was reading the landlady, you knew she damned her memory that she couldn’t remember me. You knew when Mark was standing at the peephole of his door. You knew he was still drunk from the night before.”
“I could hear him slurring,” I said. I shrugged, apologetic, in Tauber’s direction and he shrugged back. I’ve known other people over the years who drank from habit-after a while, their dignity gets pretty flexible.
“Some people slur all the time,” Max said. “Some people have speech impediments. You weren’t guessing- you knew.”
“What are you saying-I’m a mindreader?”
“I’m saying everybody mindreads,” he answered. “Almost everybody. They’re just primitive about it. This is scientific fact, not fact published in medical journals, but fact nonetheless, science that’s been distributed for years in manila envelopes, hand to hand in code to those with a need to know. And if it’s ever published, if the New England Journal of Medicine ever provides an acceptable rationale, mindreading will be routine in three years.” He tapped the steering wheel as he talked and I realized we were in a moving car, on the highway again. I’d gotten so drawn in I’d lost all sense of the world, of where we were.
“You mean we’d all be doing what you just did?”
“Hell no,” Tauber shook his head. “That’s like sayin’ anyone could paint the Mona Lisa if you give ‘em paint and canvas. Some people’ll do it better and quicker.” He looked at Max. “He’s very quick.”
“Most of them would justify their wishful thinking and call it mindreading,” Max said. He looked over to see if I was satisfied.
I was nowhere near satisfied. This was without a doubt the most ridiculous explanation of anything I’d ever been asked to swallow. There was not one thing about it that felt slightly real-except that it did explain every weird thing that had happened since morning. Once I took the whole thing in wide-angle, I realized I had to either doubt everything that had happened since Dave was shot or this was the best explanation I could think of. It was the only explanation that didn’t force me to doubt my own sanity any more than usual.
“When you first told her about the check, she wasn’t convinced. She didn’t want to check on it. You made her.”
“Bravo,” Mr. Dulles said. “Good work. Yes, I made her.”
“The job was readin’ minds and planting thoughts in other people’s minds,” Tauber explained. “He made her think checkin’ was her idea.”
Mr. Dulles grimaced. “I still think we should stop,” he said, talking to Tauber. “Beyond this, he becomes an asset-for whoever’s out there.”
“He might pick it up himself-he’s a bit of a sponge,” Tauber said, talking about me(!). He gave Mr. Dulles a moment to protest, then returned my way. “Memory’s real sensual. Once you’ve got that real good mental connection with somebody, you share whatever they’re thinkin’. Not just thinkin’ really-sights, sounds, smells-you can pull all kinds o’ stuff outta their heads. Or you can make ‘em see things that aren’t there, say things you want ‘em to say, things you want ‘em to believe. It gets pretty comical sometimes.”
“That’s enough,” Mr. Dulles said but Tauber’s eyes were bright.
“The thing is, once you make that connection, it’s not like you’re in ‘em, it’s like you’re them. You not only know what happened, you know how it felt.” He was rising up in the back seat now, the power of the thing carrying him, like an addict remembering his first fix, when he felt like he was touching God-hell, when he felt like he was God.
“And then ya feed it back to ‘em-into their minds-with all those feelings attached and it breezes by every gut check, every guidepost the mind puts up to vet information. It feels like they’re rememberin’. O’course, you add in some suggestions o’ yer own to tip the balance a bit.”
He smiled again, amazed at this nasty, awful achievement. He turned to Max. “But I’ve never known anyone who could do it so damn fast!”
We headed out onto the highway. The afternoon was waning-every once in a while, a little breeze actually cut through that hotbox car. I was trying to decide if I was any better off for having the explanation.
“How did Dave die?” Tauber asked.
“I told you-shot by three mindbenders, country unknown.”
“When did you get there?”
“Right after,” I said, which only deepened the lines on Tauber’s forehead.
Mr. Dulles reddened. “Dave said he’d been getting probed for a month. He told me something was up but I didn’t believe him.”
“Why not?”
“Because I wasn’t getting probed.”
“What’s probed?” I asked. If they were mindreaders, why didn’t they know I had no clue what they were talking about?
“Your mind transmits. Your thoughts have a physical dimension.”
“Like molecules?”
“Particles and waves, vibrations, frequencies that can be tuned and amplified. The transmission can also, to some extent, be tracked. I know your base frequency now. If you were arrested, I could follow you from several miles away to the police station.”
“So when an agent’s nearby and ya don’t know his frequency,” Tauber said, “ya probe for it. Ya send out a signal that hits a bunch o’ frequencies and see if it gets a response.”
“And what do you do about it?”
“There are ways to combat it,” Dulles said. “You change your frequency or muffle your signal. You move around the time sequence. Or, sometimes, you catch the probe and follow it back to the originator, to locate whoever’s searching for you.”
Tauber stared at Max. “You’re saying ya still get probed?”
“A couple times a year,” Max admitted and it was clear they both felt this was significant. “There are people who…want me to work for them. Doing jobs I have no desire to do. When they get annoying, I disappear. Dave was my safe haven. But when he asked me for help, I told him there was nothing to it, because if I wasn’t getting probed, nobody was getting probed.”
He slumped a bit in his seat. “I’ll take you to this Miriam Fine,” he continued, “and you can figure out what to do from there.”
We drove quiet for a long time. We’d had an outburst of talking and now we were done spent-yeah, we were spent. I liked the sound of that-it’s a better word. Words were beginning to come back to me, at least that one did. After the year I’d had, a trickle felt like a downpour.
A moment later the trickle started, like I had triggered the reality by thinking the word. Raindrops appeared on the windshield. A few moments later, the downpour was pounding the roof, slithering in the slipstream across the windows, a mad river curdling the pebbly ground along the road, a full-fledged sky-dump. Words have power — who said that?
It quickly got too much for driving. “We have to stop,” Max said and pulled off at the next exit. It was a strip mall of motels-you could see the chain signs buzzing over the treetops miles away. Five sprawling motels in an overlit shiny row, room rates a dollar apart, separated by gas stations with prices varying by three cents a gallon. We pulled into the furthest parking lot, the one with deep woods behind it and took a double room with a cot for the third man. As soon as we’d dropped our stuff inside, Tauber told Max, “Lend me ten bucks out of the stash-I’ve got some personal maintenance issues.”
“Lend?” Max asked.
“Tomorrow, you set me loose with a shopping cart and other people’s garbage; you’ll see how much money I can make. At the moment, I’m without the tools of the trade.” Max gave him some money and he was back in a few minutes with a bottle of cheap bourbon. I hadn’t even seen a liquor store but I guess he had radar.
“You could buy decent booze,” Max said. “We’re not broke.”
“I don’t want decent booze,” Tauber replied. “Ye’ll spoil me.”
“So who gets the cot?” I asked. “Should we draw cards?”
“You’d get rooked, son,” Tauber laughed. “Reading cards is how they check if you’ve got the power.”
“I don’t sleep much anyway,” Max said. “I’ll take the cot.”
Tauber had the bottle drained in fifteen minutes. He started singing after that-not loud but not good either
