would. Not by themselves. What I needed to learn was how it was done.
6
Back in my office, I phoned Ole Sigurdsson. He was tied up that afternoon, but as a personal friend, I got an appointment for eight that evening. Tuuli went with me.
We were having an early April rain, unusually hard, with thunder and lightning. Ole's place is on top of a steep ridge between two canyons in Bel Air, and the goat-trail street that zigzagged up the side flowed like a shallow creek, between ivy-covered banks that glistened wetly in the streetlights.
From the front, his house looks small for Bel Air—one story high and not particularly wide—but that's the uphill side. Seen from downhill, it's the second floor. It contains a large room with bar for entertaining, along with a small kitchen and one and a half baths. And Ole's office—a kind of smallish sitting room actually, with a long sofa where he naps when he feels like it. He's in his eighties, and doesn't take as many clients as he used to. Downstairs are their living quarters, and Laura's offices. His wife is Laura Wayne Walker, a producer of theater and TV films and holos. She's a lot younger than Ole—maybe sixty-five—but they suit each other. Besides being compatible and highly competent, they have a lot of mutual admiration.
Tuuli was my in-house psychic, but Ole has a different spectrum of talents, so I turn to him from time to time. What I wanted now was his viewpoint, which sometimes picks out things both Tuuli and I have missed.
I summarized the case for him, which didn't take long, then asked: 'What actually happened, do you think? How did these assaults take place? Assuming it wasn't some kind of hypnosis.'
He showed no sign of uncertainty. 'They are real enough,' he said. 'Each of them lived two lives at vunce for a v'ile, as if they had parallel existences. Then something happened and vun of them died—and the memories of that self snapped back into the first vun.'
'But
He grunted. 'That's your yob to find out. You're the detective. But these veren't no freaks of nature. Somevun
He had a small wood-burning brick stove, and had put on the same old-fashioned orange-red coffeepot I'd seen the first time I'd been there. It began to perk.
'Do you have any idea what kind of connection Ballenger might have with whoever—made these things happen?'
He shrugged. 'I don't know. Maybe they both belong to a Misti Innocenza fan club on the Veb.'
A fan club? I shuddered at the amount of work it would be to attack the case from that angle, though I might have to.
Ole got up and poured us coffee. He knew we took ours black, but he stirred cream and sugar into his until it had enough calories to feed the starving Sudanese. Then we sipped and talked some more. It was hard for me to accept parallel existences, even as part of quantum theory, and Ole had no more idea than I did how anyone could split a time line. Not at the level of particle integration that humans experience. But on the other hand, the breakthrough that produced the geogravitic power converter had given and continued to give rise to a whole spray of new developments, in both basic science and technology. A lot of us aren't as sure of what we know as people used to be.
Tuuli and I drove home without saying much. I didn't know whether the trip had been worthwhile or not.
7
I woke up in the morning with a decision, and when I got to the office, phoned Vic Merlin in Arizona. Vic and his wife were old friends of Ole's, that I got to know on the Puppetmaster Case. Vic is undoubtedly a higher powered psychic even than Ole. I gave him a rundown on what I was up against, then asked: 'Can you think of any way someone could split a time line?'
Education, and decades spent away from rural west Texas, hadn't entirely erased his accent. 'Not and transfer memories across like that,' he said, then added what seemed like a total non sequitur. 'But there's a guy named C.K.F. Linyetski in England, at the University of Birmingham, built an operating teleport a couple years ago. The only problem was, the block of iron he teleported arrived at the receiving plate as a little mound of fine dust—atoms of iron and assorted impurities in the same ratios as in the block.'
I frowned. 'What's the connection between that and splitting a time line?' I asked.
'I sure don't know; it just came to me.' That definitely sounded like Vic. 'I've got something else you might be interested in,' he added.
* * * * * *
Vic's mainly a psychic researcher, but like Ole Sigurdsson, he's also a healer. He'd just treated an old friend named William Harford, who'd had a severe psychotic seizure and heart attack at his home in Los Alamos, New Mexico. When her husband's condition was upgraded to stable, Harford's wife had phoned Vic, and he'd flown to Los Alamos the next day. Vic had worked his way beneath the sedatives and Harford's severe confusion, and gotten a story that in important respects was like the others I'd heard. Harford worked for the government in weapons research—he did basic theoretical work in matrix physics—and his intrusive memories were of waking up in a clinic at a foreign laboratory, in India or Pakistan he thought. There he'd been grilled about his own research and related work. When he'd refused to cooperate, they'd tried drugs and psychological stress, and having a pre-existing heart condition, he'd had a coronary attack. And died. He was sure about that: as the duplicate Harford, he'd died.
And when the memories hit the original, he'd had a coronary of his own. But the 'real' Harford didn't die.
* * *
It was an interesting report, but it didn't have the sort of information I needed. So I went to Gold's and worked out on the Nautilus equipment, then sat in the sauna and cooked out what remained of the tension. When I left, I knew what I was going to do next. I called Buddy Ballenger from a pay phone outside Morey's. I doubted he had a program he could trace the call with through our deadwall, but why take a chance?
A receptionist answered. 'I need to speak with Reverend Ballenger personally,' I told her.
Her sweetie-pie voice dripped Georgia honeysuckle. 'Whom may I say is calling?'
'Mr. Smith.' It wasn't a complete lie. In Finnish, a seppanen is a smith.
