The Doomsday Box Read Online Free PDF

which way was up. Any attempt at movement led to more confusion. A wave of nausea swept over her.
    Opal forced herself to stay calm. The most likely explanation was that Mr. Carradine had been given the wrong coordinates. It sometimes happened on missions. Usually the error was small, so you arrived only a few yards from your expected destination and it didn’t matter . . . if you even noticed at all. But a shortfall in her present mission would leave her inside the concrete plug in total darkness—exactly where she seemed to be now. It made sense; and all she had to do was figure out the direction of the time-tunnel chamber and move toward it. In moments she would emerge from the plug and complete her mission.
    Unless, a worried voice whispered in her mind, the wrong coordinates had placed her in the time tunnel itself.
    Despite all attempts at discipline, Opal felt a creeping panic. Mr. Carradine had warned her to stay well clear of the tunnel, and she knew exactly why. No one really understood the physics of space-time. For all she knew, the rift could send her consciousness anywhere, to any time or place. Alternatively, it might rip her energy body to shreds, compress it, expand it, or drive her insane like those poor sailors in the Philadelphia Experiment. It could—
    With an almost superhuman effort, Opal pushed the panic aside. She still felt afraid—very much afraid—but she forced herself to think clearly. First of all, her second body hadn’t been ripped to shreds, nor harmed in any way so far as she could tell. And she wasn’t any more of a lunatic than usual. She was simply somewhere in darkness, a little confused, and the most likely explanation for that was definitely a shortfall in the coordinates, leaving her inside the concrete plug. And since she didn’t know which way to go to reach the rift chamber, it would make sense to return to her physical body and try again.
    Gross movement follows thought. It was the first thing operatives were taught when they joined the Shadow Project. If you needed to go somewhere in your second body, you visualized your destination clearly and it drew you to the target like a magnet. If she was inside the concrete plug, her physical body was only yards away at most. It should be the easiest thing in the world to return to it and start again. She took a deep breath and turned her attention to the scene she’d just left: herself in the chair; Michael seated beside her; Mr. Carradine fiddling with his laptop; Danny, Fuchsia, and the colonel looking on. . . .
    Nothing happened.
    Opal closed her eyes and visualized as vividly as she could, this time concentrating only on her physical body seated on its chair. During Shadow Project training, they referred to your physical body as the prime objective . It was your ultimate anchor, the one thing you could rely on when all else failed. But still nothing happened. Maybe the problem had something to do with the closeness of the space-time rift. She wondered if she could contact Michael. They were linked, brain waves to brain waves, through the electronics of the psychotronic helmets, and sometimes, under rare circumstances, the linkage could be made almost telepathic so that he could experience flashes of her thoughts and she of his. She tried desperately to send him a mental message, but if Michael heard her, he didn’t manage to reply. She was alone in the darkness.
    But that was all right, Opal thought, still fighting back the panic: she could swim out if she kept her head. Swimming was a technique they taught all agents of the Shadow Project as an emergency approach to situations just like this, where it was extraordinarily difficult to judge direction, how fast you were moving, or, indeed, whether you were actually moving at all. For some reason, the actions of swimming gave you back an accurate sensation of movement. You were even able to judge approximately how fast you were