“What about the man you saw?” Riley asked.
“I’m getting to him. There are paintings and posters on the wall, all reflecting combat of some sort. Heroes, villains, and victims are represented. The man I accessed was a soldier. I say ‘was’ because I got the distinct sense that he’s dead.”
“What gave you that perception?” said Riley.
“I don’t know. It’s just the way I felt when I looked at him. He was grubby-looking, wet and dirty; I could even smell him. But there wasn’t any heart, any soul—it was like looking at a movie. All the physical attributes of emotion are there, but when you look inside, there’s nothing. Just an empty frame.” I set my notes on the table and looked at Riley and Kathleen. “Okay, so where’s my feedback?”
Riley pulled the target folder from his stack of papers and slid it across the table. I snatched it and hurriedly opened the folder.
“A museum?” I was devastated. “You sent me to a Civil War museum? I thought you were giving me an operational target.” I threw the folder back on the table. “A goddamned museum!”
“Calm down,” Riley said. “We had to be sure you could handle something simple before we could give you anything difficult.”
“So why the hell didn’t you tell me that, instead of letting me believe I was ready to go operational?”
Kathleen answered me. “We wanted to see if thinking you were going operational would pose a problem for you. I’m sorry for the deception, but we had to know.”
As angry as I was, I had to agree. “I understand. It’s just a bit unsettling, not knowing when you’re pulling a fast one on me.”
“It had to be done. I’m sorry,” said Mel.
“Okay. , : . Where to next?”
“Before you go anywhere, I want you to look at that target folder again,” Mel answered. “Don’t blow off good feedback just because the target wasn’t what you expected.” He tossed the folder back on my lap. “Open it and let’s see how good or bad you were.”
I opened the folder again and carefully analyzed it under the watchful eyes of my mentors. “Hmmm, pretty interesting.”
“Isn’t it?” said Riley. “Do you realize that you were in the target area seconds after taking the coordinates? And if that’s not enough for you, take a look at your findings. ‘A building,’ you said. Well, this museum certainly looks like a building to me. ‘With aspects of old and new,’ you said. Kathleen, does a museum have old things in it as well as new ones?”
“Yup!” She grinned.
“All right, I get the message.”
“Look, Dave,” Riley said, “you were on target almost instantly. You collected information that would have cracked the target wide open had this been an operational mission. You saw weapons where there were weapons. You accessed a Union soldier who’s been dead over a hundred years. You captured every critical aspect of the target. So what’s your bitch?”
I was embarrassed. “I apologize. I deserve whatever you guys hand out.”
Riley chirped, “I’d say you deserve a break today—like lunch at McDonald’s. My treat.”
“I thought you didn’t eat fast food.”
“Well, I’m making an exception today. Kathleen, you coming?”
“No, you two go ahead. I’m brown-bagging it.”
“Yeah, and you’ll live longer than the two of us because of it.”
After lunch Riley promised to send me on a real operational target. I took my position in the chair and hooked into the control panel to begin the cool-down process. I emptied my mind and slowed my pulse to about thirty-two beats per minute. This time without prompting from Riley, I picked up the pen, ready to receive the coordinates. I called them out as I wrote them. And as I recorded the final digit my right hand lurched, forming a quick, roughly circular ideogram.
“Good; now decode it,” came Riley’s comforting voice.
I touched the ideogram with the pen; my physical body slumped in the chair and I “separated” again. I found myself spread-eagled, spinning into the stars. This time I felt better about what was happening. As I righted myself, the lights of the stars blurred into horizontal streaks. I felt charged with electricity; my skin crawled and tingled, and my phantom body grew cold as ice.
I could feel my limbs, and my inclination was to rub them to get some life and warmth back into them; but there was nothing physical to rub. I felt myself rising higher and higher, and I closed my eyes to absorb the sensation. Suddenly, I stopped moving upward. I felt myself casually turning to the left as though I were doing a cartwheel, and then I began plummeting down the tunnel of light. I accelerated toward the target, faster and faster. The silence of the ether grew to a huge roar, as if I had stuck my head outside a jet in flight. I tried to cover my ears, but I was still unable to manage my limbs. When I finally opened my eyes, I saw myself falling toward the strange light again and I braced for the impact. I felt the light puff-of-air sensation, followed by the immediate silence. I was there.
“I can’t move! I can’t move! It’s like I’m stuck in molasses,” I cried. The sensation was stifling; I was being held in position by something I couldn’t see.
“Dave, calm down and describe what you see. Do you know where you are?”
I began coughing, choking, and flailing my arms about. I threw my head back, gasping for air and freedom; I felt as if I were fighting for my life. The pen fell from my hand.
“David! David! Get some height. Raise yourself above the target, David. Raise yourself!” I could hear Mel shouting and I struggled to comply. Gasping for air, coughing, I pitched backward in the viewing chair and sucked in a long, rasping breath, like a diver who’s made an emergency ascent. I was filled with fear, my hands were balled into fists, and I was wringing wet. I tried to regain my composure. “What … happened?”
I think Mel knew what had happened, but first he had to stabilize me and get me to describe what I was seeing.
“Dave, I need you to tell me what you see. You need to get control, shake it off, and get back to the mission.”
I sensed the confidence in his firm tone. I gathered myself and tried to focus on the target. In what seemed only a few minutes I was calm enough to begin talking again.
“Uh”—I swallowed hard—“I see a glassy surface below me.”
“Glassy, as in flat and smooth?” Riley asked.
“No; it’s smooth and flat, but there’s some texture to the surface.”
“How big is it?”
I turned in a slow circle above the plane. “It reaches as far as I can see in every direction, but it’s hard to tell, because there’s a fog or mist blocking my view.”
“About how far can you see?”
“Oh, I guess about two, maybe three hundred meters.”
“Smell the air, Dave, and tell me what you smell.”
I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. “It smells like the sea, just like the sea!”
Riley sounded relieved. “Let’s get back to the mission. What you’re seeing is not the target; you need to find the target.”
I closed my eyes and “listened” for anything, any perception, that might lead me to the target. Somewhere off in the haze I felt a vibration. Its pitch stayed constant, reverberating in my head.
“I feel a vibration, and I think I can find the source.”
“Good. Move there now.”
The vibration grew louder and more intense with each passing second. I stopped for a moment to get a better bearing, hovering a few feet above the glassy surface and listening. The sound and vibration increased. I turned from side to side, my eyes still closed, straining to get a bearing on the source. The vibration rapidly grew so intense that it shook my entire body.
Later, Mel told me he saw my hands shaking on the viewing table.
The sound grew to a roar, and I opened my eyes to see a dark mountain of steel coming at me. It hit me head on. I winced, but my phantom body passed through the steel. Reeling but uninjured, I hurled myself at the obj
ect, trying to catch it. In a few seconds, I was matching its speed, flying a hundred or so feet above it. It was obscured by the haze, so I moved in for a closer look.
“I see a large metal object moving quickly across the glassy surface.”
“Tell me about it.” .
“Uh, it has an odd shape, angular on one end, and rounded on the other. The rounded end is the front, or, at least that’s the direction it’s moving in. The object is covered in boxes, tubes, and the like … let’s see … and it’s got two major features that I can see.”
“What are they?” Riley asked.
“There is a large glass-covered box in the center of the object, toward the rounded end. I think it has some control feature. And on the square end there are one, two, three cylinders about five or six yards long. There is some sort of force coming from them, but I can’t make it out—I I mean, I can’t see what it is. It’s invisible to me.”
“Can you tell me how fast the object’s moving?”
“I can’t tell. I don’t know how to gauge it.”
“Guess.” .
“Hmm … I’d guess about forty to maybe fifty miles per hour.”
“Okay, I want you to come back now. Break contact and come home.”
“On my way!”
It took several minutes to get back. This time the effects of the session were less severe, though I felt weak and had trouble focusing, as if I were still attached to the target in some way. I kept crossing the threshold, passing in and out of the ether without any control over the process. After a while this symptom passed, but I was to experience it after every viewing session. I learned that if viewers worked more than twice in a day, we had to be driven home. We weren’t fit to drive ourselves; the chance that we would slip back into the ether was too great.
Riley went into the monitor’s room and talked with Kathleen, returning to the viewing room just as I was getting coherent.
“Stay in here and work on your summary; as soon as you’re ready, come into the garden room. Kathleen and I will be in there waiting, okay?”
“Sure.”
“You doing all right?”
“I feel a bit weak, that’s all. I’ll be okay in a minute or two.”
Riley left the room and met Kathleen in the hall. I could hear them talking.
“So, what did you think?” asked Riley.
“He’s fast, first of all. But that’s not where it stops; he’s accurate, as well.”
The two walked into the viewing room; I was just standing up from the table.
“Go ahead and get started on your summary,” Riley said. “You can use the garden room and we’ll join you in a few minutes.”
“Wait a damned minute. You guys are walking around here talking about me like I wasn’t even in the building. Well, I am. And if you’re going to talk about me, have the decency to include me. Now, what did I do wrong?”
“Okay,” Riley said, “you didn’t do anything wrong. I just wanted Kathleen to see what you left us on the table here. Look on the table there in front of Dave.” He pointed to several small pools of liquid on the table. I’d coughed them up when I was choking early in the session.
“What is it?” Kathleen asked, keeping her hands in her pockets, but bending to get a closer look.
Riley looked at me. “Where do you think you landed at first? Don’t think about it too much, just call it, tell us what it was like.”
“Well, I couldn’t breathe, there was a lot of pressure, and the environment around me was thick and restrictive. When you told me to move upward out of it, I did, and I could breathe and move.”
“Yeah, but it wasn’t that simple, was it? You coughed and choked on the thick stuff. You couldn’t breathe for a reason. What was it?”
I looked at Kathleen, but she stared at me blankly. “I don’t know. Honestly, I don’t know.”
“You landed underwater, and you started choking. You were spitting this stuff out like a drowning man. It was unbelievable!” .
“That’s ridiculous. I wasn’t really in the water!”
“No, you weren’t really in the water. But your physical body will manifest certain reactions to what your phantom body is experiencing in the target area. That’s part of bilocation, and you’re catching on to it very quickly, which is great. But the downside is you don’t have enough experience to understand it, react to it, and deal with it quickly; and that can be dangerous.”
I stuck my finger into a pool of liquid and smelled it. “It’s not seawater?” .
“No, it isn’t,” Riley said. “But it’s liquid that came from you, and that’s enough.”
Kathleen said nothing. She gave the liquid another close look and then followed Riley into the garden room.
In a few minutes I joined the two of them with my notes and sketches.
Riley began. “So! Tell us what you saw.”
I laughed nervously. “Well, I tasted more than I saw at first. And it was pretty scary coughing it up. I understand that I was in some sort of water, but I don’t have any idea where.” -
“The Baltic Sea,” Kathleen said.
“Really?”
“Really. Now tell us about the object.”
“Well, it was constructed mostly of metal. It was largely gray, although there was a good deal of black as well. I was fascinated by the three cylinders at the square end of the thing. They were the source of the vibration I reported, and appeared to be a power cell or propulsion device of sorts.”
“Were there people on this object?” Riley asked.
“I didn’t see any, but then I didn’t look for them. I kept my distance, pretty much.”
“You mentioned a box, with glass—do you remember?” Riley asked.
“Yes … yes, I do. I remember feeling that it had something to do with controlling the object. I think if there were people on this thing that’s where they’d be.”
“Can this object turn or maneuver in any way?” Riley interjected. “Can it move on any kind of surface, or is it limited to what you saw?”
“I didn’t see it do anything but travel in a straight line. But for some reason, I’m certain that it can do just about whatever it wants. It can travel over all kinds of terrain if necessary, but it’s most at home where I saw it.”
“You mean on water.”
“Yeah, on water. Okay, what is it?” I asked.
“You tell me.” Riley handed me the target folder.
I gawked in amazement at its contents. “Damn! So, that’s what it was.”
In my hand was an intelligence photograph of a Soviet Pomornik-class air-cushioned landing craft, fifty-seven meters long with a 350-ton displacement. In the photograph the ship glided along the surface of the water on a cushion of air, powered by three huge encased fans mounted on the rear.
I could only think of one thing to say: “Fascinating!”
“Yeah, fascinating,” Riley and Kathleen said in tandem. Riley smiled and shook his head. “I take it back. I told everybody you were a dumb-ass infantryman and I was having to shove this stuff down your throat with a pitchfork. But I’m beginning to think you might be catching on. This is good.”
I didn’t know whether to be flattered or insulted. “So when do I get to give the lectures?”
“Oh, not long. Maybe in five or ten years.”
We all laughed and headed for the office. I needed a good night’s sleep.
FlVE
THE CHANGELING
My next mission time was posted on the assignment board, with a huge red “T” beside my name. Another training target, I thought. Someday it won’t be. Kathleen and I entered the viewing room and started to hook up all the monitoring apparatus.
I’d been in the unit for eight months now, and I’d graduated from coordinate remote viewing a few weeks ago. That meant I was no longer required to sit in a viewing chair, or take the coordinates sitting up, or produce an ideogram. For extended remote viewing, ERV, all I did was lie on a specially designed platform
bed, count down, and make the separation into the ether. I was still hooked up, and still monitored by Kathleen in the room as well as by the audio and video monitor.
ERV technique was to place the tasking sheet on the small table next to the platform. I would look at the tasking sheet, focus on the encrypted coordinates, and then lie back, adjust the lighting, and go. With ERV, I could stay in the ether a good deal longer than under coordinate remote viewing conditions. Some of the viewers, like Mel and even Kathleen, preferred the discipline of the CRV protocols, but I became attached to the free-form process of ERV; once I had made the switch, under Levy’s tutelage, I never went back.
Adjusting her own light, Kathleen took up her position at the desk overlooking the platform I’d call home for the next hour and a half. I looked at my tasking coordinates a final time: “Coordinates seven eight five six four, nine three four five two; describe the target and any significant events.” Within minutes I was in the ether and on my way to the target. Paul Posner monitored the changes in my physical body which indicated to him that the separation was complete.
“He’s gone,” he said.
“I know.” Kathleen had been with me so often that she could tell by my breathing rate when I was gone.
I made the long fall down the tube of light and passed through the membrane into the target area. I never got used to the sickening feeling of the descent; no matter how many times I did it, it was like making a night parachute drop with combat equipment. Your heart jumps into your mouth every time you step out of the aircraft and into the empty night.
I slowed to a stop some feet from a cold stone wall. Righting myself, I studied the rough granite and lines of mortar. Grass grew up against the wall, which stretched some hundred feet to my right. The surroundings were barren and drab, the air cold and damp. Kathleen interrupted my absorption with the place.
“Where are you?”
“I have no idea. It’s cold and damp, and very lonely … . I feel very lonely here.”
“What are you looking at right now?”
I turned slowly, surveying all that was around me, describing it to Kathleen as it came into view. “I see a large stone wall, maybe a hundred feet long. The grass is poorly kept, and the ground beneath me is wet and spongy-looking; there are large patches of muddy ground as well. I see a small but very old stand of trees in the distance. The bark of the trees is dark and the leaves sparse.”
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