The Reach

'Really,' Patrick said. 'If he hadn't come here, he'd be working on his Ph.D. at Duke. We're lucky to have him. But he's never been much of a people person, an only child and all that. His parents were both physicists and they were gone a lot. I don't think he had much of a social life.'

'I'll be damned.'

Patrick turned to a small monitor where an animated flipping coin played out across the screen. 'This is a random number generator, fully automatic data recording. It uses radioactive decay times to provide electronic spikes at several thousand times a second. Heads is one, tails is zero. The computer chooses randomly, with the chance of one or zero being equal over time.

'We're going to ask her to influence the pattern. I'd expect hits in the range of fifty-three to fifty-five percent over time, if things go well.'

'That doesn't seem terribly significant.'

'The odds against it are billions to one. Now, I'd have done a blood test but I'm afraid I'd frighten her. Do you know what she's been given in the past to control her mood?'

'Sodium amytal, mostly.'

'Sodium amytal, hmmm. Rhine used that exact drug to practically eliminate psi effects during his tests at Duke. Your director knows exactly what he's doing.'

'We're getting alphas, but they're slipping,' Gee said. 'You better hurry. She's gonna fall asleep.'

Patrick took a deep breath. 'I want you to get her up and bring her out here. Gently, now, you can take off the Ping-Pong balls and blood pressure monitor but don't loosen the contacts, they'll reach. Don't make her nervous.'

They sat down facing the random number generator and Patrick refastened the blood pressure cuff, Sarah trailing wires from her skull. She was still clutching Connor, but her eyes kept closing and she seemed deeply relaxed, as if in a trance. Patrick explained to her that the coin flipping across the screen was a computer image that corresponded to the numbers one and zero, and that she must try to make the image come up heads. She must try to think of the number one, or the image on the coin. His voice was slow and deep and soothing. Jess could not tell whether Sarah heard him or not.

They sat back and all watched the screen. The coin would bounce, flip, then bounce, flip again; after a while it seemed that tails was coming up more frequently. Two in a row. Three. Six.

Finally a long, straight line of tails had flashed across the screen. Sarah frowned. She sat up a bit straighter in her chair and stared at the flipping coin.

'I'm getting betas,' Gee said. 'No, wait, hold on, something's happening here--we've got alphas with very high peaks--it's like Mt. Everest over here.'

'She's fighting herself,' Patrick said, voice quiet and tight with excitement. 'You see that, Gee? It's a reverse pattern.'

'I see it,' Gee said. His voice had lost all traces of sarcasm as he collected a steady stream of spitting paper printout. 'You gotta look at these betas, I've never . . .'

'It happens sometimes,' Patrick was saying, almost to himself, 'people fight their own minds and do the opposite. If she's afraid of what she might do, if she's trying not to make it happen--'

'Whoa,' Gee said. 'Hold on. Jesus. She's off the chart.'

Sarah was sweating lightly, her eyes wide open now, her little brow furrowed, mouth tight. A steady line of tails streamed across the computer screen.

The screen shivered; blinked. The temperature in the room had dropped. Jess felt the hairs on her arms rise up to meet it. Once again she was confronted with the familiar feeling of electricity, of a charge like an invisible presence in the room. The atmosphere had subtly changed; she held her breath and watched the air shimmer before her eyes.

The computer monitor began to smoke. A wisp curled like a gentle ghost-tongue around the plastic housing and drifted away; then the smoke grew black and thick.

'Dear Christ Almighty,' Patrick said. 'Gee, get the extinguisher. Gee.'

Ronald Gee stood frozen as sparks jumped within the depths of the machine. The screen flickered and blinked again and went dark. Jess reached for Sarah's arm. Her fingers brushed the girl's skin and the effect was like walking across a thick carpet. She gasped. Every hair on her head prickled as she felt the charge enter her and wait, coiled.

Sarah trembled, clenched, as flames licked at the monitor and the smell of melting plastic filled the room. The temperature kept dropping. The room was frigid. Someone called out and the words were lost within the buzzing that rose up like the flight of a thousand bees.

'Let it go!' Jess shouted at her. 'Into me! Just let it go!'

Sarah turned to look blankly at her and for a moment fear rose up and an oily sickness turned Jess's stomach, and then the girl looked away and a cry like a splitting inside forced itself from her lips as a series of small cracks and then explosions came in quick succession from across the room.

Sarah slumped; then her body jerked once as Jess gathered the girl into her arms and felt the coiled charge jump from her hands and dissipate into the air.

'Oh, baby, sweetheart, it's okay, it's going to be all right. . .' she whispered into the girl's muffled sobs, her body tingling, muscles suddenly weak. She stroked Sarah's hair, smoothed the sweat from her brow, pulled the electrodes from her skin as her own tears spilled out over her cheeks. Sarah curled into her lap like a small child and rocked, shaking. Jess clutched her bony ribs, rocked her, rocked. 'It's okay now, I'm here. . ..'

Jess heard the hiss of the fire extinguisher and from somewhere far away she watched Patrick spraying the monitor's smoking husk with white foam. The air was thick with a choking, acrid smoke.

Only then did she glance around at the place where the explosions had come from, and saw the rows of specimen bottles shattered across the shelves, their contents lying among the dripping ruin of glass and bottle tops like dead things, evidence at the scene of a crime.

--26--

She was in the empty church, standing with her arms wrapped around herself for warmth, as the afternoon sun trickled through stained glass and painted the polished floor in reds and yellows beneath her feet. She had wrapped Sarah in a blanket and laid her down in the backseat of Charlie's car, had smoothed the fine black hairs away from Sarah's forehead until the girl's breathing deepened and she slept.

Her heart broke for the girl. Who had been there to protect her, all these years? Who had been there to hold her when the darkness crept in, to explain that whatever affliction God had given her, whatever this curse was (and yes, Jess thought, it was a curse), it didn't destroy her humanity?

Her words, whispered before she knew what she was saying: 'I'm here for you, Sarah. Everything's going to be all right. I promise. '

She stood now among the shattered remains of her confidence, struggling to find something whole, something she could hold on to and use. But everything needed to be rethought, reevaluated. The world was different now, not on the surface but underneath, where it really mattered. For some reason, her thoughts kept going back to Michael's death; had she wanted it to happen? Had there been a part of her, however small, that had wanted it all to end, had she reached out at that moment and pushed him away when she should have been pulling him in close?

A voice spoke from somewhere like a chittering devil: You were happy when he died, weren't you? Happy to have the burden relieved?

Her helpless gaze fell on the statue of Christ, hanging cold and lifeless in the shadows of the altar. A half- remembered children's prayer rose unbidden to her lips, a prayer for forgiveness, for absolution. For strength. What sort of God would make a world like this? she wondered. Where children were given terrible burdens to carry, left alone, abused, even killed?

Everything had happened so fast. It baffled her. When had she become so attached to this girl? Surely she felt sorry for Sarah, felt as if she should do all she could to help. But when had these feelings blossomed into real responsibility, into something even more?

A noise came from the direction of the door. Footsteps offered into silence. A moment later Patrick stepped up next to her, smelling sharply of smoke and chemicals and light sweat. 'She's still asleep. I suppose you have someplace to take her?'