"Not really. I've been a little too busy, I'm afraid."
"No matter." The physicist handed the clippings to Flinn. "Read these."
Flinn scanned the first clipping. It bore a recent date.
"'… Reliable sources,'" he read aloud, "'report that a civilian, believed to be a scientist, is being held incommunicado in the Pentagon. All efforts on the part of newsmen to gain additional information have been met with polite but firm rebuffs. Spokesmen from the AEC have refused to confirm or deny theories that the man's detention is in some way connected with the recent fiasco at Eniwetok Atoll …'"
He read the second. It was date-lined Honolulu, a week before the other.
"'Beyond the terse comment that there were "no casualties," all official sources are silent today concerning the news leak of the failure of a nuclear device in our Pacific Test Area. It has been understood that this device, the third in a series of thermonuclear test shots, failed to detonate. Since this test was scheduled to have been a "tower shot," under rigid instrumental control, much speculation has arisen …'"
Flinn looked up hopelessly. "I don't understand. Does this concern you? I mean—"
"It concerns all of us," Wilmer said grimly. "But I know what you're getting at. No, I'm not the man they mention. I was in charge of that particular test."
Hayes cleared his throat abruptly and Wilmer nodded.
"I want you to understand, Mr. Flinn, before we go any further, that everything you hear and see, and have heard and seen from the time Fred first contacted you, is to be held in the strictest confidence. Is that clear?"
"Yes."
"All right. How much do you know about atomic physics?"
Flinn spread his hands. "I'm somewhat past the Democritus stage, but I don't claim to be an expert."
"Well, basically, in a thermonuclear explosive device, hydrogen is transformed into helium," said Hayes. "In the process there is a loss of mass. This loss results in a tremendous and sudden release of energy. Are you familiar with the energy-mass relationship, E = MC2?"
Flinn nodded.
"Okay. In other words, the nuclei of hydrogen atoms are fused under the influence of great heat, resulting in a different element, less mass, a release of energy, and an explosion."
"I'm with you so far," Flinn said.
"Then you realize that once this fusion process commences, nothing in God's great universe can stop it?"
"Yes."
"And that after certain things are done, fusion must result?"
"Surely."
"Well, so all of us believed, too. But we were wrong about it."
"I don't understand. You just said—"
"So I said. But let me try to describe to you the situation as it happened." He paused, not for dramatic effect, but to take a moment to force himself to recall what Flinn could see must have been a very painful experience.
"We are on the command ship," Wilmer continued, "at a safe distance from the atoll. Everything is in readiness, checked and double-checked by me, personally. The automatic firing process is in progress. The last countdown has commenced. Five, four, three, two, one, zero. Nothing happens.
"I'll simplify the subsequent chain of events. After a reasonable interval, a volunteer pilot and myself and one other man fly by helicopter to the atoll. We climb the tower. I'm sweating and so are the others. We're standing beside a live hydrogen bomb. I disconnect the power sources and do various things to render the device safe. Then we check. Everything—everything—is in working order. There is absolutely no reason why the thing failed to detonate. Yet it did fail.
"We fly back to the command ship. We hold an emergency conference. We're sitting there staring at each other. Then this—this man, Dobbs, starts to laugh. We think it is hysterics, due to the tremendous strain that everyone has been under. But apparently it isn't. He laughs and laughs and laughs. Finally he manages to say: 'You can't figure it out, can you? Well, I know. Old Dobbsie knows. It didn't explode because I willed it not to!'"
Flinn's mind was almost too tired to accept what he had heard. "Are you trying to tell me—"
"Figure it out for yourself," Wilmer said flatly. "It's your field. Telepathy, telehypnosis, and what's left?"
"Psychokinesis," Flinn said in a stifled voice.
"Right. Psychokinesis. Mind over matter."
Ordinarily, Patrick Flinn would have used the morning ride over Washington's broad avenues to good advantage—this was his first visit to the nation's capital—but his mind was too filled with the preceding day's revelations to permit anything save minimal sightseeing.
"I hate to keep repeating myself," Wilmer was saying, "but I must be certain you understand what's at stake here."
"I know," Flinn answered with some impatience. "I'm not to reveal, under any circumstances, the fact that I have telepathic powers."
"Correct." The physicist sat in the seat beside Flinn, and Hayes was in front beside the driver. "Your job is to find out just how much this man can do. We'd like to know the way he does it, too, but that's secondary."
"It strikes me," Flinn mused, "that anyone who can influence a fusion bomb can do anything."
"That's what we're afraid of." Wilmer looked soberly at the parapsychologist. "I think I can understand what's going on in your mind. This is your special love and you're finding it difficult to divorce yourself from pure clinical investigation. You want, really, to talk to Dobbs as one scientist to another. But I must warn you that this is impossible. If he gets the least inkling that you're a special mind, something disastrous may result. As long as he gets what he wants, fine, but rub him the wrong way and—"
"And yet you have him a virtual prisoner and he doesn't object?"
"Well, at least not strenuously," Wilmer said. "I don't profess to understand a warped mind, but apparently Dobbs realizes that his confinement is mostly protective custody. It's to his own advantage. After all, he doesn't have to stand up at a public forum and shout threats. All he has to do is contact the few to reach the many. And if he has the powers he says he has, full use of them would result in his own destruction. And he doesn't want that. He's too interested, right now, in satisfying his own animal appetites. But faced with losing everything—"
"Our biggest immediate worry," Hayes said from the front seat, "is keeping all this from the public. That's why we put Dobbs out of sight in a hurry. There have been some leaks already, but so far most people consider the papers' theories as just so much wild speculation. And thank God for that. You can understand why all recognizable public figures are keeping as far away from Dobbs as possible."
Flinn nodded; it was self-evident. There were other phases of the problem that bothered him more. He was still vaguely and, as it seemed, illogically worried about the several questions he had raised the day before.
The fact that Dobbs might have read his articles and hence might put two and two together, despite a cover identity, was the least of them. Flinn had never lectured in public, his efforts had received no publicity except in specialized psychological circles, and his latest monograph on TH had been published when Dobbs was working at the atoll.
Wilmer, Hayes, and others had managed to assuage reasonable fears on the other point. Flinn had always assumed that psychokinesis would be the logical result of advanced telepathy, that they were links in the same chain. Now it seemed that a person could be one without the other. Either you possessed a latent ability to scan mind-matter, or an affinity for material substance, but not necessarily both.
Earlier, Wilmer and Hayes had devised a test to check the possibility that Dobbs was an advanced telepath. They had mentally vilified him beyond the ability of even an accomplished actor to resist, over prolonged periods of time, and yet Dobbs had shown not the least indication that he had intercepted their thoughts. But there was one additional point.
"You used the expression 'warped mind' in describing Dobbs," Flinn said to Wilmer. "Is it your opinion then that he is definitely psychopathic? The reason I ask is that scanning a confused mind may prove to be more than I can handle."
"I used that expression for want of a better," Wilmer answered cautiously. "Put it this way—suppose you suddenly found you were able to control, even in a minor way, the stuff of the universe; would you use those powers for the benefit of mankind, or would you leap over the traces and reach for all the things that had been denied you over the years for moral, or legal, or whatever reasons?"