The Puppet Master

before that from Viggers Technologies in Maryland. And I'd helped finance a few small but promising businesses.' He grinned again. 'The owner of one of them introduced me to Ray. Before I was fifty, we were living off investments.

'Now and then I'd do counseling on somebody with a lot of money, like Ray. One of them signed this place over to us; these eighty acres plus the buildings. Just gave them to us. The entire ranch is half a million acres, and he'd decided to run the whole spread from his headquarters over by Yellow Jacket. Actually I was still working for Bourdon then. Getting this place was what decided me to quit and work full-time on my research.' He laughed. 'Research, naps, and puttering around the place.'

'What kind of research?'

'Nothing that science would recognize. I'd been a Noetie counselor before that, and before that I'd been interested in the mind and what the science fiction of that time called psionics. I'd had experiences that gave me something to work with, and training and experience in science and technical editing that gave me a viewpoint.

'There were problems, of course. The experiences had mostly been personal, or even subjective. So I went into it subjectively. I couldn't see any other way. Sometimes I use the psychogalvanometer and ask myself questions, to get me into it. Other times I start out with meditation. Usually not like in yoga though; generally I meditate on something. Not think, just put my attention on it. Then, after a while, things are likely to happen; I follow where they lead me, and watch or experience the results. After that I do the best I can to sort it out. Put it in words and diagrams like the ones I gave Ray. It's not always easy.'

He gestured. 'Tory gives me an anchor—Tory and sometimes the boys. Bails me out when I get in over my head.' He grinned again, ruefully this time. 'There were times, early on, when I foundered. They gave me an external viewpoint then. Seems like they'd get a sense of what was going on when I didn't.' He paused. 'Been interesting.'

He'd been leaning forward while he talked. Now he sat back. 'No,' he said, 'we live the way we like, and like the way we live. We do what we want, when we want. And we don't do without. Sometimes we don't see anyone for a week or two, until we go to town. Our nearest neighbors live seventeen miles from here. Now and then one or both our boys will drive out from Phoenix with their wives for a weekend. Other times friends will drop by, with or without their bodies.'

With or without their bodies! I wondered if he was serious. Tuuli thought so. She was listening intently.

'Ole flies out from L.A. once or twice a year,' Vic went on, 'and now and then the Diaconos fly down from the Rim. It's a good life, and public attention would have spoiled it.'

I got the message, and believed it: the Merlins were happier without recognition. Another dead end, I decided, but I still might get some useful insights out of the trip.

'Look, people,' Tory put in, 'I've got a big pot of coffee and a tray of chocolate-chip cookies in the kitchen.' She looked at me. 'Guaranteed not to add weight. If y'all are interested, we'll go out there and you can help yourself.'

We trooped to the kitchen behind her. Again there were rough-hewn roof beams, and a big adjoining pantry in which I could see a freezer. Besides freezer, fridge, electric range, microwave, dishwasher, and all the rest of the modern stuff, there was a tall 'dobe fireplace built into a corner, with two pot hooks for cooking! There were even two black iron pots on a mantel, and a woodbox to one side. With wood in it, I had no doubt. On the table, a glass cream pitcher was full of what looked to me like real cream, and the sweetener was sugar cubes, not low-cal powder in envelopes. The cookies had calories written all over them. I took three. They're not as fattening as Molly Cadigan's chocolate-glazed doughnuts, I told myself. They weren't cooked in deep fat.

Back in the living room I asked, 'What did you hope to learn from your research?'

'Whatever there was to know. I was exploring.'

'Didn't you have a hypothesis?'

'Two of 'em. That there was something to find—something to learn—and that I could learn it.'

'Such as?'

He grinned again. 'How the odds and ends of unexplained observations and experiences relate to one another, especially the ones that science doesn't like because they don't fit orthodox scientific paradigms: things like clairvoyance, telepathy, telekinesis, psychic photography, firewalking. . . . I figured if you poke around in things like that, some of them might come together for you.

'I ran into anomalies, of course, and things I could only see vaguely.' He chuckled. 'There was a time, twenty- five years ago, we thought we'd gone far enough, we could tie the rest of it up pretty fast. Have us a tight, inclusive theory; a sort of metaphysical universal field theory. That was after we debugged the surprise generator.'

I didn't know how to take that, especially the thing about a surprise generator. Metaphor I suppose.

His laugh was relaxed and self-amused. 'There were more barriers left than we'd imagined. Then Arne Haugen turned physics upside down without any metaphysical research at all. With just . . .' He paused and laughed. 'Just his native inventiveness—the meeting ground of physics and the subliminal mind. And of course the engineering knowledge and money that made it work.

'All we contributed here was, we'd debugged the surprise generator. Which had to make a difference.' He raised an eyebrow. 'That was up in your part of the country.'

Surprise generator again. I had no idea what he meant by that. Or how he knew, or if he knew, what part of the country I was from. Actually, his comment almost slipped past me. I'd started feeling groggy; something about the subject was getting to me.

I straightened, pushing the grogginesss away. 'Dr. Sproule told me that when Christman changed your stuff, she thought he screwed it up. Ole thought so too.'

Vic laughed again, as if that didn't bother him at all. 'Ray's idea was to create a religion with it, train a lot of