The Second Ship (18 page)

Chapter 37

“I hate to state the obvious,” Mark said, “but three people having exactly the same dream isn’t normal.”

The three were camped out in the Smythe living room, taking advantage of the privacy afforded by the twins’ parent’s absence.

“What was all that business about knowing what you’re becoming?” asked Mark.

“Sometimes dreams don’t make any sense,” said Heather.

“That wasn’t the feeling I got from this one.”

“Then why don’t you tell us what you think it means,” Heather snapped and immediately regretted her reaction.

Mark stood and began pacing slowly back and forth, reminding Heather of herself. “I don’t think the Rag Man guy is planting the dreams. It seems more likely that Heather’s subconscious mind is worried about what is happening to her.”

Jennifer’s eyes widened. “What do you mean, Heather’s subconscious mind? We were all having the dream.”

Mark stared out into the backyard. “Maybe.”

“There’s no maybe to it,” Heather replied.

Mark turned to look into her eyes. “I think we may be suffering from a residual link with the headsets.”

“Can’t be,” said Jennifer. “That link is a direct tie into our brains. It only works when we have the headsets on.”

“Do we know that?”

“There’s no way the computer has this kind of range.”

“Really? How much range do we have with our little Quantum Twin device?” Mark asked.

“It just doesn’t feel like that is the cause,” said Heather. “Have either of you accessed the computer from here? I can’t.”

“Well,” said Jennifer, “I hope it was a freak event. I don’t really want to be sharing your weirdo dreams.”

“Speaking of the QT device,” said Heather, quickly changing subjects. “Since we haven’t been back to the ship, we have no idea what else it may have recorded.”

“I’m not sure I want to know,” said Jennifer. “Even if it turns out to be nothing, they could lock us all up for the spying.”

Mark resumed his seat in the recliner, his white-and-red Nike sneakers dangling over the arm. “Yes. But two life terms in prison isn’t a whole lot worse than one.”

Jennifer’s mouth tightened, but she said nothing.

“Anyway,” Mark continued, “we’re all becoming something more than we were, no matter what the dream means. We think it’s because the headsets synchronized our brains, but don’t have any idea what new side effects might appear.”

Mark rose to his feet. “I didn’t want to show you guys this, but I think it’s time. Follow me.”

Heather and Jennifer glanced nervously at each other, but followed him up the stairs and into his room. It had been rearranged since the last time Heather visited. The bed and dresser were pushed all the way against one wall to accommodate a weight bench.

The bench took up most of the room. An Olympic weight bar, loaded with two hundred and fifty pounds of weight, rested across hooks at the top of the bench. Another stack of weights lay on the floor nearby.

“Wow,” said Heather. “You’re benching two hundred and fifty pounds?”

Mark’s eyes narrowed. “That’s just for show.”

Mark moved over to the bar, adding two additional fifty-pound plates to each end and then lay down on the bench beneath the elevated bar. Without hesitation, he lifted the bar, pumping it steadily up and down. The weight caused the ends of the bar to droop slightly.

Heather’s eyes bulged. “Oh my God! Mark! That’s four hundred and fifty pounds.”

“Four seventy-five, counting the bar,” Mark said, continuing to evenly knock out repetitions. After several more seconds, he stopped, setting the bar back in its rest. “I could lift more, but these are all the weights we own.”

Jennifer finally found her voice. “But how is that possible? What’s your max lift?”

“That’s just it,” said Mark. “I don’t know. I guess the neural tune-up enables near perfect synchronization of my muscles, making them easier to train and way more efficient. Either that or we’re wrong about our DNA not being affected.”

Thoughts raced through Heather’s head so rapidly that her headache began to worsen. “You could hurt someone, even accidentally.”

Mark sat up. “I’ve been thinking about that. I don’t think so. My reflexes are just too good. So long as I control my temper, no problem.”

Heather’s eyebrows shot up. “So long as you control your temper?”

“We need to get back out to the ship,” said Jennifer. “We have to know what’s happening to us.”

“I don’t get how that’ll help,” said Heather.

“Don’t you see? The medical lab. I think I can figure out how to use that equipment, at least at a rudimentary level, so that we can get some physical readouts and measurements. Maybe there will be some clue indicating the extent of the changes going on in our brains and bodies.”

“Worth a try,” said Mark. “We can, at least, check on the QT device to see if we have any more recordings of Stephenson.”

Heather moved toward the door. “Well, if we’re going, it better be soon. It’s almost noon. I’ll tell mom we’re going out biking. Then I’ll meet you out front.”

Stepping outside into the cold gray light that filtered through the clouds, conditions hardly seemed favorable for a bike ride. Nevertheless, anticipation propelled her onward. As Heather opened her front door, she saw her mother sitting on the couch, her entire attention fixed on the television, a rare scene for the ever-busy Anna McFarland.

Glancing up, Heather’s mother beckoned Heather with her hand. “Sweetie, come watch. This is important.”

By the time she had sat with her mom for five minutes, Heather had a lump in her throat from the steady stream of breaking news. A new power facility had been brought online at the Palo Verde Nuclear Power Plant in Arizona, the first commercial usage of the Rho Project cold fusion technology.

This first venture was being housed in a building at the Palo Verde facility. The reaction had been initiated without problem, and the power being produced already surpassed that of the rest of the plant.

Scientists and industry leaders from around the world were praising the project as the first truly “green” commercial energy project that had the potential to satisfy most of the world's energy needs.

In related stories, rioting had broken out in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, as well as in the Saudi cities of Mecca, Medina, and Daharan. The royal family had been deposed in a violent religious coup, many of them killed. The king himself had barely escaped with the help of US Special Forces. All US military facilities in the kingdom were on a full state of alert with fighting reported outside the US airbase near Riyadh.

A statement from the Iranian government praising the overthrow of the Saudi royal family called for the immediate withdrawal of all US forces from the Middle East. The statement also condemned the new cold fusion technology as the “hot spawn of the devil,” an evil assault on Allah's people around the world, and threatened an immediate cutoff of oil to all countries pursuing the technology.

An emergency meeting of OPEC ministers in Qatar was scheduled for Monday, to discuss a unified response to these events.

In the meantime, the United States armed forces around the world had been placed on a state of high alert. The president had just issued a stern warning that the US government and its allies would neither permit nor tolerate an attack on its deployed forces or on the oil facilities in Saudi Arabia, Iraq, or Kuwait.

Despite her pounding heart, Heather maintained an exterior calm. “Wow. That sounds really bad.”

“Bad? Heather, this is terrible. I don’t mean cold fusion—that sounds great. But it sure is causing some very dangerous events around the world.”

“Well, I’m sure the government will handle it.” Heather rose from the couch. “Mom, if we’re done watching the news, do you mind if I go biking with Mark and Jen?”

Her mother raised her eyebrows, but smiled. “I guess it’s all right. But be home before dark.”

“Thanks.” Heather kissed her mother and headed toward the garage, grabbing her heavy coat off the peg by the door as she passed.

“What took you so long?” Mark asked as Heather wheeled her bike out of her garage. “Jen and I were about to come break you out.”

Heather took a deep breath, then swung her leg over her bike. As she stepped down hard on the pedal, spinning her rear tire, she breathed two words.

“It’s started.”

Chapter 38

Although Heather constantly checked her surroundings as she rode, she didn’t stop on the way out to the Second Ship. Time was short if they were going to make it back by dark, and they had a lot to do. Besides, for the time being, no crowds dogged Mark’s footsteps—possibly because of the embarrassing hallway incident, or maybe due to his intentionally reduced scoring in recent basketball games. Whatever the reason, Heather was thankful for the respite.

Only slight variations in grayness allowed her to see texture in the clouds that draped the sky, the air as still as death itself. While no wind was blowing, the speed of the bike whipped the cold air past her cheeks with enough force to make them tingle and to turn her feet into small blocks of ice inside her sneakers. Heather regretted having been so distracted that she had forgotten to change into some warmer shoes.

By the time they dropped off the bikes and finished their descent into the steep canyon, Heather’s circulation had returned to her lower extremities. Still, it felt good to climb up into the ship with its controlled temperature. As she slipped on the headset, feeling the wonderful relaxing pulses it generated, Heather realized just how much she had missed this place. Jennifer barely hesitated, a pleasant smile lighting her features as she led the way into the medical lab.

The doors snicked closed behind them as they entered the room. Heather relaxed her own mind, letting herself pick up the same computer imagery that Jennifer was calling up. The visuals changed rapidly as Jennifer focused first on one oddly shaped couch and then another, color patterns shifting and pulsing, great columns of symbols and figures cascading across her vision.

Jennifer settled quickly on one particular apparatus: a table that rose from a single pedestal that looked like it had been pulled from the floor while it was still molten and allowed to solidify into its smooth, oblong shape.

Jennifer sat on the edge of the table and then lay down. Immediately the table changed, flowing up and around her body in long tendrils that moved to gently encase her, the thousands of small tips looking like acupuncture needles, although they did not appear to penetrate Jennifer’s skin.

If Jennifer had not appeared so relaxed and at ease, Heather was sure panic would have overwhelmed her. A quick glance at Mark’s tight face indicated he was considerably less comfortable with what was happening than was his twin sister.

A perfect bubble appeared in the air above Jennifer’s body, as big as a large beach ball, colors shifting and pulsing along its surface, symbols and numbers scrolling around the top. Inside the bubble, three-dimensional graphical displays rose and fell in a familiar rhythm.

Pulse. Suddenly Heather began to recognize what she was seeing. One of the displays corresponded to measurement of Jennifer’s pulse while another showed a clear picture of her vascular system, every small vein showing its blood flow in a small, rotating hologram of her body, the heart pulsing with a steady and powerful beat.

In another section of the beach ball's interior, a clear hologram of Jennifer’s brain activity drew Heather’s attention. The image of the brain looked like a lumpy clear jellyfish, its insides lit with a lightning storm of electrical pulses. As Heather concentrated, she found she could view it from any angle, zooming in and out at will.

As fascinated as she was, something troubled her. They had assumed that because of each of their natural preferences, the neural activity in different parts of each of their brains would be enhanced more than others, but Jennifer’s brain looked like the whole thing was on fire. There was no indication of a preferentially influenced area.

“Jen? Can you make it let you up?”

Heather gasped as Jennifer rolled her head to look at Heather, something that should have impaled her on the sharp tendrils fastened to her face and head. Instead, the tentacles moved with her, perfectly maintaining their needle-point touches, but doing no damage to her delicate skin.

Jennifer swung to a seated position and hopped down from the table, the tentacles melting back into the tabletop as she moved.

“That felt marvelous,” said Jennifer, stretching her arms high overhead.

“My turn,” said Mark, hopping onto the tabletop without waiting for a response from Heather.

Once again, as Mark lay back, the table flowed like a living creature, thousands upon thousands of clear, little pinpoint tentacles crawling over his body. Mark looked like a refugee from a horror movie as each pinpoint found the spot it was looking for. Dozens of the things even attached directly to his eyeballs, while others ran inside his nostrils and ears. Heather had not noticed this with Jennifer, but playing back the previous scene in her mind, she realized that Jennifer had been attached in exactly the same way.

The points had even penetrated Jennifer’s clothing, so fine and thin that they had left no mark.

Once more Heather focused on the hologram display of the brain activity. Mark’s brain showed the same raging electrical activity that Jennifer’s had, all centers active at the same level—no favorites, no laggards. Something was wildly wrong with her theory on how they were being affected. By what she was seeing, they should all be displaying the same types of enhancements instead of specialized effects.

“This is magnificent,” Mark said. “It’s perfect biofeedback.”

His speech and the accompanying grin produced a reaction that looked completely alien as the hundreds of needles attached to his face moved, forming a wave in the sea of clear tentacles.

“Watch this.” Mark breathed in deeply and then exhaled slowly, repeating the technique again and again.

As Heather watched, the display of his vascular system changed, the heartbeat slowing steadily. The count in her brain shifted, forty beats per minute, thirty-three, twenty-nine, twenty-four, eighteen, fifteen, thirteen.

“Mark, stop it!”

Jennifer’s panicked voice brought a slow smile to his lips as the count began to rise steadily to a normal resting heart rate. He suddenly sat up and leaped off the table, the tentacles melting away as if they had no more substance than air.

Heather did not know how long she had not been breathing, but by the size of the gulping breath she now took, she guessed that it had been a considerable time.

“Mark Smythe!” she exclaimed angrily. “If you pull something like that again without telling us first, I’m going to kill you myself.”

“Sorry about that,” Mark said, although his grin did not seem sorry at all. “It was just some of the meditations I’ve been practicing in my aikido. I got the idea that, with this kind of biofeedback, I could take it a lot farther than before. It felt wonderful.”

Jennifer continued to scowl at her brother. “Well it looked like you were dying. You scared me to death.”

Mark shrugged, turning toward Heather. “You want to give it a try?”

Heather was already up on the table. It felt like lying down on some sort of warm, soft gel. The tentacles flowed to embrace her, and at the spot where each tiny tip touched her skin, a warm glow spread outward in waves. It should have left goose bumps, it felt so wonderful.

My God, she thought. I’m never getting up. I just want to lie here and feel this good forever.

After a couple of minutes, she began refocusing on the displays above her. The sensation was odd. Despite the tentacles attached to her face and eyes, she could clearly see the bubble and its displays in her head. Just like Mark and Jennifer, Heather saw that her entire brain was lit up in an ongoing storm of electrical activity. While this wasn’t like any medical equipment on Earth, Heather had no doubt that none of them wanted to be hooked up to an electroencephalogram. Not if they didn’t want to freak out the entire hospital.

Heather stepped off the table feeling more rested and relaxed than ever before.

Mark glanced at his watch. “Much as I would love to stay and play around with this stuff, we have to get a move on. We barely have enough time to check the QT recording.”

The review of the recordings proved disappointing. While the QT device had captured some small snippets of activity, for the most part the devices on the model airplane had remained off. The lights in the room were not turned on often enough to keep the battery charged. This meant that all that had been recorded was a few minutes here and there of Dr. Stephenson typing at his computer.

As Jennifer and Mark reviewed the recording, mumbling in disgust at the lack of any useful data, Heather sat in one of the command couches exploring her headset connection with the central computer. She began working on something that fascinated her: physics.

Heather decided to start with the basic assumptions that girded all of modern physics, to see if she could communicate ideas that would generate understandable responses. Everything in humans’ modern understanding of the functioning of the universe eventually came back to the notion that energy is neither created nor destroyed, only changed from one form to another. Almost immediately the imagery she was seeing changed to one of a set of distant stars, accompanied by a very deep sense of wrongness.

The scene focused on a single star and then swept away from it, the color of the starlight shifting to red as she got farther away. This repeated itself with star after star, from multiple directions, over and over, faster and faster.

Every star shifted red the farther the observer was from the star. Okay. Nothing new there. The redshift was a well-known phenomenon and was explained by the theory that all stars were moving away from a central big bang, the first stars flung out the hardest and fastest. Of course, this caused the light coming from them to have a bigger Doppler effect, like the changing sound of a train’s horn as it approaches and then passes a stationary listener.

Again she felt the wrongness. A new sequence began, showing a single star, her perspective stepping away from it in all directions, and always yielding about the same redshift. Now that made no sense.

Another rapid shift in data, then another, then another. Heather gasped in shock, stunned to her very core. Energy was not conserved.

The bulk of the redshift was not caused by the Doppler effect. It was caused by a tiny fraction of the energy of the light waves leaking between the quantum grains of space-time into subspace. The farther light waves traveled outward from the source, the more energy leaked off into subspace, causing the wavelengths to shift toward the red end of the spectrum.

Ideas were spinning so fast in Heather’s head that she barely noticed Mark prodding her with his finger.

“Heather. We have to go. We’ll barely get home by dark, even if we pedal like hell.”

Reluctantly, Heather followed the Smythe twins back to the lower level and out of the cave. Her mind was still reeling with the incredible implications of her discovery as they spun their tires onto the dirt trail leading back toward home.

A sudden rush of cold air swept down from the high peaks above, stirring the branches of the thick brush lining the top of the canyon. From deep in that brush, the Rag Man watched them go.