Two minutes later Kenneth James had finished photographing the entire chapter and its accompanying appendices with the tiny microdisk camera. He wrapped the device in a handkerchief to help protect it, then zipped it safely away in his leg pocket, out of sight so no one would be tempted to ask to borrow his “pen.”
Satisfied, he packed up his charts and books and turned them back to the vault custodian. He would put the camera in his car outside the alert facility to prevent discovery during one of the commander’s frequent no-notice locker searches on the alert pad, then deliver it to the prearranged drop point for his KGB contact from St. Louis after he got off seven-day alert.
Dreamland, Nevada
Ken James was strapped securely into a stiff, uncomfortable steel chair, wrists, ankles and chest bound by heavy leather straps. His head was immobilized by a strong steel beam. The room where he lay on the rack was dimly lit, buzzing with the sound of power transformers and smelling of the ozone created by electronic relays and microcircuits. Two men in Air Force blue fatigues rechecked his bonds, making sure they were extra tight; one of them adjusted a tiny spotlight directly onto James’ right eyeball, smiling as James tried to squint against the glare. The sergeant knew there was nothing James could do to him.
James had been sweating in the steel chair for nearly an hour, the two technicians hovering over him, before another man entered the room. Tall and lanky, he looked considerably older than his mid-thirties, thanks to a bald head and a few stray shocks of gray hair that seemed to be haphazardly stuck onto his skull. He spoke briefly with the techs, then walked over to the rack and inspected the fitting and bonds. He stuck his face close to James, smiled and said, “Now, Captain James, I’ll ask you once more — where were you on the afternoon of August eleventh?”
In fact, Ken James was photographing top-secret documents in a vault at McConnell Air Force Base in Kansas. He rolled his eyes in exasperation. “Very funny, Dr. Carmichael. Now can we get on with this?”
“Couldn’t help it, Ken,” Alan Carmichael, the white-coated researcher, said. “Seeing you trussed up gives this place the look of some futuristic interrogation chamber.”
Which was precisely what Maraklov was thinking himself. He was wearing a heavy suit made of thick metallic fabric. The suit had several thick cables and conduits sewed into it that ran all through his arms, legs, feet, hands and neck. A raised metal spine ran along his backbone from head to tail, so thick that a channel had been cut into the chair to accommodate it. There was a bit of cool circulating air flowing through tubules in the suit, but it did little to relieve the oppressive heat and stuffiness.
“Have you been practicing your deep breathing exercises?” Carmichael asked.
“Don’t have a choice. I either breathe deep in this getup or I suffocate. Are you ever going to tell me exactly what I’m supposed to be doing?”
“Try to relax and I’ll tell.” Carmichael adjusted the volume of a small speaker next to a nearby oscilloscope-like device; the speaker began to chirp in a seemingly random pattern. Carmichael motioned to one of twenty-five lines on the oscilloscope. “Your twenty-five cps beta readouts are still firing. Relax, Ken. Don’t try to force it or it won’t come.”
“What won’t come?” Carmichael said nothing. Ken began to take deeper breaths, trying to ignore the sweat trickling down his back and the cramp in his right calf. After a few moments, the chirping subsided. Progress?
“Very good,” Carmichael said. “Beta is down … your Hertz waves are increasing. Good. Occipital alpha is increasing. Good. Keep it up.” He turned and with the help of one of the techs lifted a huge device off a carrying cart that he had brought in with him.
“What the hell is that?” James asked as the huge object was lifted overhead. It was hexagonal, and two wide visors in the front and cables leading to various parts of the suit and to controls and boxes nearby.
“Your new flight helmet,” Carmichael said. “The final component of the suit you’re wearing. The project is progressing so well, we’ve decided to proceed with a full-scale test.”
“Test of what …?”
“Wait.” Carmichael slid the heavy helmet over Ken’s head. “Watch the ears, damn it.”
“Watch your beta — you’re pinging again.” The helmet was set into place and fastened to a heavy clavicle locking ring on the metallic suit. The braces holding Ken’s head in place took some of the helmet’s weight, but his shoulders were aching after only a few moments.
A microphone clicked on, and through a set of headphones in the helmet came: “How do you hear me, Ken?”
“I think you broke my left ear off.”
“You’ll live. Try to relax and I’ll explain.” Carmichael’s voice dropped into the familiar deep, even monotone that he had used weeks earlier during several days of screening: in fact, Carmichael was hypnotizing him, not with a shiny watch on a chain, but with his voice only. James’ susceptibility to hypnotic suggestion had made him an especially good candidate for this secret project.
“As you know, we’ve been working here at Dreamland with several projects. We call them all together ‘supercockpit’ designing an aircraft workspace that allows the pilot to perform better in a high-speed, high-density combat environment. You and several other pilots were working with Cheetah, the F-15 advanced technology fighter demonstrator; that’s the state of the art, and her systems will be incorporated in the Air Force’s new fighter in the next few years. Cheetah makes extensive use of multi-function computer screens, voice-recognition and artificial intelligence, as well as high-maneuverability technology … Wall, we’ve been working on the next generation of fighters after Cheetah, things like forward-swept wing technology, hyper-start engines, super-conducting radar. But the most fascinating aspect of the new generation of fighters will be ANTARES — that’s an acronym for Advanced Neural Transfer and Response.”
“Neural transfer? Sounds like Buck Rogers thought-control stuff.” Comic books were SOP at Connecticut Academy.
A slight pause, then Carmichael said: “It is.”
Inwardly Maraklov was tingling with excitement — Carmichael’s electroencephalograph must be pinging off the dials, he thought. They were actually working on thought-controlled aircraft …?
“Relax, relax,” Carmichael said. “It might sound like science fiction but we demonstrated the rudimentary ANTARES technology ‘as early as the late nineteen eighties.”
“But is it possible …?”
“Well, we don’t know that yet… I’m hoping, I’m betting, we’ll find out pretty soon …”
“But how can you control by thought?”
“The idea is simple; the mechanism is complex.” He waited a few moments while the subject hurriedly fought to control his racing heartbeat.
“That’s better,” he said in his most soothing, uninflected voice. “Here we go. Remember back to your physiology. The human nervous system is composed of nerve cells, neurons. The neurons carry information back and forth from receptor nerves in the peripheral nervous system — nerves in the body in general — to the central nervous system, brain and spinal cord. The information carried through the nervous system is a series of chemical and electrical discharges between neurons. If one neuron is stimulated enough so that its ionic balance is changed, it releases a chemical into the synapse, the gap between neurons, and that chemical stimulates another neuron.”