CounterProbe

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  Chances are that even Nordstrom sleeps. Or does he? He could easily be insomniac. Even now he could be slipping the narrow silver eyes of his array of needles into Jane’s veins, pumping the same sinister drugs into her body and brain that he used on Kevin.

  He shuts his eyes. The retinal afterimage remains—a dark furry figure burned onto a dirty white wall. Staring, Kevin sees the tiny likeness resolve into perfect focus, drifting in the dark of his eyes. It exists, the damn thing exists—a monster of the id, the ego, the embattled subconscious. He watches it grow.

  His eyes peel open. Something shapeless is shambling against the ill-lit shower wall. Kevin’s heart quickens with a contradictory blend of alarm and Frankensteinian hubris. Jane has proven the mind capable of extraordinary feats. Maybe he can…

  The figure sways from foot to foot and begins humming “Good Night, Ladies” in flawless kazoolike tones.

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  * * *

  Suddenly everybody wants to see me,” Kevin complained. “I wish you folks could stagger your visits over the next few days. It’s gonna get lonely in here and it’s only Monday morning. Nice of you government types to visit on Martin Luther King’s birthday, though. I thought you’d take the day off.”

  “I hear you have adequate company in your cell,” Turner said.

  Kevin dropped the false cheer. He was surprised to see Turner here, especially so early Monday morning. “I didn’t know you worked the dawn patrol.”

  “I work when it’s needed.”

  “So… what can I do for you?”

  “Treat Jane Doe.”

  “That easy? Sure. When I get out. When I find her.”

  “You can get out when I say so. And you don’t need to find her.”

  Kevin struggled to keep his face blank. Turner was putting on an act, he told himself. Turner was doing what he was paid to do: applying a calculated amount of pressure to a predictable reactor—Kevin.

  “You claim you’ve got her, then?”

  “I’m tired.” Turner leaned back in his chair and let his face show it. “I don’t need a last dance with you. We’ve got her. Actually, Nordstrom’s got her.”

  “You sonofabitch.” Dull jailhouse rage choked Kevin. He knew better than to attack Turner, but he also knew that he wanted to. He wanted to attack them all, and he was too damn smart to do it.

  Turner gave Kevin’s rote obscenity a nod of recognition. “Too tired for that, too. If you’d agree to work with her, help her, I could get you out in a minute—well, a couple hours, anyway. They cling to their paperwork around here, even when cutting red tape.”

  “It’s a lie. A bluff. Psychological warfare. You don’t have Jane. You think I don’t see that this whole place, this whole detention system, is designed to soften me up?

  “Why was I paraded in the front door? All the other guys came through the underground garage, nice and private and more secure. No, I get civilians gawking at me all the way in. Everybody else gets two or three phone calls. I get one. They hoped the bastards in the dorm cell would nail me to the wall, but it didn’t work that way. You think I haven’t figured that out?”

  “I always said you were smart. Think it over. Why would I lie about having Jane Doe? What would I get out of a bluff?”

  “I might… drop my guard. Say something. Give you a clue to where she really is.”

  “I’ll tell you where she is.” Turner stood and leaned over the table. The higher he loomed over Kevin the lower his voice got. Kevin had to admire his psychology.

  “At this moment your Jane Doe is in an abandoned plant somewhere in mid-state. She’s lying in a room made to look like a hospital, with a big mirror on the wall and a little shrink sitting on the other side watching everything she does.

  “He’s ‘feeding’ her on saline IVs, Blake, making notes in his manila folders and getting ready to take her brain apart like a Tinkertoy.

  “She’s way thinner than her sketches. Some bums found her lying naked in the snow near the railroad tracks in downtown Minneapolis. She’d been mugged, stripped and left for dead. The meat wagon almost took her away Saturday morning, but Nordstrom saved her. Found a pulse in her foot. Inventive, our Dr. Nordstrom. I guess we both should be grateful.”

  Kevin’s head was in his hands. “No.”

  “Treat her. That’s all you have to do. Take her where you would have taken her anyway—to her outer and inner limits. It’s your job, Blake. Nobody can do it better.”

  “No.”

  “Don’t trust me. Trust your instincts. She’s confused. And weak. And dangerous, I think.”

  “No.”

  Turner straightened slowly, as if it hurt.

  Kevin heard the rustle of Turner’s raincoat. It sounded like someone opening a box of crackers—the rectangular old-fashioned kind with the dark blue wrapper that he hadn’t seen in years. For a moment he felt young and small and wished he could hide in somebody’s kitchen all night and sneak out to eat soda crackers and Kool-Aid and they’d never find him and they would be very, very sorry…

  “What’ll you do?” he asked Turner.

  “My job.”

  “It’s a lousy thing to do.”

  “Sometimes. I’m sorry,” Turner said before leaving.

  Kevin was sorry, too. So damned sorry.

  A flashbulb smashed into the shattered glass.

  The retinas of every man in the room exploded with small novas of light. Turner was the first to step to the worktable paved with a jigsaw of broken mirror. His fingertips glided over the reflecting pool of puzzle, looking like a kid’s finger-spiders. They crawled cautiously over the sharp fissures dividing the segments.

  Nordstrom broke the spell.

  “I suppose you want a medal?” he asked, his weak eyes still watering from the flashbulb. “Well?”

  Turner’s fingers lifted—reluctantly. The image burned straight through the glass, almost as if on film. It completely altered the molecular composition of the mirror.

  “You must have laboratories squirreled all over this barn.” Nordstrom looked to the echoing ceiling, where pipe-hung lights glimmered in faint constellations against the grimy concrete vault.

  “The only thing we have here that’s your business is Jane Doe.”

  “ ‘Thing.’ That’s the spirit, Mr. Turner. I was afraid you were turning sentimentalist on me.”

  “The letters don’t mean anything to you?” Turner persisted.

  “Letters is stretching it… more like graffiti by blowtorch.”

  “K.” Turner pointed. “E-L-L-E-H-A-Y. The shaping is primitive, almost… primordial. I’m no shrink, but it’s as if they came from a very primitive brain, an under- brain—”

  “You’re no shrink. You should see what sophisticated adults can draw during therapy. We’re all a cell’s breadth from the animal in our ancestry. So… she formed these letters in the glass before breaking it.”

  “No.” Turner picked up a shard, turned the dark jagged edge to the light. “My tech people say it’s as if the letters formed in the glass as it was breaking, as if the letters are what broke it. The molecular alteration doesn’t extend all the way to the surface—or even to the broken edges, for that matter. It was an… interrupted… process.”

  Nordstrom took the sliver from Turner. “Clever of you to have spotted a message in all that wreckage, but hardly what we’re looking for, Mr. Turner. It smacks of fraud, to my mind, of psychic hocus-pocus. Of theatrics. Wouldn’t it be amusing if that’s all you had here, if the great Dr. Blake had blown his whole career for a fake? Besides, what’s a… Kellehay?”

  “I thought you had pored over the Jane Doe files. He was one of the two police officers who found her on that Crow Wing bluff. He went to the hospital with her and later plunged out the window of her room to his death.”

  “Ah. I’d forgotten. Odd name. But this case is cluttered with bizarre names. And words. Blake even hypnotized her with a piece of gobbledegook.” When Turner looked suf
ficiently curious, Nordstrom snapped out the word. “Zyunsinth.”

  Turner chuckled wearily. “Sounds like one of those code names they love at headquarters. So that puts her bye-bye, huh?”

  “Not… yet. Apparently Blake said it differently. Or he may have given her a posthypnotic suggestion to refuse to respond to anyone else.”

  “You can’t hypnotize her? That’s serious, Nordstrom. With unexplained physical evidence mounting up”— Turner’s hand swept across its own reflection in the patch- work mirror—“we need to deliver more than more questions. We need answers. Might as well prove her a fraud and be done with it.”

  “Perhaps that’s just what I will do. You don’t really care, do you?”

  “Oh, I care.”

  Nordstrom turned from the mirror-topped table. “I’ll really get down to work with her today. She should be softened up by now. If I still can’t hypnotize her, I can always go to narcoanalysis.”

  “Maybe you got the wrong word.”

  “You want Blake back in on this,” Nordstrom accused. “Where did you go so early this morning? I wouldn’t try it, if I were you. I get along too well with your superiors.”

  Turner shrugged and turned his back on Nordstrom.

  * * *

  Letters are tumbling down the corridors of Jane’s consciousness in Morse code, stringing after one another like the lighted dots she’d seen in a photograph of a Times Square billboard.

  Letters and words and names. Symbols and representations and codes. Figures shadow-box at the fringe of the display. Some are the furred creatures she had known as Zyunsinth.

  Others are hairless, white, clothed—ambulance attendants she remembers, two sets, each face etched on her subconscious in photographic detail. There is the man with the Adam’s apple; the one with the hairs inside his nose iced over, another with a fan-shaped purple blotch on his wrist beneath the cuff of his white jacket…

  And she sees women in white—white slips and white bras and white panty hose, women in white all the way through, so they seemed transparent. And other figures wearing white—vaguer, sexless, sizeless. Memories of whiteness swarm around Jane, flurried and congregated, humming and buzzing.

  At first the buzz echoes the drone of the wall-unit heater in her room. Then the sound swells into one with the blankness and begins pulsing into her understanding.

  “Contact missed badly.”

  “Not by very much.”

  “Still, the damage is not repaired. The links are not completely severed.”

  “We were precisely aimed at the moment of deposit.”

  “Some random element… overcame the connection.”

  “The probe remains operative.”

  “The probe remains rogue.”

  “Perhaps we must intervene again.”

  “We come only to wait and watch.”

  “Their probes came to us first.”

  “Only to our edges. And their probes have always been innocuous.”

  “To our examinations.”

  “What will our probe appear like to them?”

  “Less innocuous. Ours are altered to survive hostile environments intact.”

  “So are theirs. They do not hazard genetic material to the deeper Void.”

  “So precious they hold it. A peculiar concept. All things biological are the end product of expendability. If we did not slough the extraneous cells, the mother-cell would not remain ever-new.”

  “They are much enamored of sameness though they espouse individual differences. A most intriguing notion. They remain the most complicated of the species we have surveyed.”

  “Will contact be possible ever, do we think?”

  “Unlikely. Crude and volatile. Still, tenacious for all that. They would not adapt well to the concept of existence extension through assimilation. They wish always to stand apart.”

  “As does the rogue probe. How could we release it again at its request?”

  “It surprised us. A weak cell responded to its novelty. Even we cell-mates are not beyond the failing of curiosity, for all we know of variant biological forms.”

  “And in these beings are our own roots?”

  “Of course. Though they will not last so long as we.”

  “We will last as long as light.”

  “As long as light.”

  “And they?”

  “Less long than the light of their little sun—even the last of them.”

  “We could feel pity.”

  “It is possible that they will live long enough to touch upon our metamorphosis.”

  “Their world will change so much.”

  “Only if they do.”

  “We learn much of what we are not. Sometimes we long to learn of likeness rather than dissimilarity.”

  “We are like none in our Oneness. We will collect our data, our probes and withdraw. They will hardly mark our passage, except as rumor.”

  “Or… religion.”

  “Very true. All creatures seek that larger than themselves.”

  “We find it. Within ourselves. Soon we shall no longer reach out, no longer glean the chaff of other worlds. We shall be content within our own world. We shall be Still.”

  “Yet… we remain curious. The patterns these beings scribe fit so well into the destiny of the universe, yet they themselves only see destiny on the palms of their hands.”

  “Wait until they have no hands, then they will see destiny in the stars.”

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  * * *

  Nordstrom opened the door to Jane’s room and looked first at the floor. The dishes still lay there. Food blotches had hardened to scabs on the vinyl tile.

  Jane still lay bound in her bed.

  “Awake? Or never asleep?” he wanted to know.

  “I rested,” she said calmly, opening her eyes.

  “And fasted. Too bad, in some ways you’re an ideal patient for me. You have a self-discipline I don’t find in many females.”

  He had begun unbuckling the restraints. Jane lay perfectly still, ignoring even the brush of his hands. He lifted the adhesive tape at her elbow and disconnected the IV.

  “You can visit the bathroom now, if you like,” he mocked, ripping off the top sheet as if to expose some secret.

  Jane rose and went into the small adjacent bathroom, leaving Nordstrom staring at pristine bed linens.

  “You held your urine all night?” he demanded, following her. He would have opened the closed bathroom door, but she had locked it. He eavesdropped, listening through the hollow-core door. He heard only the faucet pouring water into the sink and, finally, the flush of a toilet.

  “Jane, let me in!”

  “Not until I come out.”

  “Why did you lock the door?”

  “I wanted you on the other side of it.”

  “I can have it broken down.”

  The door opened suddenly. Jane was standing before him in the white hospital shift that made her look so childlike, staring at him with her deep-set unchildlike eyes. She was almost exactly his height.

  Nordstrom blinked. He wasn’t used to seeing patients eye to eye. He was always seated when they entered, and he always had them lie down before he began. He was used to looking down on them. “Don’t lock yourself in again; I can have it broken open,” he repeated.

  “So can I,” said Jane, returning to the bed.

  “You’ve already missed breakfast. I can cancel lunch, too.”

  She sat on the bed, slightly propped against the pillow, and folded her narrow hands over her abdomen.

  “Doesn’t that disturb you?” He advanced on her cautiously now. She was behaving abnormally—abnormally calm, abnormally docile.

  “I’m not hungry.”

  “I told you, that’s a sign of starvation.”

  Jane smiled. “Yes, but you think in extremes—no food or all food. That’s what the girls were saying at the dorm all the time—‘I’m starving!’ But they weren’t starving at all. They were
eating potato chips and Hostess Twinkies and nachos—I think that there is something in-between, Dr. Nordstrom, don’t you?”

  “No!” He pulled a chair over and sat, ignoring the fact that Jane was propped up in her bed above him like an ailing queen. “Life, our minds are nothing but polarities, nothing but extremes—love/hate, life/death, satiety/ hunger…”

  “Strength/weakness,” Jane added to the toll.

  “My strength is your weakness.”

  “Your weakness is my strength,” she replied.

  “What do you know of strength? You’re a memory- impaired Raggedy Ann, moving from the hands of one man to another, one shrink to the next. You’ll obey whoever your new master is.”

  “I obey… myself.”

  “Who told you that drivel?”

  “Kevin.”

  “He was wrong. You always obeyed Kevin. Now you obey me.”

  Jane frowned. “Kevin said—”

  “Kevin is gone now.”

  “I saw him, standing outside. I was drawn inside. I couldn’t stop myself. Nothing could stop me.”

  “Nothing can stop you from doing as I wish.”

  “Kevin said the I-ness of me was sovereign. I remember that now, Kevin—”

  “Kevin screwed you!”

  She smiled. “Yes! I know that word. That’s what the nurses said in Willhelm Hall. They talked a great deal about screwing. The books don’t mention it. The books are much more technical. Are you technical, Dr. Nordstrom?” Jane cocked her head. “Do you want to do what Kevin did with me?”

  He retreated. “No! What he did was… a violation. Of his profession. Of his self.”

  “One can’t violate what refuses to be violated,” Jane said. “I don’t like you, Dr. Nordstrom. I think liking is a prerequisite to screwing, although sometimes disliking is. It is very confusing. I love Kevin. He loves me. You don’t like me. I don’t like you. You are… arbitrary. I don’t think Kevin would like you, either.”

  “Like has nothing to do with it.”