"Hundred percent. Really! Doesn't it beat getting run over by a trolley? Doesn't it beat getting separated, losing a day or two, a century or two together?"
"The together part I like," she said. "Because I'm serious, too: if you die, I do not want to live here anymore."
"I know," I said. "So all we have to do is learn out-of-body travel, like spiritual adepts and wolves."
"Wolves?"
"I read it in a wolf-book. Some zoo-people trapped a pair of wolves, mates, in a soft trap, a humane thing that didn't hurt them a bit. Put them in a big cage in the back of a pickup-truck, drove them to the zoo. When they got there, lifted out the cage, both wolves . . . dead. No sickness, no injury, no nothing. The wolves didn't want to be separated, they didn't want to live in a cage. They let go of their will to live and they died together. No medical explanation. Gone."
"Is that true?"
"It's in the wolf-book, nonfiction. I'd sure do it, if I were them, wouldn't you? Wouldn't you say that's a civilized, an intelligent way off the planet? If the whole earth, all space-time is a dream, why not wake gentle and happy somewhere else, instead of screaming that we don't want to leave here?"
"Do you really think we could do it?" she said. It did appeal to her sense of order.
Hardly had the question faded and I was back on the bed with a dozen books from our shelves. The Study and Practice of Astral Projection, Journeys out of the Body, The Supreme Adventure, The Practical Guide to Astral Projection, Mind Beyond the Body, The weight of them sagged a shallow crater in the mattress.
"These people say it can be learned. It's not easy and it takes a whole lot of practice, but it can be done. The question: Is it worth doing?"
She frowned. "Right now I'd say no. But if you were to die tomorrow, I'd be awfully sorry I hadn't learned."
"Let's compromise. Let's learn the out-of-body part and save the not-coming-back part till a long time later. We've been out-of-body before, both of us, so we know we can do it. Now it's a matter of doing it when we want to, and doing it together. Shouldn't be all that hard."
I was wrong. It was all that hard. The problem was to go to sleep without going to sleep, without losing consciousness of ourselves separate from our bodies. Easy to imagine doing that when one is wide awake. Staying conscious with a blanket of sleep heavier than lead dragging one down-that's no simple task.
Night after night, we'd read our astral-travel books, promise to meet in the air over our sleeping bodies, just a glimpse of each other and remember when we woke. No luck. Weeks went by. Months. It became a habit that lasted long after the books were read.
"Remember to remember. . . ." we'd say, turning out the light.
We'd fall asleep programmed to meet overhead; she'd go to Pennsylvania and I'd be perched on a rooftop in Peking. Or I'd show up in a kaleidoscope future and she'd be in the nineteenth century, giving concerts.
Five months into our practice, I woke up, it must have been three in the morning.
I was trying to move my head on the pillow, change position, when I realized that I couldn't do that because the pillow was down on the bed and I was floating on my back, three feet in the air.
Wide awake. Floating. The room was wall-to-wall in dark silver-grey light. Moonlight, I would have said, but there was no moon. There the walls, the stereo cabinet; there the bed, books neatly on her side, a tumbled stack on mine. And there our bodies, asleep!
A jolt of pure astonishment, like blue fire through me in the night, and then an explosion of joy. That was my body, down there; that curious thing on the bed was me, eyes closed, sound asleep! Not quite me, of course . . . me was the one who was looking down.
Everything I thought, that first night, was underlines and exclamation points.
It works! It's so easy! This is . . . freedom! HURRAY!
The books had been right. Think about moving, and I moved, sliding on the air like a sled on ice. I didn't exactly have a body, but neither was I without one. I had a sense of body-hazy, foggy, a ghost's body. After all our determined practice, how could this be so easy? Extreme consciousness. Compared to this humming knowing razor-life, daily consciousness is sleepwalking!
I turned in the air and looked back. The faintest thread of glowing light led from me to my sleeping form. That's the cord we read about, the silver cord, that links a living ghost to its body. Sever that cord, they say, and off you go.
At that moment a rippling aura blurred from behind me, slowed to hover around Leslie in bed and faded into her body. A second later she moved, turned under the
covers; her hand touched my shoulder. It felt like being tackled from behind; I was catapulted headlong awake by the touch.
My eyes flew open in a room darker than midnight . . . so dark it didn't matter whether eyes were open or closed. I reached for the bed-lamp switch, heart pounding.
"Wookie!" I said. "Sweetie, are you awake?" . "M. I am now. What's wrong?"
"Nothing wrong!" I shouted quietly. "It worked! We did it!"
"We did?"