Operation Malacca (11 page)

`You see,' he said, absently taking another drink from the table, 'separately, these techniques tell us little or nothing about thought patterns. Collectively, with the proper data sorted out, they can tell us a hell of a lot.

`So what happens is that our trussed-up subject is quietly going nuts with the chemicals boiling through his system. After an hour or so, when even the most hardened thinker can no longer concentrate, carefully phrased and selected questions are asked periodically by the tape recorder. The sound is loud and rasping enough to penetrate the noise generated by his mind. No matter how hard he tries not to think of the proper answer, eventually he will. The questions are all designed on a simple yes–no basis. Each question is properly keyed from the electronics to the tape readouts and fed into the computer for correlation. After a predetermined period, everything is shut down and the subject's system is purged. Then he is thoroughly hypnotized, given a phony set of memories, and turned loose.'

`Holy gods,' Keilty exclaimed. 'You could wring a person clean in no time.

Èxactly. When we suspect it's been done, we use the same process to find out.'

`Then how deep are the transplanted memories,' Weston asked.

`Hell, they're deep enough. After a few years they may begin to break down, but unless you really worked at it, and I mean, work with drugs and the whole show, you will never reconstruct what happened.'

`Then how can you find out it's been done? And why not hypno everybody who might become a victim?'

`Two reasons. The first is time. It takes months of treatment. Secondly, this damn process is not even bothered by hypnotic. suggestion. On the contrary, it works on a subconscious level completely below hypnosis. It bypasses the conscious mind and gets right down to the basic thought process on the electrical

level. Microvibration and EEG measure electrical activity in the body. The skin response measures the emotional activity and the oculometer and the microvibration are measures of eye and muscle reflex. The amphetamine and tranquillizer override the conscious and part of the subconscious mind and make itimpossible to concentrate. In fact, the disappearance of concentration becomes a dead giveaway. It means that important data is coming.

`So far as we know, there is no way to beat it.'

When the admiral had finished, the three men sat quietly for some time, finishing the drinks.

`Looks like I came out of a pretty bad situation by the skin of my teeth,' Keilty commented.

'Yes, you did,' Rawingson replied seriously. `So the next time you jokers start knocking our work, remember what I just told you. We aren't amateurs.

Èxcept when it comes to knowing about the statistics of classified Soviet research on dolphins.'

Rawingson began sputtering.

He and Jack headed for the hatch, grinning at the admiral. At the hatch, Keilty turned.

'Say, Admiral, have them check into Soviet research on ESP – they classified that in sixty-three.'

'They did?' came Rawingson's startled reply, and Keilty ducked through as Rawingson jumped up and headed for the door.

On deck again, they were still laughing and breathless from the run.

`You know,' Jack chortled, 'we really shouldn't ride him like that.'

'Yeah, but you have to admit that if we don't, he'll sink back into the morass of the say-it-ain't-so types like he was when we found him. He's coming along slowly.' Keilty grinned.

CHAPTER TWELVE

Later that afternoon, Rawingson rapped on the cabin hatch. 'Come on in,' Keilty shouted.

'Can a man of little intelligence and a military background join you two sneering geniuses,' he asked as he stepped in, and sank down on an empty bunk.

Weston grinned and poured out half a glass of scotch and passed it over to him. 'Sure, Admiral.'

'Look here,' Keilty said. 'Don't take us too seriously. We aren't as smart as we pretend to be.

Rawingson rolled his eyes up. 'Now you tell me' He leaned back and propped a foot up on the bunk and surveyed the men across from him. Weston was stretched out on the bed, a cigarette dangling from his hand. Keilty sat resting his arms on the back of a chair.

On the desk between them was a navigation map of the Riouw island chain with depths and currents marked off. A red X presumably marked the location of the sub, resting in 1100 feet of water.

Keilty sat up, and reached across to the bunk for another cigarette. He lit it, then half stood and stretched widely. 'What's up, Pete?' he asked.

Rawingson studied the drink a moment. 'Well for one thing, we'll be on location in the morning. When do you jokers plan on going after the sub, and how?'

`Funny you should ask, Admiral,' Jack muttered from beneath closed eyes, 'we were just discussing that little item.'

'I'm afraid we'll have to play it by ear for the most part,' Keilty replied. 'We'll go as soon as we can, naturally, but it's going to depend a lot on weather and how soon we can get our gear checked out. Hopefully, the day after tomorrow. According to the navigation officer, we won't reach our target area till late in the morning and we're going to need a full day of light.'

Rawingson nodded. 'Okay, that takes care of when. Now how do you figure to get the sub? You've been damn mysterious about that and SEATO Command, as well as Washington, London, and Canberra, want some definite answers. They're getting edgy and are on my back to find out.'

Keilty stared thoughtfully at the map for a few moments. Finally he looked up, humor crinkling his eyes. 'Well to start

with, Charlie and I will go overboard and swim down to the sub. Then we'll blow it up.'

Rawingson looked pained. 'Just like that, huh? just swim down to eleven hundred feet and boom?'

'Just like that. Swim down to eleven hundred feet.'

'And pray tell, how do you intend to accomplish this seeming miracle?'

Keilty hesitated for a long moment. 'Okay, Admiral, just to help you out. The process is for sale to the Navy and the details are proprietary. If it works and they want it, they can buy it. Otherwise, tough luck. All right?'

'All right, Dr. Keilty,' Rawingson said formally. 'No details to the Navy. Now how?'

Keilty stood up and turned his back to the admiral. 'Look here.'

He arched his left hand over his right shoulder until his fingers rested on a flat plastic cap. Grunting with the effort, he turned the cap and began unscrewing it. It came away to reveal a stainless-steel bayonet coupling.

'What the hell . . . ?' Rawingson jumped up from the bunk for a closer look. Protruding slightly above the skin was a round fitting containing the inner coupling. Inside the three-quarterinch-diameter fitting he could see a pressure valve. The whole fitting was located just above the shoulder line and about three inches to the right of the spine.

'What the hell?' he repeated.

Jack had his eyes open now and was watching Rawingson's reaction with interest.

Keilty screwed the cap back on and sat down in the chair again.

'To begin with, Pete, this little gadget technically makes me a cyborg.'

'A what?' he asked weakly as he sank back down on the bunk.

'A cyborg,' Keilty repeated patiently. 'A cyborg is a partly mechanical human being. A human that has been partly mechanized would probably be a better description.

'There's nothing so outstanding about that, really. They've been around for quite a while.

A guy with a hand replaced with a steel hook, if it opens and closes by muscle action, is a cyborg. A man with a mechanical leg, and so on. We've got lots of people walking around now with pacemakers to keep their hearts beating or diabetics with a pancreatic stimulator to keep

their blood glucose up. They're all cyborgs. Now, they're replacing hearts with heart pumps. Last figures I saw, some four thousand people in the U.S. alone have heart pumps. All implanted in the past three years.'

`So what's that gadget got to do with you being a cyborg?' Rawingson asked. His color was beginning to return. 'I know what a cyborg is supposed to be.'

Òkay. Here's how it works. This coupling, attached to an auxiliary lung system, allows me to return quickly to the surface without wasting a couple of days in decompression.

Charlie has a lung rig too, by the way. The hard part is getting back up; down is easy.'

`Come on, skip the grade-school explanations. How are you able to accomplish this feat?'

Keilty nodded to Jack, who swung his legs off the bunk and sat up. He reached out and snagged a flat metal case and pulled it over. Unsnapping the cover, he pulled out a rectangular metal container, two by three feet, and set it on the bunk next to Rawingson.

Then he took a double hose connected with Y-joints and plugged one end into the machine.

Jack pointed to the other end and unscrewed a metal cap to reveal a blunt-ended, hollow needle.

`This end goes into his back,' he said quietly.

Keilty unfastened several quick-disconnect fasteners and lifted back the cover.

Rawingson peered inside and saw a shiny gray bladder and several black boxes.

Keilty pointed at the bladder. 'That stuff is really a silicone membrane permeable to both oxygen and hydrogen. This is how it works. A small pump pulls sea water through the ducts up here and circulates it around the bladder. As it passes through this duct, it is compressed to make it flow faster. Heating coils along the duct bring the water temperature to ninety-eight degrees Fahrenheit. The heater is a simple isotope unit.

There's a thermoelectric generator coupled to it here that produces the half watt of power to run the pump. By the time the sea water exits the duct end, it's at body temperature.

The whole contraption is insulated to keep it there. The water flows around the bladder.

'This tube,' he picked up the metal flex tube, 'attaches to my back and carries blood from the superior vena cava into the silicone plastic bladder.

`The blood circulates into the bladder and passes the oxygen and hydrogen instantly into the water. The blood, minus the

excess gases, then flows back through this side of the tubing into the superior vena cava and down into the heart.

`There's nothing really that complicated about it. The tubing can be bought from Dow Chemical, the pump is out of the Beckman Instruments heart pump. I just use the pump itself and throw away the rest of the gadget. The isotope heater, I bought from Westinghouse. The rest is just a matter of assembly.

`The big problem in deep dives is that the deeper you go, the greater the pressure from the water. If you are using an aqualung, the pressure control on the air supply compensates automatically and feeds you more air. In effect, it pushes more air into you so that the pressure inside your body is equal to that outside.

'Now, if you relieve that pressure too quickly, the gases in your air supply will bubble out

– literally. Your bloodstream will foam and the bubbles will block arteries, capillaries, veins, and what have you. That's what's known as the bends.'

Rawingson was studying the gadget with interest. 'That's nice, but where in the world does the hydrogen come from?'

Keilty lit another cigarette. 'Our scuba gear is just a modified aqualung, but instead of compressed air, we use a mixture of oxygen and hydrogen. You know as well as I do that at depths over two hundred feet or so, the nitrogen in the air tends to come out in the bloodstream as bubbles. So you either have to spend most of your time – like eighteen to thirty-six hours – waiting at various depths to allow the nitrogen to gradually go back into solution in the blood, or else they have to keep you in a decompression chamber and readjust your internal pressure to sea level.

'Ever since Jacques Cousteau, people have been looking for a way to get down to greater depths. Cousteau's deep submergence labs and the Navy's Sealabs I, II, III, IV, and V

showed that once you adjust, you can work normally. But to come back up, you have to go through a long decompression period.

'A couple of years ago, I got interested in the problem and took it to a friend of mine, a guy named Ralph Dora. He's one of the damnedest engineers you'll ever want to meet.

He's a bioengineer; he understands the workings of the human body, and he's a brilliant engineer besides.

`First, he threw out all the old, mechanical ideas for getting a man up from down there and concentrated on the physiological aspects. The most important problem was the gas bubbles. Several people have tried the heavy, inert gases, like krypton, argon, neon, et cetera, but the molecules at those pressures still formed bubbles. You could get down all right and stay there, but you still had to decompress. So Ralph suggested hydrogen and it worked better than we hoped. It has the lowest molecular weight and it is just what we needed for our gadget. Mixed properly with oxygen, it worked great.'

'Come on,' Rawingson growled, 'don't hand me that. How dumb do you think I am? Any kid with a course in high-school physics will see that the hydrogen will still bubble and if you have five hundred pounds of pressure at a thousand feet, which you do, you have to have five hundred pounds of internal pressure, and that's a hell of a lot of hydrogen. It's got to go somewhere. If you come whizzing back up, you'll inflate and explode like a balloon'

'Hell yes. Let me finish, will you.' Keilty stubbed out his cigarette and continued. 'The trick in this gadget that makes the whole thing work is the bladder. As you say, at a thousand feet, you have five hundred pounds of pressure inside you, all of it oxygen and hydrogen gas. You have to get rid of it and fast. Now, where is that gas. What part of the body?'

`The bloodstream of course . . . hey, wait .. ' The light suddenly dawned on Rawingson.

'Right. As you start your ascent, the blood, filled with gases, circulates into the bladder and the oxygen and hydrogen diffuse through the bladder wall because of the slight pressure differential created by the sea water. As you rise, the pressure lessens and so does the volume of gas in your blood, because it's escaping through the bladder. By the time you reach the surface, the two-gas regulator has cut over to pure oxygen and the hydrogen is completely flushed out. No gas bubbles, no embolisms. Simple, what?'

Ì'll be damned,' Rawingson ejaculated.

`Yeah, and you probably are too,' Weston retorted. 'It works. Mort and Charlie both have made several dives to eight hundred feet and back with no ill effects.'

"This crazy thing works on the porp ... dolphin too?'

`Sure, why not? Same physiological setup – with a few differences of course – but not enough to interfere. We have limited our stay time at great depths to five minutes so far, because we still don't know what effect the high pressure will have on the body's chemical reactions. But it works and we can reach the sub! '

`Well, how come if you had this rig, you didn't use it with Charlie on the first dive?'

`Two reasons. First of all, a dolphin on sonar looks a lot like a man unless he comes up to breathe every few minutes. They might have mistaken him for a shark, but I doubt it.

They probably used shark repellent around the tower, both for safety and for security reasons.

'Secondly, this gadget works best below two hundred feet where there is enough pressure to make its use worthwhile. Until that depth, you might as well use regular scuba gear and compressed air.'

`Then that thing on your shoulder is attached to the vein in your back?' Rawingson asked.

`Yep. It's sewn into the vein walls. The superior vena cava runs down' the thorax and directly into the heart. It's the largest and closest attachment point in the back that can be used for the "lung" hookup.'

Rawingson was now sitting on the edge of the bunk with his head and shoulders hunched in concentration over the opened 'lung'. Keilty's head was next to his as he traced out the flow pattern through the system. Weston, lying on the bunk and observing them, was struck by the paradox in the scene. He would have sworn two weeks earlier that Keilty would never again have had anything to do with the Navy, the military in general, or the U.S. Government, yet here they were, heads together, deeply involved in a technical discussion.

He rolled back and shut his eyes. He was bushed, and besides, his shoulder ached.

Weston grinned to himself. Keilty still had not seen the third 'lung' I When he did, there would be hell to pay. Grinning widely, he fell asleep.

Rawingson and Keilty talked on for another hour until Rawingson sat up and stopped in the middle of a sentence. `What's the matter?' Keilty asked.

Rawingson stood up and leaned across the bunk to look out the opened porthole.

`Sea's roughing up a bit. We're going to be in for some weather tonight.'

'Monsoon finally going to hit, hey?' Keilty rubbed his hands in anticipation. 'I always wanted to ride a big boat during a good blow.'

Hmm, you may get your chance tonight.' He stared out a moment longer, then sat down again on the bunk. 'Don't forget,

if the monsoon does hit, it could foul up the operation pretty badly.'

'It could at that,' Keilty admitted. 'You know, this is the first time I've been in this part of the world. What's a monsoon like?'

Rawingson thought for a moment. 'The initial storm is pretty much like the hurricanes you get down in the Keys, some years. The barometer drops steadily for a couple of days, then all of a sudden you find yourself in the middle of a force nine gale. Winds up to eighty or ninety knots, the rain smashing in level sheets like someone is hitting you with a fire hose. The waves will rise to twenty feet or better with the crests being blown right off ahead of the wind.