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Chapter 67 - More Converts

The following week was the beginning of April and was an extremely busy time. Tamara’s attorneys—since she was in the process of setting up two corporations, she now had a legal practice on retainer to manage the legal aspects of those businesses and her foundation too—wanted to meet with her to go over the incorporation process and the licensing arrangements for her inventions. A major application of one of her discoveries was frictionless bearings and she planned for one of the companies she was setting up to develop and manufacture small- to medium-scale generators to be used in G-force-powered turbines. The name she had chosen for the company was AlWin Systems Corporation, combining her and Peter’s names. She planned to keep control of this operation because she had hopes of locating some of the manufacturing facilities in third-world countries, where she could provide both jobs and low-cost electrical power. Some of the G-force-turbine designs she had envisioned were small units, suitable for providing local power to towns and villages. Tamara told herself that she’d need to remind President Gerston of his agreement with her.

The second corporation was to be organized to manage transportation system applications using the G-force principle she had discovered. Some of its applications would be licensed, such as one involving high-speed levitating trains. For other related applications, such as personal vehicles with levitating capabilities, she wanted to keep control of that area’s research and development. That company would also continue development of her communications device and the methods of power transmission which used the related technology. This company would also continue development of the chemical chromatography analyzer she had developed to work on her pheromone project. All of those applications were based on her G-coil invention.

She had a third idea that she wanted her attorney team to investigate, one involving a pharmaceutical application to commercialize the development of medications based on her pheromone work. By using the MRI techniques she had developed, Tamara had learned from the data that there were possible nerve-cell receptor targets for pharmaceuticals which could potentially mimic the effects that she could achieve mentally. She wanted her legal team to look into licensing those patents.

And finally, she was to meet with the new board of directors for her charitable foundation. Werner had worked with her attorneys to get the board set up, and Tamara, using Emma’s idea for a corporate name, came up with “TNA Foundation.” This entity had been set up to receive all of the funds from Tamara’s licensing contracts and used that revenue to issue research grants and pay Tamara a stipend.

The feedback which Tamara—and Emma too as her mentor—had been getting on Tamara’s dark matter and energy theory was loud and varied. A preprint of the paper she had submitted to the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences covering her theory and the mathematics supporting it had come out the previous week and, like any new theory, its critics and supporters were in full cry. The media took notice, especially at comments from some scientists that this new theory was the most important since Einstein’s relativity theories—special and general.

As a result of numerous requests from the press, the university decided that Tamara must give a press conference. She agreed to do it and one was scheduled for that Thursday, to be held in one of the university’s large auditorium-like classrooms. The university’s public relations director balked at the idea of accepting only written questions, but Tamara convinced him to allow the chairperson of Physics and Astronomy, Dr Chester Montern, to moderate and rule on each question’s merit.

Tuesday and Wednesday were lab days at the APL. Her little group was working on the levitating force principle, learning all they could about its characteristics. Their current project was scaling the device down to a size small enough to be used in bearings for shaft sizes smaller than about 2 centimeters. If they could produce bearings for shaft sizes of about 6 to 8 millimeters, roughly a quarter inch, then most small motors could be made frictionless.

The press conference was on Thursday.

The auditorium was packed; several TV crews were also present; it reminded Tamara of the Cambridge event—fortunately without the violence. She had elected to use two podiums, one for Montern and the other for her, about ten feet apart. Montern agreed to introduce her. When the time came to begin, Tamara and Montern took their places and Montern announced that they were starting and the room quieted.

“Greetings, members of the media. I’m Dr Chester Montern, chair of the Physics and Astronomy Department here at Hopkins and I’d like to introduce Miss Tamara Alexandre, a doctoral candidate in our department. Miss Alexandre has made a number of discoveries that have revolutionized physics and we’re here today to discuss her latest one, a theory that attempts to explain the nature of the dark matter and energy in the universe. Miss Alexandre will give you a brief intro and then I’ll explain how we’ll handle your questions, so please hold them until we’re ready. Miss Alexandre?”

“Thanks, Dr Montern. When I began the work that led to this theory, I had no idea that it would lead to where we are with it today. I was simply working on methods to try to improve the spatial resolution of MRI scans and building electronic circuits to accomplish that goal. But one of the devices I built did very strange things. When I tried investigating what was happening, current physics had no explanation. So I began looking for solutions to the problem, and since physics is based on math, I found the proper mathematics which could explain our observations. The best interpretation of that math is that it describes dark energy and dark matter.

“Physicists have long known that most of the mass in the universe exists as dark matter—and what dark matter is, exactly, has been one of the biggest scientific puzzles since Fritz Zwicky, who in 1933, calculated that the dispersion speeds of seven of the galaxies in the Coma cluster, in the direction of the constellation Coma Berenices, far exceeded the expected amounts, based on the sum of the masses of the individual galaxies. Those of you with science backgrounds may know that the dispersion speeds of galaxies are directly related to the galaxies’ masses. In fact, a large group of clusters of stars—galaxies—behaves very much like a gas, where the individual particles are the galaxies. To account for his finding of such high velocities, Zwicky knew that it would require significant amounts of additional matter to be present in the observed galaxies, but no such matter could be seen, so he called this missing matter ‘non-luminous.’

“Further work on a similar problem by others found that the orbital velocities of stars which were located at large distances from their galactic nucleus, were unexpectedly high, meaning that the galaxy had much more mass than could be observed. This finding, together with other observations, gave convincing evidence that most of the matter in the universe is invisible, and much of it is clumped around galaxies. Thus the term ‘dark matter’ came into widespread use.

“Current theory says that dark matter is composed of an unknown type of non-baryonic particle. Non-baryonic matter is simply matter which isn’t composed of neutrons and protons. You may have heard one of the theories of dark matter; that it’s composed of hypothetical particles called WIMPs—that stands for ‘weakly interacting massive particles.’ My paper shows that this theory is correct; the dark matter, as my calcs show, will interact weakly with ordinary matter under normal conditions, and the particles are massive, on an atomic scale, that is. We’ll get to the dark energy part in a bit. Dark-matter particles haven’t been detected experimentally. Neither collider experiments nor other detection experiments, like deep underground chambers set up to capture dark-matter particles, have directly detected it. The reason colliders haven’t been able to find dark matter is simple: the most powerful of them lack sufficient energy because the particles are too massive, as my paper shows.

“The data obtained so far indicates that the total amount of all kinds of matter in the universe is about five times greater than the amount of baryonic matter, and it also shows that dark matter is largely concentrated in giant halos around galaxies and within clusters of galaxies.

“The theory of dark energy is much more recent. It was during the late 1990s that astronomers discovered evidence that gravity wasn’t slowing down the universe’s expansion as was expected—its speed of expansion was actually increasing. What was causing this to happen? Following the naming of the unobservable dark matter in the universe, the cause of the expansion was called ‘dark energy.’ You may know that Einstein had initially introduced a ‘cosmological constant’ into his relativity equations because it appeared that his theoretical universe would collapse without that modification. Then, when the expansion of the universe was discovered, he retracted the idea of that constant. But we know now that using such a constant is valid, since the existence of dark energy is actually consistent with the slow, steady force that’s causing the universe’s expansion, and it’s dark energy that is pushing matter outward to expand the universe ever faster and faster.

“So what we know now is that baryonic matter, plus the leptons—that’s all of the fermions and bosons that comprise visible matter, plus the particles which mediate the universe’s energy, only constitutes about 4 percent of the total mass and energy density of the universe. That’s the part we can see; we can’t see what makes up the rest of the universe. Dark matter can’t be directly observed because it emits no radiation and it makes up another 24 percent of the universe, and finally, the largest share of the universe is dark energy, comprising about 72 percent.

“That’s the background. As I said when I began, my work started by looking into the use of microwaves to improve MRI resolution. Along the way, some of the devices I designed produced anomalous results and one of those results made it appear as if energy was being created out of nowhere. Obviously that was a violation of the laws of physics; that energy had to come from somewhere, so I began trying to account for its appearance using math. The results of those calcs are in the PNAS paper, and the math stands on its own. It’s the interpretation of what the math means is what’s giving some physicists fits. My own interpretation of those results is that the source of the energy I’ve detected and can reliably produce is related to dark matter and energy. I’ve showed how the model fits into the standard model of physics and meets all of its predictions. And the devices I’ve developed all use that energy to do useful things, like make frictionless bearings, for example. That will result in producing energy far more cheaply. And a new form of levitating transportation, which will greatly reduce the costs of moving products.

“I can take questions now. Dr Montern will moderate, so please wait for him.”

The group applauded.

Montern went to the podium. “Miss Alexandre has done some of the most remarkable things any of us at Hopkins have ever seen, and she’s yet to finish her doctoral program here. But for this work alone, our faculty believes that she’s more than qualified to be granted that degree.”

Applause.

“But she insists that she needs to complete all of her course objectives. As she told me, ‘I want my degree to be a proper one, earned like anyone else.’”

Laughter.

“So that means we get to keep her here for another year, which is great for Hopkins’ reputation.”

More laughter.

“So it’s time for your questions. I’ll ask you all to please keep them to professional and scientific topics. I will decide if a question is appropriate—like ones asking her if she has a boyfriend or how she gets her ideas at her age are not appropriate. And please, no shouted questions; we have a dozen wireless mikes available. Get one from a staff member roaming the aisles and then raise your hand to be recognized.”

The questions were mostly general.

The first one was: “A number of physicists have said that this is the most important theory since Einstein’s relativity. Do you agree?”

Tamara answered: “I have no opinion on that. The importance of a scientist’s work is not the work itself, but how that work influences the work of others. A very good measure of this influence is how many times that original work is cited in the papers of other researchers. So I will let my peers determine the significance of my work.”

Question: “What kind of device did you build that gave those unusual results and what was unusual about it?”

Answer: “It was a kind of RF-generating coil using superconducting circuitry. And I mentioned that we observed energy flowing into what should have been a closed system. This was not possible, meaning that the system wasn’t closed and the energy source being tapped had to be the result of the coil somehow pulling energy from outside the natural, visible world. The calcs showed that the most likely source was dark energy.”

Question: “How are those coils made that they can do that?”

Answer: “That’s too technical to go into detail here. The coils are based on an array of single-electron transistors, or SETs, which are electronic devices that have superconducting properties. We now have patents pending on the devices and you can pick up a handout after this session. It has the patents’ details. We’re in the process of licensing some of the applications of the coil devices.”

Question: “This one is for Dr Montern. Why don’t you give her the damned degree already?”

Laughter.

Montern: “I did mention about that. But Tamara’s been stubborn about wanting to go the full course, as she put it.”

Tamara: “Look at it this way. If I keep doing just fine, I keep getting all of this great support from a world-class university and access to wonderful facilities and people. If I mess up, well, then I’m just a dumb student. Right?”

The audience erupted in laughter and then applause.

Tamara: “Seriously, being a student gives me time to explore options and be creative before I leave this nurturing environment and have to assume more rigid professional responsibilities. Nobody’s holding me back from getting a degree. There are a few more things I want to do before I take the degree.”

Applause again.

Question: “What kinds of real-world applications does your theory have?”

Tamara: “The science part is probably self-evident. Commercial applications of the devices that appear to use the energy from the dark-energy source seem to be many. You already must be aware of Dr Clarke’s work on energy storage; one application of my devices allows for highly efficient energy storage and her company and my own team are working on wireless power transmission applications. We’ve got batteries for EVs—electric vehicles—under development. I mentioned levitating transportation devices. I’m thinking of trains similar to the mag-lev ones used in Europe and Asia, although my device works great without the ‘mag’ part. No magnetism is involved; it actually uses something like ground effect. We’ve already built shaft bearings that use that same repulsive principle. Magnetic bearings exist; they have good efficiency, but need complicated circuitry to correct for wobble caused by shaft loading. Our bearings don’t have those issues and use just tiny amounts of power. We’re preparing to design high-efficiency G-force turbines and working on making the bearings small enough to use them in small motors. There’s much more in the works; some of it is still confidential. Is that enough?”

Applause.

Question: “Are you leaving any problems for other physicists to work on? Sounds like you’re solving all of the open problems.”

Laughter.

Tamara: “No way could I do it all; there’s still lots more to work on. Emma—Dr Clarke—once told me of a quotation by the famous physicist Wolfgang Pauli. He said, ‘The best that most of us can hope to achieve in physics is simply to misunderstand at a deeper level.’ In other words, the more we learn, the more we learn that there’s much more to learn.”

Laughter again.

Question: “Does your theory suggest any ideas for you about understanding the nature of the universe?”

Tamara: “That’s a deep question. Some of the implications of the math I worked on suggests ideas on the quantum nature of gravitation itself. Physicists joke about seeking the ‘theory of everything,’ kind of an extended unified field theory. I think that some of my math may give insights into linking general relativity to quantum mechanics. That’s been a very elusive goal. But I’m not a computational physicist like Dr Clarke is; I’m an engineering physicist and my imagination leads me to want to solve physics questions by building devices that the mathematics suggest. So one thought I had when working out this theory is how gravitation works and what kind of fundamental particle would be the carrier of the gravitational force. If we can answer that question, then that would open an entirely new area of possible applications, even extending to space flight without the need for enormous launching facilities. But that’s all speculation now.”

There were many other questions, some of them restatements of previous questions or requests for clarification of Tamara’s answers. And of course there were a few that were ignored, ones of the nature of “how did you get to be so smart.”

Tamara was curious to see how the press conference would be treated on the local evening news, since there had been two TV camera crews there. There was a brief spot of coverage, about ninety seconds long, that had two snippets of her speaking and the rest was a simple report that she had introduced a new theory in cosmology that had the scientific community all excited about how it fit into current knowledge. She thought that it was a reasonable report.

All that week, her email in-box had been collecting messages inviting her to visit campuses all over the world to present her work. Damn, she thought, if I accepted just a small fraction of those invites, I’d be on the road most of the year. Emma says she gets a lot of invites too and has a very polite way of turning them down. My own excuse will still work, but not for much longer.

On Saturday afternoon, Tamara and Peter, together with Tamara’s parents, went to Greta’s and Werner’s home for a visit and dinner. After they arrived, they all spoke for a while together before Tamara took Greta aside for a private discussion.

“I’ve come up with several ideas about how the spirit world fits into what we know about science, Greta,” Tamara said when they were alone. “Part of what I’ve theorized is based on the observation that the cultures where spirits are venerated are very similar in their basics. It’s probably no coincidence that so many different cultures have the same kind of spiritual leaders—wise man or woman, medicine man, whatever the clergy name may be. When we first met and discussed religions, you called those people shamans, so I did a little research and found that the idea of shamanism covers many characteristics of a number of religious practices of cultures from around the world. There are two major things that kind of link the shamans of all of those different cultures—first, rituals based on achieving a trance and second, mediation in general. Other things in common are veneration of ancestors and the existence of helping spirits.

“So that gave me some ideas. The people who become shamans are generally closely related, like parent and child, but also there are people who feel a calling to become a shaman. I’ve come to agree you’re correct that there’s a genetic component to the abilities that shamans have because the trait seems to run in families. In my own case, a lot of the brain research I’ve done so far makes it appear that there’s a kind of psychic energy that seems to exist everywhere so I’ve begun to think of the skills of communing with spirits in physics terms: there are free electrons always circulating in the atmosphere and I believe that they somehow have become... like... quantum-entangled networks. The entanglement means that the information that the networks carry is present everywhere. Maybe these networks carry impressions of human personality characteristics, because the tiny electrical signal contributed by everyone becomes part of that network. I think that the brains of shamans have adapted over the millennia to be sensitive to this energy and are able to interpret and use it to derive information.”

Greta was smiling widely. “That’s a very interesting theory and a pretty accurate interpretation of shamanism, Tamara. Shall I go into my lecture mode and tell you some more? These are things I’ve learned in my own recent research on shamanism.”

“Sure. I didn’t look at cultural things—just at shamanism and psychology as applied to neuroscience and how the brain works electrically.”

“Okay, good. So maybe sixty years ago, a historian of religion named Mircea Eliade—he was Romanian if you’re wondering about the unusual name—wrote an influential text in which he claimed that the origin of shamanism goes all of the way back to the Paleolithic age and that it’s the common source of all of the original religions of humankind. This is because of the animistic beliefs and veneration of the natural world that characterizes all forms of shamanism. He traced its roots to the regions of central Asia and Siberia, where it’s still the major religion and many scholars claim that the idea of shamanism must be restricted to the original Asiatic practitioners.

“Eliade argued that in all cultures, shamans believe that everything in the universe is connected spiritually, and that there are powers outside of the mundane world which can affect nature. Those powers can be influenced by the ancestors of the society’s people, so those ancestors are remembered and venerated. One of Eliade’s key beliefs is that shamanistic ritual could be viewed as a ‘technique of ecstasy’ where the practitioners go on a spiritual journey to access the power that they’re given by spirits. Also, those spirits play a crucial role in shamanism.

“I believe in taking a more general approach to defining shamanism. Besides their achieving a state of ecstasy in their practices, another common and prominent element of shamanism, present wherever the culture is found, is the belief in the ‘spirit spouse’; these spirit husbands or wives are viewed as the shaman’s primary spiritual helpers. In this manner, shamans are usually recognized, by the people whom they serve, as the ‘masters’ or sometimes ‘servants’ of the spirits. In many cultures, the major part of being initiated into becoming a shaman is the gaining of a spirit spouse; this is typically an obligatory and expected outcome of the initiation. In those cultures, shamans interact with their spirit spouses through performing ritual ceremonies or through dreams or trance. These interactions may be purely symbolic, but they can be romantic or even sexual in nature. In those cultures, shamans have a healing role and use herbs, ritual, and prayer, and many times supernatural practices too, to heal people.”

“That’s really interesting, Greta,” Tamara said. “How did shamanism spread from central Asia? It’s present in the western hemisphere too.”

“Either through migration or possibly concurrent evolution. Or both. Remember that the Paleolithic age began 2.5 million years ago, so if shamanism began during that time, there was plenty of opportunity for it to spread as humans moved around. Besides central Asian shamanism, very similar practices are found close by in central China with the Hmong people, in many of the Nepalese cultures too, and in India, where the shaman invites a Hindu deity to use his or her body as a conduit to answer worshipers’ questions.

“Going further afield, the nomadic Bedouins of Asia Minor also use the trance for performing shamanistic rituals and like most of the other cultures, believe in three groups of entities which control nature: the gods, the ancestors, and the spirits, in their case, known as the djinn. Also in the Asian group are the Yupik and Inuit cultures, who are found in the huge region from eastern Siberia and spanning all the way to Alaska, northern Canada, to Greenland. And a type of Asian shamanism was practiced by native Americans and the First Nations of Canada, whose ancient ancestors likely originated in Siberia. My sources say that these cultures exhibit instances of shamanistic practice.

“Closer to home for me are the Finnish people, where the Sámi culture has spiritual practices and beliefs which are based on a type of animism and polytheism. In traditional Sámi beliefs and practices, there is a veneration of both spirits and ancestors. For yourself, in Africa, many cultures have animistic beliefs, some of which may include shamanism. In southern Africa, the Bantu people have shamans called sangomas or inyangas. Possibly the kujur of the south Sudanese Nyima tribe can be thought of as shamans. In west Africa, the Hausa Bori cult is found in a number of border regions of Nigeria and Niger and some scholars ascribe shamanistic practices to them. And of course, in west Africa’s Dahomey/Benin region, Vodou is practiced. Its priests and priestesses can be viewed as a kind of shaman. Africa has many other areas were similar beliefs exist.

“So many of the practices and beliefs of all those shamanistic cultures are closely related, which strongly suggests that they may indeed derive from a common source, although the parallel evolution of beliefs cannot be ruled out. But your idea that there is some sort of genetic adaptation which allows the shaman’s mind to tap into a global consciousness is really radical but sounds intriguing.”

“It is radical, but it could explain and account for all kinds of spiritual phenomena—as an example, let me point to my own case, the lwa. My theory would explain, for one thing, the help I get in translating languages. Remember what Peter told you about that, when we met Kevin and Denise in England?”

“Oh, right. Say, I was going to challenge you on that trick and I forgot to do it back then. Jag hoppas att du inte kommer att skämmas, men vet du vad jag säger nu?”

Tamara laughed. “Slipped that one in, didn’t you? Ah, thanks, Papa Legba; glad you were paying attention. Greta, you asked me, ‘I hope that you won’t be embarrassed, but do you know what I’m saying now?’ but that was Swedish, not Danish.”

“Goddess, Tamara, I simply can’t get over what you can do...”

“Not me; it’s Papa Legba through me. Wait... okay. Greta, this is hard to explain... he didn’t ‘speak’ to me in any sense of speech, but here’s one for you. Paplegbar segðir, hvernig familiar eru þú með tungarinn ór þinn áncéstörs?”

“Oh goddess, I haven’t heard that language since Grandma’s death... hardly anybody outside academic circles speaks it well. Old Icelandic—the language of the Eddas...”

“It’s Old Norse, really; the vowels are broader and the consonants are more Germanic than Scandinavian,” Tamara corrected her. “You understood it?”

“Oh yes. The grammar is a bit different but it’s ‘Papa Legba’ ... I guess is the name, ‘says, how familiar are you on tongue of your ancestors?’ Ah... ‘language’ would be better than ‘tongue.’ Oh my, this is wonderful, Tamara... Does this mean you can read and translate the Eddas in the original?”

“Um, I don’t think that it works like that,” Tamara chuckled. “Papa Legba speaks all languages and helps me to do it. I doubt that it extends to reading... but, well, if someone read it out loud, then that could work. But you’d get the Old Icelandic and not the Norse and from what I gather, there’s about a two- or three-hundred-year difference, right?”

“Yes, that’s true, but I don’t think that the language shifted all that much.”

“Well, now here’s what I really wanted you to know,” Tamara told her and then explained about her discovery of activating the limbic system. “I found that I can do it with people to make them more receptive to others’ emotions, as I told you last year. But I only recently learned how to activate it in people who already appear to have functioning parts of the system—like those with shaman skills, and yes, it appears to have a strong genetic component. Peter’s response when I worked with him was immediate and Mom and Dad also began to feel their abilities very quickly. You’re an incredibly powerful priestess—seeress, that us.”

Greta looked sad. “But Werner is...”

“Let me talk to him. He just needs to be there for emotional support, but I think that I’ll tell him that the major effect for Dad was that it gave him the ability to read people to suss out ... well... detect lies. That may be a good carrot to use.”

“Oh, if you could... how long does it take? The ‘activating,’ I mean.”

“Not long, maybe five minutes, I think. Let me go talk to Werner.”

She found him in the living room talking to her father.

“Hi, Tamara. You done with Greta now? Between you and your mom, I’ve never seen her so excited with new ideas she’s been getting from both of you.”

“Yep, and Mom and I have something coming up soon regarding Haiti. Some economic projects and planning a project on social research involving them. We’ll need Greta’s help there too,” Tamara told him. “And I’ve gotten another thought about the Davidsonville area. I’ve noticed that active agricultural use is declining along the Patuxent River Road, am I right?”

“Pretty much. Small local farming is on the decline in the whole county.”

“I’d like to acquire any land that comes up for sale in the sections closest to the resort and the old quarry. But I’d like to keep it quiet. I’m thinking of a possible planned community close to the quarry site when it’s become a school and research facility.”

“Now that’s an interesting idea, Tamara. There’ve been a few of those kind of communities built around the country and the idea is catching on in places. We already have Reston in Virginia and Columbia in Howard County, in fact. That might work in this area since we’re so close to D.C.”

“Good; glad you like the idea. So Dad, tell Werner about your being a human lie detector,” she chuckled. “Dad found that skill useful during his negotiations—tell him what happened at your diplomat’s course, Dad.”

“Well, nothing really dramatic happened, but I was assigned to go to the Joint Military Attaché School, so I did it a few months after my London gig. That was a really interesting course and Nadine also took it. They have a special program for military spouses but since Nadine will be a diplomat in her own right, she did the regular program too, Anyway, about a quarter of the people taking the course were so full of themselves—they were more out to get a good rep than anything else. My sensitivity to emotional signals that Tamara had unlocked in me—Nadine too—let me get a good sense of the people who were real and who the posers were.

“The unusual part was this Indonesian guy; he was whip-smart and had just been frocked as a Navy light commander and was to be assigned as a military attaché at the embassy in Japan when his promotion became official. He had quite a secret, though. He actually had two wives! His ‘senior’ wife was taking the spouse course and when a bunch of us were discussing what the spouses would do when their husbands—and one wife, since we had one female attaché candidate—were on assignment, his responses, although perfectly normal, set off my senses and somehow I sensed that he had a multiple marriage.

“Turns out that polygamy—actually just polygyny—is legal in Indonesia and he had already been married to both ladies well before he came here. His second wife was when he was eighteen, actually. His dad had been a U.S. serviceman who knocked up an Indonesian gal, so he was a U.S. citizen and then at 22, he came to the U.S. to study industrial engineering. He got into the Naval ROTC program in college and he’s done really well in the Navy. My truth sense clued me into something odd about his comments about marriage and, when I asked him in private, he tried denying his marriages at first. So I told him how he had given the secret away and then he relented but asked me to keep mum about it because the Navy would frown on his multiple marriage if it became generally or officially known.”

“Huh. Isn’t it risky for him to have two wives in the military?” Werner asked.

“It is if he flaunts it. But he’s not hiding that he lives with two gals. It was my truth sense that let me figure out that the other woman wasn’t something like a cousin or a housekeeper; she was way more than just a domestic helper. When he first moved to the U.S., he had gotten some legal advice that his ‘official’ wife should claim that the other gal was her dependent, so he had gotten paperwork to support that claim. But the other woman can’t get the same family benefits, obviously. Apparently they’ve got that covered, though. But the point of this story is that my truth sense is really sensitive and it’s helped me lots—it also makes people get a strong sense of trust in me.”

“Thanks, Dad. Now, Werner, here’s your sales pitch. I’d like to work with Greta to enable parts of her brain’s emotional apparatus. To let me do that, she needs the mental support of someone close and you’re it. If you can help us, it’s extremely likely that you’ll also wind up with some benefit, possibly even something like a truth sense like Dad has. When I worked with Peter and Mom, they both acquired an ability kinda like Dad’s too, but his truth sense is much stronger. You don’t need to do much. All we need from you is to hold our hands for several minutes and meditate with us and ... well, think about Greta—you’d just think about your feelings for her. Can you do that?”

Werner looked at Wilson who smiled and nodded to him. “Try it. It’s a win-win situation and think of what you might be able to gain from doing it.”

“So this isn’t like a trance or a seeress thing?” Werner asked Tamara.

“Not at all. Nothing to do with spirits or anything supernatural. You may feel... like... um... ever get an endorphin high, like after exercise? That’s what Peter said he felt after.”

Werner nodded.

Wilson told him, “You might feel something like that. You also might get a slight headache at first, though. I did but it went away after a minute. And Tamara’s right; it did feel like a bit of a high for several minutes and the world seemed brighter.”

“Let’s do this, Werner. You’ll make Greta very happy,” Tamara grinned at him.

Greta was indeed very happy when she saw Tamara leading Werner over to her and she excused herself from Nadine as Tamara went to get Peter.

When Tamara returned, she brought them to a bedroom and told them, “We need quiet and privacy. Peter’s here for balance. Also, when I did this with my parents, he was a source of strength. So here’s what we’ll do now.”

She led them through the meditation exercise and when she began sensing the auras of the Winsbergs, she was amazed at Greta’s strength. Werner also had a strong spiritual presence, much like her father’s.

Wonder why he buries that? Tamara thought. And he’s wary of Greta’s seeress skills... I wonder if his spirituality caused him embarrassment when he was younger.

Tamara let herself leave her meditative state and noticed that Peter was also back with them now. But the older couple was still sitting there, eyes closed, and seemed to be focused on each other. In another minute, Greta roused, followed by Werner.

“That was indescribable,” Greta whispered. “Werner, did you feel that?”

“If you mean that I sensed you... your essence...you use the ‘aura’ term a lot; that must have been what I felt. Tamara, you said that this wouldn’t be spiritual...”

Tamara laughed. “I actually said that no spirits or anything supernatural was involved. You felt Greta’s aura, then.”

“And yours and Peter’s too,” he replied. “And I still have what feels like a slight connection but it’s much stronger with Greta.”

“That’s what I’m feeling... a connection of our emotional feelings. Peter, is this anything like you felt back in school?”

“Maybe... but ... can you close it off, Grams?” he asked.

“Ah, yes, it’s like it’s still there but I’m not, ah, ‘listening’ to it.”

“Yeah, it’s kinda like what happened to me but I could never get it to stop,” Peter said. “So that’s a good sign, Grams. Say, now that you can feel an outside emotion from someone, you might be able to learn how to turn it around and project an emotion. That’s what Tamara does and I can do something like it too.”

He projected a quick sample of a comforting feeling, to the Winsbergs’ amazement.

“But how your own skills develop may take time,” Tamara cautioned them and then told them how she used hers. “Dad found that his skill was useful to detect lies and he found out that he can sense how receptive people are being to what he’s saying. He told me that the skill makes other people receptive to his point of view.”

“I can see where an ability like that would be useful, especially in negotiations,” Werner remarked.

“Shall we rejoin the others?” Greta asked. “I want to experience this new sense with more people.”

Tamara got Werner to wait with her as the others left the room.

As they left, she said, “Werner, this is just curious Tamara now. I sense a deep spirituality in you but you seem to reject it. When you were younger—maybe even as a kid—did you have an embarrassing experience when others learned about it?”

“Damn, Tamara, no wonder everyone thinks you’re a mind reader. Yes, things happened when I was a kid. One of the resort families, the mom, had ... it was a Romany background ... and I hung out with her and her kids one summer. I learned stuff from them, kid versions anyway. Tarot, palm reading, fortunes using playing cards. I really got into it, too. The next year they didn’t come back but other kids had begun ridiculing me for learning that stuff. The teasing even extended to school. I was maybe eight years old then but I began disavowing all of that, saying that they were just games. My rejecting spirits and the like goes back to that time, I guess. Never thought much about it, though, till now.”

“Looks like an experience similar to Peter’s, you know? But in your case it ended with the problem going away. Now that you know the source of your discomfort with Greta’s skills, I think you’ll be receptive to what your mind will be able to do with emotional interpretation.”

“You may be right, Tamara. We’ll see. I love the new connection to Greta that I feel now, so thanks.”

They rejoined the rest of the family.

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