Back in his cell, he pondered this gift further. How long had he had it? Where did it come from? What were its potential uses? So far as he remembered at first, it had developed during this last year in prison. And so slowly had it formed that he couldn’t recall its coming. For some time now he had known, without thinking anything of it, when the guards were approaching his cell, and whether it was the short one with the wall eyes, or the Polynesian-looking one who probably had Ainu blood. And he had known which of the trustees was bringing his breakfast almost immediately upon waking.
But had there been traces of it before prison? Yes. Yes, he realized with dawning memory. There had always been modest, vestigial signals from his proximity system. Even as a child, he had always known immediately upon entering if a house was empty or occupied. Even in silence, he had always known whether his mother had remembered or forgotten some duty or chore for him. He could feel the lingering charge in the air of a recent argument or lovemaking in any room he entered. But he had considered these to be common experiences shared by everyone. To a degree, he was right. Many children, and a few adults, occasionally sense such vibrant impalpables through the remnants of their proximity systems, although they explain them away with such terms as “mood,” or “edgyness,” or “intuition.” The only uncommon thing about Nicholai’s contact with his proximity system was its consistency. He had always been sensitive to its messages.
It was during his experiences of caving with his Japanese friends that his paraperceptive gift first manifested itself boldly, although at the time he gave it neither consideration nor name. Under the special conditions of total dark, of concentrated background fear, of extreme physical effort, Nicholai’s primitive central cortex powers cut into his sensory circuit. Deep in an unknown labyrinth with his companions, wriggling along a fault with millions of tons of rock inches above his spine, exertion throbbing in his temples, he had only to close his eyes (in order to be rid of the overriding impulse of the sensory system to pour energy out through the eyes, even in total darkness) and he could reach out with his proximity sense and tell, with unverifiable assurance, in which direction lay empty space, and in which heavy rock. His friends at first joked about his “hunches.” One night as they sat in bivouac at the entrance of a cave system they had been exploring that day, the sleepy conversation drifted around to Nicholai’s uncanny ability to orient himself. One young man put forth the conjecture that, without knowing it, Nicholai was reading subtle echoes from his breathing and scuffling and perhaps smelling differences in the subterranean air, and from these slight but certainly not mystical signals he could make his famous “hunches.” Nicholai was willing to accept this explanation; he didn’t really care much.
One of the team who was learning English to the end of getting a better job with the Occupation Forces slapped Nicholai on the shoulder and growled, “Clever, these Occidentals, at orienting themselves.”
And another, a wry boy with a monkey face who was the clown of the group, said that it was not a bit odd that Nicholai should be able to see in the dark. He was, after all, a man of the twilight!
The tone of this statement signaled that it was meant to be a joke, but there was silence around the campfire for some seconds, as they tried to unravel the tortuous and oblique pun that was the common stock of the monkey-faced one’s humor. And as it dawned on each in turn, there were groans and supplications to spare them, and one lad threw his cap at the offending wit.*
* The pun was almost Shakespearean in its sophomoric obliquity. It was formed on the fact that Japanese friends called Nicholai “Nikko” to avoid the awkward l. And the most convenient Japanese pronunciation of Hel is heru.
During the day and a half in his cell devoted to an examination of this proximity sense, Nicholai discovered several things about its nature. In the first place, it was not a simple sense, like hearing or sight. A better analogy might be the sense of touch, that complicated constellation of reactions that includes sensitivity to heat and pressure, headache and nausea, the elevator feelings of rising or falling, and balance controls through the liquid of the middle ear—all of which are lumped up rather inadequately under the label of “touch.” In the case of the proximity sense, there are two bold classes of sensory reaction, the qualitative and the quantitative; and there are two broad divisions of control, the active and the passive. The quantitative aspect deals largely with simple proximity, the distance and direction of animate and inanimate objects. Nicholai soon learned that the range of his intercepts was quite limited in the case of the inanimate, passive object—a book, a stone, or a man who was daydreaming. The presence of such an object could be passively sensed at no more than four or five meters, after which the signals were too weak to be felt. If, however, Nicholai concentrated on the object and built a bridge of force, the effective distance could be roughly doubled. And if the object was a man (or in some cases, an animal) who was thinking about Nicholai and sending out his own force bridge, the distance could be doubled again. The second aspect of the proximity sense was qualitative, and this was perceptible only in the cases of a human object. Not only could Nicholai read the distance and direction of an emitting source, but he could feel, through the sympathetic vibrations of his own emotions, the quality of emissions: friendly, antagonistic, threatening, loving, puzzled, angry, lustful. As the entire system was generated by the central cortex, the more primitive emotions were transmitted with greatest distinction: fear, hate, lust.
Having discovered these sketchy facts about his gifts, Nicholai turned his mind away from them and applied himself again to his studies and to the task of keeping his languages fresh. He recognized that, so long as he was in prison, the gifts could serve little purpose beyond that of a kind of parlor game. He had no way to foresee that, in later years, his highly developed proximity sense Would not only assist him in earning worldwide reputation as a foremost cave explorer, but would serve him as both weapon and armor in his vocation as professional exterminator of international terrorists.
Part Two.
Sabaki
Washington
Mr. Diamond glanced up from the rear-projected roll down and spoke to the First Assistant. “Okay, break off here and jump ahead on the time line. Give us a light scan of his counterterrorist activities from the time he left prison to the present.”
“Yes, sir. It will take just a minute to reset.”
With the help of Fat Boy and the sensitive manipulations of the First Assistant, Diamond had introduced his guests to the broad facts of Nicholai Hel’s life up to the middle of his term of imprisonment, occasionally providing a bit of amplification or background detail from his own memory. It had taken only twenty-two minutes to share this information with them because Fat Boy was limited to recorded incidents and facts; motives, passions, and ideals being alien to its vernacular.
Throughout the twenty-two minutes, Darryl Starr had slouched in his white plastic chair, yearning for a cigar, but not daring to light up. He assumed glumly that the details of this gook-lover’s life were being inflicted on him as a kind of punishment for screwing up the Rome hit by letting the girl get away. In an effort to save face, he had assumed an attitude of bored resignation, sucking at his teeth and occasionally relieving himself of a fluttering sigh. But something disturbed him more than being punished like a recalcitrant schoolboy. He sensed that Diamond’s interest in Nicholai Hel went beyond professionalism. There was something personal in it, and Starr’s years of experience in the trenches of CIA operations made him wary of contaminating the job at hand with personal feelings.