"Dr. Davenport and his crew are unhappy about that last batch of drawings
you and I gave 'em."
"What's the matter? Don't they like the color scheme? I never thought
scientists had any artistic taste, anyway."
"It's got nothing to do with that. The--"
The phone rang. Colonel Spaulding scooped it up and identified himself.
Then: "What? Yeah. All right, send him in."
He hung up and looked back at Lenny. "Davenport. We can get his story
firsthand. Just sit there and look important."
Lenny nodded. He knew that Dr. Amadeus Davenport was aware that the source
of those drawings was Soviet Russia, but he did not know how they had been
obtained. As far as he knew, it was just plain, ordinary spy work.
He came in briskly. He was a tall, intelligent-looking man with a rather
craggy face and thoughtful brown eyes. He put a large brief case on the
floor, and, after the preliminaries were over, he came right to the point.
"Colonel Spaulding, I spoke to the Secretary of Defense, and he agreed
that perhaps this situation might be cleared up if I talked directly with
you."
"I hope so," the colonel said. "Just what is it that seems to be bothering
you?"
"These drawings," Davenport said, "don't make any sense. The device
they're supposed to represent couldn't do anything. Look; I'll show you."
He took from his brief case photostatic copies of some of the drawings
Lenny had made. Five of them were straight blueprint-type drawings; the
sixth was a copy of Lenny's near-photographic paintings of the device
itself.
"This component, here," he said, gesturing at the set of drawings, "simply
baffles us. We're of the opinion that your agents are known to the Soviet
government and have been handed a set of phony plans."
"What's it supposed to do?" Lenny asked.
"We don't know what it's _supposed_ to do," the scientist said, "but it's
doubtful that it would _actually_ do anything." He selected one of the
photocopies. "See that thing? The one shaped like the letter Q with an
offset tail? According to the specifications, it is supposed to be painted
emerald green, but there's no indication of what it is."
* * * * *
Lenny Poe reached out, picked up the photocopy and looked at it. It
was--or had been--an exact copy of the drawing that was used by Dr. Sonya
Malekrinova. But, whereas the original drawing has been labeled entirely
in Cyrillic characters, these labels were now in English.
The drawings made no sense to Lenny at all. They hadn't when he'd made
them. His brother was a scientist, but Lenny understood none of it.
"Who translated the Russian into English?" he asked.
"A Mr. Berensky. He's one of our best experts on the subject. I assure you
the translations are accurate, Dr. Davenport said.
"But if you don't know what that thing is," the colonel objected, "how
can you say the device won't work? Maybe it would if that Q-shaped thing
was--"
"I know what you mean," Davenport interrupted. "But that's not the only
part of the machine that doesn't make any sense."
He went on to explain other discrepancies he had detected in the drawings,
but none of it penetrated to Lenny, although Colonel Spaulding seemed to
be able to follow the physicist's conversation fairly readily.
"Well, what's you suggestion, doctor?" the colonel asked at last.
"If you agents could get further data," the physicist said carefully, "it
might be of some use. At the same time, I'd check up on the possibility
that your agents are known to the NKVD."
"I'll see what can be done," said the colonel. "Would you mind leaving
those copies of the drawings with me for a while?"
"Go right ahead," Davenport said. "One other thing. If we assume this
device is genuine, then it must serve some purpose. It might help if we
knew what the device is supposed to _do_."
"I'll see what can be done," Colonel Spaulding repeated.
When Davenport had gone, Spaulding looked at Poe. "Got any explanation for
that one?"
"No," Lenny admitted. "All I can do is check with Rafe. He won't be awake
for a few hours yet. I'll check on it and give you an answer in the
morning."
* * * * *
Early next morning, Colonel Spaulding walked through his outer office. He
stopped at the desk where the pretty brunette WAC sergeant was typing
industriously, leaned across the desk, and gave her his best leer. "How
about a date tonight, music lover?" he asked, "'_Das Rheingold_' is
playing tonight. A night at the opera would do you good."
"I'm sorry, sir," she said primly, "you know enlisted women aren't allowed
to date officers."
"Make out an application for OCS. I'll sign it."
She smiled at him. "But then I wouldn't have any excuse for turning you
down. And then what would my husband say?"
"I'll bribe him. I'll send _him_ to OCS."
"He's not eligible. Officers are automatically disqualified."
Colonel Spaulding sighed. "A guy can't win against competition like that.
Anything new this morning?"
"Mr. Poe is waiting in your office. Other than that, there's just the
routine things."
He went on into his office. Lenny Poe was seated behind the colonel's
desk, leaning back in the swivel chair, his feet on the top of the desk.
He was sound asleep.
The colonel walked over to the desk, took his cigar from his mouth, and
said: "_Good_ morrrning, Colonel Spaulding!"
Lenny snapped awake. "I'm not Colonel Spaulding," he said.
"Then why are you sitting in Colonel Spaulding's chair?"
"I figured if I was asleep nobody'd know the difference." Lenny got up and
walked over to one of the other chairs. "These don't lean back
comfortably. I can't sleep in 'em."
"You can sleep later. How was your session with Rafe?"
Lenny glowered glumly. "I wish you and Rafe hadn't talked me into this
job. It's a strain on the brain. I don't know how he expects anyone to
understand all that garbage."
"All what garbage?"
Lenny waved a hand aimlessly. "All this scientific guff. I'm an artist,
not a scientist. If Rafe can get me a clear picture of something, I can
copy it, but when he tries to explain something scientific, he might as
well be thinking in Russian or Old Upper Middle High Martian or
something."
"I know," said Colonel Spaulding, looking almost as glum as Lenny. "Did
you get anything at all that would help Dr. Davenport figure out what
those drawings mean?"
"Rafe says that the translations are all wrong," Lenny said, "but I can't
get a clear picture of just what _is_ wrong."
* * * * *
Colonel Spaulding thought for a while in silence. Telepathy--at least in
so far as the Poe brothers practiced it--certainly had its limitations.
Lenny couldn't communicate mentally with anyone except his brother Rafe.
Rafe could pick up the thoughts of almost anyone if he happened to be
close by, but couldn't communicate over a long distance with anyone but
Lenny.
The main trouble lay in the fact that it was apparently impossible to
transmit a concept directly from Brain A to Brain B unless the basic
building blocks of the concept were already present in Brain B. Raphael
Poe, for instance, had spent a long time studying Russian, reading
Dostoevski, Tolstoy, and Turgenev in the original tongue, familiarizing
himself with modern Russian thought through the courtesy of _Izvestia_,
_Pravda_, and _Krokodil_, and, finally, spending time in the United
Nations building and near the Russian embassy in order to be sure that he
could understand the mental processes involved.
Now, science has a language of its own. Or, rather, a multiplicity of
languages, each derived partly from the native language of the various
scientific groups and partly of borrowings from other languages. In the
physical sciences especially, the language of mathematics is a further
addition.
More than that, the practice of the scientific method automatically
induces a thought pattern that is different from the type of thought
pattern that occurs in the mind of a person who is not scientifically
oriented.
Lenny's mind was a long way from being scientifically oriented. Worse, he
was a bigot. He not only didn't know why the light in his room went on
when he flipped the switch, he didn't _want_ to know. To him, science was
just so much flummery, and he didn't want his brain cluttered up with it.
Facts mean nothing to a bigot. He has already made up his mind, and he
doesn't intend to have his solid convictions disturbed by anything so
unimportant as a contradictory fact. Lenny was of the opinion that all
mathematics was arcane gobbledygook, and his precise knowledge of the
mathematical odds in poker and dice games didn't abate that opinion one
whit. Obviously, a mind like that is utterly incapable of understanding a
projected thought of scientific content; such a thought bounces off the
impregnable mind shield that the bigot has set up around his little area
of bigotry.
Colonel Spaulding had been aware of these circumstances since the
inception of the Operation Mapcase. Even though he, himself, had never
experienced telepathy more than half a dozen times in his life, he had
made a study of the subject and was pretty well aware of its limitations.
The colonel might have dismissed--as most men do--his own fleeting
experiences as "coincidence" or "imagination" if it had not been for the
things he had seen and felt in Africa during World War II. He had only
been a captain then, on detached duty with British Intelligence, under
crusty old Colonel Sir Cecil Haversham, who didn't believe a word of "all
that mystic nonsense." Colonel Haversham had made the mistake of
alienating one of the most powerful of the local witch doctors.
The British Government had hushed it all up afterwards, of course, but
Spaulding still shuddered when he thought of the broken-spirited,
shrunken caricature of his old self that Colonel Haversham had become
after he told the witch doctor where to get off.
Spaulding had known that there were weaknesses in the telepathic
communication linkage that was the mainspring of Operation Mapcase, but he
had thought that they could be overcome by the strengths of the system.
Lenny had no blockage whatever against receiving visual patterns and
designs. He could reproduce an electronic wiring diagram perfectly
because, to him, it was not a grouping of scientific symbols, but a design
of lines, angles, and curves.
At first, it is true, he had had a tendency to change them here and there,
to make the design balance better, to make it more aesthetically
satisfying to his artistic eye, but that tendency had been easily
overcome, and Colonel Spaulding was quite certain that that wasn't what
was wrong now.