Fraulein Louise didn't take a moment to think it over. She knew her friends were protecting her and nothing could harm her. She got up, left the compartment, and walked down the empty corridor to the door of the car. She intended to get off the
train, as she had been told to do, but was surprised to note how fast it was moving. She reached the door and pressed the handle down. The door opened out and she could only open it a crack because the wind was pressing against it. She threw herself against the door in her efforts to open it, determined to get off. Although she could see lights flying by outside, she wasn't in the least afraid. "My friends know what they're doing," she murmured.
Suddenly the train jerked, brakes screeched, the train slowed down. Fraulein Louise could see lighted streets and houses, bright lights on signal posts, and a sign in front of a cement block that looked like a bunker: Signal Box 2. The train was rolling into a station. "Thank you, my friends," said Fr&ulein Louise.
The train stopped. She got out. About a dozen people got off, about the same number got on. A loudspeaker announced: "Rotenburg! Rotenburg! Expression from Cologne via Bremen on Platform Three. Short stop only. Please get on and off as quickly as possible."
Fraulein Louise remained standing beside the car. She was safe. And happy. So happy! "My friends," she murmured. "My good friends."
She waited for the train to pass by until she could see its rear lights; then, leaning against the wind that threatened to throw her, she walked to an underpass and went down the steps. Not a soul in sight. There were a few benches. Fraulein Louise sat down, her bag close beside her. I won't have to wait long, she thought. There'll be a local soon and it will take me to Hamburg. A clock in the underpass read 4:56 a.m. Yes, she thought, the local will take longer, but that doesn't matter. The important thing is that I got away from Dr. Erkner. She smiled. Then she said softiy, "Where I come from nobody knows... and where I'm going
everything goes " She breathed deep and her face was filled
with an expression of great peace. "The wind blows, the sea flows, and God knows "
"You know the Marx brothers, of course/' said Hem. "American comedians."
He had come into my room just as I was writing the last words of the preceding chapter, and had read it, smoking his pipe and nodding every now and then. His hair was standing on end, as usual. He had put on his metal-rimmed glasses to read.
"Yes," I said. "Four brothers."
"Only one of them's alive now," said Hem. "Groucho. He's seventy-three. What I've just read reminds me of a picture he was in, with one of his brothers. Groucho said, 'You know, there's a treasure buried in the house next door,' and his brother said, 'Look here, there isn't any house next door,' and Groucho said, 'Doesn't matter. So well build one.' I can't think of a better definition of parapsychology."
"Parapsychology?"
"What your Fraulein felt down there, in the Rotenburg station. That's the way she told it, isn't it?"
"On my last visit. I always write exactly what she says. I never change a thing."
"What your Fraulein felt then definitely comes under the heading of parapsychology. The brain of a schizophrenic person functions dif f erendy. What she experiences is changed. We don't know what causes this different way of experiencing things. It is possible that schizophrenics have capabilities that are exceptionally suited to parapsychology. Para, you know, means 'beside' or 'beyond.'"
"You believe in it, Hem?"
"Yes. And I'm not the only one. You'd be surprised who believe in it, who have believed in it. The Russian chemist Mendelyev, the astronomer Friedrich Ztfllner, the famous biologist and philosopher Hans Driesch. Madame Curie. Sigmund Freud. Einstein. And many more."
"I've always dismissed it as nonsense," I said, "until—"
"Until you got involved in this," said Hem, puffing on his pipe
and nodding. "Every person reaches a point in his life when he decides that parapsychology is either humbug or the fantastic science of the unknown, when he is the Marx brother who j believes, or the one who doesn't. All of us are Marx brothers, believers or nonbelievers." He sat down. "Look," he said, "people have believed in that house next door as far back as can be recorded. They positioned their houses next door on stars, in moors, in thickets, in any of nature's eerie landscapes, in deserted castles, and in the brain." He paused. "I said, 'in the brain/ Walter."
"Yes," I said. "In the brain."
"These houses next door were always placed on extraordinary sites. The inexplicable thing needs a dramatic setting. What you write about your mentally ill Fraulein may be described as precognition, if you are willing to rule out coincidence. Pythia, the priestess of Apollo at Delphi, prophesied the future. Dante's son, Jacapo, was clairvoyant. Eight months after his father's death, Dante led him in a dream to the place where the thirteenth stanza of the Divine Comedy was hidden. On the following morning, Jacapo went to the place and found the manuscript. Do you remember when a schoolhouse was buried under a landslide in Aberfan, England? After the catastrophe, the English papers got dozens of letters from people living far from Aberfan, some on a different continent, who declared they had seen the catastrophe in their dreams. And they were able to describe the scene precisely, without ever having actually seen it."
"That reminds me of what cosmonaut Gagarin, the first man in outer space, said: something to the effect that on his flight he had seen things that went beyond anything imaginable, and that if he were permitted to tell about it, it would shock all mankind."
"You see?" said Hem. "In our time man is far more willing to accept parapsychological phenomena as part of the world picture, and far better equipped to do so than in the Age of Enlightenment, when reason, reason, nothing but reason counted. Today we again yearn for the miraculous. Fascination with mysterious things is nothing new. I mean that now we need to find a reasonable explanation for everything that happens, to explain fate and to prove logic in coincidence, to believe in life after death and life in the spirit "
"Like Fraulein Louise."
"And with that find security. The need for security was never as great as it is today. And in the same vein, the readiness to come
to grips with parapsychology and its phenomena was never greater," said Hem.
"Well, yes," I said. "And I have an explanation for that. Our times have a Janus head. The one face is Common Sense, the other is Euphoria. A hop in a jumbo jet to New York—with LSD to the world next door. A nod for the computer—and the cry for Aquarius in Hair. On the orje hand we initiate the most complicated projects, on the other a book like Memories of the Future becomes a worldwide best seller."
"So there you are!" said Hem. "Our world is technological to such an extent that it simply has to look for miracles as compensation, if for no other reason. Fifty-five percent of all Europeans read their horoscopes. Half of the population of West Germany believes in a sixth sense. More and more people consult astrologers, if they can afford it. Every fifth adult vows that he has received parapsychological messages from the future. And that's valid for Russia, too. They have a paper called Technology and Youth, with a circulation of five million. I have just had an article translated for me about the mysterious disappearance of planes and ships somewhere in the Bermudas. In the article, a Russian scientist vehemendy contradicts the shaky rationalization that these disappearances in the so-called Bermuda Triangle are accidents. And as was to be expected, the defense ministries of the great powers are working on it, full speed ahead!"
"You're not serious!"
"Oh, yes, I am," said Hem. "In July 1959, the American atomic submarine Nautilus left a port on the east coast of the United States. There was one passenger on board whose name nobody knew, nor why he was there. He was on board for sixteen days. Twice a day he locked himself up in his cabin and wrote lists of numbers and put them in a sealed envelope. At the same time, far far away, a second man from the Westinghouse research center was writing lists of numbers and putting them in sealed envelopes."
"For NASA! The passenger on the Nautilus was a medium. The two men were trying to come up with the same numbers, thereby establishing a wireless and energy-less telephonic contact."
"And with what result?"
"Top secret," said Hem. "Meanwhile, the Russians are experimenting in outer space. They've been doing it for such a
long time and with such success that, according to NASA director Eugene Konecci, they'll be the first to transmit human thought on an earth-circulatory system."
"Human thought?" I couldn't help being impressed.
"Yes," said Hem. "It's established that the Russians are working on parapsychological projects, sending out human thoughts and receiving them. In a war, such capabilities could be decisive when all other possibilities of communication have failed. The philosopher Tugarinov, again a Russian, has gone farthest in the field of parapsychology. He would like to teach all people the science of telepathy, so that they function just as reliably as, for instance, the telephone. It's almost impossible to keep track of the experiments that are being made today. It is common knowledge that the embryos of hens react to the sun's rising, in spite of equalized temperature and light in the research lab...."
"So how do they get the signal that the sun is rising?"
"That's just it! How? And there's more: Certain bacteria show sunspot activity as much as four days before the finest instruments register an eruption on the sun. Take cats and dogs. Their masters can go as far as two thousand kilometers without leaving a physical trace—the animals find their way back to them. What system of information shows them the way?"
"Yes," I said bitterly. "And when atomic warheads can find their way like that, what a miracle that will be!"
"They've been trying for that for a long time, too," said Hem. "In East and West they're working feverishly on things that would have been laughed at fifty years ago. In Charkov they conditioned a bitch to letting her pups be taken from her from time to time, but when someone inflicted pain on them in a room that was hermetically sealed, she became restless and barked and looked in the direction of the room. The French have established precognition in mice. The animals were put in a cage that was charged by two electric generators, one in each half of the cage, and these generators worked at random. The mouse could escape pain only if she settled on the half that wasn't charged. Neither the scientist nor the mouse knew which half of the cage would be electrified, but the mouse always jumped onto the recharged section in time."
"That's fantastic!"
"And you're writing about something fantastic," said Hem, "only you don't seem to realize it yet. The time has come, Walter, 252
when scientists will want to prove what Paracelsus wrote five hundred years ago. Through the magic power of will, a man on this side of the ocean can let the man on the other side know what he is saying—"
"And you're trying to tell me that Fraulein Louise's sick brain has such magical powers?"
"I don't know. I just want you to think of all these unreal things when you're writing your story about very real things," said Hem. "Today's scientists are talking quite casually about the radio of the brain... and synchronicity and reverse causality."
"And what are they?"
"Synchronicity—two people do or think the same thing at the same time. Reverse causality—the effect takes place before the cause."
"Like Fraulein Louise's friends, acting on their own before they felt an impetus, because for them there is no such concept as time."
"Something like that, yes," said Hem. "For this knowing ahead of time, Pasqual Jordan gives an exceptionally impressive example. He points to his experimentation with mesons—"
"With what?"
"Mesons: unstable nuclear particles, some of which are neutral while others carry a unit of positive or negative charge. Under certain conditions, they originate and disintegrate in the nucleus of the atom. And it's here that the physicists have observed happenings that can only be interpreted as action or effect—for instance, the splitting of the atomic nucleus— preceding or coming before the cause, which in this case is the appearance of mesons in the nucleus of the atom."
"You mean effect preceding cause?"
"Yes. And Jordan calls this reverse causality, and considers it the same procedure as takes place in the minds of those who 'know ahead'—or, in other words, are clairvoyant and see the future."
"The White Queen!" I said.
"What White Queen?"
"In Through the Looking Glass. She screamed first and it bled afterwards."
"Exactly," said Hem. "Did you know that Lewis Carroll, the man who wrote Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass was a mathematician; and he, too, was fascinated by parapsychology—spiritualism, they called it in those days. The
Alice stories are unique and brilliant compilations of mathematical and parapsychological problems."
"Written for a shy litde girl he happened to like."
"Right," said Hem. "And these books for children deal constantly with universal riddles and miracles, recognizable only by adults, naturally. In the universe everything has its own logic. Nothing is coincidental. It was Einstein who said, 1 can't imagine God playing dice with the universe/ Spiritual things have their law and order, too. Visions and thoughts correlate through attraction. The scientists of today are agreed that strong emotional forces of the subconscious—especially all borderline situations affecting life, such as death, illness, danger, risk ... all of which apply to your Fraulein—serve as 'arrangers' of these visions and ideas."
Hem was silent.
After giving it some thought, I said, "God doesn't play dice with the universe. To go back to your two Marx brothers—this means that the skeptical brother, who says there is no house next door, considers the world and himself as instruments that are not kept in order by any force outside our earth. For him, the throw of the dice is fate. He looks at parapsychological happenings as normal but as things that simply haven't been explored yet."
"That's it! And the other brother, who knows there is a treasure in the house next door, and if there is no house next door, wants to build one so that the treasure can be found, he is the one who can't bear the thought that his life is controlled by coincidence. He doesn't believe in a statistical, physical, throw-of-the-dice existence. He believes that there are still many things between heaven and earth that we know not of. That's what Groucho Marx thinks!"
"And what do you think?"
"I'm a Groucho. In the case of your Fraulein Louise, too. Because there's something neither those for, nor those against, parapsychology can take from us."
"And what's that?"
"The discovery of oneself," said Hem.
On Karl Concon, the Blitz archives had sent Bertie and me a thick manila envelope full of clippings, newspaper reports, and commentary, and the famous "additional information"—confidential information acquired God knows how. Bertie and I sat on his bed in the Metropole Hotel and looked through the material. We also had the pictures Bertie had taken, but they didn't add much to what we already knew. The daily news accounts of the trial in Hamburg in 1957 gave us a lot more. They told us that Concon had apparently been blackmailing homosexuals for years, forcing them to hand over highly confidential material. But they hadn't been able to prove anything, although there was quite a lot of suspicious circumstantial evidence against him, and they had had to let him go.
The additional information explained that the trial had been conducted behind closed doors when it had become a question of what kind of secrets Concon had been trying to get out of the high-ranking German officer. There it was, black on blue, in small type. I took my cigarette out of my mouth and drank from my flask and handed it to Bertie, who also took a swig.*
"Listen to this!" I said, and read a few sentences to Bertie. "It is clear that Concon was working for West Germany from 1949 to 1953— Frequent visits to East Berlin... knew a lot of people there... got national, economic, and military
information for his
West German employers Was uncovered by the East Zone
Internal Security Bureau, but nothing was undertaken against him, at any rate, not noticeably Returned safely to Hamburg ... did an about face and began working for the Internal Security Bureau in East Berlin. They succeeded in advising and protecting him so well before the trial, that there was no conviction '"
"Hm," said Bertie, drinking from my flask.
"The indictment, which was not made public, was for the attempt to betray top-secret NATO plans ... preventive measures... retaliatory measures—'"
"Donnerwetter!" said Bertie.
"It is not clear whether Concon switched sides again, resulting in his acquittal, or if he is still working for the East. His place in Sankt Pauli, King Kong, was frequented for years by agents from all camps during the days before the occupation of Czechoslovakia by the Warsaw Pact Nations... many dubious types/" My voice grew louder. "'Five Czechs visited King Kong every night!'"
Bertie let out a whisde.
"Here!" Now I was really excited. "'September 9,1968. Raid on King Kong. The Czechs fled. One was hit by a member of the police force. His friends dragged him to a car and drove off without being recognized. Hasn't been seen since/" I looked at Bertie. "Jan Bilka worked for the Czech Ministry of Defense," I said. "After his flight the Czechs and Russians went crazy, according to Irina. Why?"
"Elementary!" said Bertie. "Bilka decamps with secret documents, seeks out his friend Michelsen in Hamburg, wants to hand over the documents to West German or American agents."
"Or sell them," I said. "Everybody isn't as noble as you."
"Or sell them. Negotiates with them. Feels secure with Michelsen. So Michelsen must be a West German man, right?"
"As far as I can see—right."
"The East wants the documents back—or wants to prevent the West from getting them—but don't know where Bilka is, so they send Concon to the camp to kidnap Irina. She knows where Bilka is, and they'll get it out of her.'* He coughed. "That stinks, doesn't it?"
The Traitor Blitz Page 28