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Picture Man

Introduction

Back in the '60s I was a research ecologist for the U.S. Forest Service, stationed at CSU, Colorado State University. Sixty miles south, the Department of Psychiatry, in the University of Colorado's School of Medicine, had an engrossing research project in progress: an investigation of a psychic photographer. A man strange and interesting enough that U of C was inviting scientists of other agencies and specialties to take part in the studies. These outside scientists included a physiologist friend of mine, who brought U of C's Professor Eisenbud to give a slide lecture to a full auditorium at CSU.

Eisenbud's show blew my mind, and inspired this story.

I wrote it with The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction in mind, but my agent sent it to Omni, which rejected it. Ditto Analog, ditto Asimov's. Finally it did go to F&SF, which published it. And to cap it off, after being rejected by three magazines, it made two of the three SF "best of the year" collections for 1985, so I got paid for it three times.

Which illustrates that, among other things, editors have their own tastes, and magazines their own personalities. And also that persistence sometimes pays.

A final comment: the story's scumball Professor Boeltz in no way resembles his real-world counterpart, Professor Jule Eisenbud, a good guy.

* * *

I put down my copy of Ecological Review and walked over to the TV. I generally liked to catch the ten o'clock news. The picture popped out to fill the screen; the last moment of the opening commercials was just flashing off.

I sat back down to watch, all by myself in my three-bedroom, one-and-a-half bath, near-campus, 1950-model house. It got a little lonely at times since Eydie had "dear John'ed" me with Barney Foster, but it was certainly quieter and less irritating. For example, the house wasn't dominated night after night by game shows, situation "comedies" and TV dramas.

I'd learned the hard way that marrying the best-looking girl in the class and living happily ever after weren't necessarily the same thing.

Several female faculty and staff members had demonstrated an interest in filling the presumptive hole in my life, and there had been some interesting evenings. Maggie Lanning in particular combined looks and physical interest with remarkable level-headedness in every area we'd talked about. Plus, she was willing to hike in the rain, played a great forward in couples basketball (she was an assistant professor in phys. ed.) and even had a collection of old John Campbell editorials cut from years of Astoundings and Analogs.

Not that she was old. She was thirty-three—two years younger than I.

But marriage? We could already talk and romp at our mutual convenience, and she had one major drawback: ten-year-old Lanny. Lanny was a good kid, we got along fine, and he kept hinting I'd make a good dad and Maggie would make a good wife. But he was going to be a teenager in less than three years.

And I was still enjoying my new independence. I should, I decided, write a thank-you note to Barney, now that the divorce was final. I wouldn't, though. It would be a cheap shot, and I wouldn't feel good about it afterward.

The weatherman joggled me out of my reverie with mention of a sunspot storm. So when the basketball and hockey scores were over, I put on a jacket and went to the door. Sunspots might mean an aurora display, and watching northern lights was one of my favorite spectator activities.

If I'd turned on the porch light before I went out, I might not have seen what I did. A stocky square-looking man was digging in my plastic trash can that sat by the curb waiting for morning pickup. Two steps, and he could have been out of sight behind Chuck Ciccone's privet hedge. He'd dug in to the armpit, setting some contents on the sidewalk for better access, straightened for a moment, then tidily put everything back in the can and replaced the lid, clamping it down. There hadn't been anything edible or valuable in the can.

"Hey!" I said. Slowly he looked toward me, then lowered his face and started to walk off.

"Just a minute!" I called. "Come on in. Do me a favor; help me eat some leftovers."

The dim face looked at me again for a few seconds, then he walked toward the house, hands stuffed in the pocket of his denim work jacket. For a moment I had a feeling of strangeness as, hunched against the cold and night, he approached. Not a feeling of threat. Just strangeness.

The square, high-cheekboned face, grimy and stubbled, was lined with the track record of late middle age. He looked like someone who'd ridden into town on a freight train, probably headed south. I held the door for him—it was that or wash the knob—and headed him for the bathroom.

"Why don't you shower down while I cook?" I said, then pointed out the guest towel and washcloth and left him there.

Being fresh out of leftovers, I put eggs and wienies on to boil, set a can of beans over a low flame, and put the teakettle on for hot chocolate. When everything was under way, I resurrected an old pair of jeans and a baggy sweatshirt and put them on the bathroom rug. The place was full of steam, like a turkish bath; he must have a remarkable tolerance for hot water, I thought. I announced to the shower that I was going to run his clothes through the washer and dryer, that I was leaving some of mine he could wear, and, getting a faint acknowledgment, went and started the wash cycle. I even threw his black stocking cap in; I'd have to remember not to put it in the dryer.

What in the hell, I asked myself, are you doing? This guy could be a psycho. He could murder and rob you. But there'd been nothing deadlier than a small jackknife in his pockets.

On an impulse, and feeling uncomfortable about it, I checked his wallet. It had no money. A merchant mariner's certificate identified him as Jaakko Savimaki, of Calumet. Michigan. Fireman, oiler, water tender. Dated 1951—thirty two years back. The square face in the picture was a youthful version of my man's, the hair blonde and crewcut. His driver's license address was Ironwood, Michigan; I'd heard about the mines up there being shut down.

Opening the bathroom door, I peered into the clouded interior. "You'll find a razor and shaving cream in the medicine cabinet," I said, and turned on the exhaust fan so he could find the mirror.

When he came out, he looked a lot better, although on him, my jeans were a couple of inches too long and a couple too tight. He'd made do by folding cuffs into them, leaving the waistband open, and keeping them up with the elastic belt.

"My name's Terry," I said, "Terry O'Brien."

"Mine is Jake," he answered, "Jake Hill."

Even in those few words, I detected an accent.

"Mr. Hill, I took the liberty of looking in your billfold for identification. It said your name is Savimaki."

He didn't blush or look angry or embarrassed. The strange, soft blue eyes just gazed at me as if examining the inside of my head.

"Savimaki is a kind of hill in Finnish," he said. "Away from home, it's easier to just tell people 'Hill.' "

I nodded. "Got it," I said. "All right, Mr. Savimaki, supper is on the counter."

As hungry as he must have been, he didn't bolt his food. When he'd finished, he thanked me and took his dishes to the sink before I realized what he was doing. Then he turned to me, and again his eyes were direct. I got the feeling that he saw more than other people did. "How do I pay you back?" he asked.

"Forget it. It's on me."

He didn't shake his head—simply said, "It's not all right for me to take something for nothing."

Well, I thought, that's a refreshing viewpoint. I wasn't sure I totally agreed with it, in a country where the system was so screwed up that some people found themselves backed up against the wall. But if everyone had his attitude, things would be a lot better.

"O.K.," I said, "what do you do?"

The pale eyes shifted to the fireplace. "You got any wood to split?"

"No. Sorry. I buy it already split."

"Any carpentry you need done? Windows fixed? Locks repaired?"

I looked at the possibilities. "You hit me at a bad time. I've got nothing like that. Why don't we defer payment? There'll be snow to shovel a little later in the fall."

His eyes withdrew for a moment; he didn't plan to be around Douglas long. "Tell you what," I suggested, "why don't you pass it on? Help someone else out when you have a chance."

He nodded slowly. "O.K.," he said. "I guess that's O.K." Then he turned to the sink and began to run water for the dishes while I transferred his clothes to the dryer, remembering to hold out his stocking cap. He seemed to think slowly, but he washed dishes fast. They were clean, rinsed, and in the drainer in about two minutes.

When he was done, he followed me into the living room and stood uncomfortably. I could see he still wasn't happy about not exchanging anything for the bath, meal, and laundry. Then he noticed the pictures on my wall, mostly wildland photos. When Eydie had taken her prints from the house, I'd mounted some scenic photographs on mat and hung them to handle the bareness. He walked over and looked at them.

"You got a camera?" he asked.

"Three of them. A 35-mm Pentax for slides, an old Rollei 4 X 5, and a Polaroid 680."

"A Polaroid." He considered that for a moment. "How would you like if I gave you some interesting pictures?"

"What do you mean?"

"Let me show you. Get the Polaroid."

Feeling mystified, I got it reluctantly. When I came back to the living room, he was sitting in a chair.

"Is it loaded?" he asked.

"Always," I said.

"Then aim it at my face." He closed his eyes tightly, his brow clenched with concentration. "When I say 'now,' shoot it."

Feeling foolish, I raised the camera.

"Now," he said. I touched the shutter release, lowered the camera, and waited. He was on his feet beside me when I removed the print. It wasn't a picture of Savimaki. It was a house, somewhat blurred, an old frame, two-story house with a steep roof, no front porch, and an upstairs door that opened out onto thin air. A ladder was built on the wall up to the strangely placed door.

"Let's do another one," he said. "That one ain't very good. I can get something more—interesting than that."

"Wait a minute," I said. "How come it isn't a picture of you?"

Actually, I thought I knew why. Years before I'd read a book about the detailed, if somewhat ambiguous, studies done on Nick Kopac, the psychic photographer. This looked like the same kind of thing.

"I don't know," he said. "It's just something I can do."

"Strange-looking house. Where is it?"

"In Calumet, Michigan. It's the house I grew up in. It looks like that because they get so much snow there. Some winters you get in and out through the upstairs door."

"My god! And didn't you know that's what the picture was going to be of?"

"No. I haven't learned how to know yet." He sat down again. "Usually I get something I never even seen before. But it's always a house or a ship. So far. Actually, I only ever did this about ten or twelve times before. I found out about it last winter, by accident, when a guy tried to take a picture of me and I didn't know it. I was reading a magazine and all he got was a picture of a lighthouse.

"Are you ready now?" he asked.

I nodded. "Yep."

He closed his eyes, I aimed, he said "now" again, and I shot. Together we looked at the print. This one was sharper, hardly blurred at all, showing a square house that looked stuccoed. It reminded me of pictures I'd seen of French farmhouses, but in the background was a broadly naked landscape with what looked like a high, cliff-faced plateau behind it. As an ecologist with a strong interest in biogeography, I was willing to bet it was an Afrikaner farmstead in South Africa, and told him so.

He shrugged. "Could be."

We took a couple more then called it quits, and I showed him the guest bedroom. But my mind was racing. I didn't have a class the next day until two in the afternoon, and I could always cancel my morning office hours, although I didn't like to. I thought I knew where I could get Jake a job. After he sacked down, I went to the phone and called Herb Boeltz.

I didn't actually know Boeltz very well, although as well as I wanted to. We were both in the faculty jogging club. He was a faculty politician, if you know what I mean, reputedly handy with a knife to the back, a full professor in psychology at thirty-two, and a man who always seemed to have access to grant money. And he was said to be interested in parapsychology.

It was 11:15, and apparently I had wakened him; he didn't sound terribly friendly. So as soon as I'd identified myself, I put it to him this way.

"I think I've got something that can get you a lot ofgood publicity. Remember the studies on psychic photography at the University of Nebraska? . . . That's right, Nick Kopac.

"Well, I've got a guy staying here at my house that does the same sort of thing. I took four shots with my Polaroid; got two houses, a church, and what looks like a commercial fishing boat . . .

"No, I just met him today. Seems like a good enough guy. Kind of quiet. He needs a job and I knew, or at least I heard, that you had some grant money that might be available. It looks like a good opportunity for research with some media appeal, if it's handled right."

When I hung up, we had an appointment for eleven the next morning.

* * *

At 11:07 we walked into the Education Building, which also houses the pysch department. I prefer to be on time, but Herron's Men's Wear doesn't open until ten, and we needed some presentable but inexpensive clothes for Jake—slacks, a shirt, shoes, sweater, jacket . . . Actually, on my salary there isn't such a thing as inexpensive clothes. Some just cost less.

The meeting wasn't long. Boeltz admitted to eight hundred dollars in an account for exploratory research, which these days suggests he had something on someone. It wasn't enough to put Jake on the payroll. He agreed to pay him a ten-dollar allowance for "cigarettes and socks," as he put it. Jake was to stay with me, and Boeltz would pay me thirty dollars a week toward his room and board for any week in which Jake's services were used, plus ten dollars for each additional session, which we could split as we saw fit.

I was also to transport Jake to and from local sessions, as the studies would be done at Boeltz's home on the other side of town. Starting that evening at 7:30.

Boeltz had a bad reputation, so I wrote it all down and the three of us signed it, and afterward I got it photocopied. I was surprised that my wanting it in writing didn't annoy Boeltz, but he was genial and cheerful throughout. I told myself he ought to be. He was getting a very promising research project, journal articles, personal publicity, and speaking engagements—all at damned little expense. And none of the expense was his personally.

I, on the other hand, would be an unpaid cook and chauffeur. But it did promise to be damned interesting. We hurried home, I grabbed a quick snack, and left Jake there while I rushed off to handle the Thursday afternoon lab in Plant Science 101. It occurred to me that it wasn't ideal, leaving a stranger alone in my home while I went off to work, but somehow I didn't feel concerned.

I took time to phone Maggie that afternoon; I needed someone to tell all this to, and she was the closest thing I had to a confidante. She said she'd be at my place about 5:30 to meet Jake and fix us supper; she sounded almost too cheerful to be real. Then I phoned home. Jake sounded sober and had started reading Churchill's memoirs. I told him Maggie would be coming by to fix supper and might get there before I did.

She drove up just as I was opening the garage door, and we went in together. To find supper on the table! Jake had hunted through refrigerator and cupboard and had fixed pork chops, rice, sweet potatoes, and cornbread. He'd walked to the store and bought the cornmeal out of a five I'd loaned him. When I came out of shock, I introduced him to Maggie.

"Hyvää iltaa, Mr. Savimaki," she said grinning. I stared at her.

"Hyvää iltaa, Mrs. Lanning," he said back. "Mitä Kuuluu?"

She laughed. "I just used up all the Finnish I remember. When Terry told me your name, I thought, 'Hey! That sounds like home!' I'm from Duluth."

"So that's where you learned to say Hyvää iltaa."

"Right. My mom is Finnish-American, but my dad wasn't, so I didn't learn much at home. I learned more from the neighbors." She turned to me. "What a treat this is going to be." She gestured at the table. "If I'd fixed it, we'd be having hot dogs and beans."

I knew better than that. After supper, when Jake insisted on washing the dishes, I decided this arrangement was going to be a lot better than I'd thought. And after I took Jake to Boeltz's, I could hurry back to spend an hour or two alone with Maggie.

But that wasn't the way it worked, because Maggie wanted to go along and stay to watch.

That was fine with Boeltz; he liked to play to an audience. He had his own Polaroid, new that day, and took quite a few exposures. The first couple were "whities"—no picture. Not even of Jake. They looked as if they'd been shot into a floodlamp, which was remarkable enough in itself. The third was a blackie—it was as if it hadn't been exposed at all. But Boeltz and I were prepared for that; according to the literature, Kopac used to get whities and blackies a lot.

Boeltz looked at Jake, then, with this knowing smile, went over to a cabinet and poured a whole glass of bourbon. "Would you like a drink, Jake?" he asked. But how it came across was, Okay, you cunning boy, I know why you're holding out on me. It irritated me—I felt insulted for Jake—but whether the whiskey had anything to do with it or not. the next picture was of the Taj Mahal, sharp and clear. Then Jake threw down the whiskey like ginger ale.

The next was of a Hilton hotel somewhere. Without saying anything, Boeltz nudged me and pointed at a part of the picture. On the sign, the name Hilton was spelled wrong!

"Jacob," said Boeltz, "how do you spell the name 'Hilton'?"

Jake's quiet eyes fixed on Boeltz. "H-I-L-T-E-N," he answered.

What in the hell, I thought to myself, does this mean?

By the time we left, at 8:30, Boeltz had poured a second glass of whiskey down Jake and had half a dozen pretty fair shots—four of them buildings, one a pyramid buried in tropical jungle, and one of a three-masted schooner in a storm.

Jake didn't even seem a little tight when we walked out, although he wasn't saying much. I decided he must have a thing for booze—in his generation that was apparently why most drifters became drifters, although it might have been the other way around. And Boeltz was using it as a way to keep Jake around and performing.

That's how it looked.

When we got home, I asked Jake how the evening had been for him. His answer was concise and unambiguous: "I don't like Professor Boeltz," he said. He also said he was tired, and went to get ready for bed. Maggie and I watched television until he retired, then moved together on the sofa.

* * *

There were three more sessions scattered over the next ten days, semi-public in that Boeltz invited several faculty members and Bea Lundeen to them. Bea was the owner/editor of the local paper, the Douglas Clarion. As chauffeur, I was welcome to sit in, too. It was interesting as hell, although Boeltz didn't try anything that hadn't been tried fifteen years earlier with Nick Kopac.

Under his direction, Jake found he could do things he hadn't tried before. To start with, all he got were seemingly random shots of buildings and ships, pretty much like Kopac had gotten—almost nothing but buildings and statues. But Jake had a lot better batting average—he got a picture about two times out of three, and most of them pretty clear.

Frankly, I was surprised he did that well, because Boeltz was really unpleasant to work for. He continued to use booze in a very obvious way as a carrot on a stick. But I noticed that Jake never asked for it; he didn't even say yes when Boeltz asked if he wanted some. He just accepted it when Boeltz handed it to him.

He certainly knew what to do with it then, though.

Another thing Boeltz did was to talk to Jake as if he were some kind of retard. "Now Jacob, I'm going to ask you to make us a picture of a cathedral. Can you do this for us? Let's try. Do you know what a cathedral is? Good. Very, very good." And, "Oh, that's good, Jacob. You're doing very, very well tonight."

Maybe that's why Jake kept accepting the whiskey. Not really, though, because I'd swear I saw a sort of amusement in those pale eyes. Maybe he enjoyed seeing Boeltz unwittingly irritate everyone around him and in general make an ass of himself.

The article Bea wrote for the Clarion was all about Jake; Boeltz was mentioned only once.

Then there was a lapse of a few days before the fifth session, which was a big one, a Saturday night affair. We'd been written up far beyond the Clarion by then, and interest was spreading. More people had been invited than there was room for at Boeltz's, and it was held in the home of Professor Tony Fournais, chairman of the physics department. Fournais was wealthy, had a big house outside town, was cautiously interested in the project—and made for good positioning: physics had a lot more status than psychology.

Everyone who'd been invited was there. And relatively on time: no one was more than twenty minutes late, even though the streets were snow-packed and slippery and the temperature was about ten degrees. Professor Alfred Kingsley Kenmore had flown in from Virginia—the Kenmore of "Herz-Kenmore-Laubman Clairvoyance Studies" fame. And Marty Martin, the award-winning science writer from the Trib.

Maggie went with us.

It started out like a circus, or at least a drawing room comedy. Fournais announced that his assistant was going to film the whole procedure, and had a 16-mm movie camera at one side of the room, on a high tripod, to shoot down at Jake over people's heads. The film would later be examined in slow motion for any sign of hokey-pokey. Then Martin announced that he was going to match every shot of Boeltz's with his own camera and film, to provide a second, independent print. Finally, when Boeltz was ready to begin, Kenmore, who was a psychiatrist and therefore an M.D., had Jake lie down, and examined his eyes, pulling out the upper and lower lids, peering under them with a little light. I haven't the slightest what he was looking for.

Then we got started. Boeltz was on his good behavior for a change: he didn't put Jake down, and no booze was in evidence, confirming that his previous bullshit was deliberate.

He warmed Jake up by letting him do whatever he came up with. He started with an oblique aerial view of a beautiful landscaped home, with city spread out in the midground against a backdrop of mountains. Not Denver, I decided. Maybe Calgary. The next looked like Hong Kong. The third was a double row of tar-papered shacks with deep snow piled all around and forest close behind. A guy wearing what looked like a leather apron was caught in midstride between two of them. When it was shown to Jake, he identified it as the Axelson-Peltonnen logging camp in Baraga County, Michigan about 1948. He'd worked there. The guy in the apron, he said was Ole Hovde, the blacksmith. I could tell that Jake was really pleased with that one, and I got a notion that just maybe he'd gotten it deliberately.

Boeltz didn't take any of the pictures himself. Each of them was taken by a different person standing directly in front of Jake and about six feet away. The camera had been bought new by Fournais. The film packs were taken from their sealed wrappers right there in front of us.

Each shot was passed around before the next was taken. Then it was laid on a table available for further examination.

Martin was off to one side with his camera, and didn't pass his shots around. But after the third, he arranged them on the table with Boeltz's, making matched pairs.

Boeltz beamed. "Ladies and gentlemen," he announced, "we have something very interesting here: Mr. Martin's photographs. Come and see!"

I was already there. In each instance, Martin's picture was of the same scene, but as if seen from an angle of about ninety degrees to the right, higher, and farther away.

Everyone crowded around talking, except Fournais's assistant, who stayed by his camera. A couple of them shook Jake's hand as he came over to look. The way the pictures matched up, it was as if the actual scene, the physical scene of each pair, had occupied the location of Jake's chair, in three dimensions. And it was something that hadn't come up in the work with Nick Kopac.

Boeltz was ready now to attempt something he'd tried with equivocal results the two sessions just previous. He had Bea Lundeen and me go into Fournais's library to find a picture of a building or ship—any building or ship—in the encyclopedia. Maggie went with us. Bea pulled out volume 14—KI to LE—and turned to "Kremlin." And there was the great Russian fortress looming above Red Square, the towers of its buildings showing above the massive wall. I nodded, we all looked at it, concentrating, and Bea called out, "O.K., we got one!"

Nothing more happened for about half a minute, and I got pretty fidgety, but we all kept looking at the picture. Then someone called, "Come on out. It's done."

We did. Bea took the encyclopedia to the table and laid it down open, weighting it with an ashtray. Boeltz removed his print, marked it with black grease pencil, and laid it down next to the book.

What was there made my scalp crawl. Jake had given us the Kremlin, all right, but not at all like the picture in the book. There was no broad paved parade ground. Instead, small log buildings were backed up against the fortress wall. The ground was mud, with logs laid in it as a sort of rude and partial paving. There were rows of market booths, and hundreds of people stood or walked around, some mostly naked, a few wearing long coats.

It was a photograph of the Kremlin centuries ago! A photograph of life, not of a painting!

There were some brief, quiet comments, but actually not much was said as people crowded up to look. Everyone seemed to realize the basic significance of it: Jake Savimaki could give pictures from the past, from before photography. This was not a picture of a photograph or thing he'd seen. We were in the presence of something much further beyond the limits of known science than we'd realized—a whole dimension further.

Martin crowded his way to the table and looked without comment, then silently laid his own print beside the other. Again it showed the same scene from maybe twice as far away. And here the apparent elevation was conspicuous. Boeltz's shot might have been taken from forty or fifty feet above the ground. Martin's was an oblique aerial shot, as if from a low-flying airplane. Except, of course, it wasn't.

Jake had come quietly over, and now he took a look. His eyes didn't change. People looked at him and he didn't seem to notice. It was as if he'd just dropped in and wanted to see what was going on.

My eyes found Boeltz; he was murmuring something quietly to Fournais. Fournais then called a break. In a minute or so their cook appeared with hors d'oeuvres, and the lid was removed from the punch bowl. Something for people to handle without getting tight. Almost everyone soon had a glass in their hand except Jake. He stood apart, watching the effects he'd caused, and caught my glance with a smile and a nod.

Fournais and Boeltz talked quietly in a corner, then Martin joined them, and Kenmore. I started over to join them too, but some out-of-towner stopped me and asked if I hadn't come in with Mr. Savimaki. By the time I was free, the four of them had left the room.

I felt a hand on my arm, and it was Maggie. "What does he do for an encore?" she asked.

"God knows," I said; or the Devil, I added silently. But that was unfair; if anyone around here had a devil, it was Boeltz, not Jake. Jake was as clean as anyone; we went over to him.

" Kuinka se menee, Mr. Savimaki?" Maggie asked him.

He grinned. "Pretty good, tyttö. How about you?"

"I'm impressed," she said. "Do you know how you did that?"

"Not exactly," he told her. "I just kind of—open myself up. I still don't know what a picture's going to be, but this time I decided I wanted something that would startle people."

"You want to do any more tonight?" I asked him, "or are you tired? We can go home if you'd like."

"No, I feel real good. This gets easier every session. I'd like to see what else I can do. Those last pictures look like something from the past; maybe I can get something from the future next."

I felt my gut give a little twist.

"You know what?" he went on. "I never felt this good before. In my whole life, and most of it ain't been bad." He put his full attention on me then, and called me by my first name for the first time. "Terry, I never thanked you for calling me in that night. I'd hit bottom, and you pulled me back up. I want you to know I appreciate it." He held out a hand big enough for an NFL tackle, and we shook. Then he turned to Maggie with a big grin, and she grinned back, and they shook, too.

We were interrupted; Boeltz, Fournais, Martin, and Kenmore had come back in, Boeltz practically rubbing his hands in anticipation. "Excuse me everyone, if you please," he called and conversations stopped. "We'd like to continue now."

People quieted down and shuffled themselves into a loose circle. "Do you need to warm up with something easy, Mr. Savimaki?" Boeltz asked. Courtesy yet! It was the first time he'd called him "Mr. Savimaki." But his eager eyes were like ice picks.

Jake shook his head and said he was ready. Fournais had his wife take over Martin's camera, and he, Boeltz, and Martin left for the library. Kenmore picked up Boeltz's camera and positioned himself in front of a slightly smiling Jake.

It was a couple of minutes before we heard a voice call, "All right, we've got one."

Jake closed his eyes. No longer was there any effortful concentration, no tightly shut lids. He looked relaxed and confident. "Now," he said. Kenmore clicked his shutter and so did Liz Fournais, and someone went to get the three from the library. Martin came in with a large book and laid it open on the table. I looked at it while Liz and Kenmore brought their prints over.

It wasn't an encyclopedia, but a book entitled Weapons in the Sky: Military Applications of Space Technology. The chapter it was open to was "Soviet Programs." There wasn't even a picture on the page.

Jake had outsmarted them, though. I didn't realize it at the time, but he had. Kenmore laid down his photo, and it was not of some satellite or anything like that. Instead, I saw a car, unidentifiable to me in the darkness, lying on its top in the snow. Liz's photo was the same, from another angle. In hers, I could see a body pinned underneath.

That was the end of the performance. While people donned coats and caps, I took Boeltz aside and collected. He didn't even look irritated with me—"not there" would describe him—then pulled on his gloves and left.

On the way home, nobody talked for the first mile. "Whose car do you suppose that was?" I said at last.

"I don't know," Jake answered. "I just know I didn't want to show them what they wanted, so I just decided to do a picture from the future. And that's what I got."

No one followed up on that until we got home. When we'd hung up our coats and sat down, Maggie decided she needed to know. "Jake," she asked, "could you have shown them? . . . What they wanted?"

His eyes were sober. "Get your camera," he told me.

The first picture was of an orbiting space station, like nothing yet built, I'm sure. It was hard to judge size and distance, with nothing familiar as a reference, but it might have been a hundred feet in diameter, bright against black space, from a viewpoint of maybe a hundred yards away. A red hammer and sickle vivid on its side.

"Holy God!" I said. A whole panorama of potential events began to shape up for me: the CIA moving in, Jake held in some secluded place doing God-knows-what kind of spying for them—and Boeltz, of course, handling Jake. Boeltz would love it; how important he'd feel!

"Take another one," Jake said. "I can see this one, too."

So he was seeing them in advance now. I aimed, he said "now," and I shot. It showed Jake strapped down on something like an operating table. He didn't even take the trouble to look at the photo. Maggie's hand found mine.

"You see why I did it," he said, and we both nodded.

* * *

The first thing I saw in the Clarion the next morning, right on the front page, was a picture of an overturned car. I'd seen one like it the night before. It was Bea Lundeen's. Kenmore and Martin had been with her, and Kenmore was dead.

There was nothing in either the Clarion or the Trib about the session, that day or any other. It was as if they were afraid of it, pushing it out of sight, out of mind, unable to confront what was there.

We didn't hear anything from Boeltz, either, on Sunday. Or on Monday, or for most of the week. Meanwhile, Jake got a job cooking at the Douglas Hotel. He also arranged to move into a room there, but for some reason I talked him out of it.

On Monday evening Maggie came by with her mother. Anna Lahti, who'd driven down from Minnesota to stay a week. She was a good-looking woman about fifty or fifty-five, and she and Jake hit it off right away, talking Finnish. She turned to us and laughed—said she knew he was from Savo as soon as he opened his mouth because he rolled his r's. As if she didn't; when they talked Finnish, it sounded like two chain saws.

It was Friday when Boeltz phoned. He wanted Jake again in half an hour—said I wouldn't need to bring him, that he'd come by and pick him up. I told him he'd have to talk to Jake, and put my hand over the mouthpiece, remembering the picture of Jake strapped down.

"It's Boeltz," I said. "He wants to come and get you in half an hour, for another session. He obviously doesn't want me to be there. I don't trust him; tell him to go to hell."

He smiled and took the phone. "Hello Dr. Boeltz," he said. "I'm busy tonight, but if you want to make that for tomorrow evening at eight, that will be fine . . . At eight, then. I'll be ready." He hung up.

"Jake!" I said, and he grinned. His eyes weren't soft anymore. They looked darker, and bright.

"It's O.K.," he said. "And what you're worried about, it's not going to happen."

"Something's fishy with him," I insisted. "He's hiding something, or I'm not Irish."

He nodded. "It's nothing to worry about, though."

"Do you know that?" I asked. "Do you know what he has in mind?"

"I don't know what he has in mind, but it's not dangerous. Not to me." He grinned again then. "And you told me you're only half-Irish. The other half is Dutch."

"And you're half-Swede," I said, trying to insult him. He just laughed; maybe I should have said Russian. Then Anna Lahti drove up. They had a date for supper and an evening at the ice rink.

I watched them drive away; it looked like a romance in the bud. I hoped nothing bad would happen the next evening.

* * *

The next night Boeltz was there five minutes early. After he and Jake drove away, I put on my jacket and cap, got in my car, and headed after them for Boeltz's place.

I parked half a block away, then chickened out. I couldn't think of any excuse for going up and pounding on his door, and I didn't want to get arrested for window peeking. So I got the Black Hawks pregame show on the radio and waited. At two minutes into the first period, Marcel Dionne scored on a breakaway. A couple of minutes later, Jake walked out of Boeltz's and started down the sidewalk. I rolled down the window as he approached.

"Want a ride?"

He grinned and got in.

"Care to tell me what happened?"

"Nothing much," he said. "We talked a little bit. But you don't have to worry about my going back."

"Yeah?" I said encouragingly.

"Yeah," he answered cheerfully.

I started the car and pulled away from the curb. "Yeah what?" I demanded.

He laughed. "He wanted me to make a picture showing someone dead. His father. He said the old man is dying slowly of an incurable cancer, in terrible pain, and that he'd be grateful to die. He thought if I made a picture of it, it would happen.

"I asked him what his father did for a living, and he said he'd been a banker. You can see what he's after."

"So you told him to go to hell."

"No, I told him I'd see what I could do."

I almost drove up over the curb. "You what?"

"Then I gave him a picture of his father as he was at that moment. Playing golf." Jake laughed again. "There were palm trees in the background. Hawaii, I suppose; it's still daylight there."

"What did he say to that?"

"He got all excited, said I'd made a mistake and got something from a year or two ago."

It was six minutes into the first period. Esposito stopped a Mark Hardy slapshot and fell on Dave Taylor's rebound. Charley Simmer fell on top of Esposito. Hutchinson shoved Simmer.

"Are you sure it wasn't the past?" I asked.

"Positive."

"Then what happened?"

"I told him I'd try once more." He wasn't smiling now. "Maybe I went a little bit too far then."

"What do you mean?"

"Pull over and I'll show you."

He opened his jacket while I pulled off on the shoulder, tires crunching on frozen slush, and handed me a Polaroid color print. There was Herb Boeltz, in a coffin. He didn't look a day older than he had that night at eight o'clock.

"God!" I said. "You wished him dead?"

He shook his head. "I wouldn't do a thing like that." he said soberly. "I just decided to show him a picture of himself dead. I never thought about it looking like it could be next week or something. I just wanted to see how he liked it with the shoe on his own foot. He turned white as a sheet and just kind of fell on the chair. He sat there staring at nothing and never said another thing."

"Do you think it'll come true? This picture?" I asked.

"I don't know," Jake said. "I don't think so, but I'm not sure."

I shifted back into drive again and pulled onto the pavement, half my attention on driving and the other half on the power of suggestion. Boeltz seemed susceptible. He had at least half-convinced himself that Jake could control, as well as predict, the future.

It turned out that Jake's pictures do not fix the form of the future, or even necessarily predict it closely. Though we learned later that they tended to be quite accurate.

But the picture he showed me wasn't correct, any more than Hilton has an e in it. Because the coffin was covered. About four o'clock the next morning, Herb Boeltz put a .38 pistol barrel in his mouth and pulled the trigger, and there wasn't much the mortician could do to make him presentable.

* * *

Jake got a room in the hotel, after all. He said he'd been cramping my style, but maybe I'd been cramping his. He remained as cheerful and friendly as ever. Anna Lahti went back to Duluth, put her property up for sale, and moved down, taking an apartment in the same building Maggie lived in. A couple of months later, she and Jake got married. Maggie and I took a bunch of wedding pictures, and all they showed were Jake and Anna.

I mentioned that to Jake, jokingly, and he said he wasn't doing pictures these days.

They really are a nice couple, and we went out with them fairly often, despite the age difference. Mostly to dance halls or the ice rink. I even learned to skate, though nowhere nearly as well as all three of them did.

With their example, Maggie and I decided to tie the knot, too. So Lanny was only two and a half years short of his teens; I'd been a teenager once myself. And frankly, he was more likable than I'd been. Jake took a bunch of wedding pictures; he had a brand new Polaroid 680. I couldn't help but wonder. That summer they bought a restaurant and fixed it up really nicely with a Scandinavian motif, bringing a Swede down from Duluth to round out the cuisine. I figured Anna must have had a lot of money, but Maggie said not so far as she'd ever known.

Then, one day they asked if we'd like to go to the races that weekend. I supposed they meant at Rockston Downs, only fifty miles away, but instead we flew to Maryland! And Jake bought the tickets and rented a car there!

I bet on the same horses he did, and talk about a kick in the tax bracket! We had nothing but winners. A lot of things became clear to me then.

It felt like strange money, but the bank was happy with it.

Last evening we celebrated the anniversary of Jake's and my meeting. At their place, a little farm they'd bought just outside town. They'd fixed it up really nicely.

When we got there, I noticed a big book on the table—a folio-sized book on astronomy for the informed layman. Beside it was a brand-new video camera. He told me he had an interesting project going, and asked if we'd care to take a little tour.

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Framed