Reality Matrix Effect (9781310151330) Read online

  Rayna leaned back and rubbed her head against Keith’s upper arm in a kitten-like nuzzle.

  “I was hoping we could spend some time together and—” She broke off abruptly, and her eyes widened in a sudden shock of recognition. Uneasily, she glanced toward the bedroom, then turned to stare at Keith.

  “I don’t think that would be a good idea,” he said, quickly looking away.

  “Yes. All right,” she stammered. “Maybe you’re right.”

  Rayna pushed the chair back, rose and almost stumbled toward where her purse lay. “Call me,” she said, sounding almost panicky in her haste to leave.

  “Sure,” he said uncomfortably as he accompanied her to the door.

  Rayna half-walked/half-ran down the hallway. She stopped before the elevator, glaring at it. Finally, and with an air of defiance, she moved to the stairway and descended the three flights as rapidly as her legs would carry her.

  Chapter 5: Research

  For a week now, Rayna had been going through the motions of life instead of living it. She’d slept, eaten and worked her way through each increasingly depressing school day. She’d spoken with her parents only once since their big talk about the adoption. She’d told them matter-of-factly that she was attempting to have the records unsealed. They understood, they’d said, but she could hear the deep sorrow behind their words, and guilt gnawed at her resolve.

  Keith called once to report on his progress. Very slow, he told her. Neither of them wanted to talk about the way their last visit ended, nor about the future of their relationship. Meanwhile, the world outside Rayna’s personal sphere seemed to be collapsing, too. The news reports seemed to show a steady disintegration of the world that she had only recently taken for granted.

  At home alone and still in her bathrobe at 3 p.m. on a Saturday that she ordinarily would have spent with Keith, she had started thinking about Al Frederick once again. Lately, she was shocked to discover, she almost envied Al the gift of everlasting peace that death had bestowed on him.

  It had been three months since his death—more than a month since she and Keith had cleared out Al’s apartment and opened the permastore container Al had left her. But from that day until this, the box’s contents had remained untouched. Now, however, Rayna sat in stunned silence as the last few feet of the earliest dated cassette crossed the magnetic tape heads.

  This is just what I need, she thought bitterly. My parents aren’t really my parents. Keith’s not exactly the steadfast lover I’d counted on—a vision of the woman in the elevator flashed through her mind—and now it looks very much as if the one man I thought I could believe in may have been slightly nuts all these years.

  Rayna’s eyes grew moist as she reflected on what she’d just heard. Al actually seemed to think that he had worked some sort of magic—that he had somehow prevented John Martin Roberts from dying! She shook her head sadly and looked at the tapes she had carefully arranged in chronological order on her coffee table. Should she hear more?

  “What the hell,” she said aloud. “I’ve got nothing better to do anyway.”

  With a sigh, she removed the first cassette, inserted the second and pushed the “play” key. Though she was more prepared this time, the sound of Al Frederick’s voice seemingly coming from beyond the grave still jolted her.

  “This is Sunday, August 7, 1971,” the voice stated clearly.

  “It’s another hot one today. Yesterday, it hit 97 degrees downtown. Must’ve been over a hundred here in the Valley. All I know is this weather sure hasn’t helped things between Vickie and me. Both of us seem to have shorter fuses than usual.

  “She thinks I’m becoming obsessed. More than that. She thinks I’m crazy. Ever since the John Martin Roberts thing. Oh, she hasn’t quite said so in words, but it’s in every look she gives me.

  “Truth is, I was beginning to wonder whether she might be right. That’s why I finally decided to talk to a shrink. But the psychiatrist—a man by the name of Carruthers—never really says what he thinks. He just waits for me to talk and then gives me a look that makes me feel like some sort of specimen under a microscope.

  “I finally asked him last time. I said, ‘What’s your professional opinion? Am I crazy or what?’

  “And, of course, he said that ‘crazy’ is not a scientifically meaningful term. He did say, though, that sometimes different people can live through the same event and yet see the experience very differently. That’s the trouble with eyewitness accounts of crimes. You get two witnesses, you might just get two different stories. Anyway, that’s when Carruthers brought up Alec Zorne.

  “Oh, I know. Zorne has this reputation as just another counter-culture kook. But I remember patching together some wire copy on the guy seven or eight years ago. He used to be some kind of boy-wonder in physics. Full professor at age 23 and all that. It wasn’t until later that he started getting a name for himself as a sort of drug-culture hero. But spaced out or not, I guess the guy’s no dummy.

  “According to Carruthers, Zorne’s done a lot of interdisciplinary research on the nature of perception. (With Zorne’s background, of course, the emphasis is on the physics part of it, but Carruthers said Zorne’s also looked at the psychological and physiological aspects.) Anyway, Carruthers got me interested. So when I saw that Zorne was scheduled to give a lecture in town last night, I decided to give it a shot, even though the subject sounded kind of off the wall....”

  * * *

  The lecture “hall” (it was really just a rented community room) was still warm and stuffy at 7 p.m., despite the efforts of an old, overworked air-conditioner. Although the room could have accommodated about 100, fewer than half that number had been willing to buy a ticket and then sit in discomfort to hear Zorne discuss his ideas on parapsychophysics, the discipline of which he was the founder and, to date, sole practitioner.

  A pinch-faced man wearing a cream-colored suit and navy tie was surveying the audience with obvious disappointment. This was nothing like previous gatherings where Alec Zorne had headlined rallies to protest the Vietnam war, call for modification of drug laws, and generally push for the transformation of modern American society. Those meetings had drawn the crowds—sometimes as many to jeer as to cheer. But this time, the subject was science, not politics. The topic, not the notoriety of the speaker, had been emphasized in all the announcements. The result was a small turnout.

  Al Frederick had heard of neither parapsychophysics nor reality-matrix research, the evening’s topics. According to a mimeographed sheet handed out at the door, parapsychophysics was the study of the physical processes involved in psychic events. The very nature of the field put Zorne on the fringe of the scientific community, most of which had yet to accept the existence of psychic phenomena in the first place.

  Al was familiar with such phenomena. His mother’s family had nicknamed her m’chashefah—Hebrew for “witch”—in awe of her ability to know, even thousands of miles away, when something important was happening to a relative or close friend. Although the rational, hard-headed newsman Al Frederick often tried to deny the reality of such incidents, the wonder-filled son of Eva Frederick knew they were genuine. After all, he had been directly involved on two different occasions.

  First, there was the time he dislocated his knee playing football while he was away at college. His mother in New York had wakened with a scream at the precise moment he was injured in California. She insisted on calling the stadium, despite his father’s protestations that she had simply had a nightmare. Then there was the time his father went on a brief errand, leaving Al to keep his mother company. After about 15 minutes, the color had drained suddenly from his mother’s face as her coffee cup crashed to the floor: His father had been injured in an auto accident.

  So, although he might deny it to others, Al Frederick accepted the reality of psychic phenomena. Such things terrified him, however. They always seemed to be associated with injury or tragedy, from what he could see. For that reason, he had always suppress
ed his own latent psychic abilities. At least, he thought he had.

  Al let his mind wander during a rather lengthy introduction by the man in the cream-colored suit—an account of Zorne’s achievements in mainstream physics and the growth of the maverick scientist’s interest in conventional psychophysics. A round of polite applause brought Al out of his reverie. Hastily, he searched his pockets for a pen and the small reporter’s notebook he habitually carried with him.

  “How many of you know what psychophysics is?” Zorne was asking by the time Al was ready to listen. The speaker’s shaggy beard and medium-length, reddish-brown hair made him look more like a 30-year-old hippie than a physics professor.

  “Well, a few of you know, anyway. For the rest of you, let me explain briefly. Psychophysics is the study of the relationship between physical stimuli and the way we perceive them. Work in that field is usually done by experimental psychologists, not physicists. But the subject intrigued me.”

  Zorne fanned himself with a sheet of paper as he spoke. “I wanted to look at the physics of perception, not just the psychology or physiology of it. So I asked a friend who was doing psychophisics research to let me work with him. Using an EEG, I monitored the electrical activity in the brains of his subjects during various experiments, but the results didn’t tell me much. So I began tinkering with the EEG, modifying it to take slightly different measurements than the standard.”

  He paused and looked around the audience. “You see, I had a feeling that ultimately, the key to perception involved unique combinations of activity at the atomic and subatomic levels. Of course, that poses a problem. You can’t measure or observe that kind of activity directly. So I used the laws of probability and some intricate mathematical techniques to come up with equations that would predict some larger-scale effect that I could measure. Based on the results of those early experiments, I developed a hypothesis about the physics involved.”

  There was an anticipatory rumble from the audience, and Zorne waited for it to subside before continuing.

  “We already knew that the brain generates electrical impulses, of course. That’s what an EEG measures. My hypothesis was that the brain also produces a much more subtle, hard-to-measure level of electromagnetic energy that acts as a sort of receiving net for the mind. Various parts of the mind net oscillate in phase with different stimuli. The brain can then identify each stimulus by the unique characteristics of the oscillation.”

  Zorne again looked at the faces before him, trying to gauge how his explanation was being received.

  “The hypothesis tested out fine for a while, and I was about to publish a paper on it when I noticed that every now and then, the experimental data showed more mind-net energy than the equations could account for. At first, I blamed faulty electrodes, bad connections—anything but my hypothesis. Then I realized I had to review the data. I discovered that in each instance where the recorded energy levels were different from what the equations predicted, the same three people were involved as test subjects.

  “On a hunch, I sent those three subjects to the Rhine Institute to be tested for what’s sometimes called extrasensory perception. All three came up with scores that far exceeded the probabilities of chance.”

  Again, there was a murmur from the audience. This time, Zorne smiled.

  “Even though I was the one who sent them to Rhine, I was skeptical. For a physicist, saying you believe in paranormal phenomena is a little like being a minister who gets drunk at a party and runs around the room with a lampshade on his head: People pay a lot of attention to you, but it’s not exactly the kind of attention you’d like.”

  Al joined in the friendly laughter that rippled through the room.

  “The point is, I wasn’t exactly overjoyed at the prospect of my research taking me in this direction. Still, I couldn’t very well overlook it. There was a remarkable degree of correlation between my subjects’ deviation from chance on the Rhine tests and the deviation of the mind-net energy data from what my equations predicted.”

  “I never saw any paper on that in the physics journals!” shouted someone in the audience.

  Zorne surprised Al by responding to the heckler. “You’re right. Not for lack of trying, though. The established journals wouldn’t have anything to do with the subject. The only publications that were interested tended to be associated with things like spiritualism and UFOs. That didn’t seem the best road to respectability!”

  That drew another chuckle.

  “Anyway, I decided I couldn’t just drop a fascinating line of research. So I started revising my equations and designing new experiments. And that, ladies and gentlemen, was the birth of what I called ‘parapsychophysics’.”

  Zorne paused and gratefully accepted a glass of water from the man who had introduced him.

  “What I finally realized,” he resumed, “was that I was wrong to think of the mind net as just a passive receiver of stimuli. The net has a special kind of potential energy. Psychic events are associated with the conversion of this potential into other forms of energy—electrochemical energy, for example. When that happens, it can boost the mind net’s receiving range, allowing it to pick up messages from other minds and other places. This conversion process also makes it possible for the mind to transmit messages under certain circumstances.”

  Al glanced over his shoulder in response to some movement behind him. A sour-faced, fiftyish man was growling at the woman seated next to him, apparently his wife. She responded with an irritated “Shhhh!”

  “Now, around that time,” Zorne continued, “I was hearing a lot of talk on campus about so-called ‘mind-expanding’ drugs like LSD. I began to wonder whether those drugs were truly mind-expanding—that is, whether they might provide a psychic booster shot that enhanced the operation of the mind net in some way. I started doing some experiments—including some using myself as a subject.”

  “Yeah,” muttered the man behind Al. “That’s why you were sacked, ya damn junkie.”

  “Joe, why don’t you shut up,” the woman whispered through clenched teeth. “I want to hear what the man has to say.”

  “So do I,” Al put in, twisting around to face the couple. “I’d appreciate it if you’d do your fighting some other time.”

  The man glared back but said nothing more, and Al returned his attention to Zorne.

  “—that just as heat can be explained in terms of increased molecular motion, psychic energy can be explained in terms of molecular, atomic and subatomic motions. This kind of motion tends to be affected by strong feelings. That’s why close relatives are likely to be particularly sensitive to one another. The expression ‘good vibrations’ may turn out to be much more than just an expression. A rapport between two people may, in fact, literally have something to do with the production of sympathetic psychic vibrations that each person’s mind net is able to pick up from the other.

  “On the other hand, people can—and frequently do—inhibit their own psychic abilities. Western society in particular tends to concentrate its collective mental efforts on technology rather than on developing psychic awareness. So many of us miss the signs when our mind nets pull in anything more than just the five senses. My calculations indicate that in the long run, this can reduce psychic potential.

  “Yet, there are also people who sense their internal psychic activity but try to pretend it doesn’t exist. That only intensifies the psychic pressure within such a person—like steam building up inside a pressure cooker. Eventually, the pressure can get so strong that the intense psychic potential that’s been building up in the mind net simply escapes in an unexpected burst.

  “Just what happens then depends a lot on the individual involved. Poltergeist phenomena probably can be explained in this way. Maybe that also explains the spontaneous inspiration associated with genius. One thing my calculations show clearly is that the release of psychic energy could certainly have measurable effects on the external world. That makes this a very testable hypothesis—on
e that I think deserves further research.”

  Al could hardly believe what he was hearing. If Zorne was right, then maybe it wasn’t just an illusion, after all. Maybe he really did change the course of history the day John Martin Roberts was shot.

  Al listened intently, trying to understand Zorne’s observations, explanations and conclusions concerning the operation of the mind net. He had a tougher time following Zorne’s discussion of reality-matrix physics, which the speaker described generally as a way of explaining differences in how people perceive the universe around them. Puzzled but fascinated, Al even bought a copy of Zorne’s thin, spiral-bound book. Maybe he could understand it better if he read it, he thought.

  At 10 o’clock the next morning, Al was at Vickie Kingman’s apartment.

  “Oh, come on, Al!” Vickie said disparagingly. “Alec Zorne? Wonderful! You go to some doper to find an explanation for something that never happened in the first place!”

  “Vickie, be fair. I told you. It was Dr. Carruthers who came up with Zorne’s name. He was the one who kept telling me how Zorne was some sort of expert on perception and how what happened was probably just a matter of confused perception. In fact, isn’t that what you keep telling me? That I just thought I was the reason for Roberts’ survival?

  “Well, I—”

  “That sort of thing is Zorne’s specialty. I guess that’s what this reality-matrix thing is all about, though I’m not sure I really understand it. Seems like pretty wild stuff. But then, I haven’t had a chance to read the book yet. Maybe it’ll make more sense to me after I’ve really studied it. The guy seems pretty convincing if you give him half a chance. He’s even got the equations to explain this stuff in terms of electron spin and a whole lot of other physics concepts. Look here,” Al said, pointing to a page in Zorne’s book.

  “If he’s so great, why isn’t some university or foundation underwriting his research?” Vickie shot back, ignoring the book.