The Searing

by John Coyne

  “His eye is the sun,” Marcia said slowly. “My God, it is unbelievable.”

  “We assume that other civilizations discovered us when we ourselves became aware that there might be life out in space,” Neil went on. “But more likely we have been watched for billions of years, perhaps from the time when life on earth was no more than simple organisms like jellyfish.”

  “And that might explain why primitive man has always been attracted to the sun,” Marcia added quickly, picking up on Neil’s line of thinking. “This ‘eye,’ so close to the sun, had a meaning for them; it was their link with outer space, other galaxies. And yet they didn’t have the technology or knowledge to know why.”

  “But now we do have that technology. We do know how they are watching us,” Neil answered. He was leaning forward, growing more excited as he reasoned out what was happening.

  “How?” Tom interrupted, frowning. “Maybe you two understand how it’s being done, but I don’t.”

  “A databank,” Neil said quickly. “A computer that they have planted on earth to use as a listening post. A way for this advanced civilization out in space to watch our progress, monitor our earthly activities.” He sat back and then nodded toward Cindy.

  “Wait a minute!” Sara came back to the group. “What are you suggesting?” She glanced back and forth from Neil to Marcia.

  “It’s Cindy,” Neil said quietly. “They’ve placed a databank in the child’s mind.”

  TWENTY-TWO

  “Do you think she’s been sent here to kill us?” Tom asked the question quietly, and Neil answered in the same tone.

  “No, she wasn’t sent here. My guess would be that, for some reason, she was picked, selected, and her brain was altered, probably chemical realignment, to operate as a computer for this ‘eye of Bel.’”

  “Stop it, please!” Sara protested. “I’m tired of this cosmic connection nonsense.” She was furious now, and her voice rose and lashed out at the others. “You people are scientists. Marcia, Neil, how can you even contemplate such a bizarre chain of science fiction answers? Cindy is an autistic savant, not a space cadet! We’re not helping her or ourselves with such speculation. And besides, we’re going to be attacked again. It’s almost time.”

  But Tom was not paying attention to her. Nor were Marcia and Neil. Cindy had stood and moved away from the desk, and begun to circle the study, moving towards Sara. She moved slowly, awkwardly, her feet tripping over each other.

  The child was not threatening. She was tall and thin with the gangly body of a preadolescent, and a pale, beautiful face, lifeless as marble.

  Yet now her eyes were focusing. The black pupils narrowed and locked onto Sara. She came steadily forward, singling Sara out, cutting her out from the others.

  Sara could feel herself in retreat, stumbling back and growing alarmed. Still Cindy did not make a sudden move. Her lovely, angelic face was only tilted up, as if she were listening to some faraway sound. Yet the dark, narrow, laser-like focus of her dark eyes bore into Sara, held her as if she were caught in a rifle’s sights.

  “Tom,” Sara whispered, as she tried to dodge Cindy’s gaze. “Tom, please!” Sara raised her voice and backed herself against the oak wall of the room.

  Sara tried to look away, to find Tom across the study, but she was too afraid to take her eyes from the child. Cindy was within arm’s length, bearing silently down on her, and from the comer of her eye, Sara saw Tom approach, moving quickly around behind Cindy, getting into position, and she thought: I’ll be okay; Tom will take care of me. She had just realized that all the while she had been holding her breath, when Cindy jumped forward, seized her by the shoulders and threw her against the wall.

  Tom dove for the girl, grabbed her around the waist and tore Cindy loose. The two of them stumbled over each other, then Tom tripped on the rug and they both hit the floor. He lost his hold on Cindy and she quickly scrambled away.

  Cindy whirled around, confused and off-center, as if her sense of equilibrium was damaged, until her dark eyes spotted Sara and, holding fast on her, as if Sara, trembling with fear against the wall, was an anchor of reality in her world, she sprang forward once more, seized Sara by the shoulders, dug her nails into Sara’s body, and screeched out.

  The shrilling ripped Sara’s ear, and she jerked away as Tom recovered and once more grabbed Cindy and pulled her into his arms, locking her against his body.

  It was several minutes before they could play back the tape of Cindy’s outburst. What they heard was Cindy crying out, begging Sara in the words and voice of a terrified child, “Help me, Sara, before I kill you.”

  TWENTY-THREE

  “How can I help her?” Sara asked, looking at the others. Her voice had softened and once more she was afraid. Afraid she could not help Cindy Delp.

  “Get Santucci,” Tom suggested immediately. “Let’s have her locked up. She needs to be institutionalized.”

  “That’s not helping, Tom,” Marcia said quietly. She looked over at Neil. “Any suggestions?”

  Neil shook his head. “Maybe Sara’s right, maybe the child is only autistic. If that’s the case, then what can any of us do?” He shrugged and, taking off his glasses, wiped the lens clean, watching Cindy as she once more played with the poster board and the mysterious drawing of Bel.

  “Well, what if she isn’t autistic?” Marcia asked, sitting forward in her chair. “What if she is being controlled and her mind is a databank? How can we find out for sure?”

  Neil’s head popped back, understanding at once what had to be done. He jumped to his feet. “Of course! Her mind is simply a computer.”

  “And?” asked Sara.

  “Well, we just”—he paused, planning quickly—"we just link her with a computer artificially intelligent enough to understand the girl.”

  “But is that possible?” Tom asked.

  “Yes, I think so. Sara? Can you link her brain waves to a computer?”

  Sara nodded slowly, not sure whether she was willing to go along with the attempt. “Yes, it’s possible,” she began slowly, “I’ve done it with head trauma patients at Harvard. They are linked to a computer through an EEG. It’s a way of finding out the severity of neurological damage. But how could we do it? And where?”

  “The Naval Observatory. Its computer contains everything we know about space. We’ll take Cindy into Washington …”

  “That’s impossible now,” Tom spoke up. “Santucci has the police at every gate. I was stopped, coming into the Village, and I’m sure they won’t let us out, not with Cindy.”

  “What about Kevin Volt’s computer?” Marcia asked. She looked up at Neil. “Remember, he showed us his home computer down in his lab.”

  “Possibly. If it’s sophisticated enough, I can link it by phone to the Naval Observatory, and we can read out the results on his terminal.” He began to nod his head enthusiastically. “It’s worth a try. Sara, what do you think?”

  She began to shake her head, still protesting, and Marcia spoke out.

  “Sara, we all want to help Cindy; we all want to find out what is happening to us here, who’s attacking us.”

  “But, Marcia, he just lost his wife and child and we’re going to barge into his home with Cindy? The police think she’s the killer; they’re already searching for her!”

  “If Cindy is the killer, we’ll know soon enough. If this child’s brain is a databank, programmed to kill us, then we’ll know. Let’s find out finally what is in that child’s mind.”

  TWENTY-FOUR

  In the basement laboratory of Kevin Volt’s house, Sara worked quickly, improvising with his equipment and her medical instruments to implant the monitoring electrodes.

  “What I’m doing,” she explained to Kevin and the others, “is placing the needles bilaterally on parasagittal planes approximately one-centimeter medial to the midorbital lines. And I’m going to place an anterior pair of electrodes two centimeters above the supraorbital ridges. Now when the current is passed from
the right anterior to the left posterior electrode, we should pick up her brain waves and intercept any databank within her brain.”

  “What do you think is in there?” Kevin asked. “A computer chip?”

  Sara had never liked Peggy’s husband, but even so she was shocked by how quickly he had become absorbed in their experiment, apparently forgetting the tragedy that had taken place in his home that afternoon.

  “No, I wouldn’t think so,” Neil answered, watching Sara work on the docile child. “All they’d really have to do is rearrange the chemistry in her brain, use her cells as the databank. What do you think, Sara? You’ve done psychopharmacological research at Harvard.”

  “If they have restructured her brain as a computer databank, then they’re using the neurotransmitters. Those are the chemicals that carry nerve impulses between cells, but they’re pretty mysterious. We know the function of fewer than five percent of these neurotransmitters.” Sara stepped back from the girl and nodded to Neil. “Okay, she’s ready.”

  Neil placed the telephone receiver into the computer saddle, then dialed the Naval Observatory.

  “We’ll be online in a moment,” he added, saying to everyone, “What we’re doing, in effect, is linking her mind to the Naval Observatory computer. It will quiz Cindy, ask her a series of questions.

  “Would you turn on your terminal, Kevin?” Neil asked, and all of them looked to the screen, all except Sara, who sat by the child, holding Cindy’s hands in hers.

  “We won’t hear the questions,” Neil continued, “but on the terminal screen we’ll see Cindy, or the databank, responding to the questions.” And, on the screen, a series of numbers and formulas were instantly displayed.

  “That’s Kepler’s laws,” Neil said quickly, his voice tensing up with his own excitement. “These are basic laws of astronomy. They relate to the planet earth and its movement around the sun.

  “The observatory computer is a vast warehouse of astronomical data. It’s questioning her randomly now, discovering what level of intelligence it’s dealing with.”

  More answers were printed out on the screen, and more formulas running in long, complex configurations. Neil leaned closer to the screen, concentrating on the display.

  “I’m running a video tape, as well,” Kevin said quietly. “We’ll have a recording of this.”

  Neil nodded, then explained, without taking his eyes from the terminal.

  “She’s explaining the orbital velocity of Phobos, that’s the angular velocity of Phobos around Mars. The theory is that it’s increasing. Now to understand and explain that, Cindy would have to have at least a Ph.D. in astronomy.”

  Sara glanced over at the screen, saw the display of numbers, the child’s incredible thought pattern, then back at Cindy. The young girl sat quietly, her pale face blank and passive, her dark eyes unresponsive to the world around her.

  “There must be some logical explanation!” Kevin stated. His full attention was now riveted to the display, and he glanced at the farm girl, thinking: who is this child?

  “She’s dealing with questions of the origin of the solar system,” Neil spoke up, his voice once more registering amazement. “She is answering questions about thermal structure, planetary magnetic fields.” He gestured to the screen. “I’m sorry. I’m not that familiar with astrophysics. We can have it all checked later, run her replies back through the computer and verify them.”

  “But why?” Tom asked, awed himself by the child’s ability. “How could it happen that this girl was implanted with a databank?”

  “It must be the location, this Village,” Marcia suggested. “The temple and the worship of Bel mean this spot on the Potomac has always been significant to people, and for reasons they wouldn’t understand. We have no idea how many other ‘autistic’ children might have lived here in the last three thousand years; we only know about Cindy.”

  “And she’s trying to kill us all,” Tom answered.

  “It’s not Cindy; she isn’t in control of her actions,” Neil answered.

  “There must be another reason for these deaths,” and then he saw what it was. “Look!” he shouted, pointing to the terminal screen.

  They all saw the digital numbers flashing erratically on the terminal screen. Sara glanced back at Cindy. The child still sat quietly, unmoved and silent in the chair.

  “The databank,” Neil whispered. He and Kevin were the only ones who immediately understood what was occurring. “It’s malfunctioning. That’s what’s happening! They’re trying to reach Cindy, trying to correct the databank.”

  He spun around and his voice quickly rose with excitement.

  “They’re trying to find her, to correct her brain, and it’s the probes from outer space that are killing the children and causing your attacks. The probes must be sweeping the Village like a radar scope, but for some reason—maybe because of the malfunction of the databank—they can’t find her.”

  “Of course,” Marcia said, understanding Neil’s theory. “And since the probes are locked into a female’s hypothalamus, that’s why it’s only we that are being attacked. Benjy was never really in danger.” She stopped, stared at the child, and then added slowly, “But, Neil, you’re wrong. They aren’t trying to correct Cindy’s mind. They’re trying to destroy that databank in her brain, destroy her.”

  For a moment no one spoke. They stared back at the computer terminal, at the same flashing digital numbers that swept again and again across the screen.

  “What will happen?” Tom asked.

  Neil shrugged. “If Marcia is right, and I’m afraid she is, then they’ll keep probing, more and more frequently until the databank is destroyed.”

  “And the child killed,” Sara added.

  Tom stared at the others, frowning and uncertain. “Can’t we do something? Save her?”

  “How?” Neil asked.

  “We could deprogram her,” Sara answered. “We can change the chemical composition in Cindy’s brain, alter the neurotransmitters, and break the cell link they’re using to control her mind.”

  “Sara, is that possible?” Marcia asked, moving closer to her.

  “Yes, in theory. Chemicals bridge the gap between the nerves. If Cindy’s brain is functioning like a computer, then in theory we could inject her with psychotropic drugs, alter her consciousness, and break their databank, free the child.

  “We do know already that active agents like choline, lecithin, vasopressin, and others do promote intelligence, while a drug like scopolamine can cause learning deficiencies.”

  Sara paused a moment and ran quickly through her mind the experiments she had done at NIH, how they had taken monkeys and caused a depletion of acetylcholine activity and produced a loss of memory, then used dimethylaminoethanol

  p-acetamidobenzoate to regain the acetylcholine levels and normalize the animals.

  “We have done this on laboratory animals,” she said to the others, explaining, “and once the databank is wiped out, I’ll use choline and lecithin to reestablish the child’s intelligence.”

  “Wait a minute!” Kevin interrupted. “I mean, why do that?” He stared at the others, then said forcefully, “Look, this child’s link with an extraterrestrial force is more important than she is. You can’t just go experimenting. Christ, don’t you realize what you have here? Neil, come on, this isn’t just some sick kid.” He gestured toward the terminal screen. “I saw what she was able to achieve. My people can protect her; we can use her to reach this other life source.”

  Kevin was thinking rapidly, planning ahead. The discovery of this child, he knew immediately, was far more important than the covert operation he was developing in the Village. He had had the go ahead from the Agency to develop a microwave and laser beam listening capability in the Village, a way for the CIA to tap the private lives of all the people who worked in the White House and at the State Department.

  He had worried before about Peggy telling the community; she had been appalled by his deliberate bug
ging of their neighbors. But those experiments were insignificant compared to what the others had stumbled upon, this child who was linked to outer space, to another planet. If he brought her in to Langley, it could be the making of him.

  “No, Kevin, we can’t wait; we can’t take the chance.” As she spoke Sara began to unlink the child from the computer. “And you should understand, Kevin. You’ve lost a family because of what they are trying to do to Cindy.”

  Kevin was on his feet, shouting, “I’m taking charge of this child.” He grabbed Cindy, pulled her loose from Sara’s hands and stepped past the others, moving quickly towards the door, dragging the girl with him.

  It was Cindy herself who stopped him. She whirled around in his grasp and broke loose, fell against the laboratory table and, when he grabbed for her again, she locked her eyes on his. They could see the wide, dark eyes focus and the brilliant flash of light. Kevin’s hands shot to his face and he stumbled away, crying with pain as he hit the basement floor.

  Tom reached him first, held his body as it convulsed on the floor, shook and then froze. Slowly and with difficulty, Tom pried Kevin’s hands from his face. His eyes were wide, as if they had witnessed a revelation, and blood poured from his nostrils, filling his gasping mouth.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  “She’s a killer,” Sara whispered as she watched Cindy back into the corner of the laboratory, slide down on the floor, then, crouched like a hunted animal, scan them with her blank eyes.

  “No,” Neil reasoned, “she’s only the instrument; they’ve obviously programmed her to react violently if threatened. She has the ability, the power of concentration, to destroy minds.”

  “Like she did to that little girl in the woods,” Tom added. “And Peggy Volt.”

  “But why the baby?” Sara asked, tears in her eyes.

  Neil shook his head. “It’s impossible for us to know now, but I’d say she didn’t harm the baby. She’s only struck out, it seems, at people she thought were threatening her. Debbie and the baby were probably killed by the probe when it swept the Village. You and Marcia and the other women were strong enough to withstand the attacks; Amy and Debbie weren’t.”