Fire Of Heaven 02 - Threshold by Bill Myers

Author:Bill Myers
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Christian
ISBN: 9780310201205
Publisher: Vida
Published: 1997-09-18T05:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 9

“OKAY, WE’RE GETTING IMAGES.” The Institute’s biochemical engineer motioned for Sarah and Reichner to join him over at the computer terminal.

Across the room, Brandon lay on a hard, twelve-inch-wide table that had been rolled inside the PET, or positron-emission tomography scanner. It looked like a giant white doughnut with an opening thirty-five inches in diameter that ran forty-two inches deep. It completely surrounded Brandon’s head, which was held in place by two leather straps fastened with Velcro strips. He wore no gown, just jeans and his standard-issue T-shirt. His left hand rested in a plexiglass pan of water heated to exactly 43.6 degrees Celsius. From this hand they would remove multiple blood samples in order to monitor the radioactivity they were injecting into his body through a syringe in the other hand — a syringe surrounded by a silver cylinder designed to shield the technician from the very radiation he was injecting.

Outside the scanner, on a table near Brandon’s chest, a small cassette recorder played Reichner’s relaxation tape.

Sarah knew that PET scans weren’t always available to parapsychology labs, partly because of the machine’s 1.8 million dollar price tag. She also knew that the Institute was preparing to order a second. A wonderful indulgence. But PET scans themselves were no luxury. Unlike SCATs or MRIs, which register the same condition of tissue — whether it’s dead or alive — PET scans actually view and record the metabolic rate of a living organism.

Thirty minutes earlier, they had injected Brandon with three CCs of the radioactive isotope Fluorodeoxyglucose, a sugar that enters the cells of the brain just like any other sugar molecule. But since it is radioactive, it gives off energy — which the special crystals inside the PET’s plastic doughnut (over eighteen thousand of them) are able to record.

The purpose? To see which areas of Brandon’s brain were the most active when he had his visions.

The process was relatively painless, except for the hard table Brandon now lay on. All he had to do was listen to Reichner’s prerecorded voice and let it lead him into the lower-frequency brain waves — the brain waves present when the subject is most susceptible to paranormal activity.

Sarah joined Reichner at the computer screen to watch the first of the sixty-three sliced video images of Brandon’s brain appear. To see pictures of the human brain actually working never ceased to amaze her. The organ is by far the most complex in the known universe, and to this day prompts more questions than science has been able to answer.

The brain had not always been held in such high esteem. Aristotle figured it to be nothing but an elaborate cooling system that was good for producing mucus (after all, look how close it was to the nose). But eventually, this relatively small, three-pound organ responsible for everything from a Shakespearean sonnet to the horrors of Hiroshima, received the credit it deserved.

The biochemical engineer sitting at the computer, a young man from Taiwan, whistled softly. “Take a look at that.

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