Chronicles of Wizard Prang
by Stafford Beer

Contents

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'Nothing could be more natural,' said Wizard Prang. 'It's well below zero out there.'

Perny was rubbing his hands, which were blue with cold.

'You knew that when you went out.'

Perny made her most terrible accusations simply by flattening her voice. It was even worse when, as now, she indulged in his least favourite silent gesture: a momentary raising of her eyes towards heaven.

Slowly a beaming expression overtook his countenance.

'You think I didn't take my gloves, now don't you?'

With a flourish, he stuck the hand Perny wasn't rubbing into his fleecy Jacket, and produced the gloves.

'There you are,' he cried in triumph.

Perny said nothing, nor bothered to raise her eyes heavenwards. The beaming expression slowly disappeared. Wizard Prang had never resolved the problem that if he went out with things he always lost them, unless he put them safely away. Well, he hadn't lost the gloves, anyway.

A noisy silence buzzed subliminally around the room ... then all was quiet.

The wizard was warm, comfortably seated, and sipping from his chalice when Perny finally spoke noticeably softly.

'This is a trifle embarrassing,' she said.

She had judged the moment well.

Wizard Prang waved his arm: 'Please don't worry,' he said.

Of course, the arm ended in a hand, and of course the hand ended in a chalice. Of course (once again) the wizard's mixture of wine and water splashed across the room. A splat of mixture hit a tile bearing a rune. Something scurried away. People were always asking whether anything else had been added to the wizard's water and wine. He always raised an incredulous eyebrow. Someone always said "Amen".

Perny asked Wizard Prang to recall a letter that he had received. The signature said "Daniel Webster" underneath in type. The longhand said "Dan Webste". This was Mr. Webster's gesture of informality, and it just didn't work.

The wizard did not remember the letter.

'I'm not surprised,' Perny said in her schoolmarm voice. 'You scrumpled it up, and threw it away.'

'Then it must have been worthless,' claimed Wizard Prang.

'Well,' said Perny, 'I'm not so sure. The logo was a monogram of the letters ESP.'

'Extra Sensory Perception. How often have I told you that perception means sensory. Therefore there ain't no such thing as extra sensory perception.'

'Yes, yes,' said schoolmarm Perny, making it sound like "iss-iss" in Welsh. And this was fair enough. They lived in Ceredigion after all.

'The fact is,' she went on, 'that usage is the key to conversation. Extra Sensory Perception has meaning for lots of people, even if you choose to disregard the expression ESP itself.'

'Iss-iss,' said Wizard Prang.

Perny sighed. 'You are making my confession difficult,' she said.

'Get on with it,' said Wizard Prang.

Perny had retrieved the letter from the fireplace. The letterhead had said that it came from the International Foundation for ESP (hence the logo), and it had asked the wizard for an interview.

'Where is this International Foundation?'

'America,' said Perny.

'I know it well,' the wizard said.

The acid in his voice was as the lemon juice in the Canadian lakes, also American.

'Hell,' said Perny. I'm trying to tell you something.'

Perny remembered that Sir or Lord or just Laurence Olivier had once described King Lear as a stupid old fart. She settled for the recollection.

'I read the small print,' she said. 'And you didn't.'

Wizard Prang held out his chalice for a refill.

'Continue,' he said, with ineffable condescension.

'These people, the International Foundation for ESP, may want to give you a gold medal. That's the reason why they would want an interview.'

Wizard Prang tried to regain the initiative from his shishya.

'What would I do with a gold medal?' he asked, feeling his chin with his right hand, against his throat, under his beard.

'Give it to the poor,' said the shishya, evenly.

There was a long pause, and the evening shadows changed all their colours.

'So?' asked the Wizard.

He sounded pathetic. Perny gained an equivalent strength from his weakness. That was all down to Newton.

'You had gone travelling,' she said, 'and so I answered the letter on your behalf.'

'So?' asked the Wizard again, clearing his voice, and sensing an advantage.

'The very same Mr. Daniel Webster is on the way from London. He represents the Foundation. I couldn't check it with you. I'm awfully sorry. I did what I thought was best.'

Wizard Prang arose to get his own wine and water. This gave him the advantage of patting Perny on the head as he passed.

'And you did very well,' he said.

He brought her a musty, peaty, single malt whisky when he came back. There was no surer sign of his approval, and Perny almost (but not quite) sighed with relief.

'So much for ESP,' said Wizard Prang. 'Let's see what happens.'

There was a long pause, and a little cuddling, and a little unfolding of the likely logistics of Mr. Dan Webster's arrival.

'You know something?' said Perny eventually.

'Useless to say that I know everything,' muttered Wizard Prang disconsolately, 'because I don't. But novelty without the pejorative tone has to be injected from somewhere. Please go on.'

Perny never rose to the element of self pity in people. She rose instead to the concept of novelty.

'In Vie Prince Machiavelli explained exactly why it's difficult to initiate a new order of things. Reformers have as enemies all those who profit from the old order. And those likely to profit from the new order are luke warm about it out of ignorance or sheer cowardice, I suppose.'

'And that was in 1513,' remembered Wizard Prang.

'I was just thinking that Machiavelli founded a good school. His great grandchildren more or less run the western democracies, after all.'

What had all this to do with the impending visit of Dan Webster, the wizard was wondering.

Perny said, 'Institutions don't dish out gold medals for the new order of things. They give them for consolidations of the old order. You won't survive this interview.'

'Then why did you arrange it?'

'In honour of Machiavelli,' Perny grinned.

'Perverse shishya,' the wizard said uncomplainingly.

'Well,' said Perny, 'we have to keep an eye on his great grandchildren. Machi and Machi are quite a firm. They guarantee the old order in Britain.'

Wizard Prang reached Into thin air, and threw a snowball at her. He went outside to relish his favourite dusk.

Although Perny had cleared the visitor's chair of a stack of papers, a chocolate biscuit, and a jam jar full of tadpoles, the fastidious Daniel Webster drew a spotless silk handkerchief from his breast pocket and flicked the seat of the chair before sitting primly down. His knees were together, and he arranged a superbly styled black leather attaché case on them with the gestures that really went with covering the legs with a blanket.

He cleared his throat and said, 'That's better,' with an air of satisfaction.

Perny wanted to ask "Better than what?" as she eyed him with some dismay.

Wizard Prang was undismayed, and made a mental inventory as Dan Webster opened the locks on the case and withdrew the contents one by one. These he arranged with precision beside the herbal lea for which he had asked, handing Perny a special class of sachet that he had brought from London.

• First came a leather bound book with a clasp and the initials D.W. embossed in gold. This contained records of all his doings, arranged in seven different ways.

• Next came the counter tenor sheet music of a piece entitled Madrigal ad Mortuos (Webster was much possessed by death).

• The third item was a case of felt tipped pens, also leather and D.W.'d, containing every colour there is.

• Beside it, a small machine the size of a cigarette packet was carefully set down. This was an electronic memory bank that stored everything that Daniel Webster knew or as he put it himself, needed to know.

• Finally came the large book that he had been reading on the train to Carmarthen, which was as near as the railway came to Wizard Prang. It was Montgomery's "A History of Lint" in the annotated edition, and carried a silver clip bookmark.

'Do you clearly understand why I have come?' Dan Webster asked, as if talking to a half wit.

'You are most welcome,' said the wizard. 'No. Not at all. I haven't the foggiest idea.'

Mr. Daniel Webster sighed deeply. He explained at great length. There was much to do with gold medals in all of this. He consulted his electronic memory a lot.

'I'm very touched,' responded Wizard Prang. 'So you represent the International Foundation for ESP? Eye-fesp, I expect you call it.'

'There you are!'

His visitor gave a genuine smile for the first time. (His bogus smiles were two a penny.)

'We knew you to be a genius.'

'Thank you,' the wizard said, splashing wine and water all over the place.

Perny always knew when Wizard Prang was out of his depth, except in wine and water. All the shishyas did. It was just as well, as well. Just.

'What exactly do you plan to do?' she asked.

'We are thinking of presenting Wizard Prang with the Eye-fesp Gold Medal,' Dan Webster said with exactitude. 'That's why I've come to interview him.'

He adjusted his attache case and his other possessions.

The good Daniel was in the Lion's Den, and didn't know it.

Wizard Prang was a lion in a Den of Daniels represented by Eye-fesp.

'Thank you,' the wizard said, after surveying his visitor's chakras.

'Here you are,' Perny said, after surveying the wizard's empty chalice, and not knowing what to do about half sipped herbal tea.

Wizard Prang started again.

'What is the Foundation's attitude to Extra Sensory Perception?' he asked. 'I presume you know my own or there would be no talk of Gold Medals. But (after all) I'm really not in what academics would call the mainstream of ESP research. I live in this little stone hut. In Wales. No water supply. I am (as you might say) "into" perception itself. But what is this "extra sensory" element?'

Dan Webster moved his legs ever so slightly under the knee-blanket attaché case. He was uneasy.

During an over long pause he moved his worldly possessions around a little. The electronic memory bank was switched from right to left. He wondered dubiously why it said nothing to him about this dilemma. He picked up the felt tipped message generating set of pens, but they offered no announcement to his limp fingers.

He summoned all his courage.

'I don't know why you are talking about Extra Sensory Perception, esteemed Wizard,' he said. I don't even know what the term, if it is a term, Extra Sensory Perception, means.'

Wizard Prang's nerve endings blew on their fingernails, which rubbed themselves on his lapels. "Phew," they said to each other.

Perny who was watching, understood this allegory perfectly well. Fingernails don't say "phew", Wizard Prang had no lapels, and nerve endings don't have fingernails. This being so .... Shit: she had lost the thread.

Wizard Prang became expansive.

He brought across more drinks all round, absent mindedly giving the visitor neat vodka instead of herbal tea. He patted Daniel Webster's head to his surprise. He patted Perny not to her surprise, although she had hoped the visitor had not noticed this particular pat.

'Well, well, well,' expatiated Wizard Prang.

'Eye-fesp' he said. 'Would you mind telling me exactly what this stands for? Obviously enough the I and the F stand for "International Foundation". But the rest?'

'ESP?' asked Daniel Webster, bemused.

'Precisely so,' the wizard affirmed.

Dan Webster cleared his throat, as he was wont to do. He adjusted his knees. He squared his attaché case with his hands as he was doubly wont to do.

'I represent,' he said carefully, 'the International Foundation for Exceptionally Simple Phenomena.'

Just as an echo of a previous past, silence buzzed subliminally around the room.

It was broken only by a sputtering on neat vodka.

'Ah,' said Wizard Prang.

Perny left the room.

'Quite so,' said Wizard Prang.

Perny came back. And so the question arose for all of them the visitor, and Perny, and the wizard, and an amazed galaxy of entities crowded in the little hut.

• What now?

• What especially about gold medals and so on?

The air was thick with equivocation, treacled with ambiguity.

The fastidious visitor/inquisitor pursed his lips. He carefully packed away his material possessions in his attaché case, clicked shut the locks, stood up.

'Alas,' he said. I think I know what you are seeking to do. But I really don't think you come off.'

Goodbyes were said.

Dan Webster's hired car had disappeared.

'Goodbye,' said Wizard Prang, his word echoing in the quarry round his hut.

He felt the warmth of her proximity.

'Hello,' she said, and put her arm around him.

Chapter Eighteen

Table of Contents

Chapter Twenty