"I'm Martti Seppanen," I said.
She gestured. "Have a seat, Mr. Seppanen." She sat down herself. Elegantly. There was no desk between us; it faced a side wall. She was only about five feet from me, close enough to make me edgy at first. The office wasn't that small, and I was strongly aware of her crossed legs, which were elegant too.
"You said you're investigating the disappearance of Ray Christman. For whom, may I ask?"
"A private individual."
"I see." She lit a cigarette, the smoke wisping upward into an air cleaner. Even so, I got a whiff. It wasn't tobacco or weed. Maybe one of the herbals you can buy, supposed to be relatively harmless. I didn't know much about the different brands. I'd still been a kid when the government made it illegal to advertise them. This one had an apricot-colored filter tip.
"How can I help you?" she asked.
"I've heard you were once on the Gnosties' board of directors. And on the Noetie board of directors before that. Is that true?"
"They're both true, but neither was a position of any influence. That's one respect, one of several, in which Ray was like Haller at that time. Both kept the power—all the real power—in their own hands. A directorship wasn't even an honor, really, though they treated it as one. We rarely even had meetings. All they wanted a board of directors for was a list of names to put on legal papers and letterhead. Names with a Ph.D., MD, or DD appended, or some such. I had a doctorate in math."
I revised my estimate of her age up another notch—not easy to do, considering her looks. Or maybe she'd been a child prodigy. "But I suppose you're knowledgeable about them," I said.
She shrugged. "About current situations, no. If you're interested in organization and philosophy, yes. History definitely." Even her raised eyebrow was elegant. "Ask your questions and we'll see."
I'd been reviewing what to ask the evening before, and on the way over. Basically I was groping, fishing for leads and trying to evaluate the too numerous possibilities. What I could most hope to get from her were insights into the church and the Noeties, and possibly more contacts. I still couldn't discard the possibility that the Noeties had done Christman in. They'd had a serious grudge. And if the story was true about Christman and her, she'd have insights into him, too.
"Of the members of the Church of the New Gnosis," I said, "what proportion had been members of the Institute for Noetic Technology?"
"Over the long term? A tiny percentage. The institute was already declining when the church began. But the church began quite largely with disaffected members and ex-members of the institute."
"The institute's suit against the church was for copyright infringement. . . ."
"And was quite properly rejected by the court."
I wondered what made her so sure. "Did the church borrow ideas from the institute?" I asked. There's no legal protection for ideas by themselves.
"Your question would better be phrased, 'Did Ray Christman borrow ideas from Leif Haller.' The answer is no. Leif insisted otherwise, and I have no doubt he believed it, but by that time he was borderline psychotic. Ray didn't even know much about Leif's ideas. He'd never been connected with the institute, or interested in its technical procedures. Though the source of his own ideas had been."
"The source of Christman's ideas?"
"Right. Ray's cosmology was not his own, and the basis for his procedures wasn't either. But neither were they Leif's."
I gawped. The booklets I'd bought from the church, and material I'd called up from the library, credited all of it to Christman, or blamed it on him. "Tell me about that," I said.
"First of all, almost anyone's ideas derive to some degree from other people's. You borrow, and you build from there: revise, rearrange, and add on. Haller, for example, openly borrowed from others, bits and pieces, major ones. He added his own ideas, and integrated all of it into a functional whole, Noetics I. Which wasn't as good as he claimed, of course—nothing was—but overall it was new and remarkably effective. Later he erected a shaky additional structure on it—Noetics II—that promised more and delivered less. Considerably less.
"Ray, on the other hand, borrowed a whole system intact from someone else, reworked it to make it easier to understand, then designed an organization for large-scale application. And told people that all of it was his. The person he'd borrowed from had been associated with Leif Haller, and some of Leif's ideas were implicit in what Ray borrowed. But they weren't basic ideas, just rules of application. That's where most of the similarities lay that inspired the suit—in the rules of application."
Christman had borrowed someone else's system and never acknowledged them! That could be a motive for murder! But I stayed with the Noetie matter just then. I could come back to the other.
"The institute claimed that the copyright infringements had materially damaged it," I said. "If we change 'copyright infringements' to 'lawful borrowing of ideas,' did Ray Christman actually rob or otherwise harm the institute?"
She reached, stubbed out her cigarette, then leaned back in her tiltback chair. Not only her legs were nice. It was hard to keep from staring, and she knew it. "The institute had begun to shrink, or at least had quit growing, before Ray ever started his church," she said. "Charisma doesn't necessarily include charm, and Haller's heavy-handed arrogance had turned off too many people. And especially to people close to him, it was more and more apparent that he was becoming a mental case. Also he'd made too many claims and promises for too many years without coming through.
"As Ray's church grew, Leif came to hate him, first for cutting in on his game, and secondly for the cardinal sin of being more successful at it. The church simply speeded the institute's decline; people left more readily because they saw an alternative.
"And now, what had been a network of nearly a hundred Noetic centers worldwide, recruiting members and delivering counseling and training, is down to one, just one. A two-story building in Santa Maria. There's not much left except a few sour, hard-bitten loyalists to the memory of Leif Haller."
If they'd shrunk that much, they might be hard pressed to finance a contract on Christman. On the other hand, there'd been stories, when I was a kid, that the institute had procedures that could produce super intellects and psychic powers. I had a friend who used to fantasize about that, said that when he grew up, he was going to get in on it. I mentioned this to Sproule, and asked if there'd been anything to it.
She laughed wryly. "Not really. I said that Leif had made too many promises and claims without coming through. His early procedures and their results—Noetics I, that is—got people excited and enthused. And that, along with his charisma, made them ready to go along with him on other things. Noetics II was a much larger, open-ended set of procedures, with a foundation of untested and unlikely theory. By that time Leif was too enamored of his own intuition. The only test was application, and when it failed, he blamed other things, not his intuitions."
"Isn't that more or less what happened with Christman's work?"
"More or less, yes. But in developing his applications, Ray Christman took a lot of liberties with the theories, which makes it impossible to evaluate the theories from his results.
"And in comparing the two men, there's the matter of intentions. Their work was directed at different goals. Leif wanted to be superman—actually more than superman—and to surround himself with a corps of supermen. What he called Metapsyches. Ray, on the other hand, wanted to save humanity, which required, he felt, that we all rise above our physical selves and be what he called Freed Beings.
"They both had a lot of success with their beginning procedures, which were designed to rid people of fixations, phobias, psychosomatic ailments, things like that. Even neuroses, quite commonly; sometimes even psychoses. You get rid of someone's eczema and asthma, and they see other people around them losing their stutter, for example, or their fear of flying, or their inferiority complex . . . If you do that for someone when all the medical profession did was ease them more or less, that someone's going to look at you as a magician. And of course the medical establishment will look at you as a dangerous fraud. Not every doctor, not every psychiatrist, but the establishment as a whole: the AMA, the APA. Partly because they've seen too many charlatans; it wasn't entirely self-interest.