Farmer, Philip José - Traitor to the Living

BALLANTINE BOOKS • NEW YORK 

Copyright © 1973 by Philip Jose Farmer

Gordon Carfax moaned.

He was sitting up in bed and reaching out for Frances. The blinds were graying with dawn, and Frances had left with the night.

There were no fowl in the neighborhood, only barking dogs, but he was sure, at that moment, that he had faintly heard a crowing. He had read too much, he told himself later. Hamlet's ghost and all that. But his explanation was too soft to turn aside the knife of reason.

Out of the dark grayness, Frances had appeared. The grayness had swirled, as if it were ectoplasm arranging itself around her. Slowly, silently, she had been gliding toward him. Her arms were stretched out to him. She was unmarked, as he remembered her just before the accident. She was smiling, but behind the smile was hurt and anger.

"Frances?" he said. ”If only I had known...”

And then the cock had crowed somewhere in his mind, and Frances, also a mental configuration, had evaporated. She had not just disappeared; she had seemed to boil away in little gray clouds.

He lay back sighing and with the breath that followed he sucked in reality. But weren't dreams a part of reality? And wasn't it only through dreams that the dead could return?

Raymond Western had said that that was not so. No, give the devil--Western--his due. He had made no claim that the dead could return. He affirmed only that they could be located and they could talk with the living. Western could prove his claims with MEDIUM, which crouched metallic and humming in his house in Los Angeles.

Carfax was not alone in dreaming of the dead. The whole world was dreaming of them; the dreams were troubled or joyous or frightening, just as the conscious life of the world was troubled or joyous or frightening.

There was little doubt that MEDIUM could be used to speak with somethings or somebodies. And many accepted Western's statements that these entities were dead human beings.

Gordon Carfax had another explanation, and from this a great uproar had resulted. Sometimes, he wished he had kept his mouth shut. Now he was the center of world attention and might just possibly be involved in a murder. In its aftereffects, rather.

He closed his eyes and hoped he could go back to sleep. He also hoped that, if he did sleep, he would not dream. Or, if he did, he would dream pleasantly. He had thought he had loved Frances, but when she came to him in dreams, she scared him.

PROFESSOR SAYS SPOOKS REALLY SCIENCE-FICTION MONSTERS

Carfax forced himself to read the article under the headline. Disgusted, he threw the paper down on the floor with several others. Trust the yellow dog the National Questioner to give that turn to his lecture. 

Yet, he thought, as he picked up the New York Times from the pile on the table by his chair, the article was essentially correct. He was front-page news. Even the Times's writeup on him was on the front page. In pre-MEDIUM days, it would have mentioned him--if at all--some place deep within its massive body.

"It can't be denied that we are getting communications from another world, another universe, in fact," said Gordon Carfax, Professor of Medieval History at Traybell University, Bush-is, Illinois. "We need not, however, depend upon the supernatural for explanation. Using Occam's razor..."

The National Questioner had defined Occam's razor.

Its editors had supposed, and rightly, that most of its readers would think, if they thought at all, that Occam's razor was some sort of barber's tool.

The New York Times had not bothered to explain the term, leaving it up to their readers to go to the dictionary, if they needed to do so. However, the Times had also used "science-fiction" in classifying his theory.

Carfax was exasperated by this, but he had to admit that it was almost impossible to get away from that word; the temptation was too great for journalists. The moment you spoke of the "fifth dimension"--reported as the more familiar "fourth" by the National Questioner--you invoked science-fiction. And when you went on to talk of "polarized universes," of "worlds at right angles to ours," and "alien sentients with possibly sinister designs on our Earth," you ensured that the reporters would mention science-fiction.

You also ensured that your opponents had a solid launching base for ridicule.

But even the newsmagazine Time had refrained from its almost-compulsory policy of sacrificing truth for the sake of witty sarcasm. At the end of a series of articles supposed to devastate MEDIUM and Western, Time had admitted that Western might be right. Shortly after this. Carfax had presented his theory. Eager for any explanation other than the supernatural, Time had then backed Carfax. Once again, it was attacking Western.

Carfax had stated in his lecture that his theory owed a certain debt to science-fiction. But it did not derive from that field of literature any more than space travel or television did. Men, not books or magazines, had originated these. Carfax was advocating that scientists consider all theories to explain the entities which MEDIUM had contacted. The theory to be developed first would be the simplest one. And this, according to Carfax, was the theory that the "spirits" were actually nonhuman inhabitants of a universe occupying the same space as ours but "at right angles" to ours. And these entities, for no good reason, were pretending to be dead human beings.

Western, via a series of news media interviews, had asked how these entities had gotten such detailed and valid knowledge about the people they were supposed to be impersonating.

Carfax had replied, also via the news media, that the entities probably had always had some means of spying on us. They had not been able to communicate with us until MEDIUM opened the way. Or, possibly, they could have communicated at any time but preferred, for some reason, that we do it first.

Carfax put down the Times and unfolded the local morning paper, the Busiris Journal-Star. It contained an article which capsulized, for the dozenth time, his lecture and the "riot" that followed. Actually, the "riot" was a fist fight among six men immediately after a man was knocked down by a huge, heavily weighted purse swung by a woman.

It all started when Carfax gave the final lecture in the Roberta J. Blue Memorial Lecture Series. One stipulation of the memorial was that the final lecture be given by a member of the Traybell University faculty. Moreover, the speaker must talk about a subject outside his/her specialized field.

Carfax had volunteered to speak. He had, in fact, used his pull with the clean of education, a Wednesday night poker partner, to get the appointment. Ordinarily, he would have avoided this as a chore, especially since it was scheduled for a Thursday night and final examinations began the following Monday.

But he believed fiercely that there had to be a simpler and more scientific explanation for Western's findings.

And so he had notified members of the Busirian press and TV stations of the tenor of his lecture. He had expected to get only local publicity, but the manager of a TV station had notified the Chicago Tribune. When Carfax had entered the lecture room, he had found, not the usual fifty or so students and faculty but five hundred people from the university and city.

Moreover, four Chicago reporters and a Chicago TV team were present. The Tribune reporter had discovered that Carfax was first cousin to Western, and this was to be played up in the news media. It had no relevance to the issue, but the implications that the dispute was a family quarrel were pushed by the media.

It did no good for Carfax to explain that he had never met his cousin.

Carfax gave a lecture much punctuated and, from his viewpoint, nearly ruined, by both cheers and boos. Afterward, he answered questions from the audience.

Mrs. Knowlton, tall, angular, middle-aged, possessor of a very loud and commanding voice, was the first--and last--inquisitor. She was the sister of the publisher of the local newspaper, and she had recently lost her husband, daughter, and grandchild in a boating accident.

She was desperate to believe that they were still living and that she could talk to them. She was not, however, hysterical, and her questions were intelligent.

"You keep referring to Western's theory," she said after Carfax had tried to answer her satisfactorily. "But it's not theory! It's fact! MEDIUM works just as Mr. Western says it does, and some of the greatest minds in the United States agree with him, even though they were prepared to call him a quack when they started the investigation!

"Professor Carfax, just who is the quack? You or Mr. Western? You tell us that the scientists should be using Occam's razor! I suggest that it's about time you used it yourself!"

"Cut your throat with it!" a large and hairy student had yelled.

He was looking at Carfax, so Carfax supposed that the advice was for him, not Mrs. Knowlton.

Mrs. Knowlton's voice rose high and clear, overriding the hubbub.

"Professor Carfax, you say that we who believe in Western do so only because of emotional factors! We're supposed to be operating on highly subjective factors! Well, Doctor Carfax, why are you so emotional, so subjective, in your denial of our beliefs, when all the evidence is on our side? Isn't the blind emotionalism, as you call it, all yours?"

Carfax had gotten angry then, perhaps, no, undoubtedly, because her accusation was based on solid ground. He was not entirely objective; his theory sprang from a hunch. It was true that hunches often were the forefathers of hypotheses that later turned out to be excellent theories and often ended in proof. But he could not say that in public.

As it turned out, he was not able to say that or anything.

A man leaped up and yelled, "Carfax hates us! He wants to deny the greatest thing since creation!"

The man was quoting Western's famous phrase. Carfax had a reply to it, but the man was knocked forward by the ten-pound purse (a reporter retrieved it and weighed it before returning it to the owner just after she was bailed out).

The noise and melee were not stopped until some time after the police came. But the furore had not ceased there. Carfax had become a national figure. As such, he received many phone calls from all over the country. The two he was most concerned about at this time were from Los Angeles.

One was from Raymond Western, who had invited him to fly to California for a free session with MEDIUM. The other was from Patricia Carfax. She was the daughter of Rufton Carfax, who was the uncle of Western and Gordon Carfax.

Miss Carfax had been somewhat hysterical but evidently sincere. She believed that Western had murdered her father so that he could steal the schematics for MEDIUM.

Gordon Carfax sat in an easy chair in the glassed-in sun porch and sipped coffee. It was delicious, a blend of six special South American coffees which he prepared himself every two weeks. He watched the tiny wrens diving in and out of the little round entrance to the tiny wooden house hung from the limb of the big sycamore tree in his backyard. He enjoyed the red beauty of the cardinal perched upon the edge of the white birdbath beside a mulberry tree.

The house was comfortable and quiet, though he often felt lonely in it. It was in the middle-class Knoll-woods division on the edge of the middle-sized, mid-Illinois city of Busiris. Carfax had purchased it shortly after being hired by Traybell University. It had needed some repair and much interior decorating. He had finished the repairing but had not yet gotten around to the interior by the time he had married Frances. She had been happy to quit her job as secretary to the clean of women at Traybell, and to plunge into fixing up the house according to her excellent tastes.

And then, as she was about done with the decorating and was looking for another project, she had died.

On that twilit summer evening, Gordon Carfax had commented that he was out of cigarettes. Frances had refrained from her usual answer that she wished he would give up smoking. Instead, she had offered to drive to the shopping center for him. There she would also stop in at the book emporium and pick up a paperback mystery. This had irked him because the house was full of books, ranging all the way from the heaviest of classics to the lightest of murder mysteries.

There must have been at least a score of the latter which she had not yet read.

He said something about this, and she had replied that she wasn't in the mood for any of them. She had then asked him if he'd like to go along for the ride. It would do him, and her, some good to get his nose out of a book.

Somewhat crossly, perhaps because he felt guilty, he had said that the book was one which he could use for tomorrow's class in Medieval English History. And if she was hinting again that he did not talk to her enough, she should remember that he had taken her out last night to a show and a few drinks at the Golden Boar's Head.

Frances had slammed the door hard enough to startle him. She was justifiably angry, he told himself later, since they had not talked during the movie, and in the tavern they had been joined by the head of the English Department and his wife and so had exchanged only a few words.