The Traveler

37

When Michael was growing up on the road he had an automatic response to his mother’s wild stories and Gabriel’s impractical schemes for making money. It’s time to go to Reality Town, he told them, which meant that someone in the family had to be objective about their problems. Michael considered himself to be the Mayor of Reality Town-not a pleasant location, perhaps, but at least you knew where you stood.

Living at the research center, he found it difficult to be objective. There was no question that he was a prisoner. Even if he discovered a way to get out of his locked room, the security guards would never let him stroll through the gates and catch a bus to New York City. Perhaps he had lost his freedom-but that fact didn’t trouble him. For the first time in his life people seemed to be giving him the right amount of respect and deference.

Every Tuesday, Michael would join Kennard Nash for drinks and dinner in the oak-paneled office. The general dominated the conversation, explaining the hidden objectives behind what appeared to be random occurrences. One night Nash described the RFID chip hidden in American passports, and showed photographs of a device called a “skimmer” that could read passports from a distance of sixty-five feet. When the new technology was first proposed, a few experts had called for a “contact” passport that had to be pushed through a slot like a credit card, but the Brethren’s friends in the White House had insisted on the radio frequency chip.

“Is the information encrypted?” Michael asked.

“Of course not. That would make it difficult to share the technology with other governments.”

“But what if terrorists use the skimmers?”

“It would certainly make their job easier. Let’s say a tourist was walking through the marketplace in Cairo. A skimmer could read his passport-find out if he was American and if he had visited Israel. By the time this American reached the end of the street, an assassin could be stepping out of a nearby doorway.”

Michael sat for a moment and studied Nash’s bland smile. “None of this makes sense. The government says it wants to protect us, but it’s doing something that makes us more vulnerable.”

General Nash looked as if his favorite nephew had just made an innocent mistake. “Yes, it’s unfortunate. But you have to weigh the loss of a few lives against the power given to us by this new technology. This is the future, Michael. No one can stop it. In a few years, it won’t just be passports. Everyone will carry a Protective Link device that tracks them all the time.”

IT WAS DURING one of these weekly conversations that Nash mentioned what had happened to Gabriel. Apparently, Michael’s brother had been captured by a fanatical woman who worked for a terrorist group called the Harlequins. She had killed several people before they fled from Los Angeles.

“My staff is going to keep looking,” Nash said. “We don’t want anyone to harm your brother.”

“Let me know when you find him.”

“Of course.” Nash smeared some cream cheese and caviar onto a cracker and squeezed on a drop of lemon juice. “The reason I’m mentioning this is because the Harlequins might be training Gabriel to become a Traveler. If you both have the ability, there’s a possibility that you could meet in another realm. You’ll need to ask him the location of his physical body. Once we know that, we can rescue him.”

“Forget it,” Michael said. “Gabe would only go to another realm if he could ride there on a motorcycle. Maybe the Harlequins will realize that and let him go.”

ON THE MORNING of the experiment, Michael woke up early and took a shower, wearing a swimming cap so that the silver plates on the top of his skull wouldn’t get wet. He pulled on a T-shirt, drawstring pants, and rubber flip-flops. No breakfast this morning. Dr. Richardson didn’t think it was a good idea. Michael was sitting on the couch, listening to music, when Lawrence knocked softly on the door and entered the room. “The research team is ready,” he said. “It’s time.”

“And what if I decide not to do it?”

Lawrence looked startled. “That’s your choice, Michael. Obviously the Brethren wouldn’t be pleased by this decision. I’d have to call General Nash and-”

“Relax. I haven’t changed my mind.”

He pulled a knit wool cap over his shaved head and followed Lawrence out into the hallway. Two security men were there wearing their usual black neckties and navy blue blazers. They formed a sort of honor guard-one man in front, the other behind. The little group passed through a locked door to the courtyard.

Michael was surprised to see that everyone involved in the Crossover Project-secretaries, chemists, and computer programmers-had come out to watch him enter the Tomb. Although most of the staff didn’t understand the true nature of the Crossover Project, they had been told that it would help protect America from its enemies and that Michael was an important part of the plan.

He nodded slightly, like an athlete acknowledging the crowd, and sauntered across the courtyard to the Tomb. All these buildings had been constructed and all these people had been assembled for this moment. Bet it cost a lot of money, he thought. Bet it cost millions. Michael had always felt that he was special, destined for greatness, and now he was being treated like a movie star in a high-budget film that had only one role, a single face on the screen. If he really could travel to another realm, then they should give him their respect. It wasn’t luck that he was here. It was his birthright.

A STEEL DOOR slid open and they entered a vast, shadowy room. A glass-enclosed gallery, about twenty feet above the smooth concrete floor, ran around all four walls. Light from control panels and computer monitors glowed inside the gallery and Michael saw that several technicians were looking down at him. The air was cold and dry and he could hear a faint humming sound.

A steel surgical table with a small pillow for his head was in the middle of the room. Dr. Richardson stood near the table. The nurse and Dr. Lau were checking the monitoring equipment and the contents of a steel rack that held test tubes filled with different colored liquids. Eight wires connected to silver-colored electrode plates lay beside the little white pillow. The separate wires were spliced together into a thick black cable that slithered off the table and disappeared into the floor.

“You okay?” Lawrence asked.

“So far.”

Lawrence lightly touched Michael’s arm and remained near the door with the two security men. They were acting like he was going to run out of the building, jump over the wall, and hide in the forest. Michael walked to the center of the Tomb, pulled off his knit cap, and handed it to the nurse. Wearing only a T-shirt and the drawstring pants, he lay faceup on the table. The room was cold, but he felt ready for anything, like an athlete about to play an important game.

Richardson leaned over him and taped the eight sensor wires to the eight electrode plates on his skull. Now his brain was directly connected to the quantum computer, and the technicians up in the gallery could monitor his neurological activity. Richardson looked nervous, and Michael wished that the doctor’s face was concealed with a surgical mask. To hell with him. It wasn’t his brain that was skewered with little copper wires. It’s my life, thought Michael. My risk.

“Good luck,” Richardson said.

“Forget luck. Let’s just do it and see what happens.”

Richardson nodded and slipped on a radio headset so he could talk to the technicians in the gallery. He was responsible for Michael’s brain while Dr. Lau and the nurse were in charge of the rest of the body. They taped sensors to his chest and neck so they could track his vital signs. The nurse swabbed topical anesthetic on his arm, then slipped an intravenous needle through his skin. The needle was attached to a plastic tube and a saline solution began to drip into his veins.

“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 hands, 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.