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webbed the world, and contempt for the trivial, often destructive, uses to
which it was put. He did not return to the psychology and education classes;
from them he had learned something of his own makeup, the childhood roots of
his drive, and his tendencies towards arrogance and isolation
but most importantly, that there was nothing in their
disciplines that related to what he was searching for within himself.
It seemed to him in those months that he was growing in
this new dimension, but unaided and undirected; his life was following a
course he did not understand, and he found himself making rapid, sure
decisions that made no sense to anyone else, least of all Astor Golderman. In
a week he devoured the information local libraries had on the 'crank
pseudoscience' of parapsychology his psychology teacher had derided and found
himself half inclined to agree; there was little in this mishmash of
occultism, stage tricks, and tedious, if inexplicable, experimentation that
seemed to bear on what he knew he was growing into. Yet there were hints that
struck home:
Backster's work with plant communication was far short of the experience he
had had when the flower sang back to him, but it was his first realization
that anybody had known anything remotely similar. It was not much, but enough
to encourage him to press on.
Inquiries about work now being done led him to read up on an ambitious
research project at the Biocybernetics Centre at the University of Northern
California and - over Astor Golderman's anguished protests - to offer himself
as a subject for ESP and other testing, in the hope that steady, directed
effort would bring out the powers latent in him.
'I'll put it out you had to go away to get dried out from boozing, or you're
shacked up in Puerto Vallarta with two teen-age girls and a goat,' Golderman
said, seeing him off at the airport. 'That you could live down, they expect a
star should act like that. But if it gets around you're into this shit, I
couldn't book you except into a flying-saucer convention.'
The U.N.C. public relations man who met him at the San Francisco airport did
not take the view that Merriweather was risking his career by volunteering for
testing, and quickly laid down a set of stringent rules designed to keep him
from exploiting the Biocybernetics Centre for personal publicity~
'We have both administrative and scientific reasons for insisting that all
statements come from my office or as official publications or papers before
professional groups,' he
74
said firmly, as he drove Merriweather past lion-coloured hills framing the
city's jumbled skyline. 'We just can't have, uh, interviews...'
'That's all right,' Merriweather said mildly, looking with some bafflement at
what appeared to be a giant Egyptian pyramid among the office buildings, 'I'm
incognito here. My agent's arranged a cover story that I'm.
resting in Puerto Vallarta.'
The P.R. man looked less gloomy, and confided some of
the problems he had had to face. 'Last year, a telepath got 4 away from us and
set up a date on a local TV talk show, did a mind-reading bit, came up with
some upsetting things he said people were thinking. The host used to be in a
carnival, claimed he knew how it was done, all fake. What a hell of a mess -
we nearly got sued, only nobody could decide whether it should be for invasion
of privacy or fraud, but then they decided he was a nut case and we sent him
away.'
In spite of this unpromising introduction, Merriweather hoped that the actual
research programme would be worthwhile and submitted to a gruelling schedule
of tests. After a few days he felt something like a laboratory rat -kept at
work for long hours, with only infrequent rests, he would return to his motel
room at night, fall asleep immediately, and wake in time to go back to the
centre for another day's schedule of tests. During his three weeks there he
saw no more of San Francisco than he had seen on the drive from the airport.
Some of the researchers - Kauntz especially - were stimulating to work with,
and there were some good results, especially in the blind location tests. They
would give him a set of map co-ordinates which meant nothing to his conscious
mind, and he would draw whatever he 'saw' there, mountains, buildings, trees;
sometimes he. could see clearly enough to draw floor plans. Where these could
be checked, they seemed to be pretty accurate, but for a variety of reasons -
after all, he could have been a geography freak,
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knowing what would be found at any point on the globe, or anyhow there was no
way to prove he wasn't - that test didn't count for much with the centre's
establishment. Many of the other tests seemed to him foolish, and he proposed
new ones, which some - including, again, Kauntz -were enthusiastic about; but,
again, the dead hand of the administration had come down hard with the dictum
that research would follow the lines already laid down.
With Kauntz he had been able to discuss his theories of the whole psychic
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