The Link (2 page)

Mid-afternoon. Robert prepares to leave the house. He dresses, sets the timer on Bart’s automatic feeder, pockets his hand-size bio-feedback control and drives off in his impeccable 1975 Mercedes. An unhappy Bart watches him go. He likes to ride with Robert.

En route to the city, listening to a cassette of Mahler’s sixth, Robert begins to muse aloud regarding Alan Bremer’s plan.

“The historical background of parapsychology?” he mutters dubiously. “The events leading up to the world of psi today? Is he insane? Does he have any idea of all the material that covers?”

We see brief SHOTS of sequences to come concerning these events as Robert’s voice recounts them. “Early psi. Mesmer. The Fox Sisters. D.D. Home. Nettie Colburn. Palladino. Mrs. Piper. Mrs. Leonard. Margery. Edgar Cayce. J.B. Rhine. Good Lord.”

We are back in the car with Robert as he groans. “Maybe I should just forget it.”

Reaching Manhattan, Robert parks on the outskirts (to avoid inner city traffic) and cabs to an apartment house on the East side near the 30’s.

There, responding to a previously phoned request, he sees his father DR. FRANCIS KENNETH ALLRIGHT, 69, a retired professor of Archeology, formerly at Columbia University.

His father is a man possessed by anger and frustration, a condition exacerbated by his chronic inability to express emotion.

Something has occurred to him which, in essence, has defied a long-lasting conviction in his work. There is no time to start over again, check it all out. Consequently, rage consumes him—rage at his years, his frailties, the fate which makes it impossible for him to continue working.

He and Robert have never had an open relationship. Francis Allright has been unable to communicate with any of his three children but least of all with Robert.

So when, imperious and cold, he informs Robert that he wants him to go to Arizona and continue his project there, the all but open demand scarcely falls on fertile soil.

Robert tries to be polite but tells his father that he cannot leave his own pursuits. He has magazine and book commitments, a probable commitment on the coast now. “Why not ask John?” he suggests. “He even lives within a reasonable distance of—”

His father interrupts impatiently. “If I wanted John to do it, I would have asked him,” he says. “John is unqualified.”

Robert gestures haplessly, forcing a smile. “So am I,” he says. “You know—”

“This is
important
,” his father interrupts again. Unlike Robert’s “journalistic” projects which betray a constant tendency to “backslide” into “your mother’s illogical world.”

Robert tenses. He resents the contempt with which his father holds the memory of Robert’s mother. “Can we leave her out of this?” he asks.

“I know you think her to have been a saint,” his father snaps. “She was not. She was a woman crippled by untenable delusions.”

“I didn’t come here to listen to that,”
Robert says.

His father waves that off. “I’m going to show you something,” he says.

Robert stands. “I’m sorry,” he tells his father. “I really don’t want to see anything or hear any more.”

A few more heated exchanges, then Robert is gone. His father stands in the living room of his small apartment, seething with the fury of a man who believes that his life’s work is being rendered meaningless.

He turns and moves to his desk, picking up a small crystal. He stares at it with almost hatred, finally setting it down with a sudden, fierce movement.

He had shown the crystal to Edgar Vance, a long-time associate at the Percival Laboratories. Vance had reacted strangely to the analysis. The crystal, he said, consisted of a number of elements which he had not run across in more than fifty years at the laboratory.

For that matter, the crystalline structure consisted of elements that existed
no place on earth
.

The crystal refracts a beam of sunlight, casting spectrum colors on the sheet of white paper on which it lies, a torment to the aging man.

Driving home, Robert unconsciously removes the bio-feedback control from his sportcoat pocket, holds it to his left ear and tries to will down the faintly pitched howl. It is not easy.

The visit to his father has upset him.

Reaching his community, he stops at the residence-office of veterinarian AMELIA BROOKSTONE, an attractive spinster in her fifties and a friend of Robert’s. Can he leave Bart with her while he goes to Los Angeles?

Of course, she says. We see, from her collection of books, records and art works, part of the rapport between the two. They often go to plays, concerts and art shows together.

Arriving home, Robert switches on his telephone answering machine. The agitated voice of ex-wife BARBARA asks him to return her call as soon as possible.

He does immediately to hear that “things” with Ann are still distressing. “
You know what I mean,”
she emphasizes. “This is your kind of thing.”

Robert tenses, keeps his voice as even as he can. He has to fly to Los Angeles tomorrow. As soon as he gets back, he’ll come over and speak to Ann.

“Please do,” says Barbara tightly, hanging up.

Later. Robert packing, questioning his trip to L.A. on the morrow. Sighing, he inquires of himself, “What am I getting into?”

SUDDEN CUT. A trap door opening overhead. A tall man climbing down a ladder to an underground, dirt-walled chamber. Torches lit and placed in brackets on the wall. The flickering illumination shows a handsome Indian face, a man in his forties.

Holding an odd-looking dagger in his right hand, he performs a soundless ritual. In the wavering light, he faces north, outlining a star-like figure in the air with the dagger point. He “erases” the figure, turns to the east, using the dagger point to outline the figure once again.

He erases it, turns to the south, repeats the unseen outline with the dagger point. Erases that, turns to the west, outlines the figure for the fourth time.

Then he speaks in Hopi; after several sentences, we hear the words in English.

“—Great Spirit who is the life that is in all things. The Creator of all things. Grant this request.” CAMERA MOVES IN SHARPLY on his lips as he whispers. “
Show me the one who is to come.”

CUT TO Robert on the airplane as it sets down in Los Angeles. A driver picks him up and he is limoed to the studio where Alan Bremer works.

En route, he has the first of what will constitute a “running gag” throughout the story. He imagines what his meeting with the young producer will be like.

We see his fantasy. Bremer, five-feet tall, in jodhpurs and beret, a foot-long cigar clamped between his teeth, whacking at his giant desk top with a riding crop in an office resembling the inside of a Hapsburg hunting lodge.

Immediately after, he is at the studio and ushered into Alan Bremer’s modest office. Bremer rises, smiling, hand outstretched, a pleasant-looking young man in his thirties. He welcomes Robert, seats him, Robert glancing at a large wall photograph of Bremer’s wife and two daughters.

The producer reaffirms his enthusiasm for the project, his desire that everything in the book could be used—“all that great stuff” about Egypt and the Mayans, Stonehenge, Atlantis, UFOs, The Abominable Snowman, the Loch Ness Monsters, etc.

Robert smiles. “I think we’ll have more than enough even confining it to the area you mentioned.”

Alan nods, his gaze intent on Robert. “You think the rest would make it too much?”

“Not only too much but disjointed,” Robert says. “Those items don’t add up to anything. At least there’s some kind of continuity in the history of psi.”

“Right,” Alan gestures concedingly. As to details: where does Robert want to work on this?

“Oh, at home,” Robert says immediately. “All my material is there.”

Right, says Alan. That will work out fine since Peter Clarke and Cathy Graves are stationed in the New York area as well.

Robert’s face goes blank.

“Didn’t your agent tell you about them?” Alan asks, surprised. “They’re parapsychologists from England on a one-year loanout to ESPA in Manhattan. They’ll be your technical advisors.”

Robert hesitates, then shrugs. It doesn’t matter to him; it’s a job, no more.

Alan stands. “Come on, I’ll introduce you to her. She’s watching them shoot on the soundstage; we had lunch together.”

As they leave the office, Robert sees a framed motto on the wall which reads THAT WHICH YOU THINK BECOMES YOUR WORLD. “I like that,” he says.

“Applies to everything,” Alan responds.

Exiting the building with Robert, Alan says, “We’ve got to include the names of all the famous people interested in psi. Einstein. Edison. Newton. Lincoln. Freud. Houdini.”

Robert smiles. “I think Houdini was more interested in knocking it down than supporting it,” he says.

“Right,” agrees Alan. “Where would we start?”

Robert thinks a moment, then replies. “Some early incidents in psi might be appropriate.”

His voice narrates as we see some incidents from the early days of psi: King Croesus of Lydia testing the predictive power of his court seer; a witnessed levitation by St. Theresa; an incident from Swedenborg’s life as recounted by Kant; Mesmer and patients in his bizarre “healing” chamber; a leg amputation using, for the first time, “neuro-hypnosis” as an anesthetic; Baron Reichenback’s investigation of so-called “sensitives.”

“Great,” says Alan. “That should get us off in style.”

Entering the soundstage, Robert has another fantasy: Cathy Graves, tall and gaunt, with hawk-like features, thick-lensed glasses, wearing heavy tweed, her throaty voice heavily accented as she greets him with, “Ah! Mr. Allright!
So
! We’re to be shipmates on the sea of psi, as t’were!
Haw!”

He is more than slightly taken back by Cathy Graves’ appearance; she might well be starring in the film she’s been watching being shot. Alan introduces them, then leaves them “to get acquainted” as he goes to consult the film’s director.

Their “getting acquainted” is something less than satisfactory. Robert tries to be polite and pleasant but Cathy Graves appears to have pre-judged him sight unseen. She immediately makes it clear that she believes the film, if it is to be “of any import whatever”, must be strictly informational, scientific in approach. She is not interested in “pandering” to superstition.

Robert eyes her with a faint smile, judging her to be an intellectual snob as she tells him of her objections to the “assumed fringe” subjects of parapsychology; i.e. survival after death, reincarnation, astrology, palmistry, pyramid power, UFOs, the Bermuda Triangle et al.

“There is no methodology in these,” she states. “I trust those aspects of your book will be avoided.”

The faintest icing of his smile betrays his reactions to her.

Alan returns with a group of people—the director, actors, camera man, etc; he calls together further members of the crew. “Robert, tell them about the Great Seal,” he says.

Robert is trapped. Turning from Cathy, he tells everyone to take a dollar bill out and look at it.

Analysis of the Great Seal of the United States, he points out, indicates that the Republic’s founders were believers in the “ancient mysteries”, the Seal disclosing a number of occult symbols.

“For example,” he explains, “the unfinished pyramid with the All-Seeing Eye above it on the back side of the bill is an obvious rendition of the Masonic emblem.

“The mystical number 13 appears in the sacred emblem above the eagle, 13 stars in its center. The motto
E Pluribus Unum
contains 13 letters as does the reverse inscription
Annuit Coeptis
. The eagle clutches, in its talon, a branch bearing 13 leaves and 13 berries. In its left talon is a sheaf of 13 arrows and the face of the pyramid, exclusive of the panel containing the date, consists of 72 stones arranged in 13 rows.”

As he continues telling the intrigued group about this, he glances at Cathy.

She is not intrigued.

He turns away from her. He does not intend to lose much time with her regarding the project.