I closed my eyes and tried to absorb the unseen aspects of the site. The images and emotions came in a trickle at first, and then suddenly flooded me. “Jesus! That hurts!”
“Hurts?”
“Well, no, it doesn't hurt. I guess it's making me sick to my stomach more than anything.”
“Tell me what you sense, Dave.”
My phantom body dropped to its knees, while my physical body uncontrollably slumped onto the table. “This place is fraught with death,” I sobbed. “Everything in here smells and tastes of death.”
“Touch one of the objects and tell me what you feel and see inside yourself.”
I reached for an object near me. “I see a man walking. He is filthy, covered in smoke and blood. He smells like an animal! His hair is long, and so is his beard; he's moving in a line with a lot of other men just like him.” I paused. “He's a soldier.”
“What kind of soldier?”
“I don't know. I think he's old. Hisâhis time is gone.
He's gone ⦠gone away. I'm seeing something past, aren't I?” .
Riley sat back in his chair and took a deep breath. “Okay, Dave, I want you to come back. Let everything go now, and come back.”
I began to breathe rapidly; small beads of sweat formed on my forehead and arms. My muscles twitched and jerked involuntarily as my phantom body fell through the tunnel of light again.
I could see Mel through eyes I couldn't control. It was frightening, like the horrible nightmare I'd had months ago, to look at Mel through someone else's eyes. But in a few minutes, I was able to raise my head and focus my eyes. As my vision cleared I saw Mel sitting in front of me and smiling.
“Have fun?”
I rubbed my eyes and wiped my face on my shirtsleeve. “Oh, great fun! Where was I, anyway? And why did I feel like I was looking through another set of eyes?”
“That's for you to tell me. I want you to go into the garden room and do your summary for me. Kathleen and I'll be in there in about twenty minutes. Okay?”
I nodded, but when I stood up I started to sway. I had to grab the table for support. “Damn!”
“You'll be all right in a minute or two. That was your first real bilocation. They tend to take a bit out of you at firstâactually, they always take a bit out of you. Twenty minutes in the garden room.” Riley walked out of the room.
“Okay.” I felt awful, as if I had a hangover or maybe the flu. My legs wobbled and my stomach was queasy. I could hear Kathleen and Riley congratulating one another in the monitor's room down the hall, but I couldn't quite make out what they were saying.
In the garden room, Kathleen and Mel sat on opposite sides of the table and looked intently at me. I had the urge to say, “I didn't do it!” Whatever “it” was.
“So, give us your perceptions,” said Riley.
I gave my notes and sketches a quick glance and began reading. “The site has aspects of both old and new. It's a stone building that houses many objects. These objectsâthey're definitely weapons of some sortâhave a military value. Most of them are made of wood and metal. There is a great deal of glass in the building, plus wooden floors, carpets, -old furniture, and so on. The site has an almost domestic appearance.”
“What about the man you saw?” Riley asked.
“I'm getting to him. There are paintings and posters on the wall, all reflecting combat of some sort. Heroes, villains, and victims are represented. The man I accessed was a soldier. I say âwas' because I got the distinct sense that he's dead.”
“What gave you that perception?” said Riley.
“I don't know. It's just the way I felt when I looked at him. He was grubby-looking, wet and dirty; I could even smell him. But there wasn't any heart, any soulâit was like looking at a movie. All the physical attributes of emotion are there, but when you look inside, there's nothing. Just an empty frame.” I set my notes on the table and looked at Riley and Kathleen. “Okay, so where's my feedback?”
Riley pulled the target folder from his stack of papers and slid it across the table. I snatched it and hurriedly opened the folder.
“A museum?” I was devastated. “You sent me to a Civil War museum? I thought you were giving me an operational target.” I threw the folder back on the table. “A goddamned museum!”
“Calm down,” Riley said. “We had to be sure you could handle something simple before we could give you anything difficult.”
“So why the hell didn't you tell me that, instead of letting me believe I was ready to go operational?”
Kathleen answered me. “We wanted to see if thinking you were going operational would pose a problem for you. I'm sorry for the deception, but we had to know.”
As angry as I was, I had to agree. “I understand. It's just a bit unsettling, not knowing when you're pulling a fast one on me.”
“It had to be done. I'm sorry,” said Mel.
“Okay. , : . Where to next?”
“Before you go anywhere, I want you to look at that target folder again,” Mel answered. “Don't blow off good feedback just because the target wasn't what you expected.” He tossed the folder back on my lap. “Open it and let's see how good or bad you were.”
I opened the folder again and carefully analyzed it under the watchful eyes of my mentors. “Hmmm, pretty interesting.”
“Isn't it?” said Riley. “Do you realize that you were in the target area seconds after taking the coordinates? And if that's not enough for you, take a look at your findings. âA building,' you said. Well, this museum certainly looks like a building to me. âWith aspects of old and new,' you said. Kathleen, does a museum have old things in it as well as new ones?”
“Yup!” She grinned.
“All right, I get the message.”
“Look, Dave,” Riley said, “you were on target almost instantly. You collected information that would have cracked the target wide open had this been an operational mission. You saw weapons where there were weapons. You accessed a Union soldier who's been dead over a hundred years. You captured every critical aspect of the target. So what's your bitch?”
I was embarrassed. “I apologize. I deserve whatever you guys hand out.”
Riley chirped, “I'd say you deserve a break todayâlike lunch at McDonald's. My treat.”
“I thought you didn't eat fast food.”
“Well, I'm making an exception today. Kathleen, you coming?”
“No, you two go ahead. I'm brown-bagging it.”
“Yeah, and you'll live longer than the two of us because of it.”
Â
After lunch Riley promised to send me on a real operational target. I took my position in the chair and hooked into the control panel to begin the cool-down process. I emptied my mind and slowed my pulse to about thirty-two beats per minute. This time without prompting from Riley, I picked up the pen, ready to receive the coordinates. I called them out as I wrote them. And as I recorded the final digit my right hand lurched, forming a quick, roughly circular ideogram.
“Good; now decode it,” came Riley's comforting voice.
I touched the ideogram with the pen; my physical body slumped in the chair and I “separated” again. I found myself spread-eagled, spinning into the stars. This time I felt better about what was happening. As I righted myself, the lights of the stars blurred into horizontal streaks. I felt charged with electricity; my skin crawled and tingled, and my phantom body grew cold as ice.
I could feel my limbs, and my inclination was to rub them to get some life and warmth back into them; but there was nothing physical to rub. I felt myself rising higher and higher, and I closed my eyes to absorb the sensation. Suddenly, I stopped moving upward. I felt myself casually turning to the left as though I were doing a cartwheel, and then I began plummeting down the tunnel of light. I accelerated toward the target, faster and faster. The silence of the ether grew to a huge roar, as if I had stuck my head outside a jet in flight. I tried to cover my ears, but I was still unable to manage my limbs. When I finally opened my eyes, I saw myself falling toward the strange light again and I braced for the impact. I felt the light puff-of-air sensation, followed by the immediate silence. I was there.
“I can't move! I can't move! It's like I'm stuck in molasses,” I cried. The sensation was stifling; I was being held in position by something I couldn't see.
“Dave, calm down and describe what you see. Do you know where you are?”
I began coughing, choking, and flailing my arms about. I threw my head back, gasping for air and freedom; I felt as if I were fighting for my life. The pen fell from my hand.
“David! David! Get some height. Raise yourself above the target, David. Raise yourself!” I could hear Mel shouting and I struggled to comply. Gasping for air, coughing, I pitched backward in the viewing chair and sucked in a long, rasping breath, like a diver who's made an emergency ascent. I was filled with fear, my hands were balled into fists, and I was wringing wet. I tried to regain my composure. “What ⦠happened?”
I think Mel knew what had happened, but first he had to stabilize me and get me to describe what I was seeing.
“Dave, I need you to tell me what you see. You need to get control, shake it off, and get back to the mission.”
I sensed the confidence in his firm tone. I gathered myself and tried to focus on the target. In what seemed only a few minutes I was calm enough to begin talking again.
“Uh”âI swallowed hardâ“I see a glassy surface below me.”
“Glassy, as in flat and smooth?” Riley asked.
“No; it's smooth and flat, but there's some texture to the surface.”
“How big is it?”
I turned in a slow circle above the plane. “It reaches as far as I can see in every direction, but it's hard to tell, because there's a fog or mist blocking my view.”
“About how far can you see?”
“Oh, I guess about two, maybe three hundred meters.”
“Smell the air, Dave, and tell me what you smell.”
I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. “It smells like the sea, just like the sea!”
Riley sounded relieved. “Let's get back to the mission. What you're seeing is not the target; you need to find the target.”
I closed my eyes and “listened” for anything, any perception,
that might lead me to the target. Somewhere off in the haze I felt a vibration. Its pitch stayed constant, reverberating in my head.
“I feel a vibration, and I think I can find the source.”
“Good. Move there now.”
The vibration grew louder and more intense with each passing second. I stopped for a moment to get a better bearing, hovering a few feet above the glassy surface and listening. The sound and vibration increased. I turned from side to side, my eyes still closed, straining to get a bearing on the source. The vibration rapidly grew so intense that it shook my entire body.
Later, Mel told me he saw my hands shaking on the viewing table.
The sound grew to a roar, and I opened my eyes to see a dark mountain of steel coming at me. It hit me head on. I winced, but my phantom body passed through the steel. Reeling but uninjured, I hurled myself at the object, trying to catch it. In a few seconds, I was matching its speed, flying a hundred or so feet above it. It was obscured by the haze, so I moved in for a closer look.
“I see a large metal object moving quickly across the glassy surface.”
“Tell me about it.” .
“Uh, it has an odd shape, angular on one end, and rounded on the other. The rounded end is the front, or, at least that's the direction it's moving in. The object is covered in boxes, tubes, and the like ⦠let's see ⦠and it's got two major features that I can see.”
“What are they?” Riley asked.
“There is a large glass-covered box in the center of the object, toward the rounded end. I think it has some control feature. And on the square end there are one, two, three cylinders about five or six yards long. There is some sort of force coming from them, but I can't make it outâI I mean, I can't see what it is. It's invisible to me.”
“Can you tell me how fast the object's moving?”
“I can't tell. I don't know how to gauge it.”
“Guess.” .
“Hmm ⦠I'd guess about forty to maybe fifty miles per hour.”
“Okay, I want you to come back now. Break contact and come home.”
“On my way!”
It took several minutes to get back. This time the effects of the session were less severe, though I felt weak and had trouble focusing, as if I were still attached to the target in some way. I kept crossing the threshold, passing in and out of the ether without any control over the process. After a while this symptom passed, but I was to experience it after every viewing session. I learned that if viewers worked more than twice in a day, we had to be driven home. We weren't fit to drive ourselves; the chance that we would slip back into the ether was too great.