The Link (13 page)

Peter and the other tester come back to reveal the place they went to, photographs and all. A garden shopping plaza in Greenwich Village, craft shops on its periphery. Robert looks at one of the photographs, a pole with arrow-shaped signs attached to it. One of them reads WEAVING STUDIO.

He nods. “Mm-hmm.” He makes a hapless gesture. “Well, you better hope that Berger comes back,” he says. “You’re dealing with a loser here.”

He avoids Cathy’s eyes as she walks him to the entry foyer of ESPA. There she puts a hand on his arm. He has to look at her now.

“Was
he wrong, Robert?” she asks.

“Of course he was.” His voice is edged with tension and she backs off instantly.

It is a nervous Robert who drives home, takes care of Bart, then tries to work. He cannot work. He cannot concentrate. He paces tensely. More than once, his memory flashes to the vision in Arizona. He doesn’t know it’s Arizona but it bothers him. He picks up the bio-feedback control and tries, in vain, to lower the howling noise.

SHOCK CUT TO the dream again, this time the music of the 1950 song louder, the CAMERA ANGLES more extreme, its movements more erratic. By the time the CAMERA MOVES toward the hall, sight and sound are both askew. This time the rushing CAMERA reaches the foot of the staircase where it jolts to a visually shocking halt and Robert wakes up with a startled grunt, a sheen of perspiration on his face, the thumping of his heartbeat audible beneath the exaggeratedly loud ringing of the telephone.

He struggles for composure, draws in a shaking breath, then reaches out to pick up the receiver. “Hi!” says Alan Bremer cheerily. His voice makes Robert twitch. “Did I wake you up? Hell, I
did!
It’s only seven-thirty your time, isn’t it? Oh, God, I’m sorry!”

“‘s all right,” Robert mumbles.

Can he come to the coast in a day or so? Alan asks. He wants to discuss the outline to date. Also, he’s located some “astounding” newsreel footage he’d like Robert to look at.

Robert runs a hand across his wet brow, swallowing again. “Sure,” he says.

He is getting ready to sit on the airplane when there is a tap on his back. He turns. “Good morning,” Cathy says. Alan made arrangements for them to fly to Los Angeles together. “I hope you don’t mind,” she says. “
Mind?”
He smiles. “I’m delighted.”

As he helps her off with her jacket, a button tears loose. “Oh, no,” she says.

“Next time you buy a jacket,” he tells her, “touch the center of each button with a drop of clear nail polish. That’ll seal the thread and keep the buttons on longer.”

Cathy laughs. “From one of your books?”

He nods. “I don’t remember which: my brain is a clutter of disparate—or desperate—information,” he chuckles. “Well, I know it wasn’t the last book,” he says.

As he reaches up for something, Cathy notices the limited extension of his left arm. “Vietnam,” he tells her and we see a mini-flashback of him thrown into the air by a ground explosion, his uniform torn and bleeding at his left shoulder. “Circumscribes the reach a bit,” he says. “No pain.”

The airline takes off and they clink together glasses of champagne. “To your project,” she says.

“And our friendship,” he adds.

She smiles. “I’ll drink to that,” she says softly.

The flight. The two getting to know each other better. He learns more about her family, she does not probe further into his; “when you want to talk about it” is all she says.

Robert nods. “Thank you.”

Hours passing. A montage of their expanding relationship, broken by moments of particular conversation; she calls him Rob and asks if he minds; he doesn’t. They talk about Peter, Carol, Teddie. Drink together. Eat together. Ignore the movie together, moving up to the lounge.

Where, at one point, as he speaks, her smile is so involved that, suddenly, he feels compelled to say, “You’d better stop that, Catherine.”

She looks startled. “Stop what?”

“Smiling at me like that”, he says; a smile he cannot very well respond to since she is transmitting it from a “guarded environment.”

“My marriage, you mean,” she says.

He nods.

She puts her hand on his. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean any harm,” she tells him. “I wasn’t aware of it.”

He smiles. “Well,” he says, “if we’re to be no more than fellow psi-trekkers…”

She nods. “You’re right.”

He gazes over her beautiful face as though allowing himself the license one time. “I’ll say it now and get it over with,” he tells her. “I’m extremely attracted to you but I respect your marriage and I won’t do anything to—well, you know.”

She smiles and nods and, in recognition of what was beginning to take place between them, they mutually withdraw, trying not to be unfriendly about it, their conversation taking on a more general tone.

They land at LAX where a limo picks them up. “Good Lord, the way they operate out here,” says Cathy.

At the studio, they meet with Alan who still effuses about the project; he is up to date on it, Robert having sent the latest pages to him by express mail.

“I’m not so sure about the fraud stuff though,” he says. “I don’t think the viewers would respond to it too well.”

“We should present both sides of the case,” Robert reminds him. “Otherwise, we leave ourselves open to justified criticism.”

“I suppose,” says Alan, frowning slightly. “Still… we do all that great stuff with the Fox Sisters and Home and Palladino, then we show Houdini saying they were fakes.”

“We also show the virtual monomania against Spiritualism that motivated Houdini,” Robert responds.

“What do you think?” Alan asks Cathy.

“That we’re better off presenting both sides of the picture,” she replies.

“Uh-huh.” Alan looks at them uncertainly, then jumps up. “Well, let’s go over to the projection room. You’ve got to see this footage.”

As they leave the building, Alan asks what’s next in the outline.

“Logically and chronologically, the work of Rhine at Duke University,” Robert answers. “The beginning of the scientific period of psi.”

“You mean all those tests with cards with squares and circles on them?” Alan asks.

“The Zenor cards were fundamental to his testing, yes,” starts Robert.

“I don’t know,” Alan breaks in. “Doesn’t sound too interesting to me.”

“What Rhine did,” Cathy says, “was apply mathematical probability to massive accumulations of data. He developed a framework of technique on which generations of parapsychologists were raised. Almost every major researcher in the field was trained by Rhine and his wife or did work in their lab.”

“How do you show that on the screen?” asks Alan. “Twenty minutes of montage? They’ll be flipping channels, take my word. What I’d
like
to see is some other stuff from the book—you know, Astrology, the pyramids, Atlantis, ancient astronauts, that kind of thing.”

Robert and Cathy exchange looks. “Well,” says Robert, trying to sound polite. “Those things really aren’t part of what we’re saying.”

“I know,” says Alan. Still… he’s looking for Visuals. “We can’t just lecture people,” he tells them.

Cathy tries to get him interested in sending a film crew to Russia. “They’re incredibly advanced in psi,” she says. Alan does not respond to that either. Robert quickly tells him that the next segment of the story might detail the life of Edgar Cayce, Virginia Beach’s incredible seer and healer.

“Ah,” says Alan, pointing at him. “Now you’re talking.”

At the projection room, Alan steps into the booth to speak to the projectionist. Cathy looks at Robert with an expression of only partial mock-dismay. “Astrology?” she murmurs. “Pyramids? Atlantis? Ancient astronauts? Good God.”

He smiles sadly and nods. “A damned shame if we have to omit Rhine,” he says. “His work is the foundation of contemporary psi research.”

“Yup,” she says, making a face.

Alan joins them and they enter the projection room. “Look, I’m not trying to foul up the project,” he says. “It’s just that I know that all these different things are
joined
somehow. That’s what makes it all so fascinating. They’re all so weird, they seem to have no relationship to each other. But what if, some day, someone figures out exactly how they fit together like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle and we see the picture, the
whole damn picture?”

“It’s a thought,” says Robert. He gives Cathy a look which says: Well, hell, it’s
possible
.

She crosses her eyes, tongue tip protruding from between her lips.

The dimming light obscures his effort to repress a startled laugh.

The newsreel clips begin—either genuine (if they can be located) or staged. Whoever, from Robert’s outline, could conceivably be on film.

Then some footage of a Spiritualist conference in the 1940’s, some camp in upper New York State. We see a sitter with a female medium.

Robert tenses, staring at the screen, his features frozen.

The medium is his mother; we recognize her even though her name is not spoken—we hear her voice briefly.

Cathy, leaning over to comment on how beautiful the woman is, sees his expression and stares at him. He glances aside, then turns away, drawing in a shaken breath as he stares, once more, at the screen.

Being driven to the hotel later, Robert tells her that it was his mother, that his family has a long background in Spiritualism, that his sister still runs a Spiritualism church on Long Island, that his Uncle Jack has a psychic radio program somewhere in the mid-west, that his Aunt Myra is still a practicing Spiritualist psychic in England where his mother’s family originated.

“Why does that disturb you so?” she asks.

“Because I never saw any good come of it,” he says. He shudders. “And I just don’t want it in my life.”

“Rob.” Impulsively, she takes his hand. “It’s all right, I understand.”

He holds her hand so tightly that he doesn’t notice it is hurting her; she doesn’t tell him.

“To see her like that, so unexpectedly,” he murmurs.

He tells her of his mother’s fall when he was six. “I went to play at a neighbor’s house and when I came back she was dead.” He makes a strange noise between a laugh and a sob. “Passed on, I mean,” he adds.

He stares into his clouded memory, then looks at her. “Don’t tell Alan,” he asks her.

“No, of course I won’t,” she says.

Back in the hotel room, he phones Amelia to see if Bart is all right. “He’s doing okay,” she says. “How are
you
doing, you sound odd.”

He exhales heavily.
“I feel
odd,” he says, then tries to lighten his tone. “I’ll tell you about it when I get back,” he says.

Robert catches his breath as she opens the door of her room. “Oh, dear,” he murmurs.

Cathy’s smile is curious. “What?” she asks.

He shakes his head a little. “You look wonderful,” he says.

She does, wearing an off-the-shoulder evening dress, her hair up.

As they head for the elevator, Cathy asks him how he is.

“Fine,” he tells her. “I apologize for the melodrama before.”

She squeezes his hand. “Don’t be silly,” he says, then asks him why he said, “Oh, dear.”

He sighs, then chuckles. “Well,” he confesses, “when you opened the door, I thought: How am I supposed to think of her as nothing but a fellow psi investigator when she looks like that?”

She laughs softly. The remark has not displeased her.

The limo again (“I’ll never be able to take a bus again,” Cathy “laments”.), a short ride to Brentwood and Alan’s house; a dinner party. There they meet Alan’s lovely wife DIANE and try to stay together in a mass of cocktailing guests. It is not easy as Alan, ever on the move, introduces them to one person after another.

A high-placed agent who tells them that he “lives on hunches”; “ESPower, my friends, ESPower,” he declares, prodding Robert’s chest. “I believe it,” Robert says.

A composer who tells Robert (Cathy, by now, has been kidnapped from him) that he doesn’t write his scores, he only transcribes them. “I hear the music and I write it down. Someone else composes it and has the kindness to relay it to my brain; I’m very fortunate.” Robert nods and smiles. “You are,” he agrees.