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Authors: James F. David

BOOK: Ship of the Damned
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Washington, D.C.
Remodelled four times since World War II, the five-story brick building with old-fashioned double-hung windows still looked run down. Mounted in a quarter of the windows were air conditioners that blocked what little light the windows afforded. The interior was a monotonous institutional green, with halls so narrow they felt like tunnels. Wood trim around the doors provided the only break in the monotony. The top third of the doors was opaque glass, the panes stencilled with the names of obscure branches of government. At the end of the corridor was an elevator, its steel doors painted the same institutional green. Chipped and scratched, the elevator doors shuddered as they slowly opened.
Nathan Jett rode the elevator to the fifth floor, where his department occupied half of the office space. The OSS had used the same space during World War II. When the OSS had been reorganized into the CIA, certain ongoing operations had been consolidated into one branch. Only one of the original operations continued, the one that employed Jett. On paper it was a subdepartment of a small branch of Naval Intelligence. In terms of function, it put the cork back in the bottle whenever the genie escaped.
Jett had been with the Office of Special Projects for four years now. Recruited out of the FBI, he knew he had been selected because he was “emotionally underreactive,” had scored low on morality scales (
M
scores) and high on authoritarianism scales (
A
scores). The low
M
score meant he was unconventional, not amoral, so to find his moral center the psychologists had probed using moral dilemmas.
“You’re an eighth-grader and you see a friend steal money from the teacher’s purse,” he remembered a psychologist saying. “He tells you it’s to buy medicine for his mother. After school you see your friend buying ice cream with the money. The next day the teacher demands to know who stole her money or the whole class will be punished. Would you tell?”
“What’s the punishment?” Jett had asked.
“Would that make a difference?”
“Yes.”
“The class would have to miss a field trip to the zoo.”
“Then I wouldn’t tell.”
“Why?” the psychologist probed.
“It wasn’t much money, since it only bought ice cream. The teacher could afford to lose that much and I don’t like zoos.”
“But your friend lied to you—”
“I’d beat the hell out of him!”
Jett’s individualized morality meant he didn’t rely on others to judge right or wrong, or to mete out punishment. He did accept authority, but didn’t wholly trust it, especially where his self-interest was involved.
His low M score was typical of agents like Jett, as was his high A score. The efficiency of hierarchical authority structures was appealing to people like Jett, who preferred a one-person, one-voice management style. A natural leader, Jett was promoted quickly.
There was no paper-and-pencil test for Jett’s other distinguishing characteristic—“low emotional reactivity.” Jett had a flattened affect, which meant he couldn’t experience the full range of human emotions. Fear, panic, and terror were virtually unknown to him, but so were ecstasy, joy, and love. Only in life-threatening situations did Jett’s autonomic nervous system pump enough adrenaline to give him a rush. Even then, the anxiety he felt when facing a Special was about that experienced by an average person giving a high-school speech. Jett’s flattened affect, a high tolerance for his own pain, and unlimited tolerance for the pain of others, set him apart from the man on the street. Was he pathological? No. But he was well suited to carry out his government’s necessary dirty work.
With a rattle and a clang the doors of the old elevator opened to
another green tunnel, most of its doors unlabeled. Ten doors down he came to one with “Office of Special Projects” stencilled on the opaque glass. His agency hid in plain sight, and was listed in the phone book; its budget was a line item in the federal budget. But like an iceberg where two-thirds of the bulk is under the water line, the agency’s black-bag budget was far greater. Research was the office’s public function, and the walls were lined with reference works—statistical indexes, encyclopedias, almanacs, and guides to periodicals. Most of the data, however, was on CD-ROM now, and there was a “jukebox” containing fifteen hundred CDs that could be accessed from any workstation. Networked computers sat on every desk, gathering information on demand from libraries, universities, databases, and intelligence agencies.
As an official branch of the Navy, the office was listed in the Washington, D.C., phone book under “Navy Department of the—” Anyone who cared to look could tell it was an intelligence agency by the prefix. All the intelligence branches carried the “669” prefix. Office of Naval Intelligence was 669-3001, Coast Guard Intelligence was 669-4546, and the Marine Corps Intelligence Activity was 669-4343. Listed among the numerous other Naval offices was the Office of Special Projects, 669-3101.
Jett passed through the outer office to another complex, this time pausing by a desk and making small talk with the man stationed there. Though the man looked like a recent college graduate—young, eager, and friendly—he was actually an agent using a magnetic field to scan Jett and make sure he was carrying only authorized weapons. With a last smile and a cheery “Have a good day,” Jett was admitted to the inner office.
This complex looked like the first one; he passed through, acknowledging greetings with his usual reserve, knowing people were curious about the outcome of his last mission. Woolman’s office door was closed, but through the vertical glass panel next to it he saw a man sitting opposite Woolman. Jett recognized the middle-aged man as the next link in the chain of command. CIA chiefs were rare visitors to the Office of Special Projects. Jett waited at a discreet distance from the door, surreptitiously watching the CIA section chief. The man was composed, but intense. Woolman did most of the talking, the CIA chief listening, nodding his head occasionally. Finally, they exchanged a few last words, Woolman doing most of the nodding now. Then the CIA chief left, ignoring Jett.
Jett didn’t wait to be invited in. Woolman expected agents to report promptly whenever they dealt with a Special. Jett closed the door as he entered, taking the chair vacated by the CIA chief. Oscar Woolman typed on his computer with his back to Jett. Jett waited patiently. Woolman used
the typing ploy to keep agents in their place, typing some trivial memo while they waited, sending a clear message about hierarchy of command. Woolman’s hands flew over the keys, a sure sign that he had been deskbound for years. Jett was still a hunt-and-peck typist; something he was proud of.
While he waited, Jett studied the back of Woolman’s head. Woolman was virtually bald, a gray fringe just above his ears being his only hair. He kept the fringe neat, making frequent visits to a stylist. Jett supposed it was the scarcity that made Woolman’s fringe so precious to him. Shortly, Woolman paused, turning, leaning back in his chair, one hand massaging each arm rest. Woolman’s face was soft and round, with deep horizontal creases across his forehead. He was pudgy now, though once he had been an effective field agent of some note—but that was then and this was now.
“Well?” Woolman said.
“We lost one; one badly injured.”
“What was his ability?”
“Fire. Not as powerful as the one in seventy-eight.”
“Fire?” Woolman said, with distaste.
Woolman had been on the nineteen-seventy-eight team that had faced the most powerful Special ever tracked. Four agents had died then, literally burned to a crisp. Another four were injured, Woolman one of them. Woolman’s legs still bore the scars of the skin grafts. Ever since, his weakness had been fire.
“You said he wasn’t powerful,” Woolman said. “Yet, he killed one?”
“Powerful enough, but he wasn’t smart. He should have hit us when we were all in the car.”
“What about containment?”
“It was the middle of the night; only a few witnesses. A garage was burned; some other minor damage. We’re arranging for restitution and got the bodies out before anyone was sure of what happened. The neighbors think we captured a federal fugitive.”
“Who’s the casualty?” Woolman asked finally.
“Knox. Steele will survive but he has third-degree facial burns. He won’t be a field man anymore.”
Making notes on a yellow pad, Woolman looked thoughtful, his gray eyes blank as if staring at some inner screen. Jett knew he was thinking about replacements, not sympathizing with the families of the dead and injured. Jett often wondered if Woolman’s
M
and
A
scores were lower than his.
“Did you backtrack him?” Woolman asked.
“Not far. It was snowing pretty hard.”
“He only had about four hours. How far could he walk?”
“From the look of his shoes he had walked some miles across country. That part of Minnesota is pretty rural, lots of wooded areas,” Jett said.
“And ten thousand frozen lakes.”
“Exactly.”
“Any idea where he was going?”
“He was trying to make a phone call,” Jett said, placing the quarter in front of Woolman.
Woolman picked up the coin, looking at the date.
“Did he complete the call?”
“No.”
Woolman paused now, his fingers drumming a tuneless rhythm.
“I’ve been talking to the technicians at Rainbow about a permanent solution to the problem of the Specials,” Woolman said.
Jett had heard rumors about problems at Rainbow, the facility that contained the Specials, and he knew that breakouts had become more frequent, a sign they were losing containment. The CIA had long wanted the Office of Special Projects shut down, but a permanent solution hadn’t been considered feasible. The visit by the CIA chief told him that the situation was changing. Jett also knew that any permanent solution would be more dangerous than the worst Special the Office had ever dealt with—far more dangerous than the fire thrower Woolman had fought in nineteen-seventy-eight. The thought of what a permanent solution would entail aroused Jett like no other mission had.
“If we decide to go with the permanent solution, you would be my choice as team leader. Of course, it’s not set yet; there are technical details to work out.”
“Whenever,” Jett said.
Jett stood to leave.
“I suppose I’ll have to visit Steele,” Woolman said.
“I’ll do it,” Jett said, knowing Woolman couldn’t stand the thought of walking into a burn ward. Jett would have visited Steele anyway, not out of compassion, but out of loyalty to a team member.
“Damn fire throwers,” Woolman said, fingers drumming nervously.
Jett nodded, then left, smiling to himself. The fight with the fire thrower had provided the most excitement he’d had in three years, even giving him a small adrenaline rush. Jett wondered how Woolman would have reacted? Would he have collapsed at the first fireball, pants soaked with urine? It gave Jett a feeling of strength to know another man’s weakness.
August
University of Oregon Campus, Eugene, Oregon
With his clothes rumpled, shirt cross-buttoned, and hair unkempt, Ronald Simpson looked like a transient, but until a year ago he had been a successful stockbroker on the fast track with his brokerage. Now diagnosed schizophrenic, he sat on a cot to be fitted with the helmet containing the leads that connected him to a cryogenic computer. The cot was placed in the middle of a semicircle made up of three work stations, each packed with equipment. Elizabeth Foxworth worked with Ronald while her friend, Monica Kim, stood behind Dr. Wes Martin at one of the stations. Monica was quiet, since quiet visitors were the only ones Wes tolerated.
Ronald’s nervous habits made fitting him with the helmet—called an EET—difficult for Elizabeth. Normally, he habitually rubbed his face with his hands and then finger-combed his greasy hair over and over. The helmet disrupted his sensorimotor routine, however, and not running his fingers through his hair disturbed him. Still, he wanted to cooperate and kept catching his hands on the way to his head, forcing them back down. He tried sitting on his hands, but, as if they had a mind of their own, they
pulled free and went for his scalp, where they were frustrated by the cap covering his head.
Elizabeth reassured him, and he responded with his litany.
“Yeah, gonna be okay, everything’s gonna be okay.”
Finished, Elizabeth nodded to Shamita Patel at the center station, who signalled that she was receiving Ron’s brain waves. As senior engineer, Shamita had developed the micro electroencephalograph built into Ron’s helmet and the cryogenic central processor that was the heart of their supercooled supercomputer. Only five cryogenic supercomputers existed in the world—the CIA had three—but theirs was the only one used to intercept brain waves. Shamita was nearing fifty; her once jet black hair was graying, the patches of gray standing out like dandelions in a spring lawn. A sober person, she compensated by wearing colorful clothes. Today over black slacks, she wore a loose shirt covered with bright flowers.
Elizabeth now looked to Len Chaikin, who would monitor Ronald’s physiological responses using receptors mounted in the temples of the helmet and others taped to his chest. During the development phase of the engineering, Len had acted as Shamita’s hands, doing the physical construction of the circuit boards from Shamita’s designs, as well as designing and installing the liquid-hydrogen cooling system. Good looking, with regular features, blue eyes, and brown hair, Len was the kind of man you wanted to call pretty instead of handsome. Len had an irreverent and irrepressible sense of humor, and to Wes’s annoyance, used it indiscriminately. Now he signalled to Elizabeth that he was receiving Ronald’s blood pressure, heart rate, respiration, and galvanic skin response.
Ready for the next step, Elizabeth asked Ron to move his limbs one at a time, while Shamita studied her monitor, noting the neural activity associated with each movement.
“Yeah, gonna be okay, everything’s gonna be okay,” Ron said, moving his arms and legs as directed.
They repeated the movement sequence three times until Shamita confirmed the neurological map. Next, Ron was asked to touch his toes, clap his hands, and pass a ball from hand to hand.
“Yeah, gonna be okay, everything’s gonna be okay,” he said to each request as he complied.
In a few seconds Shamita had confirmed that Ronald’s brain was organized like most people’s, with the motor and sensory regions on opposite sides of the central fissure, running horizontally across the brain. Motor control was upside-down and backwards, with the right side controlled by the left side of the brain, and the left side controlled by the right side of the
brain. Control of the toes was located near the top of the cortex and control of the tongue low on the side. The computer quickly recognized Ronald’s psychomotor organization as standard, and the mapping proceeded.
“I’ve got motor cortex,” Shamita said finally.
“Relax him,” Wes said.
Elizabeth asked Ron to lie down, which he did with difficulty, his head bobbing up and down.
“Yeah, gonna be okay, everything’s gonna be okay.”
Suddenly his body went limp, his eyes closing.
“What did you do?” Monica asked.
“His brain waves are monitored by sensors in the EET helmet, and once we localized motor functions we used antagonistic signals to interrupt certain neural pathways and relax some of the larger muscles,” Wes said. “At the same time we blocked part of the activity in the reticular activating system.”
Wes gave a perfunctory explanation, having given it many times to visitors who never really understood what it meant. If Monica Kim followed the pattern, Wes expected her to accuse him next of paralyzing Ronald.
“You put him to sleep,” Monica said.
Wes was pleasantly surprised by Monica’s understanding. Most visitors were from the Kellum Foundation, which funded Wes’s research and couldn’t be refused access. The others were fellow neuropsychologists, or social workers like Elizabeth, who didn’t have enough knowledge of his work to even approach an intelligent question. Monica Kim had already demonstrated more depth than any of Elizabeth’s previous friends. At five foot five she was five inches shorter than Elizabeth and opposite her in almost every way. Elizabeth was a striking woman with red hair and green eyes, and while she dressed conservatively, she drew the attention of men wherever she went. Monica wasn’t beautiful, but she was pretty, with black hair and almond shaped eyes.
“You might find this interesting, Monica,” Len said, motioning for her to come to his station.
“Aren’t you just monitoring his physiological signs?” she asked.
“Well, yes, but there’s more to it—”
“Thanks anyway, Len, I’ll stay here,” Monica said, standing behind Shamita, watching her map Ronald’s cerebral cortex.
The equipment and software were designed for multiple subjects, but today the scientists were intercepting only one subject’s cerebral activity. By sending competing signals to certain regions of the subject’s brain, they could temporarily shut down selected brain activity. With two or more
subjects they could shut down a portion of one brain’s activity and substitute the activity from another brain, combining two or more minds into one. Today’s experiment wasn’t designed to blend minds; instead they would try to create order in the very confused mind of a schizophrenic. Shamita would select out brain functions, Len would receive physiological signs, and Wes would monitor both from his station.
“How do you decode the brain’s signals?” Monica asked.
“We don’t,” Wes said. “Brain waves are multiplexed signals … It’s complex.”
“You’re not assuming a hierarchical feature matrix?” Monica asked.
Impressed, Wes warmed to Monica.
“Originally we did work with the hierarchical feature detector model and there is good evidence this is how people make sense of their environment. For example, if you show a person a horizontal line tilted at an angle, a single neuron will respond. Tilt it a little more and a different cell responds. Another cell will respond to the width of the line, another to its length. These individual cells then send their signals to other cells called complex cells, which then respond only to certain combinations of width, length, and angle. The signals from the complex cells are sent to hypercomplex cells, which again only respond to certain combinations from the complex cells, and so on through a network of billions of cells with trillions of combinations. However, our work at this level didn’t take us where we wanted to go.”
“You disproved the hierarchical model?” Monica asked.
“No, we decided it was irrelevant,” Wes said.
Elizabeth interrupted, asking if they were ready to map the auditory cortex. Shamita nodded, and Elizabeth turned on a CD player which played a variety of sounds, Shamita watching her monitor for Ronald’s neural responses.
“We were able to isolate hierarchical cell structures that fit the model in both the visual and auditory cortexes, but interactions between cells increase exponentially with each new level,” Wes continued. “It’s difficult enough to track cell activity among a dozen cells, let alone millions. It finally dawned on us that we needed to be working at a macro level, not the micro level. It was like trying to appreciate the
Mona
Lisa
by looking through a microscope at the molecules of paint.
“When we treated brain waves as complex wholes and stopped trying to disassemble them, we made rapid progress. Now we look at the brain waves as functioning much like FM-radio broadcasts. In order to broadcast stereo, frequency-modulated radio combines several waves into a compound
wave that can carry more information than the individual waves—it’s called multiplexing. The signal is split again at the receiver back into the original waves. The cortex functions in much the same way, by compounding signals and then compounding the compounds—that’s multiplexing. With our equipment we intercept the multiplexed signals and re-route them through fiber optic lines and then back to the cortex.”
“Or to another cortex,” Monica said.
“We don’t do that anymore,” Wes said, remembering the disaster that had resulted from his first experiments with integrating minds. Using autistic savants, he and his team had integrated the fragments of genius from four savants, creating a single mind with amazing abilities. Unfortunately, his team had been infiltrated by someone with psychokinetic abilities whose power had been magnified by linking with the savants. People had died—Len had nearly been killed. In a perverse way the experiment had been an overwhelming success, but the cost had been too great. The fact that Monica didn’t ask why they stopped integrating minds made Wes suspect that Elizabeth hadn’t kept any secrets from her.
“I’m surprised your computer can keep up with the brain,” Monica said.
“Actually, neural activity is relatively slow. It’s based on chemical diffusion across a semipermeable membrane. Single neurons are microscopic, so the process is sufficiently rapid for mental activity, but remember we’re working at a macro level involving millions of neurons.”
“Isn’t your computer supercooled?”
“It’s a cryogenic computer. We use the liquid nitrogen to supercool our CPU. The superconducting chip processes the information faster than the brain itself, which allows us to keep up with the multiplexed brain waves. The light-wave transmission through the fiber optic lines is much faster than that of the neurons—the speed of light, actually. As long as we keep the length of the transmission lines short enough, and we work at a multiplexed level, it works.”
Elizabeth finished the audio sequence and began tactile stimulation. Using Wes’s software, the computer displayed a model of Ron’s brain from three perspectives on Wes’s screen. Elizabeth and Shamita worked together, mapping Ronald’s sensorimotor functions; the results were displayed on Wes’s monitor.
“See the schizophrenic bleed, Wes?” Shamita said.
“Yes, especially visual to auditory.” Then, explaining for Monica, Wes, added, “Schizophrenics tend to confuse sensory information—hear colors, feel sounds, that sort of thing.”
“I’ve had some experience with schizophrenics,” Monica said.
Monica said it as if it was important, and Wes briefly caught Elizabeth’s eye. She was up to something.
“This is auditory function here,” Wes said, pointing to the temporal lobe of the brain, about halfway down the side. “There are auditory regions on both sides of the brain.” Then, pointing to the back of the brain, he said, “This is where visual information is received. Notice the sharp increase in electrical activity in both auditory regions as Elizabeth plays the tape, and notice this activity connecting the two regions.”
“We can also get infrared images,” Wes said, typing on the keyboard and calling up a new view of Ron’s cortex. “The EET helmet Ron’s wearing also detects temperature differences. As neural activity increases, temperature increases. The red and orange colors indicate the highest levels of activity.”
Wes pointed to the color image on the screen. It showed green and yellow in most regions, but orange with red centers in the visual and auditory regions. Then, tracing with his finger, he said, “Notice this activity connecting the different regions. This kind of flow between regions is unusual, even for schizophrenics.”
“I’ve never seen anything like it,” Monica said, studying the screen intensely. “The flow seems … forced.”
“Exactly,” Wes said. “Ron is very unusual. It’s like he’s picking up sensations his brain doesn’t know how to process—they’re not visual or auditory. That’s why we’re interested in him.”
“We’re interested in helping him, too,” Elizabeth said suddenly.
“Of course, I didn’t mean …” Wes sputtered, embarrassed by his tendency to get absorbed by technical problems and forget the person involved.
Wes typed on the keyboard again, and the electrical activity of Ron’s brain reappeared on the screen.
“Here’s where we can do some good,” Wes said. Then to Shamita he said, “Patch auditory, visual, olfactory, and haptic regions.”

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