08 Illusion

by Frank Peretti

  She parked her VW in the visitor parking and, rather than risk being seen, remained inside the car, relaxing, immersing herself in the space around her, the streams, currents, ripples, and folds of other times and places. It was still a bizarre feeling, as easy as ever to mistake for madness or, at best, a dream state, but she’d grown used to it, even mastered it to the point that she could judge when she was “on,” really in tune with it, or maybe a little “off,” not quite finding her way. Tonight she was “on,” way on, as if the layers of time and space were rose petals emanating in graceful arcs from a center, and she was very near, almost inside, that center. Finding, connecting, slipping through were easy, and in mere seconds she was there, in that alternate, overlaid space that took her from her VW to a subterranean hallway she’d visited before.

  The rushing, invisible current grabbed at her again and would have carried her down the hall, but she was ready for it and planted her feet solidly on the tiles. Clunk! She was in the hall for real …

  … and face-to-face with the steel double doors. AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY!

  Immediately she felt it: terror was coming through that steel and knifing through her as if she were already on the other side wishing she could get out. Her feet wouldn’t move, not toward the doors, not away from them. It was like standing at the top of her first escalator when she was four: she was frozen.

  But that made her angry. Mandy Whitacre, you’re not four. You’re not even twenty. You’ve been through enough, been bruised enough, been scared enough, you’re old enough. Now you can either wimp out on this side of the doors until the dragon comes out and eats you anyway, or you can go in there, kill it, and be done with it.

  So that resolved that. She straightened her spine and held her head up. “I’m Mandy Whitacre,” she told the doors, and with one quick reach into a quaking, tea-stained other world, she let the doors suck her in, pulling her body through the metal like a string of taffy.

  She went spinning, all things around her blurring, she groped for the veil, the way out …

  Clunk! She fell out on the other side, standing in a featureless hallway lit by can lights in the ceiling. There was that deep, electric hum again, so often a part of her other visions and journeys. She heard no voices, saw no one.

  The fear would not go away. She sequestered it in a pocket of her mind, drew a deep breath, and took the first step. Other steps followed the first. She moved down the hall.

  A steel door on her left taunted her with a big cold handle and red letters that shouted with authority, AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY—just like Don’t go out on the casino floor, you’re underage! “Oh, shush!” The latch clacked open for her and she ventured a peek inside.

  She’d seen this place. It was a furnace room, a maze of water and steam pipes, aluminum ducts, catwalks and stairs all built around a furnace the size of a mobile home, and alongside the furnace, an iron box like a woodstove on a brick pedestal with a control panel and a heavy front door. She descended a flight of steel stairs and approached it, gripped the big handle, and creaked the door open. Inside was a gas-fired combustion chamber lined with ashes. An incinerator. This was where the monkeys burned.

  One more proof I’m not crazy, she thought. A new boldness pushed the fear farther back inside her.

  Double doors on the other side of the hallway looked like hospital doors that could lead to a ward or operating rooms. They didn’t appear to be bolted shut; they were unmarked. She crossed the hall, pressed against the door on the right … it swung open. She stepped through.

  In the first few seconds she was overwhelmed. It could have been a television studio with a stage built in the center, or a space flight control room with the launch pad in the middle. The room was about forty by forty with a high ceiling, windowless, all concrete, lit by fixtures suspended from an overhead grid like a soundstage. Rows of control consoles with dials, switches, keyboards, and monitors were arranged on three sides of the room, all facing the center, where a hexagonal enclosure of steel and glass about twelve feet across stood like a space-age gazebo, steel pillars at each corner, a flat canopy rigged with lights over the top. Electrical cables snaked from the platform across the floor, some taped down, some not, connecting the platform with every console, every steel cabinet marked DANGER HIGH VOLTAGE, every blinking panel.

  For the next few seconds, she was stunned speechless and immobile.

  On the right side of the room was a large console raised higher than the others, apparently the command control center. Behind that console, face illumined with blue light from a monitor, sat the man who’d come into McCaffee’s with a computer and egged her into doing the levitation. Sitting next to him was the younger, Tom Hanks–looking guy she’d seen superimposed in her apartment.

  In front of the console, rising to his feet as she came in, his eyes meeting hers unabashedly, was Dane Collins.

  At the sight of him the fear left her, carried away in a sigh as her body eased, even teetered from relief. She couldn’t imagine the story to explain why he was here, and where could she begin to tell hers? She could only find strength in the fact that he was here at all.

  So in that long, face-reading, eye-meeting stretch of time, the electrons hummed through the cables and consoles, the panel lights blinked but drew no attention, the ventilation system rushed quietly … and no one said a word.

  Dane looked up at the steel and glass enclosure, then back at her, his cue for her to take a look.

  She walked, her sneakers making little squeaks that carried through the room, then climbed the seven steps to the enclosure for a closer look through the glass. The enclosure contained a bench the size of a hospital bed. The bench was draped with a sheet that hung crookedly over either side, as if arranged in haste. The sheet was soiled, stained brown … with blood?

  The smell. It turned her nose, stung her spirit. Like singed hair, rotting flesh, something burning. She’d smelled it in her visions and interdims; she’d smelled it in the scorched car.

  The two men exchanged a glance. Dane Collins propped an elbow in the opposite hand, his fingers over his lips, his gaze strong and reassuring.

  She descended the steps and walked toward the raised console, reaching into her pocket. Dane turned, and they stood facing the two strangers together. She drew out her hand.

  In her palm was the half-melted, ash-encrusted anklet with one dove still intact.

  She asked, “What have you done to me?”

  chapter

  * * *

  46

  Parmenter introduced himself and Moss, but Mandy did not feel cordial and did not offer her hand. He pulled up a chair for her behind the console and offered her some coffee. She requested a bottle of water and sat with Parmenter, Moss, and Dane to hear the other side of her story.

  “You have unknowingly been involved in a government-funded experiment …” Parmenter began, and the story unfolded part by part.

  “… we’d never tested the process on burn injuries, so your case was an irresistible opportunity …”

  “… the bloodstains on the sheet are all that remained. Where you went and how far back your reversion was, we hadn’t a clue …”

  “… the massive gravitational influence you have on the Machine is aberrant, totally unexpected …”

  “… what you’re experiencing is alternate, parallel timelines woven through space, and what’s astounding is how you’ve learned to create them at will …”

  The audacity of these people was incomprehensible, enraging, tempered only by the fact that Mandy was still alive. Her anger made her bold, her questions and comebacks sharp-edged. Parmenter and Moss accepted and endured it, explaining, never defending. The meeting became a bilateral debriefing, the scientists as earnest to hear her side of it as she was to hear theirs. Mandy felt they could get along, but she wasn’t ready to be friends.

  They showed her the Machine.

  “We haven’t opened it, haven’t touched or tampered with anything, includ
ing the soiled sheet … yes, I guess you could call it a crime scene: we didn’t dare disturb anything until we had the uh, crime, solved.

  “The bench contains the Machine’s interdimensional core; it resembles a big black domino, about six feet long, ten inches thick, accelerated to ninety-five percent of the speed of light … oh, it’s traveling that fast, all right, but in relation to an alternate dimension of time and space while maintaining a motionless foothold in ours. You could say it has its foot in the interdimensional door, holding it open so people and objects can pass through, which you’ve been doing on a regular basis. Every bouncing tennis ball, every levitation, every vanish passes through that core. Oh, and every journey through time and space, such as your encounter with Moss …”

  They showed her the makeshift sleeping quarters where she surprised Moss during the night. It was just as she remembered it.

  She remembered parts of the lab as well, in fragmented images of consoles, lights, shadowy faces, muffled conversations, like a continuous volley of déjà vu. She could remember and describe some of the rooms before they showed them to her.

  Near midnight, they were seated around a table where the day crew took their breaks—three doughnuts left over from that day rested in a white box next to dirty coffee cups that never made it back to the kitchen. There was silence. In slow, awkward phrases and apologetic tones, Parmenter and Moss had described the final outcome, the bottom line of Mandy’s future as they saw it.

  She looked across the room at the Machine, looked again at them, tried to believe but couldn’t. Hope as in, This is just a bad dream and I’ll wake up, wasn’t working so well for her anymore. She tried denial, expecting they would now tell her the next thing, the one bit of good news they hadn’t told her yet, the way out. Maybe there would be a second opinion that it didn’t have to be this way.

  She looked at Dane and thought she saw a ray of hope. She could tell he believed it and yet … he’d thought of something. Yes, surely he’d thought of something! Dane, speak up! Tell me, tell them!

  He was listening, watching, thinking.

  She asked, “Does it have to happen?”

  Parmenter had come across a writing pad and scribbled on it, apparently organizing his answers even as he spoke them. “Inexorable equilibrium. Theoretically, the universe must return to normal anyway. It can’t stay stretched forever. That’s the fatal flaw in all of this.”

  Moss inserted, “It’s conceivable that the space-time distortion could last longer than your lifetime, meaning you would never retrace before you died naturally.”

  “But the administrators and financiers of this project aren’t going to wait that long, not by any stretch of the imagination. They want the Machine back.”

  “They would really do that?” Mandy asked.

  “They would do that.” Parmenter prepared a moment, then said, “We told you about Dr. Kessler, and you recall meeting her in the hallway …”

  “Did she take her life?” Mandy took Kessler’s note from her pocket and handed it to him.

  Parmenter read it and nodded. “She did, earlier today. She knew what would become of you but she couldn’t stop it. I’m afraid Moss and I can’t stop it either. A moral argument doesn’t hold much weight against ‘matters of national security.’ But please …” He looked at Dane.

  Dane laid his hand upon hers. “Before we despair, there might—might—be an alternative.”

  Don’t tell me. There is a next thing?

  Parmenter put down his pen and searched his mind for the right way to begin. “You recall, of course, your encounter with two thugs when you had the flat tire?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you recall”—he stopped, struggling for the question—“what your mental processes might have been immediately afterward?”

  “My mental … I’m not sure what you’re asking.”

  Dane said, “Remember running across my pasture, trying to get away from Clarence?”

  She fervently wished she could. “I don’t remember anything after they gave me that shot. I just remember waking up on your couch.”

  Parmenter pressed it. “You don’t remember any kind of interdimensional transference, any contact with another timeline?”

  Her mind was a blank. “No.”

  “No … longing, reaching, whatever it is you do to influence the Machine?”

  Dane pitched in, “Right before I looked out my window and saw you running across my pasture, I saw you in my house.”

  Now, this was news. She wrinkled her brow and stared at him.

  He continued, “Only, you were”—now he stumbled—“you were … older, the way you were before the accident.”

  “You don’t remember that?” asked Parmenter, and then he shook his head at himself. “Well, how can you? It hasn’t happened yet.”

  Mandy was frustrated. “Guys, try to make sense.”

  Parmenter regrouped with a little clap of his hands. “Okay. Here’s my theory on this. Before all this began, before we started adding timelines, before anyone or anything was reverted, you had your timeline and the Machine had its timeline, and at that point everything was in balance, no space-time distortion. So the point is, if we dissolve all timelines secondary to the original two—yours and the Machine’s—there would be no stress on the space-time fabric, and the two timelines would play themselves out in the natural order of things. It would be as if we never tampered with them.”

  “Which would be wonderful—for the universe.”

  Parmenter pointed his index finger upward, “Ahhh, but … but! Dane saw you in his home in Idaho at the age of fifty-nine after the accident, which suggests to me that somehow, in some way, you will exist as your chronologically correct self, intact and alive, subsequent to the accident, which suggests that somehow, in some way, you managed to circumvent the accident, and there’s only one way I know of to do that and still allow the universe to remain in balance with no additional timelines.”

  Then he waited as if they might guess. They didn’t. “Trade timelines. You take the Machine’s timeline, it takes yours. It plays out your timeline and burns up, you play out its timeline and live out your life with the man you love—if the theory is sound, that is.”

  “But … why wouldn’t it be sound?” she said to Dane, “You saw me alive in your house.”

  Parmenter countered, “All of this is theoretical, entirely contingent. Dane seeing you in his house—your house, the house—is one outcome that flashed through given the conditions at the time. Anything could change, any outcome could result.”

  “No promises, in other words.”

  “No, but if it did happen as Dane saw it, then it could happen if we can replicate it. Now, admittedly, there are problems. For one thing, the trade would mean the destruction of the Machine, which the other scientists and the government guys will never allow, which is almost moot in light of a bigger problem. The interdimensional mass of the Machine, that part of the Machine actually straddling time dimensions, is”—he scribbled it as he said it—“one thousand, six hundred and thirty-two pounds. And how much do you weigh?”

  “A hundred and eight pounds.”

  “You see the problem.”

  “Not yet.”

  “It’s like a pair of scales, like a teeter-totter. If you’re going to trade timelines, the trade has to be weight for weight, mass for mass, the same on both sides, an even trade, and you don’t weigh one thousand, six hundred and thirty-two pounds. That’s a lot of candy bars.” He rested his head on his hand. “Oh, and there’s another problem: in order to force the trade, to make the Machine bump from its timeline to yours, yours would have to be the only other timeline available, which means we would have to dissolve your secondary timeline, the one you’re living on right now, so that you fall back into your original, but of course, should you do that, you’ll immediately retrace the original and come to your original end, the, uh, you’ll perish, uh, in a fire.”

  She looked at Dane again.
She could tell he was really thinking, his fist propped under his nose, his eyes like steel.

  “Oh, and there’s still the other problem,” Parmenter continued. “The mental state, the reach, the method you used to generate that momentary linger on the Machine’s timeline—that would be the moment you appeared in Dane’s home as, uh, yourself. Whatever you did, however you felt, whatever method you used, it was an incredible fluke, an accident, but it put you ahead in time.” He scurried over to the command console and came back with a three-ring binder full of notes and computer printouts. “I got the exact time and location of your appearance from Dane and extrapolated backward—well, actually, extrapolated the Machine forward in computer simulation, but at any rate, the readings show a major deflection in the Machine’s timeline at that point, meaning an incursion of another timeline into its own. If the theory were sound, and if you’d weighed one thousand, six hundred and thirty-two pounds at that point, and if you’d occupied only your original timeline, you could have bumped the Machine from its timeline to yours and taken its place. You could have done it—if you had any idea how.” He calmed, looking at his notes. “But, of course, you didn’t weigh one thousand, six hundred and thirty-two pounds, you were occupying multiple timelines at the time and had no idea how you were doing what you were doing, and so … here you sit. Which brings us to the last problem.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “No. It’s just the last one I can think of at the moment.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “Your reversion, which we still don’t understand, and all the manipulations you’ve imposed on the Machine since then have rendered it … well, it’s all messed up, okay? We can’t make any of this work until we recalibrate it, and we can’t do that until we know the exact extent of your reversion, where you went and when you got there.”

  Dane clarified, “He needs to know where you were when you suddenly appeared in our time, and exactly what time and date it was. Do you remember?”