Extraordinary Powers

by Joseph Finder

  They knew I was in the house still, somewhere, and I had no doubt that all entrances were guarded; all had now been put on alert, and I was trapped.

  Looking first up, then down, I knew I couldn’t make it all the way to the first floor.

  But what was on the second?

  No choice; I had to take a chance. I sprinted out of the dark stairwell and into the second-floor corridor, but this one was not carpeted as the hallway upstairs had been, and my footsteps rang out with an alarming clatter. The voices were growing louder, nearer.

  The only light came from the moon outside, shining meekly into a window at the end of the corridor, and I spun around, dashed toward the window, poised to pull it open and jump, dammit all, before I realized that the window overlooked not soft, spongy lawn but asphalt.

  An asphalt, or macadam, car-park area depressed into the ground, a good twenty-five feet below me, a suicidal plunge. Nothing to break my fall. I couldn’t do it.

  Then came the alarm, the shrilling of hundreds of bells, deafening, throughout the house, coming from all over, and now all the lights were on, a brilliant halogen blaze illuminating the hall, illuminating everything, flashing on and off and on, and the ringing kept on.

  For God’s sake, move! I shouted inwardly.

  Move, yes, but where?

  Running desperately along the hall, away from the window, toward the main central staircase, I tried door after door, and then, four, five, six doors later, one opened.

  A bathroom, small and dark, its window opened a crack, and through the crack came a cool draft. The vinyl shower curtain rustled and fluttered in the breeze, and that was it, of course.

  I tore the shower curtain off its hooks, and it fell to the floor.

  The alarm’s ringing seemed even louder now, insistent. There was a crash somewhere, the slam of a door, shouts.

  Now what?

  Break the box!

  Only a goddamned shower curtain. If only I’d thought to take a bedsheet!

  Tie it to something, I thought wildly. Tie it. Hook it somewhere. Something stable.

  But there was nothing! Nothing to hold the length of vinyl, to anchor me as I climbed out of the window, and there was certainly no time to mess around, because the footsteps were thundering closer, closer. They had to have followed me to the second floor, and as I looked around desperately, my heart thudding crazily, I heard, not twenty feet away in the hall, “On the right! Move it!”

  Raising the window all the way, I found a screen, cursed aloud, and clawed at it, at the goddamned release pins at the base, but it was frozen in place, wouldn’t move, and I backed up and dove—

  And hurled through the window, through the screen, and into the night air, my body contorted awkwardly, trying to break my fall.

  And crashed to the ground—dirt, not sod, but cold, hard earth, which rose up to meet me and crack against my shoulders and the back of my neck, and I sprung immediately to my feet, somehow twisting my ankle a bit, bellowing out in pain.

  Trees ahead of me, a small copse of trees, just barely visible in the darkness, but now illuminated by the flashing alarm lights mounted into the third-floor eaves, now dark, now light.

  An explosion of gunfire.

  Behind me, to my left, then a whiz of something awfully close, the sting of something against my ear, and I dove down. The gunshots kept up, erratic, close, and I scuttled along the grass and into the trees, thank God. A natural cover, protection. Just feet away a tree trunk splintered, then another one, and I put on one last agonizing burst of speed, running through the dizzying pain in my ankle and my shoulders, and I was at the fence.

  Electrified, yes?

  A fifteen-foot fence, solid black wrought iron, burglar-proof, high security … high tension? Was it possible?

  I could scarcely turn around now, couldn’t turn back, couldn’t stop, I had a few seconds’ lead time on them, that was all, but now I heard them coming into the yard, in my direction, many of them, it seemed, and the gunshots were back now, they had located me, but their aim was off; the trees blocked their line of sight.

  I inhaled a deep breath and took the measure of the situation. The house is surrounded by nature, set in the rolling Virginia woods, which means trees and animals, squirrels and chipmunks that skitter here and there, up and down fences, and—

  I threw myself toward the fence, grasping a horizontal section as a handhold, and climbed up, toward the spiked top, up, and, hesitating a mere split second, which seemed an eternity, grabbed the ominous black spears atop the fence—

  And felt the cool, hard iron.

  No. Not electrified. Squirrels and chipmunks would wreak havoc on an electrified fence, wouldn’t they? You wouldn’t do it. I spun my legs around carefully, just grazing the sharpened spikes, and over, and dropped to the moist spongy grass below, and I was out.

  Behind me the mansion was flashing, the lights pulsing, the clamor shattering the night’s stillness.

  I ran, hearing shouts and running footsteps behind me, but they were on the other side of the fence, and I knew I had them.

  I ran, and ran, wincing, probably moaning aloud, but keeping my stride, until the road bent, and I was at a junction that I had noticed as we arrived, and as I dashed up the dark, narrow road, I saw a pair of headlights coming toward me.

  The car was moving along at a good clip, not too fast, not too slow, a Honda Accord. I saw it as it approached, and I considered waving it down, but I couldn’t be sure.

  It had come from the main highway, but I had to be careful, and as I slowed down, its headlights suddenly went bright, blindingly so, and then another set of headlights came up behind me, high beams, and suddenly I was caught between the two vehicles, the Honda facing me, and behind me, another car, larger, American-make.

  I spun, but the cars had hemmed me in, and then two others came out of the darkness, brakes squealing, pulling up alongside the other.

  I was blinded by four sets of headlights, and I spun around again, tried to figure a way of escape, but knew there wasn’t one, and then I heard a voice coming from one of the cars.

  Echoing in the night. “Nice try, Ben,” came Toby’s voice. “You’re as good as ever. Please, get in.”

  I was surrounded by men and guns pointed at me, and slowly I lowered the Ruger.

  Toby was seated in the back of a van, one of the last vehicles to arrive. He was speaking through the window. “Terribly sorry,” he said calmly. “But nice try all the same.”

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  They drove me in a plain government car, a dark blue Chrysler sedan, to Crystal City, Virginia. We entered an anonymous-looking office building with an underground parking garage. I knew the CIA owned several buildings in Crystal City and its environs; this was certainly one of them.

  I was escorted by the driver into an elevator and up to the seventh floor, through a plain governmental-looking corridor painted bureaucrat tan. ROOM 706 was painted in a black curve on frosted glass. Inside, a receptionist greeted me and showed me to an inside office, where I was introduced to a bearded, fortyish, Indian neurologist named Dr. Sanjay Mehta.

  You will no doubt wonder whether I attempted to read the thoughts of my driver, the people I passed in the corridor, the neurologist, and so on; and the answer, of course, is yes. My driver was another Agency employee, as uninformed as my last driver. I learned nothing there. The most I learned, walking down the hallway, was that I was indeed in a CIA building where work was being done on scientific and technical matters.

  With Dr. Mehta, things were different. As I shook his hand I heard, Can you hear my thoughts?

  I hesitated for a moment, but I had decided not to play coy, and I responded aloud, “Yes, I can.”

  He gestured to a chair, and thought: Can you hear everyone’s thoughts?

  “No,” I told him. “Only those who…”

  Only those of a particular salience—such as those accompanied by powerful emotions, is that right? I heard.

  I smi
led and nodded.

  I heard a phrase of something, in a language I didn’t know, which I assumed was Hindi.

  For the first time, he spoke. “You don’t speak Hindi, Mr. Ellison, do you?” His English was British-accented.

  “No, I don’t.”

  “I am fully bilingual, which means that I can think in Hindi or in English. What you’re telling me, then, is that you don’t understand my thoughts when they’re in Hindi. You hear them. Is that right?”

  “Right.”

  “But not all of my thoughts, of course,” he continued. “I have thought a number of things in the last two minutes, in Hindi and in English. Perhaps hundreds of ‘thoughts,’ if one can so categorize the flow of the processing of ideas. But you were able to hear only those that I thought with great force.”

  “I suppose that’s right.”

  “Can you sit there for a moment, please?”

  I nodded again.

  He got up from his desk and left the room, closing the door behind him.

  I sat for a few moments, inspecting his collection of plastic souvenir paperweights, the kind that produce a snowfall if shaken, and soon I was picking up another thought. This time it was the timbre of a woman’s voice, high and anguished.

  They killed my husband, it went. Killed Jack. Oh, God. They killed Jack.

  A minute later. Dr. Mehta returned.

  “Well?” he said.

  “I heard it,” I said.

  “Heard what?”

  “A woman, thinking that her husband had been killed,” I replied helpfully. “The husband’s name is Jack.”

  Dr. Mehta exhaled audibly, nodding slowly. After a long silence he said, “Well?”

  “Well what?”

  “You didn’t ‘hear’ anything just then, did you?” He gave the word “hear” the same spin I’d been mentally giving it myself.

  “Just silence,” I said.

  “Ah. But previously, it was a woman; you’re right. That’s quite interesting. I would have thought you’d pick up only that someone was in distress. But you don’t perceive feelings; you actually seem to hear things, correct?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Can you tell me exactly what you heard?”

  I repeated it for him.

  “Just so,” he said. “Excellent. Can you distinguish between what you hear and what you ‘hear’?”

  “The—I guess the timbre is different, the feel of the voice,” I attempted to explain. “It’s like the difference between a whispered and a spoken phrase. Or … or the way you can remember a conversation sometimes, inflections and intonations and all. I perceive a spoken voice, but it’s much different from the audible voice.”

  “Interesting,” he said. He rose, picked up a snowball paperweight of Niagara Falls from his desk, and toyed with it as he paced in a small area behind his desk. “But you didn’t hear the first voice.”

  “I wasn’t aware there was another one.”

  “There was another one, a man, on the other side of this wall, but he was instructed to think placidly, if you will. The second one was a woman, in the same room, who was instructed to conjure up a horrifying thought and think it with a certain intensity. The room is soundproof, incidentally. The third attempt, which you say you also didn’t hear, came from the woman, but this time she was a hundred yards or so down the hall, in another room.”

  “You said she was ‘conjuring it up,’” I said. “Meaning that her husband wasn’t really killed.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Which means that I was unable to distinguish between her genuine thoughts and her simulated ones?”

  “You might say that,” Mehta agreed. “Interesting, isn’t it?”

  “That’s an understatement,” I replied.

  For the next hour or so he ran me through a battery of tests, designed to ascertain how sensitive my “gift” was, how strong the emotions accompanying the thoughts had to be, how close the person had to be, and so on.

  At the end he ventured an explanation.

  “As you have already speculated,” Dr. Mehta said, “the magnetizing effect of the MRI on your brain produced this peculiar result.” He lighted a Camel straight. His ashtray was a tacky souvenir from a place called Wall Drug in South Dakota.

  He exhaled a cloud of smoke, which seemed to enable him to think deeply. “I don’t know much about you, just that you’re some kind of lawyer, and that you used to be with the Agency. I’d rather not know more than that anyway. As for me, I’m the chief of CIA’s psychiatric division.”

  “Psych tests, debriefings, and all that?”

  “Basically. I’m sure my staff ran tests on you before they sent you to the Farm, before sending you wherever they sent you, and at the end of your term of duty. Your file’s been pulled, so I couldn’t know anything more about you than I do even if I wanted. Which I don’t.” Another cloud of smoke, and then he continued: “But if you expect me to enlighten you about your ability to read minds, I’m sorry to disappoint you. When Toby Thompson came to me a few years back, I thought he’d taken leave of his senses.”

  I smiled.

  “I frankly am not one of those who believed in human extrasensory perception. Not that there’s anything inherently ludicrous about it. There’s quite a body of evidence to suggest that certain animal species possess the ability to communicate that way, whether you’re talking about dolphins or dogs. But I’ve never seen any evidence beyond highly unreliable anecdotal reports that suggest that we humans can do it.”

  “I assume you’ve changed your mind now,” I said.

  He laughed. “Thoughts take place throughout the human brain, in the hippocampus and the frontal-lobe cortex and the neocortex. A colleague of mine, Robert Galambos, has theorized that thinking is ‘done’ by the glial cells, not the neurons. You’ve heard about Broca’s brain?”

  I told him I’d only heard the term, but didn’t know what it meant.

  “The French surgeon Pierre-Paul Broca discovered an area of the human brain where language is produced, an area in the left frontal lobe. Broca’s area is the seat of the speech mechanism. Another place, known as Wernicke’s area, is where we recognize and process speech. That’s in the left temporal and parietal lobes. I’m postulating that when one of these two areas, probably Wernicke’s, was subtly altered somewhat by the powerful magnetism of the magnetic resonance imager, the neurons realigned. And that enables you to ‘hear’ output, low frequency radio waves, from others’ Broca areas. We’ve long known that the human brain puts out these electrical signals. What you’re doing, I suspect, is simply receiving those signals. You know how sometimes we can ‘hear’ ourselves think, as if in our own spoken voice?”

  “Yes, sometimes.”

  “Well, I’d theorize that at some point in the formation of such thoughts there’s concurrent activity in the speech centers. And it’s at that point that the electrical signals are generated. All right. So. Then two recent scientific findings set us to thinking, as it were.

  “One was a study published in Science magazine two years or so ago, done by a team at Johns Hopkins that discovered they could actually produce a computer image of the thinking process of the brain. They hooked up electrodes to a monkey’s brain, and used computer graphics to track the electrical activity in the motor cortex—that area of the brain that controls motor activity. So that in the instant before a rhesus monkey performed an action, they could see on the computer screen, a thousandth of a second in advance, the electrical activity in the monkey’s brain. Amazing! We could actually see the brain thinking!

  “And then, a couple of geobiologists at the California Institute of Technology discovered that the human brain contains something like seven billion microscopic magnetic crystals. In effect, bar magnets made of magnetite crystals, an iron mineral. They were wondering whether there was a link between cancer and electromagnetic fields, though there’s no evidence yet that the magnetic crystals have anything to do with cancer. But my
colleagues and I thought: what if we could use the magnetic resonance imager to somehow alter those little magnets in the human brain—to align them? Now, you’re a patent attorney, so I assume you keep up with technological developments.”

  “As a rule, yes.”

  “Early in 1993, a stunning breakthrough was announced, almost simultaneously, by the Japanese computer giant Fujitsu, the Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation, and Graz University of Technology in Austria. Using various techniques of biocybernetics, the collection of the electrical impulses put out by the brain by means of electroencephalography, human beings could actually control specially configured computers simply by thinking a command! By using their minds they could move a cursor around on a computer screen, even type letters. Well, that was it. At that point we knew it was possible.”

  “So why can’t you induce this in everyone?”

  “That’s the sixty-four-dollar question,” he said. “It may have to do with the way your Wernicke’s area is situated. Perhaps with the number, or density, of the neuronal cells there. Whatever it is about you that gives you an eidetic memory. To be honest, I have no idea. This is only sheerest speculation. But for whatever reason, for whatever confluence of reasons, it happened to you. Which makes you quite valuable indeed.”

  “Valuable,” I said, “to whom?” But he had already turned and left the room.

  TWENTY-NINE

  “I’m really quite satisfied,” Toby Thompson said, and indeed, he was visibly pleased with himself.

  I sat in an antiseptic, brightly lit white interrogation room, watching Toby in an adjoining room through a large, thick pane of glass. The glass was smudged with fingerprints, and the room was so bright that it was easy to forget it was eight in the morning and I’d been up all night. The room was situated in an underground level of the same unlovely 1960s-vintage office building.

  “Tell me something,” I said. “Why the glass barrier? Why aren’t you jamming the room with ELF like you did at the safe house?”