Chapter 12

John looked around the laboratory satisfied with his efforts. It had taken him almost a week to clean the optics and realign them. He only had to balance the lasers and then he would be able to take data. Balancing the lasers would take most of a morning. That would leave the afternoon for him to take the data. He would start with that tomorrow morning. Today was Tuesday. He would take data every day of the rest of the week. It would be exactly the same data, but that would allow him to verify that the experiment was reproducible. Actually, the data would have some variance from run to run, but the differences should be statistically insignificant.

He sat at his desk and looked over the papers that he had collected there. The majority of them dealt with the mechanics of fluid deformation. These papers covered the effects of applying pressure to a fluid; making measurements of deformations on surfaces; and formation of droplets of specific sizes. For most people, this kind of material would be as boring to read as a telephone book. To John, there was an entire world of amazing concepts and possibilities, locked up in a single droplet.

When hiking, he often came across waterfalls. The rainbows that he had seen from various locations around the falls had fascinated him. He had seen simple rainbows, inverted rainbows, circular rainbows, and double rainbows. While studying physics, he had learned how rainbows were produced. He had come to understand the impact that droplets could have on light. Then one day, he had asked himself the question concerning what impact light had on the droplet. He hoped this experiment would help him answer that question.

His thoughts were interrupted by the ring of his telephone. It surprised him. This was the very first call he had received the entire time he had been at the university. He answered it to discover that it was the department secretary. She informed him that he had a visitor and wondered if she should bring him to the lab. This had become normal procedure since a visitor had once set back an experiment by almost six months by breaking some equipment. Most researchers were very careful about inviting visitors into their labs, usually meeting visitors in their offices. Since John’s office and lab were the same room, this presented a problem. John looked at the table and decided that it was far enough to the side that a visitor wouldn’t have much chance of hurting it. He told her that it was okay to bring his visitor down to the lab.

While waiting for the visitor to arrive, John cleared the stack of papers that he had set on the second chair in the room. He wanted a place for his visitor to sit. He had just finished that when there was a knock on the door. He opened the door and greeted the secretary, “Hello, Jane.”

The gentleman standing behind Jane was tall and solidly built. He appeared to be in his early fifties. He looked like a business executive. His hair was perfectly grayed at the temples and dark every where else. Jane answered, “Hello, John this is Director Mike Holden of the FBI. He has a few questions to ask you.”

John stepped back to make room for the man to enter the lab. He replied, “Thank you, Jane. Sir, do you want to come in and have a seat?”

Mike entered the room and looked around. The room was tidy except for a couple of small stacks of photocopied papers placed on the desk and on the floor next to the desk. The table on which the experiment was laid out was extremely neat and well organized. There was no mess of any kind. Mike answered, “Sure.”

John sat in the chair at his desk and turned to face the FBI agent. He said, “I’m sorry, I’ve never dealt with the FBI before. How am I supposed to address you?”

“You can call me Mike. This is an informal visit,” replied the director. He studied John trying to correlate the description of his actions with his appearance. The mostly white beard looked rather strange. The longish hair gave him the appearance of a sixties reject. He was slender and didn’t look that strong, but he did have an air of fitness about him. The light blue shirt and denim jeans made him look like any other graduate student. There wasn’t anything about his appearance that set him apart from others, except for a kind of charismatic glow.

“So what can I do for you?” John asked. He was trying to figure out what the FBI might want with him. Perhaps they were investigating one of the other people in the university, but the intensity with which he was being examined suggested that he was the target of an investigation.

The director studied John for several minutes. The directness and intensity of his gaze made John rather nervous. He finally broke the silence, “I was visiting a friend on the police force here and your name kept coming up in conversations. I was curious, so I came here to see you for myself.”

John frowned and said, “I know a number of people in the police force. I’d be very surprised if they said anything negative about me.”

“Oh, they didn’t say anything negative. In fact, they claimed you were some kind of hero; that you went around saving people from life threatening accidents.” The police officers had all said amazing things about this young man. He heard stories of the guy interrupting robberies, running into burning buildings, and covering others with his own body in drive-by shootings. The soft-spoken young man didn’t suggest such heroic tendencies.

“I’m not any kind of hero. I’m just happy to be able to help someone when I come across a situation that I can fix.”

The agent stared at John for another minute. He had seen many people perform heroic deeds in the past. Most had that same kind of modesty, almost an embarrassment at the attention they were receiving. The silence unnerved John, but he was more confused than bothered. Finally, the agent stated, “Yes, they said that you would say that. They also said that they had assigned an undercover cop to follow you around.”

“Pardon?” asked a very surprised John. He had no idea that he had been followed. He wondered when that had happened.

“Yes, everyone thought that it was weird that you just happened to show up at the scenes of so many accidents, mishaps, and medical emergencies. They followed you to see for themselves. After two weeks of following you around, they decided that it was just a bizarre coincidence.”

John cocked his head and said, “They could have asked me. I would have told them that.”

Mike laughed at the suggestion. He said, “Well, it was possible that you were setting up these situations so that you could be a hero. You think they would have believed you if you said otherwise?”

“Sure, why wouldn’t they?”

Mike shook his head. This guy was too trusting to be a crook. He decided to tackle the real reason he was there. He asked, “May I see it?”

John’s heart seemed to stop in his chest. The medallion was the only thing this man could mean by his request. He asked, “See what?”

“The medallion.”

John took a deep breath before asking, “What do you know about the medallion?”

“Show it to me.”

John unbuttoned his shirt and pulled out the medallion. He lifted it in the direction of Mike. Mike leaned forward and examined it. John said, “I can’t take it off.”

“I know that,” Mike countered.

“You don’t have one.”

“How did you know that?”

John shrugged his shoulders and said, “I don’t know exactly. You’ve been touched by magic, but that sense of magic that comes with the medallion just isn’t around you.”

Mike nodded in agreement. He had heard that statement before from various psychics. He said, “You also won’t tell me how you got it.”

John said, “That’s correct. How do you know about the medallion?”

Mike sat back in the chair and stared across the room. He answered, “It’s a long story.”

“I have time.”

Mike turned to look at John and proceeded to tell his story. “I was a simple soldier in Vietnam. Our unit had one of the lowest casualty rates in the whole theatre of war. You see there was a guy, Pete, in my platoon that would get some weird feelings and tell us what we should do. Sometimes, he’d say we should all hunker down and prepare for a skirmish. Other times, he’d say we should get out of that area and go in that direction. Occasionally, he’d stop our patrol and tell us to change our direction to avoid an ambush. Our Lieutenant listened to this guy as if he was some sort of prophet. The thing is – this guy was always right. In Vietnam, you learned to trust people with a sixth sense. It usually meant the difference between life and death.”

“Well, one day we were on leave and the Lieutenant broke his leg in a freak accident. The army sent out a guy just out of the academy to take his place. This guy didn’t listen to Pete at all. On our first patrol out, Pete starts jumping around like a rat is chewing on his private parts. He keeps telling the Lieutenant that we need to get out of there. The Lieutenant ignores him at first and then after ten minutes of Pete’s continuous jumping about threatens to shoot him. By this time, we’re all nervous and jumpy as hell. You see, we’d been around Pete for a long time and trusted his instincts. Well, about five minutes later we find ourselves face to face with the enemy. All hell breaks loose and bullets start flying in every direction. We end up with one dead and seven wounded. It could have been worse, but we had been ready for action because of Pete.”

John listened to the story carefully. He had an idea of why Pete acted the way he did. There were times when the urge to get somewhere was so intense he couldn’t sit still. He had never been in a position where he couldn’t leave when the urge came upon him.

Mike continued his story. “You would think that after that experience the Lieutenant would have listened to Pete. He didn’t. Our second patrol started out like our first. Pete started jumping around and saying that we needed to get out of there. The Lieutenant threatened to shoot him. This time, Pete got even more frantic. Let me tell you, we were really spooked. We continued moving through the jungle for about a hundred yards and Pete almost goes catatonic. I was standing next to Pete and when he collapsed, I knelt down. At that moment, bullets start flying at us from every side. We were surrounded. Next thing I know, there are only three of us left alive. Pete, Harry, and myself were taken prisoner by the Vietcong.”

“The first thing they do is search us and remove everything. Pete has this medallion hanging around his neck. It’s just like yours only it says something to the effect of ‘A Life To Save.’ They try to remove it, but it sticks to his skin. They wrestled with that medallion for an hour to no effect. Finally, they decided they’ve been in the area too long and we were marched to a camp.”

“There is nothing pleasant about being a prisoner of war. You are fed shit to eat and are treated like dirt. What I experienced was nothing compared to what they were doing to poor Pete. They would beat him unmercifully and drag his broken body into the bamboo cage they used to hold us. He usually felt pain, but it was no where near what he should have been feeling. A week later, Pete would be back to normal. I’ve never seen anyone heal so quickly. No matter what they did though, they couldn’t get the medallion off him. They also couldn’t get him to tell them anything about it. It was unnatural that anyone could be treated so harshly and act so normally through it all.”

“Things went on like that for a couple of months. Then they noticed that Pete reacted when Harry or I would be punished. They decided on a different tack. One day they dragged me into the interrogation area with Pete. They hung Pete from a rafter using a rope tied around his wrists. They tied me down in a chair facing Pete. Then the torture started. They would ask Pete a question and when he wouldn’t answer, they would hit my feet with a bamboo cane. Soon, Pete told them everything he knew about the medallion. You could tell that telling his story was hurting him more than any torture they could have inflicted upon him.”

John shook his head in sympathy with Pete. He could see how that torture would have a greater effect on him than getting hurt personally. He wondered how he would have stood up to that kind of abuse. With that thought, he hoped that he would never be in a position to find out.

Mike paused as he thought back to that day. He continued, “Well, the story didn’t come out in a coherent fashion. I’ve reconstructed what happened from his answers to their questions. It seems he was in a park and encountered a woman. She pointed out the medallion to him and he went to get it. Along the way, he found someone bleeding to death. In another half a minute, that person would have died. He knelt down and gave first aid by tying a tourniquet around the arm. He carried the person to the medallion using a fireman’s carry. On getting the medallion, the person turned into the woman and she placed it around his neck. He apparently fell asleep and woke up to find that two days had gone by.”

John nodded his head at all the similarities between Pete’s experiences and his own. A major difference was that Pete hadn’t been raped. Of course, there may have been more to the story than his interrogators had gotten out of him. He cautiously added, “It sounds familiar.”

Mike nodded his head. “Well, the story about the medallion doesn’t end there. You see, they decided that they really wanted it. Since they couldn’t get it off his living body, they decided to see what would happen when Pete was dead. I was still tied in the chair when the commander stepped up and shot Pete in the head. He died instantly. The medallion just evaporated. I, however, went berserk. Somehow, a super human strength seemed to flow into me, and I broke the ropes they had used to tie me into the chair. I went on a killing rampage. By the time I was rational again, every Vietcong in the camp was dead. Harry was standing beside what was left of the cage with a terrified look on his face.”

“We made our way back to the American troops and told our story. We were both promoted and shipped out of Vietnam. Harry would never voluntarily stay in a room alone with me after that day. He later killed himself.”