On the morning of his thirteenth birthday, Hoagy Ferris woke to find an eros couch installed in his bedroom. He had been hoping for a more advanced model. The screen was small, the stimulus rating low. But the Freud, as his mother called it—or the Orgasm Express, as his friends called it—was potent enough for a beginner.
The eros couches Hoagy had used in friends’ apartments and public arcades came loaded with sexual fantasies for every taste, but this one required the user to create fantasies of his own. Undaunted, he buckled on the helmet and soon learned to mesh his brainwaves with the simulator, using biofeedback techniques he had learned in an effort to manage his epilepsy.
At first the video stars and nubile schoolmates he summoned onto the screen were fully clothed, their images blurry. With practice, he sharpened the focus. Undressing his heroines took longer, since his knowledge of female anatomy, after four years of sex education, was still entirely theoretical. Too shy to get down to business, he carried on long conversations with his primly dressed sirens. “Do you have many friends?” he might ask.
“Not many,” the current beauty would confess. “I get awfully lonely.”
“Does your mother understand you?”
“She’s forgotten what it’s like to be young.”
“I never had one.”
“Me neither.”
Emboldened by these chats in which he dictated both voices, eventually Hoagy allowed a strap to glide from his heroine’s shoulder, a streak of thigh to show through a slit in her gown. Once the disrobing began, it hastened forward until she lolled on the screen as naked as the sun in a cloudless sky.
Tanya Ferris had been assured by the psychiatrist that the Freud would not ply her son with fantasies but rather would train him to orchestrate his own desires. By learning to direct the flow of neural impulses, he might be able to control his epilepsy without the use of drugs. Indeed, within a few months after installation of the eros couch, Hoagy’s seizures had all but ceased, and the few he suffered were mild, allowing the doctor to wean him off medications. Still, Tanya wondered if she had done the right thing by enrolling him in the timeshell experiment, with all its risks. Yet how else could she have secured treatment for him? She could never afford even the cheapest Freud, let alone the psychiatrist’s fees. As it was, she and Hoagy were barely getting by on the pension she received as a retired surrogate mother. Even to buy him a new pair of shoes required weeks of scrimping.
In the evenings, after he had finished his homework at the kitchen table, he retreated to his room. Tanya often paused outside his shut door and listened, hearing muffled dialogue, one voice recognizably Hoagy’s, the other one higher-pitched, girlish. Even with her ear pressed against the door, she could not decipher the words. When sharp laughter or urgent moans broke out, she hurried on down the hall.
Hoagy soon lost interest in the girls who trailed perfume down the corridors at school or flashed their bare legs on the sidewalks; now he could conjure up women more desirable than any female he had seen in the flesh. The prim, chatty maidens of his early scenarios were succeeded by strumpets cavorting in negligees, then by lascivious nudes. Their breasts and buttocks defied gravity, refusing to sag, and their skin was unblemished silk. Their limbs assumed any posture he chose, including ones that would baffle a yogi. Their eyes said only what he wished them to say.
One red-haired temptress haunted him for weeks. Delicate blue veins showed through her translucent skin. Her jade green eyes, fixed on him, gave back a tiny image of his face.
“Where do you live?” he asked.
“On the fifth planet of Epsilon Eridani,” she breathed. “Come find me.”
He summoned her back again and again, surrounding her with a landscape of ancient forests, rolling prairies, wildflower meadows aflame with butterflies, rivers teeming with fish and skies with birds. Such riches were no longer available on Earth. But why not on the fifth planet of Epsilon Eridani, or on some other habitable world?
By the time Hoagy received a more powerful eros couch at age fifteen, all his projections had grown otherworldly. No longer rushing him to orgasm, as they had in the early days of acrobatic postures and lacy lingerie, now his beauties entranced him for hours at a stretch. As settings for his trysts, he fashioned gardens riotous with flowers and brimming with fruits and thronged by magnificent beasts. Sometimes he postponed climax for days in order to refine his visions, like an alchemist in search of gold.
While his friends were vibrating to sex like struck tuning forks, rubbing one another’s ticklish bodies, conceiving and aborting the occasional baby, Hoagy kept to himself at school and divided his time at home between the eros couch and his computer, where he studied exobiology.
Though the psychiatrists had warned her, Tanya was not prepared for the transformation in her son. He scarcely spoke to her anymore, unless she prodded him with questions. At meals he would stare off into space, forgetting to eat. He became alarmingly thin, his cheeks gouged by shadows. Fret lines appeared at the corners of his mouth.
One night, as she tiptoed down the hall, she noticed his door was ajar. Glancing in warily, she saw he was at his desk, studying a screenful of data. Relieved that he was not on the Freud, she slipped into the room. “What are all the numbers?” she asked.
Without looking up, he said, “Coordinates for E-type planets in our galaxy.”
“E-type?”
“Planets sufficiently Earth-like to have the potential for supporting life as we know it.”
She squinted at the rows of numbers. “So many?”
“On the order of ten million identified so far.”
“How many have we explored?”
He snorted. “A handful. And those only by drones.”
“Imagine all those planets. There might be creatures we’ve never dreamed of.”
“Or creatures we have dreamed of,” said Hoagy. Hunched over, his face reflecting the glow of the screen, he withdrew his attention from her as firmly as if he had thrown a switch.
Tanya studied the boy, her ninth birthing, whom she had been allowed to keep because of his unforeseen epilepsy. He was no more her genetic offspring than the previous eight had been. Only the Fertility Board knew whose egg and sperm had been implanted in her womb, knew what couple had refused to accept this flawed child. By rearing Hoagy, feeding him, helping him learn to crawl, to walk, to speak, she was bound to him by a link deeper than genes.
He did not glance up or speak when she wished him good night and closed the door.
Shortly before Hoagy’s eighteenth birthday, when the time came to replace the Freud with a state-of-the-art model, Tanya brooded once more on the decision she had made years earlier to sign him up for the timeshell experiment. From his earliest school-days, tests had shown him to be gifted at remembering complex images in precise detail. After glancing at a page of print, he could recite every word without error; after glimpsing a picture, he could draw an exact replica. Eidetic vision, the examiners called it, possibly a side-effect of his epilepsy. The gift was so rare that a Project VIVA psychiatrist, learning of Hoagy’s case, had persuaded Tanya to enroll him in the program. The eros couches were designed to wean him away not merely from earthly women but from Earth itself. The psychiatrist put it bluntly: Your son will give up the chance of leading a normal life for a chance to overcome his disorder. Better he should pay this price, Tanya reluctantly decided, than die of a seizure. If he could contribute to science in the process, all the better.
What the psychiatrist did not tell her was that her son might go mad. Project VIVA, the program for mapping life in the Milky Way, had been stymied by a difficulty no one had foreseen in the pre-warp days: matter, including human bodies, passed through the timeshell without harm, but minds were deranged. When the early warpships returned at all, their crewmembers were insane. Nothing, it seemed, would protect the astronauts, neither drugs nor freezing nor hypnosis. Many scientists began calling the timeshell an impassable barrier, as the speed of light had been described in the twentieth century.
Just when the International Space Agency was on the point of shelving the project, declaring the human costs too high, the seventh flight brought back the hint of an answer. Officials approved for the trip a woman who was a paranoid schizophrenic. She returned just as insane as the rest of the crew, just as incapable of reporting her observations, but with her psychosis undisturbed. Her paranoia had passed twice through the warp without altering.
If some fixation less crippling than paranoia could be induced in the astronauts, perhaps it would preserve their sanity through the warp. Subsequent flights bore crews trained with mantras and mandalas, meditation and prayer. The returning astronauts were mad in novel ways, but mad nonetheless. Again there was a curious exception—a twenty-year-old Zen adept. Although he raved most of the time, he also had lucid spells in which he could describe the lava-spouting planet his flight had orbited. He was the youngest person ever to breach the shell, the youngest to be trained in fixation.
Perhaps, the psychiatrists reasoned, adults were the wrong candidates for training. Perhaps adolescents, with their fierce cravings and attachments, were more likely subjects. And what craving was fiercer or more easily manipulated than sex? Cautiously, after prolonged debates in scientific and governmental circles, Project VIVA was commissioned to test the idea.
After more than a thousand interviews, eight couples and four single parents were persuaded to enroll their adolescent children. If this experiment succeeds in revealing how to break through the timeshell, the parents were told, your child’s name will be honored alongside those of Lindberg and Armstrong, Gagarin and Chi. The parents were not allowed to visit the hospital in Santa Fe where survivors of earlier flights dozed under heavy sedation or slouched in chairs, drooling. Imagining the dangers their children might face, Tanya Ferris and the other parents thought only of mild phobias, a stutter, a twitch. The risk seemed worth taking in exchange for the possibility of fame.
On the afternoon of his eighteenth birthday, Hoagy returned from the Institute for Exobiological Research to find in his room a top-of-the-line eros couch. Instead of projecting images onto a screen and synthesizing odors and sounds, this model directly stimulated the occipital and cerebral cortex and limbic system. The helmet pressed electrodes against his skull, the webbing cradled him as in a hammock. Lying in the machine’s embrace, mind absorbed by the tingling sensations, Hoagy immediately entered a trance. Whatever he envisioned in this spellbound state became more vivid to him than anything in the waking world.
Fantasy women still drew him into his visions, with their silky bellies and exquisite feet, their hair spun from starlight. But now his desire expanded beyond these goddesses to conjure up entire planets, lush and pristine. Making love with such women, in such places, required him to leap beyond the confines of his own chemistry, to merge with an alien ecology.
Even when not strapped into the couch and helmet, he carried the images with him. By comparison, his actual surroundings seemed ugly and crude. He shuffled between home and the Exobiology Institute in a perpetual daze of desire. His teachers had never come across anyone so insatiably curious about extraterrestrial life, so relentless in his studies. The curriculum that should have kept him busy for seven years he finished in three. By age twenty-one he was working on the frontiers of the discipline.
He became a leading proponent of the view that wherever conditions were suitable for carbon-based life such life would inevitably appear, and if given enough time it would evolve and diversify, producing more and more complex organisms. The possibility that any of these organisms would be humanoid was vanishingly small, of course, but not zero. In a galaxy with tens of millions of candidate planets, there might be thousands on which species akin to Homo sapiens had evolved, and somewhere among them he might discover the infinitely desirable women who tantalized him in daylight and dream.
Hoagy’s link to the everyday world had grown so tenuous that he felt only mild surprise when his application to become an astronaut for Project VIVA was promptly accepted. He was more surprised by his mother’s delighted response when he told her the news over breakfast.
“You’re not upset?” he asked.
“Why should I be?” she said. “You were born for space. I’ve seen you headed there since you were a boy.”
“You’re not worried about the dangers?”
“Everything worth doing is dangerous.”
“The timeshell—” he began.
“Wouldn’t you love to be the one to break through?” she asked eagerly. “You’d be a pioneer. They say you’ve got the ideal mind for it. And you’ve prepared so well on the Freud.”
The fervor in her voice rattled Hoagy. He shoved away from the table and retreated to his room and slammed the door. Prepared so well? Prepared? He paced back and forth, scowling at the eros couch, this luxurious and treacherous dream machine. All these years, his mother had let him believe these devices were only therapeutic, training him to govern his epilepsy. But that had never been their real purpose. They were designed to groom him for warp flight.
Suddenly furious, he flung the couch on its side, ripped the harness loose, tore out the electrodes, and stomped on the helmet until it cracked.
The door swung open and his mother stood there, appalled, gazing at the wreckage. “What are you doing?”
“Cutting the puppet strings!”
“What puppet strings?”
He kicked the helmet and sent it spinning across the floor. “This machine has been pumping me full of junk.”
“Your visions?”
“The psychiatrists’ visions!”
“They’re yours, sweetheart.”
“No.” He shook his head doggedly.
With hands on hips, she glared at him. “The Freud only picked up your longings.”
He slumped on the edge of the bed and waved a hand in front of his face. “Okay, they’re my stupid longings. But they’ve been used to manipulate me.”
“That’s not true, and you know it. What you’ve imagined came out of your own mind.”
He sat in silence for a moment before saying, “Then I’m a monster of desire.”
“You’re not a monster.” She sat next to him and curved an arm around his waist. “We all have strong desires. I wanted a husband. I wanted a college degree. I wanted to be an artist. I’ve run out of chances for any of those things,” she said, tears brimming. “But you have a chance to satisfy your longings. You have a gift. Your vision is so strong it can deliver you.”
He let himself relax into the curve of her arm. “Even if I survive the warp,” he said quietly, “my chance of finding a planet and a woman to match my vision is slim.”
“Slim is better than nothing,” she said. “It’s better than I ever had.”
For the first time in a long while, he looked searchingly at his mother, chastened and surprised by her grief. Her cheeks were splotched, her eyes red from crying, her lips crimped tight. Instead of dwelling on his own unappeasable hunger, he felt hers.
“Alright,” he muttered. “I’ll try. If I break through without going crazy, maybe I can find my heart’s desire.”
His mother picked up the shattered helmet. “But won’t you need the Freud?”
“Not anymore. The vision never leaves me now.”
Training for warp passage took three strenuous years. While Hoagy’s conscious mind was absorbing the technicalities of flight, cross-species communication, bio-surveys and the like, his unconscious mind was elaborating the details of his visionary planet. The VIVA engineers who lectured about safety systems, the linguists who explained computer translation, and the neurophysiologists who monitored his brain were a blur to Hoagy. He took in their lessons, but otherwise ignored the instructors. The only people who captured his attention were his two partners, Jaffa Marx and Blake Polo. The three of them made up Alpha Trio, the first mind-conditioned group selected to pass through the timeshell.
Soon after the three had been introduced, Hoagy asked the others, “How old were you when you started on the eros couch?”
“Fourteen,” answered Blake, a dark and doughy man, fluent in a dozen languages, expert in semiotics.
“Twelve,” said Jaffa. She was an astrophysicist, tall and slender, with pale skin, lilting speech, and a bright, inquisitive manner.
“How long before you were—” Hoagy let his voice trail off.
“Possessed?” said Jaffa, her green eyes glinting. “I was hooked within a few months, first on guys, then on wild landscapes, and finally on a gorgeous planet.”
“I followed the same path,” Blake said, “only it took me a year to work my way from lovers to planet.”
“This place you’ve imagined, does it feel like your real home?” Hoagy asked.
“Yes,” said Jaffa, “like a garden I’ve been kicked out of.”
“Exactly,” Blake said. “I feel I’m in exile here on Earth.”
As they compared their visions, they gradually realized they were all imagining the same planet, right down to the contours of cliffs and smell of hot stone and taste of springwater.
“Maybe the VIVA psychiatrists implanted the image,” Blake suggested.
“That’s what I used to think,” Hoagy conceded. “But there’s another possibility. Maybe our vision is a genetic inheritance, passed down from ancestors who lived on another world before they brought the seeds of life to Earth.”
Jaffa snapped her fingers. “I’ve had the same thought.”
“So myths of paradise aren’t inventions—” Blake began.
“They’re species memories,” Hoagy said.
“Eden, Elysium, Shangri-La, nirvana,” Jaffa chanted, “all of them glimpses of an actual place, somewhere out there.”
“Yes,” Hoagy said. “One of those tens of millions of E-type planets.”
“But what are the chances of finding it?” Blake asked.
“And if we do,” said Jaffa, “will it still be a paradise?”
And so the trio spoke excitedly, finishing one another’s sentences, merging ideas they had conceived in solitude. Blake held that language forms a cosmic net, which all living things are weaving with their manifold speech. Eventually, consciousness will be able to journey from galaxy to galaxy on a web of signs. Consciousness already pervades the universe, according to Jaffa, who speculated that stars and quasars were manifestations of mind, with a subjective interior as well as a physical exterior. “Matter thinks,” she said flatly. “Just look at the brain. If the brain, why not a nebula?”
Why not? Hoagy thought, even as he realized that he and his partners might only be spinning theories out of a need to believe they could actually reach the world they longed for.
The sense of being in exile from their true home bound the Alpha Trio closely, further estranging them from ordinary people. Hoagy found it difficult to speak even with his mother, when she called two weeks before the launch to wish him well.
“You must be excited,” she said.
“Yes,” was all he could answer.
“This is the last call I’m allowed to make until after . . .” Her voice broke. On the screen her face was a white smear, which he could not bring into focus.
“After I’m back?” he suggested.
“Right. After you’re back.” When he said nothing, she pleaded, “Hoagy?”
“I’m here, Mom.”
“Sweetheart, if I was wrong to get you into this . . . if anything happens to you . . . I’ll never . . .” Again she faltered. Her face on the screen crinkled with pain. “I’m sorry,” she added hastily, and hung up before he could think of anything comforting to say.
During the final week before launch, the members of Alpha Trio were kept apart, each one training in a mock-up of the warp chamber. Murmuring through headphones, psychiatrists coaxed them into deep trance, then urged them back to ordinary consciousness. “Mind sprints,” Jaffa called the exercises.
Hoagy entered trance with ease, but struggled on the return. Hearing “T-state now,” he swiftly conjured up his garden planet. Earth dwindled away behind, until he could no longer feel its pull, as he raced toward his beautiful, sumptuous globe. He recognized the oceans, the green continents, the mountain ranges, the sinuous rivers. Nearing the surface, he smelled the ozone from waterfalls, the pheromones from mating animals, the juices of burgeoning plants. He ached to land. But an instant before he touched down, the voice rang in his ear: “R-state now!” Return was torture. He had to fight against the lure of his vision, wrenching himself free, until he tumbled back into real time and found himself once more in the warp chamber. After a brief rest, he was told how many seconds he still needed to shave off his re-entry time. Then came the order, “T-state, now!” and the cycle repeated.
He was always tempted to ignore the peremptory voice that called him back. But he knew he must delay consummation, for he needed the full psychic charge of desire to keep his mind from whirling apart as he passed through the temporal dislocation of warp.
Beginning three days before launch, the training schedule was relaxed. Nutritional supplements brought Hoagy’s body up to peak strength, and injections of neurotransmitters revved his brain to a dazzling clarity. He could not help wondering how much of this treatment had been given to those earlier astronauts, who had returned broken and mad.
On the morning of launch the Alpha Trio were reunited in the warp chamber. They nodded at one another, lips tight. Once harnessed in, shoulders nearly touching in the cramped space, they went through pre-flight checks. They confirmed the targeting instructions: fourth planet of K-47 in the Great Globular Cluster of Hercules, 25,000 light years away. Time elapse, .001 seconds. For reasons the physicists still could not explain, zero-elapse passage disintegrated machines as well as minds, while times longer than a thousandth of a second accelerated the rate of metal fatigue. So the meter was set at .001, and each of the astronauts read the setting aloud.
While Hoagy listened to final instructions from the mission controller, he ran his gaze over the interior of the warp chamber, its rows of gauges and switches, its hard surfaces and warning labels. With a pang, he thought how much of his life he had spent encased in machines. If he survived this trip, maybe he would go outdoors more often. Earth must still have a few wild places. Nothing to rival his vision, of course, but small pockets of beauty here and there.
A faint whine told him the warp projectors were ramping up. Instinctively, he braced himself for super-G acceleration, even though he knew the force he was about to encounter would be nothing like gravity.
“Ready to center. Counting from sixty.”
Hoagy glanced at his partners. Blake squeezed the armrest until his knuckles turned white. Jaffa’s fingers spidered in the air, playing among life-fields only she could detect.
“Prepare for T-state,” the controller said.
The projector’s whine grew louder, and a shock sizzled along Hoagy’s spine as the warp vector strengthened.
“T-state—now!”
Warp chamber, partners, everything vanished as he leapt into trance. Immediately he was buffeted by turbulence more violent than any seizure. Gales ripped at him, twisted and tumbled him. He could feel his center loosening, giving way. It would be so easy to let go, to be torn asunder. But he clung fiercely to the vision of his garden planet, filled his mind with its glory, and at length he passed beyond the turbulence, the winds relented, and he realized the ship had passed through the timeshell. He returned to real time without being summoned.
There on the monitor was a blue planet, which the sensors confirmed as their target. Of course, it wasn’t the ancestral world that he and Jaffa and Blake had imagined, but it was lovely enough, marbled with clouds, burnished by light from its orange star. The reward for their ordeal would be to land there and search for life.
Blake’s voice came through the earphones. “Are you back?”
“Yes,” Hoagy muttered. “But it was a rough passage.”
“Jaffa hasn’t come around yet.”
Hoagy looked in alarm at Jaffa, who twitched in her harness. He laid a hand on her arm and squeezed, absorbing her tremors. Presently she grew still. Her eyes slicked open. At first only the whites were visible, then the green irises. He leaned close. “Are you all right?”
“What?” Her head swiveled, surveying the warp chamber. “Where are we?”
“The other side,” Hoagy said.
Her face lit up with a smile and she grabbed his hand. “We really made it?”
“There’s our gem,” Blake said, pointing at the monitor. “Covered in liquid water, as promised. If it isn’t brimming with life, then nature missed a good chance.”
Jaffa came fully alert as she gazed at the lovely blue planet. “There’s life down there.”
“Let’s hope so,” said Blake.
“There is. I can feel it. You’ll see when we land.”
Hoagy eased himself away from her. His hand burned where she had touched him. “First,” he said, “we have to persuade the computer we’re still sane.”
They took the psychometric exam, to prove they had survived the warp with faculties intact. When each one earned a green light, they cheered.
According to the flight plan, now the engines should ease them down into the atmosphere, with Hoagy piloting them on the final descent. Instead of hearing the sizzle of plasma, however, they heard the start-up whine of the warp projector. An instant later the ship computer buzzed in their headphones: “Five minutes until transfer.”
“Destination?” Hoagy demanded.
“Earth,” the computer answered.
“Why?” said Jaffa. “Is there something wrong with our tests?”
“You have passed the tests. Now you will be returned for study.”
“But we’re supposed to land!” Blake roared.
“The bastards,” Jaffa said. “They lied to us.”
Hoagy slammed his fist on the instrument panel, where the clock was ticking down. “They never intended for us to explore. All they wanted was to see if we could pass through the timeshell without going nuts. We’re just a source of data.”
“Three minutes,” droned the computer.
“Lab rats,” Blake muttered. He said it again, louder, then he howled and his eyes rolled up and he thrashed in his harness.
Hoagy grabbed him by a shoulder. “Blake, snap out of it. We’re going to jump.”
“We can’t let him go through warp like this,” said Jaffa.
“I don’t know if we can stop it.” Hoagy scoured the instrument panel, but he could find no switch that would override the computer, which had clearly been programmed to carry out an immediate return.
“One minute.”
Between bouts of laughter, Blake muttered in languages they had never heard.
There was no time for coaxing him back.
“Thirty seconds.”
Hoagy and Jaffa exchanged despairing glances. He grasped her hand, curling his own thick fingers around her delicate ones, which could trace life’s energy in thin air. Loud enough to be heard above the countdown, he called to her, “I need you to be whole when we get back.”
Her reply was a shout. “And I need you!”
Those words and Blake’s gibberish were the last sounds Hoagy heard before leaping into trance.
The agonizing spiral back to real-time was familiar, but instead of emerging in the warp chamber, Hoagy found himself in a blazing white room, strapped to a table, with a scanner swinging back and forth over his skull.
“Tell me your name,” said a voice he recognized as that of the VIVA psychiatrist who was in charge of the timeshell experiment.
With brusque impatience, Hoagy responded to that query and to many more, until the doctor seemed satisfied.
“How are the others?” Hoagy demanded.
“Don’t worry about the others.”
“Damn it, tell me. Is Jaffa okay? Is Blake?” A pinprick in the hollow of his elbow soon washed away his questions. This trance was a chemical one, insipid, blank.
When he was allowed to place calls the following day, Hoagy spoke first with his mother, who sobbed when she heard his voice. “I’m fine,” he assured her.
“Oh, honey, I was so worried.”
“Really, Mom. Everything’s okay. They checked me out.”
“You sound groggy.”
“They shot me up with drugs when I got back. But my mind’s clear.”
“That’s what the doctor told me,” she said. “But I needed to hear it from you.”
Unable to bear her crying, he said, “Gotta go, Mom. There’s a big meeting.”
“I’m so happy,” she breathed as he ended the call.
There really was a meeting, a debriefing session in a seminar room crammed with a couple of dozen VIVA staffers by the time he arrived. He took a seat near the door. A moment later, Jaffa sidled in and sat next to him. “Zero damage,” she confided.
“Same here,” he answered, noticing her smell, as of mint tea.
Neither mentioned Blake.
The Director, a stern, fast-talking woman, opened the session by apologizing for having deceived the Alpha Trio with the promise of landing. “We were afraid no weaker motive would carry you through, yet we couldn’t risk losing you to some mishap on the planet.”
With that formality over, she ignored Hoagy and Jaffa and proceeded to explain what the mission had revealed about the psychology of warp transfer. The lights in the room dimmed. Projected onto a giant wall screen, a graph displayed three data lines, showing changes in brain chemistry and neuronal activity in each of the astronauts as they passed twice through the timeshell, once on the way out and again on the way back. Although the data lines were labeled simply A, B, and C, it was clear which one belonged to Blake, for on the return passage the line spiked chaotically, like the seismic trace of an earthquake and aftershocks.
Using a laser, the Director pointed out that in the two records where no damage occurred, and in the outgoing phase of the third record, the peak moment when mind slipped through the timeshell coincided with a precise mix of catecholamines—principally serotonin, dopamine, and epinephrine—and a corresponding neuronal firing pattern. A murmur spread across the room as the doctors, neuroscientists, and behavioral engineers took this in.
“We should be able to reproduce this effect in any healthy brain,” the Director said, to rousing applause. She then set up two teams, one to work out the chemistry, the other to map and program the neuronal activity. “I want compounds and devices we can test on subjects within six months,” she said. “And I want astronauts prepared for safe warp travel within a year.”
The two teams gathered at opposite corners of the room and began buzzing with plans.
Hoagy leaned close to Jaffa and said, “So much for finding our planet.”
She gave him a surprised look. “You don’t think we’ll get to go out again?”
“You might, but not me. Now that they’ve figured out how to send healthy people through warp, why send an epileptic?”
“But your seizures are under control.”
“I’ve had two since we returned.”
Jaffa laid a hand on his cheek and searched his face with her jade eyes. “If you don’t go, I don’t go.”
Hoagy returned her gaze, feeling heartache for abandoning his visionary planet and gratitude for what she was offering. “I’ve been thinking there must be some wild places left here on Earth,” he said.
“There must be,” Jaffa agreed. “Let’s go look.”