Part 18 (1/2)
His mind returned to his meeting aboard the Ansor, to the facts he had presented, and he knew that he had failed to make them see. Panidyne wanted more testing. Julie was in danger.
I won't let them touch her, he vowed. I won't let them hurt her. Yet he knew if his mission failed, there would be nothing he could do.
”My sister called the house this morning,” she said, breaking into his thoughts. ”She left a message on my answering machine.”
He lowered the paper. ”I hope she's all right.”
”She sounded all right. Sometimes it's hard to tell with Laura.” She folded her section of the paper with a snap and laid it on the table. ”She bought a gun, Patrick. She says it makes her feel safer.”
”Where the h.e.l.l did she get it?”
”I'm not sure. Somebody she knows knew somebody who had one for sale.”
”Does she even know how to use it?”
”I guess she's taking some sort of cla.s.s. With Laura's psychiatric problems, I certainly don't approve, but the truth is I own one myself, so what can I say?”
Val didn't answer. Finally he sighed. ”In this town, maybe you need a gun.”
”I took a cla.s.s way back when. I go in for recertification once a year.”
He nodded. Antique weapons like guns didn't exist on Toril. There was simply no need for them.
”Laura's abduction group is meeting again tonight at the Stringer house,” Julie continued. ”Laura wants me to go with her.”
”Are you going?”
”Yes. Whatever the truth is, whatever might have happened to her, my sister needs all the support she can get.”
”Then I'd like to go with you.”
She c.o.c.ked an eyebrow in his direction. ”Why?”
”I told you why. Because I want to help her. You said yourself, she needs all the support she can get.” Of course that was only partly the truth. He wanted to study Laura, determine the extent of trauma she and the others in the group had experienced as a result of the Ansor's testing. Living as Patrick, he was beginning to understand as he hadn't before the magnitude of what they were doing to the people they brought aboard the s.h.i.+p.
Julie shook her head. ”I don't know. This whole thing is pretty far out. I have a hard time believing you'll keep an open mind.”
That was the second reason he wanted to go. To discourage the sisters' belief in Laura's tale. Fostering the public's growing concern about UFOs only made the Ansor's mission more difficult.
He gave her one of Patrick's winsome smiles. ”I promise you I'll listen as objectively as I can. I really would like to go with you.”
Julie smiled. ”All right. We'll go together. I could use a bit of support myself.”
Fourteen.
The meeting was almost ready to begin when Julie and Patrick arrived. Laura, who had mended fences with Brian Heraldson and agreed to his plea to let him join her, was already seated next to him on the sofa in the living room, a white-carpeted, silk-draped area that looked out over the channel.
Julie introduced Patrick as a friend of hers and Laura's then, at Dr. Winters's urging, they went in and sat down with the others.
”It's good you all could make it.” Dressed in jeans and a long-sleeved white s.h.i.+rt, the doctor surveyed the room full of familiar faces. ”I hope no one had an exceptionally difficult week.”
The gardening expert, Willis Small, s.h.i.+fted a bit in his chair. ”I'm afraid mine hasn't been all that pleasant. I've had several disturbing dreams this week, Dr. Winters.”
”Dreams that involved the Visitors?” he asked.
Willis Small nodded. ”I don't remember too much. I dreamed I was taken aboard one of their s.h.i.+ps. They did some testing. I dreamed they took a s.e.m.e.n sample and I remember seeing several woman they'd brought aboard. I think the women were pregnant. They were begging the Visitors not to take their unborn babies.”
Leslie Williams, the tall willowy black woman from San Diego, leaned forward. ”Are you certain, Mr. Small, that you were dreaming? Are you sure what you're telling us didn't really happen?” Her voice dropped to a whisper. ”That is exactly what happened to me.”
Willis fidgeted nervously. ”It must have been a dream. At one point, I remember waking up and walking downstairs to get a gla.s.s of water. Then the dream picked up again when I went back to sleep.”
”The part about going downstairs could have been a screen memory,” Robert Stringer put in. ”For years after my abduction, I thought my son and I had stopped for several hours at an inn for dinner on the way back from our fis.h.i.+ng trip. It used to bother me, since we had gone fis.h.i.+ng in the first place because we wanted to cook fresh trout for supper. Why would we go to a restaurant when we had exactly what we wanted to eat in the trunk of the car? Then I started to remember.”
Laura inched up her hand.
Dr. Winters nodded in her direction. ”Go ahead, Laura. You don't have to be shy. You can say whatever you wish.”
Laura fiddled with a strand of her long blond hair. ”II may have had a screen memory. Under hypnosis, I told Dr. Heraldson that I had been taken to a hospital on the afternoon of my abduction. It wasn't the truth. I haven't been in a hospital in years.”
”It could have been any number of things,” Brian Heraldson quickly put in. ”Trauma, perhaps, over problems in your youth.”
He was alluding to Laura's abortion, Julie knew. It was a plausible explanation. She wondered if the theory might not be correct.
Patrick spoke up just then. ”I came here for Laura and Julie. I don't know much about what any of you might have experienced but I've read that childhood trauma can surface in any number of ways. If what happened was painful enough, I imagine it might even come out as a belief in alien abduction.”
”That's right, Patrick,” Brian said. ”It's called False Memory Syndrome. It's like a screen memory, only in this case the false memory is the one of alien abduction.”
”How do the rest of you feel about that?” Winters asked. ”Is the abduction phenomenon a memory created because of some earlier trauma? Is it merely coincidence, then, that your experiences are so much the same?”
”It isn't coincidence,” Carrie Newcomb, the pretty young hairdresser, argued. ”We were abducted. All of us remember it nearly the same, the humiliation, the experiments, the s.e.xual manipulations. If it's motivated by problems from our past, why do all of us remember the same things?”
”All right,” Brian conceded, ”perhaps for some of you it isn't trauma. Perhaps it's simply a shared hallucination. As Carrie just mentioned, many of the overtones are s.e.xual in nature. Given the climate of repression we face in this country, that might mean the delusions are self-inflicted, invented by a society that has trouble dealing with its unfulfilled physical needs. Freud would most probably think so.”
”Well, I think you and Dr. Freud are full of s.h.i.+t,” Laura said hotly, eliciting a ripple of laughter from the group. ”If you had been there, you wouldn't have a single doubt that what happened to you was real.”
Both Brian and Patrick fell silent. Julie noticed that Patrick in particular seemed absorbed by the stories being told. The group talked for a while, each person relating his personal experiences, repeating incidents he had mentioned before, expressing fears or asking questions. It was a painful session, just as it had been before. Carrie Newcomb had tears in her eyes when Willis Small finished his pitiful tale, and Robert Stringer's face looked drawn and pale.
Julie noticed Patrick was frowning, the muscles across his shoulders knotted with tension. She hadn't realized the suffering these people spoke of would affect him in such a way.
Then Laura's voice caught her attention. ”There's something I need to say.”
Dr. Winters turned in her direction. ”Go on, Laura,” he urged.
”It's something I remembered, something I have to tell Julie.” Laura's eyes swung nervously in her sister's direction.
Brian Heraldson reached for her hand. ”Laura, we talked about this. Think about what you're about to do.”