Clumsily I got to my feet, a slight pain throbbing in my ankle, and limped back into the forest. I uncovered my pack and prepared some food, moving very slowly without thinking. Even as I ate, my mind remained surprisingly blank, like after a long meditation. Then slowly I began to increase my energy, taking several deep breaths and holding them. Suddenly I could hear the hum again. As I listened, another image came to mind. I was walking east in the direction of the sound, in search of its cause.
The thought terrified me and I felt the old urge to flee. Instantly the hum vanished, and I heard a rustling of leaves to my rear. I jerked around and saw Maya.
“Do you always show up at the right time?” I stammered.
“Show up! Are you crazy? I’ve been looking for you everywhere around here. Where did you come from?”
“I was down by the stream.”
“No, you weren’t; I’ve been looking down there.” She stared at me for a moment, then glanced at my foot. “How’s that ankle?”
I managed a smile. “It’s fine. Listen, I’ve got to talk to you about something.”
“I have to speak with you too. There’s something very strange happening. One of the Forest Service agents saw me walking into town last night, and I told him about your situation. He seemed to want to keep it quiet, and he insisted on sending a truck to get you this morning. I told him your general location, and he made me promise to ride out here with him this morning. Something about the way he was talking felt so odd, I decided to hike up ahead of him instead, but he’ll probably be here any minute.”
“Then we need to go,” I said, scrambling to pack.
“Wait a minute! Tell me what is happening.” She looked panicked.
I stopped and faced her. “Someone—I don’t know who it is—is doing some kind of experiment or something like that here in the valley. I think my friend Charlene is involved somehow, or may be in danger. Someone in the Forest Service must have secretly approved this.”
She stared, trying to take it all in.
I picked up my pack and took her hand. “Walk with me for a while. Please. There’s more I need to tell you.”
She nodded and grabbed her pack, and as we walked east along the edge of the stream, I told her the whole story, from meeting David and Wil to seeing Williams’ Life Review and listening to Joel. When I came to the part about her Birth Vision, I moved over to some rocks and sat down. She leaned against a tree to my right.
“You’re involved in this too,” I said. “Obviously you already know that your life is supposed to be about introducing alternative techniques of healing, but there’s more that you intended to do. You’re supposed to be part of this group that Williams saw coming together.”
“How do you know all that?”
“Wil and I saw your Birth Vision.”
She shook her head and closed her eyes.
“Maya, each of us comes here with a vision of how our lives can be, what we want to do. The intuitions we have, the dreams and coincidences, they’re all designed to keep us on the right path, to bring back our memory of how we wanted our lives to unfold.”
“And what else did I want to do?”
“I don’t know exactly; I couldn’t get it. But it had something to do with this collective Fear that is rising in human consciousness. The experiment is a result of this Fear… Maya, you intended to use what you’ve learned about physical healing to help resolve what’s happening in this valley. You must remember!”
She stood and looked away. “Oh no, you can’t put that kind of responsibility on me! I don’t remember any of this. I’m doing exactly what I’m supposed to be doing as a doctor. I hate this kind of intrigue! Understand? I hate it! I finally have the clinic set up just as I want. You can’t expect me to get involved in all this. You’ve got the wrong person!”
I looked at her, trying to think of something else to say. During the silence, I heard the hum again.
“Can you hear that sound, Maya, a dissonance in the air, a hum? That’s the experiment. It’s happening right now. Try to hear it!”
She listened for a moment, then said, “I don’t hear anything.”
I grabbed her arm. “Try to raise your energy!”
She pulled away. “I don’t hear a hum!”
I took a breath. “Okay, I’m sorry. I don’t know, maybe I’m wrong. Maybe it’s not supposed to happen this way.”
She looked at me for a moment. “I know someone with the Sheriff’s Department. I’ll try to get in touch with him for you. That’s all I can do.”
“I don’t know if that will help,” I said. “Apparently not everyone can hear this sound.”
“Do you want me to call him?”
“Yes, but tell him to investigate independently. I’m not sure he can trust everyone in the Forest Service.” I picked up my pack again.
“I hope you understand,” she said. “I just can’t be involved in this. I feel as though something horrible would happen.”
“But that’s just because of what happened when you tried this before, in the nineteenth century, here in this valley. Can you remember any of that?”
She closed her eyes again, not wanting to listen.
I suddenly saw a clear image of myself in buckskins, running up a hill, pulling a packhorse. It was the same image I had seen before. The mountain man was me! As the vision continued, I made my way to the top of the hill and then paused to glance back to my rear. From there I could see the falls and the gorge on the other side. There was Maya and the Indian and the young congressional aide. As before, the battle was just beginning. Anxiety swept over me, and I pulled at the horse and walked on, unable to help them avoid their fate.
I shook off the images. “It’s okay,” I said, giving up. “I know how you feel.”
Maya walked closer. “Here’s some extra water and food I brought. What are you planning to. do?”
“I’m going to head toward the east… for at least a while. I know Charlene was going in that direction.”
She looked at my foot. “Are you sure your ankle will hold up?”
I moved closer and said, “I haven’t really thanked you for what you did. My ankle will be fine, I think, just a little sore. I guess I’ll never know how bad it might have been.”
“When it happens this way, no one ever does.”
I nodded, then picked up my pack and headed east, glancing back once at Maya. She looked guilty for an instant, than an expression of relief swept across her face.
I walked toward the sound of the hum, keeping the stream in sight to my left, pausing only to rest my foot. About noon the sound ceased, so I stopped to eat lunch and assess the situation. My ankle was swelling slightly and I rested for an hour and a half before resuming my journey. After covering only another mile, fatigue overwhelmed me, and I rested again. By midafternoon I was looking for a place to camp.
I had been walking through thick woods that grew right to the edge of the stream, but ahead the landscape opened up in a series of gently rolling foothills covered with old-growth forest— three- and four-hundred-year-old trees. Through a break in the limbs, I could see a large ridge rising toward the southeast, perhaps another mile away.
I spotted a small grassy knoll near the top of the first hill, which looked like a perfect place to spend the night. As I approached, movement in the trees caught my eye. I slipped behind a large outcropping and looked. What was that? A deer? A person? I waited for several minutes, then carefully moved away toward the north. As I inched along, I saw a large man a hundred yards to the south of the knoll I had seen before, apparently setting up a camp himself. Staying very low to the ground and moving with skill, he deftly raised a small tent and camouflaged it with branches. For an instant I thought it might be David, but his movements were different, and he was too big. Then I lost sight of him.
After waiting for several more minutes I decided to move farther to the north until I was completely out of sight. I’d been moving no more than five minutes when the
man suddenly stepped out in front of me.
“Who are you?” he asked. I told him my name and decided to be open. “I’m trying to find a friend.”
“It’s dangerous out here,” he said. “I would recommend that you go back. This is all private property.”
“Why are you out here?” I asked.
He was silent, staring.
Then I remembered what David had told me. “Are you Curtis Webber?” I inquired.
He looked at me for a moment longer, then abruptly smiled. “You know David Lone Eagle!”
“I only talked to him briefly, but he told me you were out here, and to tell you he was coming into the valley and that he would find you.”
Curtis nodded and looked toward his camp. “It’s getting late, and we need to get out of sight. Let’s go up to my tent. You can spend the night up there.”
I followed him down a slope and up into the deep cover of the larger trees. While I pitched my tent, he fired up his camp stove for coffee and opened a can of tuna. I contributed a package of bread Maya had given me.
“You mentioned that you were looking for someone,” Curtis said. “Who?”
Briefly I told him about Charlene’s disappearance and that David had seen her hiking into the valley; also that I thought she had been seen coming in this direction. I didn’t talk about what had occurred in the other dimension, but I did mention hearing the hum and seeing the vehicles.
“The hum,” he responded, “comes from an energy-generating device; someone’s experimenting with it here for some reason. I can confirm that much. But I don’t know whether the experiment is being conducted by some secret government agency or a private group. Most of the Forest Service agents seem to be unaware that it’s happening; but I don’t know about the administrators.”
“Have you gone to the media,” I asked, “or to the local authorities about this?”
“Not yet. The fact that not everyone hears the hum is a real problem.” He looked out at the valley. “If I just knew where they were. Counting the private land and the National Forest, there are tens of thousands of acres where they might be. I think they want to conduct the experiment and get out before anyone knows what happened. That is, if they can avoid a tragedy.”
“What do you mean?”
“They could totally ruin this place, make it into a twilight zone, another Bermuda Triangle where the laws of physics are in unpredictable flux.” He looked directly at me. “The things they know how to do are incredible. Most people have no idea of the complexity of electromagnetic phenomena. In the latest super-string theories, for instance, one has to assume this radiation emanates across nine dimensions just to make the math work. This device has the potential to disrupt these dimensions. It could trigger massive earthquakes or even complete physical disintegration of certain areas.”
“How do you know all this?” I asked.
His face fell. “Because in the decade of the eighties I helped develop some of this technology. I was employed with a multinational corporation I thought was named Deltech, although later, after I was fired, I found out that Deltech was a fictitious name. You’ve heard of Nikola Tesla? Well, we expanded many of his theories and tied some of his discoveries to other technologies that the company supplied. The funny thing is that this technology is composed of several dissimilar parts, but basically it works this way. Imagine that the electromagnetic field of the Earth is a giant battery that can provide plenty of electrical energy if you can tie into it in the correct way. For that you combine a room temperature, superconductive generator system with a very complicated electronic feedback inhibitor, which mathematically enhances certain static output resonances. Then you tie several of these in a series, amplifying and generating the charge, and when you get the calibrations exact, presto, you have virtually free energy right out of the immediate space. You need a small amount of power to start, perhaps a single photocell or a battery, but then it’s self-perpetuating. A device the size of a heat pump could power several houses, even a small factory.
“However, there are two problems. First, calibrating these minigenerators is unbelievably complicated. We had access to some of the largest computers in existence and couldn’t do it. Second, we discovered that when we tried to increase the total output beyond this relatively small size by enlarging the mass displacement, the space around the generator became very unstable and began to warp. We didn’t know it then, but we were tapping into the energy of another dimension, and strange things began to happen. Once, we made the whole generator disappear, exactly like what happened in the Philadelphia Experiment.”
“Do you think they really made a ship disappear and show up again in a new location, in 1943?”
“Of course they did! There’s a lot of secret technology around, and they’re smart. In our case, they were able to shut our team down in less than a month and fire all of us without a breach of security because each team was working on an isolated part of the technology. Not that I wondered much about it then. I mostly bought the idea that the obstacles were just too great to proceed, so I thought it was dead-end research—although I did hear that several of the old employees were hired again by another company.”
He looked thoughtful for a moment, then continued. “I knew I wanted to do something else anyway. I’m a consultant now, working with small technology firms, providing advice for improving their research efficiency and use of resources and disposal of wastes, that sort of thing. And the more I work with them, the more I’m convinced the Insights are having an effect on the economy. The way we do business is shifting. But I figured we had to work with traditional power sources for a long time. I hadn’t thought about the energy experiments in years until I moved into this area. You can imagine how shocked I was to walk into this valley and hear the same sound—this characteristic hum—that I heard every day for years when we were working on the project.
“Someone has continued the research, and judging from the resonances, they’re much further along than we were. Afterward I tried to contact the two people who could verify the sound and maybe go to the EPA or a congressional committee with me, but I found out one had been deceased for ten years and the other, my best friend when I was at the corporation, was also dead. He had a heart attack just yesterday.” His voice trailed off.
“Since then,” he went on, “I’ve been out here listening, trying to figure out why they’re in this valley. Ordinarily one would expect this kind of experiment to be done in a laboratory somewhere. I mean, why not? Its energy source is space itself, and that’s everywhere. But then it dawned on me. They must think they are very close to perfecting the calibrations, which means they’re working on the amplification problem. I think they’re trying to tie into the energy vortexes in this valley in an attempt to stabilize the process.”
A wave of anger crossed his face. “Which is crazy and totally unnecessary. If they really can find the calibrations, then there’s no reason not to utilize the technology in small units. In fact, that’s the perfect way of using it. What they’re trying now is insane. I know enough to see the dangers. I’m telling you, they could totally wreck this valley, or worse. If they focus this thing on the interdimensional pathways, who knows what might happen?”
He stopped suddenly. “Do you know what I’m talking about? Have you heard of the Insights?”
I stared for a moment, then said, “Curtis, I have to tell you what I’ve been experiencing in this valley. You may find it unbelievable.”
He nodded and then listened patiently as I described meeting Wil and exploring parts of the other dimension. When I came to the Life Review, I asked, “This friend of yours who recently died? Was he named Williams?”
“That’s right. Dr. Williams. How did you know that?”
“We saw him reach the other dimension after his death. We watched as he experienced a Life Review.”
He appeared shaken. “That’s hard for me to believe. I know the Insights, at least intellectually, and I believe i
n the probable existence of other dimensions, but as a scientist, the Ninth Insight stuff is much harder to take literally, the idea of being able to communicate with people after death… You’re saying that Dr. Williams is still alive in the sense that his personality is intact?”
“Yes, and he was thinking about you.”
He looked at me intently as I continued to tell him about Williams’ realization that Curtis and he were supposed to be involved in resolving the Fear… and stopping this experiment.
“I don’t understand,” he said. “What did he mean when he talked about a growing Fear?”
“I don’t know exactly. It has to do with a certain percentage of the population refusing to believe that a new spiritual awareness is emerging. Instead, they think human civilization is degenerating. This is creating a polarization of opinion and belief. Human culture can’t continue to evolve until the polarization is ended. I was hoping that you might remember something about it.”
He looked at me blankly. “I don’t know anything about a polarization, but I am going to stop this experiment.” His face grew angry again and he looked away.
“Williams seemed to understand the process for stopping it,” I said.
“Well, we’ll never know now, will we?”
As he said that, I fleetingly saw again the image of Curtis and Williams talking on the grassy hilltop, surrounded by several large trees.
Curtis served our food, still appearing upset, and we finished eating in silence. Later as I stretched out and leaned against a small hickory, I glanced up the hill at the grassy knoll above us. Four or five huge oaks made almost a perfect semicircle on its crest.
“Why didn’t you camp up on the hill?” I asked Curtis, pointing.
“I don’t know,” he said. “The idea came to me, but I guess I thought it was too exposed, or maybe too powerful. It’s called Codder’s Knoll. Do you want to walk up there?”
I nodded and rose to my feet. A gray twilight was descending across the forest. Commenting on the beauty of the trees and shrubs as we walked, Curtis led the way up the slope. At the top, in spite of the fading light, we could see almost a quarter of a mile toward the north and east. In the latter direction a near full moon was rising above the tree line.