Psi Hunt

by Kurland, Michael

  “I introduced them over the phone, Herbert. Cleared for Top Secret Panda, all of them.”

  “Badges?” Herbert said, with a let’s-see-you-get-around-this-one smirk on his face. Feeling sillier than he had since graduating Naval Intelligence School, Robert reached for the chain around his neck that held the identification tags he had worn since entering the service, and the sea-blue permplast Panda picture badge he had been issued when his clearance had come through. Since he had graduated Intelligence school, few had asked to see the badge. He had to wear it, like his ID tags, as part of his uniform, but he seldom had to show it. After all, Panda was the code word for information of interest to the Navy, and therefore not of much interest to anyone else. Navy security guards seldom checked badges, they just made sure you weren’t stealing wheelbarrows.

  Friendly and Leah had red, temporary, picture badges, which were given out and collected at the door to anyone identified by the computer as having the proper clearance. Like the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace, military custom dies hard and slowly.

  Herbert inspected each badge closely, comparing it with the face in question. When he was satisfied he nodded briskly, with no trace of embarrassment. “Glad to meet you, sirs, and Miss. Any friend of Admiral Dennison has my highest regards. You can’t be too careful, you know. Once found a subminiature transponder in the eagle on the CNO’s hat. Nobody’s immune.”

  “Who bugged the eagle?” Robert asked, stuffing his badge back under his shirt.

  “The Air Force, who else? The thing broadcast to a spy satellite in synchronous orbit over the Admiral’s head.”

  “What have you got to show us?” Admiral Dennison asked.

  “Show and tell,” Herbert said, “show and tell. Listen!” He pushed a switch on the side panel of the cart, and the voice of a tortured young girl issued from it. Robert had heard the voice before.

  Siren and tire and possibly air CLICK no more than forty thousand sigh CLICK siren and tire and possibly air CLICK no more than forty thousand sigh CLICK siren and tire and poss. . . .

  CLICK

  Herbert flicked it off. “You know what that is?”

  “The voice of a girl who has looked on Hell,” Leah said gently.

  Friendly nodded, his gray eyes focused on some invisible object in the middle of the room. “We visited her yesterday afternoon, before spending our enjoyable evening with Lieutenant Burrows.”

  “I thought she’d been moved into a closed ward,” Robert said.

  Friendly’s eyes changed focus. “She has been. She’s now in a private room with two guards. You know why she’s being guarded? Out of concern for her life?” He glared around the room. “Maybe, just a little. But principally because someone decided that this telepathy business might have something to it, and they’re afraid of what she might say. Isn’t that right, Bill?”

  Admiral Dennison nodded. “In part,” he admitted. “What would you do with a telepath?”

  “The question is, what would you do with a half-starved sixteen-year-old girl?”

  “We’re trying to decide. They’re trying to decide, I should say. It’s out of my hands now. If they ever agree that telepathy is actually possible, which I doubt, they’ll probably chrome-plate her, paint a model number on her side, and issue her to Special Weapons.”

  “You,” Addison Friendly said, “are probably righter than you realize; which frightens me more than you know. Humanity has never been known for its humanity.”

  “Don’t take it personally; we’re treating her well—taking good care of her. And at present we’ve no ulterior motive.”

  “I take my cap off and tug my forelock at your altruism. Mr. Herbert, what is it that you have figured out?”

  “The tape from the police report,” Herbert said. He flicked the switch again and the thin whisper filled the room. Herbert seemed immune to the effect that the sound had on the others in the room. “I’ve analyzed what the girl was saying.”

  “You know what it means?” Dennison asked.

  “I think so. Let us trace the process of analysis and see what conclusions we reach.” He went to a dark green chalkboard to the right of the door and pulled a thick piece of yellow chalk from the bulging pocket of his dinner jacket. “This is an unusual problem.” He printed S I R E N on the board. “We know who our spies are, but we don’t know what they’re after. The Office of Naval Intelligence is not cleared for that information. The Chinese, presumably, know what they’re after, but we don’t. The John Paul Jones Society is either paranoid,” he looked around suspiciously, “or they have something to hide.” He printed T I R E. “Therefore, our first job is to find out what high command, as controlled by the JPJS, doesn’t want us to know.” A I R.

  “Now, what could this mean? Let us look for a common denominator.” He tapped the A I R. “Could it be this? Sirens use air, as do tires. And no more than forty thousand sigh—that is, take air into their lungs and breathe it out again. Air.”

  “Very clever,” Admiral Dennison acknowledged. “What does it mean?”

  “Mean? Why, nothing. Purely fortuitous. But it walled me in for a couple of hours. The image of forty thousand people sighing is a powerful one. Did they do it in unison, I wondered, or take turns? How long would it take forty thousand people to sigh, one at a time. What is the average length of a sigh? All kinds of fascinating problems.”

  “Fascinating,” Friendly said. “Forty thousand sigh. Of course!”

  “You see it then? Simple isn’t it? It’s one of those things that you either see immediately or have to work like hell to get. Fifty-five hours, thirty minutes and twenty seconds. That’s how long it would take forty thousand people to sigh sequentially, allowing five seconds per sigh; which is not overly generous. This, I admit, has nothing to do with our problem.” He turned to the blackboard, and wrote:

  p s i

  “That’s the ‘sigh’ the girl spoke of. Forty thousand psi. Now everything falls into place.”

  Robert was suddenly reminded of a mistake he had made as a freshman in college. He had signed up for a course called Elementary Particle Physics, which turned out to be a very advanced math course on the physics of elementary particles. He realized his mistake when the professor filled two blackboards with incomprehensible equations—or, possibly, one continuing incomprehensible equation—paused long enough to say, “therefore,” and started in on the third.

  “Psi is the Greek letter that’s used to represent telepathy or ESP, isn’t it?” Robert asked.

  “Not that psi,” Friendly said. “The other psi. It’s an abbreviation. Per Square Inch. Pounds per square inch, usually.”

  Herbert raised a finger and waggled it. “Aha! That’s right. What about the rest of it?”

  Admiral Dennison slapped the table. “Damn it, Herbert! We all know you’re a genius. Now elucidate! Explain. What falls into place? The rest of what? We hang on your every word, Herbert. Stick to good, solid words we can keep a grip on.”

  Herbert took a roller point out of his breast pocket and tugged at it until it had grown to a meter-long pointer. He tapped the words on the greenboard with its tip. “Siren—tire—air. Don’t think of them as words, but as names. Names, gentlemen. Place-names.”

  “Place-names,” Friendly repeated thoughtfully.

  “There’s an Ayer in Massachusetts,” Robert said. “Next to some Army base.”

  Herbert turned to the greenboard. Over S I R E N he carefully printed C Y R E N E.

  “Yes!” Friendly pounded his left fist into his right palm. “And tire—”

  T Y R E, Herbert printed.

  “Ancient cities,” Robert said. “I don’t get it.”

  “Ancient sea powers,” Friendly said. “The natural code names for bases. And, combined with that ‘forty thousand psi,’ it sounds like underwater bases—submarine cities!” “What about ‘air’?” asked Dennison.

  “Had me puzzled for a while,” Herbert admitted. “Must have been an archeologist
on the staff of whoever assigned the names.” He turned and printed A - U R on the greenboard.

  “I’ll play the game,” Dennison said. “Who, or what, is an a-ur?”

  “That, gentlemen, is the proper name of the port of Pharos, which once held a very large lighthouse.”

  Admiral Dennison tapped the edge of his pencil against his nose. “So what the girl was hearing—is that the right word, hearing?—was a conversation, or at least a thought, about an undersea base.”

  “Three undersea bases,” Friendly said.

  “If you’ll excuse me saying so, sir,” Robert said.

  “Go ahead, Lieutenant. I can tell by your unusual deference that you disagree.”

  “Yes, sir. I think you’re taking the process of deduction at least one step too far.”

  “You have a better interpretation for the names?” Herbert asked.

  “No. It’s the next step. How do we know they represent undersea bases? Perhaps they’re code words for something else altogether. After all, if the Navy had undersea bases, surely you’d know about it, sir.”

  “I’d like to think so,” Dennison said.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Twenty-two thousand three hundred miles up, in a canted synchronous orbit, a small, magnesium Christmas tree coursed around the Earth. It traveled at the same rate as the planet below: one cycle each twenty-four hours, no minutes, and no seconds; and intersected the Equator, so far below, at an angle of thirty degrees. The effect, as viewed from the Earth, was of an overhead pendulum, swinging along the meridian line, 122° East Longitude, from Ningpo on the East China Sea to Kalgoorlie, Western Australia. Each day one tick, each night one tock.

  It was one thirty-five in the morning when the small submarine surfaced in the Gulf of Tomini and sent a microwave query straight up into the night sky. A fifth of a second later the transponder aboard the Invincible Thoughts of Chairman Mao People’s Defense Surveillance Satellite # 7 acknowledged the signal and broadcast a tight-beam transmission, clearing its television tape loop of all pictures taken since it was last queried. The sub then sent another, special, coded signal, and the satellite commenced an internal systems check, reporting on the status of power, control, surveillance, and communications capabilities in its gut and bolted to its skin.

  0000101100110100101001101010111101100000101100110100101001101101000010110011010010100110100110110101000001011001101001010011010000101100110100101001110000101100110100101001101

  A computer technician 2nd class fed the binary punched tape into a black box comparator, and reported all systems functional in accord with the Precepts of Chairman Mao.

  “Clear the bird and prepare it for a special assignment,” the submarine captain commanded, taking sealed orders from his safe and carefully slitting through the sealing wax.

  The political officer gave the captain a hard look and tore open his own copy of the orders. “You should not refer to an Invincible Thoughts of Chairman Mao People’s Defense Surveillance Satellite as a bird, Captain. The improper naming of objects shows an insufficient understanding of their dialectical relationship to the needs of the proletariat, in keeping with the thoughts and doctrines of Chairman Mao. This will have to go in my report.”

  “I conceal my surprise.” The captain finished reading his orders, then separated one page from the rest and handed it to the technician. “Type this command sequence on tape and send it out. Make sure you make no errors; have someone examine your work before you transmit it. We are sending this bird off on a solo flight!” He turned and walked rapidly through the control room and then scrambled up the ladder through the conning tower onto the bridge. They would submerge as soon as the contact was complete, and this was his only chance to get any fresh air.

  The first officer had the con when the captain appeared. Aside from him and the two traditional lookouts, fore and aft, the deck was empty. “You’re relieved, Lo,” the captain said. “Go below and have a cup of soup. We’ll be diving in a minute, and you’ll have to finish the watch.”

  “Thank you, Captain,” the first officer said, handing him the large binoculars and starting down the hatch. He had to get out of the way of an angry political officer, who was coming up, but then he scampered down with the unconscious grace of one long at sea.

  “Now look here, Captain!” The political officer was red in the face. “That is the sort of insolence I would hardly expect from someone in your position. I inform you of my considered opinion that it is ill-advised to address the Invincible Thoughts of Chairman Mao People’s Defense Surveillance Satellite as a bird, only to meet with deliberate defiance. Defiance, Captain! At the very least, you need long and numerous self-criticism sessions. As spokesman for the People, as echoed in the Thoughts . . .”

  “You talk too much,” the captain said firmly. “You are bad for morale. The recent growth of extreme conservatism, after long decades of a liberal regime, is dangerous. Particularly in the military. You exemplify that danger.”

  “Captain—”

  “My first responsibility is to my crew,” the captain said, taking the aluminum latching bar from the emergency lifejacket locker and striking the political officer firmly over the head with it. Without further comment the political officer fell to the deck. The captain replaced the bar.

  “Message sent, Captain,” the intercom announced. “Confirmed.”

  The captain flipped the switch to the intercom. “Very good. We’ve done everything we can on the surface. Call in the lookouts. Take her down to thirty meters.”

  The klaxon sounded, and the fore and aft lookouts dove into their hatches and dogged them closed. The captain took a last look around the bridge, closed the watertight housing on the instrument console, and went below.

  The satellite chuckled to itself for a minute. Then it slowly drove a half-meter seeking antenna to lock on to the signal of a United States Navy Navigations Aid Satellite. Chuckling again, it computed and reached a decision. The attitude gyroscope clicked into position and spun, slowly turning the bird in the opposite direction. Then the wheel reversed, and the bird slowed and stopped. The main rocket motor burned for three-point-two seconds. The bird climbed to a higher orbit and stayed, letting the Earth turn slowly beneath it. Then it changed attitude again and fired the secondary motor for a longer, slower, milder push.

  Nine hours later the main motor burned again. When it stopped, the bird had assumed a new synchronous orbit. A straight line drawn from the center of the Earth and the Invincible Thoughts of Chairman Mao People’s Defense Satellite # 7 would now cross the Earth’s surface two feet in front of the door of Mervin’s Miraculous Assyrian Delicatessen—The Finest in International Near Eastern Cuisine, 12-1440 Grand Concourse East, The Bronx, New York. Which, considering all the parameters, was close enough for snooker.

  Across the Harlem River, in downtown Manhattan—Pell Street, Soho—was a six-story building with a two-story building on the roof; it having been long established in New York that the only way to build is up. On top of the two-story building was a one-story shed with a dovecote on the roof. The whole structure was well over a hundred years old, and had been first condemned during the LaGuardia administration; but still it stood, and would probably stand until it was ancient enough to be declared an architectural treasure. Then it would be torn down for a skyway.

  George Hing sat in an aged aluminum kitchen chair on the top floor of the upper building. Above him, in the dovecote, a one-meter dish antenna pointed straight up through the plywood roof. On the table in front of him was a portable electric typewriter plugged in to what looked like a tabletop computer. A coaxial cable ran from the computer to the aluminum parabola above.

  the socialist countries are states of an entirely new type in which the exploiting classes have been overthrown and the working people are in power Hing typed.

  The letters were turned into electric impulses which entered the computer, were scrambled with the letters on an internal magnetic bubble memory, and then fed to the
transmitter. A hundred and eighteen milliseconds later the signal reached the satellite. A tight-beam antenna retransmitted the signal at an angle of ten degrees West of due North. It reached the atmosphere somewhere over Siberia, grazed the Earth and then started back toward outer space. A high-flying reconnaissance plane over Mongolia picked up the signal with no trouble and relayed it along its last leg. In Peking a special teletype clattered into action.

  THE PRINCIPLE OF INTEGRATING INTERNATIONALISM WITH PATRIOTISM IS PRACTICED IN THE RELATIONS BETWEEN THESE COUNTRIES, Hing’s machine replied. COMMENCE YOUR REPORT.

  “I am always amazed,” Hing remarked to the elder Sen, who was in the small room with him, “when these unnecessarily complicated methods of conducting the modern business of espionage work as they are supposed to. The assumption that something is superior simply because it is more complex, newer, and covered with glossier paint, is foolish.”

  Sen nodded his head sagely. “Be not the first by whom the new is tried,” he said, “nor yet the last to lay the old aside.”

  “Well,” Hing said, feeding the beginning of a prepared tape into a slot on the side of his typewriter. “Surely that is not the thought of Chairman Mao?”

  “Alexander Pope.”

  “Oh.” For the next three minutes they sat silently, watching the tape feed into the machine and the typewriter quickly and steadily type out the report as it was transmitted.

  There was a pause, then Hing’s machine typed out RECEIVED. Then there was a longer pause.

  regret losing female listener. regret losing prisoners. transport five remaining units to los angeles state of california and await instructions.

  “Who is our Los Angeles contact?” Hing inquired.

  “The Temple of Greater Consciousness,” old man Sen told him. “The Great Biddy himself is our agent.”

  Hing nodded. “I should have guessed. This is going to be one of the greater events in my life. It has that feel.”

  I WILL COMPLY, he typed. END.