“I do.” Debbie’s eyes filled with tears. “I don’t know what to do anymore. I have no options. All I can do is hope that you give him the tools to live with this thing. That’s all I have. They took my husband from me, and I have no one to call upon, no one to help me.”
“I’ll help you.”
“No! No, Mr. Levy, I beg to differ. You are not helping me. What you are doing is using my husband’s sickness to your advantage. I can’t say I fault you for it, but I’ll allow you to do it only because I haven’t any recourse. I’m against a wall in a very small box, so you can use David and I’ll back you up. But don’t you ever expect me to thank you for it. Good day, Mr. Levy.”
Debbie stormed out without speaking to anyone else. I was already in the other building with Mel. Over the next two years Levy never mentioned the meeting to me; when I asked, he avoided the issue. I didn’t find out what happened that day until Debbie told me, in June of 1993.
“I want to introduce you to the concept of time,” Riley began. I was distracted, wondering how Debbie was faring with Levy. “Don’t worry about Debbie,” he snapped. “She’s a big girl and she can take care of herself. You pay attention, okay?”
“Sorry.” How the hell does he know what I’m thinking all the time?
“Connelly Wilson—who’s dead, by the way—and Doctor Michael Rendell, an experimental laser physicist at Stanford Research Institute … Remember him? We talked about him several weeks ago.”
“He was one of the first researchers, along with Dr. Harold Puthoff and some others.”
“That’s right. Well, the pair did some experimental work on time travel from a viewer’s perspective. They weren’t interested in actual travel, only in the ability of the viewer to project himself forward and backward along the time-space continuum. I want you to think of this continuum for a moment as linear. It isn’t, really, but we’re not going into theory. So just think of it as linear, like—”
“A fire hose?”
“Okay, like a fire hose. There are three critical points relevant to the viewer: past, present, and future time. Past time is easy; it’s locked in and doesn’t change. When you travel backward in time to a designated target, you are viewing that target as you would a snapshot. You can select any place, person, thing, or event connected to that snapshot, and view it. Everything about that instant in time will remain, infinitely. Every emotion, pain, thought, personality, horror, event, death—everything remains. Viewing the past is like opening an encyclopedia of the period, including all the relevant intangibles and aesthetics. A well-trained viewer can experience pain, temperature, everything. Can suck it right out.
“Present time is locked, too: you cannot change it; you can only experience it.” He paused. “Well, Lyn is heading up some research on influencing present time, but you needn’t concern yourself with that for now.
“Rendell and Wilson were experimenting with future time. They were convinced that Wilson could move forward in time to view events that had not yet occurred. Rendell asked him to explore the probability of a future event, and Wilson did that with a high degree of accuracy.”
“Okay, hold on. Look, I know we haven’t talked about viewing into the future, but since you brought it up—well, I don’t doubt what you’re telling me. But I don’t understand how he could view into the future with any degree of accuracy.”
Riley gave me a sidelong look. “What do you mean, ‘with any degree of accuracy’?”
“I mean just that—accuracy! How can you look into the future with any accuracy? I don’t see how results could be valid.”
“I still don’t see your point,” Riley said, taking a seat.
“I’m sorry, I don’t have the vocabulary for this. Let me see if I can find another way to put it.” I thought for a moment. “All right: as I understand it, when we tap into the unconscious mind, we are, in a sense, tapping into the time-space continuum; right so far?”
“So far, yes.”
“Then looking into the future means identifying a point in time, somewhere along this continuum, right?”
“Still right.”
I went to the chalkboard and drew a straight horizontal line across it. “Okay, this represents time, all right?” Placing a dot on the line’s far left, I labeled it “A.” “This represents present time.” Mel nodded. “So, if I remote-view a future event, that means I’m accessing a point somewhere out here.” I placed a dot halfway along the line, to the right of “A,” and labeled it “B.” “Let’s say this represents that point in future time.”
“Go on.”
“Well, the future isn’t locked, is it? Doesn’t it fluctuate in accordance with the variables that affect it?”
“No, it isn’t locked, but we can still see forward in time.”
“But the future is directly tied to countless variables. Wilson may have seen accurately into the future, but I submit that that was an aberration.”
“Why?”
“Because there must be too many opportunities for events to be skewed between ‘A’ and ‘B.’ In the time it takes one of us to write up a report about what we saw out there, the event we were looking at could change a million times.”
Riley sat in his chair frowning in thought. “So if I asked you, as a viewer, to tell me if there would be an assassination attempt on the life of the President next month, and you said yes—then I should pay no attention to it?”
I sighed. “What I’m saying is that it’s a fifty-fifty chance that you’ll be right. You might as well flip a coin. That’s why your garden-variety street and television psychic isn’t winning the lottery, isn’t protecting the President, because predicting the future is just guesswork.”
“It’s not a guess; they’re seeing into the future.”
“Without a doubt, yes, they are seeing into the future. But the data can’t be reliable! Too much happens between ‘A’ and ‘B.’ So if someone predicts an assassination attempt on the President, I say it changes nothing. The Secret Service still has to operate, every second, of every hour, of every day, as though an attempt were imminent. A remote viewer’s data or a psychic’s visions should change nothing.”
I could see that Riley wanted to get back to Rendell and Wilson, so I said, “Look, you’re the professor here, let’s get back to the lecture.”
Riley smiled. “Questioning theory is how we get better at what we do. Don’t ever stop questioning the method or the data; the day that happens, you might as well start writing science fiction novels, because that’s all you’ll get for a product. Well done!”
I don’t really know where my outburst came from; I just knew I was right. Viewers can’t accurately predict the future; they can only describe a snapshot in time, as yet unaffected by the events of life. Riley knew that, too; he’d just wanted to see if I’d figure it out. It was a test and, thank God, I passed.
My mind wandered for the rest of the afternoon, poring over the issues we’d discussed. Time travel had its limitations, and the science fiction writers were all wrong. It wasn’t like the movie Back to the Future; you couldn’t change past time to affect future time. The past was locked and the future was an untethered fire hose, rocking and swaying, constantly changing, infinite variables affecting it as time crept forward.
Weeks passed and the long hours of lecture rolled on. I never tired of hearing Mel talk. He would often anchor unusual ideas by tying them to American Indian lore or legend. He was the wisest man I’d ever met, and I was thankful for the opportunity to know him. I often wondered what my life would have been like had I passed him by and returned to the Rangers; but that wasn’t possible. I’d come to believe, more than ever, that I, like each of us, have a destiny. Mine had brought me to Sun Streak for a reason.
One night in June I awoke with a sharp pain at the base of my neck. Rubbing it, I stumbled out of the bed and into the hall; then something shot up the length of my spine, locking me in place, fixed and rigid. I was turned like a doll on a stick, looking
this way and that as the house filled with shadows and strange light.
I heard the children calling me, frightened by the lights and the presence in the hallway. Is it me they’re afraid of? I thought. Is it me? I decided to call out to quell their fears, but the voice of a beast left my mouth. The children screamed louder and louder, waking their mother. Debbie ran toward me, pulling on her house coat. She approached and horror filled her eyes. She screamed. A hand, not mine, came into view as if it were attached to me, an extension of me. It grabbed her by the throat; I watched helplessly as the beast I was a part of dragged her to the stairs and flung her to the bottom. Through foreign eyes I watched blood flow from her mouth and ears, forming a small pool beneath her head. Spitting and wheezing, she choked on the blood in her lungs as she lay there. Whatever had taken me over moved with me to the bottom of the stairs, floating effortlessly, like an apparition. Those hands grabbed Debbie’s neck and snapped it. The children wailed above me. My form moved again; it was growing in evil, and with each heartbeat I was becoming more a part of it. I entered Michael’s room and shook him by the throat, feeling his body grow limp and heavy in my hands. I dropped the child and turned to the screams of the others. Out of the bedroom and down the hall, homing in on the sound, I tasted what evil tasted and felt the power and hatred that drove it: the vileness of living flesh and the welcome feel of death. I clutched both living children in my hands and crushed them, dashing death to the floor, welcoming the silence and peace. The stillness and beauty of death and its light and song. I was at peace with my power. I understood the necessity to kill.
I sat up in bed, gasping for air. Debbie’s hands were on me.
“David! David, are you all right? It’s okay, you’re all right now. I’m here.”
I kept gasping for air, my throat closed off as if it had been clutched by the form in my hallucination. Drenched in sweat, I began to shiver. I could not speak, only gasp and moan at the horror and pain of what I’d done. My mind was clear and alert, chiming over and over: “You murdered your family … . You murdered your family … . You murdered your family!” In dismay and fear, I wept uncontrollably as Debbie held me; she too was weeping and crying out to God for help. I heard her pray aloud: “I command you in the name of Jesus Christ to depart. I command you in the name of Jesus Christ to depart!”
After what seemed like hours, I began to breathe more normally. Michael, Mariah, and Danielle had awakened; they came to our bedroom and stayed until dawn.
“Is Daddy going to be okay?” Mariah asked. “Did Daddy have a bad dream?”
“Yes, honey, he’ll be okay,” Debbie replied, still holding me and stroking my hair.
I lay there in shock, the images still clear in my mind as I relived each chilling second over and over. The children held my hands and helped their mother rub my head. They had never seen me cry before, and they didn’t quite know what to make of it.
We rested together for seven hours. Debbie didn’t let the children go to school, and she called in sick for me. By afternoon, I could speak.
“Why did you call the name of Christ?” I asked Debbie.
Tears fell from her eyes, and her lip quivered. “Because I was frightened, and that’s what I was taught to do whenever I was frightened. Why?”
I was covered in a blanket. I pulled it closer at the neck, clutching it from beneath. “I don’t know. I’ve just never heard you do it before, that’s all. It was strange. Did it help?”
Debbie looked at me, troubled. “Strange? You think calling on the name of the Lord is strange? David, have you forgotten everything you were taught in school, in church? What do you think was happening to you last night?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, you were flopping around like a rag doll, screaming and crying. I didn’t know what was happening to you, or where you were, but it didn’t matter: I needed some help. I believe that the Lord is there to help in times like that. That’s why I called his name, because I knew He’d be there to help. Don’t you know that?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know? You don’t know if you believe in Him any longer, is that it? He’s not current enough for you, all of a sudden? If that’s what’s happening, you are going to be lost. I don’t know what your life will become.”
“I’m not giving up on God—don’t exaggerate.”
“You disgust me!” Debbie cried. “I don’t know you any longer. You aren’t my husband. I don’t know what you are—but you aren’t my husband.”
I went to work the next day, still a bit shaken. I didn’t speak to anyone, but quietly made my way to my desk with a cup of coffee and tried to settle in to my lecture notes. Throughout the lectures I’d been preparing essays, as required by the training protocols. Each essay was reviewed by every operational member of the unit—that is, everyone but Judy Kessler, who was still in training. My work had passed the test and I was only a few short weeks, at most, from graduating into Stage One training.
“Ready for the day’s bombardment?” asked Riley, poking his head into my cubicle.
“Sure—you want me now?”
“Yup! But is something troubling you, buddy? You look a little peaked; maybe we should sit this one out, since you were sick yesterday.”
“No, I’m all right, really. I want to work. I’ll be there in a few minutes.”
“See you there.”
In the latrine, I splashed cold water on my face and stared at the stranger’s face in the mirror. Debbie was right; I was changing quickly, and perhaps not for the better. I made my way to the garden room where Mel was waiting.
“I have some good news,” he said. “Levy likes your progress in lecture. He wants to bump up your Stage One training. I figure you have about three more weeks of lecture, but we’ll start your first Stage One session next Monday. How’s that sound?”
“I can’t believe it—that’s terrific. Who’s going to be my trainer?”
“Kathleen. You’ll like her, she’s a neat girl.”
“Man, that’s great!” But the excitement left my face as I remembered what had happened two nights ago.
“There’s that look again,” Mel said. “What’s the matter? Is everything all right at home?”
“Yeah, everything’s fine.”
“Except?”
“Except that I had another hallucination the night before last. A terrible one!” My hands began to tremble. “Mel, in my vision I killed my entire family. What kind of man envisions that? I love my family more than life itself—how could I see myself killing them in cold blood?”
“Whoah.” Mel put his hand up to stop me. “I know you’re shaken up by this, but get a grip; there’s an explanation. You might not like it, but there is an explanation.”
“I’d sure like to know it. Debbie would sure like to know it.”
“Well, it’s not that simple. I’m not going to sit here and feed you the answer to the problem. I’m not certain I could, but even if I could, I wouldn’t. You’ll find it out for yourself eventually. All you have to do is hang in here until that time comes. Don’t start beating yourself up because of this. I know it scared the hell out of you, and you think you’re scum for even imagining it, but you aren’t. We’re going to drop this topic for now, but remember: you will soon find out that nothing in this world is as it seems. There are parallel worlds that touch and intersect with ours constantly, and there is a world of deceivers. You’re dealing with them now! Just chew on what I’ve said and forget about anything else for now. You have a long way to go. Okay?”
“Okay. Thanks for the counsel.” I was relieved to learn there was an explanation for all this, but I was frightened by the thought of an actual group or world of beings responsible for my illusions.
I could hardly contain myself through the weekend. It was difficult to stay emotionally in touch with Debbie; I wish I’d been able to share the excitement I felt, but she wasn’t ready to hear it yet. I went to work early on Monday.
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br /> When Mel arrived he came immediately to my desk with a cup of java. “Are you sure you want to do this? It’s not too late to turn back.”
“No way! After sitting through your boring lectures, you think I’m gonna miss the best part? When do we get started?”
“Well, I haven’t talked with Kathleen yet, but you’re on the board for Room Two at 0830 hours. That gives us about forty minutes to get you hooked up and ready.”
We walked over to the other building and Mel put the electrodes on my head. He took me to the CRV room and wired me into the monitor board. “I’ll be in the monitor’s room after Kathleen arrives. How you feeling, nervous?”
“Nervous as hell!” I replied. “Absolutely, nervous as hell.”
Kathleen arrived ten minutes before the start of the session. “I’m going to let you cool down for about ten minutes before I come back in. I’ll be in the monitor’s room with Mel; if you need me, just ring the call button. Any questions?”
“No, I don’t think so, at least not right now.”
“Good. Go ahead and cool down, I’ll be back in a few minutes. Oh, and good luck! You’ll do fine.”
I listened to one of the focus tapes I’d been given to help me relax. The tape carried both audible and subliminal messages; certain tonal frequencies on it were specifically designed to help merge the brainwaves of the left and right hemispheres of the brain. This helped the viewer to achieve an altered state. As I was cooling down, I could hear the tones in my biofeedback mechanism sounding the current wavelength of my brain. The target was theta wave; I was now functioning in beta.
Kathleen came in precisely ten minutes after she had left. “Adjust your chair for the session.”
“Christ!” I thought, I’ve been in here ten minutes and I’ve already screwed up. I fumbled with the adjustment handle for a moment, setting the chair in the position I thought I wanted. But as I squirmed in it, I concluded that I didn’t like it. “Goddamn it!” I exclaimed.
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