The Hollow Man

what Goldmann is saying.

“… my daughter usually manages the coffee.” The researcher tugs at his eyebrow. “She usually manages dinner as well, but she is in London for the week. Visiting relatives …” Goldmann peers at them from under his shaggy brows. “You aren’t hungry, are you? I tend to forget about things like dinner sometimes.”

“Oh, no … we’re fine,” says Gail.

“We had dinner on the train,” says Jeremy.

If you count a Payday candy bar as dinner, sends Gail. Jerry, I’m famished.

Hush.

“You said something about the mathematics being very important, young man,” says Goldmann. “You realize that the paper you saw was sent to Cal Tech so that the mathematicians there could look it over. I was interested to see if the fluctuations we are charting here compare to—”

“Holograms,” finishes Jeremy. “Yes. A friend in California knew that I was doing some pure-math research on wavefront phenomena and its eventual application to human consciousness. He sent me the paper.”

“Well …” Goldmann clears his throat. “It was a breach of etiquette at the very least.…”

Even through his tight mindshield, Jeremy can feel the older man’s anger mixing with a powerful desire not to be rude. “Here,” says Jeremy, and looks for a clear spot on desk or countertop to set the folder he has brought along. There is no clear spot. “Here,” he says again, and opens his folder on top of a massive text of some sort lying atop a mesa of papers. “Look.” He moves Jacob Goldmann closer.

Goldmann clears his throat again, but peers at the papers through his bifocals. He flips through the dissertation, occasionally pausing to look carefully at a page or more of equation. “Are these standard transforms?” he asks at one point.

Jeremy feels his heart accelerate. “That’s an application of Dirac’s relativistic wave equation modifying Schrödinger.”

Goldmann frowns. “In the Hamiltonian?”

“No …” Jeremy turns back a page. “Two components here, see? I started with the Pauli spin matrices until I realized that those could be bypassed.…”

Jacob Goldmann steps back and removes his glasses. “No, no,” he says, his accent suddenly heavier. “You cannot apply these relativistic Coulomb field transforms to a holographic wave function.…”

Jeremy takes a breath. “Yes,” he says flatly. “You can. When the holographic wave function is part of a larger standing wave.”

Goldmann rubs his brow. “A larger standing wave?”

“Human consciousness,” says Jeremy, and glances at Gail. She is watching the old man.

Goldmann stands there for a full half moment, not moving, not blinking. Then he takes two steps backward and sits down heavily on a chair littered with magazines and abstracts. “My Gott,” he says.

“Yes,” says Jeremy. It is almost a whisper.

Goldmann reaches out one liver-spotted hand and touches Jeremy’s dissertation. “And you have applied this to the MRI and S-CAT data I sent to Cal Tech?”

“Yes,” says Jeremy, and leans closer. “It integrates. It all integrates.” He begins pacing back and forth, finally stopping to tap the folder holding his now obsolete dissertation. “My work was originally just about memory … as if the rest of the mind were just hardware running a RAM-DOS retrieval system.” He laughs and shakes his head. “Your work made me see. …”

“Yes,” whispers Jacob Goldmann. “Yes, yes.” He turns to stare blindly at a cluttered bookcase. “My God.”

Later they discover that none of them has actually eaten dinner and plan to go out for a meal as soon as Jeremy and Gail are given a quick tour of the laboratory. They leave five hours later, well after midnight. In the time between introductions and their late meal, realities are shattered.

The offices are the tip of a rather significant research lab. Behind the suite of offices, in what had been a small warehouse area, lies the room within a room, grounded, shielded, and wrapped in the nonconducting equivalent of a Faraday Cage. In the room itself are the oddly streamlined sarcophagi of two magnetic-resonance- imaging units and a much less tidy cluster of four mutated-looking CAT scanners. Unlike the usual tidiness of an MR-imaging room, this lab floor is cluttered with additional shielded equipment and ungainly cables snaking into the floor, ceiling, and walls.

The room beyond is even more cluttered, with more than a dozen monitors displaying data to a master console where four wheeled chairs sit empty. The conglomeration of cables, stacked computer components, empty coffee cups, jerry-rigged patch circuits, dusty chalkboards, multiple EEG rigs, and massed oscilloscopes suggests that this is a research project that has never been touched by the tidy minds of NASA.

Over the next few hours Jacob Goldmann explains the origins of the research based upon the crude experiments done during neurosurgery in the 1950s in which patients’ brains were touched by an electrical probe. The patients were able to recall events in their lives complete with full sensory input. It was as if they were “reliving the experience.”

Goldmann does not do neurosurgery here, but by measuring, in real time, the electrical and electromagnetic fields in their research subjects’ brains, and by using the wide variety of modern and experimental medical imaging equipment in this laboratory, he—he and his daughter and two assistants—has been charting avenues of the mind undreamed of by neurosurgeons.

“The difficulty,” says Jacob Goldmann as they stand in the quiescent control room that night, “is in measuring areas of the brain while the subject is involved in some activity. Most MRI scans are done, as you know, with the patient immobilized on the sliding gurney in the machine itself.”

“Isn’t that immobility necessary for the scanning process?” asks Gail. “Isn’t it like taking a photograph with one of those old cameras where any motion produces a blur?”

“Precisely,” says Goldmann, beaming at her, “but our challenge was to bring an entire array of such imaging techniques to bear while the subject is doing a task … reading, perhaps, or riding a bicycle.” He gestures toward the television picture of the imaging room. In one corner there is an exercise bicycle with an array of consoles and cables above it, all converging on a black dome into which a person’s head might fit. Black neck clamps give the apparatus the look of some medieval instrument of torture.

“Our research subjects call it the Darth Vader Helmet,” says Dr. Goldmann with a slight chuckle. Then, almost absentmindedly, “I have never seen that motion picture. I must rent a videotape of it someday.”

Jeremy leans closer to the TV monitor to study the Darth Vader Helmet. “And this gives you all the data of the larger magnetic-resonance imagers?”

“Much more,” says Dr. Goldmann softly. “Much, much more.”

Gail is biting her lip. “And who are your subjects, doctor?”

“Call me Jacob, please,” says the old man. “Our subjects are the usual volunteers … students from the School of Medicine who wish to earn a modest stipend. Several of them, I confess, are my graduate students … bright young men and women whose wish is to score a few points with their elderly teacher.”

Gail is looking at the array of threatening instruments in the MR room. “Is there any danger?”

Dr. Goldmann’s bushy brows move back and forth as he shakes his head. “None. Or rather, no more than any of us would be exposed to if we were to have a CAT scan or MRI done. We make sure that none of the subjects are exposed to magnetic fields greater or more extensive than those allowed at any hospital.” He chuckles. “And it is painless. Other than the boredom suffered while equipment is constantly being repaired or tampered with, the subjects have none of the usual research discomforts of blood being drawn or the danger of being exposed to embarrassing situations. No, we have quite a long list of eager volunteers.”

“And in exchange,” whispers Jeremy, touching Gail’s hand, “you are mapping uncharted regions of the mind … capturing a snapshot of human consciousness.”

Jacob Goldmann seems lost in reverie again, the sad, brown eyes observing something not in the room. “It reminds me,” he says softly, “of the spirit photography in vogue during the last century.”

“Spirit photography,” says Gail, who is a talented photographer herself. “You mean when the Victorians tried to photograph ghosts and pixies and things? The kind of hoax that bamboozled poor old Arthur Conan Doyle?”