“The Black Rider,” mutters the Frump’s voice beside him. I must stop calling her that, Dann thinks. What the hell is her name? Something Italian. From beyond her the Princess smiles at him intently.
“I’m so glad you’re with us, Doctor Dann.” Her voice is very soft.
“Everybody! Give me your movie-tickets!” It’s Kendall Kirk back, looming at them in his insufferable clean-cut way. “The movie-tickets, those yellow ones. You never should have been issued them,” he says severely, as though it was their fault.
There is a general confusion while the movie-tickets are being separated from the meal-tickets and passed back to Kirk. Dann is delighted with this evidence of military bumbling. At last Kirk sits down again, and starts talking with Noah about their missing equipment.
The Frump has been making scornful comments, sotto voce. Her swarthy face looks surprisingly like a worried small boy’s. Dann experiences a rush of outgoing geniality.
“You know, after all this time of having to refer to you as Double-you-eleven and twelve, I’m not sure we’ve ever been introduced. I’m Daniel Dann.”
“Fredericka Crespinelli.” The Frump says it so like a handshake that Dann glances down and sees her small fist curled tight.
“I’m Valerie Ahlgren,” the Princess laughs. “Hey, Daniel Dann, that’s neat. It’s Dan any way you say it. I’m Val, call her Frodo.”
The Frump—Fredericka—scowls. Dann prods his memory.
“Frodo—that’s from a book, isn’t it?”
“How would you know?” Fredericka—Frodo—demands.
“Wait—Tolkien. Something Rings. And Mordor was the Black Realm, wasn’t it?” He smiles. “Do you see this place as a black realm?”
“Oh yes,” says Valerie. But her friend asks curtly, “What are you, a psychiatrist?”
“Goodness no. I’m just interested. To me this place seems, well, somewhat ramshackle and abandoned. Maybe it was blacker once.”
“It’s not abandoned,” Valerie says intensely, looking furtively about.
“Ghosts, maybe,” Dann chuckles.
“Didn’t you notice those magazines—all recent?” Frodo frowns. “They use this place.”
“That’s why we’re so glad you’re with us,” Val says quietly. “People like us, we’re vulnerable. They don’t like us.”
For an instant Dann thinks she’s telling him they’re lesbians, which he had rather assumed. (The perennial male puzzle: How, how?) But then he realizes her glance had summed up the whole table.
She means, he sees, people like Noah’s subjects. People who are supposed to be telepathic, to read minds. Nonsense, he thinks, meaning nonsense that they read thoughts and nonsense that the powers of Deerfield would dislike them.
“They value you,” he tells her gently. “They’re taking all this trouble to see what you can do.”
“Yeah,” Frodo grunts. Valerie just looks up at him so earnestly it gets through. She’s really worried, he sees. Probably people like this are inclined to paranoid suspicions, living among unreal perceptions.
“I wouldn’t worry. Really.” He summons up his doctor smile, willing her trouble away as he used to will away more tangible ills.
Slowly she smiles back at him and touches her friend’s hand. Surprisingly, it’s a strong, radiant smile, quite transforming her face. At the same moment he glimpses Frodo’s fingers; her nails are bitten off to stubs. H’mmm. His notion on their relationship somersaults. Who is the strong one here. Or must there be a strong one, do their small strengths complement each other?
“Anyway, it’s nice being by ourselves,” Val says. “Sometimes it hurts so much, in crowds.”
“You can say that again,” says Ted Yost from Dann’s other side. He and the girls exchange looks. Dann has a moment of crazy belief; what would a barrage of thought from a crowd be like for a telepath? Horrible. But of course it’s not that; they’re probably abnormally sensitive to voice-tones, body-signs of hostility.
Across from him, Chris Costakis has taken no part in this conversation; he eats stolidly, his gaze darting about. Beside him, Noah and Kirk have been going over the requirements; the doors to be installed, the missing biomonitors, the computer terminal, the power supply.
“They want the first test at eighteen hundred tonight,” Kirk says.
“ Kendall , until we get our hands on our equipment I refuse to try anything. This is going to be done right or not at all.”
“Okay, okay. They’re putting on the pressure.”
“Then they must get my equipment and get it set up right.”
“It’ll be here.”
“And properly installed.”
Kirk glances at Dann, who looks carefully blank. He knows and wants to know nothing of the entrails of the shiny cabinets he uses. To his relief Costakis speaks up abruptly.
“I can give you a hand, Doc.” The little man is still offering his help to a rejecting world.
“Good, good, Chris,” says Noah enthusiastically. “I’m glad to have someone who understands the function. If you’re all finished, shall we go?”
“Now for that pool!” Winona sings out. Behind her, Margaret Omali towers up.
As they walk toward the bus, she turns away.
“I’ll walk.”
“But the computer!” cries Noah. “We need you, Miss Omali!”
“It won’t be there,” she says flatly. “One mile, I’ll be there in fifteen minutes.”
She strides away, followed by Noah’s expostulations. Dann sees Kendall Kirk take one tentative step and says firmly, “I believe I’ll walk too. That was a heavy lunch.”
Kirk gives him a nasty look and gets in the bus. Dann finds he has to stretch even his long legs to catch up with her. The bus passes them then disappears. He swings along in silence beside her, feeling wild and happy.
“You meant it. Four miles an hour,” he says finally. “I hope you don’t mind my sharing your walk?”
“No.”
He searches for a topic. “I’m, ah, puzzled. If it wouldn’t bother you to tell me, how do they put a computer out here in the woods?”
“They install a terminal and tie in via telephone line. There’s a small computer capability at the Headquarters here, they won’t specify what. Through it I can access TOTAL. The phone line is fast enough for our purpose.”
He is enchanted that she will talk, he would listen to her read stock quotations. “What’s TOTAL? A big computer?”
Her perfect lips quirk. “More than that. TOTAL is the whole Defense system. We only use a tiny part.”
“It must be enormous.”
“Yes.” She smiles again in secret pleasure. “Nobody knows exactly how far the network extends. One time it printed out all your credit ratings.”
“Good Lord!” But he is thinking only that she is walking a little slower, relaxing. The blacktop is cool in the forest lane.
“And could you tell a layman why we need a computer? It seems to me that their answers are either right or wrong.”
“No, it’s more complex than that. For example, a subject might give a wrong letter which is right for the letter before or after. If this occurs in a series, it’s significant. Do you remember J-70; that Chinese girl? She read letters ahead, five out of six sometimes. Dr. Catledge calls it precognition. The program has to analyse correspondence against increasing distance in time forward or back.”
“But what about chance?” he asks, floundering in this rarified air.
“The basic program computes against chance probabilities,” she tells him patiently. “Including each subject’s tested letter-probability base.”