Immortals (18 page)

‘That’s incredible. What did I tell you about this boy?’ the professor remarked to Dr Ravi.

He nodded.

‘I guess he is special, the way you said he is.’

They continued the test on the PET gantry and asked Jai questions about his past, about his life in the orphanage, about his sister, about his weird dreams – but none of them caused any change in intensity of his brain activity. They tried imaging from various angles and various different sections but with the same result.

‘Let’s zoom out,’ Dr Ravi suggested.

Zooming out had a peculiar effect. The eerie glow not only persisted around Jai’s head but seemed to be coming from just above it.

‘The rays have a direction about them. Hmm… Let’s change his position instead,’ Professor Ananthakrishnan suggested.

Dr Ravi walked up to the PET table, unstrapped Jai’s head, and turned it to one side.

They started the next sequence of images.

With the head in a tilted position, they expected to see the surrounding glow also to keel over to that side, staying over his face like the last time.

But the glow stayed on the top.

‘Whoa!’ Dr. Ravi mumbled in shock.

‘Yeah! This is amazing. You know what it means, Ravi,’ the professor was mumbling, muttering something to himself rather than to Dr Ravi, ‘the rays are coming from somewhere, entering the vertex of the skull: some kind of beam from without, peering down into his brain.’

Dr Ravi had already understood the implication and was in a daze, looking at the rays suffusing Jai’s head.

‘Can we zoom it any further out?’

‘No,’ said Dr Ravi, looking down at the gantry controls, ‘I guess that’s as far as we can go with this.’

‘But we need to see where those rays are coming from. What are they? They look like some kind of radiation entering his brain. What the hell are they? Mind-control rays? Alien rays? Godly rays?’ the professor was muttering, almost to himself.

‘Professor, you realise your talk smacks of scientific heresy and is bordering on lunacy.’

‘Well, nothing in my years of study as a scientist has prepared me for this. So I may just be a heretic, an iconoclast if you like – I don’t give a damn, actually.’

Both of them were whispering to each other, still dumbstruck, their eyes riveted on the screen.

‘No, not my words; it’s what is happening on the screen which is heresy and lunacy. But I guess you cannot call it heresy if it is captured like this on this machine. This is science and we are scientists, two soon-to-be-very-famous scientists.’

Dr Ravi responded, his eyes still on the screen:

‘You are already famous.’

‘Oh that! No, Ravi, you have no idea. This is going to make us a cult of our own.’

There was nothing else that they could get from their armamentarium, and they decided to stop for the day after spending another awe-struck fifteen minutes on the images. They stored their work and un-hooked Jai from the machine.

Jai did not know what had transpired and they did not tell him much either. The professor took him to Henna and then he addressed them both.

‘We have made some progress. Today’s tests have thrown up more questions than answers. We need to run a few more tests before we can be sure.’

‘So when are those – the new tests?’ Jai enquired.

‘I don’t know. I will need some time. We need to go through the information that we have gathered today. A couple of days, max, if all goes to plan.’

Jai was happy to know that some progress had been made. But he felt that the professor was hiding something.

There was nothing that he could do about that, and he just smiled at Henna, who smiled back at him.***

The next two days went by in a blur for Jai and Henna. They were still holed up in the professor’s friend’s farmhouse. They were all alone there, all night and all day. There was nothing they could do but wait for the professor’s word. Though anxious for the results of his tests, Jai enjoyed the relative safety of the farmhouse. It was definitely better than trying to run from the gang and the police, looking over his shoulders all the time.

Moreover, waiting was much more fun this time.

There was a lot of pent-up passion between them and the breaking down of the final barriers that had held them apart meant that they were very busy with each other the whole time, exploring each other’s bodies, sating their appetite, never far away from their queen-size bed. Henna loved the attention that she was getting and rejoiced in the fact that she was able to incite such strong passion in Jai. Jai had yearned for her a long time, and he was glad that his love had the power to heal Henna’s tattered self. The scars on her body might not ever go away, but he was sure that the hurt and grief within her was definitely a lot less now.

The call from the professor came on the evening of the third day. He wanted them to be ready to leave that night around eleven. The professor would accompany them from there. He did not give away any details.

Henna packed the air-bag again and they were ready by ten to leave their latest temporary quarters, probably never to return here again.

‘I want to take this bed with me. It has given me so much pleasure,’ Jai whispered into Henna’s ears as he brushed by her while packing up.

‘Yeah, go ahead! You go and have the bed all to yourself and find the pleasure, all by yourself. I would like to see that too. You and the bed; no Henna on it, though!’ Henna quipped back.

Jai grabbed her by the arm and pulled her to him.

‘Oh, would you? Would you like to see that? Come here and I will show you now.’

Henna feigned a struggle and mocked him.

‘Hey! That’s not fair. You said it yourself: just the bed and you. Not with me on the bed!’

He lifted her and carried her to the bed and laid her down and planted a kiss on her neck, and she melted in his hands. Jai’s mobile rang and Henna slipped away from under him in his moment of distraction, laughing and mocking at him.

‘Now it’s alright. Just you and your bed!’

Jai laughed and then looked around the room. The laughter gave way to a sobering pensiveness as he thought about his life since the day they had fled Mumbai. How many places would they have to leave like this? Would he ever find any permanence?

***

The vehicle arrived at precisely eleven and the professor, Jai, and Henna set off towards Bangalore. It was a smooth overnight journey on the NH-4 and NH-44 and Henna slept fitfully on the back seat of the Toyota Innova. Jai sat in front with the professor, who drove the MUV.

Besides small talk, Jai learnt that they were headed for a small village called Byalalu,
which lay a hundred kilometres beyond Bangalore. There, they were to meet up with Professor Nair, a scientist colleague and friend of Professor Ananthakrishnan. He was a senior scientist at the Indian Deep Space Network (IDSN) and had been instrumental in the phenomenal success of India’s Chandrayaan and Mangalyan missions to the moon and Mars, thus making India only the fourth country in the world to touch down on the lunar surface and have a Mars satellite.

They reached IDSN by seven in the morning, having stopped a couple of times for tea and a visit to the rest room. Professor Nair already knew about Jai’s background, having been apprised of it earlier by his friend. He led them to two rooms in the campus guest house.

‘Get a good sleep. We shall be working late tonight,’ the professor told Jai before disappearing into his own room to get his share of sleep.

The IDSN complex had three antennae: a large 32-metre deep-space antenna, another 18-metre deep-space antenna, and an 11-metre terminal antenna, which had been built for the ASTROSAT mission. This was where all the background work took place, work aiming to put India on the global space exploration map. Another Lunar lander mission, a Solar orbiter and a Mars lander mission were in the offing within the coming decade.

Despite having had very little sleep during the ride to Bangalore, anxiety and nervousness had crept into Jai’s mind and he had a fitful sleep at best. He woke up at about noon, after a bad nightmare of himself walking away from Henna, leaving her all alone in the vast expanse of a desert. In his dream, Henna looked at him desolate, tears running down her cheeks as she waved him a forlorn goodbye. Jai was riding away in a strange vehicle that did not have any tires, and which sort of just glided in the air, over the desert sand. He looked down and found a dark, bronze-brown hue to his skin, similar to what he had seen during the ‘white’ interludes. He rode away till the form of Henna grew smaller and smaller, ultimately vanishing in the vast desolation of the desert.

Though shaken, he kept the dream to himself. Henna would be better off not entertaining such thoughts. He could not bear leaving her alone after all this. Without him, she would not stand a chance and possibly would not stay alive very long.

Later that night, Jai and Henna had a light dinner and then accompanied Professor Ananthakrishnan and Professor Nair to a large building, a little apart from the other buildings in the complex. The building housed the monitoring centre that collated the data gleaned from the various antennae and made sense of the signals received. It had the services of a ‘Param’-class supercomputer, a slightly aged pentaflop supercomputer that was just adequate for the job the centre performed.

The centre was still bustling with activity and many people greeted Professor Nair as they passed by them.  Professor Nair led them to a secluded room with many monitors and hundreds of cables crisscrossing the room.

‘I have set up the experiment in there,’ Professor Nair pointed out a door to their right.

‘I have set up an array that filters any radiation passing through it without attenuating it, and at the same time, replicating the formation of the rays,’ Nair continued, to Prof. Ananthakrishnan. ‘You had some concerns about interrupting the rays vis-à-vis the boy’s safety. I think this will help us get round that problem.’

‘Yes, the last time it happened, the boy almost died. Had an arrest and had to be revived.’

Professor Nair had been a colleague and a good friend of Professor Ananthakrishnan’s before his retirement, and even now had kept in touch, taking a keen interest in his new pursuit – the exploration of the human brain. So, when Professor Ananthakrishnan called in for a favour, he was glad to give all possible help within his means, although he had a few doubts about the fantastical story that he had been told.

Jai and Henna, holding hands, took their places in a row of chairs as both the scientists disappeared into the room to get the tests ready.

Over the last couple of days, Henna had seen a very worried Jai. She understood that it was not easy for him to go through all this, besides the larger uncertainty of being fugitives on the run. She squeezed his hand and said:

‘I know you are worried Jai, but we have no other choice. You and I need to know what is going on with you. You will never be at peace with yourself if you let go of this opportunity now. Another one may never come by again.’

Jai looked into Henna’s eyes and nodded at her words.

The professors came back to the room and Professor Nair signalled to Jai to come into the other room with him

‘I think we are ready. Simply put, you will lie down on a table while I hook you up with sensors, which will pick up on rays surrounding your head. We will see where that takes us next.’

The professor had given Jai a brief outline of what they had found during the PET scan during their journey to Bangalore. Jai got up from the chair and followed Professor Nair into the other room while Professor Ananthakrishnan sat at one of the consoles in the adjoining room, a few rows ahead of Henna.

Electrodes were placed over Jai’s head and the room was darkened. He was then asked to close his eyes and leave his mind as blank as he could. The sensors clicked in and as soon as they were started, the screen in front of Prof. Ananthakrishnan started scrolling down data.

Both the professors struggled with the signals for the better part of an hour before reaching a few conclusions. These rays were directional and they had some pattern to them. They were not random, and waxed and waned in intensity over fixed durations. It possibly indicated that the rays had some kind of information within them. Anything physical, which was not random, had to hold information within. It also indicated that the signals lay somewhere on the electro-magnetic spectrum.

They managed to deduce a trajectory of some kind, which the signals appeared to be following, and worked out and sent the purported co-ordinates to the antenna to try to pinpoint from where the signals emanated. That would take some time, and they continued with the recording of data till then.

It was almost three in the morning when the antenna started beaming back co-ordinates. They seemed to come from a near-Earth location. The co-ordinates were ‘jumpy’, frequently changing their values.

After poring over the signals for a good couple of hours, in a sudden moment of clarity, it dawned on Professor Nair why the signals chose to hop between set co-ordinates around the Earth.

‘The signals are coming from among the twenty-four set co-ordinates of the GPS satellites around the Earth.’