Collected Short Fiction, page 825
“A long day,” he said. “I walked all over the neighborhood, trying to remember. You know—” He stopped to peer around in a baffled way. “You know, I think I’ve been here before. Maybe in this very house. Did anybody else ever live here?
“Nobody,” my wife said. “We had it built after we married.”
I told him I’d made an appointment for Shafique to see him.
“The nut cracker?” He blinked at me dismally. “Do you think I’m really crazy?”
“Nothing like that.” I tried to cheer him. “Shafique agrees that it’s only a transient amnesia. Perhaps a fugue state. Just uncover the emotional shock that caused the denial or escape, and we’ll have your memory back. We can try hypnosis, but now he wants to look for suggestive symbols in your dreams.”
“Nightmares!” He seemed angry at himself. “I just had another. Crazier every time. No sense to them.”
He stalked around the back yard while I grilled the chops, as if looking for his lost memory under the rose bushes or behind the tool shed. He seemed to find nothing he liked, yet the fragrant smoke woke his appetite. He ate heartily enough. We were finishing a second glass of wine when the old clock struck. He sat listening, gaping at it, counting the strikes. They stopped at seven, but his voice went on, hoarse and loud.
“Eight . . . nine . . . ten.”
He caught himself and shrugged sheepishly at me.
“That clock,” he whispered. “I know I’ve heard it somewhere. Sometime. Striking in the dark.”
7.
Shafique gave him an hour, taped his latest dreams, and wrote him a stress reduction prescription. Next morning we found him sitting in the kitchen, watching the clock as if afraid for it to strike again. He jumped when I spoke, but sat back and turned to us with an air of bleak uncertainty.
“Maybe I’ve begun to remember.” He licked his dry lips. “If I could understand just where I am.”
“You’re right here,” my wife told him. “Dr. Shafique says you’ll soon be okay. I’ll get you some coffee and make us a ham omelet for breakfast.”
She’s proud of our new house. Seeming not to care about breakfast, he peered around the kitchen and shrugged at its shining perfection.
“Everything,” he muttered. “Everywhere. So out of date. The cars on the street all antiques. I see people on TV that I thought were dead. I—I don’t belong.”
He shook his head and sat frowning at the clock.
“It woke me last night, striking twelve. Woke me from another nightmare. I was back at Zindler’s lab on the mountain. I’d slipped past the guard. Climbed over that chain stretched across the road. I was carrying four sticks of dynamite, taped together with a detonator. He’d fired me when we fell out, but I still had my keys to the lab.
“I got in through a side door, put the bomb under his gravity wave apparatus, lit the fuse, and ran a hundred yards down the road to wait. There was a heavy thump. Fire exploded through the windows. In a few minutes the whole building was blazing. I was still there watching it when Zindler came running out of the smoke, dressed in his nightshirt and yelling at me.
“You damned idiot!’
“I had a gun. I waved it to stop him. He stalked on toward me.
“ ‘If you thought I was about to kill the Earth, you’ve done it yourself.’
“I stood there gaping at him.
“ ‘Kill me if you want.’ He ignored the gun. ‘Nothing matters now. I had the singularity well contained. Your stupid sabotage has spilled it out of containment. Do you know what it will do?’
“A fit of coughing doubled him. Blazing cinders were raining down around us. Hot smoke had choked him, and he stood shaking his fists till he could speak again.
“Nothing we do can touch it now. It’s still smaller than an atom, but heavy enough to fall through the floor, down through the mountain, down to the center of the Earth.’
“I tried to deny the danger. Tried to quote Hawking, who said small black holes would be harmless. Radiating energy, they would shrink and evaporate. I’d hoped to get rid of his before it grew beyond the critical limit.
“Zindler cut me off, looking sick. His singularity had already grown beyond that limit. He said it would keep on growing. Slowly at first, because growth still had to depend on quantum tunneling. It would grow faster as the radius of capture increased.
“You—you—”
“ ‘Strangling in a gust of hot smoke, he stabbed a shaking finger at me.
“ ‘Have you forgotten? A black hole spins like the armature of a dynamo. It generates electricity. That will make heat. You’ve lit a fire in the core of the Earth. The heat will raise magma plumes. You’ll see quakes. Volcanoes. Cataclysms and worse cataclysms, till whole continents go. Till the planet implodes.’
“ ‘You’ve murdered the Earth.’
“You can imagine how that hit me.”
The stranger seemed to shrivel into himself. He sat for a moment blinking at the old clock before he pulled together and seemed to relax, turning with a pale smile for my wife when she filled his cup.
“Good coffee.” He sipped it and nodded in appreciation. “Something I missed on Mars. Chen and Jim Fish fed me well enough when I got used to their New Hope stuff, but they had no coffee.”
The hands of the clock were on the half hour and he sat watching till it struck.
“That helps.” He nodded at the clock. “Helps me find my place in time. Chen came back in time to grab me out of that pumice rain. I’m farther back now, back to a time before I was born.”
He sighed and paused to think.
“I must have been a pretty normal kid. I remember reading comics and hating school and playing soccer. I built model rockets. I longed for a berth on the Mars Explorer till they found I was colorblind. I earned my degrees at MIT, went from there to Zindler’s lab.
“At first I liked the man. He excited me, though his notions of Hawking power were hard for me to swallow. My own field was particle physics. The black holes I knew about were more theory than fact and trillions of miles away. Yet I stayed there with him most of a year.
“His sister came out to see him on a summer vacation from Columbia. Linda—” He shook his head, with a wistful sight. “Linda Zindler. She didn’t understand black holes or even want to. He was too far down in his own black hole to do much with her. That left a chance for me. My best summer ever! We found open snow on the north slope. She taught me to ski. “If—”
He drew a long breath.
“We’d begun to dream of a life together. But one night.” He caught himself with a grimace of pain. “We were all three living in a trailer home somebody had dragged up to the lab. Linda was baking potatoes and I was grilling steaks for dinner. Claude was working day and night, trying to manufacture his own singularities.
“When I went to get him out of the lab, he had no time to eat.
“ ‘Eureka!’ he yelled at me. ‘I’ve got one!’
“When he had time to talk, I tried to warn him that he was playing with very dangerous fire. He laughed at me. Stephen Hawking had proved that small black holes don’t last. His would be gone in an hour unless he kept it fed with hydrogen ions.
“He’d written a paper about his work. Science rejected it when the peer reviewers called him a crackpot. They said gravity waves would be impossible to focus, black holes of any size impossible to contain, any radiation from them impossible to control. In spite of that, he’d somehow got the funds to carry on. I did my best to stop him. Kept protesting till he fired me. Linda took his side. Finally, I remember—”
He fell silent for a time, his gaunt face working.
“Zindler never went public with the mishap, or even accused me of arson. After all, he had his own share in the crime. Knowing the truth could help nobody. We went back to the trailer and talked till daylight. I don’t know what he told Linda. She tried not to hurt me, but we were never close again.”
He caught a long breath.
“That was a lifetime ago, but it’s fresh as yesterday now that I remember. The fact. The grief. The pain. The absolute despair.”
“You meant no harm,” my wife said.
“Which only made it worse.” His voice was flat and dead. “I’d seen disaster coming and failed to stop it. I tried to excuse myself in every way I could, tried to believe Zindler’s little nano-singularity would in fact evaporate.
“It didn’t.”
He sighed and glanced again at the old clock as if expecting it so speak. “I tried to wash my failure out with alcohol. That did no good. I drove my car into a freight train. Woke up in a hospital bed and lay there for months in the pain I deserved, still praying for any miracle that might save the Earth. Miracles don’t happen, not in Chen’s universe.”
His fingers were tracing a long blue scar across his leathery cheek.
“I never saw Zindler again, but Linda came to see me at the hospital. She never quite forgave me, but she did convince me that my own unlucky life had to go on.”
Lips tight, he sighed.
“I learned to walk again. Waiting for the end, I learned what I could about seismology and volcanology and tried to face the future. I got the jobs I could. Drove a truck. Taught high school science. Sold high-tech medical equipment. Even tried to hope for a new life with Linda.” Painfully, he grinned.
“Zindler was a better man than I ever was. He gave up his schemes for Hawking power and went back to Project Mars. I heard from Linda that he’d gone out to the colony. He wanted to make a place there for her, but she wouldn’t leave her folks.
“Those last few weeks—”
His weathered face set hard.
“Earth’s crust went fast when the lava plumes finally reached it. Civilization was gone, almost overnight. Transport, phones, radio, law and order. Trapped there in Cinci, trying to get home, I saw looting, robbery, murder. Yet I remember acts of heroism, acts of love, acts of vigilante justice. Little family groups were getting together anywhere they could. Singing, praying, making love while they waited.
“I was there till I found a little group of friends—in those final days, we all looked for friends. A pilot, a mechanic, an ex-Marine. The pilot knew a millionaire who’d owned a private jet. We found his house empty, the cars gone, a corpse rotting on the drive. The plane was still in the hangar when we broke the lock, with gas enough to take us west. We got across Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and ran into a wall of new volcanoes. The engines died, ruined by volcanic ash. We crashed somewhere in Missouri.
“The pilot was hurt. His friends stayed with him. I went on anyhow I could. On a makeshift crutch the day that farmer and his wife picked me up. Great people. They shared what they had. A few ripe apples and a loaf of homemade bread. The woman showed me photos of the son they hoped to find in Kansas City.
“They never got there. I remember gasping for life, broiling in the sulfur fumes, and waking up in bed on Mars. Chen and his amphibian team finished their dig and went home to New Hope. Left there alone, I had time enough to regret my sins and look for comfort in Chen’s theory of time.
“If free will was illusion, if my life was only one fixed instant in the infinite lines of time, if I’d never had an actual choice, I shouldn’t blame myself. Yet I had to believe the illusion, to accept what Chen called the infinite obsession of life. The guilt was mine to bear forever.
“I don’t know how long—”
He stopped to frown at the clock.
“The Martian days are about as long as ours, but I didn’t try to count them. Chen had left food and water for me. I stayed alive and watched what I’d done to Earth. Watched the accretion disk and the plasma plumes blazing in the hazy dusks and dawns.
“Till Fish came back.”
He wiped his wet eyes with the back of his hand.
“My final friend. He was human as I am, even with the way he had to twist his copper-scaled head to see me with one long green eye. I hugged him. That seemed to startle him, but then he wrapped his finny arms around me and we talked.
“Home planet again. Climbed song tower. Heard women call from sea. None for Big Jim Fish. Young daughters want young sons. Elder mothers choose men who share wisdom of the sea. None care for song of far singularity consuming ancient Earth. Difficult time for Fish.’
“His sleek head shook, and his quacking voice had a somber note.
“Dr. Chen offer alternative. Return Fish here. Monitor instruments. Record essential data. Bring condolence you. Dr. Chen promise soon return. Erect Earth memorial.’
“I thanked him, but I didn’t want any Earth memorial. In spite of all Chen said about the laws of time and the worth of Earth, I thought I saw one last chance to save it.”
A shaft of the morning sun had struck through that stained-glass plaque in the window and swung across the neglected breakfast table to paint a rainbow pattern on the stranger’s haggard face. He raised his hand to shade his eyes and waited in dismal silence while my wife rose to drawn the curtain.
“Thank you,” he whispered. “You’ve been good to me.”
She asked him to go on.
“I got help from Fish,” he said. “He’d been Chen’s pilot on the trips to trace the fatal chain. The events that set the singularity free. They looked at my life and found nothing they could hope to change. The weakest link appeared to be the birth of Claudius Zindler.
“Yet I’m guilty of one last blunder—”
He was rasping hoarsely, his face twisted with pain.
“I persuaded Fish to fly me back to Earth, back to the date Chen calculated for Zindler’s conception. I carried a pistol and a box of ammunition from the recovered artifacts. I meant to kill Zindler’s parents if I had to.” He’d bitten his lip. I saw a streak of blood down his chin.
“Fish brought me back to Chen’s selected target point. Dropped me here.” He shivered. “The next thing I knew, the gun and my clothing were gone. I suppose their lines of time had been stretched too far. I was left on the street outside, naked and freezing, with no notion where I was.”
He smiled feebly at me and then at my wife. “You took me in. I’m grateful—grateful to you.” His voice was shaking. He gulped. “Now—”
With a gesture of something like terror, he flung his hand across the table and struck his coffee cup. It shattered on the floor. He ignored it, and sat for half a minute gazing blankly at the stained-glass rose before he shrugged and went on.
“That’s what hit me. The moment, I guess, of what Shafique called my psychic trauma.” He shuddered and drew a long breath. “Time itself had beaten me. Chen’s universe is rigid, dead. He’d found sub-quantum effects that let him stretch the lines of time, but they are anchored in the future as securely as in the past. Displacements correct themselves.”
His wild eyes darted at my wife and me, back at the clock.
“And Earth—Earth is gone forever.”
He sat there a long time, staring at the clock in blind dejection. He sighed at last, wiped his eyes, and gave us a solemn smile. Life came slowly back into his voice.
“I try to remember what Chen said about that evolutionary leap. I hope his people on New Hope are really a better breed than we were. Perhaps the future is not all black. Earth-type planets may be rare, but perhaps Chen’s heirs can go out far enough to find them.”
His gaunt face lit for an instant.
“If we could shift perceptions to see the universe whole, as Chen said we should, we might discover a splendid future for mankind.” His thin voice quickened. “I see a chance that we can found a magnificent republic of the suns.”
Wryly, he shrugged.
“We may even find a safe perpetual power source in the Hawking radiation, but don’t bet on it. The future’s there, fixed forever, but we won’t see it till our turn comes. It’s the waiting that makes our lives. Que sera, sera.” He wiped at his lip and blinked at the blood on his finger.
“Or am I still crazy?”
“Shafique says you’re sane,” my wife assured him.
He gave her a grateful nod and gestured at the clock.
“It brought my life back last night when I heard it striking twelve. What hit me first was the memory of all the years I listened to it, lying awake in bed.”
“Here?” My wife was breathless. “Here?”
“Here.” In a dazed way, he shook his head at her and then at me. “I grew up in this house. You are—you will be my father and my mother.” He looked hard at her. “Are you—are you pregnant?”
She gasped and nodded.
“With a son?”
Her face gone white, she nodded again.
Shuddering, he turned to me.
“Chen was mistaken,” he whispered. “I—not Claudius Zindler—was the vital link he was looking for in the chain of things that killed the Earth. Chen had learned to stretch the lines of time and learned they can’t be broken. He found his own way to accept the fact. I was a fool to try.”
The old clock whirred and began tolling seven. With a muffled moan, he turned to gaze at it. I heard my wife scream. When I looked back, he was gone. The clothing I’d bought for him lay empty on the floor. I suppose the lines of time had snapped him back to Mars.
Robin’s future fate has been hard for my wife to accept. She wanted the stranger’s story denied and forgotten, but Shafique insisted that I compile this record of it from his tapes and my own notes and recollections. He believes that it might save the Earth if Robin ever reads it. I am leaving a copy in a bank box rented in his name, though I doubt that the laws of time will ever let him see it.
My wife says we must enjoy him while we can and never let him know who he is to be.
2004
Black Hole Station
Jack Williamson has been writing sciencefiction since 1928, with more than fifty novels published. The most recent is Terraforming Earth. One section of it, “The Ultimate Earth,” received the 2000 Hugo award as the best novella. He lives in New Mexico, where he arrived with his parents and siblings in a covered wagon when he was seven years old. He says is still writing new short stories and planning to teach a science fiction course at Eastern New Mexico University, his hometown school.
