Time Travel Omnibus, page 678
Aghast, he tells himself: “Scrub it out. Make it didn’t happen.” Regressing to childhood. His mouth tastes repulsive; he wipes his lips on the back of his hand. I can’t take much more of this, he thinks. The human frame wasn’t meant to handle the strain of dual sets of information. It’d take a Zen roshi to cope with this weirdness. The bitch, the lousy bitch.
But it isn’t Jennifer Barton’s doing. Rostow is doomed by his oafishness. I’ve got to keep away from her. I’d shred myself into a million messy bits. It is clear, though, that he cannot cower forever in the lab with only a canonized rabbit for company. Enough, he tells himself. Out. The clock shows a quarter after four. Cyclic time is slipping away. Down the corridor, unharassed, Jennifer Barton is presumably finalizing her coiffure.
Rostow slams the door, running for the stairs. As he expects, Buonacelli and his claque are milling in the Senior Faculty Bar. Donaldson dispenses whiskies in their midst, jovial, exonerated, cautioning them all to reticence under the rubric of security.
“A wonderful experience, Dr, uh, Rostow?” says one of the directors, a pleasant administrator. Eddie turns convulsively. “I’m Harrison Macintyre, Ford Foundation.” The man holds out his hand. “No problems with funding,” he smiles, “after today.”
“Oh. Thank you. Not ‘doctor’, I’m afraid. I’ve never had time to write anything up.” Stan seems to be explaining how the advanced-wave project sprang fully armed from his professorial brow. Adrenalin begins a fresh surge.
Macintyre puts liquor into his hand and says, “I’ve been wondering about that. Publication, I mean. Surely today wasn’t your first trial with the equipment.”
“No. No, Harrison. Call me Eddie. We knew it was going to work. It’s been operational for some weeks.” Across the russet carpet, Buonacelli is laughing boomingly. “The Nobel Prize for Physics, Stan,” says the senator. “The Nobel Prize for Medicine,” adds a beaming director. “Hot damn,” cries another “they’ll make it a hat trick and give you the Nobel Prize for Literature when your paper comes out.”
Rostow scowls hideously. “Normally we would indeed have published by now, Harrison,” he says loudly. “But after the tachyon fiasco, Professor Donaldson developed some misgivings about shooting his mouth off prematurely, you see.” Faces turn. “You must remember. Every man and his dog was hunting faster-than-light particles. The great physicist spied his chance at glory.” The Ford Foundation man, scandalized, tries to hush him. Eddie drains his glass, gestures for another. “But the professor blew it. His tachyons were actually pickup calls from the Green Cab Company. They snuck in through his Faraday cage. Someone didn’t check that out until after the press conference did we, Stan?”
Donaldson is peering at the half-full glass in Rostow’s grasp; slowly, he allows his gaze to rise until he studies a point somewhere near Eddie’s left ear. “Mr Rostow,” he says from the depths of his soul, “hired hands are rarely invited into this room. Those who gain that privilege generally comport themselves with civility and a due measure of deference. Those who have just been fired without a reference do not linger here under any circumstances. Get out of my sight.”
Jennifer Barton arrives at that moment, smiling, hair lustrous. At the door she hesitates, scanning shocked faces. Their eyes meet. Her presence—oblivious of edited outrage, witness to new humiliation—sends Rostow into a frenzy. He throws down his glass and catches Donaldson by his lapels.
“I wish you wouldn’t shout, Frog-face,” he says, every sinew on fire. “You astounding hypocrite,” he says, jouncing the man back on his heels. “What’s a Nobel Prize or two between hired hands?” he says, thumping Donaldson heavily in the breast. Two or three of the directors have come to their senses by now and grapple with Rostow, dragging him away from his gasping and empurpled victim. “It happens all the time, doesn’t it?” Eddie squirms, kicking at targets of opportunity. “We poor bastards break our asses so some ludicrous discredited figurehead can whiz off to Stockholm to meet the king.”
Even in his own ears, Rostow’s outburst sounds thin, thin. Where righteousness should ring, only a stale peevishness lingers. Tears of anger and mortification star the pendant cut-glass lamps. He breaks free and pushes through business suits. Jennifer stares at him, off balance. “You don’t want to stay with these vultures,” he cries, seizing her arm. It seems that she studies his scarlet face for minutes of silence. With a minimal movement she dislodges his hand.
“Eddie,” she says regretfully, “when are you going to grow up?”
Bitch. Bitch, bitch.
And the bloody aura. He is holding the rabbit, wrenching his head around to check the clock. This time the shock of recurrence is curiously attenuated, as if lunatic hostility sits better than misery with a physiology keyed to fright. Rostow’s heart rattles, catches its beat; the pulse thunders in his neck and wrists. The rabbit struggles free. He moves with Tarquin’s ravishing stride to the console, at a pitch of emotion. Icily he shuts down the mirror system. There are cracks in the concrete where the supports for the magnetic coils are embedded. A faint regular buzzing comes from the fluoros. His skin is crawling, as if each hair on his body is a nipple, erect and preternaturally sensitive. Gagging, he closes the door and paces remorselessly down the corridor.
Jennifer Barton stands on the bottom step of the carved stairs, deflecting Senator Buonacelli’s horseplay. Rostow storms past them. “Hey, boy, that was a great show,” cries the senator. “Why don’t you and this little lady come up and join us in a drink?” Rostow hardly hears the man. His feet are at the ends of his legs. Jennifer’s door is not locked. He leaves it wide for her. Staring out into the afternoon light. Three tall blacks fake and run, dribbling a ball.
“Well, Jambo!” As Eddie faces her, Jennifer is closing the door, meeting him with an infectious smile. “It’s taken you long enough to find my office, sailor.”
“What?” he says, uncomprehending. He pushes her roughly back against the crowded desk and takes her thigh with cruel pressure. Speechless and instantly afraid, she repudiates his hand. He thrusts it higher and tugs at her underwear.
“Let’s pick up where we left off,” he informs her. An absolute chill pervades his flesh. Nothing had prepared him to expect this of himself. Everything he calls himself is outraged, shrunken in loathing at his own actions.
“Stop it,” she says distantly. “You fucking asshole.” Tactically her posture is not favorable; when she drives up her right knee, its bruising force is deflected from his leg. I can have whatever I want. The whole universe is a scourge slashing at my vulnerable back. Very well, let those be the rules. He imagines he is laughing. I have nothing to offer but fear itself. As she begins to scream and batter his neck, his cheek, his temple, he clouts her savagely into semi consciousness. Oh Jesus, you can’t be blamed for what happens during a nightmare. In the absence of causality, Fyodor, all things are permitted. She is bent backward, moving feebly. One of his hands clamps her mouth, hard against her teeth, the other unzips. I’m the Primary Process Man, oh, wow. But he is so cold. There is no blood under his skin. Rostow batters at her thighs with his limp flesh. He slides to his knees. The edge of the desk furrows his nose.
“You,” Jenny grunts. She is blank with detestation. Tenderly, she touches her skull. “You.”
Eddie Rostow lurches upright. Swaying, exposed, he falls into the corridor. The same young student, returning, regards him with astonishment and abhorrence. The boy reaches out a hand, changes his mind and pelts away in search of aid. It is all a grainy picture show, a world-sized monitor screen. They’ll fire him for this. Oh, shit, Jenny, you don’t understand; I love you.
In fugue, Rostow pitches down the corridor.
The cleaver is lying where Donaldson left it on the bench, a ripple of bunny blood standing back from its surgical edge. Rostow’s self-contempt has no bounds. As he lifts the blade, there is one final lucid thought. I’m an animal, he tells himself. We can’t be trusted. The cleaver’s handle slips in his sweating fingers. He tightens his grip and with a kind of concentration brings the thing in a whirling silvery arc into the tilted column of his neck. Shearing through the heavy sterno-mastoid muscle, in one blow it slashes the carotid artery, the internal jugular and the vagus nerve, before it’s stopped by the banded cartilage of the trachea. He scarcely feels his flesh open: all pain is in the intolerable impact. A brilliant crimson jet spears and spatters, but Rostow fails to see it: he collapses in shock, and the fluid pulses out of his torpid body until he is dead.
His corpse lies cooling until half a minute after 4:37.
A dizzying aura of bloody light spangled with pinpoints of imploding radiance momentarily blinds him.
Rostow screams.
There is nothing banal in this plunge upward into instantaneous rebirth. It is overwhelming. It is transcendental. It is a jackhammer on Rostow’s soul.
Like a thousand micrograms of White Lightning, life detonates every cell of his brain and body. He has been to hell, and died afterwards. Let me stay dead. Let me be dead.
Catharsis purges him of every thought. Eddie cradles the white rabbit in his arms and sobs his heart out.
At length he is sufficiently composed to reflect: I never cried when Tania left. Everything wise within me insisted that I should cry, but I turned my back. He realizes that he hasn’t wept freely since he was a child. Dear Jesus, does it take this abomination to lance my constricted soul?
And his spirits do indeed soar. Without denying the reality of what he has done, his pettiness and spite and ignominy, he encompasses a mood of redemptive benediction. It brings a wide, silly grin to his mouth.
“Bunny rabbit,” he declares, lofting the animal high over his head, laughing as its big grubby hind feet thump the air, “ain’t nobody been where we wuz, baby. Let me tell you, buster, I like this side a lot better.”
Eddie feeds the rabbit a strip of lettuce and steps through the tedious details of shutdown. He meditates on his humbling and his bestiality, flinching at memory.
The frailty at his core yearns to interpret it all as a stress nightmare, an hallucination. Denial would be not merely futile and cowardly; it would betray what has been offered him. Rather piquant, eh? Holy shit. Still, it is a point of access. Eddie Rostow confesses to his worst self that he needs all the help he can get.
The next cycle brings swifter recovery. Rostow splashes tepid water from the flask into his face, dabbing at his reddened eyelids. Soon he must spend some time figuring how to replicate the loop condition after he gets off this one. Fertile conjectures multiply; he suppresses them for the moment. Nerving himself, he walks edgily to the Software Center, nodding companionably to the passing student. The directors have ascended to their solace. His knock is tentative.
Jennifer’s smile startles him with its warmth. She lowers her hairbrush. “Well, hello, sailor.”
Eddie stands in the doorway, drinking her unbruised face. Despite himself he flushes.
“Don’t just loiter there with intent, man. You’re the unsung hero of the moment. It was sensational.” She frowns. “I hated it with the rabbit, though.”
“Jennifer,” he says in a rush, “I’m sorry about the party. You know.”
“That. Yeah. You were rather blunt.”
“You inspire the village idiot in me.”
“Sailor, that’s the sweetest thing anyone ever. Coming up to poach on the Professorial Entertainment Allowance Fund?”
Eddie melts disgustingly within, wallowing in amnesty. “I happen to know a place.”
“You’ve got a fifth of Jack Daniels squirreled in your locker.”
“I’ve always admired your mind. Passionately.”
“That wasn’t the part you molested in public.”
“I am,” he tells her, “truly sorry.” Her hair flows in his fingers and he puts his face against hers for a moment. Jenny touches his hand.
“While we dally,” she tells him, “Stan is up there screwing you.”
“No argument. He’s like that. All scientists are lunatics and swindlers. I intend to fight. More to the point, are you screwing Dr Singh? Oh Christ, don’t answer that.”
“I will not. It’s none of your business. For God’s sake, don’t get snotty. Here, let me help you off with your—”
“Shouldn’t we shut the door?”
“Kick it, you’re closer. Why did it take you so long to get here?”
“Don’t ask.”
“Hmm. You know, I thought you were going to throw a tantrum in the lab.”
Eddie tries to keep his tone light. “Upon my soul, Miss Barton, that’d be no way for a besotted genius to contest his rights.” Shortly he asks: “Won’t the printouts get runkled?”
“There’s more in the computer, you fool.”
On the next loop, abandoning his dazed inertia for an instant, Eddie glances at Jennifer’s wrist watch and ensures that the flash comes as the flash comes as the flash comes . . .
AFTER-IMAGES
Malcolm Edwards
After the events of the previous day Norton slept only fitfully, his dreams filled with grotesque images of Richard Carver, and he was grateful when his bedside clock showed him that it was nominally morning again. He always experienced difficulty sleeping in anything less than total darkness, so the unvarying sunlight, cutting through chinks in the curtains and striking across the floor, marking it with lines that might have been drawn by an incandescent knife, added to his restlessness. He had tried to draw the curtains as closely as possible, but they were cheap and of skimpy manufacture—a legacy from the previous owner of the flat, who for obvious reasons could not be bothered to take them with her when she moved—and even when, after much manoeuvring, they could be persuaded to meet along much of their length, narrow gaps would always appear at the top, near the pleating.
Norton felt gripped by a lassitude born of futility, but as on the eight other mornings of this unexpected coda to his existence, fought off the feeling and slid wearily out of bed. After dressing quickly and without much thought, he pulled back the curtains to admit the brightness of the early-afternoon summer sun.
The sun was exactly where it had been for the last eight days, poised a few degrees above the peaked roof of the terraced house across the road. It had been a stormy day, and a few minutes before everything had stopped a heavy shower had been sweeping across London; but the squall had passed and the sun had appeared—momentarily, one would have supposed—through a break in the cloud. The visible sky was still largely occupied by lowering, soot-coloured clouds, which enfolded the light and gave it the peculiar penetrating luminosity which presages a storm; but the sun sat in its patch of blue sky like an unblinking eye in the face of the heavens, and Norton and the others spent their last days and nights in a malign parody of the mythical, eternally sunlit English summer.
Outside the heat was stale and oppressive and seemed to settle heavily in his temples. Drifts of rubbish, untended now for several weeks, gave off a ripe odour of decay and attracted buzzing platoons of flies. Marlborough Street, where Norton lived, was one of a patchwork of late-Victorian and Edwardian terraces filling an unfashionable lacuna in the map of north London. At one end of the road was a slightly wider avenue which called itself a High Road on account of a bus route and a scattering of down-at-heel shops. Norton walked towards it, past houses which gave evidence of their owners’ hasty departure, doors and windows left open. The house across the road, which for three days had been the scene of an increasingly wild party held by most of the few teenagers remaining in the area, was now silent again. They had probably collapsed from exhaustion, or drugs, or both, Norton thought.
At the corner Norton paused. To the north—his left—the street curved away sharply, lined on both sides by shabby three-storey houses with mock-Georgian facades. To the south it was straight, but about a hundred yards away was blocked off by the great baleful flickering wall of the interface, rising into the sky and curving back on itself like a surreal bubble. As always he was drawn to look at it, though his eyes resisted as if under autonomous control and tried to focus themselves elsewhere.
It was impossible to say precisely what it looked like, for its surface seemed to be an absence of colour. When he closed his eyes it left swimming variegated after-images: protoplasmic shapes which crossed and intermingled and blended. When Norton forced himself to stare at it, his optic nerves attempted to deny its presence, warping together the flanking images of shopfronts so that the road seemed to narrow to a point.
Norton suffered occasional migraine headaches and often experienced an analogous phenomenon as the prelude to an attack: he would find that parts of his field of vision had been excised, but that the edges of the blanks were somehow pulled together, so it was difficult to be sure something was missing. Just as then it was necessary sometimes to turn sideways and look obliquely to see an object sitting directly in front of him, so now, as he turned away, he could see the interface as a curving wall the colour of a bruise from which pinpricks of intense light occasionally escaped as if through faults in its fabric. Then, too, he could glimpse more clearly the three human images printed, as though by some sophisticated holographic process, upon the interface. In the centre of the road were the backs of Carver and himself as they disappeared beyond the interface, the images already starting to become fuzzy as the wavefront slowly advanced; to one side, slightly sharper, was the record of his lone re-emergence, his expression clearly pale and strained despite the heavy polarized goggles which covered half his face.
Norton had been sitting the previous morning at a table outside the Cafe Hellenika, slowly drinking a tiny cup of Greek coffee. He had little enthusiasm for the sweet, muddy drink, but was unwilling as yet to move on to beer or wine.
The café’s Greek Cypriot proprietor had reacted to the changed conditions in a manner which under other circumstances would have seemed quite enterprising. He had shifted all his tables and chairs out on to the pavement, leaving the cooler interior free for the perennial pool players and creating outside a passable imitation of a street café remembered from happier days in Athens or Nicosia. Many of the remaining local residents were of Greek origin, and the men gathered here, playing cards and chess, drinking cheap Demestica, and talking in sharp bursts which sounded dramatic however banal and ordinary the conversation. There was a timelessness to the scene which Norton found oddly apposite.
