“As a matter of fact, you’ve arrived at quite a good time,” Parminter said with a kind of menacing geniality. “I haven’t switched the entire system on yet, and I’ll appreciate the opinion of someone more knowledgeable about computers than I.”
“Go and …’ Ripley’s arm clicked audibly as the pressure on it was increased. “What do you want me to do?”
“That’s better.” Parminter let Ripley go and dusted his hands. He was wearing a massive gold ring which—like his sign—was in the shape of an open book and engraved with symbols. “The door’s locked, so don’t try to run.”
“Me run?” Ripley massaged his arm.
“Jump up and down,” Parminter commanded. Ripley gave a half-hearted leap and felt the floor move slightly beneath him. “You’re standing on a weighbridge which reads your weight to within four ounces. And over here is the camera.” Parminter walked to an ornate mirror and tapped it. “One way, of course.”
“I see. Where’s the Logicon itself?”
“Back here.” Parminter opened a door on the right and led the way into a room in which the computer sat near one wall. Its slick styling looked shockingly unfamiliar against the old-fashioned embossed wallpaper. The faded carpet had been cut back from it and a slim bunch of cables ran up to the machine through a chiselled hole in the floorboards.
“Looks all right, so far,” Ripley commented. “What’s this?” He pointed at a small camera positioned close to the computer’s print-out.
“Closed-circuit television monitor. Follow me.” Parminter went back into the lobby and entered another room. It was large and high-ceilinged, the walls completely covered by dark green velvet drapes. A long pedestal table surrounded by chairs occupied the centre of the room. The chair at the head of the table was so heavy and intricately gilded as to be almost a throne. Directly in front of it a sphere of polished crystal sat on the table in an ebony cradle carved like a pair of cupped hands. Parminter sat down in the huge chair, touched something beneath the table and a glow of greenish light appeared in the crystal.
“What do you think of it?” Parminter spoke with proprietary pride as he leaned back.
Ripley peered into the depths of the polished sphere and saw a distorted image of the computer print-out. “Neat. Very neat.”
I think so,” Parminter agreed. “There’s a fortune to be made in the spiritualist world if one goes about it the right way—but it’s a chancy business. There’s a ghastly story about one of my colleagues who told his audience he could draw on all the wisdom of the ages to answer any question, and was made to look a fool when some smart alec asked him to name the capital of North Dakota.
“With the help of your little machine he could have answered the question, but that’s not the type of information a practising spiritualist needs. The point of the story is that nobody ever asks a medium something that could just as easily be looked up in a reference book.”
“How long do you think you can keep me here?” Ripley’s fears for his own well-being were beginning to reassert themselves.
“The data a professional medium needs are more personal, more individual. When a middle-aged widow walks in here I can try to do a cold reading on her and win her confidence, but people are becoming too materialistic and sceptical to be hooked easily.
“From now on, when that widow walks in—knowing she has never seen me in her life, knowing she came only on the spur of the moment because a friend asked her—the computer gives me her name. More important, it gives me the name of her dear departed, his age, his former business, the names of other dead relatives, and so on. I look up at her, before she has a chance to speak, and I say ‘Hello, Mary—I have a message for you from Wilbur’. Can you imagine the impact?”
“I’ve never heard anything so immoral in all my life. How long are you planning to keep me here?”
“Nothing immoral about it! Ordinary mediums give people hope—I’ll be able to give them certainty.”
“Sell them certainty, you mean.”
“It’s impossible to set a price on the happiness I shall dispense to the old and the lonely and the bereaved. Besides, I’m a businessman. I’ve been working towards this for years, ploughing back the profits, denying myself the pleasure of spending all those surreptitiously folded bills the marks leave in my collecting box. Apart from the cost of the computer and other equipment, have you any idea how much it cost me to build a set of memory tapes? I’ve had dozens of people working for me coding the contents of directories, slaving in the public records offices, carrying out fake market surveys …”
“I guess you’ll get your money back in the end,” Ripley said acidly. “Is spiritualism nothing but a complete confidence trick?”
“What do you think? When you’re dead, you’re dead—and that’s the way it ought to be.” Parminter returned eagerly to his main theme. ‘But don’t class me as an ordinary confidence man, Mr. Ripley—I’m a pioneer. I’ve built something that never existed before—a computer model of the human relationships that give a city its corporate identity. Family ties, geographically created friendships and enmities, business connections … everybody in this area is part of a vast intangible matrix … and I have it right here on tape.” Parminter’s eyes were luminous. He reached below the table and there came a series of faint clicks which suggested he was activating the computer.
Ripley was convinced of the deadly necessity to get away. He began backing off slowly, and at the same time tried to keep Parminter’s mind engrossed in his creation. “The crystal ball doesn’t quite fit in, does it? I thought that was a fortune-teller’s gimmick.”
Parminter chuckled hoarsely. “Not only seers use them—the ball is supposed to be the focus for all kinds of special powers—besides, do you think Mary’s going to worry about that when I give her the message from Wilbur?”
“It still doesn’t look right to me.” Ripley reached the door as he spoke and tension made his voice a nervous squawk which caused Parminter to turn his head. The big man launched himself from the chair with frightening speed. Ripley turned and ran, but had taken only one stride when two massive hands closed round his neck from behind and pulled him back into the room. He struggled vainly against the other man’s superior strength.
“I’m sorry about this,” Parminter said with incongruous gentleness, “but no miserable little snoop is going to ruin my plans at this stage of the game.”
“I won’t talk,” Ripley husked.
“Or blackmail me either?” Parminter increased his pressure. He was not compressing Ripley’s windpipe, but his thick fingers had closed major bloodvessels. Black dots rimmed with prismatic colour began to march across Ripley’s vision. He looked around for something he might use as a weapon … nothing in sight … couldn’t even call for help … nobody to hear him anyway … nobody except those people sitting at the table…
People at the table?
Behind him Parminter gave a startled gasp and suddenly Ripley was free. He fell to his knees, breathing noisily while his eyes took in the group at the table. There were about a dozen men and women, some of them in distinctly antiquated dress, all of them looking slightly smeared and blurred round the edges, like images projected on to flurry cotton.
“No! Oh, no!” Parminter sank to his knees beside Ripley. “It can’t be.” He pressed his knuckles to trembling lips and shook his head dogmatically.
One of the men at the table pointed at Parminter. “Join us,” he said in a wintry voice, ‘there are things we wish to know.”
“Go away,” Parminter moaned. “You don’t exist.”