Mindbridge Read online

  Carol lay panting on the cot. Jacque picked up the bridge, walked stiffly over to the aquarium, and dropped the creature into its water. He retrieved his jacket from the camera and sat down next to Carol.

  “We forgot towels,” he said, and began patting her dry.

  She made a purring sound and stretched. “You don’t want to-“

  “No. I’ve had it.”

  “There’s plenty of time.” The clock said 23:14. “If we did it without the bridge you-“

  “Please.”

  “I was just-“

  “Carol, some other time I’d love to but some other time!”

  She flinched. “Don’t be mad at me.”

  “I’m not mad at you.”

  “Don’t be mad at yourself either. You couldn’t help-“

  “Let’s not talk. Let’s just not talk.”

  “All right.” She tried to dry him but he twisted away and went to get dressed. She turned her back to him and rummaged through her purse for a tissue.

  20 - Coda

  A more or less independent passage, at the end of a composition, introduced to bring it to a satisfactory close.

  They had eight hours before they were due back at the chamber for Rhine testing. Jacque walked with Carol back to her cottage. It was a misty summer’s-end night, clouds rolling in heavy with rain, heat lightning on the horizon. They walked apart and didn’t say much.

  She took his hand and held on while she thumbed the door open. “I don’t have anything to drink in the-“

  “Carol, uh, look. I’m sorry. It wasn’t you. It was that damned-“

  “Shush.” She slipped her arms around him and leaned her head on his chest. After a moment: “I owe you a meal, Lefavre.”

  “Oh, that-“

  “Free for breakfast tomorrow?” Tugging him toward the door. “Come on. I have real eggs.”

  21- To the Marriage of True Minds Admit Impediments

  The Effect of Telepathic

  Communion on Coitus

  by

  Raymond Sweeney, M.D., Ph.D.

  HIGHLY CONFIDENTIAL

  1. It is not meant to be implied that any general conclusions may be drawn from this report, based as it is on one single episode. Certain aspects of it, however, may be of interest to investigators of human sexual function and dysfunction.

  2. The subjects involved were Jacque (sic) L. and Carol W., the two veterans of the first Groombridge mission most sensitive to the amplifying effect of the Groombridge bridge. They were scheduled for two hours’ sexual experimentation in conjunction with the bridge, without observation, on the condition that they consent to interviews afterward.

  3. The subjects seem sexually compatible, but had no mutual sexual relationship prior to the experiment (in retrospect, this seems unfortunate). Neither has any significant history of dysfunction. Carol’s testimony reveals a relatively high frequency of sexual contacts; Jacque’s, relatively low.

  4. The subjects were interviewed separately for two to three hours, two days after the experiment. Carol allowed part of the interview to be conducted under hypnosis; Jacque did not.

  5. Carol reported a relatively normal, if unusually intense and accelerated, pattern of sexual response. Jacque suffered acute ejaculatory incompetence.

  6. Jacque recalled two previous episodes of ejaculatory incompetence, both with well-defined etiology: unusual fatigue, overindulgence in alcohol, lack of emotional rapport with his partner (a prostitute, when be was sixteen). He claims that none of these factors was present to any significant degree in this case, and attributes the episode entirely to the influence of the bridge.

  7. Carol, on the other hand, would like to have a bridge of her own.

  8. Directly following the experiment, the couple twice shared mutually enjoyable coitus, which of course reinforces Jacque’s claim.

  9. Transcription of the interviews, and medical histories, are here appended.

  22 - Sing Nonnie

  (From A Critical History of American Popular Music, Volume 6 [2040-2060], by Eliot Green. Copyright © Quadrangle TFX, 2072.)

  . . . briefly dominated by a bastard creation baptised the “NeoElizabethan Movement.”

  The instruments were Elizabethan-as well as copies could be made with 21St Century craftsmachineship- and the melodies and many of the words were stolen from that period. But the spirit behind it was pure profit, merchants and musicians alike cashing in on the blunted sensibilities of a novelty-hungry public.

  A typically bad example is “Sweet Lovers Love the Spring,” popular in the fall of that year:

  It was a lov-er and his lass with-> hey

  and-a ho and-a hey no-ni-no, that’s with a Broom-

  bridge bridge did pass the springtime, the only etc.

  Not a complete stanza, but could anyone care. Musically it’s unimaginative-and the words have an immediate emetic effect on any lover of Shakespeare.

  Rumor has it that the song was written by a computer in the Public Relations department of the Agency for Extraterrestrial Development.

  23 – CHAPTER SEVEN

  Jacque closed the briefing room door behind him and nodded hello to everyone. He took a seat beside Carol. The soft leather creaking was the only sound in the room.

  “Okay,” Tania said, looking up from her clipboard. “We’re all here. Jacque, this is our new teammate, Gustav Hasenfel, from Bremehauven. Jacque Lefavre.”

  Jacque leaned over the seminar table to shake hands. “Guten Tag.” Pale blond hair, handsome strong features, tall, ineffable sadness in clear blue eyes. Handshake warm, dry, firm. Jacque did not like him.

  “Tag. Sind Schweizer?”

  “Ia naturlich. Mein Akzent?”

  “Jawohi.”

  “Hey,” Carol said. “Speak French or something.”

  “Gus is a Tamer Two,” Tania said. “He’s had four missions.” Which meant, Jacque knew, that after his last mission retirement and/or death had reduced his team to two or three. Otherwise they wouldn’t have broken up his team; the AED liked to keep people together.

  “Now,” Tania said, tapping the clipboard. “Two things; three things. Jacque and Gus, they’re tapping you for a breeding mission. Day after tomorrow, September second, 0536.”

  “My poor overworked boy,” Carol whispered, humorlessly.

  “Where will it be?” Gus asked.

  “Sixty-one Cygni B. Fascinating place.”

  “Indeed. We spent two months there, geoforming.”

  She smiled. “I had a baby there last year.”

  “I missed you by three years, then.”

  Short silence while they nodded at each other. “The rest of us won’t be going out until next month. They did manage to fund another Groombridge expedition, a longer one. We’ll be there forty-seven days, starting October eleventh. With the mass spectrograph.”

  “Starting geoformy?” Vivian asked.

  “Probably not. The preliminary analysis is that Groombridge would be more trouble than it’s worth. What we’re to do, eventually, is set up a few buildings for a psychic research center. This mission is just to look for bridges. And isolate elements for an engineering team that’ll follow in a couple of weeks.

  “They’ll have our work plans printed by the last week in September. Everybody except Jacque and Gus is on leave until the twenty-fifth.”

  “How long is the breeding mission?” Jacque said.

  “Twenty hours. Oh, here.” She tossed him a small plastic vial. “Take one every six hours, starting midnight tonight. And be a good boy.” She arched one eyebrow.

  “Starting midnight,” Carol said.

  Tania laughed. “Starting midnight. Don’t wear him out, though.

  “Today the bridge slingshots back. They’re going to dissect it, starting nineteen hundred. Anybody who wants to watch is invited.”

  Carol raised her hand. “Have they found out how Ch’ing died?”

  “No. Depends on who you ask. Medical group says it has to have b
een the suit. Bioengineering says no. They’re still working on it.”

  “That’s comforting,” Carol said.

  Tania shrugged. “It’s happened before. I don’t know who to believe. Just hoping it wasn’t the suit.

  “We’ll have a meeting on the twenty-fifth. Check your mailbox a few days before that; we’ll have some sort of preliminary research summary. The math committee and bio group have already published some findings, if you want to look them up.

  “Otherwise, you’re free for a month. How many want to come to the dissection?” Everybody except Carol raised his hand; then she raised hers. “Fine, I’ll tell them. See you there.”

  Jacque and Carol walked into town for an early supper. The Mexican restaurant wasn’t good, but it was better than the AED cafeteria.

  “Why don’t we just skip the dissection?” Carol said after they’d ordered. “Spend a quiet evening at home.”

  He laughed. “You act like I’m going off on some long journey.”

  “Well, you are.”

  “For less than a day.” He stirred the ice in his water glass. “Actually, I think you’re jealous.”

  “I am not. Don’t be silly.”

  “I don’t mean jealous of this particular woman. I mean the situation. That you have to stay in one place and make babies while I . . . flit around the galaxy like a horny butterfly.”

  “I don’t brood on it.” He smiled at her pun. “Besides, it’s safer.”

  “Do you know how long it’ll be before they...”

  “Breed me? No. Tania says I ought to get at least two more regular jumps first. Then, if I follow her pattern, they’ll keep me pregnant for several years.”

  “She had six?”

  “Yes. But that’s unusual.” The waiter brought their plates: refried beans and some meatlike substance.

  “If I were a girl I wouldn’t be too enthusiastic about it.”

  “You get to meet lots of interesting men.” She tasted the food and then spooned hot sauce all over it. “What do you think of Gus?”

  “He’s all right, I guess.”

  She laughed. “The hell you say. If you could’ve seen you two sizing each other up. . .”

  “Come on. I haven’t had two words with him.”

  “Sure,” she said softly. “Did you hear what happened to him?”

  “What?”

  “We’re his third team. The first one, four people disappeared. Went out on a floater, and a little while later the super got four simultaneous death readings. Floater came back without a scratch on it.”

  “That’s creepy enough. Find out what happened?”

  “Never. No bodies, no suits, nothing. That was Seventy Ophiuchi A, about two years ago. The other was a geoformy accident, last year, Tau Ceti. Some kind of explosion killed half his team.”

  “How do you know all this?”

  “I get to briefing sessions early.”

  They ate in silence for a while. Jacque poured the last of his beer. “Poor Gus,” he said. “Good thing we’re not superstitious.”

  “Isn’t it, though.”

  It was standing room only in the hyperbaric chamber, some thirty people keeping out of the way of Willard’s Bio Group and the holo team that was setting up to record the dissection.

  A reporter from Science-News TFX asked Dr. Willard whether they would be looking for some particular feature.

  “Actually, we don’t know exactly what we’re looking for. What it’ll look like, that is. Obviously what we want is the organ responsible for its special talent.

  “We’ve done neutron and neutrino scans on the creature; X-ray movies, you name it. As far as we can tell, it has no more nervous system than a grape. It’s little more than a hollow tube that takes food in at one end and expels waste at the other. And lets people read minds.”

  He opened a black case and began to lay out glittering tools on the table in front of him. “There won’t be any anesthetic. If you’ll check your data summary, that’s experiment eleven, twenty-six August. As far as we could tell, nothing causes the creature pain. I don’t have any explanation for this. Even protozoa respond to trauma.

  “Are Jacque Lefavre and Carol Wachal here?” They raised their hands. “Come on up, please. Would you mind helping out a little here?”

  “Not at all,” Jacque said. Carol nodded. “We’re not sterile, though.”

  “That’s all right, neither am I.” To the reporter:

  “Lefavre and Wachal are the two Tamers most sensitive to the bridge effect.

  “This is Dr. Jameson’s suggestion. We want the two Tamers to stay in contact with the bridge as the experiment proceeds. Hopefully, you’ll be able to tell us at what stage of the dissection the creature loses its power. And give us some subjective impression of, oh, the rate at which the power declines, whether it might peak or otherwise fluctuate . . . and so forth. All right?”

  “We’ll try,” Jacque said. Carol was a little pale. As she’d told him on the way back from supper, she had an irrational fear of watching dissections. When she was five or six she’d seen a popular science show where they’d taken the heart out of a living turtle and kept it beating for weeks. She still had nightmares about that heart.

  They positioned the two Tamers so they wouldn’t get in the way of the holo cameras. When they touched the bridge, Jacque caught the racing fear in Carol’s mind. He tried to radiate reassurance, tenderness. He only half-heard what Dr. Willard was saying.

  “Nobody’s ever dissected one of these before, of course. The nudibranch, though, is a close structural analog.” He picked up a scalpel. “Accordingly, I will . . . I . . . will make a sss-will incision, hm. Along the dors-dors’l service. . .”

  “Doctor-“ An aide reached toward him.

  The scalpel clattered on the table. With a puzzled expression on his lined face, Willard clutched his chest and sat down on the floor. He fell over sideways without straightening.

  The aide felt for a pulse. “Heart stopped,” he said. He ripped open the front of Willard’s tunic.

  “Get him out of here!” Dr. Jameson shouted. “Get him out in the hall, oxygen, you-“ He pointed at another aide. “-call a floater!”

  There was a lot of confusion, shouting, shoving through the crowd. Jameson asked that everybody except medical doctors stay inside the chamber until they got Willard on his way to the hospital.

  After a few minutes, Jameson came back inside. He stood in front of the table and addressed the group.

  “This is a terrible . . . thing. I’ve been after Bob-“ He pointed at the reporter. “This isn’t for publication. I’ve been after Bob for ten years or more to go get an implant, a cardiac implant. An eighty-year-old man who smokes and drinks the way he does. . . well, most of you know Bob. He said he’d get an implant the day he stopped playing tennis.

  “They got here in four minutes and there’s a cardiac team scrubbed and waiting back at General. So they might be able to save him.

  “Meanwhile . . . I’d like to keep posted on Bob, but we have less than an hour to finish up here, before the thing slingshots. So on with it.”

  He went to the other side of the table and picked up the scalpel Willard had dropped. “Now I don’t claim to know half the invertebrate anatomy that Bob does. Is there anybody here who thinks they can do a better job?”

  Nobody responded. “Speak up, God damn it. I’m not puffing rank here. How about you, Modibo? You did that damn slug last month.”

  A big black man in the front of the crowd shook his head slowly. “Not out of any special expertise, doctor. I was just on deck at the right time.”

  “You go ahead, Phil,” another said. “If we see anything, we’ll shout it out.”

  “All right.” To Carol and Jacque: “You two grab hold of the thing.

  “Now. Dorsal incision.” He brought the blade down and hesitated. “Hm. Dorsal.”

  He looked up at Jacque and shook his head violently. Then he carefully raised the scalpel and slit
his own throat.

  24 - Geoformy II: Access to Tools

  To: Public Relations, Westinghouse International

  From: Black & Morgenstern

  Date: 11 November 2075

  Subject: Text and Preliminary Camera Instructions, Four-Minute Public Interest Spot (for mid-point insert, Don Loft Show, 17 Jan 76)

  SETTING: Craters of the Moon National Park

  REQUIREMENTS: Animation lab; three (3) available-light holo cameras, three (3) actors, two (2) simulated GPEM suits, one (1) Westinghouse mass spectrograph.

  Spot begins with a 30-second animated cartoon. First you have a simplified alien landscape, strange music. Five Tamers pop into existence, get out of formation and mill around, waiting.

  The place they appeared from goes pop again, this time producing a pile of bricks, mortar, bricklaying tools. Music segues into a soft jissto as they start building a house. Tempo increases as they work faster and faster. New piles of bricks appear pop as they need them; it takes four piles to finish the house.

  The Tamer-figures sit around the house, panting. Suddenly the music stops and the bottom layer of bricks disappears. The top three-fourths of the house falls with a resounding crash. This is repeated three more times, as each successive layer disappears.

  The Tamers stand there scratching their heads. Then they also disappear. Fade into Craters of the Moon sequence.

  (Camera positions given in conventional Cartesian style. Primary origin is ground level, centered underneath mass spectrograph, which will be placed on a level area 1250 meters NNW of benchmark 1728 (permissions bought from Park Service, Inc.). X-axis oriented 29° E of N. initially.)

  time origin skew X Y Z

  030 31,00,3 00 8.5,8.5,3.0 Shattered landscape.

  035 31,00,3 00 8.5,8.5,3.0 VOICE OVER:

  SLOW X-AXIS DRIFT TO (t = 33) “Nothing made on