“Sam, what's all this about…?”
“Please, Peggy, just do it my way.”
“He jumped from a window of his apartment in the Dakota Building. Nobody knew why. You were shocked, you couldn't understand it. We talked about it.”
“All right,” Sam said quietly, “thank you, Peggy. Now, the next name is Roger Fullerton. Does anybody know who Roger Fullerton is?”
This brought a chorus of response. They all knew who Roger Fullerton was. How could they not, he was world famous? They also knew that Sam had studied under him at Princeton.
“But he died this year, too, didn't he?” Jeff Dorrell asked.
“Aren't you sure?” Sam said, looking at him.
Jeff gave a slight shrug. “I'm fairly sure. Now that's odd-you'd think I'd be sure whether or not somebody like Roger Fullerton had died. Actually I know he did-I just can't remember when I heard it.”
Sam didn't pursue the question for the moment. Instead he continued with the list he had prepared in his mind. “Okay, who knows Drew and Barry Hearst?”
Again there was an affirmative response from everyone. Drew and Barry had been volunteers in a number of experiments, particularly the remote viewing ones with Brad and Tania.
“But they died,” Tania said, looking at Sam with a marked degree of suspicion now. “They were killed in a car crash about three months ago.”
“Maggie McBride?” Sam said.
Hers too was a name they recognized. Maggie had worked on remote viewing and several of the PK tests. “But I haven't seen her in a long time,” Tania said.
“And I'm afraid you won't,” Peggy added, her gaze too now fixed on Sam. “I got a note from Maggie's daughter just recently to say she'd passed away-a heart attack. I know I told you that, Sam.”
He made no comment, just went on. “What does the name Pete Daniels mean to any of you?”
This too brought a general response. They'd all known Pete.
“What is this, Sam?” Brad Bucklehurst said. “Some kind of obituary game or what? Why are you asking about all these people who've died?”
Sam held up a hand. “Please…I warned you I wouldn't say why I was asking. Just tell me about Pete, who he was, when and how he died.”
“He joined us about two years ago,” Brad said. “Worked as your personal assistant for six, seven months, then got knifed in some street fight. We never did get to the bottom of it. I was here when the police called. You went to the morgue to identify him. You can't have forgotten that.”
Again Sam made no comment. “Finally, Adam Wyatt,” he said, and looked around at them one by one. “Does the name Adam Wyatt mean anything to any of you?”
Blank faces gazed back at him, lips were pursed, heads shaken. The name meant nothing.
Sam was silent a moment. Then he pushed himself up off the arm of the chair where he'd been perched. “All right, that's it-thank you, everybody.”
True to their agreement, nobody asked questions or pressed for explanations. They all went back to what they had been doing, though full of curiosity and speculation among themselves.
Sam walked over to his office. As he turned to shut the door, he caught Peggy's gaze on him, questioning and concerned. He made an effort to give her a thin smile of reassurance, but he knew she sensed that something was deeply wrong. He closed the door, then slumped into the chair behind his desk.
There was, he told himself, an inescapable if insane logic to the situation. The world in which Adam Wyatt existed was no longer the world in which they as a group had created him. By imagining him into existence they had imagined themselves out of it-at least in the form in which they had previously existed.
It was, as Joanna and Roger had both said, a problem of compatibility. There were mathematical principles, descriptions of the fundamental laws of nature, underscoring that truth. Pauli's Exclusion Principle or Bell's Theorem could surely apply in some form. Or GOdel. Wasn't there something here of closed systems and self-reference…?
He pulled himself up short. He was doing the very thing that orthodox science contemptuously accused people like him of, and that he himself strove to avoid in all his work: he was taking the hard-won results of scientific experiment and theory and turning them back into the kind of magic that men believed in before the dawn of reason drove out the crippling superstitions that had governed man's early evolution.
Or was science itself the dead end? He thought of what Joanna had told him of her last conversation with Roger. Could that really have been what a man like Roger thought? That in the end, as the Eastern mystics taught, there was only the eternal dance, with Western thought and scientific rationalism no more than one of the forms it took from time to time, no nearer to a final truth than the caveman's belief that the sun rose only because he sacrificed the life of some animal or fellow human being on the altar of his tribal gods?
His hand closed on something in the bottom of his jacket pocket. He pulled out the square of paper torn from Joanna's notepad, the one he'd picked up in her apartment the night before on which she'd written down the address and phone number of Ralph Cazaubon.
He looked at it awhile, and wondered. He'd tried the number last night to no avail. Could there be any point in trying it again? He hesitated only for a moment, then reached for his phone and dialed.
After three rings a man's voice said, “Hello?”
Sam was aware suddenly of his heart beating in his chest.
“Is this Ralph Cazaubon?” he asked.
“Yes it is. How can I help you?”
“I'm trying to get in touch with someone called Joanna Cross.”
“Joanna Cross,” the voice on the other end repeated the name with a note of curiosity. “That's my wife's name-or was before we married.”
52
The rain had lightened by the time she reached the road and started walking toward the station. Each time she heard a car approaching she slipped into the trees and hid in case it was the police, but she knew she was going to have to risk hitching a ride sooner or later. Eventually she heard a truck coming up behind her. She turned, blinded by its massive lights, and raised a thumb. It shuddered to a halt with a hiss of air brakes.
She ignored as far as she could all the driver's standard conversational gambits, saying only that her car had broken down and she had to catch a train. He offered to let her use his phone to call a garage, but she said she'd already taken care of that. He looked at her doubtfully, bedraggled and exhausted as she was, but something about her discouraged him from asking further questions.
When they approached the station she asked him to stop about a hundred yards short. He did so, merely nodding his acknowledgment of her thanks as she climbed down from the cab, then leaning over to pull the door shut. He was glad to be rid of her. She was a good-looking woman, and for a moment when he'd seen her in the road back there he'd thought he might get lucky. But something about her had given him the shivers. She felt like bad luck-not, he told himself, that he was a superstitious man.
She approached the station carefully, hugging the fence on the far side of the road where it turned and doubled back on itself and into a narrow, quiet road on a slight hill. Standing there, she could observe the station forecourt without being seen herself.
Her caution was rewarded when she saw the police car parked right outside the main entrance. These cops were neither subtle nor particularly smart; at least she had that much going for her. Her only worry was that they'd stay there indefinitely and she'd never be able to get on a train. But after a couple of minutes they came out, gave a perfunctory check around the forecourt, then drove off.
She started to cross the road, but stopped as a thought occurred to her. There was every chance that the cops would have given her description to whoever was in the ticket office and told them to look out for her. Luckily she had a return ticket in her pocket and so didn't need to show her face at the window. Also she knew there was a way onto the platform that only the local commuters were aware of-a gate at the far end that was supposedly for
