The woman who called herself Sophia more than slept the clock around. It was well into the following morning before Derek heard her stirring.
He knocked hesitantly on the door frame. "May I come in?"
"Of course." She sat up in bed, holding the covers modestly across her body but otherwise displaying no self-consciousness. She also showed none of the grogginess that might have been expected of one just awakening from a long sleep of exhaustion. Her gray eyes were clear and alert, and her speech was precise.
"I'm Derek Secrest—"
"I know."
"Uh, I brought you here—this is my grandfather's house, by the way—and . . ." And just how the hell does she know who I am? Finding himself at a loss for words, Derek sought refuge in practicalities. "I, ah, imagine you'll want to use the bathroom. It's down the hall to the right, first door on the—"
"That won't be necessary."
Derek blinked. How could it not be necessary? "Well, er, how are you feeling?"
"Not badly." She spoke with a faint accent, one which Derek couldn't place. "I've been through a very trying experience, but I believe I'm fully recovered by now."
"Yes, well, ahem, I've been meaning to ask you about that 'experience.' " Derek mustered his forces. Where to begin? "Yesterday afternoon—"
"Good morning, young lady!" Glenn Secrest's cheerful greeting boomed from the doorway. "Sophia, isn't it? You're looking better today."
"Yes. Thank you for letting me stay here."
"Don't mention it. I took the liberty of laundering your clothes—they're over there. We'll be putting breakfast together—come on down whenever you're ready. Come along, Derek, let's go downstairs and let the lady get dressed."
I never even got to ask her what her last name is! Derek thought through gritted mental teeth as he stood up to follow his grandfather.
But Sophia whatever-her-name-was grabbed his arm. She had quite a strong grip for a woman. But that wasn't what rendered him motionless. No, it was a feeling that some kind of energy flowed through the point of physical contact between them and made it impossible for him to even consider focusing on anything but the depths of those unusual gray eyes.
"Listen, Derek, I don't know how long I'll be able to stay here. So listen carefully."
"Huh? Oh, don't worry, you can stay with us as long as you want to." Could it be the INS she's in trouble with? he wondered. She does look and sound kind of foreign.
Only . . . illegal aliens don't generally arrive the way she did yesterday.
"Listen, I said! Very soon, your life is going to change in an unexpected way. Your first impulse will probably be to rebel against what fate is forcing you into. But you must not resist. You are at the center of something extremely important—far more important than you can possibly understand. You must—"
The irritation that had been building steadily in Derek ever since he'd been ordered to the super-spooky installation in northern Virginia finally reached critical and erupted. "Jesus H. Christ on a crutch! Can't anybody say anything to me anymore without talking in riddles?" He shook off Sophia's hand and stomped out of the room and down the stairs, aware of how childish he was being but unable to bring himself to care.
Well, now I at least know what she does for a living, he fumed. She works in a fortune cookie factory!
Then, as he reached the bottom of the stairs, he heard his grandfather's voice from down the hall, toward the front door. "Why yes, Captain Morrisey. We didn't expect you so early. Come on in."
Derek cast an alarmed glance—not even considering why he was alarmed—up the stairs to assure himself that Sophia was out of sight. Then he stepped into the hallway.
As he'd more than half expected, it was the same Navy captain he'd met the week before. Doctor Kronenberg came behind him, dressed in civilian clothes about as fashionable as the lab coat in which he'd last seen her. Morrisey advanced, hand outstretched, and Derek—for all that he was on leave and out of uniform—came more than halfway to attention. Normally, an NAOC didn't even come into contact with officers this senior, much less have them come to call on him.
He managed to shake hands. "Good day, sir."
"Good day, Ensign Secrest. And no, that's not a slip of the tongue. Obviously, some explanation is in order. Perhaps your grandfather will let us have the use of a room where Doctor Kronenberg and I can discuss certain matters with you."
They sat in the study, and Derek stared at the paper Captain Morrisey had handed him.
The signature at the bottom certainly carried conviction—unless, without Derek noticing it, someone else had been elected President in the last week or so.
"Congratulations, Ensign," he heard Morrisey say, as though from a great distance.
Derek lifted glazed eyes from the commission. "Sir, this . . . this isn't right."
"I assure you it is, Ensign. A little untraditional, I admit, but entirely legal. And, even in my notoriously conservative opinion, not at all improper. You've earned it. You're simply being presented with the paper here and now instead of a week or two later at Pensacola."
"But, sir—"
"And now," Morrisey continued inexorably, reaching into his briefcase and sliding another paper across the desk, "here are your orders. You will note that they are stamped 'Top Secret.' This is because the existence—indeed, the very name—of the unit to which you are being assigned is classified at that level."
Derek studied the paper, and his bewilderment turned to stupefaction, and then to horror.
"Sir, this doesn't say anything about going back to Pensacola for flight officer school."
Doctor Kronenberg's exasperation had been waxing visibly. "For God's sake, Mister Secrest, what are you complaining about? Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think you just got handed your precious commission on a silver platter, without having to go back down to Florida and participate in some archaic, time-wasting ritual."
"But, ma'am, I'm in the RIO pipeline, and have been all along!"
"Secrest, don't be ridiculous! Is that really all you can think about—playing your silly little macho games with your silly little airplanes? Anybody can do that. You, on the other hand, now have a unique opportunity to do something important."
Captain Morrisey, reading the signs, raised a surreptitious warning hand before Derek could say the unsayable. "Doctor Kronenberg," he said suavely, "would you excuse me and Ensign Secrest for a few minutes? I believe I can clarify the situation for him."
"I certainly hope you can!" Muttering under her breath, Kronenberg stalked from the study.
Captain Morrisey turned to Derek with a smile. "Doctor Kronenberg is a very brilliant scientist—a major national resource, in my opinion. Unfortunately, she is not what I believe is called a 'people person.' And she is, of course, quite mistaken. You and I both know that not just anybody has what it takes to be a United States Naval aviator. You do, and of that you can be justifiably proud."
"Thank you, sir. But—"
"Nevertheless, in a general sense Doctor Kronenberg has a point. The particular combination of abilities and character traits that Naval aviation requires is uncommon . . . but not vanishingly so. Certainly not as uncommon as certain attributes which the tests you underwent last week revealed."
Desperately, Derek sought for the precise combination of words that would make this man, evidently the arbiter of his fate, see what a horrible, inexplicable mistake this all was. "Sir, the Navy has invested a lot of money in preparing me for flight officer training. Won't that all go to waste if I'm assigned to this, uh—" he ran his eyes over the orders again "—this JICPO outfit to do something else?" His resolve to avoid any appearance of pleading began to crack, and so did his voice. "Sir, isn't that why the Navy wanted me in the first place?"
Morrisey's sea-blue eyes hardened. "Naturally, we always seek to make the optimum use of our people's abilities, which is why you were accepted for Aviation OCS. But the Navy did not thereby place itself under any sort of contractual obligation to make you a flight officer. We could send you out to the fleet to chip rust off anchor chains for the rest of your hitch if we wanted to. We won't, of course—but only because that would be a flagrant waste of human resources."
"Precisely the point I was trying to make, sir," said Derek stiffly.
"Ah, but you need to understand something. Employing you as a RIO would be almost as wasteful as would the example I just gave. Not quite, of course. But for what you're going to be doing at JICPO, you possess an . . . aptitude which is equaled by not more than one in every hundred thousand people. That figure should be considered minimal, as Doctor Kronenberg is cautious by temperament."
Before Derek could form words, another voice did it for him.
"So it is true!"
The study had two doors. The one through which Doctor Kronenberg had exited led to the hallway. The other, in the opposite corner, connected with the great room. Derek's grandfather now stood in that door, glaring at Morrisey, who stood up and glared back.
"Mr. Secrest, I requested privacy because your grandson and I are discussing highly sensitive matters for which you are no longer cleared. Your indiscretion could have grave consequences."
"Spare me that crap. I'm not in the Navy anymore, as you yourself have just emphasized by not even giving me the courtesy title of 'Commander' to which I'm technically entitled."
"You are, however, as subject to criminal penalties under the National Security Act as everyone else. We may be forced to investigate—"
"Investigate this!" Glenn Secrest pointed in the appropriate direction on his own anatomy. "What are you going to do to me? Not even prison scares me all that much anymore; it's well known that for older men on the inside, homosexuality is pretty much consensual. Fact is, the only threat you can make that really worries me is a threat to the life and sanity of my grandson—and you're doing that anyway!"
Morrisey exerted self-control with a visible effort. "Of course I know your background, and so I can understand your concern. But by the same token, you of all people ought to be able to appreciate the importance of this—and the importance of your grandson." A wintry smile. "You were quite willing to see him go into aerial combat, so don't try to tell me you're excessively protective."
"Hell, no. When he decided he wanted to fly for his country, he made me prouder than I have the capacity to express. But he made that decision knowing more or less what he was getting into. I'm damned if I'll let you con him into a commitment he doesn't understand!"
During this entire exchange, Derek had sat in a state of silent passivity. Now, all at once, his confusion crystallized into a single, very clear realization: he resented being discussed in the third person as though he wasn't even in the room. Resented it like hell. Resented it so much that his mouth was open and the words out of it before he recalled that he was addressing his grandfather and an officer astronomically senior to him.
"Will somebody please tell me just exactly what the hell this is all about?"
"Tell him, Captain," Glenn grated. "You might as well, because if you don't, I will. You can start by telling him what the acronym JICPO stands for. I'd like to know myself—although I have a pretty good idea what the letter 'P' means."
Captain Morrisey sighed—perhaps with resignation, perhaps with a kind of relief—and turned to face Derek. "It stands for Joint Interservice Command for Psionic Operations. And you're being assigned to it because you happen to be a very powerful latent telepath."
Derek's next clear recollection was of staring across the desk at the three older people—Doctor Kronenberg had evidently come back into the study at some point. He became aware that she was speaking. Maybe it helped that her voice was so irritating.
"—And, of course, the calibration techniques are still lamentably crude. Not as much so as in your grandfather's day, of course. But we're still not in a position to measure your full potential."
Derek found his voice. "Uh . . . Doctor . . . Captain . . . Granddad . . ."
"Yes?" Kronenberg leaned forward.
"This is crazy! I mean . . . telepathy? That's nothing but a lot of mumbo-jumbo that stage magicians use!"
"So it is generally thought." Kronenberg sounded well pleased with herself. "The only people who believe in it are the sort of people who are taken in by those very stage magicians. Their belief discredits it. This allows us to explore the phenomenon's military potentialities in secret. No investigative reporter takes it seriously enough to pursue it."
"One of the government's more successful exercises in disinformation," Morrisey put in. "It dates back to the 1970s, when we first awoke to the potentialities."
Derek turned to his grandfather. "So that was what you were doing in those . . . missing years."
Glenn nodded gravely. "Yes. I was recruited, much as you are being recruited now. I was a little older, though, and your father was an infant. It was hard. Very hard. And it didn't come to anything."
"Naturally it didn't," Kronenberg resumed. "Even though you exhibited great power. At that time, we were still essentially in a prescientific stage. We didn't have a unification theory that related psionic phenomena to matter and energy. Now we do." The smugness of her tone left little doubt in Derek's mind as to the identity of that theory's author. "Also, the technology wasn't up to systematically testing large populations for the trait. It was a matter of sheer chance—as in the case of your grandfather."
Derek groped for a handhold on reality. "But, Doctor . . . you're wrong! At least about me. I swear to God, I don't go around reading everybody's thoughts, or anything like that."
"Of course not." Kronenberg settled into lecturing mode with what was obviously practiced ease. "That's the pop-culture fantasy of telepathy—and it's one of the reasons for the long-term disinformation campaign Captain Morrisey mentioned. If people knew there were actual telepaths functioning among them, there'd be a panic and hysteria that would make the witch hunts of the seventeenth century look tame. But in reality it doesn't work that way. Indeed, it normally doesn't work at all."
"That's why it came a cropper in my case," Glenn put in, drawing a withering glare from Kronenberg for the interruption. "Although a few times . . . well, the glimpses I had . . ." He shook his head slowly and subsided into a reminiscent silence.
"Nowadays," Kronenberg continued after a glacial pause, "we know that telepathy—and also the other psionic phenomena that are as yet less well understood—are subject to limitations just like anything else. We also know that in all but a very few sporadic cases they are latent, and require artificial stimulation. We're also learning how to supply that stimulation. But even when it does become active, the ability is as controllable as any other. Can you imagine receiving all the mental output of each passerby—all the random thoughts, all the constant bombardment of sensory stimuli, and all the subconscious backdrop—without being able to shut it out? And try to imagine walking through Times Square and multiplying all that by all the passersby! You'd go mad, of course."
"Still," Derek's grandfather insisted, "a telepath, properly stimulated out of latency, can receive the consciously organized surface thoughts of anyone not trained or equipped to counter the power, within a certain range. Isn't that so?"
"Yes, it is," Morrisey admitted forthrightly. "Otherwise it wouldn't be of any military use, would it?" He turned to Derek with a smile. "It might interest you to know that I am a telepath. Not as powerful as you potentially are, by a long shot, but powerful enough to receive your thoughts right now." His smile broadened at Derek's expression. "But I'm not doing so."
Kronenberg was less amused. "Oh, think about it, Secrest!" she snapped in her winning way. "Look, every infantry grunt in the U.S. Army is issued extremely deadly weapons and trained to use them. If you ask me, that's scarier than psionics. In theory, they could go around blowing the heads off all the civilians they see. So why don't they?" She paused as though she actually expected an answer.
"Well . . . that is . . . I mean . . ." Derek struggled with something too obvious to put into words.
Kronenberg smiled. "Precisely. It would be immoral and illegal, and in practically all cases they'd have no motive. Get it through your head: We're not talking about something supernatural. It's simply an aspect of the universe that isn't as well understood as most of the others. In fact, it hasn't been understood at all until very recently. But it's like any other source of power: subject to being abused, no doubt, but also amenable to social controls."
"And," Morrisey added, leaning forward significantly, "uncommonly useful in the present world situation! Since the Cold War ended in the last decade of the twentieth century, the national security problem has changed. We still can't ignore conventional forms of aggression, but for the last twenty years we've pretty much checkmated that threat. No one in the world can realistically hope to overcome us that way, and no one has seriously tried. So the military's emphasis has shifted to countering the more subtle threats of terrorism and insurgency. If anybody ignored the problem of counterterrorism before September 2001, you can be sure nobody has since! For this type of mission, multimegaton nukes are about as appropriate as using a pile driver for swatting flies. What we need are means of applying force in a very precise, very controlled manner. And, above all, really accurate intelligence information on the enemy's intentions. And, of course, undetectable and unjammable communications are always useful, especially in covert ops."
"Also," Kronenberg took up the theme, "means of 'force projection,' to use the militarese term, that are undetectable and instantaneous. Remember what I mentioned about other applications of psionics, about which we're still groping for an understanding? We think you may possess some of those, in addition to telepathy. You'll learn about them at JICPO."
Derek's eyes darted from one authoritative face to another, finally resting on his grandfather's. "Granddad, you're the only one I can turn to for advice—the only one I know has my best interests at heart. What do you think?"
"Derek, they've done as I asked and laid their cards on the table. I can't deny that they have a point: you're in a position to do your country a unique service. At the same time, all this talk of 'artificial stimulation' tells me you'd be entrusting your mind to new and untried technology."
"What if they'd had that technology back in your day? What if it had been possible to prolong and repeat those 'glimpses' you talked about earlier? Would you have gone for it?"
"Damned straight I would have! But it has to be your decision. And don't let them bullshit you into thinking they can order you to do this." Glenn briefly exchanged glares with Morrisey, then turned back to his grandson. "As you know, nobody can be ordered to fly an airplane; a pilot can plunk his wings down on the skipper's desk any time. That may not officially be the case with this stuff, but as a practical matter I guarantee you it is."
Glenn fell silent, and no one else spoke. Derek was alone amid the swirl of his thoughts.
Then, in that chaos of indecision, came a remembered female voice.
" . . . Very soon, your life is going to change in an unexpected way. Your first impulse will probably be to rebel against what fate is forcing you into. But you must not resist. You are at the center of something extremely important—far more important than you can possibly understand. . . ."
How did she know?
Abruptly, Derek stood up, and spoke in a voice whose firmness surprised him. "I'm in no condition to think very clearly just now, and I have to . . . Well, you'll just have to excuse me for a few moments." Without waiting for leave, he stepped out into the hallway and bounded up the stairs three steps at a time.
Sophia was still sitting on the guest bed. She hadn't resumed her clothes, but still had the sheet draped across her body in a way that seemed oddly precise, almost formal.
"Are you a telepath?" Derek demanded without preamble.
"No."
"I don't believe you." The rejoinder was automatic. Oddly enough, he really did find himself believing that she'd told the truth. He just wasn't sure it was the entire truth.
"I assure you that I am not. I do know more or less what has just transpired downstairs, but only as a result of some perfectly mundane eavesdropping."
"Then how did you know in advance that this was going to happen?"
"I didn't—not in detail. In general, though, it was easily predictable."
"And what about that little display I saw on the beach south of here yesterday afternoon? Was that some kind of psionic manifestation?"
"No. Not really. Not in the sense you mean."
Derek gripped his temper with both hands. "As usual, you're not making sense. Look, I want you to come downstairs with me and tell the people down there what really happened on that beach, and we'll get all this resolved. I'll step outside for a minute while you put on your clothes."
Derek stood outside the door for the stipulated minute, then another. Finally his patience snapped. "Come on!" he demanded. Bidding good manners be damned, he stepped back into the guestroom.
Sophia was gone. The sheet that had covered her lay on the bed as though it had fluttered down from shoulders that were suddenly no longer there.
Derek ran to the window. It was closed. He opened it, stuck his head outside and scanned the beach to the left, Sandfiddler Road to the right, and the adjacent beach houses. There was no running figure in sight.
Then he noticed that Sophia's clothes were still there, neatly folded.
For a while, he simply stood at the window, not seeing the view, thinking hard. Then he squared his shoulders and headed for the stairs.