Vencius and Proctor

SUPER OMNIA VINCIT VERITAS
“THE TRUTH CONQUERS ALL”




1. STRANGE DREAMS


Vencius and Proctor were receiving the message of the Guardian:

“Well done! There has been a slight improvement in segment 986, but the probability of the Breakthrough is still low... We should increase the probability to 3/4.... Otherwise, the opportunity will not pass along the Time Bridge between segments 986 and 1369, and in the 1369th we the Guardians ran out of the rights of intervention”.

The Guardian became silent, browsing virtual possibilities. Proctor and Vencius waited patiently.

“We can go back two segments, to the 984th... Yes, there we still have the rights ... and the Bridge of Time - straight to the 986th. However...”

"Venya! Veniamin!! Wake up, you're talking in your sleep again!" Mom’s voice sounded as if it was trying to break through a tight veil, but disappeared, got stuck in it, turning into an unintelligible intermittent buzzing, a disturbing background noise.

“...However, there is a problem in the 984th with the rights of intervention”, continued the Guardian.

Vencius and Proctor doubled their attention.

“... and according to the Law of Free Will established for Version 1.3.7, we leave it up to you two whether to accept this task or not...”

Venya could not figure out what kind of problem they had in the 984th segment, although he really wanted to. He wanted to know about it so much, that, apparently, he let the words slip out while half asleep, for which he was again subjected to the shaking and pulling of the blanket off him:

“O Lord! Where’s the end of it?” His mother was desperate. “When are you going to be like all the normal kids?”

Venya sat on the bed, covering his eyes from the light of the night lamp. In the restlessly swaying halo of light, his younger brother was standing next to Mom, whimpering. The boy, as it happened, was frightened by Venya's sleep-talking in a dream and called her.

Venya stroked his brother's head.

“Don’t be scared, boy. Sorry, I didn’t do it on purpose. Mom, I’ll try very hard, I promise. I will be like all the normal kids”.

Of course, he knew he could never be like all the normal kids, but did not want to upset his mother even more.



2. AN UNUSUAL KID



Veniamin Gladkov was born in 1927 in Paris, into a family of Russian emigrants who left St. Petersburg shortly after the Bolshevik revolution. Veniamin's parents had noble roots, but they came to a foreign country penniless, so his father, a professional engineer, had to take on any jobs he managed to find, and finally settled as a railway technician. His children saw very little of him, as he was always busy, came home late, and even then was so tired that their mother asked not to disturb him. Besides his younger brother, Venya had an older sister who was born in Russia. Thanks to his sister and mother, Venya spoke some Russian and even learned to write and read a little in his mother tongue, although his sister often laughed at  his spelling. French was his first language after all.

Veniamin was an unusual child. However, it took some time for him to realize it. At first, he thought that everyone saw the world around as he did - like living streams of light, rotating, pulsating, emanating from all living and inanimate things. Venya's earliest memory was this: he was eighteen months old, and his parents took him for a walk to the Luxembourg Gardens for the first time. Sitting in a stroller, he felt fascinated by the continuously flowing stream of light emanating from blossoming chestnuts, lilac bushes and flower beds. It consisted of tiny living sparks rushing out in all directions, as a fountain of lights.

It was especially interesting to look at plants: in the sunlight, the white sparks emanated from them like a fountain, and in complete darkness all plants seemed to be doused with soft light that molded to the form of their flowers, stems and leaves. Fruits and seeds gave out a remarkably bright bluish light.

Before going to sleep, Venya used to watch the light from his outstretched hands: first, they looked as if surrounded by a grayish smoke, and then the waves of light emanating from his hands turned bluish or yellow. The fingertips shone brightest, and their glow extended in straight rays almost to the length of the finger itself. Also, Venya’s whole body - chest, stomach and legs – radiated a subtle light even through a nightgown.

His younger brother, who used to sometimes rise from his little bed at night, was seen by Venya as a bluish-white ghost with a pointed helmet on his head and something like shoulder pads over his shoulders. The luminous trace of his silhouette oscillated slightly around the boy.

Once, Venya came down with a strong influenza, and while he was lying in bed with high fever, he saw his surroundings as if made up of bright white stars merging into a white veil, absorbing all shapes and forms.

At the age of six, he realized that neither adults nor other children saw the luminous fluxes around all things, and that his mother always became upset or annoyed should he talk about it, calling him a dreamer. Once, however, Mom mentioned that she used to have such color visions when she was a kid, but then the visions disappeared, and she “became normal”.

So Venya stopped sharing what he saw.

Once, when he was eleven, his mother brought a large album from the library with reproductions of paintings by famous artists, and the boy, leafing through colorful illustrations and stumbling upon Van Gogh's “Starry Night”, was deeply shocked by the discovery. There was someone else out there, who saw the world as a cornucopia of pulsating whirlwinds of light, emanating from all creation! Van Gogh’s pictures had the same vibrant and ever-changing pattern of radiance around people and objects that Venya saw. Other reproductions of Van Gogh, which the boy sought out wherever he could, convinced Venya that this strange and largely misunderstood artist saw everything exactly as he did! The fact that his view of the world filled with extraordinary energies pouring out of everything was once perceived through someone else's eyes, inspired and delighted Veniamin... however, he already knew better than sharing it with anyone.

As a teenager, Venya learned to control his unusual ability and, over time, could easily switch from his “luminous” sight to ordinary vision at will. Being in “normal” perception most of the time, he was still capable, wherever he wanted, to distinguish the white lines of energy penetrating space, and the multi-colored glow emanating from things, by slightly defocusing his eyes.

He learned to create an almost perfect appearance of a “normal” boy, and would have pleased his parents if not for those repetitive strange dreams with two mysterious characters named Proctor and Vencius. Venya never really saw these two, nor did he see the one whom they called the Guardian, but all three of these personages were undoubtedly present in these visions that excited him - so alive that when he woke up, the dream seemed more real than life.

In 1939, the Gladkov family was forced to emigrate from France – which had already become a second home - this time, to get away from the wave of war rolling over Europe. For the rest of his life, Veniamin remembered the conversation he had with his father shortly before their departure. He asked his father with chagrin why they always ran like rats, and the old man, wearily rubbing his forehead with a  hand dark from coal soot, answered: “You know, son... When I finally stand before the Creator, He will not ask me why I did not fight the Reds or the Whites, or the Jews, or the Fascists. I gather, son, He will say: ‘I have entrusted you with four souls of mine – and have you done everything you could for them?’ That’s my concern, Venya, and for the sake of this most important thing for my soul I give my ideals, my dreams and my life itself”.

Veniamin will recall his father's words almost two decades later, when he himself will have to make an important decision... but many years will pass before then.

And now their family sailed to America, where his father, after long ordeals, would find a job in a locksmith's workshop in a small town in Connecticut; Veniamin Gladkov would receive a new name - Benjamin, or Benny, Gladkoff, and their whole life would completely change in the new country.



3. CRYSTALS



Benjamin’s father was really into chemistry since his studies at the Engineering Academy, and although his work did not allow him to devote enough time to the passion of his youth, his interest in chemistry never left him. On Benny’s fourteenth birthday, his father gave him an unusual gift - a small box with a coarse powder, dark red in colour. It was Gmelin's salt bought at a photographic store, and Benjamin, helped by his father, who showed him how to handle this rather toxic substance, grew his first crystal from it. This turned out to be  a life-changing experience.

When he and his father fetched a few dark-red crystals from the saturated salt solution, where the powder sat for several days, Benjamin noticed an unusual radiance emanating from both ends of these small symmetrical formations. The radiance differed in color: the north pole of the crystal, a sharp diamond-shaped end, which Benjamin called the “head” of the crystal, emitted a bluish colored ray, while the light from the south pole was reddish-orange and not so bright.

One of these crystals became a so-called seed, which was hung on a string in a saturated solution. For more than a month, a beautiful red crystal was forming around it, repeating the shape of the initial small seed crystal exactly. It grew as something alive, like mushrooms, creating its body from the nutrients of the solution. From time to time, Benny pulled the thread with the crystal out of the solution and examined it. He had a strange, thrilling feeling that the crystal was another form of life, although different from plants and animals, but living! Of that he had no doubt. The amazing radiance intensified as the crystal grew, but the shape and color of the light did not change. It struck Benjamin that this radiance was similar to the emanations from people, plants and animals. After carefully asking his father, Benjamin realized that he was the only one who saw the various colours of light emitted from the crystal. His father saw nothing.

One day, Benjamin and his classmates went on an excursion to the American Museum of Natural History in New York to see a unique collection of minerals. There, he first saw a rock-crystal, huge unprocessed quartz crystal.. Never had he seen such radiance before! Against the black fabric of the museum’s stand, these bewitching rays emanating from both ends of a piece of crystal could be seen so clearly.

He learned that a quartz crystal began its life deep in the bowels of earth, born from the hot vapor of a silicon dioxide solution. As the steam cooled in the underground caverns, the first cell of the crystal formed - just like a pearl grows in a shell around a tiny grain of sand. This primary cell is a tetrahedron molecule consisting of four oxygen atoms and one silicon atom hidden inside the tetrahedron. The primary cell attracts other molecules of silicon dioxide, and so on, until trillions of these cells combine into one large family. So, in a spiral, one quartz layer is formed after another, and a crystal of amazing beauty is formed. The primary cell contains all the information necessary to get the right crystal - a hexagon, which we call quartz or rock-crystal.

Could Benny know back then, how crucial this experience - the primary cell - would be for the work of his life, and what kind of magnificent crystal of Truth would grow out of it over many years?

After that trip, all thoughts of the young researcher began to revolve around how to acquire a rock-crystal. He got a job in his father’s workshop and began to save money, but not in order to buy a used car or motorcycle, as his peers did, but to acquire a large natural crystal. A big flawless crystal was rare and expensive. A few months later, with a great excitement, he received his little miracle in a box lined with cotton wool - clean and spotless, like a petrified piece of ice from an alpine lake.

Benny decided to wait for nightfall to see the crystal shine, when nothing interfered with his inner vision. In the dusk of the bedroom on a moonless night, with curtains drawn, Benjamin watched the whole crystal fill with subtle light, and a sparkling bluish-colored flame the size of a hand poured from its rhomboid-shaped end, looking like a tulip bud  with its tip disappearing into darkness. At the other, flat end of the crystal, where it began its growth, the glow was yellowish and more diffused.

Benny had no idea where this bewitching light flowed from through the end of the crystal, but he was really keen to find this out.

...Later on, over many years of research, hundreds and thousands of crystals in various breeds, shades and shapes would pass through his hands, but this one, his very first, he would remember with awe throughout his entire life. It felt like the crystal was made especially for him. When Benjamin held it tight in his hand, he did not want to let it go - the stone became an extension of his hand. The glow emanating from the crystal tip became much more intense - and Benny realized that now the stone, in addition to its own, radiated the energy of the one who held it!



4. AN UNSEEN FORCE



From that moment on, the world of crystals has captivated Benny. He started reading everything he could find on the subject, spending hours at the library while his peers tried to beat each other in baseball or chased girls.
On one of those days, Benny stumbled upon the research of a German scientist of the 19th century, Baron Karl Von Reichenbach. It struck Benny just like the paintings of Van Gogh once before and inspired him greatly; here's why.

Reichenbach was an industrialist and chemical scientist who discovered a number of new substances. In his youth, he studied with Goethe and became impressed with the great German master’s ideas about light waves. Perhaps this is what has led the Baron to study the invisible vital force, named by him "od" in honor of the Scandinavian god Odin. Although Reichenbach himself was not sensitive to the unusual emanence, he based his research on experiments involving people with the ability to perceive the subtle radiation of the “od” – people like Benjamin.
Benny was amazed to learn from  Reichenbach’s book that almost a quarter of all people have such unusual vision. Since the remaining three quarters do not perceive anything “like this”, they consider visionaries to be charlatans, blindly denying everything the majority cannot see or feel. Because of this attitude, all of Reichenbach’s studies were rejected by scholars as pseudoscience.

Benny, however, trusted his senses. The testimonies of other “seers” tested by Reichenbach corresponded to his own observations word for word, and this dispelled any doubts about the reality of the unknown force.

And the reality was thus: everything emits an invisible light - everything without exception. The world we live in is filled with luminous emanations. The sun is a powerful source of invisible rays, in addition to the visible ones we call daylight. And the moon has its own light, although not comparable to the sun’s in its strength. Light is also radiated by all things on Earth, although it is much weaker. Organic matter has the faintest light of all: wool and other natural fabrics, wood, clay, rocks; the brightest light is emitted by metals, among which the magnets stand out, as well as some crystals, especially quartz.
Benjamin could testify: at night, he clearly distinguished any metal objects in his room by their luminosity: copper trim on furniture, keys, all nickel-plated objects, even every iron nail, which emanated a glowing smoke. All metals shone - some weaker, others brighter, but always more so than non-metals.

Baron Von Reichenbach was also intrigued by the ability of the unknown energy to transfer from one object to another. A magnetized or electrified object, in contact with another, transfers a charge to it, and the same thing was observed in manifestations of the "od".

Like Benjamin, the people participating in Reichenbach’s experiments saw that luminous energy is being released continuously from our entire body, especially from the tips of our fingers and toes. The Baron believed that this separation is nothing more than the transmission of "od" into air matter. In his work, he noted that the strongest movement of this kind occurs in the process of breathing for living things.

Reading this, Benny could not disagree: waking up late at night and looking at his little brother sleeping in the bed next to his own, he saw that with each breath, a cloud of glowing smoke emanated from his brother’s nose, dissolving into a much dimmer homogeneous bluish glow that filled the room.

Von Reichenbach did not attribute the phenomenon he observed to the world of electricity, since the electroscope that he brought into contact with the crystal did not register any change. The Baron also could not relate these phenomena to magnetism, because the crystals, quite obviously, were not magnetized. Having described in detail all the manifestations of the unknown force as evidenced by the sensitives, Reichenbach was forced to admit that he did not know what it was, suggesting only that this type of energy fits somewhere between magnetism and electricity.

Observing his quartz crystal in daylight or darkness, Benjamin could confirm that although the radiation from the crystal of unknown energy was continuous, its intensity varied. It occurred to him that some changes in the Earth’s field were causing it. He supposed that crystals transmit Earth's own radiation, concentrating it like a lens. But what kind of planetary radiation this was, Benny did not know yet.

He would understand this much later – and not only that, he’d also be able to measure it.



5. FIRST EXPERIMENTS




Benjamin really wanted to find a way to make the rays observable by others, so that they could also believe the rays were real.

He thought that he could put the crystal in a tightly sealed box not accessible by regular light and try to capture its radiation on film. At first, he tried to put regular film into a box with a crystal, but that only left blurred spots on the film.

Then Benny decided that he needed to find a way of focusing the rays emanating from the crystal. He took his father’s camera with regular glass lenses, but could not get any distinguishable image with it either. Having studied, over the course of many months, different books on optics, Benny hypothesized that the radiation from crystals may be in the ultraviolet spectrum, and the glass of the camera lens simply blocks it. Quartz lenses would do better because they would let in ultraviolet rays, but Benny did not have money to buy expensive quartz lenses. On reflection, he decided to try a simple pinhole camera with a very small hole for letting in light instead of a lens.

This genius improvisation brought brilliant results.

He focused the image of the lighted crystal on the back wall of the pinhole camera, where the film was located, until the image became sharp and clear. Then he tightly closed the box, so that rays of light did not penetrate there, and placed an undeveloped roll of film in the box. After 24 hours, he developed the film and obtained an image of an incredible bluish glow coming from the crystal.
This glow could not be called a ray in the literal sense, since it was quite blurry, as if the rays were moving... Benny realized that the reason he could not clearly capture the rays was that he was unable to take snapshots. The problem was that the silver nitrate coating of the film reacted extremely slowly to the weak radiation from the crystal, and it took 24 hours for any image to appear.

It took several months to find a solution to this problem – but he found it! Benny discovered that if he put a strong magnet near the film, the magnet made silver nitrate on the film so sensitive that it was able to capture the image in a few seconds. Now Benjamin could see the image of the rays much clearer than before, but still a little blurred, which suggested that the unknown rays were mobile.

Then Benny decided to try capturing the movement of the rays with a movie camera instead of the photo camera. Six months later, having earned money for an old movie camera, he, using the already-tested technology with a magnet enhancing the sensitivity of the film, was able to capture the dancing movement of the amazing rays emanating from the crystal. The rays on the film, just as observed by Benny in real life, got stronger or weaker under the influence of invisible forces, for which the young researcher had no explanation yet.



6. ALEJANDRO PRETORIUS RAMIREZ



Benny’s parents did not mind that their son spent all his free time in an improvised laboratory set up in the corner of his father’s garage. The reason was simple: Benjamin told them that he was going to send the results of his experiments to the annual competition held by the most prestigious technical university in Cambridge, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology - the famous MIT. Finalists of the competition had a chance to receive a scholarship for the entire duration of their studies at MIT. Tuition costs at MIT were such that the Gladkoffs could not even dream of sending their son there.

So it is easy to imagine their delight when Benjamin Gladkoff, a high school graduate, received a special award from the MIT for his project on images of unknown crystal radiation. Moreover, he was accepted to the Department of Chemistry with a full tuition scholarship, and offered a part-time job as an assistant at the Semiconductor Research Laboratory. The latter offer was most welcome, since it allowed Benjamin to pay for a room in the students’ residence on campus, where he moved shortly.

It was there, at the university, among the first-year students of the School of Sciences, Benjamin first met Alejandro Pretorius Ramirez, a man who was destined to play an extraordinary role in his life.

Alejandro Ramirez, or, as everyone called him, Sandro, was everything that Benny Gladkoff was not. Sandro was a young handsome heir to a formidable fortune of an old Argentinian aristocratic clan.  Alejandro’s family, descendants of German and Spanish immigrants, former landowners who later successfully invested in a pharmaceutical business, expected that the successor to the dynasty would take over the family business over time. And so, Sandro was sent to study at one of the most prestigious universities of the New World, to master chemistry, physics and biology.

Alejandro Ramirez never stepped a foot in a traditional classroom because he always had home teachers and tutors at his disposal. Among them was an Englishman from London, who made sure Sandro’s English was impeccable, with a charming British accent that hypnotized American girls. Beside that, Sandro had a lot to impress with - in addition to the magical aura of old money, he enjoyed a happy combination of natural beauty and charm. With a cascading blond hair framing his face, a dazzling smile and slightly mocking but good-natured beams in gray eyes shining from a tanned face, Alejandro Ramirez was invincible.

It should be noted that, in response to the extraordinary favor of fate, Sandro was a generous person himself. He loved life, women and friends with all his heart, and was loved the same. The fertile land of Argentina, where ripens the world's best Malbec vine; the land home to vast meadows known for their lush grass and fat herds, also gives birth to the best lovers, selfless in passion. They celebrate it with primordial joy, natural as breathing and free from guilt. Sandro started relationships easily and parted with his paramours just as easily, but due to his innate good nature and generosity left no trace of resentment. Even after years, the dames of his heart remembered Sandro with warmth.

Sandro lived in the elite quarters of Cambridge, in the historical building of the Delta Epsilon students’ residence, which was jointly owned by forty members of the fraternity, mainly the offspring of Boston’s “old money”.

Benjamin never visited that part of campus: unruly parties and rampant sybaritism of this quarter were for him the life of another world. Between the work in the laboratory, which fascinated him very much, and the time-consuming studies, Benny hardly had enough time left to have a snack on the go and catch up on sleep. As Benny Gladkoff was always hanging around in libraries and laboratories, or maybe because of his thick-framed glasses and ever-neatly combed soft hair, classmates nicknamed him a nerd, though without malice and with a note of respect; after all, it was the MIT where the nerds ruled. Benny occasionally met Sandro during classes, but, deeming him almost an extra-terrestrial, he did not even think of making acquaintance.

But once, unexpectedly, Sandro himself approached Benny after a laboratory class. Smiling his usual good-natured, insolent smile, he did not beat around the bush and offered Benjamin, as he called it, a “joint venture”: Benny makes his contribution in the form of laboratory homework for both of them, and Sandro contributes US dollars, cash. “I know you need the money, bro. And I need homework done. What do you think of this project?”

Benny glanced briefly at this insolent brat over his glasses, and then, looking away from Alejandro, replied that even if there were no ethics committee at the MIT, he, Benjamin Gladkoff, would never stoop down to this. Sandro was not offended at all, but, on the contrary, laughed and slapped Benny on the shoulder saying: “Well then, have a good day, nerd. Someone else will. And by the way, even if my father had not made sumptuous contributions to the endowment fund of this institution, I still would not care about any commissions.”

Benny looked into his face and realized that it was true; this guy had no fear in him. However, this did not change his opinion of Alejandro Ramirez. On that note, the two parted. However, an incident brought them together again in a couple of years, and what an incident that was!



7. THE INCIDENT ON A LAKE



The term project in biochemistry class, where both Benjamin and Sandro were  enrolled, involved periodic measurement of water properties in a small lake near Cambridge with the Indian name Massapoag. Every month, students had to go on a one-day expedition and take water samples in different parts of the lake. In the warm season, they used boats, and in winter they had to drill holes in the ice.

It was the beginning of December, and the ice on the lake was not yet strong in all places. It also snowed the day before, and dangerous areas became difficult to distinguish. Students were instructed to go only along a path marked by flags, where the ice strength had already been tested. So they followed each other along the beaten path, from hole to hole, until it got dark. Then the group decided not to take chances and return to their cars.

Benjamin was second last in the row of students. When just a short distance was left to the coast, he suddenly realized that he no longer heard footsteps behind him. He turned back and saw that the student following him before was now floundering in the black water about twenty meters away from the flagged route. Apparently, having seen the shore, the guy thought that there was no danger anymore, and decided to use a shortcut.

Benjamin felt himself entering a very strange state. All the feelings in him, even fear, seemed to have been tied into a knot, and this knot was somewhere in the solar plexus. He was detached from emotions, extremely calm and focused, motionless inside. He felt huge, wise and precise in action. Somehow it seemed to him that while he was able to restrain his senses, he suspended time.

In a strange voice coming from his guts he shouted: “A man is drowning!” Benjamin pulled out one of the wooden sticks that held the flags and rushed through the snow to an ever-increasing hole in the ice, the thin edge of which continued to break while the poor fellow was trying to get out. Benjamin heard someone running far behind him, but did not see who it was. Upon getting close to the gaping black hole, Benny lay on the ice where he thought it was the strongest and handed the stick to the guy. The latter, suffering a spasm from icy water, could not utter a sound, gasping for air with his eyes bulging. Finally, the guy frantically grabbed the stick, and, crawling back, Benjamin pulled him out of the icy water.

Three things then happened simultaneously, as Benny recollected it: a sudden cracking of the ice, a freezing embrace of icy water arresting his breath, and the sight of the guy he just pulled out, quickly running away in a state of shock. The thin icy edge could not hold the two of them, and Benjamin was the unlucky one this time. And unlucky he was, as he could not swim, so he just floundered, helplessly clutching at the slippery edges, scratching his palms. The woolen jacket immediately became heavy like icy armour. His glasses were lost, and he was now half-blind in shock from the cold water... but strangely he still couldn’t feel anything... all feelings were still tied in that knot inside him.

As if through a veil, he heard someone shouting: “Hey nerd, grab onto the coat! Grab it, I tell you! ” He recognized the voice of Alejandro Ramirez. So that's who followed him! Benjamin now saw other students running toward the hole. Turning to them, Sandro yelled: “Stand where you are!!! Don’t move!” There was so much power in his voice that the runners stopped and stood still, watching them anxiously.

Taking off a cashmere coat, which probably cost as much as Benny’s six-month scholarship, wearing just a silk sweater, the Delta Epsilon star tried to save the nerd’s life! Benjamin clutched at the sleeve of Sandro’s coat, which he threw to him, but could hardly move his frozen fingers, so when Sandro pulled, the sleeve slipped out of Benny’s hand again and again. With his other hand, Benny held onto the edge of the ice, afraid to let go of his only support. They tried on and on, to no avail. Benny felt that he was losing strength.

And then he saw something an unimaginable: Sandro took off all his clothes and climbed into the icy water to get him!

Half-conscious, Benjamin looked at the face of Sandro pushing him out of the water and was amazed. The look in the eyes of the child spoiled by fate, usually mocking, patronizing or arrogantly insolent, was now full of humility and bewilderment. His expression was such, as if something had just been revealed to Sandro, and this revelation turned his world upside down. But the strangest thing was something else yet - Sandro looked at Benny with compassion and love, as one looks at a brother.

In the darkness of night, everything around Benjamin seemed foggy without his glasses. His other, mystical vision, however, got strangely sharp as he was half-blind and his life was threatened. What Benny saw was astonishing: a bright white-gold light glowed and shimmered around Sandro’s head.

And then, at the most unsuitable moment for such words, Benny Gladkoff, barely moving his lips, suddenly croaked:

"I'm so sorry... I will do your... homework... for nothing..."

For a second pausing in his attempts to push the frozen Benny onto the ice, his rescuer looked at him, dumbfounded. Then Sandro's trembling lips suddenly twisted into a semblance of a grin, and a mocking spark returned to his eyes:

"You n-nerd... you r-really got a nut c-case here..."

After that, Benny lost consciousness, so he did not remember how Sandro pushed him onto the ice, and then got out himself. Benny came back to his senses after the other students dragged him to the car, rubbed his body with something smelly, then drove him to the hospital. He was down with pneumonia for about a week, while Sandro, who did not even catch a cold in this incredible adventure, came to see Benny in the hospital with gifts every day.

Recalling that amazing halo, which surrounded Sandro in the icy water of Lake Massapoag and the incomprehensible expression on his face, Benny tried to find out what his saviour felt at that moment, but Sandro avoided such conversations.

Only once did he answer with the usual grin, but unusual seriousness in his voice: “Bro, even if I knew for sure back then that I would not make it and go under the ice, I would still get in the water for you. You will not understand. Enough about that!” So Benny never asked again.

And so it happened that two completely different people became best friends for many years.



8. APPROACHING THE MYSTERY



The end of the forties was marked by a discovery that fascinated  Benjamin: he read in an American scientific journal that a married couple of Soviet scientists, Semyon and Valentina Kirlian, rediscovered the glowing effect  appearing around various objects, when they photographed them in high-frequency currents. This phenomenon was first noted in the nineteenth century by a Belarusian scientist, but later forgotten. The Kirlians found out that a glow or a halo appears on film around any object photographed in high-frequency field.
The halo looked exactly like the one Benjamin was seeing!

Examining the Kirlians’ photographs of various objects – a key, a hand, leaves and flowers, he recognized the very same glow, only much more intense and contrasting. The human aura in Kirlian photographs looked a bit different than what he saw: it was brighter and thinner, and emanated as defined rays - while Benny saw human aura as a sort of swaying cloud. He reckoned that the reason for this difference was in that a photograph captured a snapshot, a momentary slice of a dynamic field, while his inner vision was not able to make snapshots.

Several years  passed.

After the traditional mantles graduation ceremony, two newly-minted Bachelors of Science Benjamin Gladkoff and Alejandro Pretorius Ramirez were accepted into the MIT graduate school - the former due to his being in the top-five percent of the class, and the latter, as before, backed by a solid donation to the Ramirez Endowment Fund.

Benjamin was surprised that despite little passion for theoretical science, Sandro was excited about Benny's experiments and tried to help financially. Was Sandro fascinated with Benny’s stories about an unknown energy which Sandro, unlike his friend, could not perceive? One way or another, Benny's stories left him extremely interested.

During his student years, Benjamin continued his studies of mysterious energy. Of course, he could not pass by a sensational research of Wilhelm Reich, a German scientist who became famous, albeit not without controversy, in America at that time. Wilhelm Reich was a student of Freud and began his career in the fields of psychoanalysis and sexual energy. Being a Jew, Reich had to flee from Nazi Germany to the US, where he continued his research in the 40s and 50s.

While studying the human psyche, Wilhelm Reich hypothesized the existence of a universal life force fundamental to all body processes. He claimed that this energy could be observed under a microscope as a bluish glow around blood cells and other living substances. Reich called it "orgone" - from the words "organism", "organic", "orgasm" to show its connection to life processes, and believed that it is also present in an unbound form in the atmosphere. Reich wrote that a glow of blue energy envelops the entire planet - several years before the photographs taken by the first Soviet satellite from space confirmed this.

The idea of orgone energy was akin to the ancient concepts of the universal substance - the pneuma of the Greeks or the ether of Pythagoras and Plato. Reich wrote that orgone existed even in vacuum, filling all space. It pulsates in a certain rhythm and interacts differently with various types of matter. Organic materials - wood, fabric, soil - attract and absorb orgone, while metals attract and radiate it. Reich's experiments with orgone surprisingly confirmed the observations recorded by Baron Reichenbach from the evidence of sensitive subjects.

Benjamin sensed glimpses of truth in Reich’s ideas and linked the orgone energy with the force that he himself was researching. At one time, he was interested in the so-called Reich orgone accumulator, which is a sealed chamber with walls consisting of several layers of various materials. The outer layer was made of organic materials - wood, cotton, plastic, and the inner - of metal. According to Reich, such a device was able to capture and store the orgone, and he used it to treat patients, including those with cancer.

For Benjamin, there was no mystery as to why the Reich battery worked: he reckoned, the flow of energy came from a material with a lighter mass (organics) to a heavier one - metal. Indeed, it was precisely the pattern he observed with his “real vision” in the interaction of materials. The organic part of the orgone chamber, in its turn, “replenished” the lost energy attracting it from the outside, from the atmosphere, and provides a constant flow of energy into the chamber. Inside the metal box of the chamber, the energy of the orgone is captured, and its concentration grows, so it can be used for healing. After all, it is from a lack of vital energy that disease arises.

Reich claimed that water attracts orgone energy turning itself into aqua vitae indispensable for biological processes and for the formation of planetary climate. He proposed a completely new concept for the formation of weather based on the concentration of orgone in the atmosphere, and invented an original rain-making technology. The Americans widely discussed the case when, at the request of farmers suffering from drought, Reich and his “cloud-buster” attracted huge clouds that poured heavy rain onto the fields and saved the harvest.

Perhaps such a power over the forces of nature seemed dangerous to the authorities, because soon after that incident all Reich’s studies of orgone energy were banned by a court order, and any books containing the word “orgone” were proclaimed dangerous to society and destroyed. Wilhelm Reich was imprisoned for disobeying a court order, and  died in prison two years later.

The news of the arrest and subsequent death of the great scientist was a shock to Benjamin and many other young people who found it inconceivable that, in the twentieth century, in a country that considered itself an outpost of the world progress, books were burnt and scientists imprisoned like in the Middle Ages.
However, this did not stop Benny’s determination to move on with his work.

One evening, after a bottle of Argentinean malbec, Benjamin told Sandro about his strange childhood dreams with the Guardian. He shared how the dreams left a disturbing feeling of an unsolved puzzle, disappointment from his futile attempts to unite disparate parts into a whole. Now visions of Vencius and Proctor came no longer, as Benjamin slept very little and without dreams.

When telling Sandro about these dreams, he was amazed to find his friend’s face acquiring the same expression as the one in the icy water of the Lake Massapoag - an expression of detachment, humility and compassion. And, at the same time, a bright swaying halo of gold appeared around Sandro’s head, strikingly clear against a black leather couch. Remembering how after that incident on the lake, Sandro flatly refused to answer any questions, Benjamin said nothing.

After that conversation, Sandro doubled his support for Benny's research. Of course, he couldn’t care less about doing lab work himself, but, after much persuasion, convinced Benjamin to accept some money to buy equipment and materials. By that time, the friends had moved from the campus to a large house acquired for Alejandro’s family. A room and the whole basement there were available for Benjamin’s needs; the latter was soon converted to a lab.

During this time, Benjamin came up with an idea for how he could scientifically prove the fact that crystals were conductors of a special energy. He took a regular capacitor charged with direct current, and measured the time of its discharge. He then placed a quartz crystal for a few minutes at an inch and a half distance from the capacitor disconnected from the current source. (He determined the distance using his “second vision,” because he saw a point where the crystal glow was the most intense). The sharp end of the crystal was directed at the capacitor, since the radiation coming from it was the strongest. After this, Benjamin removed the crystal and charged the capacitor with direct current once more, and then again measured the time of its discharge. It turned out that the crystal increased the electric capacitance, or the ability of a capacitor to accumulate charge, just by being next to it! In a short time the crystal somehow changed the properties of the capacitor’s dielectric.

Benjamin repeated this experiment again and again, invariably getting the same result. He placed metal objects, boxes, a Faraday shield that did not allow electromagnetic waves between the crystal and the capacitor - the effect did not change. This meant only one thing - the effect of the crystal was non-electromagnetic in nature. However, now the unnamed waves emitted by the crystal could be measured in units of known energies.

The fact that the mysterious rays emitted by the crystal passed through any type of shielding gave rise to a lot of new ideas in Benjamin's head. For example, if it was possible to focus the radiation of unknown energy into a coherent ray, then such a beam could travel huge distances without any change in properties, even through the entire Earth! The permeability of such rays would be many times greater than of lasers, the study of which only recently gained momentum in those years.

These and even more fantastic ideas captured Benjamin's mind and imagination. But so much needed to be done to make this happen... and deep inside, he knew that the only person capable of turning them into reality was him, Benjamin Gladkoff.
However, earthly life was about to intervene in the grandiose plans of the gifted young scientist.



9. DAISY



Benjamin’s supervisor was an MIT Professor Elijah McKevitt, a godfather of semiconductors research that was gaining momentum in those years. He was also the director of the laboratory where Benny worked as an assistant. Occasionally, Benjamin would drop by the Professor’s home to pick up books or bring mail from the laboratory. The McKevitt family lived in an ivy-covered nineteen’s century mansion in a well-to-do neighbourhood of Cambridge.

One day, quite unexpectedly, Professor McKevitt invited Benny to their house to celebrate the coming-of-age of his youngest daughter, Daisy. As it turned out, Daisy studied music, French and literature at the Cambridge College, and the Professor, knowing that French was Benny’s first language, wanted to introduce them so that Daisy could have some practice. In any case, this is how it was explained to Benny.

Benny felt a bit uneasy about meeting McKevitt’s daughter, and he could not tell why.

Up to that day, his heart was consumed by a single passion: solving the mystery of the unknown force, the gift of seeing which was given to him at birth. The world of knowledge was his home, his sanctuary from the hardships of life, from loneliness and disharmony, from the maddening daily routine. There, among books and lab equipment, he felt like a fish in water, and always looked forward to the time of the day when he could revel again in the excitement of the chase for unknown.

Never had this haven failed him. All the grieves of the day stayed outside the lab’s door. He had no fancy for the games of romance and other substitutes for inspiration invented by people who never tasted a passion as overwhelming as his. Truth was his inspiration and reward, and nothing could ever stand next to Her in his heart.

He always thought of the womenfolk, except, perhaps, his sister and mother, as of creatures from a parallel universe: attractive but mysterious. They lived in a world where people occupied themselves with making money, parties, fashion or sports. He knew neither how to approach girls nor what to talk to them about. The idea that sooner or later he would have to make an effort to enter the unknown waters of relationships with the opposite gender brought him a slight sense of unease. He could give his heart to only one subject of love, and the subject was already there. Benny never understood his friend wasting life in meaningless affairs, although he put up with Sandro’s weaknesses.

...So, it was with this mindset that Benny Gladkoff examined himself in the mirror getting ready for Daisy McKevitt’s twenty-first birthday party. He was of a medium height, medium weight. A rather wide face of a pale complexion, soft sandy-coloured hair neatly combed to the left revealing a high forehead. A nose that seemed a bit small on such a face. Eyes of the colour of walnut behind thick glasses examined their mirror reflection with an expression too serious. The conclusion of this examination was disappointing: nothing worthy of attention of  a girl like Daisy. Although this thought was a little disheartening, it calmed him down: even better, no need to stretch. He would just chat with Daisy in French as much as politeness requires, present her with one of the old Paris photo-albums that their family brought from France, and, having satisfied the duty he owed to the Professor, happily go back to the embrace of the lab.

It was a bright spring day. With a bouquet of snowdrops and a neatly wrapped gift under his arm, Benjamin walked to the McKevitts’ place in his polished shoes, trying to avoid puddles left from the lawn sprinklers. He felt terribly uncomfortable and stupid in a tailcoat with a bow-tie, rented especially for this occasion for the first time in his life, as required by the dress code prudently indicated in the party invitation. Benjamin tried to keep calm but could hardly suppress nervousness.

When he was almost at the main entrance, the internal grumbling suddenly fell still, as Benny heard the soft sounds of piano music coming from a wide open window of the living room. It was a melody from Tchaikovsky's Seasons, and he remembered it well: the play was called “April (Snowdrop)”. Benjamin's mother, a gifted pianist, used to play it often when he was a child. The tender sounds carried him back to the nostalgic past, to the spring-filled Paris of his childhood: windows opened to the garden after a long winter, the fragrance of emerging leaves and buds, sounds of laughter, children's voices…

The coincidence seemed amazing. He looked at the bouquet of snowdrops in his hand and thought that nothing could carry us back in time so instantly and strongly as sounds and smells. A strange feeling arose in his chest, as if something was opening there achingly.

Everything was forgotten – his annoyance with the invitation, the stupid tailcoat, his dread of social talks with strangers. He wanted to see the one who carried him to his childhood, right now, before the spell of charming sounds faded away. Neglectful of the polished shoes, Benny stepped off the pavement leading to the front door and made his way straight into the wet garden, from where he could better see the living room.

...From behind of the cherry blossoms where no one could spot him, Benjamin, with his breath held, watched the girl sitting by the window and playing piano for the guests, who remained indistinguishable in the back of the room.

She was separated from the garden only by a sheer curtain, rippled by the warm wind. The girl’s glistening blond hair was fashionably arranged in two beautiful curls on top and cascaded down in soft waves to her shoulders. Benny saw her profile turned slightly to the window - a roundish face of a delicate complexion, cheeks blushing slightly from excitement. The girl concealed her shyness under a light smile on her cherry-red lips. A peach-colored sleeveless silk dress with a bouffant skirt set off the glowing freshness of her skin. Benny could not tell, either then or later, what it was - a mixed fragrance of cherry blossoms and snowdrops, Tchaikovsky’s play or the beauty of a young girl, but he felt as if he was falling into a magic whirlpool...

The girl finished played, stood up and left to join the guests, while Benjamin stayed still by the window, unable to move. While standing there, he understood two things: that the girl was Daisy McKevitt, and that he was in love with her.


10. THE SPELL


Like a delicate cherry or peach flower, Daisy McKevitt was in full bloom of her feminine charm. Such blooming is short, but the stronger is its aroma driving everyone lovesick. This time in the life of women, those of the type  destined for motherhood, does not last long - just enough to bring an enchanted bumblebee to the opened bud. Later this great power of blossom will be lent to the fruit, to the seed... but while this transient flowering lasts, such a woman is a sorceress  assisted by Mother Nature herself. Bewitching charms of hers at that hour deprive people of willpower and take away their minds, and no mortal could ever resist the magic nectar, this promise of a new life.

Talking with Daisy over cocktails, Benny was surprised to find out that he had been wrong about her – the girl seemed very interested in him. And it was not even due the charm of his French, which immediately turned an unremarkable nerd into a sophisticated Parisian. It was something in Daisy’s head tacitly filled with an agenda for life: to graduate from a “college for MIT brides”, marry a promising scientist who, like her father, would become a Professor, and live happily ever after in a mansion surrounded by a flock of children. Benny Gladkoff, of whom Professor McKevitt always spoke as one of his most talented students, fit the unspoken cliche in Daisy's head like a key in a lock. Whatever Benny said was met with Daisy’s appreciating nods. She laughed at his jokes readily looking at him with admiring eyes, and a blush of her cheeks was getting brighter with every glass she had. The snowdrops brought by Benny turned out to be her favorite flowers, and everything Benny did and said appeared to be to Daisy’s liking.

Overcoming shyness, Benny even invited the girl for a couple rounds of foxtrot - that’s where his tailcoat came into play - and Daisy tactfully left unnoticed that her rather awkward dance partner stepped on her new shoes once in a while...
All this was too good to be true. An expression of unconditional approval in Daisy’s eyes, which seemed to be signalling to him in all possible ways: “Whatever you say is right and true; you are the smartest, most worthy. Here is my admiration and my whole life, rule and possess, now and always!” These eyes haunted him even in a dream when he finally got home in the morning, after a long walk looking at the blossoming gardens and the young moon.

Daisy McKevitt, how did you do that? You made Benny half a person. He had been whole, happy with the work of his life... And now an invisible door opened inside him, and he craved to fill this openness. But there was only one person who could fill it... the goddess of spring, beauty and harmony, a fairy, a queen of snowdrops!

This was approximately the content of the speech, that his faithful Sandro, choking with laughter and not believing his ears, heard that night from Benny, who came home totally intoxicated with wine, spring and love. Pulling off his friend’s boots and tailcoat while laying him to sleep, Sandro said, as if in a joke: “Listen, I wish I could have a look at this fairy that turned a nerd into a man. Introduce me to her someday”.

The face of a half-asleep Benny wrinkled angrily. He shook his finger in front of Sandro's nose: “Don't even go there! She is... my ...“ and with that, he fell asleep.

...A week later, Daisy and Benny were sitting in the back row of a movie-theatre where the young man, according to an unspoken dating code, invited the girl after the first two cafe dates. This time he brought her a small bouquet of daisies. The girl, appreciating the graceful sign of attention, proudly attached a white-pink bouquet to her hat – an essential attribute of fashionable ladies in those days.

The cinema  they chose showed old movies, and Benny chose “To Have and Have Not” because he knew that Daisy was a fan of Humphrey Bogart or “Bogey”. Benny had watched it before, and he remembered how the atmosphere of the whole movie was electrified by the nascent romance between the aging Bogart and his young partner Lauren Bacall, who first starred in a title role. One does not often see such an intensity of passion, a genuine spark between actors in a movie, even a good one. You can’t imitate it, and millions of people watch such movies over and over again to partake in it. Why else do they crave the world of illusions?

Daisy was looking at the screen while Benny could not keep from  looking at her. She looked so nice in her blue dress that matched her eyes. A home-made white lace collar made Daisy look a bit like a schoolgirl. A silky blond curl sneaking from under the hat, a gentle curve of her chin, a tiny hand in a lace glove squeezing the armrest... Meanwhile on the screen, the temptress Bacall, Slim, having already laid her eyes on Humphrey, Steve, was asking: “Anybody got a match?”, and the glance thrown to her by Bogey along with the requested box made it clear that the sea wolf of Martinique was about to fall at the feet of the young beauty.

Scene after scene followed, while Benny hesitated whether or not it would be all right to take Daisy’s hand now? “She's probably waiting for me to make the first step...” His palms sweated, and he was embarrassed by his indecision, clutching a handkerchief in his hands. The course of the movie steadily approached the scene where Bogey and Lauren steadily approached each other. The juicy contralto of Bacall already sounded with an unambiguous seduction in the ambiguous phrase about the whistle...

Finally, the modulations of passion in the deep voice of Lauren/Slim reached the apotheosis in the tango to the accompaniment of Cricket:

Maybe it happens this way,
Maybe we really belong together,
But after all,
How little we know,
Maybe it's just for a day?

And Benjamin gathered his courage. With a heart ready to jump out of his chest with excitement, he gently covered Daisy's gloved hand with his palm, and she did not withdraw it, turning her palm up and squeezing his fingers. Through the lace of the glove, he felt the softness and warmth of her hand, responding to his move to get closer. How much a simple handshake can communicate, making sparks of fire run through the body, from the crown to the heels! Benny was afraid to look at Daisy, but his heartbeat now slowed down, and a sense of frantic joy spilled over his body at the sweetest feeling of togetherness that comes with the crossing of an invisible border. A second ago, they were just side by side, and now they were together! Slim’s contralto continued to flow from the speakers, but he could no longer hear it:

...Love is as changeable as the weather,
And after all,
How little we know,
Who knows why an April breeze never remains?
Why stars in the trees hide when it rains?


He was blind to what was going on around him in the theatre, as his second vision suddenly became active. Perhaps the excitement from holding Daisy's hand was the reason, but all that he saw in front of him were bright, incredibly fast-moving sparks of bluish and white light. They emanated from the core of his being and disappeared into the dimmer blue light surrounding him. Turning his head slightly, Benny saw the same fountain of living sparks of light emanating from Daisy's heart, only their colors were yellowish-orange. The girl looked down, still shy to turn to him, but he knew that she felt the same way he did. He no longer doubted - a gentle shake of her hand was more eloquent than any words.

Then, something that Benjamin had never seen before began to happen: two streams of living sparks coming from him and Daisy pulled together, as if attracted to each other by magnetic force, and then began to penetrate each other, mixing and sprouting into one another like young plant shoots. This sight fascinated him, making him numb. All his bodily sensations focussed in his fingers gently stroking Daisy's hand. As if through a veil came the sounds of tango:

Love comes along, casting a spell,
Will it sing you a song?
Will it say a farewell?
Who can tell?

Finally merging in irresistible attraction, the two living streams that used to belong to a man and a woman now lost their original colors and became one vibrating cloud of bright white light. To feel such unity and see it at the same time was a previously unknown bliss. Benny wished he could stop the passage of time and stay forever in this instant of fullness, feeling so complete in this state of oneness... No words were necessary. Even kisses, those which bring couples to the movies, now seemed like an excess.

And at this moment of unification, Benjamin saw something that he could not even imagine: between the two of their fused light bodies a third thing appeared, - even brighter than theirs, but looking as if it did not belong to them. The vibrating cradle of light was surrounded by many eyes - in any case, Benjamin saw them this way... He realized that the eyes were souls striving to enter the world of form through the union of man and woman. Having merged their light bodies, he and Daisy opened a door for them... Benny was amazed.

The tango from the silver screen came to its last chord:

Maybe you're meant to be mine,
Maybe I'm only supposed to stay in your arms a while,
As others have done?
Is this what I've waited for, am I the one?
Oh, I hope in my heart that it's so,
In spite of how little we know...

Later, while seeing Daisy home and trying to keep a conversation going, Benny held her tightly by the arm, still afraid to lose the newfound miracle of unity. He was wondering how he would survive leaving Daisy and going home alone. Benny was distracted from these thoughts by an unexpected appearance of a neatly dressed Sandro, who apparently came across them on his way back from a date. Sandro suggested celebrating their acquaintance with Daisy at a nearby restaurant, and although Benny had completely different plans, he could not refuse his best friend.

That was how Sandro met Daisy. Benny did not like the way Sandro looked after his girlfriend in his indestructible habit, filling her glass with malbec all the time and trying to conquer her attention. What Benny did not like even more was the familiar look of admiration in Daisy's eyes when she looked at his handsome friend. But Benny barely managed to reserve himself and to suppress the doubts stirring inside.



11. THE PAIN




He saw lace gloves and blue dress with a white collar, so painfully familiar to him, thrown on the back of a chair as if in haste...

He felt as if blood was drained from his heart and went up to his temples - it pounded so hard there, and his hands, clenched into fists, shook with anger. He was ready to destroy Sandro on the spot for the stealthy betrayal and for the cynicism with which this dastardly stallion trampled his only love, and for what? Just for fun, for another point in his damn Casanova score...

But he did not kill the villain. He just stood in front of the door with a pale face gritting his teeth, and could neither move nor utter a sound. A wave of pain, resentment and anger rose in his chest, which felt like it was going to overthrow him. He realized that he needed to rush away from the place and not look back. He realized that he would flee from this wave of pain day after day, until the open wound in that place of the soul where Daisy had entered healed completely.

Benny turned away and ran.

What happened next, he recalled with difficulty. He got into the car and drove for many hours until he crossed the Canadian border. He remembered driving to Niagara Falls and standing as close as he could to the water at that early morning time and screaming, until his stomach spasmed and his throat was raw, letting out the tormenting pain. His scream was drowned out by the roaring tons of water crashing into the black void, the same way it crashed for thousands and thousands of years.

Completely exhausted, Benjamin felt drained of the pain and finally felt a little relief. For a while there was nothing to hurt inside, and, oddly enough, his other vision suddenly emerged after hiding from a storm of passion. In the dimness of rising morning fog, Benjamin saw a fiery radiance enveloping the cascades of water boiling with foam. He realized that this radiance was the invisible force trapped in water, which was now released with its powerful fall onto the rocks.

The awe of this scene made him numb, and the sparkling flame enveloping everything around the waterfalls entered his heart, healing the pain. Benjamin felt how the vital power of water dissolved the dark wave of despair hanging over him. It was for that healing that he rushed here instinctively like a wounded animal... He stood there, breathing the moist morning air for a couple more hours, then drove to the nearest motel and slept there until next  morning.

...On the way home, Benjamin, whose state of mind was now more relaxed, became a participant of an unusual incident, which he accepted as a sign from above, accurately describing his own situation. Driving along a forest road, on its side he saw two road workers trying to hold a black bear cub and pull something off its head. Benjamin stopped and asked if they needed help. It turned out that the cub made its way to the road workers’ shack in search for food, stuck its head in a large can, attracted by the food scraps on the bottom, and could not get out. Blindfolded by the can on its head, the poor creature was rushing from side to side and roaring with fear. The road workers who had run up to the noise tried to catch the cub and pull the can off its head, but he was rushing out, scratching and trying to run away. Having realized what was happening, Benjamin grabbed the bear from behind, and while one of the workers held it by the neck, the other finally managed to pull off the can. The liberated bear immediately rushed headlong home into the forest.

Benjamin said goodbye to the workers and was going back to the car, when suddenly it dawned on him that the little bear’s struggle resembled his own situation. He was a beast yielding to temptation that got itself trapped. The cub thought that people who were trying to set it free were evil and resisted as much as it could.
It was even ready to attack its saviors.

All the way back, the image of the bear freed from the can did not leave Benjamin's head. He could not yet understand all the subtleties of what had happened, but now something wise and deep inside was telling him that the way things had turned out between him, Daisy and Sandro was the only right one, and that there was no other way. That which seemed a cruel leap of fate actually led to liberation... something in him knew this.

Benjamin turned on the radio for a change. They were playing the tango from “To Have and Have Not”. It was hard to believe in such a coincidence. Now, finally, he listened to the words of the song, which had escaped his ears back at the movies. Ontario's forests and lakes rushed by outside the car window, and Lauren Bacall sang in her deep contralto, voicing eternal human questions that no one had ever answered:

Who knows why an April breeze never remains?
Why stars in the trees hide when it rains?
Love comes along, casting a spell,
Will it sing you a song?
Will it say a farewell?
Who can tell?



12. THE HEALING



Three months later, Sandro and Daisy got married and left for Buenos Aires, where Alejandro Pretorius Ramirez, now a family man, took over management of a part of family business still supervised by his father.

After his insight on the forest road, Benjamin found an inner strength to accept Sandro's choice and to forgive him. After all, Sandro was like a brother to him, one of the few people close to his heart.

... After returning from his night escapade to the Niagara Falls, Benny found his friend waiting for him at home. The first thing Sandro said was:

“I'm sorry, brother. This is her choice. I am marrying her”.

“Tell me, Sandro, why on earth, out of thousands of girls who would happily be in Daisy's place, you chose her? You could have any of them – a smart, rich, beauty queen - anyone you wanted. Why did you take the only girl dear to me?”

“Precisely because of that, brother. You were about to give up everything for her. I know you won't forgive me for some time, but someday you will know it all, I give you my word”.

Benny was surprised to see in Sandro's face that strange mixture of detachment, compassion and humility that he noticed on the day his friend saved his life on the icy lake. There was that same bright golden glow around Sandro's head now as many years ago. It silenced Benny.

“I only hope you know what you are doing, Sandro...”

Sandro nodded silently and solemnly, with no shadow of a smile.

...Time is the best doctor, healing slowly but surely. From sudden emptiness and disappointment in earthly happiness, Benjamin escaped to his usual refuge. She, the Truth, never let him down, it was always safe and secure in Her embrace. Closing the laboratory door behind him, Benjamin plunged into the world of his own, leaving sensual storms behind these walls. The excitement of the search and the thirst for knowledge were with him again, and his whole life now belonged to Her again. He was back to his own self as he walked along the path of his destiny.

The pain in his heart dulled over time and then disappeared. The wound left by Daisy became like scar tissue insensitive to touch. Then, even the scar was gone. His mind kept every detail, but they were now free from emotion. No trace of blame, jealousy, or resentment remained in him. He healed from the experience of attachment followed by painful detachment, and knew he no longer needed another one. His thought brought a sense of freedom and peace into his heart.

During that period, Benjamin expanded his search for information about the unknown force, deciding not to limit his interests to scientific sources. The memory of radiance that stood over Niagara Falls led him to the idea of looking for references to the forces of nature in folklore, ancient treatises and old legends. He found a similar idea in the Chinese concept of the omnipresent vital energy called qi or “chi”. The word "qi" originally meant "steam" or "emanation". The Chinese believed that people, animals, and all natural and man-made objects absorb, preserve and emit qi. Although this energy is invisible to most, it was, ancient believed, the basis of existence. The sun, moon and stars are the sources of "celestial qi", as opposed to the "earthly qi" - the invisible force that comes from the bowels of earth. The flow of qi influences the shape of various natural objects: plains, mountains, lakes and rivers. The ability to attract and retain qi is the basis for maintaining vitality in a living being, including humans.

The ancient Indian concept of prana, a vital force permeating everything in the Universe and contained in living and inanimate objects, was very similar to qi in essence. According to the Vedas, prana comes to earth from the sun, and living beings breathe it in along with the air. Flowing through the subtle channels and meridians of the body, prana nourishes and gives us our life force.

Benjamin had no doubt that the ideas of prana and qi were not mere superstitions of primitive societies as they were presented by contemporary science. For some reason, it occurred to him that in ancient times, there were more people who were able to perceive subtle energies - not twenty two percent, as Baron Von Reichenbach discovered, but many more. He was convinced that knowledge of qi and prana had been passed by people of Truth, for whom the existence of an unknown force was as real and physical as it was for him.

He discovered that people of this specific knowledge also existed in his time - one of these people was a mysterious Russian-speaking mystic George Gurdjieff, who visited America several times in the past decade. Benjamin came across his books in the section of the library where they kept books about world religions, secret teachings and subtle energies.

Gurdjieff's book spoke of "a mixed substance of active elements found in physical and astral bodies," which forms a special atmosphere around a person, similar to the atmosphere around a planet. If this substance became concentrated, it could be seen as an aura or radiance around people and sometimes also around holy places or churches. Reading this, Benjamin could testify to every word, since many times he had been fascinated by the glow around objects in churches and temples themselves – not only was it stronger than around other objects, but also had a beautiful golden hue.

As the atmosphere of different planets constantly gains or loses substances due to the influence of other planets, so a person surrounded by other people is like a planet surrounded by other planets. When the atmospheres of people attractive to each other meet, a connection and exchange occurs between them. While the volume of atmosphere remains the same, its quality changes. Benjamin remembered how the lights mixed and intertwined around him and Daisy on that date in the movies and how they became whole.

During this period of his research, he realized that the mysterious energy was known to people a long time ago, and they knew much more about it than the contemporary "society of technical progress". But he still did not know how to make this knowledge available in a form that would not be rejected by the minds of his generation.



13. ANAIS LAROCHE



Upon completion of his Master's degree, Benjamin received a doctorate degree and continued working at the MIT semiconductor laboratory, with his research focused on growing crystals with desired properties. From time to time he received letters and postcards from Sandro, mostly with questions about Benny's research and news of a new Ramirez child. He and Daisy had four kids in eight years. Sandro headed a branch of the family corporation and was apparently very successful, although always up to his neck in work. Photographs of the young Ramirez family seemed to be created for glossy magazine covers – everyone looked happy, smiling and attractive. Daisy got a little bigger with each new child, gradually turning from a slender girl into a magnificent matron, but that did not at all diminish the shine in her eyes, and Benny, although  a little nostalgic, was sincerely happy for them.

Looking at these photos, he increasingly marveled at the wisdom of fate, which by Alejandro’s hands made the only right choice for him. It's true what they say: what you lose on the swings you gain on the roundabouts, although at that turning point in life, we might not realize it. Benjamin now saw clearly that he could not be satisfied with the simple happiness of a family man, and sooner or later the conflict between the purpose of his life, his research, and the needs of a growing family would become irreconcilable.

...It was the beginning of the sixties, turbulent times when America got involved in the tragedy of the Vietnam War. Faced with a real possibility of being recruited to work for the Ministry of Defense, Benny remembered the words of his father, who by that time had already passed into a better world: “...The Almighty will not ask me why I did not fight these people or those in other people's wars. He will ask if I took care of that with which He had entrusted me.”

Even in his boyhood years, Benjamin realized that the task of investigating the unknown energy was entrusted to him by someone who will come to collect, sooner or later. For that, he was given the double gift of the seer and the researcher. And he made up his mind: one day Benny Gladkoff left his established life in the States and crossed the Canadian border for good, like many of his peers who did not want to be drawn into someone else's war.

Benjamin settled in Montreal, where he found a second home - the Francophone residents of Quebec considered those born in France their own. Quebec French seemed a bit archaic to Benny and heavily loaded with English words, but nevertheless it was his childhood language –  and Benjamin, having rented a small apartment in Old Montreal that reminded him of Paris, felt at home.

Thanks to the recommendation of his old research advisor, Daisy's father Professor Elijah McKevitt, Benjamin got a job in a private research center. The center, among other things, was engaged in creating a new generation of semiconductor materials based on silicon crystals, which were needed badly by the rapidly developing computer industry. Although Professor McKevitt had retired from teaching by that time, he remained on the Board of Governors of the Montreal center. One of their sponsors was a leading American electronics corporation, which had already released its first transistorized computer by that time.
This was the dawn of the Silicon Valley, when a new era of civilization, the "Silicon Age", began.

Benny's stories about the research pursued by the center intrigued his friend Alejandro, as he was thinking of investing some capital of his company, Pretorius Enterprise, into the promising transistor industry. Sandro flew to Montreal, where he signed a long-term sponsorship agreement with the research center, among other terms having secured a position on the Board.

It was there, in Montreal, that Benjamin finally met his life partner.

Anais Laroche, three years his senior, came from Quebec - fit, swift in movement like a teenage boy, with a narrow face, straight dark shoulder-length hair  and lively, piercing black eyes, this woman was his colleague, a promising scientist with a doctorate degree and an interest in crystals. The crystals proved to be their common passion, so Benny shared with Anais everything he knew about the unexplored power they concealed. Anais took his visionary powers very seriously, although she did not possess them herself, and was extremely interested in the photographs of the crystal radiation he had once made.

Both of them stayed late in the laboratory working out the details of the experiments, sometimes engaging in friendly arguments. Benjamin had never experienced such a unity of mind and mutual understanding with anyone before - from a half glance, half a word. He was used to working alone, as he felt he could not entrust his work to anyone, fearing someone else's incompetence or inattention. But with Anais, everything was completely different. He could rely on her as he could on himself. Sometimes he could not believe his luck - it seemed that the mind of this woman was created complementary to his own.

So it was a natural course of events for both of them that one fine evening, after a long day in the lab, they went home together and never parted again.
Calm and gentle Benny was a perfect companion for Anais. After two failed marriages with continuous fights over her late nights at work and two miscarriages, the last thing she wanted in life was drama. Not only was Benny fine with her night vigils at work - he was there with her. What else could she dream of? For Benny, Anais was also an ideal partner; not only did she not take him away from the beloved science, but she shared this love whole-heartedly.

At first, Benjamin wondered how different Anais was from Daisy, and how different his feelings for her were. Although Anais and he were as close as two people can be and felt so good together, he had never seen such a merging of their light bodies as on that movie date with Daisy. That multicolored host of eyes - the souls of future children - never appeared around him and Anais. His and his wife's light bodies were perfectly combined with each other, but nevertheless they always remained separate and independent, and this mysterious third never appeared between them - the place where a child's soul could enter. Benny was not sure if it was because of the scars left by previous losses on their bodies of light, or because Anais could not have children... Anyway, over time he got used to the idea that their life pursuit was indeed their child - that third thing for which the two are joined by the higher power in union... and accepted everything as it was.



14. NEW REVELATIONS BY CRYSTALS



Thus passed the happiest twenty years in Benny and Anais’ lives, in which they advanced tremendously in their exploration of the world of crystals. All this time, they kept in touch with Alejandro, who often came to Montreal on business and paid them visits to catch up  on their lives and work. Many of Benny and Anais's discoveries were used in the booming semiconductor industry and were later applied in the first personal computers, but this was not the main thing for Benny. He was looking for ways to prove the existence of the mysterious energy he was seeing, which he considered to be the goal of his life.

In parallel with this major pursuit, Benjamin mastered another important application of crystals, which would play a key role in the task he had to fulfill. Together with Anais, they made a significant progress in growing artificial crystals with desired properties.

They came across an interesting study that showed that natural crystals sometimes formed varying structures from the same chemical sources. It turned out that many factors affecting the crystal during its growth were causing this: time of day and season; planetary and cosmic influences that changed the effect of gravitational forces on the molecular bonds. Thus, the structure of a crystal was a living history of the planet imprinted in the bonds between its atoms.

This led Benjamin and Anais to a hypothesis that it was possible to encode information as part of the physical structure of a growing crystal. After all, what is information but a specific sequence of impulses. The impulses can be of any nature - acoustic, electromagnetic, etc. Just as acoustic information can be recorded on a magnetic tape by converting a sound wave into an electromagnetic one, so other types of information can be recorded in the structure of a crystal during its growth under the influence of electromagnetic waves - for example, radio waves of various frequencies.

Moreover, while the crystal is growing, the data in it can be encoded holographically, so that each particle of the crystal would contain the same information as the entire crystal. And if such a crystal is damaged or fractured, the data in any of its parts will still be preserved in its original form.
Anais used to joke about this: “You know, Benny, you could send a message to future generations or to inhabitants of other planets on such a crystal, since crystals are carriers much more reliable than parchment, paper or even stone tablets. It lasts practically forever... Moreover, crystalline media are way more compact – in one cubic inch you can record more information than what’s contained in the whole world's libraries. The only question is if those receiving your message would be able to decode it...”

Anais had no idea how seriously Benny was considering the idea of using the structure of a growing crystal to record some information that could not yet be published openly, but could be passed on without distortion to the future generations. Again and again, he thought that some of the crystalline artifacts left by ancient civilizations were in fact such archives or libraries. It was just that the decoding key hasn't been found yet.

One such example was the famous crystal skull supposedly found by Mitchell-Hedges in Belize, the purpose of which remained unknown while the manufacturing technology was unsurpassed to this day. Benjamin once read a report from a Hewlett-Packard engineer who studied this artifact. According to him, someone crafted this skull from one piece of crystal so carefully as if they had not touched it at all during the cutting process. When he examined it under a microscope, he found no marks left by tools, just a few traces of an abrasive like sand. The processing was carried out against the crystal’s axis of symmetry, which could not be done without crushing it, even if a laser was used. As a crystallographer Benjamin could not help but agree with the Hewlett-Packard guy. He thought it was a fantastic idea that someone could make crystals soft like butter to work on them. Except if these people grew a crystal of a desired shape from a liquid solution, as Benny and Anais did in their lab... but this seemed even more incredible.

Meanwhile, the world of crystals, which had captured Benny's imagination since he was a child, continued to reveal its secrets to him.

Once, during an experiment with the creation of artificial crystals, Benjamin had a chance to see a striking phenomenon. When the substance was cooling from a melted state and transitioning to a crystalline form, Benjamin noticed a flash of bluish light, after which the sample turned from a formless mass into a liquid crystal. With multiple efforts, he managed to record this phenomenon on film, as well as photograph the moment of the transition. What appeared on the film was a crystalline light matrix that the melt had to assume. The flash of blue light contained information embodied in a geometric form from the level of the light code to the physical plane.

It was incomprehensible to the mind. Benjamin read about light matrices or "astral forms" of all creation in the metaphysical literature, but this has never been demonstrated in an experiment. For him, this evidence was an indisputable proof that crystals were a form of life, albeit different from organic.
Benjamin showed the pictures to Anais, after which they both stared at each other for a while. Finally, Anais said in a light shock:

“I always knew they were alive. After all, Tesla wrote about this.”

“Yes, Anais. When I was a boy, I observed the growth of alum crystals and came to the conviction that they were living structures. Now some say that the first forms of primitive life that emerged even before organic molecules were microscopic structures of quartz forming in the clay layers of the earth crust. As long as the vital impulse is active, the crystal grows, and this can last for millions of years. But those rock crystals that we extract in the mines have long ended their lives as they had stopped growing. What we are working on is just an empty shell, a used body of an ancient life. All the more unique is that chance given to me, Anais, to see how this form of life once descended into matter to form a shell of a crystal...”

“I think, Benny, you were lucky to peek through the keyhole of Creation’s workshop. A keyhole in the door separating matter from spirit... But would anyone in the scientific community listen to you? What you found is a challenge to the very foundations of materialism and a straight path to the label of  pseudoscience. Although it is not different from everything you see with your other vision, and everything you do to prove it’s real. Even if someone does listen, it will only be to ask if you can make money on it. And the answer is most likely not. I bet your report will be put on the “Classified” shelf, and that will be it...”

Benny nodded:

“Yes, I understand, Anais. But that is not important. The key is that I realized something in such a convincing way that it leaves not a shadow of doubt. I always remember what’s written here,” Benjamin pointed to a bronze plaque hanging on the wall of their office with an inscription in Latin “Super Omnia Vincit Veritas” –“The Truth conquers all.” “Sooner or later, what is hidden in the classifieds will become common knowledge”.

Anais was right. Since their work was carried out as part of a study sponsored by a large electronics corporation, Benjamin was obliged to transfer all intellectual property, including films and photographs, to their archives. As far as he could tell, no one had mentioned these materials ever since.


15. THE BREAKTHROUGH


“So, gentlemen,” Benjamin Gladkoff began, smoothing his graying hair while addressing the Board of Governors, “I would like to present you with the preliminary results of some extremely promising experiments that we performed as part of our laboratory's program to study the piezoelectric effect on quartz crystals. Everyone knows what the piezoelectric effect is: by subjecting quartz to mechanical stress (for example, compression), you can get electricity, and, conversely, by acting on the crystals with an electromagnetic field, you can cause their physical deformation.

“However, in the course of our experiments, one completely new property of crystals was revealed, which marks a new era in the scientific research. If a crystal lattice is affected by electromagnetic fields with a certain combination of frequencies, it is possible to stretch the crystal in all three directions, which will lead to the inversion of the space-time continuum around it. What does this mean?” Benny glanced at the Board members. “This means that the altered crystal can become a source of anti-gravity!”

Benny felt a wave of skepticism from some of his audience members. He expected such a reaction, since any study mentioning anti-gravity was almost equated with the search for perpetual motion, and anti-gravity explorers automatically fell into the category of charlatans and pseudo-scientists in the eyes of the established academic community. However, he continued:

“In 1927, exactly sixty years ago, two Polish and German scientists, Kowsky and Frost, accidentally discovered this phenomenon when they conducted experiments for the German company Telefunken, in which they applied various combinations of radio waves to quartz crystals. As Kowsky and Frost noticed, with some combination of frequencies, the crystal began to lose transparency while simultaneously increasing in volume. Following further "pumping" with an electromagnetic charge, the crystal eventually became weightless, rising into the air two meters above the laboratory floor and holding the additional twenty-five kilograms of weight of the apparatus to which it was attached. Two scientists accidentally discovered the anti-gravity effect.

“A report on the Kowski and Frost experiment with photographs was published in the same year in a German scientific journal. Later, this experiment was declared a fake, and copies of the journal were carefully removed from all libraries.

“But I was able to repeat the first stage of this experiment in our laboratory. I have a reason to assert that their result was genuine, and that it is reproducible!

“I realized that the key to success of the Kowsky-Frost experiment was a proper charge distribution. If you simply subject a quartz crystalline lattice to massive stress, the crystal will turn into an amorphous mass. However, if you distribute the charge so that it knocks out the charged particle-ions from the crystal lattice one by one, these particles will stabilize in new positions, much further than the previous ones. Then the crystal lattice, as it were, “stretches” in all directions like a balloon. Quartz will increase several times in volume, lose transparency, acquire hygroscopicity and become similar to a polystyrene foam sponge, but will not disintegrate. My experiments have confirmed all of the above, as evidenced by the presented photographs of the altered crystals,” Benjamin Gladkoff adjusted his glasses and pointed to the photographs on the stands in the conference room.

After giving his audience some time to look at the photos, Benny returned to the presentation of his project:

“Such a ‘stretched’ crystal contains a huge amount of internal stress, which can be figuratively compared to a taut bowstring. If you find a way to continue “pumping” such a “stretched” crystal with energy, it will begin to “release” stress by inverting gravity - just like a bowstring, having reached its tension limit, returns to its original position with a great force. The powerful release of the anti-gravity wave will cause phenomena such as weightlessness and levitation. In addition to its own weight, the crystal will be able to hold objects in the air that are several times heavier than its weight.

The possibilities offered by this potential invention are incredible - from heavy lifting to space travel, gentlemen. But this is in the long run. In the immediate future, our laboratory plans to reproduce the experiment of Kowsky and Frost to its end result...”

Benjamin felt confusion among half of those in session, a sense of mistrust. He glanced at Sandro, trying to find support in his eyes. Alejandro sat aloof, without any expression on his face, looking out the window. Benny’s cheeks flushed with anxiety. He loosened the knot of his tie, poured some Perrier from the bottle in front of him into a glass, and taking a sip, continued, trying to sound convincing:

“Besides, we plan to take the  experiments with crystals modified by radio waves in a different direction. I was able to develop a device using a modified crystal, which allows you to get a focused beam of energy emitted by it. The resulting beam, one inch in diameter, had optical properties and passed through a mass of matter without encountering resistance. We directed the beam through eleven feet of concrete and armature, placing an unopened package of eight Polaroid cassettes on the other end. A beam of unknown energy generated by the crystal easily passed through the obstacle and left a mark on all Polaroid cassettes, each wrapped in aluminum foil. Moreover, in the area where the impact of the beam on the Polaroid film was the most intense, the emulsion covering the film was etched or simply disappeared. We cannot yet give an explanation for this phenomenon, but we are ready to continue research in this direction. We also found that it is possible to modulate the intensity of the beam by exposing it to electromagnetic waves, which could result in a completely new way of transmitting optical information through any obstacle.

"So, gentlemen, the general research plan and financial estimates have been submitted for your consideration, and I am now ready to answer your questions.” As he finished his presentation, Benny looked inquiringly at the Board members seated at the conference table.

Answering questions, Benjamin was simultaneously counting chances: “The voting will begin soon. Six members total. The two from the computer corporation will likely refrain from voting: the subject is too far from their specialization and commercial interests. Another one is almost certainly against it: for him, the notion of anti-gravity is rather fantastic than scientific. A minimum of three votes in favor is required to obtain approval. Sandro, of course, will support me... He knows everything about this project; he had been with us from the very beginning... Professor McKevitt will also vote positively; he has always been aware of what we were doing and appreciated it. If the Chairman votes for us, we will receive funding. How I wish he did!..“

“Gentlemen, the debate is over, please proceed to voting,” Benny finally heard the Chairman pronounce in his deep bass. He felt cold sweat on his palms. Benjamin's projects had gone before the Board many times before, but he had never been so worried. He had been preparing for this day for so many years! He was already sixty then; this project is supposed be the crown of his life's work, possibly the last decisive breakthrough.

The voting started. Whoever Benjamin assumed would be against voted against. Okay, no surprises here. The other two, also predictably, refrained. McKevitt voted in favor, and, oh joy, the Chairman did too! Benjamin's heart was beating happily, he, smiling, turned towards Sandro, congratulating himself on the victory... But Alejandro Ramirez sat with his head down leaning on his hand, so his hair, as thick as in his youth but almost completely gray now covered his noble, still such a handsome face. Sandro seemed to be deep in thought. Benjamin looked at him in bewilderment, unable to comprehend what was happening to his old friend. Does he doubt it? What's going on?!

“Mister Ramirez, your word,” the Chairman finally prompted him.

When Sandro took his hand away from his face, Benny was surprised at how pale he was. Without looking at Benjamin, Alejandro said quietly but firmly:

“I'm sorry, but I'm against it”.

The Chairman turned to Benjamin, who was numb with surprise:

“I'm truly sorry, Dr. Gladkoff, but you know our rules. Your project did not receive the required half of the votes; I have to inform you that the funding request is declined. Hope you have better luck with other initiatives, Dr. Gladkoff.”

Benjamin adjusted his glasses, took his folder from the table and, keeping his back unnaturally straight, left the conference room without saying goodbye.



16. THE CRISIS



That same day he resigned from the research center and left Canada, without telling anyone except Anais where he was going. He knew that Sandro would call and did not want to hear from him. Anais was against Benny's demarche, believing that he was going too far and that they needed to keep looking for a way out. But Benny had no strength for anything, not even angry tirades. He suddenly felt old and tired, and decided to leave for Connecticut to spend some time by himself in the places of his youth. None of his family remained there - his parents died, his sister and brother returned to Europe shortly after the war, where now they had families, children, and grandchildren. Benjamin settled in a cottage in the middle of a forest on the banks of a fast stream. The wooden house nestled comfortably under the crown of a huge three-hundred-year-old pine, whose wind-blown branches gently knocked on the windows.

When Benjamin tried to get out of bed the next morning, he suddenly felt an excruciating pain in his lower back. The pain was so strong that when he struggled to get up, he could not even sit up on the bed. Somehow he managed to crawl to the bathroom. Benny was frightened, as such a thing had never happened to him before. There was no one for five miles around except wild animals. Getting into the car, let alone driving  was out of the question. If he tried to crawl to the nearest road, he would get there by the next day at the earliest. There was no telephone in the cottage - Benjamin was looking for a place where no one could disturb him. So he got his way...

Benjamin closed his eyes and noticed that against the even bluish background light which he always saw with his eyes closed, there was a gaping black hole with reddish edges, the size of a pea. He realized that this was a disease. When he used to get sick - and sometimes even before the signs of illness appeared - these dark holes appeared in the luminosity of the field around his body. “You really are in trouble, Benny,” he said to himself.

Having managed to climb back onto bed, he began to breathe deeply, trying to regain his peace of mind. Benjamin looked at the paw-like branches of the pine swayed by the wind outside the window, focusing on the pulsating halo around them, and did not notice how his breathing had cohered to the same rhythm. He had a strange feeling, as if an old pine tree felt his suffering and offered help. Unable to think because of the acute pain, he, following some kind of a gut feeling, got out of the house and crawled to the pine tree, leaning his whole body against its powerful trunk. Benny saw the bluish flame around the trunk enveloping him, merging with his own light and, wave after wave, pouring its power into him.

The dark feelings built up in the heart, the majority of which was a burning resentment against Sandro, began to rise to the surface of his consciousness. Benjamin was horrified, realizing that deep inside he hated his friend so much that he wished Sandro was dead, and only the cruel pain that struck his body kept those horrendous snake-like thoughts arrested. The disease turned out to be a blessing, not a misfortune. The old pine tree seemed to be sucking the dark clouds out of him and pouring in its pure blue fire instead.

He lay by the pine tree for several hours, feeling the pain recede along with indignation, resentment and blame. When the sun began to set, he tried to rise and was glad to find out that he could get up quite easily. Hugging the pine tree, Benjamin gave his thanks for the healing and the lesson...

The next day he was almost in perfect order, the pain was gone for good. He never figured out what it was. The days were hot and dry, and from morning until night Benjamin wandered in the woods around the cottage looking at the swaying bluish lights around the huge trees and thinking about what had happened.

He recalled how destroyed he felt many years ago when Sandro took Daisy away from him. Why had he been able to forgive Alejandro then, and found it so hard to do it now?

He thought maybe because that time the most important thing remained with him – his research, the axis around which his life revolved. Now Sandro took this from him too - the most cherished, most precious dream of the scientist, perhaps his swan song. And how he did it, unexpectedly... like a traitor. After all, Benjamin had counted on him, never doubting his support.

“How could he do this to me? Why? What is his role in my life? Why does he save me, a complete stranger, from death, risking his life, just to destroy everything dear to me when I get so close to my dream? How can one who claims to be a faithful friend, almost a brother, commit such a monstrous betrayal? And where is the logic? What's the point?! Is it money? Sandro didn't see any commercial benefit in my project? But he had always supported my studies of anti-gravity, he was so interested in them...”

Benjamin did not know what to do next. Although he had some savings, he would not have been able to continue the anti-gravity research by himself. And it seemed to him a betrayal of Truth to return to the lab and work on commercial projects as a way to pass the time until retirement. Benjamin was at a dead end. He felt infinitely lonely, abandoned by everyone, but most importantly by Her. It seemed that even She, the Truth, had betrayed him...

Everything was resolved unexpectedly a few days later, when Anais arrived and, not able to conceal her joy, handed him a package with a letter from an unknown private sponsor. The letter said that their foundation became aware of Benjamin's research, and they agreed to provide him personally a donation to continue his work on anti-gravity without any restrictions, but subject to two conditions. The conditions were as follows: all work and experimental results were to  be kept strictly confidential, and the exclusive right to intellectual property were to be automatically transferred to the sponsors.

Anais looked hopefully at Benny as he read the letter and, as soon as he looked up, asked, “Are you happy, dear? Is it not a dream coming true - so many years of work without money worries?”

However, Benjamin shook his head. He was delighted by the opportunity, of course, but shared his doubts with Anais. He didn't care that his name wouldn't appear on the titles of his works. Even as an accomplished scholar, Benjamin Gladkoff was not a slave to vanity. Neither the stick nor the carrot worried him. His reward was the incomparable joy coming with flashes of insight, bringing one closer to the Truth, even if just by one tiny step. Work for him was like water and air, and waiting for honors for breathing and quenching your thirst - isn't that strange?

Anais nodded — she knew her Benny well. She herself was devoted to science, but always felt that Benny's genius was coming from a source way upstream from where she drew her inspiration. And this source was as pure as the rock crystals on the shelves in their lab. Benjamin would rather give his life than become engaged in what his conscience could not tolerate.

Benjamin continued: he had a tormenting doubt - what is this unknown foundation, how did they find out about his research, known only to a narrow circle of scientists from his center? How do these people, who are obviously ready to allocate considerable funds, intend to apply the knowledge about forces that can serve both creation and destruction, forces that can be dangerous for the mere existence of mankind and the planet, if used improperly? Until now, that which he considered possible to publish could in no way be used for malicious purposes, but what happens in future, as he penetrates deeper and deeper into the abyss of unknown energies?..

For a long time, the two of them sat together sipping tea on the veranda of the cottage, discussing what to do, and finally, it seems, came up with an idea. Benny looked at Anais while she was talking about their future with her usual zeal, and thought: how can a person ask for more from life when he has such a devoted companion, one who understands him better than he does; his twin soul whose thoughts are an echo of his own?

The age-old elms rustled around them; the air was thick with acacia fragrance and the approach of the long-awaited rain...



17. THE MYSTERIOUS SPONSOR



Benjamin left the small office of Gladkoff Laboratories, with his briefcase in hand, and got into a taxi. He was in a hurry and excited since today, at last, he was to meet with the anonymous sponsors of his research. After regularly sending sumptuous checks in response to his progress reports, they had never showed up personally in seven years.

What a pity, he thought, that Anais is not with me. “How much I miss you, Anais...” A year has passed since the day when his wife suddenly felt unwell in the lab where they still worked side by side, and decided to walk home, but never got there... The paramedics weren’t able to help, saying that her passing was instant...

Benjamin looked at his reflection in the taxi's rear-view mirror: he didn't look good. Anais's departure crippled him. An old man, with hair completely gray, his body too heavy from eating at random, and his face pale from sitting in the lab for days on end - now he had to work for two, and there was no one to rush home to.

Fate, as if in compensation for his irrevocable loss, opened up an opportunity for Benjamin for a radical breakthrough in research in the last year. True, he has not yet told the sponsors about this major breakthrough. Seven years ago in a small cottage in Connecticut, he and Anais decided that the private foundation that offered them financing would receive reports only on their discoveries that could not be used for destruction. The patented inventions, the ownership of which  Benny transferred to the sponsoring fund, were more of a by-product of his main work, but could still be used for practical purposes.

One of such inventions that were made publicly available and patented was a device for measuring the strength of the unknown energy Benny was studying. Although the presence of such energy had been postulated mathematically by  minds like James Clerk Maxwell, who called it “displacement energy”, no one could prove its existence. Since the nature of this energy was not electromagnetic, up to this day it was impossible to measure it in terms of the already-known energies.

Apparently, Benjamin and Anais succeeded in this. They patented a unique device that detected the presence of unknown energy and recorded the intensity of its radiation. The device employed the same crystals modified by exposure to radio waves which Benjamin previously reported to the Board of Governors. Essentially, due to the stresses accumulated by their “stretched” molecular lattice, such modified crystals could be used as super-sensitive amplifiers of the specific waves emitted by any object including the Earth’s crust. When a modified crystal was excited by such a wave, it reacted in a special way, and the changes occurring with its capacitance, resistance, or physical parameters could be measured by conventional methods.

As a practical application, such a detector could be used in seismography to predict earthquakes. Many researchers had attempted to create a similar device monitoring changes in electric and magnetic fields in certain strata of the earth's crust, but were not successful. Benjamin thought they looked in the wrong direction, as other types of energy were more indicative of impending tremors. It is widely known that animals are the best predictors of earthquakes. Benjamin and Anais suggested that it was due to their specific sensitivity to emissions of the same unknown energy amplified in some locations of the earth's crust at the onset of quakes.

The anxiety demonstrated by many animals before and during solar eclipses could also be caused by a sudden change in intensity of this energy received by the Earth from the Sun.

Such sensitivity is also found in humans, albeit rarely. Benjamin concluded that it underlies the gift of dowsers. A dowser reacts not only to the intensity of this radiation, but also to differences in its frequency. Such a person is able to sense an object among a mass of other material, since his physical body is a kind of bio-detector. The ability to sense unexplored energy by dowsers is essentially similar to the ability of sensitive people like Benny to see it as light - the only difference is in the way the signal is decoded by the brain...

...The taxi stopped by Hotel Bonaparte, and Benjamin, having paid the driver, went to the hotel restaurant, where the sponsors were waiting for him in a private banquet room. He knew this old hotel in the heart of Montreal very well: because of its first-class French cuisine, Sandro used to stay at Hotel Bonaparte when he came to town on business or just to meet Benny. Benjamin did reconnect with Sandro after that incident at the Board seven years ago, but their relationship remained a bit cold, and Alejandro, citing his busyness at work, has since not come to Montreal. The solid-wood carved door opened to the luxurious private banquet room with a fitting name “Gardens of Eden”, where polished silver cutlery glittered on a huge table covered with a crispy white tablecloth, and candlelight danced in the crystal of glasses. Benjamin thought that the sponsors’ choice of hotel was an interesting coincidence. But where is the promised team of sponsors?

There was only one person in the room, sitting with his back turned to Benjamin - an elderly man with a gray beard and short white hair. Sending a glittering spark from his gold-rimmed spectacles, the man turned to face Benjamin. It was none other than Sandro! Skinnier and aged since their last meeting but still elegant, there he was, his friend Alejandro Pretorius Ramirez.

The scientist had not expected such a turn of events. Benjamin's initial reaction, together with the shock, was the realization how much he missed Sandro all this time despite the resentment hidden somewhere in the folds of his memory, and how delighted he was to see him again. As soon as he saw Sandro, even a slightest trace of past battles disappeared from his heart. Not hesitating a second, Benny rushed to his friend, who stood up and opened his arms to hug him, and for a few moments two old friends stood, embracing, wiping away their tears behind the glasses.

“Getting old, brother,” Alejandro said finally, “you’ve never been sentimental before”.

“Look who's talking! You have been even less so! What are you doing here, Sandro? How did you find out about the meeting with sponsors?”

A smile so familiar from many years ago appeared on Sandro's face:

“Benny, all the sponsors are here, no one else is coming.”

Staring at his friend in confusion and trying to wrap his head around what he had just heard, Benjamin, after a pause, slapped himself on the forehead:

“Oh, I'm an old fool!.. I should have guessed long ago that there were no miracles. But how could that be? All this time, Anais knew that it was your money?..”

“Of course. She was the one who came up with the idea. Anais was a woman of a sober mind, but of an earnest heart, and with all that heart she loved you, Benny. You were mad with anger, and would not have even deigned to listen to me then, after the Board meeting. If I had offered you help, you would have refused in the heat of the moment, and time would have been wasted. So knowing you I didn't call you, but I did call Anais and explained everything to her. At the council, I voted against funding for your project because, thanks to my connections, I knew that some organizations that you should avoid at all cost would become interested in it. The center where you worked was too transparent for them. I knew you would again consider me a scoundrel and a traitor, but I had no right to put the results of your work at risk. We needed to withdraw your research to a private laboratory, so that no one except you, me and Anais knew about their essence. I created a fund from which you received a letter, and you know the rest. Anais kept me updated on what you were really doing, and I was impressed how fast you were moving, Benny. We applied or sold some of your patents, but you know they were just the cherries on the cake. The main goal was something else. Anais and I should have told you everything before, but things went on so well, and we decided to leave it as it is. And then she left us..."

“Sandro, it’s all right. You have no idea how far I advanced since Anais passed away. I have replicated the Kowsky and Frost's experiment completely and obtained the same result! Sandro, I am developing practical details of a method, which will allow objects of certain materials to become weightless and levitate upon transferring a certain amount of charge to them. Do you see what this means?!”

“Wait, brother. You will update me on everything, and I also have to tell you a lot. It will be a long conversation, just let's have our dinner first. Malbec? They keep a good one here from a hundred-year-old vine...”

Dinner was served - it turned out that Alejandro remembered Benny's favorite French dishes: onion soup with croutons, goose pate, and Quebec crepes  with honey.

“How come after so many years, Sandro, you still remember what I like?”

“All these years, Benny, since that incident on the lake, there has not been a single day in my life when I would forget about you.”

The Dionysian ambrosia from the vineyards of Argentina sparkled like a ruby through the crystal glasses; the taste of Malbec nostalgically reminded Benjamin of his and Sandro's evening conversations in Cambridge. How young and full of life they were then! He looked at his aged friend and could not help noticing how much weight he lost and those unhealthy shadows under his eyes. But it wasn't even that bothering Benny. The bright radiance that he used to see around Sandro's fit figure was, as it were, torn in many places and dimmed like a candle flame that was about to be gone from a gust of wind. An alarming guess flashed through his mind, and Benjamin was afraid to receive a confirmation of it.

Finally, he braced himself:

“Sandro, are you telling me everything now, because...”

“Yes, you got it right, brother. There is very little time left before my return Home. I knew about my condition all along. Doctors only confirmed what I have known for a long time. When I tell you that which I am about to say, you will stop grieving for me. I’ve lived long enough for a human being and had everything a mortal can dream of, and I’ve got nothing to complain about. I’ve passed the business to my three sons; my two daughters are married and doing fine; Daisy will have everything she needs. But I must take care of the most important things in my life: you and your research. According to my will, the foundation will provide your lab with sufficient funds for fifteen years.”

“Who can know, Sandro, if I’ve got these fifteen years? And what’s in it for you, brother? Why don't you leave this money to your children, grandchildren? Who are you, Sandro, what kind of a guarding angel are you, and why do you care about my research?” Benjamin felt how grief squeezes his heart, how his only friend was painfully dear to him, and how deeply he had always loved Sandro despite the fact that the hardest blows in Benny’s life came from him. Benny thought that true friendship is the purest kind of love: unconditional, timeless and overcoming not only a discordance, but even death itself.

“You have exactly fifteen more years, Benny, but please let me tell you everything in due order. More Malbec?”



18. THE NIGHT OF REVELATIONS


Benjamin felt strange; what was happening seemed unreal to him. As his eyes lost some focus from the wine, the outlines of objects became blurry. They transitioned into the sparkling fields of light around the silver and a dim glow around everything else. Alcohol always had this effect on Benjamin, enhancing his ability to move into his “second vision”; however, the next morning he always felt a bit exhausted as if deprived of energy. While Sandro was refilling his glass, Benjamin listened to his friend's voice, which was unusually deep as if coming from within:

“Do you remember, Benny, how you told me of your childhood dreams about the Guardian?”

“I certainly do,” Benjamin answered. “But I stopped seeing those soon after you saved me on the lake, remember?”

“You bet, Benny. It was the day when I remembered everything. I don't know why that happened – because of the icy water, the nearness of death, or something else, but then, when I was trying to pull you out and had almost gone under the ice, my perception suddenly seemed to have split. In one part of it I saw both of us in the cold black water, and in the other part you and I were in another place, close to the Guardian.”

“Sandro, I remember the amazing golden glow around your head when you were dragging me out of the water. Until that day, I had not seen anything even remotely similar. I thought it ought to be due to the shock...”

“No, you saw my remembering, Benny. I saw the place from where you and I came here, the place we call Home. I saw the Design that you and I had to implement here. It was... it was as if I had been wandering in the dark not knowing my way, and then someone suddenly and forcefully pushed me into the light, and what appeared before my eyes took my breath away.”

After a pause, Alejandro continued:

“In the place we call Home the Guardian had no form, but was like a river of iridescent light, the light also being the highest consciousness, and each stream of it was a thought that we understood. We did not feel the Guardian separate from ourselves - we were one, but there were more energy, consciousness and experience in them than in you and I. It was as if neurons in the brain were talking to the nerve cells of the fingers. In a sense, they are one, and yet they are different. You and I didn't look like we do now. We did not have separate bodies similar to human ones... and yet they were merged streams of my experience and yours, I recognized both of us, without a doubt... In earthly time, this vision on the lake lasted only a moment, but in another dimension it seemed that an eternity had passed. I saw the Guardian's assignment, the entire Design, and our joint decision to take it on...”

From the monotonous sound of Sandro's voice combined with the effect of wine he had drunk, Benjamin imperceptibly crossed the border between the room in the Hotel Bonaparte and the space on the edge of consciousness where he transitioned to in his childhood dreams. That which was stored somewhere in the depths of the memory surfaced again becoming alive:

...Proctor and Vencius were contemplating the message from the Guardian:

“…The problem with segment 984, however, is that the Guardians no longer have a full-access channel there. All we’ve got are several partial access channels. There are three possible channels of communication with Home, but all without access to the Archives. There are also sixteen channels of access to the Archives, but their connection to Home is highly unreliable. They can only be used in combination - one channel of communication with Home and one with access to the Archives. This will increase the chances of preparing the Breakthrough in the 986th segment...”

“Benny, do you hear me?” Sandro was shaking him. Benjamin came back to his senses again at the restaurant table.

“Yes, just now I remembered what the Guardian was saying in those dreams,” Benjamin replied. “And now, it seems, I added two and two together. Among the available windows of opportunities, we chose the one where two complementary channels were opened at the same time. We chose yours among the communication channels because, among other things, it ensured access to material resources. And don't tell me you didn't like that genetic matrix, Proctor!”

“I did truly like it, Vencius, but your matrix was also a rare combination: you took the ability to see unusual energies from your mother, even though these genes remained almost dormant in her; from your father you inherited the mindset of a scientist”.

“Yes... It is just that the Channel of Access to the Archives with the appropriate genes entrusted to me was the only one available, and some tuning was required. In all available windows of opportunities of the 984th segment there were many difficulties: wars, revolutions, pandemics, so we had to increase the support group. Part of the group had never been activated, but the other was quite involved: my family, those who saved my parents from typhus and helped them leave Russia, who assisted in securing a job for my father in France, then helped us to emigrate from war to the States, then allowed me to escape another war - to Canada... Professor McKevitt, Anais - they were also in our group... I just realized that a three-hundred-year-old pine tree in Connecticut that healed me, and even a bear cub that I met on the way from the waterfall who taught me a lesson – all of them were also part of the support.”

“They weren't, Vencius, they are in our group. Some are still here, some have already returned Home, since their role here was over, and they are now employed in other segments again.”

“Tell me, Proctor, why did you look so lost when you remembered everything on the lake? Seeing it was so unusual, your insolent grin was way more familiar. I even felt sorry for you then, as strange as it sounds.”

“You see, Vencius, at that moment both of our destinies were revealed to me - just like you and I saw them at Home studying windows of possibilities. I saw how closely our lives were intertwined. I remembered that our meeting was part of the Design, which my human self was not able to change. The life of a rich slacker, which I had led solely for my own pleasure to that day, had to change radically. Of course, under the Law of Free Will established for Version 1.3.7., I could reject my participation in the Design, but this would entail irreparable consequences. My task was to support you with everything I possessed and to protect you from wrong steps, because the Design was opened to me, but only you were the channel that could implement it. Your link to the Archives was already evident then.”

“I also saw all the situations in the future in which I would have to hurt you, Benny. I realized that I would have to take away from you what at that moment would seem to you the most desirable, but in fact would be an obstacle to the realization of the purpose of your life, your role in the Design. If I had not taken Daisy away from you, you would have married her, and, perhaps, you would have been as happy in life as a human being can be, become a professor, a good one like Elijah McKevitt... But earthly cares would have put an end to your participation in the Design. You would not have met Anais from the support group who was intended to help you according to the Design, and without her dedication, your projects would have remained unfulfilled. Back then on the lake, the whole weight of suffering that I had to inflict on you fell on me, and you saw its reflection on my face. And the most painful thing was that all these years I could not, did not have the right, under a threat of recall, to reveal to you the Design and my role in it until my time came to an end. You can't even imagine, Benny, how hard the role of Judas can be. But you know that we have no right to violate the rules of interference...”

Benjamin took off his glasses, which fogged up, and rubbed his eyes and forehead with his hands.

“Forgive me, Proctor, for hating you, for considering you a traitor. And thank you again for saving my life.”

“And you forgive me, Vencius, for everything that you went through because of me”.

“By the way, do you know where these names, Proctor and Vencius came from?”

“Yes. These were the earthly names of two members of the support group whom we were on our first mission to implement the Design in Version 1.3.7. At that time we were two monks in segment 983, which by the standards of local chronology belongs to the Middle Ages. I was Scottish and you came from Bohemia. We both spent most of our lives at the Roslyn Temple near Edinburgh. Roslyn was the powerhouse of Scottish Knights Templar founded by Earl William Sinclair. We were a small part of an extensive support group for several key channels, the Implementers of the Design. All our life we had been making devices, searching for and preparing materials for alchemical experiments. This was our participation in the Design. According to that Design, we did not have access to the Archives then; we were just mastering the role of channels... After that assignment, we started calling each other by those names - Proctor and Vencius.”

“Our present names sound similar to those, don't they?”

“The sound of a name is a mysterious area, and all I can tell you, dear Benny, is that the vibration of a name — I mean the real names brought from Home — is more than a disturbance of air. And who knows, maybe someone whispers them to our parents when they give us names here in Version 1.3.7...”

“Sandro, but what kind of a connection could there be between alchemy and what I am doing now?”

“You’ll be surprised, Benny, but alchemists work with the same energy that you see as a radiance emanating from all things. Now you are trying to study it and use it technically. And the alchemists learned to condense it in a perfect medium and turned it into an elixir of life, which they called the Philosophers’ Stone. The devices that you and I were working on while in Roslyn were used by another monk - an alchemist, who was a channel with access to the Archives, and who became adept and accomplished the Great Work. The elixir or Philosophers’ Stone obtained by the adept was later distributed to all the Templars powerhouses in Europe: such was the Design. The name of the adept, like the names of many other alchemists, remained unknown in human history, but it is well known back there, at Home. In our current segment, the alchemical work has been deliberately suspended, but the results of the adepts' efforts in the 983rd will be used in another segment through the Bridge of Time.”

“Do you remember, Sandro, once in our student years we talked about how nice it would be to go to Scotland? Now I understand why both of us have always been attracted to that place.”

“Yes. On the southern wall of Roslyn there was a stone carving in Latin: ‘Forte est vinum, fortior est rex, fortiores sunt mulieres: super omnia vincit veritas’ – ‘Wine is strong, the king is stronger, women are stronger yet, but the Truth conquers all.’ When I was in Scotland on business, I went to Roslyn and made sure it was still there. It was the only inscription in the entire temple; the rest of the wall space is still filled with stone carvings and symbols. When once I saw the last part of that biblical aphorism engraved on a bronze tablet in your lab, I thought you remembered.”

“No, Sandro, I didn't remember –  but apparently something broke through from the subconscious, bypassing reason. This phrase has always struck me as strangely familiar. Where is it from?”

“It is from the apocryphal Old Testament parable about the Persian king Darius. Once, a dispute arose between the three bodyguards of Darius about the strongest thing  in the world. They decided to write down their assumptions and ask the king to resolve their dispute. After reading what they wrote, Darius gathered his entourage and ordered each of the three young men to substantiate their opinion in front of everyone. The first bodyguard said that wine was the strongest of all, because it darkened the mind and made the state of a king and a beggar, a slave and a freeman the same, so that a person did not remember either sadness or duty, did not think about the king, or about the satrap, or about friendship or brotherhood. Then the second bodyguard came forward and said that the king is stronger than all, because he ruled over people and commanded them, and if he sent them marching against the enemies, then they went and killed, and they were killed themselves, but did not violate the royal order; if they won, they brought all the spoils to the king. The third bodyguard named Zerubbabel, who was a Jewish prince from the lineage of David and Solomon, said that although the king was great and the wine was strong, women still ruled over all, because they gave birth to a king and all the people, and people could not live without them. People strive to collect gold and silver, he said, and then they see a beautiful woman and give her everything. A man clings to his wife and does not remember his father, mother, or his country. The king, great in power, allowed his beloved concubine to remove the crown from his head and put it on herself, and he looked at her with his mouth open; therefore, women are truly stronger than the king himself. But the wine, the king, and the women will pass away, like everything on earth, and the Truth will remain forever, and there is nothing stronger than the Truth. And when Zerubbabel fell silent, everyone acknowledged that he was right, and Darius rewarded him and appointed him to sit next to the king... That's the story, Benny.”

“You do realize, Sandro, that in Roslyn “wine”, “women”, and “the king” all had different meanings that what we usually understand by these words? And this phrase itself had a completely different connotation?”

“Of course, brother. But to understand this one needs to be able to read not by letters, but by images in stone. And that is a completely different conversation...”

...The wine was finished; the candles were burning out in an old candelabrum with the monogram of the Hotel Bonaparte, spreading a sweet mixture of jasmine and wax scents. The friends fell silent. Alejandro looked thoughtful and tired.

“Too much for one evening, isn’t it, Sandro... May I ask you just one last question?” Benjamin said.

“Of course, old man. I am at your service.”

“Did you really love Daisy?”

Alejandro smiled, and his face brightened for the first time in the evening, becoming carefree as in his youth:

“Of course, brother. I've really loved all the girls I had. In this sense, you and I have always been different. Daisy is a wonderful woman and mother. Trust me; I did everything to make her happy. It was easy! I have a big heart, you know. Why are you asking this now? Is the old resentment still there?"

“No, Sandro. I wanted to hear exactly what you said: that she was happy. As for me... You remembered that inscription on the Roslyn’s wall just now. Women, no doubt, have a power over us that is the strongest in this world, beyond that of wine and even of the king... But Truth, my brother, conquers all”.



19. THE APOGEE



After that day, Benjamin and Sandro spent a whole week together. They even went to Cambridge, wandering in places they had not been since the time they left the alma-mater. Benjamin had a strange mixed feeling: the same streets, the same buildings, but something was wrong... The Cambridge of their youth was left in memories and dreams, and the realization that there was no return to those premises echoed with an ache inside. The time of Cambridge no longer belonged to them; other young men and women have become its owners, and now they laughed, cried, loved and hoped in the space of their memories. So he and Sandro were like guests in other people's dreams... Benjamin felt this so strongly, walking the familiar alleys and paths. It seemed to him that while doing so, he was bit by bit collecting the traces, the living sparks he left in the corridors of time... to leave this time-space clear for the young men and women who would come after.

In the short time left to him Alejandro was eager to share with Benny what he knew about the Design and the Guardian, everything he carried in him but had to hide all these years of their friendship, so that the rules of intervention were not broken. Benjamin listened to Sandro in silence, absorbing the last reflections of the flame about to be extinguished and trying to comprehend the complexity of the Design which was now left for him alone to complete...

Sandro went back to Buenos Aires, and two months later, Benjamin received a letter from a law firm dealing with the affairs of the Ramirez family. He was informed that, according to the will of the late Alejandro Pretorius Ramirez, all assets of the research foundation the latter founded were transferred to the full disposal of the Gladkoff Laboratories. Attached to the letter was an envelope with Sandro’s photo from forty years ago: magnificent eyes, a wave of hair bleached by the sun on his forehead, and the signature smile of the winner on his handsome tanned face. On the back of the photo was a note in Sandro’s handwriting: “Don't be sad. See you, Vencius!”

...Benjamin looked at this photograph hanging in a frame on the lab’s wall next to the picture of Anais. It was a short respite, after which he returned to the monitor connected to the laser encoder that now contained the most important material in his life. Benjamin checked the text that he had composed in three languages known to him, for probably the hundredth time now:

“My name is Benjamin Gladkoff, and I am writing this message to future generations in my Montreal laboratory, in the year 2008 from the birth of Christ. Sitting at the computer, I watch the lines of force passing through the entire room and going further into infinity. The slight bend these white lines take as they go around the bookcase and radiator as they permeate these objects is a familiar sight. I know that this phenomenon is constant, repeatable, and therefore a physical phenomenon.

Although I perceive this energy due to some innate specifics of my vision, the phenomenon itself is not mental, but physical. The bookcase has its own energy field, which, unlike the white lines, is an individual field around a physical object. In this field of the bookcase, I distinguish four colors: blue, green, orange and red. The impact of white lines always makes the local field of objects strive upward, where at the highest point there is a local diffusion of the field, a release of energy. In my research, I have found that this local field is a treasure trove of various phenomena and the hope for future science.

Many people see or feel a local field around objects and call it aura. The aura is also present around the human body - its state reflects human health. Things like concentration of thought, intensity of emotions, sincerity or evasiveness of a person can also be observed in changes of their aura. I found that a certain, rather narrow range of frequencies of this energy carries biological information, and it is in this range where the communication among all types of organic life, including human life, takes place.

All people see light and feel heat or electrical discharges. This is how the built-in bio-monitors of various types of energies - thermal, electromagnetic, etc. work. As we sense them, we consider these types of energy “real”. Sensitive people like me who sense or see energy fields around objects simply have bio-monitors with a wider range. The energies we feel are no less real, and I have dedicated my life to proving their existence experimentally.

Like electricity, the energy creating the aura of objects is real. It can be measured, condensed, modulated, and it can pass through any physical barrier. In fact, humanity has long been familiar with it. Ancient civilizations, including the builders of pyramids and megaliths, knew about the existence of this energy and used its various manifestations. Their technologies, which are by now almost completely lost, were based on this energy. The ancients created devices from a huge mass of dielectric that captured and accumulated this energy in a dynamic system. Various geometries and shapes given to the devices have been used for its focused emission or modulation.

Besides, metaphysicians, sorcerers, alchemists and theurgists of all races and civilizations also worked with a variety of this energy that is called bio-energy.

The possibilities for the future use of this energy are innumerable. Like electricity, it will change the world through inventions that are merely at a cradle stage in our times. Clerk Maxwell hypothesized the existence of this energy through his mathematical equations, supposing it played a role in generation of electricity. He called it “displacement energy” with a neutral charge, but his contemporaries were never able to confirm its existence experimentally.

I was able to do this by developing a detector of this energy. In addition, a coherent beam of this energy was obtained in my laboratory, resembling the one generated by lasers. This energy can pass through the earth, generating electricity without a moving device. And finally, I managed to accumulate it in a dielectric to a state where it was capable of causing anti-gravity phenomena.
There is no doubt about the benefits that humanity can get from the study of gravity, but with a careless approach, the use of this energy can also be dangerous. I believe that although at present the humanity is not ready to fully explore it, in the future, our species will be able to be responsible users of new technologies; therefore I leave this “laser tablet” to you, future generations.

I am now ready to reveal the nature of this energy for those who can continue this research. I believe that space and time are linked by energetic relationships creating the fabric of all things through the white lines of force. These lines of force pass through the mass and cause vibrations known as gravitational waves. This energy is radiated by the mass at frequencies corresponding to its constituent elements. It is this radiation that a sensitive person sees and feels. What do they perceive when they do - gravity, bio-energy, or ether? My experiments have shown that all these energies are interconnected.

Gravity is not only the force about which we know that it keeps us on Earth, moves planets and suns in their orbits. It is a much more complex kind of power, the activity of which manifests on many levels. What we call bio-energy is also a type of gravity: it radiates from living masses as energy accumulated by the mass, but always remains free - not encompassed, but all-encompassing. No molecule could exist without the help of gravity, and yet that energy, in which we exist like fish in water, is very different from our idea of it. Gravity is the cause of parapsychological and psychic phenomena, and at the same time, due to it, electrons can flow in a wire. One kind of mass may be very different from another, but in some fundamental ways, they are remarkably similar.

The seemingly “empty” space is permeated with energy. It is a tempestuous sea of endless waves, although our perception tells us otherwise. My working hypothesis was that in the energy permeating “empty space”, three kinds of forces were in equilibrium: magnetism, electricity, and gravity. And as a result of my entire life’s work, I have a reason to assert that mastering any of the three forces is no more difficult than this: if you find a way to control two of the three, then you can control the third. Controlling the forces of gravity is the next giant step for humankind. This power can be measured; it can be used for good. Its use must once again become an integral part of human technologies.

The problem of studying gravity in its natural manifestations was extremely difficult until I understood the effect of geometric shapes. Any mass creates gravitational waves, but the specific characteristics of the mass determine its inherent resistance (impedance) and determine the points at which the gravitational energy will be concentrated. This is why the geometrical shape of an object is so important. Each physical object is a kind of gravitational antenna producing a field of concentrated gravity at key points in its geometric structure. These points are defined by proportions and ratios.

After many years of experiments, I have come to a conclusion that both in a solid and a hollow mass, the ratio of its sides’ length will determine its effectiveness in the concentration of gravitational energy. The optimal ratio I found was one where the ratio is 1.618034, or, in other words, when the Golden Ratio is present between the sides. The geometric mean of the impedance matching is also equal to the Golden Ratio of 1.618034. Thus, objects created based on the proportion of the Golden Ratio ensure maximum energy transfer to the key points of their geometric structure.

Having now finished with the introductory part, I will proceed to the quintessence of my whole life’s work and provide a description of the experiments with the related schemes and calculations...”

Finally, after checking everything one more time and satisfied with the work done, Benjamin took off his glasses and, rubbing his eyes, red from looking at the screen, said to himself, as it had become a habit for him over the past fifteen years: “Soon, my dears... Almost done now... Just one last touch left, the most important one.”

Tomorrow Benny Gladkoff was to fly to the homeland of his ancestors, to St. Petersburg, to participate in a scientific conference. But the conference was just an excuse. The main purpose was quite different.

...A sphinx made of red granite to his order was almost ready and waiting for him in a sculptor's workshop not far from the center of St. Petersburg. The sculpture of a reposing lion with a human head in a pharaoh's tiara, reminiscent of the Egyptian sphinxes on the University Embankment of that city, was intended as a gift to one of St. Petersburg’s universities where Benjamin's father once studied. The university was preparing to celebrate its anniversary, and Benny's sculptural gift with the anniversary date engraved on its pedestal together, with the Latin inscription “Super Omnia Vincit Veritas” –  “The Truth conquers all” - was accepted with gratitude.

The young sculptor opened the door for him, offering tea with Russian dry pretzels and jam. Benjamin felt strange speaking Russian, as this had happened so rarely since the time he left his parents for Cambridge. In addition, he no longer understood many of the words that his host used; his language was so hopelessly archaic, and he often had to ask the sculptor to repeat what he said. The young man could not help but smile when an occasional hundred-year-old word popped up in Benjamin's speech. Despite these little confusions, his mother tongue and St. Petersburg itself with its people evoked a warm and cozy feeling in Benjamin, although he had never been to this country where his family came from.

“I have done everything as you asked”, the young man said, showing Benjamin to the second floor of the workshop, where he had sculptures in varying degrees of completeness, among which stood a majestic sphinx. “Look at his left eye, Mr. Gladkoff.”

The left pupil of the sphinx was empty. Inside it was a hollow the size of a large orange. Benjamin fetched a velvet pouch from his old leather bag, from where he took out a sphere of transparent crystal.

“Is it quartz?” The sculptor asked.

“No, this crystal was grown artificially. You see, I am eighty one years old, and seventy of them were dedicated to crystals. The quintessence of my life’s work is encoded in this crystal, part of me, so to speak. Do you know why the ancient Egyptians made the right pupil of sculptural portraits from precious stones and left the left eye socket empty?"

“No, I have never heard of it.”

“Some argue that the sculptors of ancient Egypt did this on purpose. The latter believed that if the portrait perfectly resembled the original, part of the person's soul would stay in the sculpture. So they always left a little incompleteness.”

“There is something in this, Mr. Gladkoff. Sometimes sculptures seem eerily alive. It makes it even stranger, why you want to do this? Aren't you scared?”

“I am an old man, dear. If I am afraid of something, it is that I won’t be able to complete what I must complete. Maybe I want a part of my soul to stay here in this stone sphinx at the university, among the young and talented? What do you say to this?” Benjamin smiled as if turning the dialogue into a joke.

“Well, in that case, please go ahead,” smiling back, the sculptor pushed a ladder to the sphinx.

Taking the crystal, Benjamin carefully climbed the steps of the folding ladder and, reaching up to the face of the mythical creature, inserted the transparent sphere into the left eye socket. It fit there perfectly – its size, of course, was verified in advance. After descending to the floor again, Benjamin looked at the sphinx once more and felt satisfied. “Now there is part of me in it,” he said as if to himself, this time without a smile.

The sculptor took a round piece of the same red granite, and, having covered it with a special resin along the edges, inserted it into the eye socket of the sphinx, so that the crystal was firmly walled up inside. Both eyes now looked exactly the same.

“Is the part fixed securely, you think?” Benjamin asked.

“Don't worry, Mr. Gladkoff, it will stand for centuries”.

...The conference was over, and before leaving the country, Benjamin decided to visit the granite sphinx one more time. It has already been installed on a pedestal with all the appropriate ceremonies during the celebration of the anniversary. A mysterious stone statue proudly towered over the flocks of cheerful, anxious, hurrying students, as befits a creature who is never in a hurry. After all, its term is eternity.

Feeling very tired, Benjamin sat down on a bench opposite the sphinx. The morning sun, reflecting off the smoothly polished stone, blinded him, and he took off his glasses and closed his eyes. Against the familiar bluish background with dancing blue and white sparks, he suddenly saw an expanding patch of the brightest light. This spot grew until finally everything before Benjamin's eyes was flooded with light. It was not the light of the sun, but a light emanating from sparks of consciousness. That living light was full of eyes, and those eyes looked directly at Benjamin, right into his eyes, with unspeakable love and yearning for a reunion. Finally, a blinding light embraced him, wrapping him from head to toe. Vencius did not see the faces, but he recognized whose eyes they were, and his heart trembled in anticipation of the long-awaited reconnection. From somewhere inside emerged a line from the long-forgotten tango of his youth:

Who knows why an April breeze never remains?
Why stars in the trees hide when it rains?

The heavy-rimmed glasses slipped out of the hand of a blissfully smiling old man sitting on the bench, hit the stone pavement, and each of its tiny sparkling fragments was a reflection of the sun, as pure as that which does not set over this city in the white nights of summer...



20. SEGMENT 986



Proctor and Vencius attended to the communication by the Guardian of the Design:

“Excellent work in segment 984, Implementers! The chances of the Breakthrough in 986 increased to 8/9... Even better than we had hoped. Now, in order to facilitate the implementation of the Design to Segment 1369 from 986 via the Time Bridge, we only need a few reliable additional channels in 986”.

The Guardian was searching through possible communication channels opportunities. Proctor and Vencius waited patiently.

“There is only one option available with the desired combination of channels available at the same time, but three channels must work together there...”
The Guardian pointed to someone who has just joined the communication:

“Let me introduce you to a new Implementer. You must remember their impeccable work of supporting you both in the 984th segment...”

“Anais!!!” Proctor and Vencius flashed with the joy of recognition.

“If the newly appointed Implementer has no objections, you can all use this name in your future work”.

“No objections”, the new Implementer beamed with light. “Welcome back Home, beloved hearts! And to the new beginning!..”

The Guardian paused while the old friends reunited and exchanged greetings and then continued:

“However, there are some specifics with the genetic matrices available to us in segment 986... And according to the Law of Free Will established for Version 1.3.7, I leave it up to you to take on this task or not...”


EPILOGUE


Anna led six-year-old Wenceslawa through the Stone City. Today was a day off in the school garden, and she decided to show her daughter the place where their archaeological expedition was currently working.

No one lived in the Stone City for a long time, except for the birds; the ruins of the steel-and-concrete age were demolished at the inception of the bio-carbon era, and only ancient stone buildings and temples remained. On the other hand, the Stone City has always been flooded with tourists curious about what the cities looked like a millennium ago. They wandered along the narrow streets lined with stone between the houses that looked like multi-tiered cells. Cities with their overpopulation, electro-smog, pollution and a way of life that is far from natural for humans have remained only in the historical annals. The population of the Earth has long ago naturally stabilized to a size that did not upset the planetary balance.

The remains of the once majestic buildings of the Stone City towered as a tiny island among the sea of gardens, forests and parks, interspersed with crystal-clear rivers, lakes and small ponds with fish and waterfowl. Bridges of lightweight and durable carbon polymer rose above the reservoirs. Old railways and bridges still remained here and there only as historical artifacts; the time of steel-and-concrete structures - cumbersome, rapidly decaying and harmful to human health - was long gone. It happened at the same epoch when the last power plants were shut down and the ground was cleared of rusting pipes and wires. It was in the same century when weapons were banned and destroyed on the entire planet, and they stopped burning fossils from the bowels of the Earth.
 
Among the gardens, pastures, flower beds and vegetable gardens, one could see flying birds, running hares, deer roaming in flocks. Lush vegetation concealed neatly-shaped houses: some of them looked like hemispheres, some like tents or wigwams, others like halves of an egg. No angular shapes impeding the natural flow of energy were seen. Among the living quarters, there were buildings resembling beehive cells surrounded by greenery: these were the classrooms of garden schools for kids and teenagers, among which some classes were for children of mixed ages. Grass and sand playgrounds and self-cleaning water pools stretched around the school gardens.

The outer walls of houses were covered with panels that contained fluorescent microalgae converting light into energy dozens of times better than the old solar panels. The interior walls were coated with cyanobacteria generating energy from the light entering the house. Each house had support modules attached to it. One of the modules collected used water and rainwater, which was purified by electroactive bacteria, then filtered and recycled. The electroactive microorganisms purifying the water produced energy at the same time. This energy, through living networks also consisting of bacteria conducting electricity, charged live batteries that powered the house. Organic waste was sent to a special container, where it was composted for the garden around each house. Waste was also treated with special bacteria in combination with oxygen. It was the age of domesticated microcosm...

Paths and highways were laid between houses lined with “self-healing” cement, which contained special microorganisms. When it rained or snowed, these microbes produced calcite, filling the cracks in the cement. Potholes in the streets remained only in the Stone City as a historical feature.

Having stuck her foot in one of these potholes of the stone pavement as she was turning her head left and right, Wenceslawa almost fell down, but Anna held her hand tightly. Inside the Stone City, self-driving vehicles were not allowed; it was a pedestrian zone and the land of archaeologists, so Anna and her daughter had to walk to the excavation site.

“Mom, will you surely show me that lion with a man’s head you dug up?”

“Of course, Venya. I just don't see why you had to walk with me through these potholes, since you have already looked at all the holograms of our sphinx in the school garden?"

“Because those holograms were wrong, that's why.”

“Why do you think so? I made the hologram myself. How do you know if it is wrong, dear?”

“I saw it in a dream when I was very little, before the school garden, and again now when you told me you found it.”

“What did you see in your dream, honey?” Anna was puzzled.

“The sphinx. It has a transparent ball in his eye”.

“Maybe you dreamed of another sphinx, Venya, the one from the museum? Ours is made of a large whole piece of granite, you know, a red kind of stone? And there is no crystal ball in it”.

“No, Mom, it is the same sphinx, I know. I'll show you where the ball is hidden...”

...In the evening of that day, after returning home and putting Wenceslawa to bed, Anna entered the virtual room to once again view the ultrasound images of the sphinx taken today. Anna said today's date and the word “sphinx”, and the images she needed began to appear on the polymer film covering the walls of the room like a screen. Pointing to what she was looking for, she instructed the system to create a hologram. A three-dimensional image of the ultrasound scans immediately appeared next to her. It was hard to believe, but her daughter seemed to be right: a round object was clearly visible on the hologram in the place where the left eye socket of the stone statue was located. How did she fail to scan the artifact with ultrasound right after she found it?

Having seen the sphinx this morning, Wenceslawa immediately pointed to its left eye: “The ball is there!” Anna had noticed a very thin gap around the stone pupil sealed with some resin before, but did not attach much importance to it.

Anna realized long ago that her daughter was an unusual child. Wenceslawa had strange dreams about three characters named Vencius, Proctor and someone else, but Anna attributed everything to childhood fantasies. However, today's incident struck her and made her think. Besides, being a passionate archaeologist, Anna was dying to find out what that mysterious sphere was! Judging by the ultrasound scan, the density of the object was close to that of a stone. Tomorrow she will try to extract the round object and find out what it is...

“Looks like a crystal of lithium niobate, most likely with an admixture of iron,” such was the verdict of Anna’s brother Proclus, an experimental scientist who examined the bluish sphere from the eye socket of the sphinx. “It was artificially grown, which means that it was put there not earlier than the twentieth century, according to the old chronology. The crystal could be used to record information. They had this kind of technology back in the steel-and-concrete age until they began to use biopolymers for data storage and processing”, Proclus pointed to a small container in the wall of the virtual room, where its “brain” was located. “No wonder, carbon intelligence is way more flexible and mobile than silicon one and requires less energy in the conditions of Earth; otherwise, why would the nature here choose it for organic life?”

“Do you think someone recorded a message on the crystal?” Anna was excited.
“Would you be able to read it?”

“Well, in theory nothing is impossible. Have we not decoded the records on the Mitchell-Hedges crystal skull? I'll search in our technical archives tomorrow; perhaps I can find drawings of old laser decoders that should be stored there somewhere...”

...Proclus wearily got down on the couch, which immediately took on his body shape. Reclining, he freed his lower body from a chitinous exoskeleton controlled by impulses from the nervous system that helped him to move. Due to a birth defect, he could not walk on his own.

“Deciphered records from a crystal,” pronounced Proclus, and multiple diagrams and drawings appeared on the screens around him, with formulas and explanations written in three European languages of the steel-and-concrete age. Trying to comprehend them, Proclus sat up with excitement. “Is this really true? How can that be?.. These texts, of course, need to be shown to historians of technology... and linguists, so that they can help translate them... “

But it was already clear to him that right in front of his eyes was the missing part of the puzzle he had been trying to solve for years. Geometry! He must try to apply the proportions that the unknown researcher wrote about, especially those where he used the Golden Ratio. Perhaps thanks to them, Proclus would finally obtain the desired key to anti-gravity. Not just his own key, but a pass for all of the humankind to its freedom from gravity, to interstellar flights. Opening the path to the stars was Proclus’ childhood dream. He could not walk, and all the more so he wanted to fly. It was that dream of overcoming gravity that led him to the science lab.

He heard the voice of Wenceslawa calling out to him.

“I’m listening, little one,” Proclus answered, and a three-dimensional image of his beloved niece appeared sitting next to him on the couch.

“Are these the drawings from that ball that Mom and I found in the Stone City, in the sphinx? Mom told me you could read what is written on it”.

“Yes, those drawings. But how did you know?”

“I recognized them. They were from my dreams too”.
Proclus laughed.

“From those strange dreams of Guardians? You’re such a little storyteller. It’s a pity you’re at home; otherwise, I would have flicked your tiny nose!”

Wenceslawa covered her nose with her hands at once and laughed.

“Maybe you, a little seeker of hidden treasures, also know what they mean, these texts and drawings?”

“I do,” the girl said gravely. “But I still have a lot to learn to explain it to you in your words”.

Proclus burst out laughing:

“Great, my dear! Then grow up soon to teach me, an old fool, everything you know. But now it's time for you to sleep. Good night, child, say hello to Mom and Dad! I'll tell Anna tomorrow about the drawings; can’t wait to see her surprised face.”

“Good night, Proctor!” the image next to him disappeared before he could reply.

“A story-teller indeed! Calls me by that strange name again,” thought Proclus with a smile. “Or maybe there is something in her stories? How did she find the hidden sphere?..” Stretching out on a couch, he instructed the panels above the ceiling to spread apart, revealing a blackening sky behind a transparent carbon film that had long ago replaced glass. The night was clear and moonlit, and he looked through the branches of the trees at distant constellations, imagining how the human race that had once went out the caves would someday master interstellar travel... because was that not the original Design for our species?

“Tomorrow I will deal with the blueprints extracted from the crystal,” thought Proclus in anticipation.  “You will see, my dear story-teller, one day you and I will fly to those stars...”




THE END











AsSalam
Calgary, Alberta, 2020



In writing this story, the research by two American scientists and visionaries of the 20th century - Jerry Gallimore and Marcel Vogel – were used. Although these people had never met, their interests concerned the same kind of unknown energy and crystals as objects naturally radiating this energy.

Marcel Vogel (1917 - 1991) was a scientist and experimenter in the field of liquid crystals, luminescence and magnetism, who patented over a hundred inventions. For nearly thirty years, Marcel worked in the research division of IBM, where he invented the magnetic coating for hard drives still used in computers. Once, while growing liquid crystals in the IBM laboratory, Marcel witnessed a phenomenon that struck him, which he called “the binding of Light in form.” (A detailed description of his discovery was used in the chapter “New Revelations by Crystals”). This and other findings prompted Marcel to study the properties of crystals that lie beyond the purely scientific method. He left IBM and devoted the rest of his life to exploring the power of crystals for information transfer and healing, and he taught seminars on healing practices using specially cut quartz crystals. Video recordings of Marcel's lectures are available on Internet.

Jerry Gallimore (1940 - 1989) was an electronic engineer engaged in researches in the field of crystallography and semiconductors and had several registered patents. In addition, Jerry was a sensitive - a person with the ability to see unusual energies. This prompted him to look for ways to measure and use these energies. He managed to capture on a photographic film the invisible glow of crystals in the manner described in the chapter “First Experiments”. He also developed a reproducible experiment with a crystal that changed properties of a capacitor, thus scientifically proving that crystals were conductors of special non-electromagnetic waves. The essence of the experiment was outlined in the chapter “Approaching the Mystery”. In addition, Jerry Gallimore was the inventor of a device that measured gravitational waves using a modified crystal (chapter “The Mysterious Sponsor”) and the author of the “grazer” - the gravitational laser described in the chapter “The Breakthrough”. Finally, Jerry claimed to have replicated Kowsky and Frost's experiment proving that anti-gravity was indeed possible (“The Breakthrough”). The Gallimore's ideas regarding the nature of gravity and its connection with electromagnetism were used in the “message to future generations” written by the character of Benjamin Gladkoff (chapter “The Apogee”). Jerry believed that controlling the forces of gravity could bring tremendous opportunities to the humankind, but at the same time it was fraught with significant danger. Apparently, for this reason he had not disclosed key details of his anti-gravity experiments, although he might have passed them on to someone from the association of volunteer scientists working in the field of alternative energy. In the last years of his life, Jerry had been left practically without funds and had difficulties with conducting lab experiments.
He left behind several typescripts, of which the most interesting is “Handbook of Unusual Energies” in three volumes. Some of his lectures can be found on Internet.

With the exception of the subject of research, the rest of the plot and the personal stories of the characters are fictional and have no connection with the biographies of Marcel Vogel and Jerry Gallimore. The descriptions of unusual energy as perceived by sensitive people are not fictional and reflect personal experience of the author.