The Dark Between the Stars: Speculative Fiction Read online

  “Miss Barton, could you fetch the senator a chair?”

  Incredulous on her behalf, Rostow burns. Buonacelli holds the woman’s biceps as she rises. “That’s fine, honey, I’ll stand.” An arm goes around her shoulders in a friendly squeeze nobody in his right mind could construe as avuncular. Eddie Rostow damages his tooth enamel. “Don’t bother buttering me up, Dr Donaldson. Let’s get straight to the meat. What does this pile of junk do? Why do you deserve more megabucks?”

  Rostow’s chagrin buckles to delight as Stan’s moist, unhealthy jowls darken. No doubt this will be the third or fourth time Donaldson has tried to explain the advanced-wave mirror to the accountants. Probably, Eddie decides, Buonacelli is just baiting him. The old bastard might know zilch about high-energy physics, but he’s nobody’s fool.

  There again, it would serve Donaldson right if they haven’t followed a word he’s been saying. The man revels in pretentious jargon. Rostow hears a scurry of furry feet in the cardboard box near his own, cranes his neck, breaks up in silent mirth. The white bunny rabbit in the box is making its own critical observations. Cottontail high, it’s dropping a stream of dry pellets into the shredded lettuce that litters the box.

  Florid, Stan has decided to simplify his spiel. He’s saying: “A totally new branch of technology, gentlemen. Perhaps my previous remarks were overly technical.”

  “New like Princeton?”

  “New like Sandia,” the professor says, grasping thankfully at the straight line. “Yet thoroughly rooted in classical theory. What we have here, gentlemen, is the answer to a puzzle provoked by James Clerk Maxwell more than a century ago. Maxwell,” he glosses, “was the genius who first showed that electricity and magnetism were one and the same. His equations are the basis of all electronic technology.”

  “For history we fund historians,” one of the committee says coldly, currying favor, and recoils slightly when Buonacelli growls.

  Irritated and emboldened, the great physicist states loftily: “Physics is precisely the accumulated history of great physicists. My point, Senator, is that Maxwell’s equations for electromagnetic wave motion have two sets of solutions. One set describes what we term retarded waves, where fluctuations are broadcast outward due to the acceleration of a charged particle. Radio waves from a transmitter are retarded waves, akin to the ripples from a stone dropped in a pond.”

  Rostow monitors surges of power in the system, holding it in equilibrium. He seeks Jennifer Barton’s eye, hoping for a shared long-suffering grimace, but her attention is directed to the listening senator.

  Donaldson is creeping into pomposity again. “The other solutions, equally valid in theoretical terms, we call advanced waves. Until now they have never been detected, let alone utilized.”

  “Radio waves get drawn back into a transmitter?” Buonacelli poses acutely, puzzled.

  “Exactly.” Donaldson rewards him with a satisfied pout. “Advanced waves converge to a point. Another way of looking at it is to say that they travel backwards in time. They put time into reverse. Normally, for complex reasons, the two sets of waves interfere, yielding no more than the retarded component. What I’ve done here with this equipment—”

  Unnoticed, Eddie Rostow sits bolt upright and his face distorts in a throttled shriek. What you’ve done, you thieving sonofabitch?

  But Buonacelli’s scandalized roar has filled the lab. Suddenly it is obvious that indeed he had not grasped the earlier explanations. “Who in hell do you think you are, Professor – H. G. Wells? Don’t you ever learn? How dare you stand there and shamelessly tell us you’ve been spending the university’s endowment on atime machine? Credit me with the sense I was born with.”

  As Rostow spins in his chair, the dignitaries are stomping toward the door. Before Donaldson finds words, Jennifer Barton has magically slipped into Buonacelli’s path. “Surely you’re not leaving yet, Senator. Won’t you at least wait for the demonstrations we’ve prepared for you?” She blinks as if something is in her eye.

  “Harrumph!” Buonacelli lifts her hands in his beefy paws. “I don’t know how they’ve taken you in, my dear. Never trust a scientist. If they’re not lunatics, they’re swindlers. Either way, it’s a waste of good tax revenue.”

  “Why, Senator! I’m a scientist myself.”

  He releases one hand, strokes his jaw. “My apologies, dear lady. To tell the truth, my eldest son is a chemist at Dow.” Gallantly he bows, retaining one of her hands. “Very well, gentlemen. To please this charming lady, let’s take a look at the professor’s so-called demonstration.”

  Wincing, Rostow spins quickly back to his station. He knows he’ll be the butt of Stan’s fuming humiliation the moment the directors are on their way. Why do I put up with it?

  Tersely, the professor tells Buonacelli, “You may examine this equipment thoroughly.” He leads them to the mirror chamber buried between gigantic doughnut-shaped magnets, slides open the weighty hatch. With heavy sarcasm he says, “Assure yourselves it’s quite empty. There are no hidden trapdoors or disappearing rabbits.” Rostow swallows a snigger, his eye on the white bunny munching in its box between his feet. Poor little beast, he thinks an instant later. I hate that part of it. But it’s going to rock Buonacelli on his heels and open his wallet.

  “Advanced waves are generated in every molecular interaction. Within these confines they are reflected almost totally. The crystalline surface of the chamber constitutes an array of laser-like amplifiers which augment the advanced-wave component.” My idea, Eddie Rostow wants to shout. Without that, you’d have a big magnetic field going absolutely nowhere. But whose name will go on the paper? He says nothing. Donaldson puts his head inside the chamber. Dully, as he twists back and forth, his muffled voice states: “As you see, it’s perfectly safe at the moment.” An almost irresistible impulse floods Rostow. Regretfully, he pulls his finger back from the power switches.

  “Okay,” growls Buonacelli, “it’s empty. So?”

  Jennifer Barton leaves her terminal and returns with a flask of boiling water in one hand and a tray of ice cubes in the other.

  “This will be simple but graphic, Senator,” she says. It is Stan’s notion of theatrics to have her fetch the props. “As you can see, this water is very hot. Would you care to dip in your pinky to test it, sir?”

  “Thank you, honey, but I guess I recognize hot water when I see it.”

  A crony adds, unnecessarily, “You’ve been in plenty of it in your time.” Everyone laughs ingratiatingly. Jenny drops two large ice cubes into the flask, places it inside the chamber. She goes at once to her terminal, and her features blank out in the inert Zen concentration of perfect egoless programming. The assembled company stare foolishly at the sight of two ice cubes slowly dissolving. Donaldson dogs the hatch. An enhanced but rudimentary image of the interior comes to life on an adjacent TV screen. It shows two ice cubes slowly dissolving.

  “Ideally,” the professor says, fists clenched at his sides, “the chamber would be absolutely shielded. We’ve sacrificed some signal purity so you can see what’s going on inside. The process will still work reasonably well. Is the system on-line, Eddie?”

  “Yeah.” Rostow’s own palms are wet. The whole performance is premature. Five successful tests and two fails. Donaldson’s a yo-yo, bobbing from an obsession for publicity at any cost through close-mouthed paranoia and back. It’d almost be nice if the damned thing blew out. Bite your tongue. It’s my baby. Go, go.

  “Well, don’t just sit there.”

  “Right, Stan,” says Rostow through his teeth, and smashes the toggle closed.

  There is no new sound, no deep shuddering hum or rising whine. Current in the magnetic coils goes to fifty thousand amps, and there is a faint creaking as monstrously thick nonmagnetic structural members crave one another’s company in the embrace of the stupendous field. Sometimes, with the lights dimmed, Rostow has seen phantom bars of pale light crossing his line of sight. Field strengths of t
his magnitude can screw with the visual cortex. Or maybe the magnets bend cosmic radiation through the soft tissues of his eyeballs and brain, nibbling tiny explosions of pseudolight in his synapses. It isn’t happening now. Everyone stares at the TV monitor, waiting for something apocalyptic. Caught by the mood, Rostow abandons his console and steals across to join them.

  “I’m still waiting,” Buonacelli barks.

  “Watch the ice cubes, Senator,” Jennifer tells him.

  “Dear God.” It is one of the accountants who first grasps what is happening. “The bastards are getting bigger!”

  “Just so,” Donaldson says, loosening his fists. “The basic conservation law: heat can’t pass from a cold object to a hot one. But time inside the mirror is now running backwards, gentlemen, for all practical purposes. Advanced Maxwell radiation, amplified by the lasing action, is converging on the flask. The Second Law of Thermodynamics is repealed.”

  Rostow’s body thumps to his pulse. Steam is rising once more from the flask. A pair of unblemished cubes jounce at the surface of the boiling water.

  “Fantastic,” Buonacelli groans. “I take it all back. Dr Donaldson, this is the wonder of the age.”

  “You have yet to witness the more dramatic part of our demonstration.” Turning abruptly, the professor stumbles into Rostow. “Wouldn’t it be better if you were at your console, Eddie? Please power the system down immediately and put it on Standby. Where’s that animal?”

  Rostow chews at part of his face. “I’ll get him for you.” He slouches in his seat, runs the current down, feels in the box with his left hand for the bunny. Helplessly he glances at Jennifer Barton. She is watching him. Fingers tight around the bunny’s ears, he hoists it from the box and feels acid in his stomach as he identifies the flash of emotion in her face.

  Taking the bunny, Donaldson suggests: “Remove the flask and then stand by for my mark.” Rostow seethes, but welcomes the distraction. Behind him the bunny squeals. Nothing wrong with its memory at any rate. There’s a meaty thunk. When he turns back with the remelted cubes, Rostow finds the professor marching toward him with the bunny’s bloody, guillotined corpse in a sterile glass dish. One of the accountants, no great white hunter, is averting squeamish eyes. Buonacelli’s are narrowed in wild surmise.

  Resurrection is at once prosaic, electrifying, impossible to comprehend. On the monitor, the bunny’s grainy sopping fur lightens as untold trillions of randomly bustling molecules reverse their paths. As the flow staunches, its poor partitioned head rolls upward from the glass bowl and fits itself seamlessly to its unmarked neck. Prestidigitation. The bunny blinks spasmodically, slow lids snapping upward, wiggles his ass, and disgorges a strip of unchewed lettuce. The lab thunders crazily with applause.

  “By the Lord, you’re a genius!” Color has drained from Buonacelli’s seamed features; it surges back, as he beats Donaldson’s shoulders. “Reviving the dead . . .” He pauses and adds slowly, with avaricious appetite: “A man could live forever.”

  “I doubt it,” Rostow tell him. “We can put people back together, and heal wounds. But unfortunately it won’t help those who die of natural causes.”

  “Rejuvenate them!”

  “It’ll rub out your memory.”

  “Not your financial holdings, by God.” The senator flexes his fingers, thickened by incipient arthritis. “Plenty of memories I could happily live without. You could brief yourself – leave notes, tapes . . .”

  “Sorry. Reversed time passes at the conventional rate. Do you want to spend forty years in solitary confinement? Besides, even the immensely rich couldn’t run this machine nonstop for that long.”

  Donaldson is nodding his agreement, until it occurs to him that he’s no longer the center of attention. “I did ask you to stay at your console, Eddie. Miss Barton, thank you, that will be all today.” With smiles all around, he ushers the committeemen away from the mirror into a cozy space of his own contriving. Eddie Rostow watches them troop toward the door. They remain in shock, their several minds no doubt working like maniacs as each tries to figure himself in and the rest out. “Truly astounding,” one says as the door closes.

  Rostow covers his face. In the huge empty lab he hears Jennifer Barton rise from her seat. He opens his fingers for a peek. She is regarding him across her deactivated terminal; he cannot read her expression with certainty. Once more he covers his eyes and listens to the tap of her shoes, the click of her exit. Wistfully he sniffs the air for a trace of her scent, more natural pheromone than applied cosmetic. On the monitor screen, the bunny is scratching at the walls of the mirror chamber. Poor little beast. Dazed by anger, lust, remorse and sympathy, Rostow strides to the chamber and plucks the bunny to freedom and mortality.

  A dizzying aura of bloody light spangled with pinpoints of imploding radiance momentarily blinds him. “Cretin,” he mouths, dropping the rabbit and slamming the hatch. He runs toward the console, clutching his eyes, and barks his shin on the back of his chair.

  Nothing explodes. When his vision clears he scans the bank of square lights on the system he had left running at full power without computer supervision. Christ Almighty, we need a failsafe on that. Who’d expect anyone to be so dumb? Shuddering, he runs through the step-down with scrupulous attention to detail, double-checking every item.

  As he finishes, he notes the bunny lumping near his numb toes, trying to get back into its box. The stupid bastard is hungry again. He heaves it in.

  The afternoon is only half done. This is insane. Did Roentgen finish off his full day’s work after the first exhibition of X-rays? Surely Watson and Crick didn’t quietly mop up the lab after they’d confirmed the DNA helix. I’ll take myself off and tie one on, he decides. I’ll get drunk as a skunk. He’d done just that after the first successful trial of the advanced-wave mirror: alone, bound to secrecy by his nervous department head, he’d sat in a downtown bar and poured bourbon into his belly until the trembling urge to howl with joy dopplered into a morose blur. And paid for it next day. Oh, no, not that again. I’ll march down to Jennifer’s room and lay it all out for her. Invite her to a movie, a plate of Fricassée de Poulet at Chez Marius and a bottle or two of Riesling. We’ll get smashed together, bemoan Donaldson’s bastardy; hell we’ll leave Donaldson out of it; we’ll go to her apartment and screw our tiny pink asses off.

  His hand had been all the way up her skirt, and the next day she’d acted as if nothing had ever passed between them. Did goddamned Auberon Mountbatten Singh have his evil Anglo-Indian way with her that night, rotating through ingenious positions? It doesn’t bear thinking about.

  For a moment, to his horror, Rostow finds himself regretting his divorce. Worse, he finds his baffled free-floating lust drifting in the direction of the image of his ex-wife. Swiftly, before he damages his brain beyond repair, he puts a stop to that.

  With effort he levers up from the dead console and mooches to the foot of the catwalk, leaning on its handrail. I have to stop brooding about Jennifer. I could have killed myself shoving my hand into the powered mirror, through the temporal interface. I do not interest her strangely. Undoubtedly only fantastic self-restraint prevented her from smashing my impertinent jaw with her knee. My God, how can I look her in the eye?

  This kind of maundering unreels through Rostow’s head until he is so bored with it that he turns back to check the data for tomorrow’s log of tests. Glancing at the wall clock, he sees that he’s wasted half an hour in useless self-laceration. Maybe, after all, he should simply run out the door, burst into her office, and screw her until the sweat pops from her admiring brow. Oh my God. He drags a heavy battered mathematical cookbook from the bench where the bunny rabbit was murdered and resigns himself to the honorable discharge of his employment. A dizzying aura of bloody light spangled with pinpoints of imploding radiance momentarily blinds him. “Cretin,” he mouths, dropping the rabbit and slamming the hatch. He runs toward the console, clutching his eyes, and barks his shins on the back
of his chair.

  Nothing explodes. A startled, unconvinced element in his mind asks itself: Hasn’t this all happened before?

  He notes the bunny lumping near his numb toes trying to get back into its box. The stupid bastard is – Oh Jesus. A small disjointed part of him watches the wind-up golem, as detached as the bunny’s head after its sacrifice. This isn’t déjà vu. It’s too sustained. I’ll take myself off and tie one on, he decides. I’ll get drunk as a skunk. Oh my God, I’m tracking through the same temporal sequence twice. But that’s truly insane, delusional. Time isn’t repeating itself. I’m using the advanced-wave mirror system as a metaphor, at some profoundly cracked-up level of my unconscious. Didn’t my dear sweet brilliant wife complain that I’m a cyclothymic personality, a marginal manic-depressive, obsessively driven to repeat my laments? I’ve careened into a rut. A conditioned habit of thought. Jennifer Barton is driving me nuts. I can’t even see her in the same room without brooding on the same stupefying regrets and fantasies. I’ll march down to Jennifer’s room and lay it all out for her. Invite her to a movie, a plate of Fricassée de—

  All his sensations are scrambled. The terror in his head clangs against the lugubrious mood of his hormones. I looked at the clock, he tells himself desperately, clutching for a falsifiable test. Sound scientific method. What did it say? 4:37. Last time round. He grips that single datum, while his mutinous corpse leans on the railing of the catwalk, one foot propped on a rubber tread. Glancing at the wall clock, he sees that he’s wasted half an hour—