Flicker of Doom

by Paul Kenyon

  Despite his rough appearance, Joe Skytop was one of the best fashion photographers in the business, with a sensitive eye for composition, texture and color. His thick, calloused fingers handled the cameras with the tenderness of a true artist, and there was no one like him when it came to coaxing the ultimate nuance of expression out of a tired and cranky model.

  "I beg your pardon, Monsieur," the chauffeur said hastily. "It is my mistake."

  But Skytop was already looking past the man. "Baroness! You look great! I hope I can pick up some of that glow for the beachwear pictures. Get in!"

  Fiona leaned out the window. She was an exquisite redhead with a complexion like milk. "Just in time, Baroness!" she said. "Eric was just about to give me a French lesson! Gawd!"

  Eric got out of the station wagon and held the door open for Penelope. He had a grin on his handsome Viking face. "I thought she'd better learn how to say non as well as oui," he said. "Put her at less of a disadvantage while she's in Paris."

  Eric was the Baroness' top male model, but he had brains as well as good looks. He spoke eight languages fluently, and he was a mathematical whiz. He was also a deadly barroom brawler. He had to be, with his face.

  The Baroness climbed in beside Skytop. "Let's go, Joseph," she said.

  Three hundred miles out in space, a brain weighing two thousand pounds willed itself to grow a disembodied arm. It groped toward earth with electromagnetic fingers and caught the Baroness by the wrist.

  The Baroness stiffened.

  "Something wrong?" Skytop said.

  The brain was named MESTAR, an acronym for Message Storage and Relay satellite. It had just been jogged awake by an entity it recognized as Key, and told to beam a message to another entity it knew as Coin.

  The message was picked up by a pea-size transponder inside the Baroness' gold wristwatch. A computer the size of a fingernail sorted out the digital pulses, and ordered a minuscule cesium battery to discharge.

  And the Baroness got a vicious little shock.

  "Hold it, Joseph," she said. She reached over and turned off the ignition.

  The shock came again. MESTAR was getting impatient.

  She pressed the stem of her wristwatch. The little computer rearranged light by changing planes of polarization. A picture formed on the face of the wristwatch.

  It was the Mona Lisa.

  The Baroness yawned. "It's too nice a day to work," she said. "I think I'll go to the Louvre."

  Skytop looked worried. "What about the Vogue pictures?"

  "Use Fiona and Yvette."

  "But the St. Laurent collection…"

  "Inga can do it. She's my size."

  "But…"

  The Baroness was already out of the station wagon, running across the square. Brakes squealed, and a Cadillac honked its horn at her. "Faites attention!" a voice shouted.

  "Resserrez les freins!" she called without looking round.

  Admiring male glances followed her as she hurried across the Rue de Rivoli into the Tuileries gardens. A flock of pigeons exploded into the air as she hurried past, and the old man who had been feeding them gave her a dirty look. The look changed to sudden attention as his eyes fastened on the bouncing of her breasts under the thin green dress, then faded to regret. "Not for you, old man," he reprimanded himself, and went back to feeding the pigeons.

  Penelope climbed the steps of the Louvre with long-legged strides, past the tourists with their cameras, to the gallery where they kept the Mona Lisa. She spotted the painting on the far wall, and walked across the enormous skylighted chamber toward it. There were only four or five tourists about, all of them at the far end of the room.

  She was awed, as always, by Leonardo's work. The eyes gazed out at her from across five centuries of time. The lips curved in that enigmatic smile. La Gioconda. What was she trying to say?

  "Hello, old girl," the Baroness whispered.

  The lips of the portrait moved. "Hello, Coin," she said.

  "You have a beautiful smile," Penelope said.

  "Thank you," said the Mona Lisa. "How would you like to go to Tangier?"

  It was all Penelope could do to keep from smiling herself. John Farnsworth was a very dignified man. You didn't expect him to have a sense of humor. But he must have gone to a great deal of trouble to make the lips move. Audio would have been sufficient. The optical effects were only necessary for transmitting pictures and diagrams.

  "First tell me how you're doing it, John," she said.

  The Mona Lisa's smile broadened. "It's no big deal," she said. "I had an artist make up about two dozen animation cells of the Mona Lisa's lips in different positions. The computer chooses the cells that match my words as I talk."

  "John, you're wicked."

  The Mona Lisa laughed. "Wait till you see what I did to the Brueghel at the Met."

  There was a doctored painting somewhere in a museum in every major city in the world. It was a handy way of making sure that you could transmit complex information at a moment's notice, wherever your agent happened to be.

  The Mona Lisa had been bugged after the vandalism incident in Japan, when the Louvre had sent it over on special loan. A young woman protester had splashed red paint over the picture before the guards could stop her. Fortunately, there was a transparent plastic shield. When the paint-splattered shield was replaced, Key and NSA had somehow managed to substitute one that was coated with a transparent film of light-emitting phosphors and microscope electrodes. The power source, receiver and FM transmitter with a ten-foot range were in the screws that held the shield to the frame.

  Only the Baroness could see the Mona Lisa's lips move, through the polarized lenses of her sunglasses. She heard the audio portion through the earpieces of the glasses. A miniature computer whose dust-mote components were scattered throughout the frame unscrambled both the audio and video signals.

  "What's this about Tangier?" the Baroness whispered.

  If the guard at the door noticed, he thought nothing of it. People often talked to the Mona Lisa. The month before, a young American man had even proposed marriage.

  Farnsworth's voice grew serious. "The President is about to risk his neck by going there. A conference with the Arab oil ministers. Very public. Washington wants you to minimize the risk."

  "Why can't the CIA handle it? They've infiltrated Al Fatah, Black September, the Habash gang and all the other terrorist splinter groups. They've practically got Arafat and the Palestine Liberation Organization on the payroll."

  "The CIA has a limited imagination. And some very peculiar things have been happening."

  "Show me."

  The Mona Lisa's face faded. Her folded hands dissolved into a Boeing 747 jumbo jet taking off — a television news clip. There were voices and confused noises — the cockpit recorder. "Lights, lights, flashing lights…" and another voice yelling: "Grab him, he's going crazy!" Then a huge explosion and billowing flames.

  "That was a flight from Barcelona to Tangier. The airline got a blackmail note from an outfit called the Pan-Arab Freedom Fighters. But the crash is listed as accidental. The CIA thinks it's a coincidence."

  There were more pictures. Another crash in Rome. An Arab politician having some kind of a fit in front of an audience — a minor incident that was included only because it had happened in Tangier. The Baroness frowned at that one. It reminded her of something… yes, the Gaston Leclerc incident she'd seen on television.

  There was more. Something that had happened aboard a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier. Sailors going crazy, fighting with one another, jumping overboard. And a mysterious raid on a NATO arms depot in Belgium. Still pictures taken afterward, showing dead or dazed and disoriented soldiers lying on the ground.

  The Mona Lisa's face appeared once more. She wasn't smiling.

  "They got away with a tactical nuclear bomb in that one," Farnsworth's grim voice said. "It may have been that PAFF outfit. Any ideas?"

  "There's one thing that ties it to the other incidents," the
Baroness said slowly. "The soldiers who were still alive looked as if they were recovering from some kind of epileptic fit."

  "The CIA thinks it was gas," Farnsworth said.

  "Gas doesn't work that way."

  "Well?"

  "I've got a few ideas. I'll get to work on it right away. What's my cover in Tangier?"

  The Mona Lisa turned into a magazine cover girl in a low-cut gown. It was an advertising layout. The headline said: "Look like a heavenly dream… with Angel-Face Cosmetics."

  The artist's sketch was a good likeness. The girl looked exactly like the Baroness.

  "You're the new AngelFace girl," Farnsworth's voice said. "Three quarters of a million for a package of magazine ads and TV commercials. The first location shots are in Tangier. Moorish backgrounds, the Mediterranean, that kind of thing."

  "I'm on my way," Penelope said. "Good-bye, darling."

  She looked at her own face, smiling enigmatically at her from the picture frame. The smile changed subtly, and then she was looking at the Mona Lisa again.

  A hand touched her arm. She turned around.

  "Daydreaming?" Morgan Manley said. "I don't blame you. She's almost as beautiful as you are."

  "Morgan!" she laughed. "How did you find me?"

  "That Indian cameraman of yours said you'd changed your mind about working. And the doorman at the Ritz said he thought he saw you heading for the Louvre."

  "Very clever of you, darling. For your reward, you can take me to lunch at Le Grand Vefour."

  "What do I get for dessert?"

  "Me."

  * * *

  "Life and death," Don Alejandro sighed. "We have only the power of life and death so far, my dear Doctor Funke. It's as crude as that. Where are the refinements?"

  In the shadows of the great hall, a chimpanzee shape stirred. A gutteral voice said: "Be patient, Don Alejandro. We can also induce emotional states. Fear. Rage…"

  "Fear!" Don Alejandro said scornfully. "Rage! Transitory effects of the psychomotor seizures! My great ancestor, the Inquisitor Don Luis de Otero, could cause fear by putting a man on the rack. But he would have disdained to describe the results as conversion or repentance. No, no, he broke men's bodies only as a means of saving their souls…"

  He gestured at the massive El Greco portrait among the paintings on the mortared stone wall. It showed a gaunt, elongated man with cruel eyes, in clerical robes, sitting as if on a throne. In one hand he held a crucifix; in the other, a scourge.

  Don Alejandro de Otero y Quimera looked a little like an El Greco portrait himself. He had the same stringy, stretched-out body, and the sunken face of an ascetic, with gaunt, hollow cheeks, a long aristocratic nose, thin lips and a waxy complexion.

  Doctor Funke grunted. He'd heard about Don Alejandro's ancestors before.

  "He used pain and fear simply as a means to alter men's perception of reality," Don Alejandro continued. "In the sixteenth century, of course, this could only mean their faith."

  "Ja, ja," Doctor Funke yawned.

  "Am I boring you?" Don Alejandro said sharply.

  Doctor Funke sat up straight. "No, no," he said hastily. "I am just tired. The long boat trip from France. I have had no sleep…"

  "Good. It would distress me to think that I was presuming on your attention. I was talking about altering one's perception of reality."

  "Reality, yes."

  Don Alejandro gave a thin smile. "So far, we have used our flashes of light simply to press switches in the brain. Mere mechanics. But think of it, my dear Doctor Funke, the retina of the eye is a part of the brain itself. The only part of the brain which lives in the outside world. Ninety percent of our information comes from this one sense. The brain's vision of reality is based upon what the eye allows it to see."

  "True, true. Unless one is a dog. Then one's vision of reality is based upon what the nose allows one to smell."

  "Are you being facetious, Doctor?"

  Funke's bald dome jerked in alarm. "No, no, of course not! I was just making a point…"

  He trailed off as Don Alejandro stared coldly at him.

  "That vision," Don Alejandro said finally "can be altered permanently. By a great painter, for example."

  He paused to look at the magnificent collection of paintings that hung on the shadowy walls. There were gaps where he'd sold off some of the pictures. One of them had been a life-size portrait by Velazquez of Don Alejandro's ancestor, the Eighth Duke of Otero.

  "Such power!" he whispered, fixing his eyes on the El Greco again. "From light! From nothing more than the arrangement of colors on canvas!"

  Doctor Funke shifted uncomfortably in the massive oak chair. His little feet dangled, not touching the floor. "Yes," he said. "Well, that's your business. You're a neurologist. I'm just an electronics specialist. You give me the specifications, and if your theories are correct, I will find a way to make them work."

  "You have no soul, Doctor," Don Alejandro laughed. "Ah, well, what can one expect from a German? You're a superb technician. I will use you as my tool, my paintbrush, to paint new pictures inside people's heads. How are you coming along on the visual maze?"

  "All finished," Doctor Funke said shortly. "The circuits are all installed. Of course, we can keep refining the computer programs as your research on the visual centers of the brain becomes more advanced."

  "Excellent, excellent. Well, I won't keep you any longer. You deserve a rest. But first, you must join me in a glass of sherry."

  He pulled the bell cord, and Sancho shambled in. He was dressed in livery: knee breeches and a yellow silk vest and billowing sleeves with lace cuffs.

  "Si, Don Alejandro?" he said.

  "Two glasses of sherry, Nino, por favor. Amontillado, from the third cask to the right of the door."

  "At once, Don Alejandro."

  Don Alejandro turned to Doctor Funke, who caught himself just in time to stifle a yawn. "It is a fine Amontillado — my last cask of it. The vineyard it came from once belonged to my family. Those dogs in Madrid and Paris took it away from me."

  Funke nodded, bleary-eyed.

  They were just raising their glasses when the alarm went off.

  Don Alejandro took a deliberate sip of the sherry, then set his glass down. "Ah, it seems we're to have an opportunity to test your system," he said.

  He climbed the broad stone steps to the tower, with Funke following at his heels. The computer room was kept locked. Don Alejandro stood aside while Funke twisted the great iron ring. The door was stuck. Funke put his apish shoulders to the massive oak paneling and it opened with a creak.

  The computers stood, tall and silent, in rows against the stone wall of the tower room. There were a lot of them. There had to be. Their adversary was the human brain. There was a lot of peripheral equipment, too — television monitors, memory units, input devices — arranged in neat Teutonic ranks.

  Doctor Funke pulled himself into a chair with his long arms, sitting on a thick dictionary so he could reach the console. He flipped switches, punched buttons. A row of color television monitors, mounted in a semicircle above the computer cabinets, came to life.

  "There he is," Funke said. "A Berber."

  They could see him plainly, in triplicate, on three of the screens: a seamed, bearded man in tattered robes. Doctor Funke zoomed in for a close-up of his face. The light-amplification device made the view as bright as day.

  "Filthy creature," Don Alejandro said. "He must have wandered down from the hills. The Berbers around here know enough to stay away from the villa."

  The man looked around furtively, then dropped the fifteen feet from the top of the wall.

  "Come to see what he can steal," Funke grunted.

  The cameras followed the intruder as he slunk through the gardens, looking nervously from right to left. He was probably wondering why there were no signs of life. He couldn't know that Don Alejandro had given strict orders that the flies who blundered into his web were not to be interfered with.

&nb
sp; "He's reached the perimeter of the maze now," Funke said unnecessarily.

  The man paused uncertainly at a border of ornamental plantings, looking across the open expanse he'd have to cross to get to the outbuildings. The darkness of the night gave him courage. He didn't know that the faint starlight, magnified a thousand times by Doctor Funke's electronic eyes, was shining on him with the brilliance of a searchlight.

  He started across the open area, crouching. Once it had, in fact, been a real garden maze, modeled after the Hampton Court Palace maze near London. The Hampton Court layout was familiar to Don Alejandro as a neurologist — it was the classic maze used in experiments with rats.

  But last week he'd ordered his gardeners to pull the hundred-year-old hedges out by the roots. He had something better than hedges now.

  "Position him for me, will you?" Don Alejandro said.

  The cameras drew back until they were looking at the Berber from high overhead. It was like watching an insect scuttle across a rug. Doctor Funke twisted a dial, and luminous lines, like a blueprint, made a grid across the scene. The grid was in the shape of the original maze.

  "He's just about where the first turn would have been," Don Alejandro said. "Quickly now — before he passes through the wall!"

  Funke's hairy hands flew across the console. On the screens, the Berber suddenly stopped, confused. When he resumed running, he was moving between the lines that were superimposed on the screen.

  "It works!" Doctor Funke said in surprise.

  "Of course it works. I have no idea what he thinks he's seeing, but it's suddenly become extremely unpleasant for him to cross those lines. When he gets too close, he experiences nausea, fear. His brain fills in a visual image to make it plausible to him. Some kind of barrier."

  "But so quickly!" Funke said.

  "How long does a dream take?" Don Alejandro said. "You live through an hour in a few seconds. And a part of that man's brain is in a state akin to REM sleep. His brain is trying to synchronize its rhythms with the flashes of light triggered by our computer program."