Radio Free Albemuth Read online

  Nicholas, however, did not in fact plan to move from Berkeley. He and it were too closely bonded. What he looked forward to was lunch with the brass from Artists and Repertoire at Progressive Records; they would woo him and wine him, and he could then triumphantly say no to them and return to Berkeley, having been given a viable alternative which he had turned down flat. For the rest of his life, as a record clerk on Telegraph Avenue, he could tell himself that he had chosen his life in preference to the disloyalty of moving to LA.

  But when he got down to the LA area, in particular down to Orange County and Disneyland, and had had a chance to cruise around in his old Plymouth, he discovered something unexpected, although more or less in fun I had suggested it to him. Parts of that region resembled his Mexico dream. I had been right. Upon leaving the freeway near Anaheim—he took the wrong exit ramp and wound up in the town of Placentia—he discovered Mexican buildings, low-rider Mexican cars, Mexican cafes, and little wooden houses filled with Mexicans. He had stumbled onto a barrio for the first time in his life. The barrio looked like Mexico, except that there were Yellow Cabs. Nicholas had made actual contact with the world of his visionary dream. And this changed everything in regard to taking the job at Progressive Records.

  He and Rachel returned to Berkeley, but not to stay. Now that he knew an actual world existed as depicted in his dream—as seen in his dream—Nicholas could not be stopped.

  “I was right,” he told me on returning to the Bay Area. “It wasn’t a dream. Valis was showing me where I ought to be living. I have a destiny down there, Phil, that dwarfs anything you can imagine. It leads to the stars.”

  “Did Valis tell you what your destiny down there is?” I asked him.

  “No.” He shook his head. “I’ll find that out when the time comes. It’s the same principle as in the spy services; you’re to know only what’s necessary for you to know. If you understood the big picture it’d blow your head off. You’d go crazy.”

  “Nicholas,” I said, “you’d quit your job and move down to Orange County because of a dream?”

  “As soon as I saw the barrio in Placentia I recognized it,” Nicholas said. “Every building and street, every car that passed—they were precisely as I dreamed them. The people walking along, the street signs, even. Down to the smallest detail. Valis intends for me to move down there.”

  “Ask him why before you do it. You have a right to know what you’re getting into.”

  “I trust Valis.”

  “Suppose he’s evil.”

  “Evil?” Nicholas stared at me. “He’s the absolute force of good in the universe!”

  “I’m not sure I’d trust him,” I said, “if it were me and my life. I mean you are talking about your life, Nick. Here you are giving up your house and your job and your friends because of a dream he shows you—a preview. Maybe it’s just precognition on your part. Maybe you’re a precog.” I had written several stories about precogs, in fact a novel, The World Jones Made, and I tended to view precognition as a mixed blessing. In my stories, and especially in the novel, it placed the character in a closed loop, a victim of his own determinism; he was compelled, just as Nicholas seemed now, to enact later what he foresaw earlier, as if by previewing it he was destined to fall victim to it, rather than obtaining the capacity to escape it. Precognition did not lead to freedom but rather to a macabre fatalism, just as Nicholas now displayed: he had to move to Orange County because, a year ago, he had experienced a preview vision of it. Logically it made no sense. Couldn’t he avoid going just precisely because he had suffered a premonition?

  I was willing to admit that what Nicholas saw in his dream-vision was an accurate representation of the barrio down in the city of Placentia in Orange County. But I saw it more as a paranormal talent on Nicholas’s part than a communication from an extraterrestrial entity in another solar system. One had to draw the line of common sense somewhere. Using Occam’s Principle of Scientific Parsimony, the simplest theory was mine. One did not need to drag in another, more powerful mind.

  However, Nicholas did not view it that way. “It’s not a question of which theory is more economical; it’s a question of what’s true. I’m not in communication with myself. I have no way of knowing that my destiny lies down in Placentia. Only a greater mind, above human level, would know that.”

  “Maybe your destiny lies directly at the center of Disneyland. You could sleep under the Matterhorn ride and live on Coke and hot dogs, like they sell there. There’re bathrooms. You’d have all you need.”

  Rachel, who was listening to all this, shot me a look of pure malice.

  “Well, I’m just doing what you do,” I said to her. “Making fun of him. You don’t want to live in the LA area, do you, Rachel? Outside of Berkeley?”

  “I’d never live in Orange County,” Rachel said vehemently.

  “There you are,” I said to Nicholas.

  Nicholas said. “We’re thinking of splitting up. So she can continue on at the university and I can pursue my destiny down there.”

  That made it real. Divorce based on a dream. What strange grounds. Cause of divorce? I left my wife because I dreamed about a foreign land…which proved to be ten miles from Disneyland, near a lot of orange trees. Down in plastic-town USA. It was unreal, and yet Nicholas meant it. And they had been married for years.

  The resolution to this came three years later when Rachel discovered that she was pregnant. Those were the days of the diaphragm, which wasn’t all that good. This ended her university career; after she had little Johnny she didn’t care where they lived. She got fat and sloppy; her hair became a mess; she forgot all she had learned at school and instead watched daytime TV.

  In the mid-sixties they moved to Orange County. In a few years, Ferris F. Fremont would become president of the United States.

  6HOW are you to treat a friend whose life is directed from beyond the stars? What attitude do you take? I saw Nicholas rarely after he and Rachel moved down to Orange County, but when I did see him, when they drove up for a prolonged stay in the Bay Area or I flew down to visit them and take in Disneyland, Nicholas always filled me in on what Valis was up to. After he moved to Orange County, Valis communicated with him a lot. So from his standpoint the move was worth it.

  Also, the job at Progressive Records turned out to be a vast improvement over working as a record clerk. Retail record selling was a dead end and Nicholas had always known it, whereas the recording field itself was wide open. Rock had become big, now, although that did not affect Progressive Records, which signed only folk artists. Even so, Progressive Records was getting them up there on the sales charts; they had some of the best folk artists under contract, many from the old San Francisco scene: from the Hungry i and the Purple Onion. They almost signed Peter, Paul and Mary, and, according to them, they had turned down the Kingston Trio. I heard about this through Nicholas; being in Artists and Repertoire, he himself auditioned new vocal artists, instrumentalists-, and groups, made tapes of them on location…although he did not have the authority to sign them. He did have the authority to reject them, however, and he enjoyed exercising this. It beat changing the toilet paper roll behind listening booth three, back up in Berkeley.

  At last Nicholas’s natural ear for a good voice was paying off. His talent plus what he had learned from listening to rare vocal records at University Music late at night were now underwriting him financially. Carl Dondero hadn’t erred; in doing Nicholas a favor he had done Progressive Records a favor as well.

  “So you have a groovy job,” I said, as he and I and Rachel sat around their apartment in Placentia.

  “I’m driving to Huntington Beach to take in Uncle Dave Huggins and His Up-Front Electric Jugs,” Nicholas said. “I think we should sign with them. Sign them up. It’s folk rock, really. A little like the Grateful Dead does on some of their tracks.” We were listening to an LP of the Jefferson Airplane at that moment, quite a jump from the classical music Nicholas had loved back in Berkeley. Grace
Slick was singing ‘White Rabbit.’

  “What a groovy broad,” Nicholas said.

  “One of the best,” I said. I had just become interested in rock. The Airplane was my favorite group; one time I had driven over to Marin County to the town of Bolinas to gaze at the house reputed to be Grace Slick’s. It was up over the beach but back away from the people and noise. “Too bad you can’t sign her,” I said to Nicholas.

  “Oh, I see plenty of groovy broads,” Nicholas said. “A lot of folksingers, aspiring folksingers, are broads. Most of them are what we in the industry call strictly no-talent. They’ve maybe listened repeatedly to tracks by Baez and Collins and Mitchell and imitated them—nothing original.”

  “So now,” I said, “you have power over people.”

  Nicholas was silent, fooling with his glass of Charles Krug wine.

  “How does it feel?” I asked.

  “Well, I—” Nicholas hesitated. “I hate to see the expression on their faces when I say no. It’s—” He gestured. “They have such high hopes. They come to Hollywood from all over the country with such high hopes. Like in the song by the Mamas & Papas, ‘Young Girls Are Coming to the Canyon.’ There was one girl today…she hitch-hiked from Kansas City, Kansas, with a fifteen-dollar Sears practice guitar…she knew perhaps five chords, and she had to read out of a songbook. We don’t generally audition them unless they’re booked somewhere already. I mean, we can’t audition everybody.” He looked sad as he said this.

  “What’s Valis have to say these days?” I asked. Perhaps with his new, more expanded life he was no longer hearing voices and seeing printed pages in his sleep.

  Nicholas got a strange look on his face. For the first time since the topic came up he seemed reluctant to discuss it. “I’ve—” he began, and then he motioned me to go along with him, out of the living room of the apartment and into their bedroom. “Rachel has a rule now,” he explained, shutting the door after us. “I’m not to ever mention it. Listen.” He seated himself on the bed facing me. “I’ve discovered something. The clarity with which I can hear him—or her, or them; whichever it is—depends on the wind. When the wind is blowing—it blows in here from the desert to the east and north—I receive the communication better. I’ve been taking notes. Look at this.” He opened a dresser drawer; there lay a stack of papers, typed on, about a hundred sheets. And in the corner of the bedroom stood a small typing table with a Royal portable on it. “There’s a lot I haven’t ever told you,” he said, “about my contacts with them. I think it’s them. They seem to be able to come together and form a single body or mind, like a plasmatic life form. I think they exist in the atmosphere.”

  “Goodness,” I said.

  Nicholas said earnestly. “To them, this is a polluted ocean we live in; I’ve had dream after dream from their viewpoint, and always they’re looking down—I’m looking down—into a stagnant ocean or pond.”

  “The smog,” I said.

  “They hate it. They won’t descend into it. You’re a science fiction writer; could life forms exist unsuspected in Earth’s atmosphere, highly Evolved, highly intelligent life forms, which take an active interest in our welfare and can help us when they choose? You’d think there would have been reports over the ages. It doesn’t make sense; someone would have discovered them long ago. Maybe—this is one of my theories—maybe they recently entered our atmosphere, possibly from another planet or plane. Another possibility I’ve considered is that they’re from the future, come back here in time to assist us. They’re very anxious to assist us. They seem to know everything. Christ, I guess they can go anywhere; they don’t have material bodies, just the energetic plasmatic forms, like electromagnetic fields. They probably merge, pool their information, and then separate. Of course I’m just theorizing. I don’t know. That’s the impression of them I get.”

  I said. “How come you can hear them and no one else can?”

  “I have no theory about that.”

  “Can’t they tell you?”

  Nicholas said. “I really don’t understand much of what they say. I just get impressions of their presence. They did want me to move down here to Orange County; I was right about that. I think it’s because they can contact me better, being near the desert with the Santa Ana wind blowing a lot of the time. I’ve bought a bunch of books to do research, like the Britannica.”

  “If they exist, somebody else would have—”

  “I agree.” Nicholas nodded. “Why me? Why wouldn’t they talk to the President of the United States?”

  “Ferris F. Fremont?”

  He laughed. “Well, I guess so; I see what you mean. But there’re so many really important people… One time—listen to this.” He began rummaging among the sheets of paper. “They showed me an engineering principle, a motor with two shafts turning in opposite directions. They explained the whole principle to me; I saw the damn thing, round and very heavy. With no centrifugal torque, because of the opposed shafts. The shafts worked through a gear train to a common drive, finally, I guess, but I couldn’t see that; it was on the other side. In the dream I held the whole unit in my hands—it was painted red. I don’t know what the power source was, probably electricity. And I remember this: it had a cam system, a chain with weights that was tossed from one spinning rotor to the other very rapidly, to act as a brake. They wanted me to write all this down when I woke up; they showed me a very sharp pencil and note pad. They said—and I’ll never forget this—they told me, ‘This principle was known in your time.’ You see what that implies?” Nicholas had become very excited; his face was animated and flushed, and the words spilled out. “It tells me they’re from the future.”

  “Not necessarily,” I said. “It could just mean that in the future the motor you saw becomes well known. It may merely mean that they know our future.”

  Nicholas stared at me, his mouth working silently, in perplexity.

  “See,” I explained, “beings of that high order could have transcended the barrier of—”

  “This is real,” Nicholas said quietly.

  “Pardon?” I said.

  In a low, steady voice, Nicholas said. “This is not a story. I’ve got over twenty thousand words of notes I’ve taken on this. Theories, research; what I’ve seen, heard. What I know. You know what I know? This is moving toward something, but I can’t see what. They don’t want me to see what; I’ll find out when the time comes, when they want me to. They’re not telling me very much, not really; sometimes I think as little as they can. So don’t screw around with spinning science fiction theories, Phil. You understand?”

  There was silence. We faced each other.

  “What am I to say?” I asked finally.

  “Just be serious about it,” Nicholas said. “Just take it for what it is: a very serious, maybe a very grim, matter. I wish I knew. I sense that they’re in deadly earnest, playing a deadly game, on a scale beyond me, beyond all of us. Here for a purpose that—” He broke off. “Christ,” he said, “this whole thing is getting to me. I wish there was someone I could tell; that’s what bothers me, that I can’t tell anyone. They moved me from Berkeley to Orange County… I can’t even tell that.”

  “Why can’t you tell that?”

  “I’ve tried.” Nicholas did not elaborate.

  “You seem more mature,” I said.

  “Well, I got out of Berkeley.” He shrugged.

  “You have real responsibilities now.”

  “I had real responsibilities then. I’m beginning to realize that it’s not a game.”

  “Your job—”

  “What I’m being told. When I’m asleep. Just because I don’t remember it when I wake up means nothing. I’ve read enough to know it’s remembered somewhere in the brain. It goes into the unconscious and is stored. Listen.” He gazed at me intently. “Phil,” he said. “I think I’m being programmed. I catch a phrase, a word; nothing more. Nothing I can go on either way. Just enough to make me think so. If I am being programmed, then it’s i
nhibited, which is the way programming works, either in the brain or in electronic circuitry, and eventually I’ll run into the disinhibiting stimulus, and all the programming will fire, either correctly or not, depending on how well it’s laid down.” He paused and then added remotely. “I’ve been reading about it. I’d never know.”

  “Even when the disinhibiting stimulus is encountered?”

  “No, it would all seem natural, what I’d say and do. I’d think it was my idea. Like a posthypnotic suggestion; you incorporate it into your world view as logical. No matter how bizarre, or how destructive, or how—” Again he was silent, and this time he did not resume speaking.

  “You’ve changed,” I said. “Besides being more mature, but along those lines.”

  “Moving down here has changed me,” Nicholas said, “and the research I’ve done has changed me; now I have the financial resources to get prime source material to go on. Herb Jackman never paid me beans, Phil. I just floundered around.”

  “It’s more than doing research,” I said. “Berkeley is full of people doing research. What sort of friends do you have down here? Who’ve you met?”

  “People at Progressive, mostly,” Nicholas said. “Professional people, in the music industry.”

  “Have you told them about Valis?”

  “No.”

  “Have you talked to a psychiatrist?”

  “Shit,” Nicholas said wearily. “You know and I know this isn’t a matter for a psychiatrist. I might have thought that a long, long time ago. Years ago and six hundred miles away, in a town that was nuts. Orange County isn’t nuts; it’s very conservative and very stable. The nuts are up north in LA County, not here. I missed the nut belt by sixty-five miles; I overshot. Hell, I didn’t overshoot; I was deliberately shot down here, to central Orange County. To get out of parochial towns like Berkeley. To a place where I could think and introspect, get perspective and some kind of understanding. More confidence, really. That is what I think I’ve acquired, if anything.”