Farmer, Philip José - Traitor to the Living (11 page)

"You get better results when you chew them?"

"Much better. But it's more dangerous to use them. I lose more control."

"And why should that be dangerous?" he said, turning.

Mrs. Webster did not move at once, so that she was pressed against him. Then she stepped back to look up at him. Her teeth were black in a blue face, and her tongue was a dark red nickering.

"I don't want you to get too excited. It's better not to suggest what might happen."

"I'm overly excited now," he said, wondering if she guessed the ambiguity.

"All right," she said in a louder voice. "Put your cigarettes out and come back to the table. Patricia and Gordon, take the same places and link hands."

This time, there was no tingling in his hands; the electricity seemed to be in the air. Carfax wondered how she could pick up the leaf and put it in her mouth when her hands were held. An arm came over her shoulder, picked up a leaf, and placed it in her open mouth. He turned his head and saw the maid standing just behind Mrs. Webster.

There was silence eased only by the slight chewing noises from Mrs. Webster. The figures across the table became even more blue-black. His head started to ache.

Mrs. Applechard's hand became wetter, but at the same time colder. The air was getting colder, too, and it seemed to him that the drop in temperature was not due to the air-conditioning. But that must be his imagination, Suddenly, Mrs. Webster spat, and he jumped. The mass of leaf shot out beyond the bowl, and he smelled a pleasant aromatic odor. A hand appeared in the corner of his eye. It dipped into the bowl, and it moved a dim object, another leaf, into her open mouth. Silence again, except for the moist chewing sounds.

A few minutes later, while the noiselessness seemed to grow thick as a cloud, the second leaf shot out. The hand swooped down into the bowl and toward her mouth. Mrs. Webster whispered, "No! Enough!" and the hand, still holding the leaf, disappeared.

His hand felt now as if it were a corpse's. Something rumbled on his left, making him start slightly. He relaxed a trifle and even grinned when he realized that it was gas in Mrs. Applechard's stomach. A highly nervous woman, he thought, though he didn't blame her. And why was she so nervous if she had been through this before? Was it because she had good reason to be? "Don't let loose!" Mrs. Webster said sharply.

Silence again except for a panting sound. Was it coming from Patricia?

Mrs. Webster's voice seemed to bellow in his ear.

"Rufton Carfax!"

Gordon Carfax felt as if he were turning into quartz from his inner core outward. He was stone precipitating from a thick liquid of fear. Something, or somebody, had entered the room or, rather, not entered but appeared in it. The air over the table was condensing, it was swirling, and the swirls were blackening. Air moved across his face and hands, air pushed out by a mass hovering over the table.

"Rufton Carfax!"

A pseudopod, long and thin but rounded at the end, slid out of the mass toward Mrs. Webster. Cold preceded it, cold that brought time to his skin and made the stone shiver.

Someone across the table, dimly seen through the thickening, giggled. It was high-pitched and shaking with fear and not at all funny. Instead of breaking the tension, it hardened it.

"Rufton Carfax! Be still!"

Mrs. Webster's voice, though commanding, had frayed edges. Her hand had become so cold that Gordon wanted to let loose of it, but he was afraid to do so. If he broke the link, he might be helpless before something which would take immediate advantage of any weakness.

"Rufton Carfax! Take your proper shape!"

The woman giggled again; yes, it was Szegeti. And whoever was panting was desperately afraid.

"Let it go!" a man moaned.

"Hold on!" Mrs. Webster said. "You must not panic!"

"For Christ's sake!" Patricia said. "That's not Father! What have you done?"

"Stay within the bounds!" Mrs. Webster said, her voice cracking. "Stay! And identify yourself!"

"It's not Father!" Patricia shrieked.

A chair fell over, and a body struck the floor. There was a scramble of feet, a scream, and footsteps racing toward the door. Gordon jumped up, jerking Mrs.

Webster and Applechard back and paining his bruised muscles, but they clung to his hands, and Mrs. Webster said, "Don't run!"

Somebody was struggling with somebody--Patricia with the maid?--at the door. Suddenly Mrs. Webster shouted, "Be gone! Back to the pit from which you came!"

The pseudopod lifted, curved like an elephant's trunk, and then shot out toward Mrs. Webster's face.

She yelled, and she threw herself backward, pulling Gordon with her. They rolled on the floor while Mrs. Webster, her hands on her face, screamed. Gordon rose swiftly, though painfully, from the floor and saw Szegeti at the window, and he knew she was going to depolarize the window. The mass over the table was thinning now but thrashing around, pseudopods whirling outward, reaching for the edges of the table but never going past them. And then the light became redder and redder, and the sun came in unbarred, and the mass was gone.

He turned to see the door open and the maid and Patricia running down the hall. Mrs. Webster was sitting up, her hands over her eyes and moaning, "I'm blind! I'm blind!"

He leaned over and forced her hands away. "Of course you can't see, you fool!" he said savagely.

"Your eyes are closed!"

Her lids opened, and she stared at him, empty of everything but horror.

"I can't see, I tell you, I can't see! It touched my eyes!"

"It's gone," he said. "Whatever it was, it's gone!

You're safe now!"

He leaned down and pulled her up. How light she was, as if she had been decanted.

"It could all have been caused by suggestion," Gordon said. "Mass hysteria."

He looked out the window. Wilshire was speeding below them. He caught a glimpse through the window of a third-story apartment of a man shaking his finger at a woman. What were they arguing about, if indeed they were arguing? An in-law? Infidelity? Politics? MEDIUM? Their children? Sex? Money, most likely.

"Then why would we all see the same thing?"

"I don't know, Pat. But we've all been conditioned to expect an amorphous mass, a thing of ectoplasm, which then assumes a definite shape. The movies, TV, books have conditioned us even if we don't believe in ghosts."

"I don't think it was imagination, and I know it wasn't my father," she said. "It was evil, evil. My father was good. He was weak, but he was good."

"You know," Gordon said slowly, "it could have been a genuine objective phenomenon. Maybe. But it didn't necessarily have to be what we call a ghost. It might not have come from the same universe as the embu. There are a hundred, maybe a thousand, maybe an infinite number of worlds occupying the same space as ours. And maybe we can get through to them, or they to us, under certain circumstances. If this could be, then we could have summoned-- I hate that word because of its association with witchcraft--summoned some thing. In any event, I don't intend to visit Mrs. Webster again. Or any medium. Not for a seance, anyway."

"I'd rather not," Patricia said.

"La Cienega coming up," he said, looking at the flashing words on the screen at the end of the car.

"Let's get off and walk to the hotel. Our minds have been stretched; let's stretch our legs. Physical exercise often puts the mind back into shape, too."

"You're quite a philosopher," she said, smiling for the first time that day.

"Homespun as they come," he said, but his mind was only half-engaged with the conversation. He had seen for himself the existence of MEDIUM (which he hadn't really believed despite all the newspaper and TV reports). He had seen nothing to indicate that Western had stolen MEDIUM and killed his uncle. And even if he should prove that Western was guilty, a larger problem remained. If Patricia did get possession of MEDIUM, she was not going to stop its use. She would not be allowed to even if she wished, and she certainly would not wish it.

Nevertheless, he had promised her that he would either prove or disprove her suspicions. And now, while MEDIUM was not available, would be a good time to work on the minor problem.

So it was that he told her he was leaving as soon as possible for Big Sur Center.

"You're welcome to come along if you want to," he said. "But I'll be busy, and you'll have to find something, though not someone, I hope, to entertain you."

"I'll stay here," Pat said. "I can look around for some place to live, some place new where Western will have a hard time finding me. How long do you think you'll be gone?"

"At least four days," he said. He did not think that Western was worrying about her; now that her own father had denied her suspicions, she was no threat. Or, he checked himself, not her father but the thing posing as him. But its true identity made no difference in practice.

He packed, and he kissed her goodby. He checked into a motel off the campus of the University of Big Sur six hours later, which was too late to make phone calls setting up appointments for the next day. He had three books to pass the time. A collection of science-fiction stories by Leo Q. Tincrowdor, a book describing the recent translation of the Etruscan language, and The Annotated Odyssey. Since the second book was based on a linguist's interview with an Etruscan of the second century b.c., he decided to read that. The man who had done this was a Professor Archambaud, a Berkeley teacher who was also a good friend of Western's. This explained why he had been given access to the machine without being charged. He had been forced to use it early in the morning, but he had sacrificed sleep for the sake of knowledge. (Not to mention for the sake of advancing his own career. Carfax thought.) He had located a man who was fluent in both Latin and Estruscan and everything had proceeded swhnmingly fine from there.

Though Carfax was interested in the linguistic and historical details provided by Menie Amthal, he was more interested in the vignettes of Western provided by Archambaud. Western had told him of his early experiments with MEDIUM. Apparently, he had had the idea for years but had only begun working on the prototype two years before he announced its success.

Maybe so. Carfax thought, but Archambaud had only Carfax's word for it. Uncle Rufton could have confided in Western several years ago because he needed the financial backing. But why would Western have given him any money unless he had seen some evidence that it would work? Western was no dreamy visionary. He would have been as likely to finance a perpetual-motion machine as a machine for communicating with the dead. That is, not likely at all.

Overall, Western emerged in Archambaud's book as a fiercely dedicated man, a genius. That certainly did not jibe with Patricia's account. But then Patricia could be wrong.

At 22:00, he turned on the news. And he found out that MEDIUM was also a means for free and unlimited energy. It was just what Carfax had derided a few minutes before, a perpetual-motion machine. Or so Western was claiming.

The caster was brief but clear. Western had issued a statement that experiments had proved that electrical energy could be tapped from the same "place" in which the dead lived. Western's power demands for his house and the machine had been supplied by electricity drawn from the embu. An iron resistor three meters in diameter had been melted in ten seconds. Theoretically, given the proper equipment, all of Los Angeles could be powered through MEDIUM. All of California. In fact, all of Earth.

So, Carfax thought. Western had lied when he had said he was getting his power from the Four Corners.

The caster looked skeptical. Carfax did not know how he looked himself, but he thought it would be stunned. He turned the TV off and leaned back in his chair, a bourbon in his hand. Well, why not? According to theory, all electromagnetic energy produced in this universe was duplicated in the next. So, if that universe could be tapped, the energy could be withdrawn back to this universe.

But would not the withdrawn energy then be reproduced again in that other "place?" Would that place be big enough to contain all that energy? Would it, in effect, burst at its seams? And would its wild energy then come ravening into this universe to destroy it?

Nothing was ever done in this universe without work. A price had to be paid for anything gained. So why should that other universe be different? It must operate according to the same principles which apply in this universe. Somebody had to pay, and since this universe was doing the taking without any return, the penalty would have to be paid.

Or would it? Nothing was actually known about that other place. It did have sentient beings, and it did seem to contain energy replicated from this place. And that was all that was known.

But it might be dangerous to find out just how that place did operate, to find out what system of checks and balances existed between the two universes.

He poured himself another drink and contemplated the future. Forget the dangers. If what Western said was true, then MEDIUM was going to have far more of an impact than anybody had thought. Unlimited electrical power! First, pollution would be reduced enormously. Second, a worldwide power grid could be built. No. that wouldn't be necessary, since every country could have its own MEDIUM. But what if the United States kept MEDIUM for itself? It could produce goods much cheaper than any other nation.

No, that situation could last only for a time. Now that it was known that such a device was possible, the best brains of the foreign nations would be tackling the problem. And they would come up with the answer.

The world was going to be changed in ways that he could not even imagine at this moment. Oh, there'd be resistance. The electrical power establishment would see its empires and its profits dissolving, and they'd fight.

But they had already lost the battle.

Finishing his drink, he went to bed, his mind grabbing at extrapolations, seizing some, dropping them as new ones flew by. It was some tune before he could get to sleep, and it seemed that he had just dropped off when he was hooked by the alarm clock and reeled back up.