Roger Reports
Roger returns to Livermore after rendezvousing with Mitch, who went off on a restorative hike following his stressful day at SRI and drinks with Pat Price. He debriefs Archie and Jocasta (and Marshall by speaker phone, though he says nothing), on what Mitch told him:
Alright man, so I'm gonna try and debrief ya’ll. I took notes the best I could but this is Mitch we're talking about, right? So he went in, he was there, the primaries were, uh, Targ, Puthoff, Price, and Swann. This is sort of his first exposure to Swann and he gave me some bits where he said he was, you know, “a little arty,” whatever that means, but a lot psychic, whatever that means. He revealed and gave a cover that he is a night watchman at Livermore. There were connections made. It looks like Puthoff and Price did meet in the Church of Scientology, and Swann as well, so whatever that means, they really are mixed in with that. And, uh, he said something about techniques they learned, so I don’t know, that’s another avenue.
Mitch then pulled out the cards and started shuffling them and when he did, uh, Price had a massive reaction, like he had an instantaneous connection and it looks like it ties back to what, you know, the Blessed Mary Virgin Jo did. It really cemented and connected and made a, uh … well, he said, “Price got cool.” I don’t know. He did a trick. He basically tried to pull a card out to try and show them he could at least make a demonstration of a power. It didn’t come up right, but the Tower showed up, and Mitch was really sort of bummed about that. The lights flickered, so there was a real physical reaction to either a card coming up or maybe it was a reaction from Price. Nobody knows. But the key part is that, at this point, Mitch went looking and he spotted the Enemy — like the History B energy was there. So whatever it was that was creeping around the building, it was focused and it was in a fluorescent light. So, whatever that means.
Uh, OK. So then he went into things about how un-groovy this was. He did use the word “irruptor.” He said a potential irruptor is there, in that building, with the SCANATE people or whatever. And then, another spot on the campus, their potential energies were grooving, were vibing, and that means that they could be arriving. “Incipient,” is a think the word you guys use. So, Mitch had a little bit of a reaction. He broke the light with his brain. And that gave Price sort of a clue and he pulled Mitch and they went out. And they went drinking. And apparently they made buddy-buddy. Which is surprising. Uh, even Mitch was sort of, kind of won over from the the dude as a cop, but maybe he's not so bad of cop? And maybe he walked away from being a cop. It looks like Jo did a whammy on him and he really changed.
I think the thing I picked up from here, in him talking, was there was something about — since that action in ‘61 — Price has had these hunches and they’re always right. So he may have gotten a power from this or something, from that connection. Or it may be that like this tangled up time stuff is causing him a kerfuffle. I don’t know. He and Price then tried to talk out a bunch of stuff, I didn’t really get a lot of what he was saying. But he’s trying to pinpoint who, like, the actor is here. He did a card reading, and there’s like this other CIA agent. Green, I think his name was. Or that was the color of the card. I … I can’t tell. But assuming he’s Mr. Green … that he or Uri or one or two of these other people — Mitch threw names at me really rapidly — um, could be we need to sort of look into them. They are gonna do something where they’re gonna take the secrets that are being learned here, the psi power stuff, and take it back to some hidden master.
From this account, Archie starts putting a few things together.
There’s one type of irruptor with electrical powers and that’s the ugallu. These monsters are not known to exist in electrical form — they’re generally seen as giant lion-headed dudes — but they are also the beings most associated with electricity. Based on SANDMAN’s intel, the ugallu functioned sort of like the Red Kings’ battlefield tacticians because their original powers were that they were weather gods: they could call down rain or lighting, conjure weather to change the conditions of combat. In the context of 1973, then, it would make sense that such a creature would manifest in sort of network of electricity and tele-communications that surrounds us all.
URIEL got sucked into the SCANATE program, Pat Price got sucked into SRI due to his psychic powers, the La Cienega Strangler drawing occult symbols on the walls … all this suggests that something is luring URIEL into this investigation. Whether that justifies Marshall’s paranoia about Sophie remains to be seen, but it does suggest that there’s some other force at work beyond mere coincidence.
Archie and Roger discuss what all this means as Jocasta sits there, slightly agog that her communion with Price seems to have … worked? She ponders the implications of what this means, and whether she can do it again. In a general occult sense, doors open on one end and also open on another end. A door’s a door. But she’s dubious that she, alone, vested Price with any powers he did not already possess. She thinks that it’s partly both of them. Archie notes that, regardless of how, exactly, Jo’s vision-interaction with Price worked, she should keep a distance from him from going forward. Who knows how he’d react if he met the object of his vision in 1973? Jocasta pipes up and says she agrees.
I agree, for both our safeties, I should probably never meet that guy unless it's the last thing either one of us does. But I want everyone to understand that the reason — since we were operating a little bit in the dark here — and we didn’t really have any perception of whether this guy was antagonistic towards us. Whether he was on the side of the Enemy or a neutral player. It was certainly … forgive the pun, a Hail Mary on my part. This was an attempt to at least get him to trust one of us. If it worked, and it seems like it did, it at least got him to put his guard down around us.
Archie agrees this was good tradecraft on Jocasta’s part, but perhaps messy in terms of causality. Could Jocasta do this again (or, have done this) in the future? Told Price five years prior to her visitation that he must keep an eye out for the Angel URIEL, for instance? Jocasta reminds everyone that she kept Price’s badge for precisely this reason, so that she can reach him again if need be. Roger says this is all starting to sound a little bit like the machinations of the Enemy.