Jack Chalker - Kaspar's Box

“I’m not sure anyone has ever had any experience with this sort of thing, but Sergeant Maslovic has been excellent at solving the most subtle security breaches. He’s the one who found the missing neutronium, or at least accounted for it.”

“An enlisted man? And a marine at that? Very well, I’ll go along with you on this, but he better be good. Get him up here now, with every bit of data and clearances he requires to start on this right away. And bring Captain Murphy up here as well. Sober him up as best you can—check with Medical, they should have something. On the double!”

Both Captain Murphy and Sergeant Maslovic had at least one thing in common. Neither of them wanted to be there and stuck with this knotty problem, and neither of them had the slightest idea where to start. Still, Murphy, who was the most sour not only from the news that his “witches” had flown the coop, as he called it, but also that he was suddenly as sober as he’d ever felt in his adult life, was probably in the worse frame of mind.

Still, he had that deep-down sense of “told you so” satisfaction that he was more than willing to shove up these robotic martinets’ noses. He looked at Maslovic with a familiar nod, recognizing him from the squadron that boarded the freighter. Clearly the man was more than just a mere guard if he was here.

“So the little girls took a powder and now the whole navy’s in a panic,” he said with a wry smile. “And old Murphy’s been called up to help pull you out of the mess you made when you didn’t listen to him in the first place!”

“And you did so much better with them, by your own account,” Sittithong shot back.

“Well, you got a point there,” the old man admitted. “But if it wasn’t for you buttin’ in like you did, they’d be where they wanted to be and I’d be rid of them by now. Even I had no idea that they could do this! ”

Maslovic was less inclined to trust the old captain. “This is quite a level of sophistication for three airheaded young things who can hardly walk, isn’t it?”

“ ‘ Sophistication ’ he says! ’Tis the black arts, m’boy! Nobody can teleport themselves off a ship by chantin’ usin’ some kind of gizmo!”

Maslovic nodded. “And there I agree with you. Not in the black magic, but in the fact that nobody can will themselves elsewhere. If these girls really could do that, why did they need you?”

“Invisible, then! Maybe they made themselves invisible!”

“Not likely. We don’t just track by vision. Every living thing aboard gives off heat and makes noise and has all sorts of nonvisual emanations that we can use for detection. They show up on none of them, even though small pests in the deepest holds do. No, they didn’t teleport anyplace and they didn’t become invisible or any such thing. There’s only one explanation that makes any sense here, and it’s highly sophisticated. Let me see the replay again, if you please, Commander.”

All eyes went to the screen, which blacked out for just a moment and then came back up with a recording of the trio sitting there inside the pentagram chanting.

“If that’s not an act, then those faces show a near trancelike state,” Maslovic pointed out. “But they’re doing something, and more and more they’re doing it in perfect synch. Look at the slight twitching in the feet, the little muscular movements in the mouths, and you’ll see they get to where the slightest little thing, even breathing and heart rates, are absolutely identical, like they’re one organism. It’s the closest to telepathy I’ve ever seen. The chanting helps them in some way, combines them in some kind of shared consciousness. It’s a discipline, but it’s clearly deliberate.”

“So they merge,” Sittithong commented. “That would give them a combined IQ of our dumbest sailor.”

Maslovic kept staring at the three. “No, sir. It’s not intellect at work here. It’s feelings, emotions, I can’t tell what else.” He looked at the small timer clicking off the hundredths of seconds in the lower left hand corner. “Now, finally, they’ve got to where they wanted to be. How they learned this I have no idea, but it will be essential that we find out. Imagine what would happen if these girls fell into the hands of someone who could direct them for the wrong ends, or if they could teach more capable people to do this. Nothing would be safe. On the other hand, if we can learn how it’s done, nothing would be closed to us.”

Even Murphy was getting interested. “What are you talkin’ about, man?”

“Watch. There! ”

One moment the trio is still sitting there, chanting, and the next moment they simply are not there. There was no transition, no fading out, nothing. They were there, and then they weren’t, just like that.

“What do you see, Sergeant?” the exec prompted. “What do you see that we can’t?”

“Well, sir, for one thing I can see that we need a faster clock. Still, if you go back to the precise instant that they ‘vanish,’ you may be able to see it. At the moment they vanish, freeze it. I mean truly at that moment, at the precise frame number.”

It was done, but they could still see nothing. The girls sat, frozen, in that eerie unison that the sergeant had noticed. “Now advance one frame at a time.”

Each frame was a hundredth of a second, so it was going to take a while to go through the next few moments, but there they vanished, and nothing was clearly different.

“Right there, the first very few frames, perhaps five one hundredths of a second in all. Can’t you see it?”

Both Murphy and Sittithong stared as the same frames went by slowly again and again, but it wasn’t clear.

Finally, Maslovic said, “Don’t pay any attention to the girls vanishing. Look at the background, and in particular that crude design drawn around them. If we had thousandths of a second frames I think it would be obvious, but this isn’t much. Just look at the design behind where the women were sitting from the point of view of the camera.”

“I believe I see it. A slight distortion, a sort of blurring,” the exec commented. “Is that what you mean?”

Maslovic nodded. “The information had to be interpolated for that very short period. After that, the full information could be compiled from earlier storage. You see, we don’t keep every frame of every surveillance video we have. On a ship of this size the storage alone would be enormous. They’d been chanting for several hours, so the view of that part of the design was no longer in the security computer’s memory. It had to interpolate. As soon as it got the full view, it back-filled the design, redrew it digitally, but for those brief first few fractions of a second it had to hold the design while reprocessing the rest of the image. Because of that, we get that distortion. It’s so minor you’d only see it if you expected to see it, and then only in this frame-by-frame analysis.”

Both Murphy and the exec turned and stared at the marine. “And, Sergeant, how in hell did you know to expect to see it?”

“It had to be there. And because the alarms triggered at five one hundredths of a second, it was the one small section that could not be digitally redrawn before a secure offline copy was made. The two computers are substantially the same speed, but the general security and surveillance computer had a lot to do. It still almost managed.”

“And all this nonsense means what?” Murphy asked, genuinely confused.

“It means that your girls didn’t disappear anywhere. After they did what they needed to do, they simply stopped, got up, and walked out the door.”

“Impossible!” Lieutenant Commander Mohr asserted. “They’d be all over our sensors!”