Analog SFF, October 2005

by Dell Magazine Authors

  "Dan,” I said. “Please call me Dan."

  She nodded, then turned back to Sam. “But you, Sam, you're trying to seduce me, aren't you?"

  "Me?” The innocence on Sam's face was about as obvious as a flying elephant. And as phony.

  "You,” Ingrid said sternly.

  Gesturing toward the next table, Sam asked, “Is that why you brought the Four Horsewomen of the Apocalypse? For protection?"

  "I don't need protection from you, Sam. I can take care of myself."

  Sam h'mmfed. “I bet you're still a virgin."

  "That's none of your business."

  He shrugged. “Now what was this about forgiving me my debts?"

  It took her a moment to get her mind back on business. At last she folded her hands on the tabletop and said slowly, carefully, “The New Morality is willing to intervene on your behalf in the various lawsuits against you."

  "The New Morality, huh?” If this surprised Sam he certainly didn't show it. “They own a lot of stock in Masterson, and Rockledge too, don't they?"

  "That's neither here nor there."

  "And what do I have to do to get the New Morality to save my ass?"

  Her eyes flared again at Sam's crudity. I figured he had chosen his words precisely to rattle her.

  "You will give up this effort of yours to create a matter transmitter."

  "Wait a minute!” I yelped. “That's my work you're talking about!"

  "It is blasphemous presumption,” said Bishop MacTavish. “You are both placing your souls in grave danger."

  "Bullsnorts!” Sam snapped. “The New Morality doesn't want a matter transmitter because it would loosen their control over people."

  "This is a matter of religion, Sam,” Ingrid said. “The state of your soul—"

  "Stow it, Aphrodite. This is a matter of politics. Power. The New Morality isn't worried about my soul, but they're scared that a matter transmitter might let people do things they don't want them to do."

  Ingrid turned to me. She actually reached across the table and took my hands in hers. “Daniel, you understand, don't you? You can see that I'm trying to save your soul."

  I was thinking more about my body. And hers.

  "Ingrid,” I said, my voice nothing more than a husky whisper, “we're talking about my work. My life."

  "No,” she replied softly. “We're talking about your soul."

  Up to that moment I hadn't even considered that I might possess a soul. But gazing into those green eyes, with her hands in mine, I started thinking about how wonderful it would be to please her, to make her smile at me, to be with her for all eternity.

  "Hey! Break it up!” Sam said sharply. “I'm supposed to be the seducer here."

  At that, all four of the women at the next table got to their feet. I saw that they were all pretty hefty; they looked like professional athletes.

  "Bishop MacTavish,” one of them said in a sanctimonious whisper, “it's time to leave."

  Ingrid looked up at her quartet of bodyguards as if breaking free of a trance. She pulled her hands away from me and nodded. “Yes. I must go."

  And she left me there, staring after her.

  * * * *

  I thought I knew as much about entanglement as any person living. More, in fact. But all I knew was about subatomic particles and quantum physics. Not about people. And I got myself entangled with Bishop Ingrid MacTavish so completely that I couldn't even see straight half the time.

  We had dinners together. She visited my lab several times and we had lunch with my grad student assistants. She and I took long walks up in the Main Plaza, strolling along the bricked lanes that curved through the greenery so lovingly tended up there beneath the massive concrete dome of the Plaza. I kissed her and she kissed me back. I fell in love.

  But she didn't.

  "I can't let myself love you, Daniel,” she told me one evening, as we sat on a park bench near the curving shell of the auditorium. We had attended a symphonic concert: all Tchaikovsky, lushly romantic music.

  "Why not?” I asked. “I love you, Ingrid. I truly do."

  "We live in different worlds,” she said.

  "You're here on the Moon now. We're in the same world."

  "No, it's your work. Your soul."

  She meant the matter transmitter, of course. I spread my hands in a halfhearted gesture and said, “My soul isn't in any danger. The damned experiment isn't working. Not at all."

  She looked hopefully at me. “It is damned! It's that devil Sam Gunn. He's leading you down the road to perdition."

  "Sam? He's no devil. An imp, maybe."

  "He's evil, Daniel. And this matter transmitter he wants you to make for him—it's the Devil's work."

  "Come on, Ingrid. That's what they said about the telescope, for god's sake."

  "Yes, for God's sake,” she murmured.

  "Do you really think what I'm doing is evil?"

  "Why do you think your experiment won't work? God won't allow you to succeed."

  "But—"

  "And if you do succeed, if you should somehow manage to make the device work the way Sam Gunn wants it to, it will only be because the Devil has helped you."

  "You mean it'll be witchcraft?” My voice must have gone up two octaves.

  Ingrid nodded, her lips pressed into a tight line. “Don't you see, Daniel? I'm struggling to save your very soul."

  And there it was. She was attracted to me, I knew she was. But my work stood in the way. And her medieval outlook on life.

  "Ingrid, I can't give up my work. It's my career. My life."

  She bowed her head. Her voice so low I could barely hear her, she said, “I know, Daniel. I know. I can't even ask you to give it up. I do love you, dearest. I love you so much that I can't ask you to make this sacrifice. I won't ruin your life. I should do everything in my power to get you away from this devilish task you've set yourself. But I can't bring myself to do it. I can't hurt you that way. Even if it means both our souls."

  She loved me! She admitted that she loved me! But nothing would come of it as long as I worked on Sam's matter transmitter.

  I told Sam about it the following morning. Actually, he ferreted the information out of me.

  Sam was already in my lab when I came in that morning. He was always bouncing into the lab, urging me to make the damned benchtop model work so we could go ahead and build a full-scale transmitter.

  "Why isn't it working yet?” he would ask, about twenty thousand times a day.

  "Sam, if I knew why it isn't working I'd know how to make it work,” I would always reply.

  And he would buzz around the lab like a redheaded bumblebee, getting in everybody's way. My three technicians—graduate student slave labor—were getting so edgy about Sam's presence that they had threatened to go to the dean and complain about their working conditions.

  This particular morning, after that park bench confession from Ingrid the evening before, I had to drag myself to the lab. Sam, as I said, was already there.

  He peered up at me. “What bulldozer ran over you?"

  I blinked at him.

  "You look as if you haven't slept in a week."

  "I haven't,” I muttered, heading for the coffee urn the techs had perking away on one of the lab benches.

  "The good Bishop MacTavish?” Sam asked, trailing after me.

  "Yep."

  "She still trying to save your soul?"

  I whirled around, my anger flaring. “Sam, I love her and she loves me. Stay out of it."

  He put up his hands in mock surrender. “Hey, I'm just an innocent bystander. But take it from me, pal, what she really wants from you is to give up on the transmitter."

  "You want her yourself, don't you? That's why—"

  "Me?” Sam seemed genuinely astounded by the idea. “Me and that religious fanatic? You've gotta be kidding!"

  "You're not attracted to her?"

  "Well, she's gorgeous, true enough. But there are too many other women in the wo
rld for me to worry about a psalm-singing bishop who's working for lawyers that're trying to skin me alive.” He took a breath. “Besides,” he added, “she's too tall for me."

  "She loves me. She told me so."

  Sam hoisted himself up onto the lab bench beside the coffee urn and let his stubby legs swing freely. “Let me give you a piece of priceless wisdom, pal. Hard earned on the field of battle."

  I grabbed the cleanest-looking mug and poured some steaming coffee into it. Sam watched me, his expression somewhere between knowing and caring.

  "What wisdom might that be?” I asked.

  "It's about love. Guys fall in love because they want to get laid. Women fall in love because they want something: it might be security, it might be their own sense of self-worth, it might even be because they pity the guy who's coming on to them. But to women, sex is a means to an end, not an end in itself."

  I felt like throwing the coffee in his face. “That's the most cynical crap I've ever heard, Sam."

  "But it's true. Believe me, pal. I know. I've got the scars to prove it."

  "Bullshit,” I snapped, heading for the non-working model on the bench across the lab. I noticed that one of the grad students had hung a set of prayer beads from the ceiling light over the equipment. A cruel joke, I thought.

  "Okay,” Sam said brightly, hopping down from his perch. “Prove that I'm wrong."

  "Prove it? How?"

  "Make the dingus work. Then see if she really loves you, or if she's just trying to make you give up on the experiment."

  Talk about challenges! I stared at the clutter of equipment on the lab bench. Wires and heavy insulated cables snaked all over the place, hung in festoons from the ceiling (along with the prayer beads) and coiled across the floor. They say a neat, orderly laboratory is a sign that no creative work's being done. Well, my lab was obviously a beehive of intense creativity.

  Except that the damned experiment refused to work.

  Make the transmitter work, and then see if Ingrid still says she loves me. What was that old Special Forces’ motto? Who dares, wins. Yeah. But I thought there was a damned good chance of my daring and losing.

  Yet I had to do it. To prove to Ingrid that the transmitter wouldn't destroy my soul, if for no other reason.

  So I fiddled around with the power feeds and the connections between the plasma chamber and the thin mesh grid that served as the platform for the beam's focus. The same damned flimsy sheet of monofilament that I wanted to transmit to the other side of the lab sat on the grid just as it had for the past two weeks, like a permanent symbol of frustration.

  Entanglement. All the equipment had to do was to match the quantum states of the monofilament's atoms and transmit that information to the receiver, across the lab. That's a lot of information to juggle, but I had six oversized quantum computers lined up against the lab's wall, more than enough qubits to handle the job. In theory.

  I checked the computers; they were connected in parallel, humming nicely, awaiting the command to go to work.

  Everything checked, just as it had for the past two weeks. I went to the master control, on the other side of the bench. I noticed my three grad students edging toward the door. They weren't worried about the equipment exploding; they knew from experience that I was the one who blew up when the system failed to work.

  Sam was standing by the door, arms folded across his chest, a curious expression on his face: kind of crafty, devious.

  "Ready,” I called out. Then, “Stand clear."

  The latter call was strictly routine. The nearest human body to the equipment was several meters away, by the door. Except for me, and I made sure I was on the other side of the apparatus from the focus grid, shielded by the bulk of the plasma chamber.

  As if I needed protection. I pushed the keypad that activated the equipment. It buzzed loudly. The plasma chamber glowed for a moment, then went dark. The sheet of monofilament stayed right there on the focus grid, just as it had since the first time I tried to make the godforsaken junk pile perform.

  I took a deep breath and started counting to one hundred.

  Then I heard a scuffle behind me. Turning, I saw Sam had a hammerlock on one of my grad students; he was dragging the kid toward me.

  "He had this in his pocket,” Sam said, tossing me a slim plastic oblong from his free hand. The grad student was grimacing; Sam had his arm screwed up pretty tight behind his back.

  "It's a remote of some kind,” I muttered, turning the device over in my hand.

  "He clicked it on just before you pressed the start button,” Sam said.

  I turned to the student, W. W. Wilson. He was the beefy kind; I was surprised Sam could hold an armlock on him. “Woody,” I asked, dumbfounded, “what the hell is this?"

  Woody just glared at me, his chunky face red with either anger or pain. Maybe some of both. He was a biology graduate who had volunteered to work in my lab for a little extra spending money.

  Sam hiked the Woody's arm up a little higher and said, “You either tell us or I'll personally pump you so full of babble juice your brain'll shrink to the size of a walnut."

  "Go ahead and torture me!” Woody cried. “I'm prepared to suffer for my faith!"

  "Let him go, Sam,” I said. “We're not the Gestapo."

  Sam shot me a disapproving frown, but released Woody's arm. I clicked the cover off the remote and studied its interior. It seemed simple enough. It looked somewhat like an old-fashioned cell phone. But it had no keypad, no display screen.

  I looked up at Woody. “What frequency band does this work on?"

  Woody just scowled at me, as he rubbed his arm.

  "I can find out for myself easily enough.” I started for the array of test equipment stored in the lab's lockers.

  "Microwave,” Woody muttered. “Just enough power to scramble the recognition circuitry."

  "Sabotage,” Sam growled. “A goddam saboteur planted here by the New Lunar Church."

  My heart sank.

  "Not that bunch of pansies,” Woody snarled. “I was sent here by the New Morality, straight from Earthside headquarters in Atlanta."

  Sam jabbed a finger at him. “You must be doing real well in your bio classes."

  "I lead the class discussions in Intelligent Design,” Woody said, with some pride. “I can tie those Darwinians into pretzel knots."

  "And you screwed up Dan-o's experiment."

  "I'll do more than that!” Woody suddenly leaped past Sam and me and grabbed the cover of the plasma chamber. He ripped it off and threw it to the floor.

  "I'll wreck this Devil's tool once and for all!” he yelled, reaching for the focal grid. The grid was oversized, much bigger than I needed it to be; I had scavenged it from a colleague's experiment with a PET full-body scanner. Yet Woody was wrenching it out of its hold-down screws; the screech of the screws ripping out of the bench top was enough to freeze my blood.

  I was paralyzed with shock, but Sam sprang onto the kid's back like a monkey jumping onto a racing horse, knocking him on top of the lab bench. They wrestled around on the half bent focal grid, arms and legs thrashing, grunting and swearing. Woody was much bigger, of course; he got atop Sam and started punching him with both fists.

  It seemed like hours, but it was really only a few seconds. I finally came out of my surprised funk and grasped Woody by the shoulders and pulled him off Sam. I threw him to the floor; he hit with a heavy thud.

  Sam sat up, a little groggily, on the focus grid. His nose was leaking a thin stream of blood, otherwise he looked okay.

  "Sam, are you all right?"

  He shook his head slightly. “Nothing rattles. That kid can't punch worth shit. Hey, look out!"

  I turned. Woody was on his feet. He slammed a fist onto the control panel keyboard. “Die, spawn of Satan!” he screamed.

  The power thrummed, the plasma chamber pulsed, the overhead lights dimmed and then went dark. The emergency back-up lights came on. But nothing else happened. Sam still sat on the
focus grid, with that damned sheet of monofilament beneath his butt.

  I swung around on Woody and socked him in the jaw as hard as I could. His head snapped back, his knees folded, and he collapsed to the floor, unconscious.

  Sam whistled appreciatively. “That's a helluva punch you've got there, Dan-o.” He jumped down from the bench and bent over Woody. “He's out like a light."

  And from across the lab, where the receiving grid was, Sam Gunn said, “What'm I doing over here?"

  I stared at Sam, clear on the other side of the lab. Then I turned back to Sam, who was still standing by the bench, right beside me.

  Two of them!

  I think I fainted.

  When I came to, both Sams were standing over me. I was sitting on the floor next to Woody's still-unconscious body, my back propped against the lab bench.

  "Are you okay?” one of the Sams asked me.

  "You need a doctor?” asked the other one.

  I looked from one to the other. Identical, down to the number and location of his freckles.

  "It worked,” I said. “The experiment. It worked!"

  "Of course it worked,” said Sam I.

  "Once this bozo stopped sabotaging it,” Sam II said, casting a frown at Woody.

  My erstwhile lab assistant was groaning now, his legs shuffling back and forth. His eyes fluttered open.

  Both Sams grabbed his arms and helped him up to a sitting position.

  Woody looked at each of them in turn, his eyes widening with horror, his face going pasty white. He screeched like a giant fingernail scraping across a chalkboard, scrambled to his feet, and bolted for the door. My two other grad students were right behind him. They all looked terrified.

  "Unclean!” Woody yelled as he tore out of the lab. “Unclean!"

  Both Sams shook their heads. “He should've said Eureka."

  I struggled to my feet unassisted. I felt a little woozy, my legs rubbery, but my mind was whirling madly. I did it! I proved that entanglement can be used not merely to transmit macroscopic objects but to duplicate them: a human being, no less!

  Visions of the Nobel danced through my head.

  But then I thought of Ingrid. What would her reaction be?

  A little unsteadily, I headed for my desk and the phone. Both Sams trailed along behind me.