“I wasn’t aware there was another one.”
“There was another one, a man, on the other side of this wall, but he was instructed to think placidly, if you will. The second one was a woman, in the same room, who was instructed to conjure up a horrifying thought and think it with a certain intensity. The room is soundproof, incidentally. The third attempt, which you say you also didn’t hear, came from the woman, but this time she was a hundred yards or so down the hall, in another room.”
“You said she was ‘conjuring it up,’” I said. “Meaning that her husband wasn’t really killed.”
“That’s right.”
“Which means that I was unable to distinguish between her genuine thoughts and her simulated ones?”
“You might say that,” Mehta agreed. “Interesting, isn’t it?”
“That’s an understatement,” I replied.
For the next hour or so he ran me through a battery of tests, designed to ascertain how sensitive my “gift” was, how strong the emotions accompanying the thoughts had to be, how close the person had to be, and so on.
At the end he ventured an explanation.
“As you have already speculated,” Dr. Mehta said, “the magnetizing effect of the MRI on your brain produced this peculiar result.” He lighted a Camel straight. His ashtray was a tacky souvenir from a place called Wall Drug in South Dakota.
He exhaled a cloud of smoke, which seemed to enable him to think deeply. “I don’t know much about you, just that you’re some kind of lawyer, and that you used to be with the Agency. I’d rather not know more than that anyway. As for me, I’m the chief of CIA’s psychiatric division.”
“Psych tests, debriefings, and all that?”
“Basically. I’m sure my staff ran tests on you before they sent you to the Farm, before sending you wherever they sent you, and at the end of your term of duty. Your file’s been pulled, so I couldn’t know anything more about you than I do even if I wanted. Which I don’t.” Another cloud of smoke, and then he continued: “But if you expect me to enlighten you about your ability to read minds, I’m sorry to disappoint you. When Toby Thompson came to me a few years back, I thought he’d taken leave of his senses.”
I smiled.
“I frankly am not one of those who believed in human extrasensory perception. Not that there’s anything inherently ludicrous about it. There’s quite a body of evidence to suggest that certain animal species possess the ability to communicate that way, whether you’re talking about dolphins or dogs. But I’ve never seen any evidence beyond highly unreliable anecdotal reports that suggest that we humans can do it.”
“I assume you’ve changed your mind now,” I said.
He laughed. “Thoughts take place throughout the human brain, in the hippocampus and the frontal-lobe cortex and the neocortex. A colleague of mine, Robert Galambos, has theorized that thinking is ‘done’ by the glial cells, not the neurons. You’ve heard about Broca’s brain?”
I told him I’d only heard the term, but didn’t know what it meant.
“The French surgeon Pierre-Paul Broca discovered an area of the human brain where language is produced, an area in the left frontal lobe. Broca’s area is the seat of the speech mechanism. Another place, known as Wernicke’s area, is where we recognize and process speech. That’s in the left temporal and parietal lobes. I’m postulating that when one of these two areas, probably Wernicke’s, was subtly altered somewhat by the powerful magnetism of the magnetic resonance imager, the neurons realigned. And that enables you to ‘hear’ output, low frequency radio waves, from others’ Broca areas. We’ve long known that the human brain puts out these electrical signals. What you’re doing, I suspect, is simply receiving those signals. You know how sometimes we can ‘hear’ ourselves think, as if in our own spoken voice?”
“Yes, sometimes.”
“Well, I’d theorize that at some point in the formation of such thoughts there’s concurrent activity in the speech centers. And it’s at that point that the electrical signals are generated. All right. So. Then two recent scientific findings set us to thinking, as it were.
“One was a study published in Science magazine two years or so ago, done by a team at Johns Hopkins that discovered they could actually produce a computer image of the thinking process of the brain. They hooked up electrodes to a monkey’s brain, and used computer graphics to track the electrical activity in the motor cortex-that area of the brain that controls motor activity. So that in the instant before a rhesus monkey performed an action, they could see on the computer screen, a thousandth of a second in advance, the electrical activity in the monkey’s brain. Amazing! We could actually see the brain thinking!
“And then, a couple of geobiologists at the California Institute of Technology discovered that the human brain contains something like seven billion microscopic magnetic crystals. In effect, bar magnets made of magnetite crystals, an iron mineral. They were wondering whether there was a link between cancer and electromagnetic fields, though there’s no evidence yet that the magnetic crystals have anything to do with cancer. But my colleagues and I thought: what if we could use the magnetic resonance imager to somehow alter those little magnets in the human brain-to align them? Now, you’re a patent attorney, so I assume you keep up with technological developments.”
“As a rule, yes.”
“Early in 1993, a stunning breakthrough was announced, almost simultaneously, by the Japanese computer giant Fujitsu, the Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation, and Graz University of Technology in Austria. Using various techniques of biocybernetics, the collection of the electrical impulses put out by the brain by means of electroencephalography, human beings could actually control specially configured computers simply by thinking a command! By using their minds they could move a cursor around on a computer screen, even type letters. Well, that was it. At that point we knew it was possible.”
“So why can’t you induce this in everyone?”
“That’s the sixty-four-dollar question,” he said. “It may have to do with the way your Wernicke’s area is situated. Perhaps with the number, or density, of the neuronal cells there. Whatever it is about you that gives you an eidetic memory. To be honest, I have no idea. This is only sheerest speculation. But for whatever reason, for whatever confluence of reasons, it happened to you. Which makes you quite valuable indeed.”
“Valuable,” I said, “to whom?” But he had already turned and left the room.
TWENTY-NINE
“I’m really quite satisfied,” Toby Thompson said, and indeed, he was visibly pleased with himself.
I sat in an antiseptic, brightly lit white interrogation room, watching Toby in an adjoining room through a large, thick pane of glass. The glass was smudged with fingerprints, and the room was so bright that it was easy to forget it was eight in the morning and I’d been up all night. The room was situated in an underground level of the same unlovely 1960s-vintage office building.
“Tell me something,” I said. “Why the glass barrier? Why aren’t you jamming the room with ELF like you did at the safe house?”
Toby smiled almost wistfully. “Oh, we are. Better not to take chances. I don’t much trust technology. Do you?”
But I was in no mood for banter, having been through more than an hour of Dr. Mehta’s testing. “If I’d managed to escape…” I began.
“We’d have stopped at nothing to find you, Ben. You’re much too valuable. Actually, our psychological profile of you indicated, unequivocally, that you would attempt an escape. So I’m not altogether surprised. You have to remember, Ben, that with your retirement from the Agency, you no longer have the colony odor.”