Traitor to the Living

by Philip José Farmer

  Carfax knew too well that appearances meant little.

  This, plus his prejudice against Western's claims, had made him very wary. Yet he had ended the conversation feeling that he had perhaps made a mistake about the man. Or, at least, he would have to try to be more objective to ensure against making a mistake.

  After the spell had worn off, he regained the feeling that Western, despite his seeming frankness, was far from being honest.

  Western had not only invited him to come at any time to his place for a free session. He had offered to pay Carfax's roundtrip air fare. Carfax had thanked him and said that he would think about it. He would reply not later than Saturday.

  Why was Western offering all this? He was speeding along the road to success with no obstacles of any importance in sight. He had many antagonists but many more friends. Why should he worry because some obscure professor of history had happened to get some publicity about his theory? What could Carfax be to Western other than a minor nuisance?

  Or was Western aware that Patricia Carfax had phoned him and so was trying to invalidate anything she might say?

  Whatever the real situation, Gordon Carfax had never meant to say no to Western. He was far too curious about MEDIUM. He would have to see for himself what it was all about. And he could never have borrowed enough money to pay for a three-hour session with MEDIUM.

  He would, however, wait until after Patricia's call before he called Western. He might even put off phoning until late. that evening. He did not want to give Western the impression that he was eager.

  To be honest, he told himself, he was somewhat scared of the idea of sitting down before MEDIUM.

  He heard a car draw up before his house. A moment later, a car door slammed. A few seconds afterward, the door chimes bonged.

  Carfax grimaced and strode through the living room to the front door. Since the lecture, he had been besieged by phone calls and by visitors. He had changed his phone number to an unlisted one, and he had tacked a sign up by the door.

  PLEASE DO NOT DISTURB

  WRITE IF YOU MUST COMMUNICATE

  But many people paid no attention to the notice.

  Opening the peephole, he suddenly remembered the case of the private investigator who had looked through a keyhole and received a spray of nitric acid. The man had been a friend of his, and had, in fact, worked on several cases with him.

  Carfax was, however, wearing his spectacles at the moment, so that any acid would be diverted.

  He shook his head and grinned, told himself he was getting more paranoid every year, and put his eye to the hole.

  The woman was about thirty. She had a pretty face, though her nose was a trifle too long and there were spiderleg lines from the corners of her nose to the corners of her mouth. Her reddish-bronze hair was cut short and seemed to be naturally curly, though it was difficult to be sure of that, of course. She was wearing awhite somewhat rumpled dress over an attractively curved figure.

  He knew then why he had thought the hair was naturally curly. He had seen her before, though not in the flesh.

  He swung the door open and saw the two suitcases beside her.

  "You were supposed to call me," he said. "Come in, anyway."

  4.

  Patricia Carfax looked like a younger edition of his mother. The differences were that her hair was lighter, her nose longer, her eyes were a deeper blue, and she had legs even longer than his mother's. And his mother had never had that desperate look.

  He stepped out to pick up the suitcases.

  She said, very softly, "When we go in it might be best to turn up the radio before we start talking. Your house might be bugged."

  "Oh?" he said. He picked up the cases and followed her in. He set them down and rolled five long-playing

  Beethoven marbles into the stereo. While the Eroica was blasting, he gestured for her to follow him out onto the sun porch. Beethoven continued his function of beauty and of ensuring that electronic eavesdroppers, if any, were thwarted.

  "I'll get some coffee," he said. "Sugar and cream?"

  "No, thank you. Black. I'm a purist."

  Returning from the kitchen, he put her cup and saucer on the little table by her chair, put down his own coffee, also black, and then pulled up a chair close to hers.

  "Is anybody after you?"

  "I don't think anybody was on the plane with me, I mean, no shadow was. If he had been, he surely would have done something to me before I got here."

  "He?"

  "Well, I suppose a woman could have been sent to stop me. But I thought all professional killers were men."

  "The fact that you're here shows that nobody meant to kill you," he said. "Killing is very easy; especially in crowds or on the city streets. It makes little difference if it's day or night."

  She sighed and leaned back and, suddenly, she gave the impression of being boneless.

  "I'll bet you're hungry," he said. "Bacon and eggs in a little while sound good?"

  "Could you make it a hamburger? I don't like bacon and eggs. But I am hungry! And I'm also very tired!"

  She sat up, regaining the appearance of hardness under the rounded flesh.

  "But I can't sleep until I get everything off my chest."

  Carfax could not help glancing at her full breasts.

  She caught the glance, looked down, looked up, saw him smiling, and laughed. The laughter was somewhat thin; the cup shook in her hand; her eyes showed too much white.

  She drank the coffee without spilling any and set the cup down with only a slight rattle against the saucer.

  She said, "I suppose it was overly cautious of me, maybe cowardly, not to phone and tell you I was coming. But I got to thinking after my call, and it seemed to me that it just might be possible that Western had your house bugged and your line tapped."

  "Why?"

  "Because I told him I was going to you for help. I shouldn't have, I know that now. And it was a spur-of-the-moment thing. I didn't know you, except that you were my cousin and you had once been a detective. I just pulled your name out of a pile of rage, you might say. But I'll get to that. The thing was, really, I wanted to get out of Los Angeles, and I wanted to talk to you face to face. Even with the viewphone, things are so impersonal, and I was sick to death of impersonality, of hiding with no one to talk to. And I knew that that man had been hanging around the entrance of the apartment building down the street from my motel... "

  "In Los Angeles?"

  "Yes, I'd moved there so I could be close to Western. I mean, not to that motel. I had an apartment just outside Beveriy Hills, but I moved out when I knew that Western was after me. My lease wasn't up yet, but I'd paid the rent three months ahead. And I've moved twice since. I left my car with a friend in the Valley so Western couldn't trace me through it. And I never sent back for it because he may have left somebody to watch it."

  "It takes money to hire a man just to hang around one place for months on the off-chance you might come back."

  "Oh, Western has it! He has lots of money; he's a multi-millionaire! By rights, that money should be mine. But he has it all, and still he wants to kill me! Just like he did my father!"

  "You understand that I have to be objective," he said. "I just can't take your word, you know. So please don't take offense at any of my questions."

  "I won't," she said. "I know that I have to prove my accusations."

  "You only have to give me some good grounds for suspecting Western. I doubt you could prove anything."

  "You're right," Patricia said, sitting up a little straighter and smiling. "You're right. First, I may as well satisfy your curiosity as to why I didn't go to the police and tell them my suspicions about Western. Not suspicions. Facts. Only, the police, you see, would ask me for proof, and I can't give them anything that would stand up in court. Not enough, really, to make them haul him in for questioning. Besides, he's such a famous person now, and so powerful, the police would hesitate doing anything to him unless they caught him
red-handed."

  "I doubt that," Carfax said. "They might not like to arrest him, but they would do it if they had sufficient cause."

  "But if I went to them, then Western would know where I was, and he could get to me. Anyway, I went to a lawyer and presented my case. He told me I didn't have a chance. If I would leave my phone number, he would call me later. He might just change his mind. I said, no, thank you, I would tell him where I lived only when he became my lawyer."

  "I walked out, and I took a taxi straight back to my motel, and there is where I made a mistake. I think he sent someone to tail me..."

  "Who did?"

  "The lawyer!"

  "Who was he?"

  "Roger Hampton. Of Hampton, Thorburr, Roxton, and Row."

  "They have a very good reputation. Why would Hampton send somebody to tail you?"

  "Because he thought I was crazy and would get back at Western even if I had to shoot him to do it! I got pretty emotional when I was in his office! But I'm sure that he called Western and told him where I was."

  "It's true he hadn't taken your case, but what you told him should have been confidential."

  "He may have thought Western was in danger from a maniac and so he told him where I was but didn't say anything about what I'd told him."

  "Or he may have had nothing to do with it," Carfax said. "Your shadow, if any, may have been on your trail before you went to Hampton."

  "If any?" she said. "I know he was following me. I saw him go to the desk and ask the clerk there about me. After he left, I asked the clerk if he'd been asking questions about me, and he said he had."

  Carfax waved his hand and said, "Go on."

  "I packed right away and was out of there in fifteen minutes. I took a taxi to a restaurant in Sherman Oaks and another from there to Tarzana. I rented a car, paid cash, and took off for Route 1.1 was going to stay with some friends in Carmel; I didn't think Western would know about them. And then, going down one of those steep hills on Route I... "

  "I know," he said.

  "I was almost killed! The brakes gave out. I rode the car all the way down and around the curves and the only reason I didn't run headlong into cars in the outside lane when I was going around the curves was that no one was coming the other way.

  "I made the curve at the bottom, even though I went off on the shoulder, and then a tire blew and the car turned over. I got out without a scratch, but I was terribly scared. The car was completely wrecked. A police car stopped and took me back to the restaurant where I'd parked the car while I ate. Sure enough, there was a pool of brake fluid in my parking space.

  "I refused medical aid. I didn't need it, except for a few shots of whiskey. Another policeman came in and said the master cylinder had been tampered with. No doubt of it. And it was done on the parking lot, because the brakes had been all right when I drove in, and there wasn't any traffic when I left so I just drove out without using the brakes. It wasn't until I started going down the hill that I used the brakes, and then it was too late."

  "And nobody but Western would have any desire to kill you?"

  "Nobody."

  Fifty points out of a hundred in your favor now, he thought.

  He said, "Tell it from the beginning, or we'll wander all over the place. I'll keep quiet and ask questions later."

  "All right. You know my father was a professor of physics at the University of Big Sur, California?"

  "I read it in the papers. By the way, all I know about the case is what I read in the New York Times. The local paper barely mentioned it."

  "Before he went to Big Sur, he taught at UCLA. Even then he must've been working on MEDIUM. He spent a lot of his time at home on equations, schematics, diagrams, tiny models of something or other. I saw them now and then when I'd come into his study, and I asked him once what he was working on. He said, in a joking manner, that he was working on something that would be the biggest thing since creation."

  "Western is supposed to have invented that phrase."

  "MEDIUM wasn't the only thing he stole from my father. Dad always kept the papers in his safe. But, after we moved to Big Sur Center, he built an electronic device of some sort. It was small, compared to MEDIUM, but it ate up tremendous quantities of power. You should have seen our electric bills."

  "Any of those bills survive the fire?" Carfax said. Then, hastily, "I know I said I'd keep quiet, but there are some things ... "

  "No, they were all burned up. Of course, the power company had records. I say had, because when I asked for them, I was told that they had been destroyed. It was six months after the fire, and the company said it didn't keep records of paid bills any longer than that. It was part of their recycling policy.

  "Anyway, I knew he was using a staggering amount of power. We were living together, and I was sharing expenses. I was secretary to the university president then, you know. No, you wouldn't know. I was making good money, but I couldn't afford to split the power bill. He said he'd take care of all of it. But I knew Dad couldn't afford it. And, after a few months, he said he was going to a man from whom he could borrow money at a very low rate of interest. Guess who that was."

  Carfax was determined to say nothing.

  "His nephew. My cousin. And yours. Dad got the money, but he must have been forced to tell Western what he was working on. Still, would anybody advance money for a crazy, far-out thing like MEDIUM? It'd be like lending money to build a perpetual-motion machine."

  Which, Carfax thought, was now theoretically possible. MEDIUM had opened the gateway to more things than communication with the dead.

  "Dad must've got his machine to the point where he could give a convincing demonstration. I don't know. I never saw Western at our house, nor did Dad ever say anything about his being there. But he could have come there while I was working or maybe when I was off to Europe during the summer."

  Carfax wanted to ask her if she knew for certain that Western had advanced the money to her father. As if reading his mind, she said, "Dad suddenly started paying the power bills and buying more equipment. I knew he'd deposited twenty thousand dollars at one time and ten thousand at another."

  Carfax mouthed silently, "Thirty thousand?"

  "A good part went for electronic components and consoles and cabinets. Dad wouldn't tell me where he got the money or what the thing was he was working on. He said it'd all come out in good time, and meantime I wasn't to worry. The deposits were in cash, and receipts never did turn up. If there were any, they were burned. Or taken.

  "I don't know why Dad wouldn't tell me what he was doing. I wouldn't have laughed at him- or thought he was crazy. At least, I wouldn't have told him so."

  She stopped, frowned, and said, "I must be honest. Yes, I would have thought he was losing his mind, and I probably would have been unable to keep quiet about it. I would have told him what I thought. And I might have tried to get psychiatric help for him. I didn't believe in survival after death or, in fact, in anything of a supernatural nature. That's a redundancy, isn't it? Supernatural nature.

  "But neither did Dad. Not as far as I knew. But my mother had died four years before, and he took it very hard. .That's why I went to live with him. I was afraid he'd grieve himself to death or maybe even kill himself.

  And, well, I said I'd be honest. I needed him almost as much as he needed me. I loved my mother very much, and I'd just been divorced. I went to him so he could give me comfort and so I could give him comfort."

  She opened her purse, removed a delicate handkerchief, and dabbed at her eyes.

  "It's possible that his desire to make sure she wasn't dead, that she did live, that he would see her again some day, be with her . , . didn't A. Conan Doyle take up spiritualism after his son died?"

  "I think it was somebody in his family."

  "But, Dad, I'm certain, would want to approach the problem scientifically. He wouldn't go to a medium. And it's possible that Mom's death had little to do with his project. He may have serendipitously stumbled acros
s the principles of MEDIUM. Only it wasn't such a happy discovery, as it turned out."

  Looking at the grass, still dew-wet, and at the birds, Carfax felt no intimations of immortality. If he felt anything, it was an intimation of continuity of life in this world. The dead were dead, and they would never come back unless it was in the form of food for soil.

  And man's burial customs often assured that he wouldn't even do that.

  Now, he doubted even the continuity of life. Man was doing his best to kill off all life, himself included.

  "It was the evening of March 17," she said. "I had driven up to Santa Cruz to visit some college friends, and I got back to the university about one that morning. I was tired but not unhappy, because I'd had a good time. The tank was almost empty, and Dad would need the car in the morning because his was in the garage.

  He had to go to a department meeting in the morning, he said, but he didn't say why. So I decided to get a new tank before I went to bed. That probably saved my life. And then, just as I drove away from the service station ... " She swallowed audibly and, when she resumed, her voice was tight.

  "I heard an explosion. The whole town heard it. The house was five blocks away from the station, but the noise sounded as if it were right beside me. The windows were blown out for blocks around, you know, and the neighbors were thrown out of bed..

  "I... I had to stop for a couple of minutes. I was so shaken up. Then I drove home, very fast. Somehow, I knew whose house it was.

  "The house was blown apart and burning; it was just one great bonfire. The firemen got there a few minutes after I did, and they spent the first hour trying to keep the houses next door from catching on fire, too. I just sat there, unable to move or speak, unable to do anything except watch the flames and the firemen and police and the mob that had gathered. Then one of the neighbors pointed me out to a policeman, or so she told me later, and the next I knew, I was being taken off in an ambulance. The doctor there gave me a sedative, and I woke up the evening of the next day. But I still wasn't thinking very well, and I was weak.

  "They told me later what they found. Dad's body was blown out into the backyard, but a mass of flaming wood fell on him, and so he was not only ... mangled, torn apart, really ... he was burned beyond recognition. He was identified by his teeth only; our dentist had the records. And... and..."