The Dark Between the Stars: Speculative Fiction Read online

  Oh God Almighty. 4:37. Exultation bursts in his mind, leaving his flesh to plod like lead. Hold it, that doesn’t mean you haven’t flipped your cranium. Everyone has a built-in clock. Three Major Biorhythms Ordain Your Fate, that sort of thing. He wants to giggle, but his chest and jaw don’t respond to the wish. His frail flesh has resigned itself to the honorable discharge of his employment. A dizzying aura of bloody light spangled with pinpoints of imploding radiance momentarily blinds him.

  No! the small anarchic part screams silently. I can’t stand it. It’s happening again. I’m stuck in a loop of time. Wait, I can prove it. I dropped the rabbit. Any moment now I’ll glance down and see it . . .

  . . . trying to get back into its box. The stupid bastard is hungry again. He heaves it in—

  Rostow tells himself: this is the third time round. Or is it? Were he in control of his programmed muscles, he would shudder. Maybe I’ve been caught in this loop for all eternity, or at any rate long enough for random quantum variations in one part of my brain to set up an isolated observing subprogram. Jesus, how much pseudo-duration would that take? Ludwig Bolzmann’s Stosszahlansatz postulate: ordered particles spontaneously decay into chaos, but given enough interactions they can swirl together again into a new order, or even the old order. Suppose I’m at the bottom of a local fluctuation from unordered equilibrium. What’s the Poincaré recurrence time for a human being and his lab? Say 10 to the 10th power raised to the 30th power. That’s absolutely grotesque. The entire universe would have evaporated into dead cold soot. So I’m re-cycling. I stuck my mitt in the hatch and screwed up the mirror. I’m looping through the same thirty minutes forever, knowing exactly what’s due next and unable to do anything about it. Maybe I’m not crazy – but I will be soon.

  I’m a prisoner, Rostow realizes, in my own past.

  For a moment, to his horror, he finds himself regretting his divorce. Worse, he finds—

  Hold it, the isolated segment thinks. If I’m patched into the lasing system, the additional mass of my body is pushing the mirror into a singularity on an asymptotic curve, tending to the limit at thirty-odd minutes duration. But Hawking has shown that quantum effects re-enter powerfully under such conditions. After all, Rostow debates with himself, they must, or I’d be unaware of what’s happening. The human brain has crucial quantum-scale interactions. Hadn’t Popper and Eccles been arguing that case for years? So maybe I can break free of my prior actions. What’s to stop me deciding to cross the room and pick up the flask from the bench where I put it?

  Jenny, you bitch, he thinks, why are you doing this to me? Bitterly, he wanders to the bench and lifts the lukewarm flask of melted ice-cubes to his lips. It tastes terrible. He puts it down with revulsion, then picks it up once more and stares in amazement. I’m not thirsty. Something made me do that—

  —the flask slips out of his fingers and shatters. The twin sectors of consciousness fuse.

  Eddie Rostow goes stealthily to his console chair and lowers himself with infinite delicacy.

  Aloud, he mutters: “I’m not out of it yet. Or am I? Is one change in the cause-and-effect sequence sufficient to take me off the loop?” Mellowing afternoon light slants across his fists from the barred skylight, a sympathetic doubling to the shadow from harsh white fluoros, and his voice echoes wanly. Rostow flushes. If Donaldson comes through that door to hear him mumbling to himself—

  But that isn’t on the agenda, is it? If anyone in the entire world has a certified lease on his own immediate future, it’s Edward Theodore Rostow, doctoral candidate and imbecile. The sparkling impossible conjecture has come belatedly on tiptoes to smash him behind the ear. With a glad cry he leaps to his feet. “I can do anything! Anything I wish!”

  I’m not trapped. I thought I was a prisoner, but I’m the first man in history to be genuinely liberated. Set free from consequences. Do it. If you don’t like the results, scrub it on the next cycle and try again.

  Rostow grabs up paper and calculator, scrawls figures. Start by establishing the exact parameters. See if the loop is decaying or elongating. It’s aggravating, but he rounds out the cycle with his eyes clamped to the clock. The bloody aura flashes a half-minute after the digital clock jumps to 4:37. With iron control he keeps hold of the rabbit and wrenches his head around as vision clears. Three minutes after four. His endocrine fluids are telling him to panic, sluggishly stuck in the original sequence. Rostow’s excited mind shouts them down. Denying the inertia of previous events, he takes the wriggling bunny to his console and places it carefully in its cardboard home. A thirty-four minute loop, forsooth.

  Considerable effort is required initially. Rostow’s First Theorem, he thinks, grinning. Any action will continue to be repeated indefinitely unless a volitional force is applied to counter that action. Fortunately, the energy necessary to alter intention and will is in the microvolt range. Yes. The brain is a quantum machine for making choices, once you understand that choice is possible.

  He halts with his hand on the door latch. Think this through. Stan Donaldson, esteemed head of department and professor, is the last sonofabitch who deserves to know. Will I fall off the loop if I wander away from the mirror? Leaving the loop is suddenly a most undesirable prospect. Yet some obscure prompting dispels these trepidations. Rostow opens the door and enters the long colorless corridor.

  Led by bombastic Donaldson, the Board of Directors is taking the stairs to the free hooch. Jennifer Barton’s thick mane swirls as she shakes her head, freeing her arm from the senator’s grip. On the bottom step she pivots and turns right, toward her small office in the Software Center. Not celebrating? Eddie shuts the lab door and pursues her down the corridor.

  I can’t tell her about it. She’d be obliged to call for the men in white. Up ahead, she slips into her office without looking in his direction. Arousal stirs in him, fecklessly.

  Not truly believing it, he reminds himself: Anything is possible. There are no payoffs. The world’s a stage, tra-la. “I’ll just lay it on the line,” he mutters seriously. A passing student blinks at him. With an inane giggle, Rostow nods. Loudly, in a crisp tone, he tells the student: “I’ll ask her what the hell it is between us.”

  “Oh,” says the student, and walks on, swiveling his brows.

  High out of his gourd on freedom unchecked by restraint, Rostow zooms toward joy with the woman of his dreams. In a magical slalom on the vinyl tiles, he bursts through Jennifer Barton’s door and thrusts his hands on the desk’s edge. Her lab coat lies on a filing cabinet; she stands at her window, brushing her hair. “Tell me, for Christ’s sake,” Eddie barks before his vocabulary can freeze up, “what the hell it is between us.”

  His secret sweetheart narrows her eyes. With deflated, acute perception, Rostow surmises that perhaps he is not her secret sweetheart. “I hate it with the rabbit,” she tells him, putting the brush in a drawer. “But it was a sensational coup de théâtre. Coming up for a drink?”

  “Didn’t you notice? I wasn’t invited.”

  “Surely it was understood.” She is being patient with him. Rostow closes the door at his back and sits on the desk. Stress is winding him tight. Has the stoned euphoria gone already?

  “Jennifer,” he says.

  She waits. Then she rolls the caster-footed chair forward, sits before her impressive stacks of hard copy, and waits some more.

  “Look. Jennifer, something went wrong with my upbringing. The only time I’m fluent is when I’m smashed, and then I turn into the maddened wolfman. So I don’t go out very often. For example. Six months ago, after a horrible divorce, I ventured to a party without a keeper. Nobody tied me up or shoved a gag in my face. I failed conspicuously to recognize an old acquaintance, and then hectored him about the polarity of his sexual cravings. In the crudest possible terms. With no provocation, I noisily engaged a stern feminist on the matter of her tits, which I found noteworthy. I ended by shouting in a proprietorial manner from one end of the host’s house to the
other, at three in the morning, inviting young bearded people and their companions to drink up and depart swiftly, in what seemed to me a hearty and engaging fashion. When I got home I fell down in my own puke.”

  After a further silence, Jennifer lights a cigarette. “How horrible.”

  “Doubtless I’m a horrible person in every respect.”

  “That’s not what I meant.”

  Rostow starts to yell, then lowers his voice in confusion. “I stumble over you sprawled on a fat bean-bag in the middle of a room of colleagues and strangers having your tits massaged by a swarthy blackamoor—”

  She’s on her feet. “Okay, sport. Enough. Out.” Eddie is taken aback at the power of her extended arm as she hoists him off the desk. He thumps down heavily, barring the door with one leg.

  “No, goddamn it. So I sit down beside you and toy with your wonderfully hairy leg. You smile and extend your limbs. I can’t believe it. Up goes my little hand, hoppity-scamp—”

  “Shut up, you creep.”

  For this, Rostow is utterly unprepared. He gapes.

  Jennifer refuses to lower her eyes. Blotches of color stand out on her cheekbones. “You’re right, Rostow, you are a horrible person. Incredibly enough, I once found you rather piquant. Your crass behavior the other night might have been forgivable as whimsy.” In authentic rage she clamps her teeth together and wrenches the door open. “Stay or go as you please.” Then the room is vacant, and Rostow slumps on the desk with his guts spilling out of his wounds and his brain whirling into sawdust and aloes.

  The bloody aura is a jolt from one awful dream to another. With iron control he keeps hold of the rabbit and wrenches his head around as vision clears. Three minutes after four. Yet the appalling encounter echoes like a double image, a triple image in fact. His chemistry overloads and he vomits uncontrollably. Finally sourness sweeps away hallucination; he totters to the console and runs the mirror system down to Latent.

  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, s
he 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.