As the days slipped by, however, not having heard from Jack was beginning to bother me. I had been sure he would be bugging me incessantly. He had every reason to question my level of devotion to his cause. It wasn't like he was about to lose interest in my participation or to let me wander off onto something else.

I had Jack's cell phone number, but figured he might not be getting a signal in the jungles of southern Mexico. Always before no matter where he was he had been able to find somebody with Internet access. He seldom went more than several hours without checking his e-mail. Once when his computer was down he told me he felt like he had lost a body part.

On the seventeenth day of no word from Jack I found I couldn't shake Major Ed Knapps from my mind. Good ol' Ed, ex-CIA, a bit of a blunderbust, a man with zero tolerance for bullshit, an obscene jokester had been involved in that agency's famous remote viewing section. I had done a Website for him in which he promised to teach the techniques of remote viewing to all comers. As was my way in many matters commercial, I had muffled my scepticism. I had noted that some pretty hefty academic types accepted the validity of remote viewing.

Ed's cell invited me to leave a message, but I had a better idea. I called Gold's Gym. Sure enough, he was there, his gruff voice barking a friendly “Yo!” after a 30 second wait. I told him of my concern for Jack, and asked him if he thought he might be able to help.

“Don't tell me you're becoming a believer after all this time.”

“That might be stretching it, but I've gotta admit from time to time you've been rather convincing.” Ed had successfully helped me find a friend's lost sheepdog and my misplaced car keys. I found the utter lack of logic bothersome, but had been willing to submit to in-your-face pragmatism. Remote viewing didn't always work, but it did seem to work much more often than chance would allow. Ed had a rant involving quantum physics and instantaneous action at a distance that in his mind provided a few tentative steps in explaining remote viewing.

”I'll come over tonight, but you've gotta feed me,” he declared. “And while we're at it, let's discuss a few tweaks my site needs.”

I spent the rest of the afternoon working on downeastinformation.com, bringing it up to date. I had found that attempting to hit upon every point of interest Downeast was setting the bar pretty high. Maine has an unbelievable number of small businesses. There is an annual turnover, some come, some go, but most manage to stay. I was determined to mention them all, at least by name. If they signed on with me and paid small fees, they got full paragraphs, color photos, and links to their Websites. If they had no sites, I was willing to post pages for them.

When I left my shop, I stopped by Hannaford's, the local supermarket. I bought two large porterhouse steaks and two giant russet potatoes. Feeding Harold was no small task. He weighed in at around 250, most of which was muscle. It took a lot of protein to keep all those cells happy.

It was a twenty minute drive out to the old farmhouse I called home. When I acquired the place fifteen years ago, nobody else was around. I felt like a pioneer. I had to drive slowly down the dirt road leading to my place, since the birds seem unfamilar with visitors and often didn't get out of the way. After I moved in, electricity had to be strung to my place. Now the City of Ellsworth had spread out my way and I felt misplaced in suburbia.

As I knew he would, Harold showed up at eight sharp. In the five years I had known him, Harold had never been early nor late, but always right on the button. I sometimes wondered if all ex-CIA people were like this. Synchronized watches and all that.

Ed referred often to the successes of Major Ed Downes, who had headed the CIA's remote viewing program. When the famous adventurer XXXXXXXXX disappeared, search efforts initially centered in Nevada while Ed insisted XXXXX's plane had gone down in California. Subsequent events proved Ed right XXXXXX's remains were eventually found withing 40 miles of the spot Ed pinpointed.dsz

Harold had met Jack on several occasions and figured there was at least a chance he could zero in on his whereabouts. It wasn't like he had to sniff an old jock strap or something. If his remote viewing capabilities were on this evening, he could visualize Jack and the images he summned would shift from his imagination to Jack's acutualization. This was the theory anyway, a somewhat bizarre notion that often as not seemed to be bourned out in reality. More out of curiousity than anything else, I had decided not to tell Harold that Jack was in Mexico. I just said that I had tried repeatedly to reach Jack on his cell, but to no avail.

Harold sat in my overstuffed chair, crossed his arms, and closed his eyes. He breathed deeply and looked completely relaxed. He stayed in this position without moving a muscle for at least five minutes.

Finally he spoke. “A am not getting a sense of Jack being anywhere around here.”

“Can you pick up on him at all?

“I don't know. I am seeing blocks, big ones. They're grey. And maybe old. And I am seeing foliage. Lots of foliage, growing everywhere. I don't see Jack, but I think he was there. When I concentrate on him I get a void, like he really isn't anywhere.”

“There is something I didn't tell you. I have reason to believe Jack is in Mexico. He mentioned a newly discovered Mayan site near another one.”

“That would explain the big, grey blocks.”

I had to admit I was impressed. Harold had had no reason to conjure up a jungle scene, but yet he had, and it was entirely likely Jack was in such a scene. Remote viewing was famous for its hits, but remote viewers had racked just as many misses. The CIA had dismissed remote viewing as inherently unreliable.

I went over to my bookshelf and took down a World Atlas. I had bookmarked the page showing a map of the area where Jack was.

“Jack said his site was a secret. Any chance you can pinpoint it on this map?”

Harold looked at the map sceptically. He ran his hand across the mostly green page.

“Leave it to you to come up with something different,” he said. “I don't think anybody has tried this before.”

He sat with his hand on the page for another five munutes.

”I am sensing an inlet right here, ” he said, running his finger along an all-green portion of the map. I think Jack entered into it. I don't get any sense of his ever coming back out.”

The steaks were done. Jack required two dinner plates, one for his over-sized porterhouse, another for his two-pound potato. I began slicing bread off from the whole wheat boule. I gave Jack a quarter pound of butter to call his own. I was glad I didn't have to feed him every day.

After dinner we took a look at his website. Harold was firm in his conviction that everybody was a potential remote viewer. The site was replete with remote viewing success stories. It went into detail about the CIA's remote viewing program, glossing over the agency's shut down of that program.

Now Harold was wondering if we should try to explain how remote viewing worked. Doing so seemed sort of logical, except that nobody really knew how it worked. Many people associated it with quantum physics. It was well known that two elementary particles could be intimately associated. Destroy one of them and the other, no matter how far removed, would also cease to exist, instantly. This seemed to be faster-than-light communication. Distance didn't seem to be a factor. It was thought that it would operate across the universe. Einstein refused to believe that such weirdness could exist, no matter how often it was proven to do so. This was why Einstein came to be rather Irrelevant in his later years.

I told Harold that while this was all very interesting, I didn't really see what it had to do with remote viewing.

“You've been conditioned to think in terms of particles,” he said. “It's just as legitimate to think of waves. Reality is both, often simultaneously. Waves suggest connectivity. Everything in the universe is connected to everything else. The proverbial butterfly flapping its wings on one side of the world creating a typhoon on the other side. Waves can easily explain how a person at point A can see what's happening at point B.”

“Yeah, sure, whatever,” I countered.

Harold looked at me with what I swore was a bit of a glare, a not altogether unfrightening proposition. If so inclined he could have snapped me in two like a twig, although I had never seen hm engage in aggressive behavior. I had to hope that blood red beef didn't bring this out.





Questions or comments? Send them along to Captain D.

CHAPTER FOUR