The Link (20 page)

Robert looks down the list, his expression frantic. There are dozens of street intersections listed. He makes a sound of dread.

“Easy,” Peter tells him, grabbing his arm. “Do you remember anything about the vision? Any detail at all?”

Robert tries to recapture what he saw. At first, he fails. Then, abruptly, the name of the store printed on its window leaps to consciousness.

They rush to a telephone directory and look up the store. Another setback. It is a chain; there are dozens of them. “What are we going to do?!” Robert cries. He knows that Cathy is going to be killed.

Grabbing every available ESPA employee, Peter gives each of them Xerox copies of the master list and the telephone directory page. Assigning each one twenty-five target locations, he tells them to pick out the store addresses which seem to match whatever intersection they have in their twenty-five locations.

Robert tries to help but is too rattled. He tries, in vain, to use ESP to zero in on the location where Cathy is.

In a few minutes, they have narrowed the possibilities down to twelve. Robert looks at the twelve locations intently.

“Relax,” Peter tells him. “Let it come through by itself.”

Robert puts his hand over the list and closes his eyes.

His lips move in what might be a prayer.

He opens his eyes and points at one of the addresses. “This is it,” he says.

They phone the store. The line is busy.

Robert cannot bear it. He bolts from the ESPA offices, ignoring Peter’s call. He rushes from the building, tries to get a cab, can’t and races down the street, finally grabs a cab from a woman just before she can get in, blurts out the store’s address. “Hurry,” he gasps. “Someone’s going to die.”

The cab speeds through the streets and, sitting in back, a shaken Robert sees, once more, the horrible accident. He shudders. Has it already taken place?

The cab gets caught in traffic a block from the target location. Robert throws a bill to the driver, lunges out and sprints along the pavement, almost knocking people down, oblivious to their curses.

He is halfway down the block when he sees the truck veer sharply, crash into the store front.

“No!” he cries.

He reaches the spot and stands there, panting, staring at the wreckage.

“Robert!”

She is in his arms and they are embracing passionately, kissing. “Oh, my God, I thought I’d lost you.” He is almost crying now.

Cathy clings to him, shaking uncontrollably. “Rob. My darling, darling Rob.”

Moments later, huddling together in a booth of a nearby bar, she tells him that Easton had, at Peter’s insistence, telephoned a Sergeant he knows in the police department who had dispatched a radio car to get her out of the way seconds before the truck hit.

“You saved my life,” she says. “If it hadn’t been for you, I’d be dead now.” The idea horrifies and fascinates her at the same time. Robert has to accept his gift, she says. He can’t fight it any longer. It is too powerful, too valuable to waste.

He can only hold her. “Just don’t leave me,” he keeps murmuring.

“Don’t leave me. Just don’t leave me.”

Robert goes to see Ann and takes her to a local park.

There he tells her what happened, at long last able to offer her the kind of comfort she needs. They’ll work this out together, he says.

For the first time in years, Ann—her father’s arms around her protectively—truly relaxes.

December 19
^th
. Robert and Cathy are driving to JFK to pick up the famous Dutch psychic Jan De Vries who is passing through the New York area en route to Los Angeles and has agreed to some testing at ESPA.

Things have been resolved between Robert and Cathy. She knows she loves him and will go back to England for the Christmas holidays to tell Harry. She hopes she will be able to return in time to attend the San Francisco convention with Robert.

Especially since an additional point of interest has arisen regarding the trip.

While Robert was talking to Alan Bremer about the film, he mentioned the convention and, an hour later, Alan had called back, asking him if the ESPA group could check out a house in Tahoe which appears to be haunted. Strictly hush-hush since its resident is the married daughter of the man who owns the studio and the wife of a well-known country-western singer.

Robert accepted and, of course, Peter is delighted at the thought of getting to see a “real live, purebred” haunted house. It does seem odd, Robert comments, that, living in England, Peter has never had such an opportunity. He’s seen a few, Cathy tells him, but none that impressed him.

She smiles. “He’s so excited,” she says. “I don’t know which he’d rather have, a visit to a real haunted house or a date with the immortal Palladino.”

“Perfect if the ghost turns out to
be
Palladino,” he says.

Briefly, they discuss his ESP. He has accepted it now. He doesn’t know exactly what to do about it but its existence is a given. Just having it checked at ESPA seems, somehow, inadequate though. Now that he has ceased to resist the idea, he has this feeling that something more is involved in him possessing the gift than just a series of tests regarding it.

“What that something is, I have no idea,” he tells her.

They arrive at the airport and meet DE VRIES, a slim, handsome young man, flamboyant in dress and manner. “Westheimer would love him,” Robert sotto voces when they first see the Dutchman breezing into the terminal.

Handshakes are exchanged, greetings given. De Vries immediately asks each of them to think of three numbers. “What are they, quickly, don’t concentrate,” he commands.

“Three-six-nine,” says Cathy.

“One-seven-uh, eight,” says Robert.

De Vries pulls out a small pad from an inside jacket pocket, tears off the top sheet and hands it to Cathy. 3-6-9 is already printed in pencil on it.

“Mine says 1-7-9,” says Robert when De Vries hands a second sheet to him.

“You changed your mind at the last second,” De Vries tells him confidently.

“Impressive,” says Cathy.

“Very impressive,” De Vries corrects her.

They are almost to the car when De Vries points and says, “See?”

What they see, in front of them, is a STOP sign, it’s iron stand twisted to form three complete loops around an imaginary center of rotation so that the sign itself is only two feet from the ground.

“You?” asks Robert.

“Who else?” says De Vries. His laugh is bark-like. “Looks like a spiral slide for a mouse!” he cries, delightedly.

Robert and Cathy exchange a look. “We
did
walk by that sign before, didn’t we?” he asks.

“Of course you did!” says De Vries. “Listen. We must trust each other. That way we will start off on the right foot.”

His next request for trust comes when they reach the car. He would like to drive it to ESPA.

“All right,” agrees Robert, slightly taken back.

“Blindfolded,” says De Vries.

A nightmarish but bizarrely amusing ride through Queens at top speed, the blindfolded Dutchman not only driving without mishap but calling out the colors of cars they pass, houses, signs.

“There’s a stop sign, better brake now. Look at that green car, very ugly. There’s a nice house made of bricks, I like it. Here we go again!”

Robert and Cathy, cringing in their seats, validate his descriptions. “Listen, I think this is a trick,” he whispers to her. “Magicians can—”

“No, it’s not a trick!” says De Vries, looking offended. “You must have faith, my friend! Faith will move mountains!”

“And drive cars, I hope,” Robert responds.

The barklike laugh. “Yes! And Drive cars!” says De Vries.

When they reach ESPA, Robert and Cathy, separated momentarily from De Vries, fall into each others’ arms with laughter of dazed relief. “If that was real—” he mutters.

“I kept thinking: did Rob save my life just so this nut could end it?” Cathy says.

A test is going on with the use of a t-v monitor when they rejoin De Vries. One of those present is Teddie.

De Vries tells the gathering. “Let me show you what I can do.”

Holding up his fist, he glares at the t-v set and shouts, “Up! Down! Up! Down!”

Each time he shouts, the picture jumps accordingly.

“That’s nothing,” says De Vries. “Let’s have some tests. But first I have to get my sign from Electra.”

Electra is the name of De Vries “extra-terrestrial intelligence”, the one who helps him “do things”.

He closes his eyes and concentrates. Several moments later, they hear a loud bell-like noise from the next room. “That would be the random choice generator,” Peter says.

“Anybody in there?” Robert asks.

“Not a soul,” says Peter.

“Ready!” announces De Vries.

A whirlwind series of tests by the colorful Dutchman.

A single die is placed in a closed metal box. The box is shaken vigorously by one of the testers and placed on a table in front of De Vries. The challenge: to guess which die face is uppermost.

Eight times the test is performed. Eight times De Vries gets the number right.

“Too easy,” he says. “Move on.”

“Too easy?” Peter says. “The odds against that are approximately a million to one.”

De Vries shrugs. “Nothing,” he says.

Ten identical aluminum film canisters are placed on a table, in one of them a steel ball bearing taped down. After this is done, the man who did it leaves the testing room and De Vries and the others go in. None of them know in which canister the ball bearing is taped.

De Vries runs his hand over the cans. “Empty,” he says. “Empty.” They remove these cans. When only three remain, De Vries tells them which one he believes contains the ball bearing.

He does this twelve times and is correct twelve times.

“One in a trillion,” Peter says, awed.

“Better,” says De Vries. “Now I’m getting hot.”

A ball bearing is placed beneath a bell jar on a glass-topped table. De Vries assignment: make it move.

He tries and tries in vain. It irritates him hugely. Finally, he rolls his eyes heavenward and says, “Come on, help me move this damn thing!”

The ball bearing begins to jiggle back and forth, then rolls quickly to the edge of the bell jar and clangs against the glass.