Free Hazard by Gerald A Browne

of more than a thousand. The face of each card was entirely covered with an opaque adhesive paper that Hazard would peel off. No one but Hazard would get a look at an image until after it had been transmitted. That way they’d be absolutely sure only Hazard was doing the sending, explained Lowery.
    A final approving nod from Whitley. He gazed longingly at the far-off horizontal strip of gray that was land. Wishing he were back on it, he pulled the knot of his tie down, unbuttoned his collar and breathed deeply through his nose.
    Hazard’s look told Lowery he was ready.
    Lowery activated the box. The spindle rotated the cards for several seconds and then pushed up a single card.
    Hazard took it. He carefully peeled off the opaque adhesive and glanced at the image. An easy one, he thought.
    It was an ordinary circle with a much smaller circle at its center.
    Hazard immediately fixed his mind on that image. He had to force his senses to detach, ignore everything else—Lowery, Whitley, the sea, the wind. It wasn’t easy. It never was. Because success depended on more than simple concentration. It required that he focus his thoughts not only on the image as he saw it but also as Keven would see it. That meant concentrating simultaneously on two related but separate things. Not easy. Ordinarily impossible.
    Circle containing a smaller circle.
    I see it, thought Hazard, and I see it as she sees it.
    He visualized Keven’s eyes, their special blue color with slivers of silver in them. Her eyes set on the circle containing a smaller circle. Her eyes delivering that image to her brain.
    He felt a spray of cold sea water on his face, distracting. He was momentarily aware of Lowery and Whitley nearby, a peripheral impression of them. But he used the sea, its repetitive chopped-up mass, to bring his mind back to nothing but the circle containing a smaller circle.
    There it was again, isolated in his mind’s eye.
    And then, there in his mind was Keven seeing it.
    The image.
    As he saw it.
    As he saw her seeing it.
    The two still consecutive.
    For several minutes his mind shifted its intense concentration alternately between those two impressions. Back and forth, more and more quickly. Until the image became a constant and his mental view of it and his mental view of Keven seeing it superimposed one on the other for no more than the duration of an ordinary fragment of thought.
    He couldn’t hold the composite, didn’t try. The impressions became consecutive again, individual thoughts in order, and he felt he might lose them altogether and have to start over. He knew he’d lose them if he tried too hard. So he released the intensity of his concentration slightly, just enough, and that kept the impressions there. Then he pulled the separate thoughts back together to form the necessary composite again. I see it and see it as she sees it. The image. He held it for as long as he could and then let it go.
    There was the choppy sea, the sun and the wind that had been hitting him. He handed the card to Lowery.
    During all that time Kersh’s attention never left the laboratory monitors. He anticipated what might come through, so he was less surprised than pleased by what the computers picked up from Keven, swiftly processed and relayed.
    Kersh recognized it as the same extraordinary sequence that had occuurred in previous, similar exercises. Beginning with a regular, steady alpha-wave rhythm and then an abrupt block of all alphas as the beta waves took over. Indicating that Keven was responding to a sensory stimulus. Perfectly normal.
    However, at this point came the first significant variation from the normal pattern. For no apparent reason, the beta waves continued, and quickly their cycles per second increased from twenty-three to fifty-four. There was also a sharp increase in beta amplitude to sixty millivolts, and the beta impulses more than doubled in duration to eighty-five thousandths of a