Necroscope: The Touch

  “Well, if you think—”

  “I do,” said Trask. “You’re skinny enough already, and she rarely looks much better than three-quarters dead! Okay, I know her condition has little or nothing to do with her diet, but it does no one any good to walk around empty! Go get her, and I’ll meet you downstairs in the restaurant. Lunch is on me.”

  “As you wish.” The precog nodded.

  Downstairs was the hotel. The elevator used by E-Branch personnel stopped on three floors only: the ground, the hotel restaurant, and E-Branch itself on the top floor. Other than E-Branch operatives no one else was able to even use the elevator, which was situated at the rear of the building. The hotel’s common or garden residents and diners had their own elevators in front.

  Trask’s guests arrived at the restaurant as he was apologising to the head waiter for ordering out-of-hours lunches, but since most E-Branch agents were regular diners he knew it would be okay. Where the hotel’s staff was concerned, “those upstairs people” had to be respected as highly successful “international entrepreneurs”—whatever that was supposed to mean—and the restaurant’s cupboards would have to be bare indeed on the day they got turned away unfed.

  “We have salmon in a piquant sauce,” said the head waiter, “and the asparagus is excellent! As for a pudding—”

  “No pudding.” Trask shook his head. “But a bottle of wine, perhaps? Not too expensive.”

  “A nice liebfraumilch?”

  “That’ll do fine, thank you,” said Trask.

  “Salmon for three then?” And they all three nodded, though Anna Marie English looked a little pained.

  “Is there something?” Trask asked her as the waiter went off to the kitchen.

  “Only the usual,” the ecopath replied, massaging the junction of her neck and shoulder where a nerve was visibly jumping. “Mother Earth is a pain in the neck—but literally, where I’m concerned—and ecologically speaking, things are in a mess all over the place.”

  The wine arrived, and filling their glasses Trask glanced at Anna Marie. He couldn’t help feeling sorry for her—yet at the same time felt uncomfortable in her presence. It wasn’t her fault but that of her singular talent or curse. It was what her condition signalled, the statement her ailments confirmed about the ecology of the planet he lived on.

  “And are you saying this St. John fellow is a part of it?” he inquired. “Part of the mess? Or was that simply a generalization?”

  Sipping her wine, Anna Marie peered at Trask myopically—through her thick-lensed spectacles and the curving rim of her wineglass both—and hunched her shoulders in a shrug signifying nothing in particular, or perhaps apathy at best. But it wasn’t that, Trask knew. Rather it was that she wasn’t feeling very well. She rarely if ever felt well, and usually required time to put her unique physical problems aside before responding to everyday events; on this occasion Trask’s questions.

  Trying not to show any discomfort, he looked back at her, waited, and inwardly considered what he saw. Not who but what, but that wasn’t to belittle her. For despite that Trask’s ESPers were his colleagues, he considered most of them in exactly the same way. Yes, they were his friends, certainly—but they were also his subordinates, the tools of his esoteric trade.

  Anna Marie English, he thought. English by name but never a typically English rose. It was her talent, yes. Or her curse. Of all the ESP skills of all his agents, hers was the one most likely to be considered a curse. For whatever disturbed or damaged planet Earth’s well-being, it also disturbed and depleted Anna Marie’s. And in recent weeks she’d been withdrawn, dowdy, and down in the mouth generally.

  She was twenty-four and looked . . . what, fifty? The brown liver spots on her trembling wrists and hands; her hearing aid, and the thick-lensed spectacles that magnified her owlish eyes; her stringy, lustreless hair and anemic appearance in general: and all such stigmata betokening planetary diseases and disasters. That was why Anna Marie’s physical presence disagreed with Trask, because the ecopath mirrored the decline of the world.

  But at last she spoke. “Right now it’s not the work, it’s the salmon.” Their meal had arrived while they were talking.

  “The salmon?” Trask was surprised. “You don’t like it?”

  “I do like it,” she answered, “but I know I shouldn’t.”

  “What?” said Trask. “You’re going all vegetarian on us?”

  “Eventually, perhaps,” said Anna Marie. “But not until I become so ashamed that I have to. I mean, look at it this way: it’s only in the last two decades that salmon have returned to the Thames. The pollution level is at its lowest since Viking times. Salmon, back in the Thames! That’s amazing! And here we sit enjoying . . . well, what else but wild salmon? While in the Far East it’s shark’s-fin soup and—by far the most monstrous—dolphins! Right now they’re killing off entire pods of dolphins! That really hurts; it hurts me! And it’s all connected up and getting worse, while very few of us seem to care. Listen:

  “In March I visited my parents down in the wilds of Devon. My father has a few acres and he was cutting down some trees—for firewood!—these old, beautiful trees! He’s going to dig out their roots and put a pool in, heat the water with gas and put chlorine in to kill off the algae; and when it rains he’ll run the overflow into the local brook. And he’s my father!”

  She paused to take a ragged breath, then asked, “Should I go on?”

  Trask nodded and said, “Yes. Get it out of your system.”

  “Then listen,” she said again. “Just eighteen months ago we had that Armenian earthquake. It killed one hundred thousand people, and I can still feel the tremors! And a year ago it was that nightmarish Exxon Valdez disaster; I could hear the crying of the seabirds, and feel the monstrous agony of all those poor sea creatures drowning in oil. As for the year in between: well, it’s hardly been any better! Hurricane Hugo, the San Francisco quake, and all the pollution worldwide. The Thames is cleaner, true, but rivers in other places are in desperate trouble. PCB levels are on the rise in almost every lake, and Pennsylvanian spruce trees are dying from acid rain. Then there are all the radiation leaks, and the defoliation—in fact, the massacre—of the great rain forests! And what of the animals? The pandas and gorillas, deprived of their forests, the green things they live on: a pitiful handful of survivors, gradually succumbing, disappearing. It’s like a row of standing dominoes, apparently unconnected, but once they start to topple . . .”

  The ecopath paused, stared hard at Trask, and again asked him, “Do you still want me to go on?”

  “No.” Trask shook his head. “It isn’t necessary. I think I understand you well enough. We’ve asked you to ignore everything that you’re constantly suffering—to look right through it—and try to discover what affect this Scott St. John, just one man in six billion, will have on an entire world’s future.” He paused to glance almost accusingly at Ian Goodly. “A needle in a haystack sort of task, right? Almost impossible.”

  “A tall order, yes”—she nodded, appearing to agree—“but not quite impossible. So with Ian’s help . . . I looked anyway.”

  Surprised again, Trask leaned forward a little. “And?”

  “Wait!” said Ian Goodly, mainly to the ecopath. “It might be best if we started at the beginning. And anyway you haven’t eaten anything yet, so give yourself a break. You eat and I’ll talk.”

  Anna Marie nodded, however reluctantly, and began to eat. And the precog took over where she had left off:

  “Yesterday,” he began, “while St. John was here for questioning, I had his place bugged. Just a bit of foresight on my part, because ‘foresight’ is my field, if you see what I mean. Anyway, the techs did their usual superb job; they put bugs in his telephones and a listening device in his living area.

  “In the afternoon he used his telephone just once—checking us out, as it happens—but later last night the Duty Tech reported a lot of clinking of glasses and some stumbling around coming from the audio l
ink. At a guess he was drinking, mixing himself a few stiff ones. But then, who could blame him?

  “Anyway, that gave me an idea. You may remember I said we should put a few obstacles in St. John’s way to see if he would use his unknown talent to overcome them? Well, with the cooperation of his local police I did exactly that. This morning they arrested him—ostensibly for drunk driving, which he probably was anyway—and I picked up Anna Marie at home on my way out to the police station. This was our chance to observe St. John close up without his knowing about it . . . or so we thought.”

  The ecopath touched Goodly’s elbow, patted her lips clean with a napkin, and said, “Ian, let me take it from here.” Then, after a sip of wine to clear her throat:

  “We watched him through a two-way mirror—is that what you call them? Anyway, we could see him but he couldn’t see us. We talked in whispers, even though it wasn’t necessary because the room was soundproofed. And from here on it gets confusing.” She thought about it for a moment, then said: “Do you know the Heisenberg Principle?”

  Trask nodded. “I know it, even if I don’t fully understand it. Whatever we study we change, right?”

  “Exactly, and that’s why it’s confusing. We were studying St. John’s behaviour. Did we therefore change it? After a while he seemed to know we were there; he became agitated, frustrated, and anxious; he ‘performed’ in front of the mirror. But if—as Ian believes, and as I’m inclined to agree—if he knew he was possessed of some kind of extrasensory power, some wild talent, surely he would have known who we were and would have tried to conceal it. Well, that’s if he also knew that we were pursuing it.” She shrugged. “As I said, it’s confusing. Perhaps if we’d had Paul Garvey with us . . .”

  Trask finished eating. “So far this is all very theoretical,” he said. “All ifs and buts and nothing solid. You ask what if we’d had Paul Garvey on the case? But Paul’s already had his shot. And David Chung, maybe? And myself? And everybody else? I have to limit this thing some time or other. I wouldn’t be much bothered about St. John at all if Ian hadn’t brought him to my attention in the first place. There are more immediate, perhaps more important, things to attend to—plenty of them.” Again he looked at the precog, and again Goodly felt accused; but before he could begin to defend himself Trask continued:

  “However, Ian did bring it to my attention, and because I know it worries him I’m bound to want to know all about it . . . which I don’t, not yet, and not by a long shot. So, Anna Marie, please continue. Before you were interrupted you were about to tell me how with Ian’s help you tried to gauge St. John’s ecological impact, or its lack, on the future. I imagine you went about it in the usual way?”

  “ ‘Usual’?” she answered. “Well usual to E-Branch, anyway. But yes, we joined forces, holding hands like . . . like what? A pair of shy young lovers? Ugh!” She smiled wryly at the precog. “What a repulsive thought, eh? No, actually it was quite emotionless. We simply clasped hands, concentrated on the subject, and did what comes unnaturally, our own special things. I let Mother Earth wash over me, while Ian—”

  “I looked to the future,” said the precog. “I got what I call a ‘flash’—just a momentary thing, a few brief seconds, a string of mental images and / or perceptions—but I prefer to keep it to myself, until Anna Marie has finished. There’s only one thing I’ll mention now: whatever it is that Scott St. John has, I think it’s possible that for those few short seconds it may have enhanced our talents, too. Even dormant, embryonic, or atrophied, it was that dynamic!”

  Trask thought, So finally we’re getting to it, and turned back to the ecopath. “Please go on. So what does Old Ma Earth, or her future incarnation, think of Scott St. John?”

  “As Ian has said,” Anna Marie answered, “it lasted only a moment, a second or so, but it was the strangest thing! Everything felt, I don’t know, twisted somehow, as if I was experiencing a breakdown—even a total reversal—of the rules of science, the laws of physics. I sensed a planetary devolution, a massive collapse, perhaps a mass extinction . . .”

  “What!?” Trask’s jaw dropped. “You sensed a mass extinction? But of what? You can’t be talking about mankind!”

  “I’m talking about everything,” said the ecopath. “And if I didn’t actually feel it—because it hasn’t happened yet—I certainly sensed it coming and felt it looming . . .”

  The way she said it, so quiet and thoughtful, had Trask’s blood running cold. He opened his mouth to say something, and nothing came out. But by then Ian Goodly was speaking:

  “Of course,” the precog was quick to put in, “you have to take into account the fact that she did her reading through me. And you’d also do well to recall that the truth of the Heisenberg Principle is nowhere more evident than in precognition.”

  “Come again?” said Trask, blinking.

  “It’s like the past,” said Goodly. “If we could go back in time and change the past, we’d also change the present, perhaps drastically. And when I try to look at the future—what then? The things I see frequently come to pass, that’s true, but they rarely come to pass the way we expected them to. It’s almost as if by looking at the future we change it. A new spin on Heisenberg’s Principle, possibly explaining Goodly’s Principle, which in turn reminds us that the future is a devious thing.”

  Trask frowned at him and said, “Yes, and which also tells me something: that while what you just said was definitely the truth, it’s also some kind of anaesthetic designed to take the sting out of something you haven’t told me—not yet! So come on, my friend, what did you get out of it? What’s your impression of Scott St. John’s future? Is he or isn’t he the enormous danger that Anna Marie registered and which so far you’ve only hinted at? And if he is, what can we do about it?”

  The precog shook his head and smiled a thin smile. “Scott St. John isn’t the danger. It’s through him that we’ve learned of it. That much is now obvious, to me at least. And it’s also fairly obvious that you’re beginning to think I’m as devious as the future, which to me is rather like the coal scuttle calling the kettle black!”

  Sitting up straighter, for a moment Trask looked confused. Then, narrowing his eyes, he said, “What? Explain what you just said. In fact, tell it all, everything you haven’t said.”

  “As you wish,” said Goodly evenly. “In connection with St. John—concentrating on him—I tried looking at the future in a chronological sequence. So imagine my surprise when the first thing I saw was my good friend and colleague, the locator David Chung! Chung, who was watching me looking at St. John! But not for much longer . . .”

  After several seconds of total silence, Trask reddened and said, “Ah, that. Well you see—”

  “But I wasn’t offended,” the precog cut him off, “because I knew you thought it was for our own good. That way you could quickly find us, Anna Marie and myself, and pull us out if you believed things were getting too problematic.”

  Trask sighed and said, “Well, yes. And there goes the wind flying right out of my sails! But I think I’ll save any apology for later. Have you spoken to Chung about this?”

  “Just before I came to see you.” The precog nodded. “Yes, I mentioned it to David, but it’s not a problem. Not as long as he returns the Continental Airlines ballpoint that he took from my desk. I like the way it writes, and I thought I’d lost it. I might have known better because I don’t usually lose things. Of course, he was using it as his divining rod to locate me. Makes me wonder what other odds and ends he has in that locker of his . . . something of Anna Marie’s, too, I’ll wager. But there’s at least one thing I now know he’s got.”

  “Oh?” said Trask. “And what’s that?”

  “It’s a paperweight,” the precog replied, “from St. John’s study. I asked the techs to get something for me when they were bugging his house. And I’ve given it to David.”

  “I see,” said Trask. “And now I know what’s been bothering me, what you’ve been keeping back from me. Fo
r it’s obvious now that you intend to play this your way, that you’ve come to some sort of decision on your own about this case without consulting me. Why else would you, er, borrow one of St. John’s belongings if not for future use? Am I right?”

  “Yes,” said Goodly. “But of course, in any final analysis, your decision will be the only one that counts.”

  “Oh, really?” There was a touch of sarcasm in Trask’s voice now. “So I can continue to play at being boss? You’re giving me a choice, then?”

  “I would never try to usurp you, Ben,” said the precog. “I really wouldn’t want to. But the choice we’re talking about now is a very big one, very likely a life and death choice.”

  “And you didn’t think I’d get it right?” Trask’s voice was wry now. “Now tell me, Ian: how is it I’m supposed to trust you in almost everything you do, when it’s obvious that on certain occasions—times like this—you don’t trust me?”

  “Ben,” said Goodly, “there may never have been a time like this. As for trust: one good reason why you trust us is because it comes naturally to you; you’d know it immediately if we ever lied to you! But this isn’t so much about trusting us as trusting our talents. So before I tell you what I saw in St. John’s future, I’m asking for even more of your trust. Promise me that this time you’ll play it my way.”

  Trask looked at Goodly—looked into him and saw the truth of him—then nodded and said, “Okay, I’m listening.”

  Plainly relieved and grateful, the precog sighed and said, “Very well. This is how it was . . .”

  9

  “Looking at Scott St. John through the mirror, I tried to scan the future,” the precog began. “His future, to all intents and purposes, but also ours, our world’s. And yes, I saw the chaos that Anna Marie described. But the impressions I got were very fleeting, kaleidoscopic, and obscure; they were made obscure by the darkness of the vast evil that Scott St. John was fighting! He was fighting it, and he was aware—even as I am now aware—that he and his small group are the only ones who can fight it. St. John, the female figure I’ve spoken of previously, and one other who . . . who remains vague and shadowy in my mind. But there’s one thing I am certain of: none of the three is one of us. Not me or Anna Marie—not anyone from E-Branch. But there will be three of them, yes.