CANARY

by Dan Morgan

A built-in survival factor could be a useful asset in a human being, not only to save his own life but as a national early warning system against ICBMs. He might even outsmart the computers ...

* * * *

It was more than a scream. It was the howl of a damned soul falling for ever into the bottomless pit, a cry for help, a wail of despair, a whimper, a sob—all of these at the same time. I rolled off the bed, already awake as my feet touched the hard coolness of the floor, adrenalin flushing into my system with the recognition that this was the real thing.

Unless someone up at Central was being extra clever and trying just one more dry run...

I zipped up the front of the lightweight one-piece suit, stepped into some slippers and dashed from the room. I had left my watch on the bedside table and the corridor I was moving along was brightly lit twenty-four hours a day, so there was no way of telling what time it was. I had the feeling that I had only been asleep for about half an hour, but a quick glance at the wall clock as I burst into the Monitor Room told me that it was almost 3 a.m.

‘What kept you?’ said Carter.

‘Funny, funny,’ I said. That kind of pseudo-joke was only one of the reasons why I didn’t like him. I looked at the board. Three quarters of the dials were way up in the red and the enchephalo-screens were oscillating wildly. I felt a trickle of ice down my spine. Whatever it was, this was a big one—the biggest yet.

‘Why didn’t you call me earlier?’ I said. ‘You must have seen this building up.’

He shook his head. ‘Didn’t happen that way. Everything was quiet. He was jogging along comfortably in his second REM period, pulse, respiration, Alpha rhythms quite normal—then whammo! the shit hit the fan, if you’ll pardon the expression, Captain ma’am. That was maybe seven seconds ago.’

‘Seven?’

‘Could be ten. I was just going to call you.’ He lounged back in his chair, looking at me with a twisted half-grin on his dark, narrow face. I was suddenly reminded that the zipper suit fitted me like a second skin.

‘It doesn’t matter. I got it anyway,’ I said, feeling his eyes crawling over my breasts like brown slugs.

‘Bully for you, Captain ma’am. What now?’

I was holding myself back from the squashy ordure of his sub-vocal level. I didn’t want to get involved with that, particularly at this time. Sometimes I thought that he deliberately channelled his thoughts that way in the hope that I would read him. Perhaps the idea of me doing so gave him some sort of twisted thrill. His lechery was too genuine to be a mere defence mechanism and he had a reputation around the site for being hell with the women. It could be that the idea of bedding someone like me excited him. After all, there had been a lot of rumours about us and a number of those ‘Did you hear about the... ?’ type dirty jokes of the kind that fed speculation.

Tony wasn’t like that, thank God! That much I knew. Things hadn’t been easy for us one way or another, but at least we had trust and understanding. They weren’t happy about our relationship at Psi Central, but even Goldberg didn’t dare interfere directly with that particular freedom. Tony was in a Commando group down in the Western sector of Antarctica, and his six months would be up in just three days. Surely nothing could go wrong now. That would be too cruel after all the waiting.

Tony was a normal, or Thickhead, if you prefer the current Central slang—we had our equivalents of Carter and our own in-jokes. All that old business about ‘to know all is to forgive all’ and the equating of the complete Psi-man with some kind of godlike wisdom was all very well back in the early, speculative days; but the truth of the matter is that when you take a human being and add one of the Psi talents you don’t get a god at all. Psi’s are just human beings, with all the normal human failings, plus a few others that come along with the burden of possessing a talent. Tony didn’t carry that burden. He was just an intelligent, but uncomplicated guy with a build that made him the focus of attention on any beach, and a loving nature.

I stared back at Carter hard. ‘You know the drill. We’ve been through it often enough, surely?’

‘You want me to call Strategic Command at this hour of the morning?’                               

‘What the hell has the hour got to do with it?’ I snapped. ‘You think they work nine to five?’

He shrugged, his insolent eyes still pawing me. ‘All right, Captain ma’am, if you say so. But there doesn’t seem much point in ...’

‘Call them and tell them that we’ve had a category AA Emergency reaction here. I shall need a complete report on current and extrapolated probabilities.’

I was looking at the bottom monitor screen. It showed Charlie Noone’s sweating, frightened face. He was sitting up on the edge of the bed, his head cradled in his hands. His whole body was shaking.

‘You wouldn’t rather talk to them yourself?’ Carter said, reaching for the phone switch.

‘I’ll do that later, when I’ve had a chance to examine Charlie.’

‘You’re going in there now ?’

‘Naturally.’

He shook his head, a sly grin creeping back on to his face. ‘Boy! Sometimes I wish I was Charlie Noone.’

‘You wouldn’t have the guts.’

‘You can say that again.’ He pointed to the paunchy figure in the baggy pyjama suit who had just risen to his feet and was walking shakily across towards the wash basin trailing a mess of multi-coloured monitoring leads behind him. ‘He’s so goddamned clever, how come he hasn’t got the sense to keep himself in better shape?’

‘Worry about your own shape,’ I said sharply.

‘I’d rather worry about yours, Captain ma’am.’

Damn him! If there was such a thing as a Psi talent for getting under your skin, then Carter had it. Thank God I would be rid of him for good in three days’ time. I turned away quickly to avoid giving him the satisfaction of seeing the flush that had risen to my cheeks and hurried out.

Charlie Noone looked up as I entered the room and even before I went into his sub-vocal level I could sense the welcome in those trusting, washed out grey eyes. He was sitting on the edge of the bed still, bottle shoulders slumped forward. Carter was right about one thing. He looked a mess. In fact, he looked worse than he really was, because over the past six months we had been able to regulate his diet, pushing his weight down slightly by the use of lypotropics and lowering the urea content of his blood. For a man of his age and constitution Charlie was in pretty good condition. He had to be. A sudden fatal illness on his part would invalidate the entire project, because at the present time we didn’t have anybody else quite like Charlie.

I went in. It was the welcome of his eyes all over again, but plus all the warmth I had come to expect from Charlie, Warmth, not Carter’s rutting heat. I had never detected even a hint of sexual imagery in my communications with Charlie. From my point of view it was a highly satisfactory working relationship, so uncomplicated that I had accepted it gratefully and not probed further. If he wanted to look on me as a sort of sister- or mother-substitute, then that was all right by me. I didn’t need to prove anything to myself about my attractiveness. Tony was all the man I needed.

‘How was it, Charlie?’ I asked.

I sensed a resurgence of fear and darkness at the borders of his first level as he said: ‘Bad, Jan, bad ... Worse than that time in Seattle.’

I nodded sympathetically. A hundred and fifty people had died in Seattle. I hated to push it further, but if I could get more details it just might make the work of synthesis easier. ‘Can you tell me anything specific about the dream sequence leading up to the trauma ?’ I asked.

Something black and horrible bounced clear up from his third level—and faded again before I could get a fix on it. Nightmare and madness lived down there and I wasn’t about to risk my sanity by trying to follow it back to its source.

Charlie was trying to co-operate. He always did. His pudgy features screwed up with the effort of trying to remember. But I knew what the answer was going to be before he replied.

‘I’m sorry, Jan. Something like this happens, it seems to blank out the whole surrounding area.’

‘I know, Charlie,’ I nodded. ‘We’ll just have to wait and see if the computer gives us a clue.’

He eased his sweat-soaked pyjama jacket where it was binding under his armpit. ‘It was a bad one, I’m sure of that.’

‘If that’s so it’s bound to show up in the probability assessments.’

‘You think they’ll be able to do something about it?’ he asked anxiously.

‘That’s the object of the exercise,’ I said, with a phoney kind of cheerfulness. ‘Look, why don’t you disconnect that junk and have yourself a shower and change ? You’ve done your job for tonight.’

‘You’re sure it will be all right?’

‘If anybody complains, refer them to me,’ I said. He was such a nice little guy, and he tried so hard.

‘Thanks, Jan, you’re very good to me.’

I pulled out of his first level. There’s something kind of embarrassing about seeing an image of yourself dressed in white robes and haloed like one of those medieval saints. But even that’s a hell of a lot more pleasant than the kind of thing you find crawling about in the mind of someone like Carter.

‘Don’t worry, Charlie,’ I said. ‘You just make yourself comfortable and leave the rest to us. Good night.’

‘You’ll call in the morning?’ he said anxiously.

‘Sure I will,’ I said, smiling. ‘Don’t you worry about a thing.’ Not even the end of the world, qualified the grinning death’s head that had been floating around in my mind ever since that moment of wakening.

The first name of the death’s head was Escalation and his second Overkill. There had been a war going on somewhere, in the world for the past thirty years; Korea, Vietnam, Pakistan, Palestine and now Antarctica. Localised wars that acted as a kind of safety valve in relieving the pressure between East and West and in which only ‘conventional’ weapons were used. I had never been able to appreciate that nice semantic implication of the word ‘conventional’ with its intended impression that it was so much more pleasant to be torn limb from limb by a good old-fashioned chemical explosive than one of those nasty nuclear devices. I had appreciated it even less over the last six months.

There was no draft these days. Wars were fought by volunteers and there was never any shortage. For one thing, there are always some people around who need and actively seek risk and violence. Then there is the Population Control Act, which says that if a couple want to have children, one of them—usually the man—has to be prepared to put his own life at risk by serving six months in the combat area for each proposed child. The idea might have sounded harsh to some of those cosy little people back in the middle of the century who were busy breeding themselves out of existence, but looked at from a purely practical point of view there was a lot to recommend it. Apart from being eugenically sound, it did away completely with accidental parenthood and its attendant evils. Only a man who had the guts to go out and fight for his child ever got to be a father. And if he didn’t come back—well, that was the law of averages ... At least that was the way it looked in the abstract. Tony risking his life that way was another thing, as I’d found out.

The trouble with this safety valve business was that there was no guarantee. The ICBMs were still maintained in a state of readiness in their silos and submarines, backed by stocks of overkill sufficient to obliterate the human race a hundred times. Nobody but a madman would ever dare start an atomic war, but while the weapons existed there was always a chance. Conventional war or not, feelings ran high periodically on both sides. We had our extremists, a growing minority group who were agitating quite seriously for what they called a final settlement. They maintained that the government should stop ‘pussy-footing around and go for broke, by making an all-out surprise atomic attack against the other side.

The other side had their extremists too, making the same kind of demands. I suppose their people were as careful as ours about trying to screen out that kind of nut from any area where he might have the chance of starting the atomic Armageddon, but you couldn’t always tell just who was an extremist. You read all the time about these cases where some factory worker suddenly blows his top and chops up his wife and kids with a meat cleaver. The neighbours usually get together afterwards and talk it over, some of them expressing frank astonishment that such a mild little man should suddenly up and do such a thing. Then there are others who are wise after the event, sniggering into their beards and saying things like: ‘I always did think there was something odd about old so-and-so.’

The difficulty about an atomic war was that if the human race was to survive we had to be wise before the event and prevent it happening. This kind of wisdom entailed a constant monitoring and evaluation of a huge mass of data, including projected plans of both sides, intelligence reports, states of weaponry and political climate, the current Antarctica situation and a thousand other constantly changing factors. This stuff was all fed into the computer at Strategic Command, a monster about the size of a four storey building which produced a continual stream of extrapolations and probability ratings on the subject of the likelihood of atomic war.

So far the computer had always been right, but that didn’t prove that it was always going to be so in the future. That is why when Charlie Noone turned up it was the obvious move to put him in a position where he could act as a double check on the computer. It was the old ‘Who shall guard the guardians’ principle. That’s not to suggest that Charlie was smarter than the computer, but no one had yet figured a way of duplicating his kind of talent through the use of electronic gadgetry.

The words ‘turned up’ don’t exactly convey the complicated process through which Charlie came to be sleeping in that monitored room with a mass of electrodes taped to various parts of his body. Back at Psi Central there’s a whole department devoted to the task of finding people with Psi talents. Most of the time they’re just sifting through a mass of hearsay and conjecture. After all, the majority of people who have a talent know about it and have already made up their minds whether they want to get involved in the business of developing it further.

It’s surprising the number who don’t. There’s a strong conservative streak in most human beings that makes them dread the idea of being ‘different’ in any way, so a lot of them go to great pains .to conceal any Psi ability and become ‘Sleepers’ whose talents may or may not come out in the next generation. Well, that’s their privilege, I suppose, but the way I see it they’re missing an awful lot. They’re like birds with functional wings who have decided for some reason that flying is dangerous and opted for an earthbound existence. Not that being a Psi is always that pleasant. Obviously there are some penalties and obligations implied in using an extra sense, but surely anything is better than being an ostrich?

Very occasionally the Search Department pans out a piece of pure gold like Charlie Noone. They got on to him first through a newspaper story, but they weren’t the only ones interested. The way the police had it, Charlie was either a statistical freak or a mass murderer and the second alternative would have suited them much better, because they were looking for somewhere to peg the blame for three of the worst air crashes in a decade. The odds against what happened to Charlie must have been in the billions. As a travelling rep for a publishing firm he covered a lot of miles and he usually travelled by air. He had been booked on each of the three crashed planes and each time he had cancelled out at the last moment. The newspapers love those lucky survivor stories. ‘Mrs Culpeper was forced to cancel her reservation because of the illness of her pet poodle. Interviewed at her home this morning, holding the little dog in her arms, she said tearfully: “I owe my escape to Binkie, bless him! Poor little darling, I’ll never leave him again.”‘

Charlie Noone didn’t have a pet dog. He didn’t even have a wife. She had left him some five years previously and was now living somewhere in California with a Polish gas station attendant. From what I was able to gather the marriage never really got off the ground in the first instance and although my sympathies were naturally with Charlie, I could see that his temperament was probably largely responsible. He was reasonably good at his job, capable of generating the kind of surface friendliness one expects to find in a salesman; but once I dug beneath that veneer I realised with something of a shock that he was a natural introvert, a solitary who seemed to be incapable of conducting any really intimate relationship with another human being. This disability probably stemmed from his childhood background; life with his bitch of a mother, a divorcee to whom he was both a liability and a burden. She married three times subsequently, on each occasion to men with whom Charlie found himself on terms of either indifference or downright hostility.

At the age of thirty-five he was a fat man with a nervous laugh; a compulsive eater with a fund of dirty stories and a taste for deliberately casual relationships with ten-dollar whores, whom he never patronised a second time for fear of developing some kind of emotional dependency. It was an unsatisfactory, sterile life—but it was the only one he had, and as such it was very dear to him. Along with—or because of—everything else he was also a screaming hypochondriac, capable of escalating the slightest touch of indigestion into severe angina, or a mild cough into terminal lung cancer. He was a mass of psychosomatic symptoms which repeated themselves in an endless kaleidoscope of permutations for the amazement of any diagnostician who was prepared to take his complaints seriously.

The way the police saw it was that Charlie’s miraculous escapes from three air disasters in under a year could not possibly be coincidental. They were right of course, but they never even considered the true reason. They were too preoccupied with the alternative theories that he was either (A) working some kind of insurance racket, or (B) he was operating some particularly ruthless murder by contract business, in which he was prepared to kill a hundred or more people in order to nail his victim. They investigated his life inside and out searching for some kind of lead that would fit in with either of these theories, but they turned up nothing but a row of negatives. Noone was a man without real friends, or enemies for that matter—most of the time he didn’t even register on people, and that was the way he himself preferred it. The police were still trying to find props to support their circumstantial evidence when our people intervened and offered Charlie a way out.

Or rather a way in—because once he was involved with Psi Central it was highly unlikely that he would ever get out again if the Search Department guess that he was a true Pre-Cog proved correct. As usual Goldberg was all ready and waiting with a scheme to utilise his talent before its existence was fully verified. In the old days of coal-mining, before there were any such things as efficient gas detection devices, they used to take canaries down below. The gas tolerance of the little cage birds was so low that when a build-up started the canary would die first, acting as an alarm that gave the human beings a chance to escape. And that was how Goldberg’s bright idea came to be christened Operation Canary.

Charlie’s talent, like all really strong Psi gifts, was basically a survival mechanism and largely involuntary into the bargain. It happens all the time. Take a latent Teleport and try to talk him into giving you a demonstration. Ninety-nine per cent of the time you’ll just be wasting your breath. Nothing happens. On the other hand, put him in an enclosed area and pitch a live grenade in beside him. Then you’ll get your demonstration toute suite. The only trouble with the method is that then you’ve got to find him and depending on his ability he may be anywhere from a hundred metres to a thousand kilometres away. And when you do find him again he may not be very keen on making your acquaintance again, even when you try to explain to him that the ‘live’ grenade really wasn’t. After all, even Psi Central can’t go splattering latent Teleports over the landscape with reckless abandon.

Charlie’s talent was a similar kind of survival mechanism. The idea that the human mind is capable of doing a certain amount of time travelling during sleep was first suggested a long time ago. After all, people have been having pre-cognitive dreams of one kind or another as far back as human records go. Charlie’s mind had this ability to explore a probability loop until it came up against the blankness of a not-Charlie situation which indicated his own death. The traumatic reaction to this experience immediately bounced him back to wakefulness and the present time, enabling him to make a decision before the nodal point was reached, avoiding the probability pattern which had led to his death in the dream—thus allowing him to progress in reality along another sequence of events which resulted in his survival. All of which is a rather complicated way of saying that in matters that involved his own survival Charlie had the ability to foretell the future. Whether or not he was actually changing the future is an argument I don’t intend to get involved in at this time, but it seems to me that the not-Charlie situation he banged up against in those dreams was a high-probability future which faded into non-existence when he decided not to go on any of those doomed planes. The people who died in those disasters had no choice, but Charlie did and he made the right decision ... three times.

The first part of Operation Canary was the task of sensitising Charlie to the concept of atomic warfare. This was done by a process of education and conditioning, making all the strategic and statistical information stored in the computer available to him, so that he eventually possessed a more comprehensive knowledge of the global situation than any other human being alive. And, most important, he was given convincing figures which proved beyond any reasonable doubt that in the event of atomic war breaking out Operation Canary was situated in the prime target area, with a probability of less than 0.01 per cent of surviving the first hour. In other words, in Charlie terms: Atomic War = No-Charlie Situation.

To check that he had been properly sensitised there were three dry runs in which Strategic Command supplied him with false information on proposed developments that were high probabilities to produce escalation. That was a nerve-wracking time for me, because my close association with Charlie made it necessary that I should not be told that the information was false. The whole thing was a variation on the grenade method of testing a Teleport of course and Charlie reacted just as Goldberg had hoped by producing a not-Charlie dream every time.

The real difference between these tests and the grenade method was that Charlie was not told afterwards that they had been merely tests. Goldberg believed, and I was inclined to agree with him, that if Charlie were told that he had been deliberately fed with false information it might make him suspect the validity of perfectly true information in the future, and thus impair his efficiency. So Charlie went on believing what he was told and remained convinced that on three occasions he had saved the human race—and Charlie Noone of course—from atomic disaster.

And tonight? I had no way of knowing yet whether or not somebody somewhere had already made that apparently unimportant statement or action which would send the world careering down the probability loop that had kicked Charlie sweating and screaming out of his dream. According to previous experience the nodal point should come within forty-eight hours, so Strategic Command bad that much time to make the changes in planning and disposition which would drain off the tension that was building up and lower the chances of disaster to a reasonable level. Of course there was always the possibility that they might miss some important but concealed factor and fail. That wasn’t my responsibility, thank God. My job was to take care of Charlie—and hope that the end of the world didn’t come before Tony arrived back in three day’s time.

I don’t know why I was surprised to see Goldberg standing there in the Monitor Room when I arrived back. As far as I knew he must have been at Psi Central, a clear hundred and fifty kilometres from Operation Canary when the emergency alarm came through. And now, less than a quarter of an hour later, there he was facing me. Maybe it’s because I only have Tp myself, but the ‘now-you-see-it— now-you-don’t’ aspect of Teleportation always throws me. This, and the combination of Goldberg’s personality, perhaps.

He was a spare man, with a shock of grey hair and a little white beard like a Scotch terrier. Small, alert and poised, with very pale blue eyes and a clipped way of talking.

‘Well?’ Those eyes raked me up and down, demanding information.

‘Tell me one thing first,’ I said. ‘Is this another dry run, or the real thing?’

‘Jesus Christ, woman! You think I ‘ported clear over here at this time of the morning to play games?’ he crackled.

I bit my lip and wished I had kept my big mouth shut. I had been in pretty bad odour with Goldberg for some time over my pending marriage. He was a nut about racial purity for Psi-people. He believed that the two strains of Psi and Normal should not be mixed, not only from the genetic point of view, but the psychological one. To give him his due, he was also aware of the hazards facing a minority group. After all, he was a Jewish/Irish Buddhist with a touch of Norwegian himself.

‘Anything specific?’ he demanded.

‘Just the usual blanket panic reaction, as strong as I’ve ever seen it,’ I said. ‘Whatever it is, the probability must be high and it’s sure to show up in the computer’s report.’

‘Let’s hope so,’ Goldberg said. He turned to glare at the silent line printer.

As if in response, it began its super-machine-gun rattle and spewed out a metre of paper before lapsing into silence again.

Goldberg moved swiftly across and ripped the length off the machine. It took him less than a minute to digest the information, then he swore and handed me the sheet.

‘Here, what do you make of it?’

I scanned the report, conscious of his eyes on me, and praying that I wasn’t going to make a fool of myself again by saying the wrong thing. Most of the figures were virtually the same as those I had seen on the routine situation report at 18.00 hours on the previous evening, and those that had changed were in the direction of easing tension rather than increasing it. Prognosis for the next forty-eight hours was less than 15 per cent. A slightly more than six-to-one chance against atomic war breaking out during that period, which was the best odds the human race had had for some time.

“There’s nothing obvious,’ I said cautiously, handing the sheet back to him.

He snorted. ‘What about Noone ? You think he could have made a mistake and the whole thing was just a normal type nightmare?’

I turned to Carter, who was sitting very quietly watching us since my return. No backchat or comedy routines for Goldberg.

‘You have the readings at the time of the alarm?’ I asked.

‘Yes, Captain ma’am. I gave them to the General before you arrived.’

‘Maybe it won’t show until we’re nearer to the nodal point,’ I suggested to Goldberg.

‘Meaning that Noone knows better than the Command computer?’

‘Not necessarily, but if the computer doesn’t have the information...’

Goldberg ignored what I was saying. He was staring at the monitor screen, his lean face setting into hard lines.

“Who in hell told Noone to disconnect those leads?’ he barked.

‘I... I thought once he’d given us the alarm there wasn’t any reason-why he shouldn’t spend the rest of the night in comfort.’

His pale eyes blazed contempt. ‘Comfort! If you’re so concerned I wonder you didn’t hop into bed with him yourself.’

I felt the colour drain out of my face and the muscles at the corner of my mouth were tight as I said: ‘I don’t have to take that—even from you, General Goldberg.’

I should have known better. Goldberg never apologised. In any case, I had already ceased to exist for him as his mind passed on to other matters.

‘Get Wilson and Mackinder down here, on the double!’ he snapped to Carter. Then he perched his lean body on the chair in front of the keyboard and began a dialogue with the computer. By the time the dishevelled Intelligence men had arrived the printout was four metres long and growing fast. The three of them went into a huddle and I decided there was nothing useful I could be doing in the Monitor Room for the time being, so I went back to my room and got properly dressed.

When I arrived back again nearly half an hour later they were still at it and I thought for a moment that Goldberg hadn’t even noticed my absence. As usual I was wrong. His grey head poked out of the huddle and he said: ‘Where the hell have you been?’ He pointed to the monitor screen. ‘Get that Pre-Cog of yours back in harness right away. We need everything we can get on this thing.’

There was no point in arguing that Charlie was highly unlikely to get any further sleep that night and that the chances of his having yet another pre-cognitive dream were even more improbable. I went back into Charlie’s room, and poor docile creature that he was, he accepted my reassurances that everything was going to be all right—and made no objections when I taped the monitor leads back on to his body. I stayed for a while, chatting about nothing in particular, partly because I could feel the reverberations of the panic reaction still there in his first level and partly because I understood that it was at times like this his loneliness really hurt.

I left him eventually and walked back to the Monitor Room, Mackinder was seated in front of the terminal keyboard, with Wilson looking over his shoulder. I met Goldberg in the middle of the floor on his way out.

‘Nothing more I can do here for the moment,’ he said.

‘You’ve located the nodal point?’

‘Like hell!’ he snapped. ‘Roses all the way according to the extrapolations—we’re practically on the edge of a golden age. Prognosis has gone down a whole point in the last hour.’

‘Is that bad?’

‘Not if it’s true,’ he said, bunching his incongruously dark eyebrows, which seemed to belong to a different set from the grey hair and beard. ‘But if it is, where does that leave your boy Charlie?’

‘He was never wrong during the trials.’

‘That’s another thing bothers me,’ Goldberg said. ‘Then he was working on data we’d fed him deliberately—stuff on which the computer itself would have predicted a blow-up. This time he’s either spotted some relationship the computer hasn’t seen, or he’s pulled the whole thing out of thin air.’

‘I think his Pre-Cog ability is more likely to be the result of fourth level seepage than any logical process of deduction,’ I said.

‘Even unconscious?’ Goldberg shrugged. ‘Yes, I suppose you’re right. In that case he wouldn’t need the data, would he? Even so, the nodal point has to show sooner or later...’ He rushed past me towards the door.

‘Where are you going?’ I asked.

‘Over to Strategic Command,’ he flung over his shoulder as he opened the door.

He didn’t have to walk out of the Monitor Room before ‘porting himself to Strategic Command, but that’s another funny thing about Teleports. They can’t bear the idea of being seen in the act of leaving or arriving anywhere. He turned on me as I followed him out into the corridor. ‘What the hell?’

‘About the matter of my replacement,’ I said.

‘That will be arranged in due course.’

‘Due course? I leave in three days—or rather two and a half now.’

He grunted. ‘There are a couple of likely prospects over at Central.’

I was shocked by his off-handedness. ‘You mean you haven’t made a definite selection yet? I was hoping that I would have the opportunity of briefing whoever it was before I left. After all, Charlie does need careful handling if we’re to get the best out of him.’

‘If you’re so concerned about his welfare, I wonder you can bear to leave him.’

‘You don’t understand—he’s very sensitive...’

‘So am I! Especially about the thought that the whole damned world is due to go kaput sometime during the next forty-eight hours if we don’t find that node,’ Goldberg said. ‘Now will you get to hell off my back, Jan ?’

‘I’m sorry,’ I said, turning away and walking back into the Monitor Room. That was the trouble with Goldberg; you might disagree with him, hate him or condemn him for his ruthless manipulation of human beings—but in the long run you always ended up recognising the fact that he was right. The whole root of the thing was tied up with his unshakeable conviction that the entire future of the human race depended on Psi Central. He’d had every member of the Psi Corps believing that since its foundation ten years ago and me in particular for the past five. That was why he was running the show and would continue to do so after I had settled into my cosy domestic routine—if we didn’t all get blown to hell in the meantime.

I didn’t stay long in the Monitor Room. Wilson and Mackinder were far too busy to take any notice of me. Not so Carter unfortunately, now that Goldberg was gone. God! Any man who can be lecherous under such circumstances and in such surrounds at 6 a.m. must really be trying to prove something. I got out of there and took an elevator up to the roof of the building for some fresh air. I could have saved myself the trouble. A bank of smog was rolling in off the river, glowing red in the dawn light. Maybe the blow-up was the answer, ridding Earth of the disease that was mankind at last, allowing her to return to a natural, unfouled state ...

Goldberg was back again when I checked into the Monitor Room at nine o’clock. From the conversation that rattled around the knot of six people gathered near him I guessed that there was still no sign of the nodal point and therefore nothing anyone could do to avoid the disastrous probability pattern. It occurred to me that perhaps in this one instance the nodal point was so close to the actual blow-up that there would be no time to do anything to correct the situation before it happened. Like if you put your brakes on about fifty metres before you reach that corner on the down-swooping mountain road you may make it, but if you can’t see the corner until you’re on top of it then you don’t stand a chance.

Figuring that I might as well try to make at least one human being reasonably happy, I went in and had breakfast with Charlie Noone. As always, he seemed pleased of my company and after starting out by lying to him about the situation being well in hand I even managed to work myself into a slightly more cheerful mood.

Goldberg called a conference at mid-day. He looked wizened and tired, as if even his phenomenal energy was flagging under the hopelessness of his efforts. He explained that if the average forty-eight hour time lag still held good we had a whole thirty-eight hours and so many minutes in which to locate the node. He also talked very reasonably and calmly about the necessity for rushing through a full evaluation of any change, however apparently trivial, in the Overall picture. Everybody must be alert, the utmost vigilance„..

Watching that slight figure, and listening to the clipped, deliberately unemotional voice I began to be really scared that this time we just weren’t going to make it.

The rest of that day and night passed in a kind of nightmarish blur. I was in a hypersensitive state where the whole of my body seemed to be covered with exposed, frayed nerve endings and my mind was whirling in a never-ending spiral of nothingness where no coherent thought seemed to stick in place for more than a few seconds at a time. Put in so many words I suppose I was running scared—and that went for 99 per cent of the people connected with the operation.

I say 99 per cent, because one really shining example of non-panic was the person who had been the source of the whole thing. Alone in his room he was free from the contagion of fear that infected the rest, living his unchanged, routine existence. He accepted my reassurances without question and took at their face value the cheerful evaluations that channelled through to him continuously from the Strategic Command computer. That night he slept like a baby, while fifteen of us including Goldberg sat there in the Monitor Room watching the screens and dials for the first sign of ... of anything.

My part of the vigil ended around half past seven the following morning when I tore myself away and walked wearily back to my room. I had a vague sort of hope that a shower and change of clothes would make me feel more human and insulate me at least partly from the hysteria that seemed to be vibrating in the very air of the building.

I’d just finished towelling myself when the doorbell buzzed. I slipped on a robe and hurried to answer it.

His face was leaner than I remembered, tanned a deep mahogany brown, and there were lines at the corner of his eyes that hadn’t been there before. But there was no mistaking the grin as he reached out and hugged me close to his stained combat uniform.

‘Tony! What happened ?’ I squealed. ‘I wasn’t expecting you until tomorrow night at the earliest.’

‘Now what kind of a welcome is that?’ he said, picking me up like a rag doll and kicking the door shut behind him. ‘I hitched a lift with one of the fly-boys who was headed north, instead of waiting for the regular transport.’

‘Tony!’ I protested, as he dumped me on to the bed.

‘I want you, a shower and some breakfast—in that order,’ he said, peeling off the uniform.

What red blooded female could argue with that assessment of priorities after six months on the shelf? I stopped protesting.

* * * *

About an hour later I sat opposite him in the mess as he demolished a plate of ham and eggs. I was oblivious to everything but the warm glow of my satisfied body and the renewed joy of his presence. He had always been one hell of a man, but the past six months seemed to have hardened and toughened him to such a degree that I had the greatest difficulty in keeping my eyes off him for a moment.

What’s going on around here, anyway?’ he asked at length. ‘Everybody I’ve seen looks wrung out.*

‘There’s an emergency alert on,’ I explained. ‘Charlie came up with a traumatic nightmare the night before last and they haven’t been able to locate the nodal point so far.’

‘Charlie? Nodal point?’ He frowned inquiringly and I suddenly remembered that he hadn’t been told anything about Operation Canary.

‘Charlie’s a Pre-Cog,’ I explained. ‘I’ve been in charge of him for the past three months.’

‘You mean he tells fortunes?’

‘You could call it that,’ I said.

‘And this nightmare business?’

‘It will take quite a bit of explaining, I’m afraid,’ I said. ‘But in the meantime I ought to go and make sure he’s all right. He’s probably awake by now.’

‘What are you to this Charlie, some kind of wet-nurse?’

‘I’ll tell you all about it later,’ I said, rising to my feet. ‘Look, I’ll see you back in my room in twenty minutes or so, all right?’

‘Not all right,’ he said, pushing back his chair. ‘I’ve got a feeling I ought to meet this Charlie guy who’s been monopolising your time for so long.’

‘Well, I...’ I began to object, then I thought to myself what the hell ? What harm could there be in it ? After all, Charlie had to be told sometime during the next two days that I was leaving. What more logical than I should show him the reason and have him happy for me? After all, we had been good friends.

‘All right, come along if you want to,’ I said.

Charlie was up and dressed when we arrived at his room. He was seated in front of the information screen watching the latest intelligence reports on the other side’s ICBM deployment, but he switched off as soon as he heard the door open and rose to his feet.

‘Jan, where have you been? I waited breakfast for you, but when you didn’t show ...’ The welcoming smile on his round face faded as he saw that I was not alone.

‘Charlie—this is Sergeant Moreno, Tony Moreno,’ I said. ‘Tony—Charlie Noone.’

They stood eyeing each other warily. Tony, now wearing his elegant walking-out uniform, alert, handsome and tough—and the little fat civilian in his baggy salesman’s suit.

‘Tony has just got back from six months’ service in Antarctica,’ I explained, wishing that one or the other of them would make the move to shake hands, or at least to say something.

Not a word—they remained a couple of metres apart, with me in the no-man’s-land in the middle.

‘I brought him in to see you, because I thought it would be a good idea for you to meet,’ I said, trying to force an air of light cheerfulness into my voice. ‘Tony and I are going to be married tomorrow, and I knew...’

What did I know? Babbling platitudes, I knew absolutely nothing. Even though I was a Tp I had been so stupid that I hadn’t seen the thing that had been building up right under my nose for the past three months. Charlie Noone loved me—not in the carnal way the average man loves a woman. Unworthy creature that I was, he adored me as a goddess, an unattainable, pure ideal.

And I had destroyed that ideal by revealing to him that I was just another woman, no different or better after all than one of his ten dollar whores, a woman who had given her body to another man.

It was all there now, impossible to ignore, blazing out of Charlie Noone’s mind—exploding into a berserk fury as he flung himself across the room screaming his hatred for the man who had defiled his goddess.

And Tony... After six months in the combat zone, where the least unexpected movement can spell instant death and a man lived as long as he could maintain a constant state of alert readiness, he reacted on a reflex level. He needed no other weapons, his battle-trained body was a highly efficient killing machine. This was the kind of situation he had been trained to deal with.

The whole thing was over much too quickly for anyone to intervene. Charlie Noone was dead before his crumpling body hit the floor, the fire of his mind blotted out like a switched-off light bulb. There had been no time even for terror. In that last split second of his life Charlie Noone, the professional coward who had died a thousand speculative deaths, had known nothing but berserk, heroic rage.

Tony stared down at the body as if wondering how it had got there, then he looked up at me, the horror growing in his eyes. ‘Jan, I didn’t mean... He was attacking me, and for all I knew ...’

I turned away, unable to face what I now saw in him; the animal violence, the primitive, killing strength that had destroyed Charlie Noone, crushed that gentle little man like an insect.

The next sound I heard was that of footsteps—going out of the room. I knew somehow that Tony was walking out of my life for ever, but I didn’t look, for fear that if I saw just once more the movements of that strong, handsome body I wouldn’t have the will-power to resist following him .. .or calling him back.

When I did turn at last Goldberg was in the room, kneeling beside the body. It looked somehow smaller and shrunken in death. The face was a nothing, just a doughy, expressionless mask.

‘He loved me,’ I said, my voice cracking on the edge of hysteria. ‘All this time and I never even guessed. I was in his first level practically every day, but never once ...’

Goldberg straightened up and looked at me. ‘Be grateful,’ he said gently. ‘And don’t blame yourself. There was nothing you could have done to stop his being killed. The nodal point in this particular probability pattern was nothing to do with intelligence data or weapon disposition. It happened when Tony Moreno got on that plane at Antarctica Base.’

‘And now?’ I asked, aware that in one short second the whole course of my life had been changed. I could never look at Tony again without remembering what he had done to Charlie Noone—or remembering Charlie and how I had failed him.

‘Believe me, Jan, it would never have worked with Tony.’ Goldberg walked across and put his hands firmly on to my shoulders. ‘Better you should know before it’s too late.’

Why did he always have to be so damned right ?

‘But it is too late,’ I said. My own voice sounded strange, as if it belonged to someone else, and I became aware that I was trembling. There were no tears, but inside me something seemed to be contracting, shrivelling into a tight, frozen ball...