The Link Read Online Free

sensationalized potboiler churned out to make money), she’d found it to be done with scrupulous objectivity and intelligence; even noticeable caution.
    “I feel a total fool for acting as I did,” she says.
    Robert smiles. “No harm done.” He is impressed that she had taken the trouble to re-examine her behavior.
    “As a matter of fact,” she adds, “the book is so well done I wish that you’d included less material and gone into it in more detail.”
    Robert shrugs.
    “What were you writing on the pad?” she asks.
    He tells her and they talk about the Fox Sisters; a prime example of telekinesis, she observes, a prototypical poltergeist event.
    “You don’t believe it was a spirit then,” he says, knowing the answer.
    “Of course not, do you?” she asks in surprise.
    “I have no opinion either way,” he tells her.
    “You don’t?” She sounds surprised again. Evoking no response from him, she continues with the Fox Sisters incident. They
did
recant in later years, she says, admit to fraud, claiming that they make the noises by “cracking their toe joints”. That, of course, is ridiculous, she adds. The phenomena were too extensive for that.
    “They also denied their recantation,” Robert reminds her. And, of course, the “toe-joint cracking” thesis
is
absurd—although they might have done exactly that on occasion in order to impress clients.
    Still, on her deathbed, when she couldn’t move a muscle, Margaret Fox involuntarily created rappings in the ceiling, walls and floor of the bedroom.
    “A sad story actually,” he concludes. “When they recanted, both sisters were alcoholics, broken by the stresses to which they’d been exposed to by their gifts.”
    He makes a scoffing sound, almost bitter. “
Gifts
,” he says.
    She looks at him with curiosity, wondering what lies below the surface of this pleasant, somewhat enigmatic man.

    The ice broken now, they engage in conversation, first regarding ESPA which stands for
Extended Sensory Perception Association;
“all of us believe that psi is an expansion of the five senses, not a sixth,” she tells him.
    She says again—this time with more discretion—that the history of psi, while undeniably colorful, is pretty much irrelevant these days. All the early years of research were consumed attempting to prove that what was happening was actually occurring, and that primarily to verify survival after death.
    Today, the research is more inclusive. That the phenomena exist is no longer an issue to those in the field. They are more concerned with their significance.
    As for herself, she states what Robert has already presumed to be her belief: that all psychic phenomena are attributes of man’s physical system, no spiritual correlation whatever.
    “Fine,” says Robert. He is all for that. Superstition out, science in. “We have no argument,” he tells her. He only means to present, in his outline, some of the more intriguing highlights of psi’s past; no harm in that.
    Cathy smiles. “Of course not.” There are some incredible stories and she looks forward to working with him on the proposed film.
    Soon they are engrossed in personal conversation.
    She learns what we already know and, in addition, that his mother died when he was six and that he was wounded in Vietnam in 1968.
    We continue to sense that there are things about his past which he protects most carefully.
    He learns, from her, that she is married to Harry Graves, a professor of Biology at a London college.
    Robert has a brief fantasy about him: a balding man with bottle-bottom pince-nez glasses over berry eyes, a white lab coat on as he hovers above a dead frog, scalpel poised, commenting in a dry as dust voice, “We will now excise the gazongas from this filthy little beggar.”
    RETURN to Robert, a faint smile on his lips.
    “What?” she asks.
    “I’m sorry,” he apologizes. “I was thinking of something else.”
    He further learns that her father is world-famed