by Cowley, Joy
Peachman shut his eyes. If Polanski were any greener, a cow would eat him. ‘Where is there?’ he said.
‘The gas station at Eyeglass Bay, sir. Out on the coast road.’
‘Are they waiting at the gas station for you?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Good, Polanski. You can go back to bed. I’ll take care of it.’
‘Oh no! I mean—I’m sorry, sir. No offence. It’s just that she made me give my word that it would be me. I promised, sir. I really can’t go back on my word. I just felt I couldn’t go without making it, well, you know, official, sir.’
‘Polanski, go back to bed! That’s an order! Do you want a little story to rock you to sleep? I’ll tell you one. It’s about a horde of street trash having a beach party, all coked up at two in the morning and nothing to do. So they call the most gullible constable they know and tell him to get in his car and drive out. On his own, of course. Am I right about that?’
‘Well, er, yes, sir. She did tell me to come on my own.’
‘You can make up your own ending to the story, Polanski. Good night.’
‘But sir—’
‘I told you. I’ll take care of it!’
Peachman got out of bed and padded to the bathroom, tripping over towels. Hell, how had the house got into such a mess in just three days? He couldn’t go on like this. One week. That was all he would give her.
He flushed the toilet and looked at his face in the mirror. He was a reasonable man and a good husband. What had he done to deserve this? He worked his butt off to give Mandy a nice home, fancy dresses and hairdos, food in the cupboard. He didn’t play around, like some guys he knew.
He hitched up his pyjamas and went back to the bedroom. He had done nothing wrong. A man was entitled to reprimand his wife if she answered him back, and it was only a bit of a backhander across the mouth. He’d done it before and she had got over it. But this time, the minute he’d left for work, she had packed her bag and gone off to her parents.
Well, he’d give her a week. No more than that. Then he would go down there and drag her back. He could not be expected to go on living like this.
Now, what was he going to do? Oh yes, the Donoghue kids.
He sat on the edge of the bed and picked up the phone.
Chapter Fifteen
In the end there were too many of them, three cars and five people including Leroy, Zeke and Dr Frey. They came out of the darkness with crashing speed and filled the empty road with noise and light. Two white limos, a dark sedan, brakes and slamming doors.
‘Split!’ yelled Jancie and she took off down the road, while Shog dived behind the gas station.
‘Get the girl!’ someone yelled and three figures raced after Jancie, while one of the limos cruised beside them. Shog saw Zeke, in front of the lights, reach out and grab Jancie’s jacket, saw Jancie whirl like a fighting cat, arms and legs flailing, body arched, saw someone get out of the limousine. Four dark shadows surrounded Jancie and she went down in the roadway.
There could be no running now for Shog. He came out, holding his hands out from his sides, palm upwards, walking slow. They were putting Jancie in the back of the limo and there seemed no fight left in her.
Shog glanced down the dark road. Where was Polanski? He should be here by now.
Leroy was standing out in the headlights, different out of his uniform, unsmiling. He was wearing jeans and slippers and had a nylon jacket over his pyjama coat. The hood of the jacket crackled and flapped in the wind, as he waited for Shog.
Zeke and Dr Frey came from the car to stand by Leroy, none of them saying a word. Shog looked from their faces to their hands and saw that Dr Frey had one arm behind her back.
He yelled at them, ‘We’ve called the police. They’ll be here any minute. Even if you take us back, they’ll still come.’
None of them answered.
‘They know all about you,’ said Shog. ‘They’ll rip the place apart.’
Still no one spoke. Gusts of wind blew dust and grass against the headlights and flapped the clothing of the four people who stood half in bright light, half in deep shadow. Shog did not resist as Zeke stepped round behind him and grabbed his arms.
‘This will be quite pleasant,’ said Dr Frey.
Shog looked into her eyes as the needle went into his upper arm. Her face wore the expression he remembered from Peaches Can, calm, pleasant and unconcerned. ‘Are you Dr Robinson or Dr Frey?’ he asked her.
She didn’t answer as she withdrew the needle and pressed her thumb against the puncture site. She said to Leroy, ‘Put him in the car while he can still walk.’
Shog got to the side of the limousine and his legs seemed to disappear. He fell forwards and was grabbed by Leroy and held, sagging, while Zeke came round to help. Together, they slung him into the seat beside Jancie who was sprawled out, not moving, her eyes open, a vacant smile on her face.
There was a fizzing sensation in Shog’s arms and legs, streams of bubbles which made his limbs as weightless as balloons. His head, too, was floating, a long distance from his body, much too far away for speech. He was with Jancie. That was the main thing. He was too tired to care about the rest. Dr Frey got in behind the wheel, with Zeke in the other seat, and the limo did a wide turn through the empty forecourt of the gas station.
From a great distance, Shog charted the road back to Class Act House, the pause at the gate, the crunch of gravel, the pressure on his body which indicated a sharp turn at speed round the back of the house. Doors opened. They were lifted out and on to something. Doors shut, more doors opened into light. Shog was lazily aware that the soles of Jancie’s shoes made a V at his side, then he realised that his own feet were against her jacket. There were quiet urgent voices somewhere behind him and the rumbling of wheels. He and Jancie were lying on a trolley in an elevator. Inside him, laughter fizzed like bubbles in his blood and he felt like a small child on a ride in an amusement park.
The trolley stopped under bright white lights and they were lifted on to small beds, side by side. Zeke strapped their arms and legs against the beds so that they would not float away, and then left them to the silence and the lights and the laughter which kept uncurling inside Shog, without reason.
After a while, Dr Elizabeth Frey came in, now as white as the lights, white jacket, white trousers, calm white face with black hair falling forward as she spoke to them. Behind her, a lab assistant carried folded cloths and hair clippers. Clippers? thought Shog. It seemed very funny. Cloths and clippers? Clippers and cloths? He turned his head to see Jancie. She was looking up at the ceiling, a small smile at the edge of her mouth.
‘You have nothing to be afraid of,’ said Dr Frey in a calm voice which filled the room. ‘No one is going to hurt you.’
A cloth was spread over Shog’s upper body and the support under his head was removed. His head tilted back slightly against the cushion under his neck. The lab assistant was behind him, just out of sight, and Shog heard the whine of the clippers.
‘At the moment, you can’t move or speak but that will soon pass,’ said Dr Frey. ‘You can hear, though, and you will remember what I tell you. I repeat, you are not going to be hurt in any way.’
Her words were very close and pleasant. Far away, the clippers were whining against Shog’s balloon head but the noise did not get in the way of Dr Frey’s voice.
‘You are in the sunbed room, getting ready for a journey, the kind of adventure every child wants—exciting but safe. Ah yes. I appreciate the alarm you felt when you walked into the despatch room, especially when you saw your friend there. It must look scary to someone who does not know what is going on. But I can assure you, the experience is enjoyable and it is important that you are not afraid. We can waste a lot of mental energy in fear.’
Shog wanted to tell her that he was not afraid of anything but he did not know where his tongue was. Instead, he smiled inside and hoped some of it would come out on his face.
Dr Frey put a small chair
between the beds, and sat on it. She looked at one, then the other. ‘The children you saw in the despatch room are alive and well but they are not in their physical bodies. I know that is hard to understand. Let me explain. The human being is an energy field within an energy field. The inner energy field is very dense and it does have a separate existence. We call it by various names, astral body, psyche or soul. It is the real essence of ourselves. Now, while the physical bodies of those children are cared for in their beds, their astral bodies explore wonderful places. Your friend Banjo, at the moment, is in Alaska. He can go where he pleases and he does not feel the cold. He can walk right up to a polar bear. It can’t hurt him. He can ride on icebergs, swim with seals, and fly in a snowstorm. He can come and go through locked doors and he’s invisible to people. In other words, he is like a ghost with a living physical body back here. Because he is still attached to his physical body, everything he sees and hears is relayed back to a computer beside his bed.’
The lab assistant lifted Shog’s head until his chin was resting on his chest. The clippers whined behind his ears.
‘Astral travel is a natural phenomenon,’ said Dr Frey. ‘The astral body has always had the ability to leave the physical body, at times of illness, for example, or in sleep. No doubt, you two have had dreams of flying. Most of us have flown in our dreams. For centuries, people have recorded details of their flying dreams, how they felt and what the earth looked like from up in the air. The psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud often wrote about the flying dreams of his patients. But here is something to think about. In the days before aircraft, how did people know what the earth looked like from up in the air, unless they had actually been there? You see? The astral body really does travel in sleep. But it floats around in a random way, when and if it pleases. We can do better than that. I have perfected a very exciting process. I can project an astral body on a particular journey to a specific destination.’
The cloth was taken from round Shog’s neck and his head support put back in place. His head no longer felt distant, but more solid, cooler, and the light fizzing sensation in his body was disappearing. Dr Frey stood up and ran her hand over Shog’s head. Her touch was surprisingly warm and close. Then she nodded at the assistant who was putting a cloth around Jancie’s neck.
Shog turned his head and saw the assistant plunge the whining clippers into Jancie’s copper-coloured curls.
Dr Frey said, ‘I believe that Matisse told you how valuable you are. That is the truth. You are vitally important to my work and I’ll tell you why. Until now, the astral bodies, or dancers as we sometimes call them, have visited sites on earth. But you will be going on a journey to Mars, or at least to a research station in orbit round Mars. You two will be the first to have ever made an interplanetary projection. That is as significant as the first walk on the moon. You will make history. And remember, there is no risk. An astral body cannot be hurt or killed. It does not feel cold or hunger or thirst.’
Questions were beginning to form in Shog’s head but he still could not talk. What about McCready? he wanted to say. He was aware now of the pressure of the straps that kept his arms down at his sides and his legs together against the bed.
‘I’ll brief you thoroughly before you are projected,’ said Dr Frey. ‘But, really, all you have to do is wander round the space station, looking and listening. No one will know you are there. I am particularly interested in the computers on board. You will not be able to access data, but you will observe computer function whenever and wherever you can. You will literally haunt the place. Don’t worry that you can’t understand what you see. Very little of it will make sense to you. If you are clearly focussing on what is in front of you, I shall have it on your in-line computer back here.’ She smiled at them both and stood up. ‘You will be up there about four earth days, I imagine. From time to time you will hear my voice directing you, so don’t imagine that you have been abandoned.’ She walked away and then turned. ‘The children you saw in the despatch room were on life-support systems. You will be similarly protected. But we will spare you the tubes until after your departure. You’ll know nothing about that small indignity.’
As she left the room, Shog turned to look at his sister. The lab assistant had finished and he was folding the cloth that had been round Jancie’s neck. Her head was as smooth as a tawny egg.
Chapter Sixteen
Jancie felt the cold touch of the black discs as they were placed one by one against her scalp. Dr Frey’s hands were long and white, her nails clipped short. She wore no rings. She was explaining, ‘You two have very good readings, I am pleased to say. You are both physically strong and no doubt your astral bodies are likewise, although it’s hard to tell. The size and strength of the astral body is not dependent on the physical appearance.’
And hers is piddling small, Jancie thought suddenly, in Gran’s voice. She was surprised by the words and wondered if they were true.
They were in the despatch room and Shog, in the upper cocoon, was no longer in sight. Jancie guessed that he was strapped into place as she was. She looked down over the white shift, at her bare feet, then she slid her eyes sideways to see the stand of grey boxes, screens and tubes at her side. She knew that she looked like Banjo and Taylor and all the others, an octopus with black wire tentacles grasping her bald head.
The strange mixture of numbness and elation that had filled her had now subsided to a deep stillness. She did not feel fear. In fact, she did not feel anything.
‘You will find this a very exciting experience,’ Dr Frey said for the seventh or eighth time. ‘You will see your brother and he will see you, but you cannot be seen or heard by anyone else, do you understand?’
There were others standing behind her, Anna and Marlene, both lab assistants, the man called Zeke who had grabbed her when she was running down the road. Jancie wondered what had happened when Officer Polanski had arrived at the gas station and found no one there. Did he think it was just a practical joke to get a cop out of bed at two in the morning?
What was the time now? Daylight, surely. It was difficult to tell in a place without windows. All round her, the humming and hissing that was the life of the room went on as background to the muttered conversation among the figures behind Dr Frey. As Jancie looked at them, the stillness grew inside her like a large shining ball of light and the room became liquid. The faces at the end of her bed, the other cocoons, the walls, all dissolved and dripped and then ran past her like a river in flood, faster, faster, streaks of light and dark in a great swirling tide. She felt the ball of light in her pop like a soap bubble. Now there was only the river moving in a spiral and taking her with it. Whirlpool, she thought. Tornado. She was as helpless as a straw in all that huge rushing current. Gradually, the dark stream slowed and settled itself into a room. It was not like the despatch room. This was a dream room, only half real, a place of blurred shapes with liquid edges. As she watched, a grey wall with a geometric pattern on it grew solid in front of her and then faded into a blackness dotted with millions of stars. What was at her back? She turned without effort and saw the curved line of a huge red horizon, and smears of dust clouds, partly obscuring the red earth which she recognised from school photos. She was hanging in space above planet Mars.
Why, she wondered, was she not falling? How could she breathe out here?
She realised that she was not breathing. The rhythm of breath-ing was something that was going on as a background to her thoughts. It wasn’t in her chest. It was in her mind. She slowly lifted her arm and looked at it. It wasn’t there! Her legs! Her body! She tried to touch them but there was no sensation. She had disappeared! There was only a faint green light where her body had been!
Something dark was moving away from her at great speed, a mushroom shape with rows of lights, not an aircraft, not a house. Was it the research station? she wondered. The thought brought her immediately to it so that the dark grey plates of its outer shell were suddenly in front of her. How did that happen?
‘Jancie?’ It was Shog’s voice, faint in her head.
‘Shog?’ She tried to speak but the words formed no more than a thought. Somehow it must have got through because his voice was in her head again, still far away. ‘Is that you, Jancie?’
She stretched out what her mind told her was her arm. Something like a long pale green flame flickered in front of her, and then the stars and the red planet which filled half the sky disappeared and she was in a small dark room which had a row of pulsing blue lights on the wall. Her thoughts filled up with the words ‘Shog, where are you?’ as she floated somewhere between the wall and the ceiling of the dark room. Her surroundings changed to a narrow corridor and she realised that she must have gone through another wall or door, without realising it. ‘Shog? Shog?’
‘Jancie!’ His voice was loud in her thoughts and in the next instant she saw him beside her, a column of yellowish-green light much stronger than her own. When he raised an arm she saw the glowing shape of his hand and fingers. She could almost make out his face.
‘Are you all right?’ he asked. ‘You keep fading.’
‘Is this the research station?’ she asked.
‘I think so,’ he said. ‘I’m not sure whether we are floating because we have left our physical bodies behind, or because we’re in zero gravity. Are you sure you’re okay? You are very pale.’
‘I’m getting stronger.’ She tried to touch him but there was no sensation, simply a light against light. ‘Shog, I don’t like this.’
A strong voice cut across her thoughts. ‘Jancine? This is Dr Frey. My heartiest congratulations! I am very pleased with the projection and although Ashoga tolerated it a little better than you, I can assure you, you will be fine. I am getting a good reading and it seems that you are in a chamber connecting the living quarters with the recycling depot. You will need to move to the other end of the vessel to get to the research centre.’