He could pick up the strongest thoughts of any nearby person very easily. He did not need to hear the actual words, for instance, of a nearby conversation in order to follow it perfectly, because the words of verbal communication were strong in a person's mind.
But getting deeper than that required an increasing amount of understanding of the functioning of the other person's mind.
His ability to eavesdrop on conversations had been of immense benefit to Washington so far, but is was difficult for him to get close enough to the higher-ups in the Soviet government to get all the data that the President of the United States wanted.
But now that he had established a firm mental linkage with one of the greatest physicists in the Soviet Union, he could begin to send information that would be of tremendous value to the United States.
He brushed up a pile of trash, pushed it into a dust pan, and carried it off toward the disposal chute that led to the trash cans. In the room where the brooms were kept, he paused and closed his eyes.
Lenny! Are picking this up?
Sure, Rafe. I'm ready with the drawing board anytime you are.
As Dr. Sonya Malekrinova stood in her laboratory looking over the apparatus she was perfecting for the glory of the Soviet State, she had no notion that someone halfway around the world was also looking at it over her shoulder—or rather, through her own eyes.
* * *
Lenny started with the fives first, and worked his way up to the larger denominations.
"Five, ten, fifteen, twenty, twenty-five, thirty—forty, fifty, sixty...." he muttered happily to himself. "Two fifty, three, three-fifty, four, four-fifty."
It was all there, so he smiled benevolently at the man in the pay window. "Thank you muchly." Then he stepped aside to let another lucky man cash a winning ticket.
His horse had come in at fifteen, six-ten, four-fifty for Straight, Place, and Show, and sixty bucks on the nose had paid off very nicely.
Lenny Poe took out his copy of the Daily Racing Form and checked over the listing for the next race.
Hm-m-m, ha. Purse, $7500. Four-year-olds and up: handicap. Seven furlongs. Turf course. Hm-m-m, ha.
Lenny Poe had a passion for throwing his money away on any unpredictable event that would offer him odds. He had, deep down, an artistic soul, but he didn't let that interfere with his desire to lay a bet at the drop of an old fedora.
He had already decided, several hours before, that Ducksoup, in the next race, would win handily and would pay off at something like twenty or twenty-five to one. But he felt it his duty to look one last time at the previous performance record, just to be absolutely positive.
Satisfied, he folded the Racing Form, shoved it back into his pocket, and walked over to the fifty-dollar window.
"Gimmie nine tickets on Ducksoup in the seventh," he said, plonking the handful of bills down on the counter.
But before the man behind the window grating could take the money, a huge, hamlike, and rather hairy hand came down on top of his own hand, covering it and the money at the same time.
"Hold it, Lenny," said a voice at the same time.
Lenny jerked his head around to his right and looked up to see a largish man who had "cop" written all over him. Another such individual crowded past Lenny on his left to flash a badge on the man in the betting window, so that he would know that this wasn't a holdup.
"Hey!" said Lenny. His mind was thinking fast. He decided to play his favorite role, that of the indignant Italian. "Whatsa da matta with you, hah? Thisa no a free country? A man gotta no rights?"
"Come on, Mr. Poe," the big man said quietly, "this is important."
"Poe? You outta you mind? Thatsa name of a river——or a raven. I'm a forgetta which. My namesa Manelli!"
"Scusi, signore," the big man said with exaggerated politeness, "ma se lei è veramente italiano, non' è l'uomo che cerchiamo."
Lenny's Italian was limited to a handful of words. He know he was trapped, but he faced the situation with aplomb. "Thatsa lie! I was inna Chicago that night!"
"Ah! Cosè credero. Avanti, saccentone." He jerked his thumb toward the gate. "Let's go."
Lenny muttered something that the big man didn't quite catch.
"What'd you say?"
"Upper United States—the northern United States," Lenny said calmly shoving his four hundred fifty dollars into his pocket. "That's where Chicago is. Never mind. Come in, boys; back to the drawing board."
The two men escorted Lenny to a big, powerful Lincoln; he climbed into the back seat with the big one while the other one got behind the wheel.
As soon as they had left the racetrack and were well out on the highway, the driver said: "You want to call in, Mario? This traffic is pretty heavy."
The big man beside Lenny leaned forward, over the back of the front seat, unhooked the receiver of the scrambler-equipped radiophone, and sat back down. He thumbed a button on the side of the handset and said: "This is Seven Oh Two." After a short silence, he said: "You can call off the net. You want him brought in?" He listened for a moment. "O.K. Are we cleared through the main gate? O.K. Off."
He leaned forward to replace the receiver, speaking to the driver as he did so. "Straight to the Air Force base. They've got a jet waiting there for him."
He settled back comfortably and looked at Lenny. "You could at least tell people where you're going."
"Very well," said Lenny. He folded his arms, closed his eyes, and relaxed. "Right now, I'm going off to dreamland."
He waited a short while to see if the other would say anything. He didn't, so Lenny proceeded to do exactly what he had promised to do.
He went off to dreamland.
He had not been absolutely sure, when he made the promise, that he would actually do just that, but the odds were in favor of it. It was now one o'clock in the morning in Moscow, and Lenny's brother, Raphael, was a man of regular habits.
Lenny reached out. When he made contact, all he got was a jumble of hash. It was as though someone had made a movie by cutting bits and snippets from a hundred different films, no bit more than six or seven frames long, with a sound track that might or might not match, and projected the result through a drifting fog, using an ever-changing lens that rippled like the surface of a wind-ruffled pool. Sometimes one figure would come into sharp focus for a fraction of a second, sometimes in color, sometimes not.
Sometimes Lenny was merely observing the show, sometimes he was in it.
Rafe! Hey, Rafe! Wake up!
The jumble of hash began to stabilize, becoming more coherent—
* * *
Lenny sat behind the far desk, watching his brother come up the primrose path in a unicycle. He pulled it to a halt in front of the desk, opened the pilot's canopy, threw out a rope ladder, and climbed down. His gait was a little awkward, in spite of the sponge-rubber floor, because of the huge flowered carpetbag he was carrying. A battered top hat sat precariously on his blond, curly hair.
"Lenny! Boy, am I glad to see you! I've got it! The whole trouble is in the wonkler, where the spadulator comes across the trellis grid!" He lifted the carpetbag and sat it down on the lab table. "Connect up the groffle meter! We'll show those pentagon pickles who has the push-and-go here!"
"Rafe," Lenny said gently, "wake up. You're dreaming. You're asleep. I want to talk to you."
"I know." He grinned widely. "And you don't want any back talk from me! Yok-yok-yok! Just wait'll I show you!"
In his hands, he held an object which Lenny did not at first understand. Then Rafe's mind brought it into focus.
"This"—Rafe held it up—"is a rocket motor!"
"Rafe, wake up!" Lenny said.
The surroundings stabilized a little more.
"I will in just a minute, Lenny." Rafe was apologetic. "But let me show you this." It did bear some resemblance to a rocket motor. It was about as long as a man's forearm and consisted of a bulbous chamber at one end, which na
rrowed down into a throat and then widened into a hornlike exhaust nozzle. The chamber was black; the rest was shiny chrome.
Rafe grasped it by the throat with one hand. The other, he clasped firmly around the combustion chamber. "Watch! Now watch!"
He gave the bulbous, rubbery chamber a hard squeeze—
"SQUAWK!" went the horn.
"Rafe!" Lenny shouted. "Wake up! WAKE UP!"
Rafe blinked as the situation clarified. "What? Just A Second. Lenny. Just...."
* * *
"... A second."
Raphael Poe blinked his eyes open. The moon was shining through the dirty windows of the dingy little room that was all he could call home—for a while, at least. Outside the window were the gray streets of Moscow.
His brother's thoughts resounded in his fully awake brain. Rafe! You awake?
Sure. Sure. What is it?
The conversation that followed was not in words or pictures, but a weird combination of both, plus a strong admixture of linking concepts that were neither.
In essence, Lenny merely reported that he had taken the day off to go to the races and that Colonel Spaulding was evidently upset for some reason. He wondered if Rafe were in any kind of trouble.
No trouble. Everything's fine at this end. But Dr. Malekrinova won't be back on the job until tomorrow afternoon—or, this afternoon, rather.
I know, Lenny replied. That's why I figured I could take time off for a go at the ponies.
I wonder why they're in such a fuss, then? Rafe thought.
I'll let you know when I find out, Lenny said. Go back to sleep and don't worry.
In a small office in the Pentagon, Colonel Julius T. Spaulding cradled the telephone on his desk and looked at the Secretary of Defense. "That was the airfield. Poe will be here shortly. We'll get to the bottom of this pretty quickly."
"I hope so, Julius," the Secretary said heavily. "The president is beginning to think we're both nuts."
The colonel, a lean, nervous man with dark, bushy eyebrows and a mustache to match, rolled his eyes up toward the ceiling. "I'm beginning to agree with him."
The Defense Secretary scowled at him. "What do you mean?"
"Anybody who takes telepathy seriously is considered a nut," said the colonel.
"True," said the Secretary, "but that doesn't mean we are nuts."
"Oh, yeah?" The colonel took the cigar out of his mouth a gestured with it. "Anybody who'd do something that convinces all his friends he's nuts must be nuts."
The Secretary smiled wanly. "I wish you wouldn't be so logical. You almost convince me."
"Don't worry," said the colonel. "I'm not ready to have this room measured for sponge-rubber wallpaper just yet. Operation Mapcase has helped a lot in the past few months, and it will help even more."
"All you have to do is get the bugs out of it," said the Secretary.
"If we did that," Colonel Spaulding said flatly, "the whole operation would fold from lack of personnel."
"Just carry on the best you can," the Secretary said gloomily as he got up to leave. "I'll let you handle it."
"Fine. I'll call you later."
* * *
Twenty minutes after the Defense Secretary had gone, Lenny Poe was shown into Colonel Spaulding's office. The agent who had brought him in closed the door gently, leaving him alone with the colonel.
"I told you I'd be back this evening. What were you in such a hurry about?"
"You're supposed to stay in touch," Colonel Spaulding pointed out. "I don't mind your penchant for ponies particularly, but I'd like to know where to find you if I need you."
"I wouldn't mind in the least, colonel. I'd phone you every fifteen minutes if that's what you wanted. Except for one thing."
"What's that?"
Lenny jerked a thumb over his shoulder. "Your linguistically talented flatfeet. Did you ever try to get into a floating crap game when you were being followed by a couple of bruisers who look more like cops than cops do?"
"Look, Poe, I can find you plenty of action right here in Washington, if it won't offend your tender sensibilities to shoot crap with a senator or two. Meanwhile, sit down and listen. This is important."
Lenny sat own reluctantly. "O.K. What is it?"
"Dr. Davenport and his crew are unhappy about that last batch of drawings you and I gave 'em."
"What's the matter? Don't they like the color scheme? I never thought scientists had any artistic taste, anyway."
"It's got nothing to do with that. The—"
The phone rang. Colonel Spaulding scooped it up and identified himself. Then: "What? Yeah. All right, send him in."
He hung up and looked back at Lenny. "Davenport. We can get his story firsthand. Just sit there and look important."
Lenny nodded. He knew that Dr. Amadeus Davenport was aware that the source of those drawings was Soviet Russia, but he did not know how they had been obtained. As far as he knew, it was just plain, ordinary spy work.
He came in briskly. He was a tall, intelligent-looking man with a rather craggy face and thoughtful brown eyes. He put a large brief case on the floor, and, after the preliminaries were over, he came right to the point.
"Colonel Spaulding, I spoke to the Secretary of Defense, and he agreed that perhaps this situation might be cleared up if I talked directly with you."
"I hope so," the colonel said. "Just what is it that seems to be bothering you?"
"These drawings," Davenport said, "don't make any sense. The device they're supposed to represent couldn't do anything. Look; I'll show you."
He took from his brief case photostatic copies of some of the drawings Lenny had made. Five of them were straight blueprint-type drawings; the sixth was a copy of Lenny's near-photographic paintings of the device itself.
"This component, here," he said, gesturing at the set of drawings, "simply baffles us. We're of the opinion that your agents are known to the Soviet government and have been handed a set of phony plans."
"What's it supposed to do?" Lenny asked.
"We don't know what it's supposed to do," the scientist said, "but it's doubtful that it would actually do anything." He selected one of the photocopies. "See that thing? The one shaped like the letter Q with an offset tail? According to the specifications, it is supposed to be painted emerald green, but there's no indication of what it is."
* * *
Lenny Poe reached out, picked up the photocopy and looked at it. It was—or had been—an exact copy of the drawing that was used by Dr. Sonya Malekrinova. But, whereas the original drawing has been labeled entirely in Cyrillic characters, these labels were now in English.
The drawings made no sense to Lenny at all. They hadn't when he'd made them. His brother was a scientist, but Lenny understood none of it.
"Who translated the Russian into English?" he asked.
"A Mr. Berensky. He's one of our best experts on the subject. I assure you the translations are accurate, Dr. Davenport said.
"But if you don't know what that thing is," the colonel objected, "how can you say the device won't work? Maybe it would if that Q-shaped thing was—"
"I know what you mean," Davenport interrupted. "But that's not the only part of the machine that doesn't make any sense."
He went on to explain other discrepancies he had detected in the drawings, but none of it penetrated to Lenny, although Colonel Spaulding seemed to be able to follow the physicist's conversation fairly readily.
"Well, what's you suggestion, doctor?" the colonel asked at last.
"If you agents could get further data," the physicist said carefully, "it might be of some use. At the same time, I'd check up on the possibility that your agents are known to the NKVD."
"I'll see what can be done," said the colonel. "Would you mind leaving those copies of the drawings with me for a while?"
"Go right ahead," Davenport said. "One other thing. If we assume this device is genuine, then it must serve so
me purpose. It might help if we knew what the device is supposed to do."
"I'll see what can be done," Colonel Spaulding repeated.
When Davenport had gone, Spaulding looked at Poe. "Got any explanation for that one?"
"No," Lenny admitted. "All I can do is check with Rafe. He won't be awake for a few hours yet. I'll check on it and give you an answer in the morning."
* * *
Early next morning, Colonel Spaulding walked through his outer office. He stopped at the desk where the pretty brunette WAC sergeant was typing industriously, leaned across the desk, and gave her his best leer. "How about a date tonight, music lover?" he asked, "'Das Rheingold' is playing tonight. A night at the opera would do you good."
"I'm sorry, sir," she said primly, "you know enlisted women aren't allowed to date officers."
"Make out an application for OCS. I'll sign it."
She smiled at him. "But then I wouldn't have any excuse for turning you down. And then what would my husband say?"
"I'll bribe him. I'll send him to OCS."
"He's not eligible. Officers are automatically disqualified."
Colonel Spaulding sighed. "A guy can't win against competition like that. Anything new this morning?"
"Mr. Poe is waiting in your office. Other than that, there's just the routine things."
He went on into his office. Lenny Poe was seated behind the colonel's desk, leaning back in the swivel chair, his feet on the top of the desk. He was sound asleep.
The colonel walked over to the desk, took his cigar from his mouth, and said: "Good morrrning, Colonel Spaulding!"
Lenny snapped awake. "I'm not Colonel Spaulding," he said.
The Randall Garrett Omnibus Page 20
