The Link

by Richard Matheson

  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.

  “What the researchers are seeing here,” Madame Bekhtereva explains, “is a bio-electrical exchange between cells. By painstakingly logging these interactions, we have been able to trace the intricate patterns of information received by the brain and directed to appropriate ‘command centers’ where it is either stored for future use or used immediately for decision-making or emotional response.

  “In the last twenty years,” she says, “we have pinpointed and explored more than two thousand separate zones in the brain each of which serves a different purpose. We can, for example, trace a single word from the time it is picked up by the ear to where it triggers the proper response in the brain.”

  “Can you do that now?” asks Teddie.

  “If you wish,” she says. “You have a word?”

  “Parapsychology,” says Teddie.

 
; Peter throws a furious glance at him as does Cathy; Ludmilla winces. Madame Bekhtereva’s reaction is as advertised.

  “Parapsychology is not a word we speak here,” she says icily. “Parapsychology is not a science, it is a guessing game. If so-called ESP is ever verified—which I doubt—it will be through advanced physiological means, not conjectural shots in the dark.”

  “Damn it, Teddie, this has got to stop!” says Peter in an angry whisper. They are having a confrontational meeting in a corner of the hotel bar. “We are here as guests! What are you trying to do, get us thrown out of the country before we see what we came for?”

  “How much do you have to see before the bulb goes on in your head?” snarls Teddie. “These people are trying to develop a power to dominate by psychic means! If I can describe a deserted Nike base in Florida, they can describe a working missile base in Wyoming! If I can alter the functioning of a magnetometer in a sealed vault, they can alter the functioning of a defense system device inside a mountain!”

  “You honestly believe that’s what they have in mind?” demands Peter.

  “When have governments invested in anything that was not motivated by a greed for domination?” Teddie says.

  “Doesn’t that include our government too, Teddie?” Robert asks.

  “I am not talking about our government,” Teddie retorts. “I am talking about the government of the country we are in.”

  He makes a scornful noise, seeing their expressions. “Don’t believe it then,” he says. “The Devil is never happier than when people do not believe he exists.”

  “Does Russia represent the Devil now?” asks Peter coldly.

  Teddie about to answer in kind when his gaze shifts across the room. His instant smile is belied by the deadly coldness in his eyes. “Oh, well, see who’s here,” he says. “Our old friends Professor Vitroslava and his dear wife Lydia. What a dazzling coincidence.”

  Robert and Cathy are in bed together. They have made love and she lies against him, her left arm across his chest, his arms around her.

  They discuss Teddie’s behavior and Peter’s mounting anger with it. Peter knows that the Russians are keeping an eye on them, she says; he’s not naïve. But he recognizes and appreciates—as she does—that the Russians are also being very generous with their time and information. Whatever their motivation may or may not be (Teddie is convinced that he’s the reason they have been allowed in) they are, so far, seeing and learning things of “immense interest” to them. “Are we?” Robert asks. She looks taken back. “Of course we are.” “You are anyway.”

  “What does that mean?” she asks quietly.

  He shrugs. “Well, you believe that ESP is strictly physiological. Everything they say verifies that belief.”

  “Does that mean it’s wrong?” she asks a little tightly. “It means that I’m not having my beliefs verified,” he says. “I didn’t know you had beliefs about psi,” she counters. “I thought that, with you, it was strictly ‘no opinion’.” “Not any more,” he answers. “All right, what is it you believe then?”

  “It’s more what I don’t believe,” he says. “I don’t believe it’s all strictly physiological. I think there’s more involved. Something bigger.” She sighs. “I think that what we’re seeing is pretty damn big,” she says.

  “I know,” he replies.

  After a while, she starts to rub the back of her head. “What is it?” he asks.

  “Nothing.” “Sweetheart, what?”

  She tells him that she has a headache. Robert does not go into the ramifications of that; whether she got it in reaction to their difference of opinion. He touches the back of her head. “Here?” he asks.

  She nods, wincing.

  He starts to massage her head gently. At first, she tries to stop him. Then she lies quietly, a strange expression beginning on her face. He continues to rub her head with his fingers.

  “Do you feel warmth?” he asks, curious.

  “Yes,” she answers softly.

  In a few minutes, she pushes up on an elbow and looks at him oddly. “It’s gone,” she says.

  He starts to smile in pleasure, then his face goes blank and he closes his eyes with a sound of pain.

  “What is it?” she asks anxiously.

  He manages a smile. “What a healer I am,” she says. “I’ve got the headache now.”

  “Oh, sweetheart.” She holds him against her breasts. “I’m so sorry.”

  She strokes his hair. “So many different powers are coming to you,” she says. “What are they all leading up to?”

  “Good question,” Robert murmurs. “Got an opinion?” he hisses. “Better still, got an aspirin?”

  “We’ve have had a stroke of good fortune,” Ludmilla tells them as she joins them in the hotel dining room the following morning.

  “We could use one,” Teddie mutters, in a state of dark depression.

  “Tofik Dadashev is performing in Leningrad tonight,” Ludmilla says. “And we are also going to meet him this morning at a local police station for a demonstration.”

  When they exit the hotel to the car, Teddie pushes in beside Ludmilla before they can stop him and “hogs” her attention all the way to the police station, speaking to her (in Russian) in a soft, insinuating voice. Peter’s and Cathy’s expressions are hard, Robert’s is disturbed. Only he senses the great internal stress of the small man.

  At the police station, they come upon Tofik Dadashev just sitting down at a table with forty-five photographs of male criminals. He is about to attempt to pick out the mugshots of three of them being held in prison at the moment.

  Dadashev looks at the policemen in the room. “Do any of these men know who they are?” he asks.

  “Of course,” he is told.

  “Simple then,” says Dadashev. He looks at the photographs and at each of the policemen. Quickly, he picks out three photographs. “These,” he says casually.

  The policemen applaud.

  Teddie steps forward and leans over the table, pointing to a fourth photograph. “And this one is being brought in right now,” he tells them in Russian.

  They look at him, startled, then laugh, assuming it’s a joke. Teddie shrugs.

  Dadashev, a man in his late thirties, his personality also like that of de Vries—high-keyed and theatrical—looks at Teddie apathetically, then, after meeting the group, tells them how his family realized that he was “terrifically psychic” even before he knew it himself.

  We see the incident dramatized. Dadashev is living with his uncle and grandmother. “I had a terrible sweet tooth,” says Ludmilla translating for Dadashev. “So much so that my uncle and grandmother always hid the candy in the house.”

  Dadashev, a small boy, walks around the house with his grandmother, asking her where the candy is. She says she won’t tell him. He stares at her, then moves quickly to the hiding place and starts to eat the candy.

  “All I had to do was stare at either of them,” Dadashev says, Ludmilla still translating. “Then I could walk to exactly where the candy had been carefully concealed.

  “Later, I used my powerful mental ability to take myself and my friends to movie shows,” he continues.

  We see him, in his boyhood, approaching a ticket taker in a movie theatre, a group of friends with him. He starts to talk to her, staring into her eyes.

  “As I spoke to her—about the weather, the price of food, anything at all—I would place in her mind the thought that it would be nice to give us youngsters a break and let us in for free,” says Ludmilla’s voice speaking for Dadashev.

  As he speaks to the woman, he gestures furtively to his friends and, one by one, they walk past the woman into the theatre, she nods approvingly to each. All his friends inside, Dadashev salutes her with a cheerful, “Thank you. Have a nice day,” and saunters into the movie himself.

  “Not once were we ever stopped!” he tells them in the police station. “I was in complete control of the ticket taker’s mind!”

 
As they leave the station, Teddie nudges Robert and points to a man being brought into the station by an officer.

  It is the one Teddie picked out from the photographs.

  Robert starts to say something about it but Teddie restrains him. “It would only bruise his giant ego,” he mutters.

  At a local coffee house, the anecdotes of Dadashev continue, translated by Ludmilla as we see them dramatized.

  “When I was in the tenth grade, I gave more proof of my amazing power,” Dadashev says.

  We see the young boy in a hot, stuffy classroom, listening to a woman teacher drone on about Russian literature. CAMERA MOVES IN SLOWLY ON the boy.

  “The teacher grated on my nerves. She was so precise, so self-assured, so exact in her delivery,” says Dadashev’s voice.

  A mischievous expression takes over the boy’s face.

  “I began to send her a mental message. Get confused. Confused.”

  We see the monotonous drone of the matronly teacher start to change. She begins to stutter, becomes upset, stutters more.

  “She could not even finish a sentence!” crows Dadashev (through Ludmilla) at the coffee house.

  The group smiles politely except for Teddie.

  “Another fascinating incident,” continues Dadashev, “took place when I was an adolescent.”

  “You are still an adolescent,” mutters Teddie.

  “Beg your pardon?” Dadashev asks in Russian.

  “Nothing, I was thinking aloud,” Teddie tells him back in Russian. Ludmilla, who clearly thinks that Dadashev is a total wonder, gives Teddie a mildly reproachful look.

  “To continue,” says Dadashev (Ludmilla), “one of the few places adolescent boys could go in my city, which was Baku, was the local billiard hall.”

  We see Dadashev at fourteen, watching a man play pool.

  “One day a newcomer came into the hall and, as I watched him, I saw that he was a hustler, that he could win when he chose.

  “I decided to punish him and waited until a game came up in which the stakes were very high.”

  We see the game. Young Tofik stares at the hustler. The man misses his shot, looking startled. On his next turn, Dadashev stares at him again. Again, the man misses. He looks nervous, unable to understand how he could miss. He begins to come unglued and loses badly.