CounterProbe

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  Chapter Seven

  * * *

  Jesus Christ!”

  Martin Kandinsky, a wool cap jammed on his lowered head and his bare hands crammed into the pockets of an ancient wool jacket, backed away from the figure he’d collided with. He squinted into the five o’clock shadow of a winter’s dusk. “Watch where you’re goin’, man!”

  “I’m there already.”

  Kandinsky squinted harder, studying the stranger who’d confronted him. “Kevin! I didn’t recognize you without the beard. Holy balls! What’re you doing here?”

  “Here” was the parking lot behind the Student Health Center on the University of Minnesota campus. Students streamed by, too bundled against the subzero temperatures to notice anyone crazy enough to stop and talk in the open air.

  “I’m here to make a buy, what else?” Kevin joked.

  “Don’t kid about that, man.” Kandy looked around with classic paranoia. “The cops have been on my case for the pot they found when they trashed my place.”

  “They trashed your place?”

  Kandy shrugged. “It was trashed already, no big deal.”

  Kevin grinned briefly. He could picture the police turning Kandy’s upside-down digs inside out. Kandy accumulated junk mail the way compulsive shoppers stockpile hotpads.

  “I figured it’d be safer to catch you here,” Kevin admitted. “I need to find out what’s going on.”

  “You! You’re what’s going on! You weren’t gone more than ten hours before the gestapo came around asking about you. They put your office under a microscope. I stashed your car in the Coffman Memorial ramp, but they impounded it.”

  “City cops or federal?”

  “Who knows? They were kinda vague. You know how those storm troopers can get when they’re on a rampage. They gave my joint—and I do mean joint—a good going- over. Promised me a stint in the cooler for possession if I didn’t cooperate, but all they got was a few shreds. So… enough about me. How you been?”

  Kevin clapped his friend on the shoulder. “How about I buy you dinner? Then you can sing for your supper.”

  Kandy followed Kevin to his own parked van, pausing to inspect it.

  “Nice wheels.” He wrenched open the side door and jumped inside, collapsing like Big Bird on gangly crossed legs. Belatedly, he leaned forward to examine the passenger in the front seat.

  “Jane Doe, I presume.” He glanced at Kevin. “I figured you’d have Wonder Woman with you. Enchanté,” he greeted Jane in hopelessly oily French, detaching her cold bare hand from the seat back it clutched. He lifted it to his lips for an enthusiastic smack.

  Jane watched Kandy with deep confusion while Kevin sprinted around to the driver’s side and jammed himself back behind the wheel. He twisted to watch two opposite personalities on parade—Kandy ingratiatingly ugly and utterly impudent, as usual; Jane taking it all in with grave, miss-nothing eyes.

  Kandy extended his hand for a conventional shake. “I see Kevin’s got you all done up like Cathy Coed. Good thinking. My name’s Martin Kandinsky, but they call me Kandy. I call you pretty cute.”

  Jane blinked and shook his hand. “Are… you one of Kevin’s… other… patients?” she asked politely.

  Kevin smiled. Jane was progressing; not long before she couldn’t accept the idea that he had any patients besides her.

  “Wounded,” Kandy groaned, “a direct hit to the psyche. Naw, I’m a fellow shrink, Miss Doe. As sane as any shrink ever gets.

  “Speaking of which…” Kandy turned his nearsighted eyes on Kevin. “I sure hope you don’t harbor illusions of crashing at your old pad. The gestapo guys took your place to the dry cleaners; they went over it with everything but lighter fluid and a match. It’s probably still staked out. Actually, oppression is an equal opportunity railroad now. Guy and gal. A female agent came along when they did my place. Maybe they want to use feminine psychology on Jane when they get her.”

  Kevin winced. First his car, then his condo. Was nothing sacred? “Where was Cross when all this was going on?”

  “You do mean Dr. Cross, Norbert Cross, head of our esteemed Probe intensive psychiatric care unit?”

  “Yeah. I know Cross was going to shovel Jane off on some government head-tank in Virginia, but Probe was his baby. He had too much pride to let some jokers take it apart.”

  “Maybe. But Cross is gone, Kev. So is Matthews and Swanson and even the Probe unit secretary. The offices are part of the neonatal unit now. Probe is el wipe-o. Gone away for to stay. As if it had never existed. So solly. Computer error. All gone.”

  “I’ve only been away myself for… seven, eight days! How can they—?”

  “You’ve been away a lifetime, Kev, believe me.”

  In silence, Kevin revved the engine and guided the van into the dimming streets. The roadway was narrow, thanks to curbside piles of plowed snow and parked cars lining every avenue. The van crept along. Kevin headed for the nearest McDonald’s, pulled into line and when his turn came bawled an order for them all into the speaker.

  When the warm, bakery-white bags were thrust through the open window, he dumped them all on Kandy and headed for the lot’s farthest parking space.

  Kandy began cramming ketchup-bloodied fries into his mouth. Jane followed suit by tearing a ketchup bag open with her teeth and drenching her box of fries. Kevin took one bite of his first quarter-pounder and stopped, his appetite frozen by their innocent gusto.

  “So where you been?” Kandy inquired genially.

  “Outstate.”

  “Okay, I get it. None of my business. But, look, Kevin. This is Space Mountain. The big glide into nowhere. You’re a non-persona now. And the chick, she’s tomorrow’s McNuggets. Those government types are serious. They want you nailed down and they don’t care if they have to do it by the hands and feet. Why don’t you turn yourselves in? Maybe they just want to give you a medal or something—first famous medical mystery solved by the great Kevin Blake. Maybe they’re on the Side of Science.”

  “Kandy, there are dead bodies behind us.”

  Kandy whistled. “You?” When Kevin was silent he glanced to the watching Jane. “She really is something, isn’t she? Far out. You find anything more out about her—how she comes by her, uh, talents?”

  “Yeah. But I can’t say. I can’t prove it. Nobody’d believe me.”

  Kandy tsked consideringly. “That’s what they all say before we haul them away. There’s something you should know. Before the anti-A Team took over, I knew this cat—”

  “Don’t tell me they interrogated my cat?”

  “No way, they left Blue Streak strictly alone. Besides, all cats look alike, especially Russian Blues. Anyway, I know this dude and he’s a computer whiz, can really make those modems sit up and recite Deuteronomy and Numbers. So when they topsy-turvied my place, I had him go into your bank account pronto and whisk your money far, far away.” Kandy extended a Kinko Copies card with a name and account number scrawled on the back.

  “That’s you, fellah, if you want any dough. We must have done it before the G-whiz boys and girl got wise, ’cause the money’s in the new account.”

  “Or maybe they let you think you got away with it and they’ve got the bank watching.”

  Kandy made calf-eyes at Jane and burst into the chorus of “I Wonder Who’s Paranoid Now?”

  “Me.” Kevin snatched the card. “And you, too, if you’re smart. I might try it. Thanks, Kandy. I’ll repay you someday.”

  “Say no more.” He stared at Kevin in the almost-dark. “You look terrible, man. Better eat that stuff. Then crash. Then get some bread from the bank.”

  “Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I’ll drop you by your car. Do me a last favor on the way? Pick up a Strib at a corner stand. I need to catch up on what’s been happening around here.”

  The engine ignited faithfully. Dark had drifted over the day’s encompassing whiteness. The van droned under streetlights, bars of alternating dark and light rippling its hood and windshield, mesmeriz
ing Kevin. He paused to let Kandy get the newspaper, then drove on, finally pulling into the emptied campus parking lot and feeling much more noticeable.

  Kandy cracked the side door, then hesitated, looking back at Kevin.

  “Take it easy.” He turned to Jane. “A pleasure, Miss Doe. ’Bye.”

  The door slammed shut, closing out Kandy, the cold and a lot of things Kevin had once cared about. Behind intermittent oblongs of lit windows, the university hummed into evening—students and professors working late, staying late, feeling secure and unthreatened. Kevin waited, watching while the yellow jelly-bean- body of Kandy’s old VW chugged out of the lot onto the icy street.

  He shouldn’t have parked directly under a light, Kevin knew, but right now he needed something warm and yellow. He pulled off his gloves and unfolded the evening edition of the Star and Tribune that Kandy had bought.

  The paper was stiff, cold. Kevin paged through it, ignoring Jane for once, hungry for the familiar black-and- white of the newspaper’s type style.

  He wasn’t anywhere in it, nor was she. They weren’t the apple of the public’s eye, and maybe that was worse, maybe it meant they were in deeper trouble. They were anonymous fugitives, free to be plunged into cold storage so deep and frozen that even the sun wouldn’t find them.

  He scanned for mention of the deaths north of Duluth. As soon as Jane and he found a place to rest, he’d have to put her under hypnosis and recapture those lost minutes, find out what had really happened. He’d have to discover what powers remained to her, and why they’d manifested themselves so dramatically in the Volkers’ upstairs bedroom. Eat. Crash. Get money. Jane was right; Kandy was nuts. Kevin had no time for any of that.

  In a back section under an “Outstate News” heading, a word finally snagged his trolling eye. Kevin manipulated the paper, trying to illuminate the one-paragraph item. He read it without believing it. Then he looked over the paper’s trembling rim.

  Jane was watching him, as she so often did. He no longer felt flattered.

  Yet who else could he talk to? He finally glimpsed how alone Jane must feel. He finally felt it, finally knew that no one could know… even as he most desperately wanted to share it with someone.

  “Jane,” he said, because she was the only one there. “Jane. Neumeier. Neumeier’s… dead. She… died. It says of a heart attack. But they’ve killed Neumeier somehow. Up in her cabin. Natural causes! Bullshit.”

  Tears were gathering in his eyes in the dark, hot tears welling on the lip of chill flesh. “You remember Neumeier —we went to see her. And she helped us, put me on the right track about what you were. So they killed her, that great old lady. They killed her in the cold and the snow! Jane—you remember. Say you remember! She died for you—you must remember!”

  Jane dropped her head. He could see only the crown of her hair, her dark, unconfiding hair. His shocked emotions were steadying now, and he knew he had been unfair, terribly unfair, but so was the world. He knew he should try to heal Jane, protect her as he had sworn, vowed, to do. He knew all that, and knew that he needed healing and protection more.

  So he sat there, silent, lost in himself and in the insufficiency of that self, meeting the stranger he had become.

  “I’m sorry,” Jane said at last, looking up with sober, uncertain eyes. “I’m sorry.”

  Chapter Eight

  * * *

  Swashbuckling blue and green letters slashed across the white banners crowding the store’s display window. Crimson neon spelling out L-I-Q-U-O-R washed the cars parked beneath it with an urgent, brake-light glow.

  Jane huddled alone in the van. Kevin had parked, turned off the ignition and, promising not to be gone long, had locked the doors, after making Jane promise in turn not to leave.

  So she scanned the screaming hieroglyphs of the hand- lettered signs, trying to recombine them into sense. “Gilbey’s Gin. Fifth or Liter.” Numbers reeled nonsensically to the back of her mind, but words began to merge under the rapid-fire strafing of her eyes. “Four Roses.”

  “Smirnoff.”

  “Two for $16.95!”

  “Bailey’s Irish Cream for the Blue Nun.”

  “Vermouth.” Vermont? Or very mouth?

  Jane’s chin burrowed into her jacket collar as she absorbed the spectacle before her. Kevin considered Zyunsinth a strange word, she marveled, yet his world overflowed with even stranger words and no one noticed.

  A tingling began worming around her fingertips and toes. Something in her subconscious knew it for subzero cold tentatively taking her by the hands and feet before assaulting the larger body.

  Something else within her knew how to meet it, knew how to lull her acuity, her mind, her senses, her body itself to a level that required less heat. She downshifted easily into hypometabolism. Cold, that invisible incubus, bereft of easy warmth to steal, drifted elsewhere.

  Jane drifted, too. The tingling migrated to her head and rasped there with the faint, rhythmic tenacity of a tree branch scraping the window outside her room in Willhelm Hall. She stared out the van’s frost-etched window, scanning for landmarks. Some memories were dreams, Kevin had said. And some memories were not.

  Memories. Jane’s were jumbled. Her mind pawed the jigsaw puzzle pieces, trying to dovetail a coherent image from the ruins. For Roses. War of the Roses. A chaser for the Blue Nun. Chase. Chase her. Chaste. Run, Blue Nun, run. Blue with Cold Duck.

  And always, above the words that cycled through her like ticker tape, were the lights, leaving her. Retrieving her. And re-leaving (relieving?) her again—odd lights, dispensing color but not warmth. Lights pulsing in the rhythm of delivery and birth. And rebirth. Pausing to withdraw from her the gleaning… again.

  Jane moaned protest and stirred. A tiny light pricked the van’s interior darkness. Some shred of sound scratched the quiet as if it were a screen.

  Nothing moved, and the doors’ rusted chrome button locks remained depressed.

  Yet on the van’s silenced radio, a firefly of light cruised the fine-line gradations, illuminated the tiny numbers one by one. Behind closed lids, Jane’s eyes followed the light’s advance and retreat up the scale of stations—no, Jane’s eyes led the light up and down the horizontal FM ladder.

  In the beginning was the light. Sound was an afterthought. A cacophony reminiscent of the massed spinning of Lynn Volker’s slipcased record albums growled sotto voce in the van, echoed in Jane’s mind. From Babel— meaning. Jane detected words again, English words spoken in un-English accents. The seeking fine red line in her mind automatically dialed them in. Words became voices, dancing phrases in the dark.

  “If the lynx remain in place; surely the bonds can rejoin. We can—”

  “We can nothing. The lynx are merely potential This one unit is cast free of control, tumbling in the void.”

  “The liberation was an act of One.”

  “Of One, yes, called to by one not of its kind. It is most… unprecedented that those of us on deep extradition should revert so primitively.”

  “The One has been adjusted?”

  “The One has submerged in All. And the mother-cell has sent another One to add to All, with new instructions.”

  “We have been… as we are… for some time.”

  “True. But we are All, and All wishes to make us more”

  “We can grow. We have before.”

  “Still, the rogue probe is lost and we will not be complete until all our data-bearers are gathered again.”

  “What will the new one-in-all instruct?”

  “That which serves the mother of us all—who is the child-cell…”

  “We have not completely severed the lynx.”

  “No. But we do not retain enough control to recall the probe.”

  “Does it sense us still, this rogue unit, do we think?”

  “We think… but we do not sense much anymore. It is a sorrow that the old skills become so unnecessary.”

  “That way lies oneness.”

  “Wh
ich… one… of us moved to let the unit go?”

  “We are assimilated now.”

  “Then it does not matter; we are repaired. Or are all of us suspect now?”

  “Perhaps the voyager cell will know when we glean its message.”

  “Behold the imaging. It is pale, this world, and watery. The probe may mire itself in the swamp of it and sink beneath the weight of it.”

  “We have surrendered probes before.”

  “But never on their own initiative.”

  * * *

  Jane’s hand waved before her face as if to banish gnats. A grating crack echoed in the metal-walled van. She jerked upright, her eyes wide open.

  “Sleepyhead,” Kevin was accusing fondly, jamming himself into the van’s newly lit interior with a wedge of cold and a brown paper bag. The door slammed shut, encasing them both in lurid red-lit dimness again.

  “Hey, you got the radio going all by yourself? You’re getting to be quite a techie. Jane, the Radio Wave Girl. Sorry to take so long; there was a line at the checkout counter.”

  He pulled off his gloves to wrench the dial and slide the bar of light from number to number. Voices and vocals Dopplered in and out of range. Country western whining blended with rock screeching and middle-of-the-road baying.

  “Lynx,” Jane said, sitting up and narrowing her eyes. Her bare hands hugged her upper arms as if she felt cold.

  Kevin glanced her way. “What?”

  “Lynx,” she repeated with mournful certainty. “The lynx are gone.”

  He looked puzzled for a moment, his face leprosied with neon backwash. “Lynx? Still thinking about Zyunsinth in… cold storage, Jane? No more fur coats, thank God. No lynx, no opossum, not even a baby rabbit or two. I can’t afford it, and neither can you. We’ll get to a motel, and then we’ll get warm.”

  “Why are the lynx gone?” Jane persisted with childlike monotony as Kevin backed the van out of the lot.

  He was too weary to answer, but he did. “Endangered species, I guess. Getting extinct. Too many ladies with too few things to do wanting to buy dead animal skins.”