"Lots of the folks on the street had poor teeth and most of their clothes were practically rags. Everyone moved slowly and it was very dusty."
"Where else did you go besides the barber shop?" I asked.
"I peeked in a place that was sort of a cafe but didn't go in. People were eating bowls of soup. It took some getting used to moving around. I bent down to pat a dog but it was like he wasn't there. I tried to remember names on buildings but just being there was so awesome it was difficult to concentrate. A lot of store fronts were boarded up. The only businesses I remember are the feed store and a dress shop named McGuire's Clothing."
"What was the general area like?" I asked.
He closed his eyes, concentrating. "I could see mountains, high hills, at the end of the street ahead of me. The town was fairly large with a dozen or so business buildings on each side of the street but, as I said, most were closed. The place must be on a map."
Betsy kept prompting Martha to take notes.
When Howie ran dry, we began discussing reasonable explanations for what he was seeing. None of us admitted to the possibility that the visions were real visits to the past. The magnitude of that what-if scenario was downright scary.
"Your scenes can't be real." Martha finally brought to daylight what was on all our minds. "No matter how life-like they are, they have to be visions your mind is creating, as mundane they seem to be. Interesting, but let's be realistic."
"I agree," I said. "But I'm not sure there's any accurate way of proving that one way or the other."
"If the town exists . . ." Betsy began.
"Granted, that's a step in the right direction but we still wouldn't know if the scene Howie saw actually occurred." I added, "More likely it developed from some long forgotten memory in Howie's subconscious; a book he read, a movie he saw."
"It's all a moot point now," Martha said. "Quinn is packing up the power sources as we speak and the plants will be destroyed as part of the test. If the dreams are some weird combination of the lab's plant environment or Quinn's equipment, we're out of luck."
Howie looked devastated. "Can't it be reassembled?"
"What?" I asked. "We don't know if the cause is the power sources, some or more of the plants or the room itself. You might need to replicate everything."
Martha smiled. "Good luck in convincing Quinn! He's not exactly a true believer of what we're doing and he'll back teaching in his classroom in a few days."