Bradley, Marion Zimmer - Shadowgate 04 (20 page)

 
          
Colin
didn't think about Thorne Blackburn again for several days.

 
          
The
school term had ended the month before, and Colin was teaching only one summer
session this year, a three-week course on the history of the occult that
started at the end of June. It was a graduate course, and Colin had pushed very
hard for its inclusion in the curriculum, over the protests of the trustees.

 
          
Perhaps
the incidence was on the rise, or perhaps knowing Claire was what had made him
aware of it, but more and more, Colin realized that people with problems
—
problems which, though real,
were outside the scope of conventional science
—
were being funneled into
inappropriate treatment by professionals in psychology or medicine. Even with
the best of intentions, these professionals were unable to treat the problems
these people came to them to solve. It was psychiatry's fault as much as
anyone's
—
psychiatry had gone from being a fashionable adjunct to
being one of life's necessities since the fifties, as if not only the pursuit
but the attainment of happiness had now become an inalienable right.

 
          
But
psychiatry couldn't talk a poltergeist out of existence, any more than medical
science could give its victim a pill to banish the symptoms of possession by a
"noisy spirit." Not everybody who heard voices was suffering from a
treatable psychological abnormality; not every report of telepathy or
precog-nition was an indicator of a disturbed mental state
—
though the people who had
been told all their lives that such things did not exist were likely to be understandably
upset when the Unseen came barging into their lives.

           
If only the professionals who would
see these people were willing to entertain the possibility of more
explanations than the ones entombed in their textbooks, much good could be done
in the world. A summer lecture course was a small beginning, but at least it
was a beginning. And a number of those signed up for his course might do great
things with their lives, things that might reconcile the painful breach that
had been forced between Science and Belief in this century.

 
          
Since
he would be teaching over the summer, Colin had not closed up his offices and
even kept to his regular office hours. The campus had been closed by antiwar
demonstrations for so much of the year that Colin felt that the students who
were still here to get an education
—
as opposed to those whose
purpose seemed to be ending the war, for example
—
ought to get the chance to
see something of their professors. On the streets of
America
today, an entire
generation was opting out of rationalism as a basis for their decisions, or so
it sometimes seemed to Colin. At least it was Sproul and Bancroft that had been
the usual focus of the students' attention, and not Tolman Hall.

 
          
The
sword-in-stone letter opener that Alison had given him as an office-warming
present gleamed on the corner of his desk. There was a more prosaic reason for
Colin to keep office hours today. He was meeting Claire for lunch
—
it was her day off
—
and it was easiest for her
to meet with him on campus, combining that with her errands at local shops.

 
          
He
took a moment to breathe a silent prayer of thanks that Peter Moffat had made
detective before he might have had to take part in some of the brawls the
Berkeley
campus had seen over the
last year and a half. There'd been no permanent injuries on either side, but
Colin had found the passions that ran so high on both sides deeply disturbing.

 
          
This
is how it starts, the road to fascism and genocide. You know that. This is how
it always starts, and then it ends, not with a bang, but with a whimper. . . .

 
          
The
sound of the knock at his door, though soft, was jarring.

 
          
"Professor?
May I come in?" Jonathan Ashwell said.

 
          
The
painfully clean-cut young student Colin had met four years before was hard to
discern in the man who
—
with unchanged deference
—
entered Colin's office. The
sportcoat and khakis had been replaced by tattered bell-bottomed blue jeans
sewn with daisies, flags, peace signs, and other symbols Colin didn't even
recognize. Jonathan was wearing a T-shirt that had once been white, but now had
been hand-tie-dyed in Day-Glo neon colors. Around his neck he wore a number of
seed-bead necklaces and medallions, and pinned to his painted denim jacket was
a small green button with the logo: "Vietnik." There was an Army
surplus backpack slung over one shoulder.

 
          
His
hair was long now, straggling over his shoulders and accompanied by the
inevitable sideburns and mustache, and he was wearing a pair of wire-rimmed
glasses with octagonal lavender lenses. He was holding a slip of paper in his
hand.

 
          
"Of
course, Jonathan. What can I do for you?" Colin asked. He'd become inured
to student fashions long ago.

           
"Sign my drop-slip?"
Jonathan said hesitantly, sliding the paper in his hand across the desk.
"I've changed my mind. I'm dropping out."

 
          
As
he came closer, Colin caught an almost overpowering whiff of strawberry; the
rage for scented oils having kept pace with the penchant for smoking
marijuana, which had an intense and distinctive scent.

 
          
"You're
dropping the course?" Colin asked in bewilderment.

 
          
Jonathan
had only one more semester to go before collecting his Master's and had already
been accepted into the doctoral program. He'd been one of the most vocal
supporters of Colin's desire to publicize what Colin called science's dark
twin
—
the
occult
—
and
an endlessly inventive, questing mind.

 
          
"But
why?" Colin asked.

 
          
"It's
nothing to do with you, Professor," Jonathan said guiltily. "But
it's, you know, like
—
"

 
          
Colin
resisted the temptation to demand that the young man speak English; Jonathan
was almost painfully sincere in his inarticulateness.

 
          
"I've
just always known there was, like, something more. Something bigger. Something
that would make sense out of this whole mixed-up crazy world, you know? And
with what Alison said, about how we all have to be soldiers for the Light
—
but it's hard to be sure
what to
do,
you know? But now I think I know."

 
          
And
so once again Colin MacLaren heard the name of Thorne Blackburn. It seemed that
Jonathan had attended an antiwar rally in
Golden Gate
Park
a few weeks before, and
Blackburn
had been one of the
speakers.

 
          
"And
it was like ... I'd been waiting all my life to hear what he had to say. I'm
going to join his group and work with him to bring the New Aeon."

 
          
If
Jonathan had been Colin's disciple, Colin might simply have forbidden him to do
these things, but Jonathan had always been too passionate about finding his own
answers to accept the discipline of a Magickal Lodge. He'd gone with
grasshopper facility from one store of knowledge to the next, seeking, always
seeking. . . .

 
          
And
now his search had come to this.

 
          
"Jonathan,
I'll sign your drop-slip if you really want me to, but I beg you to reconsider.
You can't just abandon everything you've worked toward for years to follow some
street-person who thinks he might have the Answer," Colin said, almost
pleading.

 
          
"They
followed Jesus," Jonathan said with the same apologetic serenity.

 
          
"Surely
you're not comparing this . . . Thorne Blackburn to Jesus?" Colin
demanded, scandalized.

 
          
"Why
not?" Jonathan said. "Jesus didn't come to give us the Answer. He
came to give us the questions. It's been two thousand years
—
why shouldn't someone else
have more questions for us? But I know this comes as a shock, Professor. Why
don't you come and meet him? You'll see what a great mind he has. I've told
Thorne all about you, too, and he says he'd like to meet you."

 
          
I'll
just bet,
Colin thought to himself. His work with Claire had gained him a
quiet but well-founded reputation as debunker, and one who did not suffer
charlatans gladly.

 
          
"Look,
Jonathan. I admit this comes as a bit of a shock to me, and it seems to be
rather a sudden decision on your part. You've got at least another week before
you need to drop these summer courses; why not give it a few more days and see
what you think then?"

 
          
Jonathan's
face lost its comfortable smile.

 
          
"I
thought that you, at least, would understand, Professor MacLaren," he
said, in hurt tones. "I know that you know there's more to the world than
just this . . . military-industrial complex. And Thorne, he says it's time for
the Old Aeon to end, for us to summon the Gods to earth once more and end the
rift between us. And I can help him. It takes money to do the things he wants
to do, and I've got my grandfather's trust fund
—
"

 
          
Colin
listened in growing horror as Jonathan blithely outlined his plans to drop out
of school and subsidize what he called an "underground newspaper,"
signing over his inheritance to do so. Only a fundamental belief in freedom and
years of dealing with what sounded like similar blue-sky notions allowed Colin
to remain silent.

 
          
He
already realized that talking to Jonathan would do no good at all, but in the
end, he wasn't even able to coax the young man to wait a few days before
making such a life-changing decision, let alone keep him from dropping Colin's
course. Unfortunately, Colin was in no sense standing
in loco parentis
to
the young man
—
he had no right to withhold his consent in a matter that
was, in essence, a formality. He signed the form, and allowed Jonathan to
extract a promise from Colin to come to
San Francisco
to see Thorne Blackburn
perform.

 
          
When
Jonathan left, Colin suddenly felt very old.

 
          
Alison
had said once in passing that these days
San Francisco
reminded her a bit of
Berlin
in the thirties, but were
things really that bad? The fabled decadence of
Berlin
before the Nazis had taken
power had been the fever of an infected wound. Was this country really in that
much trouble?

 
          
It
was embroiled in an unjust war that Colin could not support; its elected
officials seemed to have become mountebanks and thieves overnight, and
everything that Colin had once known would last forever was crumbling. Even in
the wake of the Kennedy assassination, there had been a sort of tarnished
hopefulness to the country that seemed antithetical to the sickness of the
Third Reich and its would-be heirs . . . heirs who seemed to multiply every
day. But somewhere in the last two decades
America
had lost the certainty
that she was
right
and the will to act based on that knowledge.

 
          
Some
might call that change maturity . . . but to Colin, it seemed very much more
like decay.

 
          
Try
not to borrow trouble,
Colin counseled himself sternly. Trouble would find
him in its own good time
—
he had dedicated his whole self to becoming an instrument
of the Light, and if his merely human understanding sometimes did not
comprehend the choices his Higher Self made, at least he knew enough to trust
its decisions. This trust had led him to remain where he was, to go on teaching
his classes when his heart told him to abandon his teaching and go looking for
Hasloch's Masters down the scattered ratlines that the Third Reich had used to
go to ground.