The Link (43 page)

He is conscious of standing in the middle of the hotel room. Conscious of his other self lying in the bed with Cathy. Conscious of the luminous, elastic-like cable joining him to his sleeping self, his end fastened to the
medulla oblongata
region of his skull, the other end centered between the eyes of his sleeping counterpart.

Conscious, then, of moving across the floor of the room and through the door. Along the corridor to a window.

And out the window into dark space.

Something pulls him back. He is in another corridor. It is filled with smoke. He peers through the smoke and sees flames coming from an open doorway.

Abruptly, he is back in his room, standing by the bed. He tries to shake Cathy but his hands, like vapor, pass through her. He starts to panic. If he goes back into his body, they might both die in the fire.

He starts to feel himself being drawn back toward his physical self. His face becomes a mask of dread. “No,” he mutters.

His gaze is caught by a small vase on the nearby bureau. Something makes him stare at it. He moves close to it and gazes at it fixedly, teeth clenched, eyes wide, unblinking.

The vase begins to tremble and he concentrates harder. “Move,” he says. “Move. Move. Move!”

The vase leaps suddenly across the room and shatters against the wall.

He and Cathy wake with a start. He looks around groggily.

Then he says, in a quiet voice, “We have to leave. There is a fire in a room two stories down.”

Ten minutes later, having woken Peter, the three are in the lobby and the city firemen are putting out the blaze upstairs.

“How did you know there was a fire?” Cathy asks, still amazed.

He tells her that he saw it. “I was having another OOBE. I was going somewhere. Then, instead, I was in the corridor, seeing the fire.”

“And the vase?” asks Cathy, staring at him.

He shrugs. “I… think I made it jump,” he tells her.

“When you were out of your body
?” she says.

Peter grips his arm. “You may well have saved our lives, old man,” he says. “Krivorotov was right. There is a psychic potential in you which you must nurture.”

Robert nods. He is grateful to have been able to warn them of the fire. But something bothers him.

It is not until the fire has been extinguished and they have been allowed to return to their rooms that he is able to express it.

“When I saw that surveillance room,” he tells Cathy, “I was looking for something else. When I saw that fire, I was looking for something else. I actually went out a window into the night to look for it.”

He stares at her in confusion.

“But what is it?” he asks. “What am I searching for?”

Later, he dreams—or seems to dream; it is another OOBE?

He is flying high above an ocean, looking down at the water.

As he looks, across the surface of the water appears a transparent latticework of immense pentagonal slabs.

He stares at them, reacting as an overlay of equilateral triangles appears on the latticework.

At every intersecting point, there is a sudden glow of white light.

He opens his eyes. A wind outside is rattling the blinds at the window.

He lies motionless, hearing Cathy’s breathing beside him.

Wondering what he has just seen.

He speaks of it at breakfast. He feels that it means something but has no idea what. Neither of them have a clue.

“I feel different somehow,” he says. “I think Krivorotov did more than help my arm.”

“Like what?” asks Cathy.

On impulse, Robert reaches over to the bread basket and tears off a square of bread approximately the size of the one Kulagina tore off.

He lays it on the table and holds his hand over it. They watch him, taken back.

“I know, now, that I made that vase move,” he says. “I think…” He stares at the bread, his features tightening. “Yes. Yes,” he says quietly. “I feel it coming.”

As they stare at him, he moves his hand across the tablecloth and the bread slides with the movement, falling into his lap.

“Good Lord,” murmurs Peter.

Robert slumps back in his chair. “Oh,” he says. “I see what she meant. It does take something out of you.”

They look at him with such odd expressions, Cathy actually open-mouthed, that Robert has to laugh. He makes a sudden finger-wiggling gesture toward her with both hands, making the traditional ghost sound. She jumps, then smiles awkwardly.

They look at each other in silence.

“I think I have to leave soon,” he tells them quietly. “I feel as though I have to… do something.”

He chuckles. “God, I sound ridiculous,” he says, his mental side reacting.

They are about to pursue the subject when Saransky enters the dining room, looking—for him—excited.

“An unexpected opportunity,” he tells them. “Dr. Adamenko has arranged for us to meet Dr. Kirlian himself!”

Fog at Krasnodar forces a cancellation of their flight there.

Adamenko, who has flown from Moscow to join them for their visit to Kirlian, will not accept the possibility of losing this opportunity.

With Saransky’s help, he locates a taxi driver willing to drive them the two hundred miles to Krasnodar for 80 rubles—110 dollars. Quickly, they put their luggage into the trunk and speed off.

While they are riding, Peter tells Adamenko how Robert’s OOBE saved their lives the night before. Trusting the Russian scientist, Robert adds an account of his later OOBE or dream or whatever it was.

As he describes the sensation of flying east across the Pacific, (he “knows” now that this was the ocean he was over and the direction he was traveling) the sight of the pentagonal slabs appearing, then the equilateral triangles. Adamanko regards him fixedly. He nods, his reaction apparently one of little more than polite interest.

But his eyes tell another story.

CLOSE ON a headstone on which are carved the buds of lilacs. The name on the stone is VALENTINA KHRISAFOUNA KIRLIAN.

“I thought you would like to see it,” Adamenko tells them. They are in a little cemetery on the outskirts of Krasnodar.

He points at the lilac buds, a tender smile on his lips. “See,” he says, “around each bud, an aura.”

As they walk back to the cab, Adamenko starts to tell them the story of Kirlian and his wife.

“For most of his life with Valentina,” he says, “they lived in a dingy, two-room apartment on the corner of Gorky and Kirov Streets.”

We see the story dramatized with occasional narration by Adamenko.

“When it all began in the early 1920’s,” says his voice, “Kirlian was a self-taught electrical repairman with a magic touch.”

We see the young Kirlian in his tiny apartment workshop. There he fixes anything electrical from burned out fixtures to bicycle lights. Summoned by customers, he brings his toolbox and rolls of wire to put in new electrical wiring, fuse boxes, fixtures et al.

“As the years went by,” says Adamenko’s voice. “He advanced to repairing cameras and microscopes. What he didn’t know, he figured out. He did his own schematic drawings. He stayed up nights, reading to learn what he needed.

“Literally, this man was in love with electricity and the machines it powered.

“Then one night in the late 1920’s—”

We see the young couple sharing their tiny bedroom with their equipment. It is a humorous sight to watch them preparing for bed, forced to move photographic plates, develop pans and induction coils off their bed. In the corner of the room is a monstrous, black Tesla generator. They use it, at night, as a clothes hanger.

Before retiring, Kirlian decides to do a little extra work on the high-frequency generator of an electrical massage machine. Tired, he has a lapse of judgement and a sudden electrical discharge passes through him.

Valentina runs to him. “Are you all right?” she asks. He is. Excitedly, he starts to tell her what he saw. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if he could photograph it?

CUT TO days later. Kirlian has rigged an insulated table as a base, a photographic plate wrapped in black paper sitting on an electrode.

Attaching another electrode to the top of his hand, he presses his palm down on the plate, steps onto a rubber pad and nods to his wife.

Worriedly, she throws the switch. There is a click. She disengages the switch.

A frantically impatient Kirlian watches as his wife develops the photographic plate.

Appearing is the silhouette of his hand, its bones clearly outlines.

Surrounding the fingertips is a mysterious aura.

The young couple hug each other joyously. “It worked, it worked!” cries Kirlian.

“Endless experiments followed,” says Adamenko’s voice.

We see the Kirlians trying to improve the image, using various materials from fabric to tinfoil to place between the hand and the photographic plate. Again and again, the luminescence shows around the hand, clearer each time.

“What distinguished their work,” Adamenko narrates, “was their intuitive feeling that what they were seeing was more than just the simple electrical phenomenon known for decades as ‘corona discharge’.”

We see the couple examining other items for evidence of the aura—rubber, coins, metals, leather, wood, paper, textiles, plastics. The emanation from each varies—and is totally different from the pattern of emissions from their hands.

It is not an easy study. More than once, they each suffer electrical shocks that throw them, stunned, to the floor. Finally, they solve this problem by replacing the switch with a foot pedal. Whenever a shock knocks them back now, the foot, kicked off the pedal, cuts off all current.

CUT TO Adamenko in the cab en route to see Kirlian. “When I was a little boy,” he says, “I lived around the corner from the Kirlians.”

CUT TO their apartment, a group of candy nibbling children watching the Kirlians operate their machinery—from the safe distance of a doorway.

“On Sundays, they would ask us in, give us candy and let us watch them operate their mysterious machinery,” says Adamenko’s voice.

CUT TO children running outside, picking leaves off trees.

“They would tell us to go out and pick them leaves in pairs. We would race each other and whoever brought back the prettiest pair of leaves won an extra piece of candy.”

CUT TO the children, open-mouthed, looking at the photographs of the leaves.

“Later, they would show us photographs of our leaves,” says Adamenko’s voice. “Little did we know what a marvel we were viewing.”

E.C.U. of photograph of leaf. A stunning sight, the leaf surrounded by a brilliant array of twinkling lights.

“The Kirlian effect,” says Adamenko’s voice reverently.

CAMERA HOLDS, then CUTS TO the Kirlian’s workshop in later years as they photograph a set of leaves.

“One day, in 1949, the Kirlians were photographing a set of leaves given to them by a chairman of a major scientific research institute when something very strange occurred,” Adamenko’s voice goes on.

The photographs of the “twin” leaves differ from each other.

Picture after picture is taken. Still the same results.

The luminescence of one leaf shows roundish, spherical flares of light scattered symmetrically over the entire image, the typical Kirlian effect appearance.

The second leaf shows tiny geometrical dark figures grouped sparsely here and there.

The couple works through the night but nothing changes.

In the morning, weary and troubled, they show their results to the scientist.

Instead of being disturbed, the man’s face lights up. “You’ve found it!” he says excitedly.

CAMERA IN ON the two dissimilar photographs, the scientist’s finger pointing at them.

“This leaf,” he says, pointing at the photograph with the dark figures, “has been contaminated with a plant disease. There is absolutely nothing on the plant or leaf to indicate this. Yet you have discovered it.”

CUT TO Adamenko.

“It was then,” he says, “that the Kirlians realized that the galaxies of sparkling lights they saw in their photographs were nothing less than a kind of energy counterpart body of the leaf.

“That, long before illnesses could manifest themselves in the physical body of the plant, they could be seen in this counterpart body.”