Vectors (29 page)

Last year, the Russians had astronauts up in orbit for a much longer period—a hundred and fifty-nine days. They survived all right, and the use of special pressure suits helped solve some earlier problems with blood pressure and blood circulation. But I haven't seen any reports yet on their calcium loss. The only reports so far released to the West have not said anything about it. Maybe in the next six months we'll have news from Russia that tells if this story is a prediction or an obsolete worry.

BOUNDED IN A NUTSHELL

The books were piled high on the desk and overflowed into a heap on the floor. Merle Walters paused, dropped his shapeless hat onto a chair and picked up one of the books. It was heavy and blue-jacketed, and entitled
Advances In Parapsychology.
He looked in surprise at the secretary, half-hidden behind the piles of volumes.

"What's going on here, Franny? Has Tolly started seances in there?"

"Good morning, Mr. Walters. Go right on in, Mr. Suomi's expecting you."

Walters shrugged and limped through into the inner office. Tolly Suomi, neatly groomed as always, looked up at his entrance and pushed a pile of yellow file cards away from him on the desk. He shook his head, a fraction of an inch left and right, and sat tapping one remaining card held between thumb and forefinger.

"That was quick action, Merle. I thought it might take you a while to break loose after Franny called you."

Merle Walters sat down, favoring his left leg. "Loose, from nothing. There's a special Hell for people put out to pasture, and I'm in it."

Suomi looked at him keenly, assessing the eyes, complexion, and posture. "Maybe, Merle, but it seems to agree with you. You look a good deal healthier than you did six months ago. Healthy enough for you to get a bit more trouble from me." He leaned back in his chair. "You know, there's another special Hell for company presidents who don't believe the reports they get from their purchasing departments. Merle, what are your views on telepathy?"

Walters looked perplexed. He leaned back also, the fingers of his right hand automatically reaching over in a habitual gesture to massage the shoulder of his empty left sleeve. After a few moments he shook his head.

"Telepathy? It's bunk, Tolly. Now, if you'd asked me that forty years ago, I'd have said it was the most exciting thing in the world. Back when Rhine started his work, I thought there was really something there. Since then, it's gone nowhere. Christ, there's been any amount of talk, lots of horseshit, no real evidence, and nothing for progress. So now, I say it's bunk—or else we've been going about it all wrong. What's it got to do with WAWD Corporation?"

Suomi sighed. "An unfavorable review. That's just about what I thought you'd say. I would have expressed it differently, but after looking at that lot—" He jerked his thumb at the stack of books on the credenza behind him "—I tend to the same view. I was hoping you might feel otherwise, and persuade me. You see, we've got a problem." He pushed the pile of purchasing file cards toward Walters. "What do you do if your head of purchasing comes in and says that the competition is using telepathy on Government surplus buys?"

"Depends who it is. Either you send him to have his head examined, or you send somebody out to the sales with him to get a second opinion."

"Right. You send somebody really solid with him, like Jack Tukey, right? Somebody who has his head screwed on the right way around. I agree, that's exactly what you do. So now take a look at these. Jack's comments are on top, the others are underneath."

Merle Walters rubbed his finger across the bridge of his broad, blunt nose, and scowled. "You're a bastard, Tolly. I should know you better by now. I let you set me up for that. What's the story, then, as you see it?" He leaned forward and pulled the cards toward him. "Is it worth getting my glasses out to read these damned things, or can you summarize for me?

"Take them away with you and read them over later. They flesh out the details, but I can give you a summary easily enough." Suomi reached across his desk and pushed the intercom button. "Franny, bring me the file on Kirkwood Research, will you?" He looked at Walters. "No, you never heard of them. They are only an eight-man outfit, based in Arlington. Four years old, privately owned. I've had trouble getting information on them, but I can show you a copy of their 129 for DOD procurements. Maybe I should back up a bit. Did you know the Government has been holding a bunch of simultaneous auctions on the sale of war surplus equipment?"

Walters nodded. "I heard about that through the CBD. Four auctions in four different places. I suppose the idea is to stop price fixing and get better prices. It sounded half-assed to me when I first heard about it."

"Maybe. Anyway, it's not working very well—but not for the reasons you might think. We've been to six of those sales in the past two months, and we've bought a fair amount of surplus electronics equipment. Prices were good—but Jim Spurling noticed that the reps from Kirkwood Research were using a curious bid pattern."

"How do you mean, curious?"

"Well, sometimes they would bid hard, and sometimes they'd start strong and then stop suddenly. When Jim got back here he looked up the complete list of final sales prices, from all four auction centers. He found Kirkwood had a rep at each one, and had bought at all of them."

"Nothing strange in that, Tolly. Didn't you do the same? You get your bargains that way, if you happen to be the only ones interested in making a bid on something."

"Sure we did. That's not the odd part. When Jim analyzed Kirkwood's bidding, he noticed something he couldn't explain. Kirkwood seemed to know exactly what was happening, all the time at
all
the auctions."

"That's hard for me to swallow, Tolly. Why did Jim happen to pick out Kirkwood—why didn't he have his eye on Lectron, or Ajax, or one of the other big specialists in surplus equipment?"

"According to Jim they drew attention to themselves. He sat next to one of the Kirkwood men at the first sale, and at first he thought the man was stoned or sick. He sat there, spaced out, and he only seemed in touch with things about half the time. But he bid exactly right, and he
stopped
bidding—this is the heart of it—when Kirkwood had bought similar equipment, at very good prices,
at one of the other auctions.
"

"Was Jim able to compare the times at each sale?"

"He tried to, afterwards, and he decided that it had to match within a few minutes, at the most. You see the pattern? A buy in one place, a stopped bid everywhere else—consistently."

"How about two-way radios? That would do it."

"That was Jack Tukey's first thought, when he took a look at what Jim had found. Two-way radios are banned at the auctions, but it seemed like a good guess. Next time, he went to one auction and Jim went to another. They both watched the Kirkwood men, and they swear there was no sign of a radio—not even of something small, like a throat mike. How does it sound, Merle?"

Walters was hunched in his seat, bald brow furrowed and eyes far away. "Interesting. And fishy. But not tied down. How close were those times you talked about?"

"Jim Spurling and Jack synchronized watches before the sales and compared notes afterwards. Kirkwood stopped bidding at each auction
exactly
when they had bought what they wanted at one of the others—only then.

"There's one other thing, Merle. Jim claims that it's not just telepathy—there are other mysteries, too."

Walters grimaced. "One thing at a time, Tolly. Did Jim or Jack get a good look at several different Kirkwood reps?"

"Yes. They all have the same, spaced-out expression, and they all seem to cut in and out—like turning themselves on and off."

"That doesn't mean supernatural powers, Tolly."

"No, but how about this, then. Some of the auctioned equipment was made up into mixed lots. The Government does it to get rid of some of the junky stuff."

"I've been through that. To get one or two things that you really want, you have to buy a great random mass of stuff, sometimes."

"So everybody sat there with their pocket calculators, trying to estimate the value of the mixture of items on the block, and it can get very hairy, because you need to know the quantity and value of each item, and some of the lots aren't advertised in advance. The Kirkwood reps didn't have any calculators."

"But they bought anyway?"

"Right. They just sat there, bidding as though they were half-asleep—or not bidding, when it suited them. Jim went over the lists afterwards, and calculated how well Kirkwood had done. In every case, even on the most complex mixed lots, they bid only on the right side of the value. You see what that means?"

"Supermen. Lightning calculators, as well as telepaths. I don't like that one either, Tolly." Walters drummed his fingers on the desk top and stared at the Flower of Repose hanging behind Suomi. "Mind you, I've not heard anything yet that suggests this whole thing is hurting WAWD's business."

"True enough. We're still doing all right. But I'm getting awfully curious, and you suggested you've been going to seed, away from the office. Jack's up to his neck in other things, and I feel there must be—at the least—a valuable business angle."

"And at a maximum, Tolly, we've been replaced by the successor to Homo sapiens."

"Now you're getting a bit too fancy for my taste. But I wondered if you, as President Emeritus and Special Consultant to WAWD, would like to have a look and tell us what's going on."

"You couldn't stop me, Tolly. Is there a bit of hurt ego in it for you, too? I know you can't stand to have anybody get ahead of you on a business deal."

"Maybe there is, Merle. Getting one-upped by you last year was bad enough. One more thing for you, before you run out of here."

"Final customers? I've been wondering what an eight-man company would be doing with a mass of equipment."

"That's right, Merle. We've been talking all the time about the Kirkwood people, but Kirkwood Research has an agreement with Lectron. Kirkwood handles all the surplus auction work, and sells it to Lectron for a fixed percentage commission. Lectron must be delighted with the results—they've saved millions in the past few months."

Merle Walters levered himself to his feet and picked up the pile of purchasing record cards. "Let me take these away and sleep on the whole thing. I'll drop in on Jack Tukey on the way out and get his comments. See you tomorrow, Tolly. You're a damned nuisance, you know. My evening's going to be ruined."

He limped out. Suomi smiled slightly—a fraction of an inch elevation of the corners of his mouth. Was it imagination, or was there a little more spring in the old man's step than when he arrived?

* * *

"I want to see it for myself, Tolly. And I want to have a bit of equipment made up for me by the machine shop."

"Fine. Keep it as cheap as you can, Merle. Though I know you'll do that by natural instinct. What is it you need?"

"A tunable receiver. I still have great faith in the electromagnetic spectrum, and I haven't given up on the idea of two-way radios. I want a detector that will let me run over a big range of frequencies, from about five hundred kilohertz right up to a couple of hundred gigahertz. I want to be able to test for signals in the range from AM up to UHF, so I cover all the usual radio and TV frequencies. I want it strongly directional, so I can point it at the Kirkwood men. I want it small enough to fit in my briefcase; and I want it with controls that I can operate from outside the briefcase, including the displays of the received signals."

"Made of solid gold, I suppose. Anything else?"

"Yes, one other thing. I want a tape recorder attached to it, so I can record any signals that I come across. And I need it in time for the next auction, on the seventeenth."

"That's a couple of thousand dollars, throwing in labor and overhead."

"I estimated seventeen hundred. Put it on your R&D budget, or knock it off my consulting fees. Now, one final thing, I read the poop that Franny gave me about Kirkwood, but it's not very good. Can you get Vince to put feelers out through the sales staff, and see who knows Kirkwood himself? Where he came from, what he's like. I might need to meet him before we go much further."

"Consider it done. You know Vince, he could get the details on the Pope's love life if he spent an hour or two on the telephone. Who do you want with you at the auction, when the equipment is ready for you?"

"Nobody. Jim Spurling should plan to go to one of the other auction rooms, so we can compare notes afterwards. A week from now, we might know a bit more about this thing."

* * *

The nearest auction room to the WAWD offices was a big, echoing old warehouse off Maine Avenue. The bidders present were the usual mix of amateurs, looking for some particular amplifier, light table, or sensor for their own use, and professional buyers, who bought widely and never under any circumstances bid against the amateurs. Merle looked over the group with a practiced eye, separating the sheep from the goats. He moved forward at last and stood about six feet behind the Kirkwood rep. A row of heavy steel pillars running the length of the warehouse and set every twenty feet divided the fifty bidders into four smaller groups. Merle held his briefcase in front of him, switched on and began the frequency sweep as the first lot came up for bid. Twin meters set into the top of the briefcase showed signal strength, direction, and frequency.

The Kirkwood man was standing there in silence, watching the lots as they were produced. Merle began to sweep up the spectrum, beginning at AM frequencies and moving slowly to shorter wavelengths. Each time the receiver showed a significant signal, he turned the briefcase through about thirty degrees. The receiver was strongly directional and it was easy to determine if the man from Kirkwood was the source. It took time. Merle moved steadily through the spectrum, discarding numerous peaks in the power dial indicator when their directionality proved incorrect.

At last, in the CB band, he found a strong peak in the received signal that fell away sharply in strength as he turned the case away from the man standing in front of him. He moved quietly to his left, turned the case, and looked again. The signal direction had turned with him. The Kirkwood rep was the source of a strong signal. Merle noted the frequency, and went on, painstakingly exploring the higher frequencies for more signals. There were no others with the correct dependence on direction. Merle returned to the frequency he had noted, and switched on the tape recorder.