Psychomech (11 page)

‘And my doctors? Saul Siebert?” Schroeder shook his head. ‘No, time will show you how wrong you are.’ And once again Garrison felt that unnatural chill.

‘What of Willy Koenig?’ he asked. ‘Is he too to be sacrificed to this supernatural hodge-podge?’

‘No, Willy’s future seems secure. His card says; “W. Koenig. Time-scale: six months,” following which there is only one further entry. Simply your name, “Richard Garrison.”’

Again Garrison shook his head. ‘You see? None of it makes any sense.’

‘Then why does it worry and anger you?’

‘I… I don’t know. Listen, can we come out in the open, put all of this in a single nutshell?’ ‘Very well,’ said Schroeder, ‘tell me—honestly—what you make of it.’

Garrison nodded and licked his lips. ‘You believe that in about six months’ time you’re going to die.’ ‘I know it.’

‘And that after some eight years you will be reborn, reincarnated—in me.’

‘It is possible, but not without your help. Not unless you sanction it.’

‘How?’

‘You must first accept the principle. And then, when I come to you, you must accept me.’

‘Two minds in one body?’

‘I’ve already told you, it won’t be like that. More a melding of minds. We won’t be aware that there are two of us. My identity will be yours, yours will be mine.’

Garrison frowned, shook his head. ‘It’s no use. I simply can’t grasp reincarnation.’

‘That’s odd,’ said Schroeder. ‘An intelligent man like you. And yet, ask any amoeba—’

‘An amoeba? More riddles?”

‘Consider,’ said Schroeder. ‘What is the simple amoeba if not a classic case of continuous reincarnation? Why, we might state for a fact that any amoeba glimpsed in a microscope
is
the original, primal amoeba from prehistoric oceans. Mitosis has not only assured the extension of the species but also its original identity.’

‘We are not single-celled organisms,’ Garrison observed.

‘I have known several previous existences.’ Schroeder ignored him. ‘They have been discovered through hypnosis. If you too, under hypnosis, “remember” past lives—that will be another example of our compatibility.’

‘You still haven’t shown me any proof.’

‘Time will provide the proof. But there is perhaps something which will go a little way towards helping convince you.’

‘Oh?’

‘You mentioned the dog in your dream. A black bitch. And you know how I reacted when you told me about it.’

‘Yes, Ser’

‘Now you have seen the Black Dog, “S”, mentioned again in Schenk’s forecast.’

‘Coincidence,’ Garrison shrugged.

The day before Schenk came here I sent a letter to a man I know in Minden. His name is Heinz Holzer. Heinz and I go back a long way. He used to be a psychiatrist, worked with shell-shocked men from the front line. He is still a pyschiatrist of sorts, only now he works on the minds of dogs. Dobermans. Black bitches. He trains them for blind people, and they are the best, most unusual and expensive guide dogs in the world. I told him I wanted a dog for you—and this was before Schenk, before learning of the dog in your dream. Wait—’ He got up, went to a telephone, dialled and after a moment said: ‘Mina. I want the first letter to Holzer, about three weeks ago. That’s right, my original instructions. The dog for Richard Garrison. Have someone bring my copy to the door of the library, please, thank you…’

He put the phone down, turned to Garrison:

‘That letter, too, you may keep for. Willy to read to you.’

‘OK,’ said Garrison. ‘Let’s just say I believe you. I may be going mad, but I believe you anyway. But tell me, what makes you so sure I’ll accept this blind dog?’ He sensed Schroeder’s smile. ‘But you will, obviously!’

The German’s faith in the occult order of things was getting to be unnerving. Suddenly Garrison had had enough of the library and observatory. He stood up. ‘Are we finished here?’

‘We are finished here, yes. Finished for this morning. But look, the sun is so warm. Why don’t we swim, eh? Vicki is bound to be in the pool again by now. She loves the water, Lunch will be late, and this afternoon—’ ‘The other building?’

‘Yes. For that is where you shall learn that there really is substance to all of this, that it is not simply a matter of complex coincidences. Oh, and incidentally, when I asked you about dreams, that was no coincidence either.’

‘I didn’t for a moment suppose that it was.’

‘Since the bomb, during this long convalescence of mine—useless, wasted effort that it is—I too have dreamed. The dream is always the same: a light shining in darkness. And when I get to the light I find that it’s a mirror.’

‘A mirror?’

‘Indeed, Richard. A polished glass. And when I look in it—why, it’s not my face I see at all but yours! And you are not blind, Richard, for you see me, and you smile.’ Schroeder suddenly shivered. ‘A very strange smile indeed…’

A
s they left the library building Willy Koenig met them with the letter to Heinz Holzer. ‘Give it to Richard, Willy,’ said Schroeder. ‘Later he will ask you to read it to him. right now, however, we are going to swim. It’s very warm and the water will give us an appetite.’ Later, as they sat in the sunlight at the pool’s edge, Schroeder said to Vicki: ‘My dear, you must be more careful. For the first time I have noticed your bruises! goodness, how you must bump into things! I had thought you overcame that problem years ago.’ ‘Strange surroundings,’ she answered at once. ‘And I bruise so easily. And anyway, I refuse to accept that it’s all my fault. It seems to me that I don’t so much bump into things as things bump into me!’ She laughed, and Schroeder too.

Garrison also laughed, more inwardly than outwardly; but only Schroeder knew that they all shared the same joke.

Lunch came and went and later, after long cool drinks in the bar (non-alcoholic drinks, Garrison noted) he and Schroeder went to the sixth building. Here there was a difference in the atmosphere: the other place had reeked of paper and print, of old words in old books. This one smelled—different. It was like entering the lair of some unknown, unknowable beast.

‘Well,’ said Schroeder, once they were inside and the doors were closed behind them, ‘and what does your ESP faculty tell you about this place, my young friend?’

‘ESP, yes. The question contained the clue.’

‘A laboratory,’ Garrison replied, almost without conscious thought. He inclined his head upward, sniffed the air, listened to the silence. ‘A test centre.’ He sensed that Schroeder was impressed.

‘To test what?’

‘Why, ESP, of course! A place to measure the unknown, to sound the unfathomable.’

‘That is very profound,’ said Schroeder. ‘Like many of the things you say, it belies your youth. I’m sure that you have lived before, Richard Garrison.’

‘Where do we start?’ Garrison asked. ‘And what will we be doing?’

‘Measuring the unknown,’ Schroeder answered at once. ‘And we start right now.’

‘You mean I’m right? One hundred per cent? This is an ESP laboratory?’ Even Garrison sounded surprised.

‘You are right, one hundred per cent, yes. It is a complex of machines—you might even say one big machine, creating the perfect environment—for testing ESP abilities.’

‘You mean the whole building? One big—’

‘Ah! I can see the question written on your face/ said Schroeder. ‘You wonder if this complex could possibly be the “Machine” of your dreams, eh? Well, I too have wondered about that. Could it be that I shall come to you eventually through the medium of just such a machine as this?’ His gesture encompassed the room, the entire building.

‘Did you hold up your arms just then?’ Garrison asked.

‘Yes.’

‘I knew you had. Maybe there’s something to all of this after all. But no, I don’t know anything else about the Machine in my dream.’

‘Hitler dreamed of a Machine too, you know,’ Schroeder told him.

‘His war machine? The might of Der Vaterland? Ten million jackboots on the march? Yes, I know that.’

‘No, a different sort of machine. An ESP machine. A device to unlock man’s latent, superhuman psychic powers. He even started to build one.’

‘You were on it? That’s where you got the idea for all of this?’

‘No, it was completely different to this. All of these things are toys by comparison. Hitler’s machine was not designed to read or measure the psyche but to alter it, to increase it beyond all known levels of awareness and capability. Literally to create supermen! I wasn’t in on it, but I knew many of the people who were. It was called the Berlin Project. Top Secret, And oddly enough, one of the top members of the team was Heinz Holzer.’

‘The man who trains blind dogs?’ ‘Yes. His job was the definition of the working of the mind, or the psyche. His qualifications, you understand, were not confined to a purely psychiatric level. He was skilled in every area of mental science and knowledge and had a prodigious medical background. His own father was a pathfinder amongst neurologists, his mother a surgeon, and Holzer himself one of the first really effective neuropsychiatrists.’

Garrison put it more succinctly. ‘No ordinary shrink,’ he said.

Schroeder snorted. ‘Not ordinary in any way, no.’

‘And he trains blind dogs? Isn’t that a hell of a waste?’

‘He is a good man, you understand,’ said Schroeder. ‘But he is also a wanted man. At the end of the war the Allies knew about the Berlin Project, and they wanted to know more. It would not do for him to return to his old work, brilliant though he was. They would sooner or later trace him through that work. And of course his real name is no more Holzer than mine is Schroeder. As for training blind dogs: that is as close as he dares come to using his skills as they were given him to be used.’

‘I don’t get that,’ Garrison shook his head.

‘Oh? Well, dogs have minds too, you know. They are highly intelligent creatures. And minds can be—directed?’

‘He brainwashes dogs?’

‘In a manner of speaking. But to my knowledge his methods are far and away superior to conventional training systems. In most animal training the principles of fear, punishment and reward still apply. Not in Holzer’s. How he does it
exactly
I don’t know—but his methods speak for themselves. Have you not wondered what has become of your old clothes and uniforms? Or why we required all of those specimens of… well, of you? And the photographs and films, and voice-tapes? Now you begin to appreciate why one of Holzer’s dogs costs so much, eh? She will not be simply a dog, Richard. She will be a marvel!’

‘So he brainwashes dogs with a machine, does he? A scaled-down model of the one Hitler would have used to produce supermen. And he produces superdogs.’

‘Ah!’ Schroeder’s denial was immediate. ‘No, I didn’t say that. Oh, it’s possible Heinz has built less complex devices, I suppose, but nothing on the scale of that machine envisioned by Der Fehurer. Even if he had the money it would still be out of the question. To my knowledge there was only one man in the entire world who had the technological skill to build such a machine, and he died when the Russians swarmed into East Berlin. There were rumours that he had escaped, and until recently the Israelis had men in Brazil following false trails, but I think he must be dead. His name was Otto Krippner. He was a real Nazi and, I think, a madman… Anyway,
these
machines—’ again the encompassing gesture, ‘—are not of that order. They are, as you had it, machines to measure the unknown, to sound the unfathomable.’

Garrison stared blindly in the direction of Schroeder’s voice and slowly the frown lifted from his forehead. ‘OK,’ he finally said, ‘I’m hooked. You want to test me, I want to be tested. Perhaps I am—an Esper?—I don’t know. But yes, I’ve sometimes—often—felt that I’ve lived before. Deja vu, yes. I’ve looked it up. The sceptics call it paramnesia. And I’ve perhaps been more interested in parallel phenomena than I’ve admitted. But—’

‘I understand your apprehensions.’

Garrison nodded. ‘First you’d better tell me exactly what you’ve got here. I mean, I know you have machines—but what
sort
of machines? What are they exactly?’

‘Machines without engines!’ Schroeder answered at once, They are designed to harness the hidden powers of the human mind—if the subject has the required talent. Also, I have the equipment to test remote viewing. Do you know what that is?’

‘Seeing afar—without telescope or binoculars but by using the mind’s eye.’

‘The mind’s eye…’ Schroeder repeated him. ‘Excellent!’

‘What else?’

‘We also have a Ganzfeld state room, to induce maximum ESP receptivity; and devices to assist in self-hypnosis, so that we may attempt a little precognitive clairvoyance. As for more mundane tests, we have a rather sophisticated Zener cards machine, and other similar devices based broadly on the work of J. B. Rhine. Rhine “invented” ESP, you know. And there are dice, thrown mechanically and in a sealed chamber, for assessing psychokinesis; cubicles for TET—telepathic exchange tests; de-magnetized rooms for teleportation and levitation… And many more. Where would you like to begin?’

Garrison shrugged. ‘I’m in your hands.’

‘And how do you feel about it? I mean, if your approach is negative—’

‘No, I feel receptive. Responsive.’

‘Good!’

That was at 2.4S P.M. It was 10.30 when they left the laboratory. By then Garrison was feeling shaken, Schroeder was jubilant, and both of them were exhausted.

And they had made a pact.

An hour later Garrison made his way to the bar. Late as the hour was, he felt he needed a drink. And Schroeder had told him to use the bar whenever he felt inclined. Willy Koenig was there, mixing a drink for Vicki. She had already had several but was very sober. She sat at the bar on a stool; Garrison located her as soon as he entered the room—her perfume. Two of Schroeder’s guards were seated at a small table in one corner, playing cards and sharing a bottle of Schnapps. Of Schroeder himself there was no sign.

Garrison found a stool beside Vicki’s and seated himself. He took her hand. ‘Hi,’ he quietly said. ‘I’m glad you’re here.’ He wanted to add:
I couldn’t sleep and wasn’t ready for bed, and I was half-afraid you might already be asleep. I wouldn’t have wanted to disturb you…
But he merely repeated, ‘I’m glad you’re here.’