The Second Randall Garrett Megapack Read online

  “I hope so, Julius,” the Secretary said heavily. “The president is beginning to think we’re both nuts.”

  The colonel, a lean, nervous man with dark, bushy eyebrows and a mustache to match, rolled his eyes up toward the ceiling. “I’m beginning to agree with him.”

  The Defense Secretary scowled at him. “What do you mean?”

  “Anybody who takes telepathy seriously is considered a nut,” said the colonel.

  “True,” said the Secretary, “but that doesn’t mean we are nuts.”

  “Oh, yeah?” The colonel took the cigar out of his mouth a gestured with it. “Anybody who’d do something that convinces all his friends he’s nuts must be nuts.”

  The Secretary smiled wanly. “I wish you wouldn’t be so logical. You almost convince me.”

  “Don’t worry,” said the colonel. “I’m not ready to have this room measured for sponge-rubber wallpaper just yet. Operation Mapcase has helped a lot in the past few months, and it will help even more.”

  “All you have to do is get the bugs out of it,” said the Secretary.

  “If we did that,” Colonel Spaulding said flatly, “the whole operation would fold from lack of personnel.”

  “Just carry on the best you can,” the Secretary said gloomily as he got up to leave. “I’ll let you handle it.”

  “Fine. I’ll call you later.”

  * * * *

  Twenty minutes after the Defense Secretary had gone, Lenny Poe was shown into Colonel Spaulding’s office. The agent who had brought him in closed the door gently, leaving him alone with the colonel.

  “I told you I’d be back this evening. What were you in such a hurry about?”

  “You’re supposed to stay in touch,” Colonel Spaulding pointed out. “I don’t mind your penchant for ponies particularly, but I’d like to know where to find you if I need you.”

  “I wouldn’t mind in the least, colonel. I’d phone you every fifteen minutes if that’s what you wanted. Except for one thing.”

  “What’s that?”

  Lenny jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “Your linguistically talented flatfeet. Did you ever try to get into a floating crap game when you were being followed by a couple of bruisers who look more like cops than cops do?”

  “Look, Poe, I can find you plenty of action right here in Washington, if it won’t offend your tender sensibilities to shoot crap with a senator or two. Meanwhile, sit down and listen. This is important.”

  Lenny sat own reluctantly. “O.K. What is it?”

  “Dr. Davenport and his crew are unhappy about that last batch of drawings you and I gave ’em.”

  “What’s the matter? Don’t they like the color scheme? I never thought scientists had any artistic taste, anyway.”

  “It’s got nothing to do with that. The—”

  The phone rang. Colonel Spaulding scooped it up and identified himself. Then: “What? Yeah. All right, send him in.”

  He hung up and looked back at Lenny. “Davenport. We can get his story firsthand. Just sit there and look important.”

  Lenny nodded. He knew that Dr. Amadeus Davenport was aware that the source of those drawings was Soviet Russia, but he did not know how they had been obtained. As far as he knew, it was just plain, ordinary spy work.

  He came in briskly. He was a tall, intelligent-looking man with a rather craggy face and thoughtful brown eyes. He put a large brief case on the floor, and, after the preliminaries were over, he came right to the point.

  “Colonel Spaulding, I spoke to the Secretary of Defense, and he agreed that perhaps this situation might be cleared up if I talked directly with you.”

  “I hope so,” the colonel said. “Just what is it that seems to be bothering you?”

  “These drawings,” Davenport said, “don’t make any sense. The device they’re supposed to represent couldn’t do anything. Look; I’ll show you.”

  He took from his brief case photostatic copies of some of the drawings Lenny had made. Five of them were straight blueprint-type drawings; the sixth was a copy of Lenny’s near-photographic paintings of the device itself.

  “This component, here,” he said, gesturing at the set of drawings, “simply baffles us. We’re of the opinion that your agents are known to the Soviet government and have been handed a set of phony plans.”

  “What’s it supposed to do?” Lenny asked.

  “We don’t know what it’s supposed to do,” the scientist said, “but it’s doubtful that it would actually do anything.” He selected one of the photocopies. “See that thing? The one shaped like the letter Q with an offset tail? According to the specifications, it is supposed to be painted emerald green, but there’s no indication of what it is.”

  * * * *

  Lenny Poe reached out, picked up the photocopy and looked at it. It was—or had been—an exact copy of the drawing that was used by Dr. Sonya Malekrinova. But, whereas the original drawing has been labeled entirely in Cyrillic characters, these labels were now in English.

  The drawings made no sense to Lenny at all. They hadn’t when he’d made them. His brother was a scientist, but Lenny understood none of it.

  “Who translated the Russian into English?” he asked.

  “A Mr. Berensky. He’s one of our best experts on the subject. I assure you the translations are accurate, Dr. Davenport said.

  “But if you don’t know what that thing is,” the colonel objected, “how can you say the device won’t work? Maybe it would if that Q-shaped thing was—”

  “I know what you mean,” Davenport interrupted. “But that’s not the only part of the machine that doesn’t make any sense.”

  He went on to explain other discrepancies he had detected in the drawings, but none of it penetrated to Lenny, although Colonel Spaulding seemed to be able to follow the physicist’s conversation fairly readily.

  “Well, what’s your suggestion, doctor?” the colonel asked at last.

  “If you agents could get further data,” the physicist said carefully, “it might be of some use. At the same time, I’d check up on the possibility that your agents are known to the NKVD.”

  “I’ll see what can be done,” said the colonel. “Would you mind leaving those copies of the drawings with me for a while?”

  “Go right ahead,” Davenport said. “One other thing. If we assume this device is genuine, then it must serve some purpose. It might help if we knew what the device is supposed to do.”

  “I’ll see what can be done,” Colonel Spaulding repeated.

  When Davenport had gone, Spaulding looked at Poe. “Got any explanation for that one?”

  “No,” Lenny admitted. “All I can do is check with Rafe. He won’t be awake for a few hours yet. I’ll check on it and give you an answer in the morning.”

  * * * *

  Early next morning, Colonel Spaulding walked through his outer office. He stopped at the desk where the pretty brunette WAC sergeant was typing industriously, leaned across the desk, and gave her his best leer. “How about a date tonight, music lover?” he asked, “‘Das Rheingold’ is playing tonight. A night at the opera would do you good.”

  “I’m sorry, sir,” she said primly, “you know enlisted women aren’t allowed to date officers.”

  “Make out an application for OCS. I’ll sign it.”

  She smiled at him. “But then I wouldn’t have any excuse for turning you down. And then what would my husband say?”

  “I’ll bribe him. I’ll send him to OCS.”

  “He’s not eligible. Officers are automatically disqualified.”

  Colonel Spaulding sighed. “A guy can’t win against competition like that. Anything new this morning?”

  “Mr. Poe is waiting in your office. Other than that, there’s just the routine things.”

  He went on into his office. Lenny Poe was seated behind the colonel’s desk, leaning back in the swivel chair, his feet on the top of the desk. He was sound asleep.

  The colonel walked over to the desk, t
ook his cigar from his mouth, and said: “Good morrrning, Colonel Spaulding!”

  Lenny snapped awake. “I’m not Colonel Spaulding,” he said.

  “Then why are you sitting in Colonel Spaulding’s chair?”

  “I figured if I was asleep nobody’d know the difference.” Lenny got up and walked over to one of the other chairs. “These don’t lean back comfortably. I can’t sleep in ’em.”

  “You can sleep later. How was your session with Rafe?”

  Lenny glowered glumly. “I wish you and Rafe hadn’t talked me into this job. It’s a strain on the brain. I don’t know how he expects anyone to understand all that garbage.”

  “All what garbage?”

  Lenny waved a hand aimlessly. “All this scientific guff. I’m an artist, not a scientist. If Rafe can get me a clear picture of something, I can copy it, but when he tries to explain something scientific, he might as well be thinking in Russian or Old Upper Middle High Martian or something.”

  “I know,” said Colonel Spaulding, looking almost as glum as Lenny. “Did you get anything at all that would help Dr. Davenport figure out what those drawings mean?”

  “Rafe says that the translations are all wrong,” Lenny said, “but I can’t get a clear picture of just what is wrong.”

  * * * *

  Colonel Spaulding thought for a while in silence. Telepathy—at least in so far as the Poe brothers practiced it—certainly had its limitations. Lenny couldn’t communicate mentally with anyone except his brother Rafe. Rafe could pick up the thoughts of almost anyone if he happened to be close by, but couldn’t communicate over a long distance with anyone but Lenny.

  The main trouble lay in the fact that it was apparently impossible to transmit a concept directly from Brain A to Brain B unless the basic building blocks of the concept were already present in Brain B. Raphael Poe, for instance, had spent a long time studying Russian, reading Dostoevski, Tolstoy, and Turgenev in the original tongue, familiarizing himself with modern Russian thought through the courtesy of Izvestia, Pravda, and Krokodil, and, finally, spending time in the United Nations building and near the Russian embassy in order to be sure that he could understand the mental processes involved.

  Now, science has a language of its own. Or, rather, a multiplicity of languages, each derived partly from the native language of the various scientific groups and partly of borrowings from other languages. In the physical sciences especially, the language of mathematics is a further addition.

  More than that, the practice of the scientific method automatically induces a thought pattern that is different from the type of thought pattern that occurs in the mind of a person who is not scientifically oriented.

  Lenny’s mind was a long way from being scientifically oriented. Worse, he was a bigot. He not only didn’t know why the light in his room went on when he flipped the switch, he didn’t want to know. To him, science was just so much flummery, and he didn’t want his brain cluttered up with it.

  Facts mean nothing to a bigot. He has already made up his mind, and he doesn’t intend to have his solid convictions disturbed by anything so unimportant as a contradictory fact. Lenny was of the opinion that all mathematics was arcane gobbledygook, and his precise knowledge of the mathematical odds in poker and dice games didn’t abate that opinion one whit. Obviously, a mind like that is utterly incapable of understanding a projected thought of scientific content; such a thought bounces off the impregnable mind shield that the bigot has set up around his little area of bigotry.

  Colonel Spaulding had been aware of these circumstances since the inception of the Operation Mapcase. Even though he, himself, had never experienced telepathy more than half a dozen times in his life, he had made a study of the subject and was pretty well aware of its limitations. The colonel might have dismissed—as most men do—his own fleeting experiences as “coincidence” or “imagination” if it had not been for the things he had seen and felt in Africa during World War II. He had only been a captain then, on detached duty with British Intelligence, under crusty old Colonel Sir Cecil Haversham, who didn’t believe a word of “all that mystic nonsense.” Colonel Haversham had made the mistake of alienating one of the most powerful of the local witch doctors.

  The British Government had hushed it all up afterwards, of course, but Spaulding still shuddered when he thought of the broken-spirited, shrunken caricature of his old self that Colonel Haversham had become after he told the witch doctor where to get off.

  Spaulding had known that there were weaknesses in the telepathic communication linkage that was the mainspring of Operation Mapcase, but he had thought that they could be overcome by the strengths of the system. Lenny had no blockage whatever against receiving visual patterns and designs. He could reproduce an electronic wiring diagram perfectly because, to him, it was not a grouping of scientific symbols, but a design of lines, angles, and curves.

  At first, it is true, he had had a tendency to change them here and there, to make the design balance better, to make it more aesthetically satisfying to his artistic eye, but that tendency had been easily overcome, and Colonel Spaulding was quite certain that that wasn’t what was wrong now.

  Still—

  “Lenny,” he said carefully, “are you sure you didn’t jigger up those drawings to make ’em look prettier?”

  Lenny Poe gave the colonel a look of disgust. “Positive. Rafe checked ’em over every inch of the way as I was drawing them, and he rechecked again last night—or this morning—on those photostats Davenport gave us. That’s when he said there was something wrong with the translations.

  “But he couldn’t make it clear just what was wrong, eh?”

  Lenny shrugged. “How anybody could make any sense out of that gobbledegook is beyond me.”

  The colonel blew out a cloud of cigar smoke and looked thoughtfully at the ceiling. As long as the diagrams were just designs on paper, Lenny Poe could pick them up fine. Which meant that everything was jim-dandy as long as the wiring diagrams were labeled in the Cyrillic alphabet. The labels were just more squiggles to be copied as a part of the design.

  But if the labels were in English, Lenny’s mind would try to “make sense” out of them, and since scientific concepts did not “make sense” to him, the labels came out as pure nonsense. In one of his drawings, a lead wire had been labeled “simply ground to powder,” and if the original drawing hadn’t been handy to check with, it might have taken quite a bit of thought to realize that what was meant was “to power supply ground.” Another time, a GE 2N 188A transistor had come out labeled GEZNISSA. There were others—much worse.

  Russian characters, on the other hand, didn’t have to make any sense to Lenny, so his mind didn’t try to force them into a preconceived mold.

  * * * *

  Lenny unzipped the leather portfolio he had brought with him—a specially-made carrier that looked somewhat like an oversized brief case.

  “Maybe these’ll help,” he said.

  “We managed to get two good sketches of the gadget—at least, as much of it as that Russian lady scientist has put together so far. I kind of like the rather abstract effect you get from all those wires snaking in and around, with that green glass tube in the center. Pretty, isn’t it?”

  “Very,” said the colonel without conviction. “I wonder if it will help Davenport any?” He looked at the pictures for several seconds more, then, suddenly, his eyes narrowed. “Lenny—this piece of green glass—the thing’s shaped like the letter Q.”

  “Yeah, sort of. Why?”

  “You said it was a tube, but you didn’t make it look hollow when you drew it.”

  “It isn’t; it’s solid. Does a tube have to be hollow? Yeah, I guess it does, doesn’t it? Well, then, it isn’t a tube.”

  Colonel Spaulding picked up the phone and dialed a number.

  “Colonel Spaulding here,” he said after a moment. “Let me speak to Dr. Davenport.” And, after a wait: “This is Colonel Spaulding, doctor. I think we may have so
mething for you.”

  “Good morning, colonel. I’m glad to hear that. What is it?”

  “The Q-shaped gadget—the one that you said was supposed to be painted emerald green. Are you sure that’s the right translation of the Russian?”

  “Well…uh—” Davenport hesitated. “I can’t be sure on my own say-so, of course. I don’t understand Russian. But I assure you that Mr. Berensky is perfectly reliable.”

  “Oh, I have no doubt of that,” Colonel Spaulding said easily. “But, tell me, does Mr. Berensky know how to read a circuit diagram?”

  “He does,” Davenport said, somewhat testily. “Of course, he wasn’t shown the diagram itself. We had the Russian labels copied, and he translated from a list.”

  “I had a sneaking suspicion that was it,” said Spaulding. “Tell me, doctor, what does L-E-A-D spell?”

  “Lead,” said the doctor promptly, pronouncing it leed. Then, after a pause, he said: “Or lead,” this time pronouncing it led. “It would depend on the context.”

  “Suppose it was on a circuit diagram,” the colonel prompted.

  “Then it would probably be leed. What’s all this leading up to, colonel?”

  “Bear with me. Suppose you had a cable coming from a storage battery, and you wanted to make sure that the cable was reasonably resistant to corrosion, so you order it made out of the metal, lead. It would be a led leed, wouldn’t it?”

  “Um-m-m…I suppose so.”

  “You might get pretty confused if you didn’t have a circuit diagram in front of you to tell you what the label was talking about, mightn’t you?”

  “I see what you mean,” the scientist said slowly. “But we can’t show those circuit diagrams to Berensky. The Secretary of Defense himself has classified them as Class Triple-A Ultra-Hyper Top Secret. That puts them just below the Burn-The-Contents-Before-Reading class, and Berensky doesn’t have that kind of clearance.”

  “Then get somebody else,” Colonel Spaulding said tiredly. “All you need is a man who can understand technical Russian and has a top-level secrecy clearance. If we haven’t got at least one man in these United States with such simple qualifications as those, then we might as well give the country over to the Reds or back to the Redskins, since our culture is irreprievably doomed.” And he lowered the phone gently to its cradle.