Farmer, Philip José - Traitor to the Living (8 page)

She lit a cigarette, puffed on it a few times while looking at Carfax through the smoke and then said, "Won't you tell me what happened at Western's?"

He told her everything that seemed relevant. When he finished, he knew that he had angered her. The long slow puffs of cigarette smoke had become short and quick. But he was mistaken. Neither he nor Western was the object of her anger.

"Why would he lie about his invention?" she said loudly. "Why would he? What's the matter with the man? Can't he stand up for himself even when he's dead?"

"I don't understand," he said.

"I mean that he was always wishy-washy! He had no backbone! He would do anything rather than make somebody angry; and he could not stand being around an angry person! Why, I only had to look mad, and I got my way at once! It made it easy for me to get whatever I wanted, except the one thing I wanted most and couldn't get!"

Literature was full of descriptions of women whom anger made more beautiful. Patricia certainly wasn't one of them. A bitch on wheels of fire, Carfax thought. "And what was that one thing you most wanted and couldn't get?" he said, since Patricia evidently expected him to ask.

"What do you think?"

"You wanted him to stand up to you."

She looked surprised and then pleased.

"You're very perceptive. I like that."

"It didn't take much intelligence to see that," he said. He leaned forward. "To be frank, Patricia, no matter how pathological your father was about anger, he would now have no motive to lie. He's dead, and he can't be hurt by anybody in this world, and he surely would want the credit for MEDIUM if he had in ..."

"In what?"

He smiled and said, "Here I am talking as if the entity who calls himself your father really is your father. It's difficult to keep from thinking that those things are the dead, however."

"Gordon, I don't want to get into an argument with you about this. I know that Dad invented a machine to get into contact with the dead, and I know that those are the dead! I don't like to agree with Western, because he murdered my father. But he is right in what he claims MEDIUM can do. And you yourself said that it was my father's voice. Now, I wonder if Western doesn't have more power than he says he does. I mean, maybe he can not only talk to the dead and see them, but has some way of controlling them too. Maybe he can inflict pain if they don't do what he says."

"How could he?"

"How would I know?" she said angrily. "You told me he said that energy can affect them. Maybe he pours in a lot of energy and this is painful to them."

"Or maybe..."

"Yes?"

She leaned forward and to one side to punch out her cigarette in the tray, and the shield swung aside. Her breasts were shapely and full, neither too small nor too large, much like the ill-starred Edwina Booth's in the original Trader Horn.

"I have no evidence whatever to back up this speculation. But maybe Western is offering your father something, and this offer has made him lie."

"Why would he do that?" she said. Her face had smoothed out, but it was twisted again.

"I don't know," he said. "Maybe Western is lying to your father, offering, say, a chance to escape from that place. It may be the afterlife, but it doesn't seem to be heaven. Oh, what am I saying! There I go again, talking as if they are the dead,"

"Why is it you're so strongly opposed to the idea?"

"Don't start that psychological stuff with me," he said.

She was silent for a minute, then opened her mouth, but closed it when three short whistles came out of the door communicator. Carfax got up, walked to the door, looked through the peephole, and spoke the codeword that released the lock. The dome-shaped turtle wheeled in, stopped when Carfax ordered it to do so, and the top opened up. Carfax removed the tray on which were the dishes and cups and told the turtle to leave. The door swung open for it, and it disappeared. Patricia ate all the food as if she had missed several meals. Carfax got hungry watching her and helped her eat all the dishes and the tableware except for a spoon. The room service had forgotten to refill the solvosauce bottle, and so there was not enough left to melt the spoon.

"It's cherry anyway," he said, turning the spoon so that the raised word on its handle could be seen in the light. "I never cared for synthetic cherry, though I do love a home-baked cherry pie."

The tray was chocolate milkshake flavor, and he would have liked to have eaten it later. But he didn't feel like calling room service again. He poured out an ounce of Drambuie apiece, and they silently toasted each other.

"You know," he said, "it's possible that what I talked to was not your father, but a fake. I suppose that someone could have been imitating his voice. And his seeming to jump out of the screen at me could have been a holograph."

"But why would Western fake it?"

"Possibly to scare me off. And to stop me asking questions." He hesitated and then said, "Uncle Rufton never did answer me when I asked him if human mediums could get through to the dead. To the sembs, I mean."

"You can ask your wife that," Patricia said.

"And what if she doesn't know? The ... sembs ... are not omniscient, you know, not by any means."

"I've been to a very famous medium," she said, "a Mrs. Holles Webster. She seems to be honest. At least, she's been cleared of fakery by the Syracuse University Psychic Research Committee."

"You went to a medium? Never mind answering, you just said you did. But why? To talk to your? ..."

She nodded and said, "Yes, my father."

"And the result?"

"I went twice, and Mrs. Webster failed both times. But the last time she said she was starting to make contact; she could feel it."

"Feel it?"

"She claims that a human medium, the sincere ones, that is, probably operate on the same principles and in the same manner as MEDIUM. But the human medium uses somewhat different sensors and indicators. Instead of a viewscreen and meters, she uses a neural complex which comes through to her as a feeling. It's almost as reliable as the needle on a meter with its numbered graduations."

"And she makes contact with the dead, not with sembs, right?"

"As a matter of fact," Patricia said, "I asked her about that. She said she had no doubt at all that the beings she summoned were really the spirits of the departed. But she did say that it was possible that your theory was right. Or at least had some truth in it. She was inclined to think that Western had tapped right into the world of demons. Oh, don't smile! She didn't mean little homed devils with pitchforks and all that.

She meant evil spirits. Or evil entities of some sort. Not the ghosts of wicked humans but something like . .. well ... fallen angels. She claims that they disguise themselves as humans in order to . .."

She stopped when Carfax sighed heavily.

"What's the matter? I know it sounds ridiculous--to you anyway, and even somewhat to me--but..."

"Mrs. Webster's theory is a distortion of mine," he said. "She uses the term wicked spirits or fallen angels to account for those entities. And I use the more scientific semb, though in a different sense from Western's usage. At least, semb sounds more scientific. But it can't stand up to any analysis. I have no evidence to back up my theory, any more than Mrs. Webster has. Except that MEDIUM shows a world that sure as hell isn't like any spiritual universe anybody ever postulated.

And if the beings we see on medium's screen are really the dead, then they're in hell!"

"But Mrs. Webster says that we are only seeing what an electronic device can show us. We aren't seeing the reality, any more than an electronic wave rising from the beating of a heart shows us the heart itself."

"That's Western's analogy, but with a different interpretation," Carfax said gloomily.

He was silent for a few minutes. Patricia sat quite still except for the motions required to smoke her cigarette.

"All right," he said, "let's see Mrs. Webster. You make an appointment with her for next week, say, Monday."

"You sound very skeptical."

"I am, but if the dead can communicate with us, I don't see why the communication has to be through a machine. Anyway, I'm not so narrow-minded that I won't even give a hypothesis a test."

"Could I have another drink?"

"Sure."

He got up and poured her two ounces of Wild Turkey over three ice cubes. When he handed it to her, he felt a shock as if static electricity had leaped between them. But the voltage was psychic, not electrical. It was apparent that some of her thought had paralleled his.

A little shaken, he returned to his chair. She was his first cousin. But he had no idea of making her pregnant, and, anyway, he had not bedded a woman for a long time, and he did feel some affection for her.

Maybe more than he wanted to admit to himself.

It was then that his early suspicion that she might have been sent by Western, that her appearance was the first act in a put-up drama, returned to him.

"You bastard," he told himself. "You're too cynical.

And you're too afraid of having warm feelings for another woman. You're scared to death that something might happen to her and cause you pain again."

Patricia sipped her drink and said, "You never told me about your breakdown."

Was she trying to get information which she could pass on to Western?

"You look funny," she said. "I'm sorry if I seem to be nosey. If you don't want to talk about it, O.K."

"I don't like to talk about it because even I find it unbelievable when I tell it. There is only one explanation,

I tell myself, and that is that I was crazy. For a while, anyway. Certain things did happen; there's plenty of objective evidence for that. But my observations of them must have been strained through a very distorted filter. And the witnesses I had depended upon to back my story clammed up. Even those I trusted the most. But then they didn't want to be thought crazy, either."

She leaned forward and said, eagerly, "What did happen?"

He smiled and said, "Vampires and werewolves and ghosts and ghoulies and things that went bump in the night. And in the daytime, too. But I had been given LSD or something like it, no doubt of that. They seemed to be genuine objective phenomena to me at the time. And there are times when I still think they were. However, such things couldn't be, so I tell everybody that I was under the influence of a psychedelic.

"Even so, I'm not so sure now that there aren't things happening around us that cannot be explained by big capital S Science."

"What did happen?"

"I'm certified sane now and I intend to stay that way. Let's drop that subject."

Patricia looked disappointed.

"I'm sorry," he said, "but the details might convince you that I'm unreliable. Maybe I am. In any event, I decided to get out of the investigation business, change my name, and drop out of sight. But here I am, back in L.A. and a private eye again. So much for free will." "Just one thing, and I'll quit asking about it," she said. "Were you taking LSD?"

"No, it was slipped into my drink."

And if she were Western's agent, he thought, what is to prevent her putting a psychedelic in my drink and so discrediting me? If she planned to do that, she certainly had made no move to do so tonight. She hadn't been out of his sight for a second. He felt ashamed of his suspicions, though logic told him that he should question everyone.

She stood up and said, "The bathroom calls."

It was all right to look into her purse, he told himself. He'd be a fool not to. Yet he felt as if he were betraying her, and he felt even more so when he found nothing except what was to be expected. That included a bottle of contraceptive and anti-VD pills.

He made up his mind then. When she came out of the door, he was waiting. She looked up at him quickly and came into his arms.

Afterward, as he was falling asleep, he wondered briefly if the dead could see the living. Frances wouldn't like this, but then she didn't have to hang around. Besides, it took a machine to get them even halfway into this world.

Just before sleep finally pulled him down, he thought: what am I talking about? I don't believe that there is an afterlife; the sembs are parallel-world phenomena. Or something.

"Nothing has been proved or disproved," Gordon Carfax said. "The bishop tried to exorcise MEDIUM, and he had a heart attack, that's all."

"But how could Western have known that Bishop Shallund would pick out a childhood playmate, one who died at the age of eleven, one whom Western could not possibly have known anything about? Besides, Western didn't know who was going to be on the committee until the last moment."

"We know he's very rich, and we can assume that he's unscrupulous," Gordon said. "He may have found out who was chosen some time ago, even if it was supposed to be a deep secret. And he may have put his researchers to digging up everything they could find about the committee members. No, all this committee has done is to make everything even more muddy. And it has increased the tensions. The pro-MEDIUMs are claiming that the dead resented the committee and that Everts killed Shallund because he wouldn't believe that he was Everts. Or, rather, he frightened Shallund so much that he had a fatal heart attack.

"And the anti-MEDIUMs are still in two schools. One claims that Western is a fraud; the other believes that he is a witch, a Faust, who is tampering with forces that should be left alone.

"We're right where we were, except that passions are roused even higher."

"And what do you think about the validity of Western's claims?"

"I haven't changed my mind. Not yet, anyway. I will admit that I may be biased. My resistance to the idea that there could be an afterlife may be warping my judgment."

"You'll talk to Frances today, and no matter how extensively Western has researched her, he won't be able to find out everything. There are some things that only you would know about her."

Gordon smiled and said, "Yes, but according to my theory that won't matter. It won't be Frances I'll be talking to; it will be some thing, some entity, that has some means of knowing everything about Frances. Mind reading, maybe. Or perhaps it's observed Frances from her birth and so knows all about her."