Psi Hunt

by Kurland, Michael

  PSI HUNT

  Michael Kurland

  © Michael Kurland 1980

  Michael Kurland has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

  First published in 1980 by Berkley Books, New York

  This edition published in 2017 by Venture Press, an imprint of Endeavour Press Ltd.

  Table of Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  The inner mysteries are shuttered well

  And it is pain to seek and Hell to know.

  They who know speak not, and they who tell

  Know not, and it is better so.

  My gift is to know what you do,

  My fate is to speak what I hear,

  My curse is to tell only true;

  My portion is hatred and fear.

  —Sibyl’s Lament

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  Chapter One

  The Plaza DiLauria Complex, the World’s largest hotel and convention center, was stuffed from the eighth subcellar to the rotating observation platform this Power Day weekend. With six great conventions running simultaneously, all 22,480 rooms in the one hundred and seventy story hotel tower were booked and all nineteen restaurants scattered through the complex were engorging and disgorging patrons at a rate that strained the central kitchen’s defrosting capacity.

  In room 34A-104, a small room with an excellent view of the North Jersey Pleasure Gardens, a thin girl of no more than sixteen or seventeen lay, naked, strapped to the queen-sized bed nearest the door. She was quiescent, her skinny arms and legs motionless on the coverlet; only occasional small motions of her head showed that she was still alive. Her eyes were open, staring, vacant.

  On the other bed a black cube, a quarter-meter on a side, sat and chuckled. Several thin plastic tubes stretched from the cube to needles in the girl’s arm. A dozen or so wires looped from the cube to patch-electrodes scattered on the girl’s head and chest. On the night table between the two beds a delicate voice-activated sound recorder listened electronically for the girl to speak, and when she did it rearranged the molecules on a length of tape to match the sound.

  She spoke often, in a variety of voices not her own. Sometimes she muttered softly, sometimes she lectured briefly in a high, whiny voice, sometimes she snapped commands to the empty room. Occasionally she screamed.

  “No more,” she called. “No more . . . no more . . . no more than forty thousand sigh!” She twisted and stared sightlessly out the double-sealed window. “Siren and tire,” she insisted in a deeper voice; “siren and tire, I say. And possibly air! And possibly air!” Then she cried racking sobs, soul-deep sobs from far inside her skinny body; long devoid of extra moisture, she had no tears.

  The security department of the Plaza DiLauria Complex had its collective hands full this Power Day weekend. The four-day weekends were always the worst, degenerating into mild chaos by the fourth day. Security was stretched thin, keeping the unwanted unpeople out, stopping fights between patrons up on booze-courage or hidust hype, seeing that only authorized, licensed pleasure girls and boys wandered the lobbies and game rooms of the complex, discouraging door-to-door missionaries from the True Life in Space sect or the Sibhood of Scientific Karma from tramping the halls and annoying the guests. They had to assume that whatever went on behind each of the 22,480 closed doors of the hotel was the guest’s own business, provided the door stayed closed.

  On the thirty-fourth floor, behind the stayed closed door of room 34A-104, the naked, skinny girl began to scream. After fifteen minutes someone walking by in the hall heard her dimly through the door. He kept walking. When he passed again, twenty minutes later, she was still screaming. He called hotel security.

  Forty minutes later a hotel security officer arrived at the door. The girl had stopped screaming by the time he arrived, and he hesitated in front of the door. It was a serious breach of hotel regulations, and the Innkeepers Code [New York State Rev. Stan. Act of 2012], for a security officer or other agent of the hotel to enter an occupied room without a specific invitation or a proximate cause. As he hesitated, the girl started screaming again. That was proximate cause enough for him. Without further ado, he palmed the door open.

  After a brief glance inside the room, the security officer retreated to the corridor, carefully not touching anything as he left; not the naked girl, not the chittering machine-cube, not anything. This was clearly beyond his authority. He called the security chief on the hall phone.

  The security chief took one look and called the police.

  Chapter Two

  Detective-Sergeant Grayfern pushed his regulation kepi back over his balding head. “This report,” he said, “was taken by the first officer to arrive on the scene. It’s not very good, but it’s better than we had any right to expect. After all, the patrolman was just supposed to keep things under control until a detective could arrive, not make detailed studyprints.”

  “I understand,” Lieutenant, J.G. Robert Burrows said, leaning his metal chair back on its two hind legs.

  “In principle the sooner a detailed report is made, the better,” Grayfern said, “but in practice we’d have every civil rights group in the country down our necks if an officer just stood there taking pictures instead of untying the victim or giving artificial respiration or calling an ambulance or whatever. Usually that’s the right thing to do, anyway. Respect for human life and dignity and all that sort of thing. How was the officer supposed to know that the gizmo on the bed was going to burn up?”

  “You did right,” Lieutenant Burrows said.

  “Regulation,” Grayfern said. “Always follow regulation in the police department.”

  “The Navy too, Sergeant,” Burrows said. “We have no complaints with your department. You did very well. Can I look at the film?”

  “Hit it, Nancy!” the sergeant called. The room went dark and the front wall lit up with the projection of two-millimeter report film.

  Answering a call, the flat-toned narration of the patrolman began, as the scene showed an opening door, at the Plaza DiLauria Complex, floor thirty-four. Report number three, swing shift, twenty-two-thirty hours, Monday, March ninth, Twenty-thirty three.

  As reported, there is a female tied up on the near bed. I am untying her. The film showed action and motion, but there was too little light in the room to make out details. Miss? Miss? Can you hear me? Everything’s going to be all right, Miss. I have sent for an ambulance. Can you tell me what you’re doing here?

  The ceiling light was turned on at that moment. A green hotel wall with a framed painting of a yellow ship on a purple ocean came into view. Subject female cannot hear me, or, at least, cannot respond. Might be catatonic. A
pparatus of some sort attached to subject’s arm. I will not attempt to remove it.

  The camera now swung around to show the entire room: two beds, two chairs, two bureaus, a writing-desk, a mirror that faded through to a holo stage on command; a marble sink with golden diving-fish faucets. On the far bed was a quarter-meter square box which seemed to chuckle softly to itself. On the near bed was a thin, gaunt, naked girl, who looked about sixteen. Her skin was sickly-white, except for wide red bands that marked where the canvas straps had held her down. She moved her lips, and a hoarse whisper was picked up by the microphone button. “Siren—and tire—and—possibly—air.” And then, after a long pause, “no more than forty thousand sigh. . . .” and her lips closed.

  The camera moved in closer. A band around the girl’s right upper forearm was connected by several thumb-thick green plastic tubes to the square black box on the other bed. Various wires scattered out from the box to selected places on the girl’s head and chest.

  I have no idea of this apparatus’s function. The ambulance should be along any time now. I will let the ambulance crew handle this. I will stay at the door and send the floor housekeeper for something to warm the girl.

  The camera moved in for one last quick closeup of the black box, and the film ended.

  *

  “That’s it,” the sergeant said. “Got some good stills from the detective squad, but that was after it blew. Like I said, if we’d had any idea—but there you are! When the ambulance crew arrived no one could figure out what the armband and the green hose were for, so they pulled it off. About thirty seconds later the black box blew. No shrapnel or anything,—Nancy, put the lights on, please—just a sort of burping sound and the box got red-hot and crumpled up.”

  “Thank you, Sergeant,” Robert said, blinking slightly as the lights came up. He smoothed down his small, neat mustache for a moment while he thought things over. “Would you send what’s left of the box over to the Bureau lab?”

  “Sure thing. The captain says to give you whatever you want. Nothing much is left, but you’re welcome to make what you can out of it. I tell you it will be an absolute pleasure.”

  “What about the band that was around the girl’s arm and that bunch of wires?”

  “Some kind of sensors,” the sergeant said. “And some kind of liquid being metered into the girl’s arm through a couple of small flexible needles. Most of it’s melted down; I don’t know whether you can get anything from it or not. I’ll box everything we’ve got and send it along.”

  “Thanks a lot, Sergeant. You’ve been a big help.” Robert pushed himself out of the metal chair. “I’ll get over to the hospital now; see if the girl’s got anything to say.”

  “Last I heard she wasn’t talking. Just that one phrase, and since then nothing. All kinds of mumbling, you know, but none of it makes sense.”

  “What I heard didn’t make much sense either,” Robert said. “What was it—‘siren, tire, air’?”

  “That’s what it sounded like to the patrolman. That’s what it sounds like to me. And something about forty thousand sighing. Hasn’t said anything else. Mumbles to herself in what could be a language, but nobody at the hospital can figure out what it is—if it is.”

  “What about that tape recorder?” Robert asked. “Was there anything on that?”

  “Now that’s interesting,” Sergeant Grayfern said. “We’ve timed it out, and from what we can figure, the tape was put on shortly before the girl’s screaming was reported to hotel security.”

  “You mean there’s nothing on it but screaming?”

  “And the words you’ve already heard. She repeated them a lot, for whatever good that does. But that’s not the point. The point is that, from the time the screaming was reported until the hotel security man entered the room, there was someone outside the door. And there’s only one exit.”

  “The door.”

  “Right. And that means that whoever changed the tape, or turned the machine on, did it right before the girl was heard screaming.”

  “Great, Sergeant,” Burrows said. “What does that tell you?”

  “I’m not sure,” Grayfern said. “But it ought to mean something to someone.”

  “I don’t understand any of it,” Burrows said.

  Sergeant Grayfern shook his head. “It’s weird I tell you, Lieutenant. Look here: first this kid, naked, in a room in a hotel which turns out to be registered to someone who nobody ever saw. Then that machine, which blows up before we can get a look at it. Then she don’t talk anything we can understand but ‘siren-tire-air,’ if that is what she said. Then we do a routine fingerprint check and she ain’t listed. Not only that, but there’s another set of fingerprints we lift off stuff in the room, and that ain’t listed. Now there’s something. Everyone’s listed! Everyone under forty for sure.”

  “Only if they were born here,” Burrows reminded the sergeant.

  “Oh, yeah? How do they get across the border without being fingerprinted?”

  “Oh,” Robert said. “You have a point.”

  “Weird,” the sergeant insisted. “And then there’s you, Lieutenant.”

  “Me?”

  “Yeah. What are you doing here?”

  “The floor the girl was on,” Burrows explained, “was assigned to the convention of the John Paul Jones Society, which is largely made up of Navy brass. Some of that brass decided the girl was there to steal Navy secrets. Which is why Naval Intelligence. Which is why me.”

  “How could a girl strapped to a bed steal anybody’s secrets?” the sergeant asked. “And what kind of secrets could the Navy have, anyhow?”

  Burrows smiled. “To tell you the truth, Sergeant, I can’t answer either of those questions. I wish I could.”

  Chapter Three

  Lieutenant, Junior Grade Robert Burrows was starting his sixth year in the United States Navy and his fourth in Naval Intelligence. In a few weeks he would begin his second year attached to Naval Security Detachment One, North Atlantic Command Intelligence Division. Or, as it was known in the Navy: NAVSECDET ONE, NORATCOM INTDIV. This was the designation for the office of Naval Intelligence located in New Government Plaza, which ran from 130th to 135th Streets and from Amsterdam to Columbus Avenues in New York City.

  What it meant to Robert Burrows was a dead-end assignment in a useless branch of a redundant service. “The ferchrissake Navy!” his uncle called it; as in: “What the hell did you join the ferchrissake Navy for?” Robert’s uncle, Colonel Lemuel Burrows, United States Air Force Space Service, was an opinionated man.

  “The Navy,” Robert had told him earnestly, standing as tall as he could in his bright new ensign’s uniform, “has a long and honorable history.”

  “Yup,” his uncle had agreed. “So does the dildo.”

  That had ended the conversation.

  Robert knew what his uncle meant. A navy without ships is like a bathtub without water; it has its uses, but they’re unnatural. And the United States Navy approached this ideal more closely with each passing year.

  After World War II the battleship—queen of the fleet—became extinct, after proving easy prey for the dive bomber. The fossilized remains of a few examples of the species were still on display in their name-states. And, of course, there was still one resting upside-down in the middle of Pearl Harbor.

  Next the aircraft carriers went. Too slow, too big, too expensive to support properly, too vulnerable to missile attack; they faded away. This alarmed the traditionalists. “Can’t have a Navy without aircraft carriers,” said the spiritual grandchildren of the admirals who had laughed at Billy Mitchell.

  But the heart of the Navy, as everyone knew, was the submarine. And they built more, larger, faster, deeper-diving sub-marines every year.

  Until the Treaty of Addis Ababa.

  In 2002 the great powers of the world agreed to limit armed vessels capable of submerging to non-atomic-powered ships of under five hundred tons, unequipped to fire missiles. It was a great step forward
for World peace. And the heart was cut out of the Navy. The International Petrochemical Council ran larger submarines—with civilian crews and United Nations observers—than the U.S. Navy.

  Robert knew all this. And he knew that the only branch of the military worth a career in these days was the Space Service. But how could he tell his uncle that? And how could he tell his uncle that he had applied and been turned down?

  Candidate Burrows:

  On behalf of the commander I would like to thank you for your application for appointment as Cadet in the United States Air Force Space Service Academy.

  Under paragraph 6 (revised) of the USAFSS Enabling Act, Personnel Code, as orphan son of a Space Service officer who died in the line of duty, you are entitled to apply for a direct appointment to the Corps of Cadets if your educational records are up to the required standards.

  Upon reviewing your school records and the results of your competitive examination, we are unable to accept your application at this time.

  This in no way reflects on your ability to get a commission in the Air Force itself, or in any other branch of the Armed Forces.

  Good luck in whatever career you choose for yourself.

  Sincerely yours,

  Richard Travis

  Capt. Rec. Off. USAFSS

  For the Commander

  Robert had been unable to accept that, and had written back asking why he had been turned down.

  Dear Mr. Burrows,

  Under the full disclosure act we are required to give you a complete answer to your last letter. I have also taken it upon myself to make a more personal reply.

  I, of course, know your uncle, Colonel Lemuel Burrows. He has served in my command and is a fine officer.

  I also knew your father.

  You test very much the way he would have. In raw intelligence and initiative you’re almost off the board. In most of the specialty tests you score high enough for a career rating, and you’re below Plus One only in Foreign Language Assimilation and Code Pattern Recognition, peripheral skills for a Space Officer.