Free Healer by Peter Dickinson

anything.”
    â€œGranddad seeing you.”
    â€œOkay. Well, he’s seen me now. But next time…”

7
    There were, apparently, seven energies. Or, rather, Seven Energies.
    After lunch Barry lay on the lawn beneath the cedar tree and read the pamphlet Mr. Freeman had given him. It was rubbish, he thought, but much more amusing, much less hateful than the glossy brochures and other literature left lying around in the Foundation for patients to pick up and glance at the pretty pictures, the vague, warm sentences. This was a close-printed scientific pamphlet. The only breaks in the long grey paragraphs were for equations and graphs.
    It wasn’t easy reading, and from time to time Barry would roll on his side and look around. A little above him, across the lawn, the main building—a glittering white frontage, three stories high, and topped with a wide-eaved roof of purplish slates—blocked the view. Apparently it was about a hundred years old. It had been built as a country house for a rich merchant, but then, as families could no longer afford to live in houses like that, the paint had begun to flake, the roof to leak, the rafters to rot. Soon it would have fallen down if the Foundation hadn’t bought it. Now it looked smart and rich again, but it would never look beautiful.
    Still, the landscape it faced would never stop looking beautiful, Barry thought. It was Thursley all over again. Thursley squared, the Englishman’s dream of England. The house was built near the top of a gentle hill, facing out over a view of pasture and trees. Just below, a church spire, sheathed in green-blue copper, rose above the treetops, with the ridge of a big tiled barn beyond it, and a few chimneys and corners of roofs. There was a village down there. In his mind’s eye Barry could see the thatched pub and the white ducks on the pond and the cricketers on the green. Twelve miles farther off the view ended with the long blue line of the South Downs, and the whole landscape was bathed in that soft, easy Hampshire air and sunlight which never seem to have been touched by the grit and grime of the North. It was beautiful all right, beautiful because it was a landscape that had lived easily over the centuries, protected by its lovers’ money. Money made in the grit and grime. Money from the North. Barry’s North, Bear’s North.
    Bear was grumbly still after the migraine and the interview with Mr. Freeman. Or was it more than that? For the first time, lying there on the sunlit lawn in front of the Foundation, Barry began to feel as though a change had taken place that morning in his relationship with his other, imaginary self. When somebody raises a big wild animal, such as a lion cub, in captivity, they can treat it almost as though it was tame for the first year or so, though there may be a few tricky moments. But one day, practically without warning, it somehow discovers its own wildness, and from then on it is a pet no longer. It becomes too dangerous and unpredictable to play with.
    All his life Barry had treated Bear as an imaginary pet, part game, part companion. But now he felt a strangeness in himself. It was as though the stress of the migraine and the healing had woken Bear from a long hibernation, and the animal that had gone to sleep as a manageable and often cuddly cub had woken as an adult, wild.
    Barry shivered in the sunlight. I’m not standing for that he thought . Watch it, Bear. You become a nuisance, and I’ll get rid of you.
    Bear vanished. He was only a trick of the mind, of course. The moment you applied rational thought you were in control. Barry rolled onto his stomach and returned to the Seven Energies.
    The first four came from the textbooks: electromagnetism, gravity, weak interaction, strong interaction. The fifth was something called time-flow, which wasn’t exactly time; the sixth was so far undiscovered; and the seventh was Harmonic Energy. Barry had got an