“Do so,” Rekashoba growled. “And have him watched. Get every shred of evidence
you can find against him. We must make certain that all the eloquence in the
world will not save him from the vats when he stands accused before the
Council.”
6
KARL ZAMBENDORF HAD BEEN BORN IN THE NORTH AUSTRIAN city of Werfen in 1967 as
Karl Zammerschnigg, the third of a family of three brothers and two sisters
whose father was a hard-working bookkeeper and whose mother, a teacher. At a
comparatively early age he had made the disturbing discovery that his parents,
though honest, intelligent, industrious, and exemplary in the various other
virtues that were supposed to earn just reward, would never be as wealthy as he
thought they deserved, nor would their labors earn any public recognition or
acclaim. He gradually came to perceive this anomaly as simply a part of the
larger conspiracy of systematic self-deception practiced by society in general,
which while dutifully praising knowledge and learning, lavished riches and fame
not on its thinkers, creators, and producers, but on those who helped it to
defend its prejudices and sustain its fantasies. Knowledge, if the truth were
admitted—which was rarely the case—was in fact the enemy; it threatened to
explode the myths upon which the prejudices and the fantasies were based.
He left home at the age of nineteen and teamed up with a Russian defector who
was causing a small stir in Europe by claiming to have been a subject of
top-secret Soviet military experiments in psychic perception. Over the following
few years, which proved educational as well as profitable, young Zammerschnigg
came to recognize fully his own innate talents, and in the process discovered an
irresistible way to thumb his nose at the whole system of stylized rules and
artificial standards by which the drab, the dreary, the gullible, and the
conforming would have had him be like them. The Russian, however, was not
attuned to exploiting the opportunities afforded by commercialized Western
mass-media culture. So Zammerschnigg changed his name and embarked on his own
career with the aid of an influential West German magazine publisher. Within
five years Karl Zambendorf had become a celebrity.
His road to worldwide fame and fortune opened up in Hamburg when he was
introduced to Dr.—of what, was obscure—Osmond Periera from Arizona, a researcher
of the paranormal and a convinced UFOlogist who had written a number of
best-sellers claiming among other things that the roughly circular North Polar
Sea was in fact a gigantic crater caused by the crash of an anti-matter-powered
alien spacecraft; that the area had once been a continent harboring an advanced
human culture (“Polantis,” not Atlantis—the legend had been distorted); and that
a polar shift and the climatic upheavals caused by the impact were at the root
of all kinds of ancient myths and legends. Ridicule from the scientific
community had merely reinforced Periera’s lifelong ambition to go down in
history as the Sigmund Freud of parapsychology; and after his “discovery” of
Zambendorf, he displayed the fervor and ecstasy of a wandering ascetic who had
at last found his guru. Whatever else his peculiarities, Periera’s books had
made money, which meant he possessed the connections necessary to boost
Zambendorf to even higher orbits; accordingly, Zambendorf accepted an invitation
to accompany Periera back to the U.S.A.
The U. S. scientific community remained largely aloof and disinterested, and the
“experts” that Periera produced to vindicate his claims turned out to be from
its more credulous fringes. Zambendorf proceeded to divine information from
tamper-proof sealed envelopes, influence delicate electrical measuring
instruments by pure mind power, alter the decay rates of radioisotopes, read
thoughts, prophesy events, and perform many other wondrous feats which America’s
professional dream merchants built into a world sensation. Zambendorf’s
confidence grew with every new guffaw as “experts” tumbled in their
tumbril-loads.
He owed his success in no small degree to the loyalty of the odd collection of
individuals who had attached themselves to him over the years. He especially
depended on them for information-gathering, and a characteristic shared by all
the members of his team, despite their various differences, was an instinct for
information likely to be of value in Zambendorf’s business and an ability to