The Apocalypse Troll

"Well?" she demanded, and he smiled.

"I talked to Mordecai, and I think he got it all. I expect we'll be hearing more from him shortly, but remember it's only about three in the morning over there."

"Hmph!" She rose and crossed to the the scuttle, and he noted almost regretfully that someone had finally found her some pants. The dungarees looked a bit strange on her after all this time, but at least her chosen shirt was styled familiarly. She'd changed into yet another decorated tee-shirt-almost the right size, this time-which bore a huge, lovingly detailed head-on view of a B-2 "Stingray" stealth bomber.

"You were right about how they do brain scans here," she said over her shoulder. "Lordy! If the medics back home were-"

She broke off and turned at a discreet knock, then called out permission to enter. A brisk young woman wearing a white smock over a surgeon lieutenant's uniform stepped in. She had a round, Asiatic face, intelligent, determined eyes, and short-cut black hair, and her head barely reached the shoulder of the armed Marine sentry. The newcomer closed the door behind her and looked from Ludmilla to Aston and back again, raising her own eyebrows inquiringly.

"Dick, this is Doctor Shu. Doctor, Captain Richard Aston." Ludmilla made the introductions with a smile. Doctor Shu considered coming to attention, but Aston waved for her to relax, then sat down heavily himself. Lord, he felt wearier by the minute. He wasn't as young as he had been, he reminded himself again-not, he was certain, for the last time.

"We've met, Milla," he said. "I've been a busy fellow this morning, but I found time for an exam of my own."

"So that's where you've been, is it?"

"Partly." He turned back to Doctor Shu. "Are those the results, Doctor?" he asked courteously, indicating the clipboard under her arm.

"They are, Sir. Would you care to examine them?"

"Me?" He shook his head and gestured at Ludmilla. "I wouldn't know a neuron from a neutrino, Doctor. She's the one."

"Ah?" Doctor Shu glanced at Ludmilla with increased interest, then laid her clipboard on the bedside table and removed two long sheets of many-folded paper. The wavy lines traced across them meant absolutely nothing to Aston. He only hoped they did to Ludmilla. If they didn't- He stopped himself firmly before he shivered.

Ludmilla and the doctor bent over the graphs, spreading them out on the bed and speaking quietly to one another. The combination of fatigue and ignorance kept him from making much sense of their low-voiced conversation, but he was amused by Doctor Shu's expression. Ludmilla's questions were clear and concise, but they were evidently a bit out of the norm. Not surprisingly, he told himself wearily. Not given ...

"Wake up, Dick!" A small, very strong hand shook him gently, and he snorted, astounded to discover that he'd dozed off in the straight, uncomfortable chair. Either he was even tireder than he'd thought or else he was recovering his ability to sleep anywhere, any time.

He straightened his back and rubbed his eyes. The angle of the sunlight streaming through the scuttle told him at least a couple of hours must have passed, and Doctor Shu was gone. He shuddered. Odd how a few hours of sleep could actually make a man feel worse.

"Ummm." He stretched and rotated his arms slowly, settling his joints, then looked up at Ludmilla with a grin. "Sorry about that."

"You needed it," she said, sitting back down on the edge of the bed. She smiled briefly, then frowned, tugging at a lock of chestnut hair.

"Problems?" he asked quickly, and she shrugged.

"I don't know. We use different mapping conventions, but I think Doctor Shu and I got it straight." She gri

She stood again, moving with a tightly controlled, coiled-spring anxiety Aston had felt often enough. She leaned against the bulkhead, staring out the scuttle at the sun-dazzled waters of the loch.

"At any rate, I think we've identified the alpha spike we need, and it looks like you've got it, too-but what if I'm wrong?" She swung around to face him. "We've got to nail it down, Dick, and I was overconfident. I was certain I could pick it out without question, and I can't. This EEG of yours is just too different."

"Hold on," he said, rising and moving towards her. He wanted to slip an arm around her shoulders and hug her, but he didn't. At this moment they were strategists, not lovers.

"Hold on," he repeated. "We knew there might be surprises-especially with four or five centuries' difference in the technologies involved!"

"I know," she said wryly, then gave him a fleeting smile. "It's just so mortifying to be out of my depth. I'm not used to it."

He shrugged. "I hate to think what I'd be like in the twenty-fifth century, Milla! Face it-the time you spent on Amanda couldn't really prepare you for how different things are here and now. Now that you're out into the mainstream, as it were, you'll adjust pretty quickly."

"I hope so," she said, folding her arms under her breasts and drawing a deep breath. "In the meantime, we've still got our problem. I'd really hoped they'd have one of those ... biofeedback machines?-" she glanced at him for confirmation of her terminology, and he nodded "-here. It would've made life a lot simpler."

"I know. But you're pretty confident you and Doctor Shu mean the same thing when you talk about alpha waves?"

"Positive," she said unhesitatingly.

"And you think you've found the spike?"

"I think so. If we had one of those biofeedback devices, I could be absolutely certain. Interceptor pilots use neural feeds to their fighters' computers, and we spend lots of time hooked up to monitors at flight school while we familiarize ourselves with them. If we can set it up so I can watch my alpha waves while I run through a standard flight check cycle, I know exactly what to look for."

"Okay, we can try that later," he said, "but in the meantime, we've got to convince the powers that be of how important it is. And we have to find some way of picking someone we can give the whole story to-otherwise, we're going to be too busy fending off perfectly legitimate questions from people we don't dare answer to get much accomplished."

"Agreed. And I think I may have thought of a way-assuming your Admiral Rose will go along." She raised an interrogative eyebrow, and Aston shrugged.

"I'm on a roll right now, I think. Unless I miss my guess, Mordecai's going to be here soon, and Jack knows it. Which means that, for the moment, at any rate, he'll support just about anything we ask for, however bizarre it sounds. Why?"

"Because what we have to do is pick a hundred or so more people at random and run EEGs on all of them."

"What?" He frowned in momentary surprise, then nodded slowly. "Of course. We know that roughly two-thirds of all humans have the spike, so we grab a bigger sample and compare them."

"Right. It may not be definitive, but it'll give us some confirmation and a basis for deciding who we can talk to. We still won't want to tell anyone we don't absolutely have to, but we've got to start somewhere."

"Agreed. In fact, we'd better get started right away-it's going to take a while, and we need to finish up before Mordecai gets here."

"Fine." She turned her back to the scuttle and gri