"Meanwhile a lot of people are going to be impressed by Uncle Frank, whose arthritis went away at the Noetic Center. They're not going to pay much attention to Dr. Pokefinger when he says it's all a fraud." She paused, looking me over. "It freed me of some troublesome problems, though I do retain a foible or two."
I wondered if she could read people like Molly claimed Christman could. "So what went wrong?" I asked.
"Basically they hit limits. It's as simple as that. When they cured someone's arthritis and recurrent migraines, or his compulsion to window peek or fondle little boys—when they cured something like that—they had a saner, healthier human being. What neither of them succeeded in doing was to produce a Metapsyche or a Freed Being, at least not stably. Nor even that intermediate phenomenon, a reliably psychic human.
"You might have psychic experiences during and after their procedures, especially Ray's. Sometimes even verifiable psychic experiences. Even on the lower-grade procedures. And when you did, it had a real and powerful effect on how you looked at the world afterward. But you were still a human being. You still had foibles, problems, and limits. They never took us beyond that."
"So it was a matter of overreaching," I said. "They weren't actually phonies."
"Certainly not to begin with. I have no doubt that Haller deliberately lied from the beginning, but I'm also convinced that he thought he could come through in the long run. Toward the end . . . Who knows what he thought and felt, in seclusion back in Wisconsin? He used to claim that his procedures, fully and properly used, could cure virtually everything. Said it off the record, of course, so the AMA and FDA couldn't hit him for it. Publicly he only implied it. Yet he became a physical wreck himself, years before the Great Flu killed him."
She paused, glancing at the coffeemaker on her worktable. The pitcher on it held only water, presumably hot. "I'm a hell of a hostess," she said, and got up. "Would you like coffee? Tea?"
"Coffee," I told her, and she mixed two cups of instant. "Honey?" she asked. I told her I'd take mine plain.
When she sat down again, she changed direction a bit. "If you want to see some reliable psychics, visit a home for the retarded that has some idiot savants, hopefully one that does more than calendar computations. You've heard of psychic photographers? There's a boy—a young man now—who's a ward of the Savants Project at the University of Minnesota. He does some marvelous things."
I'd read a book about a psychic photographer named Ted Polemes, who'd been studied by the University of Nebraska med school, fifty or so years ago. Intriguing. But I was looking for insights into the Christman case, not psychic photography. "That would be interesting," I said, and got back on the subject. "Who was the person that Ray Christman got his ideas from?"
"There were two of them, a husband and wife: Vic and Tory Merlin. Apparently they'd dedicated themselves to metaphysical and psychic research."
"And Christman didn't tell anyone? Except you?"
"So far as I'm aware, I'm the only one."
"Why you?"
She didn't answer right away. She sipped coffee, then lit another cigarette. "I was Ray's girlfriend for a while," she said at last. "I was with him for more than a year—longer than any other I've heard of. I've always been sexually attractive, interested, and talented. And Ray . . . Besides charisma, he had a large, strong body, something that's always turned me on."
She looked thoughtfully at me. I squirmed.
"Every now and then," she continued, "Ray would get a letter from Vic Merlin, updating him on what the Merlins were doing. Some of these were fifteen or twenty pages long. I remember the first one he got while I was with him. When he saw it, he dropped what he was doing and canceled an appointment. When he'd finished reading it, he was so enthused, he gave it to me to read. That's how I learned about them.
"The first time I read it, I understood almost none of it, so he gave me a stack of older letters, a couple of hundred pages, with marginal notes in Ray's handwriting. Reading them in chronological sequence, and being a fairly advanced counseling student, they made a certain amount of sense to me, but a lot of it was still a mystery. Ray told me to read them again in a week or so, and I was surprised at how much more I got out of them the second time. It was as if exposure started a subliminal mental ferment, and out of that grew a sense of what Merlin was communicating. Reading it a third time, I found myself saying 'of course.' It was beginning to seem obvious.
"Actually, that's what got me hooked on Charles Musés' work with hypernumbers, and eventually brought me here. I'd read some things on hypernumbers years earlier, and while it was interesting, I hadn't found it at all compelling. But the Merlins' work in metaphysics, on what they called 'the reality matrix' and 'the parts of man,' complemented it and gave it additional meaning for me."
"If the subject is that abstruse," I said, "how was Christman able to use it?"
"That was where Ray's contribution came in. He saw his function as translating Vic Merlin's stuff into teachable statements and procedures. I asked him why he didn't let others get it the same way he did, from repeated readings of Merlin's writing. His answer was that people wouldn't do it, and he was probably right.
"On a couple of occasions that year, he rented a plane and flew to Arizona to consult with the Merlins, go over things with them. It was all very secret. He flew himself; he was a licensed pilot. He'd be all excited at the prospect of seeing them. Ray could be like a child. I suspect they gave him counseling sessions while he was there. Once I asked to go with him; I wanted to meet these Merlins. Ray wouldn't take me. Said he didn't want any distractions. There should be only himself, and Vic and Tory."
I'd forgotten to drink my coffee. Now I took a sip; it was tepid. "What did the Merlins think of his using their stuff and not giving them credit? Did he pay them for it?"
Sproule looked surprised. "I don't know. I never wondered. They kept sending him stuff though. There may have been some kind of payment."
She went on to tell me how Christman got connected with them. "He'd never been interested in philosophy or psychology," she said. "He'd been a hot-shot salesman—in his own words, he 'could sell sand to the Arabs.' By age twenty-six, he'd parlayed his salesmanship into a chain of computer service centers in the west, and gotten hooked on golf. The way he told it, he was one of the world's worst golfers. Then someone suggested he see Vic Merlin, that Merlin could sit down with him and perform some psychic voodoo, and it would help his golf game.
"Ray had always been interested in the idea of psychic powers, so he went to see Merlin. After that he had no more trouble with his golf game, because he lost interest in it. Merlin had blown his mind, and had also blown his muscle spasm problems; he never had another muscle spasm.
"So he attached himself to them—he insisted that Tory was as powerful as Vic—and read their foot-high stack of 'research notes.' He also had them teach him some of the procedures they used. The result was the Church of the New Gnosis.
"There was one thing about it that troubled Ray, though," Sproule went on. "It hadn't developed in him the kinds of powers he insisted the Merlins had: telepathy, clairvoyance, out of body travel . . . That sort of thing. He put a lot of importance on things like that, believed it was part of what mankind needed to be saved. I think the lack must have troubled him more as time went on—made him fear he might fail. That may have been why he got more interested than ever in money and adulation, the last few years. They helped him feel successful. That's still the dark side of American culture, though it's lost ground since the plagues—the idea that money is success and success is money."