by John Dalmas
"A private individual."
"I see." She lit a cigarette, the smoke wisping upward into an air cleaner. Even so, I got a whiff. It wasn't tobacco or weed. Maybe one of the herbals you can buy, supposed to be relatively harmless. I didn't know much about the different brands. I'd still been a kid when the government made it illegal to advertise them. This one had an apricot-colored filter tip.
"How can I help you?" she asked.
"I've heard you were once on the Gnosties' board of directors. And on the Noetie board of directors before that. Is that true?"
"They're both true, but neither was a position of any influence. That's one respect, one of several, in which Ray was like Haller at that time. Both kept the power—all the real power—in their own hands. A directorship wasn't even an honor, really, though they treated it as one. We rarely even had meetings. All they wanted a board of directors for was a list of names to put on legal papers and letterhead. Names with a Ph.D., MD, or DD appended, or some such. I had a doctorate in math."
I revised my estimate of her age up another notch—not easy to do, considering her looks. Or maybe she'd been a child prodigy. "But I suppose you're knowledgeable about them," I said.
She shrugged. "About current situations, no. If you're interested in organization and philosophy, yes. History definitely." Even her raised eyebrow was elegant. "Ask your questions and we'll see."
I'd been reviewing what to ask the evening before, and on the way over. Basically I was groping, fishing for leads and trying to evaluate the too numerous possibilities. What I could most hope to get from her were insights into the church and the Noeties, and possibly more contacts. I still couldn't discard the possibility that the Noeties had done Christman in. They'd had a serious grudge. And if the story was true about Christman and her, she'd have insights into him, too.
"Of the members of the Church of the New Gnosis," I said, "what proportion had been members of the Institute for Noetic Technology?"
"Over the long term? A tiny percentage. The institute was already declining when the church began. But the church began quite largely with disaffected members and ex-members of the institute."
"The institute's suit against the church was for copyright infringement. . . ."
"And was quite properly rejected by the court."
I wondered what made her so sure. "Did the church borrow ideas from the institute?" I asked. There's no legal protection for ideas by themselves.
"Your question would better be phrased, 'Did Ray Christman borrow ideas from Leif Haller.' The answer is no. Leif insisted otherwise, and I have no doubt he believed it, but by that time he was borderline psychotic. Ray didn't even know much about Leif's ideas. He'd never been connected with the institute, or interested in its technical procedures. Though the source of his own ideas had been."
"The source of Christman's ideas?"
"Right. Ray's cosmology was not his own, and the basis for his procedures wasn't either. But neither were they Leif's."
I gawped. The booklets I'd bought from the church, and material I'd called up from the library, credited all of it to Christman, or blamed it on him. "Tell me about that," I said.
"First of all, almost anyone's ideas derive to some degree from other people's. You borrow, and you build from there: revise, rearrange, and add on. Haller, for example, openly borrowed from others, bits and pieces, major ones. He added his own ideas, and integrated all of it into a functional whole, Noetics I. Which wasn't as good as he claimed, of course—nothing was—but overall it was new and remarkably effective. Later he erected a shaky additional structure on it—Noetics II—that promised more and delivered less. Considerably less.
"Ray, on the other hand, borrowed a whole system intact from someone else, reworked it to make it easier to understand, then designed an organization for large-scale application. And told people that all of it was his. The person he'd borrowed from had been associated with Leif Haller, and some of Leif's ideas were implicit in what Ray borrowed. But they weren't basic ideas, just rules of application. That's where most of the similarities lay that inspired the suit—in the rules of application."
Christman had borrowed someone else's system and never acknowledged them! That could be a motive for murder! But I stayed with the Noetie matter just then. I could come back to the other.
"The institute claimed that the copyright infringements had materially damaged it," I said. "If we change 'copyright infringements' to 'lawful borrowing of ideas,' did Ray Christman actually rob or otherwise harm the institute?"
She reached, stubbed out her cigarette, then leaned back in her tiltback chair. Not only her legs were nice. It was hard to keep from staring, and she knew it. "The institute had begun to shrink, or at least had quit growing, before Ray ever started his church," she said. "Charisma doesn't necessarily include charm, and Haller's heavy-handed arrogance had turned off too many people. And especially to people close to him, it was more and more apparent that he was becoming a mental case. Also he'd made too many claims and promises for too many years without coming through.
"As Ray's church grew, Leif came to hate him, first for cutting in on his game, and secondly for the cardinal sin of being more successful at it. The church simply speeded the institute's decline; people left more readily because they saw an alternative.
"And now, what had been a network of nearly a hundred Noetic centers worldwide, recruiting members and delivering counseling and training, is down to one, just one. A two-story building in Santa Maria. There's not much left except a few sour, hard-bitten loyalists to the memory of Leif Haller."
If they'd shrunk that much, they might be hard pressed to finance a contract on Christman. On the other hand, there'd been stories, when I was a kid, that the institute had procedures that could produce super intellects and psychic powers. I had a friend who used to fantasize about that, said that when he grew up, he was going to get in on it. I mentioned this to Sproule, and asked if there'd been anything to it.
She laughed wryly. "Not really. I said that Leif had made too many promises and claims without coming through. His early procedures and their results—Noetics I, that is—got people excited and enthused. And that, along with his charisma, made them ready to go along with him on other things. Noetics II was a much larger, open-ended set of procedures, with a foundation of untested and unlikely theory. By that time Leif was too enamored of his own intuition. The only test was application, and when it failed, he blamed other things, not his intuitions."
"Isn't that more or less what happened with Christman's work?"
"More or less, yes. But in developing his applications, Ray Christman took a lot of liberties with the theories, which makes it impossible to evaluate the theories from his results.
"And in comparing the two men, there's the matter of intentions. Their work was directed at different goals. Leif wanted to be superman—actually more than superman—and to surround himself with a corps of supermen. What he called Metapsyches. Ray, on the other hand, wanted to save humanity, which required, he felt, that we all rise above our physical selves and be what he called Freed Beings.
"They both had a lot of success with their beginning procedures, which were designed to rid people of fixations, phobias, psychosomatic ailments, things like that. Even neuroses, quite commonly; sometimes even psychoses. You get rid of someone's eczema and asthma, and they see other people around them losing their stutter, for example, or their fear of flying, or their inferiority complex . . . If you do that for someone when all the medical profession did was ease them more or less, that someone's going to look at you as a magician. And of course the medical establishment will look at you as a dangerous fraud. Not every doctor, not every psychiatrist, but the establishment as a whole: the AMA, the APA. Partly because they've seen too many charlatans; it wasn't entirely self-interest.
"Meanwhile a lot of people are going to be impressed by Uncle Frank, whose arthritis went away at the Noetic Center. They're not going to pay much attention
to Dr. Pokefinger when he says it's all a fraud." She paused, looking me over. "It freed me of some troublesome problems, though I do retain a foible or two."
I wondered if she could read people like Molly claimed Christman could. "So what went wrong?" I asked.
"Basically they hit limits. It's as simple as that. When they cured someone's arthritis and recurrent migraines, or his compulsion to window peek or fondle little boys—when they cured something like that—they had a saner, healthier human being. What neither of them succeeded in doing was to produce a Metapsyche or a Freed Being, at least not stably. Nor even that intermediate phenomenon, a reliably psychic human.
"You might have psychic experiences during and after their procedures, especially Ray's. Sometimes even verifiable psychic experiences. Even on the lower-grade procedures. And when you did, it had a real and powerful effect on how you looked at the world afterward. But you were still a human being. You still had foibles, problems, and limits. They never took us beyond that."
"So it was a matter of overreaching," I said. "They weren't actually phonies."
"Certainly not to begin with. I have no doubt that Haller deliberately lied from the beginning, but I'm also convinced that he thought he could come through in the long run. Toward the end . . . Who knows what he thought and felt, in seclusion back in Wisconsin? He used to claim that his procedures, fully and properly used, could cure virtually everything. Said it off the record, of course, so the AMA and FDA couldn't hit him for it. Publicly he only implied it. Yet he became a physical wreck himself, years before the Great Flu killed him."
She paused, glancing at the coffeemaker on her worktable. The pitcher on it held only water, presumably hot. "I'm a hell of a hostess," she said, and got up. "Would you like coffee? Tea?"
"Coffee," I told her, and she mixed two cups of instant. "Honey?" she asked. I told her I'd take mine plain.
When she sat down again, she changed direction a bit. "If you want to see some reliable psychics, visit a home for the retarded that has some idiot savants, hopefully one that does more than calendar computations. You've heard of psychic photographers? There's a boy—a young man now—who's a ward of the Savants Project at the University of Minnesota. He does some marvelous things."
I'd read a book about a psychic photographer named Ted Polemes, who'd been studied by the University of Nebraska med school, fifty or so years ago. Intriguing. But I was looking for insights into the Christman case, not psychic photography. "That would be interesting," I said, and got back on the subject. "Who was the person that Ray Christman got his ideas from?"
"There were two of them, a husband and wife: Vic and Tory Merlin. Apparently they'd dedicated themselves to metaphysical and psychic research."
"And Christman didn't tell anyone? Except you?"
"So far as I'm aware, I'm the only one."
"Why you?"
She didn't answer right away. She sipped coffee, then lit another cigarette. "I was Ray's girlfriend for a while," she said at last. "I was with him for more than a year—longer than any other I've heard of. I've always been sexually attractive, interested, and talented. And Ray . . . Besides charisma, he had a large, strong body, something that's always turned me on."
She looked thoughtfully at me. I squirmed.
"Every now and then," she continued, "Ray would get a letter from Vic Merlin, updating him on what the Merlins were doing. Some of these were fifteen or twenty pages long. I remember the first one he got while I was with him. When he saw it, he dropped what he was doing and canceled an appointment. When he'd finished reading it, he was so enthused, he gave it to me to read. That's how I learned about them.
"The first time I read it, I understood almost none of it, so he gave me a stack of older letters, a couple of hundred pages, with marginal notes in Ray's handwriting. Reading them in chronological sequence, and being a fairly advanced counseling student, they made a certain amount of sense to me, but a lot of it was still a mystery. Ray told me to read them again in a week or so, and I was surprised at how much more I got out of them the second time. It was as if exposure started a subliminal mental ferment, and out of that grew a sense of what Merlin was communicating. Reading it a third time, I found myself saying 'of course.' It was beginning to seem obvious.
"Actually, that's what got me hooked on Charles Musés' work with hypernumbers, and eventually brought me here. I'd read some things on hypernumbers years earlier, and while it was interesting, I hadn't found it at all compelling. But the Merlins' work in metaphysics, on what they called 'the reality matrix' and 'the parts of man,' complemented it and gave it additional meaning for me."
"If the subject is that abstruse," I said, "how was Christman able to use it?"
"That was where Ray's contribution came in. He saw his function as translating Vic Merlin's stuff into teachable statements and procedures. I asked him why he didn't let others get it the same way he did, from repeated readings of Merlin's writing. His answer was that people wouldn't do it, and he was probably right.
"On a couple of occasions that year, he rented a plane and flew to Arizona to consult with the Merlins, go over things with them. It was all very secret. He flew himself; he was a licensed pilot. He'd be all excited at the prospect of seeing them. Ray could be like a child. I suspect they gave him counseling sessions while he was there. Once I asked to go with him; I wanted to meet these Merlins. Ray wouldn't take me. Said he didn't want any distractions. There should be only himself, and Vic and Tory."
I'd forgotten to drink my coffee. Now I took a sip; it was tepid. "What did the Merlins think of his using their stuff and not giving them credit? Did he pay them for it?"
Sproule looked surprised. "I don't know. I never wondered. They kept sending him stuff though. There may have been some kind of payment."
She went on to tell me how Christman got connected with them. "He'd never been interested in philosophy or psychology," she said. "He'd been a hot-shot salesman—in his own words, he 'could sell sand to the Arabs.' By age twenty-six, he'd parlayed his salesmanship into a chain of computer service centers in the west, and gotten hooked on golf. The way he told it, he was one of the world's worst golfers. Then someone suggested he see Vic Merlin, that Merlin could sit down with him and perform some psychic voodoo, and it would help his golf game.
"Ray had always been interested in the idea of psychic powers, so he went to see Merlin. After that he had no more trouble with his golf game, because he lost interest in it. Merlin had blown his mind, and had also blown his muscle spasm problems; he never had another muscle spasm.
"So he attached himself to them—he insisted that Tory was as powerful as Vic—and read their foot-high stack of 'research notes.' He also had them teach him some of the procedures they used. The result was the Church of the New Gnosis.
"There was one thing about it that troubled Ray, though," Sproule went on. "It hadn't developed in him the kinds of powers he insisted the Merlins had: telepathy, clairvoyance, out of body travel . . . That sort of thing. He put a lot of importance on things like that, believed it was part of what mankind needed to be saved. I think the lack must have troubled him more as time went on—made him fear he might fail. That may have been why he got more interested than ever in money and adulation, the last few years. They helped him feel successful. That's still the dark side of American culture, though it's lost ground since the plagues—the idea that money is success and success is money."
* * *
That was effectively the end of the interview. Sproule didn't know the Merlins' address. They lived on a ranch somewhere. But she told me someone who might know: Olaf Sigurdsson. Molly Cadigan had already given me Sigurdsson's address and phone number.
Thanking Sproule I got up, and she stepped over to me, so close we almost touched. "It was my pleasure, Mr. Seppanen," she purred, putting her hand on my arm. And then, more softly, "If there's anything else I can do for you, I hope you'll let me know."
That's when I discovered how sexually
overwhelming a woman can be. I managed to get out without stumbling over my feet.
9
OLAF SIGURDSSON
Outside the Hypernumbers Institute, I called up the Los Angeles grid on my car computer, and keyed in the address Molly Cadigan had given me for Ole Sigurdsson. I'd intended to talk to him anyway, about the Noeties. Now it seemed he might also be able to tell me something about the Merlins, including how to get in touch with them. I wanted to see him as soon as I could.
If Ray Christman had been paying the Merlins for their ideas, paying them some agreed-upon rate, then they might or might not have a motive for killing him. It depended partly on how much they valued public recognition.
And if Christman flew to Arizona from time to time to see them, flew there alone without telling anyone, they certainly had the opportunity. My heads-up display showed Sigurdsson living in Bel Air, not far from where I was, and a Bel Air address meant he had to be pretty damned affluent. It was hard to visualize a psychic having that much money, unless . . . Maybe he could predict stock prices—things like that.
I keyed in his phone number and got a bowl-cut security man. "You've just dialed Laura and Ole's number," he said. "Neither is at home now; you've got Bel Air Security. We're being recorded. How may I help you?"
"What would be a good time for me to try again? My name is Seppanen, and I want to speak with Olaf Sigurdsson. I was referred to him by Dr. Winifred Landau Sproule."
"Right, Mr., ah . . ."
"Seppanen," I repeated.
"Seppanen. Right. Would you care to leave your phone number?"
I gave it to him. It occurred to me that Sigurdsson might be aware of Tuuli as a psychic, and feel favorably inclined toward fellow psychics, so I went on. "That's the residence of Martti Seppanen and Tuuli Waanila." I spelled them for him. "I'll call again at about nine."
"Oh! Martti Seppanen! I'm sorry! Certainly, Mr. Seppanen." People sometimes recognize my name, usually from media coverage of the case of the twice-killed astronomer. It's kind of a kick when it happens.