"Look, people," Tory put in, "I've got a big pot of coffee and a tray of chocolate-chip cookies in the kitchen." She looked at me. "Guaranteed not to add weight. If y'all are interested, we'll go out there and you can help yourself."
We trooped to the kitchen behind her. Again there were rough-hewn roof beams, and a big adjoining pantry in which I could see a freezer. Besides freezer, fridge, electric range, microwave, dishwasher, and all the rest of the modern stuff, there was a tall 'dobe fireplace built into a corner, with two pot hooks for cooking! There were even two black iron pots on a mantel, and a woodbox to one side. With wood in it, I had no doubt. On the table, a glass cream pitcher was full of what looked to me like real cream, and the sweetener was sugar cubes, not low-cal powder in envelopes. The cookies had calories written all over them. I took three. They're not as fattening as Molly Cadigan's chocolate-glazed doughnuts, I told myself. They weren't cooked in deep fat.
Back in the living room I asked, "What did you hope to learn from your research?"
"Whatever there was to know. I was exploring."
"Didn't you have a hypothesis?"
"Two of 'em. That there was something to find—something to learn—and that I could learn it."
"Such as?"
He grinned again. "How the odds and ends of unexplained observations and experiences relate to one another, especially the ones that science doesn't like because they don't fit orthodox scientific paradigms: things like clairvoyance, telepathy, telekinesis, psychic photography, firewalking. . . . I figured if you poke around in things like that, some of them might come together for you.
"I ran into anomalies, of course, and things I could only see vaguely." He chuckled. "There was a time, twenty-five years ago, we thought we'd gone far enough, we could tie the rest of it up pretty fast. Have us a tight, inclusive theory; a sort of metaphysical universal field theory. That was after we debugged the surprise generator."
I didn't know how to take that, especially the thing about a surprise generator. Metaphor I suppose.
His laugh was relaxed and self-amused. "There were more barriers left than we'd imagined. Then Arne Haugen turned physics upside down without any metaphysical research at all. With just . . ." He paused and laughed. "Just his native inventiveness—the meeting ground of physics and the subliminal mind. And of course the engineering knowledge and money that made it work.
"All we contributed here was, we'd debugged the surprise generator. Which had to make a difference." He raised an eyebrow. "That was up in your part of the country."
Surprise generator again. I had no idea what he meant by that. Or how he knew, or if he knew, what part of the country I was from. Actually, his comment almost slipped past me. I'd started feeling groggy; something about the subject was getting to me.
I straightened, pushing the grogginesss away. "Dr. Sproule told me that when Christman changed your stuff, she thought he screwed it up. Ole thought so too."
Vic laughed again, as if that didn't bother him at all. "Ray's idea was to create a religion with it, train a lot of people to go out and help others to be freed beings. His problem was writing it up and teaching it. He felt folks had to understand it before they could know it; grokking it wouldn't do. And of course, he didn't understand it himself, actually, any more than I do."
I stared at him. He got to his feet then, took a ruled pad from a big old-fashioned desk, and drew a quick diagram, then brought it over and, kneeling, showed it to Tuuli and me, pointing with his pencil and explaining.
To me it was just marks on paper, and I got to feeling weirder and weirder. It was a little like when I was thirteen and climbed this big willow tree on a cutbank on the Hemlock River, at the edge of town. Bobby Latvala had spiked pieces of one-by-four on the trunk for a ladder, and you could jump off branches into the water. The highest branch you could get out on to jump was fifty-three feet above the river, measured by Jimmy Dobrik's mother's clothesline. The first time I went out on it to jump, it felt like my knees were made of water—as if I was going to faint and fall off. Physically that's a little like I felt when Vic was explaining his diagram—like I was going to faint and fall a long way. Nothing was coming through mentally at all.
"Vic," Tory said, "I think that's a little steep for Martti." That did come through, and I was aware of her eyes on me. "Martti," she told me, "get up and walk around the room. Look at things. Touch them." I did, and felt better right away. Then we all refilled our coffee cups and I got a couple more chocolate-chip cookies, and they asked Tuuli about what it was like growing up in Lapland.
After a little, I brought the conversation back to Ray Christman, more or less. "So all this information and theory you developed—what good does it do? If Christman got it wrong and you're not doing anything with it yourself?"
"It doesn't have to do good. The bottom line is, we had fun doing it, Tory and the boys and me. Especially me. And Ray had fun with it in his own way. Beyond that, he gave half a million people enough of it that it's making a useful difference in their lives and their environments. And it's percolating into the overall body of the New Age movement, with all its interests and information, its mythologies and misinformation from a lot of different directions.
"Folks need a new paradigm, you see. One they can relate life to. Even before Arne Haugen introduced his geogravitic power converter, things were changing so fast in people's lives that a lot of them were having trouble coping. Then along came the GPC, and the incomplete theory that Haugen based it on, and all of a sudden, science had the breakthrough it needed to start simplifying a lot of things, and integrating them into new and more powerful conceptual models. And engineers had a whole new information set to play with. Play and build with. And boy have they ever!"
He paused to dunk and eat another cookie. I matched him; I'd forgotten all about calories.
"So things got to changing faster than ever," he went on, "and people are having more and more trouble with the changes. They feel like the world's getting away from them."
I nodded. "That's why the government passes laws to slow things down, some things."
I thought of the agricultural preservation acts that restrict the use of food factories in the United States and a lot of other countries. The geogravitic power converter changed agriculture as drastically as it did transportation. Desalinized seawater was nearly as cheap as river water now, and pumping it long distances over mountains is economical too. Though to call the machinery "pumps" is stretching the term; they just create localized energy fields where uphill is downhill. And there was storm control that grew out of the same theories, and the advances in molecular engineering. Along with genetic engineering, they'd changed farming so drastically my dad wouldn't have recognized it, and he'd been dead less than twenty years.
But it was still farming. People still lived on the land and worked the soil, even if a lot of it was under clear-tents that covered acres of ground. The unrestricted development of food factories would wipe out most of it, something a whole lot of people weren't ready to face yet.
That's the kind of thing I meant when I mentioned government restrictions.
"Right," Vic said, "the government does hold back some changes. But even so, they're coming faster than ever, and a whole lot of people feel anxious. Some get to be activists for some cause, trying to increase their control of things. Some take drugs, trying to relieve their anxieties. Others look for deeper meaning in consciousness clubs, dream networks, or just life itself. Or join churches or cults. A religious cult, if it's not a con, is just a church outside of what folks are used to."