Spoonbenders

He wouldn’t have traded these months for anything, but he had to admit that the daily routine bored him, made him feel like he was working a straight job, something he’d vowed never to do. He also had to admit that for a straight job, it was pretty bent. Most days the work consisted of lying on couches talking aloud, while a fellow psychic recorded his “observations.” Later, Smalls would evaluate the observations for “hits.” Maureen and Teddy, the two stars of the show, had scores that were about the same but for opposite reasons. Maureen’s observations were highly specific, so that when she hit, her concrete statements came off as undeniable facts. Teddy’s answers, however, were artfully vague, so that it was near impossible for him to be completely wrong.

For some reason, Smalls had not recruited Clifford Turner, who had demonstrated some actual psychic ability—and that reason was that Turner was black. Smalls had let his prejudice do his thinking for him and had hired instead two white men who were self-deluded yahoos. Bob Nickles was a retired electrician who claimed to be an electricity douser; Jonathan Jones was a young man who’d been “discovered” by two Stanford professors after scoring high in a series of guessing games. Their primary qualifications seemed to be (a) luck, now run out; and (b) their golden-retriever-like enthusiasm. Nickles and Jones would babble on about whatever came to mind, often subconsciously riffing on whatever cues Smalls had let slip about the assignment. A stray mention of “sand” was enough to send them conjuring camels and Arabs all afternoon. What bothered Teddy was not that these two nimrods honestly thought they were having psychic experiences, but that Smalls did, too. Some days the G-man rated their results higher than Teddy’s or Maureen’s.

The rampant gullibility seemed to permeate all levels of government, fueled by fear of the Russians. The Soviets were pouring money into psi research, and the U.S., Smalls explained, had no choice but to respond in kind. All the intelligence organizations and every branch of the military were financing parallel secret programs. Some of them were focused on mind control, others on mind reading. Smalls’s team was in charge of remote viewing. He’d been given a dusty barracks building at the fort, enough money for a secretary, a junior agent, and four psychics, and all the office equipment he could scavenge from INSCOM and other army detachments. The program had no name, so everyone just called it “the program.”

The infuriating thing was that with all this government money flying around, so little of it was going to the ones doing the work—the psychic operatives. They were paying Maureen and Teddy peanuts. When Teddy pointed this out to Smalls, the man went into a speech about duty, protecting the country, and the threat to democracy itself. Asking you to forgo your fair share for the good of the nation, the company, or the church was a common enough scam, but telling you to go broke for the sake of an abstract philosophy? That took balls.

The real money, Teddy quickly figured out, was going to consultants and third-party contractors. Case in point: The morning before the night Teddy proposed to Maureen, they arrived at the barracks to find several workmen in orange coveralls setting up stacks of electrical equipment. Smalls called the seven members of the staff into his office. “I’ve got some good news,” he told them. “Management is very excited about the results that we’ve achieved so far. We’ve been given our own funding line, and an official code name. As of today, we are Aqueduct Anvil.”

“Wow!” Jones said. “What does it mean?”

“It doesn’t mean anything,” Smalls said. “It was next in the book.”

“What book?”

“The book of available code names.”

“You have a book of pre-generated code names?” Teddy asked.

“If you don’t, then everybody picks names like ‘Thunder Strike.’ In other news—”

Teddy raised his hand. “Can I tell people I’m in AA?” he asked innocently.

“Don’t tell people you’re in anything,” Smalls said.

“Can we still call it ‘the program’?” Bob Nickles asked.

“Then they’ll know we’re in AA,” Teddy said. Only Maureen and the secretary laughed.

“In other news,” Smalls repeated, desperately trying to regain control of the meeting. He never laughed at Teddy’s jokes. Any sense of humor in the man was short-circuited in Teddy’s presence by his jealousy. The poor lug was sweet on Maureen, but couldn’t admit these unclean thoughts to himself, and so had to take out his frustrations on her charming, loudmouthed beau. It didn’t matter that Teddy and Maureen’s relationship had been classified top secret by the woman herself; Smalls could sense it.

“Management also approved an expansion of the program,” Smalls said. “We’re going on a hiring spree.”

Smalls had gotten permission to test army personnel and read them into the program if their scores matched the desired “psychological profile.” Teddy assumed that meant gullibility.