The Man Who Would Not Die

by Thomas Page

  “Married? Me? You’re joking. Me?”

  Jordan was sad for Lawrence Dutton. “You’re too sensitive. I bet you’re a good doctor, though.”

  “I’m a shitty doctor. There’s no such thing as a good doctor, never trust them. I’ve got another Dutton Special. A true-life tale guaranteed to make you want to go home and stick your head in the oven.”

  “Maybe you should think about a psychiatrist.”

  “Oh, no. I’d just push him over the edge and die of guilt.”

  Jordan blew out his cheeks. He said firmly, “Lawrence, I was hoping the passage of time would make you a happier man. The last time I saw you, you said you would put thoughts like these out of your mind, and they are back again. Something has happened, hasn’t it?”

  “Is happening sir. Right this minute.”

  “Which causes you to confront great riddles. And call on me twelve years later, saying you have a very important question to ask me. Ask me then, Lawrence.”

  Dutton wished he’d asked the question over the phone to give the old man time to phrase an answer. “Well, yes, it’s a real heavyweight one, sir.”

  “I’ll do my best.”

  “What happens when we die?”

  Jordan watched him, not unfazed, not wanting to commit himself.

  After a moment Dutton understood what he was thinking. “Not me, my health’s fine at the moment. I’m asking for someone else.”

  “Someone close to you?”

  “God, I hope not. Do you, sir, do you know the answer to that question? No one else I’ve ever met in my life besides you could even begin to approach it. No, that’s not true. A lunatic named Gareth Jones thought he had the answer to that question. Part of his answer is in that box.”

  “Very nicely set up, Lawrence. Shall I open the box and confront the ultimate mystery now?”

  “Be my guest.”

  Dutton watched him carefully withdraw Jones’s oscillator, antenna, the headband and electrodes, the two tape machines and magnetic cartridge, and the little oscilloscope from the cardboard box in which the Santa Eulalia police had packed them and which they had reluctantly turned over to Dutton. Jordan lay the paraphernalia out on his table. His eyes traced out wires and connections, then he picked up the tape cartridge connected to the headband. “Lawrence, is this an encephalograph?”

  “Yes, it is, sir.”

  “And this tape presumably means he was recording his own brain waves. Now this”—he picked up the trumpet and oscillator tapes—“means he was also recording something else.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Who?”

  “At this particular moment, sir, I would rather not answer that. What I would like to know is if anything is on it.”

  “I see. He recorded them simultaneously. I presume that means he meant for them to be analyzed simultaneously.”

  “It’s Jones’s major contribution to the world. It’s an amplifier, based on the same ones they use with space probes. He says it was sensitive enough to pick up molecules bumping together. He was looking for something, sir. If there is a God or an afterlife, that amplifier picked up a footprint.”

  The head of the physics lab was a portly man named Bondine. Jordan presented the tape from the oscillator to him and said, “Find a signal. A blip. Any kind of blip.”

  The first result came in an hour later. It consisted of a breathless call from Bondine to Jordan’s office. “Tell me who designed this amplifier and I’ve got you a Nobel Prize. I’ll make him rich.”

  “That’s encouraging. What have you got?”

  “We cracked the tape hiss and machinery sounds. We got rid of the white noise. We ran the whole thing through the computer and came up with five contacts.”

  “What kind of contacts?”

  “We don’t know. What we can do is stretch them out and break them up and see if there’s some kind of structure to them.”

  Jordan laughed. “You’re reading my mind, Bondine. What else?”

  Bondine grunted and let out a long breath. “A real hot one. The brain waves. Come on down and take a look at them. Either this guy’s equipment went haywire or he did.”

  Bondine had hooked the tape of Jones’s brain waves to the oscilloscope. When he switched it on, a snowfall blanked out the round green screen of the machine.

  “Granola,” shrugged Jordan. “The inside of your lunatic’s head looks like any other brain to me, Lawrence.”

  “They go on like this for an hour,” said Bondine. “It’s your standard alpha waves. Either his eyes are closed or they’re open but staring at a familiar pattern. So everything is fine right now, he’s probably sitting down, relaxed and everything, right?”

  Jordan nodded impatiently.

  Bondine ran the tape forward at high speed. The screen showed a fairly regular line of jagged mountain peaks moving across its face. Suddenly the alpha waves changed to longer, softer waves. Bondine stopped the tape and ran it backwards to the junction. “It happened instantly.”

  “Delta waves,” murmured Dutton. “He’s dreaming.”

  Jordan’s eyes narrowed and he had Bondine run the tape backward and forward twice more. “Yes. There’s no transition to sleep. A waking dream, Lawrence. Or a hallucination.”

  “Not Jones. What he is doing is sitting on the floor, eyes wide open, and having a dream.”

  As usual Jordan was ahead of him. “Some kind of stimulation apparently hit your lunatic’s limbic brain. Specifically the pons. It’s not unheard of. An electrode can do it, the dream state is easily evoked while awake. I doubt it’s a very pleasant experience. Does he actually know he’s dreaming? That’s the big one.”

  “Yes,” Dutton answered bluntly, remembering the night Forrester hit him with the LS. He had not known it himself until after he awakened and found the ward spotless and undamaged. “He was ready for it. I wasn’t.”

  “Not that it would do him much good. Ever try to control a dream, Lawrence? Sometimes you know you’re safe at home in bed, but it doesn’t really help, you just live through it and hope to wake up soon. Try as you might, you can’t be logical, it just carries you wherever it’s going. Bondine, how long does this go on?”

  “Not long, about ten more minutes. Then he switched the equipment off. There’s more. He managed to pick up impulses from his auditory and visual cortex centers. Yet the auditory and visual nerves show very little activity. There was something in the room with him that bypassed his sense organs, yet hit the brain bang on target.”

  “He predicted that, too,” Dutton said. “He monitored some other functions, didn’t he?”

  “Yup. His heartbeat increased and his skin perspiration level went down as if he were cold, yet the thermometer shows the temperature remained around seventy degrees. That seems to me like a very strong emotional response.”

  “Kind of like a nightmare,” said Jordan, drumming his fingers on his head. “He was not isolated long enough for his brain to devise its own stimuli, he took no drugs, he was not an epileptic. . . . Lawrence, that wraps it up. He was responding to that little contact on the other tape.”

  Bondine cleared his throat and shook his head. “That’s plain impossible.”

  “Why, pray?”

  “This blip, this contact, is too small. The brain couldn’t perceive it. It’s down there with cosmic rays or neutrinos. That’s what I meant about his equipment being so good.”

  Jordan turned his head to Dutton, whose gaze was riveted on the sleepy waves on the screen. Quietly the old man asked, “Was he bigger than a neutrino?”

  “He was around six foot two with blond hair and a blue coat and he weighed over two hundred pounds. To my eyes he looked gigantic.”

  “That’s because your eyes didn’t see him, your brain did.”

  “I don’t see how. Like Bondine said, it’s just too small.�
��

  “Oh, God knows, gentlemen, the universe is positively reeking with all kinds of stimuli we can’t perceive.”

  “Such as what?” scoffed Bondine earnestly.

  “Mr. Bondine, where are your feet?”

  Bondine and his assistants looked at their feet. Dutton looked at his own loafer-shod feet on the floor. There they were.

  “On the floor, sir.”

  “Can you see gravity? Hear it? Taste it? Pick it up on instruments?”

  “Uh . . . no, sir.”

  “If I were to tell you there is a force in the universe which binds trillion-ton bodies to quadrillion-ton stars over absolute vacuums of millions of miles with no ether to conduct this force, would you laugh?”

  Bondine laughed. “Yes, I suppose I would have, three hundred years ago.”

  “Okay, that’s one stimulus you can’t sense. Gravity. Here’s another. Ever photographed magnetism?”

  “No, sir, but still I . . .”

  “Good. Gravity and magnetism, a couple of great stim­uli you can’t see, hear, feel, touch, or photograph, yet we know they make the cosmos go round.”

  “I don’t see the connection,” Bondine replied.

  “Something was in that room with Jones.” Jordan jabbed a finger at him, the teacher knuckle-rapping a slow student. “You will never ever find out exactly what. It lies in other realms.”

  “The blip is subatomic then. A wave? A particle? A quark?”

  A soul, Dutton added mentally, looking from the tapes to the oscilloscope. Jones was right on target. He had be­lieved that the answer to death lay way down there in the region of polarities and particles which became waves, in the unseeable universe of quantum mechanics. These forces, expressible only in symbol, had enthralled the greatest thinkers of the century. It was the molecular face of Creation itself.

  “I tend to think it’s a wave. I suggest a program in pure math which shouldn’t take your computer more than an instant. I shall send down some equations to cover both the blip and Jones’s brain waves.”

  “Fine, sir. What kind of equations are they?”

  “Fourier’s equations. He was a man who devised a set of tables that just might be what our doctor ordered—no pun intended, Lawrence.”

  “Exactly what did I order?” asked Dutton, thoroughly at sea.

  Jordan tapped his knee. “Lawrence, come now. Don’t you see what your lunatic Jones was up to?”

  “Not entirely, no.”

  Jordan rapped the top of the oscillator. “This thing is supposed to be a kind of burglar alarm. To tell you if un­wanted blips are in the near vicinity.” Jordan shook his head. “I wish I’d known that lunatic of yours, Lawrence. What happened to him, anyway?”

  “He died,” Dutton replied, more lost than ever.

  “Whatever the hell that means,” Jordan chortled. “Come on, Lawrence, we’ll give Bondine and his super-brains an hour or so. I feel marvelous.”

  Dutton had rented a reasonably neat motel room about two miles from the campus. It was clean, which meant the broken television had been dusted and the paint that peeled off the pipes was carefully swept up every day. Jordan had told him to lose himself until nine o’clock, when the lab would have broken the tapes. He felt an urge to speak with Bickel and see if Forrester were in his body or wandering around.

  “I’m waiting for fibrillation, Dutton, it ought to hap­pen any minute now. Tell me about these tapes.”

  Dutton described Jones’s machine, the theoretical base of Jones’s brain-mapping, and how Jordan had reacted to it all. Bickel heard him out without much reaction. When Dutton finished, he snorted, “Well, that’s one man’s opin­ion. It would explain how Forrester got around so fast. If he’s a neutrino or something like that, he can move at the speed of light. That’s a very odd way of looking at it.”

  “It’s called trying to be a scientist.”

  “It’s not too bad. If you were made out of neutrinos, his would be a very shadowy world and you’d pass through it hardly being aware of its existence. Much the way we see the so-called spirit world. Forrester is a quark. Without much charm at the moment—your New York crack worked perfectly.”

  “You mean last night at Branch’s? How do you know?”

  “I called Bellevue this afternoon just to ask if anything unusual happened. Last night at eleven-fifty-two a man in a blue blazer showed up, walking round the place asking for Daniel Forrester. Nobody saw him come in or go out and he caused quite an uproar. They’re used to it, though, they’ve got a mental ward there.”

  “Eleven-fifty-two,” Dutton echoed, trying to do some calculating.

  “That’s right. Figure in the two-hour time difference, our friend traveled over three thousand miles to the Big Apple in less than a second. It’s not quite instantaneous, but it’s fast enough.”

  Hearing this phrased so methodically, Dutton felt a jab of despair. “Christ. It’s hopeless, Bickel. Space is nothing to him, time and space are meaningless. He hates me, and he’s a little piece of personified murder. How do you kill a ghost?”

  “I know, Dutton, that and a dime will get you a seat in Sunday school. Dead is still dead as far as I’m concerned. Look, running is action, it beats sitting on the pot feeling sorry for yourself. A very peculiar thought has just occurred to me.”

  “Only one?”

  “Maybe it’s a big one. It seems to me that if we buy Jones’s and Jordan’s foundation, we ought to buy the whole house.”

  Dutton sighed. Bickel was sounding like another Jones. “You better go back a step.”

  “Well, theoretically we’re kicking round the whole sub­atomic world, aren’t we? If we’re getting heavy into causality and synchronicity and all that, it might be your way out. In which case all you have to do is hurry up and wait.”

  “Wait for what?”

  “Socratically speaking, Daniel Forrester is an error, a mistake. Something will happen, Dutton. The whole error that we call Daniel Forrester will get corrected somehow; I don’t know how. You don’t have to drag religion into it . . .”

  Dutton wondered why everyone was so afraid of invoking religion. He supposed it was because everyone was afraid of being disappointed.

  “. . . but it’s not unreasonable to call it justice. Or Fate. Or logic. Or even something that looks like coincidence. It’ll all straighten itself out just as sure as two plus two equals four.”

  “How marvelous. God’s in his heaven, all’s right with the world. I’m surrounded by preachers with engineering degrees.”

  “Hold the phone a minute.” Bickel was gone only for thirty seconds, after which he picked up the phone again and exhaled loudly. “Okay, he just arrested. He’s on the loose again.”

  Instinctively, Dutton looked round his shabby motel room. His watch read eight-thirty-one.

  “Give me your number there, Dutton.” He wrote it down as Dutton read it off the stained notation on the phone. “Does anyone else know where you are?”

  “No. Nobody.”

  Bickel did not like it, but there was nothing he could do. “Okay, stay in touch wherever you go, all right?”

  “Why not. I’ll be especially on the lookout for a girl in a bathrobe carrying scales who goes by the name of Justice.”

  “I thought that would comfort you. Look at it this way, Dutton. He’s either at his house or looking for you or about to walk in the front door of Denver Mercy. Don’t forget, I’m sitting on top of his body. I think he’s still interested in that. Maybe more than he is in you.”

  CHAPTER 13

  Kate was standing in front of her picture window, viewing what looked like a seduction in the building across the pool. Things were about to get interesting when the apartment pipes began knocking in the walls and a cool draft blew through the apartment.

  She looked around the place trying to figur
e out where the air came from. At that moment Mr. Fudd shot out of the rattan chair, his fur puffed out, growling extraordinarily low for an animal his size. “Sit down, Fudd,” she commanded.

  Fudd stalked the rug, darting from one wall to the other, trying to pin down the knocking sounds. The only light in the room came from a table lamp. This began to sputter and dim as though shorting out.

  “Kate.”

  How goddamned wonderful! A surprise visit from Daniel Forrester, with the plumbing and electricity falling apart, and her cat stalking the rug like a Bengal tiger. She had a frozen spinach soufflé in the oven, a bottle of wine, and nothing else.

  Mr Fudd blocked her way to the door. She stamped her foot. The cat exploded off the rug and hissed into the bathroom. Kate closed the door behind him.

  “Kate. Open the door.”

  Kate hesitated. She did not have to let him in. She was tired, he could damn well call ahead. “Daniel? How did you get in?”

  She undid the chain and pulled open the door. He was standing in the middle of the hall with that goofy smile on his face. He said, “I can get in anywhere. Someone is with me.”

  “Who?”

  From some ways down the hall came a low voice, almost indistinct. Kate restrained herself from looking.

  “He’s scared about how you’ll react to him,” said Daniel Forrester. He seemed fairly sane tonight.

  Warily, Kate stepped back into the apartment. She heard soft footfalls on the hall rug approaching the apartment. “Daniel, who is it?”

  “A friend of yours. Promise you won’t be afraid of him.”

  “If I was afraid of him, he wouldn’t be a friend of mine.”

  “You asked about him.”

  Kate felt her heart trip a beat, triggering a burst of wind from her lungs as though she had fallen on her back and had her breath knocked out of her. George Hadley edged into her apartment as he had edged through his college career, with that same hang-dog, loser’s shyness.

  “Hello, Katsy.”