The Eldridge Roster Read online

  Without any apparent transition a duplicate of the coin appeared on the opposite Thing. Carefully avoiding touching the artifacts, Schmidla quickly removed both with his pen and handed them to Budd. “If you can detect a difference, tell me. You’ll be doing better than some very good numanists and metallurgists.”

  “How large an object can it duplicate?”

  Schmidla shrugged. “I had my car pushed atop one, out in the field near my house, with the other Thing a hundred meters away. I now have two identical cars with identical contents, right down to the Mahler in each CD player. My niece drives the duplicate to Boston. Thinks her silly old uncle ordered two cars.”

  “People don’t fare as well, though, do they, Richard?” prompted Whitsun.

  “Organic matter? No. Oh, Thing One and Thing Two will replicate an organism, but the replicant isn’t viable. The result is very... messy.” First they’d tried a dog, then a monkey, then a disappointing Potential. It hadn’t gone well.

  “And this?” Budd picked up the sword from the table.

  “At first sight, a common gladius, the short thrusting sword of the Roman legions,” said Schmidla. “This is a gladius hispaniensis, 76 centimeters long, used from 200 BCE until 20 BCE. The cork grip was dated at approximately 50 BCE. The blade is titanium. Mind the edge—it’s wickedly sharp.”

  “Titanium’s a modern alloy used in submarine hulls,” said Budd, hefting the sword, admiring its balance. “Rome was Iron Age. This can’t be two thousand years old.”

  Schmidla shrugged. “It is as you see it. The titanium, however, is somehow hardened by a process unknown to our metallurgy. Makes the weapon both light and extremely durable.”

  “No scabbard?” he asked, carefully setting the weapon back on the table.

  “It came with this wrapped around its hilt,” said Schmidla, handing Budd the small wooden box from beside the sword.

  Budd opened the box—and almost dropped it. Inside was the mummified dark remains of a human hand, the skin dry and shriveled, a great emerald and diamond ring on its thumb. There were six fingers.

  “Male,” said Schmidla. “Caucasian. About forty years old when he died. We’re still researching the DNA. The ring has no unusual characteristics, other than being quite valuable, of course. We provided the box.” Picking up a clothbound book, he handed it to Budd.

  “The Great Fire of London, 1733,” Budd read aloud. “Was there a great fire in London in 1733?”

  “No more than there were six-fingered swordsmen wielding titanium blades when Rome ruled the world,” said Schmidla. “At least not in our world.” Opening a drawer, he took out a photograph. “My favorite.”

  Budd looked at the black-and-white snapshot of three men, laughing, sitting inside a large blue teacup. One he recognized immediately. Turning the photo over, he read the inscription, neatly written in faded India ink. “Albert Einstein, J. Robert Oppenheimer and Ho Chi Minh: Disneyland, May 7, 1954.”

  “Disneyland opened in 1955,” said Schmidla as Budd examined the laughing faces. “Ho was consulting with General Giap that day—the day the French surrendered at Dien Bien Phu. Einstein and Oppenheimer were at Princeton. None of them were riding around in teacups. Not in our reality.”

  “How do you know these aren’t fakes?”

  “They may be. But those who died bringing them back here apparently thought them important. And there are objects that we don’t have here, sent on to our sponsors for further study,” said Schmidla, putting the photo back in the drawer. “A device the size of a conventional microwave oven that produces not food, but spare organs, adapted to the user’s body. A hand weapon that fires a particle beam. When they tried to remove its power source, it exploded, leaving a crater in the New Mexico desert.”

  Budd recalled the disaster at Sandia National Labs that had killed over three hundred people and obliterated an atomic particle research. Rourke hadn’t mentioned any of this. He wondered what else the DCI hadn’t told him.

  “Where did these come from?” asked Budd. “And how did they get here?”

  “Follow me and I’ll show you, as best I can,” said Schmidla.

  Budd had been expecting a laboratory to be their next stop. Instead it was a small windowless amphitheater with a large flat-paneled projection screen at the front. “Have a seat, please,” said Schmidla as they filed in, the lights flickering on. Stepping to the back, he keyed yet another touchpad, this one opening a small safe. Taking out a disk, he slipped it into the player at the back as the lights dimmed.

  “You haven’t seen this one, Terry,” said Schmidla, taking a seat next to the other two men. “This was January’s near-triumph.”

  “Last of three of our true Potentials,” said Whitsun, eyes on the screen.

  “Yes. And although it was a failure, it granted us a whole new perspective,” said Schmidla. “Before this event, we’d been studying a phenomenon, hoping to understand and ultimately control it. After it, we saw that we could use it to evolve humanity. All we needed were more third-generation descendants of those crews—at least three third-generation Potentials. And we had only one. Can you understand how frustrating that was? Here, see for yourself.” He touched the remote control and the video began.

  The camera aspect was from somewhere in the center of a high ceiling, looking down into a deep well of a room, its circular white walls broken only by a long high window beside the top of a narrow circular staircase. Three black coffins lay in the center of the room, arranged in a circle, their ends almost touching, wires threading away into wall receptacles. The lids of the coffins were transparent, revealing the still figure within each. All three occupants wore headsets clamped over their ears.

  “What am I looking at?” asked Budd.

  “The Chamber,” said Schmidla, eyes on the screen. “Sometimes called the Well of Souls—lost souls. And three transport crèches, though the crèches go nowhere.”

  As he spoke the camera zoomed in on the three coffins and then panned left to right, capturing each occupant: two women and one man, casually dressed, in their late twenties or early thirties. They lay unmoving, their eyes open and staring.

  “The woman in the middle is my niece, Maria,” said Schmidla. “The experiment is monitored from behind the glass wall of the observation room, at the top of the stairs. Are you familiar with our recent attempts and techniques, Mr. Budd?”

  “No,” said Budd, turning to look at the doctor as the German paused the video. “I haven’t known of your work since you used to slowly drown people or freeze them or vivisect them.”

  Schmidla shook his head, distressed. “Early blunders and so unnecessary. A horrible waste of resources. A very painful period for me to recall.”

  “More painful for your victims, surely.”

  “We all acknowledge that mistakes were made,” said Whitsun. “Let’s confine ourselves to the present. Richard, why don’t you tell Mr. Budd what you were trying to accomplish with this experiment and your methodology?”

  Schmidla nodded curtly. “Certainly. First, the methodology.

  “The crèches are small sensory deprivation capsules—the lids are of thick one-way glass, which serve to create a Ganzfeld effect within the Potential. The lines you see leading to them from the wall receptacles provide oxygen, record vital signs and carry audio signals that create a binaural rhythm within the subject, in an attempt to produce a theta state transfer. It is absolutely essential that the Potentials feel overwhelmingly alone and that the binaural rhythm be allowed to drive their brain waves into the correct megahertz range to achieve transport.”

  Budd looked at the frozen image on the screen, then at Schmidla. “Pretend, if you would, that I don’t know what binaural rhythm and theta state transfer are, please. And Ganzfeld effect.”

  Schmidla paused for a moment, collecting his thoughts. “The human brain has four basic brainwave states, ranging from high amplitude, low frequency delta to low amplitude, high frequency beta, from deep sleep to full arousal.
No matter which pattern predominates at any one time, however, all are present, even if only as trace patterns. In descending order of arousal, these brainwaves are beta, alpha, theta and delta.

  “Brainwaves can be made to fall within one of those four ranges. The most efficient way to do this is through entrainment. Entrainment, as it applies to biosystems, is the process of inducing an auditory brainstem response in the superior olivary nuclei of each hemisphere of the brain. To do this, one introduces two different auditory impulses,” he touched a finger to each of his ear lobes, “one into each ear. If, for example, a tone of 400 hertz is introduced into the right ear, and a tone of 410 hertz is simultaneously introduced into the left ear, the result is an amplitude modulated standing wave of ten hertz, the difference between the two waves. One has then induced within the subject a cortical response of ten hertz, an alpha state brainwave pattern. Essentially, it’s a consciousness management technique.”

  “And Ganzfeld?”

  “Ganzfeld effect is the quietude and isolation experienced by the subject as a result of total sensory deprivation.”

  “And the object of the exercise?”

  “To induce a theta state, the next to lowest of the four states, at the exact same frequency and at the exact same time deep in the brain, in all three subjects’ hippocampus,” said Schmidla, nodding toward the screen. “When we do this to them individually, separated from each other, they slip into the normal human response of deep meditation or dreaming.”

  “And they don’t do that here?”

  “No. That’s because they’re not quite human.”

  “That’s been known for a long time,” said Budd.

  “Yes, certainly, but no one’s been able to control any of their abilities, including the Potentials themselves. But when we entrain the neural rhythms of three Potentials simultaneously—entrain them to the same frequency, with the Potentials physically adjacent to one another, under conditions of sensory deprivation, things happen. Technically, what we’re doing is called resonant entrainment of oscillating systems. It’s a principal long understood in physics. Strike a tuning fork designed to oscillate at, say, 400 hertz, then place it close to another tuning fork designed to oscillate at the same frequency and the second tuning fork will also oscillate. The first tuning fork has thus entrained the second. Here we use binaural signals to simultaneously produce the exact same neural rhythms within all three of our subjects’ hippocampus—a frequency-following response.”

  “And then what?”

  “Watch,” said Schmidla, touching a button.

  Maria and then the other two figures began to fade from their crèches. Budd blinked, not believing his eyes. They continued to fade, figures quickly growing translucent. Watching Maria, Budd could see the cushioning of her crèche through her increasingly diaphanous body. In a few seconds all three crèches were empty.

  “Where’d they go?” asked Budd, stunned and still staring at the screen and the empty containers.

  “We don’t know,” said Whitsun. “Recording gear comes back blank or with its chips fried.”

  “It’s not that important,” said Schmidla, stopping the video. “Which brings us to our proposed revised goals for the project, Mr. Budd. Where they went is unimportant. Intellectually intriguing, but unimportant. That they went is what’s important. That they returned alive is very important. These were our first fully actualized Potentials. Years of trial and error brought us to that moment.”

  “People have transported before,” said Budd.

  “Yes, and in groups of three, using this technique. But rarely did they return as a group, or returning together, return alive. Only my niece survived those experiments. But this group made it back. Standing there, watching them return together and alive, I knew how Oppenheimer must have felt at Los Alamos when he attained his own Trinity.”

  Budd had a sudden happy vision of Schmidla, surprised by death, swinging from a gallows.

  “Those three you just saw transport should have been the nucleus of a new humanity, beings to whom space and time are transparent. Beings with innate gifts of telepathy, telekinesis, teleportation, precognition—talents embodied in all our Potentials. And now,” he said, his excitement fading, “here’s where it all fell apart.”

  The video rolled again, the digits in the lower left indicating that five hours, thirty-three minutes had elapsed since the trio had disappeared. Then they were back, with Schmidla and Bartlett running down the stairs and swinging open the crèche lids.

  Maria slowly sat up, helped by Schmidla, shaking her head, looking dazed and disoriented as he took a syringe from his pocket, injecting her in the arm. She responded almost at once, slipping back down into her crèche, apparently asleep.

  Her two companions lay as they’d arrived, eyes staring sightlessly at the ceiling, jaws gapped wide. With a sudden crack! a fierce blue torrent of light sprang from their mouths, joining above their crèches. Schmidla and Bartlett jumped aside as orange-blue flames enfolded both crèches. The fires burned fast and clean, flames dancing along the shriveling, blackened husks.

  It was over in a moment, Schmidla carrying Maria to safety as Bartlett lay foam from a fire extinguisher over the two ruined crèches and their gruesome contents.

  The still, silent death of the two Potentials took Budd back to a sweltry Saigon afternoon when a Buddhist monk sat down in the street outside MACV Headquarters and lit a match to his gasoline soaked saffron robe. The monk hadn’t moved or cried out either. It was as though all three were gone before they died.

  “Your comment about how we’ve long known they’re not human?” said Schmidla as the room lights came on again.

  “Yes,” said Budd.

  “You meant that they demonstrate nonhuman abilities?”

  “Yes.”

  “Actually they’re not human,” said Schmidla. “We know from recent genetic research that human beings may have approximately 53,000 genes. The third-generation descendants of those ships crews have about 82,000. Same number of chromosomes as us, but far more genes. Genetically the difference between say, Maria and I, is far greater than the difference between me and a field mouse.”

  “Perhaps they’re just human beings with more genes,” suggested Budd.

  “A rose by any other name?” smiled Schmidla. “Certainly, if you’re trying to boundary science with some silly metaphysics. Rationally, scientifically, they are a species apart—they only look human. But... ” he held up his hand as Budd started to speak, “they are a gift, a gift for us to study and use for our own improvement—our own human improvement.

  “Admiral Whitsun and I agree that once we’ve demonstrated that Potentials can successfully flit through time and space, we need to broaden the scope of this project. The assumption was always that the abilities we’ve seen are inherent in all human beings and could be released once we understood more about the process—how to identify it, how to control it, how to exploit it. But as Potentials aren’t human, the only way for we humans to ever have Potentials’ abilities is to understand their genetic make-up and selectively replicate it within our descendants. The tools of genomics, of genetic mapping and engineering, are fast coming to hand. But we need your support.”

  “And you need the Eldridge roster,” added Budd.

  “Yes. Without that everything stops.”

  “You need to demonstrate that these paranormal abilities can be controlled, Doctor,” said Budd. “You haven’t done that. No one wants such uncontrollable abilities—they’re a curse, not a gift.”

  “We should shortly be able to show you a successful three-person transport,” said Whitsun.

  “How will you do that? You just told me you’re out of Potentials.”

  “We’ve identified two third-generation Eldridge descendants living in this area,” said Schmidla. “They’re being picked up now. My niece will be the third Potential.”

  Budd was silent for a moment. “If you can demonstrate a successful three-person transp
ort, I’m sure Director Rourke will carefully consider your recommendations when he briefs the NSC.”

  “That’s all we ask,” said Schmidla. “Reasoned consideration. My housekeeper’s prepared a light lunch for us,” he said, rising. “Please join us.”

  “I’ll be there in a few minutes, thank you.” said Budd, taking out his cellphone. “I have to check my messages.”

  “Name number four on your list,” said Tooky, pushing his much-dented red SAAB convertible into the slowly moving expressway traffic. “This guy’s the grandson of Able Seaman Louis Bissette. Seaman Bissette survived whatever happened on the Eldridge that summer day in ‘43, but like many of the crew and scientists, suffered physical and mental complications after the war. Died of multiple melanoma in 1955, though not before fathering a child. Said child, a daughter, had one child, named Timothy O’Malley. Mr. O’Malley’s a structural engineer and lives in JP—Jamaica Plain to you foreigners. It’s become one of Boston’s many affluent enclaves.”

  He turned left, dodging an oncoming trolley and then turned up a four-lane boulevard, passing a VA hospital as they bumped along the trolley tracks, bouncing through a very deep pothole. “Sorry about that,” he said.

  “It’s okay, Tooky,” said Angie from the back seat, death hold on the handgrip. “From what I’ve seen, you’re one of the better drivers in this city.”

  “When I was a kid, this road sucked,” said Tooky, turning the wheel to avoid what looked to Jim like a sinkhole. “It still sucks.”

  Despite the road, Jamaica Plain proved a pleasant 1880’s urban enclave, a mix of 19th century homes and shops, of small yards and big houses. It looked to Jim as if everything had either been recently renovated or was in the process of being renovated: scaffolding seemed to climb every other building, construction dumpsters and contractors trucks were parked and doubled parked everywhere.

  “Gentrification continues apace,” said Tooky, turning right down a street of large gabled Victorians set amid broad lawns and wrought iron fences. “I liked Boston better when it was poor, rundown and inhabited by lots of unpleasant trolls in rumpled old clothes. Guys like me. Less charm, more character.” Tooky pulled to a stop in front of an imposing purple house with white shutters and matching trim, a magnificent Painted Lady in her second century.