Distant Friends and Other Stories

by Timothy Zahn

  "Double-check some of Rob's numbers," he said, pulling an ancient wave generator over toward the center of the table. "I want to see if flipping polarity on any of the kernel's bias terminals will affect the output the way he said it does."

  I pulled a chair over to the far end of the work bench and sat down, resisting the urge to suggest that would be a waste of time. He already thought I was too impatient. "What will that tell you?" I asked instead, trying to sound merely curious.

  "It'll tell me if energy is disappearing into the thing-if so, it may be acting as a transmitter instead of a receiver. Your shield might consist of one or more of these things blasting out an interference signal."

  "Wouldn't it be easier to absorb the telepathic signals instead?" I suggested. "Then you could use them as receivers, the way they're designed."

  "It might be," he said. "But I want to know my possible options before I start."

  He returned to his work, his mind filling up with technical thoughts... but even so he couldn't hide the fact that his last statement had been at best a half truth. He had another reason for wanting to do this experiment, a reason I couldn't quite pick up at the distance I was at.

  I thought about it for several minutes in silence. Two days ago I'd been willing to let Green do anything he wanted as long as he got me a shield, but now I was having second thoughts. After all, the telepath finder was Amos's final legacy to all the rest of us, and I had a certain amount of responsibility to make sure it wasn't ruined.

  I puzzled at the question for a minute, then came to a conclusion. Leaning back against the wall, I sent out a call. Calvin? Are you there, Calvin?

  Who's that-Dale? Calvin answered, a bit groggily.

  I grimaced; I'd forgotten Saturday was Calvin's only morning to sleep in and that it was only a little after eight Pueblo time. Yeah. Sorry, I didn't mean to wake you. I'll call back later.

  No, that's all right, he assured me. I got to bed at a reasonable hour last night. What's on your mind?

  I wondered if Gordy had finished going through all of Amos's things, both at Eureka and at his mountain cabin. Specifically, I wanted to know if he found anything else relating to the telepath finder-notes, schematics; that sort of thing.

  Um... you got me. I can call and ask, if you'd like.

  Okay. Calvin hesitated. I talked to Colleen yesterday. She said you'd had another daymare.

  Yes. It wasn't too bad, though.

  Calvin didn't buy that any more than Colleen had. Uh-huh. Any changes in the vision? Content, texture, length-anything?

  I sighed. Not really, I admitted, unless you want to count the fact that my doorbell got incorporated into it. Aside from that it was just a straight replaying of Nelson's attempt to kill both of us. And before you try to think up a euphemistic way to ask, yes, I still get some of it from Nelson's point of view.

  He was silent for a long moment, but it wasn't hard to guess what he was thinking. Among the candle flickers of ordinary humans, we telepaths stand out like carbon-arc searchlights, the strength of our mental broadcast and sensitivity enabling us to communicate over hundreds of miles. But the price for this unique companionship is a heavy one: at anything less than a hundred miles apart the contact is strong enough to be painful, and at a theoretical distance of twenty miles both personalities would disintegrate totally under the strain. Nelson and I had been close to that limit when he finally took a wrong turn and crashed the plane he was chasing me with into a mountain. I'd survived the encounter... but not unscathed. The Dale Ravenhall I'd once been had been bent and altered by the force of the mental collision, changed into something that was part Dale and part Nelson. Permanently? No one knew. But the fact that some of each daymare still came heavily flavored with Nelson's memories was ominously suggestive.

  Well, Calvin said at last, it's only been five months, after all. A lot of simpler psychological problems take longer than that to heal.

  I snorted. Thanks a whole bunch.

  Sorry, he said quickly, and I grimaced. In earlier days he would have recognized that kind of statement as the banter it was. Now, he was bending over backwards to avoid stepping on any toes, real or otherwise. Nelson had been the touchy sort.

  It's okay, I reassured him. I know you were trying to be encouraging. Uh... you don't have any plans to travel east in the near future, do you?

  I could come over any time. Why?-do you need some close-approach contact?

  Not really. I wasn't ready yet to have all my surface thoughts open to another person, good friend or not.

  I just thought maybe you'd be willing to stay in Minneapolis or Dubuque or somewhere for a week or two and let Colleen get back to Regina for a while.

  That could probably be arranged. Are her friends in Chillicothe getting tired of her company, or is she just homesick?

  No to the former; probably to the latter. Not that she'll admit it, of course-she takes her baby-sitting duties seriously.

  Uh-huh. Well, look-I'll talk to her and check the location log to make sure I wouldn't be flying in on top of anyone else and then get back to you. Okay?

  Sure. Thanks; I really appreciate it. And don't forget to check with Gordy about any other telepath locater stuff.

  Right. Talk to you later.

  I came out of the contact and glanced around the room, reorienting myself. Everything was as I remembered it... except that Green was gazing sideways at me from the work bench, his expression wary. "It's okay," I assured him. "I'm not going to faint or anything."

  "I know," he said. "Who were you talking to?"

  "Uh-Calvin Wolfe."

  "Pueblo, Colorado; right?"

  "Yes." Frowning slightly, I touched his thoughts. What I found surprised me. "You've been reading up on us lately, haven't you?"

  Again, there was that little flicker of resentment that seemed to come whenever I demonstrated my telepathic ability on him. "For a couple of days, yeah. I wanted to know what I was getting myself into. It must be nice to be able to talk to someone that far away so easily."

  "You can do almost as well by telephone," I told him shortly, "and without the disadvantages we've got."

  He shrugged. "Not much of a disadvantage. All you have to do is stay out of each other's way. Big deal."

  If I'd been a violent man I probably would've hit him. Instead, I suddenly felt a need to get far away from such stupidity. "I'll be upstairs if you need me," I told him with as much civility as I could manage. Without waiting for a response, I left.

  The call I was expecting came about eight hours later, after Green had gone home for the day; and to my mild surprise it was Gordy himself who made it. Gordy, where are you? was my first question.

  On a plane somewhere near Billings, Montana, I believe, he said. I'm on my way to Minneapolis; going to be doing some work there for the next couple of weeks.

  Such fortuitous timing, I told him. Calvin couldn't get away?

  Even eight hundred miles away I could sense his embarrassment. You make it sound like we're all conspiring to put one over on you, he protested. We're your friends, Dale.

  Yeah, I know. Feeling like a heel was becoming a full-time job here lately. What's the word on Amos's things?

  I've gone through everything from top to bottom and back again. No notes, no plans, no schematics, no extra equipment other than what you've already got. Either he deliberately destroyed all the documentation or the design of the finder was so obvious to him that he could just sit down and cobble one together. Sorry.

  My telepath shield, for example?

  Gordy broke into my musings. Look, Dale, don't you think it's about time, you let the rest of us in on what you're doing with all that stuff?

  My first impulse was to tell him that they'd find out when I was good and ready and not a solitary second sooner. But that was clearly Nelson talking. I don't know, I said instead. I'm trying to make something new out of the things Amos developed for his finder. If it works-well, it'll benefit all of us. Let's leave it at tha
t for now.

  Gordy was silent for a long moment. You know, Dale, it's possible to play these things too close to the chest. If we'd known that Amos had caught Nelson making quiet trips to Las Vegas we might have implicated him in Amos's death before he had the chance to try to kill you. You could be running the same kind of risk here.

  I'm being careful, I told him stubbornly. My doubts about Green rose unbidden before my eyes; ruthlessly, I crushed them down. I just don't want to raise any false hopes, that's all.

  All right, he said after another pause. But be careful, okay?

  Sure. Enjoy your flight, and I'll talk to you later.

  Yeah. Take care.

  I sat where I was for a long time afterwards, my book lying ignored on my lap. Once again I felt torn between my natural desire for caution and my almost suffocating urgency to possess a telepath shield.

  Colleen was practically within my grasp-how could I permit anything to get in the way of that? Besides, what earthly use would a telepath shield-or anything else Green could make in my basement-be to a normal person? A defense against the highly unlikely possibility of one of us eavesdropping on a private conversation? Ridiculous, when thirty feet of distance would achieve the same end. No-I had to be reading Green wrong... and I didn't need to be reminded that Nelson had had a strong touch of paranoia.

  Nevertheless, that evening I went out and bought a burglar alarm, and by the time I went to bed I had it rigged so that anyone entering or leaving my basement would trigger a light and quiet buzzer in my second-floor study. Now, whenever Green tried to leave I would know in time to get within telepathy range of him before he got out of the house. A rather simple precaution, to be sure-but then, I wasn't really expecting any trouble.

  The days lengthened into weeks, as days have a way of doing, and progress on the shield remained depressingly slow. Green's idea about reversing the biases hadn't panned out, and he'd been forced to seek out new approaches. Fortunately, he didn't get discouraged as easily as I might have, his failures merely spurring him to stronger efforts. He began to spend more and more time at my house, sometimes arriving while I was still eating dinner and not leaving until after midnight. What made his single-mindedness all the more astonishing was the fact that he still felt acutely uncomfortable around me, avoiding close contact and sometimes even going so far as to fill his mind with technical thoughts to try to forget I was within range. Apparently he was simply the type who enjoyed a challenge for its own sake.

  What with all this companionship therapy taking up a lot of my attention, it was early October before I finally noticed something was off-kilter.

  It began with an afternoon call from Rob Peterson, who was trying to get hold of Green and thought he might be with me. During the course of the conversation I discovered Green hadn't shown up at any of his classes for nearly a month, a figure that coincided uncomfortably well with the first of his six-to-midnight sessions in my basement. When I asked him about it later, Green admitted he'd been neglecting his schoolwork, but claimed he'd be able to catch up once he finished my shield. As usual, he stayed right at the edge of my range, so I wasn't able to confirm that he was telling the truth; and not wanting a scene I let him go back to work without further cross-examination. I soothed my conscience by reminding myself that he was a grown man, perfectly capable of deciding how to use his time.

  But the whole thing seemed funny somehow-I couldn't reconcile this sudden neglect of his studies with the ambitious and calculating personality I'd already glimpsed in him. It bothered me; and gradually I began staying on the first floor whenever Green was in the house, where I could pick up his surface thoughts as he worked in the basement. He knew, of course-my footsteps would have been audible above him-and I could sense an almost frantic note in his attempts to cram his thoughts with technical details of his work. But enough got through. More than enough...

  I waited until I was sure, and then I confronted him with it.

  "You've had it for two weeks now, haven't you?" I said, anger struggling for supremacy with other emotions I was afraid to accept. "You know how to make a telepath shield."

  "I don't know if I do," he protested. Hunched over the workbench, a soldering iron still gripped in his hand, he watched me with slightly narrowed eyes, as a rabbit might a fox. "I've never tested it."

  Hairsplitting; but it was a genuine lack of certainty, and that had been enough to fool me for nearly a week. Belatedly, I wondered if perhaps I'd gotten the rabbit and fox roles reversed. "Well, let's not waste any more time. Turn it on."

  "All right." Standing up, he went to the far end of the bench. A bulky, three-level breadboard assembly rested there, built into a framework that looked like it'd been made out of leftover angle iron. Three of Amos's kernels glittered among the tangle of electronic components. Plugging the device's cord into an outlet, Green flipped a switch and vanished.

  It took a fraction of a second for my eyes to register the fact that Green was, in fact, still standing there in front of me, that it was only his mind that had disappeared from my perception. I must have looked as flabbergasted as I felt, because Green's lip twitched in a smile of sorts. "Like it?" he asked.

  "I-yes," I managed. "How does it work?"

  "I told you that was the approach to take," I said, feeling a little light-headed. "Will it block other telepaths, too? We project a lot more strongly than you do."

  He shrugged. "Try calling someone."

  I did; and because I was afraid of false hopes I tried for a solid three minutes. But at the end of that time I was convinced. Colleen... With an effort I dragged my mind back to Earth. One more important question still needed an answer. "All right. Now tell me what you've been doing these past two weeks, while you were supposedly working on the shield."

  He radiated innocence. "I have been working on it-I've been trying to make a more practical model." He indicated the breadboards. "You see, this one is big and heavy, with an effective range of probably no more than a hundred feet, and it requires one-twenty line current. I think I can make one that would run off a battery and have almost half a mile of range-and the whole thing fitting inside a briefcase.

  Another-oh, month or so-and I should have it."

  It was a good idea, intellectually, I had to admit that. But all of my hopes and dreams had suddenly become reality and I knew I didn't have the patience to wait another day, let alone an entire month.

  "Thanks, but no. This one will do fine."

  He blinked, and I got the impression that my answer had surprised him. "But... I'm not finished here, Mr.

  Ravenhall. I mean, I promised to build you a practical telepath shield. This thing's hardly practical."

  "It's practical enough for me," I said, frowning. Goosebumps were beginning to form on my suspicions-he had no business fighting that hard for a two-dollar-an-hour job. "Before we continue, what say we make things more interesting and turn off the shield?"

  He made no effort to reach for the switch. "That's not necessary," he sighed. "I was bending the truth a little. I've already been trying to design an entirely different gadget using those kernels, and I was afraid you'd send me away permanently once I'd finished the shield."

  "What sort of gadget?"

  "A mechanical mind reader."

  "A what?"

  "Well, why not? The kernels clearly pick up telepathic signals. Why shouldn't the signals be interpretable, by a small computer, say?"

  I opened my mouth, closed it again as the potential repercussions of such a gadget echoed like heavy thunder through my mind. By necessity, each of us who'd had this gift/burden dropped on us had long ago thought out the consequences of misusing our power. The potential for blackmail, espionage of all kinds, or just simple invasion of privacy-I was personally convinced it was only our extremely limited number and the fact that we were thus easy to keep track of that had kept us from being locked up or killed outright. A mechanical device, presumably infinitely reproducible, would open up that entire can of
worms, permanently. "Forget it," I said, finding my voice at last. "Thanks for the shield; I'll give you your final pay before you leave." I turned to go back upstairs.

  killed outright. A mechanical device, presumably infinitely reproducible, would open up that entire can of worms, permanently. "Forget it," I said, finding my voice at last. "Thanks for the shield; I'll give you your final pay before you leave." I turned to go back upstairs.

  "A gold mine for whom? You and a select clientele of professional spies?"

  "It doesn't have to be that way," he protested. "Psychologists, for instance-mind readers would be a tremendous help in their work. Rescue teams could locate survivors in earthquakes or collapsed buildings. Doctors-"

  "What about bank robbers? Or terrorists? Or even nosy neighbors?" I shook my head. "What am I arguing for? The subject is closed."

  Green expelled his breath in a long, hissing sigh, and his expression seemed to harden in some undefinable way. "I'll have to collect my tools," he said stiffly.

  I hesitated, then nodded. "All right. I'll be upstairs writing your check."

  I didn't head up right away, though, but crossed instead to the dim corner where the fusebox was. The telepath shield I'd coveted for so long had abruptly become something that could be used against me, and I had no intention of letting Green leave here under its protection-I wanted to know whether he'd really given up or had something else up his sleeve. One of the peculiarities of this house was that the basement lights were all on one circuit and the outlets on another. Finding the proper fuse I pulled it... and across the basement, just barely within range, I felt Green's thoughts reappear. Simultaneously, drowning out that faint voice, came a frantic duet.

  Dale! Are you there, Dale; can you answer?

  Here I am, I said hastily. What's all the fuss?

  Oh, thank heaven. Colleen's thoughts were shaking with emotion. We thought something terrible had happened. Calvin and I have been trying to contact you for nearly five minutes.

  Another daymare? Calvin asked, trying to sound calmer than he really was. I didn't blame him; a daymare that had lasted that long would have been a real doozy.