Boothe had already returned to the bar to pour more bourbon into his glass.
Dan said, ‘Don’t get drunk. There’s sure as hell no safety in being unconscious. It’ll just complicate things.’
‘I’ve never been drunk in my life,’ Booth said icily. ‘I don’t run from problems, Lieutenant, I solve them.’ He paced again, but he didn’t suck at the bourbon as greedily as he had done previously.
Uhlander said, ‘Dylan not only believed in astral projection, but he thought he knew why it was so hard to achieve an OOBE.’
Dylan (Uhlander explained) had been certain that people were born with the ability to step in and out of their bodies whenever they wished — all people, everyone. But he was equally sure that the confining, limiting nature of all human society and teaching — with its long list of dos and don’ts, its overly restrictive definitions of what was possible and impossible — effectively brainwashed children so early that the development of their astral-projection potential was, like many other psychic powers, never realized. Dylan believed that a child could discover and develop that potential if raised in cultural isolation, if permitted to learn only those things that sharpened the awareness of the psychic universe — and if subjected to long and frequent sessions in a sensory-deprivation chamber from a young age, in order to direct the mind inward upon its own hidden talents.
‘Isolation,’ Boothe interrupted, ‘was a way of purifying the child’s concentration, a way of sealing out all the distractions of day-to-day life in order to focus her mind more intensely upon psychic matters.’
Uhlander said, ‘When Mrs. McCaffrey decided to divorce Dylan, he saw an opportunity to raise Melanie according to his own theories, so he abducted her with that intention.’
‘And you supported him,’ Dan said to Boothe. ‘Accessory to a kidnapping, a conspirator in child abuse.’
The white-haired publisher approached Dan’s chair, loomed over him, stared down with undisguised disdain. He had a haughty disregard for the pain that he’d caused. ‘It was necessary. An opportunity that could not be missed. Think of it! If astral projection could be proved possible, if the child could be taught to leave her body at will, then perhaps a system could be developed for teaching adults as well… selected adults. Imagine what it would mean if a select group, an intellectual elite, possessed the ability to enter undetected into any room in the world, no matter how heavily guarded, could listen in on any conversation no matter how secret. No government, no business competitor, no one in the world, could hide their plans or intentions from us. Without anyone knowing what we were doing or how, we could at last orchestrate the evolution of one worldwide government without effective opposition or, indeed, without any opposition at all. How could opposition exist if we could sit in on their strategy sessions, know their names, intentions, and secret organizations?’
Boothe was breathing hard, partly because of the effect of the whiskey, but largely due to the dark dreams of power that filled him with a megalomaniacal excitement. The Tiffany lamp cast amber circles of light on his cheeks, smaller spots of blue on his chin, stained his lips yellow, and painted his nose and forehead green, so he again reminded Dan of someone from a carnival, a malevolent roadshow like that in Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes. He was a bizarre and demented clown in whose eyes one could see the crimson flickering fires of Hell, a soul in damnation.
‘The world would be ours,’ Boothe said.
Both the publisher and Uhlander smiled, and they seemed to have forgotten how badly their scheme had worked out and how deep was the trouble in which they now found themselves.
‘You’re both insane,’ Dan said thinly.
‘Farsighted,’ Uhlander said.
‘Insane.’
‘Visionaries,’ Boothe said. He turned away from Dan and began to pace once more.
Uhlander’s smile gradually bled away as he remembered why they were there, and he continued the explanation that Dan had demanded. Dylan McCaffrey had lived in that Studio City house twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, year after year, staying close to Melanie, making himself nearly as much a prisoner as she was, seeing only a handful of sympathizers from his small circle of friends who bridged the scientific and occult communities and shared his interest — and who were all on the Palmer Boothe dole, one way or another. Dylan became increasingly obsessed with his project, and the regimen he designed for Melanie became ever more harsh, more demanding, less forgiving of her human failings, weaknesses, and limitations. The gray room, which was painted and soundproofed and furnished in such a way as to reduce all distraction to a minimum, became Melanie’s entire universe and also the center of her father’s world. Those privileged few who knew of the experiment all thought that they were involved in a noble attempt to transform the human race, and they held the secret of Melanie’s torture as though they were protecting something magnificent and holy.