The installation, it turned out, dated back almost sixty years, to a time before the psionic research had commenced or even been conceived.
"The government built quite a few underground facilities around that time," explained Captain Morrisey one day to Derek and a few others who'd expressed curiosity at the place's well-concealed existence. "The Cold War was at its height then, you see. Some of those places were a lot more extensive than this—especially the one in West Virginia that was supposed to be a refuge for the Federal government in event of a nuclear attack."
"But that one's been declassified, sir," observed Sergeant Tucker, the Marine.
"Since before the turn of the century," Morrisey nodded. "Big tourist attraction now. But there was, it was felt, no pressing need to go public with all of them. You never know when a bolt-hole like this may come in handy."
And, indeed, the Hole—as they soon came to call it—certainly provided privacy and adequate living quarters for JICPO, whose non-psionic support personnel naturally outnumbered the psis by a considerable factor. Its lack of luxury merely provided subject matter for that griping that is the natural and healthy background noise of every military organization, and whose absence is sufficient to set off alarm bells in the mind of any canny CO. Paul Rinnard was philosophical about it; he assured Derek that the room they ended up sharing was more spacious than a two-man junior officer stateroom aboard an aircraft carrier, and lacked the hellish noise.
"That's the part Hollywood never gets right," he explained cheerfully. "It's like you're living under an airport, with high-performance jets landing right over your head day and night—except that the landings are really controlled crashes."
"But how do you get any sleep?" wondered Derek.
"Human beings can adapt to amazing things. In fact, I think we're pretty amazing creatures all around." Rinnard gave his roguish grin, accompanied with a lift of one peaked black eyebrow. "I guess the fact that we're here proves that."
It was hard to argue the point. But Derek still found it hard to really take the whole business seriously.
Until he awoke—or, to be precise, was awakened.
He'd more or less assumed it was going to involve something like the vaguely scary high-tech caps that had been put over his head at both stages of the selection process. Doctor Kronenberg disabused him of that.
"Those were for purposes of detecting psionic aptitude," she explained. "We'd like to be able to stimulate latent talents into operancy by some application of electronic induction. But to date, it's defeated our efforts. As far as we know, the only way that works involves the psi-reactive drugs I mentioned previously."
"Like what we got before?" Derek couldn't keep the distaste out of his voice.
"Not exactly. Those were merely aids to identifying psionic talents. In the preliminary screening—what you got as part of your induction physical—we used a drug that produces the disorientation you noticed in, and only in, those with latent powers. Your fellow-inductees felt no such aftereffects, which made for a crude but effective way of eliminating them. Later, when you were brought here for further testing, we administered a more complex agent, which increased your receptivity to that testing. It had certain side effects: a confused time sense, and a breakdown of the walls that keep out the general telepathic 'background noise.' "
"The dreams that aren't really dreams," Derek half-whispered.
"It gives that impression, yes . . . or so I'm told."
"But Doctor, back at my grandfather's house you said that telepathy was controllable, that you don't constantly get this 'background noise.' "
"That's true of operant telepathy. What you experienced was a blurring of the barriers to operancy. Your abilities were still latent, and hence uncontrollable. What we're going to do now is dissolve those barriers altogether. This will result in the same side effects, in a more intense form but lasting only a short time."
"How short?" asked Derek. "And how . . . intense?"
"The duration varies with the individual, but it is measured in minutes. I won't deny that it is, by all accounts, highly unpleasant while it lasts." Doctor Kronenberg took on a look of scientific detachment which, Derek thought sourly, she could well afford. "I have a theory—you'll find I have a lot of theories—that this is why human psionic powers have remained latent. The occasional cases like your grandfather and Captain Morrisey show that the barrier can be broken without chemical aids. But the human psyche shies away from it.
"However," she continued, with her very best effort at offering encouragement, "as I said, it's brief. And now, let's see just how brief it is in your case."
The human memory will not retain extreme pain. This forgetfulness serves the species well: without it, no woman would willingly bear more than one child.
It also served Derek well.
What he experienced was not, in the strict and narrow sense, pain. It was the distilled essence of nightmare. The dreams-that-were-not-dreams that he had experienced before had been the most fleeting and veiled glimpses of a monster's face. Now that alien monster invaded his mind, and his mind had no capacity to resist nor to flee. For what he was later told was eight minutes, he was nothing more than a vessel of horror.
Afterwards, he lay in the recovery room, his mind blissfully empty of everything save his own thoughts. He grew aware of Doctor Kronenberg's presence.
"So my grandfather went through that?" he asked her.
"Not really. Spontaneous awakening into operancy entails these hallucinatory experiences to a certain degree; that's what enabled the researchers back in the early 1970s to identify your grandfather and others, who had the experiences while on active duty. But the partial nature of such awakenings makes them less severe. Unfortunately, it also means they're only temporary."
"What about Captain Morrisey? His 'spontaneous awakening' seems to have lasted."
"No. It was fading like all the others. He had to go through this. It's brutal, but it's also believed to be permanent. And it could have been worse. You reacted to it as well as anyone has—and better than some." Kronenberg looked uncomfortable, and bit her lower lip. "Corporal Estevez . . ."
"What about him?"
"He's still in a coma. Not permanent, we're pretty sure," the scientist hastily added. "In fact, we expect him to come out of it any time. And even in his case, it worked. That 'barrier' of which I spoke earlier is now dissolved."
"Or dynamited," Derek muttered.
"Whatever. Congratulations, Mister Secrest: you're now operant."
"But . . . but I don't feel anything!"
"You're not supposed to. Your abilities are no longer latent, but you haven't learned to use them. That's next."
The training involved nothing even remotely comparable to that access of horror. But it took far longer. And it was tedious.
But then came his first establishment of contact.
He had some notion of what to expect, from Doctor Kronenberg's lectures. "First of all," she pontificated, "everything you know about telepathy is wrong."
"But I don't know anything about it!" came a plaintive voice from somewhere in the little audience.
Kronenberg gave a quelling glare and resumed. "It's not like in movies—carrying on a conversation in voice-over without moving your lips. Admittedly, I'm told that the input is perceived as something analogous to sound, probably because this is the way our minds are set up to process it."
Lauren Westerfeld, the Air Force lieutenant, raised her hand. "Doctor, I've noticed you use terms like 'I'm told' and 'as I understand' a lot. Am I correct in inferring—?"
"You are, Lieutenant," Kronenberg cut in evenly. "Like ninety-nine point nine percent of the human race, I have approximately the psionic capability of a rock."
Could that be why you've got such a large, hairy bug up your ass? wondered Derek silently. Or why you get that dreamy look when you talk about the possibility of some kind of genetic goo that will bestow psi on people who don't naturally have it?
"And now, if I may resume," said Kronenberg, "what you're going to be doing is picking up thoughts—or, as I suspect is more accurate, intentions. This requires focus and concentration. The closest you'll come to conversing this way is by consciously projecting them as well, so another telepath—a friendly one, presumably—will be able to pick them up more easily. Remember my introductory remarks about the nature of psionics. Telepathy is the most subtle of all its manifestations."
Later, they were introduced to some of the less subtle ones.
"The powers other than telepathy can be categorized as follows," Kronenberg told them in a later class. "First, there's what is traditionally called extrasensory perception, comprising such abilities as clairvoyance and precognition. These are the talents that most often manifest themselves in the low-grade, unconscious ways I mentioned in the introductory lecture. But, paradoxically, they are very difficult to make conscious, volitional use of. This may be just as well. Widespread ability to foretell the future might have disturbing philosophical implications.
"Then there is psychokinesis: the direct manipulation of matter and energy. Levitation, for example, and telekinesis. This is far rarer than telepathy, and we're only just starting to understand it.
"Beyond that, things start to get really weird."
An uneasy shifting and throat-clearing suffused the room. Kronenberg ignored it. "There are two powers which we tend to bracket together. One is teleportation—loosely, the power of instantaneous physical displacement to another location, without crossing the intervening distance."
There was no more noise in the room. Everyone was too stunned for that.
"The other is projection. This is the least understood of all. In some manner, it detaches the user's consciousness from his or her physical body. That consciousness becomes an invisible, disembodied viewpoint that can roam and observe at will, subject to definite limitations.
"The reason we associate these two is that they both appear to involve some form of extradimensional movement, physical or otherwise. Physicists have long speculated that more dimensions than the four we know may have existed immediately following the Big Bang, only to collapse into nonexistence as the metrical frame of the universe established itself. This speculation now stands confirmed—except that in order to account for teleportation and projection it is necessary to postulate the survival of at least one of the 'extra' dimensions. For us, this dimension is only accessible via psionitron interactions. Actual physical access to it is evidently impossible; a teleported object spends zero time in it before being 'ejected' into some other locus of the normal physical world. The disembodied consciousness, on the other hand, seems to experience time at the normal rate.
"We know," Kronenberg went on, oblivious to her audience's glazed look, "that some of you have certain of these powers in addition to the more common telepathy. We mean to explore their possibilities in due course."
Lauren Westerfeld shook herself and thrust her head forward in a way that seemed defiant—almost angry. "Doctor, I'm trying my best to accept all this, and discard all preconceptions. But teleportation . . . Look, even accepting that someone can, uh, flick himself to somewhere else, what about the matter—air, if nothing else—that's already occupying his new location?"
"That's a fallacy," said Kronenberg, not troubling to disguise her irritation. "Remember what I keep telling you about the fundamental nature of psionic phenomena. Teleportation isn't 'transportation' any more than telepathy is a 'conversation.' What's happening is that one volume of observed reality—the one occupied by the teleporter—is changing places with another volume, including the air in it. Theoretically, the same ought to apply to anything else that was there, even rock—"
"Instant statue," Rinnard muttered to Derek sotto voce.
"—but as a practical matter, there seems to be a psychological block against teleporting into a mountain, say, or even water . . . or, for that matter, to any location the teleporter can't actually see." She made a dismissive gesture. "Or so it seems from the very limited research we've been able to conduct. We hope to learn more—from you."
"May I join you gentlemen?" asked Lauren Westerfeld rather diffidently.
Derek and Rinnard looked up from their table in the club. Of necessity in an outfit like this, it was a combined club, open to all ranks. The Hole's builders had intended it to be an oasis of fake wood paneling and indirect lighting in a desert of bleak utilitarianism. They hadn't altogether succeeded. Still, it was the best—and, just incidentally, the only—place for relaxing over a drink when off duty.
The Air Force lieutenant's words had clearly been directed to Rinnard, and he half-rose from his chair with a courtliness that somehow avoided seeming either affected or old-fashioned. "Why, certainly, Lieutenant. Lauren, isn't it? I'm Paul." Derek mumbled his own first name, silently cursing himself for not coming up with something suave.
"Thank you." Westerfeld sat down. She held a mug of beer whose level her nursing had barely lowered. Her gaze went from Rinnard to Derek and then back to Rinnard, and stayed there. "I've been hoping for an opportunity to introduce myself. You two are together a lot. I suppose it must have to do with being the only two naval officers here."
"Besides," Rinnard grinned, "we Southern boys have to stick together."
Westerfeld blinked—understandably, Derek thought. Neither he nor Rinnard spoke Hollywood Southern. As a Tidewater Virginia native, his pronunciation of words like "out" and "about" usually got him tagged as a Canadian. And as for Rinnard . . .
"Louisiana, right?" Westerfeld asked him.
"Yep," the pilot confirmed. "Sort of an advantage in this place. We Creoles are a superstitious lot. Makes it easier to accept what's going on here. I mean . . . what's new?"
Westerfeld laughed—dutifully, it seemed. Then she settled back into her usual earnestness. "Seriously, it makes you wonder, doesn't it? Maybe what we're working with here is the reality behind all the old stories of—"
"Magic."
The voice that finished her sentence for her was that of Captain Morrisey, who'd appeared behind her. He gave an as-you-were gesture and sat down. Things were informal in the club. "That's very astute, Lieutenant, but it's not new. And you yourself shot it down with the argument you made back at the introductory lecture."
"Sir?"
"There was this science fiction author back in the 1970s—not one of those that were co-opted for the disinformation program; he was too close to the truth. Anyway, he made the same point you did, but he applied it to magic as well as psionics: If it's real, then all the attempts to make it work over the centuries should have produced something."
"But, sir," Westerfeld persisted, "maybe some of what Doctor Kronenberg calls 'spontaneous awakenings' occurred in the past."
Morrisey smiled at the argumentative junior officer. "But you run into the same paradox. If those awakenings lasted no longer than the ones that have been covertly studied over the last forty years, they wouldn't have made such a deep and lasting impression on the human memory. And if they lasted, then they should have gotten into verifiable historical records."
"So what's the answer, sir?" asked Derek, beginning to warm to the bull session.
"Well, writers like the one I mentioned came up with a theory to explain it. Seems that magic requires something called 'mana.' The world started out with a fixed supply of this stuff, and magic depletes it. And once it's depleted, it's gone. It can never, ever be replenished. Back in legendary times, the sorcerers used up all the mana doing magic. So now magic won't work any more. No 'fuel,' so to speak." Morrisey gave a self-deprecating laugh and finished off his highball. "I was born in the nineteen sixties, and I used to be a nut on classic science fiction. Anyway, the idea made for some good stories."
Westerfeld wore a look of deep thought. Presently, she shook her head. "It won't work," she stated emphatically
"What won't work?" asked Derek.
"That 'mana' theory. It contains a major fallacy. If no new mana can ever be produced, then where did it come from in the first place?"
Rinnard snapped his fingers. "Yeah, good point! And how come magic won't work in orbit, and on the Moon, where ol' Merlin and those guys never did any of their tricks? Ought to be oodles of mana left out there."
Morrisey joined in the laughter, and held up his hands as though to stem the tide. "Hey, people, it was just a fictional device! Sorry I brought it up."
"Fun to play with, though," Rinnard smiled. "Buy you another drink, Skipper?"
"Better not, thanks." Morrisey stood up, and the mantle of command descended invisibly. "Busy day tomorrow. I advise all of you to make an early night of it."