Tintagel (29 page)

Christy had found the projection room door. They turned around when she switched on the lights. She found the microphone. The projection room was entirely soundproofed.

"OK in here," she said behind the window of the booth.

Ken Collins was beside her with his briefcase.

Katie turned back to Lanier, worried. "And can you do it with a recording as well?"

"Yes," Lanier told her. "It can be done on any recorded medium. What Randell has here is a perfect method to gauge and control the emotional states of anyone within reach of radio, television, or the movies. In this case, he's used it to amass a fortune through the movie industry—and he's kept the process totally secret. So, with the Syndrome bacterium causing so much personal disorder in the lives of people all over the world, who wouldn't want to go to the movies to bury his or her troubles?"

"Incredible!" Katie exclaimed. "I just can't understand how a thing like this works."

"Well," he said, "apparently it does. Randell had to be careful with the Interphase ingraining. I suspect that he kept the vibrations at a very low level. He couldn't have his audiences vanishing where they sat. First, that would attract suspicion. Second, he would stand to lose millions of dollars from his main source of income. No, he's not stupid at all."

Lanier turned to the crew boss. "Show us how it works and set it up." He faced the soldiers. "The rest of you can get out now. I'll need absolute quiet."

The small man hastened over to the machine, busying himself with the dials.

Everyone vacated the room but the President and Charlie Gilbert. Collins and Christy looked on from the windows of the projection booth.

"Where's the film you want to show?" the crew boss asked Lanier.

"Not film, but sonic-wafer." Lanier removed his long coat, keeping the shoulder bolster and Malachi in place.

"What?"

Christy waved from the booth. Between her slender fingers she held the centimeter-square sonic-wafer. She slotted it into the console.

"We're using a sonic-wafer," Lanier told the little man. "We're going to ingrain my Interphase responses onto a recording."

The man looked at Lanier as if he were insane.

Lanier continued: "So you'll have to set the machine for the adjustment."

He lay down on the couch.

Quite reluctantly the crew boss attached the leads to Lanier's wrists. Then he rubbed some petroleum jelly on his temples for the headband contact points.

"Listen, you," Christy said to the crew boss through the microphone. "I've got the switchover down. Turn the machine there all the way up." She was adjusting a dial before her.

The boss looked at her, halting. He said, "Are you crazy? Do you know what that'll do?"

Christy smiled, settling back in the swivel chair at the board. But Lanier wasn't smiling now. No one said anything.

"Go ahead," he told the man. "Do as you're told."

"Francis … ;" Katie started.

"Yes?"

"Are you sure this'll work?"

Lanier craned his eyes upward from the couch, looking at her.
The President of the United States
, he thought.

"There's no reason why not. I suspect that no one has tried the Leander Interphase at full capacity. No doubt they kept the intensity down when Ellie sat here recording her own responses. But still, they wouldn't have known."

Katie looked concerned.

"Collins?" Lanier spoke loud enough for Ken to hear through the microphone in the booth.

He leaned over Christy's shoulder into the board mike. "Yes, Francis."

"Don't screw up. Make several recordings. If Randell stops you, make sure that Colonel Johannsen has a copy. I don't want to spend the rest of my life alone."

And he meant it. No one knew what he was feeling. No one knew how close he had come to giving up. But the fragments of hope had been cast about him like broken bits of a china teacup. Slowly, though, the pieces had begun to fit.
Everything is connected
, as Two Moons often said.

Everything.

"Count on it," Collins reassured him.

"One other thing," Lanier told him. "And this includes you too, Christy. Turn off the audio in the booth. Watch the meters to see that the entire piece is played through. But I don't want anyone listening. If I understand things right, the Interphase is extremely powerful. Got it?"

"Got it," and she dimmed the lights.

"OK, I'm set." He turned to Katie Babcock and Charlie. "You two better get out now." He smiled. "And take care of yourselves."

She inhaled weakly. "Fran …"

Charlie held her arm. "It'll be all right. You'll see." He turned to the crew boss, who had completed the operation. "Let's go into the booth, friend. You've got a few more things to do."

And they left Lanier alone, with his thoughts, in the dark.

Chapter Fifteen

Tintagel, Symphonic Poem

Sir Arnold Bax

That night in Lanier's Montana ranch house, they had all realized that the situation before them had reached crisis proportions. And they realized that its resolution went beyond the simple arrest and exposure of Albertson Randell. The deaths of Perry Eventide and Floyd Matkin proved as much. His arrest could not in itself undo everything he had caused, either directly or indirectly. Lanier had Ellie Estevan to think about. Someone had to pay for her destruction, somehow.

Moreover, they knew that if someone as stable as the President of the United States could succumb, then the political and environmental circumstances that prompted her disappearance were absolutely beyond anyone's capacity to deal with. That Senator Randell wanted the presidency only showed his overall irresponsibility. They realized that the man was clearly insane.

He only wanted to be on top, another King Croesus, the most powerful man in the world. He apparently had found a cure for Liu Shan's Syndrome, kept it to himself and his allies, and planned on keeping it out of the reach of the rest of the nation. And the world.

They had no proof before them, but it made sense.

And, in the time that Francis Lanier had journeyed to retrieve the President from the flying Shawnee, Charlie and Christy Gilbert had pieced most of it together. Lanier, torn by the unexpected death of Ellie Estevan, had figured out what they had missed.

And more, much more.

If it hadn't have been for his urge to drive into town to see
Halcyon Days
, he might not have stumbled onto their only workable solution. All the loose ends had suddenly, clearly, come together. Everything made sense, finally.

It wasn't enough to put Albertson Randell out of business. As they knew, there was no real incriminating association to be made between himself and the deaths of Eventide, Matkin, and Ellie Estevan. There was no way they could concretely demonstrate that Randell had intentionally authorized the use of the Leander Interphase Translator at the White Condor Studios. And it could have been pure coincidence that the Vice President was genuinely ill, sleeping in a coma, and that the Speaker of the House was missing or succumbed. And it could have been someone else who put a neutralizer in Katie Babcock's drink, making her succumb to Liu Shan's Syndrome.

Randell, of course, would make an apologetic show of bowing out gracefully when Katie and Ken Collins stomped into the worldwide telecast that Randell had scheduled for the next day. Everyone would be surprised and overjoyed that the President was back, and healthy. And Senator Randell would insist that he had to take firm measures while she was gone. He would be happy to step aside. He would be contrite. He would be humble.

But that wouldn't do, Lanier realized. All the problems that Katie Babcock faced—that they
all
ultimately faced—would still be with them. Some were surmountable. Most of them not.

And Lanier had hit on the solution by looking into the startled faces of the two air-marauding Indians and the other surviving Walkers who came out into the living room later that night with headaches and sore spots where the anesthetic needles were delicately dissolving into their skins.

"What if," Lanier had asked them excitedly, "there were a world, a fabrication, that was composed of Walkers only? Or real people and not dreamlings? What if everyone could enter the
same
world when they succumbed to Liu Shan's Syndromer?"

They looked at him as if he had been driven over the edge by the crisis and the death of Ellie Estevan. He even looked older to them.

But it did make sense.

And so he found himself alone, lying on the contoured couch, wired in to the Leander Interphase Translator.
Alone
. Everyone was in the projection booth, staring into the darkness of the chamber before them.

In the few minutes left to Lanier before Christy engaged the sonic-wafer, the crew boss attended to the proper adjustment of the volume and intensity. Colonel Johannsen stood at his side with the business end of a .45 automatic aimed at his ribs.

Alone
. Lanier could hear only the sound of his own breathing. Christy then engaged the sonic-wafer, and Lanier made a concerted effort to calm his mind like he never had before.

Tintagel
. It was a symphonic poem he had heard only once before in his life. It was by Sir Arnold Trevor Bax, who died in the middle of the last century. The piece was obscure enough that if anyone heard
Tintagel
they would have no previous emotional ties to the work. It would make Lanier's task easier, make the transition much smoother than it would normally have been.

Tintagel
…

And he thought. And he felt. He fell into the vibrations with the full force of his psyche. The emotion surged up through the shields of his consciousness.
Ellie. Marie
. The multitude of feelings poured out through the Leander Interphase Translator, following the beautiful strains of
Tintagel
, and were in turn transcribed onto the sonic-wafer slotted before Christy in the projection booth.

And as
Tintagel
played and translated Lanier's pitched emotional responses onto the sonic-wafer, he thought about that world.
Tintagel
!

It would be empty of people. The skies would be clean, free of pollutants, the winds would blow clear, and trees would grow where trees hadn't grown in decades. Oceans would be full of the lost herds of whales, and aeroplankton would only be a memory.

An untouched world. An untapped world, the riches of the earth buried and just waiting to be used, all over again.
This time in the right way
…

The music would allow for that world. It would be a tranquil world, and Lanier, with his mind and imagination, built that world. There would be cities, empty and waiting. As he floated in the music, he let the vibrations take their own course. And the music: he could see it before him.

The cities were smaller, more efficient. Everywhere. There would be fewer people to inhabit them. There would be fewer roads, fewer markings upon the land. Everything in proper order. Harmonious, like the music.

And, for the first time in years, he longed for such serenity, such pastoral beauty, just like the worlds he had entered for Matkin and Eventide. Even Ellie Estevan within her hemisphere almost had it right. They knew what it took to bring them to peace. For the point was, why stay in the worst of all possible worlds?
Why
?

So, Lanier yearned to make the world complete. He yearned for perfect clouds of silver and white up against a bright blue sky. He yearned for the stars to be uncluttered by smoke and haze. No more radioactive wastes buried in salt domes or in storage vaults. No more mutant diseases like the bacterium that caused the Syndrome itself. It would be a new world entirely. And it would be built from scratch.

His emotions peaked. His heart beat in time to the music. For the first time in years, he wanted things to be perfect.

And he succumbed to
Tintagel
.

And dropped onto the grassy slope of the hill behind his small ranch in Montana. Broad afternoon. December. The air was crystal clear and snow lay in patches on the ground, absolutely white and pure. He could feel the calmness. He could feel the world empty of the people yet to come. Missoula, just kilometers down the road, was smaller, and waiting patiently.

And, moreover, he couldn't hear the music—
Tintagel
—any longer. The music had vanished along with the former world. His heart raced with keen excitement. He had made it! He no longer had disease, no longer had to sustain his mantra, no longer needed the music.

This world was now the real world.

A cold wind brushed up against him, and he realized that he was without his coat. He had come into this world as he had left the other one. He ran down to his ranch. Autumn and winter were his favorite seasons; seasons not of death, but of survival. They were seasons he had missed living in Los Angeles selling his worthless pieces of real estate, seasons he often felt gave meaning to his life.

But that was in another world, many years ago.

And, he realized, this would be a good year. If Collins pulls it off. A good year for everyone involved.

At eight o'clock, Eastern Standard Time, the reporters of the remaining news agencies and newspapers waited that morning for Senator Albertson Randell, acting President, to enter the White House press room. Cameras and sound equipment had already been set up by the technical staff, and everyone waited tensely, mulling over among themselves the various rumors that had brought them there.

In the director's booth at the rear of the large room, a handful of men, wearing headsets and speaking in low voices, coordinated the proceedings, counting down the seconds to go before air time. The news conference was being telecast around the globe. And where video didn't reach, radio did. Randell had seen to it that the satellite connections were functioning well; at least as best they could under the circumstances.

The statistical projections for the press conference audience held that over three hundred million people had direct access to television facilities, not including radio. Since most businesses and industries were temporarily at a standstill, the experts couldn't predict just how many people would be watching. As it was, many cities in both America and Europe were without electricity: some were on fire. Mexico City was a nuclear holocaust. Its war with Venezuela was over. Tokyo was gone. Peking smoldered in its ruins. Moscow was incommunicado.