Ian Goodly, the Night Duty Officer, was waiting for them in the corridor. Very tall, skeletally thin and gangly, he was a prognosticator or 'hunchman'. Grey and mainly gaunt-featured, Goodly's expression was usually grave; he rarely smiled; only his eyes - large, brown, warm and totally disarming - belied what must otherwise constitute a rather unfortunate first impression, that of a cadaverous mortician. 'Anna,' he offered the girl a polite nod. 'Ben?'
Trask returned the unspecified query. 'Do you see it, too?'
'We all do,' Goodly answered, his voice high-pitched and a little shrill, but not unusually so. And before Trask could say anything else: T guessed you'd be in. I've told them to wait for you in the Ops room.'
'How many of them?'
Goodly shrugged. 'Everyone within a thirty mile radius.'
Trask nodded. Thanks, Ian. I'll go and speak to them. And you'd better go back to keeping watch.'
Again Goodly's shrug. 'Very well, but apart from this it's going to be a quiet night. This thing is happening, and soon it will be finished. And then we'll see what we'll see.' He began to turn away.
Trask caught his arm and stopped him. 'Any ideas?'
Goodly sighed. 'I could give you ... an "educated guess". But I suspect you'd prefer to let it play itself out, right?' Like all hunchmen, he was cautious about being too specific. The future didn't like being pinned down.
Someone had called the elevator; its doors closed and the indicator signalled its descent. As Goodly made to return to his watch, Trask uttered a belated, 'Right,' then turned left along the corridor and headed for the Ops room. And Anna Marie English limped along behind him.
In the Ops room they found their colleagues waiting for them. In front of the briefing podium an area had been cleared of chairs where eleven espers formed an inward-facing circle. Trask and the girl made thirteen. A witch's dozen, he thought, wryly. We complete the coven.
As the circle opened up and its members adjusted their positions the better to accommodate the latecomers, so Trask saw the point of the formation. The combined awareness of the espers added to the hologram's authentication: to experience the thing as a group was to focus it, lend it definition. And the hitherto nebulous mental projection expanded in a moment from a 3-D picture in Trask's mind's eye to a seemingly physical, apparently solid figure right there in front of him! But only apparently solid, for obviously it wasn't real.
The ring formed by the espers was maybe fifteen to eighteen feet in diameter; the location of the smouldering corpse where it tumbled backwards, head over heels, free of the floor, as on some invisible spit, was no more than ten feet away from any inpidual viewer. If it were solid - if it were 'here' at all - then the figure would have to be that of a child or a dwarf. But its proportions were those of a normal, adult human being. And so the apparition was some kind of hologram, viewed as from a considerably greater distance than was apparent. It was like a scene in a crystal ball: they were seeing something which had happened, or which
was even now in enactment, somewhere else. And more than ever Trask believed he knew this ... victim? And more than ever he suspected that this was a scene from another world, even another universe.
On entering the room, the Head of Branch had noted the identities of the eleven. There was Millicent Cleary, a pretty little telepath whose talent was still developing. There seemed little doubt but that one day she would be a power in her own right, but right now she was vulnerable - telepathy could do that to a person - and Trask thought of her as the kid sister he'd never had. Then there was David Chung, a hugely talented locator and server. He was slight, wiry, slant-eyed and yellow as they come. But he was British from birth, a Londoner, and fiercely loyal to the Branch. All of them were loyal, or else the Branch would fail. Chung tracked Soviet stealth subs, IRA units in the field, drug-runners -especially the latter. Addiction had killed his parents, which was where his talent had its genesis. And it was still growing.