Chapter 2

“General, Sir…”

“You can put ranks aside, Dr. Silk.”

“Ehh… yes, of course. So, Dean, have you heard anything about mental fields?” The medical colonel glanced at me questioningly.

Our conversation was informal. General Clay brought me to the Admiralty’s central clinic and handed me over to the local vanguard of medical science who were going to explain everything. Clay also wanted to attend and brought along two generals whom I had caught a glimpse of before at headquarters.

“I only know that your department is working on this matter; nothing more.”

“Well, I see no reason to go into detail, but there are a couple of points that I really want to make clear. Until recently the physical nature of this substance wasn’t certain. Plenty of empirical data attested to the existence of mental fields and to the fact that such fields allowed for the instantaneous transfer of information from the brain activity of intelligent beings across a very large distance. At the same time, the principles of controlling these fields were, and still are, beyond our comprehension. Strangely enough, the enemy attack that you were a victim of, along with 1,500 members of our military, has led to a breakthrough. Whatever was used by the … ehh, toads, which so it seems, that’s how you call them – functioned on the basis of mental fields, but it definitely used their vibrations as one of the harmful effects. In general, the details aren’t important, but we’ve found the key to a partial understanding of this phenomenon while studying the changes in victims’ brains. Bear with me a little longer, I'm coming to the main point. We’ve modernized one of our experimental units and now we have a kind of scanner allowing to study the extent of mental fields at great distances from us. I’m talking about millions of light years. At lesser distances signals merge, unfortunately, and are distorted by interference, but that’s secondary. The important thing is we’ve discovered a human civilization. It’s very far from us, and we can’t even indicate the precise direction. We’ve been lucky with this coincidence of circumstances, and we’ve managed to gain access to the mental field of a comatose man. He’s sick. At their medical level he’s terminally ill, but we know this disease and are able to cure it. Their civilization is significantly less advanced than ours – some 200 years behind, at least. They recently discovered hyper-jump and started launching interstellar flights, and almost instantly they bumped into a hostile race, a humanoid, but not a human one. There’s a war on there, just like here. I wouldn’t say they’re loosing, but this war is all-consuming with apparently no end is in sight.”

“And how could they help us?” this question from my mouth was clearly written on the faces of all those present who still weren’t in the know.

“Generals, Sirs, tell me honestly, will we be able to win this war?”

There was a long silence in the doctor’s office. Eventually, it was broken by Clay.

“This is a very difficult question, Dr. Silk. Let's say, if there won’t be any great innovation in the field of armaments, we'll lose.”

“And how long can we keep going? After all, we're not the only ones with possible breakthroughs in new weapons; our enemy might as well.”

“The war has been going for almost 100 years. For now, we still have somewhere to retreat, but this can’t last forever. We have 20 years, probably 30 if we’re lucky.”

“And what happens next?”

“It gets pretty grim after that, doctor. We’ll be chased out of the developed worlds system interconnected by a network of stationary hyper-portals, and we’ll have nowhere to go except intergalactic space. But I don’t think they’ll let us go. They’ll catch up and destroy us. The toads can manage hyper-jumps as well as we do.”

“Here’s an answer to your question. We need a place to run to in case things turn out bad. You have this place. We found it for you.”

“But how do you expect to get there? You can’t even point in the right direction. Even if you knew it, what’s the point? A linear motion that far in hyperspace will take thousands of years. What we need is a stationary portal, a couple of gates at our side and theirs. Besides, we must know the exit’s subspace coordinates.”

“That's why you plucked our heroic Brigadier General out of that mess in Delta Kirsani. The thing is that the General’s brain was exposed to radiation from the toads’ artifact and has been altered. Now it can harmoniously resonate with the brain of a young man lying in a coma millions of light-years away, and that means we can transfer General Dean’s mind into that man’s brain. Moreover, we can download much knowledge into it, and that can be of immense service to the general when he’s there.”

“Excuse me, doctor,” I was amazed. “But I wasn’t the only man exposed to radiation. You’ve got at least a thousand patients like me at your hospitals.”

“We’ve examined all of them. Unfortunately, they’re not suitable because of the individual peculiarities of their brains. We’re lucky to have you. Your experience will be extremely helpful there.”

“But that man is incurably sick and in a coma…”

“This alone has enabled us to connect to his brain. Coma and his disease – these are undoubtedly problems, but there is a solution. While transferring your senses we’ll download an enormous amount of information into your brain, including the means of treating this disease. Your brain won’t make it, however. If it had been possible to instruct everyone in this manner then we’d have defeated the toads long ago. Alas, a human brain can’t bear a direct data download. Your case, however, is very special. Your brain will die, but it won’t matter. Your senses, including the downloaded information, will be transferred into a new body.”

“And what if I die while still in a coma?”

“It’s highly unlikely. Transfer of senses stimulates brain activity and the immune system of the recipient. You will almost certainly have two or three weeks of remission. Within this period of time you’ll have to solve the problem.”

“After that you’ve got a military career ahead of you, general,” said General Filt, the highest-ranking officer among those present. “You’re used to it. You’ll have to strive to a high position in the power structures of our potential allies and provide for the construction of the second gate of a stationary hyper-portal. Your brain will hold all the necessary knowledge and hyper-coordinates. And we’ll construct our gate here. We’ve already found a god-forsaken place on the periphery of the galaxy for the gate, and if things turn bad we’ll still have a chance to survive as a species and to start all over again.”

“And what about that civilization? They may be reluctant to accept us.”

“That’ll depend on you in many ways, General. Actually, there’s much common ground between us. Both of us are humans, hence, we’ll be able to come to an understanding. We’ll provide technological advances and help them to win the war. They’ll help us develop new territories for our settlements or invite us to their planets if they wish. Anyway, we won’t impose ourselves. In case they don’t want to collaborate we’ll go into unexplored space and start all over again.

“Dr. Silk, are you ready to do it, from the technical point of view?” I was highly excited and couldn’t control my feelings.

“Practically, yes. We have to do a little fine-tuning of the equipment, and that’s not possible without your participation. What we need is your consent.”

“My consent?” I made a half-smile. “You have it.”

* * *

Behind the open window of the nurses’ room a light wind blew the poplar’s twigs. It was early June and the smells of summer covered the specific hospital odor of the furniture and the walls. Olga sat in the armchair having crossed her legs, and looked through the news of the day on her tablet. Upon hearing the equipment beep she jumped up and rushed to look at the patient’s monitor. Her hand automatically pushed the call button.

„What happened, Olga?” asked the doctor on duty via the communicator.

“Ilja Sergeyevich, the patient in the sixth emergency room has regained consciousness.”

* * *

I awoke with a terrible headache; my head was hurting so much that I wanted to be unconscious again. I didn’t even try to open my eyes because I knew that the light would just make things worse.

A door opened with a slight click, and someone entered the room, or maybe the ward. I made an effort and slightly opened my eyes. Despite my worst expectations the pain didn’t intensify. Quite the opposite: I was lying on a narrow bed around which were cumbersome medical devices standing on tripods and supports, flashing with dozens of lights of many colors. My body was connected to these contraptions via transparent tubes and cables. Also, I was covered from head to toe with sensors, injectors and other devices that electrically stimulated the muscles, judging by the occasional light pricking that I felt.

Two people entered the ward: a middle aged man with a flat device in his arms and a young attractive woman behind him. They came towards me.

“How do you feel?” asked the man looking at me attentively.

The language he spoke seemed perfectly strange to me and sounded very unusual. Nevertheless, I understood everything he said. Dr. Silk had warned me before the transfer that both my new body’s memory and skills would remain. But fluent knowledge of a foreign language leaves one with a strange feeling.

“I have a bad headache,” I tried I to answer, and judging by his nod, I succeeded.

“That’s not surprising, Igor. You’ve awaken. This is amazing. We expected it no earlier than three days after the radial therapy, and it’s been only one day.”

“I see, Ilya Sergeyevich,” I managed to recall the doctor’s name and was glad. “Can you do something for my headache so that I can think clearly.”

“Yes, Igor, but it’s best to sleep now. Olga, give the patient some dekateral.”

“Ilya Sergeyevich,” I tried to make my voice sound firm. “You know I have little time left. I prefer to spend it conscious. I’ve plenty of unfinished business and I want to see it all through to completion before… you know what.”

The doctor knew. Asteroid fever’s terminal stage leaves a man with no chance to act consciously: the pain is so strong that even powerful drugs can’t help.

Ilya Sergeyevich wanted to object but he changed his mind.

“Olga, forget the dekateral. Use maltrin. Can I do something else for you, Igor?

„Yes, please. Could I ask for a tablet and network access?”

“Of course. Olga will bring everything you need.”

“And…” listening to my cravings, “can I have something to eat?”

“You have an appetite? That’s quite unusual. You've been fed intravenously for some time, hence your stomach isn’t used to normal food. You can start with a mug of vegetable broth, no more than that. Anything else?”

“Thank you, Ilya Sergeyevich, nothing else.”

After the shot of maltrin my headache receded. Nurse Olga got me a tablet and a mug of hot vegetable broth, and I tried to recall from my renewed memory all the information for the treatment of asteroid fever that Dr. Silk’s brilliant guys had put in my head. We called this disease by another name. Here, miners working in the asteroid belt were the first to get this ‘bug’, and so the name stuck. These humans were lucky that asteroid fever posed a risk to just three percent of the population.

Due to its particular qualities the pathogenic agent couldn’t survive in the bodies of the vast majority of people. If this fungus, however, found a way to survive in the hostile environment of the human body, then it began to modify cells into a favorable form. This process in the early stages was very slow since the immune system killed most of the malignant cells, but gradually the modified cells increased and their number grew steadily. They continued to divide, generating new cells that replaced the normal ones. The lesions grew in size: first a man felt a certain discomfort, then pain, and then organ failure. Eventually, it was like an avalanche and a person died in terrible agony.

Doctors tried to stop this disease, and drug treatments and radiation therapy slowed and even partially reversed the spread of the affected cells. But this treatment greatly damaged the body because the medicine was highly toxic, as was the radiation. The modified cells died, but healthy cells also were killed. As a result, in just a few months death occurred no matter what.

In my world they found a treatment for this disease 150 years ago, and it came unexpectedly at the intersection of two very different sciences: biochemistry and nuclear physics. Now my task was to convey the essence of the idea to people capable of making the necessary equipment.