Sedláček Street, Prague 22
Province of Bohemia
David Yaramu had to understand the true nature of anti-gravity. He not been able to get his mind around how the MarsWing worked. Could not work out, why it would fly. For hours on end the Czech patent clerk had scanned the instruction disc, listening to the same explanations. Puzzling over diagrams and flowcharts. No answer. It just didn’t fit.
In the end, his left-brained, rational self, reckoned that the MarsWing Anti-Gravity Glider patent must be a hoax. But inexplicably, his creative self did not agree. Quite the opposite. His intuitive, right-brained persona sensed an exciting new opportunity.
“Silence is golden,” his digital assistant confirmed. “Only in silence, truth is born.”
“Hello Libussa.”
“Dobre dan, Magister David.”
Over the past six hours, he had downed the cream of his mind-altering mushroom crop. Enough psychedelic power to flatten a few horses. His rational mind was nowhere to be found, a workhorse without a coachman.
Thus prepared, David was staring entranced at a singular star, floating in the deep space of his dual screens.
Thoughts are arrogant creatures; the inner dialogue chatters on all day and every day. Next morning, thoughts are there again as if they never slept. Yet David’s thoughts had come to a standstill on their own.
A solitary star radiating in a deserted universe, and the all-powerful question: What Is Gravity?
When the last of his thoughts were stripped bare, the question of gravity disappeared too. As if one cannot exist without the other. Only the sun was left behind. And just as a moth search for light, the Czech patent examiner’s attention, unshackled from incessant thinking, gravitated closer and closer to the lone luminous star in the ink black expanse.
Gravitated!
At the very moment he ceased to question the force of gravity, he became affected by its incessant tug. The heavenly weight moved him into an unusually deep relaxation. He just sat there, innocent like a baby.
It was a liberating feeling at first, but the grasp of gravity grew stronger, until his breathing became near impossible.
“For enlightenment to come, ego must go,” the old spiritual butler in his schooldays had a habit of saying. David knew he had to go with the flow.
Still, that posed a problem. The flow carried him onto a long silent vacuum. Action and re-action danced like yin and yang forces.
Remarkably, the wave of nausea that ripped his soul apart never fell into the abyss. Instead, the crest of the wave froze, crystallising in countless thought particles.
Half an hour later, Dennis Carlington reached the frazzled Bohemian. Doc called in from his outward-bound office on the Cathy III, flying over north Asia. He used the covert VIP global access override. This enabled him to contact the patent examiner in Prague directly. That way David’s virtual assistant could not block the call.
Not that prior knowledge would have mattered much. David lay slouched in his communications chair, still heavily drugged. In no shape to argue about the intrusion on his privacy, his bearings were way off-beam. For starters, he could not comprehend who Doc really was.
That pretty woman from the Sri Aurobindo channel on the ESP Citizen Band had fleetingly mentioned a Doctor Carlington and O’Neill. At first, David assumed that Doc also came on the ESP Citizen Band.
“Good evening mister Yaramu. My apologies for barging in on your living room,” Doc began. “I am Dennis Carlington, calling you on my way to the O’Neill space city. My chief of staff Meena Mukti will have mentioned to you that I would call.”
David hadn’t heard most of the sentence. Events were moving too fast for him.
“My apologies to be waking you up at this hour,” Doc continued. He was growing impatient.
“Did you say you are at O’Neill?” David said at last.
“No, I am from Space Colony O'Neill. I see I got you at an inconvenient time,” Doc replied. “Would it be better if I call you back later?”
“You want to know how the MarsWing works, don’t you?’
“Yes,” Doc acknowledged gratefully.
“David pushed himself up to a sitting position and announced: “I have solved the electro-mechanics of anti-gravity.”
For a rare moment Doc was lost for words.
“I continually thought of anti-gravity as a force which was the opposite of gravity,” David lectured. “Assuming therefore, quite without foundation, that any effects of anti-gravity should not just alter the weight of the MarsWing craft, but also its mass. I completely overlooked the obvious: gravity is a property of mass, while anti-gravity is the relationship between two masses.”
“I don’t understand a word you’re saying,” Doc said politely.
“Just reflect on the true nature of gravity, mister Carlington,” David persisted. “Think of gravity as the pressure on mass to dissolve into the ether.”
In his lab at O’Neill, Ernesto Lopest had said something like that about the harmonics of gravity. “OK, forget abstract theory,” he told David. “Can you explain briefly how all this makes the MarsWing weightless.”
“Just regard anti-gravity as a specific resonance between two objects,” David exclaimed, “cancelling out the gravitational suction towards the black holes structures in the ether.”
Doc sighed. “I am sorry” he objected, “but I am a bit tired. Can you start at the beginning and explain it slowly please.”
“As you wish”, David agreed. “Look at anti-gravity as a series of notes. As you know, everything vibrates to a specific cosmic sound, including you, me, the MarsWing, the Earth, moon and the sun. Each vibration is composed of loads of supporting vibrations and one of those is the nano sound produced by the friction of mass and ether.”
“I hear what you are saying,” Doc said. “If a person falls from a skyscraper, he or she is attracted not just by the Earth, but also towards the walls on the way down.”
“Yep. Each of these heavenly bodies attract us with their own specific harmonic profile. Not only is the size of their mass and gravitational pull different, but also the quality, the pitch, the tune of their celestial code.”
At last Doc had enough. “Fascinating insights Yaramu, but I am afraid the inner workings of the MarsWing still sound rather nebulous to me."
“It is actually surprisingly simple,” David beamed. “Let me explain it some more...”
“No thanks,” Doc interjected. “I heard enough. Your explanations are most interesting. Unfortunately, my time is limited, so let's get down to decisions. Could you build the damn machine?”
“A child could do it,” the patent examiner replied.
“How long will it take for you to assemble a fully operational MarsWing?” Doc asked.
David did not hesitate. “In twenty-four hours,” he replied casually.
“You are sure?”
“Give or take a few hours, yeah, positive.” The patent examiner looked very certain of himself.
“Build me a MarsWing mister Yaramu,” Doc decided.
Korea University
Seoul, Province of Korea
When Doc Dennis terminated his call to Prague, the Cathy III set down on the tarmac in Seoul.
“Welcome to Seoul sir,” a man said, while opening a passenger door.
Doc sat down in the back compartment and the limo sped off towards the University. He was here to visit the International Forum on Psychokinetic Energy. Doc was deep in his head pondering his task to investigate John Cotton’s powers. He had two trophies so far. The best finds: a woman in San Francisco, who might be able to levitate in public on command of a hypnotic trigger. The second ace up his sleeve: a man in Prague who might be able to build an anti-gravity glider. Both looked promising, but was it enough of an effort to neutralise Cotton? There was a risk they both could be useless for deployment in a confrontation.
Doc stopped over in Korea for only one reason. He wanted to be sure he had covered all bases in his search for answers. To get expert bearings on the whole strange business of paranormal, psychotronic, siddhis and any other psychic phenomena.
The gathering at the University of Korea was possibly the most colourful assembly of people Doc had ever set eyes on. There were famous stage magicians and skilled yogis, well known gurus and obscure fakirs, street performers and an impressive assortment of academic researchers. Attendees included gifted research subjects, freaks of all ages, exorcists, magicians and witch doctors, tea leaf readers, palmists, astrologers and clairvoyants, shamans and shysters, warlocks and windbags, crystal ball gazers and con artists, hypnotists, broadcasting evangelists and snake charmers, fire walkers, remote viewers and astral travellers, spiritual healers, aura photographers and mediums, as well as UFO abductees.
The fair-like atmosphere was heightened by various spiritual advisers, metaphysicians, automatic writers and a sixteen-year-old kid speaking for Philos the Tibetan while in trance. The university hall was full of ESP broadcasters, mana medicine men, Zen instructors, energy analysts in the Wilhelm Reich tradition, water diviners and fringe cultists. There was a centenarian great grandmother from the Kashmir highlands, who could remember more than four hundred separate reincarnations and previous existences.
Towards the rear of the auditorium, seated in a specially constructed cage, was the imposing figure of Immanuel Sarapoya, Ph.D. Doc decided to consult him in private. That decision paid off handsomely and made his Korean stopover worthwhile. It turned out that Sarapoya was remarkably well informed about the state of affairs in the south of France. The renowned psychologist had been able to circumnavigate Marshall Bourke’s media gag. He had heard about John Cotton, and he knew something no-one else had mentioned.
“Have a look at this,” he said in a conspiring tone of voice.
The wall in his office sprung to life, showing John Cotton sitting at a table outside a country cafe of a French village, in the foothills of the Alps.
Opposite Cotton, an older man was scribbling some notes on a piece of paper. The elder struck Carlington as an educated person, a man with the air of a rural aristocrat.
The aristocratic elder managed to shock with the very first thing he asked John Cotton: “So you feel you have become sort of radioactive?”
Cotton nodded. “I control the activity of any trace nuclear energy in my inner metabolism. It is only minute, but this control has given birth to special levels of consciousness.”
“Why radioactivity,” the retired psychiatrist wanted to know looking up from his notes, “it seems such an unlikely candidate to serve as an elevator of consciousness.”
“Of course,” Cotton replied, “people generally fear that which is least known.”
“Surely there’s plenty to fear about nuclear fall-out and radiation illness?”
“My focus is on enhancing bio-radioactivity, not on rolling the drums of war. Nuclear explosions are not representative of life enhancing technology. Explosions spread an overdose of raw radiation in one catastrophic phase. By contrast, in a natural state, a radioactive component is both essential and beneficial to evolution and survival. All our bodies have radionuclides and potassium-40. Everyone has uranium in their hair. We are continually emitting gamma rays.”
“C'est vrais”, admitted the village elder. “I agree there is an appreciable difference between organic nuclear background radiation and inorganic radiation, as produced by explosive devices.”
“A vibrational difference that at certain times and circumstances can be bridged by the human biological system,” John Cotton continued.
His approach seemed surprisingly casual, but generally Doc shared his outlook. He found the levitating man from the Americas more interesting. The man was not just a fakir with an invisible rope trick or a disguised platform, he had an interesting brain too.
“I don’t doubt what you say,” the retired village intellectual said, “but I imagine that such a conversion from inorganic to organic radioactivity can only take place on an extremely limited scale.”
“On the contrary,” Cotton explained, “radioactivity is simply a higher frequency of light, which vibrates on a plane which our awareness usually does not utilise. Yet some states of consciousness allow for the unfolding of these energies.”
The retired psychiatrist fidgeted with his notes, saying, “Are you implying that you get high on radioactivity. That you can absorb more radiation as your consciousness expands?”
“Within limits. Only small amounts that I can and wish to absorb. I tune into locally occurring, natural background radioactive sources,” Cotton replied.
“That’s quite a statement.”
“We live in a sea of mild radioactive radiation all our lives. Our bodies produce their own radiation and continually absorb it from the environment. The question is therefore not ‘Is radioactivity good for us,’ but ‘How much radioactivity can we absorb and how do we use it to manage our bodies’.”
“Maybe so,” the old villager retorted, “but all that is a long way from claiming nuclear radiation can aid in the development of consciousness.”
“Not really,” Cotton disagreed. “Have you ever asked yourself, why many church saints and spiritual masters have been usually somewhat translucent or have a halo. What is harmful or helpful depends on the context. Spider venom can make you very ill, or it can be used to heal the sick. Some people starve to death in ten days while others can fast for weeks on end at a benefit. To receive the full benefit of bio-radioactivity, one has to embrace it.”
The discussion at the village cafe went on in that vein for a while. Doc became convinced that John Cotton was very sane indeed. An impression that was reinforced after viewing the remainder of the footage, showing John Cotton in the centre of the village doctor’s office.
The old doctor held a Geiger counter in his hand, explaining the noteworthy find of a mildly bio-radioactive person.
The object of his awe, John Cotton, remained untouched by the commotion. The miracle man was amusing himself by levitating, exploding and restoring an antique Chinese vase. His eyes beamed from the screen into Doc’s soul in an eerie display of superhuman power.
“I sing the body radioactive”, Cotton spoke.
