Short Fiction Complete

by Fred Saberhagen

  The agent got to his feet, pulling at his sandy hair, trying desperately to think. “How—how do you know?”

  “Elementary, my dear Doctor,” the tall man said impatiently.

  RECESSIONAL

  Though reality shifted like sand beneath his fleeing feet he could not escape the Truth.

  From the window of his high hotel room, sixty dollars a day at convention rates, he could look between other buildings to see a small piece of the ocean. Within the mirror where he looked when shaving there was another window with another square of sea, and an hourly newscast came on that morning just as he was starting to shave. Razor in hand he listened while the voice of the woman announcer went through a few details of what she called the grisly discovery. The thing somehow got to him, enough to keep him from concentrating properly either on shaving or on what he ought to say when he appeared on the panel in a couple of hours. Not only that, it stayed with him after he finished getting ready and left the room.

  The radio really hadn’t given many facts. The body of a woman of indeterminate age had been washed up on a beach somewhere down in the Keys, which put it, he supposed, almost a hundred miles to the southwest of Miami Beach. An unnamed authority was quoted to the effect that the body might have been in the water as long as several years. He thought at first that the newscaster had probably got that garbled somehow, but then mention was made of pockets of cold, uncirculating water to be found in certain depths, in which unusual preservative action could be expected.

  One reason for the grisly discovery remaining with him all morning, he supposed, was that his panel topic was “Science in Science Fiction,” and he hoped to be able to work that “unusual preservative action” into what he had to say. He felt a little uncomfortable about this panel, as he really was no scientist, though he read the professional journals fairly often and popularizations a lot, and his stories tended to be thick with scientific jargon. He thought some of the readers liked the jargon better than the stories, and he loved it himself, really, which was why long ago he had begun to use so much of it. For him it had always made a kind of poetry.

  Some of the other people on the panel were not only real scientists, but were writers as well. They talked quantum mechanics. They talked epistemology. He wasn’t sure at first that he remembered what that meant. He wondered for a little while if he was going to have to sit there like a dummy for long minutes at a time. So as soon as the chance came, he got in a few words that shifted the subject to alternate universes. Anybody could talk about that.

  Suppose, he thought to himself, looking out over the heads of the audience in the far last row while some argument between two other panelists droned on, just suppose that body could have been five years in the sea. How far could a body drift in five years? Well, certainly not through the Panama Canal. When, in the early afternoon, he got back to his room, he looked out at what little he could see of the one great ocean that went all the way around the world, and thought about that body again. They hadn’t said what, if anything, the woman had been wearing. He couldn’t quite shake the subject, it seemed to have set up a resonance of some kind inside his head. Time passed, what seemed like a lot of time as he sat waiting in his room, but the phone call from another hotel room that he was expecting failed to come.

  So he left the convention earlier than he had planned, left it that very afternoon, driving north through summer Florida. Going to the convention, he told himself, had been more trouble than it was worth. In the old days, the cons ran three days, no more, and were relaxed and friendly. Now each one he went to seemed like some damned big business in itself. Just getting away on his own was something of a relief.

  A day and a half later, waking up early in his motel room in Atlanta, he put in a call to his agent in New York. The agent would be back in the office in half an hour, the girl thought, and would call him back then. Waiting for the agent to call back, he took a shower, and when he came out of the shower, dripping, turned on the radio.

  Listening, he experienced an inward chill.

  “. . . thought to have been in her early twenties, recovered from the Cattahoochie some twenty miles north of Atlanta. The condition of the body made it impossible to determine immediately if there were any marks of violence. Sheriff’s officers said that the body might have been in the water for as long as several months. Attempts at identification . . .”

  The phone rang. It was the agent, for once communicating even earlier than expected. And with good news: money was coming through, even more money than they had been looking for, and he could afford a trip, a wander across the country, if he felt like one. He hadn’t really felt like one for several years, not since he had been living alone, but he felt like one now, before he went home and got back to work. Not that New York or any place else was really home. He had reached the stage of being down to mailing addresses.

  The Interstate impelled him west. He liked driving his car, he usually liked machines. Quantum mechanics. Epistemology. That was what they talked about on panels nowadays. In the old days they had talked about relativity sometimes, but then you could figure that almost no one knew what they were talking about. He should have taken the time, before coming to the convention, to read up a little more on current work. That way he could have at least sounded a little more intelligent. He would settle in for a day or two of reading when he got home.

  A feeling was growing in him that the convention he had just left had marked some kind of turning point, a new departure in his life. Something had changed. Whether it was for better or worse had yet to be discovered. For richer, for poorer. He was never going to get married again, that much he felt pretty sure about, not even when his status as a widower became finally and fully legal and official, as one of these years it would. Was it two years now, or three? Conventions were still good for providing a little fun in bed, and that was all he needed. Then next day he waited in his room and the phone refused to ring as scheduled. Well, maybe it was just as well.

  He didn’t really know where he was driving now, he just wanted to get off for a few days. On a new course. Alternate universe. When he had brought up that hoary old science fiction concept on the panel, one of the real scientists, almost condescending though he was trying not to sound that way, had admitted aloud that some experiments in particle physics carried out within the last ten years even suggest that physical reality may depend in some sense, to some extent, on human consciousness. If that was true, the writer had thought, listening, if that could be true, how was it possible for everybody to remain so calm about it? But thus spake a real life quantum mechanic. The Bell inequality, whatever the hell that was. The spin of elementary particles . . .

  The car radio assured him that gas supplies were good everywhere across the country, though prices showed no sign of coming down. Tourist business was suffering. He was going to have no trouble finding a motel room, wherever he went.

  At Birmingham lie decided to head on west for a while, and stayed with Interstate 20 going southwest to Jackson. Hell of a country to be driving through in the summer in search of fun or relaxation. But the car was nicely air conditioned, a space capsule whose interior guarded its own sounds and atmosphere, keeping noise and dust and rain and heat all nicely sealed outside. What showed on the windows could almost be no more than pictures from outside, computer presentations.

  In Vicksburg he located a bottle of bourbon and took it to bed with him. A lot less trouble than a woman. But then to his own surprise he discovered that he didn’t feel like drinking much, even after the long drive. He took a couple of sips, then let the bottle sit. He turned on the television, got some local talk show. Talk shows were usually his favorite, they provided humanity at just about the right distance. They proved that the human race was still around somewhere, alive, not too terribly far away. But when you wanted, you could turn them off.

  “. . . for your research at the battlefield cemeteries?” the host was asking.

  “Well, the opportunit
y came about because of some new road construction in the park.” The speaker was a well-dressed man in the prime of life, mustached, relaxed, superior. He enjoyed talking like this. He was reminiscent of some of the people on the convention panel. “In the process of excavation for the road, some previously unknown 1863 military burials came to light, and we applied for permission to use some of the skulls in our tests, the same kind of tests we had been developing for the archaeological work on Indian sites. There were twenty-seven of the Civil War skulls altogether, all completely unidentified. We think they were divided about evenly between Union and Confederate.”

  “And you got the same results with these, as with the older subjects, that had been in the ground for maybe thousands of years?”

  “Better, in many cases. The bone frequently was much better preserved than in the older specimens. We were able to get some very interesting results indeed. The trace elements in the bone that resonate with the NMR . . .”

  Jargon, of any scientific field, could still soothe him like poetry. Better than poetry. He sipped at his bottle and set it back on the table and got ready to drift toward sleep.

  “. . . beauty of the whole thing, you see, is that the visual cortex of the brain need not be intact, or even present.”

  “That’s the real discovery, then.”

  “That’s part of it. Apparently what no one had suspected all along was that the hard bone of the skull itself has another purpose besides that of mere protection.”

  They had him drifting toward wakefulness again. Why hadn’t he heard anything about any of this before? It sounded revolutionary. He wanted to hear it now.

  “. . . bone perhaps serves as a kind of backup memory storage system, at least in human skulls. We don’t know yet if it works the same way in other mammals.”

  “Then there should be applications of this outside the field of archaeology, wouldn’t you say?”

  “Oh, yes, definitely. Police work, for instance. Medicine. X-rays will still have their place, of course. But in medicine the NMR is soon going to replace the X-ray for most purposes, because it doesn’t involve ionizing radiation; X-ray always presents some element of risk. Anyway, a police laboratory, say, can set up an unidentified skull and obtain from it images of scenes that the person actually saw when alive.”

  “That’s spooky. Would you get, maybe, the last thing they saw before they died? Wasn’t there some nineteenth-century theory that by photographing a dead person’s eyes the image of the last thing they saw in life could be recovered?”

  “Yes. There’s a Kappling short story about it. But that’s all sheer superstition. This is something entirely different.”

  Not Kappling, you numbskull, you mean Kipling. But the word had been so clear and deliberate. Some affected pronunciation? Some in-joke? No one was laughing.

  “. . . a thing like this to be acceptable as legal evidence, I wonder.”

  “I’m no lawyer, but I do know that police all over the country are already trying it out. I think that sooner or later it’s bound to be accepted fully. The weight of accumulated evidence is going to silence the objections.”

  “What objections are there? If you can obtain a good picture, as you say you can, doesn’t that prove you’re right?”

  “Well, a few pretty bright people were worried, at first, when they realized what we were doing. There were arguments that what we were doing could start to unravel the whole fabric of physical reality. There’s a kind of resonance factor operating, and the more people you have doing similar experiments—especially on similar subjects—the more likely it seems to be that there will be a concentration, a focusing of the effects of many separate experiments upon one subject.”

  “How can that be?”

  “We don’t know. But if reality can depend in some sense upon human consciousness, then maybe the existence, the form, of an individual human consciousness depends also upon the reality surrounding it. Or the realities, if you prefer.”

  “You said there was no harmful radiation, though.”

  “Right. All the physical objections have now been pretty well taken care of. The main objection now is lo the fact that our best pictures are partially subjective. That is, we obtain the best readings from a human skull when we use another skull, the observer’s own, as a kind of resonator.”

  The observer’s own skull? Give me that again, will you?”

  “All right.” But there ensued a thoughtful pause. The scientist chewed his mustache.

  The host, avoiding dead air time if nothing else, interjected: “With NMR you do project waves of some kind into the body, into whatever’s being examined—?”

  “Yes. NMR scans are a proven means of probing inside matter. They’ve been used now for thirty years.”

  “And, tell me again, NMR stands for—?”

  “Nuclear magnetic resonance. All that we actually project into the body, the specimen, or whatever, is a strong magnetic field. This causes the nuclei of certain atoms inside the specimen to line up in certain ways. Then, when the imposed field is removed, the nuclei flip back again. When a nucleus flips back it emits a trace of radiation that registers on our detectors, and from all these traces our computer can form a picture.”

  “No harmful radiation, though.”

  The scientist smiled. “Do you have a sort of a thing about radiation?”

  “Most people do, these days.”

  “Well, no, it’s not harmful. Now what we’ve discovered is that when the observer’s own skull is used as a kind of magnetic resonator, then pictures, images, are actually induced in the observer’s own visual cortex. He sees a finer, sharper version of what the computer can otherwise extract from the specimen and put up on a stage in the form of a holographic projection. But we can’t yet repeat the results as consistently as we’d like. When you scan a specimen skull more than once, you’re likely to get a different picture every time. So the question is, is what the human experimenter claims to see really the same as the blurry picture that the computer puts up on the hologram stage?”

  “I wish you could have brought some pictures along to show our audience.”

  “By the time I photographed the hologram, and then you ran it through your cameras and so on here, onto their sets at home, they would be seeing a picture of a picture of a not very good picture.”

  “Maybe next time?”

  “Maybe next time. But as I say, it’s not really all that informative when the first image is blurry.”

  “And you can’t get the same picture twice?”

  “The structure of the skull, the specimen, is changed minutely by the very act of reading it. There are various interpretations of why and how this whole thing works at all. It surprised the hell out of a lot of us when we first began to realize what was happening. And even worried a few people, as I say: can time and space become unraveled? Do we tend to get different readings each time because we are reaching for similar atoms, similar skulls, in adjoining universes? The theoretical physicists think it has to do with coupling through electron spin resonance, that’s ESR. The ligand field of each particle expands indefinitely, they say now, which is going to open up a whole new field of research.”

  “Superhyperfine splitting,” commented the host, nodding sagely, and got a laugh in the studio. He was obviously harking back to something that had earlier snowed him and the audience as well.

  The scientist shook his head and smiled tolerantly. He murmured something that was lost in the subsiding laughter.

  “I see,” added the host. He continued to nod in a way that meant he had given up on trying to see, especially after that ligand field. “But do you think you’d be able to help the police discover, for instance, who this young woman is whose body came down the Mississippi today? They say she might have been in the water for several weeks. Wearing a yellow bikini and—”

  His jerking hand at last found the right switch on the unfamiliar set. The picture died, in an erratically shrinking white dot-sp
ark, that lashed about for a moment as if trying to escape its glassy prison.

  The departure of the voices left a hollowness in the air of the dark motel room. Other murmurings came in from other rooms not far away. The carpet under his knees felt rough and dusty. He might have just got up calmly and walked over to the set to turn it off, if he wanted it off. But there had been a bad moment there, bad enough to make him lunge and crawl.

  He stood up, stiffly. On the bedside table the bottle waited, hardly started. No. He was all right. No, just a moment of panic there, such as sometimes came when he was drifting off to sleep. He had thought that at last, after months of learning to sleep alone again, he was all through with midnight panics. Just one small sip now, and even without that he was tired enough to sleep. Then, tomorrow, he would drive again. He could drive anywhere he wanted to. Things were all right . . .

  In the morning he knew that he was not going to follow the great river north, up to the great lakes. Yesterday the plan in the back of his mind, as well as he could remember it, had been to do something along that line. But enough of water, and watery places. He would go on west, and put the big rivers and the lakes behind him.

  In Shereveport he sat in a plastic booth, eating plastic-tasting food, and abruptly realizing that in the booth next to him sat two state police officers. Whether it was more nearly impossible that they had already been there, unseen by him, when he sat down, or that they had walked in past him without his knowing it, he couldn’t estimate.

  “. . . she mighta been from way upstream somewheres. The Doc, he says days in the water. White gal. Just a lil ol bathing suit on. No wounds, nothing like that.”