08 Illusion

by Frank Peretti

  Of course she remembered. She and Seamus had verified it on site at the fairgrounds. Still, she held her peace, reading their faces.

  “Oh!” said Parmenter. “Before you say anything, there’s still one more problem, and it’s only fair to tell you. Once you supply the information and we recalibrate the Machine, it will be fully controllable from this room, meaning anyone with access to the controls can dissolve your secondary timeline and retrace you. They will be able to end your life at will.”

  She almost laughed. She did smile at the inescapable cosmic joke being played on her, the pitiful sense of doom coursing through her. If this was sanity, being crazy made a lot more sense.

  Parmenter said in conclusion, “So it comes down to whether we have your trust, I suppose.”

  She did laugh this time, but her laugh was bitter. “You gotta be kidding.”

  Parmenter looked at Dane, so she looked at Dane, and Dane began, “I’ve been working on a plan—”

  She signaled stop with her hand. “No, no, just hold on a minute.” Then she looked him over. “First, tell me who you are.”

  He met her eyes, but then he couldn’t and looked away. The pain she saw all over him took her back to his bedroom when he stopped the dance and backed away … when he didn’t dare look at her as she was leaving. “There’s so much to think about right now, so much we just can’t get wrong—”

  “Mr. Collins”—only his last name felt safe—“at least give me that much. I’ve spent every minute of every day trying to figure out who I am, and before I give these guys the ability to fry me if they want, I need to know I’m right. I need to know who you are, and I need to know that you know.”

  He turned his gaze upon her and let his eyes rest there. They were filling with tears, but he blinked them away and spoke resolutely. “Mandy, I’m your husband. We were married June nineteenth, 1971.”

  Speaking of time, that stopped it. She explored his eyes, but in a different way now that she had permission, and for the first time since the county fair her world felt quiet, settled, unmoving. It was a sensation she wouldn’t identify until later, that of her soul dropping anchor. “Okay,” she said. “Let’s hear the plan.”

  chapter

  * * *

  47

  Dane unrolled the drawings on Preston Gabriel’s dining-room table, and the white-haired magician took a long, careful look at his rendering of a cocoonlike pod. It was six feet tall, hexagonal, with six triangular panels at the bottom that opened like a flower and closed to a point. The pod was designed to be suspended—and then dropped—from a crane. The drawing showed a girl stuffed inside, head down.

  “Explosive bolts?” Preston asked, pointing to the panels that composed the pod’s lower end.

  “We can conceal them in the seams and she can trigger them with her toes.”

  “So how do you protect her head and shoulders?”

  They looked at a third man in the room, Emile DeRondeau. The designer/builder replied, “It’s all in how the charges are mounted. We position them to blow outward.”

  “After which she has … ?”

  Dane answered, “One second, two seconds at best. Think it’s doable?”

  Preston shook his head trying to fathom it. “You’d better ask Mandy. The timing—”

  “She said she’d find out.”

  “That’s not the scary part,” said Emile.

  “All the parts are scary,” said Preston.

  Emile pointed at an escape hatch on the back of the cocoon, the side away from the audience. “For me, the scariest part is this packing bolt that locks her in.”

  No man had an argument there.

  “But the point,” said Dane, “is to keep her safe from beginning to end.”

  “What about the rigging in the costume?”

  Dane whooshed a sigh. “We’re going to need Keisha on that—which means she’s in for some staggering news.”

  “How long do we have?” asked Preston.

  “Mandy premieres in the big room at the Orpheus Friday, the twenty-fifth of March. This stunt happens in the rear parking lot at two that afternoon. That gives us just under three weeks.”

  “You could have come up with this a year ago,” said Emile.

  “Well,” said Preston, eyebrows arched at the prospects, “that’s why they call it magic.”

  “And if it works, it’ll be the biggest stunt Mandy’s ever done,” said Dane.

  “The Grand Illusion.”

  Dane looked at the drawing. “Not a bad name for it.”

  Jack Wright didn’t care much for Vegas people. “I got two thousand acres and barely enough water thanks to you people down there, you and your politics and your money.”

  Loren Moss tried to explain that he had nothing to do with that. “I’m not a hotel owner or a developer. I’m a professor of astrophysics,” he explained.

  “So what are you doing in Vegas?”

  “Well, that’s what I came to talk to you about.”

  They were driving in Jack’s old pickup across his ranch to a piece of ground that wasn’t much use for grazing anymore and a safe distance from people, homes, or anything else breakable. When they were out of sight of any sign of mankind in any direction, Jack pulled to a stop, the desert dust blowing from the truck tires. “This what you had in mind?”

  Moss climbed from the truck and looked in all directions. In the distance, a jackrabbit bounded out of sight among some rocks. There might have been some rattlesnakes around, maybe some leggy, venomous insects among the scrub brush, but that was all. “Yeah, yeah, Jack, this is just what I had in mind.”

  “So what are you doing, testing a bomb or something?”

  Moss laughed. “Oh, no, no, it’s just an experiment we didn’t want to do in town. Depending on how things go, there could be an explosion, maybe a little fire.”

  Jack took that in stride, surveying the bleak surroundings from under the brim of his hat. “Well, you won’t hurt anything out here.”

  “So we got a deal?”

  “Soon’s I get the money.”

  Moss handed Jack two thousand dollars in hundreds. “And by the way, you don’t know anything about this.”

  “Never heard of you.”

  Eighteen days to Mandy’s premiere …

  Just standing on the ground harnessed to the hang glider got Mandy’s adrenaline going. The wing quivered and tugged with any breath of wind; she could jump up and feel it grab the air as she came down. It was like Mary Poppins’s umbrella, only for real, big enough to ride on the wind and take her and her instructor with it—which it did.

  Hands on the control bar, face down the hill, start running into the breeze, control bar slightly forward …

  Ooh! Wow! It still thrilled her the way the wing picked them up, just like that, and the hillside dropped away.

  Feel it, feel it, feel it: pull the control bar from the direction you want to turn, push forward to nose up, pull back to nose down, don’t overcorrect, anticipate where the wing is going, time it out, catch those updrafts …

  Sailing through the air wasn’t much different from sailing through time and space. In both environments you rode currents and waves, negotiated through surges and ripples. The mental discipline was exactly the same: feel it, anticipate, don’t overcorrect, get the rhythm.

  Her instructor was impressed with how fast she caught on, as if she’d done it before. Well …

  Move over, birdies, Momma Dove’s on the wing!

  At dusk, in the middle of Jack Wright’s most desolate acre, Mandy tried not to fidget as Parmenter affixed sensors to her forehead to monitor her brainwaves and advised her as she affixed some more to herself to monitor her vitals. Wires from the sensors led to an interface, the interface was connected to Parmenter’s laptop computer, the computer was hooked up to a satellite receiver, and back at the lab, Loren Moss was monitoring the data at the Machine’s central console.

  This stuff was still mind-boggling.

&nbs
p; They were set up under a shade canopy where Dane had neatly stacked exactly 35.76 concrete blocks with a combined weight of 1,520 pounds. They’d brought them in Loren Moss’s pickup truck, each one carefully weighed and labeled, including a block they had to chip down to 0.76 of its original size and weight.

  Parmenter checked the readings from the sensors on his computer and nodded satisfaction. “All right. Now, Mandy, if you’ll take a seat on top of the blocks …”

  She stepped carefully onto the blocks, holding the wires from the sensors so as not to snag or tangle them. Dane took her chair next to Parmenter’s picnic table workstation to observe.

  “Comfortable?” Parmenter asked.

  “Just dandy,” Mandy replied, secretly wishing she could sit on a pillow—Parmenter said she could have one, but if she did they would have to chip away some more of the 0.76 concrete block to allow for the added weight.

  “All right,” he said, tapping away at the computer keys. “You and your clothing and the concrete blocks should now total one thousand, six hundred and thirty-two pounds. You are wearing exactly the same clothes you wore when we weighed you?”

  “Same clothes.”

  “Nothing new in your pockets?”

  “Nope.”

  “Uh, what about that gum?”

  “Oh.” He put out his hand and she spit the gum into it.

  “Very good.” Parmenter gave the gum to Dane. “Now, according to Dane’s best recollection and the cut of your later costumes, you weighed an additional four pounds at age fifty-nine, so we’ve factored that in.”

  She tried not to make a face—her face was always saying things she didn’t mean to, always giving away her thoughts and feelings. How could that guy be so doggone clinical about this? She was not only going to gain four pounds in a matter of minutes if not seconds, she was also going to gain thirty-nine years and, if she couldn’t stir up the magic feelings, thoughts, or vibes needed to pull this off, she was going to burn to death. But hey, no sweat, no big deal. It might work, it might not, you win some, you lose some, but whatever happens, it’ll be fascinating and educational.

  She stole a look at Dane, careful not to look too long, not to let her eyes place any obligation on him. As he tried to say, there were so many things to think about, so many things they couldn’t get wrong. Their love was too big a question to tackle now, and for all they knew, the whole matter of Dane and Mandy and their bond of forty years was meant to end on September 17. So, of course, he was guarded and she understood, but one look, any look at him told her he was the same man, steady as a rock, the only thing she could be sure about.

  Parmenter put on a headset and spoke via his computer to Moss back at the lab. “We are ready at this end.”

  In the solitude of the lab, Moss, headset in place and eyes on the monitors, replied, “Clear signal. Go ahead.”

  Parmenter scanned his computer screen, Mandy, the blocks, the sensor wires one more time. “All right. Now, this is all exploratory. We need to find out if you can include the mass of the blocks in your timeline with you. You were able to do that with the nurse’s coat when you slipped out of the Spokane Medical Center.”

  Oh! Mandy thought. I still need to return that!

  “You’ve done it with smaller objects in your magic act; you’ve managed to keep your clothes with you whenever you’ve traveled interdimensionally, so we know it’s possible. If you can make yourself one unit of mass with the blocks in this test run, then you should be able to make yourself one unit with them when you default to your original timeline and attempt to swap timelines with the Machine. Is that all clear?”

  Mandy ran it through her mind again, then asked, “So then, it would be Mandy and her blocks, one thousand, six hundred and thirty-two pounds of stuff, bumping out the Machine’s one thousand, six hundred and thirty-two pounds of stuff and taking over its timeline?”

  Parmenter gave a big nod. “So all you have to do is pull in those blocks. Go interdimensional and take them with you.”

  She drew a deep breath and sighed it out to ease her jitters. “Okay.”

  She looked down at the blocks, big, blah-looking, lifeless concrete things. It was hard to bond with them. No images came to her mind, no feelings to her heart. She could feel Parmenter and Dane watching her. “Am I supposed to make them move or something?”

  “If that will help.”

  She stared at them again, but nothing happened. She and the blocks were in this time dimension, stable and benign, and it was tough to find a reason, a desire, to go elsewhere.

  Parmenter suggested, “Well, why don’t you try doing a magic trick with them? Yes, make them move.”

  She closed her eyes for a moment, stroked her forehead—

  “Careful of those wires!” Parmenter butted in, shattering her concentration.

  Can’t find it. Can’t find it.

  Then Dane stood before her, leaned over the blocks, and touched her shoulder, looking into her eyes … just enough. “What if you thought about … Christmas? The dress you wore, the cake we enjoyed … how we danced.”

  Oh, no, was he going to go there, actually permit one small measure of belief that once, maybe still, they were in love? That she could really be …

  She didn’t want to cry but she did, from deep inside, from so long ago. “… sorry …”

  “No,” said Parmenter, eyes glued on his monitor. “Don’t be sorry, these are good readings, very promising. You’re deflecting the Kiley and the Delta!”

  Mandy whispered, “Could you please get him to shut up?”

  Dane looked at Parmenter, and the scientist got the message. Then Dane said, “Think of home.”

  And then he removed his touch and backed away.

  No, don’t go away! Don’t leave me!

  He kept backing away, then turned and walked across the darkening desert, not looking back.

  Walking away … again. She felt it, the longing to go with him, to be where he was.

  The earth moved and she felt she was floating above it. The blocks beneath her wavered, their cold gray turning to a tea-stain amber. She could smell that same old smell of something burning. She slipped inside, reaching, finding the waves, the currents, the invisible, nonmaterial handles that could carry her wherever her thoughts would take her. With longing and sorrow, she reached with a hand she didn’t have and touched a block.

  It leaped through the veil and became a solid gray block, part of her world.

  She reached for another, then another, then felt herself expand into a will that had no shape, no size, just presence, surrounding and permeating those blocks. They all joined her, became real within her envelope. She hung on, learning the feeling, the effect. They weren’t hula hoops, doves, or singing bottles and they were no fun to watch, but they were hers.

  “I’m Mandy Whitacre,” she heard herself say, “and I want to go home.”

  “Excellent!” Parmenter shouted. “Excellent!”

  Wham! She was back under the canopy, sitting on the blocks. Her backside was getting sore without a pillow. They’d have to have a word with Parmenter about breaking her concentration.

  Parmenter was on his feet, calling into his headset. “Did you get that?”

  * * *

  Moss was impressed, scanning the monitors. “I copy Delta thirty-two on thirty-two, Kiley twelve on twelve, Baker twenty-three on twenty-five, a little short but within limits. I would say we have a match.”

  Parmenter threw back his head in jubilation. “Ahhh! So far, the theory works!”

  “So you got what you wanted?” she asked, feeling very tired.

  “Phase one, complete! We’ve established that you can combine yourself with other objects to compose one unified mass! Very good. Very good! Now note that, remember that, remember how you did it.”

  Dane returned from the dark, stepping back under the canopy.

  “I guess we got it,” she told him.

  He smiled at her. “I could feel it.”

&nbs
p; Fourteen days to Mandy’s premiere …

  Emile DeRondeau handed Dane a pair of safety glasses, a requirement for being on the main shop floor. “You should know, Seamus Downey’s already here. He likes to keep his nose in everything.”

  “Oh. Oh, that’s good,” Dane replied, putting on the glasses. “The closer he’s watching the better.”

  “Exactly.”

  Emile DeRondeau’s company, EDR Theatrical Design and Effect, occupied an expansive building that used to be a major grocery store and was one of the backstage wonders of the showbiz world. Some of the most memorable and impressive set designs, stage effects, and convention displays originated in this place, conceived and constructed by Emile and his team of eight semi-eccentric dream builders. The place sounded like a factory, with the incessant whirring of drills, whining of saws, and growling of grinders and sanders.

  Emile led the way through the main shop to Room C, tucked away in a corner of the building and placarded against casual visitors. In the center of the room, the pod hung like a plumb bob from a ceiling hoist, suspended a foot off the floor. It was functional but still in the bare plywood stage until all the gimmicks and safety features were tested.

  Standing next to it, getting a thorough briefing from one of Emile’s builders, was Seamus Downey.

  “Mr. Downey!” Dane called out, walking right up to him.

  Mr. Downey’s face tightened a moment, but he immediately put on a smile. “Well. This is a surprise.”

  Dane extended his hand.

  Downey shook it and asked, “What are you doing here?”

  Emile piped in, “It was my request, actually. Eloise needs a safety coach, Dane was the first one I thought of. Turns out they already knew each other!”

  “Yeah,” said Seamus, his smile crooked. “Small world.”

  Dane looked the pod over, allowing himself to come close to Seamus for a lowered-voice conversation. “Just so you know, you are her manager, Mr. Downey, and I respect that. I’m only here to assure her safety. It’s a technical role.”

  “Looks to me like you couldn’t stay away.”

  Dane smiled. “Well, we have our friendship, but we’d make a pretty odd-looking couple, don’t you think?” He poked his head through the escape hatch, inspecting the pod’s interior. “Just give her some time. As near as I can tell, you’re definitely in the game. As for me, when the stunt’s over, my job’s over and I’m going home. But it’s a privilege being here and I want to thank you.”