* * * * *
The man in the pastel blue topcoat walked with steady purpose, but
without haste, through the chill, wind-swirled drizzle that filled the
air above the streets of Arlington, Virginia. His matching blue
cap-hood was pulled low over his forehead, and the clear, infrared
radiating face mask had been flipped down to protect his chubby cheeks
and round nose from the icy wind.
No one noticed him particularly. He was just another average man who
blended in with all the others who walked the streets that day. No one
recognized him; his face did not appear often in public places, except
in his own state, and, even so, it was a thoroughly ordinary face.
But, as he walked, Senator John Peter Gonzales was keeping a mental,
fine-webbed, four-dimensional net around him, feeling for the
slightest touch of recognition. He wanted no one to connect him in any
way with his intended destination.
It was not his first visit to the six-floor brick building that stood
on a street in a lower-middle-class district of Arlington. Actually,
government business took him there more often than would have been
safe for the average man-on-the-street. For Senator Gonzales, the
process of remaining incognito was so elementary that it was almost
subconscious.
Arriving at his destination, he paused on the sidewalk to light a
cigarette, shielding it against the wind and drizzle with cupped
hands while his mind made one last check on the surroundings. Then he
strode quickly up the five steps to the double doors which were
marked: _The Society For Mystical And Metaphysical Research, Inc._
Just as he stepped in, he flipped the face shield up and put on an
old-fashioned pair of thick-lensed, black-rimmed spectacles. Then, his
face assuming a bland smile that would have been completely out of
place on Senator Gonzales, he went from the foyer into the front
office.
"Good afternoon, Mrs. Jesser," he said, in a high, smooth, slightly
accented voice that was not his own. "I perceive by your aura that you
are feeling well. Your normal aura-color is tinged with a positive
golden hue."
Mrs. Jesser, a well-rounded matron in her early forties, rose to the
bait like a porpoise being hand-fed at a Florida zoo. "_Dear_ Swami
Chandra! How perfectly wonderful to see you again! You're looking
_very_ well your-_self_."
The Swami, whose Indian blood was of the Aztec rather than the Brahmin
variety, nonetheless managed to radiate all the mystery of the East.
"My well-being, dear Mrs. Jesser, is due to the fact that I have been
communing for the past three months with my very good friend, the
Fifth Dalai Lama. A most refreshingly wise person." Senator Gonzales
was fond of the Society's crackpot receptionist, and he knew exactly
what kind of hokum would please her most.
"Oh, I _do_ hope you will find time to tell me _all_ about it," she
said effusively. "Mr. Balfour isn't in the city just now," she went
on. "He's lecturing in New York on the history of flying saucer
sightings. Do you realize that this is the fortieth anniversary of the
first saucer sighting, back in 1944?"
"The first _photographed_ sighting," the Swami corrected
condescendingly. "Our friends have been watching and guiding us for
far longer than that, and were sighted many times before they were
photographed."
Mrs. Jesser nodded briskly. "Of course. You're right, as always,
Swami."
"I am sorry to hear," the Swami continued smoothly, "that I will not
be able to see Mr. Balfour. However, I came at the call of Mr. Brian
Taggert, who is expecting me."
Mrs. Jesser glanced down at her appointment sheet. "He didn't mention
an appointment to me. However--" She punched a button on the intercom.
"Mr. Taggert? Swami Chandra is here to see you. He says he has an
appointment."
Brian Taggert's deep voice came over the instrument. "The Swami, as
usual, is very astute. I have been thinking about calling him. Send
him right up."
"You may go up, Swami," said Mrs. Jesser, wide-eyed. She watched in
awe as the Swami marched regally through the inner door and began to
climb the stairs toward the sixth floor.
* * * * *
One way to hide an ex-officio agency of the United States Government
was to label it truthfully--_The Society For Mystical And Metaphysical
Research_. In spite of the fact that the label was literally true, it
sounded so crackpot that no one but a crackpot would bother to look
into it. As a consequence, better than ninety per cent of the
membership of the Society was composed of just such people. Only a few
members of the "core" knew the organization's true function and
purpose. And as long as such scatter-brains as Mrs. Jesser and Mr.
Balfour were in there pitching, no one would ever penetrate to the
actual core of the Society.
The senator had already pocketed the exaggerated glasses by the time
he reached the sixth floor, and his face had lost its bland,
overly-wise smile. He pushed open the door to Taggert's office.
"Have you got any ideas yet?" he asked quickly.
Brian Taggert, a heavily-muscled man with dark eyes and black,
slightly wavy hair, sat on the edge of a couch in one corner of the
room. His desk across the room was there for paperwork only, and
Taggert had precious little of that to bother with.
He took a puff from his heavy-bowled briar. "We're going to have to
send an agent in there. Someone who can be on the spot. Someone who
can get the feel of the situation first hand."
"That'll be difficult. We can't just suddenly stick an unknown in
there and have an excuse for his being there. Couldn't Donahue or
Reeves--"
Taggert shook his head. "Impossible, John. Extrasensory perception
can't replace sight, any more than sight can replace hearing. You know
that."
"Certainly. But I thought we could get enough information that way to
tell us who our saboteur is. No dice, eh?"
"No dice," said Taggert. "Look at the situation we've got there. The
purpose of the Redford Research Team is to test the Meson Ultimate
Decay Theory of Dr. Theodore Nordred. Now, if we--"
Senator Gonzales, walking across the room toward Taggert, gestured
with one hand. "I know! I know! Give me _some_ credit for
intelligence! But we _do_ have one suspect, don't we? What about
_him_?"
Taggert chuckled through a wreath of smoke. "Calm down, John. Or are
you trying to give me your impression of Mrs. Jesser in a conversation
with a saucerite?"
The senator laughed and sat down in a nearby chair. "All right. Sorry.
But this whole thing is lousing up our entire space program. First
off, we nearly lose Dr. Ch'ien, and, with him gone, the interstellar
drive project would've been shot. Now, if this sabotage keeps up, the
Redford project _will_ be shot, and that means we might have to stick
to the old-fashioned rocket to get off-planet. Brian, we _need_
antigravity, and, so far, Nordred's theory is our only clue."
"Agreed," said Taggert.
"Well, we're never going to get it if equipment keeps mysteriously
burning itself out, breaking down, and just generally goofing up. This
morning, the primary exciter on the new ultracosmotron went haywire,
and the beam of sodium nuclei burned through part of the accelerator
tube wall. It'll take a month to get it back in working order."
Taggert took his pipe out of his mouth and tapped the dottle into a
nearby ash disposal unit. "And you want to pick up our pet spy?"
Senator Gonzales scowled. "Well, I'd certainly call him our prime
suspect." But there was a certain lack of conviction in his manner.
Brian Taggert didn't flatly contradict the senator. "Maybe. But you
know, John, there's one thing that bothers me about these accidents."
"What's that?"
"The fact that we have not one shred of evidence that points to
sabotage."
* * * * *
In a room on the fifth floor, directly below Brian Taggert's office, a
young man was half sitting, half reclining in a thickly upholstered
adjustable chair. He had dropped the back of the chair to a forty-five
degree angle and lifted up the footrest; now he was leaning back in
lazy comfort, his ankles crossed, his right hand holding a slowly
smoldering cigarette, his eyes contemplating the ceiling. Or, rather,
they seemed to be contemplating something _beyond_ the ceiling.
It was pure coincidence that the focus of his thoughts happened to be
located in about the same volume of space that his eyes seemed to be
focused on. If Brian Taggert and Senator Gonzales had been in the room
below, his eyes would still be looking at the ceiling.
In repose, his face looked even younger than his twenty-eight years
would have led one to expect. His close-cropped brown hair added to
the impression of youth, and the well-tailored suit on his slim,
muscular body added to the effect. At any top-flight university, he
could have passes for a well-bred, sophisticated, intelligent student
who had money enough to indulge himself and sense enough not to overdo
it.
He was beginning to understand the pattern that was being woven in the
room above--beginning to feel it in depth.
Senator Gonzalez was mildly telepathic, inasmuch as he could pick up
thoughts in the prevocal stage--the stage at which thought becomes
definitely organized into words, phrases, and sentences. He could go a
little deeper, into the selectivity stage, where the linking processes
of logic took over from the nonlogical but rational processes of the
preconscious--but only if he knew the person well. Where the senator
excelled was in detecting emotional tone and manipulating emotional
processes, both within himself and within others.
Brian Taggert was an analyzer, an originator, a motivator--and more.
The young man found himself avoiding too deep a probe into the mind of
Brian Taggert; he knew that he had not yet achieved the maturity to
understand the multilayered depths of a mind like that. Eventually,
perhaps....
Not that Senator Gonzales was a child, nor that he was emotionally or
intellectually shallow. It was merely that he was not of Taggert's
caliber.
The young man absently took another drag from his cigarette. Taggert
had explained the basic problem to him, but he was getting a wider
picture from the additional information that Senator Gonzales had
brought.
Dr. Theodore Nordred, a mathematical physicist and one of the
top-flight, high-powered, original minds in the field, had shown that
Einstein's final equations only held in a universe composed entirely
of normal matter. Since the great Einstein had died before the
Principle of Parity had been overthrown in the mid-fifties, he had
been unable to incorporate the information into his Unified Field
Theory. Nordred had been able to show, mathematically, that Einstein's
equations were valid only for a completely "dexter," or right-handed
universe, or for a completely "sinister" or left-handed universe.
Although the universe in which Man lived was predominantly
dexter--arbitrarily so designated--it was not completely so. It had a
"sinister" component amounting to approximately one one-hundred-thousandth
of one per cent. On the average, one atom out of every ten million in the
universe was an atom of antimatter. The distribution was unequal of course;
antimatter could not exist in contact with ordinary matter. Most of it was
distributed throughout interstellar space in the form of individual atoms,
freely floating in space, a long way from any large mass of normal matter.
But that minute fraction of a per cent was enough to show that the
known universe was not totally Einsteinian. In a purely Einsteinian
universe, antigravity was impossible, but if the equations of Dr.
Theodore Nordred were actually a closer approximation to true reality
than those of Einstein, then antigravity _might_ be a practical
reality.
And that was the problem the Redford Research Team was working on. It
was a parallel project to the interstellar drive problem, being
carried on elsewhere.
* * * * *
The "pet spy," as Taggert had called him, was Dr. Konrad Bern, a
middle-aged Negro from Tanganyika, who was convinced that only under
Communism could the colored races of the world achieve the
technological organization and living standard of the white man. He
had been trained as a "sleeper"; not even the exhaustive
investigations of the FBI had turned up any relationship between Bern
and the Soviets. It had taken the telepathic probing of the S.M.M.R.
agents to uncover his real purposes. Known, he constituted no danger.
There was no denying that he was a highly competent, if not brilliant,
physicist. And, since it was quite impossible for him to get any
information on the Redford Project into the hands of the
opposition--it was no longer fashionable to call Communists "the
enemy"--there was no reason why he shouldn't be allowed to contribute
to the American efforts to bridge space.
Three times in the five months since Bern had joined the project,
agents of the Soviet government had made attempts to contact the
physicist. Three times the FBI, warned by S.M.M.R. agents, had quietly
blocked the contact. Konrad Bern had been effectively isolated.
But, at the project site itself, equipment failure had become
increasingly more frequent, all out of proportion to the normal
accident rate in any well-regulated laboratory. The work of the
project had practically come to a standstill; the ultra-secret project
reports to the President were beginning to show less and less progress
in the basic research, and more and more progress in repairing damaged
equipment. Apparently, though, increasing efficiency in repair work
was self-neutralizing; repairing an instrument in half the time merely
meant that it could break down twice as often.
It had to be sabotage. And yet, not even the S.M.M.R. agents could
find any trace of intentional damage nor any thought patterns that
would indicate deliberate damage.
And Senator John Peter Gonzales quite evidently did _not_ want to face
the implications of _that_ particular fact.
"We're going to have to send an agent in," Taggert repeated.
(_That's my cue_, thought the young man on the fifth floor as he
crushed out his cigarette and got up from the chair.)
"I don't know how we're going to manage it," said the senator. "What
excuse do we have for putting a new man on the Redford team?"
Brian Taggert grinned. "What they need is an expert repair
technician--a man who knows how to build and repair complex research
instruments. He doesn't have to know anything about the purpose of the
team itself, all he has to do is keep the equipment in good shape."
Senator Gonzalez let a slow smile spread over his face. "You've been
gulling me, you snake. All right; I deserved it. Tell him to come in."
As the door opened, Taggert said: "Senator Gonzales, may I present Mr.
David MacHeath? He's our man, I think."
* * * * *
David MacHeath watched a blue line wriggle its way erratically across
the face of an oscilloscope. "The wave form is way off," he said
flatly, "and the frequency is slithering all over the place."
He squinted at the line for a moment then spoke to the man standing
nearby. "Signal Harry to back her off two degrees, then run her up
slowly, ten minutes at a time."
The other man flickered the key on the side of the small
carbide-Welsbach lamp. The shutters blinked, sending pulses of light
down the length of the ten-foot diameter glass-walled tube in which
the men were working. Far down the tube, MacHeath could see the
answering flicker from Harry, a mile and a half away in the darkness.
MacHeath watched the screen again. After a few seconds, he said:
"O.K.! Hold it!"
Again the lamp flashed.
"Well, it isn't perfect," MacHeath said, "but it's all we can do from
here. We'll have to evacuate the tube to get her in perfect balance.
Tell Harry to knock off for the day."
While the welcome message was being flashed, MacHeath shut off the
testing instruments and disconnected them. It was possible to
compensate a little for the testing equipment, but a telephone, or
even an electric flashlight, would simply add to the burden.
Bill Griffin shoved down the key on the lamp he was holding and locked
it into place. The shutters remained open, and the lamp shed a beam of
white light along the shining walls of the cylindrical tube. "How much
longer do you figure it'll take, Dave?" he asked.
"Another shift, at least," said MacHeath, picking up the compact,
shielded instrument case. "You want to carry that mat?"
[Illustration]
Griffin picked up the thick sponge-rubber mat that the instrument case
had been sitting on, and the two men started off down the tube,
walking silently on the sponge-rubber-soled shoes which would not
scratch the glass underfoot.
"Any indication yet as to who our saboteur is?" Griffin asked.
"I'm not sure," MacHeath admitted. "I've picked up a couple of leads,
but I don't know if they mean anything or not."
"I wonder if there _is_ a saboteur," Griffin said musingly. "Maybe
it's just a run of bad luck. It could happen, you know. A statistical
run of--"
"You don't believe that, any more than I do," MacHeath said.
"No. But I find it even harder to believe that a materialistic
philosophy like Communism could evolve any workable psionic
discipline."
"So do I," agreed MacHeath.
"But it can't be physical sabotage," Griffin argued. "There's not a
trace of it--anywhere. It _has_ to be psionic."
"Right," said MacHeath, grinning as he saw what was coming next.
"But we've already eliminated that. So?" Griffin nodded firmly as if
in full agreement with himself. "So we follow the dictum of the
Master: 'Eliminate the impossible; whatever is left, no matter how
improbable, is the truth.' And, since there is absolutely nothing
left, there is no truth. At the bottom, the whole thing is merely a
matter of mental delusion."
"Sherlock Holmes would be proud of you, Bill," MacHeath said. "And so
am I."
Griffin looked at MacHeath oddly. "I wish I was a halfway decent
telepath, I'd like to know what's going on in your preconscious."
"You'd have to dig deeper than that, I'm afraid," MacHeath said
ruefully. "As soon as my subconscious has solved the problem, I'll let
you know."
"I've changed my mind," said Griffin cheerfully. "I don't envy your
telepathy. I don't envy a guy who has to TP his own subconscious to
find out what he's thinking."
MacHeath chuckled softly as he turned the bolt that opened the door in
the "gun" end of the stripped-nuclei accelerator. The seals broke with
a soft hiss. Evidently, the barometric pressure outside the
two-mile-long underground tube had changed slightly during the time
they had been down there.
"It'll be a week before we can test it," MacHeath said in a tired
voice. "Even after we get it partly in balance. It'll take that long
to evacuate the tube and sweep it clean."
* * * * *
It was the first sentence he had spoken in the past hour or so, and it
was purely for the edification of the man who was standing on the
other side of the air lock, although neither Griffin nor MacHeath had
actually seen him as yet.
Griffin was not a telepath in the sense that the S.M.M.R. used the
word, but to a non-psionicist, he would have appeared to be one.
Membership in the "core" group of the _Society for Mystical and
Metaphysical Research_ required, above all, _understanding_. And, with
that understanding, a conversation between two members need consist
only of an occasional gesture and a key word now and then.
The word "understanding" needs emphasis. Without understanding of
another human mind, no human mind can be completely effective. Without
that understanding, no human being can be completely free.
And yet, the English word "understanding" is only an approximation to
the actual process that must take place. _Total_ understanding, in one
sense, would require that a person actually _become_ another
person--that he be able to feel, completely and absolutely, every
emotion, every thought, every bodily sensation, every twinge of
memory, every judgment, every decision, and every sense of personal
identity that is felt by the other person, no more and no less.
Such totality is, obviously, neither attainable nor desirable. The
result would be a merger of identities, a total unification. And, as a
consequence, a complete loss of one of the human beings involved.
Optimum "understanding" requires that a judgment be made, and that, in
turn, requires _two_ minds--not a fusion of identity. There must be
one to judge and another to be judged, and each mind plays both
roles.
_Love thy neighbor as thyself._ But the original Greek word would
translate better as "respect and understand" than as the modern
English "love." The founders of our modern religions were not fools;
they simply did not have the tools at hand to formulate their
knowledge properly. As understanding increases, a critical point is
reached, which causes a qualitative change in the human mind.
First, self-understanding must come. The human mind operates through
similarities, and the thing most similar to any human mind is itself.
The next most similar thing is another human mind.
From that point on, all objects, processes, and patterns in the
universe can be graded according to their similarity to each other,
and, ultimately, to their similarity to the human mind.
Two given entities may seem utterly dissimilar, but they can always be
linked by a _tertium quid_--a "third thing" which is similar to both.
This third thing, be it a material object or a product of the human
imagination, is called a symbol. Symbols are the bridges by which the
human mind can reach and manipulate the universe in which it exists.
With the proper symbols and the understanding to use them, the human
mind is limited only by its own inherent structural restrictions.
One of the most active research projects of the S.M.M.R. was the
construction of a more powerful symbology. Psionics had made
tremendous strides in the previous four decades, but it was still in
the alchemy stage. So far, symbols for various processes could only be
worked out by cut-and-try, rule-of-thumb methods, using symbols
already established, including languages and mathematics. None were
completely satisfactory, but they worked fairly well within their
narrow limits.
As far as communication was concerned, the hashed-together symbology
used by the S.M.M.R. was better than any conceivable code. The
understanding required to "break" the "code" was well beyond the
critical point. Anyone who could break it was, _ipso facto_, a member
of the S.M.M.R.
Most people didn't even realize that a conversation was taking place
between two members, especially if a "cover conversation" was used at
the same time.
* * * * *
MacHeath's verbal discussion of the testing of the nuclei accelerator
was just such a cover. Even before he had cracked the air lock, he had
known that Dr. Theodore Nordred was standing on the other side of the
thick wall.
MacHeath pushed the heavy door open on its smooth hinges. "Oh, hello,
Dr. Nordred. How's everything?"
The heavy-set mathematician smiled pleasantly as MacHeath and Griffin
came into the gun chamber. "I just thought I'd come down and see how
you were getting along," he said. His voice was a low tenor, with
just a touch of Midwestern twang. "Sometimes the creative mind gets
bogged down in the nth-order abstractions that have no discernible
connection with anything at all." He chuckled. "When that happens, I
drop everything and go out to find something mundane to worry about."
Nordred was only an inch shorter than the slim MacHeath, and he
weighed in at close to two hundred pounds. At twenty-five, he had had
the build of a lightweight wrestler; thirty more years had added
poundage--a roll beneath his chin and a bulge at the belly--but he
still looked capable of going a round or two without tiring. His shock
of heavy hair was a mixture of mouse-brown and gray, and it seemed to
have a tendency to stand up on end, which added another inch and a
half to his height. His round face had a tendency to smile when he was
talking or working with his hands; when he was deep in thought, his
face usually relaxed into thoughtful blankness. He frowned rarely, and
only for seconds at a time.
"It seems to me you have enough to worry about, doctor," MacHeath said
banteringly, "without looking for it." He put down his instrument case
and took out a cigarette while Griffin closed the door to the
acceleration tube.
"Oh I don't have to look far," Nordred said. "How long do you think it
will be before we can resume our work with the Monster?"
"Ten days to two weeks," MacHeath said promptly.
"I see." One his rare frowns crossed his face. "I wish I knew why the
exciter arced across. It shouldn't have."
"Don't you have any idea?" MacHeath asked innocently. At the same
time, he opened his mind wide to net in every wisp and filament of
Nordred's thoughts that he could reach.
"None at all," admitted the mathematician. "Weakness in the
insulation, I suppose, though it tested solidly enough." And his mind,
as far back as his preconscious and the upper fringes of his
subconscious, agreed with his words. MacHeath could go no deeper as
yet; he didn't know Nordred well enough yet.
There were suspicions in Nordred's mind that the insulation weakness
must have been caused by deliberate sabotage, but he had no one to pin
his suspicions on. Neither he nor anyone else connected with the
Redford project was aware of the true status of Dr. Konrad Bern.
"Well, let's hope it doesn't happen again," MacHeath said. "Balancing
these babies so that they work properly is hard enough for a deuteron
accelerator, but the Monster here is ten times as touchy."
Nordred nodded absently. "I know. But our work can't be done with
anything less." Nordred actually knew less about the engineering
details of the big accelerator than anyone else on the project; he was
primarily a philosopher-mathematician, and only secondarily a
physicist. He was theoretically in charge of the project, but the
actual experimentation was done by the other four men; Drs. Roger
Kent, Paul Luvochek, Solomon Bessermann, and Konrad Bern. These four
and their assistants set up and ran off the experiments designed to
test Dr. Nordred's theories.
MacHeath picked up his instrument case again, and the three men went
out of the gun chamber, into the outer room, and then started up the
spiral stairway that led to the surface, talking as they went. But the
apparent conversation had little to do with the instruction that
MacHeath was giving Griffin as they climbed.
So when MacHeath stopped suddenly and patted at his coverall pockets,
Griffin was ready for the words that came next.
"Damn!" MacHeath said. "I've left my notebook. Will you go down and
get it for me, Bill?"
Dr. Nordred had neither understood nor noticed the actual
instructions:
"Bill, as soon as I give you an excuse, get back down there and check
that gun chamber. Give it a thorough going-over. I don't really think
you'll find a thing, but I don't want to take any chances at this
stage of the game."
"Right," said Griffin, starting back down the stairway.
MacHeath and Dr. Nordred went on climbing.
* * * * *
David MacHeath sat at a table in the project's cafeteria, absently
stirring his coffee, and trying to look professionally modest while
Dr. Luvochek and Dr. Bessermann alternately praised him for his work.
Luvochek, a tubby little butterball of a man, whose cherubic face
would have made him look almost childlike if it weren't for the blue
of his jaw, said: "You and those two men of yours have really done a
marvelous job in the past four days, Mr. MacHeath--really marvelous."
"I'll say," Bessermann chimed in. "I was getting pretty tired of
looking at burned-out equipment and spending three-quarters of my time
putting in replacement parts and wielding a soldering gun." Bessermann
was leaner than Luvochek, but, like his brother scientist, he was
balding on top. Both men were in their middle thirties.
"I don't understand this jinx, myself," Luvochek said. "At first, it
was just little things, but the accidents got worse and worse. And
then, when the Monster blew--" He stopped and shook his head slowly.
"I'd suspect sabotage, except that there was never any sign of
tampering with the equipment I saw."
"What do you think of the sabotage idea?" Bessermann asked MacHeath.