“At least I’m not shaving it off, right?”
It was not actually uncomfortable to be wired up with electrodes, but Edwin’s inexpert fingers felt shivery on his scalp. Every now and then, being touched still brought the power snapping into unwelcome focus. But he didn’t mention his difficulties to Edwin.
“See? Isn’t that cool?” Edwin adjusted the colors on his computer monitor. “That’s you!”
To Rob they looked like eight ordinary sine waves snaking slowly across the screen. “What do other people’s look like?”
“Here’s some charts that came with. Let me adjust it down
here … “
Edwin fiddled with the equipment out of sight below, while Rob flipped through old charts. He had no idea what the various lines signified at all.
So far as he could tell his brain patterns on the screen were very similar.
“Okay,” Edwin said, re-emerging. “Now! Do some stuff.”
“Like what?”
“Oh—how about the invisibility thing?”
“Fine. You don’t see me.”
Edwin rubbed his chin, his eyes narrowed to a green glint. “Now I know empirically that you’re there in my chair,” he said. “I can see the electrodes, even. And it’s not that you’re actually transparent. But it’s hard to actually discern you somehow… Let me get a mirror. I’ve always wanted to test that.” He fetched a square mirror from the lab next door. “Now, how about that. I can’t see you here either.”
“Vision’s mainly in your head, you know. The photons hit the retina, the optic nerve carries the signal, but your brain does the signal processing.
It’s not that I’m invisible—I keep on telling you that. It’s that you, the viewer, don’t see me.”
“True. It might be fun to reverse it someday—try me on the EEG, while you
vanish.” Edwin scribbled notes on a pad of paper. “Do something else. Uh, no, not the remote control bit, that gives me the creeps. Something else.”
Rob watched the colored lines wiggle and change on the computer screen as he dropped the tarnhelm. So many of his tricks involved influencing another person—there weren’t that many that he did to himself. Ah, but how about a little voyage to inner space? “Watch,” he told Edwin. “This should be different.” And he let himself drop.
To his astonishment he found himself on the barren plain again. He had never come to the same place twice, but even though it was night he recognized his surroundings. It was very cold, the black wind cutting like a razor blade and kicking up irritating powdery grit. He looked up and recognized the stars, Orion and the Big Dipper. So this was an Earthly place! But a dull one. “What is this,” Rob grumbled, “a trailer before the main feature?” He reached, to tear the fake landscape away.
Right overhead out of the clear night sky came a crack of lightning. For one strobe-like second, the sizzle of light drove the darkness back. The thunderclap sent Rob diving flat into the dust, his hands over his ears.
Still his ears rang with it, and in the ringing were words: You had a hint, and you didn’t take it. Now you get an order. Come to Aqebin!
Rob felt the command pierce into him like a blade. This is what it’s like when I do it, he realized. Someone’s doing it to me. Instinctively he
fought back. Pulling an unwitting puppet’s string is one thing, he thought grimly. But I have teeth. This is my place, my head. Nobody’s bossing me here. Dust was thick on his tongue as he struggled against the intrusion.
Then he was out, free, on his feet again. The enforcing order was gone.
This is some automatic system, he thought. Somebody left me an e-mail message here. Somebody had the power to do that, to invade my sphere and hang up a paper landscape with a note on it. The realization stunned him.
He had to get back, back to ordinary life, to think about it. He blinked and he was there.
Not, disconcertingly, in Edwin’s desk chair, but on the floor. His feet were painfully cramped under the instrument cart, and his head was jammed up against a bookcase. A small dark face hung over his, frowning. “Dr.
Lal?” Rob asked, surprised.
“Good, you recognize me.” Her English was clipped, with a heavy Hindu accent. She folded up her stethoscope and sat back on her heels.
Behind her Edwin hovered holding a glass of water. “Here, bud, drink this.
Is that okay?” he asked the doctor.
She nodded, and they both watched like hawks as Rob sat up and sipped. His hands were trembling, and he wiped something thick off his mouth. He had thought it was dust, but red showed on his sleeve—blood. He had bitten through his tongue.
“A seizure of some kind, not a typical grand mal,” Dr. Lal said. “I am M.D., but not a neurologist. Your friend must see a good one, very soon. Show him or her that.” She nodded at the computer screen, where the colored lines now stood motionless. The electrodes had been jerked off his scalp and hung forlornly from their cables over the arm of the desk chair. “From the brain scan they can diagnose, you understand? Brain tumor, epilepsy—” She held her tiny hands wide, to show she didn’t know.
“You got it,” Edwin said fervently. “I’ll set up an appointment ASAP.”
“No!” Rob protested, alarmed.
Dr. Lal rolled her dark eyes eloquently and got up. “I’ll deal with him,”
Edwin promised. “Thank the Lord you were here!” He went out with her. Rob hauled himself to his feet and dropped into the desk chair again. He hurt all over. It had never hit him like this before. A gray gritty haze seemed to overlay the world.
Edwin came hurrying back. “I thought I was electrocuting you! But Dr. Lal said it wasn’t the apparatus. You have to see a doctor, Rob. Epilepsy is no joke. They’ve got the best in the world here—”
“I am not sick, Ed,” Rob said tiredly.
“I don’t want to debate this with you, Rob. I saw what I saw. There’s something definitely wrong, completely aside from the weirdness. You know we were all set to call 911 just now?”
Rob closed his eyes, sorely tempted to just command him to lay off. It would be so much easier than explaining, arguing, persuading. But the sharpened blade that had almost impaled him just now made him think. It was very unpleasant to be muscled like that, to be the bug on the dissection tray. Maybe he should just pull down the invisibility, walk out of Edwin’s life forever? But friends didn’t do that to each other … He opened his eyes. Edwin was picking his telephone receiver up. “Hey, don’t do that! I was just thinking!”
Edwin put the phone down. “You looked like you were zoning out on me again! Tell me the truth, Rob, please—how do you feel?”
“A little logy, but all right, okay? There’s nothing wrong with me physically, I’m sure of it. It was … a message.”
“You’re receiving messages. From UFOs, maybe.”
Irrational anger seized him. “Damn it, Ed, you do not have to participate in this. I only need one thing from you and then you can bail out.”
“And that is?” “That antique archaeological report, about the dig at Aqebin.”
Edwin slowly leaned forward and banged his forehead, gently, against the file cabinet. “Now that is so bizarre, it’s just like you. So it must make sense somehow. All right. You’re not ill. Explain it all to me.”
Rob rubbed a hand down his face, feeling the sticky blood in his short beard. “Let me wash first. And could we go have coffee or something? I need ballast.”
“Food! You’re right, that’s exactly what you need, nutrition!” Edwin leaped out of his chair. “Come on!”
It was close enough to dinner time that Edwin insisted they eat a proper meal at the cafeteria. “You can pull the wool over everyone else, but you can’t lie to me,” Edwin said. “You looked like hell warmed over before, but would you admit it? Noooo.”
Cleaned and fed, Rob had to agree. “It’s never been like that before.”
“What hasn’t?”
“The … the places I go
. I can’t explain the basic experience to you,
Ed. It’s like it’s not meant to be put into words. All I can tell you is how this time it was real different. In fact,” he added, struck by the
thought, “what did the EEG show?”
“I didn’t look,” Edwin confessed. “You began to convulse, and I forgot all about it. But it’s captured on disk.”
Rob sighed. “I went—in, to where I go when I do this, and there was a message waiting for me. It was like—like logging on to a computer net, and finding an e-mail in your box.”
Edwin nodded vehemently. “Stick with the net and the e-mail, and you got me. Let’s keep away from in, and the places you go, and the basic experience. You got an e-mail. What did it say?”
“It was in the same place that I got that inscription.”
“I remember you said back then that it was a message, too.”
“It was a hint,” Rob said grimly. “Today I got the message. It was, ‘Come to Aqebin.’ And it had muscle behind it.”
“Muscle? You mean—wait a minute …”
Rob sat back and waited to see what Edwin would conclude. He imagined the gears and precision wheels spinning in Edwin’s head, the trained intelligence, so different from his own thought processes, swinging around to bear on the problem.
“If someone can enforce a command like you can—and if they can use your bulletin board system—holy mike, Rob! There’s another specimen!”
Rob burst out laughing, rocking back in his chair and slapping his knee.
“And maybe this one won’t be so pernickety about dissection, huh?”
Edwin grinned. “You better make that will before you go. Are you going? Do you have to?”
“Whoever it was isn’t making me do it, if that’s what you mean. But I think I have to go find out. If there’s somebody else, someone who’s been through this before, I could learn so much, Ed. They’d be my equal in power, and with a lot more experience. Maybe they’ve figured out the control question. Maybe they know where it comes from. Even if I could learn the name of the weirdness, that would be progress.”
“You wouldn’t be alone any more,” Edwin said.
Rob looked at him. “I haven’t been, Ed. Not really. Not since I moved down here.”
“You know what I mean,” Edwin said, embarrassed. “I wonder why this other guy is in Asia. Or girl—can’t be sexist about it. With such a wide separation you can’t be sharing a microbe or a virus. You don’t have any
Russian ancestors, am I right? Have you ever traveled to Europe or the Middle East?”
“Went to the Virgin Islands on our honeymoon, that’s it. My folks have been Californians for three generations. Before that they came from Massachusetts, and before that, Ireland.”
“Then a genetic link isn’t very likely. Maybe a random mutation? You were right—we have to find that site report. Let’s not go off half-cocked on this. Let me ask around about the dig and the area, do the background research.”
“Wait a minute, Ed. What you mean, ‘we’? You don’t want to come, do you? Not to Kurdistan or wherever it was, in January.”
“Of course I want to come! I’ve been wanting to get to the bottom of this for months!”
Rob thought about it. If he traveled alone he could go faster, without tickets or passport in fact, like a ghost. What about Edwin’s job and family? Carina surely would not approve of his jauntering off like this. On the other hand Rob now knew the perils of becoming a ghost. Edwin was a smart and resourceful fellow, excellent in the planning phase, though he tended to collapse in a crunch. It would be fun, Rob realized, to travel with a friend.
Edwin rested his elbow on the table and leaned his chin on his hand. “I hate it when you do that piercing ice-blue stare,” he remarked. “I know you’re not rooting through my thought processes, but it looks like you are.”
“Sorry,” Rob said, glancing away. “No, I was just wondering if it was really a good idea for you to come. What about your book? Your research?”
“The manuscript’s gone to one of my co-authors for revision. And I can take some vacation. How long is this likely to take, anyway? A week?”
“Longer, I bet. It sounds pretty well off the beaten track.”
“A travel agent.” Edwin wrote it in his notebook. “Equipment. Boots.
Clothes. I know, let’s go shopping for you!”
“No toys,” Rob begged. “Let’s travel light!”
Of course they did not. Rob had to get a copy of his birth certificate by mail from California to apply for a passport, and then they both needed visas. All this took more than a month, and during that time Edwin contrived to gather an astounding amount of luggage. “All these things are essential,” he insisted. “You’ve never been to a primitive dig, Rob.
Believe me, sometimes Ziploc bags and paper towels are a life saver. I went with Carina to Chile once—thought I would die.”
“We’re not going to dig,” Rob argued. “We’re just going to visit. We’re tourists! We are not going to need case lots of paper goods.”
Then Edwin hauled Rob to his favorite outdoor equipment store. “Everything for him,” he told the clerk. “From the skin out, for outdoor winter work.
Boots, Polarfleece, thermals, parka, Thinsulate, everything.”
“Is this really necessary, Ed?” Rob pleaded.
“Do you want to turn into a popsicle? We’re going camping in Central Asia in March. Get real, Rob!”
“We’re not going to the North Pole,” Rob began, but then he subsided. It came to him that Edwin had been itching for weeks to get him into thoroughly weatherproof clothing—as if Rob might suddenly start sleeping on street corners again. How could he thwart such a paternal motive? So he meekly let them put him into a plaid flannel shirt, a green waterproof down parka like Edwin’s, Vibram-lugged hiking boots lined with both Gore-Tex and Thinsulate, and flannel-lined jeans. Dressed, he felt twenty pounds heavier. In the mirror he looked rugged and competent, a blond bearded lumberjack, ready for anything. “I’ll never be cold again,” he remarked.
“Polarfleece mittens,” Edwin muttered. “They’re warmer than gloves.
Gore-tex overmittens. Wool hat, wool hiking socks. Long underwear.” He piled these garments on the counter.
It was certainly different from shopping at the Salvation Army store. When Rob saw the grand total he blinked and looked again. Luckily he had thought to close out one of his savings accounts. “I can tell you where my next stop will be,” he remarked.
Edwin looked up from his own stack of minor purchases: a folding shovel, three cheap disposable button lights, some nylon webbing luggage straps, and a quartz-krypton 360-degree camping lantern that could be recharged from a car battery. “Yeah? Where are you going?”
“Atlantic City,” Rob said, and Edwin laughed.
CHAPTER 7
During that month Rob hustled as hard as he could on the Open Door Center’s front porch. Shingling a roof in January was so crazy that passersby stopped on the sidewalk to watch him. But once the crucial weather-flashing was installed he could relax. No water or ice could creep in between the house and the porch roof to loosen joists or rot wood. The electric hammer made installing the flooring fun and easy. He laid all the floor boards and ran the circular saw around the perimeter of the porch to trim them even.
“What’s the rush, dear?” Mrs. Ruppert asked, astonished at this efficiency.
She was always bringing him hot chocolate or coffee, to keep off the chill. “You’ll catch your death working outside in this cold.”
“I’m going to be away a few weeks the beginning of March,” Rob explained.
“If you have a floor, the porch is basically useable. I’ll do the railings and banisters when I come back.”
It was beyond his skill to duplicate the old gingerbread trim, and anyway he had no table jigsaw. So he opted for a more Southern effect, with big square porch columns and stepped pediments and moldings. To keep kids from
falling off until he could build a railing, he strung two-by-fours between the pillars.
Even on the day of their departure Rob was working at it, balanced on a stepladder shooting nails into the final dentil trim. “This is gorgeous,
Rob,” Edwin exclaimed when he pulled up in the Mazda. “It’s the same old porch, only brand-new. Are you going to paint it white?”
“Not till spring—you can’t paint in freezing weather.” Rob pulled off his work gloves and dropped them into the tool box. “And I’ll tell you, a fresh-painted porch will stand out like a sore thumb against this siding.
Ideally, I’d paint the whole house to match.”
“This is neverending—I thought you were almost done!”
“The slogan of the home improver: It’s never done,” Rob said. “Let me put these tools in the office. I’ve got my bag here.”
When he saw the old brown duffel bag, Edwin said, “Oh, you’re joking.
That’s all you’re bringing?”
“This is everything I own, except a few books and the laptop. One of us has to travel light.” Rob popped the passenger seat forward and tossed the duffel into the back on top of the five fat bags already inside—Edwin’s absolute minimum. “They’re not going to let you on the plane with all this junk.”
“Books—I forgot to bring something to read!” Edwin exclaimed.
“I’ll lend you one of mine.”
“You have reading material in there too,” Edwin muttered as he started the car. “I don’t believe it.”
Their plane left from Baltimore-Washington International Airport, and connected in New York to the overnight Moscow flight. There was hardly time to settle down on the first short leg, but once the jet left JFK Rob said,
“Well, I’m going to sleep. I’ve been up since five, putting the final licks on that porch.”
“You can sleep? I can never sleep on planes. I get too excited about traveling.”
“I can sleep anywhere. I’m glad I let you have the aisle seat.”
“Let me have a book too, or I’ll go buggy. The magazine rack only has Golf World and Working Woman.”
“You do have your Diskman and the laptop,” Rob pointed out. But he unzipped his duffel and handed over an MIA Hunter paperback. “So I’m a lowbrow—sue me.”
How Like A God Page 18