5/7

Played: January 3, 2022.

Thursday, July 26, 1973. URIEL, sans Viv (who is still wrapping things up at MRI), gathers once again at Livermore to discuss their findings from the past 24 hours. Starting with Willis Harman, Jocasta and Archie provide an overview of how their lunch went, what Harman’s whole deal is, and their assessment of his threat level. Jocasta also reveals what she gleaned from her psychometric read of Harman: that he met with a shadowy committee or council who were receptive to his notions of transindustrial human potential. This body charged him with spreading his message and he left the meeting with the impression it was perhaps the most important event of his life. Jocasta goes on:

My feeling is that this went above and beyond — just the fact that I was able to read it at all, that I was able to recall that memory from that long ago, means it was invested with a superhuman amount of emotional resonance. And that indicates to me that this wasn't like getting married or graduating from college, you know? Or getting an important job or something. It was something more meaningful than that. At least to him. And that might be valuable information for us to unlock. Like, who those people were and if this meeting really took place in a physical sense, what the circumstances of it were. We can do that through research or we can put a crowbar behind it but I think that's an important lead for us to follow.

Archie asks several follow-up questions about dates and locations and identities, but these are things Jocasta can’t answer based on her reading of Harman. Then he asks:

So this was very meaningful for Harman. He felt like he had found his purpose. Or achieved his purpose — that these people had heard his message and believed him and that he was right. But they weren't telling him the message or the theories? He hit upon them himself, right? It wasn't that they were giving him the Gospel. It was that he had — he was telling them and they said, yes, good for you, spread the word, right?

Jocasta says that’s all correct, and stresses that one of the most crucial pieces of information she discerned from her reading was that Harman feels the council charged him with spreading his ideas — hence the book he’s working on — and are assisting him in some way. Perhaps opening some doors, perhaps putting him in touch with the people with whom he needs to be in touch. What Archie finds odd, however, is Harman in the role of messenger. Expert memeticist that he is, Archie knows that any effective meme requires two components: a message and a messenger, a virus and a vector. Harman’s meme about human potential is definitely the message — and a compelling one, at that — but Harman-as-messenger makes a bit less sense. He’s a kook and a fringe thinker. At one point he proposed giving every CEO in America a dose of LSD. Not the kind of guy one would normally think to assign the task of spreading ideas into the mainstream.

Roger says that Harman may not be a prophet, but instead just a bellwether — the sheep that all the other sheep follow without really knowing why. That would make sense, Archie thinks. Perhaps Harman isn’t a messenger, but the vanguard of something else. Perhaps he’s just intended to get certain concepts into place for an inspired messenger down the road. Or he could just be an asset, that is, someone whom this council has identified as potentially useful but without any strong ideas about how to use him yet. Of course, that’s SANDMAN’s modus operandi.

Marshall says it sounds like they need to get their hands on Harman and find out more about what’s inside his brain because he is the most direct link they have yet to find between all the weird shit going down at SRI, including the History B energies Mitch has detected, and an outside “actor,” namely, the mysterious council of Harman’s memory. Archie asks if Marshall means getting Harman to the Barn, but Marshall says no. He could likely get what he needs out of Harman at the Mission, using the CCRME. That’s probably the only way to get at the information they want, Marshall opines, since whatever this council is, it almost certainly did not permit Harman to retain any memories by which it would be implicated, such as the time and location of the meeting, or what the “council members” looked like. So a deeper probing of Harman’s mind will probably be necessary. Jocasta agrees with this assessment.

Marshall wonders aloud how they will get Harman in custody, though. Roger asks why can’t Marshall just invite him to the Mission. Archie immediately agrees with Roger’s point: the man is eager to get his message out, he will definitely express no hesitancy to visit the Mission if he thinks he’ll be able to present his ideas there. Archie suggests that he work as a bridge between Harman and Marshall, introducing the former to the latter, and perhaps deceiving Harman into thinking that the Mission is going to be the site of some “symposium” that Archie’s “foundation” is planning. Why, they could even invite some of the other players with whom URIEL has interacted recently — Terence McKenna, for example. Marshall gives Archie a quizzical look at that suggestion, which seems a bit out of left field. Anyway, Roger says the invitation and the symposium are good plans because they will also enable the team to observe if Harman is, himself, being watched by anyone else, which could be a possible pathway back to this council or whomever.

Marshall agrees this is all a good idea but urges the team to move quickly: he wants to get into Harman’s brain ASAP. Archie is still a bit hesitant, though.

Archie: At the end of it, he's not going to be drooling into a cup, is he?

Marshall: I mean, I hope not. But it depends on the degree to which he was programmed.

Marshall explains how there are varying levels of “programming,” each of which requires more invasive procedures to “crack.” Hypnotism works for most things: repressed memories, unconscious sensory perceptions, etc. Real programming can require the sort of head-cracking work they did to Keiner at Granite Peak. Sometimes, in exploring a target’s memories, the interrogator will accidentally stumble over a cognitive “tripwire” or “failsafe” set by the programmers. So there’s always risks. But prompted by Archie’s concern, Marshall continues:

First, I just want to note that, in terms of the resources we have in play, I can bring him to the Mission, but I want to know what the group thinks about whether other people within URIEL should be at the Mission at that time, or is it enough to just have me there? Also, do we want to use the opportunity of him being out of his residence to have someone break in and see what they can find? Just do a little clean sweep of the place?

But then in terms of what will potentially be done to Harman, and this goes to my very first point about allocating resources — um, ever since Jocasta talked about how she was able to, uh — aided by her, um … narcotics — go to Pat Price at a different time, I've been wondering, like, what other applications could that have? So I was thinking if we could get him in the CCRME, Jocasta — and with neurolinguistic programming, and my abilities as a hypnotist — could we actually place Jocasta in a living memory of what happened to him? Have her observe as a spectator from like a subjective perspective the actual true memory of what happened, rather than having Harman try to explain it himself. Because studies have shown the more you try to force — this happened to Keiner, is that I broke through his programming and he had a seizure. I was fortunately able to save his life but if I hadn’t been a doctor or something had gone wrong, he would have died. So this might be a more gentle way of doing that. It’s still experimental.

Jocasta says she’s going to need some good drugs to pull this off. Marshall says that, fortunately, he has access to the best drugs. Archie volunteers to be on site at the Mission when all this is going down, as well. He thinks between himself, Jocasta (operating under her cover as “Jill”), and Marshall, that should be sufficient for a man like Harman. And that would free up Roger and Mitch to conduct whatever field work they need done. With that, Archie turns to Marshall and Mitch and asks: “So what about Pat Price? Should we turn to that, since you brought him up?”

Marshall informs the rest of the group about how he’s taken over SCANATE as its “CIA liaison,” replacing Mr. Green. He goes on:

I had an opportunity to meet Mr. Price and, um … you know, it's the damnedest thing. He's — he seems legit. I mean, some of the stuff — well, I had him remotely view several locations — um, well, I had him remotely review several locations and someone else here had him remotely view another location — and some of what he saw could have just been really good guesswork or could have just been like, a really good understanding of geography. But some of the stuff he saw, there's just no — there's no way he could know. There's no rational way he could know. So I think he's the real deal. And so I'm just going to kind of sit on it. I'm going to sit on him for a while. I'm going to sit on the project. And, uh, I have to see how we can weaponize it. See how we can make use of this, um, this group some of whom, you know, Price is legit. Ingo I think is … I mean, he may be legit but if he's just a con artist then he's very good con artist and that has its own uses. We know from Mitch that the woman in the program, that she has something special about her. So think it's a useful group to just kind of keep corralled for the time being.

Archie asks if URIEL still needs Mitch embedded in SCANATE if Marshall is now in charge of the project. “Mitch,” he asks, “what do you think? Are you done there? Is there more? Does it make sense to keep sending you? We always have more places — we can always find things for you to do.” Mitch lets out a long sigh and then says in a halting, drawn-out manner:

Yeah. I mean it's more comfortable. Coffee's better. Company is — I can call that a wash, I guess. It's not the case that I'm, like, excited about the prospect of not having to go there anymore. I'm not like, please no stop it, pull me out of there, I am going to lock myself in my closet and just not come out. That's — that's not where I'm at right now.

Archie: “Well, I’m glad to hear that.” Mitch resumes:

Oh, well, thank you. If there's something more pressing, then I can be doing that. The more pressing thing. But at the moment a lot of my time has been … pretty unstructured a lot of the time. So I think that I can squeeze in continuing to participate in SCANATE alongside my existing duties. Unless there's — unless something happens, in which case I might just have to flake out on them for a while.

A silence descends upon the room. After a beat:

Charley: Marshall, so you were having Pat look at places? I was — what if he looked at Long, uh, Meg? I was thinking that might be a good place for him to look at. I was talking to Mitch about that …

Marshall: Funny you mentioned that because I think your old Uncle Mitch maybe had a little hand in me selecting one of the locations, because I did have Mr. Price look at that location and he —

Mitch: I don’t think there’s any actionable way you can connect me to that, man. I was in another room.

Marshall: Yeah, there’s no actionable way I can connect you to that …

Roger: But Mitch, circumstantial evidence is evidence.

Marshall: I’m trying a new way of thinking, so let’s try this. What do you think Mr. Price saw at Long Meg, Charley?

Charley: What?

Marshall: I’ll tell you, but first guess — why don’t you tell me what you guess he saw.

Charley: Oh! Well, I was hoping he would — he would have seen what happened with the original Ontoclysm — the battle against the Red Kings and, um, King Arthur. And, yeah, I was hoping that he’d have a little more information that he could have shared with — um, how they won the battle. So that we can use that in our battle now.

Marshall: Noble! He did not see that. He saw a team of what I presume to be Sandman or Sandman-affiliated commandos … uh, execute the GRAIL TABLE team and then massacre their bodies to make it look like animals did it. He was able to describe the, uh Sophie's ex —

Archie: David Wolf?

Marshall: Yes. He was able to describe David Wolf to a tee. And there is no way — there is no way — that Pat Price knew who David Wolf was. So, you know, I’m still processing that but I’m trying to think about things differently now, so I’m not going to run it up the ladder. Your Uncle Mitch and I had a talk, you see. About how we’re all part of the same team. And so to be a team player, I’m just going to sit on that information about the commandos for a while.

Mitch: I said we’re all in the same club.

Marshall: Club! Thank you! Club. You know, I was — I knew it wasn’t team, but I just hadn’t … I’m just … I’m working on that. I’m working on that.

Charley: We are a team.

Marshall: Yes.

Roger: (to Mitch) It looks like good news that you might be off surveillance duty because now Pat will take it up.

Charley: But if you were to share that information with SANDMAN, what would be the best case scenario? Like, what would be your, um, ideal outcome? What would be the benefit in doing that?

Marshall: Well … the benefit of doing it would be that it would move me to a better position on the board within SANDMAN. So that type of information — potentially leading to either there being some sort of a faction within SANDMAN that is, uh, under the cloak of authority or maybe with actual authority, executing members like the GRAIL TABLE team — or that they were executed with full authority and were told to conceal it for some purpose that has been highly classified at the highest levels of Control — that type of information is a big pile of chips in the game that is SANDMAN. And I could use those chips to better position myself. I'm using terrible metaphors because it's hard to explain the game to somebody who's not playing the game. But, yes, so that would be the benefit. But like I said, I'm trying to think differently. So I'm not going to do that.

Charley: … OK.

Charley notes that Price’s remote viewing abilities might be similar to Jocasta’s, in that his psychic perceptions are “drawn” to the most important moment in a specific location’s history. So even though Marshall (or Mitch) gave Price the coordinates for Long Meg, his vision might have been distracted by the events at Brougham Castle, which, for whatever reason, his powers deemed “more important.” Archie considers this a good enough theory but notes that they have no real idea how Price’s powers really work: there might be a limit on how far back or forward in time he can see things, etc. After another beat, Jocasta speaks up:

I have an idea that may be terrible, but it won't be my first. We've discussed the possibility of having this symposium — which is really just an excuse for us to do some investigation — at the Mission. Now our brief in a broad sense is to just keep an eye on irruptions, on weird behavior, of which there has been no shortage in the Bay Area recently. In fact, we've even talked about that: how there just seems to be an a marked increase in the kind of behavior that pulls our attention, right? And there's a lot of little threads that we've been pulling at over the last month. What if we staged this symposium as a sort of … you know, the stuff they used to have in the ‘60s of being an event that would attract all kinds of the people that we've been looking at. Put them in a controlled environment and let us monitor them collectively, saving us a huge amount of time and maybe letting us identify some high profile targets at a time when their defenses are down. Terrible idea? Not so terrible?

Roger laughs. “First of all: Christ, man, you want to give us all the work in the world, don’t you? Second, didn’t we just make a powder keg?” Jocasta smirks and says that this plan would save them weeks and weeks of individual surveillance. Plus, URIEL would be able to monitor the targets on URIEL’s terms. Roger: “But it’s also like putting all those nerds together in a room at the St. Francis.” Jocasta shrugs. “I know.” Marshall says that it’s an idea that has merit but that he wants to come out of this meeting with actionable, short-term goals. Plus he wants to hear about what Roger and Charley learned about ARCNET, which may inform their next steps. Jocasta agrees: the symposium could be a longer-term project that they start working on while also handling some of the immediate items on their agenda with SRI and Harman.

Archie asks Marshall where else he had Price “look,” and if so, what did he find. Marshall pauses and then sighs:

I mean … I'll tell you. So I'll tell all of you, but I'm giving this reservation because it's … it’s real weird in there, man. Like, I don't want anyone coming out of this meeting thinking that like, I have access to like the Oracle of Delphi. So let's just take everything he's saying with a grain of salt. That grain of salt being that he doesn't know how his shit works, Targ and Puthoff are fucking idiots, there's no experimental controls in place here in terms of like social cueing or anything like that. So it's hard to know how much he's picking up just on my energy or Mitch's energy or whatever. So there's a lot of caveats here.

I had him check out the St. Francis and he saw the death of that actress from the ‘20s by, uh, Roscoe — by Fatty Arbuckle. You know, whatever. I had him check SRI just to see what would happen. Like, just to see if he knew coordinates well enough that he could place SRI immediately. And then I had him check out here. I had him check out Livermore. And he said that he got the — he got the feeling that something terrible was going to happen here. It was connected to a warehouse full of failed experiments, and that when Puthoff and Targ come here, they’re going to release a vengeful ghost.

A couple people start talking at once. Jocasta asks to clarify: he said that the warehouse was full of vengeful ghosts? No. He said they’d release a vengeful ghost. The warehouse was full of failed experiments. Charley chimes in: “We have a Houdini!” Archie laughs, sure, that’s one vengeful ghost. Mitch observes that Houdini would definitely look at Targ and Puthoff and think, “Marks.” Then he says: “I could see Houdini being mad at, like, me and wanting to use cutouts as his methodology for attacking me. Or if not me, somebody else. Yeah, somebody else could also work in this theory. Thoughts?” Marshall says, “I mean, it just — I really, I was so hesitant to tell you guys this but again, I’m trying to think differently. Because he can see into the future. I mean, he’s telling me that he’s seeing the location of a thing that hasn’t happened yet. We don’t even know how is powers work with regards to seeing the future. Like, why would Puthoff and Targ come here? And what about them would help eventually … and like, I mean, there’s just so many wild variables. It’s not worth losing sleep over.”

Without looking, Mitch leans backward in his chair a bit and grabs something off a nearby bookshelf. It’s a copy of a recent TIME magazine, apparently having been mis-shelved in the Librarian’s absence. This particular TIME magazine — about how Europe may become America’s “new rival” on the world stage — carries an article about famed psychic spoon bender Uri Geller. Marshall says: “I hate it when he shows off like this.” Mitch says: “Well, that doesn’t seem like a good thing. I mean, it doesn’t lead to any clear answers. Just kind of brings up the next topic of conversation which is: what should we do to Uri Geller?” Uri is coming to the Bay Area tomorrow.

Marshall says all his information on Geller is that he is a fraud and a con-artist, but an extremely skilled one. He can’t speak for Mitch, but in his (Marshall’s) experience at SCANATE, Uri’s name just keeps. coming. up. Mitch asks aloud: “Doesn’t it taste like acid reflux in your mouth? Saying that name?” Roger raises an eyebrow and says that if they were on the playground they’d certainly make fun of his name (“Urine Geller”) but that the name itself doesn’t trigger anything with him. Marshall says he’s flummoxed about what do with Geller, and how Geller fits into all this. They could just toss him out of SCANATE now, of course. Or maybe Geller is compromised? Maybe he has a kulullû on his back, or he’s possessed by an êkimmu. Mitch says that’s plausible. Regardless, the minute Mitch gets eyes on Uri, they’ll know. Archie says he also doesn’t see the connection here. How is Geller any different than Puthoff or Targ? Also, now that Marshall runs SCANATE, doesn’t that mean Geller is also one of URIEL’s assets, in a sense? Marshall says that Mr. Green told him that Geller’s been checked out by the CIA and the NSA at the highest levels and has come back clean. The domestic intel community’s best assessment is that he’s just in it for the fame and the money.

Marshall proposes that they send Mitch to the airport tomorrow to observe Geller as he deplanes. That way they’ll know almost instantly if Geller is “just a man” or if he’s “glowing green.” Jocasta asks if URIEL has a vested interest in either promoting or lessening the public belief in the supernatural through Geller, either by ramping up his PR or by humiliating him on national TV? Roger asks Archie if Uri is one of those, “you know, vectors — what do you call them … one of those things that makes a meme propagate?” Archie says he certainly could be, but that the only way to know for certain would be to “see him in action,” that is, watch some of his old interviews and demonstrations to see how he’s communicating. This could be done, of course — URIEL could pull a bunch of old tapes from local cable stations and the like — but Archie sighs nonetheless: “That’s something Sophie would normally do.” Marshall says they could perhaps have Charley stay up and watch all the tapes. You know, the kids these days with their TVs and whatnot.

Charley apprises everyone on her findings with regards to ARCNET. It’s supposed to be the “office of the future,” with everyone connected to one another using an internal computer network, similar to DARPANET but on a localized scale. The program was partly successful, in that having people work with one another via a connected computer system did increase productivity, and partly unsuccessful, in that having everyone hooked up to one another created significant workplace tension. Sure, people didn’t need secretaries anymore — they could manage their own calendars and send their own correspondence now — but they also really disliked one another. Cliques formed. Gossip spread. People sniped at one another anonymously. Things got so bad that the project’s bosses wound up shelling out a ton of money to send the entire workforce to Esalen for a weekend team-building retreat.

“The programming was solid,” Charley explains, “it’s solid. It’s a success. But it seemed like the more connected they were electronically, the more they grew apart. The more there was a disconnect emotionally. It was weird.” From Charley’s report, the brains in the room rapidly deduce that ARCNET is likely intended to function not merely as a technological prototype but a social prototype. In other words, everyone working at ARCNET is part of an experiment on workplace psychology. Gesturing at the bookshelves and the out-of-place TIME magazine, Archie quips: “This is why we need Sophie back. This is why we need a librarian.” Marshall speaks up, thinking aloud:

So we know from the St. Francis that having enough people in a single — or like an approximate geographic location — their beliefs can create subduction zones or ontological events. Amplify each other. People in groups are it's not ideal, basically. So at SRI we have a sort of latent, low-grade History B influence that Mitch has picked up and which has not gone away with Mr. Green being reassigned back to D.C. But we have a group of some legit — some probably legitimate psychically active individuals adjacent to a psychological experiment being done on people in creating, I don't know, I guess you would call it a hostile work environment or something ridiculous like that, and you have Harman on the board, and he's getting his orders from a shadowy council. And maybe it's all three of these things working in tandem that's creating a corrupt influence. So maybe we need to just pull all three apart. Like get ARCNET reassigned to a different location, maybe move SCANATE — oh. Oh. I was going to say move SCANATE in-house but that would require us to bring Targ and Puthoff here.

As Marshall cuts himself off, both he and Jocasta has a revelation. Marshall jumps up from his seat and starts pacing. He explains: the Red Kings were trying to retrocreate something by getting URIEL to split up the three relevant pieces at SRI, i.e. SCANATE, ARCNET, and Harman. What the Anunnaki want is to have everything feed into itself and they’ve made ways for that to happen. Price’s warning about Puthoff and Targ coming to Livermore was real! What he saw in his vision was likely not a ghost — that was simply the way his Catholic mind interpreted things — but instead an ontological event caused by Puthoff and Targ’s proximity to URIEL’s warehouse full of reality shards.

Marshall: It really was the Librarian! She sent us here! To get us to the point where we would see that we needed to break these three pieces apart so the contagion would spread. So that we would bring SRI here to Livermore, where Puthoff and Targ would be in proximity to our warehouse full of reality shards, which would be cataclysmic! Or it would be a coup! Or something! It would be an advance for the other side. It was all — it was all a game! I knew it was all a game and it was all a game!

Roger: Or she was a patsy that got drawn in by them.

Marshall: Sure, no — right, right. Yeah. It may not have been — it may not have been wittingly.

Roger: So it’s a honeypot? OK.

Archie: But we didn’t have the idea of splitting them up until just now.

Marshall: But we had the problem of them. So we had to find the solution! The problem of them was that forces acting in tandem were creating a radioactive site of History B energy. I was looking at it and looking at it and I was like, what is creating this energy? Is it a person? Is it a confluence of people? Is it something else? And we — it is something else! It's these three things acting in tandem. But they knew we would figure it out and they knew that one of the solutions we would think of would be to take them all apart. To move ARCNET over here and to move SCANATE to Livermore and to, I don’t know, discredit Uri Geller and interrogate Harman and remove him from the board and all these things so that they would get the pieces in place. It's really beautiful like when you step back and look at it.

Archie: Sounds like a good idea.

Mitch: One, I feel like you're ascribing them a level of agency and deliberation that I don't necessarily think is appropriate. And two, it sounds like you're thinking we should shift from this discredit Uri Geller plan to a murder Uri Geller plan, and I'm definitely down with that. I think that's the way to go.

Marshall: The agency thing, the deliberation, we can talk about another time. I'm not committed to doing any particular thing because I’m trying to think differently. I think that what we should do in the immediate sense is, I do think that we should play their game just a little bit longer. I think that we should bring Harman into the Mission immediately. I think we should have Mitch intercept — for a lack of better word — Uri Geller and see what he can see is on him, if anything. I think we need to get Roger into Harman’s apartment or into Engelbart’s apartment to see what he can find there. And I think if we can have Charley rapidly watch and analyze all of the Geller tapes by tomorrow, that coupled with what Mitch observes might help us make a decision. But I think that to some degree we have to keep all the pieces together. Like, we can't take them apart.

While all this is going on, Jocasta turns the situation over in her paranoid brain. She believes it would indeed be bad for URIEL and SCANATE to get too mixed up with each other. She has confidence in Price’s visions and her and Marshall’s conclusion about all this being a potential retrocreation. So then what could prompt Puthoff and Targ to come to Livermore, if URIEL doesn’t invite them? Well, if their project got defunded, or they lost interest in psychic phenomena, they may go back to their original research into lasers. Livermore would be the place for that. This also jives with URIEL’s earlier experience with Rich and Carl and their experiments at LeConte Hall, which also involved lasers. Jocasta envisions a computer circuit: all these elements have to be connected for the chip to work, but as long as URIEL can keep the parts unconnected, it can tinker with the chip at its leisure.

Conversation turns back to the Geller Question, which snaps Jocasta out of her reverie. “Did someone mention killing Geller? Because I thought I heard somebody say that.” Marshall says that all the cards are on the table, killing that, but that the plan right now is to get Mitch to the airport so that he can get eyes on Geller.

Roger: Depends on whether Mitch will have a rifle at the airport.

Mitch: I don’t need a rifle.

Marshall: Killing him is 100 percent on the table. We just need to, literally, to have Mitch look at him first.

Mitch: In the moment, I might feel like killing Uri Geller is a thing that needs to happen.

Marshall: I mean, I’ve always trusted you to follow your instincts. So I’m not ruling it out. I just think we need to do a little more research on him.

Roger: Let’s just, before killing him, we need to find out if he’s a memetic time bomb that goes off if we kill him.

Marshall: Yes! Yes, exactly. Yes! That’s the new way of thinking! That’s exactly right. I’m not trying to dictate what people are doing. It could be that we get Mitch to the airport with a rifle and just get eyes on him —

Mitch: I don’t need a rifle.

Marshall: Oh, right. Right.

The team discusses Geller a bit more, including the potential that he may be perceived as a martyr — or even just have his legend and mystery increased — by an obvious assassination. Even if he dies “accidentally,” certain people may read conspiracies into that. Jocasta opines that the safest course of action would seem to be to discredit or humiliate him and then, if need be, kill him and make it look like a suicide. After that, the meeting adjourns. Marshall, Roger, Jocasta, and Mitch meet separately go over Geller’s travel plans and itinerary for the next day. Archie reaches out to various local TV stations to obtain copies of any tapes they have featuring Geller. Those arrive over the course of the afternoon; by early evening, he and Charley have a stack to sort through. Father and daughter watch these tapes late into the night — another phone call to Melanie apologizing for another missed dinner — and reach a few conclusions.

Archie is able to discern fairly quickly that Uri is a highly skilled magician. His abilities at sleight-of-hand are phenomenal but are, ultimately, just tricks. Archie is able to suss out about 70 or 80 percent of what he’s doing. He’s seen it a million times before during his long tenure in the entertainment industry. The other thing he notices is that Geller never goes “full weird” in public. It’s only when one reads the more obscure occult periodicals that one learns that he’s hanging out with people like Andrija Puharich, a true fringe thinker who’s into UFOs and channeling and whatnot. Geller seems to believe all of that stuff: when the periodicals ask him about such things, he’s all-in. But when he’s in a TV studio, presenting himself to a mainstream audience, he’s very much of the mentalist magician archetype. He will talk about his abilities when asked, but he’s discreet. It’s only when he’s in like-minded company that he gets really strange. Archie also concludes that Geller possesses a degree of natural NLP ability, including the ability to sort of “cloud men’s minds.” Near the end of their viewing session, Archie asks Charley what she makes of the man. “I like him! He reminds me of Houdini.”

Archie turns over what sort of memetics Geller may be engaging in. After calling Marshall at the Mission to consult with him about NLP, Archie concludes that Geller is attempting to inspire people to think that they can affect their physical environment with their minds. In this regard he is sort of presenting a powerfully symbolic memetic analogue to Houdini — Houdini, the great escapist, breaking free of straight jackets and iron chains, showing that the material world cannot control him; Geller, the handsome psychic, showing people that they can change the material world to suit their will. This also resonates, Archie realizes, with Harman’s essential teachings about human potential: everybody has the power to do something amazing. They just need to learn how to do it.