Traitor to the Living

by Philip José Farmer

  "... from now on, the air pollution index should indicate a steady decrease of pollutants. Every day sees at least five hundred vehicles with internal-combustion motors retired, replaced by the battery or fuel-cell vehicles. The BSD is confident that the worst days are over, that the record peak of ..."

  That was welcome news, but it wasn't the first time he'd heard its like. Two years ago, electrohydrodynamic generators were to be a household item in a short time. These would revolutionize society and reduce pollution at once. But the devices were still in the experimental stage, and there were a number of disadvantages to their use which had been overlooked when they were first proposed.

  The Hotel La Brea occupied two blocks of what had been a dozen omce buildings when Carfax had lived in L.A. It was across the street from the La Brea tar pits.

  Carfax decided to look again at the leftover of the Pleistocene.

  He walked across the overpass above Wilshire and then walked down to where the corner of Wilshire and Curson had been. Curson had been removed and made part of the park, and the buildings for a block eastward had also been torn down.

  He went around the wire fence and stood within a few feet of the two concrete mammoths at the edge of the tar pit. The gigantic father mammoth and the baby mammoth were watching the mother sink into the thick black waters of the pit. The baby was stretching his little trunk out toward his doomed mother as if he could trumpet her out of the tar and back to safety. The great female was struggling vainly against the oily clutch that had killed so many thousands of beasts, large and small.

  Many people were surprised and disappointed at the smallness of the pit. Evidently they had expected something covering many acres. But all that was left of the great reaches of tar that had once covered much of Los Angeles in this valley was a pool not as large as a football field. There were several very small pools behind the museum, and these still caught animals, such as gophers and squirrels, even though they had to climb over wire fences to get inside to the pool. If the disappointed tourist walked around the park, however, he would see tar oozing up here and there from the grass.

  He would, if he had any imagination, get an uneasy feeling. The liquid bitumen lay beneath the grass and the concrete not too far beneath, and it was waiting.

  Someday, that dark ooze said, someday this thin shield will be gone, and I'll be back. And things will be as they were. The mammoths and the dire wolf and the great lion and the saber-tooth and the camel and the giant sloth won't be here. But there will be other animals for me to pull down. And perhaps a man now and then, a man clad in skins, hunting the animals, unwary enough to get trapped.

  Carfax did not stand before the pit very long. His eyes stung and watered, and the lining of his nose and throat felt hot. He hurried back to the hotel and entered its triple doors and the comparatively clean and cool air inside. In the evening, the cloud-seeding activities of the day might bring rain, and the air of the metropolis would be breathable for another three days. It was the seeding, which, though expensive and not always fruitful, made life in L.A. possible. It was this that gave it hope and kept the citizens going until the time would come when the electric cars would bring the air back to the 1973 level.

  The world was polluted more than it had been ten years ago, but it should be much cleaner in the next ten. The prophets of doom would be wrong.

  Carfax ate supper in the hotel dining room. About ten minutes after he got back to his room, his phone rang. He turned it on and saw Patricia in a booth in the Riverside airport.

  "Have a good trip?" he said.

  "I couldn't relax," she said, but she smiled.

  "You don't look tense," he said. "You look quite relaxed. And lovely."

  "Thank you. Did you find ... never mind. I'll see you in ... your place. Or do you think it'd be wise to stay in the same place?"

  "I'm sure our line isn't tapped," he said. "Not yet, anyway. Sure, come on as planned. I don't really think that... "

  She frowned and said, "Think what?"

  "Never mind," he said. It would probably anger her if he said that he did not really believe that Western was dangerous. Not dangerous in the sense she meant, anyway, though he might be dangerous to humanity in general. Besides, he shouldn't be making any such statements when he did not have any evidence for them.

  "Just come on out," he said. He waited to make sure that she had no other messages, but she said, "All right," and the screen went blank.

  8.

  Patricia phoned him when she checked in. He told her the voice code to open his door. He had ordered a supper for her but it had not yet arrived. The kitchen supervisor had apologized, saying that the meal had been sent out on the robot "turtle" and had gotten as far as the elevator. Then it had broken down, and it was being repaired by the hotel tech. The other turtles were all in use, but the meal would not be more than half an hour late if the supervisor had to bring it up himself.

  The announcer spoke Patricia's open-sesame, and the door opened. She looked lovely in her nina, an outfit consisting of a very short skirt and a stiff triangular fabric suspended from her neck and hanging loosely over her breasts. Both articles looked as if they were fashioned from grass, though they were plastic. They were based on the costume worn by the White Goddess of the Izaga, Nina T—, in the TV series. Trader Horn. Carfax was dressed in a "white explorer's" outfit though he did not wear the pith helmet. Patricia sat down carefully, since she wore nothing under the skirt, and she was careful not to bend over or to turn too suddenly because she would expose her breasts. Carfax thought this modesty ridiculous, since she would appear on the beach in nothing at all. But the mores of clothes wearing were not based on any sort of rationality, though each item of apparel had its own internal system of consistency.

  Patricia showed no evidence of self-consciousness, though she surely must have had some thoughts about the very small amount of covering and the insecurity of fastening even that little. He certainly could not keep his mind off it, just as he could never keep from being sexually aroused by the sight of a good-looking girl in a miniskirt. Which meant that he had been in a continual state of excitement for many years.

  However, she was his first cousin, and that should cool him off. Should, he thought, but of course it didn't. Especially when you considered that the tabu against incest had been decaying steadily for the past fifteen years. He would do better not to think about such things. Which was like the sea telling itself to pay no attention to the pull of the moon.

  She lit a cigarette, puffed on it a few times while looking at Carfax through the smoke and then said, "Won't you tell me what happened at Western's?"

  He told her everything that seemed relevant. When he finished, he knew that he had angered her. The long slow puffs of cigarette smoke had become short and quick. But he was mistaken. Neither he nor Western was the object of her anger.

  "Why would he lie about his invention?" she said loudly. "Why would he? What's the matter with the man? Can't he stand up for himself even when he's dead?"

  "I don't understand," he said.

  "I mean that he was always wishy-washy! He had no backbone! He would do anything rather than make somebody angry; and he could not stand being around an angry person! Why, I only had to look mad, and I got my way at once! It made it easy for me to get whatever I wanted, except the one thing I wanted most and couldn't get!"

  Literature was full of descriptions of women whom anger made more beautiful. Patricia certainly wasn't one of them. A bitch on wheels of fire, Carfax thought. "And what was that one thing you most wanted and couldn't get?" he said, since Patricia evidently expected him to ask.

  "What do you think?"

  "You wanted him to stand up to you."

  She looked surprised and then pleased.

  "You're very perceptive. I like that."

  "It didn't take much intelligence to see that," he said. He leaned forward. "To be frank, Patricia, no matter how pathological your father was about anger, he would now
have no motive to lie. He's dead, and he can't be hurt by anybody in this world, and he surely would want the credit for MEDIUM if he had in ..."

  "In what?"

  He smiled and said, "Here I am talking as if the entity who calls himself your father really is your father. It's difficult to keep from thinking that those things are the dead, however."

  "Gordon, I don't want to get into an argument with you about this. I know that Dad invented a machine to get into contact with the dead, and I know that those are the dead! I don't like to agree with Western, because he murdered my father. But he is right in what he claims MEDIUM can do. And you yourself said that it was my father's voice. Now, I wonder if Western doesn't have more power than he says he does. I mean, maybe he can not only talk to the dead and see them, but has some way of controlling them too. Maybe he can inflict pain if they don't do what he says."

  "How could he?"

  "How would I know?" she said angrily. "You told me he said that energy can affect them. Maybe he pours in a lot of energy and this is painful to them."

  "Or maybe..."

  "Yes?"

  She leaned forward and to one side to punch out her cigarette in the tray, and the shield swung aside. Her breasts were shapely and full, neither too small nor too large, much like the ill-starred Edwina Booth's in the original Trader Horn.

  "I have no evidence whatever to back up this speculation. But maybe Western is offering your father something, and this offer has made him lie."

  "Why would he do that?" she said. Her face had smoothed out, but it was twisted again.

  "I don't know," he said. "Maybe Western is lying to your father, offering, say, a chance to escape from that place. It may be the afterlife, but it doesn't seem to be heaven. Oh, what am I saying! There I go again, talking as if they are the dead,"

  "Why is it you're so strongly opposed to the idea?"

  "Don't start that psychological stuff with me," he said.

  She was silent for a minute, then opened her mouth, but closed it when three short whistles came out of the door communicator. Carfax got up, walked to the door, looked through the peephole, and spoke the codeword that released the lock. The dome-shaped turtle wheeled in, stopped when Carfax ordered it to do so, and the top opened up. Carfax removed the tray on which were the dishes and cups and told the turtle to leave. The door swung open for it, and it disappeared. Patricia ate all the food as if she had missed several meals. Carfax got hungry watching her and helped her eat all the dishes and the tableware except for a spoon. The room service had forgotten to refill the solvosauce bottle, and so there was not enough left to melt the spoon.

  "It's cherry anyway," he said, turning the spoon so that the raised word on its handle could be seen in the light. "I never cared for synthetic cherry, though I do love a home-baked cherry pie."

  The tray was chocolate milkshake flavor, and he would have liked to have eaten it later. But he didn't feel like calling room service again. He poured out an ounce of Drambuie apiece, and they silently toasted each other.

  "You know," he said, "it's possible that what I talked to was not your father, but a fake. I suppose that someone could have been imitating his voice. And his seeming to jump out of the screen at me could have been a holograph."

  "But why would Western fake it?"

  "Possibly to scare me off. And to stop me asking questions." He hesitated and then said, "Uncle Rufton never did answer me when I asked him if human mediums could get through to the dead. To the sembs, I mean."

  "You can ask your wife that," Patricia said.

  "And what if she doesn't know? The ... sembs ... are not omniscient, you know, not by any means."

  "I've been to a very famous medium," she said, "a Mrs. Holles Webster. She seems to be honest. At least, she's been cleared of fakery by the Syracuse University Psychic Research Committee."

  "You went to a medium? Never mind answering, you just said you did. But why? To talk to your? ..."

  She nodded and said, "Yes, my father."

  "And the result?"

  "I went twice, and Mrs. Webster failed both times. But the last time she said she was starting to make contact; she could feel it."

  "Feel it?"

  "She claims that a human medium, the sincere ones, that is, probably operate on the same principles and in the same manner as MEDIUM. But the human medium uses somewhat different sensors and indicators. Instead of a viewscreen and meters, she uses a neural complex which comes through to her as a feeling. It's almost as reliable as the needle on a meter with its numbered graduations."

  "And she makes contact with the dead, not with sembs, right?"

  "As a matter of fact," Patricia said, "I asked her about that. She said she had no doubt at all that the beings she summoned were really the spirits of the departed. But she did say that it was possible that your theory was right. Or at least had some truth in it. She was inclined to think that Western had tapped right into the world of demons. Oh, don't smile! She didn't mean little homed devils with pitchforks and all that.

  She meant evil spirits. Or evil entities of some sort. Not the ghosts of wicked humans but something like . .. well ... fallen angels. She claims that they disguise themselves as humans in order to . .."

  She stopped when Carfax sighed heavily.

  "What's the matter? I know it sounds ridiculous--to you anyway, and even somewhat to me--but..."

  "Mrs. Webster's theory is a distortion of mine," he said. "She uses the term wicked spirits or fallen angels to account for those entities. And I use the more scientific semb, though in a different sense from Western's usage. At least, semb sounds more scientific. But it can't stand up to any analysis. I have no evidence to back up my theory, any more than Mrs. Webster has. Except that MEDIUM shows a world that sure as hell isn't like any spiritual universe anybody ever postulated.

  And if the beings we see on medium's screen are really the dead, then they're in hell!"

  "But Mrs. Webster says that we are only seeing what an electronic device can show us. We aren't seeing the reality, any more than an electronic wave rising from the beating of a heart shows us the heart itself."

  "That's Western's analogy, but with a different interpretation," Carfax said gloomily.

  He was silent for a few minutes. Patricia sat quite still except for the motions required to smoke her cigarette.

  "All right," he said, "let's see Mrs. Webster. You make an appointment with her for next week, say, Monday."

  "You sound very skeptical."

  "I am, but if the dead can communicate with us, I don't see why the communication has to be through a machine. Anyway, I'm not so narrow-minded that I won't even give a hypothesis a test."

  "Could I have another drink?"

  "Sure."

  He got up and poured her two ounces of Wild Turkey over three ice cubes. When he handed it to her, he felt a shock as if static electricity had leaped between them. But the voltage was psychic, not electrical. It was apparent that some of her thought had paralleled his.

  A little shaken, he returned to his chair. She was his first cousin. But he had no idea of making her pregnant, and, anyway, he had not bedded a woman for a long time, and he did feel some affection for her.

  Maybe more than he wanted to admit to himself.

  It was then that his early suspicion that she might have been sent by Western, that her appearance was the first act in a put-up drama, returned to him.

  "You bastard," he told himself. "You're too cynical.

  And you're too afraid of having warm feelings for another woman. You're scared to death that something might happen to her and cause you pain again."

  Patricia sipped her drink and said, "You never told me about your breakdown."

  Was she trying to get information which she could pass on to Western?

  "You look funny," she said. "I'm sorry if I seem to be nosey. If you don't want to talk about it, O.K."

  "I don't like to talk about it because even I find it unbelievable when
I tell it. There is only one explanation,

  I tell myself, and that is that I was crazy. For a while, anyway. Certain things did happen; there's plenty of objective evidence for that. But my observations of them must have been strained through a very distorted filter. And the witnesses I had depended upon to back my story clammed up. Even those I trusted the most. But then they didn't want to be thought crazy, either."

  She leaned forward and said, eagerly, "What did happen?"

  He smiled and said, "Vampires and werewolves and ghosts and ghoulies and things that went bump in the night. And in the daytime, too. But I had been given LSD or something like it, no doubt of that. They seemed to be genuine objective phenomena to me at the time. And there are times when I still think they were. However, such things couldn't be, so I tell everybody that I was under the influence of a psychedelic.

  "Even so, I'm not so sure now that there aren't things happening around us that cannot be explained by big capital S Science."

  "What did happen?"

  "I'm certified sane now and I intend to stay that way. Let's drop that subject."

  Patricia looked disappointed.

  "I'm sorry," he said, "but the details might convince you that I'm unreliable. Maybe I am. In any event, I decided to get out of the investigation business, change my name, and drop out of sight. But here I am, back in L.A. and a private eye again. So much for free will." "Just one thing, and I'll quit asking about it," she said. "Were you taking LSD?"

  "No, it was slipped into my drink."

  And if she were Western's agent, he thought, what is to prevent her putting a psychedelic in my drink and so discrediting me? If she planned to do that, she certainly had made no move to do so tonight. She hadn't been out of his sight for a second. He felt ashamed of his suspicions, though logic told him that he should question everyone.