The Karma Booth. Jeff Pearce

familiar with the history of penicillin, thank you, Mister…?”

      “Doctor Andrew Miller,” answered the scientist. “I’m team leader for Gary’s neuroscience division.”

      His straight brown hair almost reached his shoulders, looking like it could use a wash, and his large hazel eyes were fierce in their direct stare. No doubt, he used all this Byronic intensity with girls. Tim knew his type from his university classes.

      “Good for you, but I know about penicillin, Doctor Miller,” Tim said calmly. “That was a time when—”

      Miller wasn’t listening. “Fine then, look at the recent tests that demonstrate adrenaline can play a factor in memory. We don’t fully understand them, but they began with mice running around a drum full of water. Drug trials went ahead even though researchers didn’t know exactly what was going on. Look at atomic energy—”

      “Maybe that’s a bad example,” one of the scientists interjected.

      “Hippie!” joked Miller, and he got a good laugh.

      “We’re talking for the moment about applications ahead of full comprehension of potential,” said Weintraub, wanting to get them back on track.

      “There is only one application,” said Miller. He sighed as if satisfied with his judgment and laced his fingers behind his head. “We’ve seen its potential. We know it! We know the results.”

      “Really?” asked Tim.

      Miller leaned back in his chair and pushed a sneaker against the edge of the table, tilting his chair back. “Frankly, even if we did understand the scientific process behind this machinery, it wouldn’t be a good idea to tell you. I don’t mean you personally—I mean any layman.”

      “Make it personal if you like,” answered Tim. “What’s your rationale in keeping it secret?”

      The rest of those seated around the conference table could hardly believe the naïveté of the question. There were gasps and pens tossed on notepads, more squeaking of pushed chairs and mutters under the breath.

      “You’ve got to be kidding!” sneered Miller. “We’re going to catch enough flak from people bitching and whining the old saw that ‘just because you can do a thing doesn’t mean you should do it.’ Jesus… You want this process out there where it can be abused?”

      “That isn’t where I’m going,” replied Tim. “And your logic is flawed. You assume that by limiting those knowledgeable to a select few, the technology isn’t vulnerable to abuse. But here’s the thing.”

      He had their attention.

      “By not explaining the science, making it absolutely crystal clear how this thing works, you already begin an abuse of the technology. It makes the whole apparatus into a kind of Ouija board—something occult. It’s the natural product of ignorance.”

      Miller drummed his pen on the table and tipped his chair back another inch.

      “Ignorance is something we’ve always had to tolerate.”

      He glanced around the table and smiled to the other faces, but they were unconvinced. Tim thought he looked too young to have tolerated much of anything yet.

      He rose to leave. He could see he would get nowhere with them for the moment. “I’m sorry, I’ve worked several years in diplomacy, but I have to say that’s one of the most irresponsible, stupid things I’ve ever heard. You’re scientists. You’re not supposed to tolerate ignorance—you’re supposed to cure it. Oh, and trust me, time has a nice way of curing hubris.”

       CHAPTER TWO

      India. But not India. Not quite. It was what changed everything for him, and it was likely why the government needed him now. Let’s talk about India, that government man had asked him. What was his name? Schlosser. But he didn’t talk about India with anybody.

      Timothy Cale had been at his mid-level posting in Delhi for a year when the American embassy got a strange request to mediate in a violent ethnic clash. Of course, the details were so few as to be practically useless for any preparation. He was told that a remote village on the border between Nepal and the Indian state of Bihar had been invaded by a group of rebels, their exact affiliation vague and obscure.

      It wasn’t clear to him even why a US representative should get involved in what seemed like an internal dispute, especially when there were no obvious American interests. It didn’t matter. He would go. Sure, the assignment was at his discretion, and as one of the principal secretaries of the embassy, he could have easily turned it down. In looking back on it later, he cursed his own ambition and an almost juvenile urge for thrill-seeking. His Paris and London appointments had been junior postings, but it was the locales that held the glamour, not the office work itself: pushing papers, handling tourist complaints and making sure the colleges for overseas students were behaving themselves. This might be something substantial.

      As he boarded an ancient-looking Bombardier turboprop commercial plane, he secretly hoped for adventure, with the equally childish wish that, of course, he’d come out on top and his resolution of the affair would help his career.

      All he knew of Bihar he had picked up from the backgrounders written up in neat Times Roman 12 point type from the policy office and from his dog-eared Lonely Planet India guide. He stepped off a plane into Patna, gasping over the pollution and the rampant poverty, which was clear from the minute a US Consulate limo picked him up in the Bankipur district. It would take him to where he would rendezvous with an armed Indian escort for the next leg of his journey.

      He got a fleeting glimpse of the Ganges, and then the city became another Third World blur with naked, dirty children, a clamor of street noise and sizzling grills for kiosk food, all contrasting sharply with the opulence of the modern glass castles for the city’s rich businessmen. There were pungent spices. There was the almost crippling stench of decaying shit in the alleys and backed up sewers, and the coppery smell of stale blood—whether from accident or violent robbery, you could never tell and didn’t want to know. Auto-rickshaws buzzed like dragonflies near the Ashok Rajpath, the main market.

      Bihar was practically marinated in religion—the Buddha had walked this countryside, and there were lavish Hindu festivals to last you for ages. The last, tenth Guru of Sikhism was born right in Patna. A cynic would have enjoyed pointing out the fact that, amid all this faith, the province had an appalling rate of illiteracy, poverty, inter-caste warfare. The Bihari people faced a revolting degree of bigotry and ridicule in the rest of India.

      And here he was, the fair-haired American boy from Illinois, thinking himself sophisticated after his years in Paris and London and a brief stint in Bangkok. Fool. He knew nothing. But that didn’t stop him. And where he was going was a dot on the map with the name of a Bihari–Nepalese subgroup of a people, a similar but unique culture with a name he couldn’t even pronounce, on the knife edge of a border. A no man’s land that would make even the Himalayas—so many miles away but still familiar from photos and news reports—a touchstone of reassuring normalcy.

      He was briefed in minutes that “the situation hasn’t changed,” and he didn’t even get the chance to ask what the hell the situation was before the Indian soldiers in their neatly pressed khaki uniforms insisted he climb into the SUV. It was monsoon season, but they would have good luck with the roads—little report of flooding. Just potholes.

      He couldn’t detect the passage of time. Bumped and rocked for hours, with only brief rest stops, he tried unsuccessfully to doze and ignore a pounding headache as the rain hit the vehicle’s roof in torrents. There were streaks of glistening drops across the windows, while bullets of moisture dug into the brown soil and made the road into a slippery obstacle course. It was late at night when the engine stopped, and the five Indian soldiers reached for their rifles, the interpreter telling