A time to sow and a time to reap.
The words oscillated around the bone of his skull like a ringing alarm clock dropped down a well.
Crazy as a bugbed bugbed bugbed.
The woman held out her arms as if she wanted to embrace him, and despite his fear and awe, Bondurant felt a stirring in his groin.
Now Bondurant realized what was odd about the woman. His eyes had traveled all over her figure, he'd played with her curves in his mind licked his lips as he imagined his hands on her, his palm stinging her softest flesh as he meted out the punishment every woman deserved. Last of all, he looked at her eyes.
Eyes that saw nothing, because the sockets were empty. The makeshift skin around them bore runnels carved by fingernails.
Her voice came like icy rain: The better to see you with, my dear, precious, sweet Little Red Riding Hood.
She opened her palms and revealed her loose eyes, red strings of flesh dangling from them.
Starlene screamed. Bondurant choked on a prayer, sprayed a geyser of vomit on his shoes, and stumbled backward in the dark.
The Miracle Woman smiled, too many teeth and not enough eyes.
TWENTY-FOUR
Kracowski glanced at the computer screen, then checked his meter. "A hundred-and-twelve milliGuass," he said.
Paula, standing behind his chair, rubbed his shoulders. "It's only numbers, honey."
Kracowski knew he might as well be talking to the wall as talking to Paula, but he'd talked to walls too often lately. "These anomalies are not what I expected. Synaptic Synergy Therapy is designed to heal my patients, not cause them to have subjective experiences."
"Well, the ESP data is strong enough to convince even the biggest skeptics. And everything's subjective, honey."
"Except the truth."
He cleared the meter, changed its coordinates so that it detected another area of the basement. "Look at these spikes. The electromagnetic fields created by my equipment should be consistent. These are all over the place."
"So? If it bothers you, just ignore it."
"I can't ignore it. These readings aren't consistent with my theory."
"Change your theory, then."
Kracowski pushed away from his desk. "I was so sure I was right."
"You are right, Richard. You just found more than you bargained for."
He went to the two-way mirror and looked into the darkened space of Room Thirteen. He had helped those children. He had aligned their minds into harmonious states. He had restored them, made mem whole, healed what the religious-minded such as Bondurant called their "souls."
But souls didn't exist. The human body was a complex bag of chemicals, mostly water. The brain was nothing but a series of electromagnetic impulses. Thoughts and dreams were merely a random alignment of those impulses. Things like wishes and hopes and love and fear were specific patterns of neural activity, a battery of switches thrown on or off. Never mind that the number of possibilities were nearly limitless. "Nearly" was the key word. Everything had its limits.
Money.
It didn't buy happiness, and Kracowski knew this truth better than most.
Love.
That heralded and holy set of specific mental disorders, praised by poets throughout human history, chased by the weak who expected a miracle cure for their individual shortcomings, embraced by the masses as something worthy of sacrifice. If only they knew that Kracowski could create a series of electromagnetic wavelengths that aligned the synapses so that the subject experienced all those physical and emotional sensations: quickening of pulse, widening of pupils, flushing of skin, racing of blood to erogenous zones.
Fools fall in love, indeed. Research had already shown that those newly in love displayed the same synaptic patterns as those diagnosed with obsessive-compulsive disorder. A rose by any other name.
Faith.
Faith had its own built-in limit. Faith was the answer to its own question, a circular logic that satisfied simpletons around the world. No matter whether they called it God or Buddha or Allah or Moon or Krishna. No matter whether you met it on your knees or from the heights of a Himalayan monastery or in any of the modern brainwashing facilities they called temples, churches, and synagogues. All religious faith was selfish because all believers ultimately sought to save themselves, not others.
Science.
Ah, that was the one that might not have limits. Or the one discipline that might impose them. Truth. Knowledge. Facts. Hard evidence and data. That was almost something worthy of worship.
Except when the facts suggested that the entire truth would never be understood. Which was happening right now.
Telepathy and clairvoyance were theoretically possible, if one believed that the brain's electrical impulses weren't confined to the flesh. He could accept a world of mind intersecting with the world of space and time. But the existence of a soul separate from the body smacked far too much of metaphysical idiocy.
He'd been given a starting point, the abstracts and data that McDonald's people had compiled over the previous decade, the backlog of Dr. Kenneth Mills' experiments. ESP was producible as an innate ability that could be induced with a balance of force fields and systemic shock. But these latest experiments had skewed toward the spiritual, the unprovable, the unbelievable. That bothered him. That scrambled the harmony of his own synapses. It misaligned his neural patterns and disturbed his sure vision of the universe. It pissed him off.
"What are you thinking about?" Paula said.
He tapped his forehead against the mirror a couple of times. "I'm thinking of you, dear. What else?"
"I love it when you talk that way."
Her perfume cloyed the air. If only she knew that the natural pheromones in her perspiration were far more sexually alluring to the human male than perfume's scent. Still, she satisfied a need, and she was only temporary. He could always air out his office after she left.
"Hey, what's this?" she said.
She pointed to one of the video screens that monitored the equipment in the basement. The picture was greenish and fuzzy. The Trust had coughed up a fortune for the remote electromagnetic resonance system, spending millions on superconducting magnets and advanced circuitry, but the infrared video system was low budget. All Kracowski made out on me screen was a soft blur of movement.
"No one's supposed to have access to the basement," Kracowski said. "That equipment is delicate."
"I thought McDonald had some guards down there."
"They're under orders to stay away from the equipment." Even as he spoke, he remembered McDonald's words as the equipment was being installed. Orders change, McDonald had said, ex-Army bastard that he was. Kracowski peered at the screen. One of the figures separated from the green dimness and backed away.
"Bondurant."
"What's he doing down there?" Paula asked.
"He's the only one on staff with a key."
"Look. There's somebody else down there."
Kracowski cursed a god he didn't believe in. The magnetic pull of a regular MRI scanner was about 20,000 times the force of the earth's magnetic fields. It was strong enough to rip a pacemaker right out of a patient's chest, which was why MRI patients got a thorough going-over before being slid into the tube.
The equipment in the basement generated a field a hundred times stronger than that, at least in certain localized points. The magnetic field was strong enough to hum and created static electricity and microshocks. If the anomalous fluctuations continued, they could create a serious danger by pulling hardware from the walls. A loose piece of metal might fly across the room and pierce one of the tanks of liquid helium. The helium wasn't explosive, but an accident could set Kracowski's work back by several months, not to mention drawing the interest of a lot of busybodies in the state Social Services Department and the county planning department.