Psychomech (9 page)

While he had talked they both had watched the screen, had seen Vicki collapse on to Garrison, their bodies shuddering in unison. Mina’s nipples had hardened along with a return of Schroeder’s erection. ‘Maybe this time, Thomas,’ she said, moving her hand a little faster, more rhythmically, and opening her shapely legs until his hand slid into her moistness.

‘Perhaps,’ he answered, ‘but I don’t think so.’

She pouted as only a German girl can. ‘You’re not even trying!’

‘No, I don’t think I am. They have me fascinated.- See how they cling, drenched in sweat and revelling in it? And Vicki, she—’

‘She is surprising even you now, eh?’

‘That boy,’ said Schroeder, changing the subject in a moment, ‘could be an image of myself at his age. He has the vigour.’

‘Perhaps he’s just been saving it?’

‘Oh, yes, I imagine so,’ Schroeder nodded. ‘Enforced abstinence. His blindness. But the way they
cling
—like real lovers…’

‘Love at first sight?’

‘They can’t get enough of each other. They feel they should be able to stretch their skins flat, one on top of the other. She would like to be able to draw him in utterly, his entire being, body and soul. And he desires so to be drawn. They want to explore, to know everything, now.’

‘Thomas, I—’ She was beginning to sound tired.

‘No, no!’ he quietened her. ‘We must see this out. There’s an unusual excitement here. Listen, Mina, you talked about Vicki being a nice girl. Well so she is, but—’ He paused. ‘Before the night is out, Garrison will enter her by the third route. And it will be a first for both of them.’

‘No, you are mistaken,’ she told him. ‘Only lovers in the fullest—’

‘They will!’

‘No, by 3.00 it will be over. They’ll sleep like babes.’

‘5.00 at the earliest,’ Schroeder insisted. ‘And it will be as I said.’

‘Are you wagering?’

‘Double your normal cheque if I’m wrong!’

‘Ah! You fed him some of your mushrooms, of course!’

‘No, I had the mushrooms.’

‘Then it must soon be over.’

‘Mina, you are quite wrong.’

‘But how can you be so sure?’

‘Because I
remember
how it was, Mina! I remember it so well.’

‘Double my normal cheque?’ she said after a while.

He merely nodded, his eyes glued to the screen. He knew it was money she would never collect…

‘D
ay Two, Richard,’ said Schroeder over a very late breakfast. ‘And the sun already high, and we haven’t even started yet. So much for late nights and demon drink eh?’

‘Yes,’ Garrison agreed, his mind dull in a drained body. But the food was good and plenty, and he knew that strength would soon flow back into him. He thought of last night and of Vicki, and begrudged the three and a half hours they had slept (died?) in each other’s arms before he had returned to his own room.

Nor had he left her any too soon, for within a half-hour he had been awake again, this time at the insistence of ‘nurse’, a crusty old Fraulein (Frau?) whose word was apparently law. He remembered wondering what she would have thought if she’d entered his room an hour earlier—or worse, Vicki’s room!

‘Er,’ (he hadn’t wanted to seem obvious, but—) ‘where is Vicki, by the way?’

‘Vicki? She rose, breakfasted, swam, went back to bed. She has no tight schedule like you. Also, she seemed very tired this morning. But don’t worry, we’ll all have a late lunch and you can talk to her then.’

She must have got up immediately after he had left her, Garrison thought. But was that amusement in Schroeder’s voice? He couldn’t quite make up his mind.

‘Are you ready for today?’ Schroeder continued. ‘Perhaps you didn’t sleep too well? You, too, seem a little tired.’

‘Ready?’ Garrison answered. ‘For the sixth building, the Big Secret—the future? I won’t go to sleep on you, promise.’

‘First the library,’ said Schroeder. ‘I want to show you some books, ask you certain questions.’

Garrison felt a sudden uneasiness. ‘This isn’t all going to be a pain like yesterday, is it?’

‘Oh, no,’ Schroeder shook his head. ‘If I’m right you’ll find it all very interesting.’

They finished their coffees and Garrison pushed Schroeder to the library building. There Schroeder used an electronic key to unlock the library’s shatterproof glass doors.

Garrison then guided the chair to the bookshelves lining the walls. Now he found the books—books by the hundreds, the thousands—and let his hands run over their spines.

‘The shelves are only two meters high,’ Schroeder told him, and went on to explain: ‘I hate shelves you need a chair to reach! But they fill all four large rooms on both floors. And they contain more than three hundred and ten thousand books. Hardbacks, softbacks, magazines, periodicals, first editions, rare collector’s items, cheap pulps. Yes, and they all have one thing in common. A single theme, you might say.’

‘Oh?’ Garrison was politely curious.

‘The mysterious, the unexplained, the supernatural, the strange, the esoteric…’

‘Weird stuff? I was never much interested in—’

‘That shelf you are touching now,’ Schroeder cut in, ‘contains books dealing with ESP. About two hundred of them. To your right are some fifty volumes dealing with possession. To your left, about thirty on alchemy. Over here we have astronomy, and right alongside it astrology. A great number of books on the latter.’

Schroeder was on his feet now. He took Garrison’s elbow and led him to a shelf standing apart from the rest. Beside it a small table was littered with books. ‘This subject, however, is my favourite. You see, I have a table here where I can sit and read without going up to the observatory.’

An odd chill struck Garrison. It was as if a cold wind suddenly blew on him from his host, like the one he had felt in the gardens when they were looking for the mushrooms. Perhaps it had something to do with the man’s voice, which had taken on a new (guarded?) intensity. But guarded or otherwise, this preternatural chill told Garrison that whatever Schroeder said or did in the next few minutes, he would be in deadly earnest.

‘Do you remember what you said to me yesterday evening when I told you I didn’t have a great deal of time left?’ Schroeder asked, and quickly continued: ‘You said that—’

‘You’d live forever,’ Garrison finished it for him. As he spoke a word jumped to the front of his mind, formed itself and fell out of his mouth almost unbidden. ‘Reincarnation.’

Schroeder gasped but Garrison only smiled. He had always been quick on the uptake. After a moment the industrialist took his elbow and said, ‘Sit.’ He held a chair for Garrison. They sat at the table and Garrison could hear Schroeder turning the leaves of a book. ‘Reincarnation, yes. Metempsychosis. Do you believe?’

Garrison shrugged. ‘I suppose I’ve given it some thought, not much.’

‘Men have given it thought since the very first men knew how to think,’ the other told him. ‘I think, therefore I am—and will go on being!I have more than two hundred and forty works on the subject, in all languages, and there is an even greater number which I do not deem worthy of my collection. And I’ll tell you something: the older a man gets, the more he thinks about it. It’s like believing in God. The closer you get to dying the more inclined you are to believe.’

‘And you really do believe,’ said Garrison. He made it a statement of fact, not a question.

‘I do, yes. Richard, I have a son. Thanks to you he still lives. He is healthy, he will be handsome, intelligent. He will have a full life. If I had twenty years—if I had even ten—perhaps I could find a way to return, to come back in the body of my son.’

Garrison was suddenly prompted to laugh. He did no such thing, however, but merely sat motionless. He could still feel the chill, the tension in Schroeder’s voice, the goose-flesh creeping on his arms. No, this was no time for laughter; the man was deadly serious.

Finally Garrison said, ‘Come back in the body of your son? Usurp his mind, you mean? Return as Thomas Schroeder?’

He sensed the other’s denial, the immediate shaking of his head. ‘No, no. That is quite impossible.’ (Again the air of absolute sincerity, conviction.) ‘No, it would be more a sharing. I would be Heinrich, he would be me. And we would go on together. But… I don’t have ten years. I don’t have ten months. Heinrich is a mere child, a baby. He knows nothing. To come back in him, if it is at all possible, would be to lose myself. I would not know!Do you understand?’

‘In his untried mind the greater You would overflow, spill out. Only a spark of You would remain. Without even knowing it he would evict You. Your identity would be gone forever.’

‘Exactly! Your grasp is amazing.’

The chill was now intense. Garrison could feel Schroeder leaning closer, the man’s hot unpleasant breath in his face. He suddenly feared what Schroeder might say next. But when it .came it was anticlimax:

‘Richard, what of dreams?’

‘Dreams? What of them?’

‘Are you not a dreamer? Do you dream when you are asleep?’

‘Of course. I’ve had dreams, like anyone else. But not recent—’ He froze, the word incomplete. He drew air in a gasp, pictured the industrialist’s fear-shiny face as he had seen it at the doors of the Europa in Belfast. Suddenly it fitted perfectly over another face he had thought long banished in realms of nightmare.

A face in the sky—that of the man-God- bald-headed, with a high-domed forehead, eyes made huge through thick lenses—

Garrison shook his head, but to no avail. More of that old dream came flowing back, unbidden except by Schroeder’s question, flashing on his mind’s eye like stills from some old film.

A man with a crewcut, blond, standing beside a silver Mercedes atop an impossibly steep crag—

Garrison’s mind whirled.

‘Richard, are you all right?’ Schroeder’s voice, full of concern, seemed to come from a million miles away. It dragged Garrison back to reality. But though the rest of his dream remained shrouded, those two definite images stayed sharp, mirror-bright on his memory. The man-God’s face in the sky—Schroeder’s face—and the crewcut man with the Mercedes, who could only be Willy Koenig. Those images and one other
of a burning brown-paper parcel, a cube of lashing energy and glaring, searing, blinding light and heat!

Schroeder’s fingers dug into his wrist. ‘Richard—!’

‘I’m… all right. You woke something in me, that’s all. Something frightening. I had forgotten it, until now.’

‘What?’ Schroeder did not relax his grip. ‘What did I awake in you?’

‘A memory. I remembered a dream. A recurrent dream. Parts of it, anyway. A dream of you, and of Willy Koenig.’

Schroeder’s fascination was a tangible thing. ‘Oh? And when did this occur? When you knew you were coming out here to see me?’

Garrison shook his head. ‘No, long before that. It was something that happened to me over a period of about three weeks. A recurrent nightmare that came again and again. A warning. You were in it, and Koenig—and the bomb!’

‘The bomb?’ Koenig’s voice was a whisper.

Garrison nodded. ‘And the last time I dreamed it was—the night before the Europa!’

‘The night
before
the Eur—’ the German repeated, his words fading into a sigh.

For the first time in his life, Richard Garrison was glad he was blind. Glad, at least, that he could not see the other’s face. But he could still feel it. That look of amazement slowly turning to—

To what? Disbelief? Hope?

… Or triumph?

‘A hypnotist? Are you serious?’ Garrison had not yet learned that this was a question unworthy of his host. If Schroeder said he would do something, he would do it.

‘With your permission, yes.’

‘But why? I don’t understand.’

They were now in the observatory at the top of Schroeder’s library building, seated at a large circular table where the sun struck in at them through curving windows. The table’s top was smooth, cool and metallic. Schroeder had come up in a tiny lift only recently fitted, installed specially to accommodate his wheelchair. Garrison had climbed the stairs.

‘I wish to know those portions of the dream you can’t remember. A good hypnotist could probably draw them out of you. I know some of the very best.’

‘But is it so important? I mean, I can’t even remember now if the thing was real. Do you know what I mean? I might have confused things. I may have dreamed it after the explosion, while I was still in hospital.’

‘I don’t think so,’ replied Schroeder. ‘You were pretty certain a few minutes ago. No, I would prefer to believe that it was precognition. You have that sort of mind, Richard.’

‘I do? How could you possibly know that?’

‘Powers of observation,” Schroeder answered. ‘Your instinctive reactions, for instance. Why, you seem sometimes to act upon a thing before it happens. Take for example Gunter’s intrusion upon us in the woods. You sensed, heard, knew he was there before I had even suspected it. And I can see perfectly well. And I knew that there were men in the woods.’

‘But it’s a recognized fact that if you lose one of your senses the other four try to even up the score, become sharper.’

‘In time, yes,’ Schroeder agreed. ‘But your four surviving senses have not yet had time to develop such an edge—or if they have you are even more unusual than I suspect.’

‘But what is it about the dream that so interests you?’

‘What? Can I believe my own ears? Why, I was part of that dream, before ever you met me!’

Garrison frowned. Shadows seemed to be lifting from his mind. After a moment he said, ‘I can remember more of it now.’

‘Go on then,’ said Schroeder eagerly. ‘Go on, by all means.’

‘There was a girl, with huge eyes and shiny black hair.’

‘Oh? Did she have a name?’

Garrison shook his head. ‘I can’t remember. But—I had never seen her face. What I knew of her I knew by touch, or perhaps I had heard it from her. I think I knew her body. I’m not sure.’

‘Anyone else in the dream who you had never seen?’

‘Yes, a man.’ Garrison tried to concentrate. ‘A man in a castle. No description but—’

‘Yes?’

‘I think—yes, he’s tall, slim, and—a liar. A cheat!’