Four times he tried different combinations without any result, and I was beginning to wonder if perhaps the effect of the drug wouldn’t have worn off before they found whatever it was they were looking for, when suddenly, at the fifth attempt, the ripples suddenly disappeared. At least for a moment I thought they had, but then I detected the merest traces of them still drifting outwards along the margins of the screen. It was almost as if they had struck some invisible rock and were now being forced to squeeze their way round it. Peter juggled about, first intensifying and then diminishing the ripples. Finally, he said, ’That seems to be about it. Shall I resolve now?’

  ‘Sure. Go ahead,’ said Dumps.

  Except for a faintly flickering midnight aurora along its outermost fringes, the whole screen darkened precipitately to a fathomless velvet black. Renewed apprehension gripped me like a sudden nausea. After a long moment Peter said, ‘I’m sorry, I can’t seem to resolve at all.’

  ‘Goddamit,’ said Dumps, his voice betraying strain for the first time, ’there’s something there all right.’ They both peered into the screen. ‘Can you make it out, Jimmy?’

  ‘I think it’s the sky,’ I said.

  ‘Without any stars?’ said Peter. ‘It hardly seems likely.’

  I did not argue. ‘Rachel,’ I said softly, ‘what are you dreaming about?’

  ‘About home,’ came the sleepy whisper.

  ‘Where is your home?’

  Perhaps she did not know herself: certainly she did not answer.

  Dumps said, ‘We’re on the wrong track here. Bring her back to us, Jimmy.’

  ‘But you said you wanted to know where she came from,’ I objected. ‘Maybe she’s telling us.’

  ‘Maybe she is,’ he agreed, ‘but we can’t work from that. Go ahead and tell her she’s with you.’

  ’Tell her she’s dreaming about me?’ I asked.

  ‘No, just that she’s with you. She’ll accept it.’

  ‘But whereabouts?’ I asked.

  ‘We’ll let her decide that for herself.’

  ‘Rachel,’ I said, ‘you’re back with me now.’

  At once the screen became alive with shifting shadows. As I stared at them they began to align themselves into a pattern which was at once both strange and familiar. As the outlines became firm and sharp I realized that I was looking in through my own bedroom door at myself lying asleep. The detail and the illusion of depth were so nearly perfect it was uncanny. The picture seemed to move out towards us as she herself moved into it and bent over my sleeping image. Then, with the very turning of her head, I saw Hilary enter the doorway and move towards her.

  ‘Well, that seems clear enough,’ said Dumps. ‘Almost too clear if anything. Let’s go back to the crisis point just before she passed out.’

  ‘How long before?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh, just a minute or two.’

  ‘Rachel,’ I said, ‘you’re sitting on the bed.’ I swallowed and murmured all but inaudibly. ‘We’ve just been making love.’

  Even as I was talking the picture was changing. When it had resolved itself I couldn’t for a second make out what it was, and then I divined that it was in fact Rachel herself looking down at her own body. As she raised her eyes the lampshade hanging above her seemed to stretch itself out into a grotesque, luminous diabolo, and the plaster scrollwork on the ceiling wobbled as though it were made of grey junket. The whole room seemed in fact to have become oddly insubstantial. She swung her legs over the edge of the bed and stood up. I saw myself, fluttering like a dark flame before her and grinning idiotically. Then, immediately behind myself, I saw another me, and behind him another and another, like images seen in two inward-facing mirrors, reaching back and back down a dim, interminable corridor. These suddenly receded as she sank back on the edge of the bed again, and then the picture rapidly came and went as she opened and closed her eyes. Abruptly all those phantom ‘me’s’ seemed to flutter forward into one another like the cards in a conjurer’s pack and, as the room settled back into stillness, I watched myself turn towards the door, call something reassuringly over my shoulder and finally go out.

  ‘Well, that seems pretty unexceptionable,’ began Dumps. ’Admittedly the degree of visual aberration is—’

  ‘Wait,’ I whispered. ‘It’s not over.’

  The picture in the screen began to flick swifdy from one corner of the room to the other as Rachel’s eyes glanced watchfully round. Then, absolutely without warning, the whole place suddenly seemed to explode outward in slow motion. Walls, ceiling, furniture and floor swirled and dissolved into mist. There was a momentary flicker of snow-covered mountains, trees, the river, but in the twinkling of an eye they had been sucked up into some cataclysmic vortex, an impossibly immense inverted whirlpool, deep in whose spinning heart I thought I glimpsed for a fleeting fraction of a second Rachel’s own terrified face outlined against a nebulous canopy of stars. At that precise instant my mind was splintered by the very panic shriek which had snatched me back to her side like a fish hooked to the end of her line. Something exploded with a dull report at the far end of the testing room; the screen died; and, from a long way off, I seemed to hear Peter’s excited voice fading out on the words: ‘An inductor’s blown, I think.’

  TWENTY-FOUR

  According to Peter, I was out cold for three and a half minutes, and I have no reason to disbelieve him. He also assured me that my first coherent sentence on coming round was, ’Is she all right?’ It flatters my ego to believe this, but I confess that my own recollection of my first utterance is that it was the time-honoured classic, ‘What happened?’ closely followed by, ‘God, my arm hurts! ’

  I sat up, rubbed the back of my head and then my arm, and looked about me. Dumps was away at the far end of the room bending over one of his innumerable metal cabinets; Peter was poking about with a screwdriver at the back of the screen; Rachel was lying peacefully asleep wrapped up in her blankets. My sense of my own importance dwindled almost to nothing. ‘Well/ I demanded plaintively, ‘did anyone find out anything?’

  ‘You passed out,’ said Peter mildly.

  ‘I didn’t suppose I’d dropped off to sleep.’

  He smiled. ’The Doctor decided it was best to let you come round on your own.’

  ’Is that sort of thing likely to happen again?’ I asked him. ‘I really couldn’t say. The degree of psychokinesis was quite unexpected—that’s why I wasn’t able to divert it in time. We didn’t think it could come through on the primary circuit.’

  ‘And that’s what happened?’

  ‘We think that’s what happened,’ he qualified carefully.

  I got up from the floor, massaged my arm and walked down the room to Dumps. ‘You were just about to say something about the degree of visual aberration,’ I reminded him, ‘when we were interrupted.’

  He blinked at me. ‘It’s your own fault, Jimmy. Nothing you’d told me had led me to expect that.’

  ‘My fault I’ I protested. ‘I wasn’t even in the room when it happened! When I got back she was stretched out on the floor. As a matter of fact, I’ve only just this minute realized that her scream was telepathic.’

  ’Maybe it’s just as well you weren’t in the room,’ he observed. ‘Whatever happened then was pretty obviously beyond her control.’

  ‘Do you know what it was?’

  He scratched his chin with a pair of plastic-handled pliers. ‘I guess it was the breaching of the dam. Pretty impressive spectacle, huh?’

  ‘But what happened? It looked as if the whole room blew apart.’

  ‘Well, maybe it did at that.’

  ’Oh, come off it! ’

  ‘I’m serious, Jimmy.’

  ’Then you’re way beyond me. How could it have blown up? It was all right when I got back there.’

  He sighed. ’O.K., so it was an illusion. But not for her. Hell, Jimmy, we’ve just seen what she experienced. Was that an illusion?’

  ‘But it must have been,’ I insisted stubbornly. ‘After all, the house is still real enough, and so am I. And, damn it all. Dumps, so’s she—isn’t she?’

  Dumps grinned. ‘4,Blank misgivings of a creature, moving about in worlds not realized”?’

  ‘You can say that again,’ I muttered. ‘But, Dumps, I swear that when she came round again she was her old self—except for being able to pick up my thoughts, I mean. How do you explain that?’

  ‘We don’t really know what her old self was, do we?’ he parried. ’That’s one of the things we’re trying to find out.’

  I met his eyes squarely. ‘Very well, then,’ I said, ‘I’ll prove it. We’ll get her to go back to the moment when she came round.’

  ’That’s what I hoped you’d say,’ he smiled. ’O.K., Pete, if you’ve finished there, activate number 18 and we’ll see if we’re getting through.’

  There was a moment’s pause, then Peter called, ‘Registering.’

  ’Excellent,’ said Dumps. ‘Running repairs effected.’ He patted me on the shoulder. ‘Come on, Jimmy, back to work.’ The way in which Rachel seemed to pick up the thread as though nothing had happened was quite uncanny. I took up her hand again; Peter coaxed the screen into life; and before I had even told her where she was, the darkness was dispersing and Hilary’s anxious face and my own were congealing out of the shadows. All was exactly as I had expected, and I was just about to comment on it to Dumps when I noticed that the area immediately surrounding the image of my own head was curiously unstable, as though a faint, shimmering outline had been brushed in there like the hint of a heat haze. As my features sharpened into focus this outline diminished until I could hardly be sure that I wasn’t imagining it, and I was debating whether to mention it to Dumps when, clear as a bell, I heard Rachel speaking into my mind the very words she had spoken then: ‘Jimmy, what happened?’

  Peter said, ‘I’ve just picked up about 3 5 on number 18.’ Dumps turned to me. ‘What gives, Jimmy?’

  ‘She spoke to me,’ I said. ‘She said, “Jimmy, what happened?” It’s what she said at the time.’

  ‘I’ll shunt off 19 and 20 as well, just in case,’ said Peter.

  The screen dimmed and then brightened again. The fact that I hadn’t answered Rachel’s query did not appear to have affected the continuity of the sequence. I whispered to Dumps if he’d noticed anything odd about my own image.

  ‘You’ve seen it too, have you?’ he murmured. ‘We’ll follow it through and see what gives.’

  What did happen was that every time Rachel spoke into my mind, Peter’s dials registered a reading. I scanned the screen for other evidence of difference, but could detect nothing abnormal, though once or twice it did seem to me that my own image brightened a little at those moments of contact. Finally, we moved downstairs to the drawing-room and I watched myself go out to send the cable to Dumps.

  Everything was exactly as I had imagined it would be. The picture shifted in to a close-up of Hilary dealing out her patience, remained static for a time except for an occasional swing towards the door and then spun round as I re-entered and paused to chat with Mother. When the card table again came into view Peter said, ‘Picking up steadily now on 18. Reading 2 5; 2 7; 2-9.’

  ‘What’s she up to there?’ asked Dumps.

  I told him in a whisper about the game of patience while Peter intoned steadily, ’31; 3-3; 3-5,’ culminating in ‘4-8’ when Rachel indicated tire final aces and Hilary turned them up.

  ’This is where that business with the glass started,’ I said.

  Dumps turned to Peter. ‘Divert everything through the torus circuit and be ready to trip it when I give the word.’

  The screen dimmed almost to extinction and then slowly picked up again. I watched the Scrabble letters being laid out and saw myself reach out for the box and select the missing ‘Y’. Then Hilary was back with the glass and the proceedings got under way. I smiled faintly as I watched myself spell out my spoof message and then the picture was flicking rapidly back and forth between Hilary and myself as Rachel looked from one to the other. Finally, Mother and I changed places and Hilary, frowning with concentration, prepared to readdress the spirits.

  The instant that Rachel herself offered to take over Peter said, ‘Same again on 18. Nothing yet on the secondary though.’

  The screen suddenly blanked out.

  ‘She closed her eyes,’ I said. ‘My sister’s idea.’

  ‘We’re over on to 19 already,’ said Peter, ‘and increasing steadily. Number 20 coming in…now.’

  Dumps whistled faintly through his teeth.

  ’This is when she spelt that name,’ I said, and I shivered.

  There was a pause for perhaps a minute, then Peter said, ’Torus circuit taking over any second now. 4; 3; 2; 1; zero! Shall I trip?’

  ‘No,’ said Dumps, ‘hold it for a moment.’

  The screen jumped, died and flickered back into shadowy life. I saw myself move forward holding out Mother’s shawl. Then, without warning, the picture assumed the curiously unreal quality of a photographic negative, all the lights and darks seeming to transpose. I watched, wonderstruck, and saw a strangely insubstantial sister and mother push back their chairs and begin to get up. Remembering how Rachel had again closed her eyes, I fully expected the screen to blank out, but this time it didn’t. Hardly hearing Peter’s murmur of anxiety, I gazed spellbound at the wineglass and suddenly, incredulously, I saw what looked like a disembodied, shadow arm stretch out from the surrounding gloom, slide the glass slowly to one side, lift it and spin it horizontally by its stem. At the instant it dropped Dumps shouted something; a switch thudded heavily; and Rachel cried out in sudden pain.

  ‘You O.K., Jimmy?’

  ‘What’s happened to Rachel?’

  ‘She got the backlash when we cut off. The torus wouldn’t take any more! ’

  ’Is she all right?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘It must have given her a nasty jolt though. That kid’s p.k. potential is absolutely phenomenal—right out of this world. Come over here.’

  He hauled me across the room to where a sort of large, black, metal doughnut was lying on the farther bench surrounded by a mass of tentacular cables. ‘Feel that,’ he said. I touched the metal gingerly with my fingertips. ‘It’s hot.’ He chuckled grimly and, using his handkerchief for a glove, unscrewed a tap in the wrist-thick cooling pipe that lapped the machine like a coiled python. ‘If it weren’t,’ he said, ‘I guess none of us would be here now. This thing’s just absorbed about enough energy to lift the roof clean off the building. I wish I’d seen what was left of that glass.’

  ’There wasn’t anything left of it,’ I said. ‘It was just dust. But what sort of energy is it, Dumps?’

  He shrugged. ‘Psychic certainly. Temporal possibly.’

  I suppose I must have looked even blanker than usual, for he added with a smile, ’That is assuming you’re prepared to accept Time as a force as well as a dimension,’

  ‘Well, this thing’s certainly hot,’ I admitted. ‘And you say she did it?’

  ‘With your help,’

  ‘What on earth did I do?’

  ‘I’m not sure,’ he confessed. ‘But I don’t think she’s able to function at full power unless you’re in the vicinity.’ He took out his pipe and peered into the bowl almost as if he were unwilling to meet my eyes.

  ‘Go on,’ I said.

  He smiled. ‘Why should I destroy what little faith you have left in me?’

  ’Then you have got an idea?’

  He nodded uneasily. ‘An idea, yes. But it’s crazy.’

  ’This whole thing’s crazy. Dumps. I’m prepared to listen to anything.’

  ‘Beginning to see through not with the eye?’ he grinned. ‘I thought you’d come round to it in the end.’ He stroked the bowl of his pipe thoughtfully against his nose and then blinked. ‘Did you ever hear that old saying attributed to Archimedes: “Only give me a lever long enough and a point on which to rest it and I’ll shift the world”?’

  ‘I always thought that was Pythagoras. Well, what about it?’

  He parted his lips, clenched the pipe stem firmly between his teeth, then took it out again. ‘I’m going to ask you to try and envisage this lever he’s talking about not as just an ordinary pole, but as a pole composed of some invisible force—say an electromagnetic field. Does the analogy hold good?’

  I blinked. ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I’m no physicist. But I suppose it might.’

  ‘Good enough,’ he said. ‘Right, we now have one invisible pole of indeterminate length, but we still haven’t got a point on which to rest it. Without that the whole proposition breaks down. So we must set about finding ourselves a suitable fulcrum.’

  It suddenly struck me what he was after. ‘Meaning me, for instance?’ I suggested.

  He eyed me speculatively. ‘Something on those lines,’ he conceded.

  I considered the implications behind this astonishing proposition. ’That’s all very well,’ I said at last, ‘but aren’t you forgetting something? What about Archimedes himself? Isn’t he an essential part of the works?’

  ’The Wizard of Syracuse,’ he nodded. ‘No, I haven’t forgotten him.’

  ’Then where the hell is he?’

  ‘Where you’d expect him to be, of course. At the far end of his lever.’

  ‘Just supposing there is a lever.’

  ‘Yes, indeed,’ he agreed.

  ‘A long way away,’ I said.

  ‘A long time away,’ said Dumps and gave me a slow, crafty smile.

  I stared at him. ‘Great God,’ I whispered at last, ’for a moment I almost found myself believing you.’

  He nodded like a wise, wide-eyed owl. ‘Here’s the next point, Jimmy,’ he said. ‘Assuming you were old Archimedes and you wanted to exert the maximum amount of force, just where would you position your fulcrum in respect of your lever?’

  ‘Well, as far away from myself as possible, I suppose. Right up the other end.’

  ’Exactly,’ said Dumps. ‘About an arm’s length away might be about right, wouldn’t you say?’

 

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