“Ahh, I brought a tape recorder, if that’s okay. I’m not the best note-taker in the world.”
There was a brief silence. “Yeah, there’s a problem: you can’t record the lecture, it’s classified. You’ll have to take notes, and we’ll store them in a safe drawer: Jenny? Did you assign Dave a drawer yet?”
“Oh, no, I haven’t, have I?” She sprang from behind her desk, carrying a green ledger book with her. “Okay, here’s the combination to the safe.” She showed me the open page. “Don’t say it out loud! People might be listening—you know, the bad guys. You can write the combination down, but you can’t carry it with you. Learn it quick or check this book. I keep it up-to-date. The combination changes every ninety days. When you get a new combination, you have to sign here acknowledging that it has been given to you. Your drawer will be this one”—she pointed—“the third one down, fifth from the right. That’s the best way to remember it. Got that?”
“Yes, I think so.”
“You keep all your notes and session records in here. It’s your drawer to keep anything classified in. But, remember, Mr. Levy checks them periodically, so don’t be stupid and put anything in here that you don’t want to have to answer for. Okay?”
“I understand. Thanks.”
“All right, let’s get to it,” said Mel. “Let me introduce you to the world beyond.”
We walked across the parking lot and paused at the entrance to a long single-story building. Mel punched in the combination and then used a key to unlock the second lock. “After you,” he said.
I stepped into a strangely barren lobby. There was a desk with a phone on it, and two couches separated by a coffee table. Nothing hung on the walls. The floor was covered in a thin gray carpet, and the room was cold. There were two doors directly across the room, one on the extreme left, one in the center of the wall. Riley led me to the door on the left.
“This is the monitoring room. It’s usually manned while you are doing an operational session. This is where they monitor your body signs: respiration, pulse, temperature. This is your lifeline back to reality. If you ever get into-trouble out there in the ether, they’ll know it in here, and they’ll break the session to get you back home.”
In the room were three chairs facing a large electronic panel filled with closed-circuit TV monitors, microphones, and cassette- and video-taping machines. In a small closet were hundreds of cassettes and videotapes, neatly catalogued and labeled.
“The joysticks let the monitors control the cameras in the viewing rooms. They can zoom in on you to see what you’re writing if you’re doing coordinate RV, or just to look at your eyes or anything else they want to see if you’re doing ERV.”
“What’s ERV?” I asked.
“Extended remote viewing. Don’t worry about that for now. The tape players pipe music of your choice in for your cool-down and then record your session so that we won’t lose anything. Everything is recorded and monitored. This little gizmo here will monitor your brainwaves during your first few months of training. When we’re certain that you can achieve the desired frequency in the appropriate amount of time, you won’t have to wear the electrodes anymore. But at first you’re gonna be wired for sound, and sweat, and farts, and anything else you decide to do in the ether. Fucking scary, huh? Come on, I’ll show you the rest of the place.”
We entered the other door which opened on a long, narrow-hallway. There were doors on the left and right, and Mel popped one open.
“This is ERV Room Number One, and the other is Number Two, there on the left. They’re identical, but you get so sensitive doing this stuff that you’ll develop a preference.”
The room was completely gray: carpet, walls, fixtures, desk, chair. There was a strange couchlike object, and that was gray, too.
“What’s this thing?”
“That’s an ERV chair. You sit in it like this.” Riley jumped into the device and began pulling wires and belts into position. “You plug this in to monitor your pulse, and you wrap this around your chest to record your respirations. These are light and volume controls, here on this console, and you wear these headphones. Here’s the microphone; you don’t have to do anything with it, it’s activated automatically from the monitor’s room. Let’s see … anything else? Oh, yeah, sometimes a close monitor will sit at the desk. Levy may do that, so he can lead you to the target and back. He likes to see up close and personal how you’re doing. You have to watch the bastard, though. He’s been known to separate and Join you on the mission from this chair. There’s not really any harm in that if you know he’s going to be there; otherwise it can scare the hell out of you. He showed up in one of Kathleen’s sessions, dropped right into her sanctuary and she damned near had a heart attack over it.”
Mel saw that I didn’t have any idea what he was talking about. “I’m getting a little ahead of myself again, huh? Just keep all this in the back of your mind. It’ll be several months before you actually have to mess with any of it.”
“I figured as much. Why is everything gray?”
“To avoid mental noise, incorrect information in the signal or transfer. It’s kind of like TV interference; the same thing happens in your head—if there’s a lot of color, light, or noise in the room where the viewer is working, the chances are high that it’ll interfere with the session. By eliminating all that mental noise, we can keep the chances of a ‘pure’ session fairly high.
“In the old days, the plan was to train us to be able to do this stuff on the front lines of combat. Can you imagine? Squatting in a trench somewhere and jumping into the ether—that would be wild.”
Mel led me three doors farther down the hall. “This is a dowsing room. It’s where you’ll be trained to find a moving target on the map. You’ll learn any number of methods to do it, but whatever works best for you is obviously what you’ll use. The large drafting table will have a flat map of a suspected location on it.” On the wall was a map of the world. “In the closet there you’ll find pendulums, rulers, dowsing rods—hell, anything you’d need. Over there against the far wall is a map storage box; it has just about every large-scale map of every target we’ve worked.”
“Who picks the map?” I asked.
“Levy, usually. Sometimes he’ll let someone else play program manager, but not often. When you’re asked to work a dowsing problem, this room will be set up and waiting for you. All you have to do is find the target.” He smiled and led me across the hall. “This is a CRV, coordinate remote viewing, room; that door over there is to Room Number Two. Again, they’re identical, but you’ll have a favorite.”
The CRV room was longer than the ERV room, with a narrow table, eight feet long, in the middle. A row of track lights was centered over the table and a control panel sat next to the place the viewer worked from. The walls were gray, as was the carpet, the table, the chair, and all the fixtures. Mel pointed out that the room was absolutely soundproof and lightproof, just like all the others.
“This is the CRV chair,” he said. “It has all the hookups the other ones did, plus it adjusts to whatever height you want. When you start CRV you’ll see—it’s critical to be comfortable.” He pointed out the cameras’ locations. “You adjust lights and sound here. That podium is called the target podium. It stays there, behind the monitor.”
“What’s it for?”
“The location of your target, training or otherwise, will be sealed in a manila envelope and placed on this podium by the monitor. It’s there more for your subconscious than anything else, but it’s always there. We’ve done some experiments to see what effect switching the target folder might have, and the results were fairly astonishing. If I were working you on Target X, and during a break I substituted Target Y’s folder without telling you, you’d start describing aspects of Y.
“That’s very strange. Why would that happen?”
Riley shrugged. “It just does, that’s all. If we waited until we could explain everything we do, we wouldn’t have accomplis
hed a thing in the last fifteen years. We know it works; we don’t know how. So we just do it!”
“I see. I suppose this last room is the garden room?”
“It is indeed, and it is where you get your first dose of lecture.”
“Hell, I thought I’d already gotten it as we walked down this hallway.”
“I’ll go easy on you—you won’t have any homework tonight. This room is called the garden room because it has plants growing in it. It’s the only room in either of the two buildings where anything will grow.”
“Yeah. I noticed. Why the hell is that?”
Riley scoffed, “Beats the hell outta me. It’s been that way for as long as I’ve been here on this tour, going on eight years.”
“You were here on a tour before this one?” I asked.
“Yeah, I was one of the first viewers—me, Joe McMoneagle, and a few others. Lyn Buchanan’s been here for a long time as well.” Mel’s eyes sparkled. Perhaps those early days in the unit were a better time than now, because now he looked tired. “Shit,” he said, smiling, “you keep wasting time like this, and I’ll have to give you some homework.”
“Levy didn’t say anything about homework when he hired me!”
Mel slapped me on the shoulder. “Come on, we have a lot of ground to cover today.”
In lecture, Mel laid out the historical evidence of time travel and out-of-body travel, from ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics to Scripture. Man, Mel argued, is more than his physical self. Each day flew by, and yet I hardly remembered it. It was as if I checked reality at the door each time I entered the unit, and picked it up later when I went home to my family. I strangely enjoyed the loss of time, the absence of the world around me. As the weeks rolled by, I felt more and more at peace with my environment. Everything around me seemed vibrant, clear, and meaningful, as if to a dead man suddenly revived. Life was a process of absorption. I drank in everything Mel said. I questioned nothing; it all made sense to me. I no longer felt strange about believing in remote viewing, but I felt apart from the others because I hadn’t yet received my “eyes.” The eyes of the Watcher. The eyes of the viewer.
Every night I told Debbie all the particulars of the day’s training and let her read my secretly copied notes. Mel taught me small games. He’d have me concentrate on a color, for instance—“Swim in it,” he’d say—and then he’d name the color, having plucked it from my head. I showed Debbie and the children how they, too, could reach into the minds of others. Debbie seemed to be growing more comfortable with the unit as the weeks passed, and as for the children, they thought the circus had come to town, because every night Dad had another game or drawing exercise to teach them. I was making progress, and we were all pleasantly happy about it.
One night, after many weeks of lectures, the phone rang just minutes before dinner. Mariah sprang up to answer it. “Mom, it’s for you. Somebody named Mr. Levy.”
Debbie looked at me. I could only shrug; I had no idea why he would be calling. Debbie picked up the receiver, pausing to remove an earring, and tried to speak.
“Hello, Mrs. Morehouse?” Levy’s sharp voice cut her off.
“Yes?”
“This is Bill Levy. I just wanted to call and formally welcome you into the family, so to speak. I usually do this a bit earlier, but time seems to have slipped by. I wonder if I might convince you to pay us a visit at the office sometime in the near future. I’d like to discuss the unit with you, and some of the changes—well, little things that you might start noticing about David. Different things.”
Debbie looked frightened. “Of course, I can come in to talk.”
“Splendid. Would tomorrow morning be convenient—say nine or nine-thirty?”
“Nine would be fine. I’ll ride in with David if that’s okay.”
“Yes, of course. I’m looking forward to meeting you. Good-bye.”
“Good-bye.” Debbie set the receiver down. “That’s a very strange man! I can hear it in his voice … . Well, I guess you heard—I’ll ride in with you and keep the car for the day when I’m finished. I have some errands to run. I’ll pick you up around four-thirty.”
I was glad to see that, at least for the moment, Debbie could keep it all in perspective. “Sounds great to me. I wonder what sort of lecture you’re in for tomorrow?” She looked at me as though I’d set her up. “I swear, I had nothing to do with this, and I know nothing.”
The next morning, we pulled into the parking lot and I led Debbie to the front door.
“Dumpy place.”
“Be quiet!” I scolded. I opened the door and shouted from the entrance, “Hello, everybody! Debbie’s here with me. If you have anything on your desk she shouldn’t see, you’d better put it away. She has instructions from the Kremlin to photograph everybody’s desktop.”
Jenny laughed. “Make sure you get a shot of Pratt’s desk. I want to send it to the Guinness Book of World Records for the Trashiest Desktop in the Known World category.”
“Ah, Mrs. Morehouse.” Levy scurried out of his office. “Welcome! Can I get you some coffee or tea? Anything?”
Debbie offered him her hand. “No, thank you. I’m afraid David is the only member of our family who drinks it.” She glared at me. Mormons aren’t supposed to drink coffee, but I’d picked up the habit in the infantry.
“Well, I think we should get started, then. David, I believe you have some lectures to attend. If you will kindly loan me your wife for a few minutes, she and I have some things to discuss.” He motioned Debbie toward his office door and followed her in, closing the door behind.
It wasn’t until years later that Debbie told me what happened. Levy began by thanking her for coming in on such short notice, then said: “I asked you to come here because I want to talk to you about David. Please don’t be alarmed; this has been standard procedure for some time now. Our psychologists feel it’s important to let the family know exactly what is going on with the service member and what might happen to him.”
“Please do tell me what could happen to my service member, Mr. Levy.”
“Yes, I’m sorry. I’m trying to find the proper words—”
Debbie interrupted, smiling politely. “I assure you, the proper words in this case will be the truth about what my husband is involved in and what might potentially happen to him. Please continue.”
“I see. Well, then. I’ll be blunt. What we do here is select and train people in a very unusual intelligence-collection method. We call our staff viewers. The training usually takes anywhere from twelve to eighteen months, but I believe that David will become operational much sooner. He is doing remarkably well.” Levy paused and looked away. “The training is rigorous, and the emotional makeup of those being trained is very fragile. So I’m constantly on the prowl for variables in the trainee’s day-to-day routine that might make the training more difficult or perhaps more dangerous. I’m aware of your husband’s frequent nightmares. While they present no immediate cause for alarm, I want you to know that I believe they eventually will.”
“In what way?”
“First, I want you to understand that David promises to be one of the very best viewers we’ve ever produced. But he is extremely vulnerable to outside influences.”
“You’re talking about me, aren’t you?”
“Yes—but please don’t be offended; that’s not my purpose in bringing you here. It is also not the only thing I’m concerned about. I think that the visions David is having suggest that many of the conduits normally left closed at birth have been damaged in some way. They have been forced open and are not reclosable. While that will make him a natural and excellent remote viewer, he will also be operating in a way, and in a world, very foreign to him. David is not what I would call the usual remote-viewing personality. He is accepting of the training, but very confused about the visions. I think he believes that we will make them stop. I’m afraid the opposite is true. The more capable a viewer he becomes, the more frequent his contact with the ether will b
e, and the more chances for spillover through the ‘conduits.’”
“What you are telling me is that he runs the risk of not being able to tell where reality stops and the ether begins.”
“Exactly; you’re very astute. Now, this curse is also a blessing.”
“I tend to think of it as a curse.”
“Well, that is true only if you limit David by the usual definition of normality. He is an exceptional human being; he will only become more exceptional. If he has your understanding, and if you help him establish and keep a solid belief structure, then I think we can minimize the negative impact. However, if he doesn’t have your support, I would fear—I’d expect—the worst.”
“I have to be honest, Mr. Levy: I don’t want him here at all. I want him to get professional help at a hospital, with doctors who know what to do for someone like him.”
Levy leaned forward. “I’ll tell you what the doctors will do. They will very carefully document his descriptions of the visions, perhaps even ask him to draw sketches. They will put him through some simple tests. They will classify him as delusional, maybe even psychotic. And then they will prescribe all sorts of drugs. They will want to control his visions with a chemical straitjacket. They will not be understanding; they will not care; and his career will be over. The best you could hope for would be a medical discharge for psychological disability. Not a very fitting end to an otherwise exceptional career, is it?”
“Maybe that’s not what they’d do! Maybe they’d find a cure for what happened to him. The bullet must have caused some damage. Maybe they can find it and correct it.”
“Mrs. Morehouse, you’re being far too optimistic. When it comes to the psychology of its soldiers, the army is downright archaic. They won’t understand what is wrong with David, because there’s nothing visibly wrong with him. We gave him a CAT scan at Bethesda three weeks ago; there is nothing medically wrong with him. They can’t cut into his brain and take something out, or move something over and stitch it up again. Please try to understand what I’m telling you.”
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