Kaspar's Box

"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 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.

"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?"