Robert Sawyer - Hybrids

“A fascinating premise,” said Ponter. “Is there any danger in the procedure?”

Reuben shook his head. “None at all. In fact, I had to certify that.” He smiled. “The big problem with most psychological studies is that all the guinea pigs are psych under-grads-people who have self-selected to study psychology. We know an enormous amount about the brains of such people, who may or may not be typical, but very little about the brains of the general population. I first met Veronica last year; she approached me about getting some of the miners to be test subjects-a completely different demographic than she usually gets to work with.” Reuben was the mine-site physician at Inco’s Creighton nickel mine, where the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory was located. “She was offering the miners a few bucks, but Inco wanted me to okay the procedure before letting them do it. I read up on Persinger’s work, looked at Veronica’s modifications, and underwent the procedure myself. The magnetic fields are minuscule compared to those in MRIs, and I routinely recommend those for my patients. It’s completely safe.”

“So she will pay me a few bucks?” asked Ponter.

Reuben looked shocked.

“Hey, a fellow has to eat,” said Ponter. But he couldn’t keep up the facade; a giant grin crossed his face. “No, no, you are right, Reuben, I do not care about compensation.” He looked at Mary. “What I do care about is understanding this aspect of you, Mare-this thing that is so important a part of your life but that I find incomprehensible.”

“If you want to learn more about my religion, come to Mass with me,” said Mary.

“Gladly,” said Ponter. “But I would also like to meet this friend of Reuben.”

“We have to get over to your world,” said Mary, sounding a bit petulant. “Two will soon be One.”

Ponter nodded. “Oh, indeed-and we don’t want to miss a moment of that.” He looked at Reuben. “Your friend would need to make time for us tomorrow. Can she do that?”

“I’ll give her a call right now,” said Reuben, getting up. “I’m sure she’ll move heaven and Earth to accommodate you.”

“ Jack Kennedy was right: it was time then for us to take longer strides. And it’s that time again. For the greatest strength we Homo sapiens have always had, since the dawn of our consciousness 40,000 years ago, is our desire to go places, to make journeys, to see what’s beyond the next hill, to expand our territories, and-if I may borrow a phrase coined just four years after JFK’s speech-to boldly go where no man has gone before…”

Ponter and Mary had spent the night at Reuben’s place, sleeping together on the foldout couch. Early the next morning, they headed over to the small campus of Laurentian University and found room C002B, one of the labs used by the tiny Neuroscience Research Group.

Veronica Shannon turned out to be a skinny white woman in her late twenties with red hair and a nose that until she’d met female Neanderthals, Mary would have called large. She was wearing a white lab coat. “Thank you for coming, Dr. Boddit,” she said, pumping Ponter’s hand. “Thank you so much for coming.”

He smiled. “You may call me Ponter. And it is my pleasure. I am intrigued by your research.”

“And Mary-may I call you Mary? — it is such a treat to meet you!” She shook Mary’s hand. “I was so sorry I didn’t have a chance when you were on the campus earlier, but I was back home in Halifax for the summer.” She smiled, then looked away, seeming almost embarrassed to go on. “You’re a bit of a hero of mine,” she said.

Mary blinked. “Me?”

“There aren’t that many female Canadian scientists who really make it big, but you have. Even before Ponter came along, you’d really put us on the map. The work you did with ancient DNA! First-rate! Absolutely first-rate! Who says that Canadian women can’t take the world by storm?”

“Um, thank you.”

“You’ve been quite the role model for me. You, Julie Payette, Roberta Bondar…”

Mary had never thought of herself in that august company-Payette and Bondar were Canadian astronauts. But, then again, she had gotten to another world before either of them…

“Thank you,” said Mary again. “Umm, we really don’t have that much time…”

Veronica blushed a bit. “Sorry; you’re right. Let me explain the procedure. The work I’m doing is based on research begun here at Laurentian in the 1990s by Michael Persinger. I can’t take credit for the fundamental idea-but science is all about replication, and my job is verifying his findings.”

Mary looked around the lab, which had the usual university mix of shiny new equipment, battered old equipment, and beat-up wooden furniture. Veronica went on. “Now, Persinger had about an 80 percent success rate. My equipment is second-generation, a modification of what he developed, and I’m getting about 94 percent.”

“It seems a bit of a coincidence that this research is going on so close to the portal between worlds,” said Mary.

But Veronica shook her head. “Oh, no, Mary, not really! We’re all here because of the same thing-the nickel that was deposited when that asteroid hit the Earth here two billion years ago. See, originally Persinger was interested in the UFO phenomenon: how come flying saucers are most frequently seen by guys named Clete and Bubba out in the back forty.”

“Well,” said Mary, “you can get beer anywhere.”

Veronica laughed more than even Mary thought the joke deserved. “That’s true-but Persinger decided to take the question at face value. Not that he, or I, believe in flying saucers, but there is a real psychological phenomenon that makes people think they’ve seen such things, and Persinger got to wondering why that phenomenon would be triggered outdoors, especially in isolated locations. Laurentian does a lot of mining studies, of course, and when Persinger started looking for possible causes for the out-in-the-countryside UFO experience, the mining engineers here suggested piezoelectric discharges.”

Ponter’s Companion, Hak, had bleeped a couple of times, indicating he hadn’t understood some words, but neither Ponter nor Mary had interrupted Veronica, who was clearly on a roll. Apparently, though, she didn’t expect Ponter to know the term “piezoelectric,” and so explained it of her own accord: “Piezoelectricity is the generation of electricity in rock crystals that are being deformed or are otherwise under stress. You get piezoelectric discharges, for instance, when a pickup truck drives over rocky ground out in the country-the classic UFO-sighting scenario. Persinger managed to reliably replicate that sort of electromagnetic effect in the lab, and lo and behold, he could make just about anyone think they’d seen an alien.”

“An alien?” repeated Mary. “But you’d mentioned God.”

“To-may-to, to-mah-to,” said Veronica, grinning a very toothy grin. “It’s all the same thing.”

“How?”

Veronica pulled a book off her shelf: Why God Won’t Go Away: The Biological Basis for Belief. “Newberg and d’Aquili, the authors of this book, did brain scans of eight Tibetan Buddhists meditating and of a bunch of Franciscan nuns praying. Naturally, those people showed increased activity in the areas of the brain associated with concentration. But they also showed decreased activity in the parietal lobe.” She tapped the side of her skull, indicating the lobe’s location. “The left-hemisphere part of the parietal lobe helps define your own body image, while the right-hemisphere part helps orient you in three-dimensional space. So, collectively, those two parts are responsible for defining the boundary between where your body ends and things outside your body begin. With the parietal lobe taking a coffee break, the natural feeling is exactly what the monks report: a loss of the sense of self, and a feeling of being at one with the universe.”