by Larry Niven
"There are prisoners missing. You know that?" He didn't wait for the mechanic's answer. "Find Bessie's serial number and description and give them to my secretary. If you find Bessie, call my office. For the moment I'm going to assume the car is stolen."
The mechanic turned and ran toward an office. Jesus Pietro used his handphone to issue instructions regarding a possible stolen car.
Jansen came back on the line. "One rebel dead, sir. That leaves five missing." He listed them.
"All right. It's beginning to look like they took a car. See if the wall guards saw one leaving."
"They'd have reported it, sir."
"I'm not so certain. Find out."
"Sir, the carport was attacked. The guards had to report five prisoners stealing an aircar during a mob attack!"
"Jansen, I think they might have forgotten to. You understand me?" There was steel in his voice. Jansen signed off without further protest.
Jesus Pietro looked up at the sky, rubbing his moustache with two fingers. A stolen car would be easy to find. There were no crew pleasure-cars abroad now, not in the middle of Millard Parlette's speech. But they might have landed it. And if a car had been stolen in full view of the wall guards, it had been stolen by ghosts.
That would fit admirably with the other things that had been happening at the Hospital.
8: Polly's Eyes
Geoffrey Eustace Parlette's house was different inside. The rooms were big and comfortable, furnished in soft good taste. They were innumerable. Toward the back were a pool table, a small bowling alley, an auditorium and stage with pull-down movie screen. The kitchen was the size of Harry Kane's living-room. Matt and Laney and Lydia Hancock had moved through the entire house with stun guns at the ready. They had found no living thing, barring the rugs and the no-less-than-six housecleaner nests.
Lydia had threatened force to get Matt to return to the living room. He wanted to explore. He'd seen incredible bedrooms. Hobbyists' bedrooms ...
In a living room two stories tall, before a vast false fireplace whose stone logs showed red electrical heat where they touched, the five survivors dropped into couches. Harry Kane still moved carefully, but he seemed almost recovered from the stunner that had caught him in the Hospital. Hood had his voice back, but not his strength.
Matt slumped in the couch. He wriggled, adjusting his position, and finally put his feet up. It was good to feel safe.
"Tiny hearts and livers," said Hood.
"Yah," said Matt.
"That's impossible."
Harry Kane made a questioning noise.
"I saw them," said Matt. "The rest of it was pretty horrible, but that was the worst."
Harry Kane was sitting upright. "In the organ banks?"
"Yes, dammit, in the organ banks. Don't you believe me? They were in special tanks of their own, makeshift-looking, with the motors sitting in the water next to the organs. The glass was warm."
"Stasis tanks aren't warm," said Hood.
"And Implementation doesn't take children," said Harry Kane. "If they did, I'd know it."
Matt merely glared.
"Hearts and livers," said Harry. "Just those? Nothing else?"
"Nothing I noticed," said Matt. "No, wait. There were a couple of tanks just like them. One was empty. One looked ... polluted, I think."
"How long were you in there?"
"Just long enough to get sick to my stomach. Mist Demons, I wasn't investigating anything! I was looking for a map!"
"In the organ banks?"
"Lay off," said Laney. "Relax, Matt. It doesn't matter."
Mrs. Hancock had gone to find the kitchen. She returned now, with a pitcher and five glasses. "Found this. No reason we shouldn't mess up the place, is there?"
They assured her there wasn't, and she poured for them.
Hood said, "I'm more interested in your alleged psychic powers. I've never read of anything like you've got. It must be something new."
Matt grunted.
"I should tell you that anyone who believes in the so-called-psi powers at all usually thinks he's psychic himself." Hood's tone was dry, professional. "We may find nothing at all."
"Then how did we get here?"
"We may never know. Some new Implementation policy? Or maybe the Mist Demons love you, Matt."
"I thought of that, too."
Mrs. Hancock returned to the kitchen.
"When you tried to sneak up to the Hospital," Hood continued, "you were spotted right away. You must have run through the electric-eye net. You didn't attempt to run?"
"They had four spotlights on me. I just stood up,"
"Then they ignored you? They let you walk away?"
"That's right. I kept looking back, waiting for that loudspeaker to say something. It never did. Then I ran."
"And the man who took you into the Hospital. Did anything happen just before he went insane and ran back to the gatehouse?"
"Like what?"
"Anything involving light — "
"No."
Hood looked disappointed. Laney said, "People seem to forget about you."
"Yah. It's been like that all my life. In school the teacher wouldn't call on me unless I knew the answer. Bullies never bothered me."
"I should have been so lucky," said Hood.
Laney wore the abstracted look of one tracing an idea.
"The eyes," said Harry Kane, and paused for thought. He had been listening without comment, in the attitude of The Thinker, jaw on fist, elbow on knee. "You said there was something strange about the guards' eyes."
"Yah, I don't know what. I've seen that look before, I think, but I can't remember — "
"What about the one who finally shot you? Anything odd about his eyes?"
"No."
Laney came out of her abstraction with a startled look. "Matt. Do you think Polly would have gone home with you?"
"What the Mist Demons does that have to do with anything?"
"Don't get mad, Matt. I've got a reason for asking."
"I can't imagine —"
"That's why you called in the experts."
"All right, yes. I thought she was going home with me."
Then she suddenly turned and walked away."
"Yah. The bitch just — " Matt swallowed the rest of it. Not until now, when he could feel his pain and rage and humiliation in bearable retrospect, did he realize how badly she'd stung him. "She walked away like she'd remembered something. Something more important than me, but not particularly important for all that. Laney, could it have been her hearing aid?"
"The radio? ... No, not that early. Harry, did you tell Polly anything by radio that you didn't tell the rest of us?"
"I told her I'd call for her speech at midnight, after everyone had gone home. They could hear it through the radios. Otherwise, nothing."
"So she had no reason to drop me," said Matt. "I still don't see why we have to dig into this."
"It's strange," said Hood. "It can't hurt to look at anything strange in your young life."
Laney said, "Did you resent it?"
"Damn right I did. I hate being left flat like that, toyed with and then dropped."
"You didn't offend her?"
"I don't see how I could have. I didn't get drunk tell afterward."
"You told me its happened before like that."
"Every time. Every damn time, until you. I was virgin until Friday night." Matt looked belligerently around him. Nobody said anything. "That's why I can't see how it helps to talk about it. Dammit, it isn't unusual in my young life."
Hood said, "Its unusual in Polly's young life. Polly's not a tease. Am I wrong, Laney?"
"No. She takes her sex seriously. She wouldn't make a play for someone she didn't want. I wonder .... "
"I don't think I was kidding myself, Laney."
"Neither do I. You keep saying something was strange about the guards' eyes. Was there anything strange about Polly's eyes?"
"What are you getting at?"<
br />
"You claim every time you're getting ready to lose your virginity to a girl, she drops you. Why? You aren't ugly. You probably don't have the habit of being grossly impolite. You weren't with me. You bathe often enough. Was there something about Polly's eyes?"
"Dammit, Laney ... Eyes." Something changed in Polly's face. She seemed to be listening to something only she could hear. She certainly wasn't looking at anything; her eyes went past him and through, him, and they looked blind ...
"She looked abstracted. What do you want me to say? She looked like she was thinking of something then she walked away."
"Was it sudden, this loss of interest? Did she — "
"Laney, what do you think? I drove her away deliberately?" Matt jumped to his feet. He couldn't take any more; he was wires stretched on a bone frame, every wire about to break. Nobody had ever so assaulted his privacy! He had never imagined that a woman could share his bed, listen in sympathy to all the agony of the secrets that had shaped his soul, and then spill everything she knew into a detailed, clinical roundtable discussion! He felt like one who has been disassembled for the organ banks, who, still aware, watches a host of doctors probing and prodding his separated innards with none-too-clean hands, hears them making ribald comments about his probable medical and social history.
And he was about to say so, in no mild terms, when he saw that nobody was looking at him.
Nobody was looking at him.
Laney was staring into the artificial fire; Hood was looking at Laney; Harry Kane was in his Thinker position. None of them were really seeing anything, at least not anything there in the room. Each wore an abstracted look.
"One problem," Harry Kane said dreamily. "How the blazes are we going to free the rest of us, when only four of us escaped?" He glanced around at his inattentive audience, then went back to contemplating his navel from the inside.
Matt felt the hair stir on his head. Harry Kane had looked right at him, but he certainly hadn't seen Matt Keller. And there was something very peculiar about his eyes.
Like a man in a wax museum, Matt bent to look into Harry Kane's eyes.
Harry jumped as if he'd been shot. "Where the blazes did you come from?" He stared as if Matt had dropped from the ceiling Then he said, "Umm ... oh! You did it."
There wasn't a doubt of it. Matt nodded. "You all suddenly lost interest in me."
"What about our eyes?" Hood seemed about to spring at him, he was so intense.
"Something. I don't know. I was bending down to see, when" — Matt shrugged — "it wore off."
Harry Kane used a word.
Hood said, "Suddenly? I don't remember its being sudden."
"What do you remember?" Matt asked.
"Well, nothing, really. We were talking about eyes — or was it about Polly? Sure, Polly. Matt, did it bother you to talk about it?"
Matt growled in his throat.
"Then that's why you did whatever you did. You didn't want to be noticed."
Probably.
Hood rubbed his hands briskly together. "So. We know you've got something, anyway, and it's under your control. Your subconscious control. Well!" Hood became a professor looking around at his not-too-bright class. "What questions are still unanswered?
"For one, what do the eyes have to do with anything? For another, why was a guard eventually able to shoot you and store you away? For a third, why would you use your ability to drive girls away?"
"Mist Demons, Hood! There's no conceivable reason — '
"Keller."
The voice was a quiet command. Harry Kane was back in Thinker position on the couch, staring off into space. "You said Polly looked abstracted. Did we look abstracted a moment ago?"
"When you forgot about me? Yah."
"Do I look abstracted now?"
"Yah. Wait a minute." Matt stood up and walked around Harry, examining him from different sides. He should have looked like a man deep in thought. Thinker position: chin on fist, elbow on knee; face lowered, almost scowling; motionless; eyes hooded ... Hooded? But clearly visible.
"No, you don't. There's something wrong."
"What?"
"Your eyes."
"Round and round we go," Harry said disgustedly. "Well, get down and look at my eyes, for the Mist Demons' sake!"
Matt knelt on the indoor grass and looked up into Harry's eyes. No inspiration came. A wrongness there, but where? ... He thought of Polly on Friday night, when they stood immersed in noise and elbows, and talked nose-to-nose. They'd touched from time to time, half accidentally, hands and shoulders brushing ... He'd felt the warm blood beating in his neck ... and suddenly —
"Too big," said Matt. "Your pupils are too big. When somebody really isn't interested in what's going on around him, the pupils are smaller."
"What about Polly's eyes?" Hood probed. "Dilated or contracted?"
"Contracted. Very small. And so were the guards' eyes, the ones who came for me this morning." He remembered how surprised they'd been when he yanked on the handcuffs, the handcuffs that still dangled from his wrists. They hadn't been interested in him; they'd merely unlocked the chains from their own wrists. And when they'd looked at him — "That's it. That's why their eyes looked so funny. The pupils were pinpoints."
Hood sighed in relief. "Then that's all of it," he said, and got up. "Well, I think I'll see how Lydia's doing with dinner."
"Come back here." Harry Kane's voice was low and murderous. Hood burst out laughing.
"Stop that cackling," said Harry Kane. "Whatever Keller's got, we need it. Talk!"
Whatever Keller's got, we need it .... Matt felt he ought to protest. He didn't intend to be used by the Sons of Earth. But he couldn't interrupt now.
"It's a very limited form of telepathy," said Jay Hood. "And because it is so very limited, it's probably more dependable than more general forms. Its target is so much less ambiguous." He smiled. "We really ought to have a new name for it. Telepathy doesn't apply, not quite."
Three people waited patiently but implacably.
"Matt's mind," said Hood, "is capable of controlling the nerves and muscles which dilate and contract the iris of another man's eye." And he smiled, waiting for their response.
"So what?" asked Harry Kane. "What good is that?"
"You don't understand? No, I suppose you don't. It's more in my field. Do you know anything about motivational research?"
Three heads waggled No.
"The science was banned on Earth long, long ago because its results were being used for immoral advertising purposes. But they found out some interesting things first. One of them involved dilation and contraction of the pupil of the eye.
"It turns out that if you show a man something and measure his pupil with a camera, you can tell whether it interests him. You can show him pictures of his country's political leaders, in places where there are two or more factions, and his eyes will dilate for the leader of his own. Take him aside for an hour and talk to him, persuade him to change his political views, and his pupils will dilate for the other guy. Show him pictures of pretty girls, and the girl he calls prettiest will have dilated pupils. He doesn't know it. He only knows she looks interested. In him.
"I wonder," said Hood, smiling dreamily at himself. Some people love to lecture. Hood was one. "Could that be the reason the most expensive restaurants are always dark? A couple comes in, they look at each other across a dinner table, and they both look interested. What do you think?"
Harry Kane said, "I think you'd better finish telling us about Keller."
"He has," said Laney. "Don't you see? Matt's afraid of being seen by someone. So he reaches out with his mind and contracts the man's pupils whenever he looks at Matt. Naturally the man can't get interested in Matt."
"Exactly." Hood beamed at Laney. "Matt takes a reflex and works it in reverse to make it a conditioned reflex. I knew light had something to do with it. You see, Matt? It can't work unless your victim sees you. If he hears you, or if he gets a blip when you cro
ss an electric-eye beam — "
"Or if I'm not concentrating on being scared. That's why the guard shot me."
"I still don't see how it's possible," said Laney. "I helped you do your research on this, Jay. Telepathy is reading minds. It operates on the brain, doesn't it?"
"We don't know. But the optic nerve is brain tissue, not ordinary nerve tissue."
Harry Kane stood up and stretched. "That doesn't matter. It's better than anything the Sons of Earth have put together. It's like a cloak of invisibility. Now we have to figure out how to use it."
The missing car was still missing. It was nowhere in the Implementation garages; it had not been found by the search squad, neither in the air nor on the ground. If policeman had taken it out for legitimate purposes, would have been visible; if it had not been visible, it would have been in trouble of some kind, and the pilot would have phoned a Mayday. Apparently it really had be stolen.
To Jesus Pietro, it was disturbing. A stolen car was one thing; an impossible stolen car was another.
He had associated Keller with miracles: with the miracle that had left him unhurt when his car fell into the void mist, with the miracle that had affected Hobart's memory last night. On that assumption he had sounded the "Prisoners Loose." And, lo! there were prisoners running amok in the corridors.
He had associated missing prisoners with a missing car with the miracles of Keller. Thus he had assumed a stole car where no car could have been stolen. And, lo! a car had indeed been stolen.
Then Major Jansen had called from the vivarium. No body had noticed, until that moment, that the sleep helmets were still running. How, then, had ninety-eight prisoners walked away?
Miracles! What the blazes was he fighting? One man, many? Had Keller been passenger or driver of that car? Had there been other passengers? Had the Sons of Earth discovered something new, or was it Keller alone?
That was an evil thought. Matthew Keller, come back from the void in the person of his nephew to haunt his murderer ... Jesus Pietro snorted.