He picked up the first picture and was about to throw it in the fire.

At that moment, he felt a hand on his shoulder.

Thinking Mary Alice [his wife] had come back, he turned around to tell her to leave.

But it wasn't Mary Alice.  It was a man, someone he had never seen before — tall, distinguished, dressed in a business suit, and clearly audible.  Aware now that he was facing an unknown materialized apparition, O'Neil began to tremble.

"Who are you?" he demanded.

"I'll tell you that when you calm down," the figure said.

"What are you doing here?  What do you want?"

"Are you calmed down?" the visitor asked.

"I'll calm down if you tell me what you want here."

"It's very simple," said the figure.  "I need your help to carry out research in several areas."

"What kind of research?" Bill asked.

"Research in just the kind of thing you are doing right now, and not succeeding.  I can help you."

"Nobody will believe any of this anyway," O'Neil told him.

"Would you like some facts so you can prove you're not just seeing things?"

"What kind of facts?" O'Neil asked.

"Name, former address, background — all the details you need to know to confirm what I was when I lived on your plane."

Hearing Bill in he extended conversation, Mary Alice got out of bed and came to the lab.  At first O'Neil didn't see here, and he spoke to the image of the visitor.  "Even if your facts do check out," Bill said, "who will believe them?"

From the doorway, Mary Alice said, "I'll believe you, honey.  I know you're not crazy.  I can see him too."

Bill turned toward her.  "You can?"

"I can see him standing right there beside you," she said.

"I don't believe you," Bill said.  "You're just saying that to humor me."

But the visitor interceded.  "Of course she sees me.  Why shouldn't she?  You can, can't you?"

"Mary Alice," Bill said.  "Tell me the truth.  You can see him?"

"I swear to God I can, Bill," she said.

"Ask her if she can hear me," the visitor instructed.

"Can you hear him, Mary Alice?"

"I can see his lips move, but I can't hear him," she replied.

O'Neil gradually regained his composure.  He elicited the full details of the night visitor's background, repeating them out loud on the tape recorder as the details were given.

Name: Dr. George J. Mueller.  Former social security number: 142-20-4640.  Ancestry: English, Irish, German.  B.S. in electrical engineering, University of Wisconsin.  Top fifth of his class in 1928.  M.S. in physics, Cornell, 1930.  Ph.D. in experimental physics at Cornell, 1933.  Additional training, New York University and UCLA.  Meritorious Civilian Award from the secretary of the army.  Physics instructor and research fellow while at Cornell.

Urging O'Neil to check all these details to verify his former existence, Mueller added that at Wisconsin he had been a member of the Haresfoot Club and the Triangle Club.

"That should be enough information to remove your doubts," Mueller told O'Neil.  "But if you still don't believe this, I'll give you a complete rundown on every detail of my accomplishments and experience."

Mueller seemed rather testy and irascible to O'Neil, who responded with the same attitude.  "Of course I want a complete rundown," O'Neil said.  "If I have any hope of getting anybody to believe this."

"You'll get it," the voice of Mueller snapped.  "And you might be interested in knowing that I once worked for the government and the United States Signal Corps.  In design and development.  A lot of miscellaneous electrical equipment, and a lot of specialized medical electronics for hospital use."

"I still need every scrap of proof I can find," O'Neil warned him.

"Look — I rather resent your questioning me so much.  I think you're being rather childish.  But if you want something further, here's the name and address of my daughter.  You can verify my death records through her."  He gave the information to O'Neil, who added it to the tape he was running.

"I've run into this problem of trying to establish proof of existence with a discarnate who calls himself Doc Nick.  Have you encountered him?"

"I don't know anything about him," Mueller answered.

"He has some pretty good ideas," O'Neil said.

Mueller replied stiffly, "I simply want to help you if you'll listen.  If you don't feel you want or need my help, just say so, and I won't bother you anymore.  I won't be offended, and I'll understand."

O'Neil assured him that he wanted all the help he could get.  Before he could say anything more, however, the same thing happened as with his other strange visitors: Muller simply disappeared.

Even though Mueller's voice could not be heard on the tape, O'Neil now had something tangible to work with.  But after months of frustration he was less optimistic that Mueller's visit would produce tangible results.

*

When Meek received O'Neil's tape and letter, he was elated.  Even though Mueller's voice was not recorded on the tape, here was material that could be verified by fact-checking all the details thoroughly.  The new turn of events created the fabric that Meek's engineering mind liked to work with.  It was tangible, traceable, solid.  It could be nailed down or discarded.  Verification would be a giant step forward.  He wrote O'Neil that it was critical to follow up on every fact.

Meek immediately wrote a letter to his friend Tom Bearden, a nuclear engineer who had just retired from a military career, including five years with Air Force Intelligence in Germany.  Bearden would be helpful in checking out Dr. Mueller's military awards and activity.  Meek also sent off a letter to Dr. Walter Uphoff, a former professor at the universities of Minnesota and Colorado, and a leading researcher in parapsychology.  Living in Madison, Wisconsin, Uphoff would be in a good position to check the records at the campus there.

With Tom Bearden tracing everything from Mueller's purported "Meritorious Civilian Award" to his "Top-Secret Clearance," and Walter Uphoff tracing his academic records at Wisconsin and Cornell, Meek turned his attention to other confirmatory details.

In Madison, Wisconsin, Walter Uphoff struck oil.  He found that Mueller was enrolled at the University of Wisconsin when he said he was, in the class of 1928.  He was also listed as a member of the Triangle Club.  Uphoff had traced this through a group picture of the club in the Badger, the university yearbook.  But he was not listed as a member of the Haresfoot Club, a small but important detail.

Uphoff finally dug up an old picture of the club, an informal drama group at the university.  The members' names appearing on the picture included that of George Mueller.  Moreover, his face matched the one in the Triangle Club picture.

Since Uphoff's son, Norman, was a political science professor at Cornell, Uphoff wrote him to check the records to see if Mueller had received his master's degree there.  While Uphoff waited for the results, he called to inform Meek of his progress.

O'Neil included a long tape that described in fuller detail his session with Mueller.  The data included not only the corporations Mueller worked for, but also the large number of employees who worked under him, and the multimillion-dollar operational budgets involved.

O'Neil claimed that Mueller sounded like quite a braggart.  "I don't think Dr. Einstein had a background like this," O'Neil wrote Meek.  "In fact, it's awfully hard for me to believe, George."

Meek was enthusiastic because he was now confident that nearly all the material supplied would check out.  O'Neil, however, remained shaken by the experience.  On August 8, 1977, he wrote Meek:

I'm sorry, George, but I am still frightened, and I just can't believe my eyes and ears until you and I get a verification of a death certificate from Sacramento.  I'm sorry.  I didn't ask all this, and I can't take any more until I have absolute proof.  I want to believe all you have told me, and have to believe that Dr. Mueller did attend those colleges, etc.  I told him this, and he said proof would be forthcoming.  I said good, I'll wait.  And that upset him.  I just don't know, George.  I hope you understand.  I believe that anyone "over there" could get that kind of information if they wanted it.

Further confirmation came in from Walter Uphoff's son, who telephoned Meek from Cornell to say that Mueller's record was exactly as reported.  In addition, Meek's inquiry through the social security office not only confirmed the correct number, but provided a former address where Mueller's surviving family could be reached.

A letter to Mueller's widow, who was now living in California, brought a confirmation that Mueller had died on May 31, 1967, and that she would be glad to provide any other information.

. . . Meek received a copy of the official death certificate he had requested from the California Department of Health.

But one important piece of information that O'Neil had reported had not yet been confirmed.  It was the booklet Mueller was said to have written as an introduction to electronics for the US Army.  To Meek this was critical.  It would not only be an important piece of evidence to confirm O' Neil's contact with Mueller.  It would also be a clue to Mueller's philosophy about the potential of electronics and communication devices.

Reassured by the doctor's confirmation of his sanity, O'Neil returned to his Spiricom and Vidicom projects with a renewed sense of dedication.  Even when Dr. Mueller appeared several times again, O'Neil was able to keep calm.  The confirmation of the death certificate gave him confidence that at least he was in touch with a discarnate personality who was confirmed to have once existed with a record of considerable scientific achievement.

. . . Meek was still bothered that he could not  track down the elusive  book Mueller had insisted contained valuable confirmatory evidence of the reasons for his work on the Spiricom project.

The search had now gone on for a year and a half, and had run into many blind alleys.  But Meek's Holmesian  bloodhound instincts kept him pressing.

After an unsuccessful trip to the library at West Point, Meek made his own follow-up mission to the Pentagon, visiting over half a dozen offices.  Although he found no book, one Pentagon official provided an important clue.

Meek had earlier learned that Mueller's book might—just might—be part of a series of training manuals published by the military in the 1940s.  But all the manuals were now out of print.  As Meek was leaving his last Pentagon office, the officer called him back.  He had just remembered that there was an Army archives collection at the State Historical Society of Wisconsin.

Meek wrote to the organization, and waited again.  About two weeks later, he opened a letter from the society.  It stated that they had a full set of army manuals from the forties, and that Mueller's publication was among them.  Meek was overjoyed that the long search had come to an end.

He lost no time ordering a photocopy, which arrived within a few days.  Quickly, he turned to the pages Mueller had designated as important.  They included a summary of the progress of electronics since 1895.  Mueller's words pointed out that back in that era, the popular belief was that everything of importance had already been discovered, and that the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were considered the ultimate in all that could possibly be discovered in the universe.

Meek read on, sensing that the words would reveal insights that were even more directly in line with his own research.  The opinion of scientists, Mueller's book stated, was that future generations would have to be content with making "minor refinements and rearrangements of the established order of science."

Finally, Meek's eye caught a paragraph on the last page of the book that he felt made all the long search for the missing document worthwhile.  As Mueller had phrased it in 1947:

Men are reaching even into the spectrum heights of those fabulous cosmic rays.  Out of the work, new techniques and instruments of electronic wizardry will emerge, but only after seemingly impossible problems have been solved.

These solutions will require the careful thought and patient work of many people, whose findings will be correlated with many other efforts, verified by experiments, and aided now and then by sparks of genius to reconcile the irrational and so accomplish the impossible.

That was it for Meek.  The last phrase of the book.  To reconcile the irrational, and so accomplish the impossible.  What better description could be found for the Spiricom efforts that he and O'Neil and the others had been pursuing for such a long time?