Ghostwalker 02 - Mind Game

temperature. They currently need to lower the temperature to several hundred degrees below zero in order to create their superconductors.”

    “Antigravity?” Gator echoed, “isn’t that just a little farfetched?”

    “And what we do isn’t?” Nicolas asked.

    “Well, actually I thought it was impossible at first, too,” Lily conceded. “But if, like me, you’ve watched these tapes several hundred times, you begin to notice little details. Here, let’s rewind it to where she’s crossing the cable. Now let’s watch it in slow motion. See?
    Right there when the cable starts to straighten out?” She touched the screen to indicate where they should look. “Look here, at the ceiling above the cable—see that electrical wire connecting the two overhead lights? Look, it’s moved up, about half an inch! Do you see that? And then it falls back right when Dahlia jumps off the other end of the cable. That’s exactly what you’d expect to see if there was an antigrav field extending upward from the cable.”

    Lily pointed to the image of the young girl frozen on the screen. “Look at her, she’s laughing, not grabbing her head in pain.” She pushed in another tape. “In this one, she moves locks so fast, at first I thought a machine had to be involved.” The tape showed a huge vault with a complex lock system. The bolts slid so fast, the tumblers spun and clicked as if a large pattern was predetermined. The camera had focused completely on the heavy door so that it wasn’t until they heard a child’s laughter as the door swung open that they even realized Dahlia was there, opening locks with her mind.

    Lily regarded the men. “Isn’t that incredible? She never even touched the vault. I considered a few theories— clairaudition for one, but I just couldn’t account for the sheer speed with which she opened the vault. Finally it hit me. She was directly intuiting and taking pleasure in the state of lowest entropy in the tumbler-lever system of the vault!”

    Lily looked so triumphant Ryland hated to crush her joy. “Sweetheart, I’m so excited for you. Really, I am. It’s just that I didn’t understand a damn thing you said.” He looked around the room with a raised eyebrow. The other men shook their heads.

    She tapped her finger on the table, frowning. “All right, let’s see if I can come up with a way to explain it to you. You know those movies where the burglars put their stethoscope up against the safe as they’re turning the dial?”

    “Sure,” Gator said. “I watch that stuff all the time. They’re listening for the tumblers to click into place.”

    “Not exactly, Gator,” Lily corrected. “They’re actually listening for a drop in the amount of sound. You’re hearing clicking with each number you pass, and then you hear just a little less clicking when one of the tumblers has fallen into place. That’s why I first thought of clairaudition, which as you know, is like clairvoyance, seeing things at a distance in your mind, but this would be hearing things at a distance in your mind.”

    “But you don’t think that’s what she’s doing?” Nicolas asked.

    Lily shook her head. “No, I had to throw that theory out. It doesn’t explain her incredible speed. Plus, I found out that the vault in the videotape—like most safes made since the 1960s—has all kinds of safeguards like nylon tumblers and sound baffles that make them pretty much impenetrable from lock-picking of this sort.”

    “So Dahlia doesn’t do it through sound,” Nicolas said.

    “No, she doesn’t,” Lily agreed. “I was stumped for a while. But in the middle of the night a much simpler explanation occurred to me; she literally ‘feels’ each lever falling into place. But there’s more. I think she has an emotional distaste for entropy in systems that gives her speed.”

    “You’ve lost me again, Lily,” Ryland said.

    “Sorry. The second law of thermodynamics says that the amount of entropy, or disorder, in the universe, tends to increase unless it is prevented from doing so. You can see the second law in action everywhere. A vase breaks into pieces. You never see a bunch of pieces assemble themselves into a vase. Left to itself, a house always gets dustier, never cleaner. And tumblers, because they’re spring-loaded, always spring out of place, not into place, when left to themselves. That’s the second law of thermodynamics in action—
    disorder keeps increasing if things are