I have to kill you outright?"

He sank down to his knees, resting his palms on the carpet so recently vacant of illusory snake. "Yo' got me convinced, suh," he admitted. "No mo', you hear?"

"Any more protests?" I said. I got none. "Here's what we have to do," I went on, and spelled it out for them. At last they were ready to go, three shaken young people. "I repeat—absolute secrecy—none of you is a telepath, so only your lips can give you away if you keep your thoughts screened around TP's. Later that may change—the Lodge is preparing to come a little more into the open with Psis."

My whole membership nodded and left me. I was shaking from head to foot.

We had things to do in the forenoon, and I didn't try to see His Honor Judge Vito Passarelli until after lunch. But the docket was crowded, and there was no chance until after court had adjourned, which was well on toward four o'clock. His Honor was hanging his robes on a clothes-tree as I came into his Chambers, and he nodded me politely to a chair, just as if our last words hadn't been pretty heated.

"Mary Hall?" he asked, fumbling around to find his in-Chambers glasses. He's too vain to wear them on the bench.

I nodded an answer to his question as he came back to take a creaky horse-hair swivel, relic of more judges and years than I like to think about. "I'm here as her counsel," I said.

"What else?" he asked mildly, taking the lid off a big humidor on his desk and starting to fill a pipe.

"We'd like you to know that Mary has joined an organization that should do for her all that the social workers would like to see done for her. She's no longer a behavior problem for Normal society."

"Quite some organization," he said, showing interest. "What one?"

"It has no formal name," I said. "Being a secret organization. In point of fact, it's an organization of Psis that is revealing itself for the first time."

"Odd that I never heard of it," Passarelli said, looking at his fingernails. He puffed smoke around the stem of his pipe. His coolness bothered me. He should have been much more excited about what I was saying. I threw my high hard one.

"This organization exercises a formidable discipline over its members," I went on. "One of its firm rules is that no Psi may use his powers to the detriment of a Normal."

He chuckled softly. "You're taking advantage of what I told you yesterday, Maragon," he said calmly. "You know, and I know, that Psis have never done any such thing. And if they had, why would they pick you to run their errands? What Psi would ever trust a Normal?"

It was getting sticky. I was skating perilously close to the brink—once I revealed to a Normal that I had the Stigma, my days as an attorney were done. "This organization—I'll call it the Lodge, if I may—has to have an attorney to represent it in Court. And you know as well as I do they can't hire a Psi attorney—the Bar Association has taken care of that. They came to me because...."

"Yes, yes," he interrupted, taking his eyes off his nails, and showing some real interest at last. "If you only knew how much I want to believe you, Maragon. But I will never believe that Psis would permit themselves to be represented by a Normal. Too bad, but the social workers, and not your mythical Lodge, will get Mary Hall. That or a Federal Grand Jury."

Well, this was the fork in the road, I had been kidding myself, and now I knew it. Persist in my masquerade as a Normal, and I'd never get Mary off the hook. But reveal myself as a Psi, and I was through as an attorney. It really wasn't much of a decision—I had made it when I revealed myself to Keys, Mary and Elmer.

I looked at the humidor of tobacco on his desk. Without changing expression, I aimed a lift at it. The container came up smoothly from the polished walnut and hovered in the air before us.

Passarelli looked at it blandly. I don't think anything in my life has ever been a greater shock than his unconcern. He should have dropped his teeth. Slowly I let the lift break, and lowered the humidor to his desk.

"Fairly good TK, if that's all you're capable of," Passarelli said. "Or can you do better, Maragon?"

"You slimy Normal!" I exploded. "You tricked me into exposing myself!"

"What am I, an idiot?" he snapped. "I had to know."

I stood up. "Until now, I never really hated Normals," I began.

"Oh, sit down, for Heaven's sake," he said testily. "Now don't get emotional and lose all your perspective. Doesn't it occur to you that there's been just too much coincidence in this whole thing?"

I think the word for it is "collapsed." I fell back into my chair. "You'll have to spell it out," I said.

Passarelli leaned forward, his face concentrated, almost angry. "You have the Stigma, you admit it?"

"Of course I admit it."

"You think any other attorney is a Psi?"

"No. I certainly do not. It's only a miracle that I ever got through the screening and made it."

"And yet you, the only attorney with the Stigma, gets tapped to be Public Defender for a Stigma case—Keys Crescas. Doesn't this strike you as more than coincidence can account for?"

"Now it does," I admitted. "Are you trying to tell me...."

"I'm telling you I've been suspicious of you for a long time, Pete," Passarelli said. "Perhaps you didn't know it, but I was one of the young attorneys on the Committee from the Bar Association that checked your heredity. No, you were born in San Francisco. No, your parents didn't live in the Logan Ring—their home was in Sausalito. But—the day that neutron bomb was accidentally fired and started the rash of Psi mutations in the ring outside the fatal area centering on Logan, your parents were in a jet airliner. I found that out—and kept my mouth shut. I never told the rest of the Committee that on the 19th of April in '75 that jet was over Iowa, en route to San Francisco, and possibly close enough to Logan for its passengers to have been affected by the neutron spray. Even then I knew the law was painting itself into a corner with its attitude toward Psi. I hoped. I hoped you did have the Stigma, and I've waited my time to force you into the open."

"Stinking Normal!"

"Stop acting like a child. I said I hoped!"

"Hoped?"

"Yes. I meant what I said about wishing there were a responsible organization of Psis we could turn to. Are you serious about this organization, this Lodge?"

"I guess I am," I said, shaken.

"How many members does it have?"

"It's a secret organization," I protested.

"How many members?"

"Four, including me."

He shrugged. "You start somewhere. Mostly with a man you can trust, and I trust you, Maragon. You can keep this girl in line?"

"Our discipline is formidable," I reminded him, trying a grin. It was pretty sick.

"I'll bet," he grinned back. "Well, it had better be, for I'm going to take a chance on you. Sooner or later the law will have to admit the existence of Psi. I know as well as you Stigma cases that this gene is dominant—that there'll be more Psis every generation. We've got to find some common ground between the two societies—some way to get along. Give me your personal surety in this Mary Hall thing. As an attorney, you're an officer of the Court, and I guess I have the right to make her your responsibility. I certainly don't want it getting out that I'm playing footsie with an organization of Psis—this is an elective office, after all."

"After all," I agreed. "But I am glad to hear you sounding like a politician again."

"We'll have to keep our dealings off the record," Passarelli insisted. "But if I thought I could call on you when we get one of these sticky Psi cases before the Courts...."

You'd recruit for the Lodge, I thought to myself. "You've got yourself a deal, Your Honor!" I said fervently.

"Call it a modus vivendi," he smiled. "Now my big problem is to find a way to eat my words, and let the 99th National Bank accept restitution of what Mary Hall stole from them."

"No sweat," I grinned, beginning to feel better. "It's already been done."

"Done? How could it be? I told the bank not to...."

"You told them," I conceded. "But they had no choice, Your Honor. Mary Hall went to the 99th National Bank this morning and asked for change of a five dollar bill."

"What!"

"And passed to the teller a hundred dollar bill. After all HC works both ways. They've got their money back. By noon they had half a dozen IBM technicians in there trying to figure why they were out of balance!"

THE END End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Modus Vivendi, by Gordon Randall Garrett