Farmer, Philip José - Traitor to the Living (5 page)

Carfax had to give Western credit for one thing. He had made no effort to create a mystical atmosphere.

There were none of the exotic trappings so often found in the seance chambers of the human medium. The room was bare and bright. The dull-gray one-decameter cube fronted by a curving console with its many panels, dials, switches, rheostats, indicator lights, and viewscreens and backed by enormous cables running down into the floor spelled out S-C-I-E-N-C-E. Western was not clad in flowing robes covered with astrological symbols. Nor did he look like a laboratory worker; he seemed to have just stepped off a tennis court. He wore white tennis shoes, no socks, light-green shorts, and a white sleeveless shirt. Thick black hair- curled out over the deep V of the shirt; his thickly muscled legs were matted with black curly hair.

Carfax had expected him to be wearing the ankh with the M, but even that was lacking. He smiled as he came toward Gordon and put out a large, powerful, and hairy hand.

When he smiled, he looked much like Patricia.

He talked easily with Carfax for a few minutes, asking him about the trip, making the usual comments about the smog, and remarking that life was tolerable in Los Angeles only if you stayed indoors six months of the year and if you had much money.

"Oh, not by the way," he said, "but very definitely relevant—has our cousin gotten in touch with you?"

Carfax had not expected such frankness. His entire campaign was wrecked in a few seconds.It would be best to tell the truth, or, at least, asmuch of it as would be needed to convince Western that he was not lying. Western might know that Patricia had been at his house.

"Yes," he answered, hoping his manner was as easy as Western's. "In fact, she flew out, unannounced, and was my guest for almost a week."

Carfax had gone through his house very thoroughly, looking for bugs. He had found no evidence of them or of a phone tap. Patricia could have been followed to Busiris, or her destination could have been gotten from the air line. If the latter were true, it would be obvious whom she was going to see in Busiris.

"I'm not too surprised, Gordon," Western said. "I don't know what you think of her, but I think that she was driven off the deep end by her father's death. She loved him very much. Perhaps too much. And the circumstances of his death would be enough to deeply disturb even a well-balanced person.

"But she accused me of having stolen the plans for MEDIUM from her father and, of course, since one follows the other, of having murdered her father. Or did she tell you that? Of course, she did."

Western certainly knew how to disarm. Who would believe that such openness could conceal a thief and a killer?

"Yes, she did," Carfax said.

"And you expected, or at least hoped, to use MEDIUM, my own invention, to find out if she was telling the truth?"

"You're very perceptive," Carfax said. "To tell the truth, and that seems to be what both of us are doing, I wasn't sure that I would ask you to find my--our--uncle. I have my own interests, you know."

Western laughed and said, "I'll give you two sessions.

I'll admit it will cost me, but I'm not entirely unselfish. I'm offering two for several reasons. One is that, if you're convinced I'm right, your following will die off. Your theory, and others like it, will be scotched aborning. I'm offering some free time to some of my other opponents, you know. I've got a mob of them coming in tomorrow. A trinity of Jesuits: a prominent physicist, an eminent theologian, and an authority on exorcism. The exorcist has my permission to conduct an exorcism if he wishes to.

"And with the Jesuits will be some prominent Anglican and Methodist ministers, two rabbis. Orthodox and Reformed, a Christian Scientist, a Mormon, a famous atheist who's also a science writer, and the head of the African Animist Church, a Nigerian, I believe."

He paused and then said, "I don't know how objective that committee is going to be. After all, their religions, and that includes the atheists, since atheism is a form of religion, are likely to be shattered. And if that happens, then they may be shattered, too. A man's religion often is part of the deep core of his identity, you know. If that is broken, the self-image is threatened."

"Very few can stand up to that."

"But I hope you'll be as objective as possible. I don't know where you got your theory, unless it was from reading too many science-fiction books ..."

Carfax winced. Western smiled and said, "Pardon me. There's really nothing ridiculous about the premises of your theory, but I believe that the facts invalidate it."

His voice became louder, and his face became somewhat red.

"Great God! What more do people want? The federal commission made a thoroughly exhaustive inquiry, and you know what its unofficial report was! Like it or not, MEDIUM is a means for communicating with the supernatural, though I prefer my own term, embu, meaning electromagnetic-breing-universe. The official report has not been published yet, as everybody knows, because the president is afraid of the repercussions."

"He's damned if he says, yes, it's true, and damned if he says, no, it's not true. But the report will have to be issued soon. There's too much pressure on to keep it back forever."

"I know," Carfax said.

"No doubt you do. There's enough talk about it in the news media. However, you're anxious to get going, and I'm anxious to have this cleared up. Not that Patricia could really hurt me, but she could be a nuisance."

He spoke into a screen in a console panel.

"Harmons!"

A moment later, a short, fat, baldheaded man in white shoes, trousers, and a long white laboratory coat appeared.

"Harmons is our chief first-shift engineer," Western said. "He'll stand by in case anything goes wrong with MEDIUM or you need help. MEDIUM is a giant piece of instrumentation, but it's as delicate as a baby kitten. Even the masses of our bodies affect it. When it's in operation, we allow no more than three people to get within a meter of it. And it's better if only one . . ."

A light, on what Carfax had thought was a piece of blank wall, flashed red. Western leaned over the console and said, "Yes?"

"Mrs. Sharpe calling you, Mr. Western."

"Tell her I'll call back later."

"Yes sir, but she says it's urgent."

"Later!"

"Yes, sir!"

Western straightened up. His voice had been harsh, but he was smiling now and, when he spoke, it was gently.

"The woman's very old and very wealthy. And whom does she want to talk to? Her late husband? Her late parents? Her late children? The late Jesus? No, she wants to talk to her late dog!"

He shook his head.

"She's leaving all her money to an animal hospital, and there are children out there dying ..."

He stopped, bit his lip, and then said, "Well, shall we get started?"

Gordon Carfax sat down in the chair indicated by Western. He knew that, according to theory, everything that radiated, or had radiated, electromagnetic energy in this universe also existed in electromagnetic form in the other universe. This justified Western's insistence on calling a dead human by the name of semb, an initialization of sentient electrowagnetic feeing. Western had tried to avoid using such emotion-loaded and unscientific terms as Spock, ghost, spirit, departed, and so forth. He had invented a vocabulary which, however, the man in the street and the news media were largely ignoring.

He had also stated many times that he could not locate individual animals. It was difficult enough to locate human beings, impossible in many cases, and always impossible for animals. But he still got requests, even demands and threats, from many pet lovers.

Western sat down by Carfax and pressed a START button on a panel to Carfax's right. Most of the several hundred lights on the console lit up.

"We use vacuum tubes in the main circuits," Western said. "Transistors and such small stuff can't handle the enormous load of power. Actually, what you see before you is only the tip of the iceberg. The main equipment is on the floor below. It's hooked up to the Four Corners atomic-energy power plants. The only California power we use is for the phones and lights elsewhere in the house.

"The air-conditioning for this room is automatically controlled at an exact 70 plus or minus one degree Fahrenheit. Some of the elements and components are very delicate. There are six circuits enclosed in liquid xenon or liquid hydrogen. And that's all I'm going to tell you about medium's physical aspects."

A red light came on over an unmarked dial. Western reached up and turned it counterclockwise 76 degrees.

He picked up a keyboard attached to the console by long thin cables and punched about a dozen letters and numerals in rapid succession.

"I'm saving us much time because I've already located Uncle Rufton. I did it for my own purposes some time ago. But I would have done it, anyway, since I suspected you would want to make contact with him. His coordinates are on tape, and we will run them off right now, if you don't object."

He took an octagonal punched card from the inner pocket of his shirt and inserted it in a slot. The card disappeared as silently and as swiftly as a mouse into a hole.

"You'll get a chance to see how we make a search during your second session," Western said. "That's scheduled for two days from now. We never permit a client more than three sessions a week. His nervous system can't stand more than that. There's something about contact with the embu, something we can't isolate and identify, that disturbs the client. And the operators, too. We take turns operating MEDIUM. This, by the way, is my first this week, so I'll be able to be with you during your second. I'm saving my second for tomorrow's session with the theological-cum-exorcism committee."

While he was talking, he was watching various lights: PROG ST; SRCH LCK; STTC REP; REPEL. A yellow light flashed above SRCH END, and a buzz came from one of the panels.

Western punched a button under HOLD just after a large viewscreen in front of Carfax became alive. It was milky and filled with what seemed to be thousands of tiny circling sparks.

"Just remember," Western said, "you're not seeing the true form of these ... creatures. You're seeing an electronic analogy. The shapes are the machine's interpretation of the actual shapes. What they really look like, we don't know. There's much that we don't know, so I won't be able to explain everything in that universe any more than I can in this universe."

He pressed the RLS button under HOLD. The sparks became fewer, and the spaces between them widened. It was as if Carfax were sitting in a spaceship going faster than light and approaching galaxies which were so far away that each had seemed a single point of light, though composed of millions of stars. There was no Doppler shift affecting the light, of course, since this was not faster-than-light space travel. Nor was the device traveling. It was pouring more power into that "otherworld" or embu, and was, in theory at least, "attracting" the desired configuration to it.

"Whatever entity, whatever inanimate object, radiates electromagnetic energy in our universe is caught up in a configuration in the embu. When the source of radiation dies, or ceases to radiate, in this universe, it becomes final in the embu, that is, takes a final form. A lightning streak is an inanimate object. In my theory, anyway. It's true that the lightning streak's energy is not lost in our universe. It's dissipated or undergoes transformation, just as sunshine does. But in the embu the lightning streak lives on, you might say. And just so, a cockroach or a man lives on."

"Sunshine is too diffuse to be an inanimate object," Carfax said. "The sun shines at all times. It's the rotation of the earth which brings on night, but on earth only. Even in night, there's a certain amount of light. Does each individual night come to life, as it were, in the embut And how can it, when there is no such thing as an individual night? Where would the dividing line be? Surely our time-zone limitations would have no reflection in the embu"

"That I don't know," Western said with just a touch of irritation. "Asking me that is like Queen Isabella asking Columbus to describe everything in the New World when he had just made a few landings on the shores of a few islands off the still unsuspected continent."

"Sorry," Carfax said.

"I suppose that the energy of the sun itself, as a flaming sphere, and the energy reflected from objects in space, such as our planet, are both present in the embu. At the moment, however, we are concerned only with the human beings of the embu. We know, for instance, that each is received at death into a configuration, or a colony, of older beings. This colony is composed of a rigidly determined number. There are eighty-one humans or sembs in a colony. Rather, I should say there are only eighty-one potential orbits, since a colony has to have a nucleus of one around which others collect, and there are many new colonies forming and, thus, many incomplete ones.

"Eighty-one is nine times nine, and so the mystics have been having a field day with that. And the communists would be making something ideological out of the sembs' communal system too, except that they flatly deny the possibility of an afterlife of any sort. I've invited Russia and China to send over their own investigating committees for free sessions. But they've rejected my offers."

"They've used my theory," Carfax said, "though it wasn't my intention to give them aid and comfort. Or to give the Roman and Orthodox Catholics and Protestant fundamentalists support. But their siding with me makes it difficult for people who would otherwise have accused me of being a godless commie."

The screen had suddenly shown only one spark, and then, even more suddenly, the spark was revealed as a complex of orbiting sparks.

"Notice the central spark, or semb," Western said.

"The others revolve around it in what looks to the untutored eye like crazy random orbits. But we've analyzed the patterns of several colonies, and the sembs follow very complicated but limited and repetitive orbits. We have detected new sembs, the recently dead, sometimes displacing the nuclear semb. A semb becomes finalized-- I hate that word but it's part of our jargon here--and when this happens, the finalized being sometimes takes over the nuclear role. What that means, I don't know. But I suspect that force of personality has something to do with it."