Джозеф Файндер - Extraordinary Powers

Toby smiled, slowly and lopsidedly. “True enough. It was a real problem, from what I’ve read. They employed a double-blind security system, using two middlemen. But as I said, we came to this belatedly. Spurred on, naturally, by the Soviets.”

Rossi cleared his throat and remarked, “The Cold War had its uses.”

“Indeed,” Toby resumed. “Going back to at least the 1960s, the Agency began hearing credible reports of Soviet military efforts in parapsychology. I think it was around that time that a small cell of senior Agency people decided to fund an in-house study of the espionage possibilities of ESP. But what a treacherous undertaking! For every person who may have some glimmering of the ability, there are hundreds of hucksters and nutty old ladies with crystals. In any case, you may remember hearing about the Apollo 14 flight to the moon, in 1971, when the astronaut Edgar Mitchell performed the first ESP experiment in space. Didn’t work, by the way. In those years — the early years, I think of them as — we and the Armed Forces Medical Laboratories and NASA were spending almost a million dollars a year on parapsychology research. Peanuts, yes, but then we were whistling in the dark anyway.

“Then came a series of classified reports, in the early 1970s, from the Defense Intelligence Agency, predicting that we would soon be endangered by Soviet psychic research, which was enabling the KGB and the GRU and the Soviet Army to do such neat tricks as ascertain the deployment of troops, ships, even military installations. Someone at the top of the Agency got serious about it. I don’t suppose I’m spilling any secrets to tell you that Richard Nixon took a very strong interest in the program.

“Our intelligence confirmed by the mid-seventies that the Soviets had several secret parapsychological laboratories for military purposes, the main one in Novosibirsk. Then, in 1977, a reporter for the Los Angeles Times was arrested by the KGB in Moscow while attempting to obtain top secret documents from an institute of parapsychology. This really spurred the CIA, since now both sides knew that the other knew...

“Anyway, within the Agency, the program was so top secret that the term ESP never appeared anywhere, in any documents. It was called ‘novel biological information transfer systems’! A few years later, after my... accident... I was brought in to head the project, to accelerate it — or scrap it. ‘Shit or get off the pot,’ I was instructed.”

I nodded. “And you decided to shit.”

“In a manner of speaking. Certainly I was as much of a skeptic as anyone has ever been. I was quite hostile to all this foolishness, and I thought I was being given some make-work, time-wasting rehabilitation crap, the sort of thing they give a washed-up operations expert whose legs don’t work anymore.

“But then” — here he waved his hands in Rossi’s direction — “then one day I met Dr. Charles Rossi, and I learned about something that I knew at once would change the world.”

“Can we get you anything?” Toby asked just as my curiosity was piqued. “You like Scotch, don’t you?”

“Why not?” I said. “It’s been a long day.”

“Certainly has. And the ketamine appears to have worn off, so booze should be okay. Wally, Scotches all around — no, Charles, you like vodka, isn’t that right?”

“On the rocks,” Rossi said. “A touch of pepper ground over it, if you please.”

One of the security people got to his feet — he was, I now saw, definitely wearing a shoulder holster — and ambled out of the room. A few minutes later, during which we all sat in silence for some reason, he returned with a tray of drinks. Obviously he was not trained in the art of butlery, but he managed to serve each of us without spilling a drop.

“So tell me this,” I said. “Why am I not able to scan you?”

“At this distance—” Rossi said.

“No. I wasn’t even able to scan your security guy here, just now, when he gave me my drink. Nothing comes across. What’s going on?”

Toby watched me for a moment, thinking. The strong light made hollows of his eyes. “Jamming,” he finally said.

“I don’t understand.”

“ELF. Extremely low frequency radio waves.” He swept a hand around the room. “The RF equivalent of inaudible white noise is being emitted from speakers set up throughout the room, broadcast on the same frequencies that the human brain in effect ‘broadcasts’ on. This makes it impossible for you to pick anything up.”

“So you won’t mind if we sit a little closer.”

Toby smiled. “We don’t like taking chances.”

I nodded, decided to drop it. “All this CIA work on ESP — I thought it was terminated by Stan Turner in 1977.”

“Officially, yes,” Rossi said. “In fact, it was simply buried in the bureaucracy under deep cover, so that hardly any personnel within the Agency knew of its existence.”

Then Toby continued his narrative. “Until then, our efforts had concentrated on how to locate those few talented individuals. They’re few and far between. The question soon became, how can you actually instill the power? Is it possible? It seemed far-fetched, seemed in fact absolutely impossible. Charles... well, Charles can tell you himself.”

Rossi shifted in his chair, took a deep breath, and exhaled slowly. “In the early 1980s,” he said, “I was working with a small California firm, developing something the Pentagon found most interesting. It was, in simple terms, an electronic paranoia inducer — a ‘psychic neuron disrupter,’ they called it, which would ‘jam’ the synaptic connections between the brain’s nerve cells. In effect, this would do electronically what the drug LSD often does. Nasty stuff, really, but then, the Pentagon are the folks who brought us napalm, courtesy of Dow Chemical. Anyway, this project thankfully went nowhere, but then one day I got a call from Toby, who offered me double my salary and lured me from the sunny climes of Southern California to this lovely metropolis. I continued my work on the effects of electromagnetic stimuli on the human brain. Initially, we were intrigued by the notion of mind control. I was concentrating on ELF, extremely low frequency radio waves, as Toby said. You see, the brain generates electrical signals. So I was attempting to learn whether we could transmit strong signals in the same frequencies that the brain transmits in, to induce confusion, even death.”

“Charming,” I said.

But Rossi ignored me. “Nothing there either. But we had discovered the possibilities of ELF. I came upon research done by Dr. Milan Ryzl of the University of Prague involving hypnosis. Dr. Ryzl had discovered that certain people can, under hypnosis, relax themselves, relax their inhibitions, to such an extent that they can receive images by telepathy. That set me thinking.

“And it turned out, quite by coincidence, that in 1983, in a hospital in the Netherlands, a middle-aged Dutchman underwent a routine examination in a magnetic resonance imager and emerged with a measurable, documented extrasensory perception. His doctors were aghast. The man and his doctors were immediately visited by agents of Dutch, French, and American intelligence, who all confirmed the report. The man had the ability actually to hear the thoughts of others in close proximity. Neurologists attributed this to the intense magnetizing effect of the MRI on the man’s cortex.”

“Did the power last?” I asked.

“Not exactly,” Rossi replied. “The man went mad, actually. He began to complain of terrible headaches, of awful noises, and one day he literally ran his head into a brick wall and killed himself.” He took a long sip of vodka.

“Then why didn’t the MRI work like this on everyone?” I asked.