to do that if it meant missing out on a wonderful heaven.”
Colin cocked his head. “You’re sounding downright religious, Peter.”
Peter concentrated on finishing his food. “Sorry. Idle thoughts, that’s all.”
“What did Cathy think of Life Unlimited?”
“She didn’t seem very interested,” said Peter.
“Really?” said Colin. “I think it sounds great. I think it’s something I’d very much like to do.”
“It costs a fortune,” said Peter. “You been embezzling from the bank?”
“Hardly,” said Colin. “But I think it would be worth every penny.”
IT TOOK THREE WEEKS to get two additional recordings of the soulwave departing from human bodies. Peter made one of the recordings at Carlson’s Chronic Care, the same place he’d met Peggy Fennell. This time, the subject was Gustav Reichhold, a man just a few years older than Peter who was dying of complications from AIDS, and had chosen to end his life through doctor-assisted suicide.
The other recording, though, had to be made somewhere else, lest critics charge that the soulwave, far from being a universal component of human existence, was simply some mundane electrical phenomenon related to the wiring in that particular building, or to its proximity to power lines, or to some particular course of treatment used at Carlson’s. So, to get his third recording, Peter had put an ad out on the net:
Wanted: person in very late stages of terminal illness or injury to participate in testing a new biomedical monitoring device. Location: southern Ontario. Will pay participant CDN$10,000. Terminal individuals, or persons with power of attorney for same, please apply in confidence to Hobson Monitoring (net: HOBMON).
Peter felt funny about placing the ad—it seemed so cold. Indeed, his embarrassment probably had a lot to do with why he offered such a large fee. But within two days of the ad going out on the net, Peter had fourteen applicants. He chose a boy—just twelve years of age— who was dying of leukemia. He made the choice as much for compassionate reasons as for varying the sample base: the boy’s family had bankrupted themselves coming to Canada from Uganda in hopes of finding a cure for their son. The money would be some small help in paying their hospital bills.
And, feeling upon reflection that the others who had already participated in the study deserved the same compensation, Peter also made a $10,000 payment to the estate of Gustav Reichhold. Since Peggy Fennell had no heirs, he made a donation in her name to the Canadian Diabetes Association. He reasoned that soon researchers around the globe would be scrambling to reproduce his results. It seemed appropriate to establish up front a generous payment for test subjects.
All three recordings looked remarkably similar: a tiny cohesive electrical field departing the body at the precise moment of death. To be on the safe side, Peter had used a different superEEG unit to record the Ugandan boy’s death. The principles were the same, but he used all-new components, some employing different engineering solutions, to make sure that the previous results weren’t due to some glitch in his recording equipment.
Meanwhile, over the course of several weeks, Peter had also used a superEEG on all hundred and nineteen employees of Hobson Monitoring, without telling any except his most-senior staff what it was actually for. None of his employees were dying, of course, but Peter wanted to be sure that the soulwave did indeed exist in healthy people, and wasn’t just some sort of electrical last gasp produced by an expiring brain.
The soulwave had a distinctive electrical signature. The frequency was very high, well above that of normal electrochemical brain activity, so, even though the voltage was minuscule, it wasn’t washed out in the mass of other signals within the brain. After making some refinements to his equipment, Peter had little trouble isolating it in scans of all his employees’ brains, although he did find it amusing that it took several tries to locate it in the brain of Caleb Martin, his staff lawyer.
Meanwhile, that selfsame Martin had been working his tail off, securing patent protection on all the superEEG components in Canada, the United States, the European Community, Japan, the CIS, and elsewhere. And the Korean manufacturing firm Hobson Monitoring used to actually build its equipment was gearing up a new production line for superEEGs.
Soon it would be time to go public with the existence of the soulwave.
CHAPTER 12
Peter felt like a student again, pulling off a silly fraternity prank involving putting clothing on animals. He made his way over to one of the