The Lost Perception (9 page)

Gregson alighted and headed for the building with the other passengers. In the austere lounge, he found an empty comviewer station—“audio only, no video,” the sign said in French—and placed his call through the Security Bureau communications network to Forsythe’s farm in Pennsylvania.

When Helen’s voice came through, he explained that he’d been unable to reach her from New York as a result of line trouble. When she learned where he was, she seemed both surprised and dejected.

“This was something I couldn’t walk away from,” he apologized. “It’s a job only I can do.”

Her voice was toneless as she said, “I imagined it would be.”

“You don’t understand! And I can’t go into details. But,” he lowered his voice, “—well, there’s a possibility that
within a few weeks
they’ll be able to start tearing down the place where I spent my last two years.”

Her exuberance came through over the wire. “Oh, Greg! Really?”

“I’ll keep in touch as much as I can until then. How’s Bill?”

“Stubborn as a mule.”

“Don’t push him too hard about the institute. I held off two months. Maybe he can stick it out for as long as will be necessary.”

Dix-sept Rue de la Serenite,
the address on Gregson’s slip of paper, was an ancient, though well-preserved apartment building just off Avenue Foch, practically in the shadow of the
Arc de Triomphe.

Brooding behind its ironwork fence, it looked patronizingly down from its eight-story height upon the quiet courtyard and shaded street below. The antiquity of the section softened the harsh sounds of injection sirens that chorused throughout the rest of the city.

Gregson paid the cab driver and went hesitatingly through the massive gates and on into the building’s main entrance.

“Monsieur veut quelque chose?”
the stern-faced
concierge
demanded.

“I’m Arthur Gregson.”

“But of course, Mr. Gregson. Madame Carnot will be found in her eighth-floor suite.”

“I’m supposed to be met here by a Miss Karen Rakaar.”

“And you will be. Meanwhile, Madame Carnot awaits you.” The man indicated a tiny, glass-walled elevator enclosed in the helical coils of a staircase.

That
17 Rue de la Serenite
was no apartment building became clear as the elevator ascended, giving Gregson a view of each level through which it rose. The second floor was an assembly hall. The third and fourth floors were compartmented into glass-enclosed cubicles. The next two appeared to be living quarters, with plush carpeting running down narrow corridors.

On the seventh floor, many persons were busy at switchboards. Centrally located, a huge, inner-illuminated Earth was impaled on a shaft extending from floor to ceiling.

Reaching out into the room from its equator was a stiff, transparent collar. At the edge of this flange, and positioned above the Atlantic Ocean, was a radiant point flagged with the letters “VJO.” It was the same ground control device that had directed Vega Jumpoff Station shuttle operations.

As the elevator continued upward, Gregson pondered the tight secrecy that cloaked this operation and wondered why it was necessary to conceal Ground Control Headquarters behind the false front of an apartment building. Unless the idea was to develop the super suppressor in total obscurity so there would be no false hope for a demoralized world. One day, the Screamies—fierce, relentless and horrible. The next, silence and calm.

On the top floor he was deposited in a hallway that led to the opulence of a richly paneled sitting room, verdant with its profusion of tropical plants and quiet in the sound-muffling lavishness of its carpeting.

“Entrez, Monsieur Gregson.”

The quavering voice drifted past delicately-laced French windows, opening on a roof garden whose tiled terrace was splotched with sunlight He stepped out into a jungle of shrubbery and ivy that clung to wrought-iron trellises after springing from miniature beds of fragrant blossoms. Then his eyes were drawn to the woman on a satin chaise longue near the vine-matted railing.

Like discolored ivory veined with antiquity, the flesh of her exposed forearm seemed merely to be draped over bone. Distorted into talons, her fingers clutched nothing, trembled incessantly. Her hair, thin and white, was conspicuous only in its sparseness.

“Ah yes,
monsieur,”
she acknowledged, as though conscious of his thoughts, “I am, indeed,
une vieille femme.”

Her admission to being an old woman, he decided, carried no regret.

“And what have I to rue,
monsieur?
You regard not a picture of weakness, but one of strength. For I am the most 79 powerful person in the entire world,” she said with puerile conceit.

He studied her warily. An old woman, doddering in her senility? Or something more than that? Twice she had seemed to know almost exactly what he was thinking, hadn’t she?

She laughed. “More than that I know even what you
are going
to think. Monsieur Forsythe was close to the truth,
vraiment.”

Astonished, he seized her arms. But he had no opportunity to speak.

There was brisk movement beyond a clump of shrubbery and he looked up into the menacing eyes of an International Guardsman with a laserifle. In another roof garden across the courtyard, two more armed Security Bureau men stepped into view. Gregson released the woman and the trio became inconspicuous once more.

Madame Carnot gestured feebly toward a chair. “Seat yourself. Mademoiselle Rakaar will be here soon.”

Gregson only stared numbly at the woman. She
was
aware of his thoughts! How else could she know about Bill? And what did she mean by saying Forsythe was close to the truth? Bill had spoken of the Screamies as being a means of
seeing
one another’s thoughts.

And—

“Mais non, monsieur.
He insisted it was
not
’seeing,’ did he not?”

Confounded, Gregson muttered, “Bill was right, then?” But, of course he was. For wasn’t this frail, childish woman not only verifying, but also demonstrating everything Forsythe had said?

Madame Carnot chuckled, baring stained teeth eroded to the pulp.
“Voilà!
You have answered your own question.”

“You were a Screamer?”

She nodded and her features assumed a sober cast. “A very long time ago. That much,
monsieur,
we have in common. And now you come to us so that you, too, may learn what powers are available. Very well, I shall try to teach you while we await Mademoiselle Rakaar.”

With considerable effort, she raised herself erect and sat on the edge of the chaise longue. “First,
monsieur,
let us welcome the fierce light of the Screamies into our brains. And then perhaps we shall learn that your old friend isn’t as mad as you imagined.”

Perplexed, he continued staring at the woman.

“Can you not invoke the blinding darkness, the roaring silence, at will?” She chuckled. “Until you learn to do that, you will never be able to
zylph.”

Zylph?
The word had a strangely familiar ring, as though he had heard it somewhere before but couldn’t remember in what context.

Madame Carnot closed her eyes. “Very well. Since you know next to nothing at all, I shall take you by the hand. Let us pretend that we have eyes
inside
the head. And now we are opening them—slowly.”

Abruptly, the searing, invisible flames burst in on his consciousness and he recoiled from the scorching terror.

“We are
not
afraid,” the woman encouraged. “The fire does not harm. Nor does it consume. The flames are but like a pastel crimson sunset over the cliffs of Calais.”

At length the nuclear holocaust raging within his brain no longer seemed painful.

“Non,
monsieur.
It is not pain at all. It is something we
desire
—just as a moth is drawn by the light. Let the gentle radiance wash down upon you. Accustom yourself to its softness.”

Eyes closed, Gregson became lost in the bewildering sensation. It was as though he were adrift in an infinite field of burning, yet soothingly cool radiance. There was no terror, no anguish. The sensation, he realized, was not optical at all, nor had it anything to do with light.

Vision, he understood now, had merely been the nearest thing to which he could liken the manifestation.

“No, not light,” she agreed. “Something above light. A hypervision. At the moment, we are zylphing only the super radiance itself. But, come—let us expose ourselves more fully.”

The infinite sea of brilliance began churning and seething, spawning things of unguessable shape and bewildering design—things that suggested their own integrity as objects merely because they were separated one from the other.

But there was no stability of form or permanence of position. Mere hulks of substance—indescribable because they violated all known concepts of shape and materiality.

Were these the things he had accepted as hallucinations during his seizures? Things he had occasionally imagined were grotesque, twisted representations of the objects about him—the Screamers in their beds—a distorted hypodermic needle thrusting toward his arm to bring relief? But what
were
these hallucinations?

“They
are
the objects about you,
monsieur,”
the woman whispered. “You do not know them because you have never before
zylphed
those objects. You have only seen or heard them. Did not Monsieur Forsythe say that a blind person learning to see would not recognize a waterfall by the way it looks?”

“How do you know what Bill said?” Gregson asked weakly.

“What is said or thought leaves its impression on your brain. And the hyperlight can reveal all such traces. Even now I zylph that your attention is being attracted by the huge form that is towering so close to you in your nonradiant field of perception. Concentrate on it,
monsieur.
You desire desperately to know what it is! You
must
zylph it in its entirety! You
must
learn what it means—what it is!”

Gregson brought all his perceptive faculties to bear on the object And it became firm and stable as his attention trapped it.

And now he knew! It was the imposing Arch of Triumph, rearing into the sun-washed Parisian sky only a few blocks away!

Suddenly, with explosive force, he was aware of almost everything there was to know about the huge monument—its exact dimensions, its mass and weight, the precise number of stones that had been assembled into the gestaltic whole. And he could even recognize the radial pattern of boulevards converging like the spokes of a wheel on the edifice.

“Ah,
monsieur
learns quickly,” the woman said.

In Gregson’s field of appalling perception, he now sensed the vast, recondite impression that he recognized as Madame Carnot. The distortion was incredible. She was a great, hulking form that clutched all the grotesqueries of a Dalian Paris. And he could sense her avarice and malevolence, as though they were attributes inseparable from the hyperimage.

“Eh bien,”
the woman observed,
“monsieur fait le zylph, n’est-ce pas?”

Her words were clearly enunciated. But he had been more directly aware of the vivid thoughts behind them, of her amusement over the fact that he was studying her hypervisually. The very impressions he was receiving seemed to be radiant with her ideas and attitudes.

“Very well,” she added, and he could readily sense the mischief lurking in her words, “perhaps we can—as he would say in his language—throw some light upon the subject”

Even with his eyes still closed, he was somehow aware of Madame Carnot’s hand slipping beneath the quilted cover of the chaise longue, reaching for something—incomprehensible. Then the most terrifying blaze of nonradiant light he had ever encountered seared his brain, swamping all his senses with its supernatural brilliance.

One of the guards on the opposite roof shouted and dropped his rifle. Down the street, desperate, shrill cries suggested someone had gone Screamie. Confirmation came a moment later when a hypodermic needle’s siren subdued the outcries.

Gregson’s mind seemed instinctively to close itself to the hyperradiance that had engulfed nun and he opened his eyes and stared at a grinning Madame Carnot.

Beside her stood a slender, auburn-haired girl, hands lodged upon her hips as she laid down a barrage of snarled French phrases.

Madame Carnot only bared her stained, crooked teeth in a tolerant grin and, in English, said, “I was
not
merely amusing myself. With the rault caster I was examining your candidate.”

That appeared to quell the girl’s indignation. “And?”

“I predict Radcliff will regret having enrolled him.”

“Are you sure?”

“Très certain.”

“But you could be wrong.”

Madame Carnot elevated a skeletal hand.
“C’est possible.
There is a small chance I may be wrong.”

“But Radcliff is going to take that chance.”

“It was inevitable that he would. I could zylph as much.”

With that, the old woman lay back on the couch and, exhausted, said,
“Je suis fatigué.”

She appeared to fall asleep immediately.

The girl turned to confront a still confused Gregson. Her face, he noticed, was strikingly beautiful—hazel eyes complementing reddish-brown hair that fell softly to her shoulders, lips full and vibrant in the subtle smile they now presented.

“I am Karen Rakaar,” she said. And in her almost negligible accent there was the suggestion of tulips wavering upon the slope of a Dutch dike. “I’m to be your tutor at Versailles. You must forgive Madame Carnot. She is at times childish in her senility. She has foreseen her own death and is afraid you are in some way connected with it.”

Ignoring the fierce pounding in his head that had been set off by the recent blast of nonradiant light, Gregson remembered that Forsythe had said, “The new form of perception… would be almost like
seeing
into the future.” Was it in this sense that the old woman had “foreseen her own death”?