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"So the little girls took a powder and now the whole navy's in a panic," he
said with a wry smile. "And old
Murphy's been called up to help pull you out of the mess you made when you
didn't listen to him in the first place!"
"And you did so much better with them, by your own account," Sittithong shot
back.
"Well, you got a point there," the old man admitted. "But if it wasn't for you
buttin' in like you did, they'd
be where they wanted to be and I'd be rid of them by now. Even I had no idea
that they could do this!"
Maslovic was less inclined to trust the old captain. "This is quite a level of
sophistication for three airheaded young things who can hardly walk, isn't
it?"
" 'Sophistication' he says! 'Tis the black arts, m'boy! Nobody can teleport
themselves off a ship by chantin'
usin' some kind of gizmo!"
Maslovic nodded. "And there I agree with you. Not in the black magic, but in
the fact that nobody can will themselves elsewhere. If these girls really
could do that, why did they need you?"
"Invisible, then! Maybe they made themselves invisible!"
"Not likely. We don't just track by vision. Every living thing aboard gives
off heat and makes noise and has all sorts of nonvisual emanations that we can
use for detection. They show up on none of them, even though small pests in
the deepest holds do. No, they didn't teleport anyplace and they didn't become
invisible or any such thing. There's only one explanation that makes any sense
here, and it's highly sophisticated. Let me see the replay again, if you
please, Commander."
All eyes went to the screen, which blacked out for just a moment and then came
back up with a recording of the trio sitting there inside the pentagram
chanting.
"If that's not an act, then those faces show a near trancelike state,"
Maslovic pointed out. "But they're doing something, and more and more they're
doing it in perfect synch. Look at the slight twitching in the feet, the
little muscular movements in the mouths, and you'll see they get to where the
slightest little thing, even breathing and heart rates, are absolutely
identical, like they're one organism. It's the closest to telepathy I've ever
seen. The chanting helps them in some way, combines them in some kind of
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shared consciousness. It's a discipline, but it's clearly deliberate."
"So they merge," Sittithong commented. "That would give them a combined IQ of
our dumbest sailor."
Maslovic kept staring at the three. "No, sir. It's not intellect at work here.
It's feelings, emotions, I can't tell what else." He looked at the small timer
clicking off the hundredths of seconds in the lower left hand corner. "Now,
finally, they've got to where they wanted to be. How they learned this I have
no idea, but it will be essential that we find out. Imagine what would happen
if these girls fell into the hands of someone who could direct them for the
wrong ends, or if they could teach more capable people to do this. Nothing
would be safe. On the other hand, if we can learn how it's done, nothing would
be closed to us."
Even Murphy was getting interested. "What are you talkin' about, man?"
"Watch. There!"
One moment the trio is still sitting there, chanting, and the next moment they
simply are not there. There was no transition, no fading out, nothing. They
were there, and then they weren't, just like that.
"What do you see, Sergeant?" the exec prompted. "What do you see that we
can't?"
"Well, sir, for one thing I can see that we need a faster clock. Still, if you
go back to the precise instant that they 'vanish,' you may be able to see it.
At the moment they vanish, freeze it. I mean truly at that moment, at the
precise frame number."
It was done, but they could still see nothing. The girls sat, frozen, in that
eerie unison that the sergeant had noticed. "Now advance one frame at a time."
Each frame was a hundredth of a second, so it was going to take a while to go
through the next few moments, but there they vanished, and nothing was clearly
different.
"Right there, the first very few frames, perhaps five one hundredths of a
second in all. Can't you see it?"
Both Murphy and Sittithong stared as the same frames went by slowly again and
again, but it wasn't clear.
Finally, Maslovic said, "Don't pay any attention to the girls vanishing. Look
at the background, and in particular that crude design drawn around them. If
we had thousandths of a second frames I
think it would be obvious, but this isn't much. Just look at the design behind
where the women were sitting from the point of view of the camera."
"I believe I see it. A slight distortion, a sort of blurring," the exec
commented. "Is that what you mean?"
Maslovic nodded. "The information had to be interpolated for that very short
period. After that, the full information could be compiled from earlier
storage. You see, we don't keep every frame of every surveillance video we
have. On a ship of this size the storage alone would be enormous. They'd been
chanting for several hours, so the view of that part of the design was no
longer in the security computer's memory. It had to interpolate. As soon as it
got the full view, it back-filled the design, redrew it digitally, but for
those brief first few fractions of a second it had to hold the design while
reprocessing the rest of the image. Because of that, we get that distortion.
It's so minor you'd only see it if you expected to see it, and then only in
this frame-by-frame analysis."
Both Murphy and the exec turned and stared at the marine. "And, Sergeant, how
in hell did you know to expect to see it?"
"It had to be there. And because the alarms triggered at five one hundredths
of a second, it was the one small section that could not be digitally redrawn
before a secure offline copy was made. The two computers are substantially the
same speed, but the general security and surveillance computer had a lot to
do. It still almost managed."
"And all this nonsense means what?" Murphy asked, genuinely confused.
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"It means that your girls didn't disappear anywhere. After they did what they
needed to do, they simply stopped, got up, and walked out the door."
"Impossible!" Lieutenant Commander Mohr asserted. "They'd be all over our
sensors!"
"Not, sir, if the surveillance computer was told to remove them from any and
all monitoring."
"What?"
"They are here, somewhere. They are simply being completely ignored, both by
the monitoring computers and any crewmembers they might come into contact
with. The background for every single security point on the ship is in memory,
so only the parts that move or change need to be dealt with. Wherever they
are, the computer is simply not showing or reporting them, but painting each
frame and adjusting all records using prior data to have them not show up. As
I say, I don't know how they do it, but the computers are self-aware and in
many ways would be recognized as just other life-forms, so whatever they're
doing to make them not noticed by our people is the same thing they did with
the computer. I don't think they know how they do it. In fact, I'd rather
doubt it. But they're here, as you saw them, most likely walking around the
ship, and absolutely no person or computer is taking any notice of them. Is,
in fact, blotting out their very existence. That's why I mentioned telepathy,
although I don't think they read minds, I just do not have another term for
this. They could be right here, right now, and neither we nor our highly
sophisticated surveillance equipment would show it. Our brains would simply
paint them out, just like the computers are doing. Since they don't seem very
bright, sir, I think we're in very big trouble if they stop sightseeing and
begin pushing buttons and interfering with other processes. This ship's run by
computers that are of the same relative design as the one they've
compromised."
The chief of security and the executive officer were appalled. Murphy, a queer
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