Moreover, waiting was much more fun this time.
There was a lot of pent-up passion between them and the breaking down of the final barriers that had held them apart meant that they were very busy with each other the whole time, exploring each other’s bodies, sating their appetite, never far away from their queen-size bed. Henna loved the attention that she was getting and rejoiced in the fact that she was able to incite such strong passion in Jai. Jai had yearned for her a long time, and he was glad that his love had the power to heal Henna’s tattered self. The scars on her body might not ever go away, but he was sure that the hurt and grief within her was definitely a lot less now.
The call from the professor came on the evening of the third day. He wanted them to be ready to leave that night around eleven. The professor would accompany them from there. He did not give away any details.
Henna packed the air-bag again and they were ready by ten to leave their latest temporary quarters, probably never to return here again.
‘I want to take this bed with me. It has given me so much pleasure,’ Jai whispered into Henna’s ears as he brushed by her while packing up.
‘Yeah, go ahead! You go and have the bed all to yourself and find the pleasure, all by yourself. I would like to see that too. You and the bed; no Henna on it, though!’ Henna quipped back.
Jai grabbed her by the arm and pulled her to him.
‘Oh, would you? Would you like to see that? Come here and I will show you now.’
Henna feigned a struggle and mocked him.
‘Hey! That’s not fair. You said it yourself: just the bed and you. Not with me on the bed!’
He lifted her and carried her to the bed and laid her down and planted a kiss on her neck, and she melted in his hands. Jai’s mobile rang and Henna slipped away from under him in his moment of distraction, laughing and mocking at him.
‘Now it’s alright. Just you and your bed!’
Jai laughed and then looked around the room. The laughter gave way to a sobering pensiveness as he thought about his life since the day they had fled Mumbai. How many places would they have to leave like this? Would he ever find any permanence?
***
The vehicle arrived at precisely eleven and the professor, Jai, and Henna set off towards Bangalore. It was a smooth overnight journey on the NH-4 and NH-44 and Henna slept fitfully on the back seat of the Toyota Innova. Jai sat in front with the professor, who drove the MUV.
Besides small talk, Jai learnt that they were headed for a small village called Byalalu, which lay a hundred kilometres beyond Bangalore. There, they were to meet up with Professor Nair, a scientist colleague and friend of Professor Ananthakrishnan. He was a senior scientist at the Indian Deep Space Network (IDSN) and had been instrumental in the phenomenal success of India’s Chandrayaan and Mangalyan missions to the moon and Mars, thus making India only the fourth country in the world to touch down on the lunar surface and have a Mars satellite.
They reached IDSN by seven in the morning, having stopped a couple of times for tea and a visit to the rest room. Professor Nair already knew about Jai’s background, having been apprised of it earlier by his friend. He led them to two rooms in the campus guest house.
‘Get a good sleep. We shall be working late tonight,’ the professor told Jai before disappearing into his own room to get his share of sleep.
The IDSN complex had three antennae: a large 32-metre deep-space antenna, another 18-metre deep-space antenna, and an 11-metre terminal antenna, which had been built for the ASTROSAT mission. This was where all the background work took place, work aiming to put India on the global space exploration map. Another Lunar lander mission, a Solar orbiter and a Mars lander mission were in the offing within the coming decade.
Despite having had very little sleep during the ride to Bangalore, anxiety and nervousness had crept into Jai’s mind and he had a fitful sleep at best. He woke up at about noon, after a bad nightmare of himself walking away from Henna, leaving her all alone in the vast expanse of a desert. In his dream, Henna looked at him desolate, tears running down her cheeks as she waved him a forlorn goodbye. Jai was riding away in a strange vehicle that did not have any tires, and which sort of just glided in the air, over the desert sand. He looked down and found a dark, bronze-brown hue to his skin, similar to what he had seen during the ‘white’ interludes. He rode away till the form of Henna grew smaller and smaller, ultimately vanishing in the vast desolation of the desert.
Though shaken, he kept the dream to himself. Henna would be better off not entertaining such thoughts. He could not bear leaving her alone after all this. Without him, she would not stand a chance and possibly would not stay alive very long.
Later that night, Jai and Henna had a light dinner and then accompanied Professor Ananthakrishnan and Professor Nair to a large building, a little apart from the other buildings in the complex. The building housed the monitoring centre that collated the data gleaned from the various antennae and made sense of the signals received. It had the services of a ‘Param’-class supercomputer, a slightly aged pentaflop supercomputer that was just adequate for the job the centre performed.
The centre was still bustling with activity and many people greeted Professor Nair as they passed by them. Professor Nair led them to a secluded room with many monitors and hundreds of cables crisscrossing the room.
‘I have set up the experiment in there,’ Professor Nair pointed out a door to their right.
‘I have set up an array that filters any radiation passing through it without attenuating it, and at the same time, replicating the formation of the rays,’ Nair continued, to Prof. Ananthakrishnan. ‘You had some concerns about interrupting the rays vis-à-vis the boy’s safety. I think this will help us get round that problem.’
‘Yes, the last time it happened, the boy almost died. Had an arrest and had to be revived.’
Professor Nair had been a colleague and a good friend of Professor Ananthakrishnan’s before his retirement, and even now had kept in touch, taking a keen interest in his new pursuit – the exploration of the human brain. So, when Professor Ananthakrishnan called in for a favour, he was glad to give all possible help within his means, although he had a few doubts about the fantastical story that he had been told.
Jai and Henna, holding hands, took their places in a row of chairs as both the scientists disappeared into the room to get the tests ready.
Over the last couple of days, Henna had seen a very worried Jai. She understood that it was not easy for him to go through all this, besides the larger uncertainty of being fugitives on the run. She squeezed his hand and said:
‘I know you are worried Jai, but we have no other choice. You and I need to know what is going on with you. You will never be at peace with yourself if you let go of this opportunity now. Another one may never come by again.’
Jai looked into Henna’s eyes and nodded at her words.
The professors came back to the room and Professor Nair signalled to Jai to come into the other room with him
‘I think we are ready. Simply put, you will lie down on a table while I hook you up with sensors, which will pick up on rays surrounding your head. We will see where that takes us next.’
The professor had given Jai a brief outline of what they had found during the PET scan during their journey to Bangalore. Jai got up from the chair and followed Professor Nair into the other room while Professor Ananthakrishnan sat at one of the consoles in the adjoining room, a few rows ahead of Henna.
Electrodes were placed over Jai’s head and the room was darkened. He was then asked to close his eyes and leave his mind as blank as he could. The sensors clicked in and as soon as they were started, the screen in front of Prof. Ananthakrishnan started scrolling down data.
Both the professors struggled with the signals for the better part of an hour before reaching a few conclusions. These rays were directional and they had some pattern to them. They were not random, and waxed and waned in intensity over fixed d
urations. It possibly indicated that the rays had some kind of information within them. Anything physical, which was not random, had to hold information within. It also indicated that the signals lay somewhere on the electro-magnetic spectrum.
They managed to deduce a trajectory of some kind, which the signals appeared to be following, and worked out and sent the purported co-ordinates to the antenna to try to pinpoint from where the signals emanated. That would take some time, and they continued with the recording of data till then.
It was almost three in the morning when the antenna started beaming back co-ordinates. They seemed to come from a near-Earth location. The co-ordinates were ‘jumpy’, frequently changing their values.
After poring over the signals for a good couple of hours, in a sudden moment of clarity, it dawned on Professor Nair why the signals chose to hop between set co-ordinates around the Earth.
‘The signals are coming from among the twenty-four set co-ordinates of the GPS satellites around the Earth.’
Professor Ananthakrishnan was shocked to hear this, but had to agree with Professor Nair on further scrutiny of the data pouring out on the screen in front of him.
‘Could it be distribution of an out-bound signal? Something that was beamed out from Earth and is being beamed back to Jai’s head?’
Professor Nair was dumbstruck. He whispered back in a conspiratorial tone:
‘You are thinking mind-control and stuff, aren’t you?’
‘Kind of. I do not know how else to explain it. Rays converging on to someone’s brain and conferring on him extraordinary abilities; abilities that are unheard of, wilder than even the most bizarre in the paranormal circles. I still can’t explain the rest of what is happening to him. How that is making him cheat death or to reset time itself, is beyond me at present. We need to analyse these signals and see what we come up with. Do you think these signals have been sent out from Earth? Some classified or fringe experiment of some kind maybe? A lot of governments have dabbled in it at some point or other. The US and the USSR had rival armies of psychics doing thought experiments during the height of the Cold War.’
‘I doubt that. As far as I can tell, this signal is unique because it lacks the reverberating quality of other signals that are sent and bounced back by the GPS satellites. It does not seem to be stemming from an upload,’ Professor Nair replied, as his mind furiously considered the various possibilities.
‘So, what is the locus that is feeding the signals to the GPS satellites?’ Professor Ananthakrishnan asked Nair, just framing the unknown rather than really expecting an answer.
‘Well, that is the proverbial million dollar question, isn’t it?’ Professor Nair replied perfunctorily, still busy looking at the data being collected by the computer.
They kept dissecting the raw data and improvising algorithms to analyse the data that kept streaming on their screen. It was another hour before another brainwave hit Professor Nair
‘Is this signal unique?’
‘Hmm?’ Professor Ananthakrishnan mumbled, not understanding Nair’s question.
‘I meant, is this signal being uniquely sent to Jai, or are there other locations where it is being sent to?’
‘You mean are there other people who are receiving the broadcast of this signal? How can we find that? You mean Jai may not be the only immortal on Earth. There may be others here, with similar capabilities. I am already getting goose-bumps thinking about all of this.’
Nair pondered the question for a moment.
‘Well, the signal is uniquely situated on the electromagnetic spectrum, isn’t it? We can make use of its unique signature to see if other such signals are leaving the GPS satellites.’
‘Wow! You are a nocturnal creature, Nair. The night brings out the best in you. Do you have that kind of access to the GPS sat system?’
‘I have a limited academic access and I think that would help us locate the broad region, rather than pin-pointing any other deviant individuals like Jai.’
‘Let’s do that. Let us first know if there is anywhere else this signal is going to. We may have a legion or an army of these immortals. We may be dealing with something much bigger than just Jai and his accidental immortality.’
Professor Nair retrieved his access codes for the GPS system and fed in the data, looking for any broadcast on a frequency similar to Jai’s. The results were instantaneous and startling.
That is the problem with computers – they do not pause for effect. They heed to the commands given and spit out the results as soon as they have them.
There were only two results on the computer. One was Byalalu, Bangalore, India, and the other read Noyabrsk, Russia.
Both the professors looked at each other, perplexed.
Prof. Nair clicked the lower button and a map of northern Russia appeared on the screen with a tag saying ‘Noyabrsk’.
‘Northern Russia! Now, what could we be having there?’
Professor Nair shrugged. He punched in a few strokes and got the Wikipedia page on Noyabrsk. It was a bustling oil and mining business centre in northern Russia. There was a recent burst of news about Noyabrsk, and it was all about a Sonya Ludvigsdottir, heiress to the international Hantel Corporation, who had apparently been kidnapped from Noyabrsk a few days ago.
On Professor Nair’s computer, the GPS localised images were displayed on the Google Earth software. Professor Nair zoomed in on the Google Earth image and the signal further localised to an urban landscape. On further zooming, they could isolate the signal to a posh business centre in Noyabrsk, with wide four-lane roads and a number of high-rises. Scaling up the zoom factor once more gave them one of the many high-rises. Nair flipped up the zoom further and the signal went off the map. It was not possible to get any further with the signal.
‘Get the address of that building,’ Professor Ananthakrishnan directed Nair, by now mesmerised by their progress on the screen.
Nair switched over to the map from the satellite version and clicked on the address.
Hotel Park
St Soviet, 19, Noyabrsk, Russia
629807
parkhotel.ru
It was the address of a posh five-star hotel in Noyabrsk.
It was almost five in the morning. They needed to get Jai away from there and back into the guest house before daybreak. They could not afford to get caught with a fugitive from the law within the premises of IDSN, once the regular hustle bustle of the centre started. The official timing was from nine, but people came in much earlier, some as early as seven to set up the work they had to do for the day.
They backed up all the data that was gathered, and erased their footprint from the lab’s computer. Jai was unhooked from the wires and was led away to the guest house.
‘We’ve come up with lots of different leads. You need to get some rest while we work on the data that we have gathered. In fact, I think I’ll take a short nap, too, while Nair works on it. We may have some answers for you tonight.’
Henna smiled when she heard this. She held on to Jai’s arm and gave it a light squeeze. Jai looked back at Henna and smiled too.
‘It’s about time I had some answers. Thanks, Professor. I shall always be thankful to you,’ Jai said to the professor.
‘Hey, kid,’ the professor ruffled Jai’s hair playfully, ‘you saved my life. This is the least I could do. And don’t think that I have not gained anything from doing all of this. You are perhaps the most exciting science that I have done in my entire life.’
Jai and Henna were puzzled and excited to hear this but the Professor declined to give them any further details before analysing the data further. They went back to their room, and tired after a wakeful night, they slept almost as soon as their heads touched their pillows.
***
The professor had been working almost non-stop for thirty-six hours, including the overnight drive from Chennai to Bangalore the previous night. His ‘short nap’ stretched to about six hours.
He was awake
ned by a sharp knock on his door at around one in the afternoon. He woke up groggily and opened the door to find a visibly excited Nair at the door.
‘Hey, what are you doing here? Aren’t you supposed to be at work now?’
‘Lunch break. Anyways, I was too excited to wait until evening. I had to tell you now.’ Nair was literally shaking, agog with excitement.
‘What happened?’ asked the professor while letting Nair into the room, where he paced up and down, too keyed up to sit in the chair indicated by Professor Ananthakrishnan. He was clutching a piece of typed paper, crushing it in his grip.
‘What’s in your hand?’ Professor Ananthakrishnan asked Nair.
‘Yeah… I’ll tell you about this,’ Nair waved the paper in the professor’s face and continued, ‘but let me start from the beginning.’
The professor nodded and sat on his bed.
Nair went on:
‘I was too excited to go to my routine work. I kept at the data that we had generated in the night. When I did not make any headway there, I thought I should take a look at the Noyabrsk angle. I followed news items on Noyabrsk in the recent past and that woman Sonya Ludvigsdottir’s kidnapping is all over the regional news there.’
‘Who’s that?’
‘We saw her name today morning when we pulled up the Wiki page on Noyabrsk, remember?’ Nair reminded Professor Ananthakrishnan.
‘Anyway, it seems that Sonya was apparently kidnapped about ten days ago from the same Park Hotel, to which our signal is homing down. That meant that the signal is being broadcast to someone in that hotel. We know that it could not be Sonya. So, I turned my attention to who is in that hotel at this time. I put that and the fantastical story of Jai, which you had told me earlier, together. I made a fair assumption that someone with the gift of immortality will have as fantastical a life as your Jai had been leading. The inescapable conclusion that I have reached is that besides Jai, the only other immortal person to which the signals are being sent, must be Ludvig Hanssen, the owner and CEO of the Hantel Corporation and father of Sonya Ludvigsdottir.’
Immortals Page 16