Reality Matrix Effect (9781310151330) (17 page)

“Holy shit,” Keith breathed, eyes riveted on
Rayna’s computer terminal display. “I see what you mean. I never
noticed the pattern.”

“I didn’t, either. Not until I ran this
trend-analysis program. I’ve been having some problems getting
through to my students lately. I thought maybe if I could tie the
lessons into the latest social and political trends—things that
mean something to the kids—it might help. Having 24-hour
world-watch service makes it pretty simple to use the program. News
events automatically plug right in. But I never expected to find
anything like this.”

They gazed silently at the screen as the
display scrolled to a new set of graphs.

“They all say basically the same thing,”
Keith said, more to himself than to Rayna. “All those things that
have been happening. New problems in the Middle East. The rumblings
of war in Africa. The rumors of revolution in South America. Even
the increasing crime rate right here in Los Angeles. The world’s
going straight to hell!”

Rayna nodded uncomfortably. “Yes.”

“And the trend line leads back to
mid-April?  Just about the time Al Frederick died?”

Another nod.

“But what makes you think there’s a
connection?”

Without saying a word, Rayna tapped the
appropriate instructions into the terminal’s keyboard, and a new
chart appeared on the screen.

“This trend line’s based on a composite index
using the same kind of statistics that the other graphs used. Only
this one gives an overall picture of what’s been going on for the
last hundred years. The solid parts of the line cover the periods
before 1971 and after Al’s death. The broken line here covers the
period in between. Notice anything peculiar?”

Keith studied the screen carefully before
speaking. “It almost looks as if... as if....”

“As if there’s a discontinuity,” Rayna
interrupted. “As if something—or someone—skewed the curve and made
it veer off its natural course!”

“And you think that something might be
related to Al Frederick’s death?”

Rayna tilted her chin upward and closed her
eyes, inhaling deeply. Keith could almost feel her body shaking.
Finally, she released her breath in a heavy sigh.

“I’m not really sure, Keith. You still don’t
know the whole story. Al was....  I don’t know. Maybe Al was
crazy. Maybe
I’m
crazy even to consider the possibility. But
it certainly would explain what’s been happening lately.”

“Go on,” said Keith, “I’m listening.”

Rayna frowned thoughtfully. “No,” she said
slowly, “I don’t want you to listen to me. I want you to listen to
Al.” 

Keith’s eyebrows arched in surprise. Rayna
reached beneath the computer table and slid out the permastore box
that Al Frederick had left her. “Here,” she said as tonelessly as
she could manage. “Take these in the other room. Listen to the
first two or three tapes.”

“Look, why don’t you just give me a
summary.”

Rayna swallowed, pressed her lips together
firmly and repeated simply, “Listen to the first two or three
tapes.”

“Honey, I really think—”

Keith’s protest was cut short by the
electronic tone that signaled an incoming call. Rayna pressed the
“accept” key on her comm terminal, and a vaguely familiar face took
shape on the screen.

“Aurora?” Rayna said with surprise. “This is
certainly unexpected!  I don’t think I’ve seen you since we
went to that concert of colonial music six months ago!”

That’s right, Keith recalled as he examined
the angular face on the screen. Her name’s
Aurora—Aurora...something. Oh, yes. Sanger. Aurora Sanger. Tall,
attractive woman in her mid-twenties. Her boyfriend Rafe’s some
kind of artist—the guy who made that holopainting for Rayna. The
four of us went to dinner and then a performance of some way-out
electronic music from the Asteroid Belt that Aurora got to like a
couple of years ago when she was in the Merchant Fleet.

“...and now I really don’t know what to do,”
Aurora was saying. “Vince has changed. He was never terribly bright
or sensitive, but he used to be kind of sweet in his own special
way. Last night, though, he was almost raving. I think he would
have killed Rafe—maybe me, too—if I didn’t agree to have dinner
with him tomorrow night. Listen, Rayna, you know me; I’m no coward,
but I really don’t want to be alone with him. I know it’s asking an
awful lot, but I thought maybe if you and Keith could join us, it
might help keep Vince in line.”

“Aren’t you being a little melodramatic?”
Rayna began. “Maybe Vince was overbearing and impolite, but after
all, this isn’t the mid-Twentieth Century. People have been pretty
civilized for the last 50 years, and....” 

A printout from Rayna’s trend-analysis
program caught the corner of her eye. No, it wasn’t the
mid-Twentieth Century, she thought, but things were no longer what
she used to consider “normal,” either. She shot an inquiring glance
at Keith, who responded with a noncommittal shrug of his
shoulders.

“Well, I don’t know if it’ll do any good,”
she told Aurora, “but we’ll try to help you out. When does Vince go
back out to the colonies?”

“I’m not sure. He was pretty vague about what
he’s been doing lately. I couldn’t tell whether he was being
secretive or whether he realized that I really wasn’t very
interested in anything he had to say.”  She shook her head
uncertainly. “Anyway, I really appreciate your coming along. See
you at Eduardo’s at 1930 tomorrow.”

Rayna nodded and broke the connection.

“Looks like we’re in for a pretty sticky
evening,” said Keith.

She nodded again. “Sure does. But we’ll deal
with that tomorrow.” 

Rayna closed her eyes, inhaled deeply through
her nose and then blew the air slowly out of her mouth. Keith
recognized the relaxation technique, but it didn’t appear to be
working very well.  Despite a comfortable room temperature,
she seemed to shake with a cold that was more than physical.

“I still want you to hear these tapes, Keith.
It’s important. We need to talk more about this, and I think it’s
best if you get Al’s story the same way I got it. You’ll understand
once you hear the tapes. Please—just take the box with you. Listen
to them tonight, but try not to jump to any conclusions. Can you
spare me a few hours tomorrow afternoon?”

Keith glanced at the box of tapes.

“I’m not sure I’ll have the chance to listen
to them all by then, Ray.”

Rayna rubbed her chin nervously.

“Of course, you’re right,” she sighed. “I’ve
been listening to these things at my leisure over the past couple
of months, and here I am trying to rush you into a marathon
session. But Keith, this is…. The implications of the trend
analysis…. Well, let’s put it this way:  If I’m right, what’s
in these tapes is a lot more important than we thought.”

  
Keith tore another piece from the stick of cherry licorice in
his right hand as the fingers of his left began tapping out a
nervous rhythm on his thigh. It was past midnight. He should get
some sleep. That dinner with Rayna’s friends tomorrow night
promised to be something of an ordeal, and he had a stack of work
awaiting him before that. But he had made the mistake of playing
the first of Al Frederick’s tapes as he was preparing for bed, and
now, despite increasing fatigue, he was finding it hard to stop
feeding cassettes into the tape player.

Strange to think of Frederick as a young man,
Keith mused. The former newspaperman had impressed him as a sour
old apple from the first time they met. Brooding, almost haunted
brown eyes had glared at Keith from beneath bushy eyebrows that
matched the gray of Frederick’s dry, wiry hair. The gaunt face was
wrinkled and careworn, and Frederick insisted on using a hearing
aid instead of having his hearing problems corrected. (Like
everyone else in the country, of course, Frederick was covered by
MediNet, but Keith suspected that Frederick rather liked the idea
of being able to use the hearing aid to tune others out whenever he
pleased.)  No question about it, Keith thought, Al Frederick
looked much older than he should have. After all, he was only in
his 80s. Keith knew many people who lived healthy, productive lives
well into their 120s.

Intellectually, Keith also knew there must be
another side to the man. Rayna spoke of him with such warmth and
respect. Keith realized that Frederick must once have been youthful
and vigorous. Still, it was hard to reconcile the haggard
curmudgeon he’d met with the audio-taped voice that had been
speaking to him across the years.

Though he’d heard only the first few tapes,
Keith already had learned enough to understand Rayna’s concern
about Frederick’s sanity  and her suspicions about the
connection between Frederick’s death and the recent problems that
seemed to be cropping up at every turn. Was it possible, he
wondered?  Could that headstrong old man have been the force
that kept the world on a peaceful, upward spiral of political,
social and scientific progress for 50 years?  He shook his
head doubtfully. More likely that all this psychic control nonsense
was just wishful thinking  the result of an idealist’s
frustration over broken dreams.

Keith yawned and stretched. His thermofab
sleep suit was designed to keep  his body at optimum
temperature for slumber, but as he sat, robeless, debating with
himself about whether to play another tape or retire for what
remained of the night, he realized that he felt uncomfortably cool.
He glanced at his watch.

“What the hell,” he said aloud, popping the
next cassette into the player and reaching for the robe at the foot
of his bed.

“Today is Tuesday, Sept. 9, 1986,”
announced a
somewhat hoarse voice that Keith recognized as Frederick’s.
Frederick coughed in an effort to clear his throat before
proceeding.  

“Sorry ’bout that. I think I’m fighting off a cold.
Pretty strange. With all the practice I’ve had for the last 15
years, I’ve gotten pretty good at steering important things the way
I want them to go. You’d think I could generate enough psychic
energy to shake a damned cold!  Oh well. Maybe it’s better
this way. If I could direct things in my personal life the same way
I can for the world ‘out there,’ Brad Hershey and Ed Baumgarten, to
name just two, would have been goners just because they crossed me
when I was in a bad mood.

“I worried about that sort of thing a lot back when
Azey and I first started working together in ′71. I remember
getting sore as hell at George Locke one day at the Star. I was
afraid I was going to wind up wishing him dead. But Azey assured me
that, according to the experimental results, I have only passive
psychic powers when it comes to personal matters. I can receive
telepathic or clairvoyant messages in personal crisis situations,
but I can’t influence reality unless something conflicts with my
‘reality matrix,’ as Azey calls it. I’m just grateful that he was
able to explain that much before the accident. I’ll always wonder
where the experiments might have taken us if he hadn’t been killed
in that fire.

“I bumped into Vickie Kingman a few days ago. Funny,
I really thought I was over her, but seeing her again, even after
all these years, got my heart to pounding so hard that I half
expected an invitation to join the percussion section of the Los
Angeles Philharmonic!...”

*    *    *

“Hello, Al,
”
she
said, eyes flitting nervously between his face and the ground.
“
It
’
s been a long
time.
”

Al stared at her in numbed
silence. Vickie Kingman was the last person he
’
d expected to see when he decided to attend his first
Press Club meeting in five years.

“How  how long have you been
back in town?
”
he finally managed to
croak.

Vickie smiled weakly.
“
I’
ve been back for three
years.
”

Al pressed his lips together and
shook his head up and down in a controlled nod.
“
You look good. Lost some weight, I see.
Hair
’
s different, too. I almost
didn
’
t recognize you with it short and
curly like that. The Vickie Kingman I remember had long, straight,
black hair.
”

“Nice of you to notice the style
but not the color, Al. I
’
m afraid the
gray
’
s out to get me, but then, I guess
that
’
s the way it goes when you hit your
40s.
”
  She paused to inspect him more
critically.
“
On the other hand, you
don
’
t seem to have that problem, and
you
’
re  what, 53?  All you have
is a slight touch at the temples, and that just makes you look more
distinguished. Now, is that fair?
”

“Don
’
t
worry about it. You look great.
”

They studied each other
uncomfortably.

“So,
”
Al
began.
“
Tell me what you
’
ve been doing for the last— Oh, hell!
”
 

He closed his eyes and snapped his
mouth shut, praying that he didn
’
t look as
flustered as he felt. What an idiotic thing to say! 
That
’
s not what I want to ask her!  I
work with words for a living. Why is it that when I most need to
think of the right words, they go into hiding!  He ran a hand
over his bearded chin and gazed for a moment in the direction of
the bar.