Asimov's SF, October-November 2008

by Dell Magazine Authors

  He watched her carefully as he recited the names, as if she should somehow react. Carrie knew some of those people, but mostly just to say hello. Only Mr. Cosmano was on her resident-assignee list. Dr. Erdmann looked stranger than she had ever seen him.

  He said, “Carrie, what time did Jim ... did he drop dead? Can you fix the exact time?”

  “Well, let me see ... I left here at two and I stopped at the bank and the gas station and the convenience store, so maybe 3:00 or 3:30? Why?”

  Dr. Erdmann didn't answer. He was silent for so long that Carrie grew uneasy. She shouldn't have come, it was a terrible imposition, and anyway there was probably a rule against aides staying in residents’ apartments, what was she thinking—

  “Let me get blankets and pillow for the sofa,” Dr. Erdmann finally said, in a voice that still sounded odd to Carrie. “It's fairly comfortable. For a sofa.”

  * * * *

  SIX

  Not possible. The most ridiculous coincidence. That was all—coincidence. Simultaneity was not cause-and-effect. Even the dimmest physics undergraduate knew that.

  In his mind, Henry heard Richard Feynman say about string theory, “I don't like that they're not calculating anything. I don't like that they don't check their ideas. I don't like that for anything that disagrees with an experiment, they cook up an explanation.... The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool.” Henry hadn't liked Feynman, whom he'd met at conferences at Cal Tech. A buffoon, with his bongo drums and his practical jokes and his lock-picking. Undignified. But the brilliant buffoon had been right. Henry didn't like string theory, either, and he didn't like ideas that weren't calculated, checked, and verified by experimental data. Besides, the idea that Henry had somehow killed Jim Peltier with his thoughts ... preposterous.

  Mere thoughts could not send a bolt of energy through a distant man's body. But the bolt itself wasn't a “cooked-up” idea. It had happened. Henry had felt it.

  DiBella had said that Henry's MRI looked completely normal.

  Henry lay awake much of Thursday night, which made the second night in a row, while Carrie slept the oblivious deep slumber of the young. In the morning, before she was awake, he dressed quietly, left the apartment with his walker, and made his way to the St. Sebastian's Infirmary. He expected to find the Infirmary still crammed with people who'd vomited when he had yesterday afternoon. He was wrong.

  “Can I help you?” said a stout, middle-aged nurse carrying a breakfast tray. “Are you feeling ill?”

  “No, no,” Henry said hastily. “I'm here to visit someone. Evelyn Krenchnoted. She was here yesterday.”

  “Oh, Evelyn's gone back. They've all gone back, the food poisoning was so mild. Our only patients here now are Bill Terry and Anna Chernov.” She said the latter name the way many of the staff did, as if she'd just been waiting for an excuse to speak it aloud. Usually this irritated Henry—what was ballet dancing compared to, say, physics?—but now he seized on it.

  “May I see Miss Chernov, then? Is she awake?”

  “This is her tray. Follow me.”

  The nurse led the way to the end of a short corridor. Yellow curtains, bedside table, monitors and IV poles; the room looked like every other hospital room Henry had ever seen, except for the flowers. Masses and masses of flowers, bouquets and live plants and one huge floor pot of brass holding what looked like an entire small tree. A man, almost lost amid all the flowers, sat in the room's one chair.

  “Here's breakfast, Miss Chernov,” said the nurse reverently. She fussed with setting the tray on the table, positioning it across the bed, removing the dish covers.

  “Thank you.” Anna Chernov gave her a gracious, practiced smile, and looked inquiringly at Henry. The other man, who had not risen at Henry's entrance, glared at him.

  They made an odd pair. The dancer, who looked younger than whatever her actual age happened to be, was more beautiful than Henry had realized, with huge green eyes over perfect cheekbones. She wasn't hooked to any of the machinery on the wall, but a cast on her left leg bulged beneath the yellow bedcover. The man had a head shaped like a garden trowel, an aggressively bristly gray crew cut, and small suspicious eyes. He wore an ill-fitting sports coat over a red T-shirt and jeans. There seemed to be grease under his fingernails—grease, in St. Sebastian's? Henry would have taken him for part of the maintenance staff except that he looked too old, although vigorous and walker-free. Henry wished him at the devil. This was going to be difficult enough without an audience.

  “Miss Chernov, please forgive the intrusion, especially so early, but I think this is important. My name is Henry Erdmann, and I'm a resident on Three.”

  “Good morning,” she said, with the same practiced, detached graciousness she'd shown the nurse. “This is Bob Donovan.”

  “Hi,” Donovan said, not smiling.

  “Are you connected in any way with the press, Mr. Erdmann? Because I do not give interviews.”

  “No, I'm not. I'll get right to the point, if I may. Yesterday I had an attack of nausea, just as you did, and you also, Mr. Donovan. Evelyn Krenchnoted told me.”

  Donovan rolled his eyes. Henry would have smiled at that if he hadn't felt so tense.

  He continued, “I'm not sure the nausea was food poisoning. In my case, it followed a ... a sort of attack of a quite different sort. I felt what I can only describe as a bolt of energy burning along my nerves, very powerfully and painfully. I'm here to ask if you felt anything similar.”

  Donovan said, “You a doctor?”

  “Not an M.D. I'm a physicist.”

  Donovan scowled savagely, as if physics were somehow offensive. Anna Chernov said, “Yes, I did, Dr. Erdmann, although I wouldn't describe it as ‘painful.’ It didn't hurt. But a ‘bolt of energy along the nerves'—yes. It felt like—” She stopped abruptly.

  “Yes?” Henry said. His heart had started a slow, irregular thump in his chest. Someone else had also felt that energy.

  But Anna declined to say what it had felt like. Instead she turned her head to the side. “Bob? Did you feel anything like that?”

  “Yeah. So what?”

  “I don't know what,” Henry said. All at once, leaning on the walker, his knees felt wobbly. Anna noticed at once. “Bob, bring Dr. Erdmann the chair, please.”

  Donovan got up from the chair, dragged it effortlessly over to Henry, and stood sulkily beside a huge bouquet of autumn-colored chrysanthemums, roses, and dahlias. Henry sank onto the chair. He was at eye level with the card to the flowers, which said FROM THE ABT COMPANY. GET WELL SOON!

  Anna said, “I don't understand what you're driving at, Dr. Erdmann. Are you saying we all had the same disease and it wasn't food poisoning? It was something with a ... a surge of energy followed by nausea?”

  “Yes, I guess I am.” He couldn't tell her about Jim Peltier. Here, in this flower-and-antiseptic atmosphere, under Donovan's pathetic jealousy and Anna's cool courtesy, the whole idea seemed unbelievably wild. Henry Erdmann did not like wild ideas. He was, after all, a scientist.

  But that same trait made him persist a little longer. “Had you felt anything like that ever before, Miss Chernov?”

  “Anna,” she said automatically. “Yes, I did. Three times before, in fact. But much more minor, and with no nausea. I think they were just passing moments of dozing off, in fact. I've been laid up with this leg for a few days now, and it's been boring enough that I sleep a lot.”

  It was said without self-pity, but Henry had a sudden glimpse of what being “laid up” must mean to a woman for whom the body, not the mind, had been the lifelong source of achievement, of pleasure, of occupation, of self. What, in fact, growing old must mean to such a woman. Henry had been more fortunate; his mind was his life source, not his ageing body, and his mind still worked fine.

  Or did it, if it could hatch that crackpot hypothesis? What would Feynman, Teller, Gell-Mann have said? Embarrassment swamped him. He struggled to rise.


  “Thank you, Miss Chernov, I won't take up any more of your—”

  “I felt it, too,” Donovan said suddenly. “But only two times, like you said. Tuesday and yesterday afternoon. What are you after here, doc? You saying there's something going around? Is it dangerous?”

  Henry, holding onto the walker, turned to stare at him. “You felt it, too?”

  “I just told you I did! Now you tell me—is this some new catching, dangerous-like disease?”

  The man was frightened, and covering fear with belligerence. Did he even understand what a “physicist” was? He seemed to have taken Henry for some sort of specialized physician. What on Earth was Bob Donovan doing with Anna Chernov?

  He had his answer in the way she dismissed them both. “No, Bob, there's no dangerous disease. Dr. Erdmann isn't in medicine. Now if you don't mind, I'm very tired and I must eat or the nurse will scold me. Perhaps you'd better leave now, and maybe I'll see you both around the building when I'm discharged.” She smiled wearily.

  Henry saw the look on Donovan's face, a look he associated with undergraduates: hopeless, helpless lovesickness. Amid those wrinkles and sags, the look was ridiculous. And yet completely sincere, poor bastard.

  “Thank you again,” Henry said, and left as quickly as his walker would allow. How dare she treat him like a princess dismissing a lackey? And yet ... he'd been the intruder on her world, that feminine arena of flowers and ballet and artificial courtesy. A foreign, somehow repulsive world. Not like the rigorous masculine brawl of physics.

  But he'd learned that she'd felt the “energy,” too. And so had Donovan, and at the exact same times as Henry. Several more data points for ... what?

  He paused on his slow way to the elevator and closed his eyes.

  * * * *

  When Henry reached his apartment, Carrie was awake. She sat with two strangers, who both rose as Henry entered, at the table where Henry and Ida had eaten dinner for fifty years. The smell of coffee filled the air.

  “I made coffee,” Carrie said. “I hope you don't mind ... This is Detective Geraci and Detective Washington. Dr. Erdmann, this is his apartment...” She trailed off, looking miserable. Her hair hung in uncombed tangles and some sort of black make-up smudged under her eyes. Or maybe just tiredness.

  “Hello, Dr. Erdmann,” the male detective said. He was big, heavily muscled, with beard shadow even at this hour—just the sort of thuggish looks that Henry most mistrusted. The black woman was much younger, small and neat and unsmiling. “We had a few follow-up questions for Ms. Vesey about last night.”

  Henry said, “Does she need a lawyer?”

  “That's up to your granddaughter, of course,” at the same moment that Carrie said, “I told them I don't want a lawyer,” and Henry was adding, “I'll pay for it.” In the confusion of sentences, the mistake about “granddaughter” went uncorrected.

  Geraci said, “Were you here when Ms. Vesey arrived last night?”

  “Yes,” Henry said.

  “And can you tell us your whereabouts yesterday afternoon, sir?”

  Was the man a fool? “Certainly I can, but surely you don't suspect me, sir, of killing Officer Peltier?”

  “We don't suspect anyone at this point. We're asking routine questions, Dr. Erdmann.”

  “I was in Redborn Memorial from mid-afternoon until just before Carrie arrived here. The Emergency Room, being checked for a suspected heart attack. Which,” he added hastily, seeing Carrie's face, “I did not have. It was merely severe indigestion brought on by the attack of food poisoning St. Sebastian's suffered yesterday afternoon.”

  Hah! Take that, Detective Thug!

  “Thank you,” Geraci said. “Are you a physician, Dr. Erdmann?”

  “No. A doctor of physics.”

  He half-expected Geraci to be as ignorant about that as Bob Donovan had been, but Geraci surprised him. “Experimental or theoretical?”

  “Theoretical. Not, however, for a long time. Now I teach.”

  “Good for you.” Geraci rose, Detective Washington just a beat behind him. In Henry's hearing the woman had said nothing whatsoever. “Thank you both. We'll be in touch about the autopsy results.”

  * * * *

  In the elevator, Tara Washington said, “These old-people places give me the creeps.”

  “One day you and—”

  “Spare me the lecture, Vince. I know I have to get old. I don't have to like it.”

  “You have a lot of time yet,” he said, but his mind clearly wasn't on the rote reassurance. “Erdmann knows something.”

  “Yeah?” She looked at him with interest; Vince Geraci had a reputation in the department for having a “nose.” He was inevitably right about things that smelled hinky. Truth was, she was a little in awe of him. She'd only made detective last month and was fucking lucky to be partnered with Geraci. Still, her natural skepticism led her to say, “That old guy? He sure the hell didn't do the job himself. He couldn't squash a cockroach. You talking about a hit for hire?”

  “Don't know.” Geraci considered. “No. Something else. Something more esoteric.”

  Tara didn't know what “esoteric” meant, so she kept quiet. Geraci was smart. Too smart for his own good, some uniforms said, but that was just jealousy talking, or the kind of cops that would rather smash down doors than solve crimes. Tara Washington knew she was no door-smasher. She intended to learn everything she could from Vince Geraci, even if she didn't have his vocabulary. Everything, and then some. She intended to someday be just as good as he was.

  Geraci said, “Let's talk to the staff about this epidemic of food poisoning.”

  But the food poisoning checked out. And halfway through the morning, the autopsy report was called in. Geraci shut his cell and said, “Peltier died of ‘a cardiac event.’ Massive and instantaneous heart failure.”

  “Young cop like that? Fit and all?”

  “That's what the M.E. says.”

  “So no foul play. Investigation closed.” In a way, she was disappointed. The murder of a cop by a battered wife would have been pretty high-profile. That's why Geraci had been assigned to it.

  “Investigation closed,” Geraci said. “But just the same, Erdmann knows something. We're just never gonna find out what it is.”

  * * * *

  SEVEN

  Just before noon on Friday, Evelyn lowered her plump body onto a cot ready to slide into the strange-looking medical tube. She had dressed up for the occasion in her best suit, the polyester blue one with all the blue lace, and her good cream pumps. Dr. DiBella—such a good-looking young man, too bad she wasn't fifty years younger aha ha ha—said, “Are you comfortable, Mrs. Krenchnoted?”

  “Call me Evelyn. Yes, I'm fine, I never had one of these—what did you call it?”

  “A functional MRI. I'm just going to strap you in, since it's very important you lie completely still for the procedure.”

  “Oh, yes, I see, you don't want my brain wobbling all over the place while you take a picture of—Gina, you still there? I can't see—”

  “I'm here,” Gina called. “Don't be scared, Evelyn. ‘Though I walk in the valley of—'”

  “There's no shadows here and I'm not scared!” Really, sometimes Gina could be Too Much. Still, the MRI tube was a bit unsettling. “You just tell me when you're ready to slide me into that thing, doctor, and I'll brace myself. It's tight as a coffin, isn't it? Well, I'm going to be underground a long time but I don't plan on starting now, aha ha ha! But if I can keep talking to you while I go in—”

  “Certainly. Just keep talking.” He sounded resigned, poor man. Well, no wonder, he must get bored with doing things like this all the live-long day. She cast around for something to cheer him up.

  “You're over at St. Sebastian's a lot now, aren't you, when you're not here that is, did you hear yet about Anna Chernov's necklace?”

  “No, what about it? That's it, just hold your head right here.”

  “It's fabulous!” Evelyn said, a little desperatel
y. He was putting some sort of vise on her head, she couldn't move it at all. Her heart sped up. “Diamonds and rubies and I don't know what all. The Russian czar gave it to some famous ballerina who—”

  “Really? Which czar?”

  “The czar! Of Russia!” Really, what did the young learn in school these days? “He gave it to some famous ballerina who was Anna Chernov's teacher and she gave it to Anna, who naturally keeps it in the St. Sebastian's safe because just think if it were stolen, it wouldn't do the Home's reputation any good at all and anyway it's absolutely priceless so— oh!”

  “You'll just slide in nice and slow, Evelyn. It'll be fine. Close your eyes if that helps. Now, have you seen this necklace?”

  “Oh, no!” Evelyn gasped. Her heart raced as she felt the bed slide beneath her. “I'd love to, of course, but Anna isn't exactly friendly, she's pretty stuck-up, well I suppose that comes with being so famous and all but still—Doctor!”

  “Do you want to come out?” he said, and she could tell that he was disappointed, she was sensitive that way, and she did want to come out but she didn't want to disappoint him, so ... “No! I'm fine! The necklace is something I'd really like to see, though, all those diamonds and rubies and maybe even sapphires too, those are my favorite stones with that blue fire in them, I'd really really like to see it—”

  She was babbling, but all at once it seemed she could see the necklace in her mind, just the way she'd pictured it. A string of huge glowing diamonds and hanging from them a pendant of rubies and sapphires shining like I-don't-know-what but more beautiful than anything she'd ever seen oh she'd love to touch it just once! If Anna Chernov weren't so stuck-up and selfish then maybe she'd get the necklace from the safe and show it to Evelyn let her touch it get the necklace from the safe it would surely be the most wonderful thing Evelyn had ever seen or imagined get the necklace from the safe —

  Evelyn screamed. Pain spattered through her like hot oil off a stove, burning her nerves and turning her mind to a red cloud ... So much pain! She was going to die, this was it and she hadn't even bought her cemetery plot yet oh God the pain—