The Link (37 page)

As they drive Adamenko back to his office, Robert listens, in silence, as Cathy and to a lesser degree Peter enthuses about what they’ve seen. “An incredible demonstration of psycho-kinesis,” Cathy says. Teddie looks bored.

“And what is
your
reaction?” Adamenko asks Robert.

He tries to be polite. “Interesting,” he says.

“No more?” asks Adamenko.

Robert hesitates, then opts for honesty. Trying to phrase it as politely as he can, he says that he finds such abilities (in de Vries as well as Ermolaev) only “marginally” interesting in psi. He realizes that telekinesis is an important aspect of psi but wonders about the “parlor trick” aspect of it both men seem to favor.

Adamenko nods and says he understands.

They are quiet until Adamenko has been dropped off at the Institute and Ludmilla at her government building. Leaving them, she says that she will arrange for them to see Bekhetereva in a few days. If they like, they can spend those few days sightseeing in Moscow. Also Dr. Adamenko would, of course, like very much to see Mr. Berger “at work”.

“Was that really necessary, Rob?” Cathy asks after she is gone.

“I tried to be polite about it,” he says. “And I didn’t volunteer the information. But I don’t want to lie either. Floating ping pong balls and uncooked rice is no more mind-enlarging than de Vries and his watches.”

“I tend to agree,” says Peter, “but… well, we’d best be careful what we say. We are guests after all.” He seems to address the remark more to Teddie than to Robert.

“We have seen two psychics now,” Teddie says, “and both of them are handled by a government booking agency. What the hell are they into here, psi or vaudeville?”

A tour of Moscow. Robert, Cathy and Peter enjoy it very much. Teddie either looks bored or, seeing soldiers, glowers.

Cathy and Robert sleep together now.

A day or two later, they watch Teddie “perform” for Adamenko.

To their surprise, he is not asked to demonstrate distance perception.

Instead, Adamenko asks if Teddie can affect a small magnetic probe in a magnetometer located in a vault beneath the building. The vault is shielded by a magnetic shield, an aluminum container, copper shielding and, most powerful, a super-conducting shield.

“A decaying magnetic field has been set up inside the magnetometer,” says Adamenko. “This provides a background calibration signal which registers as an oscillation on a chart recorder. The system has been running for an hour now in a stable pattern.

“We would like you, if possible, to see if you can change the output recording.”

To the added surprise of the group, Teddie does not complain about the test even though he has never taken one like it.

Lighting a cigar (this casual touch startles but impresses Adamenko) Teddie sits in a chair and concentrates.

CUT BACK AND FORTH between him and the vault.

In twenty-five seconds, the middle wave line on the chart disappears entirely for fifteen seconds.

Then Teddie says, “I can’t hold it any longer.”

Adamenko is awed, then stunned as Teddie proceeds to draw a picture of the magnetometer interior, commenting in particular about a gold alloy plate which he had no way of knowing about.

“It works both ways, you see,” he says to Adamenko.

As they ride back to the hotel, sans Ludmilla, Peter asks Teddie what he meant by his comment to Adamenko.

“I meant that he should know that they, too, can be spied upon by this method.”

“Oh, for God’s sake, Teddie,” Peter says.

“Do you know what happened here when Gagarin became the first man to orbit the earth?” Teddie demands. “They ran in the streets with placards that read
Hurrah! The Cosmos is Ours!”
He bares his teeth. “The cosmos is not theirs,” he adds.

“It’s not ours either, Teddie,” Robert says. “Stop being so suspicious.”

SHOCK CUT TO Robert’s room that night as, with incredible swiftness, he is seized and pushed out horizontally, set on his feet and thrust forward.

His body checks its outward movement and he turns. Once more he finds himself staring at the coil of light behind him, fastened to the back of his head like a luminous garden hose, its other end attached to the brow of his sleeping self.

This time, the illumination of the hose-like cord lights the face of the him on the bed. Moving closer to it, he can see the sleeping version of himself breathing peacefully, mouth slightly ajar, cheeks a little flushed, hair lifted by the pressure of the pillow.

He stares at himself with fascination. His sleeping face seems, somehow, pathetic and touching to him with its vacant innocence of expression.

Now he looks at Cathy sleeping next to his other self. He finds her expression equally fascinating, staring at it fixedly. She stirs in her sleep as though, somehow, aware of his observation.

Abruptly, then he is turned away and finds himself walking toward the hall door. It is like wading through a moving surf. He staggers uncertainly to the door and reaches for the handle. There is no grip in his hand, it passes through the handle.

After a moment, he moves forward and glides through the door as though it doesn’t exist.

He moves along the corridor, the luminous cord trailing behind his head. Passing a wall mirror, he stops to stare at his reflection. He is dressed exactly as his sleeping self, in blue pajamas.

He reaches out to a table underneath the mirror, tries to take hold of a brass urn. He cannot.

He begins to search.

Like a sleepwalker, he moves along the corridor, leaning against an invisible current.

A woman comes out of the elevator and moves toward him. Alarmed, he presses back against the wall. The move is unnecessary. She passes him without noticing.

Then he finds himself moving through another door, into another room.

It is a surveillance center, filled with electronic gear from closed-circuit television monitors to a huge, push-button panel, colored lights flickering.

A man is sitting behind the panel, sipping tea; there is a steaming samovar on a nearby table.

Robert stares at the colored lights. There are three for each numbered room in the hotel, white, green and red. The labels indicate two cameras in each room and a microphone.

Robert’s second body stands weaving unsteadily, staring at it all. His eyes move to a monitor screen above his room number and he sees himself and Cathy lying in the bed.
“Oh,”
he says.

The man with the tea looks around in surprise.

“I had another out-of-the-body experience last night,” he tells the others at breakfast.

When he describes what he saw (with certain omissions) Teddie says, “Ah-ha! So I am paranoid, am I?”

“Should we ask Ludmilla about it?” Cathy says.

“No, it could do nothing but embarrass her,” Peter says. “Let’s avoid problems if we can. We are here to observe, not pass judgement.”

He returns to Robert’s OOBE, clearly more interested in that than in Soviet eavesdropping methods. He wishes there were some way to test Robert. Maybe when they get back to ESPA?

“Maybe,” Robert says dubiously.

“It disturbs you a lot, doesn’t it?” Cathy says.

“It disturbs me because I don’t know why it’s happening,” he replies. “It’s one more big question mark in my life.”

“Maybe you and I are meant to team up and form an Anti-Soviet Spy Patrol,” says Teddie. He is only half kidding.

Later, Cathy takes Robert aside and thanks him for not mentioning her in his story.

“How did I look in my sleep?” she asks, curious. “All right?”

Robert laughs and hugs her. “Good enough to make love to,” he says. “Except I didn’t have the right equipment with me.”

It is three days later. They are flying to Leningrad to visit Natalia Bekhtereva. En route, Ludmilla has cautioned them to avoid one word in particular in speaking to Madame Bekhtereva.

The word is parapsychology.

Robert speaks of this to Teddie who is seated between him and a dozing Peter. It seems particularly odd since Bekhtereva’s grandfather, the founder of the Brain Institute, was among the first to investigate parapsychology in Russia.

When Teddie’s reaction is one of disinterest, Robert asks him what’s wrong.

“Don’t think I’m not aware of what our pudgy scientist here is doing in having your lady friend sit with our Russky guide,” Teddie says.

“What is he doing?” Robert asks blankly.

“Keeping me at arms length from potential sex,” says Teddie.

Robert smiles uncomfortably. Teddie’s referring to Cathy as his “lady friend” has given him a twinge. He has avoided the notion that Teddie is aware of their relationship but realizes now that, of course, he is.

“What about Carla?” he asks, unable to resist a nicking reminder.

“Out of sight, out of luck,” says Teddie.

“Why don’t you travel to your apartment?” Robert suggests, repressing a smile. “See how she is?”

“And find her in the beefy arms of some policeman? No, thank you.”

“Teddie,” Robert says. “Are you really as bleak a person as you present yourself? If not, don’t you think we’ve known each other long enough for you to give me a hint that you’re not?”

“I’m a Jewish psychic, not a hint giver,” Teddie growls.

They land in Leningrad and are driven to the world famed Brain Institute Research Center where Madame Bekhtereva commands an army of seven hundred doctors.

Before they meet her, Robert indulges himself in yet another fantasy.

Madame Bekhtereva is a tall, gaunt woman sans make-up, hair pulled back in a severe knot, wearing a long white smock with a line of ball point pens bristling at the rim of her breast pocket. Her office is austere to the point of being nunnery-like.

As usual, his imagined vision is entirely wrong. Madame Bekhtereva’s mahogany-paneled office could be that of any corporation president. And Madame Bekhtereva is a short, plump woman in her early sixties, carefully made up and coiffed, her hair teased into a pompadour which frames her face in flaming red. She wears an elegant long-sleeved dress with a floral pattern on it and around her is the aura of expensive perfume.

Her personality, however, would be appropriate to Robert’s fantasy image of her. In a precise, metallic voice she says, “Would you state your case? What do you want to know? I will talk to you in English.” Her English, though heavily accented, is good.

She sits back, waiting, her small well-manicured hands folded on the desk in front of her.

“Madame Bekhtereva,” Peter says. “We know that you have reached a point where your institute has begun decoding electrical impulses in the human brain caused by sound.”

Madame Bekhtereva tries not to smile but clearly she is pleased that Peter has done his homework regarding her project.

“What is the ultimate aim of this work?” Peter asks.

“To transcribe electronically the entire range of intellectual activity of the human mind”, she answers. There is a vast matrix linking groups of brain cells, all powered by bio-electricity. Each group of cells has a different function and shows different outputs of these electrical impulses. They believe that they will soon be able to isolate what zones of the brain deal with each intellectual thought.

“Once you have done this,” Teddie asks unexpectedly, “would it not be feasible to enhance lesser brains with greater ones?”

“That would not be ethical,” she says off-handedly. She rises behind her desk. “But let me show you how we work,” she says.

As they leave the office, Peter gives Teddie a hard look. Teddie returns it in spades.

CUT TO CLOSE-UP of a male subject with a mass of bunched wires apparently sprouting from his head.

“Each bunch has six to eight wires fifty to one hundred microns in thickness,” says Madame Bekhtereva. “They are passed into minute areas of the brain through tiny holes bored into the skull.”

Robert and Cathy exchange a wincing look but say nothing.

“Each wire is connected to an electrode which monitors a different level of cells,” continues Madame Bekhtereva. “The electrodes are attached to an electroencephalograph.”

We see a demonstration of her gold electrode method.