“But, my friend …” The blurred man stood up, rippling like a figure in a three-dimensional plastic picture, and came towards Parminter and Ripley. His eyes were dark holes into another continuum. Parminter scrabbled away from him, got to his feet and ran. The front door of the house slammed behind him. Ripley and the insubstantial man faced each other.
“You,” the man said. “You know how to operate the machine?”
“I … yes.” Ripley formed the words by consciously directing his tongue and lips.
“That is good. Please be seated at the head of the table.”
Ripley stood up and walked mechanically to the big chair. A dozen vaporous faces regarded him as he sat down, and he noticed they were all expectant rather than menacing. He began to feel more at ease as the first dim understanding of the situation came to him.
“This is a great moment,” the spokesman for the group said. “Communication between the two planes of existence has always been difficult and uncertain. The few genuine mediums still alive are so … inefficient that it is hardly worth one’s while bothering with them. It is impossible for us to materialise for more than a minute or two and,” a note of petulance crept into his voice, ‘you’ve no idea how frustrating it is to make the effort only to find oneself expected to deal with an elderly lady in some kind of fainting fit.”
The blurry features became animated. “But now—at last—an effective system has been created, a pool of the kind of information about loved ones on the other side of the veil that we all crave. The information will be available quickly and easily, provided there is a human agent to operate the machine. You will continue to be available, won’t you?”
“I …” Ripley was unable to speak.
“There’s good money in the spiritualism business,” the spokesman said anxiously. The other misty figures nodded emphatically. Looking around them, Ripley thought about his miserable existence as a salesman, and suddenly the decision was very easy to make, although he would still have to come to some arrangement with Parminter.
“I’ll be here as long as you want me,” he said. There was a flutter of pleasure around the assembly.
“That’s just wonderful,” the spokesman said. “And now, as I’ve been using up ectoplasm faster than the others, I claim the first question. My name is Jonathan Mercer and I used to live on the corner of Tenth and Third. I would like to know if my daughter Emily ever married that young accountant, and if cousin Jean finally got her divorce.”
Ripley put his fingers on the keyboard beneath the edge of the table and—with the look of a man who has found fulfilment—began to address the computer.
The Cosmic Cocktail Party
A highball on the human reality vector:
Urquhart, just returned from holiday, was staring nostalgically through the wall of his office at the silver of morning frost on rooftops. Beyond the grey rectangles of the administration complex he could see the brow of a wooded hill, its tints bleached by distance, and again he felt a curious sense of urgency.
A literary acquaintance had once told him it was not uncommon for people to experience vague stirrings when they looked through a window at a far-off hillside, especially if it had trees and sunlit slopes. Read The Golden Bough, the writer had said, and you’ll understand that the part of you which still worships at lost altars in the Cambodian rain forest becomes uneasy when reminded of how far you’ve strayed from your true destiny. Urquhart had dismissed the idea as pretentious nonsense, yet on this morning it seemed almost valid. Back in his first week at Belhampton he had decided to go to the hill and explore it on foot, but that had been six years ago, and he had done nothing about it. I’m squandering time as if it were money, he thought in sudden alarm. Tenpence fugit….
The mood of introspection faded as the silver bullet of the 9.00 monorail came sweeping along the spur line which connected Biosyn’s headquarters to the 1,000 kph London-Liverpool tubeway. A handful of passengers got out on to the elevated platform, among them a tall Negro in a flame-coloured tunic. Even at two hundred metres the powerful spread of the man’s shoulders was noticeable, and Urquhart felt a spasm of alarm as he half-identified the new arrival.
“Theophilus,” he said, addressing the admin computer. “Is Martin M’tobo in this country?”
There was a barely perceptible pause while Theophilus used a microwave link to interrogate the GPO computer in Greenwich. “Yes,” the terminal on the polished desk said.
“How and when did he arrive?”
“On the Meridian Thistledown flight from Losane, touching down at Chobham at 7.11 this morning.”
“You’re a fat pig,” Urquhart said bitterly.
“I’m a fat pig,” the computer agreed. “Go on—if this is one of your ridiculous test problems in two-valued logic I require to hear the other premises before printing out any Boolean truth tables.”
Ignoring the sarcasm, Urquhart extended a freckled hand and pressed a button which connected him to Bryan Philp, who was his technical director and chief of the bionics staff. The image of Philp’s close-cropped head floated at the communicator’s projection focus.
“Martin M’tobo is outside.” Urquhart kept his voice flat. “Were you aware of this?”
“No.” Philp smiled immediately, showing unusually large and white teeth, and tilted his head back so that the lenses of his spectacles became two miniature suns. His bony face was suddenly impenetrable, inhuman. It was, Urquhart knew, a defensive move and it showed the other man felt he had been remiss in not keeping a check on M’tobo’s movements.
“He arrived in England only two hours ago and must have come straight here. Unannounced. What does that suggest to you?”
Philp’s face became serious. “Well, it doesn’t suggest he merely wants to talk to the founder and illustrious leader of his nation.”
“I agree. But it does suggest he’s losing faith in Biosyn, growing suspicious.”
Philp smiled and flashed his glasses on the instant, turning himself into a genial mechanical man. “We held Crowley as best we could, but with that personality structure he was disposed to drift. Very difficult.”
“Have you an address for him now?”
“An approximate one. We can’t locate him with much more accuracy than a decimetre or so on all three co-ordinates.”
“Can you recall him before M’tobo gets through security, say within ten minutes?”
Philp looked pained. “If we could do that there’d be no problem, would there?” The image of his head jiggled up and down slightly, and Urquhart guessed he was making violent and probably obscene gestures out of camera range, but this was no time to concern himself with trivial matters of discipline.
“Mmmmph.” He drummed his fingers as he made the decision. “I’m going to let M’tobo see the Tank.”
“Is that wise?”
“Better than letting him get the idea that Crowley’s dead. I’d like you to be there too.” Urquhart broke contact and the other man’s image dissolved into the air in swirling motes of brilliance, fugitive fireflies. He told Theophilus where he was going, then hurried out of his office and took the dropshaft to the ground floor. M’tobo’s theatrical figure was immediately discernible in the Arctic blue reception hall, his huge shoulders straining impatiently beneath the orange tunic as he headed towards the row of scanning booths which would judge his eligibility to enter the building proper. Approaching the booths from the inward side, Urquhart used his key and over-rode the security computer of one cubicle just as M’tobo was reaching it. The Negro looked mildly surprised as both doors quivered open and he saw Urquhart waiting for him with outstretched hand.