O'Flynn was there with more NASO techs, and to the side was a trio of base administrative staff.

"Why? What have I done now?" Zambendorf asked, moving over to join them. The attention in theroom followed him and shifted away from Thelma, who remained standing by the card players.

"That show of yours the other day with Gerry Ma.s.sey," Tak.u.mi Kahito, one of the programmers, said. "We think we know how you did it."

"But I've already told you how I did it," Zambendorf answered. "Surely you're not saying you didn't believe me."

Kahito smiled and gestured at the large mural screen. "Mind if we rerun the video?"

Zambendorf shrugged. "Go ahead." In the background Thelma drifted to the back of the room.

Everyone present had as good as forgotten that she existed.

"All it proves is that closed minds are capable of explaining away anything," Malcolm Wade declared, puffing his pipe near the serving counter.

Sitting by Wade was the round-faced, wispy-haired figure of Dr.-of what was obscure-Osmond Periera, wearing a rose-colored shirt under a V-neck fawn sweater. The author profiles in his best-selling books on paranormal research and UFOlogy-which claimed, among other things, that the North Polar Sea was a gigantic crater caused by the crash of an antimatter-powered alien s.p.a.cecraft, and that television altered the climate via mind power concentrated through ma.s.s suggestion-described him as Zambendorf's discoverer and mentor. Certainly he was one of the staunchest disciples, and the boosting of Zambendorf's career from European nightclub performer to celebrity of worldwide acclaim owed no small part to Periera's contacts and the influence his royalties were able to attract.

"There's no question that it demonstrates how much more reliably psychocommunicative signals propagate in the outer planetary void, free from disruptive terrestrial influences," Periera said, ostensibly to Wade but so that everyone could hear. "Of course, it doesn't come as any great surprise to anyone of genuine scientific impartiality. The effect was predicted by Bell's inequality many decades ago."

Periera's ability to invent the most outrageous explanations for Zambendorf's feats never ceased to amaze even Zambendorf. None of the scientists at Genoa Base took Periera seriously, but either tolerated him as part of the much-needed entertainment or ignored him with disdain, depending on their disposition. Periera, of course, took himself very seriously and read their att.i.tudes as a direct, inverse measure of open-mindedness.

Conspicuously absent, Zambendorf noted, were Weinerbaum and his coterie of "serious" scientists, who were above sharing in the fun the regular messroom gatherings generated. Harold Mackeson, the base commander, who had presided the last time, was not present either.

By now the mural screen was showing Ma.s.sey relaxing back in his chair, as they had seen him at the time of the live transmission from theOrion.

"What is it, Gerry?" Vernon Price's voice asked again.

"I'm not sure. I feel more than just aware of the s.p.a.ce outside," Ma.s.sey replied. "It's as if part of my mind is reaching out into it . . . being touched by something. My G.o.d, I'm getting something!

Suddenly I'm flooded with an image of Karl, and yes, the feeling of a number." Zambendorf continued staring fixedly from where he was standing, aware but not showing it of the curious glances being sent in his direction from around the room. Ma.s.sey continued, "It's . . . let me see . . ." His hand came up, touching the fingers to his brow. "Fifty . . . fifty-three."

"There!" Spearman stabbed at the comm unit on the table in front of him to freeze the image. "See -Ma.s.sey's hand is covering his mouth. We heard the number over the audio all right, but you don't actuallysee him say it." Spearman fast-forwarded the sequence to the next number Ma.s.sey had gotten right, which they heard him giving as seventeen. But again, at the moment of uttering it he was looking up at the ceiling with his arms braced on the rests of his chair and could have been saying anything. Ma.s.sey had failed on the next, which had been seven, and Spearman went on to the last two. Freezing the view at 68 showed Ma.s.sey with the back of his head to the camera, and when giving the last, 90, he had been wiping his mouth after taking a sip of water.

"All four of them, Karl?" Spearman smiled wryly and shook his head. "Too much of a coincidence.

I'll believe that what we'relooking at came in from theOrion when it said it did-no question of that. Butwhat weheard is a different matter. There isn't one instance where you can actually synch anything to lip movements, noevidence that Ma.s.sey ever actually received anything. All weknow is that he said he did."

"Then where did those numbers come from?" Zambendorf asked.

"Prerecorded and mixed in as a voice-over after the signal packet came in from theOrion ," Kahito replied.

Zambendorf was impressed. "Not a bad effort at all," he said, his eyes twinkling. "If it were true, I'd even go as far as to say that you're learning something about being real scientists at last." In fact, it had been just as Spearman had said. Ma.s.sey had sent a recitation, in his own voice, of all the numbers up to a hundred as part of the messages he had exchanged with Zambendorf the day before the demonstration. Joe Fellburg had persuaded a pal on the NASO communications staff to give him access to the incoming message processors, and he had keyed the appropriate selections to slot into the audio track at the blind spots during the fifty-two-minute wait for the signal from theOrion to come in.

Spearman backed the recording up to the third number, 7, the one Ma.s.sey had pa.s.sed on. "This one's not coming through very clearly at all," Ma.s.sey said on the screen. "No, just a blur, I'm afraid. It has a feel of 'threeness' about it-thirteen, maybe, or thirty-something . . ."

"That was a neat touch, Karl. I've got to hand it to you," Spearman said. "This time it is real. All the time that Gerry was talking about this stuff, you could see his mouth clearly. It leaves you believing that the same was true with all the other numbers, too, but it wasn't. I had to run through this a dozen times before I spotted the difference."

All of it was true. The other part about this particular detail was that for some strange psychological reason n.o.body really understood, people in general were much more likely to find a demonstration of this kind believable when it didn't go a hundred percent right. Conjuring tricks worked every time, the inverted logic of these judgments seemed to say; therefore, if it didn't work every time, it couldn't be a trick.

"What clinched it for me was having the choice restricted to numbers," John Webster said, leaning back. Evidently, as far as he was concerned, the whole matter was already wrapped up, with no call for further questions.

"Really?" Zambendorf just smiled and waited for the opportunity to ripen. He had weathered worse than this many a time before.

"It makes it easy for them to have been prerecorded," Spearman explained. "But suppose that instead of a number you'd used something selected arbitrarily on the spur of the moment-say, an object produced in the room."

"Oh, I see." Zambendorf nodded, as if that should have occurred to him before. "That would have convinced you, would it?"

"It would have convinced me," Kahito said. "If somebody had been free to say, oh . . ." He looked around, then pointed at Spearman's spectacles. "Black-rimmed gla.s.ses, or anything they liked, and then it had come in from Ma.s.sey fifty-two minutes later, sure,then I'd believe it."

"I've seen Karl do that several times," Wade a.s.sured everybody. Their conviction, however, evidently fell somewhere short of total.

"We'd have had you cold, Karl," Spearman said to Zambendorf.

"Nonsense," Zambendorf answered breezily. "I'll do it for you right now, if you like."

n.o.body had been prepared for that. They looked at each other uncertainly, as if to check what they thought they had just heard. "What?" Spearman said. "I'm not sure I follow. How can you do it right now?"

"Ma.s.sey isn't set up or anything," Webster pointed out.

Zambendorf turned up his hands as if asking what the problem was with that. "So set him up again,"

he said. He was comfortably sure that they wouldn't. It would mean taking another day to exchange preparatory messages, making the slot a.s.signments in the communications trunk beam, then getting everybody together again when the response from Ma.s.sey was due."It's all a bit messy now," Webster said. "A pity somebody didn't think of it before." The others concurred glumly.

"There is another way," Zambendorf told them after a moment of apparent thought. "You all know Joe Fellburg, right? Well, he isn't with us just to handle security, you know. I only accept colleagues into the team who show unusual talent in their own right. Isn't that so, Osmond?"

"Absolutely," Periera confirmed from beside Wade, flattered at having his credentials endorsed publicly. "An extraordinary collection of individuals. Fellburg does possess an unusual sensitivity for receiving telepathic images. I've seen Karl transmit to him in an absolutely sealed room. Checked it myself. It's quite unexplainable by any purely physical process."

By this time the fact that only a few minutes previously the Ma.s.sey performance had been as good as solved was lost in the minds of most of those present. And that was exactly how Zambendorf wanted things to be. The goalposts had shifted; nowthis would be the test of his authenticity.

Spearman looked around the company, then back at Zambendorf. "I'm not sure I know what we're talking about," he said. "How is this supposed to work?"

"Very simply," Zambendorf replied. "We call Joe-" He turned toward where Wade and Periera were sitting. "Does anyone know where he is?" They returned negative gestures and head shakings.

Zambendorf shrugged. "Well, he'll be easy enough to locate." He looked back at Spearman. "You call him and tell him what we want to do, and if he agrees, you hang up-so there's no open line or other channel back to him. Then anyone here who wants to can pick whatever objects they like-purely arbitrarily, which was the way you told me it ought to be done a few minutes ago-and I'll send the images to him." Zambendorf shrugged again as if he were describing something he did every day. "And then he'll come here and tell us what they were."

"What? With Zambendorf here in the room?" Sharon Beatty put in. "These people have codes that you can't even see. They can signal to each other."

"Ask Joe to write them down before he comes in," Zambendorf suggested.

n.o.body could find any objection to that. There was a short debate to consider additional details, until finally a procedure was agreed on that all were happy with. Somebody pa.s.sed Spearman a seefone from the shelf by the door, and he began calling around the base to locate Fellburg. Zambendorf settled himself down at the central one of the messroom's three long tables. Fellburg turned out to be in the guardroom of the main gatehouse. "Putting him on," Sergeant Harvey, the current watch officer, said.

"Er, I hope this isn't an inconvenient time, but we were hoping that you might help us out with something, Joe," Graham Spearman said when Fellburg's features appeared on the screen.

"If I can. What's your problem?"

"I'm in the messroom with a bunch of people, and Karl's with us. He's saying that-"

"Just ask him if he feels able to receive remote images," Zambendorf whispered in his ear to keep things short.

"Are you up to receiving remote images right now?" Spearman repeated.

"Why not?, Let's give it a whirl."

"Without the phone connection."

"Okay."

"We want you to write them down and bring the list straight to the messroom to compare with a checklist that we'll be making. n.o.body leaves here till you show up," Spearman said.

"Anything else?"

"That's about it."

"Let's go, then," Fellburg said, and the screen went blank. It left a mood of surprise hanging in the air. Somehow this was all too simple and more straightforward than anyone had imagined. Zambendorf waited, looking at ease.

"We didn't tell Fellburg how many items there'd be," somebody said."He'll know," Zambendorf predicted confidently.

As had been agreed, people from all over the room produced items from pockets, purses, and about their persons and pa.s.sed them to Spearman, who arranged them in a circle covering the width of the center table. He then placed a table knife inside the circle and set it rotating horizontally. The knife spun through several revolutions, slowing and becoming more wobbly until it lurched to rest pointing at a gold signet ring. O'Flynn, the NASO maintenance sergeant, turned the top card of a deck that had been shuffled by several people. "Eight," he announced. The rule was that if the number was odd, the object would be accepted; if even, it would be ignored, and the procedure repeated. Spearman spun the knife again. This time it selected an American Express card from somebody's wallet. Flynn turned over the three of clubs.

"AmEx gold card," Spearman p.r.o.nounced. Webster wrote it down as the first item on his checklist.

Everyone stared at Zambendorf, who had closed his eyes and was sitting with a distant expression on his face, his arms resting on the table in front of him.

After several seconds he opened his eyes. "Very well. Next?"

The knife picked out a paper clip and a pencil stub, both of which had to be discarded because the corresponding cards were a ten and a two. But the next was the five of hearts, which allowed a brown leather b.u.t.ton to be added to the list.

There followed a red pocket notebook, a plastic sachet containing a medication patch, an electrical cable running down the wall of the room-the knife had stopped midway between two of the objects on the table-a jeweler's eyegla.s.s, and finally the person of Tak.u.mi Kahito, described on the list as "male of Oriental appearance."

By this time practically everyone in the room had been drawn into the circle of curious watchers around the center table. A few remained here and there, obstinately continuing with their chess games or buried in a newspaper, and Wade and Periera had remained seated, but n.o.body paid any attention to them. And neither was anyone paying any attention to Thelma, out of sight at the back of the room, quietly writing down the selections as they were announced on the NASO notepad sheet that had been inside the magazine Zambendorf had handed her when he had come into the room. n.o.body would recollect that seemingly insignificant event. In fact, n.o.body would even be able to recallif Thelma had been anywhere near Zambendorf from the time he had first appeared.

So when Zambendorf announced that he could feel the receiver's power "fading" (they had agreed on a time limit so that Fellburg knew how long to wait), Thelma already had the complete list written out -penned in a strong, distinctly masculine style-and ready in the room. And with Zambendorf chattering and answering questions at the center table, n.o.body took any notice when she moved to the serving counter to get herself a soda and then wandered back along the other side of the room to be only a matter of feet from the doorway when Fellburg arrived. This would be the most crucial moment of the whole exploit.

Fellburg appeared with a wide grin on his face and a folded sheet of paper in one hand, pausing for a second to a.s.sess the situation in the room. He saw Zambendorf and began moving toward him, at the same time raising the hand holding the paper. At that instant Thelma stepped forward in front of him.

"No. Karl shouldn't touch it." She took the paper, turned with it, and walked a few steps to where Spearman and the others were sitting. In the process, her body hid the paper for a split second, but her movement was so smooth that there wasn't one person watching to whom it even occurred that the folded piece of paper that she pa.s.sed to Spearman might not have been the one they saw her take from Fellburg. And so, of course, the two lists were found to match. No amount of speculating about hidden lip movements or prerecorded voice-overs could account forthat. And that confused the other issue, which by rights should by then have been put to rest, somehow leaving the impression that the Ma.s.sey demonstration was still an open case too.

John Webster stared down at Fellburg's list, clearly unwilling to accept what it meant, though just as obviously flummoxed as to what to make of it. Finally he looked up. "Joe, can I ask you something?"He held up the sheet, which had the NASO emblem printed at the top. "You were in the main gatehouse when we located you, right?"

"Right."

"So was that where you got this paper?"

Fellburg frowned as if having to think back. "Yeah, that's right. There was a pad on Harvey's desk back there." The others in the room looked at Webster curiously.

"There's just one more thing I'd like to try." So saying, Webster used the seefone to call the gatehouse again. Harvey's face and shoulders appeared, showing the top of a military shirt.

"Main gate, Sergeant Harvey. Hi, John," he greeted.

"I believe that Joe Fellburg was with you not long ago," Webster said.

"Yeah, right. I think he went to the general mess."

"I know-he's with us here. But I wonder if you'd do something for us. Tell, me, is there a NASO notepad on the desk there-regular sort, lined pages. NASO whatsit at the top?"

Harvey looked around, then stretched out an arm. "You mean like this?" He held up a pad.

"Did Joe use it for anything when he was there?"

"As a matter of fact, he did. He went off in a corner with it for a few minutes, but I'm not sure what for. Why?"

"Oh, just something we're curious about. Could you tell me, what's the number of the next available page there, on the top?"

"It's, let's see . . ." Harvey turned the pad around and looked down at it. "Thirty-seven."

Webster stared at the sheet in his hand. The number printed in large black numerals in the top right-hand corner was 36.

7.

Two dark-painted military flyers-one a general-purpose, twenty-seat personnel carrier, the other, a smaller two-man scout-skimmed over a darkened landscape of low hills marked by pipelines and scattered patches of engineering constructions.

"Delta Two to Delta Leader. Patterned layouts with cl.u.s.ter of pumpkin houses coming up on the imager at twelve o'clock. I think this could be it."

"Okay, we got 'em. Bunch of Ts in the center standing around a walking cart. It looks like them, all right." In the rear c.o.c.kpit of the larger machine, Captain Mike Mason of the Special Forces contingent flipped to the intercom circuit. "Joe, gimme a close-up on that central area on the intensifier. Make a slow circuit while we check it out, Ed. If it looks like this is the place, we'll go straight down." He switched back to call Delta Two. "Two, this is Leader. Stay with us while we make a pa.s.s. If it checks out, we're going down. Continue circling for illumination and cover."

"Roger, Leader."

"Area checks clear of obstacles," the copilot reported.

Behind Mason, Sergeant Yaver addressed the squad sitting along the sides of the aft compartment, kitted out in military-version EV suits. "Check weapons, life support, radio. Close and secure helmets.

We're going down."

Outside, the stub wing dipped as the craft banked into a tight turn, at the same time shedding speed and height. From the scout trailing in echelon, a searchlight beam came on and stabilized to light up the central open area of the Taloid settlement. The view on the c.o.c.kpit monitor showed lots of figures standing immobile as they stared upward, or sitting in their crazy walking "spudmobiles." A number of the wheeled and legged machines that usually accompanied them stood in the surrounding area. Mason had heard the scientists refer to them as "animals." It had to be something to do with the loneliness out here getting to their heads. h.e.l.l, they were all just machines . . . And now, if the latest reports the Taloidswere bringing back to Genoa were anything to go by, they had machines getting a notion that they could steal dead Terran bodies if they felt like it.

Jeez!

Varlech, Avenger-of-Heresies, watched from the central square as the sky dragon came lower and circled the village, which was called Quahal. The smaller dragon following it flooded the surroundings with a cone of violet heat-light. This was his test, he decided: the challenge to his resolve and fort.i.tude sent by the Lifemaker to try his faith. He forced himself to remember that these were not dragons or living beasts at all; they were imitations crafted by the Lumians from rock, as a legwright coaxed imitation limbs from growth seed nurtured in enriched clays. He looked across at the cart with its bundle wrapped in metallic braids and cord. And the Lumians were not immortal or G.o.ds.

Most of those around him were standing petrified. They had heard the rumors and listened to tales second- or third-hand, but few, if any-apart from some of his own Avengers who had encountered Lumians before as soldiers with the Paduan army-had ever seen a Lumian flying beast for themselves.