They sat for a few moments with their eyes absorbing the weather-beaten mailbox, then Ole turned the Caddy onto the dirt road and headed toward the mountains nearby. Soon they entered a small canyon with a trickling creek that disappeared into the gravel at its mouth. Along the canyon bottom were scattered clumps of cottonwood, and somehow it seemed to Jerry that they had been planted there by sorne pioneer.
About a mile up the canyon they came to a set of buildings that were once the headquarters of a ranch. There was the adobe house they'd sought, almost encircled by box elders which in summer would shade it. A small microwave dish sat on its roof. Next to the house, and taller than the box elders, stood a conventional farm windmill; the water tank beside it stood on a platform for gravity feed to the house. Nearby was another windmill, with long latticed vanes, apparently to generate electricity. But now the air was still, the vanes motionless. From somewhere came the sound of a gasoline engine, perhaps a backup generator.
Two vehicles stood in the yard—two pickups. One was a tall, new-looking, four-wheel-drive model with a camper shell. The other was older, a work vehicle, also with four-wheel drive but without the camper shell or oversized snow tires. Ole pulled the Caddy in beside them.
Well, we're here, Jerry said to himself as he got out. Now what? So far, everything had matched the predictions, right down to McBee's atrocious pun, but this was where the prediction ended. What if the people here told them to get off the place? But no, McBee had said that someone here wanted to see them.
The ranch house door opened, and a wiry man with a short grizzled beard stood waiting in the doorway. He looked fiftyish and wore scarred lace-up boots, faded jeans, and a gray twill shirt: a desert rat. While walking toward the house, Jerry noticed that the taller pickup had a current Northern Arizona University parking decal on the windshield and a power winch on the front bumper. A mountain man, he thought, to go with the desert rat.
Ole stopped at the edge of the low porch.
"Can I help you folks?" asked the desert rat.
Oh man, Jerry thought at him, you aren't going to believe this.
"Ya," said Ole, "I'm pretty sure you can. Ve come to talk about—the surprise yenerator."
"Well, that sounds interesting." The man's glance encompassed all of them. "Come on in. We've been waiting for y'all and never even knew it."
To Jerry Connor, the reply fitted all the other strange occurrences of the past three days. The man held the door open and they trooped in, Connor feeling as if this had to be a dream. They were in a large living room with throw rugs on a floor of worn, closely fitted planks. The ceiling was high, supported by rough-sawn beams—vigas. A big adobe fireplace in one wall held a slow fire. Besides themselves and the man who'd let them in, there were four people in the room—eight in all now.
One of the two women seated there got up. "It looks like we're going to need more coffee," she said. "Y'all just take whatever seats you'd like." She walked briskly from the room. Jerry tentatively identified their accents as Texan.
The man introduced himself as Vic Merlin. The woman who'd gone to the kitchen was his wife, Tory. The others were from Flagstaff—a mathematics professor, his wife, and a football coach. Jerry recognized Frank Diacono as an ex-NFL star, an all-pro linebacker. In turn, the Merlins and Van Wyks had read the book on Ole.
By the time the handshakes were over, Tory Merlin was back. "I've put the big pot on," she announced, "but it'll be a while."
Tory Merlin was about five feet two and a hundred and ten pounds, her carroty-red hair dulled by gray. There was power in her that he wouldn't want to cross, Jerry decided. She had an eye that would see through any pretense or cover and knock off your hat on the other side.
"You don't need to rerun the introductions," she added to her husband. "I heard them in there." She sat down and turned to Ole. "So you're Ole Sigurdsson! We always thought it would be neat to meet you someday. Matter of fact, it seems like I know you from somewhere—you and him," she added, indicating Jerry.
"Maybe so," Ole said, "but I don't remember it."
Tory shrugged. "Vic and I sometimes do things we don't see that clearly, or don't remember afterwards, although we're getting better. I don't know how it is for you, but for us sometimes, operating psychically is like working in the dark."
Ole laughed. "By golly, I sure as hell know v'at you're talking about there."
Tory looked around. "Did I hear something about a surprise generator? What's that all about?"
Ole looked at Jerry and grinned. "V'y don't you tell them? You talk better than me."
For just a moment Jerry froze as every eye in the room turned to him. Why me? he thought. Ole talks all right. But he began, and the tension disappeared. He talked for fifteen minutes, not omitting Ole's remarkable handling of Carol and her brother's ghost. Telling about the encounter on the pass, he noticed Vic's and Tory's eyes move to each other. Again a cold chill flowed over him, leaving his skin pebbled. He decided they'd found the ones who'd helped them out with the tollgate sentry.
"Well," said Tory when he'd finished, "y'all had a pretty eventful few days. The coffee'll be ready by now," she added, "but you'll have to serve yourselves." She got up and led an exodus to the kitchen. A few minutes later they were back with assorted cups, and coffee that even Ole would approve.
"It sounds like you folks were supposed to come here, all right," Vic said when they were seated again. "Frank here just finished telling us another interesting story." He turned to Diacono. "Maybe you'd run through it again for these folks."
Diacono nodded. "Okay, although it doesn't seem to fit in with Jerry's story in any way I can see—not the way Bill's story will." He paused thoughtfully, then described his evening on the mountain, and of getting in touch with the Merlins through Lewis Quahu's uncle.
He glanced at the Van Wyks, then turned to Vic. "The funny thing is that as soon as I heard about you, it felt to me as if I had to bring Bill and Sharon along, even though it didn't make sense at the time, because as far as I know, they're not particularly interested in Indian lore. But they didn't even argue. Now it looks as if this meeting is turning out to be more important to them than to me." He looked at Bill Van Wyk. "Do you want to tell them about your work, Bill?"
Van Wyk was eyeing Ole Sigurdsson. "You bet I do," he said. "It's amazing how we came together like this—like witchcraft." Then he gave them a five-minute rundown on his research on cycles. "It fits perfectly with what the fortune-teller and the medium told you," he finished.
Even Tory seemed impressed. She looked at her husband. "Well, you'd better tell them what we've been doing the past four years out here—besides reroofing the buildings, growing vegetables, shooing rattlesnakes and scorpions away, chopping up firewood, designing and building the wind generator, and a few other odds and ends."
Vic nodded. "Right. But first I'd like to thank you all for being here. It feels like the time's arrived to do whatever it is we've been getting ready to do. About us: We bought this place four years ago—these buildings and 160 acres to go with them, part of the Stokes Ranch—and moved out here from Phoenix to do research where we wouldn't be disturbed. Before that I was personnel relations chief at Bourdon Electronics. Before that, Tory and I were 'Noeties'—noetic counselors and counseling supervisors with the Institute of Noetic Technology. Before that I was supervising editor of Energy Weekly Review, which I got into from having been a technical editor at Viggers Electronics.
"I've been interested all my life in what makes people what they are, and why they do what they do. In fact, I started college as a psychology major, but some of the psych professors were pretty crazy compared to my professors in science and math and English. And it seemed to me like, if psychology really understood very much about the basics of the mind and human behavior, the people teaching it would be saner than most. So I transferred to chemistry; I was pretty sure the people there knew what they were talking about.
"And meanwhile I got into reading on eastern religions, Edgar Cayce, the occult, and things like that.
"Later on, while I was working for Viggers, Tory and I heard about Leif Haller and the Noeties, and got interested enough to visit their Washington D.C. branch. We ended up getting a lot of noetic counseling from them; we only lived about twenty miles from there in Maryland. Three years later I quit Viggers and we joined the staff at the Noetie central organization in California. Leif Haller had come up with some neat knowledge and techniques—powerful, the most comprehensive and workable mental and psychic techniques I'd run into up till then. They did some neat things—helped a lot of people.
"But there was something wrong there, and after a couple of years we couldn't keep looking the other way. It seemed to us like they'd taken a wrong turn somewhere down the line and couldn't turn around. They weren't making any more real advances, and the organization was going sour. And it seemed like you couldn't get the kind of changes made that were needed."
He paused to drink some coffee, then lit a cigarette. No one broke the silence. Jerry noticed that Ole looked particularly intent.
"So we moved to Phoenix, and I went to work for Bourdon Electronics as technical editor. But mainly because of my training and experience in Noetie counseling, I got to be everybody's unofficial counselor and squabble fixer there, until I got enough of a reputation for handling those kinds of things that Old Man Bourdon established the position of Personnel Relations Director and put me in it. I was a one-man department.
"The work was pretty interesting and it paid well, but somehow it wasn't very satisfying. Sometimes Tory and I, occasionally with our sons, would talk about where Haller and the Institute might have gone wrong. There were plenty of things we could point to and say this shouldn't have been that way, or that didn't make sense, but none of them was basic. None of them was the cause.
"So I started doing some research. I looked at times when there'd been a major change in Noetie technology—changes in direction or emphasis. There were several of these, but one of them looked to us like the most critical. Then I looked for what had happened just before that, something that might have led to it.
"One thing that had turned on for me while I was a Noetie counselor—not something I was taught, but something that just turned on by itself—was to see things from the past. Quite a few Noetie counselors get so they do that. Like Ole apparently does, a lot of times I can see things from the past of a person or place, sometimes as still pictures and sometimes like holographic movies. But I'd only done this while counseling a person, or incidentally while doing something like driving past a Civil War battlefield.
"Then, when I started exploring what you might call the unrecorded past of the Institute of Noetic Technology, I started running into things I never expected or even imagined, and they led a lot farther back than the Institute. So instead of a little investigation to satisfy our curiosity, I'd gotten us into a major project.
"That's when we bought this place and I quit Bourdon's, so I could work on it pretty much full time, in a place that's about as undisturbed as you can find. Since then I keep pulling the strings I uncover, seeing what they lead to. They hardly ever have anything to do with the Institute anymore; it turned out to be just a starting point. I just sense back to what feel like key points, and sort out what I find there; so far, I've got about four thousand pages of research notes on a word processor.
"Sometimes I've had to take a couple of weeks or a month off to recover, or get over a case of psychic block, like writer's block. I work in the garden, cut wood, and things like that. Overhaul the transmission. Some of the stuff I've run into is pretty heavy; sometimes it's kicked back on me and I've had to stay in bed for a week or so.
"Tory works with me, but I'm the point man. Mostly I probe alone, and she bails me out when I need it. And she and the boys help me sort things out afterward. We've come up with some pretty advanced psychic procedures and drills."
He looked at Ole, their eyes meeting. "One of the things I ran into was the history and nature of reality," he went on. "And while I never ran into a surprise generator, there's sure enough a reality generator.
"The reality generator we're interested in is the one for this sector of the universe. It's got a whole network of output terminals, and what it generates is a matrix—the Tikh Cheki Matrix—which is reality as we know it. But someone could have patched a surprise generator into the reality generator."
Vic grinned. "As soon as you said 'surprise generator,' I thought, Wow! That would sure explain a lot of things!"
He looked around at the others. "Being in the Tikh Cheki Matrix is like being part of a giant video game, but it's a lot more complicated than Pac Man. The reality generator's got all the laws of nature programmed into it. In fact, that's what natural laws are, and that's all they are: parts of the program of the reality generator. And all that reality is, actually, is the Tikh Cheki Matrix.
"Something that injects irrational or other destructive impulses—confusion, chaos—into the matrix, would account for some of the things that still haven't made sense to us." He looked at Van Wyk. "If the surprise generator is speeding up, that would account for the statistics you've found." He turned his glance to Jerry. "And for the accident statistics you turned up, and for the fortune-teller's dead-ended futures.
"The present reality isn't the first reality we've had. There's been a long sequence of realities; the Tikh Cheki series is just the most recent set. Now, whenever the ratio of disorder to order gets too high in a matrix, the existing reality erases and the generator generates a new matrix—a new reality. That's probably where the Hindu belief in cycles of the universe comes from: The world ends and a new one starts. And generally the new one doesn't include any physical evidence of past civilizations: even the old iron ore and fossil hydrocarbon deposits get replaced.
"And in between cycles, modifications get put into the program to try to take care of some of the things that were wrong with the reality just past, while still keeping things interesting and challenging."
He scanned his small audience. "The reality generator is actual physical machinery, but it exists on what we think of as 'the other side of reality.' It's like it's on the other side of a wall. We don't have the language to talk about it exactly, but that's a pretty good simile.
"There are installations scattered around all over the world, but the central one is right here in the Southwest. It's almost as if they were in the same space as here, but they can't be seen by most people. They're in what's been kept of the reality that existed when they were installed, quite a few realities ago. You can think of it as being like the part of a building where the wiring and pipes and central air system are that keep the building functioning, but in this case it keeps the building itself in existence, too."
Vic's eyes went to Diacono. "And now we're coming to your Indian spirit. There are gates—access points from this side to the generator installations—and the gates have guardians who are pretty powerful beings. They're what people refer to as Indian spirits, or 'the old man of the mountain'—things like that.
"If there is a surprise generator tied into the reality generator, and I expect there is, and if we wanted to disconnect it to get less insanity, we'd have to go to the other side of reality to do it. We'd have to go through the gate where it's at, and then we'd have to disconnect it, and that means we'd have to get approval from its guardian."
"Wait a minute," said Jerry. "Assuming ... assuming what you've said is real—and the past few days have sure as heck expanded my view of reality—then even if there weren't any guardians, how would we get through?"
"Oh, we could get through all right," Vic said. "I've been through two gates; Tory and I both have. We decided not to try the one under Humphrey Peak, where Frank was, because that's the central installation for this planet, and we were a little afraid of it. But we've been through the one in the Davis Mountains in West Texas and the one up at Sipapu."
"Sipapu?" Frank said. "I've been to Sipapu, and I didn't see anything I'd think of as a gate."
"Right. People have various things that keep them from seeing things like that or, in the case of Sipapu, of recognizing what they are. You just about have to have some preparation."
Frank remembered what Lewis Quahu had said about fasting and steaming. "What kind of preparation?" he asked.
"We'll show you, if you'd like." Vic turned to Ole. "From what Jerry said about how you handled Carol and her brother, you're a Noetie, too."
Ole nodded. "I used to be, for about five years in the late sixties and early seventies. Vorked up to a Class Five counselor. I still do it sometimes, like vith Carol, but I left the Noeties in seventy-three." He grinned. "Actually, they kicked me out. I had this bad habit that I made my own decisions and did and said v'at I thought vas right. They couldn't have that."
Vic grinned back at him, then looked around at the others. "I need to sit down with Ole alone for a while and go over some things with him," he said, then turned to Ole. "Is that all right with you? With your talents and your Noetie training and experience, I don't think it'll take much to teach you some techniques that Tory and I've developed. And we could sure use your help."
Ole's big grin was in place. "Sure," he said. "It sounds interesting."
"And if it's all right with Tory," Vic went on, looking around at the others, "she could tell you about what you might call the operating diagram of a human being. It's part of the preparation you'll need to help disconnect the surprise generator. If anyone isn't interested, or if you'd rather not get involved in something crazy like this, you can go outside and take a drive or explore the canyon or do whatever else you'd like."
No one got up.
"Looks like we've got a full house," he said to Tory. "Now, if any of you-all decide to leave for any reason before we're done, we can work out the transportation."
And that, thought Jerry Connor, is about the least coercive recruiting proposition I've ever heard.
He didn't even think of leaving.