"Christ," I said; that hadn't dawned on me yet, but the realization had been coming.
"Right," Kevin said. "We see Brady, but obviously they don't; they don't realize what's happened. It's a power struggle between Brady and his electronic know-how and equipment, and Fremount and his secret police -- the men in black are the secret police. And those broads who looked like cheerleaders -- they're something, on Fremount's side, but I don't know what. I'll figure it out next time." His voice rose. "There's information in Mini's music; as we watch the events on the screen the music -- Christ, it isn't music; it's certain pitches at specific intervals -- unconsciously cues us. The music is what makes the thing into sense."
"Could that huge mixer actually be something that Mini really built?" I asked.
"Maybe so," Kevin said. "Mini has a degree from MIT."
"What else do you know about him?" Fat said.
"Not very much," Kevin said. "He's English. He visited the Soviet Union one time; he said he wanted to see certain experiments they were conducting with microwave information transfer over long distances. Mini developed a system where -- "
"I just realized something," I broke in. "On the credits, Robin Jamison who did the still photography. I know him. He took photos of me to go with an interview I did for the London Daily Telegraph. He told me he covered the coronation; he's one of the top still photographers in the world. He said he was moving his family to Vancouver; he said it's the most beautiful city in the world."
"It is," Fat said.
"Jamison gave me his card," I said. "So I could write to him for the negatives after the interview was published."
Kevin said, "He would know Linda and Eric Lampton. And maybe Mini, too."
"He told me to contact him," I said. "He was very nice; he sat for a long time and talked to me. He had motor-driven cameras; the noise fascinated my cats. And he let me look through a wide-angle lens; it was beyond belief, the lenses he had."
"Who put up the satellite?" Fat said. "The Russians?"
"It's never made clear," Kevin said. "But the way they talk about it... it didn't suggest the Russians. There's that one scene where Fremount is opening a letter with an antique letter-opener; all of a sudden you have that montage -- antique letter-opener and then the military talking about the satellite. If you fuse the two together, you get the idea -- I got the idea -- the satellite is real old."
"That makes sense," I said. "The time dysfunction, the woman in the old-fashioned long dress, barefoot, dipping water from the creek with a clay pitcher. There was a shot of the sky; did you notice that, Kevin?"
"The sky," Kevin murmured. "Yes; it was a long shot. A panorama shot. Sky, the field... the field looks old. Like maybe in the Near East. Like in Syria. And you're right; the pitcher reinforces that impression."
I said, "The satellite is never seen."
"Wrong," Kevin said.
"'Wrong'?" I said.
"Five times," Kevin said. "It appears once as a picture on a wall calendar. Once briefly as a child's toy in a store window. Once in the sky, but it's a flash-cut; I missed it the first time. Once in diagram form when President Fremount is going through that packet of data and photos on the Meritone Record Company... I forget the fifth time, now." He frowned.
"The object the taxi runs over," I said.
"What?" Kevin said. "Oh yeah; the taxi speeding along West Alameda. I thought it was a beer can. It rattled off loudly into the gutter." He reflected, then nodded. "You're right. It was the satellite again, mashed up by being run over. It sounded like a beer can; that's what fooled me. Mini again; his damn music or noises -- whatever. You hear the sound of a beer can so automatically you see a beer can." His grin became stark. "Hear it so you see it. Not bad." Although he was driving in heavy traffic he shut his eyes a moment. "Yeah, it's mashed up. But it's the satellite; it has those antennae, but they're broken and bent. And -- shit! There're words written on it. Like a label. What do the words say? You know, you'd have to take a fucking magnifying glass and go over stills from the flick, single-frame stills. One by one by one by one. And do some superimpositions. We're getting retinal lag; it's done through the lasers Brady uses. The light is so bright that it leaves -- " Kevin paused.
"Phosphene activity," I said. "In the retinas of the audience. That's what you mean. That's why lasers play such a role in the film."
"Okay," Kevin said, when we had returned to Fat's apartment. Each of us sat with a bottle of Dutch beer, kicking back and ready to figure it all out.
The material in the Mother Goose flick overlapped with Fat's encounter with God. That's the plain truth. I'd say, "That's God's truth," but I don't think -- I certainly didn't think then -- that God had anything to do with it.
"The Great Punta works in wonderful ways," Kevin said, but not in a kidding tone of voice. "Fuck. Holy fuck." To Fat he said, "I just assumed you were crazy. I mean, you're in and out of the rubber lock-up."
"Cool it," I said.
"So I take in Valis,"Kevin said, "I go to the movies to get away for a little while from all this nutso garbage that Fat here lays on us; there I am sitting in the goddam theater watching a sci-fi flick with Mother Goose in it, and what do I see. It's like a conspiracy."
"Don't blame me," Fat said.
Kevin said to him, "You're going to have to meet Goose."
"How'm I going to do that?" Fat said.
"Phil will contact Jamison. You can meet Goose -- Eric Lampton -- through Jamison; Phil's a famous writer -- he can arrange it." To me, Kevin said, "You have any books currently optioned to any movie producer?"
"Yes," I said. "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?* ( * Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Doubleday, 1968. ) a nd also Three Stigmata.†" († The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, Doubleday, 1964. )
"Fine," Kevin said. "Then Phil can say maybe there's a film in it." Turning to me he said, "Who's that producer friend of yours? The one at MGM?"
"Stan Jaffly," I said.
"Are you still in touch with him?"
"Only on a personal basis. They let their option on Man in the High Castle ‡ (‡ The Man in the High Castle, G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1962. ) l apse. He writes to me sometimes; he sent me a huge kit of herb seeds one time. He was going to send me a huge bag of peatmoss later on but fortunately he never did."
"Get in touch with him," Kevin said.
"Look," Fat said. "I don't understand. There were -- " He gestured. "Things in Valis that happened to me in March of 1974. When I -- " Again he gestured and fell silent, a perplexed expression on his face. Almost an expression of suffering, I noticed. I wondered why.
Maybe Fat felt that it reduced the stature of his encounter with God -- with Zebra -- to discover elements of it cropping up in a sci-fi movie starring a rock figure named Mother Goose. But this was the first hard evidence we had had that anything existed, here; and it had been Kevin, who could disintegrate a scam with a single bound, that had brought it to our attention.
"How many elements did you recognize?" I said, as quietly and calmly as I could, to the dejected-looking Horselover Fat.
After a time, Fat pulled himself erect in his chair and said, "Okay."