The Lost Perception

by Daniel F. Galouye

  A sedate, elderly receptionist called to Gregson from across the room, then ushered him into the office of the director.

  Heavy set shoulders hunched low over the desk, Radcliff sat there swiftly signing one form after another.

  Gregson approached. But he was altogether unprepared for the jarring thud that exploded behind him as the receptionist slammed the door on her way out.

  In the next instant his startled mind, stripped of its defenses, was again laid bare to the scorching, blinding radiance of the Screamies. But he quickly restored his composure and locked out all the horrors of the attack.

  Radcliff looked up and smiled. “Don’t hold that against Miss Ashley. It was a test. And apparently your control is excellent”

  “Thanks,” Gregson said stiffly. “I really needed that”

  Radcliff came around the desk, hand extended. “Welcome back to the grind. We have plenty of work cut out for you.”

  “Sorry. But all I’m interested in is a heavy dose of quiet life—and my own problems.”

  “I think you’ll change your mind.”

  Gregson accepted a chair. “Hear anything about Wellford?”

  “That British agent? The one who went Screamie just before you did? He was released from isolation six months ago.”

  Then Ken had made it safely through the barrier too! “Where is he? I’d like to get in touch with him.”

  “If you do, you’d better take along a battalion of Guardsmen and some heavy artillery. He’s been collected by one of the remaining Valorian cells. Four months ago, I believe.”

  Gregson shook his head incredulously. “Not Wellford!”

  “Afraid so. That’s what put us on to the fact that the aliens would rather condition an ex-Screamer than a pre-Screamer—so they don’t have to worry about their puppets becoming plague casualties.”

  “But I thought the Valorian threat was over.”

  “It is, for all practical purposes. Oh, there’re a few cells here and there. But every tune we close in on one, the others scatter. We’re changing tactics though. We’re going to try for a grand slam—knock them out all at once with nuclear stuff the next time we pin down their locations.”

  “Of course you’re going to get Wellford back first”

  “We’re working on that now.”

  “I’d like to get in on it.”

  “Can’t be spared. We need you for something more vital.” Radcliff paused, then said tensely, “Greg—I think we can put an end to the Screamies! We may finally have the answer.”

  “Based on the idea that they’re caused by radiation from space?”

  The director nodded.

  He reached into his drawer and placed on the desk top a small metal box equipped with a single, knurled knob. There was a recessed red bulb in its face.

  “This,” he said, “should prove to be the solution—if its limited effect can be built up sufficiently to give universal coverage.”

  Gregson bent anxiously forward. “What is it?”

  “It’s a suppressor. It can cancel out—over a small range—the radiation which has nearly ruined our civiliation during the past sixteen years.” Radcliff turned the knob and the crimson bulb cast its soft glow into the room.

  “I don’t feel anything,” Gregson said.

  “Of course not. But… well, here’s a demonstration.”

  He touched a button on his desk and drapes were drawn across the windows. A panel opened in the wall to his left, unveiling a projector which cast its picture across the room.

  The scene was in one of the wards of an isolation institute. Radcliff turned the volume up and his office was filled with desperate, coarse cries as scores of Screamers writhed against their bed straps.

  The director himself appeared on the screen and paused to display the same metal box that was now on his desk. He turned its knob and the suppressor’s recessed pilot bulb flared into brilliance.

  All the patients in the nearest beds instantly ceased struggling, as though a curtain had dropped over their terror and pain. They turned to stare in bewilderment at Radcliff, who was now walking along the aisle.

  Their astonishment was no more than that felt by Gregson himself as he watched the incredible demonstration. There was a way to stop the Screamies! As Radcliff proceeded along the rows of beds, it was as though he were the center of a sphere of calm that was washing over the Screamers, releasing them temporarily from their torment Behind nun, the patients were being engulfed once more by their agony.

  The director switched off his projector. “What do you say?”

  Gregson thought of his two years of isolation, of Forsythe and the millions of others who were following in his wake. “It’s tremendous! You’ve got to let everybody know about this!”

  Radcliff laughed. “And get ourselves promptly mobbed? So far, we have only a handful of these suppressors. And we haven’t fully tested them.”

  Gregson bent excitedly over the desk. “What can I do? How can I help?”

  “You were project engineer in charge of systems aboard Vega Jumpoff Station—right?”

  “Up until we abandoned VJO. Then I transferred to SecBu.”

  “Greg, you’re the only man we can find who knows all the station’s systems. And Vega Jumpoff is essential to our plans.”

  “What’s VJO got to do with it?”

  “We’re going to construct a super suppressor—with a range of thousands of miles. In order to get it to operate over that distance, its generating units will have to be somewhat removed from Earth’s intense, surface-level magnetogravitic field—somewhere out in space. We’ve already started reactivating our Space Division to handle the logistics of the job.”

  “And VJO…?”

  “VJO, Greg, is already up there. All we must do is reactivate it and modify the station to accommodate the super suppressor. Then we’ll be able to cancel out all the radiation that’s causing the Screamies. You with us?”

  “I’m ready to shuttle out to the station tomorrow. Hell, today—now!”

  Radcliff grinned. “I’d hoped for such a response. But I’m afraid we can’t go about it that directly.”

  He wrote hurriedly on a note pad, then tore off the sheet and handed it over. “Tomorrow you will report in at this address in Paris, where we’re setting up a control point for Operations VJO. You’ll get a superficial briefing, I suppose, then be tested as to further qualifications. Then you’ll be sent on to Versailles for special training.”

  “I don’t need any training to handle VJO systems. I lived with them for three years.”

  “Your training will have to do with the radiation we’re trying to suppress. You’ll find it much stronger twenty-two thousand miles out, you know. If you aren’t properly conditioned, you may start fighting your Screamie battles all over again.”

  CHAPTER IX

  Coming in over the Bois de Vincennes in its approach to New Orly Airport, the Security Bureau Transport plane provided Gregson with his first view of Paris since before ’95’s Nuclear Exchange. Most of the western half of the city had escaped major damage. But the devastation wreaked by unintercepted rockets was all too apparent To the northeast, beyond Montmartre, there was only gouged, blackened terrain where a multiple warhead had struck. Although the hill itself was almost flat now, Montmartre had at least protected most of the city from holocaust.

  Much of the Bois de Vincennes no longer existed. A series of crater lakes, fed by a diverted Seine, had replaced broad areas of forest. The river, as though drawn in fascination towards the lakes, had established a new bed, bypassing the city and leaving only a stagnant ribbon of dark water extending like a slug’s trail through the heart of Paris.

  The plane landed on a strip obscured by weeds and taxied up to a frame building with a tarpaper roof and identified by a hand-lettered sign:

  DIVISION DE LA AEROTRANSPORTATION

  BUREAU DE LA SURETE

  PARIS.

  Gregson alighted and headed for the building
with the other passengers. In the austere lounge, he found an empty comviewer station—“audio only, no video,” the sign said in French—and placed his call through the Security Bureau communications network to Forsythe’s farm in Pennsylvania.

  When Helen’s voice came through, he explained that he’d been unable to reach her from New York as a result of line trouble. When she learned where he was, she seemed both surprised and dejected.

  “This was something I couldn’t walk away from,” he apologized. “It’s a job only I can do.”

  Her voice was toneless as she said, “I imagined it would be.”

  “You don’t understand! And I can’t go into details. But,” he lowered his voice, “—well, there’s a possibility that within a few weeks they’ll be able to start tearing down the place where I spent my last two years.”

  Her exuberance came through over the wire. “Oh, Greg! Really?”

  “I’ll keep in touch as much as I can until then. How’s Bill?”

  “Stubborn as a mule.”

  “Don’t push him too hard about the institute. I held off two months. Maybe he can stick it out for as long as will be necessary.”

  * * *

  Dix-sept Rue de la Serenite, the address on Gregson’s slip of paper, was an ancient, though well-preserved apartment building just off Avenue Foch, practically in the shadow of the Arc de Triomphe.

  Brooding behind its ironwork fence, it looked patronizingly down from its eight-story height upon the quiet courtyard and shaded street below. The antiquity of the section softened the harsh sounds of injection sirens that chorused throughout the rest of the city.

  Gregson paid the cab driver and went hesitatingly through the massive gates and on into the building’s main entrance.

  “Monsieur veut quelque chose?” the stern-faced concierge demanded.

  “I’m Arthur Gregson.”

  “But of course, Mr. Gregson. Madame Carnot will be found in her eighth-floor suite.”

  “I’m supposed to be met here by a Miss Karen Rakaar.”

  “And you will be. Meanwhile, Madame Carnot awaits you.” The man indicated a tiny, glass-walled elevator enclosed in the helical coils of a staircase.

  That 17 Rue de la Serenite was no apartment building became clear as the elevator ascended, giving Gregson a view of each level through which it rose. The second floor was an assembly hall. The third and fourth floors were compartmented into glass-enclosed cubicles. The next two appeared to be living quarters, with plush carpeting running down narrow corridors.

  On the seventh floor, many persons were busy at switchboards. Centrally located, a huge, inner-illuminated Earth was impaled on a shaft extending from floor to ceiling.

  Reaching out into the room from its equator was a stiff, transparent collar. At the edge of this flange, and positioned above the Atlantic Ocean, was a radiant point flagged with the letters “VJO.” It was the same ground control device that had directed Vega Jumpoff Station shuttle operations.

  As the elevator continued upward, Gregson pondered the tight secrecy that cloaked this operation and wondered why it was necessary to conceal Ground Control Headquarters behind the false front of an apartment building. Unless the idea was to develop the super suppressor in total obscurity so there would be no false hope for a demoralized world. One day, the Screamies—fierce, relentless and horrible. The next, silence and calm.

  On the top floor he was deposited in a hallway that led to the opulence of a richly paneled sitting room, verdant with its profusion of tropical plants and quiet in the sound-muffling lavishness of its carpeting.

  “Entrez, Monsieur Gregson.”

  The quavering voice drifted past delicately-laced French windows, opening on a roof garden whose tiled terrace was splotched with sunlight He stepped out into a jungle of shrubbery and ivy that clung to wrought-iron trellises after springing from miniature beds of fragrant blossoms. Then his eyes were drawn to the woman on a satin chaise longue near the vine-matted railing.

  Like discolored ivory veined with antiquity, the flesh of her exposed forearm seemed merely to be draped over bone. Distorted into talons, her fingers clutched nothing, trembled incessantly. Her hair, thin and white, was conspicuous only in its sparseness.

  “Ah yes, monsieur,” she acknowledged, as though conscious of his thoughts, “I am, indeed, une vieille femme.”

  Her admission to being an old woman, he decided, carried no regret.

  “And what have I to rue, monsieur? You regard not a picture of weakness, but one of strength. For I am the most 79 powerful person in the entire world,” she said with puerile conceit.

  He studied her warily. An old woman, doddering in her senility? Or something more than that? Twice she had seemed to know almost exactly what he was thinking, hadn’t she?

  She laughed. “More than that I know even what you are going to think. Monsieur Forsythe was close to the truth, vraiment.”

  Astonished, he seized her arms. But he had no opportunity to speak.

  There was brisk movement beyond a clump of shrubbery and he looked up into the menacing eyes of an International Guardsman with a laserifle. In another roof garden across the courtyard, two more armed Security Bureau men stepped into view. Gregson released the woman and the trio became inconspicuous once more.

  Madame Carnot gestured feebly toward a chair. “Seat yourself. Mademoiselle Rakaar will be here soon.”

  Gregson only stared numbly at the woman. She was aware of his thoughts! How else could she know about Bill? And what did she mean by saying Forsythe was close to the truth? Bill had spoken of the Screamies as being a means of seeing one another’s thoughts.

  And—

  “Mais non, monsieur. He insisted it was not ’seeing,’ did he not?”

  Confounded, Gregson muttered, “Bill was right, then?” But, of course he was. For wasn’t this frail, childish woman not only verifying, but also demonstrating everything Forsythe had said?

  Madame Carnot chuckled, baring stained teeth eroded to the pulp. “Voilà! You have answered your own question.”

  “You were a Screamer?”

  She nodded and her features assumed a sober cast. “A very long time ago. That much, monsieur, we have in common. And now you come to us so that you, too, may learn what powers are available. Very well, I shall try to teach you while we await Mademoiselle Rakaar.”

  With considerable effort, she raised herself erect and sat on the edge of the chaise longue. “First, monsieur, let us welcome the fierce light of the Screamies into our brains. And then perhaps we shall learn that your old friend isn’t as mad as you imagined.”

  Perplexed, he continued staring at the woman.

  “Can you not invoke the blinding darkness, the roaring silence, at will?” She chuckled. “Until you learn to do that, you will never be able to zylph.”

  Zylph? The word had a strangely familiar ring, as though he had heard it somewhere before but couldn’t remember in what context.

  Madame Carnot closed her eyes. “Very well. Since you know next to nothing at all, I shall take you by the hand. Let us pretend that we have eyes inside the head. And now we are opening them—slowly.”

  Abruptly, the searing, invisible flames burst in on his consciousness and he recoiled from the scorching terror.

  “We are not afraid,” the woman encouraged. “The fire does not harm. Nor does it consume. The flames are but like a pastel crimson sunset over the cliffs of Calais.”

  At length the nuclear holocaust raging within his brain no longer seemed painful.

  “Non, monsieur. It is not pain at all. It is something we desire—just as a moth is drawn by the light. Let the gentle radiance wash down upon you. Accustom yourself to its softness.”

  Eyes closed, Gregson became lost in the bewildering sensation. It was as though he were adrift in an infinite field of burning, yet soothingly cool radiance. There was no terror, no anguish. The sensation, he realized, was not optical at all, nor had it anything to do with light.

/>   Vision, he understood now, had merely been the nearest thing to which he could liken the manifestation.

  “No, not light,” she agreed. “Something above light. A hypervision. At the moment, we are zylphing only the super radiance itself. But, come—let us expose ourselves more fully.”

  * * *

  The infinite sea of brilliance began churning and seething, spawning things of unguessable shape and bewildering design—things that suggested their own integrity as objects merely because they were separated one from the other.

  But there was no stability of form or permanence of position. Mere hulks of substance—indescribable because they violated all known concepts of shape and materiality.

  Were these the things he had accepted as hallucinations during his seizures? Things he had occasionally imagined were grotesque, twisted representations of the objects about him—the Screamers in their beds—a distorted hypodermic needle thrusting toward his arm to bring relief? But what were these hallucinations?

  “They are the objects about you, monsieur,” the woman whispered. “You do not know them because you have never before zylphed those objects. You have only seen or heard them. Did not Monsieur Forsythe say that a blind person learning to see would not recognize a waterfall by the way it looks?”

  “How do you know what Bill said?” Gregson asked weakly.

  “What is said or thought leaves its impression on your brain. And the hyperlight can reveal all such traces. Even now I zylph that your attention is being attracted by the huge form that is towering so close to you in your nonradiant field of perception. Concentrate on it, monsieur. You desire desperately to know what it is! You must zylph it in its entirety! You must learn what it means—what it is!”

  Gregson brought all his perceptive faculties to bear on the object And it became firm and stable as his attention trapped it.

  And now he knew! It was the imposing Arch of Triumph, rearing into the sun-washed Parisian sky only a few blocks away!

  Suddenly, with explosive force, he was aware of almost everything there was to know about the huge monument—its exact dimensions, its mass and weight, the precise number of stones that had been assembled into the gestaltic whole. And he could even recognize the radial pattern of boulevards converging like the spokes of a wheel on the edifice.