“That doesn’t sound at all like why Ravenette wanted to hook me up to that thing,” I told Jack. “Just the opposite, really; she was trying very hard to convince me that the shadow on the fire escape was nothing more than a damaged engram, or something like that. She wasn’t exactly inviting me to join the ranks of the exalted.”
“Well, sure,” Jack replied. “Because the way she must see things, a non-Aware can’t possibly have had an encounter with a member of the alien race. Gilmartin’s son, Raymond, is running the organization now and he’s the one who took his father’s ideas—and his lousy science fiction stories—and turned them into what he says is a religion. And from what I understand, one of their sacred tenets is that no one—no one—other than Howard ever actually saw or spoke to the alien. With the possible exception of you, of course. Am I right?”
I didn’t respond one way or the other, but Jack didn’t seem to care. “What Awares aspire to by studying the principles of Blue Awareness,” he continued, “is to eventually achieve a true understanding of the Wild Blue Yonder which, as far as I can make out, symbolizes for them all the knowledge that the alien supposedly shared with Howard Gilmartin. When they reach that goal, they will finally get to meet their alien creators once again. I can’t imagine it would sit well with a Second Level Aware like Ravenette that she hasn’t reached nirvana yet, but somehow you have—and you don’t even seem to take it seriously. I suppose she wanted to hook you up to that box and get you to tell her why the radioman was so interested in you. You, specifically.”
“I never said he was,” I pointed out to Jack. “She did.”
“And I’m telling you that she wasn’t happy about it.”
“What about the ghost signals?” I asked. “Are they part of Blue Awareness theology?”
“That’s part of what’s revealed when you’re ready to face the Wild Blue Yonder which, of course, only happens after you’ve been thoroughly worked over by the Blue Box and cleansed of all your bad engrams. Which is where an interesting connection between Howard Gilmartin and Avi Perzin comes in. Your Avi Perzin.”
That was a surprising development. More than surprising—bizarre, I thought. Bad enough that I had stumbled into an involvement, however tenuous, with the Blue Awareness; what were the odds that before me, Avi had, too? Apparently, I was about to find out.
“Just like in his stories,” said Jack, “in real life, Howard Gilmartin felt that he was the only person who took the ghost signals seriously enough—except, of course, for Avi. At some point after he’d begun writing his tall tales, Howard read an article about the ghost signals that your uncle wrote for some scientific journal. I gather there was some contact between them—letters went back and forth for a while. And it seems that somewhere along the line, the two of them met in person. Howard must have shown Avi the Blue Box, or maybe just some early prototype. Either way, that turned out to be a very bad idea, at least for Howard, because whatever your uncle believed about ghost signals and aliens, in his heart of hearts, he was a scientist. And he immediately recognized the Blue Box for what it really is: a simple Wheatstone Bridge, a device for measuring electrical resistance dressed up as a kind of lie detector for the soul. As a matter of fact, in 1969, the FDA sued the Blue Awareness for, essentially, practicing medicine without a license by claiming that they could actually cure a variety of afflictions by subjecting members to Blue Box sessions designed to cleanse their spirits of disabling thoughts and ideas. Avi was one of the scientists who provided the FDA with a brief to support their claims. But he did more than that: he actually built a Wheatstone Bridge and demonstrated that it had no healing properties whatsoever. That’s the primary reason that now, Awares have to be careful to say that they use the Box only for ‘counseling.’ ”
“And?” I said, because there was something in his voice when he mentioned Avi that made it clear to me there was an and coming. Maybe not unless I prodded him, but it was definitely there.
“Well, okay,” Jack said. “I did make you come all this way so I might as well get to the rest of it, since I feel a little responsible. Maybe a little more than that, because I pushed so hard for you to go see Ravenette. Maybe she would have just let it go, the coincidence of seeing the radioman when she tuned into you, or whatever the hell it is she does—but telling her you had a Blue Box was probably going too far. Laurie,” Jack said, leaning forward and adding a clearly discernible emphasis to his words, “these people can be vindictive. Dangerous. They are also not averse to using violence. People have been beaten up. A reporter who wrote an exposé a couple of years ago received mail tainted with anthrax. I’m telling you all this because I want you to be careful. Please.”
I had read about some of these incidents, but it was very hard to think of them as having any real relevance for me. “You’re serious?”
“I am. I just don’t like that she even mentioned the Wild Blue Yonder to you. That’s in the vicinity of saying ‘if I tell you, I’ll have to kill you.’ ”
“Okay,” I said. “So that sounds really crazy.” And then something else occurred to me—something even worse. “You aren’t implying that the Blue Awareness killed Avi, are you? Because he died of cancer. I don’t think there’s any question about that.”
“They may think they were responsible. It would fit in with Howard Gilmartin’s ideas that the body can be destroyed because the mind’s ability to defend itself against destructive forces from within and without can be severely compromised by diseased engrams. That’s how the Blue Awareness views most illnesses, both physical and mental—as manifestations of damaged engrams. Some of the Awares also think they can cause illness—maybe even kill a person—by deliberately misusing a Blue Box. You hook it up to someone you want to harm and reverse the energy flow or something like that. That’s more secret lore from the Wild Blue Yonder, though it seems Raymond—Gilmartin’s son—may have been the one who added that particular tenet to Awareness doctrine. He’s even more—well, shall we say, extreme?—than his father ever was. So do I really have to tell you that there’s no end to what true believers like that are capable of? I think we can agree that someone who’s reached the Second Level of Awareness is the definition of a true believer. I’ll take the responsibility for bringing you two together but I don’t want to be responsible for you getting hurt.”
Jack asked me if I wanted another beer and I said no because I had to leave, soon, to get to work. But he said he thought he’d have one, so he left the room again and returned a few minutes later. When he sat down again, I pointed at the brown folder, which was still sitting on the floor.
“So what’s in the folder?” I asked.
He smiled. “If I tell you, I have to kill you.”
“Nice,” I said sourly.
He laughed, and then tipped back the bottle of beer. After taking a long swallow, he put down the beer, lifted the folder from the floor, and tapped it with his finger. “What’s in there,” he said, “is the real secret of the Wild Blue Yonder.”
“I can’t wait.”
Jack ignored my sarcasm. He tapped the folder again and said, “I’d heard so much about the ghost signals, first from Avi and then from one particular Awareness defector who actually knew Howard Gilmartin, that I decided to see what I could find out about them. Avi tried before me using the Freedom of Information Act. But the material he got didn’t really shed any light on what the ghost signals were. All Avi received were redacted reports and transcripts of conversations in which all sorts of people were speculating about what the signals could be. There was one interesting thing though: during World War II, there were a couple of reports of these kind of signals being registered at radar installations—which does track with Gilmartin’s experience on the ship—and then nothing until Sputnik was launched. After that, they turned up fairly steadily, always associated with satellite telemetry, until they completely stopped.”