The Link (51 page)

“I hope you’re wrong, Teddie,” Robert says quietly. “God help all of us if you’re not.”

“Who?” asks Teddie.

Robert smiles a little and pats Teddie on the shoulder. “God,” he answers.

Teddie looks at him as though he has become instantly feebleminded.

“That’s what I thought you said,” he replies.

On May 26, Peter has a heart attack and is hospitalized.

Robert and Cathy go to see him. Then Robert stays with him while she goes to ESPA to complete some work. She will pick Robert up at the end of the day.

Carol, who has not rested for several days, falls into an exhausted sleep in a nearby room. Robert sits with Peter.

A series of scenes between the two separated by SLOW DISSOLVES. Peter awake, fading slowly, his thoughts varied.

“We have, in the last fifty years,” he says, “demonstrated that man is more than just a hit or miss bundle of molecules. That he is, in fact, a miraculous assemblage of energies which are part of and participant in the purpose of the universe.” DISSOLVE.

“If there is survival after death,” he says, “that which survives must exist beforehand in the living. Why not, then, a study of living consciousness as an approach to the survival question? The more we know about the characteristics of consciousness in living people, the more insight we gain into what aspects of that consciousness might persist after death.”

DISSOLVE.

“If the earth, as we believe,” he says, “possesses its own energy field, its own aura so to speak, wouldn’t the outer edges of that aura be the least physical, the most potentially meta-physical? Does that explain why so many mountain climbers and flyers and astronauts experience a sense of heightened consciousness?”

DISSOLVE.

“Since distance perception is clearly unrestrained by time and space,” he says, “why not a distance perception test between life and possible afterlife?”

DISSOLVE.

“It is amusing to consider,” he says, “that the event which was, in a very real sense, the birth of parapsychology (The Fox Sisters) may have been, after all, nothing more nor less than a case study in survival.”

DISSOLVE.

“It is terribly significant,” he says, “that the rising sense of crisis and alienation in the world is occurring simultaneously with the ecological destruction of our planet. Man being an organism-environment, would he not suffer with the damage being wrought upon that larger organism-environment of which he is an integral part?”

DISSOLVE.

“I see a future using psi; a future I hope you live to see, Robert,” he says. “Scientific research aided by psychic means. Law enforcement agencies solving crimes and locating missing persons through psi. Historians and archeologists using psi to aid their research into historic figures and cultures. Psychiatry aided by psychic means to help understand the roots of neurotic and psychotic behavior. Disaster prediction agencies run by psychic means forecasting accidents, earthquakes, unexpected events.”

DISSOLVE.

“In spite of everything we’ve done,” he says regretfully, “forty-nine percent of America’s elite scientists regards psi as only ‘a remote possibility’, seven percent as an ‘impossibility’. And the twenty-nine percent sympathetic to it cite ‘personal experience’ as their reason.”

DISSOLVE. Cathy is back now, Carol awake. Peter very weak now.

“Dr. Elmer Green,” he says, “theorizes that there is a field of mind surrounding the earth similar to the field of gravity and magnetism. That awareness of this field can be extended through meditation, yoga, hypnosis, psychedelic drugs…”

His voice slows down and stops. He chuckles feebly. “Enough of lecturing,” he says. “I have proclaimed my final proclamation.”

Cathy is crying now. She asks Peter’s forgiveness for her “cold and dreadful” treatment of him since their return from England.

Peter strokes her cheek tenderly. “My dear, my dear,” he says, “You are an honest human being doing what you believe in. More cannot be asked.”

He smiles at her. “Give me a kiss now,” he says.

Her tears fall on his face as she does. “It’s a kiss I want, not a bath,” he tells her, smiling.

Robert leans over impulsively and kisses Peter on the cheek. Peter whispers, “Give me a trivia question, quickly.”

Robert’s mind goes blank. Then, impulsively, he asks, “How does a jewel thief know which pearls are worth stealing?”

Peter nods. “All right,” he mumbles.

Moments later, he looks alarmed and reaches for Carol. “My love,” he says, “I’m so sorry!”

He dies in her sobbing embrace.

Peter’s funeral. Unlike the other men attending, Robert wears a light-colored suit. He doesn’t want to wear black for Peter; somehow, it seems wrong. It is June 17.

Carol appears to be bearing up; quiet and sad but not ill. Her brother has arrived from London to be with her.

Cathy gives the eulogy, recounting her years with Peter. The casket is closed. Following the ceremony, it will be flown to England for interment in a family plot in Cambridge.

Robert, staring at the casket, has a fantasy. The lid pushed up by Peter, his arm reaches out, his finger pointing at a part of the casket, his voice inquiring hollowly, “What’s this called?”

Robert smiles at the thought, lowering his head so no one will see. A sudden indrawn breath and when he lifts his head again, his eyes glisten with tears.

When the service is over, Robert and Cathy invite Carol and her brother out for something to eat but Carol says they have other plans. Robert and Cathy drive home instead.

En route, Cathy speaks again of her guilt about the way she spoke to Peter regarding his survival study. Especially since she realizes now that his motivation was a sense of his own impending death.

“That’s all it amounted to, anh?” Robert says, unable to disguise his unfavorable reaction to her observation.

“What do you mean?” she asks.

He feels impelled to pass on to her what Peter told him about his need for “something more”, some kind of “connective tissue” between the various phenomena of psi. “Some kind of link.”

“We all hope for that, Rob,” she says.

He starts to say more, then restrains himself. What good would be served by telling her that Peter had also said that her approach to psi was losing its appeal to him too?

Instead, he puts his hand on hers as they drive to Connecticut. At one point, he looks over and sees tears running down her cheeks.

“I’m going to miss him so,” she murmurs.

Robert’s association with ESPA ends abruptly.

It happens at the Psi Workshop over the July 4
^th
weekend.

This is a highly technical gathering, intended, Cathy tells him, to make it clear that ESPA is devoted to providing explanations for psi which are unassailable by science.

This being the keynote of her approach to psi, she is very active in the Workshop.

Robert is very bored.

He watches as she demonstrates the use of a new electronic random target generator designed to test precognition and clairvoyance.

“The machine has four stable internal states,” she tells the audience. “A million pulse-per-second oscillator sends pulses to an electronic counter which passes through each of its states two hundred and fifty thousand times per second.”

Robert conceals a yawn behind his hand.

CUT TO a man theorizing the operational mode of psychometry, Robert and Cathy listening.

“Assume that each individual radiates a unique wave field which acts as a ‘carrier’ wave for all information relevant to that individual,” the man says. “Objects in contact with this field absorb the radiation and become a link to the carrier field. Psychics holding the object tune in to this field and become linked with it.”

Robert sighs. Cathy looks at him. He manages a smile.

CUT TO a roundtable discussion, Robert watching Cathy as she says, “Materialism does not deny the existence of consciousness. It merely tries to explain it in physical terms. Slow but sure progress is being made in brain research in understanding the physical basis of the mind. When we were in Russia –”

Robert tunes out. He is back in London, hearing his Aunt Myra tell him, “Your father has been pestering me unmercifully. He insists you take over his ‘dig’ whatever that may be. He says it’s most urgent, it will answer all questions.”

CLOSE ON Robert’s face as he stares into his remembrance, his aunt’s voice repeating in his mind, “—it will answer all questions.”

“What’s the matter, Rob?” Cathy asks him at lunch.

He smiles. “Nothing, sweetheart.”

“Yes, there is.”

“Oh—” he gestures vaguely. “The usual. The feeling that I should be somewhere else.”

“Arizona?” she asks, smiling faintly.

This time he isn’t quick with a reply. “I don’t know,” he says, surprising her.

She says she’s sorry he isn’t enjoying the Workshop as much as she is.

Maybe Elmo’s speech will give him a few laughs.

It turns out to be distinctly otherwise.

To the best of his observation, Stafford tells the audience, there is no justification from physics for the existence of psi.

Everyone looks at him in startlement.

Regarding ESPA’s testing procedures, Stafford goes on, the results of their studies in distance perception, telepathy and precognition seem “most likely” due to coincidence. Further, there is a dependence, by ESPA, on “shaky” statistical analysis. Arguments put forward by ESPA for the feasibility of these phenomena, moreover, are based on “distortions” or the writings of physicists as well as “complete ignorance” of relevant and important areas of physics.

“In brief,” says Stafford, “all phenomena observed by ESPA during my period of witnessing were either happenings by sheer chance or due to natural causes. An inability to recognize the role chance or nature can play has led ESPA to give unwarranted importance to these events. When examined with care, the so-called evidence for these phenomena collapse to nothing.

“I have searched for the supernatural and not found it. In the main, all I have encountered is poor experimentation, shoddy theory and human gullibility. All claimed paranormal phenomena are in total contradiction to established science.”

He smiles at the audience.

“The mystery of existence is not to be gained by searching for strange paranormal powers possessed by humans,” he says. “Such powers could only operate by means of electromagnetic action and we have established beyond question that there are no abnormal electromagnetic signals during so-called paranormal events.”

By now, Robert is so angry his face is like stone as he hears Stafford finish by saying, “On the evidence presented, therefore, I am here to state, unequivocally, that the paranormal is completely normal. ESP is dead.”

Applause from the back. The audience turns as Stafford walks to the rear of the room and joins a smiling Westheimer. The two depart together.

“That son of a bitch,” says Robert, incredulously. “It was a set-up right from the start!”

Easton takes the microphone, his expression grave.

“In the final analysis,” he says, “what can be said in answer to accusations of naïveté, delusion and incompetence in our work?”