It was a bright warm day for January—seventy degrees at 10:53 A.M. Ole Sigurdsson was driving east on the Sunset Strip, hardly noticing the glass-faced towers, the shops and cafes, a huge entertainment sign promoting "Bilbo and the Seven Orcs." He was watching for a street sign.
The boulevard changed, its buildings and mood becoming less flamboyant. Trees lined one side. Seeing the street he'd been watching for, he turned south on it. If some powerful, hateful entity had any attention on Ole just then, it was too slight to be apparent to him.
A block farther he surprised himself by turning a block east, out of his way, then half a block south again. Pulling to an available length of curb, he stopped. Just ahead was a site of strong psychic trauma, flagged by the standing waves of emotion left by murder. Briefly, Ole sorted out the elements; they matched a news report he recalled from television a few months earlier.
Then he drove on and parked a block north of Santa Monica Boulevard. Behind him, on the front porch of an elderly house, hung a varnished wooden sign, the words routed into it and painted white:
MADAME TANYA—PSYCHIC
Auras Read, Fortunes Told
Questions Answered
Trees shaded the emerald yard; rose bushes, blooming yellow, white, and red, guarded the walk; bougainvillea rioted wildly scarlet over the porch roof and down a trellised end to the ground. Madame had a green thumb.
Ole Sigurdsson knew a number of professional psychics, from as far away as Indonesia and Lapland, and as near as Beverly Hills and Hollywood, but almost all only casually. Anna Jennings, AKA Madame Tanya, he'd never met, had only heard about, but she was reputed by her peers to have more psychic ability than most.
Ole's telepathic ability was neither controllable nor precise, so he'd phoned her. Now, walking up her front steps, he glanced at his watch: eleven sharp. Nearly exact promptness without effort was one of his rather consistent talents.
He pushed the button on the doorpost and heard the buzzer inside. Shortly, Madame opened the door. "I'm Ole Sigurdsson," said Ole. "I called you a v'ile ago."
Madame Tanya was not a typical homemaker, nor did she use makeup the way she did through any illusion that it beautified her. Simply, many clients expected it. Lipstick too vivid, eye shadow too thick, eyebrows plucked and penciled to a thin black line, and clothes that might have come from a gypsy wagon, all were useful parts of her image. When a client left, the image stayed with him or her; it helped them remember to talk about Madame Tanya and her considerable abilities.
Most of her business came to her from word of mouth, although occasional appearances on local radio and TV talk shows had certainly helped. She was good, both as a sensitive and as a showperson, in her living room and in the studio.
She looked Ole over, her eyes seeing physical things that most people wouldn't have noticed, her "inner eye" noticing other things that very few indeed would have picked up.
"Olaf Sigurdsson," she said, pronouncing the first name almost like "Olive." "What brings a celebrity psychic from Bel Air to a palm reader in West Hollywood?"
"You tell fortunes," he said. "V'at do you see for me?"
She grinned up at him. "You haven't showed me your palm yet."
He smiled slightly. "If you needed to see my palm, that vould really be a surprise."
She laughed, then gathered her attention and frowned thoughtfully. "I don't want to sound corny, but you're going to take a trip. You'll leave tomorrow, with a young man and a good-looking young woman with long blonde hair. The young man wears a ... bandage of some kind. A cast, on his arm. And I see desert, and there's a 'dobe ranch house, with trees around it, and a windmill. Two windmills; now that's interesting. And a water tank on stilts. Any of that mean anything to you?"
"The trip does, and the company, but ve don't expect to go for a veek or so yet. The rest of it don't ring any bell at all, but it feels right v'en you say it.
"V'ere is this place in the desert?"
"Damned if I know." She concentrated again. "Arizona someplace, that's all I get on it. Yeah, Arizona."
"Vell, if finding it is in my future, I von't vorry about how."
"I don't guarantee it's in your future. It's just what I got in answer to your question. Fortunes aren't what they used to be." She peered at him interestedly. "Don't you see futures?"
"Now and then, for this vun and that vun. Never my own. Mainly I help people straighten out their lives. I used to be a Noetie, you know—a counselor vith the Institute of Noetic Technology. I see more the pasts of people and places, and things in the present that other people don't, or things somev'ere else."
He paused. "V'at do you mean, 'fortunes ain't v'at they used to be'?"
She cocked her head. "How do you feel about how things are going lately?" she countered. "With the world, I mean."
"To hell on a bobsled," he said. "So vy ain't fortunes v'at they used to be?"
"Well, the last couple of years I've been running into people with short futures. I mean, it's everybody that comes to me to get their fortune read. Mostly I get that their future just ... stops a little way up the line; whatever it is that happens then, I can't see. I don't get a date on it, but it feels like, oh, about half a year from now.
"But the funny thing is, it feels as if there's a weak alternate line for them, too, not strong enough—maybe too improbable—for me to read.
"This hasn't screwed up business yet, because mostly I just tell the near future anyway: next week, maybe month after next. I bat a lot better that way; the odds start to slip when you forecast farther ahead than a few weeks. It's that way with me anyway. If I get something really interesting a few months up the track, and it's not too heavy, I give 'em that, too. But these days, if they insist on anything long-term, I have to fake it.
"So the way it looks to me, six months from now there's not likely to be any more future."
Ole nodded; all this was new to him, but it felt right. "You get anything on me besides a trip vith two people and a ranch house?"
She looked at him as if evaluating. "Actually, there's more, but I can only kind of feel it. It's ... heavy, but not... it doesn't feel all that terrible. Necessarily. Whatever it is, the outcome is undecided." She shrugged. "I'd never lay that on an ordinary client, but you asked, and you're different."
"But there's still vun track vith a future on it, eh? Veil hell, that's hopeful; it could be vorse than that. I'll vork on that vun. You get anything else at all?"
She shook her head. "Not a damn thing... Except be sure to check your answering machine when you get home. It's important."
He nodded. "V'at do I owe you?"
"Nothing. It's a professional courtesy."
"Okay. So v'at's your favorite charity?"
"Huh? Oh." She grinned again. "Next to me, the Salvation Army, I guess. I'm reaching the age where I appreciate an outfit that helps old derelicts... There is a favor maybe you can do for me, though. My house is haunted lately."
"Ya, I noticed. It's the guy v'at got chopped by a sword last summer, yust a few blocks from here. How come he's hanging around you?"
"Because I noticed him. He's on a big guilt trip, and nobody but me paid any attention to him. He makes it kind of sticky around here—all that guilt. Do you suppose you can get rid of him for me?"
Ole looked past her, his line of vision above her shoulder. The ghost of Lefty Nagel appeared then, like ragged, semidissolved cheesecloth to Ole's perception. That was a good sign; instead of still carrying around his old physical appearance, Lefty had adopted a "ghostly look." Ole said nothing out loud to him; sound wasn't necessary, and their exchanges were much faster than speech. Within three or four minutes the guilt blew the way Carol's grief had, leaving Madame Tanya's lavender hair electrified. She looked at Olaf Sigurdsson with appreciation and increased respect.
"What the hell did you do?"
"Oh, ve yust looked at a few things, me and him. A modified Noetie action ve done together."
"Well, I'd say we're even now. More than even. You've got something on account with me."
Ole looked at her thoughtfully. "You know," he said, "I vouldn't be surprised if I drew on that, vun of these days."
When he got home, he checked the messages on his machine; there were three. The first was from a Mrs. William Benning, telling him there'd been a cancellation; if Mr. Sigurdsson wanted to talk with Mr. McBee this evening, it was now possible. He should confirm right away. The second was from his wife, Laura: The Burriston script for The Lantern of God was a disaster, and she'd be at the studio until very late. The third message was from Jerry Connor: His patrol car had been broadsided by a drunk driver, and his right arm was broken. He was now on sick leave and would be available for the trip as soon as Sigurdsson wanted.
Ole took a deep breath, remembering Madame Tanya's predictions of an arm in a cast and a next-day departure. The two expected delays—the approval time for Connor's vacation and the wait to talk with McBee—had both unexpectedly evaporated. He dialed Benning's number and confirmed a McBee conference at eight. Then he called Carol Ludi at her sister-in-law's health salon, where Carol was the administrator. Finally he phoned Laura and told her what was happening.
After that he sat on the sundeck overlooking the canyon and relaxed with a scotch on the rocks. It occurred to him that Lefty Nagel was hanging around him now, not particularly noticeable because the grief and guilt were gone. Ole could have run the ghost off but decided to let him stay for the time being. He didn't know why; it just felt right.
Then he fell asleep on his recliner, knowing the sun would waken him in half an hour or so when it moved around to shine in his face.
Jerry Connor couldn't drive with his arm broken, so Carol picked him up at his Van Nuys apartment and crossed the hills via Coldwater Canyon Drive. She wasn't about to take the freeway over the pass. They arrived in front of Benning's Culver City home with fifteen minutes to spare, and waited in the car until Ole arrived at seven fifty-six.
Benning's wife let them in. She seemed like a regular housewife-mother type with her head on straight, not like the wife of a spirit medium. Jerry wondered what kind of people she usually met at the door, and whether any before him had carried a police shield in their wallet.
She left them in the living room, where a ten-year-old boy and an eight-year-old girl were watching television, oblivious to the newcomers.
Three minutes later, Benning walked in, wearing bedroom slippers. He was about thirty-five, a machinist at McDonnell Douglas, and he'd been taking a nap. Sometimes, he said, these sessions ran late, and he had to get up at six in the morning. He led them into what might once have been a bedroom, and asked if they had a tape recorder. They didn't, so he seated a cassette in his own, gave Ole brief instructions on its operation, and sat down opposite them.
To Jerry, the machinist sounded like Oklahoma a generation removed—very middle America.
"All right," said Benning to Ole, "we can get started in just a jiffy. I'll need $200 in advance, cash or money order, like my wife told you over the phone. If you don't feel all right about what you hear in the first five minutes after McBee takes over, you can wake me up and give me $30. I'll give you back your advance payment then and we'll quit. When the session is over, you can have the cassettes of it for $3 each, and any copyrights are yours. Mr. McBee can't use them, and I'm just the medium.
"Now, have you got any questions before we start?"
Ole shook his head. "I don't think so. I'm ready."
"All right. It may be a couple minutes before Mr. McBee takes over, so I need you to be quiet until he talks to you. He'll tell you when to start asking questions."
Benning leaned back in his old naugahyde recliner, then tilted it and closed his eyes. In the silence that followed, Jerry Connor became aware of the throbbing ache in his lower right arm, broken only eleven hours earlier. Briefly, he wondered if he was rushing things, coming here tonight and leaving town tomorrow. Quietly, he took a pain pill from a pocket and swallowed it dry.
His eyes watched the sweep second hand on the wall clock. It had made less than one complete circle when Benning spoke again. But the voice—its pitch, its timbre, its accents—was utterly different from before, reminiscent more of Calcutta than Oklahoma. The words chased each other more quickly than Connor was used to, though they were easy enough to understand.
"Thank you, beloved," the voice said. "I am with you now. If you will ask whatever questions you have, I will answer those which I may. There may be questions, however, which it is not proper for me to answer. What is it you wish to ask first?"
He's hedging already, thought Jerry.
Ole summarized very briefly the deaths on the pass and their statistical pattern, but did not mention Jerry's speculation on the cause. He also summarized what Madame Tanya had told him about futures. "So v'at I vant to know first is, v'at's going on?" he finished.
"Ah. There is ... machinery at the point of which you speak, beloved. On the pass. Very old machinery, in the order of millions of years, left over from a very ancient game, from a cycle long before that in which you now find yourself. It has been operating at a uniform rate until very recently, when it began to accelerate. Next question, please."
Does he know that, Jerry wondered, or did he put it together from what Ole told him? He watched Benning's relaxed face for any sign of the effort of thought as Ole put the next question.
"Okay. V'at speeded it up?"
"Its rate of operation is influenced by the output of another, much older machine, which we may call the 'surprise generator.' This surprise generator makes it possible for the people of this planet to lead more interesting lives. And under certain conditions it accelerates. Those conditions now exist, beloved, and therefore its output of, um, aberrative impulses is speeding up. This has resulted in acceleration of the tollgate. Next question, please."
God, Jerry thought, if he ever decides to go out of the spirit business, he could write science fiction.
"Okay," Ole said, "v'at vere ve running into last night that tried to kill us? V'at kind of being vas that?"
"It is an artificial construct, one which might be called a robot sentry. It was designed to protect the tollgate, and was activated by your awareness and attention. Next question, please."
Jerry sat thunderstruck: The tollgate! He'd called it the tollgate!
Ole said nothing for a minute, his brows gnarled in thought. Finally, he focused again on Benning/McBee, who still lay slack-faced. "This surprise yenerator—does it have anything to do vith v'at else is happening? You said it's accelerating; so is craziness. And Madame Tanya said ve maybe only got about half a year before there ain't no future. Is that because the surprise yenerator is speeding up?"
This time it was Benning/McBee who had a long lag before answering—at least it seemed long to Jerry Connor. Finally, the medium's mouth moved. "Beloved, there are things I may not tell you. There are rules governing these things and much else. You have discerned something independently which allows me to answer this question, but I will not talk about it any further than that. Yes, the surprise generator is responsible, as you surmised, for the phenomena which you call 'increased craziness.' Next question."
"Wait a minute!" Jerry interrupted. "Ole has this idea that the world may end or something in six months, and somebody or something is killing people on the pass and tried to kill us last night. Do you mean to say you can't tell us what you know because of some stupid rules?"
"Thank you, Jerry Connor. I appreciate and admire your exasperation. But Mr. Sigurdsson, and you two as his teammates, are embarking on a game which we might call 'save Earth.' You may not heretofore have realized that fully, but it is so. The name is not fully appropriate, but from your point of view it might be called that. And indeed, almost everyone on Earth has an interest in that game, actively or passively, though few of them know consciously that there is such a game, as a game.
"Such games have rules. Human beings are so deeply conditioned to those rules that they do not even know the rules exist. To them there are only inabilities, which are the rules agreed to long ago and continuingly, and which are closely enforced.
"Meanwhile, Mr. Sigurdsson, and you, his teammates, may conceivably win the game, but this will not happen should I break the rules for you. God bless you, beloved. Next question, please."
Jerry sat back, confused. Sigurdsson changed the line of inquiry. "Ve're going to the desert tomorrow, but ve don't know v'ere. All ve know is, ve're looking for a 'dobe ranch house in Arizona somev'ere; ve don't know v'ere it is or who lives there. Can you tell me either vun? Or better yet, both?"
"It is not allowed that I tell you either. My position is one of neutrality always. If I should become polarized in favor of one side or another in my actions, or give what might be called 'operational guidance,' then I would become part of the game, and I do not wish to be so. Also, it would jeopardize your own efforts. But I can tell you this: there are others in the game who wish in turn that you will arrive at that place. If you do not try hard, but allow yourself to go there, not demanding it seriously of yourself or of God, you will probably arrive."
He paused, and it seemed to Connor that McBee was consulting silently with others. It was nothing that Jerry could see or hear, but it seemed that way to him. Then Benning/McBee spoke again. "There is one thing further I can say. It is in the nature of a riddle, and it is as far as I can go in this matter." He paused. "When you see the sign of the triumphant sorcerer, you will need to seek no further.
"I will tell you now that this interview must end soon. The entire subject is one of which I may not speak at length. There are too many opportunities for damage. I will answer two more questions."
Jerry Connor looked at Sigurdsson, then at his watch. He wasn't sure they'd gotten their $200 worth, but more than five minutes had passed; they couldn't get it back. Ole spoke again.
"There's somevun v'at came vith us tonight. He's kind of hard to notice. I think he's adopted me. Vy did he do that? Does he have a part to play in any of this?"
The next sound from Benning/McBee startled all of them: a peal of laughter, the laughter of delight. "You are testing me! Yes, beloved, he did indeed adopt you, because you relieved him of his burden, one which he was unable by himself to put down. As you already know, you can send him away if you wish, and he will go. But he would like to help you in his turn. I may say no more about that.
"And now you have one more question. Perhaps Miss Ludi would like to ask it; she has not spoken yet."
Jerry's scalp crawled. It occurred to him that neither his name nor Carol's had been mentioned to Benning unless Ole had named them over the phone. Yet Benning/McBee had referred to each of them by name.
"Mr. McBee," said Carol, "we need to appraise what you've told us, but we don't know anything about you. Who or what are you?"
"Hoo-oo! Hoo-oo! An excellent question, beloved! Very well; that I may certainly answer without care.
"There are many spectators without bodies who are also outside your universe or indeed any universe—spectators of the games played by men and other embodied spirits, here and on other worlds. I am one of those spectators. We are in some ways like the people who watch your sporting contests. For example, we are far greater in number than the players, and we may not interfere in the games ourselves. However, noninterference is not a difficult or onerous constraint, because we do not have favorites. To have favorites would draw us into your games. But also we do not have the inclination to favoritism, because we have chosen to remain outside.
"Our position outside the games allows us to perceive far more than the players, at one level, are allowed to know. And really, beloved, that is the basic difference between those like myself, and those like you who have chosen to operate bodies and play within your universe.
"But now I must end this interview. You have the potential to succeed in your objectives, and either you will or you will not. Your best chance lies in not striving excessively, but simply in doing what seems appropriate at any given time. God bless you, beloved."
A few minutes later, Ole, Jerry, and Carol stood by the curb, deciding the time and place of their next day's departure. When they had done that, Carol looked thoughtfully at Sigurdsson. "Ole," she asked, "did you mention our names to Mr. Benning at any time?"
"You noticed that too, eh? No, I never did. Only mine. I told him I vas coming vith two friends, but I never said either of your names."
"Are you sure?" Jerry asked.
Ole cocked an eyebrow at him. "Positive," he said.
"Did you tell the fortuneteller our names?"
"No. And I never told her I vas coming here, either."
"You said something about someone else who came with you tonight," Carol said. "I didn't understand what that was about. And Mr. McBee said you'd helped this person. That wasn't me, was it?"
Ole grinned and shook his head, then looked at Jerry. "Did you feel anyvun hanging around?" he asked.
"What do you mean? Like Kevin hung around?" Then waves of chills hit Jerry Connor again; for the first time, he felt the presence of Lefty Nagel. Ole laughed out loud looking at him.
"Okay, you got him. Carol, I got adopted by a ghost today. I helped him kind of the vay I helped you and Kevin, but this ghost decided to stay vith me, and I agreed he can if he don't make no trouble. His name is Lefty."
"Can't ghosts be dangerous sometimes?"
"Not for me they ain't; not anymore. But now and then vun of them can be unpleasant. Those are the vuns—they ain't very common—that can cause physical effects. The vuns that can knock dishes off the shelves and throw the furniture around—things like that. Those are the vuns people ask for help vith the most."
He looked at each of the two younger people in turn. "I think ve learned something useful from McBee tonight," he added. "V'at ve're getting into here can sound pretty vild and danyerous. But if ve can go at it vithout getting up-tight, ve got a better chance to pull it off."
Two hours later, Jerry Connor was in bed. Ole had taken him home and given him a "treatment" for his arm. When he'd left, Jerry had awkwardly packed, then mixed himself a vodka collins and thought for a while. If Carol had brought him home, he might have asked her to stay—or he might not. He was really interested in creating a future with her, not simply an affair—if there was going to be a future.
The future. Tomorrow, he thought, we'll be headed for we don't know where, looking for we don't know who, and we'll probably have a left-handed ghost with us.
He wondered if he was crazy; it didn't feel right for a dream. Mr. McBee was a spirit, Benning a medium, Madame Tanya a fortuneteller, and he didn't know what to call Ole—a master psychic, he guessed. And a week earlier he didn't really believe that any of those things existed as genuine. He still wasn't a hundred percent sure.
But there was the pass and its fatality statistics. You couldn't argue with those. And what had happened last night on Ventura Boulevard and on the freeway were real without a doubt. While the world ... the way things had been going lately in the news, it was easy to believe that the world might end in half a year.
Jerry Connor hadn't prayed since he'd graduated from Saint Ignatius High School. He decided to give it another try after all those years.