The Link (55 page)

John smiles without humor. “You’re psychic, can’t you tell?” he says.

Robert looks at him in silence. Suddenly, he feels a dull pain in his bowels that makes him wince.

“You all right?” John asks.

The pain fades, Robert draws in deep breath. “Just like mother,” he says.

John flinches. “Jeez, you really
are
psychic, aren’t you, kid?”

It’s his colon; probably the same thing that got their mother. “That’s why I hemmed and hawed when you asked me to go to Arizona with you,” he says. “I may not be much use to you.”

Robert puts his hand on John’s arm. What does John’s doctor say?

“The usual crap,” John answers irritably. “Chemo-therapy, etcetera, etcetera. I won’t go that route. I’ve seen it. I hate it.”

“Robert tries to talk him into not backing off from medical treatment so soon but John only gets aggravated by this. “Look, do you want your dying brother with you in the wilderness or should I go home?” he demands.

Robert smiles at him. “I want my brother with me in the wilderness,” he says quietly.

“Jeez,” says John. “That sounded almost biblical.”

Knowing that they need an expert with them, they drive to Norman Konrad’s apartment.

En route, Robert tells his brother what he’s come to believe. That their mother’s suicide filled him with dread and hatred for Spiritualism. She placed her life in its hands and, as far as Robert had been able to observe, it had failed her, made her kill herself and tear away from him the loving care he needed from her.

Now he understands. It wasn’t Spiritualism, it was their mother’s fear and pain.

His smile is somber. “I was doing what she begged me not to do,” he says. “Judging the belief, not the believer.”

He feels certain that is why he buried his ESP, feeling revulsion toward anything psychic. “I think when I wrote THINGS WITHOUT EXPLANATION, it was the first sign that it was coming back to me—or, rather, starting to come back out of me.”

Konrad’s reaction is not enthusiastic. He’s getting up in years, he tells them. The idea of going back into the desert heat to burrow in the ground for artifacts is not exactly appetizing to him anymore.

Robert gives him the journal, the three objects and the crystal. Then he and John go to a restaurant for a long lunch.

When they return, Konrad has finished skim-reading the journal. It has not impressed him outside, of course, of his father’s “admirable efficiency”.

What
has
impressed him is the clay face. Does Robert know, for a fact, that it was dug up at the Arizona site?

Robert says that he believes his father’s journal.

Konrad nods. “Well, it’s very odd,” he says. He doesn’t give much credence to the “ancient culture with unknown powers” notion mentioned by his father. “Can’t imagine why he’d write such a thing,” he says. “It doesn’t sound like him at all.”

He holds up the clay face. “But this,” he says. “This is something else again.”

The only other faces he has seen remotely similar were in two other digs he was on. Not in Arizona either.

One in Egypt, one in Mexico.

“Very, very odd,” he says.

They wait.

“You really mean to do this,” he says.

“As soon as possible,” Robert answers.

Norman hesitates. He makes an inconclusive sound. Finally he sighs. “Oh, well,” he says. “I’m getting tired of being comfortable anyway.”

Robert startles him by hugging him spontaneously.

Dinner with Cathy at her apartment.

He learns that Carol has gone back to England and seems happy to be reunited with her family.

“Does that mean you’re thinking of going back too?” he asks.

She says she doesn’t know. She can’t go back at the moment. She has a contract with ESPA and is deep in her work there. They are conducting “in-depth” examinations of the effects of a new sensory overload chamber on the human mind.

The chamber, she explains, contains a U-shaped screen around the seated object. A computer selects slides which are projected onto the screen by polarized light while stereo speakers surround the subject with appropriate music. The effect on subjects has been most dramatic: blossoming mental images, powerful emotional reactions, even religious experiences—

She stops. “You aren’t interested, are you?” she says.

“Of course I am.”

She shakes her head. “No,” she tells him sadly.

“Sweetheart,” he says. “I know it’s valuable to psi. I just need more right now.”

“And you’re going to find it digging up pieces of broken pottery in the Arizona heat,” she says.

He shakes his head. “I’m not going there to dig up pottery.”

“Robert, you could be so valuable to ESPA!” she pleads.

“Cathy, I’m not going to Arizona for the rest of my life,” he responds. “When I come back, I may very well go back to ESPA. But now I have to go to Arizona. There’s something there I have to find. Something important.”

“More important than us?” she asks, tears starting in her eyes.

“That isn’t fair,” he tells her quietly. “But since you insist on asking—something more important than any one person in the whole world. That’s what I believe.”

She gestures haplessly. “I guess that takes care of that,” she says.

She stands. “I’ll get dessert,” she mutters bleakly.

When Robert goes to Ann to tell her of his departure, she gets so upset that he finally asks Barbara if Ann can go with him. It won’t be primitive, he says. He’s using money left by his father to buy a used motor home. He’ll take good care of Ann, get her back in time for school.

To Ann’s delight—and Barbara’s attemptedly hidden but obvious relief—Ann is given permission to go. She hugs her father with joy.

August 8. Amelia throws a farewell party at her house. She and Norman get along so well that when she jokingly suggests she “may just come out to Arizona and join you”, Robert encourages it. They’d like nothing better, he enthuses.

During the party—a general festivity celebrating the outset of the trip the next day—Robert telephones Cathy. She is still at ESPA, working.

“You’re not going to make the party then?” he asks.

She starts to make an excuse, then says, with a weary sigh, “Rob, I’d only cry or get angry, what’s the point?”

She pauses. “Good luck,” she says. “I hope you find what you’re looking for.”

“I love you, Cathy,” he says.

“I love you too,” she says, sounding almost unhappy about it. “Let me know what happens.”

He hangs up and stands in the hallway of Amelia’s house, looking in at the party—Norman chatting animatedly with a pleased Amelia, Ann laughing with her Uncle John. He smiles at them all. It is a smile tinged with sadness over Cathy.

DISSOLVE TO early morning. They start off in the motor home, towing a jeep behind. Ann sits in the front with her father, Bartoo on her lap, John and Norman both asleep in back. “It’s just like when I was small,” says Ann, radiating happiness. “When we used to get up before dawn to go camping.”

Robert reaches over and takes her hand, kisses it. “I’m so glad you’re with me, sweetheart,” he says. “We’re going to find a new world, you and I.”

Later; all of them awake. They are nearly out of Pennsylvania, close to Ohio.

Perhaps affected by Robert’s and Ann’s casual acceptance of what he has always regarded as “autre” subjects, Norman starts to talk about the “suggested” multiple origin of the American Indian.

“There are some indications that several biologically different groups migrated to this hemisphere in the past,” he says.

“This could explain,” he goes on, “why American Indians have different blood genetics than the Asians—why, in fact, their blood is different from any other ethnic group in the world. Why their dental and skull parameters are so unique. Why they have over two hundred languages, none of which bear any resemblance to those of their supposed Asian ancestors.”

That’s why the artifacts, particularly the clay face, are so interesting to him. They seem to indicate a possibility that people existed in the Arizona area prior to previous archeological indications.

“I’ve heard it reported that some archeologists have found sites in America which seem to bear dates older than when the Bering Bridge existed. Not that I—”