LOST LEGION
by Lyle Monroe
A Full-Length Science Novel
"The door of the mind is open, yet have a care where ye tread." Eternally sealed 
is a secret vault in the brain, the No Man's Land which three humans had dared 
to explore....
And found themselves at bay against the world!



CHAPTER ONE
"Ye Have Eyes to See With!"
"HI-YAH, Butcher!" Doctor Philip Huxley put down the dice cup he had been 
fiddling with as he spoke, and shoved out a chair with his foot. "Sit down."
The man addressed ostentatiously ignored the salutation while handing a yellow 
slicker and soggy felt hat to the Faculty Clubroom attendant, but accepted the 
chair. His first words were to the Negro servant.
"Did you hear that, Pete? A witchdoctor, passing himself off as a psychologist, 
has the effrontery to refer to me--to me, a licensed physician and surgeon, as a 
butcher." His voice was filled with gentle reproach.
"Don't let him kid you, Pete. If Doctor Coburn ever got you into an operating 
theater, he'd open up your head just to see what makes you tick. He'd use your 
skull to make an ashtray."
The colored man grinned as he wiped the table, but said nothing.
Coburn clucked and shook his head. "That from a witchdoctor. Still looking for 
the Little Man Who Wasn't There, Phil?"
"If you mean parapsychology, yes."
"How's the racket coming?"
"Pretty good. I've got one less lecture this semester, which is just as well--I 
get awfully tired of explaining to the wide-eyed innocents how little we really 
know about what goes on inside their think tanks. I'd rather do research."
"Who wouldn't? Struck any pay dirt lately?"
"Some. I'm having a lot of fun with a law student just now, chap named Valdez."
Coburn lifted his brows questioningly. "So? E. S. P.?"
"Kinda. He's a sort of a clairvoyant; if he can see one side of an object, he 
can see the other side, too."
"Nuts!"
"If you're so smart, why ain't you rich? I've tried him out under carefully 
controlled conditions, and he can do it--see around corners."
"A guy like that could be an awful menace at stud poker."
"Matter of fact, he made his stake for law school as a professional gambler."
"Found out how he does it?"
"No, damn it." Huxley drummed on the table top, a worried look on his face. "If 
I just had a little money for research, I might get enough data to make this 
sort of thing significant. Look at what Rhine accomplished at Duke over ten 
years back."
"Well, why don't you holler? Go before the board and bite 'em in the ear for it. 
Tell 'em how you're going to make Western University famous in ten easy 
lessons."
Huxley looked still more morose. "Fat chance. I talked with my dean and he 
wouldn't even let me take it up with the president. Scared that the old fathead 
will clamp down on the department even more than he has. You see, officially we 
are supposed to be behaviorists. Any suggestion that there might be something to 
consciousness that can't be explained in terms of physiology and mechanics is 
about as welcome as a Saint Bernard in a telephone booth."
THE TELEPHONE signal glowed red back of the attendant's counter. He switched off 
the news vuecast and answered the call. "Hello . . . Yes, I'll call him. 
Telephone for you, Doctuh."
"Switch it over here." Coburn turned the telephone panel at the table around so 
that it faced him; as he did so it lighted up with the serious face of a young 
woman. He picked up the handset, "What is it?". . . What's that? How long ago 
did it happen? . . . Who made the diagnosis? . . . Read that over again . . . 
Let me see the chart." He inspected its image reflected in the panel, then 
added, "Very well. I'll be right over. Prepare the patient for operating." He 
switched off the instrument and turned to Huxley. "Got to go, Phil--emergency."
"What sort?"
"It'll interest you. Trephining. Maybe some cerebral excision. Car accident. 
Come along and watch it, if you have time." He was putting on his slicker as he 
spoke. He turned and swung out the west door with a long, loose-limbed stride. 
Huxley grabbed his own raincoat and hurried to catch up with him.
"How come," he asked as he came abreast, "they had to search for you?"
"Left my pocket phone in my other suit," Coburn returned briefly. "On purpose--I 
wanted a little peace and quiet."
They worked north and west through the arcades and passages that connected the 
Union with the Science group, ignoring the moving walkways as being too slow. 
But when they came to the conveyor subway under Third Avenue, opposite the 
Pottenger Medical School, they found it flooded, its machinery stalled, and were 
forced to detour west to the Fairfax Avenue conveyor. Coburn cursed impartially 
the engineers and the planning commission for the fact that spring brings 
torrential rains to Southern California, Chamber of Commerce or no.
They got rid of their wet clothes in the physicians' room and moved on to the 
gowning room for surgery. An orderly helped Huxley into white trousers and 
cotton shoe covers, and they moved to the next room to scrub. Coburn invited 
Huxley to scrub also, in order that he might watch the operation close up. For 
three minutes by the little sand glass they scrubbed away with strong green 
soap, then stepped through a door and were gowned by silent, efficient nurses. 
Huxley felt rather silly to be helped on with his clothes by a pretty, 
diminutive nurse who had to stand on tip-toe to get the sleeves high enough. 
They were ushered through the glass door into Surgery III, rubber-covered hands 
held out, supporting a sterile towel, as if holding a skein of yarn.
THE PATIENT was already in place on the table, head raised up and skull clamped 
immobile. Someone snapped a switch and a merciless circle of blue-white lights 
beat down on the only portion of the patient that was exposed, the right side of 
his skull. Coburn glanced quickly around the room, Huxley following his 
glance--light green walls, two operating nurses, gowned, masked and hooded into 
sexlessness, a "dirty" nurse, busy with something in the corner, the 
anesthetist, the instruments that told Coburn the state of the patient's heart 
action and respiration.
Coburn ignored the long glass window that stretched along one side of the room, 
behind which medical students crowded, one with a candid camera, but Huxley 
noted them and the automatic motion picture camera mounted in the overhead as 
well.
He decided that this instrument must have a telephoto lens.
The "dirty" nurse held the chart for the surgeon to read. At a word from Coburn, 
the anesthetist uncovered the patient's face for a moment. Lean brown face, 
aquiline nose, closed sunken eyes. Huxley repressed an exclamation. Coburn 
raised his eyebrows at Huxley.
"What's the trouble?"
"It's Juan Valdez!"
"Who's he?"
"The one I was telling you about--the law student with the trick eyes."
"Hm--Well, his trick eyes didn't see around enough corners this time. He's lucky 
to be alive. Now, Phil, if you'll stand there, you'll see better."
Coburn changed to impersonal efficiency, ignored Huxley's presence and 
concentrated the whole of his able intellect on the damaged flesh before him. 
The skull had been crushed, or punched, apparently by coming into violent 
contact with some hard object with moderately sharp edges. The wound lay above 
the right ear, and was, superficially, two inches or more across. It was 
impossible, before exploration, to tell just how much damage had been suffered 
by the bony structure and the grey matter behind.
Undoubtedly there was some damage to the brain itself. The wound had been 
cleaned up on the surface and the area around it shaved and painted. The trauma 
showed up as a definite hole in the cranium. It was bleeding slightly and was 
partly filled with a curiously nauseating conglomerate of clotted purple blood, 
white tissue, grey tissue, pale yellow tissue.
The surgeon's lean slender fingers, unhuman in their pale orange coverings, 
moved gently, deftly in the wound, as if imbued with a separate life and 
intelligence of their own. Destroyed tissue, too freshly dead for the component 
cells to realize it, was cleared away--chipped fragments of bone, lacerated 
mater dura, the grey cortical tissue of the cerebrum itself.
Huxley became fascinated by the minuscule drama, lost track of time and of the 
sequence of events. He remembered terse orders for assistance: "Clamp!" 
"Retractor!" "Sponge!" The sound of the tiny saw, a muffled whine, the 
teeth-tingling grind it made in cutting through solid, living bone. Gently a 
spatulate instrument was used to straighten out the tortured convolutions. 
Incredible and unreal, he watched a knife whittle at the door of the mind, shave 
the thin wall of reason.
Three times a nurse wiped sweat from the surgeon's face.
Wax performed its function, vitallum alloy replaced bone, dressing shut out 
infection. Huxley had watched uncounted operations, but felt again that almost 
insupportable sense of relief and triumph that comes when the surgeon turns away 
and begins stripping off his gloves.
When Huxley joined Coburn, the surgeon had doused his mask and cap, and was 
feeling under his gown for cigarettes. He looked entirely human again.
He grinned at Huxley and inquired, "Well, how did you like it?"
"Swell. It was the first time I was ever able to watch that type of thing so 
closely. You can't see so well from behind the glass, you know. Is he going to 
be all right?"
Coburn's expression changed. "He is a friend of yours, isn't he? That had 
slipped my mind for the moment. Sorry. He'll be all right, I'm pretty sure. He's 
young and strong, and he came through the operation very nicely. You can see for 
yourself in a couple of days."
"You excised quite a lot of the speech center, didn't you? Will he be able to 
talk when he gets well? Isn't he likely to have aphasia, or some other speech 
disorder?"
"Speech center? Why, I wasn't even close to the speech centers."
"Huh?"
"Put a rock in your right hand, Phil, so you'll know it next time. You're turned 
around a hundred and eighty degrees. I was working in the right cerebral lobe, 
not the left lobe."
Huxley looked puzzled, spread both hands out in front of him, glanced from one 
to the other; then his face cleared and he laughed. "You're right. You know, I 
have the worst time with that. I never can remember which way to deal in a 
bridge game. But wait a minute--I had it so firmly fixed in my mind that you 
were on the left side in the speech centers that I am confused. What do you 
think the result will be on his neurophysiology?"
"Nothing, if past experience is any criterion. What I took away he'll never 
miss. I was working in terra incognito, pal--No Man's Land. If that portion of 
the brain that I was in has any function, the best physiologists haven't been 
able to prove it."

CHAPTER TWO of LOST LEGION
Three Blind Mice



"YOU'VE got to get up! You've got to get up! You've got to get up this 
morning--"
Joan Freeman reached out blindly with one hand and shut off the music of her 
alarm clock, her eyes jammed tight shut in the vain belief that she could remain 
asleep if she did. Her mind wandered. Sunday. Don't have to get up early on 
Sunday. Then why had she set the alarm? She remembered suddenly and rolled out 
of bed, warm feet on a floor cold in the morning air. Her pajamas landed on that 
floor as she landed in the shower, yelled, turned the shower to "warm," then 
back to "cold" again. She let the air blast dry her, luxuriated for two minutes 
in the electrical massage, then jumped out.
The last item from the refrigerator had gone into the basket, and a thermos jug 
was filled by the time she heard the sound of a car shifting gears on the hill 
outside, and the crunch of tires on granite in the driveway. She hurriedly 
pulled on short boots, snapped the loops of her jodphurs[sic] under them, and 
looked at herself in the mirror. Not bad, she thought. Not Miss America, but she 
wouldn't frighten any children. She turned away from the glass with the warm 
replenishment of the soul that comes only to females sure of their own 
appearance.
A banging at the door was echoed by the doorbell, and a baritone voice, "Joan! 
Are you decent?"
"Practically. Come on in, Phil."
Huxley, in slacks and polo shirt, was followed by another figure. He turned to 
it. "Joan, this is Ben Coburn, Doctor Ben Coburn. Doctor Coburn, Miss Freeman."
"Awfully nice of you to let me come, Miss Freeman."
"Not at all, Doctor. Phil has told me so much about you that I have been anxious 
to meet you." The conventionalities flowed with the ease of all long-established 
tribal taboo.
"Call him Ben, Joan. It's good for his ego."
While Joan and Phil loaded the car, Coburn looked over the young woman's studio 
house. A single large room, panelled in knotty pine and dominated by a friendly 
field-stone fireplace, set about with untidy bookcases, gave evidence of her 
personality. He had stepped through open French doors into a tiny patio, paved 
with mossy bricks and fitted with a barbecue pit and a little fishpond, 
brilliant in the morning sunlight, when he heard himself called.
"Doc! Stir your stumps! Time's a-wastin'."
He glanced again around the patio, and rejoined the others at the car. "I like 
your house, Miss Greeman. Why should we bother to leave here when Griffith Park 
can't be any pleasanter?
"That's easy. If you stay home, it's not a picnic--it's just breakfast. My 
name's Joan."
"May I put in a request for 'just breakfast' here some morning--Joan?"
"Lay off o' that mug, Joan," advised Phil in a stage whisper. "His intentions 
ain't honorable."
JOAN straightened up the remains of what had recently been a proper sized meal. 
She chucked into the fire three well-picked bones to which thick sirloin steaks 
were no longer attached, added some discarded wrapping paper and one lonely 
roll. She shook the thermos jug. It gurgled slightly. "Anybody want some more 
grapefruit juice?"
"Any more coffee?" asked Coburn, then continued to Huxley, "His special talents 
are gone completely?"
"Plenty," Joan replied. "Serve yourselves."
The doctor filled his own cup and Huxley's. Phil answered, "Gone entirely, I'm 
reasonably certain. I thought it might be hysterical shock from the operation, 
but I tried him under hypnosis, and the results were still completely negative.
Joan, you're a wonderful cook. Will you adopt me?"
"You're over twenty-one."
"I could easily have him certified as incompetent," volunteered Coburn.
"Single women aren't favored for adoption."
"Marry me, and it will be all right. We can both adopt him and you can cook for 
all of us."
"Well, I won't say that I won't and I won't say that I will, but I will say that 
it's the best offer I've had today. What were you guys talking about?"
"Make him put it in writing, Joan. We were talking about Valdez."
"Oh! You were going to run those last tests yesterday, weren't you? How did you 
come out?"
"Absolutely negative insofar as his special clairvoyance was concerned. It's 
gone."
"Hmm--How about the control tests?"
"The Humm-Wadsworth Temperament Test showed exactly the same profile as before 
the accident, within the inherent limits of accuracy of the technique. His 
intelligence quotient came within the technique limit, too. Association tests 
didn't show anything either. By all the accepted standards of neuropsychology he 
is the same individual, except in two respects; he's minus a chunk of his 
cortex, and he is no longer able to see around corners. Oh, yes, and he's 
annoyed at losing that ability."
After a pause she answered, "That's pretty conclusive, isn't it?"
Huxley turned to Coburn. "What do you think, Ben?"
"Well, I don't know. You are trying to get me to admit that that piece of grey 
matter I cut out of his head gave him the ability to see in a fashion not 
possible to normal sense organs and not accounted for by orthodox medical 
theory, aren't you?"
"I'm not trying to make you admit anything. I'm trying to find out something."
"Well, since you put it that way, I would say if we stipulate that all your 
primary data were obtained with care under properly controlled conditions--"
"They were."
"--and that you have exercised even greater care in obtaining your negative 
secondary data--"
"I have. Damn it, I tried for more than three weeks under all conceivable 
conditions."
"Then we have the ironclad conclusions, first--" He ticked them off on his 
fingers "--that this subject could see without the intervention of physical 
sense organs; and second, that this unusual, to put it mildly, ability was in 
some way related to a portion of his cerebrum in the dexter lobe."
"Bravo!" This was Joan's contribution.
"Thanks, Ben," acknowledged Phil. "I had reached the same conclusions, of 
course, but it's very encouraging to have someone else agree with me."
"WELL, now that you are there, where are you?"
"I don't know exactly. Let me put it this way; I got into psychology for the 
same reason a person joins a church--because he feels an overpowering need to 
understand himself and the world around him. When I was a young student, I 
thought modern psychology could tell me the answers, but I soon found out that 
the best psychologists didn't know a damn thing about the real core of the 
matter. Oh, I am not disparaging the work that has been done; it was badly 
needed and has been very useful in its way. None of 'em know what life is, what 
thought is, whether free will is a reality or an illusion, or whether that last 
question means anything. The best of 'em admit their ignorance; the worst of 
them make dogmatic assertions that are obvious absurdities--for example, some of 
the mechanistic behaviorists that think just because Pavlov could condition a 
dog to drool at the sound of a bell, they therefore knew all about how Bauer 
makes music!"
"It is certainly necessary to set up a pattern of conditioned reflexes in order 
to play the piano."
"Certainly it is, Ben, but it's equally certain that reflexes aren't the whole 
answer. Behaviorism doesn't account for the music welling up in him, nor for the 
overpowering drive to express it."
Joan, who had been lying quietly in the shade of the big liveoaks and listening, 
spoke up. "Ben, you are a brain surgeon, aren't you?"
"One of the best," certified Phil.
"You've seen a lot of brains, furthermore you've seen 'em while they were alive, 
which is more than most psychologists have. What do you believe thought is? What 
do you think makes us tick?"
He grinned at her. "You've got me, kid. I don't pretend to know. It's not my 
business; I'm just a tinker."
"That's just it." She sat up. "Give me a cigarette, Phil. I want to put in my 
two-bits worth. I've arrived just about where Phil is, but by a different road. 
My father wanted me to study law. I soon found out that I was more interested in 
the principles behind law and I changed over to the School of Philosophy. At the 
same time I was active in campus dramatics. At the end of my sophomore year I 
dropped out and played a season at the Pasadena Playhouse, and followed that 
with about a year on the road as ingenue in a stock company. I enjoyed acting 
and was doing pretty well at it, but I still wasn't entirely happy. I still 
wanted to know. So I quit and came back to school. But philosophy wasn't the 
answer. There really isn't anything to philosophy.
"Did you ever eat that Cotton Candy they sell at fairs? You know, the fluffy 
stuff they spin out of sugar and sell on a stick. Well, philosophy is like 
that--it looks as if it were really something, and it's awful pretty, and it 
tastes sweet, but when you go to bite it you can't get your teeth into it, and 
when you try to swallow, there isn't anything there.
"I was just about to get my Ph.D. in the School of Philosophy, when I chucked it 
and came to the science division and started taking courses in psychology. I 
thought they were on the right track, and that if I was a good little girl and 
patient, all would be revealed to me. Well, Phil has told us what that leads to. 
When that proved to be a dud, I began to think about studying medicine, or 
biology. You just gave the show away on that. Maybe I might as well go back to 
acting, or Church, Kitchen, and Kids. Maybe it was a mistake to teach women to 
read and write."
BEN laughed and answered, "This seems to be an experience meeting at the village 
church; I might as well make my confession. I guess most medical men start out 
with a desire to know all about man and what makes him tick, but we are almost 
certain to get sidetracked, as I did. It's a big field, the final answers are 
elusive, and there is always so much work that needs to be done right now, that 
we quit worrying about the final problems. I guess I'm as interested as I ever 
was in knowing what life, and thought, and so forth, really are, but I have to 
have an attack of insomnia to find time to worry about them. Phil, are you 
seriously proposing to tackle such things?"
"In a way, yes. I've been gathering data for some time on all sorts of phenomena 
that run contrary to orthodox psychological theory--all the junk that goes under 
the general name of metapsychics, telepathy, clairvoyance, so-called psychic 
manifestations, clairaudience, levitation, Yoga stuff, stigmata, anything of 
that sort I can find."
"Don't you find that most of that stuff can be explained in an ordinary 
fashion?"
"Quite a lot of it, sure. Then you can strain orthodox theory all out of shape 
and ignore the statistical laws of probability to account for most of the rest. 
Then by attributing anything that is left over to charlatanism, credulity, and 
self-hypnosis, and refusing to investigate it, you can go peacefully back to 
sleep."
"Occam's razor," murmured Joan.
"Huh?"
"William of Occam's Razor. It's a name for a principle in logic; whenever two 
hypotheses both cover the fits, use the simpler of the two. When a conventional 
scientist has to strain his orthodox theories all out of shape, till they 
resemble something thought up by Rube Goldberg, to account for unorthodox 
phenomena, he's ignoring the principle of Occam's Razor. It's simpler to draw up 
a near hypothesis to cover all the facts than to strain an old one that was 
never intended to cover the non-conforming data. But scientists are more 
attached to their theories than they are to their wives and families."
"What sort of stuff," put in Ben, "have you dug up, Phil?"
"Quite a variety, some verified, some mere rumor, a little of it carefully 
checked under laboratory conditions, Iike Valdez. Of course, you've heard of all 
the stunts attributed to Yoga. Very little of it has been duplicated in the 
Western Hemisphere, which counts against it; nevertheless a lot of odd stuff in 
India has been reported by competent, cool-minded observers--telepathy, accurate 
soothsaying, clairvoyance, fire walking, and so forth."
"Hmm."
"Is the idea any more marvelous or incredible than the fact that you can cause 
your hand to scratch your head? We haven't any more idea of the actual workings 
of volition on matter in one case than in the other. A similar case is the Terra 
del Fuegans. They habitually slept on the ground, naked, even in zero weather. 
Now the body can't make any such adjustment in its economy. It hasn't the 
machinery; any physiologist will tell you so. A naked human being caught 
outdoors in zero weather must exercise or die. But the Terra del Fuegans didn't 
know about metabolic rates and such. They just slept, warm and cozy."
"So far you haven't mentioned anything close to home. If you are going to allow 
that much latitude, my Grandfather Stonebender had much more wonderful 
experiences."
"I'm coming to them. Don't forget Valdez."
"WHAT'S this about Ben's grandfather?" asked Joan.
"Joan, don't ever boast about anything in Ben's presence. You'll find that his 
Grandfather Stonebender did it faster, easier, and better."
A look of more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger shone out of Coburn's pale blue eyes. 
"Why, Phil, I'm surprised at you. If I weren't a Stonebender myself, and 
tolerant, I'd be inclined to resent that remark. But your apology is accepted."
"Well, to bring matters closer home, besides Valdez, there was a man in my home 
town, Springfield, Missouri, who had a clock in his head."
"What do you mean?"
"I mean he knew the exact time without looking at a clock. If your watch 
disagreed with him, your watch was wrong. Besides that, he was a lightning 
calculator--knew the answer instantly to the most complicated problems in 
arithmetic you cared to put to him. In other ways he was feeble-minded."
Ben nodded. "It's a common phenomenon--idiots savants."
"But giving it a name doesn't explain it. It's fairly common, but totally 
unexplained. Besides which, while a number of the people with erratic talents 
are feeble-minded, not all of them are. I believe that by far the greater 
percent of them are not, but that we rarely hear of them because the intelligent 
ones are smart enough to know that they would be annoyed by the crowd, possibly 
persecuted, if they let the rest of us suspect that they were different. You 
know the old story about the pink monkey? Paint a monkey pink and put him back 
in a cage full of ordinary brown monkeys, and the brown monkeys will kill him. 
Humans are just as bad."
Ben nodded again. "You got something there, Phil. Go ahead."
"There have been a lot of these people with impossible talents who were not 
sub-normal in other ways and who were right close to home. Boris Sidis, for 
example--"
"He was that child prodigy, wasn't he? I thought he played out."
"Maybe. Personally, I think he grew smart and decided not to let the other 
monkeys know that he was different. In any case he had a lot of remarkable 
talents, in intensity, if not in kind. He must have been able to read a page of 
print just by glancing at it, and he undoubtedly had complete memory. Speaking 
of complete memory, how about Blind Tom, the Negro pianist who could play any 
piece of music he had ever heard once? Nearer home, there was this boy not so 
very many years ago who could play ping-pong blind-folded, or anything else, for 
which normal people require eyes. I checked him myself, and he could do it. And 
there was the Instantaneous Echo. He showed up about ten years ago."
"You never told me about him, Phil," commented Joan. "What could he do?"
"Nothing very useful, but pretty incredible. He could talk along with you, using 
your words and intonations, in any language, whether he knew that language or 
not. And he would keep pace with you so accurately that anyone listening 
wouldn't be able to tell the two of you apart. He could imitate your speech and 
words as immediately, as accurately, and as effortlessly as your shadow follows 
the movements of your body."
"Pretty fancy, what? And rather difficult to explain by behavioristic theory. 
Ever run across any cases of levitation, Phil?"
"You know the story they tell about Nijinsky?"
"Which one? I've heard a thousand."
"About him floating. There are literally thousands of people here and in Europe 
(unless they died in the Collapse) who testify that in his dance, Le Spectre de 
la Rose, he used to leap up into the air, pause for a while, then come down when 
he got ready. Call it mass hallucination, if you like--I didn't see it." 
"Occam's Razor again," said Joan.
"So?"
"Mass hallucination is harder to explain than one man floating in the air for a 
few seconds. Mass hallucination not proved--mustn't infer it to get rid of a 
troublesome fact. It's comparable to the 'There ain't no sech animal' of the 
yokel who saw the rhinoceros for the first time."
"HOW about forerunners, and telepathy?"
"Well, telepathy is positively proved, though still unexplained, by Dr. Rhine's 
experiments. Of course a lot of people had observed it before then, with such 
frequency as to make questioning it unreasonable. Mark Twain, for example. He 
wrote about it fifty years before Rhine, with documentation and circumstantial 
detail. He wasn't a scientist, but he had a lot of hard common sense and 
shouldn't have been ignored. Forerunners are a little harder. Every one has 
heard dozens of stories of compelling hunches that came true, but they are 
impossible to follow up in most cases in any fashion amounting to evidence. You 
might try J. W. Dunne's Experiment With Time for a scientific record under 
controlled conditions of forerunners in dreams."
Coburn considered this. "Where does all this get you, Phil? You aren't just 
collecting Believe-it-or-nots?"
"No, I was definitely after something, just what I didn't know at first. I had 
to assemble a pile of data before I could formulate a working hypothesis for 
directive research. I have one now."
"Well?"
"You really gave it to me--by operating on Valdez. I had begun to suspect 
sometime ago that these people with odd and apparently impossible mental and 
physical abilities were no different from the rest of us in any sense of 
abnormality, but that they had stumbled on potentialities inherent in all of us. 
Tell me, when you had Valdez' cranium open did you notice anything abnormal in 
its appearance?"
"No. Aside from the wound, it presented no special features."
"Very well. Yet when you excised that damaged portion, he no longer possessed 
his strange clairvoyant power. You took that chunk of his brain out of an 
uncharted area--no known function assigned to it. Now it is a primary datum of 
psychology and physiology that large areas of the brain have no known function. 
It doesn't seem reasonable that the most highly developed and highly specialized 
part of the body should have large areas with no function; it is more reasonable 
to assume that the functions are unknown. And yet men have had large pieces of 
their cortices cut out without any apparent loss in their mental powers, as long 
as the areas controlling the normal functions of the body were left untouched.
"Now in this one case, Valdez, we have established a direct connection between 
an uncharted area of the brain and an odd talent, to wit, clairvoyance. My 
working hypothesis comes directly from that: All normal people are potentially 
able to exercise all (or possibly most) of the odd talents we have referred 
to--telepathy, clairvoyance, special mathematical ability, special control over 
the body and its functions, and so forth. The potential ability to do these 
things is lodged in the unassigned areas of the brain."
Coburn pursed his lips. "Mmm--I don't know. If we all have these wonderful 
abilities, which isn't proved, how is it that we don't seem able to use them?"
"I admit I haven't proved anything--yet. This is a working hypothesis. But let 
me give you an analogy that may make it seem more probable that most of these 
powers would usually remain unused in most cases. These abilities are 
comparatively subtle; they aren't like sight, hearing, and touch which we can't 
avoid using from birth. They are more like the ability to talk, which has its 
own special centers in the brain from birth, but which has to be trained onto 
being. Do you think a child raised exclusively by deaf-mutes would ever learn to 
talk? Of course not. To all outward appearance he would be a deafmute.
"Or take Helen Keller. She always had the potential ability to talk, but it took 
a teacher with subtle imagination and ingenuity to devise some way to get into 
contact with that ability and to train it into operative being. Otherwise she 
would never have talked, although her vocal cords were healthy and her speech 
centers in her brain unimpaired."
"I give up," conceded Coburn. "You set up an hypothesis and made it plausible. 
But how are you going to check it? I don't see any place to get hold of it. It's 
a very pretty speculation, but without a working procedure, it's just fantasy."
Huxley rolled over and stared unhappily up through the branches. "That's the 
rub. I've lost my best wild talent case. I don't know where to begin."
"But, Phil," protested Joan, "you want normal subjects, and then try to develop 
special abilities in them. I think it's wonderful. When do we start?"
"When do we start what?"
"On me, of course, you idiot. Take that ability to do lightning calculations, 
for example. If you could develop that in me, you'd be a magician. I got bogged 
down in first year algebra. I don't know the multiplication tables even now!"

CHAPTER THREE of LOST LEGION
"Every Man His Own Genius"



"SHALL we get busy?" asked Phil. "Oh, let's not," Joan objected. "Let's drink 
our coffee in peace and let dinner settle. We haven't seen Ben for two weeks. I 
want to hear what he's been doing up in San Francisco."
"Thanks, darling," the doctor answered, "but I'd much rather hear about the mad 
scientist and his Trilby."
"Trilby, hell," Huxley protested. "She's as onery as a hog on ice. However, 
we've got something to show you this time, Doc."
"Really? That's good. What?"
"Well, as you know, we didn't make much progress for the first couple of months. 
It was all uphill. Joan developed a fair telepathic ability, but it was erratic 
and unreliable. As for mathematical ability, she had learned her multiplication 
tables, except for a slight weakness on the seven's and nine's, but as for being 
a lightning calculator, she was a washout."
Joan jumped up, crossed between the men and the fireplace, and entered her tiny 
pullman kitchen. "I've got to scrape these dishes and put them in the dishwasher 
before the ants get at 'em. Talk loud, so I can hear you."
"What can Joan do now, Phil?"
"I'm not going to tell you. You wait and see. Joan! Where's the card table?"
"Back of the couch. No need to shout. I can hear plainly since I got my Foxy 
Grandma Stream-lined Ear Trumpet."
"Okay, wench, I found it. Cards in the usual place?"
"Yes. I'll be with you in a moment." She reappeared, whisking off a giddy 
kitchen apron, and sat down on the couch, hugging her knees. "The Great Gaga, 
the Ghoul of Hollywood, is ready. Sees all, knows all, and tells a darn sight 
more. Fortune telling, teeth pulling, and refined entertainment for the entire 
family."
"Cut out the clowning. We'll start out with a little straight telepathy. Throw 
every thing else out of gear. Shuffle the cards, Ben."
Coburn did so. "Now what?"
"Deal 'em off, one at a time, letting you and me see 'em, but not Joan. Call 'em 
off, kid."
Ben dealt them out slowly. Joan commenced to recite in a sing-song voice, "Seven 
of diamonds; jack of hearts; ace of hearts; three of spades; ten of diamonds; 
six of clubs; nine of spades; eight of clubs--"
"Ben, that's the first time I've ever seen you look amazed."
"Right through the deck without a mistake. Grandfather Stonebender couldn't have 
done better."
"That's high praise, chum. Let's try a variation. I'll sit out this one. Don't 
let me see them. I don't know how it will work, as we never worked with anyone 
else. Try it."
A few minutes later Coburn put down the last card. "Perfect! not a mistake."
JOAN got up and came over to the table. "How come this deck has two tens of 
hearts in it?" She riffled through the deck, and pulled out one card. "Oh! You 
thought the seventh card was the ten of hearts; it was the ten of diamonds. 
See?"
"I guess I did," Ben admitted. "I'm sorry I threw you a curve. The light isn't 
any too good."
"Joan prefers artistic lighting effects to saving her eyes," explained Phil. 
"I'm glad it happened; it shows she was using telepathy, not clairvoyance. Now 
for a spot of mathematics. We'll skip the usual stunts like cube roots, 
instantaneous addition, logarithms of hyperbolic functions, and stuff. Take my 
word for it; she can do 'em. You can try her later on those simple tricks. 
Here's a little honey I shot in my own kitchen. It involves fast reading, 
complete memory, handling of unbelievable number of permutations and 
combinations, and mathematical investigation of alternatives. You play 
solitaire, Ben?"
"Sure."
"I want you to shuffle the cards thoroughly, then lay out a Canfield solitaire, 
dealing from left to right, then play it out, three cards at a time, going 
through the deck again and again, until you are stuck and can't go any farther."
"Okay. What's the gag?"
"After you have shuffled and cut, I want you to riffle the cards through once, 
holding them up so that Joan gets a quick glimpse of the index on each card. 
Then wait a moment."
Silently he did what he had been asked to do. Joan checked him. "You'll have to 
do it again, Ben. I saw only fifty-one."
"Two of them must have stuck together. I'll do it more carefully." He repeated 
it
"Fifty-two that time. That's fine."
"Are you ready, Joan?"
"Yes, Phil. Take it down--hearts to the six, diamonds to the four, spades to the 
deuce, no clubs."
Coburn looked incredulous. "Do you mean that is the way this game is going to 
come out?"
"Try it and see."
He dealt the cards out from left to right, then played the game out slowly. Joan 
stopped him at one point. "No, play the king of heart's stack into that space; 
rather than the king of spades. The king of spades play would have gotten the 
ace of clubs out, but three less hearts would play out if you did so."
Coburn made no comment, but did as she told him to do. Twice more she stopped 
him and indicated a different choice of alternatives.
The game played out exactly as she had predicted.
Coburn ran his hand through his hair and stared at the cards.
"Joan," he said meekly, "does your head ever ache?"
"Not from doing that stuff. It doesn't seem to be any effort at all."
"YOU know," put in Phil, seriously, "there isn't any real reason why it should 
be a strain. So far as we know, thinking requires no expenditure of energy at 
all. A person ought to be able to think straight and accurately with no effort. 
I've a notion that it is faulty thinking that makes headaches."
"But how in the devil does she do it, Phil? It makes my head ache just to try to 
imagine the size of that problem, if it were worked out long-hand by 
conventional mathematics."
"I don't know how she does it. Neither does she."
"Then how did she learn to do it?"
"We'll take that up later. First, I want to show you our piece de resistance."
"I can't take much more. I'm groggy now."
"You'll like this."
"Wait a minute, Phil. I want to try one of my own. How fast can Joan read?"
"As fast as she can see."
"Hmm--" The doctor hauled a sheaf of typewritten pages out of his inside coat 
pocket. "I've got the second draft of a paper I've been working on. Let's try 
Joan on a page of it. Okay, Joan?"
"Sure."
He separated an inner page from the rest and handed it to her. She glanced at it 
and handed it back at once.
He looked puzzled and said, "What's the matter?"
"Nothing. Check me as I read back." She started in a rapid singsong, "Page four. 
--now according to Cunningham, fifth edition, page 547: Another strand of 
fibres, videlicet, the fasciculus spinocerebellaris (posterior), prolonged 
upwards in the lateral funiculus of the medulla spinallis, gradually leaves this 
portion of the medulla oblongata. This tract lies on the surface, and is--"
"That's enough, Joan. Hold it. God knows how you did it, but you read and 
memorized that page of technical junk in a split-second." He grinned slyly. "But 
your pronunciation was a bit spotty. Grandfather Stonebender's would have been 
perfect."
She pretended to be miffed. "What can you expect? I don't know what half the 
words mean."
Ben's face was very serious. "Joan, how did you learn to do all this stuff?"
"Truthfully, Doctor, I don't know. It's something like learning to ride a 
bicycle --you take one spill after another and get holes in the knees of all 
your stockings and never seem to make any progress, then one day you get on and 
just ride away, easy as you please. And in a week you are riding without 
handlebars and trying the stunts you've seen the other kids do. It's been like 
that--I knew what I wanted to do, and one day I could."
BEN maintained a puzzled silence and permitted Phil to lead him away to a little 
desk in the corner. "Joan, can we use any drawer? Okay, Ben, pick out a drawer 
in this desk, remove any articles you wish. Then, without looking into the 
drawer, stir up the contents and remove a few articles and drop them into 
another drawer. I want to eliminate the possibility of telepathy."
"Phil, don't worry about my housekeeping. My large staff of secretaries will be 
only too happy to straighten out that desk after you get through playing with 
it."
"Don't stand in the way of science, little one. Besides," he added, glancing 
into a drawer, "this desk obviously hasn't been straightened for at least six 
months. A little more stirring up won't hurt it."
When the doctor had complied and closed the drawer, Phil continued, "Better use 
pencil and paper on this one, Joan. First list everything you see in the drawer, 
then draw a little sketch to show approximate locations and arrangement."
"Okay." She sat down at the desk and commenced to write rapidly:
One large black leather handbag
Six-inch ruler
Ben stopped her. "Wait a minute. This is all wrong. I would have noticed 
anything as big as a handbag."
She wrinkled her brow. "Which drawer did you say?"
"The second on the right."
"I thought you said the top drawer."
"Well, perhaps I did."
She started again:
Brass paper knife
Six assorted pencils and a red pencil
Thirteen rubber bands
Pearl-handled penknife
"That must be your knife, Ben. It's very pretty; why haven't I seen it before?"
"I bought it in San Francisco. Good God, girl. You haven't seen it yet."
One paper of matches, advertising the Sir Francis Drake Hotel
Eight letters and two bills
Two ticket stubs, the Follies Burlesque Theatre--"Doctor, I'm surprised at you."
"Get on with your knitting."
"Provided you promise to take me the next time you go."
One fever thermometer with a pocket clip
Art gum and a typewriter eraser
One toothbrush--"What's that doing there?"
"To clean typewriter type, idiot."
Three keys, assorted
One lipstick. medium
A scratch pad and some file cards, used on one side
One small brown paper sack containing one pair of stockings, size nine, shade 
Creole--"I'd forgotten that I had bought them; I searched all through the house 
for a decent pair this morning."
"Why didn't you just use your X-ray eyes, Mrs. Houdini?"
She looked startled. "Do you know, it just didn't occur to me."
"Anything else in the drawer?"
"Nothing but a box of notepaper. Just a sec; I'll make the sketch." She sketched 
busily for a couple of minutes, her tongue between her teeth, her eyes darting 
from the paper toward the closed drawer and back again.
"Do you have to look in the direction of the drawer to see inside it?"
"No, but it helps. It makes me dizzy to see a thing when I am looking away from 
it."
The contents and arrangement of the drawer were checked and found to be exactly 
as Joan had stated they were. Doctor Coburn sat quietly, making no comment, when 
they had finished. Phil, slightly irked at his friend's lack of 
demonstrativeness, spoke to him.
"Well, Ben, what did you think of it?"
"You know what I thought of it. You've proved your theory right up to the hilt-- 
but I'm thinking about some of the implications, some of the possibilities. I 
think we've just been handed the greatest boon a surgeon ever had to work with. 
Joan, can you see inside a human body?"
"I don't know. I've never--"
"Look at me."
She stared at him for a silent moment. "Why--why, I can see your heart beat! I 
can see--"
"Phil, can you teach me to see the way she does?"
Huxley rubbed his nose. "I don't know. Maybe--"
JOAN bent over the big chair in which the doctor was seated. "Won't he go under, 
Phil?"
"Hell, no. I've tried everything but tapping his skull with a bungstarter. I 
don't believe there's any brain there to hypnotize."
"Don't be pettish. Let's try again. How do you feel, Ben?"
"All right, but wide awake. I can't seem to relax."
"I'm going out of the room this time. Maybe I'm a distracting factor. Now be a 
good boy and go sleepy-bye." She left them.
Five minutes later Huxley called out to her, "Come on back in, kid. He's under 
this time."
She came in and looked at Coburn where he lay sprawled in her big easy chair, 
quiet, eyes half closed.
"Ready for me?" she asked, turning to Huxley.
"Yes. Get ready." She lay down on the couch. "You know what I want; get in 
rapport with Ben as soon as you go under. Need any persuasion to get to sleep?"
"No."
"Very well, then--Sleep!"
She became quiet, lax.
"Are you under, Joan?"
"Yes, Phil."
"Can you reach Ben's mind?"
A short pause: "Yes."
"What do you find?"
"Nothing. It's like an empty room, but friendly. Wait a moment--he greeted me."
"What did he say?"
"Just a greeting. It wasn't in words."
"Can you hear me, Ben?"
"Sure, Phil."
"You two are together?"
"Yes. Yes, indeed."
"Listen to me, both of you. I want you to wake up slowly, remaining in rapport. 
Then Joan is to teach Ben how to perceive that which is not seen. Can you do 
it?"
"Yes, Phil, we can."
It was just as though one voice had spoken.

CHAPTER FOUR of LOST LEGION
Holiday



"FRANKLY, Mr. Huxley, I can't understand your non-co-operative attitude." The 
president of Western University let the stare from his slightly bulging eyes 
rest on the second button of Phil's vest. "You have been given every facility 
for sound useful research along lines of proven worth. Your program of 
instructing has been kept light in order that you might make use of your 
undoubted ability. You have been acting chairman of your sub-department this 
past semester. Yet instead of profiting by your unusual opportunities, you have, 
by your own admission, been, shall we say, frittering away your time in the 
childish pursuit of old wives' tales and silly superstitions. Bless me, man, I 
don't understand it!"
Phil answered, with controlled exasperation, "But Doctor Brinckley, if you would 
permit me to show you--"
The president interposed a palm. "Please, Mr. Huxley. It is not necessary to go 
over that ground again. One more thing--it has come to my attention that you 
have been interfering in the affairs of the medical school."
"The medical school! I haven't set foot inside it in weeks."
"It has come to me from unquestioned authority that you have influenced Doctor 
Coburn to disregard the advice of the staff diagnosticians in performing 
surgical operations."
Huxley maintained his voice at toneless politeness. "Let us suppose for the 
moment that I have influenced Doctor Coburn--I do not concede the point--has 
there been any case in which Coburn's refusal to follow diagnosis has failed to 
be justified by the subsequent history of the case?"
"That is beside the point. I can't have my staff from one school interfering in 
the affairs of another school. You see the justice of that, I am sure."
"I do not admit that I have interfered. In fact, I deny it."
"I am afraid I shall have to be the judge of that." Brinckley rose from his desk 
and came around to where Huxley stood. "Now, Mr. Huxley--May I call you 
Philip?--I like to have my juniors in our institution think of me as a friend. I 
want to give you the same advice that I would give to my son. The semester will 
be over in a day or two. I think you need a vacation. The board has made some 
little difficulty over renewing your contract inasmuch as you have not yet 
completed your doctorate. I took the liberty of assuring them that you would 
submit a suitable thesis this coming academic year, and I feel sure that you can 
if you will only devote your efforts to sound, constructive work. You take your 
vacation, and when you come back you can outline your proposed thesis to me. I 
am quite sure the board will make no difficulty about your contract then."
"I had intended to write up the results of my current research for my thesis."
Brinckley's brows raised in polite surprise. "Really? But that is out of the 
question, my boy, as you know. You do need a vacation. Good-by, then. If I do 
not see you again before commencement, let me wish you a pleasant holiday now."
WHEN a stout door separated him from the president, Huxley dropped his pretense 
of good manners and hurried across the campus, ignoring students and professors 
alike. He found Ben and Joan waiting for him at their favorite bench.
He flopped down on the seat beside them. Neither of the men spoke, but Joan was 
unable to control her impatience. "Well, Phil? What did the old fossil have to 
say?"
"Gimme a cigarette." Ben handed him a pack and waited. "He didn't say much, just 
threatened me with the loss of my job and the ruination of my academic 
reputation if I didn't knuckle under and be his tame dog--all in the politest of 
terms, of course."
"But didn't you offer to bring me in and show him the progress you had already 
made?"
"I didn't bring your name into it; it was useless. He knew who you were well 
enough--he made a sidelong reference to the inadvisability of young instructors 
seeing female students socially except under formal, fully chaperoned 
conditions-- talked about the high moral tone of the university, and our 
obligation to the public!"
"Why, the dirty-minded old so-and-so! I'll tear him apart for that!"
"Take it easy, Joan." Ben Coburn's voice was mild and thoughtful. "Just how did 
he threaten you, Phil?"
"He refused to renew my contract at this time. He intends to keep me on 
tenterhooks all summer. Then if I come back in the fall and make a noise like a 
rabbit, he might renew--if he feels like it. Damn him! The thing that got me the 
sorest was a suggestion that I was slipping and needed a rest."
"What are you going to do?"
"Look for a job, I guess. I've got to eat."
"Teaching job?"
"I suppose so, Ben."
"Your chances aren't very good, are they, without a formal release from Western? 
They can blacklist you pretty effectively. You've actually got about as much 
freedom in the matter as a professional ball player."
Phil looked glumly at his feet and said nothing.
Ben said thoughtfully, "You know, Phil, the old boy's idea about a vacation 
wasn't too stupid. I could do with one myself."
"Anything in particular in mind?"
"Why, yes, more or less. I've been out here seven years and never really seen 
the state. I'd like to start out and drive, with no particular destination in 
mind. We could go on up past Sacramento and into northern California. They say 
it's magnificent country up there. We could take in the High Sierras and the Big 
Trees on the way back."
"That certainly sounds inviting."
"You could take along your research notes and we could talk about your ideas as 
we drove. If you decided you wanted to write up some phase, we would just lay 
over while you did it."
Phil stuck out his hand. "It's a deal, Ben. When do we start?"
"As soon as the term closes."
"Let's see--we ought to be able to get underway late Friday afternoon, then. 
Which car will we use, yours or mine?"
"My coupe ought to be about right. It has lots of baggage space."
Joan, who had followed the conversation with interest, broke in on them. "Why 
use your car, Ben? Three people can't be comfortable in a coupe."
"Three people? You aren't going, bright eyes."
"So? That's what you think. You can't leave me behind."
"Now Joan, it would look like the devil for you to be barging about the country 
with a couple of men--"
"Sissies! Tissyprissles! Pantywaists! Worried about your precious reputations."
"No, we're not. We're worried about yours."
"It won't wash. No girl that lives alone has any reputation. She can be as pure 
as Ivory soap and the cats on the campus, both sexes, will take her to pieces 
anyway. What are you so scared of? We aren't going to cross any state lines."
Coburn and Huxley exchanged the secret look that men employ when confronted by 
the persistence of an unreasonable woman.
"LOOKOUT, Joan!" A big red Santa Fe bus took the shoulder on the opposite side 
of the highway and slithered past. Joan switched the tail of the grey sedan 
around an oil tanker truck and trailer on their own side of the road before 
replying. When she did, she turned her head to speak directly to Phil, who was 
riding in the back seat.
"What's the matter, Phil?"
"You darn near brought us into a head-on collision with about twenty tons of the 
Santa Fe's best rolling stock!"
"Don't be nervous; I've been driving since I was sixteen and I've never had an 
accident."
"Anyhow," Phil went on, "can't you keep your eyes on the road when you drive? 
That's not too much to ask, is it?"
"I don't need to watch the road. Look." She turned her head far around and 
showed him that her eyes were jammed shut. The needle of the speedometer hovered 
around eighty.
"Joan! Please!"
She opened her eyes and faced front once more. "But I don't have to look in 
order to see. You taught me that yourself, Smarty. Don't you remember?"
"Yes, yes, but I never thought you'd apply it to driving a car."
"Why not? I'm the safest driver you ever saw; I can see everything that's on the 
road, even around a blind curve. If I need to, I read the other drivers' minds 
to see what they are going to do next."
"She's right, Phil. The few times I've paid attention to her driving she's been 
doing just exactly what I would have done in the same circumstances. That's why 
I haven't been nervous."
"All right. All right," Phil answered, "but would you two supermen keep in mind 
that there is a slightly nervous ordinary mortal in the back seat who can't see 
around corners?"
"I'll be good," said Joan soberly.
"I'm interested," resumed Ben, "in what you said about not looking toward 
anything you wanted to see. I can't do it too satisfactorily. I remember once 
you said it made you dizzy to look away and still use direct perception."
"It used to, Ben, but I got over it, and so will you. It's just a matter of 
breaking old habits. To me, every direction is in 'front'--all around and up and 
down. I can focus my attention in any direction, or two or three directions at 
once. I can even pick a point of view away from where I am physically, and look 
at the other side."
YOU two make me feel like the mother of the Ugly Duckling," said Phil bitterly. 
"Will you still think of me kindly when you have passed beyond human 
communication?"
"Poor Phil!" exclaimed Joan, with sincere sympathy in her voice. "You taught us, 
but no one has bothered to teach you. Tell you what, Ben, let's stop tonight at 
an auto camp, pick a nice quiet one on the outskirts of Sacramento, and spend a 
couple of days doing for Phil what he has done for us."
"That's mighty white of you, pardner," Phil conceded. It was obvious that he was 
pleased and mollified. "After you get through with me, will I be able to drive a 
car on two wheels, too?"
"Why not learn to levitate?" Ben suggested. "It's simpler--less expensive and 
nothing to get out of order."
"Maybe we will some day," returned Phil, quite seriously. "There's no telling 
where this line of investigation may lead."
"Yeah, you're right," Ben answered him with equal sobriety. "I'm getting so that 
I can believe seven impossible things before breakfast. What were you saying 
just before we passed that oil tanker?"
"I was just trying to lay before you an idea I've been mulling over in my mind 
the past several weeks. It's a big idea, so big that I can hardly believe it 
myself."
"Well, spill it."
Phil commenced checking points off on his fingers. "We've proved, or tended to 
prove, that the normal human mind has powers previously unsuspected, haven't 
we?"
"Tentatively, yes. It looks that way."
"Powers way beyond any that the race as a whole makes regular use of?"
"Yes, surely. Go on."
"And we have reason to believe that these powers exist, have their being, by 
virtue of certain areas of the brain to which functions were not previously 
assigned by physiologists? That is to say, they have organic basis, just as the 
eye and the sight centers in the brain are the organic basis for normal sight?"
"Yes, of course."
"Well, what is the evolutionary course of any function, and any organ? You can 
trace the evolution of any organ from a simple beginning to a complex, highly 
developed form. The organ develops through use. In an evolutionary sense, 
function begets organ."
"Yes. That's elementary."
"Don't you see what tremendous thing that implies?"
Coburn looked puzzled for a moment or two; then a look of comprehension spread 
over his face. Phil continued, with delight in his voice, "You see it, too? The 
conclusion is inescapable: There must have been a time when the entire race used 
all these strange powers as easily as they heard, or saw or smelled. And there 
must have been a long, long period--hundreds of thousands, probably millions of 
years-- during which these powers were developed as a race. Individuals couldn't 
do it, any more than I could grow wings. It had to be done racially, over a long 
period of time. These strange powers are vestigal[sic], hangovers from a time 
when the whole race had 'em and used 'em."
PHIL stopped talking, and Ben did not answer him, but sat in a brown study while 
some ten miles spun past. Finally Ben said, a little defensively, "But, brother, 
you've sure raised hell with modern anthropology. How about it? You can't ignore 
it."
"Well, for every distinguished anthropologist you'll find one equally 
distinguished who will call him a diamond-studded liar. They can't agree on the 
simplest elements of their science. In the second place, there isn't a 
corporal's guard of really decent exhibits to back up their assertions about the 
career of mankind on the way up--his family tree--missing link stuff. I never 
saw so much stew from one oyster. They write book over book and what have they 
got to go on?--The Dawson Man, the Pekin[sic] Man; the Heidelberg Man and a 
couple of others. And those aren't complete skeletons--a damaged skull, a couple 
of teeth, maybe another bone or two."
"Oh now, Phil, there were lots of specimens found of the Cro-Magnon men."
"Yes, but they were true men, as highly evolved as you or me. I'm talking about 
submen, our evolutionary predecessors. You see, I was trying to check my 
hypothesis--prove myself wrong. If man's ascent had been a long steady climb, up 
from the slime of the sea bottom, through reptiles and mammals to the submen . . 
. submen into savages, savages to barbarians, barbarians perfecting their 
cultures into civilization . . . all this with only minor setbacks of a few 
centuries, or a few thousand years at the most . . . and our present degree of 
culture, and mental and physical complexity, the highest the race has ever 
reached.... If all this was true, then my idea was wrong.
"You follow me, don't you? The internal evidence of the brain proves that 
mankind, sometime in its lost history, climbed to heights undreamed of today. In 
some fashion the race slipped down from those heights. And all of this happened 
so long ago that we have found no record of it anywhere. These brutish submen 
that the anthropologists set such store by can't have been our ancestors, for 
man had evolved to his highest perfection even before their time.
The can't be our ancestors; they are too new, too primitive, too young; they 
allow for no time for the race to develop these strange abilities whose 
existence I have proved.
"Either anthropology is all wet, or Joan can't do the things which we have seen 
her do."
The center of the controversy said nothing. She sat at the wheel, as the big car 
sped along, her eyes closed against the slanting rays of the setting sun, seeing 
the road with an inner impossible sight.
FIVE days were spent in coaching Huxley, and a sixth on the open road. 
Sacramento lay far behind them. For the past hour Mount Shasta had been visible 
from time to time through openings in the trees. Phil brought the car to a 
grinding stop on a turnout parking shoulder built out from the pavement of U.S. 
Highway 99. He turned to his passengers.
"All out, troops," he said. "Catch yourselves a slice of scenery."
For some moments the three stood and stared over the canyon of the Sacramento 
River at Mount Shasta, thirty miles away. It was sweater weather and the air was 
as clear as a child's gaze. The peak was framed by two of the great fir trees 
which marched down the side of the canyon. Snow still lay on the slopes of the 
cone and straggled down as far as the timberline, which was sharp and level as 
if cut by an architect.
Joan muttered something to herself. Ben turned his head. "What did you say, 
Joan?"
"Me? Nothing--I was saying over a bit of poetry to myself."
"What was it?"
"Tietjens' Most Sacred Mountain:
"'Space, and the twelve clean winds are here;
And with them broods eternity--a swift white peace, a presence manifest.
The rhythm ceases here. Time has no place. This is the end that has no end.'"
Phil cleared his throat and rather self-consciously broke the silence. "I think 
I see what you mean."
Joan faced them.
"Boys," she stated, "I am going to climb Mount Shasta."
Ben studied her dispassionately.
"Joan," he pronounced, "you are full of hop."
"I mean it. I didn't say you were going to--I said I was."
"But we are responsible for your safety and welfare, and I for one don't relish 
the thought of a fourteen thousand foot climb."
"You are not responsible for my safety; I'm a free citizen. Anyhow, a climb 
wouldn't hurt you any; it would help to get rid of some of that fat you've been 
storing up against winter."
"Why," inquired Phil, "are you so determined so suddenly to make this climb?"
"It's really not a sudden decision, Phil. Ever since we left Los Angeles I've 
had a recurring dream that I was climbing, climbing, up to some high place, and 
that I was very happy because of it. Today I know that it was Shasta I was 
climbing."
"How do you know it?"
"I know it."
"Ben, what do you think?"
The doctor picked up a granite pebble and shied it out in the general direction 
of the river. He waited for it to come to rest several hundred feet down the 
slope.
"I guess," he said, "we'd better buyg some hobnailed boots."
PHIL paused and the two behind him on the narrow path were forced to stop, too.
"Joan," he asked, with a worried tone, "is this the way we came?"
They huddled together, icy wind cutting at their faces like rusty razor blades 
and gusts of snow eddying about them and stinging their eyes, while Joan 
considered her answer.
"I think so," she ventured at last. "But even with my eyes closed this snow 
makes everything look different."
"That's my trouble, too. I guess we pulled a boner when we decided against a 
guide. But who would have thought that a beautiful summer day could end up in a 
snowstorm?"
Ben stamped his feet and slapped his hands together.
"Let's get going," he urged. "Even if this is the right road, we've got the 
worst of it ahead of us before we reach the rest cabin. Don't forget that 
stretch of glacier we crossed."
"I wish I could forget it," Phil answered him soberly. "I don't fancy the 
prospect of crossing it in this weather."
With Ben now in the lead they resumed their cautious progress, heads averted to 
the wind, eyes half closed. Ben checked them again after a couple of hundred 
yards.
"Careful, gang," he warned. "The path is almost gone here, and it's slippery." 
He went forward a few steps. "It's rather--" They heard him make a violent 
effort to recover his balance, then fall heavily.
"Ben! Ben!" Phil called out, "are you all right?"
"I guess so," he gasped. "I gave my left leg an awful bang. Be careful." He 
groaned.
They saw that he was on the ground, hanging part way over the edge of the path. 
Cautiously they approached until they were alongside him. "Lend me a hand, Phil. 
Easy, now."
Phil helped him wiggle back onto the path. "Can you stand up?"
"I'm afraid not. My left leg gave me the devil when I had to move just now. Take 
a look at it, Phil. No, don't bother to take the boot off; look right through 
it."
"Of course. I forgot." Phil studied the limb for a moment. "It's pretty bad, 
fella--a fracture of the shin bone about four inches below the knee."
Coburn whistled a couple of bars of Suwannee River, then said, "Isn't that just 
too, too lovely? Simple or compound fracture?"
"Seems like a clean break, Ben."
"Not that it matters much one way or the other just now. What do we do next?"
Joan answered him. "We must build a litter and get you down the mountain!"
"Spoken like a true girl scout. Have you figured how you and Phil can maneuver a 
litter, with me in it, over that stretch of ice?"
"We'll have to--somehow." But her voice lacked confidence.
"It won't work, kid. You two will have to straighten me out and bed me down, 
then go on down the mountain and stir out a rescue party with proper equipment. 
I'll get some sleep while you're gone. I'd appreciate it if you'd leave me some 
smokes."
"No!" Joan protested, "We won't leave you here alone."
Phil added his objections. "Your plan is as bad as Joan's, Ben. It's all very 
well to talk about sleeping until we get back, but you know as well as I do that 
you would die of exposure if you spent a night like this on the ground with no 
protection."
"I'll just have to chance it. What better plan can you suggest?"
"Wait a minute. Let me think." He sat down on the ledge beside his friend and 
pulled at his left ear. "This is the best I can figure out: We'll have to get 
you to some place that is a little more sheltered, and build a fire to keep you 
warm. Joan can stay with you and keep the fire going while I go down after 
help."
"That's all right," put in Joan, "except that I will be the one to go after 
help. You couldn't find your way in the dark and the snow, Phil. You know 
yourself that your direct perception isn't reliable as yet. You'd get lost."
Both men protested. "Joan, you're not going to start off alone."--"We can't 
permit that, Joan."
"That's a lot of gallant nonsense. Of course I'm going."
"GOOD EVENING, friends. "A tall, elderly man stood on the ledge behind them. 
Steady blue eyes regarded them from under shaggy white eyebrows. He was smooth 
shaven but a mane of white hair matched the eye brows. Joan thought he looked 
like Mark Twain.
Coburn recovered first.
"Good evening," he answered. "If it is a good evening, which I doubt."
The stranger smiled with his eyes. "My name is Ambrose, ma'am. Your friend is in 
need of some assistance. If you will permit me, sir--" He knelt down and 
examined Ben's leg, without removing the boot. Presently he raised his head. 
"This will be somewhat painful. I suggest, son, that you go to sleep." Ben 
smiled at him, closed his eyes, and gave evidence by his slow, regular breathing 
that he was asleep.
The man who called himself Ambrose slipped away into the shadows. Joan tried to 
follow him with perception, but this she found curiously hard to do. He returned 
in a few minutes with several straight sticks which he broke into uniform 
lengths of about twenty inches. These he proceeded to bind firmly to Ben's left 
shin with a roll of cloth which he had removed from his trouser pocket.
When he was satisfied that the primitive splint was firm, he picked Coburn up in 
his arms, handling the not inconsiderable mass as if it were a child.
"Come," he said.
They followed him without a word, back the way they had come, single file 
through the hurrying snowflakes. Five hundred yards, six hundred yards; then he 
took a turn that had not been on the path followed by Joan and the two men, and 
strode confidently away in the gloom. Joan noticed that he was wearing a light 
cotton shirt with neither coat nor sweater, and wondered that he had come so far 
with so little protection against the weather.
He spoke to her over his shoulder, "I like cold weather, ma'am."
He walked between two large boulders, apparently disappeared into the side of 
the mountain. They followed him and found themselves in a passageway which led 
diagonally into the living rock. They turned a corner and were in an octagonal 
living room, high-ceilinged and panelled in some mellow, light-colored wood. It 
was softly illuminated by indirect lighting, but possessed no windows. One side 
of the octagon was a fireplace with a generous hearth in which a wood fire 
burned hospitably. There was no covering on the flagged floor, but it was warm 
to the feet.
The old man paused with his burden and indicated the comfortable fittings of the 
room--three couches, old-fashioned heavy chairs, a chaise-longue--with a nod. 
"Be seated, friends, and make yourselves comfortable. I must see that your 
companion is taken care of; then we will find refreshment for you." He went out 
through a door opposite the one by which they had entered, still carrying Coburn 
in his arms.
When Ambrose returned some ten minutes later he found them blissfully toasting 
their tired feet before the fire. He was bearing a tray from which he served 
them big steaming bowls of onion soup, hard rolls, apple pie, and strong black 
tea. While doing so he stated, "Your friend is resting. There is no need to see 
him until tomorrow. When you have eaten, you will find sleeping rooms in the 
passageway, with what you need for your immediate comfort." He indicated the 
door from which he had just come. "No chance to mistake them; they are the 
lighted rooms immediately at hand. I will bid you good night now." He went 
silently away.

CHAPTER FIVE of LOST LEGION
"--through a Glass, Darkly"



WHEN Phil entered the living room the next morning he found a small table set 
with a sound, a very sound breakfast for three. While he was lifting plate 
covers in a saliva-stirring preliminary reconnaissance and wondering whether 
good manners required him to wait until joined by others before commencing to 
breakfast, Joan entered the room. He looked up.
"Oh! It's you. Good morning, and stuff. They set a proper table here. Look." He 
lifted a plate cover. "Did you sleep well?"
"Like a corpse." She joined his investigations. "They do understand food, don't 
they? When do we start?"
"When number three gets here, I guess. Those aren't the clothes you had on last 
night."
"Like it?" She turned around slowly with a swaying mannequin walk. She had on a 
pearl grey gown that dropped to her toes. It was high waisted; two silver cords 
crossed between her breasts and encircled her waist, making a girdle. She was 
shod in silver sandals. There was an air of ancient days about the whole 
costume.
"It's swell. Why is it a girl always looks prettier in simple clothes?"
"Simple--hmmf! If you can buy this for a hundred and twenty-five dollars on 
Hollywood Boulevard, I'd like to have the address of the shop."
"Hello, troops." Ben stood in the doorway. They both stared at him. "What's the 
trouble--aren't I welcome?"
Phil ran his eye down Ben's frame. "How's your leg, Ben?"
"I wanted to ask you about that. How long have I been out? The leg's all well. 
Wasn't it broken after all?"
"How about it, Phil?" Joan seconded. "You examined it--I didn't."
Phil pulled his ear. "It was broken, or I've gone completely screwy. Let's have 
a look at it."
Ben slid up his pajama leg, and exposed a shin that was pink and healthy. He 
pounded it with his fist. "See that? Not even a bruise."
"Hmm--You haven't been out long, Ben. Just since last night. Maybe ten or eleven 
hours."
"Huh?"
"That's right."
"Impossible."
"Maybe so, Let's eat breakfast."
THEY ate in thoughtful silence, each under the pressing necessity of taking 
stock and reaching some reasonable re-orientation. Toward the end of the meal 
they all happened to look up at once and Phil broke the uncomfortable silence.
"Well, how about it?"
"Seriously, some things have happened which require explanation: Let's tick 'em 
off: One; I break a leg last night; it's all healed this morning."
"Wait a minute--Are we sure you broke your leg?"
"I'm sure. Furthermore, our host acted as if he thought so too--else why did he 
bother to carry me? Two, our host has direct perception, or an uncanny knowledge 
of the mountainside."
"Speaking of direct perception," said Joan, "have either of you tried to look 
around you and size up the place?"
"No, why?"--"Neither have I."
"Don't bother to. I tried, and it can't be done. I can't perceive past the walls 
of the room."
"Hmm--we'll put that down as point three. Four, our host says that his name is 
Ambrose. That is his first name. I know. My dad had a picture of him in our 
living room at home. He was a well-known artist, who disappeared sometime before 
I was born. At the time of the out-break of the first World War, as I recall it. 
If this is the same man, he must be over a hundred years old."
"He didn't look that old by forty years."
"Well, we'll put it down for what it's worth. Point five--we'll make this one an 
omnibus point--why does our host live up here? How come this strange mixture of 
luxury hotel and cliff dweller's cave anyhow? How can one old man run such a 
joint? Say, have either of you seen anyone else around the place?"
"I haven't," said Ben. "Someone woke me, but I think it was Ambrose."
"I have," offered Joan. "It was a woman that woke me. She offered me this 
dress."
"Ambrose's wife, maybe?"
"I don't think so. She wasn't more than thirty-five. I didn't really get 
acquainted. She was gone before I was wide awake."
Phil looked from Joan to Ben. "Well, what have we got? Add it up and give us an 
answer."
GOOD MORNING, friends!" It was Ambrose, standing in the doorway, his rich, 
virile voice resounding around the many-sided room. The three started as if 
caught doing something improper.
Coburn recovered first. He stood up and bowed. "Good morning, sir. I believe 
that you saved my life. I hope to be able to show my gratitude."
The older man bowed formally. "What service I did I enjoyed doing, sir. I hope 
that you are all rested."
"Yes, thank you, and pleasantly filled from your table."
"That is good. Now, if I may join you, we can discuss what you wish to do next. 
Perhaps you would like to see the rest of our home and meet the other members of 
our household?"
"Oh, I think that would be lovely!" Joan exclaimed.
"It will be my pleasure, ma'am."
"As a matter of fact, sir--" Phil leaned forward a little, his face and manner 
serious "--we are quite anxious to see more of your place here, and to know more 
about you. We were speaking of it when you came in."
"Curiosity is natural and healthy. Please ask any question you wish."
"Well--" Phil plunged in--"Ben had a broken leg last night. Or didn't he? It's 
well this morning."
"He did indeed have a broken leg. It was healed in the night."
Coburn cleared his throat. "I am a physician and surgeon, but my knowledge does 
not extend to such healing as that. Will you tell me more about it?"
"Certainly. You are familiar with regeneration as practiced by the lower life 
forms. The principle used is the same, but it is consciously controlled by the 
will and the rate of healing is accelerated. I placed you in hypnosis last 
night, then surrendered control to one of our surgeons, who directed your mind 
in exerting its own powers to heal its body."
COBURN looked baffled. Ambrose continued, "There is really nothing startling 
about it. The mind and will have always the possibility of complete domination 
over the body. Our operator simply directs your will to master its body. The 
technique is simple; you may learn it, if you wish. I assure you that to learn 
it is easier than to explain it in our cumbersome and imperfect language."
He saw Joan nodding her head in agreement.
Ambrose went on in his gentle, resonant voice, "Was there any other matter 
troubling any one of you?"
"One more question--this is rather personal; you may ignore it if you like. Are 
you Ambrose James, the artist, who disappeared a good many years ago?"
"I am. I first came up here in 1880 in search of a cure for asthma. I retired 
here in 1914 because I wished to avoid direct contact with the tragic world 
events which I saw coming and was powerless to stop." He spoke with some 
reluctance, as if the subject were distasteful, and turned the conversation. 
"Perhaps you would like to meet some of my friends now?"
THE apartments extended for a hundred yards along the face of the mountain and 
for unmeasured distances into the mountain. The thirty odd persons in residence 
were far from crowded; there were many rooms not in use. In the course of the 
morning James introduced them to most of the inhabitants.
They seemed to be of all sorts and ages and of several nationalities. Most of 
them were occupied in one way or another, usually with some form of research, or 
with creative art. At least James assured them in several cases that research 
was in progress--cases in which no apparatus, no recording devices, nothing was 
evident to indicate scientific research.
Once they were introduced to a group of three, two women and a man, who were 
surrounded by the physical evidence of their work--biological research. But the 
circumstances were still confusing; two of the trio sat quietly by, doing 
nothing, while the third labored at a bench. James explained that they were 
doing some delicate experiments in the possibility of activating artificial 
colloids.
"Are the other two observing the work?" Ben inquired.
James shook his head. "Oh, no. They are all three engaged actively in the work, 
but at this particular stage they find it expedient to let three brains in 
rapport direct one set of hands."
Rapport, it developed, was the usual method of collaboration. James had led them 
into a room occupied by six persons. One or two of them looked up and nodded, 
but did not speak. James motioned for the three to come away. "They were engaged 
in a particularly difficult piece of reconstruction; it would not be polite to 
disturb them."
"But," Phil commented, "two of them were playing chess."
"Yes. They did not need that part of their brains, so they left it out of 
rapport. Nevertheless they were very busy, I can assure you."
It was easier to see what the creative artists were doing. In two instances, 
however, their methods were startling. James had taken them to the studio of a 
little gnome of a man, a painter in oil, who was introduced as Charles, without 
qualification. He seemed quite glad to see them and chatted vivaciously, without 
ceasing his work. He was doing, with meticulous realism, but with a highly 
romantic effect, a study of a young girl dancing, a wood nymph, against a pine 
forest background.
The young people each made appropriate appreciative comments, Coburn observed 
that it was remarkable that he should be able to be so accurate in his 
anatomical detail without the aid of a model.
"But I have a model," he answered. "She was here last week. See?" He glanced 
toward the empty model's throne. Coburn and his companions followed the glance, 
and saw, poised on the throne, a young girl, obviously the model for the 
picture, frozen in the action of the painting. She was as real as bread and 
butter. Charles glanced away. The model's throne was again vacant.
The second incident was not so dramatic, but still less comprehensible. They had 
met, and chatted with a Mrs. Draper, a comfortable, matronly soul, who knitted 
and rocked as they talked.
After they had left her Phil inquired about her.
"She is possibly our most able and talented artist," James told him.
"In what field?"
"I don't believe I can tell you adequately at this time. She composes moods 
--arranges emotional patterns in harmonic sequences. It's our most advanced and 
our most completely human form of art, and yet, until you have experienced it, 
it is very difficult for me to tell you about it?"
"How is it possible to arrange emotions?"
"Your great grandfather no doubt thought it impossible to record music. We have 
a technique for it. You will understand later."
The three talked it over that night in the living room they had first entered. 
This suite had been set aside for their use, and Ambrose had left them with the 
simple statement that he would call on them on the morrow.
THEY felt a pressing necessity to exchange views, and yet each was reluctant to 
express opinion. Joan broke the silence.
"What kind of people are these?" she said. "They make me feel as if I were a 
child who had wandered in where adults were working, but that they were too 
polite to put me out."
"Speaking of working--there's something odd about the way they work. I don't 
mean what it is they do--that's odd, too, and I don't pretend to understand half 
of what they do. It's something else--something about their attitude, maybe, or 
the tempo at which they work."
"I know what you mean, Ben," Joan agreed. "They are busy all the time, and yet 
they act as if they had all eternity to finish whatever it is they are doing. 
James was like that when he was strapping up your leg." She turned to Phil. 
"What are you frowning about?"
"I don't know. There is something else about these people, something we haven't 
mentioned yet. They have a lot of special talent sure, but we three know 
something about special talents--that ought not to confuse us. But there is 
something else about them that is different."
The other two agreed with him but could offer no help. Sometime later Joan said 
that she was going to bed and left the room. The two men stayed for a last 
smoke.
Joan stuck her head back in the room.
"I know what it is that is so different about these people," she announced. 
"They are so alive."

 CHAPTER SIX of LOST LEGION
Ichabod!



PHILIP HUXLEY went to bed and to sleep as usual. From there on nothing was 
usual.
He became aware that he was inhabiting another's body, thinking with another's 
mind. The Other was aware of Huxley, but did not share Huxley's thoughts.
The Other was at home, a home never experienced by Huxley, yet familiar. It was 
on Earth, incredibly beautiful, each tree and shrub fitting into the landscape 
as if placed there in the harmonic scheme of an artist. The house grew out of 
the ground.
The Other whose being Huxley shared left the house with his wife and prepared to 
leave for the capital of the planet. Huxley thought of the destination as a 
"capital," yet he knew that the idea of government imposed by force was foreign 
to the nature of these people. The "capital" was merely the accustomed meeting 
place of the group whose advice was followed in matters affecting the entire 
race.
The Other and his wife, accompanied by Huxley's awareness, stepped into the 
garden, shot straight up into the air, and speeded over the countryside, flying 
hand in hand.
The country was green, fertile, park-like, dotted with occasional buildings, but 
nowhere did Huxley see the jammed masses of a city.
They passed rapidly over a large body of water, perhaps as large as the modern 
Mediterranean, and landed in a clearing in a grove of olive trees.
THE Young Men demanded a sweeping change in custom, first, that the ancient 
knowledge should henceforth be the reward of ability rather than common 
birthright, and second, that the greater should rule the lesser. Loki urged 
their case, his arrogant face upthrust and crowned with bright red hair. He 
spoke in words, which disturbed Huxley's host, telepathic rapport being the 
natural method of mature discussion. But Loki had closed his mind to it.
Jove answered him, speaking for all:
"My son, your words seem vain and without serious meaning. You ask that the 
ancient knowledge be made the reward of ability. Has it not always been so? Does 
our cousin, the ape, fly through the air? Is not the infant soup bound by 
hunger, and sleep, and the ills of the flesh? Can the oriole level the mountain 
with his glance? The powers of our kind that set us apart from the younger 
spirits on this planet are now exercised by those who possess the ability, and 
none other. How can we make that so which is already so?
"You demand that the greater shall rule the lesser. Is it not now so? Has it not 
always been so? Are you ordered about by the babe at the breast? Does the waving 
of the grass cause the wind? What dominion do you desire other than over 
yourself? Do you wish to tell your brother when to sleep and when to eat? If so, 
to what purpose?"
Vulcan broke roughly in while the old man was still speaking. Huxley felt a stir 
of shocked repugnance go through the council at this open disregard of good 
manners.
"Enough of this playing with words. We know what we want; you know what we want. 
We are determined to take it, council or no. We are tired of this sham equality. 
We intend to put an end to it. We are the strong and the able, the natural 
leaders of mankind. The rest shall follow us and serve us, as is the natural 
order of things."
Jove's eyes rested thoughtfully on Vulcan's crooked leg. "You should let me help 
you heal that twisted limb, my son."
"No one can heal my limb!"
"No. No one but yourself. And until you heal the twist in your mind, you can not 
heal the twist in your limb."
"There is no twist in my mind!"
"Then heal your limb."
The Young Men stirred uneasily. They could see that Vulcan was making a fool of 
himself, and wished to put a stop to it. Mercury separated himself from the 
group and came forward.
"Hear me, Father. We do not purpose warring with you. Rather it is our intention 
to add to your glory. Declare yourself king under the sun. Let us be your 
legates to extend your rule to every creature that walks, or crawls, or swims. 
Let us create for you the pageantry of dominion, the glory of conquest. Lead us, 
Father! Be our king!"
Slowly the elder man shook his head. "Not so. There is no knowledge, other than 
knowledge of oneself, and that should be free to every man who has the wit to 
learn. There is no power, other than the power to rule oneself, and that can be 
neither given, nor taken away. As for the poetry of empire, that has all been 
done before. There is no need to do it again. If such romance amuses you, enjoy 
it in the records--there is no need to bloody the planet again."
"That is the final word of the council, Father?"
"That is our final word." He stood up and gathered his robe about him, 
signifying that the session had ended. Mercury shrugged his shoulders and joined 
his fellows.
THERE was one more session of the council--the last--called to decide what to do 
about the ultimatum of the Young Men. Not every member of the council thought 
alike; they were as diverse as any group of human beings. They were human 
beings, not supermen. Some held out for opposing the Young Men with all the 
forces at their command, translate them to another dimension, wipe their minds 
clean, even crush them by major force.
All these courses were repugnant to them in the deepest inner sense, although 
physically quite possible. The simple bucolic appearance of their culture was 
superficial; they had such complete control over their bodies and the world 
around them that they had no need of the complex mechanical crutches used by 
modern man to maintain his precarious defenses against the jungle.
But to use force on the Young Men was contrary to their whole philosophy. "Free 
will is the primary fact of the Cosmos. Where there is no free will there can be 
no values, no evaluation. Shall we degrade, destroy all that we have worked for 
by subverting the will of even one man?"
Huxley became aware that these Elders had no need to remain on Earth for their 
own development. They were anxious to move on to another place, the nature of 
which escaped Huxley, save that it was not of the time and space he knew. In 
this place they anticipated further development, greater and more interesting 
problems.
The issue was this: Had they done what they could to help the incompletely 
developed balance of the race? Were they justified in abdicating?
The final decision was yes, but a female member of the council, whose name, it 
seemed to Huxley, was Demeter, argued that records should be left to assist 
those who survived the inevitable collapse. "It is true that each member of the 
race must make himself strong, must make himself wise. We cannot make them wise. 
Yet, after famine and war and hatred have stalked the earth, should there not be 
a message, telling them of their heritage?"
The council agreed, and Huxley's host, recorder for the council, was ordered to 
prepare records and to leave them for those who would come after. Jove added an 
injunction:
"Bind the force patterns so that they shall not dissipate while this planet 
endures. Place them where they will outlast any local convulsions of the crust, 
so that some at least will carry down through time."
SO ENDED that dream. But Huxley did not wake. He started at once to dream 
another dream, not through the eyes of another, but rather as if he watched a 
stero-movie[sic], every scene of which was familiar to him.
The first dream, for all its tragic content, had not affected him tragically; 
but throughout the second dream he was oppressed by a feeling of heartbreak and 
overpowering weariness.
After the abdication of the Elders, the Young Men established their rule by fire 
and sword, searing rays and esoteric forces, chicanery and deception. Convinced 
of their destiny to rule, they convinced themselves that the end justified the 
means.
The end was empire--Mu, mightiest of empires and mother of empires.
Huxley saw her in her prime and felt almost that the Young Men had been right. 
She was glorious! Her heart-choking magnificence filled his eyes with tears; he 
mourned for the glory, the beautiful breathtaking glory that was hers, and is no 
more.
Gargantuan silent liners in her skies, broad-beamed vessels at her wharves, 
loaded with grain and hides and spices, procession of priest and acolyte and 
humble believer, pomp and pageantry of power--he saw her intricate patterns of 
beauty and mourned her passing.
But in her swelling power there was the germ of decay. Inevitably Atlantis, 
richest colony, grew to political maturity and was irked by subordinate status. 
Schism and apostasy, disaffection and treason, brought harsh retaliation--and 
new rebellion.
Rebellions rose, were crushed. At last one rose that was not crushed. In less 
than fifteen months two-thirds of the peoples of the globe were dead; the 
remainder were racked by disease and hunger, and left with germ plasm damaged by 
the forces they had loosed.
But priests still held the ancient knowledge.
Not priests secure in mind and proud of their trust, but priests hunted and 
fearful, who had seen their hierarchy totter. There were such priests on both 
sides, and they unchained forces compared with which the previous fighting had 
been gentle.
The forces disturbed the isostatic balance of the earth's crust.
Mu shuddered and sank some two thousand feet. Tidal wave met at her middle, 
broke back on itself, surged twice around the globe. It climbed the Chinese 
plains, lapped the feet of Alta Himalaya.
Atlantis shook and rumbled and split for three days before the water covered it. 
A few escaped by air, to land on ground still wet with the ooze of exposed 
seabottom, or on peaks high enough to fend off the tidal waves. There they had 
still to wring a living from the bare soil, with minds unused to primitive 
art--but some survived.
Of Mu there was not a trace. As for Atlantis, a few islands, mountaintops short 
days before, marked the spot. Waters rolled over the twin Towers of the Sun and 
fish swam through the gardens of the viceroy.
The woebegone feeling which had pursued Huxley now overwhelmed him. He seemed to 
hear a voice in his head:
"Woe! Cursed be Loki! Cursed be Venus! Cursed be Vulcan! Thrice cursed am I, 
their apostate servant, Orab, Arch-priest of the Isles of the Blessed. Woe is 
me! Even as I curse I long for Mu, mighty and sinful. Twenty-one years ago, 
seeking a place to die, on this mountaintop I stumbled on this record of the 
mighty ones who were before us. Twenty-one years I have labored to make the 
record complete, searching the dim recesses of my mind for knowledge long 
unused, roaming the other planes for knowledge I never had. Now in the eight 
hundred and ninety second year of my life, and of the destruction of Mu the 
three hundred and fifth, I, Orab, return to my fathers."
Huxley was very happy to wake up.

CHAPTER SEVEN of LOST LEGION
"The Fathers Have Eaten Sour Grapes, and the Children's Teeth Are Set on Edge"



BEN was in the living room when Phil came in to breakfast. Joan arrived almost 
on Phil's heels. There were shadows under her eyes and she looked unhappy. Ben 
spoke in a tone that was almost surly.
"What's troubling you, Joan? You look like the wrath to come."
"Please, Ben," she answered, in a tired voice, "don't heckle me. I've had bad 
dreams all night."
"That so? Sorry. But if you think you had bad dreams all night, you should have 
seen the cute little nightmares I've been riding."
Phil looked at the two of them.
"What did you dream about?"
Neither one answered him.
"Wait a minute. I had some very strange dreams myself." He pulled his notebook 
out of a pocket and tore out three sheets. "I want to find out something. Will 
you each write down what your dreams were about, before anyone says anything 
more? Here's a pencil, Joan. "
They balked a little, but complied.
"Read them aloud, Joan."
She picked up Ben's slip and read, "'I dreamed that your theory about the 
degeneracy of the human race was perfectly correct.'"
She put it down and picked up Phil's slip. "'dreamed that I was present at the 
Twilight of the Gods, and that I saw the destruction of Mu and Atlantis.'"
There was dead silence as she took the last slip, her own.
"My dream was about how the people destroyed themselves by rebelling against 
Odin."
Ben was first to commit himself. "Anyone of those slips could have applied to my 
dreams." Joan nodded. Phil got up again, went out, and returned at once with his 
diary. He opened it and handed it to Joan, then said:
"Here's something I want you both to see. I wrote it earlier this morning. Kid, 
will you read that aloud, starting with 'June sixteenth'?"
She read it through slowly, without looking up from the pages. Phil waited until 
she had finished and closed the book before speaking. "Well," he said.
Ben crushed out a cigarette which had burned down to his fingers. "It's a 
remarkably accurate description of my dream, except that the elder you call 
Jove, I thought of as Ahuramazda."
"And I thought Loki was Lucifer."
"You're both right," agreed Phil. "I don't remember any spoken names for any of 
them. It just seemed that I knew what their names were."
"Me, too."
"Say," interjected Ben, "we are talking as if these dreams were real, as if we 
had all been to the same movie."
Phil turned on him. "Well, what do you think?"
"Oh, the same as you do, I guess. I'm stumped. Does anybody mind if I eat 
breakfast--or drink some coffee, at least?"
AMBROSE JAMES came in before they had a chance to talk it over after 
breakfast--by tacit consent they had held their tongues during a sketchy meal.
"I see," he said, searching their faces, "that none of you look very happy this 
morning. That is not surprising; no one does immediately after experiencing the 
records. "
Ben pushed back his chair and leaned across the table at James. "Those dreams 
were deliberately arranged for us?"
"Yes, indeed, but we were sure that you were ready to profit by them. But I have 
come to ask you to interview the Senior. If you can hold your questions for him, 
it will be simpler."
"The Senior?"
"You haven't met him as yet. It is the way we refer to the one we judge best 
fitted to co-ordinate our activities."
EPHRAIM HOWE had the hills of New England in his face, lean, gnarled 
cabinet-maker's hands. He was not young. There was courtly grace in his lanky 
figure. Everything about him, the twinkle in his pale blue eyes, the clasp of 
his hand, his drawl, bespoke integrity.
"Sit yourselves down," he said. "I'll come straight to the point." He called it 
'pint'. "You've been exposed to a lot of curious things and you've a right to 
know why. You've seen the Ancient Records now, part of 'em. I'll tell you how 
this institution came about, what it's for, and why you are going to be asked to 
join us.
"Wait a minute," he added, holding up a hand. "Don't say anything just yet. . 
.."
WHEN Fra Junipero Serra first laid eyes on Mount Shasta in 1781, the Indians 
told him that it was a holy place, only for medicine men. He assured them that 
he was a medicine man, serving a greater Master, and to keep face, dragged his 
sick, frail old body up to the snow line, where he slept before returning.
The dream he had there--of the Garden of Eden, the Sin, the Fall, and the 
Deluge--convinced him that it was indeed a holy place. He returned to San 
Francisco, planning to found a mission at Shasta. But there was too much for one 
old man to do, so many souls to save, so many mouths to feed. He surrendered his 
soul to rest two years later, but laid an injunction on a fellow monk to carry 
out his intention.
It is recorded that this friar left the northernmost mission in 1785 and did not 
return.
The Indians fed the holy man, who lived on the mountain until 1843, by which 
time he had gathered about him a group of neophytes, three Indians, a Russian, a 
Yankee mountainman. The Russian carried on after the death of the friar until 
joined by a Chinese, fled from his indenture. The Chinese made more progress in 
a few weeks than the Russian had in half a lifetime; the Russian gladly 
surrendered first place to him.
The Chinese was still there over a hundred years later, though long since 
retired from administration. He tutored in esthetics and humor.
AND this establishment has just one purpose," continued Ephraim Howe. "We aim to 
see to it that Mu and Atlantis don't happen again. Everything that the Young Men 
stood for, we are against.
"We see the history of the world as a series of crises in a conflict between two 
opposing philosophies. Ours is based on the notion that life, consciousness, 
intelligence, ego is the important thing in the world. That puts us in conflict 
with every force that tends to destroy, deaden, degrade the human spirit, or to 
make it act contrary to its nature. We see another crisis approaching; we need 
recruits. You've been selected."
He paused for a moment. Coburn ventured to ask a question.
"Why," he said, "do you feel another crisis is imminent?"
Howe shifted his gangling form in his rocking chair.
"It's these monkey tricks," he said seriously. "Since the fall of Mu the race 
has climbed back up quite a way, especially in mechanical development. We can 
build machines to do practically anything, talk and see around the world, fly 
through the air and even through space, make a million articles of trade at a 
time--monkey tricks, all of them, no more significant to the spirit than an 
ape's ability to use a club to knock nuts from a tree. But with television and 
radio one sick soul can infect a continent, a world. And there are things in the 
laboratories now that could knock man right off his perch, plunge him back into 
a darkness from which he might never climb out. Radiations, damaged germ plasm. 
As happened after Mu.
"This crisis has been growing on us since Napoleon. Europe has gone, and Asia, 
surrendered to authoritarianism, nonsense like the leader principle, 
totalitarianism, all the bonds placed on liberty which treat men as so many 
economic and political units with no importance as individuals. No dignity--do 
what you're told, believe what you are told, and shut your mouth! Workers, 
soldiers, breeding units....
"If that were the object of life, there would have been no point in including 
consciousness in the scheme at all!"
"This continent," Howe went on, "has been a refuge of freedom, a place where the 
soul could grow. But the forces that killed enlightenment in the rest of the 
world are spreading here. Little by little they have whittled away at human 
liberty and human dignity. A repressive law, a bullying school board, a blind 
dogma to be accepted under pain of persecution--doctrines that will shackle 
mankind and put blinders on their eyes so that they will never regain their lost 
heritage.
"We need help to fight it."
Huxley stood up. "You can count on us."
Before Joan and Coburn could speak the Senior interposed. "Don't answer yet. Go 
back to your chambers and think about it. We'll talk again."

CHAPTER EIGHT of LOST LEGION
"Precept upon Precept. . ."



HAD the place on Mount Shasta been a university, some of the value of the 
instruction would have been lost, by having been broken up into disjointed 
courses. As it was, Huxley, Coburn, and Joan Freeman learned from tutors who led 
them to teach themselves, and they took to it as an eel seeks the sea, with a 
sense of returning home after a long absence.
All three made rapid progress from the first. Being possessed of rudimentary 
perception and some knowledge of telepathy, their instructors could teach them 
directly. First they learned to control their bodies. They regained the control 
over each function, each muscle, each tissue, each gland, that a man should 
possess, but has largely forgotten, save a few obscure students in the far east. 
There was a deep, welling delight in willing the body to obey and having it 
comply. They became intimately aware of their bodies, but their bodies no longer 
ruled them. Fatigue, hunger, cold, pain--these things no longer drove them, but 
rather were simply useful signals that a good engine needed attention.
Nor did the engine need as much attention as before; the body was driven by a 
mind that knew precisely both its capacity and its limitations. Furthermore, 
through understanding their bodies, they were enabled to increase those 
capacities to their full potential. A week of sustained activity, without rest 
or food, was as easy as a morning's work had been. As for mental labor, it did 
not cease at all, save when they willed it, despite sleep, digestive languor, 
ennui, external stimuli, or muscular activity.
THE greatest delight was levitation. To fly through the air, to hang suspended 
in the quiet heart of a cloud, to sleep, like Mohamet, floating between ceiling 
and floor--these were sensuous delights unexpected, and never before 
experienced, except in dreams, dimly.
Huxley found it difficult to learn to levitate. His inquiring mind demanded a 
reason why the will should apparently be able to set at naught the inexorable 
"law" of gravitation, and his doubt dissipated his volition. His tutor reasoned 
with him patiently.
"Are you powerless to move your hand because you can not give a full rational 
explanation of the mystery? Life has power to affect matter; you know that--you 
have experienced it directly. It is a fact. Now there is no 'why' about a fact. 
There it stands, serene, demonstrating itself. First you tell me why you are, 
then I will tell you why levitation is possible.
"Now come," he continued, "place yourself in rapport with me, and try to feel 
how I do it, as I levitate."
Phil tried again.
"I don't get it," he concluded miserably,
"Look down."
Phil did so, gasped, and fell three feet to the floor. That night he joined Ben 
and Joan in a flight over the High Sierras.
Their tutor enjoyed with quiet amusement the zest with which they entered into 
the sport. He knew that their pleasure was suited to their stage of development. 
They would soon learn its relative worth, and then be ready to turn their minds 
to serious work.

CHAPTER NINE of LOST LEGION
Fledgings Fly



"WE COULD hang around here for fifty years, learning new things, but in the 
meantime we wouldn't be getting anywhere. I, for one, am ready to go back as 
soon as possible.
Phil crushed out a cigarette and looked around at his two friends reflectively, 
awaiting their reaction.
Coburn pursed his lips and nodded. "I feel the same way, Phil. There is no limit 
to what we could learn here, of course, but there comes a time when you just 
have to use some of the things you learn; or it just boils up inside. I think we 
had better tell the Senior, and get about doing it right away."
Phil turned to the girl. "How about it, Joan?"
She nodded vigorously. "There's work to be done, and the place to do it is 
Western, not up here in Never-Never Land. Boy, I can hardly wait to see old 
Brinckley's face when we get through working out on him!"
Huxley sought out the mind of Ephraim Howe. The other two waited for him to 
confer, courteously refraining from attempting to enter the telepathic 
conversation. "He says he has been expecting to hear from us, and that he 
intends to make it a full conference. He'll meet us all here. "
"Full conference? Everybody on the mountain?"
"Everybody--on the mountain, or not. I gather it's customary when new members 
decide what their future work will be."
"Whew!" exclaimed Joan. "That gives me stage fright just to think about it. 
Who's going to speak for us? It won't be little Joan."
"How about you, Ben?"
"If you wish."
"Take over."
They meshed into rapport. As long as they remained so, Ben's voice would express 
the combined thought of the trio. Ephraim Howe entered alone, but they were 
aware that he was in rapport with, and spokesman for, not only the adepts on the 
mountainside, but also the two hundred odd full-geniuses scattered about the 
country.
The conference commenced with direct mind-to-mind exchange:
--"We feel that it is time we were at work. We have not learned all that there 
is to learn, it is true; nevertheless, we need to use our present knowledge."
--"That is well and entirely as it should be, Benjamin. You have learned all 
that we can teach you at this time. Now you must take what you have learned out 
into the world, and use it, in order that knowledge may mature into wisdom."
"Not only for that reason do we wish to leave, but for another more urgent. As 
you yourself taught us, the crisis approaches. We want to fight it."
"How do you propose to fight the forces bringing on the crisis?"
"Well...." Ben did not use the word, but the delay in his thought produced the 
impression. "As we see it, in order to make men free, free so that they may 
develop as men and not as animals, it is necessary that we undo what the Young 
Men did. The Young Men refused to permit any but their own select few to share 
in the racial heritage of ancient knowledge. For men again to become free it is 
necessary to return to each man his ancient knowledge powers."
"THAT is true; what do you intend to do about it?"
"We will go out and tell about it. We all three are in the educational system; 
we can make ourselves heard--I, in the medical school at Western; Phil and Joan 
in the department of psychology. With the training you have given us, we can 
overturn the traditional ideas in short order. We can start a renaissance in 
education that will prepare the way for everyone to receive the wisdom that you, 
our elders, can offer them."
"Do you think that it will be as simple as that?"
"We don't expect it to be simple. We know that we will run head on into some of 
the most cherished misconceptions of everyone, but we can use that very fact to 
help. It will be spectacular; we can get publicity through it that will call 
attention to our work. You have taught us enough that we can prove that we are 
right. For example--suppose we put on a public demonstration of levitation, and 
proved before thousands of people that the human mind could do the things we 
know it can. Suppose we said that anyone could learn such things who first 
learned the techniques of telepathy. Why, in a year or two, the whole nation 
could be taught telepathy, and be ready for the reading of the records, and all 
that that implies!"
Howe's mind was silent for several long minutes. No message reached them. The 
three stirred uneasily under his thoughtful, sober gaze. Finally:
"If it were as simple as that, would we not have done it before?"
The thought that Coburn sent in answer was hesitant. "It is difficult.... Many 
of you are very old, and we know that all of you are wise. Nevertheless, it 
seems to us, in our youth, that you have waited over long in acting. We feel--we 
feel that you have allowed the pursuit of understanding to sap your will to 
action. From our standpoint, you have waited from year to year, perfecting an 
organization that will never be perfected, while the storm that overturns the 
world is gathering its force."
The conference of elders pondered before Ephraim Howe answered for it.
"Each must act as he sees it. Is it your decision to do this?"
When finally he answered, Ben spoke aloud, in a steady voice, "It is!"
"So let it be! Do you remember the history of Salem?"
"Salem? Where the witchcraft trials were held? Do you mean to warn us that we 
may be persecuted as witches?"
"No. There are no laws against witchcraft today, of course. It would be better 
if there were. We hold no monopoly on the power of knowledge; do not expect an 
easy victory. Beware of those who hold some portion of the ancient knowledge and 
use it to a base purpose--witches . . . black magicians!"
THE conference concluded and the rapport loosed; Ephraim Howe shook hands 
solemnly all around and bid them good-by.
"I envy you kids," he said, "going off like Jack the Giant Killer to tackle the 
whole educational system. You've got your work cut out for you. Do you remember 
what Mark Twain said? 'God made an idiot for practice; then he made a school 
board.' Still, I'd like to come along."
"Why don't you, sir?"
"Eh? No, 'twouldn't do. I don't really believe in your plan. F'r instance--it 
was frequently a temptation during the years I spent peddlin' hardware in the 
State o' Maine to show people better ways of doing things. But I didn't do it; 
people are used to paring knives and ice cream freezers, and they won't thank 
you to show them how to get along without them, just by the power of the mind. 
Not all at once, anyhow. They'd read you out of meetin'-- and lynch you too, 
most probably.
"Still, I'll be keeping an eye on you all the time."
Joan reached up and kissed him goodby. They left.

 CHAPTER TEN of LOST LEGION
Lion's Mouth



PHIL picked his largest class to make the demonstration which was to get the 
newspapers interested in them.
They had played safe to the extent of getting back to Los Angeles and started 
with the fall semester before giving anyone cause to suspect that they possessed 
powers out of the ordinary.
Phil built up to his key demonstration with care. His lectures were sufficiently 
innocuous that he could afford to have his department head drop in at any time 
without fear of reprimand or interference. But the combined effect was to 
prepare the students emotionally for what was to come. Carefully selected 
assignments for collateral reading heightened his chances.
"Hypnosis is a subject but vaguely understood, even today," he began his lecture 
on the selected day. "It formerly classed with witchcraft, magic, and so forth, 
as a silly superstition. But it is a commonplace thing today, and easily 
demonstrated. Consequently the most conservative psychologists must recognize 
its existence and try to observe its characteristics." He went on and on, 
cheerfully uttering bromides and commonplaces, while he sized up the emotional 
attitude of the class.
When he felt that they were ready to accept the ordinary phenomena of hypnosis 
without surprise, he called Joan, who had attended for the purpose, up to the 
front of the room. She went easily into a state of light hypnosis. They ran 
quickly through the small change of hypnotic phenomena--catalepsy, compulsion, 
post-hypnotic suggestion--while he kept up a running chatter about the relation 
between the minds of the operator and the subject, the possibility of direct 
telepathic control, the Rhine experiments, and similar matters, orthodox in 
themselves, but close to the borderline of heterodox thought.
Then he offered to attempt to reach the mind of the subject telepathically.
Each student was invited to write something on a slip of paper. A volunteer 
floor committee collected the slips, and handed them to Huxley one at a time. He 
solemnly went through the hocus-pocus of glancing at each one, while Joan read 
them off as his eyes rested lightly on them. By such easy stages he led them 
around to the idea that mind and will could exercise control over the body much 
more complete than that ordinarily encountered. He passed lightly over the tales 
of Hindu holy men who could lift themselves up into the air and even travel from 
place to place.
"We have an exceptional opportunity to put such tales to practical test," he 
told them. "The subject believes fully any statement made by the operator. I 
shall tell Miss Freeman that she is to exert her will power, and rise up off the 
floor. It is certain that she will believe that she can do it. She will be in an 
optimum condition to carry out the order, if it can be done. Miss Freeman!"
"Yes, Mr. Huxley."
"Exert your will. Rise up in the air!"
Joan rose straight up into the air, some six feet, until her head nearly touched 
the high ceiling.
--"How 'm I doing pal?"--"Swell, kid, you're wowin' 'em. Look at 'em stare!"
At that moment Brinckley burst into the room, rage in his eyes.
"MR. HUXLEY, you have broken your word to me, and disgraced this university!" It 
was some ten minutes after the fiasco ending to the demonstration. Huxley faced 
the president in Brinckley's private office.
"I made you no promise. I have not disgraced the school," Phil answered with 
equal pugnacity.
"You have indulged in cheap tricks of fake magic to bring your department into 
disrepute."
"So I'm a faker, am I? You stiff-necked old fossil--explain this one!" Huxley 
levitated himself until he floated three feet above the rug.
"Explain what?" To Huxley's amazement Brinckley seemed unaware that anything 
unusual was going on. He continued to stare at the point where Phil's head had 
been. His manner showed nothing but a slight puzzlement and annoyance at 
Huxley's apparently irrelevant remark.
Was it possible that the doddering old fool was so completely self-deluded that 
he could not observe anything that ran counter to his own preconceptions, even 
when it happened directly under his eyes? Phil reached out with his mind and 
attempted to see what went on inside Brinckley's head. He got one of the major 
surprises of his life. He expected to find the floundering mental processes of 
near senility; he found.... cold calculation, keen ability, set in a matrix of 
pure evil that sickened him.
It was just a glimpse; then he was cast out with a wrench that numbed his brain. 
Brinckley had discovered his spying and thrown up his defences--the hard 
defences of a disciplined mind.
Phil dropped back to the floor, and left the room without a word or a backward 
glance.
From THE WESTERN STUDENT, October 3rd:
PSYCH PROF FIRED FOR FRAUD
  ...... students' accounts varied, but all agreed that it had been a fine show. 
  Fullback 'Buzz' Arnold told your reporter, "I hated to see it happen; Prof 
  Huxley is a nice guy and he certainly put on a clever skit with some good 
  dead-pan acting. I could see how it was done, of course--it was the same the 
  Great Arturo used in his turn at the Orpheum last spring. But I can see Doctor 
  Brinckley's viewpoint, you can't permit monkey shines at a serious center of 
  learning."
  President Brinckley gave the STUDENT the following official statement: "It is 
  with real regret that I announce the termination of Mr. Huxley's association 
  with this institution--for the good of the University. Mr. Huxley had been 
  repeatedly warned as to where his steps were leading him. He is a young man of 
  considerable ability. Let us devoutly hope that this experience will serve as 
  a lesson to him in whatever line of endeavor......"
COBURN handed the paper back to Huxley.
"You know what happened to me?" he inquired.
"Something new?"
"Invited to resign . . . No publicity-- just a gentle hint. My patients got well 
too fast; I'd quit using surgery, you know."
"How perfectly stinking!" This from Joan.
"Well," Ben considered, "I don't blame the medical director; Brinckley forced 
his hand. I guess we underrated the old cuss."
"Rather! Ben, he's every bit as capable as any one of us, and as for his 
motives--I gag when I think about it."
"And I thought he was just a mouse," grieved Joan. "We should have pushed him 
into the tar pits last spring. I told you to. What do we do now?"
"Go right ahead. " Phil's reply was grim. "We'll turn the situation to our own 
advantage. We've gotten some publicity--we'll use it."
"What's the gag?"
"Levitation again. It's the most spectacular thing we've got for a crowd. Call 
in the papers, and tell 'em that we will publicly demonstrate levitation at noon 
tomorrow in Pershing Square."
"Won't the papers fight shy of sticking their necks out on anything that sounds 
as fishy as that ?"
"Probably they would, but here's how we'll handle that: Make the whole thing 
just a little screwball and give 'em plenty of funny angles to write up. Then 
they can treat it as a feature rather than as straight news. We'll get more 
column-inches than Russia. The lid's off, Joan--you can do anything you like; 
the screwier the better. Let's get going, troops. I'll call the News Service. 
Ben, you and Joan split up the dailies between you."
The reporters were interested, certainly. They were captivated by Joan's obvious 
good looks, cynically amused by Phil's flowing tie and bombastic claims, and 
seriously impressed by his taste in whiskey. They began to take notice when 
Coburn courteously poured drinks for them without bothering to touch the bottle.
But when Joan floated around the room while Phil rode a non-existent bicycle 
across the ceiling, they balked.
"Honest, doc," as one of them put it, "we've got to eat. You don't expect us to 
go back and tell a city editor anything like this. Come clean--is it the 
whiskey, or just plain hypnotism?"
"Put it any way you like, gentlemen. Just be sure that you say that we will do 
it all over again in Pershing Square at noon tomorrow."
Phil's diatribe against Brinckley came as an anticlimax to the demonstration, 
but the reporters obligingly noted it.
JOAN got ready for bed that night with a feeling of vague depression. The 
exhilaration of entertaining the newspaper boys had worn off. Ben had proposed 
supper and a bit of dancing to mark their last night of private life, but it had 
not been a success. To start with, they had blown a tire while coming down a 
steep curve on Beachwood Drive, and Phil's grey sedan had rolled over and over. 
They would all have been seriously injured had it not been for the automatic 
body control which they possessed.
When Phil examined the wreck, he expressed puzzlement as to its cause. "Those 
tires were perfectly all right," he maintained. "I had examined them all the way 
through this morning." But he insisted on continuing with their evening of 
relaxation.
The floor show seemed dull, and the jokes crude and callous, after the light, 
sensitive humor they had learned to enjoy through association with Master Ling. 
The ponies in the chorus were young and beautiful--Joan had enjoyed watching 
them, but she made the mistake of reaching out to touch their minds. The 
incongruity of the vapid, insensitive spirits she found in almost every instance 
added to her malaise.
She was relieved when the floor show ended and Ben asked her to dance. Both of 
the men were good dancers, especially Coburn, and she fitted herself into his 
arms contentedly. Her pleasure didn't last; a drunken couple bumped into them 
repeatedly. The man was quarrelsome, the woman shrilly vitriolic. Joan asked her 
escorts to take her home.
These things bothered her as she prepared for bed. Joan, who had never known 
acute physical fear in her life, feared just one thing--the corrosive, dirty 
emotions of the poor in spirit. Malice, envy, spite, the insults of twisted, 
petty minds; these things could hurt her, just by being in her presence, even if 
she were not the direct object of attack. She was not yet sufficiently mature to 
have acquired a smooth armor of indifference to the opinion of the unworthy.
After a summer in the company of men of good will, the incident with the drunken 
couple dismayed her. She felt dirtied by the contact. Worse still, she felt an 
outlander, a stranger in a strange land.
She awakened sometime in the night with the sense of loneliness increased to 
overwhelming proportions. She was acutely aware of the two million-odd living 
beings around her, but the whole city seemed alive only with malignant entities, 
jealous of her, anxious to drag her down to their own ignoble status. This 
attack on her spirit, this attempt to despoil the sanctity of her inner being, 
assumed an almost corporate nature. It seemed to her that it was nibbling at the 
edges of her mind, snuffling at her defenses.
Terrified, she called out to Ben and Phil. There was no answer; her mind could 
not find them.
The filthy thing that threatened her was aware of her failure; she could feel it 
leer. In open panic she called to the Senior.
No answer. This time the thing spoke, --"That way, too, is closed."
As hysteria claimed her, as her last defences crumbled, she was caught in the 
arms of a stronger spirit, whose calm, untroubled goodness encysted her against 
the evil thing that stalked her.
"Ling!" she cried, "Master Ling!" before racking sobs claimed her.
She felt the quiet, reassuring humor of his smile while the fingers of his mind 
reached out and smoothed away the tension of her fear. Presently she slept.
He stayed with her all through the night, and talked with her, until she 
awakened.
BEN AND PHIL listened to her account of the previous night with worried faces.
"That settles it," Phil decided. "We've been too careless. From now on until 
this thing is finished, we stay in rapport day and night, awake and asleep. As a 
matter of fact, I had a bad time of it myself last night, though nothing to 
equal what happened to Joan."
"So did I, Phil. What happened to you?"
"Nothing very much--just a long series of nightmares in which I kept losing 
confidence in my ability to do any of the things we learned on Shasta. What 
about you?"
"Same sort of thing, with variations. I< operated all night long, and all of my 
patients died on the table. Not very pleasant--but something else happened that 
wasn't a dream. You know I still use an old-fashioned straight-edge razor; I was 
shaving away, paying no attention to it, when it jumped in my hand and cut a big 
gash in my throat. See? It's not entirely healed yet." He indicated a thin red 
line which ran diagonally down the right side of his neck.
"Why, Ben I" squealed Joan. "You might have been killed."
"That's what I thought," he agreed dryly.
"You know, kids," Phil said, slowly, "these things aren't accidental--"
"Open up in there!" The order was bawled from the other side of the door. As one 
mind, their senses of direct perception jumped through solid oak and examined 
the speaker. Plainclothes did not conceal the profession of the over-size 
individual waiting there, even had they not been able to see the gold shield on 
his vest. A somewhat smaller, but equally officious man waited with him.
Ben opened the door and enquired gently, "What do you want?"
The larger man attempted to come in. Coburn did not move.
"I asked you your business."
"Smart guy, eh? I'm from police headquarters. You Huxley?"
"No."
"Coburn?" Ben nodded.
"You'll do. That Huxley behind you? Don't either of you ever stay home? Been 
here all night?"
"No," said Coburn, frostily. "Not that it is any of your business."
"I'll decide about that. I want to talk to you two. I'm from the bunco squad. 
What's this game you were giving the boys yesterday?"
"No game, as you call it. Come down to Pershing Square at noon today and see for 
yourself."
"You won't be doing anything in Pershing Square today, Bud."
"Why not?"
"Park Commission's orders."
"What authority?"
"Huh?"
"By what act, or ordinance, do they deny the right of a private citizen to make 
peaceful use of a public place? Who is that with you?"
The smaller man identified himself. "Name's Ferguson, D. A.'s office. I want 
your pal Huxley on a criminal libel complaint. I want you too as a witness."
Ben's stare became colder, if possible. "Do either of you," he inquired, in 
gently snubbing tones, "have a warrant?"
They looked at each other, and failed to reply.
"Then it is hardly profitable to continue this conversation, is it?" Ben 
suggested and closed the door in their faces.
He turned around to his companions and grinned. "Well, they are closing in. 
Let's see what the papers gave us."
They found just one story. It said nothing about their proposed demonstration, 
but related that Doctor Brinckley had lodged a complaint charging Phil with 
criminal libel. "That's the first time I ever heard of four metropolitan papers 
refusing a juicy news story," was Ben's comment. "What are you going to do about 
Brinckley's charge?"
"Nothing," Phil told him, "except possibly libel him again. If he goes through 
with it, it will be a beautiful opportunity to prove our claims in court. Which 
reminds me--we don't want our plans interfered with today; those bird dogs may 
be back with warrants most any time. Where'll we hide out?"
On Ben's suggestion they spent the morning buried in the downtown public 
library.
At five minutes to twelve they flagged a cab and rode to Pershing Square.
They stepped out of the cab into the arms of six sturdy policemen.
BEN, PHIL, how much longer do I have to put up with this?"
--"Steady, kid. Don't get upset."
--"I'm not, but why should we stay pinched when we can duck out any time?"
--"That's the point; we can escape any time. We've never been arrested before; 
let's see what it's like."
THEY were gathered that night late around the fireplace in Joan's house. Escape 
had, in fact, presented no difficulties, but they had waited until an hour when 
the jail was quiet to prove that stone walls can not hold a person adept in the 
powers of the mind.
Ben was speaking. "I'd say we had enough data to draw a curve now."
"Which is?"
"You state it."
"All right. We came down from Shasta thinking that all we had to overcome was 
stupidity, ignorance, and a normal amount of human contrariness and cussedness. 
Now we know better. Any attempt to place the essentials of the ancient knowledge 
in the hands of the common people is met by determined, organized effort to 
prevent it, and to destroy, or disable the one who tries it."
"It's worse than that," amended Ben. "I spent our rest in the clink looking over 
the city. I wondered why the district attorney should take such an interest in 
us, so I took a look into his mind. I found out who his boss was, and took a 
look at his mind. What I found there interested me so much that I had to run up 
to the state capitol and see what made things tick there. That took me back to 
Spring Street and the financial district. Believe it or not, from there I had to 
look up some of the most sacred cows in the community--clergymen, clubwomen, 
business leaders, and stuff." He paused.
"Well, what about it? Don't tell me everybody is out of step but Willie--I'll 
break down and cry."
"No, that was the odd part about it. Nearly everyone of these heavyweights were 
good Joes, people you'd like to know. But usually--not always, but usually--the 
good Joes were dominated by some one they trusted, some one who had helped them 
to get where they were, and these dominants were not good Joes, to state it 
gently. I couldn't get into all of their minds, but where I was able to get in I 
found the same sort of thing that Phil found in Brinckley--cold, calculated 
awareness that their power lay in keeping the people in ignorance."
Joan shivered. "That's a sweet picture you paint, Ben. What's our next move?"
"What do you suggest?"
"Me? I haven't reached any conclusion. Maybe we should take on these tough 
babies one at a time, and smear 'em."
"How about you, Phil?"
"I haven't anything better to offer. We'll have to plan a shrewd campaign, 
however."
"Well, I do have something to suggest myself."
"Let's have it."
"Admit that we blindly took on more than we could handle. Go back to Shasta and 
ask for help."
"Why, Ben!" Joan's exclamation of dismay was matched by Phil's unhappy face. Ben 
went on stubbornly:
"Sure! Sure! I know it's grovelling to tuck our tails between our legs and run 
for help after we told the elders how we were going to clean up the world this 
week and take Saturday off. But pride is too expensive and the job is too 
important. If there is any chance of doing what needs to be done, we need all 
the help that we can get. Let's not be infantile about it."
He broke off when he noticed Joan's expression. "What is it, kid?"
"We'll have to make some sort of a decision quickly--that is a police patrol car 
that just stopped out in front."
Ben turned back to Phil. "What'll it be; stay and fight, or go back for 
re-inforcements?"
"Oh, you're right. I've known it ever since I got a look at Brinckley's mind, 
but I hated to admit it."
The three stepped out into the patio, joined hands, and shot straight up into 
the air.

CHAPTER ELEVEN of LOST LEGION
"A Little Child Shall Lead Them."



"WELCOME home!" Ephraim Howe met them when they landed. "Glad to have you back." 
He led them into his own private apartment. "Rest yourselves while I stir up the 
fire a mite." He chucked a wedge of pinewood into the wide grate, pulled his 
homely old rocking chair around so that it faced both the fire and his guests, 
and settled down. "Now suppose you tell me all about it. No, I'm not hooked in 
with the others. You can make a full report to the council when you're ready."
"As a matter of fact, don't you already know everything that happened to us, Mr. 
Howe?" Phil looked directly at the Senior as he spoke.
"No, I truly don't. We let you go at it your own way, with Ling keeping an eye 
out to see that you didn't get hurt. He has made no report to me."
"Very well, sir." They took turns telling him all that had happened to them, 
occasionally letting him see directly through their minds the events they had 
taken part in.
When they were through, Howe gave them his quizzical smile and inquired, "So 
you've come around to the viewpoint of the council?"
"No, sir!" It was Phil who answered him. "We are more convinced of the need for 
positive, immediate action than we were when we left--but we are convinced, too, 
that we aren't strong enough nor wise enough to handle it alone. We've come back 
to ask for help, and to urge the council to abandon its policy of only teaching 
those who show that they are ready, and, instead to reach out and teach as many 
minds as can accept your teachings.
"You see, sir, our antagonists don't wait. They are active all the time. They've 
won in Europe; they are in the ascendency in Asia; they may win here in America, 
while we wait for an opportunity."
"Have you any method to suggest for tackling the problem?"
"No, that's why we came back. When we tried to teach others what we knew, we 
were stopped."
"That's the rub," Howe agreed. "Even though I didn't think your plan would work, 
I've been pretty much of your opinion for a good many years, but it's a hard nut 
to crack. What we have to give can't be printed in a book, nor broadcast over 
the air. It must be passed directly from mind to mind, wherever we find a mind 
ready to receive it."
They finished the discussions without finding a solution. Howe told them not to 
worry.
"Go along," he said, "and spend a few weeks in meditation and rapport. When you 
get an idea that looks as if it might work, bring it in and we'll call the 
council together to consider it."
"But, Senior," Joan protested for the trio, "you see--well, we had hoped to have 
the advice of the council in working out a plan. We don't know where to start, 
else we wouldn't have come back."
He shook his head. "The council can't help us now. You are the newest of the 
brethren, the youngest, and the least experienced. Those are your virtues, not 
your disabilities. You are as able as any of them, with as many lives behind you 
as the majority. The very fact that you have not spent years of this life in 
thinking in terms of eons and races gives you an advantage. Too broad a 
viewpoint, too philosophical an outlook paralyzes the will. This is a practical 
problem here and now; I want some one who can think of it in those terms, 
instead of speculating as to the results a thousand or ten thousand years from 
now, and planning to do something then."
THE three did as he asked. For weeks they discussed the situation, considered it 
in rapport as a single mind, exchanged thoughts severally, hammered at it in 
spoken conversation, meditated its ramifications. They roamed the nation with 
their minds, examining the human spirits that lay behind political and social 
action. With the aid of the archives on Shasta they relived dead years of the 
republic and learned how the present social and spiritual structure had come 
about. They learned the techniques by which the brotherhood of adepts had 
interceded in the past when freedom of thought and action in America had been 
threatened. They proposed and rejected dozens of schemes to get over the innate 
barriers to the dissemination of the esoteric arts of human consciousness.
Phil proposed a national department of education.
"We should go into politics," he told the other two, "as we did in the past. 
Education is the problem, and freedom of education is the method. If we had a 
Secretary of Education, appointed from among the elders, he could found a 
national academy in which freedom of thought would really prevail, and it could 
be the source from which the ancient knowledge could filter out to the masses."
Ben was still considering this when Joan put in an objection.
"Suppose you lose the election?"
"Huh?"
"How do you know that we are strong enough at this time to do what would be 
necessary to win a national election? Even with all the special powers that the 
adepts have, it would be quite a chore to line up delegates for a national 
convention, get our candidate nominated, then get him elected in the face of all 
the political machines that would require handling, economic issues to be dealt 
with, pressure groups, newspapers, favorite sons, et cetera.
"And remember this--the opposition can fight as dirty as it pleases, but we have 
to fight fair, or we defeat our own aims when we win. If we go into politics, we 
have to win on issues while the oppostion[sic] is free to use any spellbinding, 
or chicanery, they care to employ."
Ben nodded. "I am afraid she is right, Phil. Not but what a department of 
education is a good idea, under a decent administration. I can see where it 
would be just another chain on liberty under a bad administration. But you are 
absolutely right in one thing; this is a problem of education." He stopped to 
meditate, his mind turned inward.
Presently he resumed. "I wonder if we have been tackling this job from the right 
end? We've been thinking of it as a problem in education, yes, but we've been 
thinking of re-educating a hundred million adults, already set in their ways. 
How about the children? They haven't crystallized; wouldn't they be easier to 
teach?"
Joan sat up, her eyes bright. "Ben, you've got it! Back the children to beat the 
Young Men--a long shot to win!"
Phil shook his head doggedly. "No. I hate to throw cold water on your 
enthusiasm, but there is no way to go about it. Children are constantly in the 
care of adults; we couldn't get to them. Don't think for a moment that you could 
get past local school boards; they are the most conservative and tight little 
oligarchies in the whole political system."
They were sitting in a group of pine trees on the lower slopes of Mount Shasta. 
A little group of human figures came into view below them and climbed steadily 
toward the spot where the three rested. The discussion was suspended until the 
group moved beyond earshot. The trio watched them with casual, friendly 
interest.
They were all boys, ten to fifteen years old, except the leader, who bore his 
sixteen years with the serious dignity befitting one who is responsible for the 
safety and well-being of younger charges. They were dressed in khaki coats and 
breeches, campaign hats, neckerchiefs embroidered with a conifer and the 
insignia Alpine Patrol, Troop I. Each carried a staff, and a knapsack, and they 
were linked together with a stout line like adult mountain climbers.
As the little procession came abreast of the adults, the patrol leader gave them 
a wave in greeting, the merit badges on his sleeves flashing in the sun from 
cuff to shoulder. The three wheel waved back and watched them trudge out of 
sight up the slope.
Phil watched them disappear with a faraway look. "Those were the good old days," 
he said. "I almost envy them."
"Were you one?" Ben said, his eyes still on the boys. "I remember how proud I 
was the day I got my merit badge in first aid."
"Born to be a doctor, eh, Ben?" commented Joan, her eyes maternal, approving. "I 
didn't--Say!"
"What's up?"
"Phil! That's your answer! That's how to reach the children in spite of parents 
and school boards."
She snapped into telepathic contact, her ideas spilling excitedly into their 
minds. They went into rapport and ironed out the details. After a time Ben 
nodded and spoke aloud.
"It might work," he said. "Let's go back and talk it over with Ephraim."
SENATOR MOULTON, these are the young people I was telling you about." Almost in 
awe, Joan looked at the face of the little, whitehaired old man whose name had 
become a synonym for integrity. She felt the same impulse to fold her hands 
across her middle and bow which Master Ling inspired. She noted that Ben and 
Phil were having trouble not to seem gawky and coltish.
Ephraim Howe continued, "I have gone into their scheme and I think it is 
practical. If you do too, the council will go ahead with it. But it largely 
depends on you."
The Senator took them to himself with a smile, the smile that had softened the 
hearts of two generations of hard politicians.
"Tell me about it," he invited.
They did so--how they had tried and failed at Western University, how they had 
cudgeled their brains for a way, how a party of boys on a hike up the mountain 
had given them an inspiration. "You see, Senator, if we could just get enough 
boys up here all at once, boys too young to have been corrupted by their 
environment, and already trained, as these boys are, in the ideals of the 
ancients--human dignity, helpfulness, self-reliance, kindness, all those things 
set forth in their code--if we could get even five thousand such boys up here 
all at once, we could train them in telepathy, and how to impart telepathy to 
others.
"Once they were taught, and sent back to their homes, each one would be a center 
for spreading the knowledge. The antagonists could never stop it; it would be 
too widespread, epidemic. In a few years every child in the country would be 
telepathic, and they would even teach their elders--those that haven't grown too 
calloused to learn.
"And once a human being is telepathic, we can lead him along the path of the 
ancient wisdom!"
Moulton was nodding, and talking to himself. "Yes. Yes indeed. It could be done. 
Fortunately Shasta is a national park. Let me see, who is on that committee? It 
would take a joint resolution and a small appropriation. Ephraim, old friend, I 
am afraid I shall have to practice a little log-rolling to accomplish this. Will 
you forgive me?"
Howe grinned broadly.
"Oh, I mean it," Moulton continued. "People are so cynical, so harsh, about 
political expediency--even some of our brothers. Let me see, this will take 
about two years, I think, before the first camp can be held--"
"As long as that?" Joan was disappointed.
"Oh, yes, my dear. There are two bills to get before Congress, and much 
arranging to do to get them passed in the face of a full legislative calendar. 
There are arrangements to be made with the railroads and bus companies to give 
the boys special rates so that they can afford to come. We must start a 
publicity campaign to make the idea popular. Then there must be time for as many 
of our brothers as possible to get into the administration of the movement in 
order that the camp executives may be liberally interspersed with adepts. 
Fortunately I am a national trustee of the organization. Yes, I can manage it in 
two years time, I believe."
"Good heavens!" protested Phil. "Why wouldn't it be more to the point to 
teleport a them here, teach them, and teleport them back?"
"You do not know what you are saying my son. Can we abolish force by using it? 
Every step must be voluntary, accomplished by reason and persuasion. Each human 
being must free himself; freedom cannot be thrust on him. Besides, is two years 
long to wait to accomplish a job that has been waiting since the deluge?"
"I'm sorry, sir."
"Do not be. Your youthful impatience has made it possible to do the job at all."

 CHAPTER TWELVE of LOST LEGION
"Ye Shall Know the Truth--"



ON THE lower slopes of Mount Shasta, down near McCloud, the camp grew up. When 
the last snow of the second spring was still hiding in the deeper gullies and on 
the north sides of ridges, U.S. Army Quartermaster trucks came lumbering over a 
road built the previous fall by army engineers. Pyramid tents were broken out 
and were staked down in rows on the bosom of a gently rolling alp. Cook shacks, 
an infirmary, a headquarters building took shape under the hammers and saws of 
the C.C.C. Camp Mark Twain was changing from blueprint to actuality.
Senator Moulton, strangely youthful breeches, leggings, khaki shirt, and a hat 
marked Camp Director, puttered around the field, encouraging, making decisions 
for the straw bosses, and searching, ever searching the minds of all who came 
into or near the camp for any purpose. Did anyone suspect? Had anyone slipped in 
who might be associated with partial adepts who opposed the real purpose of the 
camp?
Too late to let anything slip now--too late, and too much at stake.
In the middle West, in the deep South, in New York City and New England, in the 
mountains and on the coast, boys were packing suitcases, buying special Shasta 
Camp round-trip tickets, talking about it with all their envious contemporaries. 
And all over the country the antagonists of human liberty--the racketeers, the 
crooked political figures, the shysters, the dealers in phony religions, the 
sweat shoppers, the petty authoritarians, all of the key figures among the 
traffickers in human misery and human oppression, themselves somewhat adept in 
the arts of the mind and acutely aware of the danger of free knowledge--all of 
this unholy breed stirred uneasily and wondered what was taking place. Moulton 
had never been associated with anything but ill for them; Mount Shasta was one 
place they had never been able to touch. They hated the very name of the place. 
They recalled old stories and shivered.
They shivered, but they acted.
Special transcontinental buses loaded with the chosen boys. Could the driver be 
corrupted? Could his mind be taken over? Could tires or engine be tampered with? 
Could a switch be thrown? Could the drinking water be polluted?
Other eyes watched. A trainload of boys moved westward; in it, or flying over 
it, his direct perception blanketing the surrounding territory, and checking the 
motives of every mind within miles of his charges, was stationed at least one 
adept whose single duty it was to see that those boys reached Shasta safely.
Probably some of the boys would never have reached there had not the opponents 
of human freedom been caught off balance, doubtful, unorganized. For vice has 
this defect: It cannot be truly intelligent. Its very motives are its weakness. 
The attempts made to prevent the boys reaching Shasta were scattered and 
abortive. The adepts had taken the offensive for once, and their moves were 
faster and more rationally conceived than their antagonists.
Once in camp a tight screen surrounded the whole of Mount Shasta National Park. 
The Senior detailed adepts to point patrol night and day to watch with every 
sense at their command for mean or malignant spirits. The camp itself was 
purged. Two of the counselors, and some twenty of the boys, were sent home when 
examination showed them to be damaged souls. The boys were not informed of their 
deformity, but plausible excuses were found for the necessary action.
THE camp resembled superficially a thousand other such camps. The courses in 
woodcraft were the same. The courts of honor met as usual to examine candidates. 
There were the usual sings around the campfire in the evening, the same 
setting-up exercises before breakfast. The slightly greater emphasis on the oath 
and the law of the organization was not noticeable.
Each one of the boys made at least one overnight hike in the course of the camp. 
In groups of fifteen or twenty they would set out in the morning in company of a 
counselor. That each counselor supervising such hikes was an adept was not 
evident, but it so happened. Each boy carried his blanket roll, and knapsack of 
rations, his canteen, knife, compass, and hand axe.
Phil started out with such a group one morning during the first week of the 
camp. He worked around the mountain to the east in order to keep well away from 
the usual tourist haunts. They camped that night on the bank of a mountain 
stream, fed by the glaciers, whose rush sounded in their ears as they ate 
supper.
After supper they sat around the campfire. Phil told them stories of the holy 
men of the east and their reputed powers, and of Saint Francis and the birds. He 
was in the middle of one of his yarns when a figure appeared within the circle 
of firelight.
Or rather figures. They saw an old man, in clothes that Davy Crockett might have 
worn, flanked by two beasts, on his left side a mountain lion, who purred when 
he saw the fire, on his right a buck of three points, whose soft brown eyes 
stared calmly into theirs.
Some of the boys were alarmed at first, but Phil told them quietly to widen 
their circle and make room for the strangers. They sat in decent silence for a 
while, the boys getting used to the presence of the animals. In time one of the 
boys timidly stroked the big cat, who responded by rolling over and presenting 
his soft belly. The boy looked up at the old man and asked,
"What is his name, Mister--"
"Ephraim. His name is Freedom."
"My, but he's tame! How do you get him to be so tame?"
"He reads my thoughts and trusts me. Most things are friendly when they know 
you--and most people."
The boy puzzled for a moment. "How can he read your thoughts?"
"It's simple. You can read his, too. Would you like to learn how?"
"Jiminy!"
"Just look into my eyes for a moment. There! Now look into his."
"Why--Why--I really believe I can!"
--"Of course you can. And mine too. I'm not talking out loud. Had you noticed."
--"Why, so you're not. I'm reading your thoughts!"
--"And I'm reading yours. Easy, isn't it?"
With Phil's help Howe had them all conversing by thought transference inside an 
hour. Then, to calm them down, he told them stories for another hour, stories 
that constituted an important part of their curriculum. He helped Phil get them 
to sleep, then left, the animals following after him.
The next morning Phil was confronted at once by a young skeptic. "Say, did I 
dream all that about an old man and a puma and a deer?"
--"Did you? Talk to my mind now."
--"You're doing it now!"
--"Certainly I am. And so are you. Now go tell the other boys the same thing."
Before they got back to camp, he advised them not to speak about it to any of 
the boys who had not as yet had their overnight hike, but that they test their 
new powers by trying it on any boy who had had his first all-night hike.
ALL was well until one of the boys had to return home in answer to a message 
that his father was ill. The elders would not wipe his mind clean of his new 
knowledge; instead they kept careful track of him. In time he talked, and the 
word reached the antagonists almost at once. Howe ordered the precautions of the 
telepathic patrol redoubled.
The patrol was able to keep out malicious persons, but it was not numerous 
enough to keep everything out. Forest fires broke out on the windward side of 
the camp late one night. No human being had been close to the spot; telekinetics 
was the evident method.
But what control over matter from a distance can do, it can also undo. Moulton 
squeezed the flame out with his will, refused it permission to burn, bade its 
vibrations to stop.
FOR the time being the enemy appeared to cease attempts to do the boys physical 
harm. But the enemy had not given up. Phil received a frantic call from one of 
the younger boys to come at once to the tent the boy lived in; his patrol leader 
was very sick. Phil found the lad in a state of hysteria, and being restrained 
from doing himself an injury by the other boys in the tent. He had tried to cut 
his throat with his jack knife and had gone berserk.
Phil took in the situation quickly and put in a call to Ben.
--"Ben! Come at once. I need your help."
Ben did so, zipping through the air and flying in through the door of the tent 
almost before Phil had time to lay the boy on his cot and start forcing him into 
a trance. The lad's startled tentmates did not have time to decide that Dr. Ben 
had been flying before he was standing in a normal fashion alongside their 
counselor.
Ben greeted him with tight communication, shutting the boys out of the circuit. 
--"What's up?"
--"They've gotten to him, and damn near wrecked him."
"--How?"
--"Preyed on his mind. Tried to make him suicide. But I traced back the hookup. 
Who do you think tried to do him in?--Brinckley!"
--"No!"
--"Definitely. You take over here; I'm going after Brinckley. Tell the Senior to 
have a watch put on all of the boys who have been trained to be sensitive to 
telepathy. I'm afraid that any of them may be gotten at before we can teach them 
how to defend themselves." With that he was gone, leaving the boys half 
convinced of levitation.
HE HAD not gone very far, was still gathering speed, when he heard a welcome 
voice in his head,
--" Phil! Phil! Wait for me."
He slowed down for a few seconds. A smaller figure flashed alongside his and 
grasped his hand. "It's a good thing I stay hooked in with you two. You'd have 
gone off to tackle that dirty old so-and-so without me."
He tried to maintain his dignity. "If I had thought that you should be along on 
this job, I'd have called you, Joan."
"Nonsense! And also fiddlesticks! You might get hurt, tackling him all alone. 
Besides, I'm going to push him into the tar pits."
They were south of the Tehachapi by now and rapidly approaching Los Angeles. 
They flitted over the Sierra Madre range, shot across San Fernando Valley, 
clipped the top of Mount Hollywood, and landed on the lawn of the president's 
residence at Western University. Brinckley saw, or felt, them coming and tried 
to run for it, but Phil grappled with him.
He shot one thought to Joan.--"You stay out of this, kid, unless I yell for 
help."
Brinckley did not give up easily. His mind reached out and tried to engulf 
Phil's. Huxley felt himself slipping, giving way before the evil onslaught. It 
seemed as though he were being dragged down, drowned, in horrible quicksand.
But he steadied himself and fought back.
WHEN Phil had finished that which was immediately necessary with Brinckley, he 
stood up and wiped his hands, as if to cleanse himself of the spiritual slime he 
had embraced.
"Let's get going," he said to Joan. "We're pushed for time."
"What did you do to him, Phil?" She stared with fascinated disgust at the thing 
on the ground.
"Little enough. I placed him in stasis. I've got to save him for use--for a 
time. Up you go, girl. Out of here--before we're noticed."
Up they shot, with Brinckley's body swept along behind by tight telekinetic 
bond. They stopped above the clouds. Brinckley floated beside them, starfished, 
eyes popping, mouth loose, his smooth pink face expressionless. --"Ben!" Huxley 
was sending, "Ephraim Howe! Ambrose! To me! To me! Hurry!"
--"Coming, Phil!" came Coburn's answer.
--"I hear." The strong, calm thought held the quality of the Senior. "What is 
it, son? Tell me."
--"Not time!" snapped Phil. "Yourself, Senior, and all others that can. 
Rendezvous! Hurry! "
"We come." The thought was still calm, unhurried. But there were two ragged 
holes in the roof of Moulton's tent. Moulton and Howe were already out of sight 
of Camp Mark Twain.
Slashing, slicing through the air they came, the handful of adepts who guarded 
the fire. From five hundred miles to the north they came, racing pigeons 
hurrying home. Camp councilors, two-thirds of the small group of camp matrons, 
some few from scattered points on the continent, they came in response to 
Huxley's call for help and the Senior's unprecedented tocsin. A housewife turned 
out the fire in the oven and disappeared into the sky. A taxi driver stopped his 
car and left his fares without a word. Research groups on Shasta broke their 
tight rapport, abandoned their beloved work, and came--fast!
"And now, Philip?" Howe spoke orally as he arrested his trajectory and hung 
beside Huxley.
Huxley flung a hand toward Brinckley. "He has what we need to know to strike 
now! Where's Master Ling?"
"He and Mrs. Draper guard the camp."
"I need him. Can she do it alone?"
Clear and mellow, her voice rang in his head from half a state away,--"I can!"
"The tortoise flies." The second thought held the quality of deathless merriment 
which was the unmistakable characteristic of the ancient Chinese.
Joan felt a soft touch at her mind, then Master Ling was among them, seated 
carefully tailor-fashion on nothingness. "I attend; my body follows," he 
announced. "Can we not proceed?"
Whereupon Joan realized that he had borrowed the facilities of her mind to 
project himself into their presence more quickly than he could levitate the 
distance. She felt unreasonably flattered by the attention.
Huxley commenced at once. "Through his mind--" He indicated Brinckley "--I have 
learned of many others with whom there can be no truce. We must search them out, 
deal with them at once, before they can rally from what has happened to him. But 
I need help. Master, will you extend the present and examine him? You alone can 
do it."
Ling had tutored them in discrimination of time and perception of the present, 
taught them to stand off and perceive duration from eternity. But he was 
incredibly more skilled than his pupils. He could split the beat of a fly's wing 
into a thousand instants, or grasp a millenium as a single flash of experience. 
His discrimination of time and space was bound neither by his metabolic rate nor 
by his solar dimensions.
Now he poked gingerly at Brinckley's brain like one who seeks a lost jewel in 
garbage. He felt out the man's memory patterns and viewed his life as one 
picture. Joan, with amazement, saw his everpresent smile give way to a frown of 
distaste. His mind had been left open to any who cared to watch. She peered 
through his mind, then cut off. If there were that many truly vicious spirits in 
the world, she preferred to encounter them one at a time, as necessary, not 
experience them all at once.
Master Ling's body joined the group, melted into his projection.
Huxley, Howe, Moulton, and James followed the Chinese' delicate work with close 
attention. Howe's face was bleakly impassive; Moulton's face, aged to 
androgynous sensitivity, moved from side to side while he clucked disapproval of 
such wickedness.
Ambrose looked more like Mark Twain than ever, Twain in an implacable, lowering 
rage.
Master Ling looked up. "Yes, yes," said Moulton, "I suppose we must act, 
Ephraim."
"We have no choice," Huxley stated, with a completely unconscious disregard of 
precedent. "Will you assign the tasks, Senior?"
Howe glanced sharply at him. "No, Philip. No. Go ahead. Carry on."
Huxley checked himself in surprise for the briefest instant, then took his cue. 
"You'll help me, Master Ling. Ben!"
"Waiting! "
He meshed mind to mind, had Ling show him his opponent and the data he needed.
--"Got it? Need any help?"
--"Grandfather Stonebender is enough."
"Okay. Nip off and attend to it."
--"Chalk it up." He was gone, a rush of air in his wake.
--"This one is yours, Senator Moulton."
--"I know." And Moulton was gone.
By one's and two's he gave them their assignments, and off they went to do that 
which must be done. There was no argument. Many of them had been aware long 
before Huxley was that a day of action must inevitably come to pass, but they 
had waited with quiet serenity, busy with the work at hand, till time should 
incubate the seed.
IN A windowless study of a mansion on Long Island, soundproofed, cleverly locked 
and guarded, ornately furnished, a group of five was met--three men, one woman, 
and a thing in a wheel chair. It glared at the other four in black fury, glared 
without eyes, for its forehead dropped unbroken to its cheekbones, a smooth 
sallow expanse.
A lap robe, tucked loosely across the chair, masked, but did not hide the fact 
that the creature had no legs.
It gripped the arms of the chair. "Must I do all the thinking for you fools?" it 
asked in a sweet, gentle voice. "You, Arthurson--you let Moulton slip that 
Shasta Bill past the Senate. Moron." The epithet was uttered caressingly.
Arthurson shifted in his chair. "I examined his mind. The bill was harmless. It 
was a swap on the Missouri Valley deal. I told you."
"You examined his mind, eh? Hmmm, he led you on a personally conducted tour, you 
fool. A Shasta bill! When will you mindless idiots learn that no good ever came 
out of Shasta?" It smiled approvingly.
"Well, how was I to know? I thought a camp near the mountain might confuse . . . 
them."
"Mindless idiot. The time will come when I will find you dispensable." The thing 
did not wait for the threat to sink in, but continued, "Enough of that now. We 
must move to repair the damage. They are on the offensive now and very 
dangerous. Agnes--"
"Yes." The woman answered.
"Your preaching has got to pick up--"
"I've done my best."
"Not good enough. I've got to have a wave of religious hysteria that will wash 
out the Bill of Rights--before the Shasta camp breaks up for the summer. We will 
have to act fast before that time and we can't be hampered by a lot of 
legalisms."
"It can't be done."
"Shut up. It can be done. Your temple will receive endowments this week which 
you are to use for countryside television hookups. At the proper time you will 
discover a new messiah."
"Who?"
"Brother Artemis."
"That cornbelt pipsqueak? Where do I come in on this?"
"You'll get yours. But you can't head this movement; the country won't take a 
woman in the top spot. The two of you will lead a march on Washington and take 
over. The Sons of '76 will fill out your ranks and do the street fighting. 
Weems, that's your job."
The man addressed demurred. "It will take three, maybe four months to 
indoctrinate them."
"You have three weeks. It would be well not to fail."
The last of the three men broke his silence. "What's the hurry, Chief? Seems to 
me that you are getting yourself in a panic over a few kids."
"I'll be the judge. Now you are to time an epidemic of strikes to tie the 
country up tight at the time of the march on Washington."
"I'll need some incidents."
"You'll get them. You worry about the unions; I'll take care of the Merchants' 
and Commerce League myself. You give me one small strike tomorrow. Get your 
pickets out and I will have four or five of them shot. The publicity will be 
ready. Agnes, you preach a sermon about it."
"Slanted which way?"
It rolled its non-existent eyes up to the ceiling. "Must I think of everything? 
It's elementary. Use your minds."
The last man to speak laid down his cigar carefully and said, "What's the real 
rush, Chief?"
"I've told you."
"No, you haven't. You've kept your mind closed and haven't let us read your 
thoughts once. You've known about the Shasta camp for months. Why this sudden 
excitement? You aren't slipping, are you? Come on, spill it. You can't expect us 
to follow if you are slipping."
The eyeless one looked him over carefully.
"Hanson," he said, in still sweeter tones, "you have been feeling your size for 
months. Would you care to match your strength with mine?"
The other looked at his cigar. "I don't mind if I do."
"You will. But not tonight. I haven't time to select and train new lieutenants. 
Therefore I will tell you what the urgency is. I can't raise Brinckley. He's 
fallen out of communication. There is not time--"
"You are correct," said a new voice. "There is not time."
The five jerked puppetlike to face its source. Standing side by side in the 
study were Ephraim Howe and Joan Freeman.
HOWE looked at the thing.
"I've waited for this meeting," he said cheerfully, "and I've saved you for 
myself."
The creature got out of its wheelchair and moved through the air at Howe. Its 
height and position gave an unpleasant sensation that it walked on invisible 
legs. Howe signalled to Joan,--"It starts. Can you hold the others, my dear?"
--"I think so."
--"Now!" Howe brought to bear everything he had learned in a hundred and thirty 
busy years, concentrated on the single problem of telekinetic control. He 
avoided, refused contact with the mind of the evil thing before him and turned 
his attention to destroying its physical envelope.
The thing stopped.
Slowly, slowly, like a deep sea diver caught in implosion, like an orange in a 
squeezer, the spatial limits in which it existed were reduced. A spherical locus 
in space enclosed it, diminished.
The thing was drawn in and in. The ungrown stumps of its legs folded against its 
thick torso. The head ducked down against the chest to escape the unrelenting 
pressure. For a single instant it gathered its enormous perverted power and 
fought back. Joan was disconcerted, momentarily nauseated by the backwash of 
evil.
But Howe withstood it without change of expression; the sphere shrank again.
The eyeless skull split. At once, the sphere shrank to the least possible 
dimension. A twenty-inch ball hung in the air, a ball whose repulsive 
superficial details did not invite examination.
Howe held the harmless, disgusting mess in place with a fraction of his mind, 
and inquired,--"Are you all right, my dear?"
--"Yes, Senior. Master Ling helped me once when I needed it."
--"That I anticipated; Now for the others." Speaking aloud he said, "Which do 
you prefer: To join your leader, or to forget what you know?" He grasped air 
with his fingers and made a squeezing gesture.
The man with the cigar screamed.
"I take that to be an answer," said Howe. "Very well, Joan, pass them to me, one 
at a time."
He operated subtly on their minds, smoothing out the patterns of colloidal 
gradients established by their corporeal experience.
A few minutes later the room contained four sane but infant adults--and a gory 
mess on the rug.
COBURN stepped into a room to which he had not been invited. "School's out, 
boys," he announced cheerfully. He pointed a finger at one occupant. "That goes 
for you." Flame crackled from his fingertip, lapped over his adversary. "And for 
you." The flames spouted forth a second time. "Yes, and for you." A third 
received his final cleansing,
BROTHER ARTEMIS, "God's Angry Man," faced the television pick-up. "And if these 
things be not true," he thundered, "then may the Lord strike me down dead!"
The coroner's verdict of heart failure did not fully account for the charred 
condition of his remains.
A POLITICAL rally adjourned early because the principal speaker failed to show 
up. An anonymous beggar was found collapsed over his pencils and chewing gum. A 
director of nineteen major corporations caused his secretary to have hysterics 
by breaking off in the midst of dictating to converse with the empty air before 
lapsing into cheerful idiocy. A celebrated stereo and television star 
disappeared. Obituary stories were hastily dug out and completed for seven 
members of Congress, several judges and two governors.
The number of disappearances, sudden deaths, and mental breakdowns which took 
place among key people on that calendar date were not subjected to statistical 
analysis for several months, until they came to the attention of a teaching 
fellow who proved that they could not have happened, and then dropped the 
matter.
THE USUAL evening sing at Camp Mark Twain took place that night without the 
presence of Camp Director Moulton. He was attending a full conference of the 
adepts, assembled all in the flesh for the first time in many years.
Joan looked around as she entered the hall. "Where is Master Ling?" she inquired 
of Howe.
He studied her face for a moment. For the first time since she had first met him 
nearly two years before she thought he seemed momentarily at a loss. "My dear," 
he said gently, "you must have realized that Master Ling remained with us, not 
for his own benefit, but for ours. The crisis for which he waited has been met; 
the rest of the work we must do alone."
A hand went to her throat. "You . . . you mean. . . ?"
"He was very old and very weary. He had kept his heart beating, his body 
functioning, by continuous conscious control for these past forty-odd years."
"By why did he not renew and regenerate?"
"He did not wish it. We could not expect him to remain here indefinitely after 
he had grown up."
"No." She bit her trembling lip. "No. That is true. We are children and he has 
other things to do . . . but--Oh, Ling! Ling! Master Ling! " She buried her head 
on Howe's shoulder.
--"Why are you weeping, Little Flower?"
Her head jerked up.--"Master Ling!"
--"Can that not be which has been? Is there past or future? Have you learned my 
lessons so poorly? Am I not now with you, as always?" She felt in the thought 
the vibrant timeless merriment, the gusto for living which was the hallmark of 
the gentle Chinese.
With a part of her mind she squeezed Howe's hand. "Sorry," she said. "I was 
wrong." She relaxed as Ling had taught her, let her consciousness flow in the 
revery which encompasses time in a single deathless now.
Howe, seeing that she was at peace, turned his attention to the meeting.
He reached out with his mind and gathered them together into the telepathic 
network of full conference. --"I think that you all know why we meet," he 
thought.--"I have served my time; we enter another and more active period when 
other qualities than mine are needed. I have called you to consider and pass on 
my selection of a successor."
Huxley was finding the thought messages curiously difficult to follow. I must be 
exhausted from the effort, he thought to himself.
But Howe was thinking aloud again. --"So be it; we are agreed." He looked at 
Huxley. "Philip, will you accept the trust?"
"What?"
"You are Senior now--by common consent."
"But . . . but . . . I am not ready."
"We think so," answered Howe evenly. "Your talents are needed now. You will grow 
under the responsibility."
--"Chin up, pal!" It was Coburn, in private message.
--"It's all right, Phil." Joan, that time.
"I will try!" he answered.
ON THE last day of camp Joan sat with Mrs. Draper on a terrace of the home on 
Shasta, overlooking the valley. She sighed. Mrs. Draper looked up from her 
knitting and smiled. "Are you sad that the camp is over?"
"Oh, no! I'm glad it is."
"What is it, then?"
"I was just thinking . . . we go to all this effort and trouble to put on this 
camp. Then we have to fight to keep it safe. Tomorrow those boys go home--then 
they must be watched, each one of them, while they grow strong enough to protect 
themselves against all the evil things there are still in the world. Next year 
there will be another crop of boys, and then another, and another. Isn't there 
any end to it?"
"Certainly there is an end to it. Don't you remember, in the ancient records, 
what became of the Elders? When we have done what there is for us to do here, we 
move on to where there is more to do. The human race was not meant to stay here 
forever."
"It still seems endless."
"It does, when you think of it that way, my dear. The way to make it seem short 
and interesting is to think about what one is going to do next. For example, 
what are you going to do next?"
"Me?" Joan looked perplexed. Her face clear.
"Why . . . why I'm going to get married!" she said.
"I thought so." Mrs. Draper's needles clicked away.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN of LOST LEGION
"--and the Truth Shall Make You Free!"



THE GLOBE still swung around the sun. The seasons came and the seasons went. The 
sun still shone on the mountainsides, the hills were green, and the valleys 
lush. The river sought its goal in the lap of the sea, then rode the cloud, and 
found the hills as rain. The cattle cropped in the broad brown plains, the fox 
stalked the hare through the brush. The tides answered the sway of the moon, and 
the gulls picked at the wet sand in the wake of the tides. The earth was fair 
and the earth was full; it teemed with life overflowed with life--a stream in 
spate.
Nowhere was man.
Seek the high hills; search him in the plains. Hunt for his spoor in the green 
jungles; call for him; shout for him. Follow where he has been in the bowels of 
earth; plumb the dim deeps of the sea.
Man is gone; his house stands empty; the door open.
A great ape, with a brain too big for his need, and a spirit that troubled him, 
left his tribe and sought the quiet of the high place that lay above the jungle. 
He climbed it, hour after hour, urged on by a need that he half understood. He 
reached a resting place, high above the green trees of his home, higher than any 
of his tribe had ever climbed. There he found a broad flat stone, warm in the 
sun. He lay down upon it and slept.
But his sleep was troubled. He dreamed strange dreams, unlike anything he knew. 
They woke him and left him with an aching head.
It would be many generations before one of his line could understand what was 
left there by those who had departed.