Impossible Dreamers

Chapter 4 (que): Thought-scanner

He pressed a button on the wall by his bed. There was a high-pitched tone, and then the first few notes of the tune 'Tyro the Great' rang out. Then a high pitched voice.

'Yes, High Master Sleech?'

'Bring me the scanner.'

'The scanner? You mean the thought-scanner?'

'What else could I mean?'

'Well, High Master, we have a number of different scanners here. Face-scanners, body-scanners, book-scanners, room-scanners, fruit-scanners...'

'I don't need a list of scanners. Just bring the thought-scanner to my room immediately.'

'Yes, High Master.'

Within seconds there was a knock at the bedroom door.

'Enter!' Sleech called.

A young woman walked in pushing a trolley. She was wearing a white coat, a white cap and green shoes. Sleech noticed with concern that she didn't look frightened, which was unusual in the people that he met during the course of the day. In fact, she looked friendly and calm.

'Perhaps,' Sleech thought, 'she is just very good at disguising her feelings. Perhaps under this calm outside, she is as terrified of me as most people.' That made him feel a little easier. Maybe later he would be able to use the scanner to check.

The scanner was on the trolley beside the woman. It was big. Bigger than she was. Bigger even than Sleech. Sleech looked at it closely. At the top was a box with a flexible tube sticking out. That was the directional probe. It waved itself around to find thoughts to lock on to. Point it in the direction of the subject, and it would pick out their thought patterns. Of course, if you were targetting a particular person, you had to be careful that you pointed it in exactly the right direction. Otherwise, it could lock on to the wrong person's thoughts and show you the workings of another mind entirely. That was why it was often used at night, when people were in bed. This was good, because it meant that people weren't likely to move about very much, but on the other hand it was not so good, because they were likely to be dreaming or snoozing. If the subject was dreaming, their thoughts could be very muddled and difficult to read. If they were just snoozing, they might not have any thoughts at all. But if they were awake and worried, that was very good. You could sometimes even tell what they were worried about. Not necessarily the full story of what worried them, but at least some idea of what it was about. Quite a few people had been caught like that. Worried thoughts at night. Actually, you didn't even need to know what was on the scanner screen. Once you saw that someone was lying awake worrying, you could just bring them in and tell them that you had scanned them, and that you knew what they were thinking about. Usually they then told you the whole story – including stuff that you didn't know. This method could even work if the person hadn't been scanned. Just being told that they had was usually enough to get them to confess to all sorts of things.

The other way of making sure you were scanning the right person, of course, was to put them right in front of the machine, strapped to a chair so they couldn't move. You could usually get a pretty good picture of what they were thinking then. In those circumstances it was often quite easy to tell what people were thinking even without a machine, but the scanner added a certain authority to one's guesses.

Sleech looked again at the scanner. Below the box with the tube there was another box with all sorts of dials, buttons and levers. Sleech couldn't use the controls himself; he had to have somebody to do that for him. That was this woman's job. He didn't recognise her, but he supposed that she was one of the scientists who worked in the underground part of the Palace. She was smiling at Sleech, which again made him feel a bit uneasy. People shouldn't smile unless they had a good reason. He very rarely smiled. He had tried it in his audiences with Tyro, but he never could really get the hang of it.