"They may not be any help to you," she added, "but they're interesting as hell, both of them. And who knows?"
Yeah, I thought, who knows? "Well then . . ." I started to get up.
"Just a minute."
I paused.
"Do you think you might try to interview anyone in the church? Lon Thomas maybe?"
"It's crossed my mind." I used her line then. "Who knows?"
"Sit down, Sweetbuns." When I had, she went on. "What do you know about church staff? And the Campus? The actual physical property?"
"The property's four square blocks, six or seven buildings, and some parking lots. And the staff? There's a lot of them, and they aren't very smart."
She snorted. "Don't underrate them. They work incredibly hard, and do what they're told. More than a few of them are even bright; they just have a blind side. They're also loyal as hell. If Lonnie Thomas tells them a cow turd is cheesecake, they ask for seconds. Otherwise most of them wouldn't be there. They'd have seen through it and blown." I found my hands breaking another doughnut. My third? Fourth? I dunked it and took a bite, remembering the things Fred Hamilton and Eric Fuentes had told me about being on church staff. Molly opened a drawer of hanging files in her desk and handed me what looked like a folded-up road map. "The latest table of organization of the church," she said. "Of the Central Chancery—the central management organization that is. Could be useful to you, and I've got a couple others."
I started to open it. "Don't look at it now," she told me. "It'll take too long, and I've got to get some phone calls made this morning. Besides, you're not going to understand a lot of it. I just want you to have an idea of how big and complicated an outfit we're talking about.
"Meanwhile, Sweetbuns, if you decide to talk to Lonnie Thomas, and if by some quirk he agrees to see you, be careful."
"I'd probably do better to talk to someone lower on the totem pole," I said. "High enough that they might know something, but not that high."
She shook her head. "Nobody's going to talk to you about anything except registering for church services or joining staff. Except Lonnie. Even Ray never gave interviews; not since the early days. Said he was consistently misquoted, and his facts altered or used out of context. Which was true. If an outsider wants an interview with someone in the church, it's Lonnie or no one. Usually no one."
She cocked an eye at me. "And if you plan to join staff and snoop from inside, forget it. Anyone who wants to join staff gets grilled on a sort of lie detector first, a psychogalvanometer. You'd never pass.
"If Lonnie does give you an interview, be damned careful. There are interconnecting utility tunnels all over beneath the Campus. Some have dead ends used for storage rooms, full of junk and the personal stuff of people on staff, but mostly they hook up. If you know your way around, and some staff members do—the security people do—you can go between any two buildings there without ever sticking your head above ground."
"So?"
"So if Lonnie Thomas decides you're a threat, you could be quietly drugged, taken underground, and brought out through some manhole by the light of the moon. Slid into the back of some staff member's old van, and given a free ride out to the Ranch, where they could grind you up for fertilizer."
I stared at her. As far as I could see, she was serious.
"Do you think they'd actually do something like that?"
Her eyes were steady as a lioness'. "Damn straight they would! So don't give them an incentive. Don't even hint you're investigating the possible death of Ray Christman. Because if they think he's dead, and they think you might find any real evidence, they're going to be scared spitless."
Her eyes had narrowed, the pupils glistening out at me through the slits. Her voice, normally loud, lowered almost to a whisper, pulling me into it. As if it was important that I listen and understand.
"If the word gets out," she went on, "it will do two things. It'll do more than hurt the church's income. It'll slowly kill the church itself."
I thought then that I knew what she was getting at. Some of the staff members, maybe most of them, felt at a gut level that they couldn't survive outside it. It was their family, their home. Their cocoon. Williams and Hamilton and Fuentes, even Molly Cadigan, had left because they were disillusioned. If they got kicked out, it had been only the formal, final act. But for those who weren't yet disillusioned . . .
Molly wasn't done; she talked on relentlessly. "And to almost all of them," she said, "even Lonnie Thomas I suspect, reality and the alternative futures of mankind are exactly the way Ray Christman described them."
Her eyes burned me like lasers as she finished. "The ones who know their cover story is only a cover story are already scared. They're scared because Ray isn't with them anymore. They're scared because Ray won't be developing new procedures to bring people to Freed Being—or more to the point, bring them to Freed Being. They think of the church as the only salvation of mankind, and that its failure will damn us all forever. It's crazy, but that's how they see it."
* * *
The chills still hadn't gone away entirely as I walked to my car.
7
A TAIL VERIFIED
As I drove away, all I could think of was how crazy people could get in the grip of religious fanaticism. By the time I got back to my office, I'd gotten things at least partway into perspective again, but there were some things I wanted to ask Hamilton about.
As soon as I got back, I keyed Hamilton's office number. He was busy; his secretary said he'd call back at lunch time. So I keyed the number Molly Cadigan had given me for Doctor Winifred Landau Sproule. Sproule had turned off the vidcam on her phone, leaving me to guess what she looked like. She sounded too young to be a veteran of the Noeties in their prime. We only talked for a minute or so, but I got a mental image of someone slim and blond and beautiful. She gave me an appointment for 9 a.m. the next morning. Then, so I wouldn't be talking to her cold, I keyed the library and called up an article on the life of Leif Haller, serialized by the L.A. Times in 1990, updated and published as a small book twelve years later. The writer had done her homework, traced Haller's roots and talked to scores of people who'd known him before he got famous.
It was one of the more interesting lives I've read about.
* *
Leif Haller
The Early Years
Oscar Leif Haller, founder of the Institute for Noetic Technology, was born on Valentine's Day, 1930, on a farm near Opdal, Wisconsin, to Britta Augustsdatter Haller and Johan Ola Haller, Norwegian immigrants. Among his peers, the child would insist on being called "Leif"; he despised the name Oscar, and rarely even used the initial.
Almost from the beginning, Leif Haller was an energetic dynamo, but not hyperactive. His schoolmates would remember him as always in control of himself, and generally of the situation. For even as a child, a child smaller than most, he had charisma. In the one-room country grade school he attended, he was a leader, full of ideas, and able to dominate in his boyhood disputes.
He matured early. He was shorter than average, of medium frame, and sinewy muscular. By age fifteen, despite his youth, he was locally renowned for the amount of heavy work he could do in an hour or a day. By his sixteenth birthday, Haller was in trouble with three different families regarding their daughters. This seems to have been less a matter of adolescent horniness than of a desire, a need, to dominate.