Collected Short Fiction, page 823
He wore a wild, iron-gray beard, with thin gray hair that fell to his bony shoulders. His lean hand shook with the cardboard, which had a black tire print across the words SIDE UP. He lifted his free hand to wave as if he thought he knew me, shrugged uncertainly, and shaded his eyes again.
Half ashamed of staring, I tinned to pick up the paper from the fallen leaves under the half-bare elm.
“Hullo?” His voice was a rusty creak.
“Hello,” I answered. “Can I help you?”
“Don’t know.” His haggard face crinkled with despair. “Lost. Frozen. Everything—” A fit of shivering checked him. “Can’t remember.”
I saw blood drying on his naked feet. My wife is tolerant of the unexpected. I asked if he wanted to come inside.
“Can’t—remember.” Whimpering like a hurt child, he shook his head. “Can’t remember anything.”
I caught his trembling arm. Sudden tears in his eyes, he dropped the cardboard, let me drape him in my housecoat, and limped after me into the kitchen. I’m a physician, a partner in a small suburban clinic. I sat him in a chair and got my emergency kit to take his vital signs. His body temperature was depressed, but not alarmingly. Everything else seemed normal.
“Bath?” He seemed to search for words. “Please. Need bathroom.”
I led him to the bathroom, found him a towel, left him with the shower turned on hot. My wife wanted to call the police.
“They know who’s missing. He must have family or friends anxious for him.”
I delayed. Amnesia fascinates me and I thought he could be a classic case. Breakfast was ready when he came back from the bath, no longer shivering. At the table he ate his eggs and bacon with a ravenous appetite, but responded with helpless shrugs when my wife asked his name, where he was from, if he had family, if he could remember anybody. He was soon yawning groggily. We put him to bed in the guestroom. He slept until my wife called him for dinner.
He came out looking pale and haunted.
“Nothing,” he muttered when she asked if he had remembered anything. “But I dreamed.” His gaunt face twitched. “A horrid dream!”
With us at the table, he sat staring moodily at the tall clock by the door, a family relic built by my own grandfather. I poured wine, but he took only a single absent sip. My wife asked about the dream. Her voice seemed to startle him.
“Sorry.” He shook himself. “A nightmare I can’t forget.”
“You might feel better,” she told him, “if you just talk about it.”
“I was in an airplane. Flying to New York. To see—to see a girl.” He began haltingly, but spoke with growing animation. “Linda. Linda Zindler, that was her name. A slim little blonde who taught French lit at Columbia. She was just back from a summer in Paris, visiting her folks on Long Island. We’d quarreled over something. I was hoping to patch things up, but—”
His face tight as if in pain, he said no more till my wife asked what happened.
“It bugs me.” He reached for his wineglass, pushed it away, and stared a long time at with her with a kind of terror in his eyes before he collected himself to go ahead. “I was in an aisle seat when we took off from LAX. The others were empty. Midway of the flight, a man came from the back of the plane to take the window seat.”
He turned to peer groggily at me.
“A slender man about your size but older. He wore a loose black beret and mirror shades. Just another Hollywood type, I thought, till he pushed the shades up, polished the window with his handkerchief, and leaned to look out. All I could see was the blue haze under us, but he kept on looking. He hadn’t said a word, but that made me wonder.
“The attendants were preparing for the landing at Kennedy when the pilot came on to say the landing would be delayed. He didn’t say why, but passengers were already on the telephones. Rumors buzzed though the cabin. A big earthquake. The epicenter was out somewhere under the ocean, with damage far along the Atlantic coast.
“We circled over New York. The time was just past noon, the weather clear and bright. The stranger was leaning closer to the window. Looking over his shoulder, I found the skyline. Still familiar, but the ocean beyond it was draining out, uncovering a strange wilderness of mud flats and bare dark hills. I saw great canyons filled with racing white water.
“Somebody shouted Tsunami!” The uproar hushed. We watched the sea come back. An incredible wave that looked half a mile high. It curled over the city, hid it, covered everything. All I could see for a long time was white foam, dark water, the litter of ruin. The human bodies were too far for me to make them out, but I knew they were there.
“Millions killed. And Linda—”
Lips set white, he caught a long breath.
“The pilot kept us over it till the sea drained off again. In just half an hour—” He shivered. “The whole city was gone. Washed to bare rock, rivers of black mud, jungles of broken steel where towers had stood. I’d forgotten the man at the window till I saw him slumped against it.
“The black hole!’ Looking stricken, he was muttering to nobody. ‘The baby black hole!’
“I wanted to know what he meant, but he got up, slid past me, and hurried away toward the lavatories at the back of the plane. People were yelling into the phones. Most of them got no answers. The pilot spoke to say we were being diverted to Cleveland. He begged for order and promised to land us safe.
“A minister in the front row stood up and wanted us to join in the Lord’s Prayer. A few did. A man with him tried to lead us in ‘The Battle Hymn of the Republic,’ but his voice broke. People were crying. The attendants tried to silence hysterical children. Finally we landed.
“That’s the end of the dream, except—” His voice had fallen to a husky whisper. “I wonder about that man in the black beret.”
He stopped at that, looking sick and shaken.
“Dreams are strange.” My wife tried to comfort him. “Relax and eat your dinner.”
“It seemed so real!” He peered at her and back at me. “Did it—did any earthquake happen?”
We had attended a medical convention in New York just the week before. I always missed the old Trade Center, but my wife assured him that nothing worse had taken place. He sipped his wine at last and finally accepted a second helping of her pot roast.
The old grandfather clock seemed to startle him when it pealed the half-hour. His animation gone, as if it brought the nightmare back, he sat squinting at it for a long minute before he asked us to excuse him and wandered moodily around the kitchen and the front hall before he shuffled back to his room.
2.
Next morning he still recalled nothing. Yet he seemed almost cheerful when I promised to get help for him. I took him down to the clinic to meet my partner, Fred Neblen, who is a top-rank internist. I keep Monday mornings open, and we gave him a battery of tests. Waiting for results, I took him to a clothing shop and bought him an outfit of essentials. He let a barber cut his hair and trim his beard to a neat Vandyke. He looked younger and vaguely familiar, but still I failed to place him.
“Physically you’re okay,” Neblen told him when the test results were in. “Nothing worse than evident exhaustion and mental stress. Mentally, I think you’ve suffered a severe trauma, something so painful you had to blot it out. You might see a psychiatrist. There are drugs we might try. The best thing we can do is get you back into your own environment.” With that environment still unknown, Neblen wanted to contact social services.
“Not yet.” The stranger turned anxiously to me. “I don’t want drugs. And I—” He shrank into his new blue suit as if against a sudden chill. “I’m afraid.”
“Afraid of what?”
“I don’t remember.”
“Exactly,” Neblen nodded. “That’s your problem. You’ve got to have help.”
He turned to me and I saw tears in his eyes. “Doctor, can’t I just stay with you and your wife? For now, anyhow?”
He had the appeal of a frightened child, and I felt more than ever fascinated with his predicament. I took him back to the house. My wife was out, but I left him to take a nap in the guestroom. He was rubbing his deep-sunk eyes when he came out for dinner, and he stood blinking around him as if searching for anything familiar.
My wife agrees with me on the medical benefit of a little alcohol. We were sitting in the living room with our daily vodka and tonic. She gave the stranger a glass, but he had barely sipped it when the old clock struck. Its measured peals seemed to relax him, and he was suddenly ready to relate another dream.
“I was younger.” His eyes widened as if in surprise. “No great tidal wave had ever hit New York. I had new degrees in math and physics from MIT, and I’d just accepted a position at Zindler Research.” He squinted anxiously at me. “You’ve probably heard of Claudius Zindler?”
I shook my head.
“You haven’t?” He seemed bewildered again. “I can’t imagine why. He’s famous. Or at least he was in the dream. A polymath. He’d made his name in quantum optics. He was a NASA adviser on the ion drive for the Mars Explorer. A pioneer in the theory of wireless power transmission. He was on his way to the top till he got sidetracked into what he called nano-singularities.”
He saw that he had lost us.
“They are low-mass black holes.” His eyes narrowed. “You know what black holes are?”
“I’ve heard the term. I don’t know much.”
“Nobody knows enough. Actually, nobody has ever seen one. By definition, they’re invisible.” He grinned as if the science had erased his troubles. “But solid evidence says they do exist. Gravity wells so deep that space at the bottom is squeezed to an infinitesimal point. Nothing that falls in can ever escape. Not even light; that’s why they’re black.
“There’s a monster at the core of the galaxy. Such big ones swallow suns. Zindler was looking for something smaller, something he could study in the lab. He expected to find it in the cosmic radiation. His papers about it were controversial, but they fascinated me. I was delighted to get on with him. He advanced my bus fare and picked me up at the stop in a dusty little adobe town in New Mexico where nothing much had happened since Coronado’s conquistadors.
“Zindler was an odd sort. A big fellow in blue jeans and cowboy boots. Lean but muscular, an old Stetson canted over his eyes. He’d grown up on a ranch. Learned there, I guess, to look for far horizons. He got into college as a football quarterback. The first step on his way to quantum infinities.
“He’d convinced some big power company that his patents could be worth billions. Persuaded them to build him a lab on a mountain somewhere north of Albuquerque. We ate enchiladas in a little Mexican cafe and he drove me up there in an old pickup, over a washed-out road that scared me silly. On our way up I asked what he hoped to get out of black holes.
“Power!’ His voice boomed with fervor for the future as he saw it. They devour matter, but Stephen Hawking discovered they radiate energy. If I can capture and control those nano-singularities, that Hawking radiation ought to give me a universal electric generator. Actual perpetual motion, out of units small enough to power cars and planes and homes.’
“He steered around a pothole, his face lit with that vision of a world transformed.
“Hawking power could restore our wasted Earth. Terraform deserts. End famines. It would drive interplanetary flight. Maybe take us to other stars. Create wonders to come you can’t imagine!’
The stranger shrugged and finally frowned.
“Zindler was a great dreamer, but he’d run too far ahead of reality. If there are any nano-singularities in the cosmic rays, he hadn’t found them. The failure had made him a prophet without honor anywhere. His recent papers had failed to pass peer review. The power people had cut off his funding.
“But he never quit. He’d found money for a scheme to manufacture his own nano-singularities, focusing gravity waves on microscopic metal beads. The wise old hands called him an idiot for that. Gravity waves might possibly exist, but nothing could possibly focus them. He snorted at the skeptics. Quantum science had been useful in its time, but he was looking for a better handle on the universe. He said he was finding it in what he called a sub-quark physics.
“He steered us around a rock and scowled at the road ahead. He said he was learning how to make nano-singularities, but now some crazy guy was trying to stop him. He fumbled in the glove compartment and dug out a book. Cosmic Crapshoot: Planet Earth at Risk, by John Monkhouse.
“ ‘Monkhouse!’ He muttered the name like a curse. “He’s out to scare the world and ruin me. He claims he’s found fatal errors in my science—not that he has the wits to understand it. He claims my singularities could get out of control and destroy the planet. He wants the government to outlaw my research. His book is full of facts nobody has any right to know. Photos of my detectors and manipulators. Facsimiles of private notes I keep in the safe. Records of my blunders and corrections.’
“Zindler said he’d tried to sue, but Monkhouse was a pen name. The publisher refused to reveal anything about him. He’d hired a detective to investigate his former employees. They all came up clean. None of them had access to what was in the Monkhouse book.
“ ‘An actual devil.’ He shivered. ‘He give me the creeps.’
“He jockeyed the pickup through a gully where the pavement was gone and glowered at me with his jaw set hard.
“He’ll never stop me, whoever he is. I’ve found enough funds to take us through the summer, and I’m finally getting real results. What we do will make you proud.’ He gave me a quick brown grin. ‘We’ll show this Monkhouse up for the lunatic he is.’
“In a narrow canyon high toward the peak, we came to a chain stretched across the road. He rolled his window down and honked a horn. A man with a gun at his hip came out of the woods, spoke to him, and unlocked a padlock to lower the chain to let us pass.
“Monkhouse!’ he muttered again. ‘He’ll blow up the lab if he can ever get to it.’
“A little farther on, I saw a yellow coyote in the road ahead of us. Zindler jammed on the brakes. The pickup lurched toward the ditch. I guess that woke me.”
3.
One of my friends is Amur Shafique, a psychiatrist who shares my interest in amnesia. The stranger agreed to let me call him. He came over after dinner with his tape recorder and heard the stranger recount those disturbing dreams. We had a long discussion over a Scotch and soda after the man had begun to yawn and we let him limp away to bed.
“Very odd!” Shafique thanked me for calling him over and shook his head. “A real phenomenon. The visions are too vivid, too specific, too consistent internally, for any easy explanation. You know—”
He frowned and sipped his drink.
“I’ve looked at all the evidence for precognition. Some of it’s compelling. Never quite convincing. But this—” He drained his glass and rose to go. “I want to see the fellow again.”
The stranger came out late next morning, too agitated to touch his breakfast.
“I lay awake half the night.” The coffee cup was shaking in his hand. He spilled a little and set it back before it touched his lips. “Afraid to sleep. Afraid—afraid to dream again. Shafique says there’s something I’ve got to face. But after last night—”
He reached for his coffee again and took both hands to get it to his lips.
“The clock had struck eleven before I dozed off. And I don’t know. Maybe Shafique—” The cup rattled in the saucer when he tried to set it down. “I was in a farm truck loaded with household goods. It was after the Atlantic tsunami. The driver and his wife were running away from a chain of new disasters somewhere in Missouri. Terrible quakes. Lava floods. The whole world going—”
He bit his lip and caught his breath.
“The farmer had the radio on. A lot of static, but I caught talk about the whole continent splitting through the middle, along what some geologist called the New Madrid fault. A chain of new volcanoes. Deadly pyroclastic flows. I heard a dozen theories of the cause, but nothing of any black hole.
“We were somewhere in Missouri, driving west through mobs of people in desperate flight. Roads were jammed with cars and trucks and buses. People on bikes. On horses. On foot. All of them running from a terrible rain of fire. I never saw any volcano. Nothing except a dim red glow of fire in a great black cloud, alive with lightning, rolling after us.
“It came overhead. Ash fell out of it like red-hot snow. Great drops of thick gray mud fouled the windshield in spite of the wipers. The farmer cursed his luck and cursed Claudius Zindler and drove too fast, trying to keep ahead of the lava flood.
“Blind with the mud, he didn’t see the wreck, not till we were on top of it. A jackknifed truck and trailer. A car off a side road had crashed into it. The farmer got us around it, but the world was shaking under us. We went off the road and into a gully. The truck rolled over. The wind caught us there.
“A blast of fire with a hot sulfur stink, howling out of the east. It hit me like a fist in the chest. Scorched my face. I couldn’t breathe. I saw the farmer lying under the truck, his mouth wide open. Blind with the mud in his eyes. The woman was gasping for air, trying to drag him free.
“The ground thundered under me. It shook me off my feet. I remember falling. But then—”
The stranger shuddered and sat blinking at nothing till my wife asked if he couldn’t eat his breakfast now. He shook his head with a pale apologetic smile and turned back to me.
“Maybe you and Dr. Shafique can help me understand.”
“I’ll call him,” I said. “He does want to see you.”
“I hope,” he whispered. “Because the dream went on.”
He reached for his coffee cup and saw that it was empty. My wife hurried to fill it. He thanked her absently and forgot to pick it up. For a long minute, he sat squinting at a stained-glass plaque that hung in the window, a house-warming gift from my wife’s mother.
“Yes?” she said.
