The Golden Age Of Science Fiction Vol Vii Part 26

She thinks someone blew up the s.h.i.+p, he thought. She thinks I heard about the plot some way. For an instant he hesitated, then: "No, Susan; they weren't after you. No one was trying to kill you. Don't worry about it."

Relief washed over her face. "O.K., Doc; if you say so. Look, I've got to run now, but we've got to sit down and have a few drinks together, now that I'm back. And ... Doc--"

"Yes?"

"Anytime you need anything--if I can ever help you--you let me know, huh?"

"Certainly, my dear. And don't you worry about anything. The stars are all on your side right now."

She smiled, patted his hand, and then was gone in a flash of gold and honey. Dr. Joachim looked at the door that had closed behind her, then he looked down at the envelope in his hands. He opened it gently and took out the sheaf of bills. Fifteen hundred dollars!

He smiled and shoved the money into his pocket. After all, he was a professional fortuneteller, even if he didn't like that particular label, and he had saved her life, hadn't he?

He returned to the small back room, sat down again at the typer, and, after a minute, began typing again.

When he was finished, he addressed an envelope and put the letter inside.

It was signed with his legal name: Peter J. Forsythe.

It required less than two hours for that letter to end up at its destination in a six-floor brick building, a rather old-fas.h.i.+oned affair that stood among similar structures in a lower-middle-cla.s.s section of Arlington, Virginia, hardly a hop-skip-and-jump from the Pentagon, and not much farther from the Capitol.

The letter was addressed to Mr. J. Harlan Balfour, President, The Society for Mystical and Metaphysical Research, Inc., but Mr. Balfour was not at the Society's headquarters at the time, having been called to Los Angeles to address a group who were awaiting the Incarnation of G.o.d.

Even if he had been there, the letter wouldn't have reached him first. All mail was sent first to the office of the Executive Secretary, Mr. Brian Taggert. Most of it--somewhat better than ninety-nine per cent--went directly on to Mr. Balfour's desk, if it was so addressed; Brian Taggert would never have been so cruel as to deprive Mr. Balfour of the joy of sorting through the thousands of crackpot letters in search of those who had the true spark of mysticism which so fascinated Mr. Balfour.

Mr. Balfour was a crackpot, and it was his job to take care of other crackpots--a job he enjoyed immensely and wholeheartedly, feeling, as he did, that that sort of thing was the only reason for the Society's existence. Of course, Mr. Balfour never considered himself or the others in the least bit crackpottish, in which he was just as much in error as he was in his a.s.sumption of the Society's raison d'etre.

Ninety per cent of the members of the Society for Mystical and Metaphysical Research were just what you would expect them to be. Anyone who was "truly interested in the investigation of the supranormal", as the ads in certain magazines put it, could pay five dollars a year for members.h.i.+p, which, among other things, ent.i.tled him to the Society's monthly magazine, The Metaphysicist, a well-printed, conservative-looking publication which contained articles on everything from the latest flying saucer report to careful mathematical evaluations of the statistical methods of the Rhine Foundation. Within its broad field, the magazine was quite catholic in its editorial policy.

These members const.i.tuted a very effective screen for the real work of the society, work carried on by the "core" members, most of whom weren't even listed on the members.h.i.+p rolls. And yet, it was this group of men and women who made the Society's t.i.tle true.

Mr. Brian Taggert was a long way from being a crackpot. The big, dark-haired, dark-eyed, hawknosed man sat at his desk in his office on the fifth floor of the Society's building and checked over the mail. Normally, his big wrestler's body was to be found quietly relaxed on the couch that stood against a nearby wall. Not that he was in any way averse to action; he simply saw no virtue in purposeless action. Nor did he believe in the dictum of Miles Standish; if he wanted a thing done, he sent the man most qualified to do it, whether that was himself or someone else.

When he came to the letter from Coney Island, New York, he read it quickly and then jabbed at a b.u.t.ton on the intercom switchboard in his desktop. He said three syllables which would have been meaningless to anyone except the few who understood that sort of verbal shorthand, released the b.u.t.ton, and closed his eyes, putting himself in telepathic contact with certain of the Society's agents in New York.

Across the river, in the Senate Office Building, a telephone rang in the office of Senator Mikhail Kerotski, head of the Senate Committee on s.p.a.ce Exploration. It was an unlisted, visionless phone, and the number was known only to a very few important officials in the United States Government, so the senator didn't bother to identify himself; he simply said: "h.e.l.lo." He listened for a moment, said, "O.K., fine," in a quiet voice, and cut the connection.

He sat behind his desk for a few minutes longer, a bearlike man with a round, pale face and eyes circled with dark rings and heavy pouches, all of which had the effect of making him look like a rather sleepy specimen of the giant panda. He finished the few papers he had been working on, stacked them together, rose, and went into the outer office, where he told his staff that he was going out for a short walk.

By the time he arrived at the brownstone building in Arlington and was pus.h.i.+ng open the door of Brian Taggert's office, Taggert had received reports from New York and had started other chains of action. As soon as Senator Kerotski came in, Taggert pushed the letter across the desk toward him. "Check that."

Kerotski read the letter, and a look of relief came over his round face. "Not the same typewriter or paper, but this is him, all right. What more do we know?"

"Plenty. Hold on, and I'll give you a complete rundown." He picked up the telephone and began speaking in a low voice. It was an ordinary-sounding conversation; even if the wire had been tapped, no one who was not a "core" member of the S.M.M.R. would have known that the conversation was about anything but an esoteric article to be printed in The Metaphysicist--something about dowsing rods.

The core members.h.i.+p had one thing in common: understanding.

Consider plutonium. Imagine someone dropping milligram-sized pellets of the metal into an ordinary Florence flask. (In an inert atmosphere, of course; there is no point in ruining a good a.n.a.logy with side reactions.) More than two and a half million of those little pellets could be dropped into the flask without the operator having anything more to worry about than if he were dropping grains of lead or gold into the container. But after the five millionth, dropping them in by hand would only be done by the ignorant, the stupid, or the indestructible. A qualitative change takes place.

So with understanding. As a human mind increases its ability to understand another human mind, it eventually reaches a critical point, and the mind itself changes. And, at that point, the Greek letter psi ceases to be a symbol for the unknown.

When understanding has pa.s.sed the critical point, conversation as it is carried on by most human beings becomes unnecessarily redundant. Even in ordinary conversation, a single gesture--a shrug of the shoulders, a snap of the fingers, or a nose pinched between thumb and forefinger--can express an idea that would take many words and much more time. A single word--"slob," "n.a.z.i," "saint"--can be more descriptive than the dozens of words required to define it. All that is required is that the meanings of the symbols be understood.

The ability to manipulate symbols is the most powerful tool of the human mind; a mind which can manipulate them effectively is, in every sense of the word, truly human.

Even without telepathy, it was possible for two S.M.M.R. agents to carry on a conversation above and around ordinary chit-chat. It took longer, naturally; when speaking without the chit-chat, it was possible to convey in seconds information that would have taken several minutes to get over in ordinary conversation.

Senator Kerotski only listened to a small part of the phone discussion. He knew most of the story.

In the past eight months, six anonymous letters had been received by various companies. As Taggert had once put it, in quotes, "We seem to have an Abudah chest containing a patent Hag who comes out and prophesies disasters, with spring complete."

The Big Bend Power Reactor, near Marfa, Texas, had been warned that their stellarator would blow. The letter was dismissed as "crackpot," and no precautions were taken. The explosion killed nine men and cut off the power in the area for three hours, causing other accidents due to lack of power.

The merchant submarine Bandar-log, plying her way between Ceylon and j.a.pan, had ignored the warning sent to her owners and had never been heard from again.

In the Republic of Yemen, an oil refinery caught fire and destroyed millions of dollars worth of property in spite of the anonymous letter that had foretold the disaster.

The Prince Charles Dam in Central Africa had broken and thousands had drowned because those in charge had relegated a warning letter to the cylindrical file.

A mine cave-in in Canada had extinguished three lives because a similar letter had been ignored.

By the time the fifth letter had been received, the S.M.M.R. had received the information and had begun its investigation. As an ex officio organ of the United States Government, it had ways and means of getting hold of the originals of the letters which had been received by the responsible persons in each of the disasters. All had been sent by the same man; all had been typed on the same machine; all had been mailed in New York.

When the sixth warning had come to the offices of Caribbean Trans-Air, the S.M.M.R., working through the FBI, had persuaded the company's officials to take the regularly scheduled aircraft off the run and subst.i.tute another while the regular s.h.i.+p was carefully inspected. But it was the replacement s.h.i.+p that came to pieces in midair.

The anonymous predictor, whoever he was, was a man of no mean ability.

Then letter number seven had been received by the United States Department of s.p.a.ce. It predicted that a meteor would smash into America's Moonbase One, completely destroying it.

Finally, a non-anonymous letter had come to the S.M.M.R. requesting admission to the society, enclosing the proper fee. The letter also said that the writer was interested in literature on the subjects of prescience, precognition, and/or prophecy, and would be interested in contacting anyone who had had experience with such phenomena.

Putting two and two together only yields four, no matter how often it's done, but two to the eighth power gives a nice, round two hundred fifty-six, which is something one can sink one's teeth into.

Brian Taggert cut off the phone connection. "That's it, Mike," he said to the senator. "We've got him."

Two of the Society's agents, both top-flight telepaths, had gone out to "Dr. Joachim's" place on Coney Island's Boardwalk, posing as customers--"clients" was the word Dr. Joachim preferred--and had done a thorough probing job.

"He's what might be called a perfectly sincere fraud," Taggert continued. "You know the type I'm sure."

The senator nodded silently. The woods were full of that kind of thing. Complete, reliable control of any kind of psionic power requires understanding and sanity, but the ability lies dormant in many minds that cannot control it, and it can and does burst forth erratically at times. Finding a physical a.n.a.logy for the phenomenon is difficult, since mental activities are, of necessity, of a higher order than physical activities.

Some of the operations of tensor calculus have a.n.a.logs in algebra; many do not.

Taggert gestured with one hand. "He's been in business there for years. Evidently, he's been able to make a few accurate predictions now and then--enough to keep his reputation going. He's tried to increase the frequency, accuracy, and detail of his 'flashes' by studying up on the techniques used by other seers, and, as a result, he's managed to soak up enough mystic balderdash to fill a library.

"He embellishes every one of his predictions to his 'clients' with all kinds of hok.u.m, and he's been doing it so long that he really isn't sure how much of any prediction is truth and how much is embroidery work.

"The boys are trying to get more information on him now, and they're going to do a little deep probing, if they can get him set up right; maybe they'll be able to trigger off another flash on that moon-hit--but I doubt it."

Senator Kerotski thumbed his chin morosely. "You're probably right. Apparently, once those hunches come to a precog, they get everything in a flash and then they can't get another thing--ever. I wish we could get our hands on one who was halfway along toward the point. We've got experts on psychokinetics, levitation, telepathy, clairvoyance, and what-have-you. But precognition we don't seem to be able to find."

"We've got one now," Brian Taggert reminded him.

The senator snorted. "Even a.s.suming that we had any theory on precognition completely symbolized, and a.s.suming that this Forsythe has the kind of mind that can be taught, do you think we could get it done in a month? Because that's all the time we have."

"He's our first case," Taggert admitted. "We'll have to probe everything out of him and construct symbol-theory around what we get. I'll be surprised if we get anywhere at all in the first six months."

Senator Kerotski put his hand over his eyes. "I give up. First the Chinese Soviet kidnaps Dr. Ch'ien and we have to scramble like maniacs to get him back before they find out that he's building a s.p.a.ce drive that will make the rocket industry obsolete. Then we have to find out what's causing the rash of accidents that is holding up Dr. Theodore Nordred's antigravity project. And now, just as everything is coming to a head in both departments, we find that a meteor is going to hit Moonbase One sometime between thirty and sixty days from now." He spread apart the middle and ring fingers of the hand that covered his eyes and looked at Taggert through one eye. "And now you tell me that the only man who can pinpoint that time more exactly for us is of no use whatever to us. If we knew when that meteor was due to arrive, we would be able to spot and deflect it in time. It must be of pretty good size if it's going to demolish the whole base."

"How do you know it's going to be a meteor?"

"You think the Soviets would try to bomb it? Don't be silly, Taggert," Kerotski said, grinning.

Taggert grinned back. "I'm not thinking they'd bomb us; but I'm trying to look at all the angles."

The worried look came back to the senator's pandalike face. "We have to do something. If only we knew that Forsythe's prediction will really come off. Or, if it will, then exactly when? And is there anything we can do about it, or will it be like the airline incident. If we hadn't made them switch planes, nothing would have happened. What if, no matter what we do, Moonbase One goes anyway?

"Remember, we haven't yet built Moonbase Two. If our only base on the moon is destroyed, the Soviets will have the whole moon to themselves. Have you any suggestions?"

"Sure," said Taggert. "Ask yourself one question: What is the purpose of Moonbase One?"

Slowly, a beatific smile spread itself over the senator's face.

The whole discussion had taken exactly ninety seconds.

"Mrs. Jesser," said Brian Taggert to the well-rounded, fortyish woman behind the reception desk at S.M.M.R. headquarters, "this is Dr. Forsythe. He has established a reputation as one of the finest seers living today."

Mrs. Jesser looked at the distinguished, white-bearded gentleman with an expression that was almost identical with the one her grandmother had worn when she met Rudolph Valentino, nearly sixty years before, and the one her mother had worn when she saw Frank Sinatra a generation later. It was not an uncommon expression for Mrs. Jesser's face to wear: it appeared every time she was introduced to anyone who looked impressive and was touted as a great mystic of one kind or another.

"I'm so glad to meet you, Dr. Forsythe!" she burbled eagerly.

"Dr. Forsythe will be working for us for the next few months--his office will be Room B on the fourth floor," Taggert finished. He was genuinely fond of the woman, in spite of her mental dithers and schoolgirl mannerisms. Mysticism fascinated her, and she was firmly convinced that she had "just a weenie bit" of psychic power herself, although its exact nature seemed to change from time to time. But she did both her jobs well, although she was not aware of her double function. She thought she was being paid as a receptionist and phone operator, and she was quick and efficient about her work. She was also the perfect screen for the Society's real work, for if anyone ever suspected that the S.M.M.R. was not the group of crackpots that it appeared to be, five minutes talking with Mrs. Jesser would convince them otherwise.

"Oh, you're staying with us, Dr. Forsythe? How wonderful! We simply must have a talk sometime!"

"Indeed we must, dear lady," said Forsythe. His voice and manner had just the right amount of benign dignity, with an almost indetectable touch of pompous condescending.

"Come along, doctor; I'll show you to your office." Taggert's face betrayed nothing of the enjoyment he was getting out of watching the mental gymnastics of the two. Forsythe and Mrs. Jesser were similar in some ways, but, of the two, Mrs. Jesser was actually the more honest. She only fooled herself; she never tried to fool anyone else. Forsythe, on the other hand, tried to put on a front for others, and, in doing so, had managed to delude himself pretty thoroughly.

Taggert's humor was not malicious; he was not laughing at them. He was admiring the skill of the human mind in tying itself in knots. When one watches a clever contortionist going through his paces, one doesn't laugh at the contortionist; one admires and enjoys the weird twists he can get himself into. And, like Taggert, one can only feel sympathy for one whose knots have become so devious and intricate that he can never extricate himself.

"Just follow me up the stairs," Taggert said. "I'll show you where your office is. Sorry we don't have an elevator, but this old building just wasn't built for it, and we've never had any real need for one."

"Perfectly all right," Forsythe said, following along behind.

Three weeks!

Taggert had to a.s.sume that the minimum time prediction was the accurate one. d.a.m.n! Why couldn't this last prediction have been as precise as the one about the air flight from Puerto Rico?

It had taken six days for the "accredited" agents of the S.M.M.R. to persuade Dr. Peter Forsythe that he should leave his little place on the Boardwalk and come down to Arlington to work. It isn't easy to persuade a man to leave a business that he's built up over a long period of years, especially during the busy season. To leave the Boardwalk during the summer would, as far as Forsythe was concerned, be tantamount to economic suicide. He had to be offered not only an income better than the one he was making, but better security as well. At fifty-four, one does not lightly throw over the work of a lifetime.

Still, he had plenty of safeguards. The rent was paid on his Boardwalk office, he had a guaranteed salary while he was working, and a "research bonus," designed to keep him working until the Society was finished with that phase of its work.

It's rather difficult for a man to resist the salesmans.h.i.+p of a telepath who knows exactly what his customer wants and, better, what he needs.

On the fourth floor, there were sounds of movement, the low staccato chatter of typers, occasional bits of conversation, and the hum of electronic equipment.

Forsythe was impressed, though not a line on his face showed it. The office to which he had been a.s.signed was lined with electronic calculators, and his name had already been put on the door in gold. It was to his credit that he was impressed by the two factors in that order.

In the rear of the room, two technicians were working on an open panel in one of the units. Nearby, a dark-haired, dark-eyed, maturely handsome woman in her early thirties was holding a clip board and making occasional notes as the men worked. One of the men was using an electric drill, and the whine of metal on metal drowned out the slight noise that Taggert and Forsythe made as they entered. Only the woman was aware that they had come in, but she didn't betray the fact.

"Miss Tedesco?" Taggert called.

She looked up from her clip board, smiled, and walked toward the two newcomers. "Yes, Mr. Taggert?"

"'Bout done?"

"Almost. They're setting in the last component now."

Taggert nodded absently. "Miss Tedesco, this is Dr. Peter Forsythe, whom I told you about. Dr. Forsythe, this is Miss Donna Tedesco; she's the computer technician who will be working with you."

Miss Tedesco's smile was positively glittering. "I'm so pleased to meet you, doctor; I know our work together will be interesting."

"I trust it will," Forsythe said, beaming. Then a faint cloud seemed to come over his features. "I'm afraid I must confess a certain ... er ... lack of knowledge in the realm of computerdom. Mr. Taggert attempted to explain, but he, himself, has admitted that his knowledge of the details is ... er ... somewhat vague."

"I'm not a computerman, myself," Taggert said, smiling. "Miss Tedesco will be able to give you the details better than I can."

Miss Tedes...o...b..inked. "You know the broad outline, surely? Of the project, I mean."

"Oh, yes, certainly," Forsythe said hurriedly. "We are attempting to determine whether the actions of human beings can actually have any effect on the outcome of the prophecy itself. In other words, if it is possible to avert, say, a disaster if it is foretold, or whether the very foretelling itself a.s.sures the ultimate outcome."

The woman nodded her agreement.

"As I understand it," Forsythe continued, "we are going to get several score clients--or, rather, subjects--and I am to ... uh ... exercise my talents, just as I have been doing for many years. The results are to be tabulated and run through the computers to see if there is any correlation between human activity taken as a result of the forecast and the actual foretold events themselves."

"That's right," said Miss Tedesco. She looked at Taggert. "That's what the committee outlined, in general, isn't it?"