"Why won't you help us bring Starn back to you, dear?" asked Higgins.
Rob laughed dryly. "Sweet talk will get you nowhere," he said. "Cytherni's torn up by all this, and blames herself for what she thinks was a disloyal attitude toward her husband's work. Anyhow, she's determined to be on his side from now on."
"And she could help us, if she would?" Higgins asked.
"Yes. It's. . .it's rather complicated to explain to somebody who doesn't understand the Novo senses. But there is an emotional tie between parent and child, Higgins, that stays intact even when they're miles apart. It's something quite different from telepathy, and only serves as a line of communication in moments of great stress. But there are some of us who can help others use this linkage. That's the way we locate lost children who have wandered or have been carried out of telepathic range.
"But for it to work, the parent must actively desire the recovery of the child. In our case, Cytherni refuses to cooperate. She is willing to leave the boy with Starn."
"Well, I'm glad you're a reasonable enough man, Foser, to consider cooperation, even if Cytherni is not. Perhaps we can think of some other approach, if your people share your viewpoint."
"They do."
"Good. I'll leave these men and their flier near your Compound, if that meets your approval, while all of us give this matter more thought. I suggest that you try to convince Cytherni to help us, Foser, since she offers the only prospect we know of right now."
"That won't be easy," grumbled Rob.
The next day Rob sent for Cytherni.
"I'm not going to try to talk you into anything," he said, "but I want you to know of a thought that has come to me. You asked the other day why Starn left you here, and I said because you oppose him. That wasn't a very satisfactory, or true, answer, I realize now. You have your doubts about his work, but you are his wife, and in a pinch you would stand with him. You've been proving that. What's more, I think Starn would have known it all along.
"Then why did he leave you here? A number of us have been thinking about that, Cytherni, people who knew Starn well in the old days, and understand the kind of person he is, and how grim he can be when he's determined to do something.
"We've thought about it at length," he said, watching her face, "and the conclusion we've reached is more disturbing than anything else in this whole affair. He dumped you here, Cytherni, because his plans involve something you couldn't possibly approve. Something you would have to fight to prevent, even against your own husband.
"As to what that could be—well, Billy is the subject in Starn's experiments, the only subject with a strong Novo sense available to him. Now I'm sure Starn wouldn't do anything which he was convinced would be harmful to the boy, but he must have had something in mind that would be risky, at least. He's working in unexplored fields, where nobody knows what is and is not dangerous. So—"
"Stop it!" cried Cytherni, a wild look in her eyes. Rob's mouth twisted in an unhappy little smile of victory. He rose and led her across the Compound to the hut of Virnce, Starn's father, where the Pack's finder, an old man named Harnk, joined them very quickly. "She's ready?" Harnk asked.
Rob nodded. "She's ready." Harnk pointed to the paint-sculptured portrait of Billy. "Look at that," he told Cytherni. "You want to find your son? Yes . . . yes . . . indeed you do." He was silent for a moment, then looked up at Rob. "I need pen and paper."
Virnce produced the writing equipment and Harnk began sketching. "This is the aspect of a mountainside which catches the morning light. The boy can see it across a narrow valley. See how the rocks tilt in this double row of cliffs. The trees cover everything else. He sees a crestline that humps here and here, and dips here. He is sitting—or will be sitting when you find him—on a rock by a tent of Olsapern stuff, tall trees all around. The tent must be straight across the valley from this point on the mountain."
"Excellent, Harnk!" Rob applauded, looking over the old man's shoulder at the scrawly sketch. "Good work! Now, where's the mountain?"
Harnk shook his head. "I get no other impressions," he said.
Rob grunted in disappointment. "It's somewhere in the High Mountains, but you have no idea where?"
"No."
"Then how are we supposed to find the boy?"
Harnk lifted his shoulders. "Find the mountain, and the boy will be there."
"Yeah, find the mountain," parroted Rob in annoyance. "But who knows where a mountain that looks like that is located?"
Cytherni moved forward hesitantly and looked at the sketch. She did not recognize the mountain, of course, but its shape interested her as an artist. She recalled the massive triphoto geographical survey albums the Olsaperns had developed over the years, and which she had examined as part of her preparation to do landscapes. Probably the very mountainside Harnk had sketched was included in those albums.
Rob sighed. "I'd hoped we could handle this without the Olsaperns," he said, "but we'll need flier transportation, anyway. Somebody go tell the defensemen to bring the Higgins box in again."
4
"When are we going hunting, Daddy?" asked Billy.
"This afternoon," Starn replied. It was the day after they had chuted from the flier. Starn was relaxing in a folding chair while the boy played around the camp. He grinned at his son. "For someone who put in a hard day yesterday, you're awfully eager to start chasing coons."
"Oh, you did most of the work," Billy replied. "Are you tired today?"
"No, I'm just thinking."
"Oh. What about?"
"How to make your perception work better."
"It works good now, Daddy, with the needle rods. Can I take them along when we go hunting? I think I can find a coon with them. What does a coon look like?" Starn described the raccoon's appearance, and asked, "Does knowing what a coon looks like help you percept it?"
The boy thought about this before shaking his head.
"I don't think so. But that'll let me know what I've found when I've found one." Starn chuckled, and the boy said, "While you're thinking, let me take the needle rods and practice. Maybe there's a coon close by."
"O.K., but don't go far." Starn had misgivings about letting Billy out of sight in such wild country, but memories of himself running loose at the boy's age kept him from being too restrictive during outings such as this. He settled back into his chair, and his brow creased in a concentrated effort to think the problem out.
The trouble was that his unconscious just wasn't producing. Despite his reading of everything in Olsapern literature that pertained even slightly to the Novo senses, and his own numerous experiments with Billy and himself, his unconscious still seemed to lack the clues necessary to produce that sudden burst of insight. This meant that he was missing some basic point, he guessed, some key concept that had to be fed to his unconscious before the problem would be solvable. What was it?
About an hour later Billy returned, a little winded from climbing about the steep mountainside. "I didn't find a coon," he reported, "but I found two chipmunks. The needle rod works good for animals, even when I stand still and don't move it."
Starn nodded. Perception worked only in the presence of motion. The object could be moving, or the perceptor, or the percepting device in the perceptor's hands. The more motion the better. Probably that was why dowsing rods had traditionally been used more often to find underground water than for any other purpose. The water was moving, the dowser was walking more often than not, and when water was detected the rods moved. But this was a line of thought Starn had pursued often before, to no new conclusion. Motion might be basic to perception, but it didn't seem to be—at least not in any gross form—to the other Novo senses. That made it unlikely to offer the opening he seemed to need.
Billy got a drink of water, puttered about the camp for a few minutes, and sat down at last by Starn's chair.
"Can I help think, Daddy?" he asked.
"Maybe so, son," Starn smiled. "I could certainly use some help."
Billy nodded gravely, and wrinkled his brow in imitation of his father. But in short order he looked up to complain, "I have to know how percepting works before I can think about it."
"If I knew how it worked—" Starn began. He stopped and began trying to explain. "Perception is a sense, Billy, like seeing, hearing, tasting, smelling, and feeling. But not everybody has perception. That's the main reason it's called a Novo sense. There are others like it, such as being able to know what somebody else is thinking, called telepathy, or to know things that haven't happened yet, which is premonating.
"Now, people have all sorts of contrivances to extend their ability to see and hear—telescopes, microscopes, sound amplifiers, radios, infrared viewers, and so on. They have done less with smell, taste, and touch. They have made mechanical feelers that can tell a lot more about the feel of something than you could with your fingers, but these machines report their findings to our eyes and ears, so they're extensions of our sense of touch only indirectly. As for smell and taste, what they do with those is mostly to control what we smell and taste, to give us the ones we like and get rid of the ones we don't like.
"What I want to do is find ways to extend the Novo senses, the way telescopes and radios extend seeing and hearing. That's what the dowsing machine with the needle rods does for perception, but it doesn't do it very well. I want something much better than that."
Billy was silent for a while after Starn finished. Then he asked, "How do the regular senses work, Daddy?" Hiding a touch of impatience, Starn said, "Well, there are thousands of tiny nerve ends at the back of our eyeballs, and in our ears, and in our skin. When we open our eyes, light reflected from the things around us goes in and excites our eye nerves in different ways, and this pattern of excitements go to our brain which interprets them as an image of whatever we're looking at. Or a sound we hear is a vibration of the air in our ears, which makes little membranes and bones vibrate, too, and the ear nerves take the message of those vibrations to the brain. Or when we press a finger against something, like this piece of bark, for example, the nerves in our skin are excited, and the pattern of excitements tells the brain if we're feeling something smooth or rough, hard or soft, or cold or hot."
"That makes perception a lot like feeling and hearing," said Billy, "but not much like seeing, don't it?"
Starn blinked. "How is that?"
"Well, you got to move to touch something, or the air's got to move for you to hear something. But nothing has to move for you to see something."
"That's right," Starn grinned with amusement. "But seeing requires light, which is moving, although much too rapidly for you to be aware of it as motion. Light, like air vibrations, is energy, and all the senses, even smell and taste, need energy to make them work."
"Yeah, you need to breathe in the air to smell," agreed Billy wisely, "or put something in your mouth to taste it."
"I wasn't thinking of that, exactly," said Starn. "The food in your mouth and the smelly molecules in your nose have to undergo a chemical reaction with the liquid on your tongue or your nasal passage. They give up chemical energy to work your senses. In fact—"
Starn hesitated. It was not a new thought, exactly, that stopped him. It was an old one that had never come through to him quite so vividly before. "In fact," he repeated slowly, "it is energy, and not substance, that all our senses detect."
His mind was a whirl of activity. No wonder perception required motion, which was itself an aspect of energy. But what about telepathy? Brainwaves? Energy in the electromagnetic spectrum? That was hardly likely, or the Olsaperns would have devised a means of telepathic jamming long ago. Even a flash of lightning would create telepathic static if that were the case, and lightning did no such thing.
Also, gross motion could not be the only energy involved in perception. The motion had to set up an energy field of some sort; otherwise the motion could not be percepted at a distance. Whether or not this field was the same kind of energy that powered telepathy he couldn't guess. It could be the same, or it could be as different as a light photon is from a sound vibration.
And what about the energy that premonating would require—an energy that went backward through time? Well, weren't some subatomic particles time-reversible? He seemed to recall reading that they were, but that was an area of science that he knew little about.
The trouble was, he thought with frustration, there was precious little he understood about any science at all. Take the medium Cytherni used for her paint-sculptures, for instance: menergy. He understood what it was only in a very general, and, therefore, highly uninformative, way. Matrices of "solid" energy, or self-containing energy.
And that, he had a hunch, was something he definitely should understand, because as he had finally realized, the key to the secret of the Novo senses was hidden in the concept of energy, which made that a subject he couldn't know too much about!
Billy had to repeat his question before Starn heard him.
"Where are the perception nerve ends, Daddy?"
"Huh?"
"The seeing nerve ends are in the eyeballs, and the feeling nerve ends are in the skin. Where are the perception nerve ends?"
"Oh. I don't know. Perhaps all through us. Or perhaps those nerves end inside the brain, with no external sense organs. Maybe that's the difference between Novo and regular senses."
In which case Novo energy would have to be of a kind that passed readily through flesh and bone, like a ghostly type of X-ray.
Starn got up and went into the tent, where he rummaged around in the bottom of the chutepacks for several minutes before he found what he thought would be there somewhere. A pack of collapsed menergy matrices, of the small size used by Cytherni for quick outdoor sketches. He took one out and activated it, watching and feeling the way it expanded in his hand from a tiny gray wafer to a clearly transparent, slightly shimmering cube with eight-inch sides. Inside, near the center, he could see the pea-sized black sphere that powered the matrix. An eight-inch cube of energy . . . but what kind of energy? Starn's comprehension stopped far short of the answer to that. "Pure energy," one of the Olsaperns had told him, but what did "pure" mean when applied to energy? Wasn't light pure? Or relative motion? Obviously "pure" in this context had a specialized meaning that was a mystery to him.
Still carrying the menergy matrix, he went back to his chair. "Did you get an idea, Daddy?" Billy asked.
"Maybe the start of one. Let's let it rest a while and see. Right now, how about some lunch, then I'll show you how to handle a gun, and we'll do a little hunting."
"Oh, boy!" Billy exclaimed.
The next day Starn had enough tentative ideas to try some experiments. They were failures. Working from the analogy between ancient crystal-radio receivers versus powered electron-tube receivers—which had the advantage of being understandable to him—he tried to apply power to his dowsing machine circuit. The hope was to amplify the output, thus extending the device's range.
Not that he hadn't tried that before, but previously he had tried to energize the circuit with electricity. This time, working on the assumption that there might be something truly fundamental about the "pure" energy of a menergy matrix, he used a matrix as his power source. He tried every circuit arrangement he could imagine. Using techniques he had learned from watching his wife work, he even built a needle rod device completely inside a matrix, hoping to saturate it with the energy present there. It worked no better or worse than before.
He had to conclude that he was going about his job the wrong way. His device was not a detector like a radio receiver; the detector system was within the human perceptor. That, he realized with annoyance, should have been clear to him all along. The needle rod device was . . . well, an auxiliary device, an extension of the human "antenna" perhaps, plus a visual read-out unit. Or maybe it was analogous to a tuning coil. Or perhaps a tuned antenna.
There was a thought! If it were a tuning device, perhaps something very like it could be used to "tune" energy,
not for itself but for the central perception circuitry in the human brain!
Billy's restlessness and his own uncertainty of how to proceed caused him to put off further tests until the next day, and to go exploring with the boy. This was something he had to do, anyway, to familiarize himself quite thoroughly with the neighboring terrain. If, by some chance, the Olsaperns and/or the Pack men located him sooner than his scheme called for, he would have to know every possible route of escape from his camp area.
That night as he and Billy ate supper, the boy asked, "How long are we going to camp, Daddy?"
"I'm not sure," said Starn. Realizing that this was an insufficient answer he added, "You see, Billy, we're playing a game like hide-and-seek with Higgins, and with my old friends in Pack Foser. So we have to stay hidden until some of them find us. I don't know how long that will take."
"Oh," said Billy, obviously pleased to be playing a game with grown-ups, and as his father's teammate. "Do you guess they're hunting us right now?"
Starn smiled. "I'm quite sure they are, son," he said, "quite sure, indeed."
But, he wondered silently, are they hunting together or separately?
When he woke the following morning the solution was waiting for him. It unfolded in his conscious, rough-hewn to be sure, but complete. And as one often does when a simple answer finally dawns, he wondered why he had missed it before.
As soon as breakfast was over and Billy was off in pursuit of whatever mountain fauna he could scare up, Starn got to work again. Energy could be tuned to supplement that normally available to the perceptive circuitry in the human nervous system! The needle rod device could do it. His trouble before was that he had been trying to go in the wrong direction. The device was essentially a . . . not a filter, exactly, but something like that. The Olsaperns would have a proper descriptive word for it, but Starn was less interested in words than results. A filter took out what was not wanted, but his device catalyzed what was not wanted into what was. What he had to do was surround an energy source with this pseudo-filtering effect. The job was a tricky one for his amateur hands. It involved reshaping a cubical, leak-proof menergy matrix into one that was spherical and, therefore, thoroughly leaky, and enclosing the sphere with his pseudofilter. Actually, the effective circuitry surrounded not the sphere but the small central power source, and that made the fabrication process much simpler.
A Sense of Infinity Page 43