the feel of fear. The sun was ahead, and she would ride Necromancer all the way to the sea, where she would perhaps find her father and the two of them would live by pulling in nets full of shining, slippery fish.
“Faster!” she cried triumphantly. “Oh, Necromancer, go
And that was when the silhouette stepped into the widening funnel of light where the woods ended, blocking the light in its own shape, blocking the way out. At first, as always in this dream, she thought it was her father, was sure it was her father, and her joy became almost hurtful… before suddenly transforming into utter terror.
She just had time to register the fact that the man was too big, too tall-and yet somehow familiar, dreadfully familiar, even in silhouette-before Necromancer reared, screaming.
Struggling to stay on, her thighs slipping as his hooves pawed at the air, and he wasn’t screaming, he was whinnying, but it was a
Up ahead, blocking the light, that silhouette, that dreadful shape. Now it began to come toward her; she had fallen onto the path and Necromancer touched her bare stomach gently with his muzzle.
“Don’t you hurt my horse!” she screamed at the advancing silhouette, the dream-father who was not her father. “Don’t you hurt the horses. Oh, please don’t hurt the horses!”
But the figure came on and it was drawing a gun and that was when she awoke, sometimes with a scream, sometimes only in a shuddery cold sweat, knowing that she had dreamed badly but unable to remember anything save the mad, exhilarating plunge down the wooded trail and the smell of fire… these things, and an almost sick feeling of betrayal…
And in the stable that day, she would touch Necromancer or perhaps put the side of her face against his warm shoulder and feel a dread for which she had no name.
ENDGAME
1
It was a bigger room.
Until last week, in fact, it had been the Shop’s non-denominational chapel. The speed with which things were picking up could have been symbolized by the speed and ease with which Cap had rammed through Hockstetter’s requests. A new chapel-not an odd spare room but a real chapel-was to be built at the eastern end of the grounds. Meanwhile, the remainder of the tests on Charlie McGee would be held here.
The fake wood paneling and the pews had been ripped out. Both flooring and walls had been insulated with asbestos batting that looked like steel wool and then covered over with heavy-guage tempered sheet steel. The area that had been the altar and the nave had been partitioned off: Hockstetter’s monitoring instruments and a computer terminal had been installed. All of this had been done in a single week; work had begun just four days before Herman Pynchot ended his life in such grisly fashion.
Now, at two in the afternoon on an early October day, a cinderblock wall stood in the middle of the long room. To the left of it was a huge, low tank of water. Into this tank, which was six feet deep, had been dumped more than two thousand pounds of ice. In front of it stood Charlie McGee, looking small and neat in a blue denim jumper and red and black striped rugby socks. Blond pigtails tied off with small black velvet bows hung down to her shoulder blades.
“All right, Charlie,” Hockstetter’s voice said over the intercom. Like everything else, the intercom had been hastily installed, and its reproduction was tinny and poor. “We’re ready when you are.”
The cameras filmed it all in living color. In these films, the small girl’s head dips slightly, and for a few seconds nothing happens at all. Inset at the left of the film frame is a digital temperature readout. All at once it begins to move upward, from seventy to eighty to ninety. After that the figures jump up so rapidly that they are just a shifting reddish blur; the electronic temperature probe has been placed in the center of the cinderblock wall.
Now the film switches to slow motion; it is the only way that the entire action can be caught. To the men who watched it through the observation room’s leaded-glass viewing ports, it happened with the speed of a gunshot.
In extreme slow motion, the cinderblock wall begins to smoke; small particles of mortar and concrete begin to jump lazily upward like popping corn. Then the mortar holding the blocks together can be observed to be
Set around this testing room that used to be a chapel are eight huge Kelvinator air conditioners, all running at high speed, all pumping freezing air into the testing room. All eight kicked into operation as soon as the room’s
Charlie had got very good at directing the stream of heat that somehow came from her at a single point, but as anyone who has ever burned his or her hand on a hot skillet handle knows, even so-called nonconductable surfaces will conduct heat-if there is enough heat to conduct.
With all eight of the industrial Kelvinators running, the temperature in the testing room should have been minus fifteen degrees Fahrenheit, plus or minus five degrees. Instead, the records show a continued climb, up over a hundred degrees, then a hundred and five, then a hundred and seven. But all of the sweat running down the faces of the observers cannot be accounted for by the heat alone.
Now not even extreme slow motion will give a clear picture of what is happening, but one thing is clear: as the cinderblocks continue to explode outward and backward, there can be no doubt that they are burning; these blocks are burning as briskly as newspapers in a fireplace. Of course, an eighth-grade science book teaches that
Then everything is obscured by a furious blowback of disintegrating particles as the whole wall vaporizes. The little girl makes a slow-motion half turn and a moment later the calm surface of the icy water in the tank is convulsed and boiling. And the heat in the room, which has crested at a hundred twelve, (even with all eight air conditioners, it is as hot as a summer noontime in Death Valley), begins to go back.
There’s one for the sweeper.
2
Pat-I’ve watched the films four times now and still can’t believe it isn’t some sort of special effects trick. Some unsolicited advice: When you get before the Senate subcommittee that’s going to deal with the Lot Six appropriations and renewal plans, have your ducks in a row and do more than cover your ass-armor-plate it! Human nature being what it is, those guys are going to look at those films and have a hard job believing it isn’t a flat-out shuckand-jive.
To business: The readouts are being delivered by special messenger, and this memo should beat them by no more than two or three hours. You can read them over for yourself, but I’ll briefly sum up our findings. Our conclusions can be summed up in two words: We’re stumped. She was wired up this time like an astronaut going into space. You will note: 1) Blood pressure within normal parameters for a child of eight, and there’s hardly a jog when that wall goes up like the Hiroshima bomb. 2) Abnormally high alpha wave readings; what we’d call her “imagination circuitry” is well engaged. You may or may not agree with Clapper and me that the waves are rather more even, suggesting a certain “controlled imaginative dexterity” (Clapper’s rather fulsome phrase, not mine). Could indicate she’s getting in control of it and can manipulate the ability with greater precision. Practice, as they say, makes perfect. Or it may mean nothing at all. 3) All metabolic telemetry is within normal parameters-nothing strange or out of place. It’s as if she was reading a good book or writing a class theme instead of creating what you say must have been upwards of 30,000 degrees of spot heat. To my mind the most fascinating (and frustrating!) information of all is the Beal-Searles CAT test.
If she can produce 30,000 degrees of spot heat without even trying, have you ever thought what might happen if she really set her mind to it?
Brad
