The Hollow Man

by Dan Simmons

  Bremen hesitated. He was not sure if he did want to know. At that second he felt a strong urge to get out of the cab and to start walking again.

  “I don’t like little assholes who act like big assholes just ’cause they got some authority,” she said. The last word—authority—came out like an obscenity. “ ’Specially when they use that authority to pick on someone who’s got enough troubles, which it looks like you do.”

  Bremen set his hand on the door latch, but hesitated. It was at least eight miles back to the interstate and another twenty-some to the nearest town, according to the fuzzy map he’d picked up from the deputy’s thoughts. There would be nothing for Bremen in the town except a possible run-in with Howard. He had kept eighty-five cents after the last gas fill-up in Utah. Not enough to eat with.

  “Just tell me one thing,” said the woman. “Did you steal that car Howard was talkin’ about?”

  “No.” Bremen’s tone didn’t even convince him. Technically, that’s true, he thought tiredly. Soul Dad was the one who hotwired it. Soul Dad, the tarp village, Denver, the man going home to his daughter … it all seemed light-years and real years away to Bremen. He was very tired, having slept only an hour or two in Utah the day before. The woman’s white-noise mindshield … neuroblock … whatever it was, filled Bremen’s head with static. It blended with the ache from alcohol withdrawal to give him the best escape from the neurobabble he had found in four months.

  Even the desert had been no refuge. Even with no people in sight and ranches visible only every four or five miles, hiking across the desert had been like wandering in a vast echo chamber filled with whispers and half-heard shouts. The dark wavelength of thought that Bremen somehow seemed attuned to now evidently had no limitations of distance; the crackling and surge of violence and greed and lust and envy had filled the interstate with mindnoise, had echoed down the empty county road, and had bounced back from the lightening sky to drown Bremen in reflected ugliness.

  There had been no escape. At least in the city the closer surges of mindtouch had given him some clarity; being out here was like listening to a thousand radio stations at once, all of them poorly tuned. And now, with the white noise from Miz Fayette Morgan’s mind blanketing him like a sudden desert wind, there was a certain peace.

  “… if you want it,” the woman was saying.

  Bremen shook himself into wakefulness. He was so tired and strung out that the late-morning sunlight coming through the tinted windshield of the Toyota seemed to flow like syrup across him, the woman, the black upholstery.… “I’m sorry,” he said. “What did you say?”

  Miz Morgan showed her impatient smile. “I said, you can come back to the ranch and try out for that position if you want to. I do need a hired hand. The fella who wrote to me from Denver never showed.”

  “Yes,” said Bremen, nodding. Each time his chin came down it wanted to stay down. He struggled to keep his eyes open. “Yes, I’d like to try. But I don’t know anything about—”

  “Name like Goldmann, I wouldn’t think so,” said Miz Morgan with a flicker of a grin. She gunned the Toyota around in a tight turn that bounced up onto the desert sand and then back on tarmac, accelerating toward the west and the Two-M Ranch somewhere out beyond the heat ripples and mirages that floated like phantom curtains ahead of them.

  EYES

  Jacob Goldmann’s research so excites Jeremy—and through Jeremy, Gail—that they take the train to Boston to visit the man.

  It is a little less than five years before Gail will discover the tumor that will kill her. Chuck Gilpen, their old friend who was now a researcher at Lawrence Livermore Labs in Berkeley, had sent an unpublished paper on the Goldmann research to Jeremy because of its relevance to Jeremy’s Ph.D. thesis on human memory analyzed as a propagating wavefront. Jeremy sees the importance of Goldmann’s research at once, calls the researcher two days after receiving the paper, and is on the train north with Gail three days after that.

  Jacob Goldmann had been suspicious on the phone, demanding to know how Jeremy had received a copy of a paper not yet submitted for publication. Jeremy assured him that he had no intention of trespassing on the researcher’s domain, but that the mathematical aspects of Goldmann’s work were so profound that the two must speak. Reluctantly, Goldmann had agreed.

  Gail and Jeremy take a taxi from the train station to Goldmann’s lab in a run-down industrial section miles from Cambridge.

  “I thought he’d have some fancy laboratory at Harvard,” says Gail.

  “He’s a fellow at the School of Medicine,” says Jeremy. “But his research is mostly his own, I understand.”

  “That’s what they said about Dr. Frankenstein.”

  Goldmann’s lab is sandwiched in between offices for a wholesale religious-textbook distributor and the headquarters for Kayline Picnic Supplies. Jacob Goldmann is the only one there—it is late on a Friday evening—and he looks the part of a scientist, if not exactly a mad scientist. In his early seventies, he is a small man with a very large head. His eyes are what both Jeremy and Gail will remember later: large, brown, sad, and sunken under brows that make his intelligent gaze seem almost simian. Goldmann’s face, forehead, and wattled neck are creased with the kind of wrinkles that only a lifetime of indomitable personality and internalized tragedy can impress on the human physiognomy. He is dressed in a brown three-piece suit that had involved a significant amount of money and tailoring a decade or two earlier.

  “I would offer you coffee, but the Mr. Coffee does not seem to be working,” says Dr. Goldmann, rubbing his nose and looking distractedly around the cluttered little cubicle that is obviously his sanctum sanctorum. The outer office and file room that Gail and Jeremy have just passed through are meticulously neat. This room and the man in it, however, remind Jeremy of the famous photo of Albert Einstein looking lost in the littered mess of his office.

  He is like Einstein, shares Gail. Have you touched his mind?

  Jeremy shakes his head as unobtrusively as possible. He has his mindshield raised, trying to concentrate on what Goldmann is saying.

  “… my daughter usually manages the coffee.” The researcher tugs at his eyebrow. “She usually manages dinner as well, but she is in London for the week. Visiting relatives …” Goldmann peers at them from under his shaggy brows. “You aren’t hungry, are you? I tend to forget about things like dinner sometimes.”

  “Oh, no … we’re fine,” says Gail.

  “We had dinner on the train,” says Jeremy.

  If you count a Payday candy bar as dinner, sends Gail. Jerry, I’m famished.

  Hush.

  “You said something about the mathematics being very important, young man,” says Goldmann. “You realize that the paper you saw was sent to Cal Tech so that the mathematicians there could look it over. I was interested to see if the fluctuations we are charting here compare to—”

  “Holograms,” finishes Jeremy. “Yes. A friend in California knew that I was doing some pure-math research on wavefront phenomena and its eventual application to human consciousness. He sent me the paper.”

  “Well …” Goldmann clears his throat. “It was a breach of etiquette at the very least.…”

  Even through his tight mindshield, Jeremy can feel the older man’s anger mixing with a powerful desire not to be rude. “Here,” says Jeremy, and looks for a clear spot on desk or countertop to set the folder he has brought along. There is no clear spot. “Here,” he says again, and opens his folder on top of a massive text of some sort lying atop a mesa of papers. “Look.” He moves Jacob Goldmann closer.

  Goldmann clears his throat again, but peers at the papers through his bifocals. He flips through the dissertation, occasionally pausing to look carefully at a page or more of equation. “Are these standard transforms?” he asks at one point.

  Jeremy feels his heart accelerate. “That’s an application of Dirac’s relativistic wave equation modifying Schrödinger.”

  Goldmann frowns. “In the Hamilt
onian?”

  “No …” Jeremy turns back a page. “Two components here, see? I started with the Pauli spin matrices until I realized that those could be bypassed.…”

  Jacob Goldmann steps back and removes his glasses. “No, no,” he says, his accent suddenly heavier. “You cannot apply these relativistic Coulomb field transforms to a holographic wave function.…”

  Jeremy takes a breath. “Yes,” he says flatly. “You can. When the holographic wave function is part of a larger standing wave.”

  Goldmann rubs his brow. “A larger standing wave?”

  “Human consciousness,” says Jeremy, and glances at Gail. She is watching the old man.

  Goldmann stands there for a full half moment, not moving, not blinking. Then he takes two steps backward and sits down heavily on a chair littered with magazines and abstracts. “My Gott,” he says.

  “Yes,” says Jeremy. It is almost a whisper.

  Goldmann reaches out one liver-spotted hand and touches Jeremy’s dissertation. “And you have applied this to the MRI and S-CAT data I sent to Cal Tech?”

  “Yes,” says Jeremy, and leans closer. “It integrates. It all integrates.” He begins pacing back and forth, finally stopping to tap the folder holding his now obsolete dissertation. “My work was originally just about memory … as if the rest of the mind were just hardware running a RAM-DOS retrieval system.” He laughs and shakes his head. “Your work made me see.…”

  “Yes,” whispers Jacob Goldmann. “Yes, yes.” He turns to stare blindly at a cluttered bookcase. “My God.”

  Later they discover that none of them has actually eaten dinner and plan to go out for a meal as soon as Jeremy and Gail are given a quick tour of the laboratory. They leave five hours later, well after midnight. In the time between introductions and their late meal, realities are shattered.

  The offices are the tip of a rather significant research lab. Behind the suite of offices, in what had been a small warehouse area, lies the room within a room, grounded, shielded, and wrapped in the nonconducting equivalent of a Faraday Cage. In the room itself are the oddly streamlined sarcophagi of two magnetic-resonance-imaging units and a much less tidy cluster of four mutated-looking CAT scanners. Unlike the usual tidiness of an MR-imaging room, this lab floor is cluttered with additional shielded equipment and ungainly cables snaking into the floor, ceiling, and walls.

  The room beyond is even more cluttered, with more than a dozen monitors displaying data to a master console where four wheeled chairs sit empty. The conglomeration of cables, stacked computer components, empty coffee cups, jerry-rigged patch circuits, dusty chalkboards, multiple EEG rigs, and massed oscilloscopes suggests that this is a research project that has never been touched by the tidy minds of NASA.

  Over the next few hours Jacob Goldmann explains the origins of the research based upon the crude experiments done during neurosurgery in the 1950s in which patients’ brains were touched by an electrical probe. The patients were able to recall events in their lives complete with full sensory input. It was as if they were “reliving the experience.”

  Goldmann does not do neurosurgery here, but by measuring, in real time, the electrical and electromagnetic fields in their research subjects’ brains, and by using the wide variety of modern and experimental medical imaging equipment in this laboratory, he—he and his daughter and two assistants—has been charting avenues of the mind undreamed of by neurosurgeons.

  “The difficulty,” says Jacob Goldmann as they stand in the quiescent control room that night, “is in measuring areas of the brain while the subject is involved in some activity. Most MRI scans are done, as you know, with the patient immobilized on the sliding gurney in the machine itself.”

  “Isn’t that immobility necessary for the scanning process?” asks Gail. “Isn’t it like taking a photograph with one of those old cameras where any motion produces a blur?”

  “Precisely,” says Goldmann, beaming at her, “but our challenge was to bring an entire array of such imaging techniques to bear while the subject is doing a task … reading, perhaps, or riding a bicycle.” He gestures toward the television picture of the imaging room. In one corner there is an exercise bicycle with an array of consoles and cables above it, all converging on a black dome into which a person’s head might fit. Black neck clamps give the apparatus the look of some medieval instrument of torture.

  “Our research subjects call it the Darth Vader Helmet,” says Dr. Goldmann with a slight chuckle. Then, almost absentmindedly, “I have never seen that motion picture. I must rent a videotape of it someday.”

  Jeremy leans closer to the TV monitor to study the Darth Vader Helmet. “And this gives you all the data of the larger magnetic-resonance imagers?”

  “Much more,” says Dr. Goldmann softly. “Much, much more.”

  Gail is biting her lip. “And who are your subjects, doctor?”

  “Call me Jacob, please,” says the old man. “Our subjects are the usual volunteers … students from the School of Medicine who wish to earn a modest stipend. Several of them, I confess, are my graduate students … bright young men and women whose wish is to score a few points with their elderly teacher.”

  Gail is looking at the array of threatening instruments in the MR room. “Is there any danger?”

  Dr. Goldmann’s bushy brows move back and forth as he shakes his head. “None. Or rather, no more than any of us would be exposed to if we were to have a CAT scan or MRI done. We make sure that none of the subjects are exposed to magnetic fields greater or more extensive than those allowed at any hospital.” He chuckles. “And it is painless. Other than the boredom suffered while equipment is constantly being repaired or tampered with, the subjects have none of the usual research discomforts of blood being drawn or the danger of being exposed to embarrassing situations. No, we have quite a long list of eager volunteers.”

  “And in exchange,” whispers Jeremy, touching Gail’s hand, “you are mapping uncharted regions of the mind … capturing a snapshot of human consciousness.”

  Jacob Goldmann seems lost in reverie again, the sad, brown eyes observing something not in the room. “It reminds me,” he says softly, “of the spirit photography in vogue during the last century.”

  “Spirit photography,” says Gail, who is a talented photographer herself. “You mean when the Victorians tried to photograph ghosts and pixies and things? The kind of hoax that bamboozled poor old Arthur Conan Doyle?”

  “Ja,” says Goldmann, his eyes regaining focus and his subtle smile returning. “Only our ghost photography is all too real. We have stumbled upon a means to capture an image of the human soul itself.”

  Gail frowns at this mention of a soul, but Jeremy is nodding. “Jacob,” Jeremy says, his voice all but vibrating with emotion, “you see the ramifications of my wave-function analyses?”

  “Of course,” says the old man. “We expected some rough equivalent of a hologram. A crude, fuzzy analog to the patterns we were recording. What you have given us is a thousand thousand holograms—all crystal clear and three-dimensional!”

  Jeremy leans close to the other man, their faces only inches apart. “But not just of their minds, Jacob …”

  The eyes are infinitely sad under their simian brows. “No, Jeremy, my friend, not just their minds … but of their minds as mirrors of the universe.”

  Jeremy is nodding, watching Dr. Goldmann’s face to make sure that the scientist understands. “Yes, mirrors, but more than mirrors—”

  Jacob Goldmann interrupts, but he is speaking to himself now, oblivious to the presence of the young couple. “Einstein went to his grave believing that God does not play dice with the universe. He became so insistent on making that point that Jonny von Neumann … a mutual friend … once told him to shut up and quit speaking for God.” Goldmann moves his large head until it is cocked at a defiant angle. “If your equations are true—”

  “They are true,” says Jeremy.

  “If they are true, then Einstein and all
of the others who rejected quantum physics were incredibly, terribly, magnificently wrong … and triumphantly correct!”

  Jeremy collapses into one of the chairs at the console. His arms and legs are rubbery, as if someone has cut his strings. “Jacob, do you know the theoretical work of Hugh Everett? I think it was published in fifty-six or fifty-seven … then forgotten for years until Bryce DeWitt from the University of North Carolina picked it up in the late sixties.”

  Goldmann nods and lowers himself into a chair. Gail is the only one in the room left standing. She tries to follow the conversation through mindtouch, but both men are thinking primarily in mathematics now. Jacob Goldmann is also thinking in phrases, but the phrases are in German. She finds an empty chair for herself. The conversation is giving her a headache.

  “I knew John Wheeler at Princeton,” says Dr. Goldmann. “He was Hugh Everett’s adviser. He urged Everett to give a mathematical basis to his theories.”

  Jeremy takes a deep breath. “It solves everything, Jacob. The Copenhagen interpretation. Schrödinger’s cat. The new work that’s being done by people like Raymond Chiao at Berkeley and Herbert Walther in Frankfurt—”

  “Munich,” Dr. Goldmann says softly. “Walther is at the Max Planck Institute in Munich.”

  “Whatever,” says Jeremy. “Sixty-five years after the Copenhagen interpretation and they’re still messing around with it. And still finding that the universe seems to work by magic when they try to observe it directly. Lasers, superconductors, Claudia Tesche’s goddamn squid … and they’re still finding magic.”

  “Squid?” says Gail, grasping a word more reliable than “magic.” “What squid?”