A knock on the door woke me up. I went to open it, and there was Liv, again in full uniform, her hair in a tucked braid updo that must have taken quite some work to make.
“I didn’t hear you leaving,” I said, yawning. I am a light sleeper, and I usually wake up at the softest of sounds, but I hadn’t, that time.
“I thought it best to go. You were sleeping like a baby.”
“Thanks to you … let me go wash my face.”
When I came back I saw that she had placed a tray with coffee and pastries on the coffee table.
“We don’t have time for breakfast. They’re waiting.”
“Oh, screw them!”
“My orders are to get you there on time. Drink this,” she said decisively, handing me the coffee.
“Do you have to be that serious about your duty?”
“I do, when I am in uniform.”
“Then I look forward to getting you out of it.”
“So do I,” Liv said, with an impish smile, but immediately became serious again. “But now let’s go. You can drink while you walk.”
I followed her, trying not to spill coffee on myself, and by the time we reached the laboratory I had managed to wash down a croissant and a scone with it. The director and Doctor Alexander were waiting impatiently, and the doctor scowled at my coffee cup. I guess it was blemishing the sanctity of his lab, or something.
“I trust you had a good night’s rest, Miss Tessa,” he said, sounding as if he didn’t really mean it. “Please climb onto the bed and lie with your head under the arch.”
“You mean, inside the slipper?”
“You can call that a slipper, if you want, but that’s hardly an appropriate name for a highly sophisticated piece of equipment.”
He sounded hurt, and that was okay with me. The director had said nothing since I had arrived, merely gazing at me with disinterest and not giving me an opportunity to say anything to annoy him. He knew me well. For want of a better option, I climbed onto the bed and waited for the doctor to go on explaining.
“Now, Miss Tessa,” said the doctor, “look at the screen before you. What you see are your brain waves. The red wave line shows your beta waves activity right now, the green wave line shows the activity of the theta waves, and the blue wave line, that of the gamma waves. Do you see that?”
“Yes. What is the yellow wavy line that jumps up and down?”
“That shows the amplitude of the combined beta, theta, and gamma waves in the specific combination that permits telepathy. It is not a simple summation of the waves but rather a very specific combination.”
“But that is barely visible; it’s below all the others.”
“That’s right. At this moment you don’t have sufficient telepathic power, do you?”
I thought about if for a moment, trying to sense the surroundings, but felt nothing.
“No, I don’t. I’m not feeling anything. Should I?”
“Not yet. Now see what happens when I turn on the amplifier just a little bit.”
He pushed a button and turned a knob, and the yellow line on the screen jumped up, above the level of the others.
“What does that mean?” I asked. I didn’t feel any different.
“It means that the machine has increased the amplitude of the wave combination that is happening in your brain. It is helping you to do it better.”
“But I’m feeling nothing. I’m not being telepathic.”
“I know. I have done merely a tiny amplification that doesn’t make a difference, only to explain to you. When I turn this on to a higher level, you will feel the difference. But you have a few things to learn first.”
“Like what?”
“Like how to get out of the telepathic state if, for any reason, you want to interrupt contact with a subject and we, here, beside the machine, are not aware of it. Do you have a preferred quiet place where you like to go in your mind to relax?”
“Sure, I always think of myself on a boat, drifting on the surface of a quiet mountain lake I visited as a child. But what does that have to do with it?”
“You’ll see that immediately. Please close your eyes and go to that quiet place, and after you feel relaxed there, open your eyes again and look at the screen.”
I did as instructed and immediately felt relaxed. I had learned to do it everywhere, and it had helped me through difficult times, particularly when I was about to do something difficult that required concentration. I opened my eyes and looked at the screen. The yellow line had dropped and was now much lower than at first—it was almost unnoticeable.
“You see what happened? The safe place is your safety switch. If anything goes wrong, you use it to resurface and to break the connection.”
“All right. This is good. I like to be in control.”
“You always will be,” said the director, speaking for the first time. “Now, let’s take fifteen to relax and come back for training then. Lieutenant Ellman needs to stay and prepare for the training session.”
The base was being lavish with food and beverages. I had noticed a dispensing machine, inside the top secret complex and close to the entrance to the laboratory, and I got a soda from it. The place was quiet with nobody around, and I sat on a nearby bench to think. So far what I had seen made sense, but we hadn’t got started yet, and I had to admit to myself that I was looking forward to starting training. Wherever that would take me.
When I returned—three minutes later than I had to, just to make a point—Liv was sitting on a chair beside the machine and the director and Doctor Alexander were confabulating at the other side of it. When they saw me they stopped, and the doctor turned to me.
“Please, Miss Tessa, jump in. As you know, Lieutenant Ellman has volunteered to allow you to make telepathic contact with her. For today, we will do two trial runs. Right now, we will ask you to read her where she is, and then she will go into another room where you can’t see her, and we will repeat the experiment. Ready?”
I nodded, and the doctor touched the controls again. This time, I started to hear something. At first just noise, like water dripping, and then I ran into something unexpected. Stop reading me! came a clear thought, unmistakably from the director. He couldn’t have known that I was reading him, which I wasn’t. He was just being preemptive. I wasn’t tempted to read him, anyway. The code instilled in us from day one of the service prohibited that, and I would never read him, or spy on anybody who worked in my unit in any other way, without permission.
“Close your eyes and concentrate on your target. Focus on Lieutenant Ellman, otherwise the background noise will confuse you,” Doctor Alexander said, speaking softly.
I did as he said, and the background noise started to fade away. I thought of Liv, imagined her face, and sought her mind, but nothing came.
“I can’t see a thing,” I said, as I opened my eyes and sat up.
“Give it time. Relax and concentrate on your target. If you try hard enough, you’ll get the hang of it, eventually.”
I lay down again, and this time I concentrated hard on Liv’s face. I pictured it close to me, as I had seen it in my room, and managed to shut out every other thought from my mind. As if by magic, everything else, noise and images, disappeared into the background, and I found myself in her head. It was weird, because I was actually there, feeling her entire being. In the past, all I could get were random thoughts, often unclear, and garbled snippets. Now, I could hear her thoughts as if they were mine.
“When you have made contact, lift a finger,” Doctor Alexander continued to instruct, and as I lifted my finger he continued. “Good. Now, Lieutenant, I’ll ask you to think of what we agreed before—don’t say it, just think of it. What’s the matter, Miss Tessa?”
I realized that I was giggling, reading Liv’s thoughts and seeing the images that she had in her head. I doubted very much that this was what she had agreed to imagine during the experiment; surely she would not share our time together with her superiors. But then, the image changed into that of two kittens, playing on the bed, and I got the joke. I stopped giggling and just smiled.
“If you’ve made contact, and you think that you have succeeded in reading Lieutenant Ellman’s thoughts, lift your finger … good, I’ll end it now.”
My contact with Liv was instantly severed and I sat up, rather dazzled.
“Wow! That was something!”
“Did you take a good look? What was Lieutenant Ellman thinking?”
“What I saw was a couple of kittens playing on a bed.”
“Great! That was what she suggested using for this experiment. How was the quality of the imagery?”
“Very good, very life-like,” I said, gazing at Liv from the corner of my eyes. She smiled and blushed a little.
“Do you understand the potential now?” said the director, speaking for the first time since the beginning of the experiment.
“I don’t know yet how controllable this is. It’s easy to concentrate on someone you know, who’s sitting next to you in the same room, but what about someone you’ve never met, who is a thousand miles away. That’s a whole new ball game.”
“That will take training, I’m sure. Don’t be too ambitious. Let’s start by having Lieutenant Ellman sit in a distant room. You won’t know exactly where she is, and we need you to connect to her and read her thoughts without seeing her.”
“All right, I’m ready.”
I climbed again into the slipper—I had become used to calling it that by now—and waited for Liv to call to say that she had reached her position. A few minutes later the phone rang and the director spoke briefly into it and then said, “Proceed!” The doctor again switched on the system and in under thirty seconds my brain was overloaded with background noise—a jumbled mass of thoughts coming from God knew where. I had to focus quickly or go mad from the noise. I imagined Liv’s face, and right away the background noise faded and then disappeared. All I could hear was Can you hear me, Tessa? We hadn’t discussed two-way communication, and I didn’t know whether it would work, but I tried hard to project my thoughts to her. I hear you, I’m with you. Do you hear me? I thought, but apparently she wasn’t hearing me. If you can hear me, she thought, I want you to know how much last night meant to me … and if you can read my thoughts, you’ll know that I’m sincere. I’m opening my mind to you, and you can search it any way you want.
“Have you made contact, Miss Tessa?” came the doctor’s nagging question, just when I was starting to dig into Liv’s mind.
“Yes, yes!” I answered impatiently.
“Well, let me know when you’re through,” he said, sounding a little hurt.
His question had distracted me and it took me a while to get back to Liv. When I did, I picked up her thought somewhere in the middle. … so now you know, and I hope you understand, she was saying. And, oh, tell them that I was thinking about water skiing.
Right then I realized that something amazing was happening: I not only heard Liv’s thoughts, but I saw the room in which she was. I was actually seeing through her eyes and not only the images that her thoughts projected to her mind. The sensation was extraordinary, a kind of out-of-body experience, and I didn’t want it to end.
“Tessa, are you okay?” The director’s voice hit my ears; he sounded worried.
The contact with Liv had been broken, and I jumped again to a seating position.
“Of course I’m okay. Why shouldn’t I be?
“You’ve been out for some time, Miss Tessa,” said the doctor, “and you didn’t respond to my questions.”
“I’m sorry. I got a bit disoriented.” The intensity of the experience, which was completely new to me, was so great that I had become totally immersed in it.
“That’s understandable.”
“She was thinking about water skiing. Was that it?” I asked.
“Yes, that was the thought that she had to pass on to you,” the director confirmed. “But are you feeling well? You look flustered.”
“It’s all new to me, and it is confusing. I need to rest.”
I was in fact tired and could have gone to sleep there and then, on the slipper.
“It’s a natural reaction to your first exposure; it will pass. We have seen that happening with the rats as well. After a day or two, they got used to it.”
“Doctor,” I said, “if you tell me again about your rats, I am not responsible for the consequences. Understood?”
“Yes, sorry. I didn’t mean to, but we have data …”
“Just don’t, please,” I said, raising a hand to check him.
It was lucky that right then Liv returned, or I might have socked him.
“Lieutenant Ellman,” said the director, “please escort Miss Tessa to her quarters and see if she needs anything. You are in charge of her until tomorrow morning. I want you to make sure that she feels well, and if she complains of any side effects, you are to call in the medical staff immediately. Understood?”
“Yes, sir. I’ll stay with her tonight, to make sure that she feels okay.”
I was standing next to her, and she was holding my arm, as if to make sure that I would keep my balance. I didn’t mind.
“That was satisfactory, Tessa,” the director said, adding an uncharacteristic hint of a smile. “Now go and rest. Tomorrow we have hard work to do.”