Part 3 (1/2)
O'Flynn was there with more NASO techs, and to the side was a trio of base administrative staff.
”Why? What have I done now?” Zambendorf asked, moving over to join them. The attention in theroom followed him and s.h.i.+fted away from Thelma, who remained standing by the card players.
”That show of yours the other day with Gerry Ma.s.sey,” Tak.u.mi Kahito, one of the programmers, said. ”We think we know how you did it.”
”But I've already told you how I did it,” Zambendorf answered. ”Surely you're not saying you didn't believe me.”
Kahito smiled and gestured at the large mural screen. ”Mind if we rerun the video?”
Zambendorf shrugged. ”Go ahead.” In the background Thelma drifted to the back of the room.
Everyone present had as good as forgotten that she existed.
”All it proves is that closed minds are capable of explaining away anything,” Malcolm Wade declared, puffing his pipe near the serving counter.
Sitting by Wade was the round-faced, wispy-haired figure of Dr.-of what was obscure-Osmond Periera, wearing a rose-colored s.h.i.+rt under a V-neck fawn sweater. The author profiles in his best-selling books on paranormal research and UFOlogy-which claimed, among other things, that the North Polar Sea was a gigantic crater caused by the crash of an antimatter-powered alien s.p.a.cecraft, and that television altered the climate via mind power concentrated through ma.s.s suggestion-described him as Zambendorf's discoverer and mentor. Certainly he was one of the staunchest disciples, and the boosting of Zambendorf's career from European nightclub performer to celebrity of worldwide acclaim owed no small part to Periera's contacts and the influence his royalties were able to attract.
”There's no question that it demonstrates how much more reliably psychocommunicative signals propagate in the outer planetary void, free from disruptive terrestrial influences,” Periera said, ostensibly to Wade but so that everyone could hear. ”Of course, it doesn't come as any great surprise to anyone of genuine scientific impartiality. The effect was predicted by Bell's inequality many decades ago.”
Periera's ability to invent the most outrageous explanations for Zambendorf's feats never ceased to amaze even Zambendorf. None of the scientists at Genoa Base took Periera seriously, but either tolerated him as part of the much-needed entertainment or ignored him with disdain, depending on their disposition. Periera, of course, took himself very seriously and read their att.i.tudes as a direct, inverse measure of open-mindedness.
Conspicuously absent, Zambendorf noted, were Weinerbaum and his coterie of ”serious” scientists, who were above sharing in the fun the regular messroom gatherings generated. Harold Mackeson, the base commander, who had presided the last time, was not present either.
By now the mural screen was showing Ma.s.sey relaxing back in his chair, as they had seen him at the time of the live transmission from theOrion.
”What is it, Gerry?” Vernon Price's voice asked again.
”I'm not sure. I feel more than just aware of the s.p.a.ce outside,” Ma.s.sey replied. ”It's as if part of my mind is reaching out into it . . . being touched by something. My G.o.d, I'm getting something!
Suddenly I'm flooded with an image of Karl, and yes, the feeling of a number.” Zambendorf continued staring fixedly from where he was standing, aware but not showing it of the curious glances being sent in his direction from around the room. Ma.s.sey continued, ”It's . . . let me see . . .” His hand came up, touching the fingers to his brow. ”Fifty . . . fifty-three.”
”There!” Spearman stabbed at the comm unit on the table in front of him to freeze the image. ”See -Ma.s.sey's hand is covering his mouth. We heard the number over the audio all right, but you don't actuallysee him say it.” Spearman fast-forwarded the sequence to the next number Ma.s.sey had gotten right, which they heard him giving as seventeen. But again, at the moment of uttering it he was looking up at the ceiling with his arms braced on the rests of his chair and could have been saying anything. Ma.s.sey had failed on the next, which had been seven, and Spearman went on to the last two. Freezing the view at 68 showed Ma.s.sey with the back of his head to the camera, and when giving the last, 90, he had been wiping his mouth after taking a sip of water.
”All four of them, Karl?” Spearman smiled wryly and shook his head. ”Too much of a coincidence.
I'll believe that what we'relooking at came in from theOrion when it said it did-no question of that. Butwhat weheard is a different matter. There isn't one instance where you can actually synch anything to lip movements, noevidence that Ma.s.sey ever actually received anything. All weknow is that he said he did.”
”Then where did those numbers come from?” Zambendorf asked.
”Prerecorded and mixed in as a voice-over after the signal packet came in from theOrion ,” Kahito replied.
Zambendorf was impressed. ”Not a bad effort at all,” he said, his eyes twinkling. ”If it were true, I'd even go as far as to say that you're learning something about being real scientists at last.” In fact, it had been just as Spearman had said. Ma.s.sey had sent a recitation, in his own voice, of all the numbers up to a hundred as part of the messages he had exchanged with Zambendorf the day before the demonstration. Joe Fellburg had persuaded a pal on the NASO communications staff to give him access to the incoming message processors, and he had keyed the appropriate selections to slot into the audio track at the blind spots during the fifty-two-minute wait for the signal from theOrion to come in.
Spearman backed the recording up to the third number, 7, the one Ma.s.sey had pa.s.sed on. ”This one's not coming through very clearly at all,” Ma.s.sey said on the screen. ”No, just a blur, I'm afraid. It has a feel of 'threeness' about it-thirteen, maybe, or thirty-something . . .”
”That was a neat touch, Karl. I've got to hand it to you,” Spearman said. ”This time it is real. All the time that Gerry was talking about this stuff, you could see his mouth clearly. It leaves you believing that the same was true with all the other numbers, too, but it wasn't. I had to run through this a dozen times before I spotted the difference.”
All of it was true. The other part about this particular detail was that for some strange psychological reason n.o.body really understood, people in general were much more likely to find a demonstration of this kind believable when it didn't go a hundred percent right. Conjuring tricks worked every time, the inverted logic of these judgments seemed to say; therefore, if it didn't work every time, it couldn't be a trick.
”What clinched it for me was having the choice restricted to numbers,” John Webster said, leaning back. Evidently, as far as he was concerned, the whole matter was already wrapped up, with no call for further questions.
”Really?” Zambendorf just smiled and waited for the opportunity to ripen. He had weathered worse than this many a time before.
”It makes it easy for them to have been prerecorded,” Spearman explained. ”But suppose that instead of a number you'd used something selected arbitrarily on the spur of the moment-say, an object produced in the room.”
”Oh, I see.” Zambendorf nodded, as if that should have occurred to him before. ”That would have convinced you, would it?”
”It would have convinced me,” Kahito said. ”If somebody had been free to say, oh . . .” He looked around, then pointed at Spearman's spectacles. ”Black-rimmed gla.s.ses, or anything they liked, and then it had come in from Ma.s.sey fifty-two minutes later, sure,then I'd believe it.”
”I've seen Karl do that several times,” Wade a.s.sured everybody. Their conviction, however, evidently fell somewhere short of total.
”We'd have had you cold, Karl,” Spearman said to Zambendorf.
”Nonsense,” Zambendorf answered breezily. ”I'll do it for you right now, if you like.”
n.o.body had been prepared for that. They looked at each other uncertainly, as if to check what they thought they had just heard. ”What?” Spearman said. ”I'm not sure I follow. How can you do it right now?”
”Ma.s.sey isn't set up or anything,” Webster pointed out.
Zambendorf turned up his hands as if asking what the problem was with that. ”So set him up again,”
he said. He was comfortably sure that they wouldn't. It would mean taking another day to exchange preparatory messages, making the slot a.s.signments in the communications trunk beam, then getting everybody together again when the response from Ma.s.sey was due.”It's all a bit messy now,” Webster said. ”A pity somebody didn't think of it before.” The others concurred glumly.
”There is another way,” Zambendorf told them after a moment of apparent thought. ”You all know Joe Fellburg, right? Well, he isn't with us just to handle security, you know. I only accept colleagues into the team who show unusual talent in their own right. Isn't that so, Osmond?”
”Absolutely,” Periera confirmed from beside Wade, flattered at having his credentials endorsed publicly. ”An extraordinary collection of individuals. Fellburg does possess an unusual sensitivity for receiving telepathic images. I've seen Karl transmit to him in an absolutely sealed room. Checked it myself. It's quite unexplainable by any purely physical process.”
By this time the fact that only a few minutes previously the Ma.s.sey performance had been as good as solved was lost in the minds of most of those present. And that was exactly how Zambendorf wanted things to be. The goalposts had s.h.i.+fted; nowthis would be the test of his authenticity.
Spearman looked around the company, then back at Zambendorf. ”I'm not sure I know what we're talking about,” he said. ”How is this supposed to work?”
”Very simply,” Zambendorf replied. ”We call Joe-” He turned toward where Wade and Periera were sitting. ”Does anyone know where he is?” They returned negative gestures and head shakings.
Zambendorf shrugged. ”Well, he'll be easy enough to locate.” He looked back at Spearman. ”You call him and tell him what we want to do, and if he agrees, you hang up-so there's no open line or other channel back to him. Then anyone here who wants to can pick whatever objects they like-purely arbitrarily, which was the way you told me it ought to be done a few minutes ago-and I'll send the images to him.” Zambendorf shrugged again as if he were describing something he did every day. ”And then he'll come here and tell us what they were.”
”What? With Zambendorf here in the room?” Sharon Beatty put in. ”These people have codes that you can't even see. They can signal to each other.”
”Ask Joe to write them down before he comes in,” Zambendorf suggested.
n.o.body could find any objection to that. There was a short debate to consider additional details, until finally a procedure was agreed on that all were happy with. Somebody pa.s.sed Spearman a seefone from the shelf by the door, and he began calling around the base to locate Fellburg. Zambendorf settled himself down at the central one of the messroom's three long tables. Fellburg turned out to be in the guardroom of the main gatehouse. ”Putting him on,” Sergeant Harvey, the current watch officer, said.
”Er, I hope this isn't an inconvenient time, but we were hoping that you might help us out with something, Joe,” Graham Spearman said when Fellburg's features appeared on the screen.
”If I can. What's your problem?”
”I'm in the messroom with a bunch of people, and Karl's with us. He's saying that-”