The Link

by Richard Matheson

  Allright does.

  The Indian puts the crystal cone in his palm. “This was with the other things we found this afternoon,” he says. “I had to look at it before I gave it to you. I had to be sure.”

  “Of what?” asks Allright.

  “That it is what I hoped,” the old man says. “The link.”

  “Link to what?” asks Allright. He is groggy now.

  “Watch my hands,” the old man says.

  In the dim interior of the tent—the Hopi turns the lantern almost off—Allright sees the old man light a pipe and begin to smoke.

  He watches the curling smoke thicken.

  Then curl downward toward the old man’s hands which he holds apart.

  Thicken even more, then form a ball of smoke between his palms.

  Allright blinks, his glazed eyes narrowing.

  The ball has become a globe. It has become the earth turning slowly in space.

  He peers closer, his expression confused.

  The earth looks vaguely crystalline. Across its surface is a formation of lines.

  Dodecahedrons overlaid with equilateral triangles.

  Allright stares at the sight.

  The old man blows out smoke which turns into a thin, glistening stream which turns down suddenly, piercing the earth at a point in the Pacific Ocean and creating a glare which blinds Allright.

  He opens his eyes. It is morning. He is lying on the floor of the empty tent.

  The crystal still in his hand.

  He goes outside and looks around.

  “The old man was gone,” says his voice. “I have not seen him since.”

  He starts walking back to the site of the dig, his tent.

  “What did he show me last night? Was it only an induced hallucination?

  “I wish I could believe that. I wish with all my heart and mind I could believe that. It offends me that I can’t.

  “What I do believe—without the least bit of evidence—is that there is something very strange on this site.

  “Something which, if the old man’s words are to be believed, I myself will never see.”

  CUT TO Robert cutting the twine off a package wrapped in thick paper.

  The strange clay face with the sloping eyes.

  The small pinkstone head.

  The ornament made of shell.

  As he turns the ornament, Robert gasps, his breath taken by what he sees.

  “Without the least bit of evidence, father?” he says.

  On the back of the ornament is a design.

  A four-bladed scythe, a circle in its center, each blade with a spearlike projection on its cutting edge, inside the circle a hieratic letter symbol, a step-like configuration on each blade, the one on the upper blade connected to the letter symbol.

  He is so struck by the sight that when the telephone rings, he jolts sharply and Bartoo is thrown to the floor ignominiously.

  Laughing, comforting the whimpering puppy, Robert picks up the receiver.

  “Where’s my driver?” Cathy asks, calling from the train station.

  She tries to share his excitement but is unable to do so.

  What he speaks of represents a world of such myth-like conjecture to her that she must reject it.

  Pre-literate ancient civilizations creating geometric structures on the earth for some vast, unknown purpose? No, thank you.

  “But the matrix on the earth!” says Robert. “I dreamed of it in Russia! Then, later, Adamenko told us about it! I drew that symbol at ESPA more than a month ago! Today I see it on an ornament found in Arizona years ago! Months ago, I see an image in my mind of energy coming down to the earth! I read in my father’s journal today that he saw something just like that in the Indian’s tent! Are you telling me it’s all coincidental?”

  “Robert, can’t you see?” she argues. “The knowledge about that matrix was in Adamenko’s mind when we met him! The symbol in full detail was in your father’s mind years ago!”

  “You’re telling me it’s all a prime example of telepathy?!” he cries.

  “Can you say it definitely isn’t?” she challenges.

  He stares at her, baffled.

  “No,” she says. “You can’t.” She looks at him embitteredly. “You can’t. Yet, on the basis of this so-called ‘evidence’, you’re going to Arizona. Well, I find that questionable! Naïve and questionable!”

  She draws in deep breath, holds it, then releases it.

  “I believe you’re wrong,” he tells her quietly. “I have to go to Arizona. That’s where the answer lies. It’s not naïve. It isn’t questionable. It’s true.”

  July 26th, Robert picks up John at JFK. He has talked his brother into going to Arizona with him on the dig.

  John has been drinking before the flight as well as during it. Why didn’t the old bastard ask me first? He says truculently when Robert tells him what the Indian told his father.

  “If he said one of us was coming,” John says. “Why did Pop choose you? I’m the one who went with him on digs.”

  “John, what’s the difference now?” Robert asks. “We’re going together, that’s all that matters.”

  “Yeah,” John grumbles. He lets it go. “So how’s your girlfriend?” he asks.

  “She was my intended,” Robert answers.

  “Isn’t she any more?” asks John.

  Robert tells him that Cathy is living in Manhattan now. She says it’s because working late hours at ESPA makes it difficult to commute. Actually, he feels it’s because of Arizona.

  “She feels that I’m betraying her, I think,” Robert says.

  “Are you?” counters John.

  “No,” says Robert. “She knows I love her. She knows I want her to go to Arizona with me. She knows I accept her views, her work at ESPA. She knows that Arizona isn’t going to last forever, that when I get back, if her divorce is final, I want to marry her.”

  “And is her divorce still in the works?” John asks.

  Robert looks glum. “That’s the question,” he says. “She isn’t really telling me.”

  Later, at the house, he shows John the items he took from their old house and they start to talk about their past.

  Finally, Robert tells him about their Mother’s suicide.

  John is taken back but, oddly enough, not that surprised. He never did feel right about the “fall down the staircase” story he’d been told.

  Things add up now, he says. Her marriage to a man whose strength of character she so admired. A strength that ultimately proved to be her undoing.

  “He never understood her,” John says. “Never even came close. To him, she was an innocent, a virginal beauty. That she had anything at all going on in her head probably never occurred to him.

  “When he finally came to terms with what she believed—up ‘til then, I think he relegated it to Sunday morning church activities, he had no idea how totally it permeated her life—he… well, he never did come to terms with her beliefs. He couldn’t. He attacked them instead.

  “She tried to live with his criticism, his mental abuse. She never showed anger. Never resisted him. He was too strong, too authoritative. So she turned it in on herself, hid in her room and prayed.” His voice goes bitter. “And got cancer.”

  He remembers now—Robert doesn’t—the occasional smell of bourbon on her breath. Obviously, she drank it to numb the pain. He remembers—Robert doesn’t—her asking Robert, when he was three, to put his hands on her stomach “to stop the tummy ache.”

  John sighs. “Poor woman,” he says.

  Robert looks at his brother, sensing something. “What’s wrong?” he asks.

  John smiles without humor. “You’re psychic, can’t you tell?” he says.

  Robert looks at him in silence. Suddenly, he feels a dull pain in his bowels that makes him wince.

  “You all right?” John asks.

  The pain fades, Robert draws in deep breath. “Just like mother,” he says.

  John flinches. “Jeez, you
really are psychic, aren’t you, kid?”

  It’s his colon; probably the same thing that got their mother. “That’s why I hemmed and hawed when you asked me to go to Arizona with you,” he says. “I may not be much use to you.”

  Robert puts his hand on John’s arm. What does John’s doctor say?

  “The usual crap,” John answers irritably. “Chemo-therapy, etcetera, etcetera. I won’t go that route. I’ve seen it. I hate it.”

  “Robert tries to talk him into not backing off from medical treatment so soon but John only gets aggravated by this. “Look, do you want your dying brother with you in the wilderness or should I go home?” he demands.

  Robert smiles at him. “I want my brother with me in the wilderness,” he says quietly.

  “Jeez,” says John. “That sounded almost biblical.”

  Knowing that they need an expert with them, they drive to Norman Konrad’s apartment.

  En route, Robert tells his brother what he’s come to believe. That their mother’s suicide filled him with dread and hatred for Spiritualism. She placed her life in its hands and, as far as Robert had been able to observe, it had failed her, made her kill herself and tear away from him the loving care he needed from her.

  Now he understands. It wasn’t Spiritualism, it was their mother’s fear and pain.

  His smile is somber. “I was doing what she begged me not to do,” he says. “Judging the belief, not the believer.”

  He feels certain that is why he buried his ESP, feeling revulsion toward anything psychic. “I think when I wrote THINGS WITHOUT EXPLANATION, it was the first sign that it was coming back to me—or, rather, starting to come back out of me.”

  Konrad’s reaction is not enthusiastic. He’s getting up in years, he tells them. The idea of going back into the desert heat to burrow in the ground for artifacts is not exactly appetizing to him anymore.

  Robert gives him the journal, the three objects and the crystal. Then he and John go to a restaurant for a long lunch.

  When they return, Konrad has finished skim-reading the journal. It has not impressed him outside, of course, of his father’s “admirable efficiency”.

  What has impressed him is the clay face. Does Robert know, for a fact, that it was dug up at the Arizona site?

  Robert says that he believes his father’s journal.

  Konrad nods. “Well, it’s very odd,” he says. He doesn’t give much credence to the “ancient culture with unknown powers” notion mentioned by his father. “Can’t imagine why he’d write such a thing,” he says. “It doesn’t sound like him at all.”

  He holds up the clay face. “But this,” he says. “This is something else again.”

  The only other faces he has seen remotely similar were in two other digs he was on. Not in Arizona either.

  One in Egypt, one in Mexico.

  “Very, very odd,” he says.

  They wait.

  “You really mean to do this,” he says.

  “As soon as possible,” Robert answers.

  Norman hesitates. He makes an inconclusive sound. Finally he sighs. “Oh, well,” he says. “I’m getting tired of being comfortable anyway.”

  Robert startles him by hugging him spontaneously.

  Dinner with Cathy at her apartment.

  He learns that Carol has gone back to England and seems happy to be reunited with her family.

  “Does that mean you’re thinking of going back too?” he asks.

  She says she doesn’t know. She can’t go back at the moment. She has a contract with ESPA and is deep in her work there. They are conducting “in-depth” examinations of the effects of a new sensory overload chamber on the human mind.

  The chamber, she explains, contains a U-shaped screen around the seated object. A computer selects slides which are projected onto the screen by polarized light while stereo speakers surround the subject with appropriate music. The effect on subjects has been most dramatic: blossoming mental images, powerful emotional reactions, even religious experiences—

  She stops. “You aren’t interested, are you?” she says.

  “Of course I am.”

  She shakes her head. “No,” she tells him sadly.

  “Sweetheart,” he says. “I know it’s valuable to psi. I just need more right now.”

  “And you’re going to find it digging up pieces of broken pottery in the Arizona heat,” she says.

  He shakes his head. “I’m not going there to dig up pottery.”

  “Robert, you could be so valuable to ESPA!” she pleads.

  “Cathy, I’m not going to Arizona for the rest of my life,” he responds. “When I come back, I may very well go back to ESPA. But now I have to go to Arizona. There’s something there I have to find. Something important.”

  “More important than us?” she asks, tears starting in her eyes.

  “That isn’t fair,” he tells her quietly. “But since you insist on asking—something more important than any one person in the whole world. That’s what I believe.”

  She gestures haplessly. “I guess that takes care of that,” she says.

  She stands. “I’ll get dessert,” she mutters bleakly.

  When Robert goes to Ann to tell her of his departure, she gets so upset that he finally asks Barbara if Ann can go with him. It won’t be primitive, he says. He’s using money left by his father to buy a used motor home. He’ll take good care of Ann, get her back in time for school.

  To Ann’s delight—and Barbara’s attemptedly hidden but obvious relief—Ann is given permission to go. She hugs her father with joy.

  August 8. Amelia throws a farewell party at her house. She and Norman get along so well that when she jokingly suggests she “may just come out to Arizona and join you”, Robert encourages it. They’d like nothing better, he enthuses.

  During the party—a general festivity celebrating the outset of the trip the next day—Robert telephones Cathy. She is still at ESPA, working.

  “You’re not going to make the party then?” he asks.

  She starts to make an excuse, then says, with a weary sigh, “Rob, I’d only cry or get angry, what’s the point?”

  She pauses. “Good luck,” she says. “I hope you find what you’re looking for.”

  “I love you, Cathy,” he says.

  “I love you too,” she says, sounding almost unhappy about it. “Let me know what happens.”

  He hangs up and stands in the hallway of Amelia’s house, looking in at the party—Norman chatting animatedly with a pleased Amelia, Ann laughing with her Uncle John. He smiles at them all. It is a smile tinged with sadness over Cathy.

  DISSOLVE TO early morning. They start off in the motor home, towing a jeep behind. Ann sits in the front with her father, Bartoo on her lap, John and Norman both asleep in back. “It’s just like when I was small,” says Ann, radiating happiness. “When we used to get up before dawn to go camping.”

  Robert reaches over and takes her hand, kisses it. “I’m so glad you’re with me, sweetheart,” he says. “We’re going to find a new world, you and I.”

  Later; all of them awake. They are nearly out of Pennsylvania, close to Ohio.

  Perhaps affected by Robert’s and Ann’s casual acceptance of what he has always regarded as “autre” subjects, Norman starts to talk about the “suggested” multiple origin of the American Indian.

  “There are some indications that several biologically different groups migrated to this hemisphere in the past,” he says.

  “This could explain,” he goes on, “why American Indians have different blood genetics than the Asians—why, in fact, their blood is different from any other ethnic group in the world. Why their dental and skull parameters are so unique. Why they have over two hundred languages, none of which bear any resemblance to those of their supposed Asian ancestors.”

  That’s why the artifacts, particularly the clay face, are so interesting to him. They seem to indicate a possibility that people existed in the Arizona area prior t
o previous archeological indications.

  “I’ve heard it reported that some archeologists have found sites in America which seem to bear dates older than when the Bering Bridge existed. Not that I—”

  “You mean that the Indians might have come by sea?” Robert breaks in.

  “You said that, not me,” says Norman, gesturing away the very thought.

  “Maybe we’ll find out about these things when we reach the site,” Robert says.

  “An ambitious maybe,” Norman observes with a smile.

  Robert tells them that he’s “seen”, what he expects to find at the site, notably the ruined temple at the top of a hill. Ann accepts this unquestioningly, John less so. Norman only shrugs and looks amused.

  “We’ll see,” he says.

  He is definitely from Missouri.

  Days passing. Driving; gassing up at stations; grocery shopping. Stops at night. Cooking outdoors when they can. Sitting around fires, chatting, the men drinking beer, Ann with a Coke. The group becoming closer, Ann to her Uncle, her father, Norman. John to Robert and Norman. Norman to all of them. A pleasant journey across the country.

  Toward a goal that none of them, in their wildest imaginations, could possibly anticipate.

  They are crossing Kansas, Robert driving, when Ann, flipping radio channels, comes across a “psychic answering” show. They listen to it with amusement. Then John comes up to them and says, “You know who that is, don’t you.”

  “Who?” asks Ann.

  “That, my dear niece, is your infamous Great Uncle Jack,” John tells her.

  Since it is on their route, John insists they stop to say hello.

  “Ann has a right to meet the nut fringe of her family,” he says. “Not just us elite.”

  Robert isn’t wild about the idea but can’t come up with any valid objection.

  They stop in the small city when they reach it and park across the street from the radio station, send a message in.

  Moments later, JACK LEICESTER bursts into the lobby to greet them.

  “What a grand surprise!” he says elatedly.

  Jack is sixty-seven, his hair dyed brown, his clothes gaudy, his jewelry excess, his manner flamboyant. He is a car salesman version of a psychic and Robert’s wan smile as he shakes his Uncle’s hand shows why he was hesitant about stopping to see him.