Dreams

by Richard A. Lupoff

  Try it without the Primal Atom snow globe.

  Nothing.

  Try it with a Santa Claus snow globe.

  A dream of her childhood in Wheaton, Illinois. Pleasant enough but nothing special about that.

  Try it on an empty stomach, try it on an avocado and tomato salad, try it on a glass of wine. Try it with a different brand of incense. Try it with no incense. When one of the Mountain View bigdomes suggested trying it on LSD, Olga refused flat out.

  Try it in teams. Olga and Walter, Olga and Milton, Olga and her friend Robyn.

  Nix.

  Try it with—now here's a concept!—Olga's twin siblings, Anna and Hannah.

  Neither twin had shown any particular talent for graphics or any particular interest in drawing or painting. Still Jaskaran Singh thought it would be worth a try. Olga had come to trust Dr. Singh by this time, a feeling that she did not have for most of his colleagues.

  Everything was kept as much like Olga's surroundings, the surroundings that had worked for her, as possible. The snow globe, the incense, the drawn drapes, the Buxtehude music. The only difference was the second chair that had been added.

  Anna and Hannah were the youngest of the Smith septet, born three minutes apart in the maternity ward of Wheaton Lutheran Hospital and inseparable, in what sometimes seemed virtual telepathic empathy, all their lives. They were eleven years old—oh, you knew that already—and their greatest passion was roller-blading.

  There was a question of supervision and observation. Olga Smith was adamant about barring the Mountain View people from the trance room with Anna and Hannah during the experiment. Pamela Snowden—remember her?—the NASA psychologist on site, vetoed Olga's presence. That would distract the twins, the headshrinker insisted, and Olga had to concede that this would be the case.

  Anna and Hannah were of the peculiar variety of twins who were alike in every way imaginable, at least genetically. To the NASA biologists, that meant that they had started as a single fertilized ovum. At a very early stage of development, as the cells multiplied, the almost microscopic cluster of protoplasm had split in half, each half carrying a full set of chromosomes. But in this case, instead of being identical, they were each other's mirror images. Anna was left-handed. Hannah was right-handed. Anna's hair parted naturally on the right. Hannah's hair parted naturally on the left.

  Sitting at their older sister's desk, the twins tried to maintain silent concentration on the Primal Atom snow globe. At least, that appeared to be the case in the image that Pamela Snowden and the rest of the NASA gang saw in the video monitor that was the compromise agreed to in lieu of having live witnesses in the trance room with the twins.

  After the first thirty seconds the girls had their heads together, whispering. Within the next thirty seconds this led to mutual rib-poking and threats of tickling. Next came the giggles.

  Pamela Snowden looked at Olga Smith, who looked at Jaskaran Singh, who looked at Pamela Snowden. In short order they were giggling, too.

  But the twins settled down, put their elbows on the desk, gazed into the snow globe, and slowly slid forward until their heads lay on the desk.

  The sound of Glen Wilson playing a Buxtehude sarabande on a lovingly restored 1805 Marcus Gabriel Sondermann harpsichord filled the air.

  Nothing happened except for two twenty-first-century eleven-year-olds snoozing, emitting occasional gentle snores to the accompaniment of seventeenth century music played on a nineteenth century instrument. After a while the Buxtehude harpsichord compositions gave way to organ performances—those are what brought J. S. Bach to Buxtehude's venue in Lübeck—and choral works.

  Anna and Hannah slept on.

  The watchers drank coffee, took notes, and made sure that the recording apparatus hooked up to the TV monitor was functioning. Eventually they started taking relief in shifts. Several six-packs of beer were obtained and consumed. A table-stakes poker game broke out in the kitchen.

  Dr. Singh remarked that it was getting light outside, although the trance room was kept dark. By eight o'clock Arcata was up and bustling but the twins still slumbered.

  Followed a brief consultation among the Mountain View contingent and Olga Smith. The music was faded to silence. The incense sticks had long since burned out and were not renewed.

  Still the twins slept on.

  Olga insisted on being the one to enter the trance room and draw back the drapes.

  Slowly, Anna sat up, stretched, yawned, got to her feet, and looked around as if she wasn't quite sure where she was.

  Simultaneously, Hannah yawned, sat up, stretched, got to her feet, and looked around with exactly the same expression as her sister. Well, not quite exactly. Each girl's actions reflected the right-for-left, mirror-like reversal of the other.

  Then Anna and Hannah began to dance.

  Olga started toward them but she felt a hand on her elbow and turned to see Pamela Snowden, the head headshrinker from Mountain View.

  "Please," Snowden said, "don't touch them. They're doing something very important. I can't say that I understand it, but we must not interrupt."

  Biff McGurk—you remember him, too—growled, "Well, I do understand it. Can't you see the pattern in what they're doing? We're getting all of this down on microchips, I hope."

  They were.

  First Anna and then Hannah slouched back into their deserted chairs. They looked up at their elder sister, Olga, and first Hannah and then Anna said, "Wow, am I ever hungry!"

  One twin wanted ice cream and pizza and the other wanted pizza and ice cream. You are free to decide which girl wanted which treat first. They both got what they asked for.

  While the twins were stoking up their eleven-year old bodies with sugar, fats, and carbohydrates, the main nutritional requirements of their generation, Eldon M. J. McGurk, Doctor of Philosophy, Doctor of Science, was uploading the contents of the microchip recording of Anna and Hannah's dance.

  Jaskaran Singh, the de facto chief of the NASA team, asked Dr. McGurk what he had in mind.

  "It's just a lucky thing that those kids are mirror-image twins, Jasko. I need to add in the music that was playing while they were off on another world."

  "Why?"

  "There's a mathematical basis for music. You know that. Everybody knows that. And you know what they call me around Mountain View."

  "Sure. Biffo."

  "No. Mr. Matrix. They call me Mr. Matrix. I think I can reduce those kids' dance moves to a long-stream math statement. And I can matrix it onto that bozo's—what's his name again?"

  "Dietrich Buxtehude."

  "Right. I prefer Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys, Hank Williams, even Johnny Cash, myself. That's my kind of music. But what the hell. Thanks. The music is the matrix. The dance statement is the observational data. Let me see what I can do with it. I have a feeling it's all going to come out as a series of statements that we'll be able to read."

  "You mean like the famous mathematical formulas they've been sending up from SETI for all these years?"

  "Something like that. Only better. Keep everybody away from me for a while, will you, Jasko?"

  Jaskaran Singh did as Biff McGurk requested. And McGurk did what he said he would do. The result was a flurry of messages. Here's a sampling:

  Hey, kids, welcome to the party.

  Hi there, saps, what the heck took you so long?

  Last one into the pool is a rotten grudznik!

  Listen, folks, whatever you do, puh-lee-uz stop wrecking your planet.

  We've noticed you have some pretty nasty diseases there on your marble. Anything we can do to help, just let us know.

  And so on. Message after message. Tens of thousands of them. Hundreds of thousands of them. From species scattered throughout the galaxy, the galactic cluster, and mega-clusters and mega-mega-clusters in a whole, glorious, infinitely beautiful and infinitely wonderful universe.

  After a while Dr. Jaskaran Singh, the friendly fellow with the turban and dagger, frowned. Dr. Pamel
a Snowden, the headshrinker from Mountain View, asked what was troubling Dr. Singh.

  "It's all one way," he said. "These aliens are all talking to us, but we don't seem to have got any messages through to them."

  "I see what you mean," Dr. Snowden said. "It's kind of like taking your pet raccoon to the vet's—"

  "You have a pet raccoon?" Singh interrupted.

  "No, you're being obstructive. I said, 'kind of like,' I didn't say that I had a pet raccoon. In fact I have a year-old doxie and a ginger cat that I adopted from the animal shelter."

  "Then why didn't you say it was like taking your doxie or your cat to the vet?"

  Dr. Snowden said, "Jaskaran Singh, you are the most maddening man I know. If you weren't a genius I don't know why I would put up with you." She made a face at him.

  Then she said, "All right, it's like taking your doxie to the vet. She's been acting listless lately and her nose is hot. If she were a human patient the doctor would say, 'Describe your symptoms, please,' or the famous, 'Where does it hurt?' But a dog can't describe her symptoms so the vet has to look for clues so she can figure out what's the matter."

  Dr. Singh sighed. "How did we get onto the subject of veterinary medicine? I thought we were talking about communication with aliens."

  "Are you following me at all? We're the animals. All you have to do is pick up a morning newspaper to see that we're sick. We're very, very sick. And up to now, those aliens, those millions of aliens, are the veterinarians. But if we could find a way to talk to them, we'd be more like human patients in the doctor's examining room."

  Dr. Snowden turned to Olga Smith. "Miss Smith, you're the one who invented or discovered this amazing method of communicating with aliens. Do you have any idea how we could turn this one-way communication into a real dialog?

  Olga Smith said, "Yes, I have an idea."

  Now, here's another remarkable thing. You might expect these clever people gathered in Madame Olga's salon in Arcata, California to run through one idea after another in hopes of getting a message through to the aliens, and finally hitting on an approach that actually worked on the tenth or twentieth or fiftieth attempt.

  Didn't happen that way. Olga had an idea, they tried it out, and it worked.

  Hey, sometimes you get lucky.

  "Try playing the music backwards," Olga suggested.

  Biff McGurk said, "Sure, invert the matrix."

  By this time the twins, Anna and Hannah, had consumed most of their body weight in pizza, ice cream, pizza, hamburgers, pie a la mode, and a couple of extra slices of pizza for dessert. They'd had a good rest and they were not averse to trying another session of extraplanetary (extrasolar?) (extragalactic?) communication.

  There was a small problem as to how to play music backwards—nobody seemed to remember the famous secret messages on the Beatles' album Abbey Road—but Butch McGurk devised a new and elegant solution, and soon the works of Dietrich Buxtehude, Georg Philip Telemann, and others of their ilk were streaming backwards from the heart of Arcata, California, to the farthest reaches of all creation.

  You'd think there would be a problem with the old speed-of-light limitations. Even the nearby planets of our own solar system were ridiculously far away from Earth at speed-of-light. The distance to other stars had to be measured in light-years, and the distance to remote galaxies—hey, as they say in the gangster movies, Fuggeddaboudit.

  But if this problem bothered Dr. Singh and Dr. Snowden and Dr. McGurk, and maybe even Madame Olga—well, do you remember the old story of the professor and the bumble bee? Okay, here's a gentle reminder.

  A physics professor (maybe even at Humboldt State University) was lecturing to a room full of students on the characteristics of the bumble bee. "The bumble bee cannot fly," the professor asserted. "Merely consider the configuration and weight of its body, the size and shape of its wings, and you will quickly realize that this creature is an aerodynamic impossibility."

  At this point a bumble bee flew in through the classroom window and stung the professor smartly on the nose.

  The moral of the story, of course, is that nobody had explained to the bee that it could not fly, so it proceeded to fly anyway.

  Well, back to Doctors Singh and Snowden and McGurk and their problem with the speed of light.

  The twins Anna and Hannah, their tummies happily filled with a glorious assortment of junk food, returned to their older sister's trance room. The lights were dimmed. The Primal Atom glowed hypnotically. The audio system proceeded to play the works of Eduhetxub Hcirteid. Don't worry if you can't pronounce that, hardly anybody can.

  The twins rose from their seats and initiated a dance similar to the one they had previously performed.

  Dr. Eldon M. J. McGurk did his hands-on magic with his computers.

  Dr. Pamela Snowden asked, "Biff, can you understand that?"

  Dr. McGurk laughed. "Anna just asked the residents of a distant galaxy if their species is divided into boys and girls, and if so, are the boys as icky and disgusting as the ones we have here on earth. Hannah just asked somebody about a billion light years away if they have a curfew and do they get grounded if they get home late. Oh, wait, now this is important. Anna got an answer to her question and she asked her alien counterpart if there was any way they could exchange pictures and the alien told her, yes."

  Dr. Singh was dancing himself, for pure joy.

  Dr. Snowden was rubbing her temples with her fingertips and muttering unintelligible words.

  Dr. McGurk was tapping away at several keyboards in rotation.

  Olga Smith's brother Milton wandered in and asked if anybody wanted to head out for a burrito with him and his buddy Walter Macintosh. Walter had just got a gigantic royalty check from the Apple Corporation and he was ready to treat.

  That's how we did it. That's how we got an answer to the question, Is anybody out there? And the answer, very loosely translated, was, You bet your bottom dollar there is! And that, of course, changed everything.

  And all because Olga Smith felt uncomfortable living in Wheaton, Illinois, and decided to move to the West Coast.

  Now that is the Law of Unintended Consequences. In spades!

  The Green Fairy

  Jimmy Kerr looked at the stack of unpaid bills on his desk, booted up his computer and opened his financial institution's online banking site. Then he read his balance.

  He muttered something under his breath and inhaled. Told his heart to slow down. The fight-or-flight reflex might have worked wonders for Cro-Magnon Man facing an angry woolly mammoth on the plains of northern Europe but it didn't seem particularly useful to a guy trying to keep his financial head above water and not having a hell of a lot of luck.

  He shut down the banking site, switched to his word processor, and opened a new file. His mind went blank. He had no idea for a story, not even a title. He'd been standing behind the counter at Crazy Crepes, the fast food joint where he put in forty hours a week to supplement his writing income, and . . .

  Actually, his minimum wage job at Crazy Crepes was his main source of income. What he made from writing was the supplement. When he made anything from his writing.

  But anyway, he'd been standing behind the counter, his French-style beret cocked at the precise angle that the Employee Handbook prescribed and his blue-and-white striped shirt proclaiming his occupation, when Jordan Elster strolled in.

  The place was hopping with noontime customers, shoppers stopping in for a bite before resuming their pursuit of the perfect pair of shoes, office slaveys seeking relief from the prison-like surroundings of their workplace, school kids cutting classes and whooping it up in midtown.

  Elster waited in line until he reached the counter and for the first time made eye contact with Jimmy.

  He made a startled sound. Something like, "Gaak?"

  Jimmy said, "Hello, Jordan. You slumming today? What can I do for you? What about our Summer Strawberries and Cream Delight?"

  Elster made a quick recovery. Well
, fairly quick. He said, "Jim, I didn't know you – " He made a gesture indicating the fast food joint.

  "It's just temporary," Jimmy said. "I'm a little behind on my rent and the landlord is getting cranky. And a friend of mine who works here is out sick and he called me to fill in for him."

  Right, he thought, and I've been here for four years and eleven months and in another month when I get my Five Year Pin my name gets entered in the Win-a-Trip-to-France Lottery.

  "Are you okay?" Elster asked. "I mean, this job can't pay very much, and – "

  "No, it doesn't."

  "Jimmy, I'd like to offer an advance but you know we're kind of tapped out up at Grand Periodicals. And you're already into us for a couple of stories that you haven't delivered yet."

  "I have one in my computer now, Jordan. It's just about finished. All I need to do is polish it up. You'll really love it."

  "That's wonderful. Great, Jimmy. You know I love your stuff. If you're blocked on crime stories why don't you try one of the other mags? You're one of our stars at Grand Detective Cases but you can always try a western or a spook yarn. I know you're no Johnny-one-note, Jim."

  Jimmy uttered a monosyllable that he tried to make sound positive.

  "Anyway," Elster said, "about this new story. Soon as it's ready just zap it to me. Or print it out and bring it by the office and we'll cut you a check on the spot. Boss is feeling pretty good these days. Strike while the iron is hot, Jim."

  Jimmy said, "That'll be great, Jordan. Maybe I can come by tomorrow on my lunch hour and deliver the script. I know you'll love it."

  "Course I will. And I'll have that strawberry thingie, too, if you don't mind. Summer delight, is it? In the middle of January? Somebody around here has a sense of irony."

  Jimmy started building a Summer Strawberries and Cream Delight crepe. Once he'd finished it and put it in its take-out container he turned around and handed it to Elster.

  Elster handed Jimmy a bill and told him to keep the change. He started to leave the establishment but instead turned back to the counter.

  "Jimmy," he asked, "what's the title on that story? I might be able to get you cover billing."