The Opal Legacy

by Fortune Kent

  “Help you? I think you’ve gotten the wrong idea of what we do here. We don’t do individual counseling.” He led her into an elevator where he pushed the button labeled B. In the basement, he unlocked a door to a room filled with shelf upon shelf of cages. She wrinkled her nose at the strong, heavy odor.

  “Rats,” he told her. A sign hung from a chain stretched across the aisle—Authorized Personnel Only.

  A rat in a cage at the far end of the aisle raced from side to side, scattering wood shavings onto the floor. “He’s in pain,” she said. “Can’t you do something?”

  “It’s really quite the opposite. Our technicians have implanted electrodes in a zone of this rat’s brain where stimulation gives him intense pleasure: The stimuli are delivered at random intervals determined by a computer. If the rat is able to anticipate the computer, the degree of pleasure he experiences goes above the fifty percent level we’d expect from pure chance.”

  “And the results?”

  “Negative, no better than chance. There’s no indication at all that these animals have ESP powers.” Craig opened the door to a small room with white walls and an acoustical-tile ceiling. Lesley’s feet sank into the heavy carpet. “Would you mind being the subject of an experiment while you’re here?”

  “Whatever you want. But I think you should know—”

  “Good,” he interrupted, sitting across a desk from her. “You’ve seen ESP cards before, haven’t you?”

  “No.” He looked sharply at her. “I’ve read about them,” she added, “but I’ve never seen one.”

  He broke the seal on a pack of oversized cards and began turning them over. “There are five symbols—a star, a circle, a rectangle, wavy lines, and a plus sign. Each deck has twenty-five cards, with five cards of each symbol. We’ll try a run, Lesley, and see how you do.”

  Craig inserted the deck in a slot and pressed a button. “An automatic shuffler,” he explained. Then he removed the cards and placed the deck facedown between them. “Identify the top card,” he asked her.

  She tried to shut her mind, to look within, but she could not. “A star,” she guessed. He laid the card to one side, still facedown, and marked a pad. When they had completed the pack, he turned the cards over to check her answers.

  “How many?” she asked.

  “Only four right. That’s even less than you’d expect by chance. Do you want to try again?”

  “Mr. Ritter, I don’t think you believe in your own mind that any of these experiments will succeed. Not just mine. Any of them. The cards, the rats, the study you’re doing on the computer. You’re convinced they’ll all fail, aren’t you?”

  “I believe what I see, what I touch, taste, smell, or hear. I believe what I prove scientifically by controlled experimentation. I never rely on blind faith or guesswork. And after making twenty-six investigations I’ve drawn a blank, a complete blank. Those are the facts. They’re true. Anything else—” He shrugged.

  “You’ve closed your mind. There’s so much in the world that can’t be explained. Predictions do come true; people are healed by faith. You act as though Dr. Rhine and Edgar Cayce never lived, as though the Russian experiments had never taken place. There’s so much we don’t understand! Our knowledge is so imperfect!”

  “People believe what they want to believe; I can demonstrate precognition myself. I can look into the future.” He tore a sheet from his pad, wrote on the back and folded the paper and placed it between them on the desk. “Now,” he said, “I’m going to ask you three questions. Easy questions, like ‘Tell me the name of a tree.’ Just give the first answer that comes into your mind. Are you ready?”

  “Yes, I guess I am.”

  “Name a color.”

  “Red.”

  “A piece of furniture?”

  “Chair.”

  “A flower?”

  “Rose.”

  “All right, now read what I wrote on the paper in front of you.”

  “Why, that’s wonderful! You got every one of them right! How did you do it?”

  Craig grunted. “Nothing wonderful at all. No ESP, no magic. Those are the answers most people give. I merely relied on the law of averages. Anyone can try the same trick and consistently guess two out of three answers. That’s what you people do—give answers you know are right ahead of time, or make vague predictions and count on the credulous remembering your lucky hits and forgetting the misses.”

  “And I thought you could help me. I can see I was wrong.”

  “Help you? I can, by giving you some advice. Get out of this business. Give it up before you become too involved. Go back home to New York. You’re a pretty girl. Get married.”

  “What do you know about me?” Lesley’s voice trembled. “You and your computers and your caged rats and your smug and easy answers. Have you ever come awake at six in the morning knowing someone was going to die and realizing you couldn’t save him, that nothing you could do would save him? Have you, ever? Is anything like that included in your law of averages?” Tears stung her eyes.

  “If you would just calm yourself—”

  “People aren’t animals; they aren’t rats. You can’t push a button to make them happy, and push another button to make them sad. No two people are the same. They live, they die, they hurt, they suffer.”

  “Please,” he said.

  Lesley stood up. She drew in a deep breath, and let it out with a sigh. “I’m sorry I wasted your time.” Her voice was almost a whisper. Then she walked rapidly from the room. In the corridor she saw a door marked Exit, pushed through it, climbed some stairs, and was outside. A high fog obscured the sun. Not looking back, she ran beneath the trees to her car.

  Chapter Two

  Lesley unlocked the car door, slid onto the seat, and started the motor. The car bumped ahead, seeming to pull to the right, so she stopped, got out, and walked behind the car. The right rear tire was flat.

  “May I help?” She looked up, and then up some more. He was tall and large, like a football player, was her first thought. “I’ll be glad to change it for you.”

  He was older, she saw, perhaps thirty-five or forty; his short dark hair was beginning to gray. He held an attaché case in one hand and a newspaper in the other.

  “I could use some help,” she told him. She showed him where the spare was kept and together they changed the tire. After finishing they wiped their hands on tissues.

  “Thanks,” Lesley said. “I’m glad you happened along when you did. May I drop you somewhere?”

  “Well—” He hesitated, glancing at his watch. His eyes, she noticed, were a soft brown. “If I wait for a taxi around here, I may miss my flight. Are you headed anywhere near the airport?”

  “Get in, I’ll take you. Lindbergh Field is on my way.”

  He opened the passenger door and laid his attaché case and newspaper on the backseat. She felt small sitting beside him. As he fastened his seat belt, she noticed a turquoise in a ring on his right hand.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t introduce myself. My name’s Jon Hollister. Jon without an h.”

  “I’m Lesley Campbell.”

  “Campbell. Are you Scottish? You have Scottish coloring with your fair hair and blue eyes.”

  “Yes, I am. I take after my grandmother. She came from Scotland.”

  They drove without talking and as they passed the last of the university buildings she again remembered the ESP laboratory. Her breathing quickened in anger as she recalled Craig Ritter’s cynicism. Why had he been able to upset her so much?

  Glancing at Jon Hollister she found him relaxed; he was sitting back and looking at the new housing tracts going up on the barren hillsides. He makes me feel comfortable, Lesley thought, because he’s comfortable himself. And he doesn’t criticize. He accepts.

  “I have another meeting scheduled in L.A. tonigh
t,” he told her. “So I would have been in a real bind if you hadn’t offered me a lift. I’d never been to the university before and didn’t realize how far from the airport it was. I came here to get information about kelp.”

  “Kelp?”

  “Yes. It’s a brown tubular seaweed growing in great beds in the ocean just off the coast near here. I’m thinking of investing in a company that uses kelp to make iodine.” Again they rode in silence for a time. “What do you do, Lesley?” he asked, shifting in the seat to look at her.

  “I’m a nurse, an RN at Copley Hospital in the pediatric ward. I start on the three-to-eleven shift this week,” she added, as a reminder to herself.

  Once more the stone in his ring caught her eye. “A turquoise,” he said. “A gift. It’s not my birthstone, though. I’m an Aries.”

  “Oh, do you believe in astrology?” She sat up straighter.

  “I don’t know. My mind’s open. Let’s see what today’s paper has to say.” He retrieved the newspaper from the backseat and leafed through the pages. Lesley sighed. Did he actually pay attention to the astrology columns in the papers? And she had begun hoping he might be really knowledgeable about astrology!

  “Here we are,” he said. “‘A good day’—I’m reading now—‘to go to new places and meet interesting people. Be somewhat dramatic and helpful and you will make a favorable impression.’ Well, the university was a new place, and I’ve met at least one interesting person.” She reddened as she sensed his eyes on her. “I don’t know if drama is quite my line, though. What are you, Lesley, your sign?”

  “I’m a Libra. I was born on October 22.”

  “Libra? Then opal’s your birthstone.” He shook his head. “Opals are unlucky.”

  “That’s just a superstition.”

  “Well, maybe, maybe not. ‘October’s child is born for woe’,” he quoted. “Are you, Lesley? Are you full of woe?”

  She bit her lip. “At times I am.”

  He perceived her anguish at once. “I’m sorry,” he said gently. “I was teasing. Let’s see what the paper says about Libras. ‘You may meet two strangers. Be wary of one, depend on the other. Take time for meditation in the evening.’” He folded the paper and laid it again on top of his attaché case in the back.

  Two strangers, she thought. Well, I’m certainly going to be wary of Craig Ritter. Depend on the other? If only there were someone I could depend on. If, if, if—

  “—complete nonsense, I know.”

  “What? Now it’s my turn to apologize,” Lesley said. “I was daydreaming.”

  “These newspaper astrology columns. They’re complete nonsense, a waste of time. I suppose they do create interest in astrology; yet I’m sure they do more harm than good. They’re so bland because they try to be all things to all men.”

  “From what you said before, I thought you took them seriously.”

  Jon snorted. “You can’t after you’ve read Jung. And D. H. Lawrence—do you remember what Lawrence said? ‘The sun is a great heart…the moon a great gleaming nerve center…who knows the power that Saturn has over us, or Venus?’ And yet—and yet, I don’t know.”

  “I’ve never been satisfied by what I’ve read. I’m always left with so many doubts.”

  “Yes, erecting a horoscope is one thing; interpreting the result is quite a different matter. Anyone can construct the diagram after a little practice, if he knows the exact time and the geographical location of his birth. All you need is an ephemeral. The rest follows—the zodiacal sectors, the location of the planets at the time, the twelve houses, the aspects.”

  “You mean an ephemeris, don’t you? The chart of the positions of the planets and the sun and moon?”

  “Yes, didn’t I say ephemeris? It’s been years since I last made a horoscope.”

  “You can do a person’s horoscope? I’ve always wanted to see mine.”

  “When were you born?” He wrote the month, day, and year in his pocket calendar. “Do you know the time?”

  “Five minutes before midnight.”

  “And the place?”

  “Paisley, a small town in Scotland.”

  “The home of the famous paisley cloth and pattern.”

  “Then you’ve heard of Paisley. Most people recognize the pattern without realizing it’s named for an actual place.”

  “I did a lot of reading when I lived at Iron Ridge.” He returned the calendar to his pocket. Lesley swung the Pinto into an interchange and approached downtown San Diego on Highway 5. “I detest cities,” he said, “The noise, the smog, the crime. Do you know, we never locked our doors at home in Michigan when I was growing up. Never.”

  “Is Iron Ridge in Michigan?”

  “On Lake Superior in the Upper Peninsula. Iron Ridge isn’t the name of a town. It’s the estate and the house.”

  They drove by a row of chemical tanks, an intersection with a gas station on each corner, and a huge warehouse of an aerospace company. Jon Hollister, she noticed, had closed his eyes.

  “You drive north from Marquette.” His voice was low and affectionate. “I haven’t been back to Marquette or Iron Ridge for almost ten years, not since Mary died, but they’re probably much the same as they were then. Change comes slowly in the Upper Peninsula.”

  “I imagine it’s lovely country.”

  “First you drive through the second growth, maple and hemlock, birch and elm, where the virgin timber was cut or burned in one of the great forest fires. Today the woods are thick with underbrush and a worthless growth of scrub. Then after twenty miles or so, you turn from the asphalt onto a dirt track leading in among the trees. There’s no sign to point the way; we never put up a sign. You have to know where the road is. Our land begins at the turnoff. After a mile on the dirt road you leave the second growth behind and enter the white pine forest. The trees are magnificent, as tall and majestic today as they’ve been for generation after generation.

  “When Mary was alive and I would drive home in the early evening from the airfield, I’d stop my car on top of the last rise before the house. I’d stand under the pines with the wind sighing over my head and the waves whispering on the shore beyond the house. I’d breathe the scent of the pines and feel more content, be more at peace with myself than ever before or since. I couldn’t see the house from the rise because of the trees, unless the wind came up—as it often does after the sun sets, or when there’s a storm gathering over the lake. Then the trees would sway, and through the branches I would sometimes see the yellow light from the tower. It had been the warning light for ships on the lake in the old days. But even after the need was gone, we continued to keep a light in the tower. Even now, when I see a light in the dusk I think of Iron Ridge.”

  “We’re here,” Lesley said reluctantly. She hadn’t wanted to interrupt but she was now parked in the waiting zone in front of the airport terminal.

  Jon opened his eyes, blinking. His smile was almost shy. “I don’t usually go on like that,” he said. “But somehow with you I can say whatever’s in my mind. I love Iron Ridge. I don’t know why I ever left.” Looking into his face she warmed to him. Faint lines creased his forehead, and for the first time she noticed light-colored wedges in his otherwise brown eyes.

  “I understand. We’d all like to have a place where we could get away, where we could be alone or just with someone we love. I know I would. I’d like some place where I belonged.”

  Jon stood, slipped the paper under his arm, gripped the attaché case in his left hand, and then ducked down to reach across the seat and put his hand on top of hers. “Good-bye, Lesley,” he said. “I won’t forget.”

  She watched him until he disappeared into the crowd. Her hand tingled where he had touched it. The driver behind her, trying to pull in next to the curb, pressed insistently on his horn.

  “All right, all right,” she said aloud as she merged into
the traffic. I’m alive again, she thought. Yet not happy, exactly. Almost sad. Uneasy, restless.

  I won’t forget, he had said. What had he meant by that? She remembered the horoscope in the paper. Was he the one to depend on?

  He offered to make my horoscope, she thought. Yet he doesn’t even know where I live. I’ll probably never see him again.

  But something within her told her she would see him, and soon. And she realized she wanted to.

  Chapter Three

  Today. Something will happen today, Lesley thought as she fastened the name tag to her uniform. Lesley Campbell, RN, she read backward in her bedroom mirror.

  The apartment doorbell rang. Jon? Lesley wondered. Jon Hollister?

  She found Craig Ritter on the landing outside the door. “Craig.” She tried to keep the disappointment from her voice.

  “You’re on your way to work,” he said, glancing at her pantsuit uniform. “I’ll come another time.”

  “No, come in. I’ve fifteen or twenty minutes before I have to leave. I like to get ready early.”

  Craig followed her into the living room where he sat on the couch. “I came to apologize,” he said. “For the way I acted the other day at the university. I didn’t mean to upset you.”

  “Don’t apologize. It’s over and done with.”

  “I hoped you wouldn’t say that, Lesley. Won’t you come to the institute again? You’ve got exceptional ability. I want to know more about you.”

  She hesitated, knowing how she felt. Yet, to her own surprise, she was reluctant to hurt his feelings. “No,” she said at last, “I don’t want to come. You were right when you told me I had the wrong idea about what your institute was. I expected too much. Not too much, exactly, I thought the institute would have a different approach.”

  “If we had more money we could do more. Or if we had more staff.”

  “I understand, Craig. I didn’t when I saw you the first time but I do now. The mix-up was my fault. I wasted your time so I should be the one to apologize.”