Free Shift: A Novel by Tim Kring and Dale Peck Page A

Naz turned back to Logan.
    “There was a … connection. A mental connection.”
    “Huh,” Logan said. “In spy school, they teach us that reluctant interviewees tend to understate the facts, often by eighty or ninety percent. If that statistic is true, then I’m guessing you guys experienced something like full-on telepathy.” He snorted at the absurdity of what he’d just said, but Naz didn’t snort, and neither did Chandler.
    “Was that a possibility?” Chandler said in a level voice.
    Logan just stared at him a moment, then shook his head as if to clear it.
    “It depends who you talk to. Talk to Joe Scheider, he’ll say don’t be crazy, we’re just trying to make a truth serum, a knockout potion, maybe our own Manchurian candidate. But talk to Allen Ginsberg, Ken Kesey, that lot, they’ll tell you the sky’s the limit. Telepathy, the astral plane, naked walks on the rings of Saturn.” He looked between Naz and Chandler and shook his head again. “If you’d backed me into a corner and forced me to pick sides, I guess I’d’ve gone with the headshrinker. But there you go. Sometimes even the beatniks can be right.”
    Chandler nodded. “What’s the Gate of Orpheus?”
    Logan glanced at Chandler sharply.
    “How did you—”
    “I pulled it out of your head,” Chandler said coldly, “when you were jerking off on the other side of the mirror.”
    Logan’s cheeks turned bright red. His mouth opened, then closed.
    “Jesus Christ.” He shook his head incredulously. “Look, all I know—”
    He broke off again, his jaw hanging open as the magnitude of whathad happened settled into his brain. Nearly a minute passed before he took a deep breath and started speaking again.
    “All I know is that some scientists have theorized the existence of a receptor in the brain. Just as certain people have unusually keen senses of smell or taste or rhythm, the hypothesis went, so other people might have retained some vestigial receptiveness to ergot alkaloids, which is what LSD is made from. Ergot’s a fungus that affects most grains. It’s one of those things like alcohol—its existence is so enmeshed with human civilization that most people have developed a genetic resistance to it. But, just as many Indians are especially susceptible to the effects of alcohol because they didn’t evolve with it, it seemed possible that there might also be a population, albeit a much smaller one, similarly sensitive to ergotism. Even its proponents admitted that the possibility was remote, but the consequences if it proved true were so profound that the Company couldn’t ignore it. We know the Soviets are conducting their own experiments, and we can’t risk falling behind.”
    It was a moment before anyone spoke. Then Naz said:
    “So how do we find out if Chandler possesses this receptor?”
    Logan looked at Naz as if he’d forgotten she was in the room.
    “We take a little road trip,” Logan said. “It’s time you two met LSD’s fairy godfather.”

Mount Vernon, VA
November 1, 1963
    Melchior sat in the front seat of the battered Chevy he’d pulled from the garage beneath the Adams Morgan apartment. A hand-me-down from the Wiz, who’d driven it for half a dozen years, then passed it to his eldest son, then his youngest, then handed off what was left—rust held together by paint and prayers—to Melchior. You had to hand it to the good folks at General Motors: Melchior had hooked up the battery, and the jalopy started right up.
    The radio was on. The speaker spat out angry white and defiant black voices calling one another names—nigger, redneck—in Bum Fuck, Alabama, or Shit Hole, Mississippi, the insults and epithets interrupted by hopeful or sentimental or otherwise naively wishful songs: “One Fine Day,” “Be My Baby,” “Blowin’ in the Wind,” along with the indecipherable but infectious “Louie Louie.”
    Outside the window, a big white house sat on the far side of a wide lawn. Picket fence,