Seaspun Magic (28 page)

"I—I...yes."

"Arianne, honey, I'll be there. But it's vital that you convince Thrush, Arianne. Barnes is too sly. He'd just as soon sell you out, take the money and live to steal another day. I want him picked up before he so much as thinks of whispering your name to anyone. Oh, and that reminds me, the admiral's given me two guards to be assigned to you twenty-four hours a day. Didn't you know? I thought for certain you'd—"

"It doesn't work for me, Leo. That's the part that seems so unfair! But guards? You mean, bodyguards? Isn't that a bit absurd? "

"Do you have any idea of what you' d be worth on the black market? One small-sized, black-eyed beautiful young witch...."

The admiral's residence was very comfortable and not too imposing, not particulary unusual in any way, until Arianne saw what had once been the cellar was now like the inside of a computer. The vast space was entirely made up of metal, plastic and glass, and the whole was sparked to life with electricity.

In the center of the compartmentalized space, subdued spotlights shone on a grouping of soft sofas and low tables. One piece of whimsy in the entire room dominated this relaxed arrangement: a waist-high antique atlas, lovely in every detail.

It might have been way past her bedtime, but Arianne was wide awake. She was introduced to what seemed a barrage of men, young and old, some in uniform, most not, and of course, Admiral Lyndon Thrush. He looked disapproving, disgruntled and extremely doubtful as he studied her face with uncompromising eyes that were as pale as Leo's, but blue, instead. She judged him to be in his early fifties. He unintentionally crushed the hand she gave him.

"You have an impressive history, Arianne—may I call you Arianne?" His manner was crisp and coldly formal.

"Please do, sir. But I don't think I'll say thank-you, because you didn't mean that as a compliment." She smiled beautifully.

The thin gray eyebrows rose a fraction. "Forgive me. I've never met a witch before." There was an acknowledging glint of amusement in the shrewd eyes.

Arianne didn't think she liked him. She glanced at Leo, who was stationed behind her left shoulder, so close that he was almost but not quite touching her. "This is a first for me, too, sir," she replied evenly.

He stared her down, and she, looking up, stared back with an unexpectedly feisty sparkle.

"Let's get on with it," murmured Leo diplomatically. "Dr. Ekhart, why don't you start?"

"Call me 'Jim,' Arianne." Dr. Ekhart came forward and the others stepped back. He motioned to Leo, as well, and with a brief squeeze of her hand Leo went back to stand in the shadows. Arianne noticed the rest of the room had dimmed. There was a small desk and chair arrangement in the middle of the circle of sofas, and this was spotlit by the lamp directly above it. Dr. Ekhart motioned her there, while the rest settled quietly into the outer circle or else stood behind the sofas to watch.

"Please, sit down and make yourself comfortable," the doctor prompted. "You've worked with the cards before?" He had a standard ESP deck, and she nodded . Most recently she had practiced her skills on Larry. "We'll start with a series, that's ten runs of twenty-five trials each. You understand the procedure? Simple telepathy test only. You've done it before on paper." Her dossier had been widely read, she reflected. "This time your record sheet will be on a display screen." He motioned the admiral's aid to roll a small computer console on castors to a stop in front of Arianne. It came with a small remote unit that had buttons for each of the five symbols of the cards, and one to erase. "But other than that there's no difference. You use the remote, instead of a pencil. The control person is seated upstairs. You'll try to read his mind as he flips through the deck. Card by card, you must try to correctly call the symbols as they come up in his hand. You get no help. You can't see him. You don't know who he is, or how fast he's going through the deck. You'll begin at my nod." He seated himself in the outer circle behind another small console that the aid had brought.

Arianne, under the spotlight, thought they couldn't have made her feel more uncomfortable. Of course that was prearranged, admiral's orders, probably, the purpose being to force her to prove herself under adverse conditions. A sheen of perspiration broke out on her forehead. She glanced around at her silent audience in the semigloom between her and the blinking myriad tiny computer lights. And then Leo moved slightly, attracting her attention, and she looked at him and felt reassured. She took a deep breath. Dr. Ekhart had been watching her narrowly. Seeing that she was ready, he nodded.

Arianne looked down at the remote, memorized the order of the symbols and then focused on her screen. The record sheet was divided into squares like a graph, twenty-five down, twenty across, with space at the top for her name and the particulars of place and time and room at the bottom for scores. The twenty squares across were subdivided to make ten blocks, with two columns in each block. The first column was for her call, the second column for the card—the actual symbol on the card of the control upstairs.

Shooting a quick look over to Dr. Ekhart, Arianne surmised he would probably be getting the control's results simultaneously with her calls. How much shorter the computers made the task of scoring! Wondering whether Dr. Mathias Dickenson would have a computer when she started working with him, and licking suddenly dry lips, she started pressing the symbol keys in the order that she read them in the mind of the control person.

Quickly she tapped out twenty-five keys for the first run: star, star, circle, square, circle, waves, waves, and the first column on her screen displayed her called symbol. Waiting for the next nod to start the second run, she noticed the unnatural quiet, and glanced uneasily around to realize that the menfolk were all watching what appeared to be display screens that now projected down from the ceiling above her head. The screens hadn't been there before.

And judging by the rapt attention those screens were receiving, the scoring of her call to the control's card must be appearing up there as she worked. Thinking back, she remembered that Dr. Mathias Dickenson had circled a correct hit with a red pen, so that the sets of identical symbols side by side were paired and stood out from the rest. She wondered how the computer would mark whether the calls were 'psi hitting' or 'psi missing.'

At Dr. Ekhart's nod she went on to the next block of columns and filled in her row, then waited for another nod, and so on and so forth, until the ten runs of twenty-five calls each had been done.

Each time she waited for a nod she tried to fathom how her audience was reacting to the scoring. A couple of times she sensed a ripple of quickening reaction traveling around the circle of men, but no one spoke or made a sound. But when she finished, the reaction was immediate.

Everybody began talking at once, but in low murmurs, so she didn't catch any of the comments. The silent excitement had turned into a sudden buzz of discourse.

"Again, Arianne. Do it again. Same thing. Ten runs, twenty-five calls each. Try to relax." Dr. Ekhart's voice floated out to her from the throng in the semidarkness.

"Why don't you try relaxing under this heat lamp?" Arianne snapped, and there was a whisper of snickers and then silence as the testing started again.

After she had whipped through the ten series, Dr. Ekhart sat back in his chair with a tired sigh. A few of the figures in the dimness shifted slightly, but there wasn't much of a stir otherwise; no quick burst of conversation, only silent stares riveted on him and Arianne, who was growing more nervous by the second at this odd response. She began to wiggle uncomfortably in her plush chair. She was too ill at ease even to be tired.

"It's plain, isn't it? She's definitely bewitching, but she's no witch." The admiral rose, breaking the catatonic silence. "She missed them all!"

"I beg to disagree with you, sir," Dr. Ekhart said in a hushed tone. "Ten series of ten runs each amounts to twenty-five hundred scores total... and she missed them all. Every one. Do you care to speculate on the odds of such a feat? Out of twenty-five calls, to hit five is the chance average. This is how you or I would rate. A score of ten to twelve hits is significant of the paranormal, but so is a score of two! Do you see how that works? It's called 'psi missing,' instead of 'psi hitting,' that's all. It probably means that subconsciously she's trying not to cooperate with us. Arianne, you've just performed a phenomenon in front of our eyes." He smiled at her, containing his excitement in a calm manner suitable to a laboratory. "Arianne, are you unhappy?"

"'Unhappy'!" she cried, "I feel like an insect stuck on a pin, and you ask if I'm unhappy?"

"If you were made comfortable, could you try hitting, instead of missing? We'll see how well you do in a different mental state. Now what can we do to put you in a more positive frame of mind?"

"If the admiral could stop glaring... And it would help if you turned off that spotlight and brought me some coffee. And you wouldn't happen to have some short-bread cookies around, would you?"

"Why don't you just wiggle your nose?" somebody in the audience suggested, and almost everyone laughed.

"She'll turn you into a frog for that," somebody else offered.

"Uh-huh, and it's the frog who gets kissed!''

"Fat chance!" Leo said with a chuckle, going to Arianne just as the spotlights trained on her went out. Groaning softly in relief, Arianne sank gratefully against him as he sat down beside her and slid an arm around her shoulders. He was just what her ruffled nerves needed.

"Are you all right?"

Leaning blissfully against his broad shoulder, she nodded. "I am now. You're a prerequisite, along with the coffee and cookies," she whispered, just to make sure that he understood she was desperately in need of his support. "Don't leave me alone here, Leo. Please don't go away."

He hesitated a bare second, and then, smiling crookedly, asked, "Do you know that's the first time you've asked something of me? I'll be here, Arianne—" his eyes held hers tenderly "—if you want me."

Arianne suddenly felt a whole lot better. But for their fascinated audience she would have kissed him. Instead she contented herself with a radiant smile. Her black eyes began to dance again. "How does the admiral like me so far?" she queried, with a wry little laugh.

Ten series of ten runs of twenty-five calls each were performed all over again, this time in comparative ease. After this test was completed, Dr. Ekhart reported to Admiral Thrush, "The chance average for each run of twenty-five calls, as I said before, is five hits. Now she's showing an average of twenty. And she's tired. If she weren't tired... Of course, these record sheets aren't absolutely conclusive, but on the basis of her past record and what we saw tonight—well, I think you'll agree, the lady's psychic."

Every eye in the room fell on her.

"Abracadabra." She smiled into the stillness.

The admiral mused, "But even if you ran a hundred tests all you'd prove is that she
could
have given Lieutenant Barnes the password. Not that she
did
. We have no proof of his reliance on her!"

Leo persisted. "But now that we've established that she is capable of helping him, we'll prove that she did by having her do it again. She'll give Barnes the password for level two, the...er...new level two. When Barnes uses this password to log on we'll know he used Arianne."

"I'm game to try it," the admiral said with a sigh. "If he does use her keyword, and I imagine he'll do so immediately, then we'll give her some other piece of information, something Barnes can pass on without using the computer. If we can trace that information directly from her to Barnes to the network... I'll give the order to run him in. Give her the password."

"She already knows it, sir."

There was another ripple of laughter around the room.

"Next you'll be telling me what I had for breakfast this morning!" Thrush charged, glaring at her from under lowered brows. As she opened her mouth he quickly held up his hand. "No, no, please don't tell us!"

Clasping his hands behind his back, he walked away with bowed head, in earnest discussion with Dr. Ekhart. After a moment he gestured for Leo to join them. The other doctors and research staff were talking together in undertones. Arianne heard such phrases as "the variance differential effect" and "the deterministic universe," "psi dexterity" and "the current most effective precognition test." There was something about "spontaneous paragnostic experiences'' and "veridical pseudohallucinations.'' It occurred to her that in her own research into ESP she certainly hadn't been reading the same books as this bunch! But the comment that most most tweaked her curiosity was that psi was not unlike a bird in the forest. What on earth could the fellow be talking about? This hum of conversation combined with the soft clicking and whirring of the living, blinking walls made for an interesting effect.

The admiral was coming back toward Arianne. She heard him say to the men on either side of him, "But I want more tests. Lots of them. All kinds—telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition, psychokinesis—as soon as possible. And I'll assign more guards... her value increases by the hour. What a confounded nuisance! Who would think one pint-size witch could wipe out our security without even having to wiggle her pretty nose! She's dangerous." They came to a stop in front of her.

"Precisely my point," Leo agreed dryly.

"It's monstrous!"

Dr. Ekhart cleared his throat. "Sir, if you'll permit me, that's the sort of thinking that would have had her burned at the stake a hundred and fifty years ago. These days we try to steer clear of that sort of panicky response to the unknown."

"Another comment like that and I'll have your stripes!" the admiral threatened coldly. "If you will permit me. Dr. Ekhart, when I said it was monstrous, I was referring to the unbridled destruction possible with such a weapon." He looked at her. "I was not referring to the lady, or her awesome power. As far as that goes, I'm relieved we found her first!"