Brown, Dale - Patrick McLanahan 02 (9 page)

 
          
Two
minutes later Kenneth James had finished photographing the entire chapter and
its accompanying appendices with the tiny microdisk camera. He wrapped the
device in a handkerchief to help protect it, then zipped it safely away in his
leg pocket, out of sight so no one would be tempted to ask to borrow his “pen.”

 
          
Satisfied,
he packed up his charts and books and turned them back to the vault custodian.
He would put the camera in his car outside the alert facility to prevent
discovery during one of the commander’s frequent no-notice locker searches on
the alert pad, then deliver it to the prearranged drop point for his KGB
contact from St. Louis after he got off seven-day alert.

Dreamland,
Nevada

Monday, 3 December 1994
, 0730 PDT (1020 EDT)

 
          
Ken
James was strapped securely into a stiff, uncomfortable steel chair, wrists,
ankles and chest bound by heavy leather straps. His head was immobilized by a
strong steel beam. The room where he lay on the rack was dimly lit, buzzing
with the sound of power transformers and smelling of the ozone created by
electronic relays and microcircuits. Two men in Air Force blue fatigues
rechecked his bonds, making sure they were extra tight; one of them adjusted a
tiny spotlight directly onto James’ right eyeball, smiling as James tried to
squint against the glare. The sergeant knew there was nothing James could do to
him.

 
          
James
had been sweating in the steel chair for nearly an hour, the two technicians
hovering over him, before another man entered the room. Tall and lanky, he
looked considerably older than his mid-thirties, thanks to a bald head and a
few stray shocks of gray hair that seemed to be haphazardly stuck onto his
skull. He spoke briefly with the techs, then walked over to the rack and
inspected the fitting and bonds. He stuck his face close to James, smiled and
said, “Now, Captain James, I’ll ask you once more—where were you on the
afternoon of August eleventh?”

 
          
In
fact, Ken James was photographing top-secret documents in a vault at McConnell
Air Force Base in
Kansas
. He rolled his eyes in exasperation. “Very funny, Dr. Carmichael. Now
can we get on with this?”

 
          
“Couldn’t
help it, Ken,” Alan Carmichael, the white-coated researcher said. “Seeing you
trussed up gives this place the look of some futuristic interrogation chamber.”

 
          
Which
was precisely what Maraklov was thinking himself. He was wearing a heavy suit
made of a thick metallic fabric. The suit had several thick cables and conduits
sewed into it that ran all through his arms, legs, feet, hands and neck. A
raised metal spine ran along his backbone from head to tail, so thick that a
channel had been cut into the chair to accommodate it. There was a bit of cool
circulating air flowing through tubules in the suit, but it did little to
relieve the oppressive heat and stuffiness.

 
          
“Have
you been practicing your deep breathing exercises?”
Carmichael
asked.

 
          
“Don’t
have a choice. I either breathe deep in this getup or I suffocate. Are you ever
going to tell me exactly what I’m supposed to be doing?”

 
          
“Try
to relax and I’ll tell.”
Carmichael
adjusted the volume of a small speaker next to a nearby oscilloscope-like
device; the speaker began to chirp in a seemingly random pattern.
Carmichael
motioned to one of twenty-five lines on the
oscilloscope. “Your twenty-five cps beta readouts are still firing. Relax, Ken.
Don’t try to force it or it won’t come.”

 
          
“What
won’t come?”
Carmichael
said nothing. Ken began to take deeper
breaths, trying to ignore the sweat trickling down his back and the cramp in
his right calf. After a few moments, the chirping subsided. Progress?

 
          
“Very
good,”
Carmichael
said. “Beta is down ... your Hertz waves
are increasing. Good. Occipital alpha is increasing. Good. Keep it up.” He
turned and with the help of one of the techs lifted a huge device off” a
carrying cart that he had brought in with him.

 
          
“What
the hell is that?” James asked as the huge object was lifted overhead. It was
hexagonal, with two wide visors in the front and cables leading to various
parts of the suit and to controls and boxes nearby.

 
          
“Your
new flight helmet,”
Carmichael
said. “The final component of the suit
you’re wearing. The project is progressing so well, we’ve decided to proceed
with a full-scale test.”

 
          
“Test
of what . . . ?”

 
          
“Wait.”
Carmichael
slid the heavy helmet over Ken’s head.

 
          
“Watch
the ears, damn it.”

 
          
“Watch
your beta—you’re pinging again.” The helmet was set into place and fastened to
a heavy clavicle locking ring on the metallic suit. The braces holding Ken’s
head in place took some of the helmet’s weight, but his shoulders were aching
after only a few moments.

 
          
A
microphone clicked on, and through a set of headphones in the helmet came: “How
do you hear me, Ken?”

 
          
“I
think you broke my left ear off”.”

 
          
“You’ll
live. Try to relax and I’ll explain.”
Carmichael
’s
voice dropped into the familiar deep, even monotone that he had used weeks
earlier during several days of screening: in fact,
Carmichael
was hypnotizing him, not with a shiny watch
on a chain, but with his voice only. James’ susceptibility to hypnotic
suggestion had made him an especially good candidate for this secret project.

 
          
“As
you know, we’ve been working here at Dreamland with several projects. We call
them all together ‘supercockpit’— designing an aircraft workspace that allows
the pilot to perform better in a high-speed, high-density combat environment.
You and several other pilots were working with Cheetah, the F-15 advanced
technology fighter demonstrator; that’s the state of the art, and her systems
will be incorporated in the Air Force’s new fighter in the next few years.
Cheetah makes extensive use of multi-function computer screens,
voice-recognition and artificial intelligence, as well as high- maneuverability
technology . . . Well, we’ve been working on the
next
generation of fighters after Cheetah, things like
forward-swept wing technology, hyper-start engines, super-conducting radar. But
the most fascinating aspect of the new generation of fighters will be
ANTARES—that’s an acronym for Advanced Neural Transfer and Response.”

 
          
“Neural
transfer? Sounds like Buck Rogers thought-control stuff.” Comic books were SOP
at
Connecticut
Academy
.

 
          
A
slight pause, then
Carmichael
said: “It is.”

 
          
Inwardly
Maraklov was tingling with excitement—
Carmichael
’s
electroencephalograph must be pinging off the dials, he thought. They were
actually working on
thought-controlled
aircraft
. .
.?

 
          
“Relax,
relax,”
Carmichael
said. “It might sound like science fiction
but we demonstrated the rudimentary ANTARES technology as early as the late
nineteen eighties.”

 
          
“But
is it possible . . . ?”

 
          
“Well,
we don’t know that yet. I’m hoping, I’m betting, we’ll find out pretty soon
...”

 
          
“But
how can you control by thought?”

 
          
“The
idea
is simple, the mechanism is complex.”
He waited a few moments while the subject hurriedly fought to control his
racing heartbeat.

 
          
“That’s
better,” he said in his most soothing, uninflected voice. “Here we go. Remember
back to your physiology. The human nervous system is composed of nerve cells,
neurons. The neurons carry information back and forth from receptor nerves in
the peripheral nervous system—nerves in the body in general—to the central
nervous system, brain and spinal cord. The information carried through the
nervous system is a series of chemical and electrical discharges between
neurons. If one neuron is stimulated enough so that its ionic balance is
changed, it releases a chemical into the synapse, the gap between neurons, and
that chemical stimulates another neuron.”

 
          
“Like
electricity flowing through a wire?”

 
          
“Well,
some discharges are purely electrical, like when neurons physically touch, but
mostly the connection is chemical. Anyway, this electrochemical and ionic
activity can be detected and read by electroencephalographs, which you’ve
become very familiar with the past weeks.” He would have nodded if he could.
“EEGs in the past could only
measure
electrical
activity—they couldn’t analyze, decode that activity. It was like the Plains
Indians putting their ears up to a telegraph pole, which they used to call the
spirit trees, by the way. They could hear the telegraph clicks and tell that
something
was happening, but they
couldn’t decipher the clicks or tell which direction the clicks were coming
from, and of course, they didn’t know how it was being done, just as we are
ignorant about so many things in the nervous system. Sure, lots of clicks
usually meant the army was coming, but that was about all. Ditto for us
twentieth-century wizards.”

 
          
Carmichael
paused to adjust his oscilloscope. “Well, a
few years ago we built an EEG that
could
read the spirit tree. You could lift a finger or hand and this EEG could tell a
researcher that you lifted a finger. And the opposite was true, too—when you
generated a thought command to lift your hand, that impulse could be detected
and read—in effect, we could read your mind.

 
          
“Of
course, the military got their mitts on the system right away. The new-style
EEG, nicknamed Spirit Tree—hey, I’m famous—was the ultimate lie detector. But
there was much more potential in Spirit Tree than use as a glorified polygraph.
We already knew the general path of nerves and which areas of the brain
corresponded to certain thoughts or activities— that all came about during Nazi
Germany’s infamous lab experiments on human guinea pigs, when they would
surgically remove parts of a prisoner’s brain and see what the victim could no
longer do. The new idea was, if we could now read the information flowing
through the system, was there a way we could interject outside or foreign
stimuli into the nervous system? Instead of receptors in, say, the fingers
generating the initial sensory impulse, could we send information from a
computer into the system and read how the brain reacted to it? And could the
opposite be true—could we think about, say, moving a finger, and have a
computer read that nervous instruction and execute the command
electronically?”

 
          
The
more James heard, the more excited he became, though now it was an intellectual
response and his signs stayed relaxed. A computer issuing instructions to a
human via his own nervous system ... a computer reading the human nervous
system ... For a while he thought his time might better be spent making
drawings or photographs of the F-15 Advanced Tactical Fighter named Cheetah.
But now ... well, the Academy hadn’t imagined anything like
this
when they sent him to
America
. Of course nobody could have . . .

 
          
“Got
all that?”
Carmichael
asked.

 
          
“I
think so ... You’re going to try to read my mind with this . . . whatever it is
. . .”

 
          
“In
a sense, yes.”

 
          
“But
how strong are those electrochemical discharges across the synapse? Don’t you
have to clip some electrodes onto my skull?”

 
          
“In
the past that’s how EEGs were done. Every human body has a basic electrical
potential, an electrical aura, so to speak, and that potential is affected by
the central nervous system. Simple electrodes could read the tiny impulses
generated by the brain and nervous system. But those electrodes couldn’t
measure anything except the
change
in
electrical potential ...”