by Jerry
Lindquist looked thoughtful. “How about it, Doc?” He called into the truck. A tall, red-haired man with thick glasses and a balding head stepped out of the truck and joined them. His name was Tom Case and he was the last person I ever expected to see in the North Chihuahuan Desert.
“I would love to call it off,” said Case. “Who though, is going to tell Johnny?”
“Use a megaphone. Let me tell him!” Leslie on a rampage was impressive. “You don’t need to capture him to communicate with him!”
“Oh? All the Houston Post wanted was a photograph and they got mad and spent much more time than the story was worth trying to get it. I have the feeling it will take capturing to talk with Johnny.”
I circled until one of the trucks was between me and the awning. There was a window facing me, but nobody looked out of it. Quietly striding across the gravel, I slipped up beside the truck. Narowitz’s voice came from around the corner.
“I knew Danforth carried many government contracts, but I didn’t realize you wielded this much influence.”
“Mr. Narowitz, we simply pointed out the advantages of survival training. At the same time, the Agency let Geosource know of our interest in Mr. Galighty . . . as a consultant, of course. I think it was quite kind of them to arrange my insertion into your crew.”
Lindquist sounded more confident than Joe, the explosives man.
“You didn’t fool me one minute,” replied Narowitz. “Your explosive techniques were more suited to demolition than to seismic signaling. I thought you were placed with us for intelligence work in North Africa.”
“It wasn’t a very long-term cover.”
“No,” I agreed, stepping around the comer of the truck. “It was a lousy cover.”
This time I meant to startle. I was quite successful.
Lindquist, his chair already tilted back, went the rest of the way with a crash. Tom Case jerked back against the truck. Narowitz dropped his Coke and Gamble started coughing violently from inhaled Sprite.
“Mother of God!” exclaimed George as she sketched a hasty cross. Narowitz began pounding Gamble on the back and Case helped a red-faced Lindquist to his feet.
Leslie sat back in her chair and laughed and laughed.
“Did someone treat your leg?” I asked Narowitz as Leslie’s peals of laughter died to suppressed giggles. Lindquist had vanished into a truck to recall his wandering warriors.
Narowitz smiled slowly. “I guess I forgot about it.”
I knelt and peeled back the ragged flap of cloth. “Soak it in warm, soapy water. I trust you’ve had a tetanus booster lately?”
“Yes.”
“Good.” I stood and faced Case. “Tom, let’s take a walk.”
Memories from the halls of madness: memories of the man—Tom Case.
He was a graduate student doing thesis work at Brentwood. There were several of them puttering about, giving tests to the patients and trying to make it with the nurses. The staff doctors regarded them as something to be endured and took delight in puncturing their tender egos. The staff particularly disliked Case.
We played chess once a week and, although we were evenly matched, I won a majority of the games.
“Why do I lose so much?” he once asked, more to himself than to me.
I started to set the board up for another game. “The reason you lose is simple. You pay too much attention to me and not enough to my pieces.”
“I’m a psychologist, damnit! I pay attention to people.”
“And you lose chess games you shouldn’t.”
He opened with the Ruy Lopez. “How do I stop it? If I knew when my attention was wandering, I’d be able to stop it. Obviously, I don’t notice.”
“Have you tried tying a string around your thumb? Who’s the patient around here anyway?”
Halfway through the pawn exchange I said, “You’re doing it again.”
He froze with his hand halfway to the board. “You’re right, but how’d you know?”
“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you. Read my file.” I put his queen in jeopardy. “Quit staring. It hurts and is going to lose you another game.”
The next day he arrived in my room with a deck of cards and score sheet. The cards were divided into circles, squares, stars, triangles, and wavy lines. It was a test of my paranormal sensory abilities. I failed miserably.
“You’re wasting your time, Mr. Case. I’m just another paranoid who thinks he knows when people are watching him. What you need is another Edgar Cayce.”
He came back a half hour later. “Put this blindfold on for me, Johnny.”
I eyed it with distrust. “Why?”
“Don’t be such a cynic. Put it on.” He checked the edges. “What do you feel?”
“What do you mean?”
“Like . . . how many people are watching you?”
I said without hesitation, “Three. You, someone on the other side of the inspection panel, and someone out the window.” I tore the blindfold off. “Do you get your jollies from playing with the mentally disturbed? Please get out of my room before I call one of the staff and complain.”
“Take it easy, Johnny.”
“Stuff it. I’ve managed to build a secure and private nest in this hellhole and you’re messing it up. I don’t like people who stare! Get out!”
He left my room. Two days later, after a violent argument with the staff, he left Brentwood. He didn’t come back.
In the shade of a tilted slab of rock we sat and watched the old creekbed dry up once again. I wondered how many times a year it guided water to the basin.
“So, Tom, when did you get your doctorate?”
“Last May.”
“Amazing. I didn’t know they awarded doctorates in bumbling.”
He sighed and declined comment.
“How on earth did you get the C. I. A. to authorize this stupid jaunt?” I crossed my arms in front of me.
He laughed. “You’d be surprised what the Agency will authorize if the project is cheap enough.”
“Cheap? The manpower you’ve tied up must be enormous.”
“Not really. The assault team just graduated and were going on a field test anyway. We just shifted the site.”
“They don’t know much about the desert, do they.”
“I guess not. Lindquist is permanently attached to my department and from what I’d heard. Geosource got their money’s worth.”
“Okay, that’s how. Now, tell me why? Why do you want to trouble my sleep any more than it already is?”
His eyes stared through me, but the brain behind them was elsewhere. I think he was considering what approach to take with me.
“First, will you listen and let me finish before making any decisions?”
I nodded. “Within reason. I’ll give you five minutes.”
“I work for an obscure little department the Agency has named Dark Hunter. We locate wild talents and identify, study, and come up with ways to utilize them. For example, we have a girl with the gift of sight. This may not sound like a big deal, but she lost both her eyes six years ago. She can describe the contents of a sealed safe at three hundred meters.
“She’s our prize, the one we show visiting VIPs, but since I’ve worked with the section, I’ve located three probable telepaths, one possible tele-kinetic, two erratic precognates, and a person who knows for a fact when people are looking at him.” He paused and sat back.
“You never belonged in Brentwood. Their diagnosis was completely wrong. I shudder when I think of the wasted years of your life.”
“Don’t bother. Electroshock therapy is a blast. I recommend it to all my friends.”
“You don’t have any friends.”
“Oh, shut up.”
Case went on with his pitch. “I was going to make you my doctoral thesis, Johnny, but something else came up. Still, Dark Hunter needs you. We wanted to test you.”
“The last I heard, my telephone number is still in the book. Why didn’t you just ask?” I was ge
tting fed up and my voice was showing it.
“Did Johnny Go Lightly let a Houston reporter do something as harmless as take his picture? I’ll bet you had your fill of tests and labs at Brentwood.
“Then there’s another factor Dark Hunter has discovered. We have discovered several subjects that perform well in the lab, but fall apart under field conditions. They become useless for intelligence gathering purposes. By testing you this way, we’ve certified the effectiveness of your talent under stress.
“Whoopee.”
“Good grief, man! You are the covert agent’s dream. You’ve got eyes in the middle of your back and you can’t be tailed. Here we set nine trained men on your trail and you lose them in the blink of an eye. We need you!”
“Are you through?”
“Except to say the pay is good and you travel well.”
I looked up at a red-tailed hawk riding the thermals above us. He looked content in his comer of the sky. I wondered if I would ever find mine.
“Tom, let me tell you about my recurring nightmare. It goes as follows. It’s dark and I’m tied to a chair and I can’t get free. Still, I struggle, because I know that if I don’t break loose something terrible is going to happen. Then the lights come on and I’m sitting in the middle of the Houston Astrodome. I usually wake up before all the seats are full, but I’m usually screaming.” I shivered involuntarily. “I will not work for you, I might find myself waking up in that chair.”
I got up and walked down the hill. “I want to see you again.”
“I was afraid of that.”
“Am I so repulsive?”
“You know better.”
Leslie, with an inch of vibram soles, came up to my chin. She looked up at me with great soulful eyes. The intensity of her gaze gave me shivers that were not altogether unpleasant. The Danforth Geosource team waited impatiently by their cars, and the battered assault team was struggling up the ridge.
Leslie brushed back a strand of hair. “Why are you afraid of me?”
“Did they tell you anything about me?”
“A little. You know when people are looking at you.”
“Or hearing, smelling, touching, tasting, or perceiving me in any fashion whatsoever. And the stronger they perceive, the more I feel it.” I felt an overwhelming loneliness steal over me and the pesky wind was making my eyes water. At least a tear slid down my dusty cheek. “You are taken with me—I can feel it. You focus your attention on me as the lens focuses light. I’m like a plant. I need the sun, but when you focus it on me, I bum. I find extreme attention very distracting and even painful.”
She lifted a wondering hand to the streak of water on my face. My heart nearly stopped.
“Will you ever be able to take it?”
“I’m getting better all the time.” She dropped her hand. “My tour in Africa is over in seven months.” Without another word she turned and walked back to the Geosource group.
I climbed shakily into the Toyota Land Cruiser and hastily started the engine. Leslie was only halfway to the Blazers as I drove down the road and mercifully out of sight of everyone behind me. A great load eased off my shoulders and I began conditioning myself to being alone again.
Out across the basin, the sun dropped below the Sierra Diablo. Cursing softly to myself, I drove off into the sunset . . . dammit!
1981
INCREDIBILITY GAP
Ian Stewart
Ingenuity will be recognized, of course—but it doesn’t hurt to make sure!
An irregular furrow, too straight for natural origins, traversed some half a mile of salt flats to end at the borders of a marsh. It terminated at a crumpled metallic structure recognizable as the remains of a sigmat shuttle, its hull battered but intact, its landing-vanes reduced to mere stubs. Portions of the vanes and certain external equipment were strewn at intervals along the furrow.
A lone figure sat beside the wreckage in a small pool of brine, holding his head between his palms in an attitude of dejection. Then, as though the dampness had penetrated not only his clothing but also his despondency, he rose unsteadily to his feet and clambered back into the vessel.
It took Morgan de Vere the best part of a day to pull all three corpses, the pilot and two crewmen, from the damaged nose-compartment. He dragged them a hundred yards to a place where the salt had weathered into shallow ripples, and hid them behind a clump of splaythom. When night fell the kshoggi would crawl out from the salt-marshes, and by morning nothing would be left but bones. It would be preferable not to attract the creatures to the vicinity of the shuttle. Nor did Morgan care to contemplate the remains.
He spent the first night behind the dubious protection of the cargo hatch, which though badly twisted could still be fastened shut. He was sufficiently exhausted to ignore the distant rasping of the nightfaring kshoggi, and his sleep was deep and untroubled.
When he awoke the next morning he remembered the cartons of fungicide, sat down on a hummock of silver vetch, and tried to think.
He was stranded about five hundred miles northwest of Crazy Harbour, in the middle of a wilderness of salt. Patches of splaythom scrub relieved the yellow-grey monotony of the salt flats, while the run-off from seasonal rains collected in hollows to form sour marshes, edged with vetches and haulvers, and matted with colonies of brown aligot. The plants seemed well adapted to their saline environment. Here and there a solitary saltskater would skitter across the ground on its many-jointed limbs, in search of a more succulent cluster of splaythom tubers. The ’skaters were numerous, and their soft underbellies were vulnerable to attack by the carnivorous kshoggi, as was the unwary traveller.
The salt flats stretched away in all directions as far as the eye could see, broken only by regions of marshland. Overhead an unbroken canopy of swirling cloud rolled endlessly eastward, lagging behind the planet’s rotation and thus appearing to move in the opposite direction at a speed of some forty-six miles per hour. Seen from space, Skaun Secundus was a sparkling sphere striped with multicoloured horizontal bands; but seen from its own surface the clouds were grey. Paradoxically, the winds at ground level were erratic and arbitrary, the atmosphere becoming turbulent as its lowest layer rubbed shoulders with the dreary terrain. The cloud layer muted the harsh radiance of the Skaun sun, which would otherwise have rendered the planet inimicable to life.
Morgan reviewed his meagre assets. One wrecked sigmat shuttle. A consignment of two hundred rolls of heavy-duty plastic sheeting for the Crazy Harbour polyfarms. One balloon-tired manure-spreader for farmer Massey, an awkward looking hopper affair on four gigantic wheels, designed to be drawn behind a gyrotractor without damaging the crop, and hence unfortunately lacking any motive power of its own. Two-day rations for a four-man crew, which might stretch to last one man two weeks. He could make almost limitless quantities of water, either by burning hydrogen fuel from the shuttle’s tanks, or by distilling brine from the marshes.
And, not least, he was in good physical shape.
He sighed. Next, the liabilities. Here the Wheel of Fortune appeared in need of balancing. Saltskaters were inedible to humans, having the wrong amino-acids; so were the local plants. The kshoggi too, although that didn’t bear thinking about. The radio was smashed, not that it would have proved useful in any case. The pilot had sent off a distress signal before the crash, but the nearest shuttle was two months’ travel away on Skaun Primus. Crazy Harbour was too new a colony to own any ground transport capable of surviving in this wilderness, and it owned no air transport at all. A rescue party was out of the question, since the kshoggi made sure that nothing on foot would last out the night behind anything weaker than armour plate.
Finally—and it was both asset and liability—there were five cartons of fungicide, urgently needed to deal with an outbreak of leafwilt on Fergus Massey’s cowcumber crop. Two months’ delay was bad enough: a few weeks more and it would ruin the best part of a year’s work by Old Man Massey. By itself that would not have caused Morgan any distress, bec
ause he hated the Old Man and his caustic jibes; but Morgan was hopelessly enamoured of Massey’s daughter Jane.
Morgan Knutsson de Vere was alone in the limitless waste. He should have despaired, but in a curious way it appealed to a romantic streak in his nature.
I’ll have to think my way out.
Instead, he found himself thinking about Jane.
. . . she nestled in his arms in Old Man Massey’s hayloft. Morgan had given her an oddly formed rock, a lump of blue dioptase, brought on the shuttle from Skaun Primus. While she inspected it, he nibbled gently at the coral shell of her left ear. Jane sighed and snuggled up closer. “It’s beautiful, Morgan. Just beautiful.” She clasped his hand tightly. “Morgan—when are you going to ask Father?”
Morgan always dreaded that question. Not because he had dishonourable intentions, but because her father was a daunting figure of a man, and the owner of Crazy Harbour’s best and biggest poly farm.
As he hesitated, shorn of speech. Jane tugged more urgently at his arm. “I think you should ask him as quickly as you can.”
“Why, hunkabee?”
“Because he’s just coming up the ladder.”
Morgan leaped to his feet and feigned interest in the joinery of the beams. “Good day, Farmer Massey. I was just saying to Jane what a remarkably accurate mortise-and-tenon you have . . .”
Massey ignored him. “Jane, what are you doing up here with this imbecile?”
“He’s not an imbecile, father. He just gives that appearance!”
“What do you mean, not an imbecile? Him? Brainless Morgan? D’you remember when fuzzy plague hit the cabbage crop? It was Morgan de Vere’s inspection duty. And why had he not noticed? Because he was mooning over an illicit tub of daffodils!”
“He was growing them as a present for me, Father. Morgan has a very sensitive nature.”
“He’ll have a sensitive hide if I get my way,” said the polyfarmer grumpily. “And what about that time he reprogrammed the biogene to grow butterflies instead of earthworms?” The Old Man was slowly working his way from asperity to apoplexy. “It isn’t only me that he’s caused trouble for. I haven’t forgotten that business with Veterinary Wufnook’s image-intensifier, either!”
