“So he’ll take action . . . at the latest as soon as the order is given to move our telepath to the Cleaver Project. But you two won’t be here when it happens. You’re not needed for that part, and while we’ve been talking, the main project conduit has been shunted from our university exit here to a security island outside the area. You’ll move there directly from the project as soon as you finish checking me out, and you will remain there until Operation Rogue is concluded.
“And now let’s get busy! I think it would be best, Ben, if I assumed Arlene’s usual role for a start . . . secondary operator . . . and let you go through the regular pattern of contacts while I look on. What do you say?”
* * *
Arlene Rolf had taken a chair well back from the table where the two men sat before the diex projector. She realized it had been an attempt to dissociate herself—emotionally as well as physically—from what was being done there, and that the attempt hadn’t been at all successful. Her usual composure, based on the awareness of being able to adjust herself efficiently to the necessities of any emergency, was simply gone. The story of the rogue had been sprung on them too abruptly at this last moment. Her mind accepted the concept but hadn’t really assimilated it yet. Listening to what Weldon had said, wanting to remain judiciously skeptical but finding herself increasingly unable to disbelieve him—that had been like a slow, continuous shock. She wasn’t yet over it. Her thoughts wouldn’t follow the lines she set them on but veered off almost incoherently every minute or two. For the first time in her adult life she was badly frightened—made stupid with fear—and finding it something she seemed unable to control at will.
Her gaze shifted back helplessly to the table and to the dull-blue concave viewplate which was the diex projector’s central section. Unfolded from its case, the projector was a beautiful machine of spider web angularities lifting from the flat silver slab of its generator to the plate. The blurred shiftings of color and light in the center of the plate were next to meaningless without the diex goggles Dr. Lowry and Weldon had fitted over their heads; but Arlene was familiar enough with the routine test patterns to follow their progress without listening closely to what was said. . . .
She wanted the testing to stop. She felt it was dangerous. Hadn’t Weldon said they still couldn’t be sure of the actual extent of the rogue’s abilities? And mightn’t the projector be luring their minds out now into the enemy’s territory, drawing his attention to what was being done in this room? There had been seconds when an uncanny certainty had come to her that she could sense the rogue’s presence, that he already was cynically aware of what they were attempting, and only biding his time before he interfered. That might be—almost certainly was—superstitious imagining, but the conviction had been strong. Strong enough to leave her trembling.
But there was, of course, exactly nothing she could do or say now to keep them from going on. She remained silent.
So far it had been routine. A standard warm-up. They’d touched Vanderlin in Melbourne, Marie Faber in Seattle. The wash of colors in the viewplate was the reflection of individual sensory impressions riding the diex field. There had been no verbalizing or conscious response from the contacted subjects. That would come later. Dr. Lowry’s face was turned momentarily sideways to her, the conical grey lenses of the goggles protruding from beneath his forehead like staring insect eyes.
She realized he must have said something to Weldon just now which she hadn’t heard. Weldon’s head was nodding in agreement. Dr. Lowry shifted back to the table, said, “Botucato, Brazil—an untried location. How the pinpointing of these random samplings is brought about is of course . . .” His voice dropped to an indistinct murmur as he reached out to the projector again.
Arlene roused herself with an effort partly out of her foggy fears. It was almost like trying to awake from a heavy, uncomfortable sleep. But now there was also some feeling of relief—and angry self-contempt—because obviously while she had been giving in to her emotional reactions, nothing disastrous had in fact occurred! At the table, they’d moved on several steps in the standard testing procedure. She hadn’t even been aware of it. She was behaving like a fool!
The sensory color patterns were gone from the viewplate, and now as she looked, the green-patterned white field of the projector’s location map appeared there instead. She watched Dr. Lowry’s practiced fingers spin the coordinating dials, and layer after layer of the map came surging into view, each a magnified section of the preceding one. There was a faint click. Lowry released the dials, murmured something again, ended more audibly, ” . . . twenty-mile radius.” The viewplate had gone blank, but Arlene continued to watch it.
The projector was directed now towards a twenty-mile circle at ground level somewhere in Brazil. None of their established contacts were in that area. Nevertheless, something quite definite was occurring. Dr. Lowry had not expected to learn much more about this particular process until a disciplined telepathic mind was operating through the instrument—and perhaps not too much more then. But in some manner the diex energy was now probing the area, and presently it would touch a human mind—sometimes a succession of them, sometimes only one. It was always the lightest of contacts. The subjects remained patently unaware of any unusual experience, and the only thing reflected from them was the familiar generalized flux of sensory impressions.
* * *
Arlene Rolf realized she was standing just inside the open records vault of Dr. Lowry’s office, with a bundle of files in her arms. On the floor about her was a tumbled disorder of other files, of scattered papers, tapes. She dropped the bundle on the litter, turned back to the door. And only then, with a churning rush of hot terror, came the thought, What am I doing here? What happened?
She saw Dr. Lowry appear in the vault door with another pile of papers. He tossed them in carelessly, turned back into the office without glancing in her direction. Arlene found herself walking out after him, her legs carrying her along in dreamlike independence of her will. Lowry was now upending the contents of a drawer to the top of his desk. She tried to scream his name. There was no sound. She saw his face for an instant. He looked thoughtful, absorbed in what he was doing, nothing else. . . .
Then she was walking through the living room, carrying something—the next instant, it seemed, she’d reentered Lowry’s office. Nightmarishly, it continued. Blank lapses of awareness followed moments in which her mind swayed in wild terrors while her body moved about, machinelike and competent, piling material from workshop and file cabinets helter-skelter into the records vault. It might have been going on for only three or four minutes or for an hour; her memory was enclosed in splinters of time and reality. But there were moments, too, when her thoughts became lucid and memory returned. . . . Colonel Weldon’s broad back as he disappeared through the narrow door in the living room wall into the private conduit entry, the strap of the diex projector case in his right hand; then the door closing behind him. Before that had been an instant when something blazed red in the projector’s viewplate on the table, and she’d wondered why neither of the two men sitting before it made any comment—
Then suddenly, in one of the lucid moments, there was time for the stunned thought to form: So the rogue caught us all! Weldon’s self-confidence and courage, Dr. Lowry’s dedicated skill, her own reluctance to be committed to this matter . . . nothing had made the slightest difference. In his own time, the rogue had come quietly through every defense and seized their minds. Weldon was on his way to him now, carrying the diex projector.
And she and Dr. Lowry? They’d been ordered by the rogue to dispose of every scrap of information dealing with the projector’s construction, of course! They were doing it. And after they had finished—then what?
Arlene thought she knew when she saw Dr. Lowry close the vault, and unlock and plunge the destruct button beside the door. Everything in there would be annihilated now in ravening white fire. But the two minds which knew the secrets of the projector—
* * ** * *
She must have made a violent effort to escape, almost overriding the rogue’s compulsions. For she found herself in the living room, not ten feet from the door that opened into the outer halls where help might still have been found. But it was as far as she could go; she was already turning away from the door, starting back across the room with the quick, graceful automaton stride over which she had no control. And terror surged up in her again.