STEALING EDEN Part Five

Two fax machines spit out the following document within a few moments of each other.....

Julie,

Here's my transcription of our interview with Angie Becker. Kevin and I will have some comments at the end. Read and study, Julie. We've got something here.

Kate Roberts

Kate: "Tell us a little about yourself--who you are; what you do--that sort of thing."

Angie: "My name is Angie Becker. I'm twenty-five years old, and I am a biologist for the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources. "

 Kate: "How do you know Lt. Col. Paul Marriner?"

Angie: "We went to junior high and high school together and were in the same graduating class. Paul provided a reference for me when I interviewed for my position with the state. I was never a close friend of Paul's, but I knew his wife Jennifer fairly well and spent some time with them as a result."

"How do you want me to proceed here?"

Kate: "Start at the beginning, go to the end, then stop."

Kevin: "Tell us about where he came from, first. I think that's what Kate means."

 Angie: "Okay, that sounds good. What I'm going to begin with is sort of second hand. You should really get Leslie McDowell to find out about the really ancient stuff. She lived next door to him when he was very young and knows a lot of interesting stuff, but since she works for Marriner Group, I suspect that may be easier said than done. My folks didn't come to town until after this, so I can't vouch for everything personally.

 Marriner's folks were killed when he was quite young. Four years old, I think. Double murder, no clues. The only suspect was a strange guy who showed up shortly afterwards claiming to be an uncle. Paul was missing until the uncle showed up, but there were never any clues to link the uncle with the murder, and so they had to let him go. He raised Paul here in town, but kept a very low profile and home-schooled him out of sight of everybody.

Kate: "Does Marriner ever speak of these events today? I'd think he'd be traumatized by this."

Angie: "No. Paul rarely ever mentioned his parents or their death. Jennifer said once she didn't think they even mattered to him at all, but she felt it was because he was so young at the time.

 Kevin: "Was Paul able to tell the police anything?"

Angie: "Not that I've ever heard."

Angie: "Anyway, this uncle was a fellow who called himself Dr. Angelus. Really bright scientist or something, and he raised Paul to be just like him. Paul turns out to be a genius, and Dr. Angelus gets Paul noticed by the Pentagon. The Pentagon wanted to have him, Angelus wanted to sell him to whomever bid the highest. Paul played one off against the other and had Dr. Angelus busted for trying to sell him to the Soviet bloc. In exchange for his "services" to the American government, they signed a treaty with him granting him certain rights and privileges to make him happy."

Kate: "Is Angelus still in prison?"

Angie: "I think the government swapped him in a spy deal. I'm not sure."

Kevin: "What sorts of privileges are we talking about here?"

Angie: "Such as the right never to have to go to school. A driver's license. Cooperation of state and local authorities in protecting his autonomy. Basically, the right to do whatever he liked, as long as Uncle Sam got a better bomb in exchange."

Kate: "And the local authorities agreed to this?"

Angie: "Money talks. Paul bought the mayor, the town council, and the chief of police off. The Board of Education was not amused, and he fought with them for years."

Kevin: "Money? Where does a ten year old get money to buy off politicians?"

Angie: "We never knew. He never said---we used to joke he had a private printing press that he just fired up any time he needed to buy a new part or a new politician. He thought that was funny, and never discouraged that sort of talk.

 Anyway, once Paul came home to Cedar Rapids, the school board wanted proof he shouldn't be in school, and didn't buy the idea of a government treaty being admissible as proof of educational ability. So Marriner offered to take any test they could throw at him and pass it. They tried everything from third grade handwriting and story problems to college entrance exams and he passed every one with flying colors. They had to give him a diploma after that, and the University of Minnesota gave him a degree or two when he did the same to them. After he does all this, Paul decides he's going to go back to school with us, but not to learn anything. He wanted to keep tabs on what children his own age were thinking and learning and feeling about life. That's how he explained it to me. I thought he was lonely.

 Then a funny thing started to happen. Those of us in his class all began to grow more intelligent. Not to the degree Paul was, but intelligent enough to basically begin running our own lives and using the school as a sort of home base for whatever plans we made. That was true all the way through graduation, and nobody ever figured out how it happened. Some of the class troublemakers started getting drunk, smoking, driving too fast....imagine that among twelve year olds! Paul got a few of his mates together, bought a bunch of police cars and guns, and set about playing cops and robbers for real. When one of the creeps in junior high tried to rape a girl in a stairwell, Paul shot him dead on the spot. That was when I was here, so I know for sure that's no joke. It stopped being just a game then."

Kate: "So you came to be part of the group when?"

Angie: "First year of junior high--seventh grade. My parents moved here from Minneapolis."

Kate: "And did you become highly intelligent?"

Angie: "I don't know about highly! I was an average student, but I started doing a lot better within a couple weeks of coming here."

Kevin: "What was it like for the teachers with kids like these?"

Angie: "We would have lessons and take tests, but it was all sort of a charade. The teachers knew we'd pass them, we knew we'd pass them, so we didn't study a whole lot and showed up for class when we felt like it. Paul would have science experiments going in the lab, and if he needed some helpers, he'd just grab a few friends out of other classes. Or he'd sit in on a teacher's class and critique his or her performance if he didn't like what he heard. Teachers hated that! I was in an English class with Jennifer, when they were first dating, and we were doing Romeo and Juliet. On the day we were going to read the balcony scene, there he was, and Miss Thorston guessed why and had him read Romeo and her, Juliet. You should have been there, you two! To watch two people falling in love play that scene--with all the passion you wished your boyfriend had for you at that age and twenty times more--it was something nobody who saw it will ever forget."

Kate: "How did he meet Jennifer?"

Angie: "This is one of those cool stories about Paul. He is walking along the hall with the principal after school and hears a violinist practicing in the band room, and really struggling with a piece of music. I'm not into classical stuff, so I don't know what it was. Paul walks in the room with the principal and she stops playing. He tells her to continue practicing, and to concentrate on the notes and have faith in her own abilities. She starts to play, and plays the piece perfectly while he's standing there watching her. The band teacher comes out of his office---he can't believe she's nailed the piece. The principal is applauding. Some of the other students in the room are applauding. Paul smiles at her; she has this stunned look on her face. Then she looks at him and says 'You did that.' He smiles, and walks out of the room. One year later, they married during the half-time of the homecoming football game."

Kevin: "How did he do it? She was the one playing the piece, not him."

Angie: "Yeah, but Paul's not like any other motivational speaker you'll meet. I know somebody who said once that Jennifer told her that when it happened, it was like a switch being thrown and she could feel her something in her mind suddenly understand everything you needed to play the violin well. As if the thoughts were just planted there. When he left the room, however, she still knew everything. I suspect that's true, and how we all got to be good students. He allowed it to be so."

Kate: "Would you say he can read minds then?"

Angie: "I hope not! We all thought he might be able to, because sometimes he'd know things that we were sure nobody else knew. But he could have had the girls locker room bugged and gotten the same information, so how could you know? The scheme wasn't so much taking thoughts out of our heads as putting them in, at least as we saw it."

Kate: "Did Jennifer marry him of her own free will, then?"

Angie: "We all thought so. They were really complimentary personalities, and she was a good influence on him. They enjoyed each other's company and yet had lives of their own. That's why we weren't really worried that he would manipulate her every move. He would go away for a week at a time on Army business and she'd be free as a bird to party with us, and she did often. She was never trapped, if that's what you mean."

Kevin: "What did her parents say about her marrying so early?"

Angie: "Her dad fought in Korea in the Marine Corps, and kept contact with some of the guys at the base outside of town. He loved Paul, and Paul milked that for all it was worth. He'd show up in his uniform to pick Jennifer up for a date and look just like a soldier. (Except for having hair, of course. You couldn't have got Paul to shave his head for all the gold in the world. ) Her dad flipped for this guy. Her mom was scared to death, but didn't dare oppose her husband's approval. They regret it now."

Kate: "The parade, right?"

Angie: "Yeah, Independence Day, 1989. They're riding in a parade when someone opens fire from the roof of Eddie Schechter's barber shop. She's killed, he is mortally wounded. The shooter is busted--a lunatic who thought aliens were telling him to kill the Colonel. And before you say anything, Paul died. Everyone here knows that. He died, got shoved into the morgue, and the very next day, the body is gone and someone completely different but with all the memories of the original is there replacing him. What was anyone to say? He left town soon afterwards, but he's always coming back for visits now and then. People have just accepted him over time as the original. I don't think he will ever come back permanently because he can't face his in-laws knowing he cheated death and his wife could not."

Kevin: "Have you met him personally? Since he, um, died?"

Angie: "Sure. I know the faces are different, but the memories are all there. The personality is pretty much the same, too, although the new one is very hard to figure out. The biggest thing I noticed is that the old Paul was a lot more intelligent in a bookish way. You had a hard time understanding him. The new one is more flippant, and even a little scatter-brained at times. The new Paul isn't set into one place for very long, and always is wandering from point to point. He's much more emotional, much less demanding, and likes to be on his own. I don't think Paul does much official work for the government now. He's more of a free-lance guy they call in when they have a problem that needs special attention."

Kevin: "Francis likes to talk about him and aliens in the same sentence."

Angie: "Lots of people say lots of things. Only Paul knows the truth now. I think Jennifer may have, and she was always nervous about that sort of thing when it was discussed."

Kate: "So, what are some of the wild stories we would never believe about him?"

Angie: "He lived underground in the middle of a woodland area owned by the city as a nature reserve. You'd drive out to his house on a dead-end road and just as you came to the end of the road, your car would suddenly materialize in an elevator that went down into a parking garage of the biggest house I'd ever seen. Every guy on the physics team said it was absolutely impossible for that house to be located underground, but nobody could prove how he managed the illusion, or if it wasn't underground, where that house was. He or Jen would drive to school some days, or just show up without driving at all and walk out of a broom closet or something equally strange. When he and Jennifer came back from their honeymoon, she looked at least a year older. He once got mad at a teacher who wouldn't let him borrow Jennifer out of a class, and blew up her car in the parking lot in front of her, and then flipped her the keys to a brand new car. The teacher quit the next day. I could go on for days, but that's an example."

Kevin: "If we met Paul on the way back to the hotel, should we be frightened?"

Angie: "Worried, yes. Frightened....well, that would depend on what you were thinking of doing to him."

Kevin's thoughts: I thought she was credible. We've got some names of people from her that we're going to contact to confirm some of the bits of her story. When we talk to a few more people, we'll know for sure what kind of a story Angie was telling us.

 Kate's thoughts: I think she's a plant. She's articulate, but she sounds like she's rehearsed this very well. This is too weird, but she doesn't bat an eye at any of it. Everybody here is reading from a script or looks like they've had a few too many drinks at a Trekkie convention. But why go through the charade of faking all this if there isn't something to this story? As a lie, it is pretty strange. There's something here, Julie--I know it. I just don't know what.

On To Part Six