The most significant event of Nicholai Hel’s years in solitary imprisonment was the flowering of his proximity sense. This happened quite without his will and, in its incipient stages, without his conscious recognition. It is assumed by those who study paraperceptual phenomena that the proximity sense was, early in the development of man, as vigorous and common as the five other perceptual tools, but it withered through disuse as man developed away from his prey/hunter existence. Too, the extraphysical nature of this “sixth sense” derived from central cortex energies that are in diametric contradiction to rational reasoning, which style of understanding and arranging, experience was ultimately to characterize the man animal. To be sure, certain primitive cultures still maintain rudimentary proximity skills, and even thoroughly acculturated people occasionally receive impulses from the vestigial remnants of their proximity system and find themselves tingling with the awareness that somebody is staring at them from behind, or somebody is thinking of them, or they experience vague, generalized senses of well-being or doom; but these are passing and gossamer sensations that are shrugged away because they are not and cannot be understood within the framework of pedestrian logical comprehension, and because acceptance of them would undermine the comfortable conviction that all phenomena are within the rational spectrum.
Occasionally, and under circumstances only partly understood, the proximity sense will emerge fully developed in a modern man. In many ways, Nicholai Hel was characteristic of those few who have flourishing proximity systems. All of his life had been intensely mental and internal. He had been a mystic and had experienced ecstatic transportation, and therefore was not uncomfortable with the extralogical. Gô had trained his intellect to conceive in terms of liquid permutations, rather than the simple problem/solution grid of Western cultures. Then a shocking event in his life had left him isolated within himself for a protracted period of time. All of these factors are consonant with those characterizing that one person in several million who exist in our time with the additional gift (or burden) of proximity sense.
This primordial perception system developed so slowly and regularly in Nicholai that he was unaware of it for fully a year. His prison existence was measured off in so many short, redundant bits that he had no sense of the passage of time outside the prison walls. He never dwelt upon himself, and he was never bored. In seeming contradiction of physical laws, time is heavy only when it is empty.
His conscious recognition of his gift was occasioned by a visit by Mr. Hirata. Nicholai was working over his books when he lifted his head and said aloud to himself (in German, for it was Friday), “That’s odd. Why is Mr. Hirata coming to visit me?” Then he looked at his improvised calendar and realized that, indeed, six months had passed since Mr. Hirata’s last visit.
Several minutes later, he broke off from his study again to wonder who this stranger with Mr. Hirata was, because the person whose approach he sensed was not one of the regular guards, each of whom had a characteristic forepresence that Nicholai recognized.
Shortly later, the cell door was unlocked, and Mr. Hirata entered, accompanied by a young man who was in training for social work within the prison system, and who diffidently stood apart while the older man ran routinely through his list of questions and meticulously checked off each response on his clipboard sheet.
In response to the final catch-all question, Nicholai requested more paper and ink, and Mr. Hirata pulled in his neck and sucked air between his teeth to indicate the overwhelming difficulty of such a request. But there was something in his attitude that left Nicholai confident that his request would be fulfilled.
When Mr. Hirata was preparing to leave, Nicholai asked him, “Excuse me, sir. Did you pass near my cell about ten minutes ago?”
“Ten minutes ago? No. Why do you ask?”
“You didn’t pass near my cell? Well then, did you think about me?”
The two prison officials exchanged glances. Mr. Hirata had informed his apprentice of this prisoner’s precarious mental condition bordering on the suicidal. “No,” the senior man began, “I don’t believe I—ah, a moment! Why yes! Just before entering this wing, I spoke to the young man here about you.”
“Ah,” Nicholai said. “That explains it, then.”
Uneasy glances were exchanged. “Explains what?”
Nicholai realized that it would be both difficult and unkind to introduce something so abstract and ethereal as the proximity sense to a civil service mentality, so he shook his head and said, “Nothing. It’s not important.”
Mr. Hirata shrugged and departed.
For the rest of that day and all of the next, Nicholai contemplated this ability he had discovered in himself to intercept parasensually the physical proximity and directed concentration of people. During his twenty minutes of exercise in the narrow court beneath a rectangle of stormy sky, he closed his eyes as he walked and tested if he could concentrate on some feature of the walls and know when he had approached it. He discovered that he could and, in fact, that he could spin around with his eyes closed to disorient himself and still concentrate on a crack in the wall or an oddly shaped stone and walk directly to it, then reach out and touch within several inches of it. So this proximity sense worked to some degree with inanimate objects as well. While doing this, he felt a flow of human concentration directed at him, and he knew, although he could not see past the sky-reflecting glass of the guard tower, that his antics were being observed and commented on by the men there. He could distinguish between the qualities of their intercepted concentration and tell that they were two in number, a strong-willed man and a man with weaker will—or who was, perhaps, relatively indifferent to the carryings-on of a crazed inmate.
Back in his cell, he pondered this gift further. How long had he had it? Where did it come from? What were its potential uses? So far as he remembered at first, it had developed during this last year in prison. And so slowly had it formed that he couldn’t recall its coming. For some time now he had known, without thinking anything of it, when the guards were approaching his cell, and whether it was the short one with the wall eyes, or the Polynesian-looking one who probably had Ainu blood. And he had known which of the trustees was bringing his breakfast almost immediately upon waking.
But had there been traces of it before prison? Yes. Yes, he realized with dawning memory. There had always been modest, vestigial signals from his proximity system. Even as a child, he had always known immediately upon entering if a house was empty or occupied. Even in silence, he had always known whether his mother had remembered or forgotten some duty or chore for him. He could feel the lingering charge in the air of a recent argument or lovemaking in any room he entered. But he had considered these to be common experiences shared by everyone. To a degree, he was right. Many children, and a few adults, occasionally sense such vibrant impalpables through the remnants of their proximity systems, although they explain them away with such terms as “mood,” or “edgyness,” or “intuition.” The only uncommon thing about Nicholai’s contact with his proximity system was its consistency. He had always been sensitive to its messages.
It was during his experiences of caving with his Japanese friends that his paraperceptive gift first manifested itself boldly, although at the time he gave it neither consideration nor name. Under the special conditions of total dark, of concentrated background fear, of extreme physical effort, Nicholai’s primitive central cortex powers cut into his sensory circuit. Deep in an unknown labyrinth with his companions, wriggling along a fault with millions of tons of rock inches above his spine, exertion throbbing in his temples, he had only to close his eyes (in order to be rid of the overriding impulse of the sensory system to pour energy out through the eyes, even in total darkness) and he could reach out with his proximity sense and tell, with unverifiable assurance, in which direction lay empty space, and in which heavy rock. His friends at first joked about his “hunches.” One night as they sat in bivouac at the entrance of a cave system they had been exploring that day, the sleepy conversation drifted around to Nicholai’s uncanny ability to orient himself. One young man put forth the conjecture that, without knowing it, Nicholai was reading subtle echoes from his breathing and scuffling and perhaps smelling differences in the subterranean air, and from these slight but certainly not mystical signals he could make his famous “hunches.” Nicholai was willing to accept this explanation; he didn’t really care much.