The Dreaming Dragons Part 4

'As you've gathered,' Sutton told him, 'we have a direct interest in your work on out-of-body-experience. I'm afraid I can't give you all the background, but Lennox and a large number of colleagues have spent the last few months examining a curious effect with a bearing on your own experiments.' He leaned forward and knotted his hands. 'I'm having some equipment set up for you right now. Hugh will be seconded to your staff. Run this thing down for us, Bill. It is a matter of imperative national security.'

DelFord regarded him with amus.e.m.e.nt. 'I a.s.sume you're not out of your mind, Dwayne, but let me remind you of the security status of my merry little team. Alister Jerison -- '

' -- is a member in good standing of the Trotskyite alliance, Science for People's Liberation. Dr Alice Langer is a spokeswoman for Sappho. And the rest of you are a bunch of left-liberal freak-fringe intellectual bandits. I know.' Sutton was angry, but contained the emotion well behind his bland sun-lamped face; he _didn't_ enjoy it. 'Just take my word, Bill. The normal criteria have been waived. J. Edgar is reeling in his plutonium coffin.'

's.h.i.t,' said delFord. 'So they've finally found something bigger than the "national interest". I take it the Russians are involved?'

'What we're dealing with here,' the physicist said, 'makes the International s.p.a.ce Station look like a picnic.'

Briefly, Bill's stomach spasmed. You don't worry about OOBEs, he told himself, if the world's coming to an end after all. A muted buzzer sounded. DelFord stood up, and placed his empty mug neatly next to the bubbling percolator.

'Okay, guys,' he told them. 'Let's meet the gang. But let me caution you -- your security reports might have us labelled as bandits, but you'd better _believe_ it. We've devised our own methods, and they're not what you'll be accustomed to from the Pentagon.' He held the door open as Harrington followed the general out. 'Or the Caltech common room, either.'

For a moment the astronaut trailed behind, studying a free-standing basalt, an Aztec rendering of Ehacatl, Quetzalcoatl under his guise as wind deity.

'You have a startling decor, Bill.' He gestured at the muted mural of entwined Islamic geometric forms, the skinny bank of secretarial microprocessors and the fleshy indoor plants.

'Yeah.' Bill delFord walked beside Lapp as they went down the corridor to the Grope Pit. 'The whole spread came to us by default, and we've tinkered with it. You can blame the OPEC upheaval. There was this sheikling, Hosein el-Bagir Shah, who came to the States in the sixties to learn the finer details of petroleum engineering, mixed with some advanced chicanery at the Harvard Business School. He was a devout Muslim and the hippie thing took his interest. I think his father had known Aldous back in the bad old days; anyway the kid sank some spare millions into this set-up, in memoriam, with some muddled notion of blending Sufism and high technology. Shortly after it was established, the price of oil rocketed and Hosein came to his senses. I think he's doing very nicely.'

'And you?'

'I was in the right place at the right time. He had it all locked in as a non-profit Foundation, and there's still a trickle of money available to pay for upkeep and incidentals. Most of our funding -- such as it is -- comes from research contracts from NASA and several of the bigger foundations.'

They stepped into a medium-sized room filled with sprawling bodies under lights with a warm golden tinge; heavy curtains covered one wall, blocking the natural illumination from the enormous sky. DelFord flopped on a large bean-bag waving his hands at the floor as the visitors stood perplexed. Sutton let himself down quickly, favouring the creases in his trousers. The other two, after some hesitation, sat on a single large fluffy mattress, Lapp with his broad back against the wall, the physicist hunched forward with his hairy shins exposed.

'Morning folks. As you know, these gentlemen have expressed an interest in our work on ooby. I don't know any more about it than you, right now, but I'm certain we can depend on the general to have something piquant up his sleeve -- like maybe a new device for detecting insipient terrorism by the radical absorption lines in the auric spectrum.' A t.i.tter from one corner. Briskly, delFord introduced the visitors. 'Obviously I needn't waste time returning the introductions; I'm sure our friends here have spent many happy minutes studying our files.'

Tony Freestone shifted his great bulk, propping his elbows. 'It's that big?'

'It is.' Sutton refused to be nettled. 'Ladies and gentlemen, let me say personally, and on behalf of my colleagues, that we're pleased to meet you. What Bill states so bluntly is true, but I hope you won't find anything unduly sinister in what is after all a routine pre-briefing procedure.'

'h.e.l.l no,' said Alice Langer. 'The price of liberty is eternal voyeurism.'

Audibly, Lennox Harrington's knuckles cracked. He stared at Alice and said precisely, through tight lips, 'At this moment a pair of Army technicians is setting up a small piece of equipment in your main psychophysical laboratory. Outside, a truckload of soldiers is stationed with maser surveillance, two nausea-inducing subsonic generators and a machine gun. The device the technicians are installing is capable of withstanding a ground-zero gigaton nuclear explosion. Perhaps this will enable you to grasp the need for caution.'

In the ensuing silence, Bill delFord waited for Sutton to hit the roof. Instantly he told himself: Don't be foolish. They've brought the thing here for us to study. Why should it matter who tells us about it? But he knew that Harrington's outburst had been a bad lapse. The strain, he thought, must have been immense. He let out his breath, and realised he was trembling. The implications began to race in his mind.

Delwyn Schauble, the bio-feedback specialist, began to giggle. 'And you're telling _us?_' she asked with a squeak.

'We're not the first on the block.' Bill said to her. 'The Israelis and the Russians have it too.'

The babble began, kids let loose in the playground.

'There goes deterrence.'

'The N-country proliferation theorem -- '

'Opportunities for reactor terrorism -- '

'Poor old Teller, all those years -- '

'And what the h.e.l.l,' broke through Alister Jerison's booming voice, 'does an anti-nuclear shield have to do with astral projection?'

'Let's have a little restraint in here,' Sutton barked. He was met with unfriendly looks, but the room quietened. 'The work your Inst.i.tute has prosecuted on OOBEs may have a critical bearing on certain by-products of this process. Before we discuss the details, however, it's necessary for Dr Harrington to give you an outline of how the field functions. Lennox?'

With distaste, the physicist stated: 'I cannot pretend that this forum meets with my approval. There is no doubt in my mind that the so-called "paranormal" phenomena with which you waste your time are a congeries of delusive -- ' He halted and licked his lips. 'However, your work on sensory deprivation and overload may well contribute to a solution of our pressing difficulties. The device, as you have understood, is intended as a defense against nuclear attack. Do you have an overhead projector?' He was directed to the display terminal, and rapidly jotted down a series of equations; they were displayed on a large wall screen. After thirty seconds of incomprehensible Hermitian scalar a.n.a.lysis, Bill interrupted him.

'Lennox, I'm sorry but you've lost me. Could we have some approximation of the central data in clear? My math goes about as far as soph.o.m.ore calculus I'm afraid.'

Lewis Carroll country, Bill thought. _He only does it to annoy, because he knows it teases_. But that was probably unfair. Lennox Harrington doubtless pitched his delivery more generously when giving advice to the ignoramuses of Military Intelligence, but the man was accustomed to the swift cut and thrust of his peers. Even this unruly shambles must project enough of the tone of an academic symposium to cue him in to high-powered exposition.

'I take it you are all familiar with the elements at least of quark confinement theory?' the physicist said impatiently. He p.r.o.nounced it to rhyme with _cork_ rather than _mark_. 'Most subatomic particles are of the cla.s.s known as hadrons. These in turn are composed of six kinds of quarks, paired into three generations, and distinguished by ma.s.s and other quantum values. Despite strenuous efforts, no one has been able to liberate the quark const.i.tuents from baryons and mesons, though they can readily be observed as approximate point-sources inside protons, for example. In fact, M-theory shows that they aren't points at all. My own approach, using N-branes, sees hadrons as strings or membranes, whose vibrational states define each particle's momentum and energy.'

'My G.o.d,' Freestone said, 'it's a brane baggie!'

Annoyed, Harrington nodded sharply. 'You could put it that way. Years ago, Kenneth Johnson at MIT proposed that quarks were literally held captive within gluon bags. He was nearly right. They're confined by gluon brane sheets.'

'You've built a bottomless bag,' delFord said, tracing Freestone's intuition. 'No matter how much radiant energy you pour in, it turns into a tougher fabric. What's the, uh, the elastic limit?'

'There is none.' Harrington turned off the display and sat down gingerly. 'You're only half right. Quarks are generated as well, and confined within hadron-sized bags. On the interface of the field helium is created, which disperses as fast as it is formed. Under sustained nuclear or laser bombardment, of course, a fusion plasma envelope is produced, which decays when inputs are extinguished.'

'Jesus Christ,' said Berys Marshall. Her gentle, grandmotherly face was pale. 'You boys have been busy.'

DelFord regarded the ceiling. His thoughts leapt like chains of sparks.

'Cities and agricultural belts get a perimeter of bag generators,' he said. 'The standard infrared detection satellites monitor a possible ICBM barrage launch. Up go the shields. If the intelligence was incorrect, no harm done. Unless the bag field injures the people inside it. So it does, of course.' He sat up and stared at Sutton. 'Something happens to people under the brane barrier, something intolerable. And you want us to find out what it is.' He laughed incredulously. 'An altered state of consciousness. Little wonder you came to us, Dwayne. We're expendable, and we're experts in deliberate derangement. A convenient combination.'

'That's not true,' the astronaut said sharply. 'You're free to volunteer, as I did. The United States government doesn't -- '

'Oh, we'll volunteer all right, Hugh,' Delwyn Schauble told him softly. 'They know we can't pa.s.s up a chance like this. Total exclusion of ambient electromagnetic noise. That's what it is, isn't it, Dr Harrington?'

'Absolute interdiction,' he said. 'Nothing gets in, nothing gets out. Including gravity waves.'

'A s.p.a.ce drive?'

'No.' He drew back his lips unconsciously. 'Einstein's Equivalence postulate has been disproved. Our protected cities won't be flying off into s.p.a.ce; the inertial frame -- '

'What does it do to people?' Bill asked the general. The room was utterly still.

'There is no observable effect whatsoever, detrimental or beneficial, upon animal test preparations,' Sutton said. 'Experiments with marine organisms like grunions, aquatic worms and oysters, which respond to the lunar periodicity, show a temporary confusion of life-cycle. Extensive reports will be made available to -- '

'What does it do to people?' delFord asked again.

'Anxiety. Hysteria. Delusions of leaving their bodies. Mystical trance. In some cases,' he said with retributive brutality, 'it drives them insane.'

'I see.' Bill closed his eyes, bent his chin to his folded hands. 'Out-of-body-experience.'

'Yes.' The general stood up, stretching his legs. 'Think of yourselves as guinea pigs if it pleases you, if it caters to your d.a.m.ned paranoia, but the truth is that you crazy loonies come closer to being experts on this son of a b.i.t.c.h than anyone else we've been able to locate who wasn't under lock and key. I read your last report, Bill, read it twice, carefully, and I tell you it distressed me. All of you people in this room. G.o.d Almighty, I know your track records. You could have been doing useful work, making significant contributions. Be that as it may. My superiors want you to take a shot at it. Someone has to make sense of it.' He seemed genuinely in the grip of powerful, confused emotions.

'Sure, Dwayne,' delFord said, aware of sudden compa.s.sion for the man. He sat up straighter and looked around the group. 'Here's an idea I'd like to try out on you, gang. Romantic versus Cla.s.sical science.'

'Nice,' Tony said at once.

Anne Hawthorne, their British psychologist, looked at Bill sharply. She rolled over, plucked her sari across brown knees. 'I thought we'd got past binary, polar paradigms, Bill. Even Freud used a three-way system, and he had to keep replacing the parameters. And Lennox here wants six quarks for his _elements_.'

Tony Freestone shook his great, jowled head. 'The mind has an inescapable tendency to reduce to pairs. Maybe it's the cerebral bilateral asymmetry. Pursue that -- there's no reason why the dimensions need be seen as ends of a continuum, maybe they're orthogonal.'

Crisply, Alice Langer stated: 'For what it's worth, the distinction isn't new.' Her knowledge was encyclopedic; she tended, as a result, to the pedantic, even in the Grope Pit. 'There was a respected tradition of "romantic" chemistry as late as the nineteenth century. Charles C. Gillespie discussed it in relation to the Jacobin -- '

'It's a starter, Alice, I'm not looking for prizes for originality. Here's the sort of thing I had in mind. Cla.s.sicism typically connotes a regime of well-ordered rules, unities, causality viewed as segmented chains, decorous generalities. While Romanticism, of course, is the affirmation -- '

Sutton, staring around him with growing choler, said sharply, 'What the h.e.l.l are you maniacs babbling about?' He looked at his watch. 'The technicians will have the device set up by now. I suggest that we break up this merry antiquarian kaffeeklatsch and get to work.'

For the first time, delFord felt truly angry at the man. 'Dwayne, shut your mouth or get out. When you're in the Grope Pit and we're engaged in heuristic reciprocity, you contribute or you leave.'

In honest bafflement, Sutton said, 'We don't have time for philosophy.'

'General, at Bethesda we used similar techniques,' Lapp said. 'Conceptual block-busting, lateral search -- '

'Those methods are tactical,' Anne told him. She eyed the astronaut with some interest. 'Ours is strategic.'

The tension and hostility in the Pit eased. As if there had been no interruption, Alister Jerison said, 'The Romantic/Cla.s.sic dichotomy emerged in a specific dialectical context. Romanticism was a last-ditch attempt by a malcontent intellectual elite to regain the imagined freedoms of feudalism.'

'Nonsense,' the Caltech physicist said, to everyone's surprise. 'Go back to the late Tom Kuhn's view; you might regard the normal conduct of scientific investigation as subject to the Cla.s.sical constraints. Romanticism then emerges justifiably during the collapse of exhausted paradigms.'

'Courtly love!' Anne cried. 'The doomed, heroic quest for an object which by definition is out of reach. But isn't that the background to _all_ science now, not just during paradigm upheavals?' She glanced around the group. 'I mean, we don't just have experimental limitations any more. There's quantal uncertainty, chaotic doubling, Goedel's Proof. Emergent complexity. Our courtly quest is intrinsically unsatisfiable.'

'Okay,' Alister admitted heavily. 'But in any case ordered data only becomes knowledge, in the authentic sense, when it stands in meaningful relation to the active struggle for human liberation.' Sutton groaned. 'Romantic ideology imposed isolation on intellectuals. Cla.s.sic culture was repressive, sure, but it remained social. The Romantic rebellion was decadent rather than liberatory precisely because it _rejected_ the social context.'

Bill delFord lifted his head. 'Dwayne, were your experimental subjects put under the shield singly or in groups?'

The general blinked. 'Why, each man went in alone, of course. It's standard procedure; minimises risks to personnel, reduces the variables under consideration -- '

'I thought so. Good old positivist lab technique.' Rising, Bill opened the soundproofed door. 'Okay, gang, that's it for the morning. Thanks for your help.' The team immediately got to their feet and straggled out. None of them continued the fierce debate. DelFord stopped Anne Hawthorne, holding her suntanned arm. 'I'd like to try Hugh, you, and me under the field simultaneously. Are you game, Anne?'

'Fine.' The woman looked slightly nervous, but she smiled as she glanced across at the waiting astronaut.

'I presume the dimensions of the field are adequate for three people,' Bill said to Harrington.

'Certainly,' the physicist said, taken aback by the abrupt change of pace. 'It's an oblate spheroid four metres high, with the generator at one of the foci. We didn't intend the subject to be claustrophobic.'

Testily, the general said: '_I'm_ claustrophobic, G.o.dd.a.m.n it and you're s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g the lid tighter every minute. Would I offend you too grossly if I ask for an explanation?'

'Three heads are better than one,' delFord told him.

'Bill, that's not a working hypothesis, it's a blind shot in the dark. You don't lock three amnesiacs together to speed their recovery.'

'How do you know?'

'I've seen men blundering around in battle shock.'

'And do your psychiatrists treat them with solitary confinement?'

'Hmmm. Yes, if they become violent -- as they often do.'

'That's not therapy, it's staff insurance. Nor did you mention violence as a side-effect. My best guess right now is that Alister hit the nail on the head. Your methods of investigation destroyed the social context your experimental subjects needed to sustain their sanity. The gluon field imposes more savage quarantine on its victims than human beings have ever experienced. We're all linked together, Dwayne. Profoundly. Organically. This field severs that link, and your subjects bleed to death.'

Sutton grunted in disgust. 'Jung. Lilly. I've read my share, Bill, and there's not a single operational definition in the whole mystical box of tricks. Nothing testable, not one item you can put on a bench and measure.'

'We'll provide your test, Dwayne. And if I'm wrong,' he said with a grin that failed to convince any of them, 'you can tie us up in satin ribbons and pack us off to the closest funny farm as a matched set.'

On the way to the main entrance, delFord stuck his head round his office door and spoke briefly with Janine. Then they went out into the cooler midday air. Waves crashed behind them, at the foot of the vast bluff. They crossed the parking ap.r.o.n and left the paving, following a gentle gra.s.sy incline to the mandatory geodesic domes half-hidden in trees and shrubbery. A bird sang out; it, or its fellow, left a leafy branch and veered off into the grey sky. A large armoured vehicle stood outside one of the black domes, ugly in outline against the sombre solar-energy hexagons. On its roof, a maser mirror whirled. Sutton gestured to a patient, alert serviceman; they conferred in low tones. The general brusquely waved the others on to the entrance.

Against G.o.d's and Murphy's express ordinance, the Army technicians had evidently experienced no difficulties in getting the device installed and phase-tested within the echoing barn. In among the litter of hastily cleared equipment, the gluon field was a prodigious bauble. Like a great curved mirror, an impossible egg of mercury, it rested without compressive distortion from gravity under the bolder arc of the Fuller dome. Bill gazed at it, dazzled, expecting it to roll from its unstable position and break into a myriad smaller b.a.l.l.s of spinning light.

Abruptly it was gone, replaced by a drab skeletal construction of bolted structural steel, an ovoid of wire mesh, a neat matt-finish box on a stanchion at one focus.

'It's activated and deactivated by a quartz crystal clock,' Lennox Harrington told him. 'Naturally, there's no way we can control it externally while the gluon field is energised. Our standard run is five minutes. You can alter that to suit yourselves -- and override the programming from inside if the strain becomes intolerable.'

Sutton was obliged to drag Bill away from the cage for the concentrated briefing session he'd prepared with Hugh Lapp and the physicist. The woman and the four men sat around a rickety table on stools, intently going over the doc.u.ments and reports from previous experiments. Periodically shadows shifted subtly as the mirror flashed into existence, hovered for five minutes and extinguished itself. After ninety minutes Anne leaned back from the table, stretched, and said, 'I'm ravenous. I don't suppose we can have some sandwiches?'

'Not recommended,' said Hugh.

'You're telling me.' She pulled a face. 'But that's the best we can do over here in greasy-hand territory.'

'The only time I was in there I threw up,' the astronaut told her.

Anne nodded. 'You must have the same catering service.' Sighing, she asked delFord: 'Enemas too, I suppose?'

'I think so. And ten minutes of yoga before we pull the blanket over our heads.' He glanced at the captain, and his mouth drew down ironically. 'All our affective runs are done nude, Hugh. I hope you won't mind.'

'I'll try to sustain my grief.' His muscular shoulders moved. He gazed reflectively at Anne. She grinned back at him.

Minutes later, after she'd vanished into the bathroom with the enema bag, the men heard her vomiting in a business-like fashion. Hugh halted at the door of the men's room and raised his eyebrows. 'She's that nervous?'

'No. I'll be doing the same myself. It's a combination of common sense and Reichian relaxation therapy. Emptying the gut is a precaution suggested by your own experience. But I wouldn't recommend it unless you know how -- it's a bit wearing.'

DelFord came out naked, and kicked his sandals off at the edge of the cage. The technicians had positioned three aluminium and foam plastic harnesses during the briefing; Anne, eyes closed and breathing deeply, was already resting semisupine in the central billet. Bill climbed up beside her and squeezed her hand. She really is a most attractive woman, he thought. How the h.e.l.l does she keep that rich suntan? Her light brown hair, long and fine, was swept up carefully in a knot. He recalled the feel of that hair, and was briefly sad. Their affair had been short and intense. Then he thought, with amus.e.m.e.nt, She's l.u.s.ting after our honest captain today. The myth of astronauts. I wonder how long it'll take her to have him in bed. Not long, he decided. Hughie's no slouch, unless I miss my mark.

Lapp crossed the floor, stolid in his nudity. He held something metallic in his fist; after he had clambered up and slid into place, he leaned across Anne and handed it to delFord. 'I took it out of your shirt pocket,' he said. 'It was barking at me. Like a pekinese.'

'Oh s.h.i.t, Janine must have been trying to reach me. No time now. Dwayne,' he yelled, 'will you phone the main building and tell my secretary we're in the middle of a run? If it's Selma tell her I'm in bed with Bob and Alice.' He placed the phone on the black box at his head and said, 'Everyone ready?'

'Sure.'

'Let's go,' grunted the astronaut; he was pale, and his voice was tight.

'You heard what the man said,' Bill told Harrington. He saw the physicist's fingers jab a sequence of b.u.t.tons on the central generator, then close a clear cover across them.