Brain Storm

1

The thing that scared Andy Frost most that day was the parking.

The crime rate didn't bother him. Everyone he knew had been mugged at one time or another.

Among New Yorkers, it was sort of a twisted badge of honor. In fact, it wasn't uncommon for people to invent stories of violence for the daily water-cooler competition.

The people themselves didn't frighten him, though the Christmas crowds had a tendency to get on his nerves. Everyone had a touch of agoraphobia at one time or another, but not Gothamites. When you were raised in a ten-story walk-up like a nest of rabbits in a squalid hutch with a hundred other human dregs screaming and pounding through the walls and ceiling and floor all hours of the day and night, you learned to live with overcrowding. You complained about it, sure.

Constantly. But you lived with it.

Yes, the murder rate was high. So what? Everyone died in his or her time. Here people were killed over stuff as trivial as a pair of sneakers or a leather jacket. What, they didn't have murders in Wiscon-sin? Facing down the business end of a gun didn't worry Andy. And it was a trade—a high per capita murder rate in exchange for all-night drugstores, fresh bagels on demand and the chance to see Cats or Evita or a dozen other shows seven nights a week.

The other fearful things of everyday life in the city were too numerous to mention. You had to deal with Con Edison, rabid rats, cockroaches the size of ashtrays, greedy landlords if you weren't lucky enough to benefit from rent control and about a million foreign cabbies who seemed to have learned their driving skills behind the wheel of a Kuwaiti bumper car.

All of these things he could shrug off as part of living in the most exciting city in the world. If you complained about them, you were a New Yorker. If you complained about them and meant it, you were a schlemiel.

No, none of these things bothered him anymore.

But the one thing that still made Andy Frost shiver and whimper like a rain-drenched fox terrier was the parking in midtown Manhattan.

Parking condensed every fearful element of the city. You got your ticket from an angry foreigner in a tiny booth. You drove into a drafty underground garage that stank of urine and housed more species of wildlife than the Bronx Zoo. Muggers and murderers were likely skulking behind every other parked car.

And at Christmas? Forget it.

You'd be better off leaving your car in the middle of the Triborough Bridge and walking the rest of the way in.

Fortunately for Andy, the holidays were months away and so the crowds of people heading to work were no worse than usual. It was ridiculous, but ne-gotiable, which was good for him since he was already running late.

The parking garage was less than a block away from the bank where he worked, and as he angled down into the musty bowels of Manhattan, Andy took a moment to quietly curse his parents. Not for the first time today, and it surely wouldn't be the last.

They were the reason he had the car. In fact, it was their car.

The biggest, ugliest conglomeration of metal and plastic Detroit could produce, slapped front and back with the telltale orange-and-green Florida license plates. There was no doubt about it—if the Big Three started making cars with shark fins again, Andy's father would be first in line to buy one.

His parents were up on a visit with his mother's sister and they were going to spend the day taking Andy's aunt around town to see all the sites they had neglected to visit during their fifty-odd years of living in the Big Apple. It was an irony he had pointed out at least a hundred times during the past two days.

They had made Andy promise he would pick them up at Rockefeller Center at five-thirty that afternoon—a feat he still had no idea how to accomplish—and his father had dropped the keys to the Buick in his hand as he went out to work that morning. And so here he was, at 9:11 a.m. on a Monday morning, already more than ten minutes late for work, driving down into some subterranean nightmare and not knowing whether or not he was ever going to see a ray of sunlight again.

He did. In record time. Andy was up on the sidewalk and trotting along through the heavy pedestrian traffic three minutes later.

As he jogged along, he continually checked his watch at thirty-second intervals, each time stepping up the pace a little more. Plowing through the chok-ing throng of people, he caught a few angry glares from other pedestrians but in spite of everything that could have gone wrong, he was at the bank by twenty minutes past nine.

In front of the massive building, Andy noticed that the gutter had been marked off with several strate-gically placed orange traffic cones. These were obviously set up to discourage anyone from slowing down or parking in front of the bank's double doors.

The sounds of honking horns and angry shouts were proof that not everyone appreciated their careful placement.

At the center of the arrangement of cones, directly across from the glass foyer doors of the bank, a large white van sat soaking up the few feeble rays of di-luted sunlight that managed to penetrate the smog and towering buildings. The van's engine hummed softly.

As he approached, Andy noted that the cab of the van was empty.

Not a very wise move in New York. It was an open invitation to thieves. As he drew closer, Andy noticed the name PlattDeutsche A.G. stenciled in small black script above the door handle on the passenger's side. That explained it. This was the new security company which for the past few weeks had been installing the bank's new high-tech camera and vault system. Probably the van was wired to explode the minute somebody touched the door handle.

Suddenly the door separating the cab from the rear opened, and Andy got a quick glimpse of a distinctly high-tech environment A brief flash of computer monitors, blinking lights and men in white lab coats moving urgently around the cramped interior showed before the door was closed once more. A young man moved from the rear of the van to settle down in the vacant driver's seat behind the leather-wrapped steering wheel.

The man sported a mane of dirty blond hair swept carefully back onto the broad shoulders of his expensive suit, and when his gaze settled on Andy, the young mortgage officer found himself staring into a pair of the angriest blue eyes he had ever encountered. Looking at them was like peering into the eyes of a feral jaguar.

Andy didn't know what it was with those PlattDeutsche people, but ever since they'd shown up more than a month ago, they'd been giving everyone at the Butler Bank of New York a first-class case of the screaming-meamies.

Andy tore his gaze away from the feral eyes of the young man and hustled through the massive bank doors.

An hour later, Andy had settled down behind his desk on the main bank floor. He was a junior member of the bank's mortgage team, and even though his father referred to him as a 4'glorified teller," he still hoped that one day he would move into the upper offices of the Butler banking empire.

As a junior officer in the banking industry, Andy generally considered his greatest misfortune to be the placement of his work space so close to the bank's main entrance. His proximity to the front door invited gentle queries on every imaginable topic from a wide range of the Butler Bank's many patrons. He felt that his desk was the informal information booth for the whole bank, and though he complained about it many times in the past, his supervisor had so far managed to avoid taking corrective action.

Today Andy wasn't complaining. He had completed the bulk of his work after a mere forty-five minutes behind his desk and he was intent on frit-tering away the remainder of the day until it was time to retrieve his father's car and battle his way through the insane rush-hour traffic. Most days when Andy goofed off, he had little to occupy his time save the endless shuffle of papers and an occasional trip to the men's room, but today he had a floor show.

Through the bank's hazy tempered-glass doors, he watched the activity around the white van.

The young blond man had remained behind the steering wheel for the better part of an hour, staring down pedestrians with his steely blue gaze. Only when another car pulled up into the cordoned area behind the van did the van driver exit the cab. He and the driver of the new vehicle stood together by the side of the large white truck. Their matching suits made them look like twins.

Andy tore his eyes away from the sidewalk and feigned interest in a document in his hand. The columns of numbers and dry words ran together in an incoherent jumble.

He looked back out the door. Several more men had joined the first two. They stood, glancing up and down the street nervously, as the man from the car spoke instructions to each of them in turn.

Every now and then, one of the newest arrivals would glance toward the bank entrance. Even though Andy was certain that the glare of the late-morning sun reflecting off the black-tinted main doors would be enough to shield him from view, he nonetheless felt himself growing more nervous with each subsequent glance.

What were those guys up to?

His hand began to snake toward the phone, ready to alert security to the suspicious activity on the sidewalk out front, when something suddenly popped into view. Walked into view, more accurately.

Somebody had come over from the main bank

floor, positioning himself before Andy Frost's desk and blocking his view of the men on the sidewalk.

Andy leaned to one side, trying to catch a glimpse of whatever was going on outside.

"Excuse me," said a precise voice that reminded Andy of his grammar-school English teacher, Mr.

Henry.

He could no longer see the men on the sidewalk.

Andy leaned the other way, but his line of sight was still blocked.

"Excuse me," the voice repeated. It was somewhat nasal and parched, as if the speaker's larynx had been soaked in a gallon of grapefruit juice and left to dry on a desert rock.

Andy looked up, exasperated. "Yes. What?" he demanded.

"There is an error in my account."

Andy rolled his eyes. Just another mindless questioner. He was going to kill his supervisor if he wasn't moved into a cubicle soon.

"This is the mortgage desk, sir," Andy said in an icy tone.

"I realize that. But there is a discrepancy in my personal account that I wish to correct, and the lines at the teller windows are intolerably long. You seemed not to be busy."

The group of men on the sidewalk were quickly forgotten. With as much agitation as decorum would allow, Andy stared up at the old man standing before his desk.

4'Sir, I am certain that any of our tellers are more than qualified to help you with your little problem."

"Perhaps," said the older man, "and I ordinarily would not mind waiting in line. But I have left my car in a nearby garage and if I do not return within the next fifteen minutes, I will be charged the day rate. I am certain it will not take you long." The old man offered Andy one of the brand-new Butler bankbooks, first remembering to remove an ancient plastic cover that was yellowed from long use.

Andy sighed audibly. As if he didn't have enough to worry about, what with having to pick up his parents on the busiest street in the world at the busiest time of the day, he was now reduced to checking on some old codger's passbook. The guy had probably just forgotten to add the interest payment from the previous month. Andy didn't want to count how many times he had seen that particular mistake when he was a teller. He snatched the bankbook from the gentleman at his desk, noticing for the first time that the old man's skin was the color of a sickly fish belly, and started to rise from his seat.

Andy froze in midmovement.

"Nobody move," a too cheerful voice shouted from over near the main entrance.

Andy could see that the two men—the young

blond man and the later arrival—were standing at the bank entrance. The others, a larger group, were circulating through the bank, sweeping in around the velvet-roped queue and up to the bulletproof teller windows.

A robbery!

Damn! Andy thought. I should have alerted the security guards.

He'd known something was up earlier. If he hadn't been distracted by the old man, Andy would have called the manager, maybe gotten the police involved. He would have been a hero, but instead he was going to become just another hostage if this thing played out the way most of these daylight robberies did.

Worse, if he was late tonight, his dad would slaughter him.

Andy started to sit back down, determined to remain as inconspicuous as possible and hopefully to get through this thing in one piece. That was when the sudden realization hit him. He couldn't move.

Andy tried forcing himself to sit down. His legs wouldn't budge. He tried pushing them into place with his arms. He realized with a sinking feeling that his upper torso was frozen in place, as well.

Andy was locked in an awkward squatting position just above the seat of his vinyl junior-executive's chair.

He tried harder but found that it was no use. He was a human rock.

And, he soon discovered, he wasn't alone.

As Andy's frightened eyes darted helplessly around the bank interior, he found that the only people who seemed to be moving were the thieves. Each member of the larger group had taken up a post at every teller window, most standing directly in front of bank patrons, who for some inexplicable reason remained as motionless as statues. Not only that, but all of the normal extraneous sounds of people talking, coughing, shifting from foot to foot—indeed, all sounds save those of the robbers themselves—had ceased at the precise instant the main thief had first spoken.

Everyone within the bank—employees and patrons alike—was as helpless as a mannequin.

At one window, an old woman was standing too close for a robber to access the teller window. The man simply picked the woman up as if she were nothing more than a piece of wicker furniture and set her down over near the head of the line. Though her eyes darted wildly in every direction, the rest of her might have been carved in stone.

"Of course, that was an unreasonable demand,"

the cheerful voice of the head robber said into the silence of the frozen bank lobby. As he spoke, he moved toward the center of the lobby. The blond man remained dutifully behind, a loyal sentry at the bank entrance. "For an operation of this kind to work, there has to be some movement, obviously."

As if his words were some sort of prearranged cue, the tellers began reaching into their cash drawers and stuffing bills into bags that were handed over by the thieves. They moved like automatons, with simultaneous motions. Hands entered cash drawers, money was removed, hands entered bags, repeat. It was a flawless series of movements, seemingly more precise than the most meticulously rehearsed Broadway dance number. When the tellers were finished, they shoved the bags through the narrow slots beneath the bulletproof partitions and snapped to attention behind the windows as if awaiting further instructions.

Watching the entire procedure from a squatting position behind his desk and unable to move a muscle, Andy, in some lucid part of his mind, was struck by the surrealism of the entire procedure. It was an eerie tableau, as if everyone inside the bank were some sort of dusty museum exhibit demonstrating modern banking techniques.

Andy caught a hint of movement before him and shifted his eyes—which seemed about all he could move—in that direction. He had forgotten about his customer. The old man was standing stock-still before his desk, frozen like everyone else.

Not entirely, it seemed.

Faintly, so much so that it was barely detectable, the old man was swaying from side to side. Also, as Andy watched, there seemed to be a slight trace of movement at the tips of the man's slender gray fingers.

Andy's attention was distracted in the next minute when his legs suddenly buckled. He fell roughly back into his chair, dropping the old man's passbook to his desk blotter.

All around the bank, patrons suddenly began to stir as if some huge unseen switch had been activated.

Tellers backed away from their windows. Bank patrons stood nervously in place, eyeing the robbers, who seemed themselves at a loss for what to do next.

The men looked suddenly panicked, as if the thought that anyone in the bank would be able to move had never occurred to them.

For the first time, Andy noticed that none of them carried guns.

Andy looked beyond the old man in front of him toward the street, where he fervently hoped that an NYPD SWAT team was positioned to take out the robbers. All he saw beyond the large white van was a pizza delivery truck stuck in late-morning traffic, a giant CB antenna bobbing impatiently from its roof.

Suddenly a command cracked through the air.

"Okay, hold it right where you are!"

Bank security. There were three green-suited guards standing around the lobby, their guns drawn and trained toward the largest concentrations of thieves.

The leader held his hands high above his head.

"I'm certain that this is just a misunderstanding, sir," he said tightly. He tried to force the cheerful-ness of a moment before, but the words sounded terse. He glanced impatiently out toward the parked van. Andy noticed that he wore a hearing aid.

"Shut up!" the head of the Butler Bank security force ordered. "Down on the floor, hands behind your heads! Now!"

The man looked back from the door, eyeing the guard balefully. "Do you have any idea how much this suit cost?" he asked. He shot another glance toward the bank entrance. The traffic seemed to be picking up. The pizza truck had moved a car length down the street.

"Down! Now!"

The robbers were beginning to comply. They dropped to their knees, all the while watching their leader expectantly. The man refused to move an inch.

The pizza truck drove away.

Andy felt an odd tingling sensation at the back of his head.

It was a sort of tickle, as if someone had brushed his neck with a feather. The sensation made his ears itch.

The robber turned victoriously back toward the guard. With a boldness that was surely suicidally motivated, the man strode purposefully up to the guard and, wrapping his fingers around the barrel of the gun, tugged the weapon from the guard's out-stretched hand. The guard didn't react, didn't move an inch.

With obvious relish, the robber tucked the gun back into the guard's holster. Frozen once more, the other two security men watched helplessly as the same procedure was repeated with them.

Andy tried to move but realized that he, too, was immobile. All around the bank, patrons and employees alike were once again rooted to wherever they stood.

Bags of money in hand, the robbers clustered around their leader in the center of the lobby. Some people were staring stonily off in other directions, but most were looking in the general direction of the thieves, their eyes darting helplessly from side to side. Drool leaked from one man's parted lips.

The lead thief grinned triumphantly around the lobby of the bank.

"And now, with your kind assistance, gentlemen..." With a nod from their leader, the thieves began to circulate through the frozen crowd.

This was it. They were going to start killing people. Or worse.

All thoughts of his dreaded commute were ban-ished from Andy's mind as one of the thieves—a sinister-looking man in his forties—approached his desk. He reached into the money bag he had taken from one of the teller windows and, stuffing his hand deep inside, proceeded to remove a handful of bills.

As the young mortgage officer watched in disbelief, the thief stuffed the wad of bills into the pocket of the old man in front of Andy's desk. Moving on, he found a patron who was standing nearer the door and went through the same motions.

Eyes straining to catch every movement at the limits of his peripheral vision, Andy saw the other thieves stuffing money into satchels and jacket pockets. While they seemed to carry out this task grudgingly, their leader performed it with unreserved joy.

One bank patron was dressed in only jeans and a T-shirt, but the gang leader carefully wrapped up a tight roll of crisp new fifty-dollar bills and tucked it neatly into the pocket of the man's torn shirt.

Oddly the Butler Bank employees seemed to be the only ones who were left out of this bizarre re-distribution of wealth.

When all was done and the bags were once more empty, the thieves clustered back around their leader.

There was something cultured, almost regal about him. He raised his hand in a casual gesture that would have made the Queen of England feel as if she'd just rolled off the back of a turnip truck.

"Ladies and gentlemen," he called happily to the crowd. "My name is Lothar Holz, and you have just been privileged to witness the premier nonlaboratory test of PlattDeutsche, America's Dynamic Interface System."

Andy felt the strange sensation at the back of his head return. He realized immediately that he could move. All around the bank, patrons and employees alike were coming to the same conclusion. The guards were in the process of unholstering their weapons once more, but Andy saw that the bank president, Clive Butler, trailed by a clutch of VPs, had entered the lobby from the rear elevator and was now circulating among the crowd, calming concerns and exhorting employees not to succumb to panic.

A smattering of applause went up around the man who identified himself as Lothar Holz, led by the blond man at the door and the rest of the robbers.

They were joined in their enthusiasm by Clive Butler and the other executives. With the urging of the suits from upstairs, it wasn't long before all of the junior employees were applauding the man who moments before had brought terror to an otherwise ordinary day. Amazingly most of the bank customers also joined in. It was a classic example of mob mentality, de-duced Andy, though he suspected that their enthusiasm for the would-be robber was mostly motivated by the cash in their pockets.

Lothar Holz stood in the center of the crowd, soaking up the admiration as if such a display was his birthright

Clive Butler moved to Holz's side, quieting the crowd with a raised hand. When he spoke, his words had the clipped intonation of an old-money New Englander. It was as if the sounds were produced in his sinuses and every word had a gasping, affected qual-ity that suggested each syllable would be his last. As he spoke to his customers, his teeth never parted.

"I want to thank Mr. Holz on behalf of the entire Butler/Lippincott family of banks for the privilege of witnessing his remarkable new technology firsthand.

And I am certain that we are all thankful that it is PlattDeutsche who has developed our new security system. I know my money sleeps better at night knowing PlattDeutsche is on the job."

Andy was about to call the paramedics until he realized the painful series of groans emanating from Clive Butler's throat was the man's version of laughter.

A brief round of fresh applause ensued.

"Thank you, thank you," Holz said to the now genuinely enthusiastic crowd. "You will all be relieved to know that the technology used to temporarily immobilize you is a harmless neural linkup that connects the human brain to a computer. And thanks to the kind cooperation of my good friends at the Butler Bank of New York, we are now ready to offer our invention to the government of the United States.

All of you will surely agree that the scientific potential for such a device is limitless. As it happened, this test was necessary to prove to our government that this is a viable technology.

"And a very personal thanks to my good friend Mr. Clive Butler for the generous use of these facilities to introduce our product to the world. And to further thank each of you for your cooperation in this most successful enterprise, my company is going to deposit five thousand dollars in each of your accounts. I thank you for your invaluable assistance."

The ensuing applause was deafening. Whistles pierced the staid lobby. A call for the amount to be doubled was pointedly ignored.

Like a prince after a tour of a peasant village, Lothar Holz exited the building, surrounded on all sides by his coterie of thieves. The blond man pushed the door open and fell in respectfully behind him.

Outside, a gaggle of press descended, as if they, too, had been frozen off at some distant point and only now released. They circled around Holz like a swarm of buzzing flies.

Andy Frost watched all of this with a mixture of confusion and relief. The bosses were making the rounds now, gathering information for the PlattDeutsche deposits and instructing employees to put the best possible face on this bizarre event.

Not wanting to appear either flustered or lax in his work habits, Andy turned back to his desk. Remembering the old man, Andy reached for the bankbook he had dropped in the confusion. It was gone. He glanced around and found that the old man was gone, as well.

On Andy's desk was a handful of crumpled

twenty-dollar bills.

HOLZ CLIMBED UP into the back of the van half an hour later. His delicate fingers were wrapped around the neck of a chilled bottle of champagne, which he had retrieved from the trunk of his car once the crowd of expectant reporters had departed. His young assistant wordlessly passed out crystal stemware to the elated collection of scientists.

"It all worked flawlessly, Mr. Holz," a nervous man said.

"Let's not delude ourselves, Mervin, hmm? It worked out very well. That's why we celebrate now." Holz downed his glassful of champagne in one gulp. With giddy looks, like schoolchildren proud to have come in first in a spelling contest, the gathered scientists followed suit.

His assistant offered the bottle to him once more, but Holz declined. While the others still reveled in their success, he waved his empty glass around the cramped interior of the van, indicating the complicated machinery with the offhand gesture. "That moment when we lost contact—what went wrong?" he asked.

"A radio signal, Holz. There was a truck out here with a powerful CB transmitter. It garbled our signal."

Holz tipped his head boyishly. "Mervin, your garbled signal almost got me shot," he admonished the programmer.

Mervin Fischer looked nervously at the others. "It wasn't a fault in the program. It's a design flaw. I warned you this could happen, Mr. Holz. We should have done more lab testing."

"How long would you suggest we take, my friend? Ten years? Twenty? The Japanese will easily outstrip us by then."

"Germany is the only country we have to worry about right now. No one's deeper into interface technology than they are."

Holz gave the man a paternal slap on the back.

"No one is ahead of us," he announced. A nod of his head, and his assistant returned with a fresh bottle of champagne, filling the programmer's glass.

One scientist sat far back in the van, still staring intently at a monitor screen. His hands were flying across a compact keyboard as he sifted through all of the raw data they had collected in the previous hours.

Holz left the others and stepped over to the man.

"I had hoped you would revel in your success, Curt. Aren't you going to join us for a drink?"

Dr. Curt Newton didn't tear his eyes away from the screen. "This is amazing," he said, shaking his head.

"What is?"

Newton pointed at the screen. "As you know, the Dynamic Interface System not only manipulates the human mind, but we are able to download information as if it was stored on a computer. Which, in effect, is what the human brain is."

"So?"

"There was one individual in the bank who wasn't affected by our immobilization program."

"That is impossible. No one moved but us."

"Yes, yes," Newton said impatiently. "But look." His hands moved in a flurry over the keyboard. In a matter of seconds, he had pulled up the CD recorder files from the bank's stationary cameras.

Displayed on the small screen was an unremarkable man in gray standing before one of the bank lobby desks.

"He's not moving," Holz said.

"Look more closely."

Setting his champagne glass on a console, Holz leaned closer to the monitor. The old man was as frozen as everyone else, staring blankly in the direction of the would-be robbers. Holz was about to tell the scientist that he saw nothing that wasn't expected from the man when all at once he noticed movement at the end of the man's hand.

As he watched more carefully, he saw that the old man was swaying from side to side. It was obvious from the footage that this man was somehow immune to the immobilizing effects of the interface system.

He was only mimicking the rest of the bank patrons.

"Explain this," Lothar Holz demanded, indicating the monitor.

On the small screen, the drama continued to play out. The robbers were circulating among the crowd, passing out money.

"I don't understand it."

Holz's features were grim. "Did the rest of the interface work?"

"We downloaded his thought patterns into our system along with the others in the bank. And that's another remarkable thing. If I didn't see him with my own eyes, I would swear the patterns were a computer construct. This man interfaces with the computer better than any human I've ever seen. He's remarkable."

Lothar Holz stood. "Use him as a test subject."

Newton seemed delighted at the prospect.

"Gladly," he said. He couldn't wait to download the hard-drive information into the mainframes back at PlattDeutsche America's headquarters in Edison, New Jersey. The man's thoughts were so precise, so logical, that they would be easier to read than those of any of the laboratory test subjects he had used up until now. He couldn't wait to use the revolutionary new interface program to tinker around in the old man's head and see what secrets were hidden up there.

He watched the small monitor screen excitedly. On it, Harold W. Smith, the man on whom the "revolutionary new interface program" had no immobilizing effect, hurriedly dropped the robbery money onto the desk of Andy Frost. Without so much as a glance in the direction of Lothar Holz, he tucked his bankbook into the torn plastic cover he had received when he opened his original account at the Butler Bank of New York thirty years before and ducked out the bank's side entrance.