CounterProbe

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  “Oh, I’ll ‘elicit her potential,’ all right. Just don’t ask for any seamy details, because there won’t be any. That’s all over.”

  “I can’t believe you mean that.”

  Kevin looked Turner dead in the eye. “I do.”

  Turner believed him because Kevin believed himself. Kevin sighed and sipped the boiling hot tea. Convincing this determined new Jane would be a lot harder.

  Later, after Turner left, he lingered to analyze himself.

  It didn’t help that he felt Jane’s betrayer in more ways than one. He had so easily converted to Turner’s side. At times, living in this remote rural bunker, moving from one indoor area to another, he took this mock world so for granted that the outside world seemed unreal. He didn’t even know what day it was now, or what date. The world turned without him.

  They provided him with food and fresh clothing whose origins he never questioned. He came and went without visible surveillance, though he was sure Turner never for a moment underestimated his capacity to rebel. He could even resume a physical relationship with Jane with no static—the government didn’t care about that, as long as he continued to probe her psychic abilities.

  Sometimes Kevin fantasized that he would “confess” the whole thing. Commit truth. He would tell them that Jane’s so-called psychic abilities were even more unearthly than they thought. She was a space-born clone, he would admit, a test-tube baby an alien species had Tinkertoyed together. A genetic erector set.

  He would swear he had seen the alien vessel, swear that a UFO sat at the center of everything weird about this case. They could polygraph him, and the needles would write a thin, level line of truth under every one of his assertions.

  But it wouldn’t matter what the polygraph said. If Kevin claimed what he believed—knew—to be the truth, he would be as discredited as Nordstrom. They’d consign him to storage so cold and so dead even Zyunsinth wouldn’t survive it. And Jane would be in other hands, subject to other obsessions than his own. He still seemed the least of several evils, even to himself.

  * * *

  Jane studied herself in the mirror that Kevin didn’t like.

  Kevin didn’t like very much here, she knew, including herself. She blew out the hollows of her cheeks, her fingers pushing her flesh into a fuller configuration. It didn’t help. Nor did her slowing herself, hoarding her body heat and limiting her motions. She was gaining weight, but it would still take many days for her to resume the appearance she last remembered of herself and that seemed to be so vital to Kevin.

  As for the other thing… Jane frowned. She knew what a hymen was, but had never seen one, had never experienced it as other than something she felt the absence of more than its presence. It was hard to restructure a null.

  In the end, she went into the tiny bathroom and probed until she found it, a tough wall of thin tissue. She finally forced her hand through, felt the unpleasant burning tear. Her fingers came away bloodied, but she washed them under the tap water. She didn’t have the proper equipment the girls at the dorm had given her on the other occasions she had bled like this, but the red rinsed away as fast as it had come and she knew she had no hymen any longer.

  She had hoped some magic would make this renewed absence result in Kevin’s presence. But he didn’t seem inclined to touch her in that way again, and something in herself—something alien—balked at telling him what she had done. She would have rather done it as she was used to doing things—from within, subtly. She would have wished that he had done it, as before. Now, Kevin would be angry at her alteration of herself for himself, Jane sensed. Something in her wished not to anger Kevin, and something in her was—slowly—becoming angry with him.

  “Jane,” he said later in the day that she’d freed—or bound?—herself for him. “I guess I’ve got to ask you to try to… move something. Turner will boot me out if I don’t put on a show for him. I know you can do it now, much more consciously. Will you try?”

  “What shall I move?”

  “What do you feel like moving?”

  “Sometimes… everything.”

  “I’ve never seen that in you before.”

  “What?”

  “That… adolescent… rage.”

  Jane was silent.

  “Well,” he asked. “Will you?”

  “You always ask the wrong questions.”

  “That’s a heck of a thing to tell a psychiatrist.”

  “The table.”

  “What?”

  “I’ll move the table.”

  Kevin glanced to the hospital tray-table pushed against the wall. Jane ate with him now, in a different room, like a grown-up girl, like a well person.

  “Okay.” He sat back to watch, half disbelieving, half reluctant to see her reduced to doing parlor tricks. “How do you do it?”

  “I begin by seeing it. Then I let it see me.”

  “I… see.” He nodded gravely.

  Jane didn’t so much look at the table as look within herself. The table didn’t so much move as… sparkle. Kevin stared. He saw it shimmer in its position, glimpsed the ceaseless atoms randomly colliding yet holding a shape. He saw matter literally unravel itself. The impression lasted a mere nanosecond. It registered on his brain only because that organ dealt in hypertime, too.

  Then the illusion was gone. And the table, the table had jumped two feet away from the wall. Kevin heard the noise of its motion from a distance, as if the hand of time had muffled reality for an instant.

  “That’s wonderful. Carolyn Swanson would have given her best starched lab coat to see that. Can you… show someone else?”

  “Yes—”

  Kevin rose, went to the table, touched it. The Formica surface felt slightly warm, as if sun-baked. Otherwise, it looked perfectly normal. As did Jane. He turned to look at her.

  She was sitting on the edge of her bed, her feet crossed at the ankles, her hands in her lap. An expression he didn’t want to read sat uneasily on her face. She looked slight and young and too powerful to psychoanalyze.

  “Jane… I’m sorry. I had to ask you to do it.”

  “Kevin—”

  “No.”

  “I did what you wanted.”

  “Sometimes, that’s not enough.”

  Her expression intensified. “I could… move you.”

  “Jane, no! That would change me. And us. That’s not the way.”

  For a moment he read unbridled power in her expression. His body tingled all over, as if every cell were snapping its electrical fingers.

  “Jane… you don’t want to—alter me.”

  “I altered me! But I still don’t know how—how to be me anymore,” she complained.

  He went to her and pulled her close as he stood there, pulled her face into the dubious comfort of the sweater Turner had provided him. Nothing was his anymore. He had fought them until he had become them.

  “Jane—” But he had nothing to say to her anymore. He was not enough, and she was too much.

  She wordlessly wrapped her arms around his hips, pressed her cheek into his stomach. He stroked her hair. It had never been soft, glossy. Always thick and strong. It was the kind of hair that grayed early. He was thinking of time passing, of survival—hers and his. He was thinking forward and there wasn’t any future in it.

  “Later,” he said. “We’ll do it again. For Turner and his cameras, is that all right? We have to show them something.”

  She tilted her head to look up at him. Nothing but emptiness filled her face. Kevin bent down to kiss her and left the room.

  * * *

  Jane studies herself in the mirror again.

  So much is missing that she sometimes expects to see holes in her image. There is not only her amnesia, the missing memories of all the time with Kevin after the aliens returned her. There are missing feelings as well, instincts. She knows what she should know, but doesn’t know how to use it.

  Frustrated, she stares at herself until she sees the infinitesimal bits of t
hat self disassembling, dissolving in the glass. Reality mimicks the illusion. She sees another self reassemble—an old self.

  A fur-coated Jane strides through the snow, booted feet kicking small sprays of white before her so she seems at times to be walking on water.

  This Jane is whole, healthy—her face soft, not harshly drawn. This Jane walks with her head up and her hands in her pockets. She comes on, her eyes oddly dreamy for a figure so intent, so energetic. She comes so close to the silver surface of the mirror that Jane thinks she can reach out to pet the fur—the Zyunsinth that was long buried, Kevin said.

  This remembered Jane comes so close her frosty breath seems to fog the mirror, obscuring her own image, everything. Jane’s feet stutter forward, bring her eye to eye with the misty surface. She pushes a forefinger through the condensation, wiping the mirror clear again.

  In the cloud of fog that remains, Jane’s forefinger traces a design she’d seen on the steam-fogged dorm bathroom mirror one day. “K.B. + J.D.” Jane draws a big heart shape around it and watches.

  In time, the steam evaporates and Jane goes to bed.

  The Severing

  January 22

  “…the fever of the bone…”

  —T. S. Eliot, Whispers of Immortality

  Chapter Thirty-seven

  * * *

  Tomorrow,” Kevin told Turner that night.

  “Drink?” the government man asked in answer.

  “Yeah. Drink.”

  Turner—perceptive—poured a full three fingers of Scotch into a tumbler. Kevin hoisted it.

  “That all the government can afford?” He nodded at the bottle still in Turner’s hand.

  “All that’s allowed for medicinal purposes. I guess you’re a doctor, so you can prescribe for yourself. I congratulate you, against your better judgment. If you can produce any concrete evidence of Jane Doe’s abilities, we’ll really get some dough behind us. You can keep her as a patient.”

  “I’ve lost her,” Kevin said, drinking. “I’ve sold her out.”

  “Somebody had to do it.” Turner sat at the lunch table in the ground-floor lounge. He’d angled out one of the lower window squares so a blast of fresh winter air prowled the smoke-stale atmosphere.

  “What did this place used to be anyway?” Kevin stared up at the high, relentlessly functional ceiling.

  “Meat-packing plant. We’re sitting in the employee lounge. The outfit went bust in the sixties. This was a one-industry town and it dried up.”

  Kevin laughed until Turner looked at him oddly. “What are you going to do with Nordstrom?” Kevin asked.

  “Ship him out when we close down operations.”

  “Leave here?”

  “Sure. Now that we’ve got something concrete, there’s no reason she—you and she—can’t go to Virginia and work with the pros—the PID parapsychology team. They’re top people, Blake. Academics. They’re not Mind Wars engineers, just curious scientists.”

  “So were the Nazi doctors. Who knows, maybe ‘curious scientists’ are eavesdropping on us up there even now—” Kevin nodded beyond the concrete ceiling. “Maybe they’ll experiment us into oblivion, like the ever-useful drosophila. Fruit flies,” he added when Turner looked blank.

  “You’re tired.” Turner stood, then drained the undiluted gold in his glass. “Better get some rest. You’ve got a big day ahead of you tomorrow.”

  “Right. In a minute.”

  Turner left him the bottle, a tall green bottle wearing a label full of blarney about its impeccable Scottish ancestry.

  Kevin poured another three fingers into his glass. The Scotch was warm but its too-sharp bite matched his inner bile. He got up and went to the window, stuck his head under the slanted glass and inhaled the brutal wind chill.

  A meat-packing plant. Turner hadn’t even noticed the irony. An abandoned meat-packing plant.

  The night was dark. Woods surrounded the plant; inside the trees lay a ring of unmarked snow. Kevin knew there was perimeter security—there had to be. He just didn’t see it. So was it so much worse—how his kind would use Jane, compared to how the aliens already had?

  He strained his neck out the opening, looking for sky, for stars. Only darkness yawned over him—either the sky was overcast or he couldn’t see well enough. In his hand, the glass was turning to smooth ice. His knuckles felt burned. He tilted the glass and let cheap Scotch pierce the snow below, driving into it like hot piss.

  He leaned back into the room, dully thinking that he should really shut the window for the night, Simple Citizen saving the government heating money.

  And then he saw her.

  Standing among the trees—a vague figure. He knew it was Jane.

  He rubbed his eyes, as they do in turn-of-the-century dime novels. She was still there—worse, she was walking out from under the shadowy trees toward the building.

  Jane, no,… Jane, yes. He didn’t want her to be real.

  She was coming closer, step by step, more recognizably herself with every advance. Behind her stretched a trail of footprints. Even as he watched, the snow blurred unnaturally in her wake, erasing the signs of her passage. Ghosts don’t leave tracks, he told himself, and normal people don’t erase their own imprints. It must be Jane.

  Zyunsinth’s long hair riffled as she moved. Kevin had seen no stars, but there must have been a full moon. Jane seemed us well lit as a church on a Christmas card.

  A few feet from his watching post she paused, seeming to stare right through him. The wind tickled a few black threads of hair along her cheek, blending with the upraised hairs of the coat collar. Her hair looked… teased. No! She wore a hat. A mink pillbox.

  Kevin waited for his dream to end or take a bizarre new direction. Instead, Jane turned. She vanished along the wall to his right, the holes of her footsteps closing up behind her in neat sequence.

  Kevin went back to the table to contemplate the low- grade Scotch. He was shivering. Projection? He wondered. Jane wishing her old self back so much she had produced it? Or had he just glimpsed a figment of his own wish fulfillment? And what explained the bizarre clothing this phantom wore?

  With his eyes shut, he envisioned Jane wearing her Crow Wing jacket and politely lost expression, Jane as one solitary figure in a bank lobby bristling with anonymous passersby.

  Cold entered the room—not from the window. Kevin’s opening eyes had already focused on the door. He had to get upstairs and check Jane’s room. He arrived at the door just as it swung open. Jane herself stood on the threshold, her nose burnished red, her eyelashes whitened with ice.

  “Kevin?” she asked, looking dazed, surprised and happy all at once.

  He was too stunned to answer and, anyway, she fainted at his feet.

  * * *

  Jane sat at the Formica-topped lunch table, the satin lining of her fur coat unfurled behind her, eating a baloney sandwich.

  She wolfed it down—two slabs of whole-wheat bread, pickles, lettuce, tomato, mayonnaise and six slices of Peters’ baloney.

  The sight would have turned Nordstrom’s stomach.

  Kevin sat watching her, his face propped in his fists, his expression sandwiched between two seldom-paired emotions—parental pride and adolescent infatuation. It was Jane, he knew. His Jane. Back again as she was, only God knew how. Back from someplace she couldn’t have been.

  “You walked from the Twin Cities?” he asked.

  Jane nodded broadly, chewing. “Mwfffaplssss,” she corrected.

  Of course. She came from Minneapolis, not St. Paul. Precise Jane. Surprising Jane. Jane. Really, truly Jane Jane. Again.

  Then who the hell was that upstairs? His mind reeled, torn between two mutually exclusive truths. If he didn’t force his eyes to focus, they kept seeing Jane… and Jane. Double vision. Somehow, she was two. That would explain the bewildering weight discrepancy, and why Turner’s Jane had selective amnesia…

  Jane took a professional swig of the beer Kevin had fetched from the Company refrig
erator.

  Her eyelashes were dewy, as if she’d been crying. Kevin knew better. She’d been walking in subzero temperatures for hours—other than a slow heartbeat, icy extremities that were rapidly warming, and a Godzilla-sized appetite, she seemed fine. Her face and body seemed fully fleshed, healthy despite the ordeal.

  “You want some more?” he asked.

  Jane frowned at the few bread crumbs spangling her empty plate. “In a minute.”

  “I can’t believe that you found me,” Kevin marveled. “Where is this place, anyway?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You must know if you found it!”

  Jane shook her head. Her only makeup was the blood rushing back into her lips and cheeks, but she looked terrific. She glowed. “I just… went where I had to go.”

  “Speaking of going—” Kevin swooped the empty plate into the stainless steel sink, where other used utensils still lay. “We better scram before anybody sees you.” He’d suddenly realized that no one must see her and lifted the foreign fur coat off the back of her chair. “My place or yours?”

  Jane stared at him, surprised, then winked.

  The hall wore its usual air of desertion that Kevin never quite believed. Someone was clocking his comings and goings. He prayed whoever it was took naps. Their footsteps seemed thunderous in the stairwell, but no governmental lightning struck. They saw no one and no one spotted them.

  “It looks like a hospital,” Jane said when he got her— unseen—to his room. She was not being complimentary.

  Kevin sat on the bed’s fake blanket—some sort of foam matted into blanket shape. “It’s better than county jail. Jane… my God, how… where… have you been? If you only knew what’s been going on here—!”

  She sat beside him. “I don’t know, Kevin. It’s so confusing. I was with Panama Hattie and Boomer in the dumpster, and then the fire started burning the blankets and I—I lifted it.