Zeiss photographic lenses, of any length, were good. Their long lenses were just about the best in the world. What a longer lens does for you, it provides more subject magnification at a given distance. By moving back, you reduce the magnification ratio between the front and back of your subject because the distance ratio is diminished. So you can get farther from whatever you're shooting without the image ending up too small.
The Air Support Division cops doing a photo recon of a salvage yard in the Valley couldn't keep far enough away from the target they were shooting: the possible locale of a telepath that, if it wanted, could real easy make the pilot fly his 206 Jet Ranger straight into the ground at max throttle. Most photo recons take ten minutes. This one—shot with the longest lenses the LAPD had on hand—took three minutes, and would've taken less if the cops had it their way, before the pilot yanked the stick and peeled the helicopter for Piper Tech.
The photos processed, printed, unspectacular as they were— B&W shots of a ramshackle building center of the salvage yard— were taken to Em Ops for Tannehill and Rysher and Ostrander and Bo and Yar and Soledad to view for all the little the pictures revealed.
Bo, pointing to the building: "This is the only structure on the property. It's been built on a few times over the years. This outer part is all wood, the rest sheet metal."
"And with relatively few people in the vicinity," Ostrander noted,"it will give the freak an advantage in sensing anyone looking for him."
"Able to get any blueprints?" Yar asked.
Bo: "The additions were done without permit, so there's nothing on record."
"So we don't know the layout. Whatever we send in is going in blind." There was a tightness where Tannehill's neck met his shoulders, an aching knot that'd been living there for years but making itself felt with severe pain since the day Valley MTac put itself down. As professional, as detached as he tried to be, had to be, doubt and guilt and stress seeped through Tannehill like a slow-working poison manifesting itself inside him in a thousand ways. A tightness here, a twitch there. Heart palpitations more often than not. Although he believed in the work he did, Tannehill's work very truly, gradually, was killing him."If the telepath's there at all."
"You don't believe the speed freak?" Soledad asked.
"I've learned not to trust where freaks are involved."
Bo: "Why would it say the telepath is there if it's not?"
"A distraction," Rysher answered, guessing.
"A distraction from what? If the telepath wanted to go after cops, it could do that easy enough without dragging them to the middle of nowhere."
Rysher made a point of: "It lured one MTac element out. Why not do the same with another? Lures them out, then attacks another part of the city."
"He could do that without baiting us. Come and go before anybody knew what they got hit with."
The fingers of Yar's right hand did an unending tap-step over his palm. Talk, talk; all this… There was a freak out there. The freak had to be dealt with. How much talk was needed for that?
"He's there," Soledad said, no doubt in her voice."He's waiting there."
Tannehilclass="underline" "For?"
Soledad: "A showdown. Kill or be killed. He takes out one element to show us how powerful he is. Now he's waiting to see if we've got the apples to ice him."
"If he wants to know if we've got the balls…" Yar didn't miss a beat.
Neither did Rysher."Let's go for a full strike: have all our MTac units hit him at once."
"Remind me to purchase shares in an American flag company. Undoubtedly their price will skyrocket with all the coffins that will need draping." Ostrander had a way of putting pitch-black into dark humor.
"You saw what it did to Valley MTac. It's going to take everything we have just to slow the freak down."
"I promise you he will turn your people against each other, and then the last man remaining against himself."
Rysher gave a cold reminder: "I'm familiar with the MO of these mind freaks."
"Then I'd suggest we take the knowledge and find another way to apply it."
"We could go with nonlethal weapons," Rysher offered.
"Well, that's a good idea." A sarcastic tone made it clear Yar thought otherwise."You can't take out druggies jacked on PCPs with nonlethals, and you want to use them against a telepath? The freak can make the operators choke each other, beat each other to death bare-handed, and they'd have no way to kill it."
"Your suggestion?" Rysher asked, pointed.
"One element. Make it a lightning strike. I'm volunteering Central."
Bo: "It's appreciated, Yar. But cowboy time is still a ways off."
"Yar's right," Soledad said."But for the wrong reason. It should be one element, should be Central. What the freak wants… I killed its wife. It wants me."
"You'd never make it out alive," Rysher said.
"That a fact or wishful thinking?"
A quiet hiss of nasty words came from Rysher.
Soledad ignored them."Look, we take out the freak, problem solved. But if we don't make it, if I don't make it… maybe that's payback enough for it. Maybe it's done and nobody else has to get killed."
Rysher: "So it kills a bunch of cops, and we just let the thing get away."
Yar, talking from experience: "If we can't put it down, you better hope it goes away."
"If we go after it, if we lose out, if the freak's not done killing," Soledad said,"then you don't stand any worse than you do right now."
"With the exception," Tannehill's hand working hard on his neck,"of four dead officers."
"Sooner or later, going against this thing, we'd be dead anyway. This way we just go down first."
"So you're volunteering," Bo, being clear about things,"for a suicide mission."
Soledad looked to Yar.
Yar grinned."To my hearing she's volunteering to get in the first kick to the freak's ass."
And Bo wished, for one split second, he could own that kind of fearlessness again.
Again?
Bo wondered: Did he ever own it? Or was what drove him for so long just the youthful delusion that with enough will you can live forever?
The call was Tannehill's to make. Nothing easy about making it. What was the best way to put down what maybe couldn't be put down; that could probably kill whatever you sent at it? And here, before him, were two cops begging to take the call. How many more in the PD would be happy to stand with them? Where the hell, Tannehill thought, did you get people like this? For whatever their reasons, for whyever they chose to do what they do, where did you find such people?
Tannehilclass="underline" "I'll put out a warrant. Central gets the call. You go it alone."
Soledad and Ian were having dinner at Soup Plantation, which was their favorite place to have dinner. Not so much their favorite place to eat, but they liked getting the two-for-one special. Soup Plantation didn't actually offer a two-for-one special. What it did offer was an all-you-can-eat soup and salad bar run by college kids and underprivileged illegals working for minimum who didn't much notice or care if one person in a party of two went to the bar and got food that the other person had paid for. More than the okay food, Soledad and Ian dug the" we're getting away with something" pleasure that came with it. Made them feel like they were a couple of kids, like they were back in high school. Even though getting something for nothing was, in this case, illegal. Even though Soledad was a cop. There weren't any freaks involved. No freaks involved, Soledad gave no more thought to scuffing the law for pleasure than anybody else. She chalked that mostly to Ian. Day by day he was making her feel like a regular girl.
Ian said: "You put too much dressing on your salad."
"I like dressing."
"I know, but you put too much on."
"What's too much?"