Mind's Eye

by Douglas E. Richards

  “I’ve been busy, Colonel, but I did manage to prepare for this call. So, yes, I have thought about what this would mean.”

  “Then you must see that this guy is far too dangerous to let live. ESP—true, potent, absolutely perfect ESP—is a power that can never see the light of day. We’ll be the instruments of his death, but whoever did this to him put this death sentence on his head. We’re just the executioners, doing what needs to be done. I’m sick about it. But if we allow ourselves to be compassionate, we stand to lose everything.”

  “Surely you’re overstating the case, Colonel? He’s one man.”

  “Would you want to be in the same room with him?”

  A slight smile came over Sobol’s face. “I can’t say that I would. I may have committed an . . . indiscretion . . . or two,” he said wryly, “that I wouldn’t want him to read. But so what? I wouldn’t want to be in the same room with a trained attack dog, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t useful. I say we capture and study this guy. Can you imagine someone with these abilities working for our side? And what if we can use him to figure out how to give others this ability?”

  “That’s exactly what we’re afraid of,” said Mike Campbell. “It’s too much power for any man. Even a man who is a perfect angel, with a perfect moral compass. It’s absolute power and it’s corrupting. Remember your Sunday school, General? Satan, himself, began his career as an angel. If he could be corrupted, even while an angel in heaven, what hope does a mere man have?”

  “But it’s far worse than just what Hall could do if he turned,” added Girdler. “If we let him live, we open Pandora’s box. We all but ensure the start of an international ESP arms race.”

  Sobol stared at him as though he hadn’t heard correctly.

  “Every country will search for the key to unlock ESP,” clarified Girdler. “Both to use as a weapon and to achieve parity if some other country gets there first. With disastrous results no matter how you slice it. ESP arms race.”

  “Has Hall’s condition become international news in the past five minutes?” said Sobol sarcastically. “Because the last I heard, the only people who have any suspicion of it are the three of us, and the girlfriend of a fallen paramedic.”

  “You don’t think other countries would get wind of this?” said Girdler, refusing to back down. “With all due respect, General, you know they would. One way or another. And if Hall is left at large, very quickly. He’s apparently not shy about showing off his ability. If we try to harness him for our own ends, this will eventually leak out as well. If we can even contain him, which I suspect we can’t. How bad would we panic if we thought Iran or Russia or China had a program that was yielding perfect psi ability? Would we pull out all the stops to start a crash program, General?”

  “Of course. We’d have no other choice.”

  “And neither will they when they learn about our program. Anyone who can’t harness this ability, in a world with those who can, would be at a devastating disadvantage. And suppose a straightforward way to confer this ability could be found? And don’t underestimate the ingenuity of humanity. We put bloodhounds to shame once we’re following the scent of a breakthrough. If this were to occur, and ESP became widespread, it’s game over. An extinction level event. If you think this through, we’re not a species who can read each other’s inner thoughts without self-destructing. We’re teetering on the brink right now, even without this destabilizing influence.”

  Sobol now looked more thoughtful. “Even if we eliminate Hall, isn’t there a chance this has already leaked more broadly?” he asked. “Unlikely, but not impossible. If an arms race is about to begin, can we afford to throw away a winning hand?”

  “There is no arms race without Hall,” replied Girdler. “Think about it. If we kill him and bury this story, everyone thinks he went down with the Scripps Explorer. Any rumors that he was ever even alive after this tragedy will be seen as crackpot conspiracy theories.”

  He paused. “This isn’t to say that we let those responsible for this atrocity escape justice. We can wait and see who comes out with breakthrough advances and then quietly investigate, taking care of them before anything is public. Before they go public, the first thing they’ll do—they’ll have to do—is file patents. They’ll delay doing this until the last second, but we can have Nessie tie into the patent computers and sound the alert the moment something is filed.

  “The people behind this will be brought to justice,” insisted the colonel. “And we can consider making use of what they learned. Although there are plenty of issues with this as well. But keeping Hall alive is a recipe for disaster. The existence of his abilities will get out, even if we can contain him. Which is a huge if. And it will boomerang on us—and the world.”

  “I’m not as certain about that as you are, Colonel. If I had ESP right now, what would I read in your mind? That your superior officer is a lobotomized jackass for not immediately agreeing with you on this?”

  Girdler smiled. Perhaps Sobol could read minds. “Not at all, General. I’d be thinking that I appreciate your insight, and the fact you’re open-minded enough to listen to me and consider the merits of my argument.”

  “Uh-huh,” said Sobol skeptically. “While I don’t share your views entirely, Colonel, you do make some compelling points. I need some time to think this through. I’ll call you back in forty-five minutes.”

  With that, the screen went dark.

  Forty-five minutes later they were staring at Sobol’s dark visage once again. “I’ve looked at this from several angles,” he began. “I think you made some excellent points, gentlemen. But I’m afraid I can’t support your recommendation. First, we don’t have the power to kill an innocent American citizen who has displayed no intent to endanger this country. Second, now that you’ve made me painfully aware of the unstable nitroglycerin we’re holding, I’m counting on you to take the proper precautions to make sure your doomsday scenario doesn’t come to pass. The three of us are the only people authorized to know about this. Period. And I want a list of recommendations for how to contain this secret. And how to contain someone with these abilities.”

  “I urge you to reconsider, General,” said Girdler. “Trying to harness Hall and ESP is more likely to boomerang and bite us all in the ass than playing around with germ warfare, for Christ’s sake.”

  “You have your orders, gentlemen,” said Sobol firmly.

  Both men nodded. “Roger that,” said Girdler. And while he managed to say this in a neutral tone, his eyes blazed with a steady defiance.

  32

  Girdler and Campbell sat in silence for several minutes after Sobol’s virtual presence no longer inhabited the small conference room. The major finally broke the silence. “How surprised are you?” he asked.

  “I don’t know. I thought the arguments were convincing. I know you well enough, Mike, to know that you’re not just humoring me, and you thought so too. Not that you’d ever just humor me on something this important.”

  Girdler shrugged. “But I suppose this threat is too insidious for the general. If Hall had his finger on a button that could detonate a hundred nukes around the world, this would get Sobol’s attention. But he can’t really see the potential for disaster as easily with just one poor son of a bitch who can read minds.”

  “At least we’ll be in charge of containment. The people most aware of the danger. At least that’s something.”

  “It’s not good enough, Mike,” said the colonel, shaking his head. “I don’t care what our orders are. When the world is in flames, I won’t feel better about myself because I was only following orders. That’s what the Nazis said at Nuremberg.”

  Campbell frowned. “Look, Justin, you know I’m on your side on this one. But some could argue we’re the Nazis here. We’re the ones recommending the assassination of an innocent man. It’s not comforting to know that our goal is now the same as those who committed mass murder on Hall’s colleagues.”

  Girdler’s eyes fell. “N
o, it’s gut-wrenching to have to advocate for this.” He returned his gaze to Campbell and shook his head morosely. “But we have no other option. Hall has to die. It isn’t his fault. If they had given him a drug that turned him into a crazed killer, it wouldn’t be his fault either. But that wouldn’t change the cold equations.”

  The colonel paused. “Hall may be a great guy. He probably is. And he may mean very well. Right now. But what if this changes? What if he becomes unstable? He’s the sword of Damocles and Pandora’s box rolled up into one.”

  Campbell sighed heavily. “You’re right. We have no other choice. It would have been hard enough to do this if Sobol were on board. Now it’s even worse. We do something that goes against everything we believe in on one level, and our reward is a court martial—with no possible defense.”

  “Not necessarily. It depends on how it goes down. If we kill him cleanly, we can pretend we were never able to find him. Or if not, we can claim it was an accident. He forced our hand.”

  Campbell considered. “Okay, but even if we can do this and still save our own necks, Sobol is now a believer in ESP. So won’t he insist on us starting a program to look into this—Hall or no Hall?”

  “It’s a good point. But I’ll be the one running any program he wants initiated. I’ll just make sure we never get anywhere.”

  “But can we count on Sobol not mentioning this program to anyone? Isn’t there a danger in having a program running, even one we sabotage? What if what we’re doing becomes known? Won’t this start an arms race anyway?”

  “No. Sobol wouldn’t breathe of word of it to anyone. He couldn’t. Without being able to produce Hall to demonstrate ESP, people would think he was out of his mind. They’d think he was back to having us try to stare goats to death. He wouldn’t say word one until we produced some unambiguous evidence. And even if I’m wrong about that—which I’m not—a living Hall is still the key. Without him, whatever gets out will be seen as a load of conspiracy theory crap that no one will take seriously. We can even leak that rumors about Hall were part of a PsyOps mission to get other countries to waste resources on ridiculous ESP projects, and to sow panic that the US has cracked mind reading.”

  The major stared at Girdler for several seconds, weighing his points. “Okay,” he conceded finally. “That makes sense.” He paused. “But we do have one more problem.”

  “Finding Hall in the first place?”

  “No. Not that finding him won’t be challenging enough. But that wasn’t the problem I meant. When we do find him, have you considered how we go about killing him?”

  “I have,” replied the colonel. “And you’re right. This could be . . . problematic. How do you sneak up on a guy, with intent to kill, who can read your thoughts from six miles out?”

  “Exactly,” said Campbell.

  “It’s a very good question,” said Colonel Justin Girdler. “I only wish I had a good answer for you.”

  33

  When the cab dropped them at the Vons parking lot, Nick Hall and Megan Emerson entered the store while Alex Altschuler waited for them in the parking lot in his black BMW. They quickly picked out sunglasses that covered much of their faces, and baseball hats, using a tiny fraction of the loot Hall had amassed cheating at poker, having decided not to steal these items from the poor Glandons.

  They emerged five minutes later, and Hall insisted Megan take the front seat with Altschuler during the relatively quick drive back to Fresno. It had taken Altschuler ninety minutes to arrive, but it would take over two hours to return at a pace that was at least within shouting distance of the posted limits.

  Megan and Alex Altschuler chatted and got to know each other while Hall remained silent behind them. He had announced at the outset he needed time to think. To get reacquainted with himself. And that he didn’t plan to be sociable during the early part of the drive.

  As they pulled out into the street, Nick Hall allowed himself to face the full horror of the massacre that had taken place. Bad enough to contemplate the murder of twenty-six people when this was just a number. But with his memory restored, he now could run down an inventory of who was on the ship. He knew them all. While it was true that several were little more than strangers, many others he had known for years, and were colleagues and in some cases friends. People he had worked with and laughed with. People who shared his passion for oceanography. Tara Cohen, Ashok Patel, and Gavin Hirsch. Don McBride and Andy Chen. Latisha Lewis and Min-sue Ahn. The list went on and on. It was a tragic, senseless loss of a truly wonderful group of human beings. How could they all be gone?

  He allowed himself to wallow in the misery of their loss for ten minutes and then forced himself to put this massacre out of his mind. For now. He would continue to mourn their loss in the days and weeks ahead.

  So now he knew who he was again. And much of who he was, he liked. He had been hard-working, determined, and successful. He was a loyal friend and someone who set high moral and ethical standards for himself.

  But there was much about himself he now didn’t like, even detested. He had been arrogant. Smug. He was an only child. Bright. Funny. Athletic. But his success had gone to his head. He had become selfish. In short, he had begun to think he was hot shit.

  It was funny what waking up in a dumpster without a memory could do for your perspective. And reading minds could take anyone down a peg. He had thought when he walked into a room, everyone inside had been holding their breath, waiting to be dazzled by Nick Hall’s entrance. By his lean, athletic body and ruggedly handsome face.

  What an arrogant, self-delusional fool he had been. He had now read the minds of dozens of women he had passed. While a few had reacted positively to his appearance, an equal number had been decidedly unimpressed.

  How had he gotten so full of himself? And how had his friends put up with him?

  And seven months ago he had been engaged to a woman named Alicia Green. Beautiful, but on the cold side. Okay to talk to, but not . . . Megan Emerson.

  But seven months ago he would have never given Megan a second look. She had a cute face and appealing figure, but she wasn’t nearly hot enough for the great Nick Hall. She would never have made the first cut for the superficial asshole he had been.

  When his parents had both died in a car accident two years previously, he had mourned for six months and then asked Alicia to marry him, more to get a feeling that he was moving forward with his life than out of a passion that couldn’t be denied. Alicia was a perfectly fine woman, with a spectacular appearance. He had thought he was her equal in the looks department, but given his new perspective, he knew he was not.

  But so what? That shouldn’t have been so important anyway.

  He had been about to settle. He hadn’t been passionately in love with Alicia Green. And while they mouthed the words, she hadn’t been in love with him either. Not really. Maybe it was telling that he had looked her up on Facebook while the cab was taking them to Vons, and she was already in another relationship.

  And why was it that his mind and heart wanted to focus on Megan Emerson, even when his fiancée was now also part of his memory? Was it just proximity?

  He didn’t think so. What Megan had brought him was contrast. She wasn’t as beautiful as Alicia, by any means, but she was more energetic. Warmer. More fun to be around. Without Megan he would never have known he was missing anything. He would have thought he had hit gold with Alicia Green.

  And he couldn’t blame Alicia for moving on. She thought he had died seven months ago. And in a way, he had died. He was not the same man she had been in love with—if that’s truly what it had been.

  Too much was going on for him to contact her now, but after his return from the dead became public, he would have no choice. He would call her. He would explain he had seen she had moved on, and that this was probably for the best.

  He wouldn’t blame her. He wouldn’t pretend even for a second she had betrayed him by entering into a new relationship so quickly. He would wish her w
ell and explain that he had been traumatized and changed.

  Once he had become, temporarily at least, the most famous man on the planet, he suspected she might make a strong effort to hang on, but it wouldn’t work. If she knew the truth, she wouldn’t let him and his mutated psionic mind get within ten miles of her, anyway.

  He wasn’t certain how this would play out with Alicia. But he was certain that he wasn’t the same man he had been seven months before. Even if Megan Emerson walked out of his life forever, she had already shown him there could be so much more to a relationship than he had known. And while looks deteriorated with time, a great personality and great chemistry only strengthened.

  The funny thing was that the last seven months were still completely absent from his memory, even though everything prior had returned. He had done some research into amnesia and learned this wasn’t impossible.

  He remembered the Scripps Explorer exactly, and all the colleagues with whom he had embarked. He remembered beginning to feel woozy. And hearing what sounded like multiple helicopters off in the distance.

  Was he getting seasick? Hallucinating? He had never been prone to seasickness, so he was very confused.

  Then several people around him fell to the deck. His mind was too far gone to realize he had been drugged, which was obvious in retrospect. Whether by gas in the air or by something in the food or drink was unclear. His last memory of the ship was falling to the deck, closing his eyes, and noting in the back of his mind that the helicopter sounds were coming closer.

  Next he remembered a small room with a small bed, locked from the outside. And a television that could only play movies and wasn’t connected to the Internet. And then a man had come by with a clipboard, asking about his health but refusing to answer any questions. A man he now knew to be Kelvin Gray.

  And then he awoke in the dumpster.

  But it wasn’t as though the events on the Explorer seemed to have happened only days before. The memories felt old. Felt like there had been a seven-month gap since he had experienced them.