Кен Лю - The Anderson Project

“Just tell me if you woke up before the tsunami came ashore.”

“I did. It was still pretty far out to sea. Listen, I want to hear about what I was doing in your nightmare, I’ll call you tonight, okay?”

“Any time after nine. I have to write a report.”

Tim clicked off. Josh fell back on his bed, filled with foreboding.

Bob Christian had left his office door standing open; when Josh arrived he waved him in. “Have a seat. Thanks for coming by on short notice.” Josh sat uneasily on the edge of Bob’s ratty old couch. Bob noted that his favorite student looked rumpled and jittery—short on sleep, perhaps. Well, no wonder. He got up and closed the door, then fell heavily into his desk chair; he was a bit short on sleep himself. “I’ll get right to the point. I’ve read your report—more than once, actually. You probably won’t be surprised to hear that.” Josh nodded nervously. “I need to ask you about your brother—why you’ve included his dream in your report.”

“Oh. I probably should have explained that.” Josh shrugged out of his backpack and then his down vest, and dumped both on the floor. “Tim’s a dreamer too, a good one. His scores weren’t as high as mine but they’re pretty high, he made the first cut, he could have tried for the Center if he’d wanted to. And he was in my dream, and his dream was linked to mine through the moon painting. And the tsunami thing just felt like it had a connection to the underwater setting in my dream, so I put him in my report—I don’t know what the connection is yet, but there always turns out to be one. I’m so used to the way we operate, I didn’t think to explain.”

“But the two of you aren’t identical.”

“No,” Josh said, “but we did spend nine months in the same uterus. Like somebody pointed out in class, Claudia, I think. It seems to create a powerful connection. That’s in my painting too, in a way.”

Bob laced his fingers behind his neck and leaned back in his chair. “Did you ever read that old Heinlein novel, Time for the Stars ?” Josh shook his head. “I read it a couple of times when I was a kid, and I remember it because I was fascinated by the concept. The plot is based on the twin paradox, ever hear of that?” Josh shook his head again, looking sheepish, as if he expected himself to know everything there was to know about twins. “It’s a thought experiment about special relativity, invented by a French physicist called Paul Langevin. Langevin was a student of Pierre Curie’s and knew Einstein. Anyway, in the novel it’s been discovered that some sets of identical twins can communicate telepathically and instantaneously, and that distance doesn’t seem to affect that ability. So a number of pairs of twins get recruited to be the means of communication on a starship with an exploratory mission. One twin stays on Earth, the other gets on the starship. The ship is gone for decades, accelerating all that time, and all that time the twins onboard are sending and receiving instantaneous telepathic messages with their twins back on Earth.”

“Like human ansibles,” Josh said, and when Bob looked puzzled, “Never mind. But same principle.”

“The ship comes back, and the twins on the ship aren’t much older than they were when they blasted off, but the twins on Earth are elderly and feeble. Some have even died. That was the point of the thought experiment—it’s been verified by the way, they put atomic clocks in planes and satellites and the clocks lost time relative to atomic clocks on the ground. But what fascinated me was that idea of twin telepathy.”

“That’s been studied,” Josh said, eager to demonstrate that he did in fact know some things about twins. “They’ve done quite a few experimental studies on twins and telepathy. Though actually it doesn’t necessarily have to be twins. What you need is a powerful emotional connection between any two people, but twins do give especially good results. You can look it up, there’s stuff all over the internet. Psychotherapists and their patients apparently do it sometimes, when the connection’s really strong. Freud even published a paper about telepathy and dreams. He believed in it and so did Jung.”

Bob recalled a clinical patient or two of his own, from his private practice days before the assassination. He cleared his throat. “Were you and your brother ever enrolled in a study?”

Josh shook his head. “No, but we’ve always connected like that, always. We get into each other’s dreams pretty often. And there’s one experiment I remember they did at some medical center in Brooklyn. They were testing for telepathy in the dream state, I read about it when I was applying to the Center. This was a dream study, not a twin study, but anyway they got statistically significant results, which didn’t surprise me at all because Tim and I are always doing it. Like now.”

Bob had been tapping at his computer. Now he read aloud from the screen: “‘A series of tests conducted by psychologists at the University of Alberta, Canada, confirmed this theory by establishing statistical evidence that identical twins, and to a lesser extent, fraternal twins, have remarkable ability to communicate with one another through ESP.’ Okay, Josh, I believe you. Provisionally I do. But if I believe you, then we’re going to have to ratchet up this dream of yours a notch. I’m not ready to say it’s precognitive, but I’m thinking we need to start considering the possibility.”

“Seriously,” Josh said. He looked a little sick.

“And I think we may need to start monitoring the dream sites. I’ll clear that with the director, but my conclusion is the same as yours. Amid generalized fear, an object or objects—ship, shuttle, maybe both—are in space, and are also deep underwater. In your dream there’s no image or sense of the object plunging from space into the water, but your twin dreams of a tidal wave, and his dream and your reentry experience are linked through your moon painting. The only object from space that could cause a tidal wave on earth is a good-sized asteroid. Putting it all together, everything we’ve got adds up to a tsunami caused by an asteroid strike in the Pacific off the California coast.”

“Asteroid!” Josh cried, electrified. “An asteroid strike! We didn’t even think of that, I don’t know anything about asteroids—I mean, I know they make huge craters when they crash on land, like that one someplace in the southwest—” He jumped up in his agitation. “God, that’s so stupid ! I could have Googled tsunamis!” Suddenly he turned even paler. “Christ, my family lives in Ventura, right down the coast from Santa Barbara. That’s where I’m from, Ventura.”

Bob stood up behind his desk. Making his voice warm and reassuring, he said, “It’s way too soon to panic, Josh. You deactivated and deflected the shuttle by confronting it, remember. The Center’s going to confront it now. We’ll bring in the big guns.” He smiled his best therapist’s smile. “For starters, I’m going to assign the class to incubate this as a group—among other things, we need to try for a more accurate sense of when . Your painting’s been knocking around in all our psyches for five days, that’ll help.” He stood up. “Go get some rest, you look done in.”

Josh stuck his arms through his vest and picked up his backpack. Bob thought, as he often did, how much the kid looked like that actor—what was his name?—who’d played Harry Potter in the old movies. Apart from Harry’s glasses. And Josh’s green hair.

In the doorway Josh paused with his hand on the door lever and looked around at his professor. “We actually do know one thing about the timing. There’s a full moon.”