Reality Matrix Effect (9781310151330) (9 page)

Keith jabbed sharply at a final key, then
offered Rayna the chair.

“Here. You take over and punch in the answers
to these questions. Then the computer can check out any special
legal problems that might apply in your specific case.”

Rayna began keying in answers as Keith walked
away from the terminal, his hands drawn into fists as he paced the
room.

“Okay, Keith,” Rayna said after a time. “Now
what?”

“Hmmmmh?  Oh—let’s see,” Keith
responded, moving close behind Rayna and examining the screen
thoughtfully. Reaching around her, he punched in a series of
instructions and carefully studied the data that pranced across the
screen.

“Uhhh,” he grumbled. “This may take awhile.
Your case involves several different jurisdictions—at least one
each in England and the United States. I won’t know quite how many
courts will have to clear this till I start opening things up. You
might as well go home, and I’ll let you know when I start getting
somewhere.”

Rayna leaned back and rubbed her head against
Keith’s upper arm in a kitten-like nuzzle.

“I was hoping we could spend some time
together and—”  She broke off abruptly, and her eyes widened
in a sudden shock of recognition. Uneasily, she glanced toward the
bedroom, then turned to stare at Keith.

“I don’t think that would be a good idea,” he
said, quickly looking away.

“Yes. All right,” she stammered. “Maybe
you’re right.”

Rayna pushed the chair back, rose and almost
stumbled toward where her purse lay. “Call me,” she said, sounding
almost panicky in her haste to leave.

“Sure,” he said uncomfortably as he
accompanied her to the door.

Rayna half-walked/half-ran down the hallway.
She stopped before the elevator, glaring at it. Finally, and with
an air of defiance, she moved to the stairway and descended the
three flights as rapidly as her legs would carry her.

 
For
a week now, Rayna had been going through the motions of life
instead of living it. She’d slept, eaten and worked her way through
each increasingly depressing school day. She’d spoken with her
parents only once since their big talk about the adoption. She’d
told them matter-of-factly that she was attempting to have the
records unsealed. They understood, they’d said, but she could hear
the deep sorrow behind their words, and guilt gnawed at her
resolve.

 
Keith called once to report on
his progress. Very slow, he told her. Neither of them wanted to
talk about the way their last visit ended, nor about the future of
their relationship. Meanwhile, the world outside Rayna’s personal
sphere seemed to be collapsing, too. The news reports seemed to
show a steady disintegration of the world that she had only
recently taken for granted.

At home alone and still in her bathrobe at 3
p.m. on a Saturday that she ordinarily would have spent with Keith,
she had started thinking about Al Frederick once again. Lately, she
was shocked to discover, she almost envied Al the gift of
everlasting peace that death had bestowed on him.

It had been three months since his death—more
than a month since she and Keith had cleared out Al’s apartment and
opened the permastore container Al had left her. But from that day
until this, the box’s contents had remained untouched. Now,
however, Rayna sat in stunned silence as the last few feet of the
earliest dated cassette crossed the magnetic tape heads.

This is just what I need, she thought
bitterly. My parents aren’t really my parents. Keith’s not exactly
the steadfast lover I’d counted on—a vision of the woman in the
elevator flashed through her mind—and now it looks very much as if
the one man I thought I could believe in may have been slightly
nuts all these years.

Rayna’s eyes grew moist as she reflected on
what she’d just heard. Al actually seemed to think that he had
worked some sort of magic—that he had somehow prevented John Martin
Roberts from dying!  She shook her head sadly and looked at
the tapes she had carefully arranged in chronological order on her
coffee table. Should she hear more?

“What the hell,” she said aloud. “I’ve got
nothing better to do anyway.”

With a sigh, she removed the first cassette,
inserted the second and pushed the “play” key. Though she was more
prepared this time, the sound of Al Frederick’s voice seemingly
coming from beyond the grave still jolted her.

“This is Sunday, August 7, 1971,”
the voice stated
clearly.

“It’s another hot one today. Yesterday, it hit 97
degrees downtown. Must’ve been over a hundred here in the Valley.
All I know is this weather sure hasn’t helped things between Vickie
and me. Both of us seem to have shorter fuses than usual.

“She thinks I’m becoming obsessed. More than that.
She thinks I’m crazy. Ever since the John Martin Roberts thing. Oh,
she hasn’t quite said so in words, but it’s in every look she gives
me.

“Truth is, I was beginning to wonder whether she
might be right. That’s why I finally decided to talk to a shrink.
But the psychiatrist—a man by the name of Carruthers—never really
says what he thinks. He just waits for me to talk and then gives me
a look that makes me feel like some sort of specimen under a
microscope.

“I finally asked him last time. I said, ‘What’s your
professional opinion?  Am I crazy or what?’

“And, of course, he said that ‘crazy’ is not a
scientifically meaningful term. He did say, though, that sometimes
different people can live through the same event and yet see the
experience very differently. That’s the trouble with eyewitness
accounts of crimes. You get two witnesses, you might just get two
different stories. Anyway, that’s when Carruthers brought up Alec
Zorne.

“Oh, I know. Zorne has this reputation as just
another counter-culture kook. But I remember patching together some
wire copy on the guy seven or eight years ago. He used to be some
kind of boy-wonder in physics. Full professor at age 23 and all
that. It wasn’t until later that he started  getting a name
for himself as a sort of drug-culture hero. But spaced out or not,
I guess the guy’s no dummy.

“According to Carruthers, Zorne’s done a lot of
interdisciplinary research on the nature of perception. (With
Zorne’s background, of course, the emphasis is on the physics part
of it, but Carruthers said Zorne’s also looked at the psychological
and physiological aspects.)  Anyway, Carruthers got me
interested. So when I saw that Zorne was scheduled to give a
lecture in town last night, I decided to give it a shot, even
though the subject sounded kind of off the wall....”

*    *    *

The lecture
“
hall
”
(it was really just a
rented community room) was still warm and stuffy at 7 p.m., despite
the efforts of an old, overworked air-conditioner. Although the
room could have accommodated about 100, fewer than half that number
had been willing to buy a ticket and then sit in discomfort to hear
Zorne discuss his ideas on parapsychophysics, the discipline of
which he was the founder and, to date, sole
practitioner.

A pinch-faced man wearing a cream-colored suit
and navy tie was surveying the audience with obvious
disappointment. This was nothing like previous gatherings where
Alec Zorne had headlined rallies to protest the Vietnam war, call
for modification of drug laws, and generally push for the
transformation of modern American society. Those meetings had drawn
the crowds—sometimes as many to jeer as to cheer. But this time,
the subject was science, not politics. The topic, not the notoriety
of the speaker, had been emphasized in all the announcements. The
result was a small turnout.

Al Frederick had heard of neither
parapsychophysics nor reality-matrix research, the
evening
’
s topics. According to a
mimeographed sheet handed out at the door, parapsychophysics was
the study of the physical processes involved in psychic events. The
very nature of the field put Zorne on the fringe of the scientific
community, most of which had yet to accept the existence of psychic
phenomena in the first place.

Al was familiar with such phenomena. His
mother
’
s family had nicknamed her
m
’
chashefah
—Hebrew for
“
witch
”
—in awe of
her ability to know, even thousands of miles away, when something
important was happening to a relative or close friend. Although the
rational, hard-headed newsman Al Frederick often tried to deny the
reality of such incidents, the wonder-filled son of Eva Frederick
knew they were genuine. After all, he had been directly involved on
two different occasions.

First, there was the time he dislocated his
knee playing football while he was away at college. His mother in
New York had wakened with a scream at the precise moment he was
injured in California. She insisted on calling the stadium, despite
his father
’
s protestations that she had
simply had a nightmare. Then there was the time his father went on
a brief errand, leaving Al to keep his mother company. After about
15 minutes, the color had drained  suddenly from his
mother
’
s face as her coffee cup crashed to
the floor:  His father had been injured in an auto
accident.

So, although he might deny it to others, Al
Frederick accepted the reality of psychic phenomena. Such things
terrified him, however. They always seemed to be associated with
injury or tragedy, from what he could see. For that reason, he had
always suppressed his own latent psychic abilities. At least, he
thought he had.

Al let his mind wander during a rather lengthy
introduction by the man in the cream-colored suit—an account of
Zorne
’
s achievements in mainstream physics
and the growth of the maverick scientist
’
s
interest in conventional psychophysics. A round of polite applause
brought Al out of his reverie. Hastily, he searched his pockets for
a pen and the small reporter
’
s notebook he
habitually carried with him.

“How many of you know what psychophysics
is?
”
Zorne was asking by the time Al was
ready to listen. The speaker
’
s shaggy
beard and medium-length, reddish-brown hair made him look more like
a 30-year-old hippie than a physics professor.

“Well, a few of you know, anyway. For the rest
of you, let me explain briefly. Psychophysics is the study of the
relationship between physical stimuli and the way we perceive them.
Work in that field is usually done by experimental psychologists,
not physicists. But the subject intrigued me.
”
 

Zorne fanned himself with a sheet of paper as
he spoke.
“
I wanted to look at the physics
of perception, not just the psychology or physiology of it. So I
asked a friend who was doing psychophisics research to let me work
with him. Using an EEG, I monitored the electrical activity in the
brains of his subjects during various experiments, but the results
didn
’
t tell me much. So I began tinkering
with the EEG, modifying it to take slightly different measurements
than the standard.
”

He paused and looked around the audience.
“
You see, I had a feeling that ultimately,
the key to perception involved unique combinations of activity at
the atomic and subatomic levels. Of course, that poses a problem.
You can
’
t measure or observe that kind of
activity directly. So I used the laws of probability and some
intricate mathematical techniques to come up with equations that
would predict some larger-scale effect that I could measure. Based
on the results of those early experiments, I developed a hypothesis
about the physics involved.
”
 

There was an anticipatory rumble from the
audience, and Zorne waited for it to subside before
continuing.

“We already knew that the brain generates
electrical impulses, of course. That
’
s
what an EEG measures. My hypothesis was that the brain also
produces a much more subtle, hard-to-measure level of
electromagnetic energy that acts as a sort of receiving net for the
mind. Various parts of the mind net oscillate in phase with
different stimuli. The brain can then identify each stimulus by the
unique characteristics of the oscillation.
”
   

Zorne again looked at the faces before him,
trying to gauge how his explanation was being received.

“The hypothesis tested out fine for a while,
and I was about to publish a paper on it when I noticed that every
now and then, the experimental data showed more mind-net energy
than the equations could account for. At first, I blamed faulty
electrodes, bad connections—anything but my hypothesis. Then I
realized I had to review the data. I discovered that in each
instance where the recorded energy levels were different from what
the equations predicted, the same three people were involved as
test subjects.

“On a hunch, I sent those three subjects to
the Rhine Institute to be tested for what
’
s sometimes called extrasensory perception. All three
came up with scores that far exceeded the probabilities of
chance.
”

Again, there was a murmur from the audience.
This time, Zorne smiled.

“Even though I was the one who sent them to
Rhine, I was skeptical. For a physicist, saying you believe in
paranormal phenomena is a little like being a minister who gets
drunk at a party and runs around the room with a lampshade on his
head:  People pay a lot of attention to you, but
it
’
s not exactly the kind of attention
you
’
d like.
”