She looked at him and saw a mousey-haired, green-eyed man in his late thirties. Trask was about five feet ten, a little overweight and slope-shouldered, and wore what could only be described as a lugubrious expression. Perhaps it had to do with his talent: in a world where the plain truth was increasingly hard to find, it was no easy thing being a lie-detector. White lies, half-truths, and downright fables came at Trask from all directions, until sometimes he felt he didn't want to look any more.
But Anna Marie English had her own problems. Finally she nodded her bedraggled mop of a head. 'I see it, yes, but don't ask me what it's all about. I woke up, saw it, and knew I had to come here. That's all. But I've a hunch the world's a loser yet again.' Her voice was a coughing rasp.
'A hunch?'
This thing isn't specific to me,' she frowned. This time I'm just ... an onlooker? It isn't hurting me. I feel for him, yes, but his fate doesn't seem to have made much impression on the world in general. Yet at the same time, somehow I think it makes the world less.'
'Do you know him?'
'I feel that I should know him, certainly,' she answered, simultaneously shaking her head. And ruefully, 'I know that I was watching him when I should have been watching the road. I went through two red lights at least!'
Trask nodded, took her by the elbow and guided her across the street. 'Let's join them and see if anyone else has a clue.' In fact he already had more than a clue but was unwilling to give it voice. If he was right, then just like the ecopath he could scarcely view this phenomenon as Earth-damaging. In fact it might even be a relief.
With Whitehall no more than a ten minute walk away, the torn front page from a discarded Pravda seemed strangely out of place where it spun slowly in the current of the flooded gutter, inching soggily and
perhaps prophetically towards the iron-barred throat of a gurgling sump. But as if in defiance of the stinging rain, the night, and all other distractions, the phantom hologram continued to display itself wherever the glances of Trask and Anna Marie English happened to fall. It was there in the tiny unmanned foyer, playing on the neutral grey doors of the elevator as if projected there from their eyeballs; and when the doors hissed open to admit them, they took it with them into the cage to be carried up to the top floor offices of E-Branch HQ.
The rest of the building was a well-known hotel; bright lights at the front, and a uniformed doorman from the Corps of Commissionaires sheltering from the rain under his striped plastic canopy, or more likely inside taking a coffee with the night clerk now that all the guests were abed. But up here on the top floor ...
This was a different world. And a weird one.
E-Branch: Ben Trask felt much the same about it now as he had fourteen years ago when he was first recruited, and as every Branch esper before and since. Alec Kyle, an old friend and ex-Head of Branch was dead and gone now, (was he? And his body, too? Was that what this was all about?) but he had come closest to it when he'd used to say, 'E-Branch? A bloody funny outfit, Ben! Science and sorcery - telemetry and telepathy - computerized probability patterns and precogni-tion - gadgets and ghosts. We have access to all of these things .. . now.'
That 'now' had qualified it. For at the time, Kyle had been talking about Harry Keogh. And later he had become Harry Keogh; Keogh's mind in Kyle's body, anyway ...
The cage jerked to a halt; its doors hissed open; Trask and the unnaturally aged 'girl', and the hologram, got out.
Hologram or phantom? Trask wondered. Gadget ... or ghost? When he was a kid he'd believed in ghosts. Then for a time he hadn't. Now he worked for E-Branch and ... sometimes he wished he were a kid again. For then it was all in the imagination.