Lock and Key

"Um, Reno..."

I looked up at Wayback, just a little surprised. It wasn't like him to sound so uncertain. "Yeah?"

"You guys think it's my fault, don't you?"

Having ridden with Buckaroo under considerably stranger circumstances than this, I managed to answer him before he got the wrong idea. "If you had it that under control, somebody in D.C. would have you locked up in a hole so the Soviets couldn't get their hands on you. We're lucky Replay saw it as soon as she did." If we hadn't still been in the restaurant, I might have been more specific. Then again, with Wayback, maybe not.

"That's just it. I should have seen something that big days ahead of time. Or maybe I did and went looking for an excuse not to be there when it went down." No doubt about it; either he was feeling guilty or convinced he should have been.

"Don't be too hard on yourself," I told him. " Tommy's the only one around with a perfect reputation to live up to. Besides, even if you were excuse-hunting, you kept Buckaroo out of things. Some of us think that's worth a brownie point or two." Replay in particular would have held that opinion, although I didn't think saying so would help. "Any possibility she might have been catching someone's intent? Not really being clairvoyant?"

He had to think about that for a moment. "Theoretically, I suppose so. If the bomber was still nearby, almost certainly it's possible. We hadn't gotten an absolute limit on her range with people she knew yet, but I'd think anywhere in the building would have been sufficient. Depending on how focused he was on causing trouble, maybe a block would have been."

"Then she didn't ruin your reputation or start a new one of her own. How far along were you with testing, or is that still a closed subject?"

"A moot one, I think. She was always well-shielded, but I knew she was there before. Tracking was possible, if sometimes difficult. Now --" He shook his head mournfully. "I've met concrete walls with higher levels of psionic ability."

For a moment I was tempted to tell him that he was one of the reasons Replay had finally come back, just to see what reaction the news would get. Like every other intern and no few apprentices, he knew the story of why she'd put so much distance between herself and us. Unlike most of them, however, we'd given him an idea of what to expect from her based on what we'd known her talents to be prior to her earlier encounter with talava. That it was estimation and guesswork at best could not be avoided; even Buckaroo had known there were probably skills she'd possessed we simply hadn't seen yet. Possibly she had abilities she wasn't even aware of; almost certainly she hadn't achieved her full potential with those talents she had demonstrated.

Wayback had scarcely agreed to test her present limitations when she'd started blowing all our assumptions away at their first meeting. She'd arrived at the main house weary and travel worn, a full three hours behind schedule and wearing the bruises and split lip one might have expected to see on an assault victim. The smug look on her face at the time fairly screamed that she was the last one standing at the end of whatever brouhaha had occurred, and her first words were for Buckaroo, whom she told she was finally convinced that it was okay for her to be back, or the Bravos wouldn't have met her at the airport. If she was already a threat to us, why had they been there at all? Lindbergh was only slightly more forthcoming in regard to the fight, which had indeed ended with only the two of them left upright, although in his case it had been just barely; dispatched to La Guardia to pick her up, he'd felt compelled to lend his assistance and thus had likewise drawn the ire of bravos and thus the attention of the airport police, but I digress.

There had been other telepaths in Wayback's life before he came to the Institute, but none of them had been in his own league, which naturally enough had led him to believe he was very possibly the best. At first blush, Replay had seemed so completely open and transparent that she couldn't possibly have much of a gift, regardless of what we'd told him. This first impression had been so outside his own experience as to confuse him rather badly; indeed, he could have been forgiven for mistaking her for the stereotyped "bubble-headed bleach blonde" in spite of her coloration. If that hadn't been enough to have made him start wondering what he'd gotten himself into, she'd further demolished our collective expectations by managing to tell him verbatim what he'd been thinking in spite of his own shields.

Startled, but game, he'd vanished into his lab for the rest of the day, only to reemerge the next morning and declare open testing season on her. After several weeks, she'd gotten comfortable enough with him for joking around a bit, some of it relatively public. She'd actually begun to think they were on the verge of finally learning something she didn't already know, and then a hotel blew up in her face.

"You don't suppose she's --?"

He cut me off. "No. Once I knew she could shield like that, I learned what I was looking for. The only hope I have for her recovering this time would be if it's equivalent to light blindness. If it's just a matter of the channels shutting down from shock, there's a chance. If there's real damage, then this is permanent. She might not be able to deal with it."

Knowing the lady as I did, I doubted she'd go as far around the bend as he was hinting, at least in the short term. "So you've seen this before?"

"Just the opposite, I'm afraid. Someone I was closer to than I should have gotten. He drank himself to death trying to block the world out for a few hours. I can't imagine that losing the talent you've always had could be any easier than trying to deal with suddenly gaining the untrained equivalent." He looked at his coffee mug as though he wanted to throw it, or anything else he could get a good grip on, through the window just to release some of his frustration. "I can't expect you to understand what she's going through. I'm not sure I understand; I barely remember what it was like before I grew up to be a telepath. Even if I did, I couldn't explain it. The language just doesn't exist."

"Not in words," I agreed. "She's been known to refer to the sensory deprivation tank as something of a metaphor-by-example." I could not help but wonder what Buckaroo would make of this conversation, and began to realize we might collectively have more pieces to the puzzle than any one of us realized. "You don't know how to tell how bad it is for certain, do you?"

"Not a clue."

***

Much has been made in certain circles of the Institute's security -- or lack thereof -- in the aftermath of our first encounter with Lectroids, and rightly so. Even while the popular press was hailing us as heroes for our successful resolution of that situation, our detractors were bemoaning the fact that we'd permitted it to occur at all. Yet to the best of our collective knowledge, nowhere was the subject pursued farther than among ourselves; being rather forcefully informed that the measures we had taken to date were insufficient was something we'd taken personally. A great deal of debate and no small amount of research had been given over to the issue of exactly what level of security was prudent. Ultimately, we'd realized that we were dealing with the same dilemma faced by anyone with a new automobile or house; if the other guy wanted in badly enough, it was going to happen, and the entire trick was to know he was there so he could be dealt with.

This did not mean that we left things as they had been; far from it. Some of the new safeguards we came up with have been patented and are presently in use by various security agencies throughout the world, as result of which, many people sleep better at night with the certainty that their countries are not being run by aliens from Planet 10. Other changes to our facilities are even less visible to the naked eye, and although some of these are perhaps known to various outsiders, I will not be drawn into a discussion of them here. Overall, however, our biggest objective had been to improve our collective safety as seamlessly as possible, and I am pleased to be able to report that very few of the new measures caused anyone problems of a significant nature.

The real shift, however, has not been so much in procedures or premises as in attitudes. We are perhaps more aware of our surroundings when off campus than we had routinely been before, and if public reaction is any indicator, rather more subtle about that alertness than in years past. Undoubtedly, such interns as Wayback are as much responsible for that low-key approach to these issues as the lessons Yoyodyne taught us are, and I have no doubt that our gypsy residents are likewise involved. If some of our personal precautions seem a bit unconventional, they are nonetheless effective enough to have become routine, if not always habitual.

Certainly security was a particularly pertinent issue to the residents at this most recent briefing. Buckaroo looked around the lounge casually enough, making sure everyone he needed to see was accounted for. He'd just realized who was missing when Lindbergh arrived unannounced. "Rawhide says to tell you that you may be right," the pilot reported. "He said he was working on it."

"He know I wanted him up here?"

"I think he's planning to stay with her until this --" He was interrupted by thunder from a lightning strike near enough to shock a couple people who had their feet resting on metal chair legs. "Is over. They're down in the boiler room. Any reason I should know about why she doesn't like storms?"

"Maybe he'd better," Buckaroo allowed. "The last thing we want is to add to her paranoia. Wayback says it's not a problem anymore, but I'm not placing bets." This made things awkward, not so much because Rawhide wasn't at hand as because the pilot was. It was risky enough sharing what little he knew with the residents, even after having the room checked for bugs for the umpteenth time. Still, Lindbergh understood better than most of us what Wayback was and wasn't capable of overhearing, and Rawhide was much less likely to have Replay become a problem he couldn't cope with. "You aren't here, and this isn't happening," he said after a moment's hesitation.

"I can live with that," said the pilot. "Won't be the first time." He came all the way in and sat down. He'd flown contract work for several outfits before joining us, some of them a bit on the questionable side however official they were; we believed him.

Buckaroo nodded. "Big Norse, you'll need to get Rawhide to speed on this."

The blonde communications expert didn't bother turning down her personal stereo before she answered; she wasn't there merely because she'd been involved from the beginning, although even Lindbergh's checkered past hadn't prepared him to expect her other purpose. "Not a problem." She still blushed rather easily, but not when business was involved. The fact that it was common knowledge around the Institute that she and Rawhide might have a mutual thing going on was wonderful cover under the circumstances; Wayback was probably even less inclined to eavesdrop on what he believed to be a romantic interlude than on a headblind telepath. "I'll drop it in with the other updates."

"Good," Buckaroo said and began to speak in earnest. "Tommy told most of you she was going to make it. Right now, apart from exhaustion, she's in good shape. Physically, this was much easier on everyone than last time. No convulsions apart from the detox reaction, and the punctures didn't try to go septic this time, although some of them are still scabbed over.

"Mentally, I don't know. Something set her off about ten minutes before she came to, but we're still not sure what caused it, just that she didn't want it around."

"Harmonics blew the windows and some of the equipment," Perfect Tommy admitted. If any of the glass had chanced to land on him, he'd long since brushed it off. "Not much serious damage, but quite a show. Scared hell out of Wayback." No one but Lindbergh seemed surprised to hear that.

"Not just Wayback," said Big Norse, which was completely unexpected. "We caught some of it on the bus and had a time deciding it was local. Evidently the monitor had more of an RF signature than we knew." The EKG monitor she referred to had started out life as a standard model, but whether the modifications we'd done had affected its radio frequency interference was something that bore investigating. Replay had been known to react badly to less.

"Unfortunately, we have a bigger problem than equipment or water damage, or her being headblind." Buckaroo went on. If he'd stopped to think about what he was saying, he might not have gotten this far. "She's got too much time missing."

"Brain damage?" New Jersey brought up the question, but it wasn't far from anyone else's mind.

"Doesn't look like it, unless I'm way behind on my reading. This is too selective. Right now, I'm convinced she doesn't belong to Xan, but she's not the woman we know, either." The rest was almost an afterthought, as subdued in volume as it was in tone. "And we know her a lot better than she knows us."

"Amnesia, maybe?" Lindbergh recovered the power of speech first, perhaps because he had so few preconceptions. He'd only known Replay for a few weeks, not for the years everyone else in the room had.

Buckaroo shook his head. "Doesn't fit the pattern. I want to do more checks, but as far as I can tell, she's not missing just one block of days; this is spread out over years, and every hour of it involves us. The Replay persona just isn't there."

"Does that mean she's not Jet either?" Pecos gave Tommy an odd look as she asked that question.

Buckaroo nodded. "Closer to it, but a fair amount of that persona's gone too. My best guess is that this is who she is at home. Which means that calling her Lightfoot is probably a very bad idea." Tommy stared at his shoes at that. New Jersey whistled. Pecos and Big Norse both winced at the thought of the reaction 'lightfoot' was apt to get out-of-context even if it was still meant as the compliment Tommy'd intended the first time he'd said it.

"Wait a minute," Lindbergh protested. "Somebody wanna loan me a quarter to buy a clue with?" He knew the term persona, but the context threw him. It simply wasn't something he'd ever thought to have to deal with around the Institute, though technically, many of the names we were accustomed to using could be called aliases. "On second thought, make that a roll of quarters." He hadn't seen Tommy behaving like this before, but was convinced the engineer had something to do with the present situation. "And point me at the machine."

"Lo Pep turned up in California a few months back with Xan's latest overthruster prototype," Buckaroo began, which made so much less sense to Lindbergh that the pilot took it to be the beginning of the whole story. "From what we could put together afterward, we think this one was intended to be a man-portable, statically emplaced unit which would generate a crossover field you could literally walk through without needing room to slow down on the other side. More of a gate than ours, evidently meant specifically for breaching walls."

"Zero escape velocity?" Lindbergh said. The concept alone would have been astounding if any of us had proposed it; with Hanoi Xan involved, it became frightening.

"The real 'render all conventional defense perimeters useless' thing, " said Perfect Tommy. "We can't prove it, but we think the first test may have been the Modesto PD evidence lockers. Which could mean that it's a heavy piece of equipment or that it vibrates quite a bit when it's activated, because something registered on the seismographs in the middle of the night before they discovered they had a problem." No longer in the papers, the strange incident had been a media field day for some several weeks at the time. The chain-of-evidence so crucial in prosecutions had been sundered for more than 300 items housed in a single locker, most of them related either directly to the World Crime League or to those who owed various League bosses favors. In spite of the massive number of evidence tags apparently switched at random, no one had seen or heard anything apart from the strange seismograph tapes and a garbage truck hitting a light standard across the street (which had proven completely unrelated). The few items completely missing from the lockers have yet to be located more than six months later.

"We know they must have tested it somewhere, or Lo Pep wouldn't have been trying to use it himself," said Buckaroo. "Fortunately for us, it turned out to be more hazardous than they thought. We might not have known until much later if the field had been stable. As far as we know, that line of research has been abandoned, maybe permanently."

Lindbergh relaxed considerably. The notion that Xan's bravos might literally have come through the Institute walls one night without warning would have been enough to disturb any sane person in the country, for what would keep them from stopping at that? Why not the White House, or Fort Knox? But since they apparently didn't have the capability, he could still go to sleep in reasonable safety. "I don't suppose they ended up in the Phantom Zone," he joked, only a bit lamely.

The looks the residents flashed back and forth for a moment didn't escape his notice completely. "That would have been too simple," said Pecos. "Simple doesn't happen around some of us much, if you haven't noticed." She might have said more but there was a momentary shadow on the other side of the frosted glass in the door.

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