None of the group had ever taken the time to try to dismantle any of the gateways; after all, once you’d taken one apart, there was no guarantee of being able to put it back together again. Ryan didn’t want to find himself in a situation where they’d broken down their only avenue of escape because they’d gotten creative.
Nor had they been able to completely figure out exactly how a destination was chosen for them. The process was unpredictablesome jumps seemed to take only seconds, others hours or days. The time spent in transit always varied, surprisingly enough, even from person to person, depending on how their own perceptions colored the excursion.
“I’m really not looking forward to this,” Krysty said softly.
Ryan moved closer to her in silent reply, acknowledging the journey to come.
Chapter Three
Exposing body and psyche to the forces of the mat-trans gateway was never a pleasant experience. At best, one might hope to walk away with a nosebleed and a feeling of nausea. Vomiting was a frequent companion to those who dared partake of the unforgettable mat-trans experience. At worst, a traveler arrived on the other end in a near coma, vital signs at a low ebb. There was also the haunting possibility of coming out of a jump in a state of dementia, thrashing around and causing injury to oneself and comrades.
Days before, when the group had first arrived at the gateway chamber inside the biological and genetics laboratory, Ryan and Krysty both were unconscious and dreaming, their sleeping minds locked in a simultaneous dream vision of erotic horror.
Later, all had determined that this shared dreampieces of which Doc had also been privy to, minus the erotic elementhad been brought to the forefront by the pharaoh and his formidable mutant gifts. But it was ultimately connected by their own psi abilities. Ryan was latent sensitive, which in many ways accounted for his own finely honed survival instincts. With the damage Doc had suffered by being time trawled, it was hard to determine how strong his own “psychic” abilities might beor had once been.
Of the three, only Krysty possessed any outward manifestations of true extrasensory abilities. Her gifts were strong, skirting doomie status when in full bloom and serving as an advance-warning system for the group in times of uncertainty and danger.
Still, any example of a shared dream was most unusual. As a rule, everyone enveloped within the gateway process dreamed, and usually the experience wasn’t pleasant. More often than not, what Ryan and the others were forced to endure while in the midst of molecular meltdown and reassembly was forgotten once they were awake and safe, the only vestiges being fleeting images of evil and feelings of unease.
Some of the dreams triggered by the mat-trans jumps they underwent were amazingly banal when exposed to the cold light of unforgiving reason and logic vicious gunfights in the Old West along muddy streets and wooden sidewalks; card games with elegantly dressed gentlemen scalie gamblers on river-boats made of thick plastic and spun glass; a fistfight with a walking, talking plant that spouted platitudes from Plato; wild, unbridled sex with a multitude of partners.
Anything and everything burbled up from the subconscious and intruded when it came to the insanity of a mat-trans dream.
Ryan had asked Mildred what she thought caused the dreams to be so vividly violent, and she’d told him that the mind was only able to absorb and comprehend so much. When they took their places in a mat-trans chamber to go spiraling off into the infinite, perhaps the dreams were a defense mechanism to deal with sights and sounds that could otherwise drive them to insanity.
Not a bad theory, but Ryan had later placed his own spin on why the dreaming was induced. Depending on the level of just how psi sensitive you might be, tapping into the place where time and space met might also allow one a subtle, cloaked and symbolic glimpse into the future, such as the recent precognitive visit in the Egyptian-styled halls of Hell Eyes.
“There is truth in dreams, my dear Ryan,” Doc had intoned more than once after recovering from a jump. “Ignore them at your peril.”