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estimated fifty pounds of dynamite, which Mr. Houvelle,
a chemist, had made himself on company time.
The plane, the pilot, the dynamite, and the house disintegrated
in a ball of flame and expanding an".
With these also went MEDIUM and thirty employes
of Western, including Tours, Mrs. Morris, Harmons,
and two clients who were interviewing the late Karl
Marx.
Western and two of his bodyguards had survived
without serious injury. Mr. Western had been in a subbasement
beneath the garage at the time, with another
client. What he was doing there or the identity of his
client were not known. During the confusion, his client
had disappeared, and Mr. Western did not care to
name him.
Mr. Houvelle had failed in his mission, which must
have been to send Mr. Western on to the great beyond.
Carfax, along with many others, had assumed that
Houvelle had belonged to some religious group which
loathed Western because he was discrediting its faith.
Not so. Mr. Houvelle was a fanatical atheist. He had
78 Traitor to the Living
ridiculed all religions and once had been beaten up in a
Silverlake bar when he had suggested that Christianity
was the greatest evil that this planet had ever known.
Why would Mr. Houvelle want to kill the man who
was in the process of destroying all established religions
and most of the unestablished?
No one knew, but the TV casters thought it probable
that Mr. Houvelle hated Western because he was also
destroying atheism.
The ruins of the house as seen from a helicopter
were shown briefly. There was only a deep black hole
with pieces of wood and metal scattered outward like
the petals of a flower scattered by a giant reciting for-
get-menots.
Mr. Western, his bodyguards, and the unnamed
client had scrambled out of the subbasement a few
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minutes after the explosion and escaped with some burns on their backs and
heads.
There was a shot of Western, part of his body and
the top of his head covered with bandages. The casters
added that he had stated that a new house would be
built on the site and a new MEDIUM installed. Mr.
Western had also stated that it would have done no
good to kill him, since his followers would carry on his
work.
"I'd sure like to know what he was doing in that
basement and who his client was," Gordon Carfax said.
"I wish he had been killed!" Patricia said. "It would
serve him right! And maybe then he might have confessed
that he killed my father and stole MEDIUM."
"Why should he?" Carfax said.
"What would he have to gain by lying after he's
dead?"
"Being dead doesn't make you any less hypocritical
or spiteful," Gordon said.
"There you go again," she said. "You insist that they
are not the dead but entities posing as the dead. Yet
you talk as if you believed they are the dead."
"I know. It's too easy to slide into the habit of think
Traitor to the Living 79
ing of them as those who did live. There's a continuity
that overwhelms you even if you don't want to believe.
A man dies and then you're talking to him. And it's
only by a rigid discipline of mind that you can separate
the two, the once-living man and the thing that's pretending
to be him. H, that is..."
"H, that is, they are not really discrete entities, is
that what you were going to say?"
"I'm afraid so," Carfax said, smiling. "In any event, lluman or not, they are
dangerous. I know, though I
can't prove it, that one of them was trying to take me
over, possess me, when I was interviewing your father."
"But how could they do that?"
"How would I know? If I did suggest that to the
news media, Western would be sure to stress my mental
breakdown. Everybody would conclude that I was
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crazy. Maybe I am."
"I don't think so," Patricia said. "But what matters
now is what we can do. You'll have to forget Frances,
for a while, anyway, until a new MEDIUM is built. It's
an awful thing to say, but maybe it was a good thing
that the house was blown up. Western's going to be too
busy rebuilding to pay much attention to us. We can
get something done while he's occupied."
Like what? Carfax thought. But they were'going to
Mrs. Webster for a seance, though he did not expect
much from that, and he could sniff around later at the
University of Big Sur.
Just before they turned the TV off that night, the
caster announced that the official report of the FCIM
would be released within a few days. Apparently, the
president had yielded to the public clamor. It was a decision
reluctantly taken, since it was going to offend
many voters no matter what its conclusions.
11.
The Spock business had always done well, but now it
was in its Golden Age. Where there had been one
medium before Western, there were now twenty. Some
operated according to tradition, despising the use of
electromechanical aids, depending solely upon their
psychic powers. And upon the gullibility of their
clients. Carfax thought. Others had gone modern and
used devices of their own make which were supposed
to be modeled on Western's. (All of these could be classified
as fakes. Carfax assumed. But whatever their
means, they took in the clients and the money).
Mrs. Webster was no exception, as far as the money
was concerned. She lived in a six-room penthouse on a
thirty-six-story apartment building in Santa Monica
only two blocks from the Pacific. A security guard
checked Gordon and Patricia in the main lobby, and
another accompanied them in a private elevator. A
third rechecked their credentials before admitting them
into the anteroom. A maid who looked as if she came
from Arabia (and did) escorted them to the seance
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room. This had none of the trappings of the seance
room which Carfax expected. It was large and airy and
bright, its walls were oyster-white with a mural which
looked like a Cazetti original (and was) running completely
around the room, broken only by several doors.
A Matisse and a Renoir which looked like originals
(and were) were the only paintings. The furniture was
the frail Neo-Cretan style, becoming so popular.
Mrs. Webster herself looked as fragile as the furniture.
She rose from a spindly sofa and approached
80
Traitor to the Living 81
them, her hand out, and smiling. She was about fifty
years old and about five feet tall, thin in arms and legs
but with large breasts and a posterior that delighted
Carfax. Her face was oval, large-eyed, and high-
cheeked. Her hair was very black and long, floating
free. She wore no jewelry except for a small golden ring
set with an azure gem which Carfax could not identify.
When he took her hand he saw that the ring itself was
in the shape of a serpent.
Mrs. Webster's voice was deep for such a small
woman.
"Please sit down. The others will arrive within a few
minutes. You can smoke if you wish; there are some
Kenyans on the table, but you can use your own if you
I'ke. You'll have to excuse me for a moment; I have to
change into my working clothes."
The few minutes stretched out to fifteen. Patricia
smoked several of the strong Kenyans while Gordon
paced back and forth, looking now and then out of the
high and broad window fronting the ocean. He noticed
thin wires running from the wall into the lower edge of
the window. His eyebrows rose. Windows which could
be electrically polarized were very expensive indeed.
He had just glanced at his watch when he heard
voices. The maid, now dressed in flowing white robes
that made her look even more Arabic, entered. Behind
her were three women and three men of various ages
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but all well-dressed. One of them, a blonde of about
twenty, was too well-dressed, he thought. She wore the
bell-shaped skirt reaching to the floor and the brocaded
jacket which the more daring young girls in the larger [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]