The Dancers of Noyo by Margaret St. Clair Page B

here.
     
                  "I know something about the way the chemical conscience is mediated," he answered. He bit off the words precisely with his thin lips. "You see, the, ah, conscience is only partly physical, partly a matter of a drug given the patient. At least half the effect is secured by means that one might describe as magical."
     
                  Magical ... The word returned me to a fantasy that I had had just before Farnsworth picked me up: that I was wandering through a world magically wasted, full of dry lightnings, toward a crucial conflict with some malign sage. Magic had seemed to crackle and flash over the surface of the pavement; and when the Mercedes had stopped near me it had, for an instant, seemed a sorcerer's flying chariot.
     
                  "Well, I've certainly been having some strange experiences," I answered cautiously. "You mean they were somehow caused by magic? I'm not sure I understand what you mean."
     
                  He pressed his lips thoughtfully. "Well, in the, ah, chemical-conscience therapy there is an object, a material object, to which the patient's moral sentiments have been magically attached. Something of the same sort might be true of the experiences of Pilgrims on the Grail Journey."
     
                  "You mean, like in witchcraft?" I asked. I spoke from a fog; it wasn't that I was beginning to be somebody else than Sam McGregor, but that I was experiencing, in my own person, a sort of horror—of the house and of the man—that got between me and what I was saying. I tried to fight down the feeling; I was afraid of making a fool of myself. And yet the horror persisted. To feel horror-struck was, I supposed, better than having another extra-fife, and as long as I remained in Farnsworth's company it seemed that I was in little danger of abruptly becoming somebody else. But I was so on edge that when Farnsworth raised his wine glass and sipped from it, I almost jumped up from my chair.
     
                  Farnsworth looked at me from under his eyebrows with curiously direct and limpid eyes. "Witchcraft? In a way. I think that in the case of the Grail Pilgrims a material object has been made the focus for an immaterial force. This force has been controlling what you experienced. Call it witchcraft if you like."
     
                  He bent over the Franklin stove and poked at the ashes in it. "I'll make a fire," he said. "It's cool tonight."
     
                  While he was gone I looked at the door jamb and wondered what had splintered it. When Farnsworth came back with the wood and had got the fire going, he said, "The object might be back in Noyo, or it might be something you're carrying. Whichever it is, it must have been possessed in some special way."
     
                  I tried to think. Farnsworth's big hands were clasped loosely around the poker. Finally I said, "Would I know what the object was?"
     
                  "Oh, no, not consciously. But you may be able to remember. Was anything given to you, or taken away from you, just before you left on the Pilgrimage?"
     
                  "They took my motorbike away from me," I said. "And they gave me some food and a bundle of wooden passports."
     
                  "It probably isn't the motorbike," Farnsworth said. "It's too big a thing to act as a focus where only one man is concerned. It might be the food, but I don't think so. It's most likely the bundle of passports. Most likely they've smeared the passports with one of your body secretions—urine or sweat or tears or blood. That would do the trick."
     
                  "But—Gee-Gee came running after me with them!"
     
                  "Who's Gee-Gee?" Farnsworth asked.
     
                  I explained about Gee-Gee and the Russian Gulchers, ending, "They'd let me go off without the