Chapter 3

Two questions remained to be resolved: What could they do with the freed slaves and what could they do with the 47 soldiers who might be convertible?

There were not enough hotel rooms in Dothan to accommodate all of the ex-slaves, so they would have to stay at Camp Rucker (the original name was restored) and live in the barracks until they could be sorted out. This should be good for a week or so, if not longer.

On the other hand, the soldiers had to be dealt with immediately. As the most experienced, Brenda and Bruce undertook the job of deep scanning the men to see if they were acceptable candidates for ESP conversion. As it turned out, only one was a loser, the other 46 were deemed salvageable. The odd ball was dumped back with the other approximately 240 rejects and they were all put to sleep, permanently. Their bodies were TPed into the sun.

The 46 ex-troopers were converted that day and put to use checking and maintaining the military equipment under the command of Capt. John Appleby. They were joined by the men who had been previously converted and John organized them into a company of two platoons. This was expected to grow before long. They expected trouble from Fort Benning and, possibly, other places.

All five McClouds turned to scanning the ex-slaves. All were found to be acceptable, but some seemed to be better suited to the task than others. Nevertheless, it was decided to convert all of the ex-slaves because the manpower might be needed when they had to face the next wave of soldiers.

The ex-slaves were divided into five teams of 100 each and conversion was started. A day was spent with each team, as this seemed to be ample time for the basic conversion and indoctrination. On the sixth day, Brenda and Bruce picked out the individuals they believed to be the best choices for leaders.

The soldiers were kept separate because of their special background and training, but the remaining approximately 640 people were divided into teams of 40 members, including the leaders. Just managing this many people was a full time job for Donald and Mary. From the purely logistics point of view, Dothan had to be abandoned and operations shifted to Camp Rucker. A few of the Dothan natives were unhappy for a short while, but they realized the stakes they were fighting for and agreed to go along with the Camp Rucker shift for the good of the group. Brock TPed the two jeeps and the tank from Dothan back to Camp Rucker, since they didn't have any resources to waste.

Bruce and Brenda began an intensive training course for the 16 teams of "civilians" in why their world had fallen into such dire straits. The world wide economic depression which had begun in the mid 1920s had mushroomed into a downward spiral which could not be checked by the foolish and selfish measures employed by the various world governments. Most had tried to stop their own economic slide by throwing up trade barriers to keep foreign goods out of the domestic market, hoping to force people and companies to buy their needs locally. They had not realized, or refused to acknowledge, that it was world wide trade that kept all their economies alive and vibrant. When they had cut off trade with other parts of the world, they had hurt everybody.

For example, when the USA had stopped buying rubber and tin from southeast Asia, not only had those countries been hurt, but the USA automobile business had been hurt from the lack of rubber for tires and wire insulation. The canning and food processing industries had been hurt because they could not get tin for making tin-plated steel cans. And so it went, industry after industry was forced to cut back as its markets shrank and its raw materials were used up; this caused massive layoffs and plant closings. The workers, who were also the customers of these same plants, ran out of money and could not buy what little was manufactured, so more plants were closed.

This was a vicious circle which drained money from governments as they tried to aid their populations, but there was no trade to tax, so the money could not be replaced. Governments had to cut services as they went bankrupt; finally, there was no government and local warlords like Lawrence moved in to fill the power vacuum. Ultimately, it was the fist with the biggest club which dominated a local area, and there was no way to fight back.

Finally, ESP had given the downtrodden the edge they needed to recover and regain what they had lost. It was this ESP that they were learning to use which would drive out the tyrants of the world and return life to the people and society. The war would be long and they would have to face some tough battles, but they would win eventually, as long as they did not give up hope.

The plan was to send these teams out to defeat the local warlords and set up working societies of the local people who would return to controlling their own lives. These teams would convert and train more teams who would go out on their own crusades. This would result in a geometric progression of more and more teams, until the world was finally covered.

Bruce and Brenda were working on an education program which would teach the people of the world that they were all dependent on each other. The idea was to eliminate the stupid artificial barriers among people and let them interact with each other. ESP would make it possible to be a citizen of the world because there could be no barriers against POV and TP; a person could go anywhere he could imagine and there would be no way to block him from entry or exit. This utopia was reachable; the people just had to try!

John Appleby was working on a training plan to teach his men how to fight a new kind of war. No longer would his men be dependent on guns, instead, they would fight with POV, TP, and TK. They must learn to take advantage of knowing exactly what the enemy was doing and being able to reach him no matter where he was hiding. They must learn to be discriminating in the amount of damage they did; they now could control the extent of the damage their actions caused, so they did not have to cause destruction over a large area just to achieve a limited objective. They must learn that each one of them was more powerful than any army the world had ever before seen.

John's preliminary training plan was concentrated on learning how to locate someone with POV and follow his actions. His first step was to pit his two platoons against each in friendly competition. They would duplicate the training the people in Dothan had used to find their opposite number in a defined area. Once that had been mastered, they would learn to do the same thing in complete darkness. Finally, they would learn to find somebody when they had no information on his current whereabouts.

After a few days of the initial POV training, he wanted to switch all communication to mind-speak. When the men had learned to control and direct that to specific individuals in a crowd, they would have an unbreakable avenue of communication much better than the best radio. Their talk could not be overheard or blocked by an enemy; they would have the best possible battle field communication.

John wanted to find the men most talented in the use of POV to have them concentrate on being the scouts for his new army. They could move among the enemy undetected and be perfectly safe because their bodies would be at home where they would be completely protected. He would have the best scouts and spies the world had ever known, undetectable and untouchable.

The next phase of training would be in TP. The men would have to learn to move themselves, as well as other people and objects safely from place to place, with cunning and stealth. This would take a lot of practice, since any object, when moved, would disturb the air around it and, if the object were big enough, cause a monstrous thunder clap, something sure to attract attention.

Training in TK should be easy, once the other two skills of POV and TP had been mastered. TK would mostly be used as a weapon. Bruce, the most skilled in this art, would teach the men how to fashion balls of hardened air and throw them at the target. Probably, the most useful projectile would be a ball about half an inch in diameter, moving at about 1000 feet per second (just under Mach 1), which would be dissolved as soon as it had done its damage. This would probably cause the least collateral damage while being easy to control. The great advantage of a TK projectile was that it would need no distance to accelerate; it could be moving at the desired speed as soon as it was created. TK never heard of inertia and other trivial laws of physics!

The purpose of the training was explained to the men and they began to practice with considerable enthusiasm. It was a lot of fun to surprise a buddy by suddenly appearing at his side when he was not expecting you. The men realized that this was serious training, but they did get a lot of laughs out of it. This was good because it kept the men from getting bored and interested in improving their technique.