Personal Power

Victor Devlin had never been able to understand why he so lacked in influence over other human beings. He was bright enough to have maintained a high B average through schools and college without exerting himself unduly, sufficiently amusing to have been on intimate terms with a sequence of attractive women and in possession of endearing qualities that caused him to be thought of as a good friend by a host of persons of both sexes. Yet no one in any of these venues or categories ever changed an opinion after listening to one of his arguments, or so much as took a casual suggestion of his (to eat a meal at a restaurant he recommended, to see a movie at his urging, to read a magazine article, to buy a certain shirt), let alone honored his wishes in matters of enduring substance.

Had he been asked, Devlin would have called himself not really unhappy but rather, perhaps, unfulfilled, his conception of happiness being also a compromise and consisting in a comfortable sense that without power one was virtually immune to the kind of disasters that result from serving as the object of others' envy.

Thus, when one day he found, among the junk that clogged his mailbox, a pamphlet advertising a technique for the acquisition of personal power—how to dominate others in business, love and recreational games—he sniffed in amused contempt and dropped it into the trash along with the bogus notices that he had won (if certain conditions were met) vast sums of money, all-expenses-paid trips to Hawaii and matched sets of luggage. But a moment later he retrieved the brochure, which might prove just the thing with which to divert the young woman he was currently dating. After seeing her on only two occasions, he had utterly exhausted every subject for conversation that would not be certain to lead to an argument, for Annemarie took non-negotiable positions on many matters and enjoyed wrangling.

He had not yet been to bed with Annemarie, in fact, had not yet really made a move on her. He waited people out. Such was the technique he had formulated over the years, given his basic inability to work his will on others by direct means. This was somewhat more successful in affairs of the heart—for he frequented spirited women—than in his career, where an office full of competitive colleagues, mostly males, were never impatient with his apparent lack of ambition. He had not risen far in seven years with the same firm, but neither had he had to leave, which could not be said of several aggressive hotshots.

He remembered the pamphlet that evening. He had brought Annemarie to his apartment for the first time and had awaited her negative, perhaps eVen rude, response to the decor or lack thereof, for the meanness of his abode usually evoked such a reaction from the women he brought home. In fact, it was one of the things he counted on to break the ice. He paid a big rent in this upscale building and had an admirable view of the city. So much could have been made of it. The reason the place stayed eternally in the same shape, however, was that his affairs typically did not last long enough for him to acquire new furnishings or to hang pictures reflecting the taste of any particular woman, and he had not succeeded in developing any general convictions about decor, given the diversity in the opinions of his advisors.

But if Annemarie had a reaction, she failed to show it. She strolled to the sofa and sank down onto, into, its worst corner, where the upholstery of the arm was nearly threadbare and the springs within the cushion had long since subsided, and proceeded to stare neither at the room nor at the skyline available through the wide window nearby but rather at Devlin himself, who was thereby made very uneasy as to his appearance. He was never secure in his choice of clothing to begin with, and in recent months the principal garments had become too tight owing to his slow but relentless acquisition of excess poundage, despite the sporadic measures he took with his diet.

Annemarie did not want any more wine, having drunk enough at dinner, about half a glass. Nor did she wish to discuss the movie, the trashiness of which she pronounced undebatable. She continued to fix him with what he assumed was a hostile stare. He sat down in dismay and, considering the frigid atmosphere, not on the couch but in the lone chair. He was preparing to ask her about her childhood, a subject he had found appealing to those people who had had a happy one (though in a certain few cases it could be a disaster), when Annemarie, exasperated at his inability to intuit her wishes, made it clear what they were: to go to bed with him without further palaver.

He was shocked, not by a boldness that in recent years had not been unprecedented but rather by his own total failure to set any kind of pace or fashion any structure for the evening. The movie had been altogether her choice, apparently for no better reason than to confirm a presupposition that it had been universally overpraised, and at dinner he had ordered a seafood casserole only so as not to reject her forceful recommendation. The sexual encounter made it a clean sweep, and needless to say, it was she who orchestrated the procedure from start to finish.

When Annemarie left the apartment, firmly rejecting his offer of an escort home, the first thing he did on closing the door was to pad—barefooted, towel-wrapped—to the coffee table and sort through the papers and magazines strewn there in search of the brochure advertising the means by which to attain power over others, presumably without violence. He had saved it to show her for purposes of mutual amusement, but as things turned out, he no longer saw the idea as inevitable farce.

•

That night he tore off the attached coupon and wrote a check for $19.95, and the next morning, having already returned to much of the derisive skepticism with which he had first scanned the brochure, he nonetheless dropped the postpaid envelope into the box on the corner.

He proceeded to wait for six long weeks (during which Annemarie dumped him in the forthright style with which she performed in all areas of existence). There was no response to the check, though it had been cashed within five days of his posting it to the address printed on the envelope, a postal box in a town in Iowa he could not find on a map. Devlin may have lacked in confidence, but he was not one to play the victim of a blatant swin-dle. He had once gone so far as to threaten to punch a dry cleaner who had shrunk a sweater, then claimed it had been received in that condition. On his next lunch hour he went to the main post office and sought to find the department in which to file a formal complaint. But the lines at all the windows seemed endless, and while he was waiting, he was so pestered by panhandlers, who grew even more importunate after they received a contribution, that he left the building. He was well aware that some people were never approached by beggars and that others turned them down with impunity. Presumably these gentry were the same who sent back restaurant wine when it did not please their palates, who got apologies from the IRS and who were accepted as ultimate authorities on any subject on which they voiced an opinion, effortlessly intimidating other men with a command, while intriguing women with the suggestion that more was forthcoming than was, at any time, at hand.

But as it turned out, when he came home from work that evening and collected the mail from the lobby box, he found among the bills and the throw-aways a long but neither slick nor heavy envelope from Krafft, Inc., the name to which he had written the check for instruction in the technique of dominating other people.

What arrived was not a manual but a letteracknowledging receipt of an initial payment of $19.95, entitling him to sign up for what was apparently much more than the anticipated instructional booklet, being rather a course of some extent, the specifics of which were not given except for the price: $89.95.

To go no further and let them keep the $19.95 would be an abject surrender to loss. Therefore, with full awareness of the possibility that he was throwing good money after bad, he wrote a check for $89.95 and immediately posted it before there was time for craven second thoughts.

The response this time was, given the current average speed of the mail, prompt, not even really long enough for them to have waited for his out-of-state check to clear. However, what he got for $89.95—now in sum really $109.90—was only two sheets of faintly photocopied typescript joined by a staple, only one prong of which pierced paper, leaving the other dangling.

Reading the text so poorly reproduced removed any possible doubt. Devlin could conclude only that he had paid more than a hundred dollars to arrant charlatans. The "course" in how to dominate others consisted of a collection of restatements of the Golden (continued on page 178) Personal Power (continued from -base 132)

Rule, with twists that in the wrong hands could be treacherous: treating others as they think you would treat yourself, giving people what they don't realize they need until so persuaded, using strangers as if they were close relatives over whom you have a natural advantage. Irrespective of the questionable morality (if that could ever be said), the efficacy of these principles could be called doubtful. The members of Devlin's family (two parents, two older sisters) were the last people he would expect to influence—as they had been the first on whom he tried it as a boy. And before he could get anywhere near being able to con others (if that was his aim), he must first get them simply to listen to him, something that seemed to him to be a basic right, not a privilege to be gained by dupery.

In his abusive letter to Krafft, he freely engaged in the use of obscenities he would not have put into writing under other conditions. If this was a degrading sort of revenge, at least no third party knew of it, and in fact he did thereafter feel, if not exactly fulfilled, then at least not so bitter as to be emotionally disabled. He even began to think again about resuming a social life.

•

He had on several recent occasions seen an attractive woman in the local delicatessen where he was wont to acquire the elements of his evening meal. Whenever observed, she had been buying the cold poached chicken, a dish that Devlin knew from experience to be dry and overdone. (The adjoining turkey legs were edible enough, the cold roast meats, especially the pork, were unexceptional.) This gave him a subject on which to address the woman, who was as fair as his first wife and as tall as Annemarie and finer of feature. Therefore, the next time he saw her at the appropriate counter, he drifted there and asked, as if casually, whether she could recommend the chicken.

She winced at him. "Hardly."

He quickly decided to come clean.

"I've seen you buying it several times. I wanted to meet you. I guess I chose the wrong topic. I apologize."

"All right," she said, smirking. "It's for my dog. I know I should cook it myself, and sometimes I do, but frankly, during the week, I'm often too exhausted."

Devlin said he had owned several dogs during his life and spoiled them all, and having made what he hoped was a good impression, nodded goodbye to her at the frozen-yogurt case. Such was the discreet style he had fashioned for city life. It was very likely he would encounter her again, at which time they would already have a precedent on which to build. Meanwhile, she had nothing, in this criminal era, to give her concern. Nor had he done anything, as yet, that could be used as a pretext for rejection.

When he got home with his sliced corned beef and coleslaw, he found in the box a letter from Krafft, Inc., indeed, from someone who had signed himself H. Krafft, no title given.

Dear Mr. Devlin:

I'm rising above your abuse, though it is likely such language would be actionable. I do this because my sole interest is control and not reaction.

Normally, the course in my technique consists of ten lessons in as many weeks, each at the low, low price of $89.95. Believe me when I say that though this schedule may seem endless to you, and the early lessons may not appear to break new ground, experience has taught me that it is necessary for the beginner to proceed slowly until he is equipped psychologically and emotionally to handle the extraordinary power he will have at his command by the end of lesson ten.

Were the situation otherwise, I would not want to be in any way responsible for what might happen, were an individual not so carefully prepared. But you, sir, have questioned my honor and challenged a good name such that you have so insulted me as to have relieved me of any concern for your well-being. Therefore I enclose, free of charge, lesson ten. I suspect you will use it badly.

Contemptuously yours,

H. Krafft

The so-called lesson ten was printed on a sheet of paper of standard size, though its message could have been easily accommodated on a notepad. Reading it alone in the elevator, Devlin sounded a loud, bitter laugh. As soon as he reached his apartment, he threw his parcels of food onto the kitchen counter and sat down to write a furious answer.

Dear crook,

That's it? That's the great secret at the end of all this? To dominate a person, all you have to do is stare between his eyes? For this your dupes pay (counting the first $19.95) $919.45? That's all I get for $109.90?

You dirty son of a bitch, don't think I'm going to take this lying down. I intend to report you to every authority I can find.

Your nemesis,

Victor Devlin

But the fact was that when his indignation had had time to subside, he was left with only the kind of disgust that saps the will, and he did nothing to carry out his threat. His life proceeded as before. At work he was jollied along by his colleagues, and the boss rarely passed his desk without patting him on the shoulder. But when it came to staff conferences, his proposals-including that for an exciting new marketing procedure on which he had been laboring for months-were politely, even affectionately, tabled.

•

He failed to encounter the attractive dog owner on many consecutive visits to the deli, but his luck changed one evening when buying shredded wheat for the next day's breakfast. He was standing before the dairy case, trying to remember the expiration date on the carton of milk at home, when he saw her reflection in the glass door. He spun around eagerly.

"Hi!" "Do I know you?" She was dubious but not quite hostile.

"You buy cooked chicken for your dog."

She nodded judiciously. "I've certainly done that in my day."

"I've been looking for you for some time."

"Why?"

He had to face the fact that she had no memory of him whatever. Suddenly he was desperate enough to try anything nonviolent. He stared at an imaginary spot on her forehead, just above the nose, midway between her eyes. "You don't recognize me?"

She trembled slightly. Then she cried, "Of course! You're the best-dressed man who comes in here. Those fabulous paisley ties, the great belts!"

He brought his eyes down to hers. He owned no paisley ties, and his one serviceable belt was dull brown leather (continued on page 232)Personal Power(continued from page 178) with a tarnished buckle. "Thank you. I've been thinking about that chicken. They charge too much for it here. Your savings would be enormous if you bought it fresh from the supermarket down the block and just boiled it up. Probably be better for the doggie anyhow."

"What a great idea!"

"If you've got a minute, we could go there right now."

She smiled. "If you have the time, I would really be grateful for your company. Those places make my head spin: too many colors, too many choices." Her voice was as silken as her jacket, and obviously she was prosperous, to speak so cavalierly of supermarkets. However, it was clear that he had assumed authority.

They had almost reached the door when a tall young man loped through it and thrust a huge handgun at the clerk nearest the cash register. Although the gunman had ignored the half-dozen customers and the two remaining deli workers, all froze in position as if so ordered. But in Devlin's case this was true for less than a second, after which he stepped near the would-be robber and spoke sharply to him, and when the man turned malevolently, Devlin stared between his fierce eyes.

Now it was the gunman who froze. Devlin put out a hand. "Give me that."

The man docilely, politely, surrendered the weapon, butt first. "Now, you," Devlin said to the ashen clerk at the register while gesturing at the front window with the gun barrel. "See those cops in the car in front of the drugstore? Go to the door and yell at them. Quicker than nine-one-one."

When this had been done and Devlin saw one of the officers leave the vehicle, he gave the pistol to the clerk. "I've got an appointment. If he moves, pull the trigger." Even so, the deli employee, a thin, graying man, stayed frightened. Devlin therefore stared between his eyes and said, "You can do it. He's unarmed now. He's nothing."

The clerk grinned cockily. "Sure." He brandished the weapon at the criminal. "Hit the deck, face down and spread 'em."

Devlin and the young woman walked to the nearby supermarket. Just outside the entrance she stopped and said, in a certain awe, "That was impressive. I know you took it in your stride, but / can't. I'm still shaking. Are you some kind of detective? How in the world . . . ?"

Devlin had impressed himself, insofar as he believed the incident happened in fact and not in a waking dream. "I don't know," he said with genuine modesty. "Ijust had an idea and it worked. Come on, let's find that chicken."

•

Miranda tu0rned out to have an executive position in the advertising department of a television network. Her marvelous body came from nature: Like him, she hated exercise for its own sake, though she would swim some, when the spirit moved her, in the pool at her weekend house, or bike over to see the new ducklings on the town pond. They also shared a preference for Indian-Pakistani food over the cuisines from the Farther East. Neither liked horror films, any kind of pasta but the three old standards, spag, mac and nood; and TV panel discussions irrespective of topic were also disliked. Both enjoyed wearing shoes without socks on the weekends, feeling superior to those who used "graduated" without an accompanying "from" and listening to vintage jazz of the late Twenties on ten-inch 78s recorded on one side only. Actually, these tastes were Devlin's. Whether or not Miranda would have shared them without being kraffted was not important. What mattered was that she could be counted on to agree with him on every opinion and in every taste. This situation was all the more gratifying in that she was otherwise a self-reliant person, successful in her career, beautiful and even more prosperous than he was aware of until after they had lived together for a while in her midtown duplex and decided to get married: She was the only child of an investment banker who had close links to the current administration.

Devlin had yet to meet his prospective father-in-law, who was abroad educating the liberated Slavs in how a free market is supposed to work. But he was anxious to try the technique of H. Krafft on this powerful individual. If it was effective on the likes of Virgil C. Harrelson, with his access to the White House . . . ? But Devlin tried to restrain himself from too extravagant projections. Life was going fabulously well as things stood. He had certainly used the technique to good advantage at his company, where staff conferences now went as he wanted them to go. His marketing system had been instituted, and though the early results were disappointing, putting the firm a good four points behind its chief competitor, nobody whose eyes he had stared between blamed him, including the head of the department, who had in fact been asked to resign. Whereas Devlin had been elevated to the newly created post of special assistant to the CEO, a place of the most power conjoined with the least responsibility, much preferable to that of the conspicuous chief executive, who could too easily be made a target by-press and government snoops and disgruntled stockholders.

The Krafft technique was successful in all areas of life: getting the best restaurant tables without enriching maitre d's, nonviolently subduing the pugnacious maniacs encountered everywhere on city sidewalks, winning political arguments with dinner-party zealots and inducing the purveyors of luxury goods such as high-performance motorcars, custom-made clothing and vintage wines to offer large discounts. Of course, it could not be used by telephone, fax or mail. One's living presence was required. And Devlin discovered another limitation on the windy day when some foreign matter was blown into his left eye, which subsequently he could not keep open. That the waiting room of the eye clinic was jammed with fellow sufferers meant little to him until he tried to dominate the receptionist with the Krafft stare.

"I'll go first," said he, one functional eye focused between her two.

The woman snorted. "You got to be kidding."

He waited three hours but learned a valuable lesson: On windy days, he would henceforth wear sunglasses, even if the sky was overcast, removing them when the Krafft technique was required. To be efficacious, the stare had to employ both eyes with maximum intensity. It was as if he were drilling a hole through the frontal bone and penetrating the soft tissue of the brain-not a pretty thing to visualize for someone as squeamish as Devlin, but he forced himself to disregard unattractive matters and take pleasure in the evidence that the effects seemed permanent.

Miranda continued to regard him as exemplary even after, developing a new method of fireplace cookery, he burned down a wing of her house. At work each of his policies was proving worse than the last, bringing the firm ever nearer to Chapter 11. Yet, while others were fired, his salary kept rising. The irony was that only now did he at last understand why, throughout his life, until the discovery of the Krafft technique, other people had not taken him as seriously as he would have liked. It was simply because his ideas were rotten. But it would be asking too much of any successful human being to stop doing that from which his success came, just because it could not be called honorable, or else many celebrated professions would provide a living for few. And there was no law against staring between someone else's eyes.

He did wonder why the technique was not more widely known, and for that matter, why H. Krafft had not made more of a mark on the world—unless of course he had discreetly done so, as in Devlin's own case. Tyrannical leaders of many kinds, from political despots to the robber barons of industry, were often said to have an almost hypnotic influence on their underlings. There had been people who professed to hate Hitler but were helplessly mesmerized by his presence. Perhaps Krafft had had more pupils than one might think from the apparent modesty of his business. But that was unlikely. Why would he have remained so obscure if his technique had been used by others to conquer countries and make billions?

It seemed more probable that many other people, in fact just about everybody who did extremely well in life, had discovered Krafft's trick, or some variant of it, on their own. Yet Devlin had been face to face with a few persons of power—had shaken the hand of a senator whose name was a household word, given some papers for signature to a noted publishing magnate, negotiated with a famous general whom his firm paid to endorse its products—and had never seen any of them stare between his eyes. But then, he had already been in a subservient position with all, and furthermore, had behaved so obsequiously that additional domination would have been a waste of time for men whose time was in such demand. The real test would be to observe how they acted toward those who resisted them. But surely the defiant were few up there on the heights and were dealt with on lower levels by junior dominators. What complicated the whole business was that rebels also often dominated others, beginning with their own natural constituencies, the allegedly disenfranchised, and if successful went on to establish masteries at least as absolute as those they replaced.

But before long it occurred to Devlin that to be truly dominant was to become so habituated to the exercise of power as to forget how it was acquired: One should rule as if there were no alternative. With this understanding, he became secure—except in one minor area. The Krafft stare had no effect on Miranda's dog, the female shelty, who had in effect, with its diet of chicken, brought them together. There was a choice of reasons why the technique did not work on Georgette. It was hard to do since the nervous creature disliked him to begin with. Then he had heard somewhere that Mace, which will repel a 200-pound mugger, is ineffective against dogs be-cause they have no tear glands. Perhaps something else was lacking in canines that kept them immune to the stare: Devlin liked to think it was an incapacity to aspire to that which was beyond basic animal needs. In a word, despite Miranda's sentimental conviction, Georgette was demonstrably not human. But, of course, he could not produce such evidence without revealing the source of his own power, without which, he now realized, he had no special value to anyone.

•

Although dominating others was so easy nowadays, Devlin had not yet grown tired of doing so. He could have afforded to travel exclusively by limo, but with that mode of transport there was only the driver to control. Devlin therefore used public carriers and taxis when they were scarce, at rainy rush hours, for the pleasure of reducing otherwise aggressive, even hostile, people to toadies who made way for him, holding doors and simpering. He began to yearn to go into politics and was only waiting for the first face-to-face meeting with his father-in-law, who currently was en route to the Far East. Meanwhile, by acquiescing to his wishes in all matters, Miranda had begun to bore him, and he frequented other women, some of whom he would allow to show a stimulating resistance before being subdued at a moment of his choice. Among his conquests was the young movie star most often in the news, to whose presence he made his way at a premiere party and, after krafft-ing her bodyguards, put her under his power by staring between her famous emerald-green eyes. He also kraffted the gossip columnists, lest news of his latest score become an item, with possible adverse effects on his political ambitions.

Then one day when he was at his office—the big corner one surrendered to him by the GEO, whose career was on the brink of ruin because of the policies he had been kraffted into adopting—Devlin's assistant announced that a visitor without an appointment wanted to see him.

There was a standing order barring such intruders, Devlin roared angrily into the intercom. Since learning the Krafft technique, he had never needed to raise his voice. He was furious now and frightened. This was an unprecedented wearing off of the effect. His assistant, a lively young woman with a natural tendency toward insolence, had long since been stared into sycophancy. It was unthinkable for her to disobey explicit orders. Was it only the first of many defections? Or could he take corrective measures, administer, so to speak, booster shots of the stare, as was done with certain types of inoculations when their residual potency had diminished?

The door was opened by the offending assistant. "Listen here," Devlin cried out quickly. "Look at me!"

But she brazenly ignored him and instead turned to the person she was ushering in. "Mr. Devlin will be happy to see you now."

A stocky figure marched into his office, a woman in her middle years, with graying hair and glasses, the temple pieces of which dipped below the level of the eye. Devlin was made uncomfortable by the sight of such frames, associating them in memory with a teacher he had had in grade school so long before: She had often hectored him for inattention.

Annoyed, he determined to lose the intruder without ceremony. Who was she, with those glasses, that navy-bluesuit and big black bag? Someone self-righteously collecting for a charity? "Sorry," said he, trying to stare between her eyes, "I'm too busy to see you now."

Advancing, the woman disregarded his stare. "I'm Hilda Krafft. Some time ago, you sent me a nasty letter."

"You?" He came around the desk. "You are H. Krafft? You've taken me by surprise. . . . Your technique is all it claims to be! I should not have. . . . Once it began to work so well, 1 guess I forgot. Look, I apologize. I should have written back, not only to beg your pardon but to tell you how effective the technique has been!"

But could she be the real thing? Tohave discovered the secret of domination and remained so commonplace in appearance?

"Victor, you're a silly little person," Hilda Krafft said, more in schoolteacher-ly reproof than in anger.

"Yes, ma'am." Devlin looked toward the floor. "But please tell me this, if you don't mind. Why aren't you famous? Your work is truly miraculous."

"You moved," Hilda Krafft said reprovingly. "But it's just as well I found you at work. Your wife has somehow survived, but I gather you are destroying this firm."

He raised his eyes. "You're right, of course. I'll resign immediately. Then I'll go find Miranda and offer her a divorce. All I want to do in life henceforth is to serve you."

"Why am I not famous?" Hilda Krafft shook her head in contempt. "Victor, you're a total loss."

"I'm stupid, is what I am," Devlin readily confessed. Having surrendered his will to her, he thought he saw himself without vanity.

"No," said Hilda Krafft. "Your mistakes are due not to a weak mind but rather to the kind of weak character that sees success as due only to cheap tricks." She brought up her bag, rummaged in it and produced a capacious coin purse from which she audibly counted out bills and change to the amount of $109.90. She placed this money on the desk.

"I could learn," Devlin pleaded. "Please take me with you!"

"Certainly not," said Hilda Krafft in her positive way. "You are by nature simply too sentimental." She marched out of his office on her thick-heeled shoes.

It was remarkable: She had given him the stare only briefly and not again, but he had been so thoroughly in her power that for some moments he did not believe he could survive bereft of a connection with her. And once she returned the fee, the Krafft technique no longer worked as performed by him. People assumed he was rudely staring at pimples on their foreheads or displaying a new tic and were annoyed or bored, as the case may have been. At the office, his bygone errors forgotten, he was soon reduced to his old status as a comfortable mediocrity, and business picked up.

Miranda severed their connection, though she was decent about it, letting him take along the gold cuff links and the expensive cologne. Strangely enough, now that he had lost his power, Georgette took an unprecedented liking to him, nudging his ankle with an affectionate nose and whining piteously as he left for good. But then, nobody was easier to take, by one and all, than the old Vic Devlin.

You dirty s.o.b., don't think I'll take this lying down. I'll report you to every authority I can find."