Hazard (8 page)

With the wind and sea as they were, Lowery nearly had to shout when explaining to Whitley the controlled conditions under which the exercise would be conducted. Whitley merely gave a single emphatic nod every once in a while. Not really listening. His cigar had gone out but he still held it tight between his lips. Hazard imagined the end of the cigar soaking in Whitley's mouth.

Lowery opened the box of images to show Whitley how the four-by-five cards were always concealed. He demonstrated how the battery-powered box rotated the cards on a spindle, how it automatically selected and presented one card at random out of more than a thousand. The face of each card was entirely covered with an opaque adhesive paper that Hazard would peel off. No one but Hazard would get a look at an image until after it had been transmitted. That way they'd be absolutely sure only Hazard was doing the sending, explained Lowery.

A final approving nod from Whitley. He gazed longingly at the far-off horizontal strip of gray that was land. Wishing he were back on it, he pulled the knot of his tie down, unbuttoned his collar and breathed deeply through his nose.

Hazard's look told Lowery he was ready.

Lowery activated the box. The spindle rotated the cards for several seconds and then pushed up a single card.

Hazard took it. He carefully peeled off the opaque adhesive and glanced at the image. An easy one, he thought.

It was an ordinary circle with a much smaller circle at its center.

Hazard immediately fixed his mind on that image. He had to force his senses to detach, ignore everything else—Lowery, Whitley, the sea, the wind. It wasn't easy. It never was. Because success depended on more than simple concentration. It required that he focus his thoughts not only on the image as he saw it but also as Keven would see it. That meant concentrating simultaneously on two related but separate things. Not easy. Ordinarily impossible.

Circle containing a smaller circle.

I see it, thought Hazard, and I see it as she sees it.

He visualized Keven's eyes, their special blue color with slivers of silver in them. Her eyes set on the circle containing a smaller circle. Her eyes delivering that image to her brain.

He felt a spray of cold sea water on his face, distracting. He was momentarily aware of Lowery and Whitley nearby, a peripheral impression of them. But he used the sea, its repetitive chopped-up mass, to bring his mind back to nothing but the circle containing a smaller circle.

There it was again, isolated in his mind's eye.

And then, there in his mind was Keven seeing it.

The image.

As he saw it.

As he saw her seeing it.

The two still consecutive.

For several minutes his mind shifted its intense concentration alternately between those two impressions. Back and forth, more and more quickly. Until the image became a constant and his mental view of it and his mental view of Keven seeing it superimposed one on the other for no more than the duration of an ordinary fragment of thought.

He couldn't hold the composite, didn't try. The impressions became consecutive again, individual thoughts in order, and he felt he might lose them altogether and have to start over. He knew he'd lose them if he tried too hard. So he released the intensity of his concentration slightly, just enough, and that kept the impressions there. Then he pulled the separate thoughts back together to form the necessary composite again. I see it and see it as she sees it. The image. He held it for as long as he could and then let it go.

There was the choppy sea, the sun and the wind that had been hitting him. He handed the card to Lowery.

During all that time Kersh's attention never left the laboratory monitors. He anticipated what might come through, so he was less surprised than pleased by what the computers picked up from Keven, swiftly processed and relayed.

Kersh recognized it as the same extraordinary sequence that had occuurred in previous, similar exercises. Beginning with a regular, steady alpha-wave rhythm and then an abrupt block of all alphas as the beta waves took over. Indicating that Keven was responding to a sensory stimulus. Perfectly normal.

However, at this point came the first significant variation from the normal pattern. For no apparent reason, the beta waves continued, and quickly their cycles per second increased from twenty-three to fifty-four. There was also a sharp increase in beta amplitude to sixty millivolts, and the beta impulses more than doubled in duration to eighty-five thousandths of a second.

Obviously Keven's brain was very hard at work. Relaxed as she was, and alone in that silent room, it was doubtful that she was responding to any external sensory stimulation. At least not to this extent.

Kersh noted the auxiliary channel that corresponded with the electrodes attached to the corners of Keven's eyelids. Indications of very rapid eye movement. Her eyes were shifting erratically, as though she were being bombarded by myriad visual attractions. Despite the fact that she was looking at nothing but a blank black wall.

All the while, the beta waves kept coming from her. Within less than a minute they had doubled again in frequency, voltage and length; were peaking up to a hundred and ten cycles; one hundred twenty-five millivolts, one hundred seventy thousandths of a second.

Kersh tried to identify with what Keven was experiencing at that moment. By comparative standards her brain was electrocuting itself. Yet she felt no pain.

The betas went on and up to one hundred thirty cycles, one hundred fifty millivolts, two hundred thousandths of a second. And then, abruptly—

The betas stopped.

As though someone had pulled the plug or severed the wires, the monitor that had been registering the beta rhythm indicated no beta response at all. Strange enough, but all the more so because the expected didn't happen—there was no reversion to an alpha-wave rhythm. The monitor that registered alphas showed no sign of activity. And the eye movement, so prominent before, had suddenly stopped.

Incredible as it seemed, every monitor relating to Keven's brain was now presenting nothing. Blank. It appeared that her entire cerebral cortex had shut down. For one, two, three, four, five seconds.

Then, while all other channels stayed void, there came a distinct pulsating wave of a different sort. It didn't begin low and build up—it came through full at once. Eleven cycles per second with a very high amplitude of two hundred fifty millivolts. Each wave was extremely short, a mere ten thousandths of a second. Graphically, the pattern being recorded was one of long, sharp, individual spikes, like a symmetrical line of identical inverted icicles.

It was relatively easy for Kersh to determine from which part of Keven's brain these waves were coming. He only needed to see which of the keyed depth electrodes on Keven's scalp was picking up this isolated electrical activity.

The old brain. That was the point of origin. Deep down past the new bark, inside the old bark where the three earliest brain vesicals had evolved. Just anterior of the brain stem, those three known as the rhombencephalon, metencephalon, and thalamencephalon, also called the hind, mid, and fore sections of the old brain. In the evolution of the human thinking and sensory mechanisms, these three had been the first to develop. However, most of their earlier functions had since been taken over by newer brain parts.

Kersh suspected that the waves originating in the old brain were possibly the so-called lambda waves that neuroscientists had detected infrequently on the
EEGS
of certain subjects. It seemed that lambdas showed up with some subjects and didn't with others. Kersh wasn't sure they were that unpredictable and generally ignored lambdas, so he arbitrarily called them something else. Psi waves.

Now, as abruptly as they'd begun, the psi waves coming from Keven cut off. Leaving once again that inexplicable, contrary one, two, three, four, five seconds of blank. Then in proper reversion sequence the recognizable beta waves returned as strong as before. Gradually they subsided to normal range.

Kersh focused on the monitor that corresponded with the graph, the easel-like electronic apparatus on which, earlier, Keven had drawn a heart.

Within seconds, there, on the silvery face of that monitor, appeared the image she had chosen to draw this time.

A circle containing a much smaller circle.

Kersh didn't know, of course, whether or not that image had been telepathically received by Keven, whether it was a hit or a miss. He wouldn't know until the rest of the exercise was done and the score was added up with Lowery.

“Know what that looks like to me?” said Richland from the rear of the lab. He'd gone for the bottle of bourbon and had missed most of what had happened. He wouldn't have understood it anyway. Now he gulped from a styrofoam cup and said, “It looks like a tit.”

Kersh didn't turn to Richland, thought it better not to in order to control his flare of anger. He kept himself in check by once more reminding himself that his affiliation with Richland and all the others like Richland had been his own choosing. Out of necessity, yes, but he'd known pretty well beforehand how it would be.

In 1950 at the Cavendish Laboratory of Cambridge University Kersh was one of a small group of biologists working on the possible genetic importance of protein molecules. While at Cavendish, it became apparent to Kersh that the protein theory, then supported by so many scientists, was not going to prove itself out as the answer to genetic structure. He preferred to believe that the solution lay in the area of nucleic acids rather than the proteins.

To research that field he left Cavendish in 1952 and established himself at Harvard. He was close to the nucleic acid answer when, in 1953, Crick and Watson proved he was right by beating him to it. A disappointment, but Kersh drew valuable self-confidence from knowing he'd been on the right track. That fact also brought him a certain amount of recognition.

Crick's and Watson's double helix discovery was a huge jump ahead. Kersh wisely jumped ahead with it. He stayed at Harvard, refocused his efforts, and over the years made numerous valuable contributions. His reputation grew within the scientific community and reached its height in 1968 when he was awarded a top international prize—just this side of the Nobel—for his work on the replication of
DNA
and
RNA
.

By then he was in his fifties, and late one Saturday night at his desk, having worked straight through without dinner, more or less out of habit, he paused for a moment, glanced at his plastic-protected prize certificate and realized how much he really hadn't lived, how much of his time he'd given to his work. Most of his best. It was a feeling that had been coming on for quite awhile. He decided he wouldn't rest on his laurels, stay in the rut. There was still time, and possibly he could make the best of it.

Soon afterward he took a leave of absence. Went to warm foreign places and tried not to think of such things as crystalline
A
-form
DNA
fibers. Within six months he had met Julie, loved her, married her, returned to Harvard, and found he couldn't pick up where he'd left off. Changed that much.

It was during his prolonged sabbatical that he'd developed an interest in extrasensory perception, particularly telepathy. Julie's influence had much to do with that. Her belief in it was emphatic and she enjoyed discussing it with Kersh. She related telepathy to something spiritual, a psychic phenomenon. Without belittling her theories, he naturally took a scientific position. If telepathy did exist, he said, there was a scientific explanation for it.

Did he believe there was such a thing as telepathy?

Possibly.

“Then why,” asked Julie, “hasn't science given it more important attention?”

He wasn't sure. Perhaps the most inhibiting factor was the religious belief that God, not man, works in strange and wondrous ways. Geneticists were getting some of the same treatment for their discoveries that chromosomatic arrangements could be manipulated to predetermine human characteristics.

Julie didn't believe that was a good enough excuse.

Kersh agreed, and told her, “As much as they deny it, scientists also want acceptance outside their own special community. That's what often holds them back more than anything else.”

Julie put the question to him again. “Do you believe in telepathy? Yes or no?”

“There must be something to it,” he conceded.

There was an impressive amount of evidence in favor of humans having such an ability. But little of it scientifically acceptable. Except for the work of J. B. Rhine at Duke and a few others, all of whom had gone at it rather defensively, attempting to prove the existence of telepathy rather than assuming it did exist and concentrating their energies determining how and why.

The new challenge of it appealed to Kersh. Also, for him, a not unimportant consideration was Julie's enthusiastic interest. Work was better when there was love in it.

He outlined a research program and submitted an official request to the appropriate board of grants at Harvard. The board, though taken aback by Kersh's proposal to research telepathy, did not turn him down. They just politely tried to dissuade him, urged him to continue with his brilliant work in molecular biology.

Kersh stood fast. The board stalled, suggested he take another sabbatical.

Kersh insisted.

Harvard lost him.

But where to get financing for the research of telepathy? One of the private foundations? Too controversial a field for them, Kersh decided. He looked to a more likely money source.

The letter he wrote to Washington was purposely vague, but it received a prompt reply and a week later Kersh flew the shuttle down to Washington for a meeting. As he was escorted down one of the wide upper corridors of the Pentagon, past offices with doors displaying gold-leaved eagles and stars and other emblems, he felt sure he'd come to the right place.