Twistor (38 page)

She moved her arms inside their canvas cocoons. How was it stage magicians were always able to escape from these things? She had seen it done, tried to remember how. Loosen one arm, put it over the head, same with
the
other, then shrug out of the thing. Trouble was, the magician always tensed his body when he was being strapped in. She'd been unconscious and fully relaxed, and the straps felt tight. Still . . . For the next ten minutes she worked to develop some slack in her right arm. Not much progress. She walked to the bathroom and looked in. There was a toilet and a wash basin. Her clothes were hanging from a hook on the wall, undies and all. She looked in the mirror over the wash basin. Below the canvas edge of the straitjacket, she could see she was wearing a hospital gown. Those bastards, she thought.

She walked over to the closed door. Leaning a shoulder against the wall, she turned the knob slowly with her bare foot. The knob felt cold between her toes. It turned freely, but the door didn't open. Locked from the outside.

Then she heard approaching footsteps. Quickly she got back into the bed and tried to simulate an attitude of unconscious sleep. She heard the door open and footsteps entering the room. She kept her eyes closed.

'No use playing possum, Miss Gordon,' a voice said. 'We've got a Doppler sensor on this room, and it showed you moving around. We know you're awake.'

Shit, thought Victoria. She opened her eyes. A man wearing a ski mask was looking down at her. 'Must be cold out there on the slopes to make you wear that thing,' she observed. 'Is there much powder on the runs today?'

He laughed. She noticed that another man was behind him, also wearing a ski mask. The missing hand was unmistakable. He was the big one she'd kicked in the groin. She wondered now if that had been wise.

'Miss Gordon, we're here on a matter of national security,' the first one said. 'We work for a special agency of the federal government. It would be very dangerous for you to know too much about us. That's why we've
concealed
our identities with these masks. It's for your own protection.'

'Of course it is,' Vickie said sweetly. 'You're very special federal agents who just happen to go around kidnapping people whenever Mr Martin Pierce of the Megalith Corporation gets on his computer and tells you to. Is that the story you want me to believe, Mr Mandrake?'

The man paused. Vickie watched the masked face closely. Gears seemed to be spinning just behind the wool covering. He hadn't expected me to confront him like that, she guessed.

'Miss Gordon,' he said finally, 'we're well aware of your brother's criminal activities in illegally gaining access to certain commercial computer systems. He's in custody now and has made a full statement. We'd like you to cooperate also.'

Vickie blinked. Did they have William? Should she believe them? Probably not. If they
said
that they had him, it probably meant that they didn't. Now it was her move. 'Yes, of course, Mr Mandrake,' she said in a sarcastic tone. 'You clowns have probably also kidnapped the whole physics department and the UW women's volleyball team by now. Right?'

It was Mandrake's turn to blink behind the ski mask.

'Come on,' she continued, 'let's stop playing these silly intimidation games, shall we? I know exactly who you are and why you kidnapped me. Kidnapping directed across a state border is a federal crime, you know. Now just why is it that you and Mr Pierce are willing to risk the consequences of something like that? Just what does the Megalith Corporation have to gain that makes the stakes so high?' Vickie looked closely at the man. Perhaps her strategy of forthright challenge was paying off. He was still off balance.

Mandrake sat heavily in the chair beside the bed. 'Miss Gordon,' he said, 'you're clearly a highly intelligent person. I'm sure you know what my employers, whoever
they
may be, want. I take it from your tone that you might be willing to cooperate, if the price is right. Just what is your price.'

She looked directly into the eyes behind the mask. 'You've been listening in on us all week, Mandrake. You know the score. My colleague David Harrison and I have made a marvelous discovery. It's something that might happen to a physicist only once in a lifetime, if she was very lucky indeed. But because of your meddling, David and two innocent children are either dead or in a life-threatening situation. My price? My price is that I want to be able to follow up on our discovery without any further interference from you and your goons. I want to try to get those three people back. When that's accomplished, I'll be glad to tell Megalith anything they want to know about the twistor effect, provided I can tell the rest of the world at the same time. What you and Mr Pierce already know ought to give you a head start in exploiting the effect, and that should be sufficient. On the other hand, if you don't let me go, you'll never be able to learn enough to even recoup your losses. So that's my price, Mandrake. Let me go now and stay the Hell out of my way.'

Mandrake stood up. He unbuckled the straps on her straitjacket. 'You can take that off now,' he muttered. 'It was only to keep you from doing something stupid. You're on your honor not to try to escape. You couldn't anyhow, but you could cause us some trouble. I'll communicate what you've said to my employer. I don't know if he'll buy it, but I'm willing to treat it as a legitimate offer and try.' The two masked men left the room. The door clicked shut, then there was a second click from outside.

Removing the straitjacket, Vickie hurled it angrily at the box near the ceiling. It missed the box and fell to the floor with a klunk. She felt very alone, very vulnerable.

Something was bothering her. Why had Mandrake unbuckled the straitjacket, she wondered. Was this really
a
process of rational negotiation? Was it some kind of good-guy/bad-guy trick? Or was it only that this way they avoided having to assist her in eating meals or using the toilet? She moved toward the bathroom. Perhaps she'd feel better wearing her own clothes, she decided.

Mandrake, still wearing the ski mask, returned after a few hours. 'Sorry,' he said, 'no deal. You're not, as you seem to think, holding a winning hand. My employer instructs me to make you aware of certain facts and techniques.' He described the drug neurophagin and its effects on the nervous systems of those to whom it is administered. He explained that they would have to use it on her unless she elected to cooperate.

'That's a frightening and disgusting story,' she said. 'But I don't believe a word of it. It's just another technique from your bag of interrogation tricks. If it were true, you wouldn't tell me about it unless you planned to kill me sooner or later.'

'It leaves no traces,' said Mandrake, 'and no one would believe you. Any doctor would testify the syndrome was a premature case of Alzheimer's. But you do have a point. It would be pointless to tell you about neurophagin unless we could demonstrate its effects.'

He opened the outer door of the room and led her down the hall to a second doorway. The large man followed silently. Mandrake produced a bundle of keys and unlocked a deadbolt lock mounted on the outside of the heavy door. They entered a room much like the one they had left. On the bed lay Allan Saxon, smiling placidly and talking quietly to himself.

'There are people coming into my room now,' Vickie heard Saxon murmur. 'Oh, there's Vickie. She's such a pretty girl. Nice legs. I wonder if she fucks.'

Vickie was shocked. Was this really Allan Saxon?

He sat up in the bed. 'The trick is to gain control, dominance,' he murmured. 'I'll speak to them in a loud voice, and perhaps they'll do what I want.' He paused.
'
Gentlemen, it's time for me to leave! Please accompany me to my car.' He stood beside the bed. Vickie took a step backward.

'Not just yet,' Mandrake said. 'But soon, sir, soon.' He gently put his hand on Saxon's shoulder.

'I wonder if he's lying,' said Saxon. 'He always lies, doesn't he. I always lie too, when I can get away with it. Am I lying now? I like to lie to women. I like to lie with women. I wonder if Vickie would lie with me. Should I ask her. No, the men might hurt me again. I never knew that it could hurt so much. But I didn't lie to them. I told them the truth, but they wouldn't believe me. I told them that David had gone to a shadow universe. The shadow knows what evil . . . Poor David. He's only a shadow, now. Just he and his shadow . . . '

Mandrake looked at Vickie. 'Seen enough?' he asked.

'I've seen many things,' Saxon said. 'I've seen an atom alone in a trap. I saw a rat in a trap, once, but it was dead. It had yellow teeth and a long scaly tail . . . '

Vickie nodded, retreating from Saxon, and they quickly left the room. Mandrake relocked the door, then led her into her own room. She sat on the bed. Mandrake sat on the chair, and the big man stood by the door.

'That's horrible!' Vickie cried, her face in her hands. 'How could you do that to someone?'

'I could demonstrate,' Mandrake said.

'Look,' said Vickie, 'you're not thinking this through. You don't need another zombie, you need my cooperation. If I were in that condition, you'd never learn what your friend Pierce wants to know.'

'I agree with you, Miss Gordon,' Mandrake said, 'but my employer doesn't. By the time he realizes his mistake, it will be too late for you. So your only alternative is to cooperate.' He put a little digital disk recorder on the table and activated it, then asked her a stream of questions.

She answered the questions truthfully, as long as they didn't reveal certain key techniques needed for the twistor
effect.
And the questions were mainly about where the twistor apparatus 'had been taken.' She carefully explained to Mandrake what she thought had happened to the apparatus. She described the physical evidence that supported her views. The questioning took a long time. Mandrake was noncommittal at the end, but she felt that he hadn't believed her. Finally, the two masked men left her alone again.

About half an hour later the large man came back alone. He had something to tell Vickie, he said through the ski mask stretched tightly over his face. It was about sex. He sat in the chair by the bed, his hands in his lap, and spent a seemingly endless time telling her in great and graphic detail what he planned to do to her and with her. Some of it involved his arm stump. It was almost as if she were not in the room, or perhaps as if he were confessing to a priest. He told her about the prostitutes he'd 'snuffed,' about the things he'd done to them first . . .

He was clearly psychotic. She wasn't sure that some of the actions he described were physically possible. Mandrake must have sent him in to scare her. He had succeeded; she was completely and profoundly terrified, afraid to even look at the man. Finally he left, locking the door behind him.

David sat back from the worktable and placed the pistol-grip wirewrap tool on the candle-lit surface. One of the blue flying creatures buzzed near the candle flame, and he swatted at it. Then he examined the object on the table with satisfaction.

The twistor prototype was done. Mounted on the perf-board surface were a jumble of capacitors, resistors, IC chips, transistors, and diodes. Some of the components were crudely tack-soldered together, while others were enmeshed in many-layered zigzags of pale red wirewrap connections.

It
was not very neat, but after all this was only a test prototype, to see if a small twistor field could be generated on battery power. At the edges of the perf-board dangled about a dozen silvery potentiometers, three wires leading from each to the prototype while their shafts rested on the table top. The function of each pot was scrawled in black letters across its shiny black surface.

David connected wires from the prototype to the bank of flashlight batteries he'd assembled. Then he quickly did some power-up checks using dummy loads for the twistor coils and observing electrical wave shapes with Sam's small LCD oscilloscope. He noticed an interesting effect. When the feedback loop gain of one of the operational amplifiers was set slightly above its proper value, it tended to oscillate. This had the consequence of making the twistor rotation sequence advance continuously. He'd seen the effect before. It had been responsible for their first 'vacuum improvement' indications of the twistor effect.

He considered. For the gadget he was planning to build, this bug might actually be a feature. It might, with luck, allow him to 'peek' through the field sphere, seeing light and perhaps even hearing sounds from the other side. David scribbled some changes on the circuit diagram, adding two integrated circuit chips and another switch to the design. He continued with the power tests until he was satisfied. It was looking very good. He cut power.

Then he connected the twistor coils he'd carefully wound and set in epoxy the day before. They were curved sections of spherical surfaces, scaled-down versions of the useless big ones that still stood in the center of the room on their large wooden supports like some inept attempt at post-modern sculpture. He reconnected power and pushed a red button mounted on the perf-board. Nothing.

He'd screwed up, cut too many corners in the design, he thought ruefully. Or perhaps . . . perhaps he just
needed
to increase the positive feedback coupling. He twitched the feedback potentiometer clockwise and made a note in the open lab notebook beside him, then made two measurements with the ohmmeter and noted them.

He reconnected the batteries and repeated the earlier checks. He pressed the red button and watched the candle flame through the little coils. The region between the coils might have wavered infinitesimally, creating the illusion of a very slight dimming of the candle flame beyond. Good! He turned another potentiometer clockwise, watching the faint darkness between the coils near the flame as it deepened, then lightened, then grew very dark indeed. He smiled and disconnected the batteries, made more notes and more ohmmeter readings. He would need this information if a portable unit was to be built.

Finally he reconnected the battery bank, pushed the red button to verify that the darkness still came, and reduced one of the pots until a black mark on its shaft matched a similar mark on its threaded sleeve. He inhaled and pressed the red button. There was a quite audible
pop!
sound.