The Reach

his palm and scribbled something with a stubby end of a pencil. 'Hmmm. So the director, he's asking you to believe that this storm came up out of nowhere, picked up a hailstorm of stones without doing any other damage to the grounds, and dropped them on the roof. Without damaging a single other person or object within a ten-foot radius?'

'I don't know half of what he said, to be honest. I was pretty shaken up, and I suppose he was too. I don't know if he believed it himself. But you have to understand that Dr. Wasserman is a man of science.'

'So am I.' Patrick edged slightly closer. She could not look away from his eyes, such strange eyes. 'You know how ancient man worshipped the sun as a god because they could not understand the meaning of such a great, shining presence in the sky? Or that before they understood mental illness they believed in possession of the body by spirits?'

'I'm not very good at this, Patrick. If it wasn't for this girl... you might call me one of your skeptics.'

'I'm only trying to make a point. I want you to entertain for a moment another possibility. This is quite scientific and utterly reasonable. Suppose that there are functions within the mind we have yet to understand. Perfectly rational, explainable abilities if only we knew how the process worked. In some cases these abilities are more advanced, more developed, the same as musical talent or physical coordination. A person might even be able to improve these abilities, strengthen them with practice.'

'I'm listening.'

'The human brain contains over seventeen billion cells. Seventeen billion. These handle approximately one hundred million messages per second. There are many different areas of specialty inside the brain itself, and we understand the functions of a bare fraction. What are these other cells doing? Is it fair to assume that we have no idea? That we cannot even speculate? Look at your airplanes. And yet they're so primitive compared to what we've been given. If you told anyone that you could build a machine with seventeen billion parts and make them all work fluidly together, and explain what each part does and how it does it, do you think they would believe you?'

'Being in here inspires you, doesn't it?'

'It just serves as a reminder of what a gift we have. And it keeps me humble. There are many mysteries in the universe, and I've chosen to focus on just one of them, because to take them all on at once would be impossible.'

They were very close now, knees touching.

Deeper in the shadows above the altar was a life-size statue of Jesus on the cross. Patrick saw her looking at it. 'We believe now that he was very likely a sensitive. Certainly telepathic, clairvoyant, quite possibly psychokinetic. It would explain a lot--his knowledge of future events, the power to heal, even walking on water.'

'Rising from the dead?'

Patrick smiled. 'We've chosen to leave that particular miracle to the imaginations of the parishioners.' He touched the briefcase she still held on her lap. 'This girl you've told me about, she may have a gift, a portion of the brain more developed than the average person. We've studied that here, and we've come to a few conclusions based on scientific method. One, these psychic abilities do exist. Two, they follow specific physical rules. And three, they are not as rare as you might think. But they are variable, much like personalities, and for the most part they are minute, measurable only in a laboratory setting.'

'But not always?'

'Stories like yours have been told for centuries. A mother who suddenly has the strength to lift an overturned car. A grandfather clock stopping at the exact moment of someone's death. A rain of stones. Generally they happen only once or twice in a lifetime, and so it is very hard to document them. A person who can perform at such a high level over time is extremely rare.'

'You asked me if the stones were warm.'

'If you'll recall from your early physics classes, it takes energy to create motion. If something is being levitated, raised into the air, some force must be accountable for it. What we've concluded here--and it's been documented in South Carolina and other places--is that psychokinesis involves some sort of heat transference at a microscopic level. In any successful PK experiment, the air temperature drops while the surface temperature of the moving object rises.'

'I'm not sure I understand.'

'Neither do we,' Patrick said with a smile. 'We don't understand the process. But what is heat except the movement of molecules? Isn't it possible that during a psi event, a person is somehow able to borrow motion and energy from moving particles--perhaps at the atomic level--and use that energy to affect a change in the environment?'

'Anything's possible.' Just don't ask me to believe in the bogeyman. That would be next, Jess felt suddenly sure; she was careening down a path with no brakes and no map, without even an idea of where she might be at the end. I've never believed in anything my eyes couldn't see. Maybe it was the way I grew up. Maybe it was Michael's death. But I've got to believe the world has a set of rules. And this goes way beyond anything the world has ever shown me.

But that wasn't really true, was it? Didn't she know just one split second before Michael ran out in front of that car, wasn't there a single moment in time where she knew what was going to happen? Or was that just hindsight?

'In your little girl's case,' Patrick was saying, into the deep and heavy silence of the church, 'she would have been pulling heat energy from the air and using it to exert force upon the stones. The resulting temperature drop causes moisture in the surrounding air to form ice almost instantly, even as the stones heat up. How did she do it? It's difficult to say. There's been a lot of study lately on brain wave activity and microparticles. But the fact is, we don't know for sure.'

'Would you take CAT scans in a case like this? MRIs? EEGs?'

'Absolutely.'

Jess touched her briefcase and unsnapped the clasps. With slightly unsteady hands she withdrew the yellow folder. 'This is her file,' she said. 'What I've been allowed to see of it anyway. I'd like you to take a look and tell me what you make of it.'

Patrick took the folder and withdrew the contents, spreading it across his lap. He studied in silence for a few moments, his eyes moving quickly across the pages of notes and reports. Then he held a transparent film up to the flickering light. 'Here, you see a slight enlargement of the cerebral ventricles,' he said, pointing at a gray area. 'And here. But no visible reduction in the hippocampus or hypothalamus. In fact, I'd say it's enlarged.'

'In other words, if they were looking for a neurobiological sign of schizophrenia, they didn't find it.'

'Mmm-hmm. And yet there are abnormalities.'

Suddenly he stood up and went to the candles at the altar, holding the film up to the light and pacing, peering, his voice rising in excitement. 'There's definitely increased activity here. Let me see the rest of it.' He returned and fumbled through the records with more urgency. 'You see, look at these readings. The patterns are positively abnormal. Ordinarily you would have a beta wave reading if the person was awake, delta if they were in deep sleep. Occasionally you might see an alpha or even a theta in a state of hypnosis. But in this case it isn't either, but rather a combination of the two, even when she's supposedly awake. And in several instances'--he punctuated this with a tap of his long finger on a graph--'there's a spike, a surge of terrific proportions. It's as if someone jump-started her brain with a car battery.'

'Have you ever seen anything like it before?'

'Not like this.' Patrick seemed to lose himself for a moment. 'I'd heard stories, seen hints, but nothing like this.'

He turned to face her, leaned down, and smacked both hands on the back of the pew. He grinned. 'Do you know what you've done? If what you've told me is true, and these records are accurate? Something we've been failing to do for years, with people like Bilecki, thousands of them.'

Patrick clapped his hands together like a child. The sound was like a gunshot in the silent church. 'You've found us our Holy Grail.'

--21--

Jess Chambers dreams she is in a large, cavernous building. The lights are all off, but emergency bulbs allow her enough light to see. Red light glints off polished metal doorknobs, shines dully from the stone walls, and turns