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THE MIND GAME |
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Chapter Fourteen Weller took a sip of his honest-to-God mint julep. Across the courtyard the fountain gurgled, and the sweet smell of blossoms filled the cooling evening air. Maria Steinhardt sat on the bench beside him, dressed in a brocaded kimono, her hair wild around her shoulders, her eyes smoky with satiation. Money, sex, and languor perfumed the atmosphere. It all seemed light-years away from the grinding, sullen tension of the set, the vicious, nerve-shattering silence of the Transformation Center. "At first it really didn't get to me,"' Weller said. "But now ... I come back from work, and I eat by myself. They point and grunt at me in the kitchen while I'm washing the goddamn dishes. I walk into a room, and conversation stops as soon as I get within earshot. Even at work no one talks to me unless it's in the line of duty. It's beginning to drive me a little nuts. I mean, I know I'm becoming a bastard on the set. If it keeps up much longer, I'm afraid I'm going to start talking to myself." Maria shrugged, not very sympathetically. "You knew what you were getting into, Jack," she said. "I can't do anything about it." Weller took another cooling sip of his drink. "I didn't ask you to," he said. "Frankly I don't give much of a damn about improving my present situation. I want to get to the Institute. If that ends up being impossible, or if I'm kept waiting much longer, I'm just going to pack it all in." "All of it," Maria said, arching an eyebrow and moving closer. "All of it," Weller said evenly. And I'm beginning to mean it, he thought. I'm pressuring her, but I'm not just pressuring her. If I can't get to the Institute, there's no further point in torturing myself. I'll release my own copies of the damned Master Contact Sheet and let the fur fly where it may. "Well I've spoken to John," Maria said. "Twice ... " "And?" "And he's amused." "Amused?" "John loves to think in twelve directions at once," Maria said. "I could tell that the idea of starring in commercials tickled him. But, of course, he knows about you and your wife and why you're doing what you're doing. And that amuses him too, on a different level. I have the feeling that this Coventry directive was his idea. He's playing with you. He's toying with you. He's running one of his silly experiments." She put a hand on Weller's thigh. "And of course, he knows all about us," she said. "That amuses him too." "I don't think I follow that one," Weller said sourly. Maria placed her hands on her knees, leaned back, and stared up at the darkening sky as she spoke. "It's hard to explain, and it's not very pretty," she said. "Our arrangement permits me my little affairs, but John doesn't exactly like it. It's more of a quid pro quo. If he forced me to stay at the Institute, or if he expected me to be totally faithful to him while he was off playing the Great I Am, it would be divorce-court time, ducks. Aside from the fact that my divorcing him would drive John crazy, it would be one holy horror for Transformationalism, because this is a community-property state, love, and I have enough on John and his whole movement to drag it through the gossip columns for months. She looked at Weller and smiled rather sadly. "So John permits me my little affairs," she said. "'Your little egobooster-shots,' he calls them. Not that there isn't truth in that, not that there isn't a certain amount of love in it too. I mean, he understands me, he knows what a beating my ego has to take as the wife of the God-Of-All-He-Surveys. But John is a man too -- even though he likes to pretend he's transcended all that -- and it does give him a perverse satisfaction to be able to view what I'm doing in as tacky a light as possible." She patted Weller's knee. "And the idea that you're ... servicing me for the most obvious of ulterior motives amuses him on that level." "Pardon me while I puke," Weller grunted. What she had told him made him feel small and toadlike indeed. I think I'm running numbers on them, and all the while I'm a spear carrier in their loathsome little porno movie. Blech! "Takes one to know one ... Maria said. "In the Biblical sense of course. "Well, where does your charming little psychodrama leave me?" Weller asked. "Leave us not be crude, my pet," Maria said gaily. Weller was beginning to steam. He had a fantasy impulse to smash his fist into her face. "I mean what do you think John is going to do," Weller said, through grinding teeth. "Is he going to turn me down, or do I eventually get to the Institute?" "Always an eye for the main chance, hey?" Maria said teasingly. She laughed. "Oh, I believe John will eventually want to see you," she said blithely. "After he's extracted the maximum amusement from this little situation. You just have to hang on, love." She gave him a cold, hard look. "And make sure that I don't tire of you before then," she said. "What's that supposed to mean?" Weller said belligerently. Maria stared into his eyes. "I don't think you like me very much now," she said. "Well, I can tolerate that. I can even be amused by it. Because like me or not, you have to please me, don't you, lover?" Weller glared back at her, seething with rage and loathing. Maria laughed cruelly. "It does something for this old lady's poor battered ego to, have a young man like yourself in her power. And at the moment the way you feel about me just makes it all the tastier." She stood up, reached down, picked up the hem of her kimono, and lifted it, exposing her bare fur of dark pubic beard. Weller jumped to his feet, grossed out by this unlikely act. Maria laughed. "Right now I want you to eat me," she said. "Right here, just like that. On your knees." Weller's hands convulsed into fists. He took a half step forward, violence pounding through his arteries. "You lousy --" "Of course, you don't have to do it," Maria said. "We can just call it quits right now. In which case ...," She let the sentence dangle around a smug, amused smile. Weller stood there frozen, his mind unable to function, while his treasonous body found itself being turned on by the very vileness of the situation, the pure brutal animalism of her domineering command. Maria put a hand atop his head. He did not resist. "Eat my tired old cunt, lover," she said hoarsely. "Be my little slave, you dirty mind-fucker, you. Down on your knees!" Trembling, resignedly, but not without a surge of perverse and twisted passion, Weller sank slowly to his knees. The worst of it was that a part of him knew that he was going to enjoy it, that in a moment he would be lost in her triumphant moans, that somehow the self-loathing he felt was being transformed into the demon desire to master her with pleasure. And she knew this and was getting off on it, and that, most vile of all, was making his body throb with a sickening lust. *** Weller plodded numbly down the hallway to his room, passing one of the fading Coventry notices taped to the wall. He had to admit that the silent treatment had finally gotten to him. His life had become a dreary tunnel of isolation -- from meaningful human contact, from anything that gave even a dim and feeble pleasure. He felt like a rat in a totally deterministic maze. A tasteless silent breakfast in the commissary, eight hours at Changes Productions shunned by his fellow workers and communicating only on a technical level, a grim lonely dinner at the Center, an hour of dishwashing, then walking around the Center like an invisible ghost or reading nothing in particular in his room until he was sleepy enough to blot out the world and begin the cycle again in the morning. Now he understood what the Monitors were doing. Gomez, and beyond him, Torrez wanted him out, but thus far Maria was preventing them from simply declaring him a regressive, so the only way they could get him out was to make him leave of his own volition. So they were making his life a torture to be endured. All that kept him going was waiting for a summons from Steinhardt to go to the Institute. That was the contest he was locked into with the Monitors: could he endure the silent treatment until word came down, or could they drive him into giving up? Even his hours with Maria were now part of it. Sex with her bad become a contest of wills in which he held a losing hand. If he didn't please her, he would be at the nonexistent mercy of the Monitors. Maybe she had even lied to him. Maybe she had never spoken to Steinhardt about his proposal at all. Maybe that was part of a cruel mind game too: something to make him endure the agony of Coventry forever, to lock him in perpetual stasis which would eventually break him to their will. Weller reached his room, went inside, took a piss, and sat down on the edge of the bed to wait until the dining room opened so that he could pass another hour shoveling bad food into his face in stony silence. I've got to get out of this, he thought. I'm starting to feel like the walls are closing in on me. Well, why not? he thought. I've got two hours till I have to show up to wash dishes, I could go out to eat. Most of the restaurants in the area were greasy joints, and he really didn't have the time to drive somewhere else, but there was a pretty good Chinese restaurant on Cahuenga, and he'd have time to get there, eat, and walk back. Why not? He bounded off the bed, combed his hair, took the elevator to the lobby, and walked defiantly out of the Transformation Center, past the deliberately unseeing eyes of the guards and inmates, and out into the non-Transformationalist reality of the streets. During the short walk to the restaurant, Weller found himself enjoying the anonymity of the streets, the tackiness of the porno shops, the bars, the sleazy massage parlors, the very scurviness of the denizens of downtown Hollywood. Although this had never been his world, it was very much like the world he had lost in a basic human sense: chaotic, plotless, random; uncontrolled by Monitors, life directives, or Transformationalist mind games. Like his lost world it was full of frustrations, boredom, desperation, and thwarted dreams, but at least it was a world of natural human evolution and natural human conflicts, not a hermetically sealed universe proceeding according to the plans, scenarios, and whims of one man and the power structure he had built to contain it. That thought gave Weller some comfort, but it also made him feel somewhat alien out here in the free air, less than human, a creature of the psychic catacombs, a halfling. The Chinese restaurant was a rather plain storefront with an extensive menu posted on the window. Inside, dim lighting, square tables with white clothes, Chinese paintings and instruments on the walls, and a kind of gilt-and-red pagoda facade across the entrance made a pass at atmosphere. At this early hour the place was almost empty. But as a waiter led him toward an isolated table-for-two, Weller spotted Johnny Blaisdell, his sometime press agent, eating at a table in a corner with his wife Madge. A moment later Johnny spotted him. ''Jack! For Chrissakes! Are you alone? Come over and eat with us." Johnny waved at him, very Beverly Hills with his silvery hair, air force shades, and mint-green leisure suit, with his honey-blond wife in a tightly tailored denim dress festooned with turquoise and silver. Uneasily Weller went over to their table. The Blaisdells were an apparition out of his old life, the world he had lost. Once he had inhabited their reality and been one of them. Seeing them now and feeling his own sense of alienation, he had a sickening floating feeling of not knowing who he was or whether he still had a reality. "What are you doing here, Johnny?" he asked as he sat down. "This isn't exactly your usual turf." "We're going to an early sneak preview up on Hollywood Boulevard, " Madge said. "Yeah. Hey, you want to tog along? I can probably bullshit you in." "No thanks," Weller said automatically. ''I've got to be back at the Transformation Center by a quarter after seven." He could've bitten his tongue off after he said it, the way both of them looked at him as if he were the carrier of some loathsome disease. "Yeah, I heard you had gotten really involved with Transformationalism," Johnny said. "How's your head, boy? You still just chasing Annie, or have they got you hooked?" "How did you find out?" Weller blurted, and then realized how paranoid he sounded. Johnny shrugged. "Word gets around," he said. Then the waiter appeared and sidetracked the conversation while Weller ordered a Martini, hot-and-sour soup, and chicken with peanuts and hot chilies. But after the waiter left, Johnny returned relentlessly to the subject. "Look, Jack, I know where you're coming from, but don't you think you might be getting in over your head?" "What are you talking about?" Weller said guardedly. Johnny laughed rather humorlessly. "Hey, don't get paranoid," he said. "I only mean you haven't worked for a long time and --" "I'm making commercials for Changes Productions," Weller said defensively. "Who the hell is Changes Productions?" Weller sighed. "A Transformationalist company," he admitted in a very small voice. "Oh shit, you're working for them?" Johnny said. "Jesus, if you're that hard up, I ought to be able to --" "Not, it's not like that, Johnny," Weller said. "I have to keep working for them; it's the only chance I have of finding Annie." "So they've still got her somewhere ...," Madge said. Weller nodded glumly. For some reason he found that he was very reluctant to discuss the whole thing. He recognized that as paranoia in himself, which made the conversation doubly distressing. At this point the waiter arrived with Weller's food and drink. There was another break in the conversation during which Weller gulped down half his Martini and began to feel a little looser. After all, these were friends of his, sort of, and they cared about him, they were worried about him. They surely weren't agents of the Monitors or anything like that. "Just how deep into Transformationalism are you, Jack?" Johnny asked. "I mean you're working for them.... " He studied Weller more narrowly for a moment. "I mean, you're not, you know, converted, are you?" "Shit, no!" Weller exclaimed. He gulped down the rest of his drink and began picking at his food with chopsticks. "No fucking way!" he said vehemently. "You have no idea what it's like. I mean, they've got me living at the goddamn Transformation Center! It's a loathsome, Fascist organization, and all I want to do is find Annie and get us both out." "Sounds like a tall order from what I hear," Johnny said. "I can handle it," Weller told him. "Worse comes to worse, I've got some inside information I can --" "Jesus, he's beginning to sound like Rich Golden." Madge muttered. "Who?" Johnny Blaisdell groaned and shot his wife a warning look. "Who's Rich Golden?" Weller insisted. "Just some nut," Johnny said, with obviously forced casualness. "I think maybe Jack should talk to him," Madge said. "Oh, for Chrissakes, Madge," Johnny snapped. "What will Golden do but make him more paranoid?" ''That's the point," Madge insisted. "If Jack's really so involved with Transformationalism, it might do him some good." Johnny fingered his chin thoughtfully. "You might have a point," he mused. "Will someone please tell me what this is all about before you drive me crazy?" Weller demanded. Johnny shrugged. "Well, what the hell ...," he said. He looked at Weller with as serious an expression as Weller had ever seen on his face. "Richard Golden is ... or was ... a hotshot journalist a few years ago," he said. "Mostly film stuff, but a pretty good muckraker now and again too. The girl he was living with -- I forget her name -- got gobbled up by Transformationalism, just like Annie. Well, Golden was a tough, hot-blooded son of a bitch with an exaggerated idea of the power of the press, and instead of playing whatever game you're playing, he went after their asses. Nosed around and started writing magazine pieces about Transformationalism, even had a contract to do a book about it at one point, I think." Johnny paused dramatically and forked some food into his mouth. "Well, Transformationalism proceeded to go after his ass," he said. "They sued him about a million times, and they sued the magazine that printed the pieces, and finally they started suing anyone who tried to publish anything he wrote. Never won anything in court, but they made him a very undesirable boy to publish, and they bankrupted him with lawyer bills." Johnny shrugged. "I don't know much more," he said. "All I know is that these days Golden bombards every column and press agent in town with totally libelous stuff about Transformationalism. I mean, genuine lunacy. You know, they own GAC and MGM and Howard Hughes, and they control your phones and have half of Washington in their pocket, and they're sending out secret control rays from the Capital Records Tower, and generally polluting everyone's vital bodily fluids. He's gone all the way round the bend." "But apparently he does know a lot about Transformationalism," Madge said. "Yeah, I mean, he's spent the last couple of years totally obsessed with the subject," Johnny said. He grinned wanly. "I suppose he must know a lot of real dirt too. Even paranoiacs have enemies." "How can I get in touch with this guy?" Weller asked. Rays from the Capital Tower seemed a bit much, but there was little else that he didn't believe possible when it came to the powers and tentacles of Transformationalism. If nothing else, this guy Golden might have some stuff that would go nicely with the Master Contact Sheet in his blackmail file. And something else made him want to meet the man; here, after all, was someone he could really talk to, crazy or not. "I could call him and set up an appointment," Johnny said uncertainly. "If you really want to get involved in that insanity ..." "You think I'm not involved already?" Weller said dryly. "Yeah, but you're not down on your knees chewing the rug yet, Johnny said. "I mean this guy is cray-zee!" "Please do it, Johnny," Weller said. "I think I owe it to myself to look into it," ''Okay,'' Johnny said, "I'll give it a try. But I don't guarantee anything. I mean, Golden sees Transformationalist agents under every bed. It'll take some convincing." "That's the name of your game, isn't it?" Weller said. Johnny laughed. "So it is," he said. "Give me a call about noon tomorrow, and I'll let you know how it goes." He glanced at his watch. "Hey, it's getting late. We'd better get the check or we won't make it. Sure you won't come along, Jack?" "No," Weller said. "I really can't. But thanks. Thanks for everything. " "De nada," Johnny said. "Anything I can do to help." He looked at Weller narrowly. "I mean, almost anything. Don't you start hitting me with daily paranoia stories about Transformationalism, okay?" "Even if they're true?" Weller asked. Johnny grimaced. "Especially if they're true," he said. "If there's really a conspiracy out there controlling my vital bodily fluids from the Capital Tower with secret rays, this old boy doesn't want to know about it. As far as I'm concerned, my clients already give me all the paranoia I can handle." *** The address that Johnny Blaisdell had given Weller turned out to be a crumbling and sinister-looking apartment house on a slimy back street in Venice a couple of blocks from the beach; an area haunted by spectral hippies left over from the sixties, ghostly old beatniks left over from the fifties, and wasted junkies living very much in the perpetual now. Parking spaces at the beach were at a premium, so Weller had to park four blocks away and walk nervously down the dark streets, tensing every time he passed a shadowed alleyway. This is really the pits, he thought, as he climbed the crumbling flight of concrete stairs to the building entrance. He checked Golden's apartment number on the mailbox -- 3C -- and entered the building through the unlocked inner door, for there were no working buzzers. Up three flights of stairs smelling of old cooking grease and piss and into a dim hallway with peeling yellow paint and a series of doors, each one painted a different fading color. Three-C was painted battleship gray, and the door had a peephole and three locks in it. Weller banged sharply on the door, and a moment later there was an eye at the peephole. "Jack Weller," he said, as per Johnny's instructions, "the man from Changes." Click! Slok! Blang! The sounds of locks being turned and bolts being thrown, and then the door opened. A gaunt figure wearing T-shirt and jeans stood there outlined in the dim light, with matted brown hair that looked as if it hadn't been combed in a week, big sunken eyes, an etched beak of a nose, and a heavy five o'clock shadow. "I'm Rich Golden," the man said. "Inside." Weller stepped directly into a dark kitchen. He could make out the rough shapes of mounds of dirty dishes and pots heaped in the sink and more on the drainboard. His nostrils were assailed by the odors of old food scraps, garbage, and pot. Golden threw a bolt, turned three locks, and led him through a beaded archway into a kind of living-room-cum-office. There was a musty old couch heaped high with papers, files, newspapers, reels and cassettes of tape. There were two chairs, also heaped with paper and crud. There was a big fancy desk with a typewriter, a telephone, a complex tape-recorder rig, and a metal gooseneck lamp which cast a harsh cone of white light on more papers, files, newspapers, pictures, and tapes. Two walls were lined with filing cabinets, and the tops of the cabinets were piled nearly to the ceiling with more files and papers. The room was lighted by a naked bulb covered by a pink Japanese lantern. The air was blue with pot smoke. And the only two windows were completely covered with tinfoil. Golden casually cleared sitting space on the couch by dumping some heaps of papers, files, and tapes on the dusty floor. He sat down, lighted a half-smoked joint that had been sitting in an ashtray on the arm of the couch, exhaled smoke as Weller gingerly sat down, and said, "Let's get on with the briefing." "Briefing?" Weller said uncertainly. "Blaisdell told me your situation," Golden said, "and he told me you wanted a briefing on Transformationalism. I've checked him out, and I don't think he's in on it, though of course you never can tell. If you're paranoid, I could play back our conversation for you. Naturally I tape all my phone calls. "Uh ... I don't think that's necessary," Weller said. Golden giggled nervously. "Right," he said. ''Tapes can be doctored anyway, so what would it prove? You wouldn't believe what they can do with tapes." Weller was having difficulty following the logic of Golden's conversation, if indeed there were any. "Tapes? They?" Golden looked at him strangely. ''Transformationalism,'' he said. "The conspiracy. They can even synthesize your voice with a computer. They've got me making threatening crank calls all over town. Destroys the credibility of the real thing." He pushed the burning joint at Weller. ''Take a hit." "No thanks," Weller said. He was having enough trouble understanding what Golden was saying without getting stoned! "You really should," Golden said. "It randomizes your synapses and keeps the programming from taking hold in your brain. Blocks the control waves too. I've been doing a lid a week since I got into this. It's the only thing that keeps me autonomous. That's why they are against legalization, you know. No? Yeah, well you don't know what I know. But that's why you're here, right?" "Right." Weller said. But he was beginning to wonder. So far, Richard Golden seemed crazy as a bedbug. He didn't even know where to begin, what to ask. He felt totally disoriented. "Well, where do you want to start?" Golden asked. ''The heaviest stuff? The snuffs?" "Snuffs?" "Wait a minute," Golden said. "I'll go get the snuff file." He got up, rummaged in his filing cabinets for a few minutes, and came hack with two fat folders. He handed them to Weller. "Snuffs, he said. "The first file is the certains. Second is the probables." Weller leafed through the first file. There were newspaper clippings of murder stories, neatly typewritten lists of names and dates cross-indexed to the clippings, and pages of typed notes that seemed to be in some kind of code. The second file was more of the same, but there was a lot of weird stuff about the assassinations of JFK and Bobby Kennedy. "Surprises you, doesn't it?" Golden said. "You can hardly believe it. But it's all there in black and white. I estimate that they've done maybe a hundred snuffs. Including both Kennedys. Possibly King, too." "What?" Golden laughed. "Right, you think I'm crazy, and I don't blame you. But I've got evidence that both Sirhan and Oswald received Transformationalist processing. And how do you think Jack Ruby contracted cancer in prison? They can do it to you with rays. They've got all kinds of things at that Institute of theirs. Why do you think I've got tinfoil on my windows, huh? "Are you serious?" "Everyone thinks I'm crazy," Golden said. "Even I think I'm crazy. That's part of the technique. They don't just discredit everyone who's onto them. They try to turn you into a mental wreck so you stop believing it yourself. You want proof? Take a look at this!" He rummaged through his files again. muttering and cursing to himself, and came back with another folder. This is hard investigative reporting," he said. "I got myself a book contract on the basis of this material. It's a file on the companies they control, though I certainly don't guarantee that it's complete yet. Some of them they own through fronts, some of them they control through key personnel. Take a look." Weller looked through the neat compilation of lists, corporate letterheads, newspaper and magazine clippings, and carefully typed interview transcriptions with ever-growing unease. He recognized companies from the Utopia Industries listings in the lobby of their office building. He recognized companies and names from the Master Contact Sheet. There was no doubt that some of this stuff was true, and only a really top investigative reporter could have ferreted much of it out. But there was more, much more. Studio's. General Motors subsidiaries. Names of local phone-company executives scattered throughout the country. Oil companies. Radio stations, TV stations, publishers, newspapers, and national magazines. Much of it he knew to be true. Some of it was so clearly fantastic that it had to be pure paranoia. But in between were dozens or even hundreds of companies and executives who might or might not be really under Transformationalist control. And all of it seemed to be the product of the same brand of very professional investigative reporting. Where could you draw the line between paranoia and horrible reality? "Well, what do you think about that?" Golden finally said. "Very impressive. Very scary," Weller admitted. "And I've got confirmation of some of it. How in hell did you dig all this out?" "Professional secrets," Golden said, taking a long drag off his joint. "I was one hell of an investigative reporter. I know how to dig out a story. And I've been at this full time for years. I wrote two dozen articles about it, and three of them were published, and people knew I was doing a book before they came down on me. People talked for a while. Before they started disappearing. Before they killed my book and kept my articles from being published. Whatever they do, they can't keep me from doing what I know best. And someday ... someday ...." Golden began to tremble. He balled his bands into fists, released them, did it again, four times in quick succession. He took a quick drag off his joint, bounded off the couch, and snatched four huge files off the top of one of the cabinets. He sat down and dropped them heavily on the floor in front of him. Look at this shit!" he said shrilly. "Know what it is? My media files! Records of all the lawsuits they threw at me. Letters from magazines telling me they won't publish what I write. Think I'm just being paranoid? I've also got records on three dozen writers, reporters, and TV newspeople that Tranformationalism has beaten into the ground for daring to say anything about them. Lawsuits. People getting fired for no apparent reason and then never getting rehired. Reporters just disappearing, man! Getting cancer. Being committed to mental institutions. Bankruptcies. Phony dope raps." Golden bounced off the couch and went to his desk. "Think I'm crazy, huh?" he said, touching his phone. "Well, maybe I am. They sure try hard enough. Phone calls in the middle of the night every night for months. Now they're tapping it, and I think they're sending subsonic vibrations -- fourteen cycles a second, the panic frequency, look it up -- through the dial tone. I may be crazy, but I'm not full of shit." Golden abruptly seemed to calm himself somewhat. He sat back down on the couch. "Look," he said, "Blaisdell told me what your situation was, otherwise I wouldn't have taken this chance, not unless I knew you were really in danger, I mean, how do I know you're not a Monitor, right? For that matter how do you know I'm not a Monitor? How do either of us know Blaisdell isn't a Monitor ... ?" Golden blinked, as if realizing that he was wandering. "Shit," he said, sucking on his joint, "what I'm trying to tell you is that I come from the same place you do, is why I'm taking this chance. They sucked up Carla, my old lady, just like they did your wife. Only instead of being nuts enough to try and infiltrate them -- and you think I'm crazy! -- I went after them head on, power of the press, and all that bullshit." Golden got up, went to the desk, took a plastic bag of grass and some rolling papers out of a drawer, and began to roll a fresh joint. "But that's what it was, bullshit," he said. "Man, the so-called power of the press is like pissing into a hurricane up against something like Transformationalism." He lighted the joint and began pacing in small circles, pulling on it as he spoke. "Shit, they destroyed my career. I mean, I'm good, I've sold articles everywhere, magazines came after me, and now I couldn't get an assignment to cover a cat show for the Valley Green Sheet. You know why I'm still alive? Because the fuckers figure I'd be more trouble to them dead than alive. I've got information that should send them all to jail for a thousand years, and I can't do anything with it. No one will touch it, no one dares listen to me. But I'm a well-known crank on the subject of Transformationalism: if I were murdered, then maybe there'd have to be an investigation. If I hadn't understood that early on and gone totally public, I wouldn't be talking to you now." "Why don't you turn over this stuff to the police?" Weller asked. "Or the FBI? Or even a congressional committee?" Golden laughed maniacally. He went over to a row of filing cabinets and leaned against them. "The police? The government?" he said scornfully. "In here I've got records of how many congressional campaigns have been financed with Transformationalist money. How many state legislators they control. How many cops they own." He shook his head and sat down on the couch beside Weller. "What I'm trying to tell you," he said in a strangely subdued voice, "is give it up, man. Don't you yet understand what you're up against? Transformationalism controls over a billion dollars in capital. They snuff people. They control dozens of politicians. They can stop anyone from writing anything about them. They know more about brainwashing and mind control then anyone. And at that Institute of theirs, they've got whole platoons of Dr. Frankensteins inventing subsonics that can control your mind through your phone, rays that give you cancer, drugs they can put in the water to turn people into zombies, machines that can read your thoughts, and other machines that can put thoughts into your head. Give it up, man! You can't beat the bastards." "What about you?" Weller said. "You're still fighting them...." "Me?" Golden said bitterly. "What the hell else can I do? They took my love away from me, they took my career away from me, and they're trying to take my mind away from me. I've got no choice. What am I supposed to do? It's keep going or become a junkie or commit myself to a nut house or kill myself. Fighting Transformationalism is all I have left. There isn't any other me." Weller stared into Golden's red-rimmed eyes, and what he saw shook him to the core. With his cancer rays and Kennedy assassinations and hypnotic dial tones, there was no doubt that Golden was far around the bend. Yet it was also certain that some of his material was the real thing -- the Master Contact Sheet proved that. If some of it were true, how could Weller be sure that any specific part of it wasn't true, except for the rays and the phone paranoia and the Kennedys? If most of the material on companies controlled by Transformationalism were true, if the media file were the real thing, if the political files weren't pure paranoia, then he was up against something that made the Mafia look like the Knights of Columbus. The Master Contact Sheet might be worthless as blackmail material if Golden, with all his files, was so totally impotent. But, even more frightening was what he saw in the man himself. This broken, raving creature had been a top journalist; Johnny Blaisdell had said so, and Johnny knew who was whom. And whatever else was or wasn't true, it was an indisputable fact that it was Golden's involvement with Transformationalism which, one way or another, had reduced him to this state. An involvement that had begun just as his involvement had begun. "Fighting Transformationalism is all that I have left," Golden had said. ''There isn't any other me." And you, Weller? he thought. What other you is there now? Are you looking at your future? Are you looking at what you're becoming? "Can't you get yourself out of it, Golden?" Weller said. "Can't you move to New York or somewhere, get your head straight, and start all over?" Golden sighed. "You still don't have the big picture," he said. ''I've been declared a regressive. They're all over the country, and they watch me all the time. Wherever I'd go, they'd know. Wherever I try to get published, they'll stop me. Their rays reach everywhere. They're keyed into the national phone system. There's no way I can escape them. All I can do is keep on fighting until they stop me." He took a long hit on his joint. "Which, some day, they surely will," he said. Weller sighed. There was a long, long silence. Finally Weller stood up. "I think I'd better go now," he said. "I've got a midnight curfew at the center and it's getting late." "Yeah," Golden said. ''I've told you what I can, and you sure don't want them looking into where you disappeared to tonight." He smiled softly. "Good luck, Weller," he said. "I hope you make it. I know you won't, but I hope you do." Golden extended his hand. Weller took it, making it, for some atavistic reason, an old-fashioned fists-upraised sixties handshake. "You too, brother," he said. For the first time in months, he had met a kind of kindred spirit, someone with whom he felt a strange sense of solidarity. You poor bastard, he thought, as Golden closed his locks and bolts behind him. You poor, brave bastard.
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