The Traveler Page 27

  "Are you getting a wave range?" Richardson whispered into the microphone. "Good. Yes. That's very good."

  "We need a baseline to start out," he told Michael. "So we're going to give the brain different kinds of stimuli. Nothing to think about here. You'll just react."

  The nurse went to the steel cabinet and came back with several test tubes. The first batch contained tastes: salty, sour, bitter, sweet. Then different smells: rose, vanilla, and something that reminded Michael of burned rubber. Richardson kept murmuring into the headset as he took a special flashlight and aimed colored lights at Michael's eyes. They played sounds at various volumes and touched his face with a feather, a block of wood, and a rough piece of steel. Satisfied with the sensory data, Richardson asked Michael to count backward, add numbers, and describe the dinner served to him last night. Then they went into deep memory and Michael had to tell them about the first time he saw the ocean and the first time he saw a naked woman. Did you have your own room when you were a teenager? What did it look like? Describe the furniture and the posters on the wall.

  Finally Richardson stopped asking him questions and the nurse squirted some water into his mouth. "Okay," Richardson told the technicians. "I think we're ready."

  The nurse reached into the cabinet and took out an IV bag filled with a diluted mixture of the drug they called 3B3. Kennard Nash had called Michael to talk about the drug. He explained that 3B3 was a special bacterium developed in Switzerland by a top scientific team. The drug was very expensive and difficult to manufacture, but the toxins created from the bacterium seemed to increase neural energy. As the nurse raised the bag higher, the viscous turquoise-blue liquid sloshed around in the IV bag.

  She took away the neutral saline solution, attached the IV bag, and a thread of 3B3 raced down the plastic tube to the needle in his arm. Richardson and Dr. Lau stared at him as if he were going to float off into another dimension.

  "How do you feel?" Richardson asked.

  "Normal. How long does it take for this stuff to kick in?" "We don't know."

  "Heart rate slightly elevated," Dr. Lau informed them. "Respiration unchanged."

  Trying not to show his disappointment, Michael gazed at the ceiling for a few minutes, then closed his eyes. Maybe he wasn't really a Traveler, or perhaps the new drug didn't work. All this effort and money had led to failure.

  "Michael?"

  He opened his eyes. Richardson was staring at him. The room was still cool, but there were beads of sweat on the doctor's forehead. "Start counting backward from one hundred."

  "We already did that."

  "They want to return to a neurological baseline."

  "Forget it. This isn't going to ..."

  Michael moved his left arm and saw something extraordinary. A hand and wrist composed of little points of light emerged from his flesh hand like a ghost pushing through a locked cabinet. Lifeless, his flesh hand flopped back down onto the table while the ghost hand remained.

  He knew instantly that this thing—this apparition—had always been part of him, inside his body. The ghost hand reminded him of the simple drawings made of constellations like the Twins or the Archer. His hand was composed of tiny stars that were connected by thin, almost imperceptible lines of light. He couldn't move this ghost hand like the rest of the body. If he thought—move thumb, clench fingers—nothing happened. He had to think of what he wanted the hand to do in the future and, after a brief interval, it responded to his vision. It was tricky. Everything operated with a slight delay, like moving your body underwater.

  "What do you think?" he asked Richardson.

  "Start counting backward please."

  "What do you think of my hand? Can't you see what's going on?"

  Richardson shook his head. "Both of your hands are lying on the examination table. Can you describe what you see?"

  Michael was finding it difficult to talk. It wasn't just moving his lips and tongue; it was the awkward, laborious effort to conceptualize ideas and come up with words for them. The mind was faster than words. Much faster.

  "I—think—that . . ." He paused for what felt like a long time. "This is not a hallucination."

  "Describe, please."

  "This was always inside me."

  "Describe what you are seeing, Michael."

  "You—are—blind."

  Michael's annoyance grew stronger, twisting into anger, and he pushed with his forearms to sit up on the table. He felt as if he were cracking his way out of something old and brittle, a capsule of yellowed glass. Then he realized that the upper part of his ghost body was vertical while his flesh body remained behind. Why couldn't they see this? It was all very clear. But Richardson continued to stare at the body on the table as if it was an equation that would suddenly produce its own answer.

  "All vital signs have stopped," Lau said. "He's dead or—" "What are you talking about?" Richardson snapped.

  "No. There's a heartbeat. A single heartbeat. And his lungs are moving. He's in some kind of dormant state, like someone who's been buried beneath the snow." Lau studied the monitor screen. "Slow. Everything is very slow. But he's still alive."

  Richardson leaned down so his lips were only a few inches away from Michael's left ear. "Can you hear me, Michael? Can you . .

  And the human voice was so difficult to listen to—so attached to regret and weakness and fear—that Michael ripped the rest of his ghost body from his flesh and floated above them. He felt awkward in this position, like a child learning to swim. Floating up. Floating down. He watched the world, but was detached from its nervous commotion.

  Although he couldn't see anything visible, he felt as if there were a small black opening in the floor of the room, like a drain at the bottom of a swimming pool. It was pulling him downward with a gentle force. No. Stay away. He could resist it and keep back if he wanted to. But what was there? Was this part of becoming a Traveler?

  Time passed. It could have been a few seconds or several minutes. As his luminous body drifted lower, the power—the attractive force—gained strength, and he started to get frightened. He had a vision of Gabriel's face and felt an intense desire to see his brother again. They should face this together. Everything was dangerous when you were alone.

  Closer. Very close now. And he gave up struggling and felt his ghost body collapse into a globe, a point, a concentrated essence that was pulled into the dark hole. No lungs. No mouth. No voice. Gone.

  ***

  MICHAEL OPENED HIS eyes and found himself floating in the middle of a dark green ocean. Three small suns were above him in a triangular arrangement. They glowed white-hot in a straw-yellow sky.

  He tried to stay relaxed and assess the situation. The water was warm and there was a gentle swell. No wind. Pushing his legs beneath the water, he bobbed up and down like a cork and surveyed the world around him. He saw a dark, hazy line that marked a horizon, but no sign of land.

  "Hello!" he shouted. And, for a moment, the sound of his voice made him feel powerful and alive. But the word disappeared into the infinite expansion of the sea. "I'm here!" he shouted. "Right here!" But no one answered him.

  He remembered the transcripts from the interrogated Travelers that Dr. Richardson had left in his room. There were four barriers that blocked his access to the other realms: water, fire, earth, air. There was no particular order to the barriers, and Travelers encountered them in different ways. You had to find a way out of each barrier, but the Travelers used different words to describe the ordeal. There was always a door. A passageway. One Russian Traveler had called it a slash in a long black curtain.

  Everyone agreed that you could escape to another barrier or back to your starting place in the original world. But no one had left an instruction book on how to manage this trick. You find a way, a woman explained. Or it finds you. The various explanations annoyed him. Why couldn't they just say: walk eight feet, turn right. He wanted a road map, not philosophy.

  Michael swore loudly and splashed with his hand
s, just to hear a sound. Water struck his face and trickled down his cheek to his mouth. He expected a harsh, salty taste, like the ocean, but the water was completely neutral, without taste or smell. Scooping up some of the water in his palm, he examined it closely. Little particles were suspended in the liquid. It could be sand or algae or fairy dust; he had no way of knowing.

  Was this just a dream? Could he really drown? Looking up at the sky, he tried to remember news stories of lost fishermen or tourists who had fallen from cruise ships and floated in the ocean until they were rescued. How long had they survived? Three or four hours? A day?

  He dropped his head beneath the surface, came up, and spat out the water that had leaked into his mouth. Why were three suns in the sky above him? Was this a different universe with different rules for life and death? Although he tried to consider these ideas, the situation itself, the fact that he was alone without sight of land, asserted itself in his mind. Don't panic, he thought. You can last for a long time.

  Michael remembered old rock-and-roll songs and sang them out loud. He counted backward and chanted nursery rhymes—anything to give him the feeling that he was still alive. Breathe in. Breathe out. Splash. Turn. Splash some more. But each time, when he was done, the little waves and ripples were absorbed by the stillness around him. Was he dead? Perhaps he was dead. Richardson could be laboring over his limp body at this exact moment. Maybe he was almost dead and, if he allowed himself to go under, the last fragment of life would be washed from his body.

  Frightened, he picked a direction and began to swim. He did a basic crawl, then a backstroke when his arms got tired. Michael had no way of gauging how much time had passed. Five minutes. Five hours. But when he stopped and bobbed around again he saw the same line on the horizon. The same three suns. The yellow sky. He let himself go under, and then came up quickly, spitting out water and shouting.

  Michael lay faceup, arched his back, and closed his eyes. The sameness of his surroundings, its static nature, implied a creation of

  the mind. And yet his dreams had always featured Gabriel and the other people he knew. The absolute solitude of this place was something strange and disturbing. If this was his dream, then it should have included a pirate ship or a flashy speedboat filled with women.

  Suddenly he felt something touch his leg with a quick slithery motion. Michael began to swim frantically. Kick. Reach forward.

  Grasp the water. His only thought was to go as fast as possible and get away from the thing that touched him. Water filled his nostrils,

  but he forced it out. He shut his eyes and swam blind, with a pawing, desperate motion. Stop. Wait. Sound of his own breathing. Then the fear passed through him and, once again, he was swimming nowhere, toward the endlessly receding horizon.

  Time passed. Dream time. Space time. He wasn't sure about anything. But he stopping moving and lay on his back, exhausted and gasping for air. All thoughts disappeared from him except for the desire to breathe. Like a single piece of living tissue, he concentrated on this action that had seemed simple and automatic in his past life. More time passed and he became aware of a new sensation. He felt as if he were moving in a particular direction, pulled toward one part of the horizon. Gradually the current grew stronger.

  Michael heard water flowing past his ears and then a faint roaring sound, like a distant waterfall. Moving into a vertical position, he forced his head up and tried to see where he was going. In the distance a fine mist was rising into the air and small waves broke the surface of the ocean. The current was powerful now and it was difficult to swim against it. A roaring sound grew louder and louder until his own voice was overpowered by the noise. Michael raised his right arm into the air as if a gigantic bird or an angel could reach down and save him from destruction. The current pulled him on until the sea appeared to collapse in front of him.

  For an instant he was underwater, and then he forced himself toward the light. He was on the side of an immense whirlpool that was as big as a crater on the moon. The green water was swirling around and around to a dark vortex. And he was pushed along by the current as it dragged him deeper, away from the light. Keep moving, Michael told himself. Don't give up. Something within him would be destroyed forever if he allowed the water to fill his mouth and lungs.

  Halfway to the bottom of this green bowl, he saw a small black shadow about the size and shape of a ship's porthole. The shadow was something independent from the whirlpool. It vanished beneath the spray and foam, like a dark rock hidden in a river, only to reappear again in the same position.

  Kicking and thrusting with his hands, Michael fell downward toward the shadow. Lost it. Found it again. And then he threw himself into its dark core.

  Chapter 38

  Most of the glass-enclosed gallery that ran around the interior of the Tomb was used by the technical staff, but the north side of the building could be entered only through a guarded door. This private viewing area was carpeted and filled with a sectional couch and stainless-steel floor lamps. Small black tables and straight-backed suede chairs were set beside the tinted windows.

  Kennard Nash sat alone at one of the tables while his bodyguard, an ex—Peruvian policeman named Ramón Vega, poured Chardonnay into a wineglass. Ramón had once murdered five cop per miners foolish enough to organize a strike, but Nash valued the man for his skill as a valet and a waiter.

  "What's for dinner, Ramón?"

  "Salmon. Garlic mashed potatoes. Green beans and almonds. They'll bring it over from the administrative center."

  "Excellent. Make sure the food doesn't get cold."

  Raman went back to the anteroom near the security door and Nash sipped his wine. One of the lessons Nash had learned from twenty-two years in the army was the necessity for officers to remain separate from enlisted men. You were their leader, not their friend. When he worked in the White House, the staff followed the same procedure. Every few weeks, the President would be brought out of seclusion to throw a baseball or light the national Christmas tree, but for the most part he was protected from the dangerous randomness of unscripted events. Although Nash was a military man, he had particularly warned the President against attending any soldier's funeral. An emotionally unstable wife might weep and scream. A mother could throw herself on the coffin while a father demanded a reason for his son's death. The philosophy of the Panopticon taught the Brethren that true power was based on control and predictability.

  Because the Crossover Project had an unpredictable outcome, Nash hadn't informed the Brethren that the experiment was actually going on. There were simply too many variables to guarantee success. Everything was dependent on Michael Corrigan, the young man whose body now lay on the table in the middle of the Tomb. Many of the young men and women who took 3B3 had ended up in mental hospitals. Dr. Richardson complained that he couldn't gauge the correct dosage of the drug or predict its effect on a possible Traveler.

  If this had been a military operation, Nash would have given full responsibility to a junior officer and stayed away from the battle. It was easier to avoid blame if you weren't in the same area. Nash knew that basic rule—had followed it throughout his career—but he found it impossible to stay away from the research center. The design of the quantum computer, the construction of the Tomb, and the attempt to create a Traveler were all his decisions. If the Crossover Project was successful, he would change the direction of history.

  Already the Virtual Panopticon was taking control of the workplace. Sipping his wine, Kennard Nash allowed himself the pleasure of a grand vision. In Madrid a computer was counting the keystrokes of a tired young woman inputing credit card information. The computer program that monitored her work created an hourly chart that showed if she had achieved her quota. Messages would automatically tell her Good work, Maria or I'm concerned, Miss Sanchez. You're falling behind. And the young woman would bend forward and type faster, even faster, so that she wouldn't lose her job.

  Somewhere in London a surveillance camera was focusing
on the faces in a crowd, transforming a human being into a string of numbers that could be matched with a digitized file. In Mexico City and Jakarta electronic ears were overhearing phone calls and the constant chatter of the Internet was being monitored. Government computers knew that a certain book was bought in Denver while another book was being checked out of a library in Brussels. Who bought one book? Who read the other? Track the names. Cross-reference. Track again. Day by day, the Virtual Panopticon was watching its prisoners, becoming part of their world.

  Ramón Vega slipped back into the room and bowed slightly. Nash assumed that something had gone wrong with dinner.

  "Mr. Boone is at the door, General. He said you wanted to see him."

  "Yes, of course. Send him in right away."

  Kennard Nash knew that if he had been sitting in the Truth Room, the left side of his cortex would have glowed a deceitful red color. He disliked Nathan Boone and felt nervous when the man was around. Boone had been hired by Nash's predecessor, and he knew a great deal about the inner workings of the Brethren. During the last few years, Boone had established his own separate relationships with the other members of the executive board. Most of the Brethren thought Mr. Boone was brave and resourceful: the perfect head of security. It bothered Nash that he wasn't in complete control of Boone's activities. He recently discovered that the head of security had disobeyed a direct order.

  Ramón escorted Boone into the gallery, and then left the two men alone. "You wanted to see me?" Boone asked. He stood with his legs spread slightly, his hands behind his back.

  Nash was supposed to be the leader, the man in charge, yet both men knew that Boone could walk across the room and break the general's neck in a few seconds. "Sit down, Mr. Boone. Have a glass of Chardonnay."

  "Not right now." Boone strolled over to the window and gazed down at the surgical table. The anesthesiologist was adjusting a heart sensor on Michael's chest. "How's it going?"