This time, Derek rated a helicopter ride from Andrews AFB to the installation in northern Virginia. Viewed from the air, that installation was even more unprepossessing than it had been at ground level. It seemed an incongruous setting for a super-spooky outfit like JICPO.
Once on the ground, Derek was ushered into one of the nondescript government-issue buildings and through a door on which "No Admittance" was stenciled. He found himself in a small, empty room walled in some composite material. With a faint whirr, a segment of the same gray stuff slid over the doorway, leaving the room a featureless cube. Then there was a sensation of the floor falling away beneath Derek's feet, and he decided the chamber wasn't so small after all . . . for an elevator.
Presently the descent ended, and the door slid aside to reveal a harshly lit corridor. A guard wearing camo fatigues and a sidearm met Derek as he emerged. "This way, sir. I'll direct you to Processing, where you'll be assigned quarters." Derek hoisted his sea bag and followed.
There were a few other new arrivals in Processing. Only one wore a Navy uniform. He turned as Derek entered, and his dark face split in a familiar easy grin.
"Well, well! Congratulations, Ensign!"
"Thanks . . . Lieutenant Rinnard," said Derek. For no reason he could define, he wasn't surprised in the least to see the fighter jock here.
"That's 'Paul'—we're both officers and gentlemen now. It's Derek, right?"
"Right . . . Paul." Derek's eyes went to Rinnard's left breast. "I see you're still wearing your wings."
"Hell, yes! I'll be back to driving F-39s after we're through doing . . . what we're going to be doing here. And," added Rinnard with a sensitivity not generally associated with fighter pilots, "you'll get back to flight officer training. This is just a kind of temporary detached duty."
"You really think so?"
"Sure I do. When I was ordered up here, I was pretty mad at first. Then they told me why, and I . . . well, I just couldn't accept it at first. But the skipper set me straight."
As he was probably under orders to do. Derek dismissed the unwelcome thought. "Hey, I was meaning to ask you something. When we were up here before, did you happen to meet this tall woman—a civilian, I'm pretty sure—with long dark hair?"
"I think I know who you mean. Not exactly what you'd usually call pretty, I suppose, but . . . something about her that I couldn't get out of my mind. And I could never decide what her age was."
"That's the one."
"I never got to talk to her. Too bad; a couple of times she looked me straight in the eye like she knew me from somewhere . . . or maybe wanted to know me." Rinnard's cocky grin immediately faded into regret. "I would have been only too glad to oblige! But something always seemed to come up before I could introduce myself."
"Sounds like you saw more of her than I did," Derek mused.
"Anyway, let's get checked in. We're all supposed to report for orientation at 1600. Doctor Kronenberg—remember her, the tight-assed old biddy?—is going to give us an introductory lecture. Maybe we'll see what's-her-face there."
Somehow, Derek doubted it.
"As most of you have probably been able to figure out for yourselves," said Doctor Kronenberg, "what you've been through was a winnowing process. The preliminary tests, which everyone in the armed forces has been getting, eliminate those with no latent psionic power whatsoever: about nine hundred and ninety-nine out of a thousand. The remaining one-tenth of one percent—minus those who were, for any reason, not granted Top Secret clearance—were the ones brought here recently for more intensive assessment. This enabled us to further eliminate everyone whose power was deemed too low to be useful. Then we eliminated everyone who was married or otherwise attached." She ran her eyes over the little auditorium. "You're what's left. We don't expect to get many more, if any. The armed forces are just about tapped out."
Small as it was, the auditorium wasn't nearly full. There were only a baker's dozen of variously uniformed people, three of whom were women. They sat giving their undivided attention to Kronenberg, who stood behind the podium on the slightly raised dais. Morrisey—who, it turned out, was the Commanding Officer of JICPO—sat behind and to her left.
"Naturally," Kronenberg continued, "we would like nothing better than to expand our recruitment. Unfortunately, civilians can't be ordered to submit to the testing. Also, we'd have to co-opt a wide range of research facilities—and that would be the end of any hope of maintaining security." Kronenberg smiled, briefly so as not to hurt her face too much. "Incidentally, the reason for the low percentage of women here is that you're a cross section of the military, not of the general population. There is no conclusive evidence of any linkage of psionic aptitude to gender—or to ethnicity, for that matter, even though the trait is clearly genetic.
"And now, before turning the podium over to Captain Morrisey, I'll open the floor to questions."
For a few heartbeats there was an uncomfortable silence as people who were still trying to come to terms with the powers they'd been told they possessed cast nervous glances at each other, each one willing someone else to speak first. Finally, one of the women, an Air Force first lieutenant, raised her hand and spoke hesitantly.
"Uh, Doctor Kronenberg, you must understand that this is all very difficult for us to accept at face value. You're talking about things which we're accustomed to regarding as . . . well, as claptrap. I suppose the very existence of this installation proves that's not the case. But still . . . well . . ." Abruptly, her diffidence vanished. "Please tell us what we're dealing with here!"
It was as though a dam had burst, for the silence was no more. Above the rising hubbub, the voice of a Black Marine staff sergeant rose. "You heard the lady, Doctor! We want to know just what the fuck's going on here!" Drilled-in military propriety reasserted itself with an almost audible clank. The man came to a seated position of attention and faced Morrisey, trying not to look appalled at his own lapse. "Excuse me, sir. But we need . . . well, we need to know, without any . . . any . . ."
Morrisey smiled. "Without any jive, Sergeant?"
The Marine smiled back. "That's right, sir."
"Well, Doctor?" said Morrisey. "Without any jive?"
Kronenberg looked nonplussed. "You're all scheduled to receive a series of lectures on the theoretical basis of psionics in due course, with full mathematical—" A renewed tumult from the floor drowned her out.
Paul Rinnard raised a lazy hand and spoke up in an equally lazy drawl. "Doctor, if I might make a suggestion, perhaps a brief, simplified introduction to the subject would be in order at this time." He flashed his trademark disarming grin. "And no math, please! It always makes my poor ol' head hurt."
Joining in the general chuckles, Derek realized that those chuckles were breaking a silence. The vaguely ugly rumbling in the room had ceased the instant the fighter pilot had spoken. He wondered why. Granted, the two silver bars on the collars of Rinnard's short-sleeved khakis made him the most senior person this side of the dais—this was a young group, and mostly enlisted. But there was more to it than that.
If any further evidence of the pilot's unique, indefinable quality had been needed, it would have been supplied by the look he was now getting from the Air Force lieutenant.
Derek had noticed her before. She was of medium height, with a sturdy but very female figure and wheat-blond hair. Her face was wide across the cheekbones, with a short nose and wide-spaced green eyes. He told himself he had no business feeling resentment over the fact that those eyes were quite obviously seeing nothing in the room but Rinnard.
Doctor Kronenberg huffed and puffed for only a few seconds. "Well, the theory can't be presented meaningfully without the mathematics. Ordinary language is simply not structured for it. In essence, however, the facts are these.
"There is an underlying sub-quantum level of reality which determines the nature of the universe which we observe—the universe which conventional physics, chaos theory and so forth describe tolerably well. Any disturbance on this very fundamental level can alter observed reality in ways not readily explainable by established science, nor accountable for in terms of causality.
"It now appears that conscious decision-making above a certain minimum threshold number of neural interconnections somehow provides the energy needed to create just such a disturbance. The mechanics are still improperly understood. But we have inferred the existence of massless particles—'psionitrons' is our convenience-label—which interact in a domain where time and causality become very problematical concepts. Psionics is the exploitation of this energy to . . . shape reality. Or, perhaps it would be more appropriate to say, predispose outcomes."
The Marine sergeant leaned slowly forward, eyes wide. "Whoa, Doc! Are you telling us that somebody who's using psionics is changing the universe every time he does it?"
"In very small ways, very subtle ways . . . yes, I suppose that's one way of putting it," Kronenberg allowed judiciously. Then she took up where she'd left off, speaking briskly into the stunned silence. "All neural activity constantly produces these particles—or, at least, it does in the brains of all the animals we've studied. However, in them it's just an irrelevant byproduct. Only human neural processes are complex enough to rise above the threshold I mentioned." Kronenberg's face took on a faraway look that seemed out of character. "It will be interesting to see how the world's religions react to these findings when we finally go public with them. In a sense, we seem to have proven that the human race really is unique and not just another member of the animal kingdom, the status to which Darwin relegated us. On the other hand, it could be argued that even this difference is one of degree, not of kind."
A Hispanic-looking Army corporal, clearly uncomfortable with this train of thought, cleared his throat. "Doctor, I don't get it. Earlier, you told us only one in a thousand people have this . . . stuff, and that even fewer, by a long shot, have enough of it to amount to diddly. But now you seem to be saying that everybody's got it!"
"You misunderstand, Corporal Estevez. The quantum energy of which I speak is, indeed, inherent in all human neural activity. But the ability to exploit it—loosely, psionic power—is restricted to a rare genotype, which we're now learning to isolate."
The woman in Air Force blue spoke up—a little truculently, Derek thought. "But even if this power is limited to a small fraction of one percent of the human race, the fact remains that there are a lot of human beings—and we've been around a long time! Why hasn't somebody done something with it? And I mean something impossible to ignore or rationalize or explain away. Something as inarguable as Hiroshima!"
"Remember, Lieutenant Westerfeld, the power is normally latent in human beings. This limits it to the unconscious, low-grade manifestations that we label 'luck' or 'intuition' or 'a sixth sense' or the like." Kronenberg squeezed out another brief, tight smile. She's getting downright giddy, thought Derek. "Haven't you ever noticed that some people always seem to drive up to the traffic light just as it turns green? Or that some people seem to know when they're in danger a split second in advance—the proverbial 'tingle between the shoulder blades'? I imagine a great many of the more elusive human qualities will prove to have such an explanation. But only occasionally do certain individuals spontaneously emerge from latency and become 'operant,' as we term those who can make conscious, purposeful use of psionics."
"Like my grandfather," said Derek, as much to himself as to Kronenberg.
The scientist gave him a sharp glance. "Precisely, Ensign Secrest. For reasons we still don't understand—probably just coincidence—there was a rash of such cases in the late 1960s and early 1970s, including Glenn Secrest. Especially Glenn Secrest, for he manifested greater power than anyone else who was recruited at that time. But psionic phenomena were not understood at that time—the research was still on the level of Rhine cards. And the emergence into operancy was always brief. The subjects lapsed back into latency, and so the experiments were unrepeatable. The project went pretty much belly-up.
"But things have changed in the four decades since then. Using recombinant DNA, we've been able to tailor psi-reactive drugs. Some of these you have already experienced: the ones which effectuate testing for the trait. But there are others, which stimulate latent powers into operancy. You'll be getting those presently. And still others, which we believe will enhance those same powers, are now in the research stage. Using the knowledge gleaned since the completion of the Human Genome Project, we hope to eventually tailor genetic retroviruses which will confer psionic powers on those who have none. But that's a long-range dream; I don't really expect to live to see it."
Lieutenant Westerfeld spoke with the same hint of disbelief, which Derek now recognized as a defense mechanism. "Surely you can't believe that you're going to be able to keep this a secret forever. Anything that's discoverable by science—"
"No, not forever. Eventually, we're going to broaden our recruitment, let certain selected scientists in on it. But we're going to be very cautious about it. And now let me turn the briefing over to Captain Morrisey, since I believe I've gone as far as I can in explaining the theory without giving Lieutenant Rinnard a headache." She bestowed one of her almost imperceptible smiles on the fighter pilot as she relinquished the podium.
Jesus Christ! thought Derek. Even she's not immune!
"I'd like to welcome you all here," Morrisey began, "and tell you a little about this command. Doctor Kronenberg was correct just now in her remarks on the subject of secrecy. But while the secret does last, we're going to explore the military applications thoroughly. This is at least as much a research outfit as an operational one. And we're going to make it our business to see that the secret lasts as long as possible.
"For example, in her discussion of the selection process Doctor Kronenberg mentioned that only single people were considered. It shouldn't be difficult for you to figure out why. Can you imagine family quarters, complete with nursery, in this place? And don't think you're going to get a housing allowance and turned loose to find an apartment in the Washington suburbs! No, you're going to be under conditions of very tight security here." Morrisey essayed a pleasantry. "As you were told, you'll be getting hazardous duty pay. But your opportunities for spending it will be somewhat limited.
"Now, I won't go into detail as to the organization chart. That's in one of the handouts you've gotten. I just want to make a couple of remarks about the nature of JICPO as a military outfit—a very unorthodox one.
"First of all, as would be obvious even without the name, it is an interservice command. I will tolerate no rivalries, feuds or animosities that interfere with the accomplishment of our mission. In turn, I assure you all that there will be absolutely no favoritism based on the branch of the service to which anyone belongs." Morrisey accompanied this last with a meaningful glance at Derek, Rinnard and the three enlisted Navy types present. "The only naval custom that I'm going to impose on everyone is that of not saluting when below decks. I think the reasons why that makes sense aboard a ship apply equally to this environment.
"Secondly, what you've just heard from Doctor Kronenberg should make clear that you are extremely scarce human material. If it didn't, you need only look around you in this auditorium. You must therefore be prepared to do whatever is needed at any given time. You've already had to adjust to being taken away from the jobs you were trained or in training to do, simply because people with psionic power are so rare that we can't afford not to make use of any of them. Flexibility must be your watchword. To put it bluntly, most of your skills have just become irrelevant.
"Furthermore, while I expect ordinary standards of military courtesy and decorum to be observed at all times, the fact is that this outfit is going to have to be function-based more than it is rank-based. Reality dictates this, despite my personal preference for a more traditional military structure. In this, also, we're going to have to be flexible. And—" a wintery smile "—if I can do it, you can do it."
Morrisey looked at his watch. "All right. It's 1800, so let's adjourn to the canteen. Afterwards, I suggest you spend the evening settling in, reading the handouts . . . and getting some rest. There'll be precious little of that in the next few weeks."