“Sure. I’ve played a little,” Ellis said with a shrug. “What of it?”
“Get a game going. I can spot you some money if you need it. I want you to make some friends and see what slips out over cards.”
“All right, then. I suppose I can do that. Can’t hurt to see if these fine young men have any cash to part with.” Ellis grinned.
Frank turned to Cal. “This is voluntary, Cal. I don’t want you to do anything you’re uncomfortable with.”
Cal just smiled. “Well, I admit you got my curiosity up, Mr. Lodge. What you got in mind?”
“Same thing, just with the medics and the folks taking care of you. You’re an old man these days, so use some of that grandpa charm and see what they tell you,” Frank said. “That goes for all of us, but some of us are more charming than others.”
Cal nodded. “I can do that. You know, when they had me in yesterday, Danny told me they got a hospital around here. I figure it’s where you’re talking about — the main base, I guess? He says when I’m strong enough again, they gonna take me up there for a healing so they can watch me close-up. I’ll keep my eyes open when that happens. Let y’all know what I see.”
Frank nodded. “Good man.” He then turned to the rest of them. “Look, they’re paying us well. They’re helping us learn about what we can do. But I know there’s more to this than they’re letting on, and I know you all have had the same thoughts. We still don’t know why we have these abilities or where they come from. That’s the kind of information I’d like to have, wouldn’t you?”
There were general murmurs of agreement, and with that, Frank let them out. Ellis was the last one to leave, and he stopped at the door with an odd look on his face.
“Frank, I gotta say, this is a helluva lot more than I bargained for, all this business. There are days I just want to go home, see my wife and kids, get back to normal, you know?”
Frank nodded, feeling a twinge of sympathy and regret. “I know, Ellis.”
“So, what happens if they find out we’re spying on them? Or worse, what if all this training is for some nasty business we don’t want to get involved in? What happens if we find out exactly what’s going on… and then wish we hadn’t?”
“I don’t know.”
Ellis looked at Frank a moment longer, then shrugged. “All right. I’m with you, but I don’t understand why you’re bringing Cal Hooks into this.”
“Come again?” Frank asked, though he already sort of knew where this would go.
Ellis gave Frank the pained smile of someone who had explained himself many times over. “Look, where you’re from up north, I understand that you may see some things differently than me, and that’s fine. But trust me when I tell you, Frank, that boy can’t handle something complex as all this. My Negroes, when I had ’em working for me down at my garage, they could barely handle simple instruction. They’re children, Frank. Not that bright. Asking him to do this spy stuff, well, it goes against the nature of things.”
“Ellis—” Frank began, but was quickly cut off with a wave from Ellis.
“I know, I know. I ain’t gonna convince you. You just ain’t seen what I have. No experience with it, and that’s fine. I’m just trying to help. Cal is too simple. Either the MAJESTIC folks will figure that out and send him home, or he’ll spill on what you’re trying to do here, figuring out what’s going on. So, I’m just saying, you’d best keep an eye on him, that’s all.”
Frank simply shook his head sadly. He’d been at the Battle of the Bulge in Belgium and the Ardennes during the war, and saw the men of the 333rd Field Artillery Battalion remain in position in the face of withering enemy fire to support the 106th Infantry. The battle had been lost that day, but the sacrifice of the 333rd made it possible to eventually take back that position and advance on Germany.
Weeks later, when that little spit of Belgium was reclaimed, Frank saw the bodies of eleven men of the 333rd outside the village of Wereth. They were tortured and massacred by the Nazis. The Wereth 11, like the rest of their battalion, were black, and they died horribly because they were black. Frank would never again accept “the nature of things” after seeing that.
“Don’t worry, Ellis,” he said simply. “I know who to keep an eye on.”
10
Maggie stared idly at the man seated across the table from her, a youngish, tweedy fellow with horn-rimmed glasses, slicked-back hair, and a weak chin, wearing a white lab coat. She could sense mild impatience and slight boredom from him as he fidgeted with a pen and leaned back in his chair.
“Commander Wallace,” the man said with a Boston accent, “when are we starting this up? I have to get back to check on something I have running.”
“We just needed to establish a baseline, Doctor,” Danny said. “Wanted to make sure you have a clear head.”
Behind Danny, a tall, reedy man in Navy whites — and a couple of stars on his shoulder boards — waited with arms folded, scowling slightly, and a Navy corpsman stood ready next to him with a first aid kit. At the door, one of the MPs stood guard. Maggie favored him with a slight smile, which he returned with all the subtlety an Air Force airman barely out of his teens could muster. Roger — the guard’s name was Roger Fitton — was smitten with her, of course. She hadn’t even needed her Enhancement to convince him to lend her his binoculars, which now sat locked away in her quarters.
“So, what are we going for today?” Maggie asked Danny.
“Well, it’s not strictly an emotion, but I was thinking maybe we’d try sleepy,” Danny replied. “Let’s see if there’s some kind of connectivity there between an emotional state and physical exhaustion.”
The scientist frowned, not having been briefed on the specifics of today’s testing. “What?”
Maggie held out her hand slightly. “Hush, now,” she said, focusing her ability to calm the alarms going off in his brain. A moment later, the scientist sat back in his chair again, at ease, and Maggie congratulated herself silently for her control. “Commander, I can calm someone. Like I just did here. But sleep?”
Danny merely shrugged. “It’s a reach. See how calm you can get him, for starters.”
Scowling slightly, Maggie turned back to the man across the table, who was firmly disinterested in pretty much anything going on at that moment. Normally, she drew upon her own emotional experiences to find the right thread in someone else. She would visualize her own emotional thread and entwine it with the other person’s moods, then coax the color she associated with that emotion to overtake the others. In this case, she would use the deep blue of mellow disinterest to slowly overcome the yellow-green of the man’s annoyance.
“All right, buddy. Let’s make you calm,” Maggie said, realizing from the look the two-star gave her that she may have sounded like a pet owner addressing a dog. And there were days it felt like that.
The man behind the table shrugged. “I’m already feeling pretty calm.”
Not yet, you’re not. Maggie closed her eyes slightly and tried to think of nothing but the serene calm she occasionally felt right before sleep, and fixed that feeling in her mind’s eye. She could see it, could practically reach out and cup that feeling in her hands, like a tennis ball of midnight-blue energy that hummed inside her head.
Then, gently — because, hey, this had to be calm — she let that energy snake off toward the man across the table. If the feeling were more extreme, she’d pretty much shove it up his nose. But not today. Calm.
She opened her eyes to see her test subject still sitting there, eyes half-lidded, smiling slightly. Maggie breathed in slowly, concentrating on keeping his emotions stable. “I think… well, he’s really calm. Not sleepy, but…” She smiled slightly. “Hey, can you lend me five bucks?” she asked him in a gentle voice.