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  Alvarez was listening attentively. He waited a couple of beats after I'd finished, then said, "And... ?"

  "That's it," I replied. "That's all he said to me."

  "That's all he said."

  "That's right."

  "So on the basis of that—no more than that—you dropped everything and rushed down to Laguna?"

  I said, "Well... that's all he said, but..."

  "But what?"

  "It was the way he said it. The way he looked. The way he appeared and disappeared. I don't fight the angels, pal."

  “You assumed this was an angel?”

  I shrugged. "How many humans have materialized and dematerialized in your presence?"

  He was still giving me the fish-eye. “But you assumed angel. Why not devil?”

  I said, "I've never met the devil."

  He said, "But of course you have met angels."

  I said, "Sure...frequently. It's a rather common experience."

  "Wings and halos and the whole bit, huh?"

  I explained, "Wings and halos are no more than artistic representation of certain angelic attributes; that is, the ability to move freely through the air without machinery, and the body of light."

  "Body of what?"

  "Light. The light body. Also referred to as the astral body, the ethereal body, the spiritual body."

  "But this guy Valentinius..."

  "Some angels can materialize very dense bodies, much like yours and mine. You'd never know you were talking to an angel. Or—"

  "Or what?"

  I said, "Or making love to one."

  He grinned. "Come on!"

  I said, "It happens."

  The grin broadened. "Maybe I had one the other night. How can you tell for sure?"

  I replied—just joking, really, "Thrice is nice but there are seven levels to heaven."

  He took it seriously. "Yeah?"

  So I took it on. "Sure. The seventh heaven is orgasmic infinity."

  Then I chuckled, and he chuckled, and the ice between us was broken forever. He said, "Fix me up sometime."

  I said, "Sure."

  "How d'you do that total recall thing? Is that for real?"

  "It's for real, yeah. The brain records it all—even background sounds and odors—it's all there. Just have to know how to access it."

  He said, "Like computer memory."

  "Sort of like that, yeah."

  "Could you show me how to do that?"

  I said, "Probably. Some day when you have an hour or so free."

  He said, "I'm holding you to that. Do you really get five hundred a day?"

  I told him, "Well, that's negotiable. More often than not I work for good company and interesting experiences."

  "Do I qualify for that rate?"

  I said, "So far, sure. Just don't go weird on me."

  He chuckled, said, "Look who's talking."

  That office was becoming intensely busy, with the homicide technicians doing their thing and the medical examiner preparing to transport the body. They were having a hell of a time because that body was frozen into the seated position. I asked Alvarez to walk me to my car, where I showed him the file from Sloane's office. He flipped through it interestedly, remarked, "I'd like to have a copy of this." So we went back inside and found a coin-operated copier.

  As we were parting, the cop told me, "Want you to know that I appreciate your cooperation. I'd like to think that it will continue."

  I assured him that I would keep him informed of all developments in my investigation.

  He said, "Thanks," and then, following a brief and almost embarrassed pause asked, "Is Miss Amalie an angel?"

  I told him, "I'm still working on that."

  He said, "Yeah, it's nasty work but someone has to do it, right?"

  It was meant as a joke but was right on nevertheless.

  Someone, for damn sure, had to do it. It seemed as

  though I had been elected. And this day's work could become very nasty indeed.

  I wanted to find Windmere Hill and have a little visit with Thomas Sloane, Jim's disabled father. I was thinking that it would be interesting to discover how the elder Sloane regarded his relationship with the mysterious Valentinius.

  At that moment I had no inkling—let me assure you— of what I would encounter at Windmere Hill.

  I would have gone anyway, of course.

  Someone had to do it.

  Chapter Eighteen: On Windmere Hill

  Windmere Hill is a convalescent home for millionaires. It boasts a full medical staff, including a psychiatrist, two geriatric specialists, and a fully accredited gerontologist. Gerontology, I learned, has to do with the scientific study of the aging process, also with the problems of the aged, whereas geriatrics is that branch of medicine that deals with the diseases of old age.

  The gerontologist was a fascinating guy, a Dr. Cross— mid-forties, bright-eyed and energetic, sharp of wit and seemingly enamored of challenging conversation.

  I drew him by default, all the other professionals being busy with their patients and the administrator insisting that I speak with one of the staff before being allowed to visit Thomas Sloane. He seemed delighted, offering me in turn coffee and chocolate and tea and finally—in hospitable desperation maybe—a snort of bourbon. We sat on a wide veranda at the side of the main building in a beautiful environment of flowering bougainvillea and roses, and I could tell by the way we settled in that this guy wanted to talk, so I was resolved to make it worthwhile.

  "What exactly does a gerontologist do?" I asked him, leaving Sloane aside for the moment.

  "Around here, not much," he replied with a relaxed laugh. "Afraid I'm here for window dressing. But the pay is excellent and I can virtually write my own research program. I'm available for consultation, of course, and I am a medical doctor so I can help out in emergencies."

  "I didn't ask it right," I told him. "Actually I guess I was looking for the difference between geriatrics and gerontology."

  Cross scratched his head and replied, "About the same magnitude as, say, a research chemist and a pharmacist. A geriatric doctor treats disease and discomfort in the aged. A gerontologist wonders why disease and discomfort accompany old age."

  I asked, "How would you qualify old age?"

  He replied, "We have only two directions in life, Ford: up and down. Like firing a gun into the air. The bullet goes up as far as the inherent energy can take it, then it reverses direction and falls to the ground. Life is like that. The explosion of conception sends us hurtling upward. When the inherent energy is spent, we begin collapsing back toward the nothingness we started from. What was the question?"

  "How old is old age?"

  "Semelparous or iteroparous?"

  "What?"

  "Depends on the reproductive mode. Semelparous organisms reproduce once and promptly die—not from disease but because they're programmed for it. The process is called senescence or growing old, and for the semelparous it is a very rapid senescence—and definitely programmed. Couldn't say they're old, could you, at the moment of sexual maturity, but the mating triggers senescence, as though their own purpose in life is to reproduce. Once they've done that, what is there to hang around for?"

  I said, "Interesting."

  "Sure it is. Salmon and eels are semelparous, all of your annual and biannual plants, many insects, but only a very few vertebrates like you and me. No no—" The doctor laughed explosively. "Many married men may feel semelparous, but I assure you that the human species is certifiably iteroparous—most of us screw around as much as we can—however...we're talking old age—semelparous forms of life require full vigor right up to the very end so that they may reproduce. So old age for a moth—that is to say, senescence—is a very brief affair, greatly accelerated compared to an ape say—but the moth is not complaining because he enjoyed vigorous life all the way through his entire reproductive life span. The ape will live through maybe fifty percent of his. Old age for this guy began at about mid
life."

  I said, "Yes, that's fascinating. But how old is old for the human being?"

  "In a practical sense," Cross replied, "human senescence begins at about forty—but our clock has been winding down from the moment we reached full maturity. Top

  of the trajectory, see, and the bullet begins to fall. But what we commonly think of as old age depends a lot on the individual. In gerontology ninety years is given as the life span of man. I would say the last one-third of that is old age. But again, depending on the individual."

  "What would you say," I asked him, "if I told you that yesterday I dined with a three-hundred-year-old man who played the piano like Liberace and spoke knowledgeably and interestingly on virtually every subject in the arts and sciences of mankind?"

  Those knowing eyes danced with good humor as the doctor replied, "I'd say sell me a ticket to that act. There are outward exceptions to the life span—notably in sections of the USSR, where they claim to have people living for twenty-five to thirty years beyond the century mark, but I'd have to say that a three-hundred-year-old man is an impossibility. We simply don't have the program for it. Aging is a greatly misunderstood process in the common mind. We don't simply grow older. We begin to break up and dissolve. Lean body mass decreases steadily after physical maturity, and dramatically so under senesence—so that a man of ninety will have depleted two-thirds of his mature lean body mass. Basal metabolism decreases as lean mass decreases, everything slows down, the DNA/ RNA sequence becomes confused, the immune systems fall apart, the brain loses mass, cells are dying faster than they can be replaced, and even those that survive become less functional, less responsive. So your three-hundred- year-old man must be a bat."

  I said, "Whoa! Ever hear of Dracula?"

  Cross laughed, said, "Sure, but they got the story all

  wrong. It isn't vampirism that gives the bat long life; actually the vampire is one of the shortest-lived bats. The little brown bat—myotis lucifugus—has a life span of twenty-four years. That's a hell of a long time for so small a mammal. Has to do with conservation of inherent energy. I'm talking metabolism. The total lifetime energy-burn for man is set at about 1,200,000 calories per gram of tissue. Compare that to 400,000 per gram for your dog or cat. But see, that's tied to brain weight. The highly cephalized animals have a prodigious output of energy, and that feature is tied to longer life span. But a bat is a very small animal with a tiny brain. No way could he live long enough to produce that kind of energy. Yet some of them have very long lives, if you want to call that living. They do it by turning down and conserving energy instead of expending it. Eighty percent of an insectivorous bat's twenty-plus years of life is spent in deep torpor. A house mouse gets about three years—but, oh, he's a bundle of energy while he's here."

  I said, "So Dracula..."

  "Yes, if I had written the story I would have forgotten about the blood sucking and developed a way to reduce the metabolic rate by about twenty-fold through torpid states. Crawl into the coffin, yes, and snooze for several years or several centuries with the metabolism near zero, then come out when the coming was good and party like hell for a couple of nights."

  I said, "You lose a lot of friends that way."

  He laughed and replied, "And wake up each time to a totally new world. Think I prefer it the way I have it."

  I said, "Other than becoming a hibernating animal, do

  you see anything in the cards right now for someday greatly extending the human life span?"

  "Oh sure, it will come. That's our next big breakthrough. Lot of brilliant people working the problem. Sooner or later someone will find a way to rewrite the genetic program."

  I said, "You think it's basically a matter of programming then, despite all that stuff about energy and metabolism."

  "Basically, yes," he agreed, "I think so."

  We then put Thomas Sloane on the agenda. Cross gave me a bit of patient history and we talked a bit about the quality of care at Windmere Hill. Sloane was under the care of a cardiovascular specialist, a neurologist, and a psychiatrist. He had suffered a massive stroke, sustained severe neurological damage, and appeared to be in a mental state resembling catalepsy. He had been at Windmere Hill for eleven months; he was seventy-five years of age.

  Each patient at Windmere Hill enjoyed private quarters and around-the-clock nursing. Even while the patient was asleep, a nurse sat beside the bed. The care was, in Cross's word, immaculate.

  "Not that Tom would know it," Cross added with a sad smile. "I'm going to be perfectly frank about this, Ford. As nice as it is, this place is no more than a charnel house. These poor people require constant care and they always will. There is only one way out of here."

  I said, "But they hang on. Must be a reason, wouldn't you think?"

  He replied, "Sure, because they are being urged to do so, and I think maybe they just don't know how to die. I

  don't call this living, my friend, what they experience here."

  I had to agree with the good doctor when I saw old Tom Sloane. No way could he have weighed a hundred pounds, though in his prime he must have topped two-hundred easily. He was dressed, but the clothing was falling off him everywhere. And he was seated in a comfortable leather chair facing the window, but he could not have known if it was raining or shining out there.

  The thing that really curled me—I mean really knocked me out—was the face of old Tom Sloane. It was not a face but a leathery grimace, thin flesh pulled tautly across that skull and the eyes bugging as though viewing something unspeakably terrible, mouth open in a silent scream.

  I muttered, "Good God," and stepped quickly back to speak to Dr. Cross. "How long has he been like that?" I asked.

  "Since they brought him here eleven months ago," he replied solemnly. "Responds to nothing."

  I had seen that face before, twice, and recently. It had been worn by the younger Sloane as he lay crumpled on the beach below Pointe House. And it had been worn by the boy entrepreneur, Hank Gibson, as the medical examiners fought his stiffened corpse from an office chair.

  "Prognosis?" I muttered to Cross.

  "Oh, he's terminal. Came in here terminal. Like I said, there's but one way out of here. A mere question of time. For the lucky ones it's a brief senescent climax."

  I went around and took the old man's bony hand, forced myself to gaze into those horrified eyes—and then my sense of humanity stirred itself and went inside of him.

  It was much worse, in there.

  It was chaos, in there.

  I moved my other hand to the top of his skull, and I said to him, through the mind, “Go home, Tom.”

  I became aware of a faint clearing from somewhere within the chaos, then I thought I saw movement in the eyes. So I sent it again, “Go home, Tom. It’s all done here. Thank you. Now go home.”

  Old Tom Sloane died in my arms.

  Thank God, and thank God. I feel sure that that liberated soul sang a happy song all the way to wherever. And mine sang with him.

  Chapter Nineteen: Logia

  There are those moments in direct experience when you can touch something with the mind and be forever changed in your own perception of who you are and what the human experience is all about. That moment on Windmere Hill was one such revelation for me. I do not pretend to fully comprehend the event, nor could I have said with any certainty at the moment that I understood more about the mystery of Pointe House than at any moment earlier—but I did know that some fresh perspective on the situation was beginning a movement at some level of my own consciousness.

  Certainly I had been deeply and strongly moved over the plight of Tom Sloane—though a total stranger—and I felt nothing short of elation over my role in helping him to escape it—but this is not to say I intellectually understood that plight, the reason behind it, or my almost instinctive response to it.

  If you were walking in your neighborhood one evening at dusk and saw a trash can upended and heard a commotion beneath it, stopped to investigate, rais
ed the can, and a small furry animal shot out between your feet and raced away into the gloom before you could get a good look at it—you might draw reasonable conclusions as to the situation and your role in it. But if pressed with questions as to what kind of animal?—how had he gotten there?—why could he not get out on his own?—where did he go when you set him free?—See, the answers to those questions lie outside your direct experience in the matter, so you can respond with surmise only: it might have been a squirrel or a cat; probably searching for food; accidentally turned the can over and became trapped beneath it; too small or confused or panic-stricken to free himself; probably ran straight home, wherever that was, as fast as he could.

  That is where I was, see, in my own understanding of Tom Sloane and his plight, but with one important additional factor: I knew that what I had done was right and good, though some may recoil at my intervention in that situation, because I was given the understanding at the moment that I had discharged an important obligation, and that the obligation was part and parcel to the mission, whatever that was, in which I was presently engaged.

  All of which is a lengthy way of saying that Tom Sloane is no mere footnote to this story; he too is the story as much as any other character, and somewhere I knew that, as I came down off Windmere Hill. I just did not understand all that I knew, and I was determined all the more to do so.

  But I am going to give you another leg up on me at this point in the story, because I want you to follow it better than I was while I was experiencing it. That means that I have to talk a bit about metaphysics, particularly that branch originating in Neoplatonism—and more particularly, the distinctions elaborated by Plotinus (a.d. 205-270).

  As you probably already know, metaphysics is an attempt to elaborate mystery—the ultimate mystery: who and where am I?—who and where is God?—what is the significance of existence?—or, what is it all about? For some it is a meaningless exercise that only confounds the thinking mind and clouds reason and experience. Those people will usually turn to science, economics, history, humanistic philosophy, and/or simple religious faith as a better alternative to frame their existence and sensing of self. Others—more and more others in this modem age—cannot find a satisfactory framework for their own existence in the purely earthbound dimensions of experience, so go seeking the great mystery itself: the basis of all experience; the great Truth behind it all; the origin, the meaning, and the relationships of existence itself. Call it metaphysics—and you may include in there all the parlor games and light diversions that frequently take the name—just do not limit the field by dismissing metaphysics as astrology or spiritualism or sorcery, etc.