Memory Blank

by John Stith

  “Maybe the police could figure it out.”

  “That’s the last thing I need right now, with all this circumstantial evidence dribbling over me. I need information—the kind that only I can get. Don’t call the police.”

  Nikki’s eyes searched his. “All right,” she said finally. “Why didn’t you tell me this earlier?”

  “I was afraid. And I didn’t want you to think I was making it all up to keep you from leaving.”

  Nikki said nothing, but walked to the window and stood staring for a moment before she said, “I don’t suppose I could blackmail you into staying here at least overnight?” When Cal didn’t respond, she sighed and said, “All right. Do what you want. I’m going home.”

  “Before you go, could you tell me where my clothes are?”

  “I’ll have them sent in,” she said, and moved toward the door.

  Cal called after her. “I’m not trying to hurt you. I just have to find out what’s been happening. I’ve got to find out soon. I don’t know why, but I do. Please understand.”

  She turned back at the door and looked at him. Finally she nodded in resignation and left.

  Minutes later Cal was halfway down the hall to the nurses station.

  “I’m not sure it’s wise for you to be up and around so soon,” Dr. Bartum said from behind him.

  “There are things I’ve got to do,” Cal said simply.

  “Nikki warned me you were stubborn. But—but come in here for a minute.” He gestured at a small, empty waiting room.

  Bartum shut the door. “Sit down a minute, Mr. Donley. I’m stepping a bit outside my normal professional boundaries, because I like Nikki, and because I’m bothered by something.” He looked out the window for just a moment, and then turned back. “Do you have any enemies?”

  Cal suddenly felt a draft. “None that I know of,” he said truthfully.

  “I’m not trying to alarm you. But one of the things you told me about your seizure bothers me. It could be a quite normal, although rare, occurrence. But I think you should know something.” The doctor’s eyes were unblinking. “The sensations you experienced, like the odor of rain, are typical for that kind of attack. But there’s also a chemical—a gas—that can also induce those same symptoms.”

  “Go on,” Cal urged as Dr. Bartum hesitated again.

  “Well, the reason I mention all this is—and it may be simply my overactive imagination—the gas smells like mint.”

  CHAPTER 7

  Hoax

  “You’re saying my going through hell this morning might have been deliberately induced?” Cal asked, incredulous.

  “Might be,” Dr. Bartum said.

  “But I was on a crowded tube car. Why wouldn’t anyone else have succumbed?”

  “There’s a possible explanation for that. The gas oxidizes rapidly in air. If it were released quite near you, you alone might breathe it in its original state.”

  “But how—” Cal stopped. The young man with the mustache who sat down next to him on the tube car. All he would have had to do was run a flexible hose down one sleeve, spread his arm across the seat back, and turn a valve. “Okay,” he said slowly. “I’ll grant that it could be done deliberately. But why?”

  “You’re asking the wrong person.”

  “You’re right. How difficult would it be to obtain this gas?”

  “I’m afraid I don’t know that either. You’re outside of my specialty now. The gas is called Lendomen. I can tell you its chemical formula, its specific heat, its molecular weight, the effect it has on humans, and a few other details. But I wouldn’t know where to start in buying it or handling it. And this could easily all be my imagination.” Bartum stood. “I just wanted to let you know, just in case.”

  “Thanks. I appreciate it.” He shook Bartum’s hand, and left. He could tell the doctor was still curious about why such a thing might have been done, but he couldn’t help the man. Cal was just as curious. And worried.

  Cal was stopped once again as he tried to leave, this time by a nurse seated at the hall station. She demanded that he sign a release to absolve the clinic and Dr. Bartum if there were any complications. She was painting her fingernails, a different color on each, so that her nails looked like a spectrum.

  “This is a usual practice?” Cal asked.

  “No. Only when a patient wants to leave before the doctor recommends it.”

  Cal flushed and signed the log.

  Outside he found a bench and sat. The mild heat from the sun’s rays felt good against his skin. It had been colder than he liked inside the clinic.

  “I suppose you heard,” he said. His tongue felt like an old sock.

  “What?” said Vincent.

  “Don’t be cute.”

  “I heard. I’m glad you’re feeling better.”

  “I hope I didn’t knock you around too much.”

  “I’m getting used to it,” Vincent said. “You’re a regular bumpathon.”

  “You don’t have any odor detectors, do you?”

  “Nope. Video, audio, temperature. That’s the lot.”

  “What can you tell me about Lendomen?”

  “All that stuff the doctor mentioned. And that it’s used in the assembly of lightweight solar panels. It’s not an illegal substance. Why? Do you think he might be right?”

  “I’ve never liked coincidences. What bothers me is why. Is there someone trying to get revenge on me, or does someone just plain hate me? I barely noticed that guy who sat next to me, but he didn’t seem familiar. So does that mean maybe I killed Domingo, who was blackmailing me, and that guy was his partner, trying to even things out?”

  “To quote Dr. Bartum, you’re talking to the wrong person.”

  Cal stared into the distance. He missed the changing shadows of Earth. A flicker of motion high above caught his attention. There were a few tiny specs flying near the center of Daedalus’s axis. An almost invisible net contained them.

  “Has anyone ever fallen from up there?” Cal asked.

  “‘Fall’ isn’t the right word. This isn’t true gravity, so it’s got some quirks. If you pushed an object with no wind resistance out from the center, it would just slowly keep going until it hit the ground as slowly as you pushed it. But the ground’s relative velocity, because it’s spinning, would do a lot of damage. If the object had a lot of wind resistance, it would gradually spiral down just because it was being pushed farther out by the centrifugal force caused by the wind.”

  Cal squinted into the light. Lynn had never been able to go hang gliding. Cal felt sad. There were so many things she’d never seen. So many first times he would never be able to share with her.

  He watched for another moment before he recalled what he had scheduled. “Oh, no,” he said abruptly. “I’m supposed to meet Leroy Krantz this afternoon. I’m almost late.”

  He felt weak and wobbly for his first few steps but ignored the discomfort. “Vincent, how much video can you store without cramping yourself too much?”

  “At what rate and resolution?”

  “Ten frames a second. Typical newscast resolution.”

  “Almost thirty minutes. Why?”

  “I’m worried about future attempts. How about this? Can you continuously record, and save the most recent ten minutes, and keep portions of the oldest recordings? For instance, one frame a second for the previous hour, one a minute for the previous day? Or as close as you can come to that. If something happens to me, save as much as you can while adding a frame every ten seconds from that point? And can you save all the audio?”

  “Easy. I’m starting now. Why didn’t you think of this before?”

  “I couldn’t use my hindsight any earlier.”

  The trip to Vittoria seemed to take longer than it had the day before. Cal arrived fifteen minutes late at Leroy Krantz’s office, not having had time to do the research he had planned. He would just have to fake it the best he could.

  “Sorry I’m late,” Cal said.

 
“What?” Leroy asked.

  “I said sorry I’m late,” he repeated slowly.

  “You okay?”

  “Fine.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Leroy said, pushing aside whatever he was working on. “Can I get you anything to drink before we get started?”

  Cal thought about his missed lunch, then considered the way his body felt after the morning’s activities. “Thank you, no.”

  “Let’s go, then,” said the older man. “You want to sit at the keyboard?” Leroy gestured at his desk and leaned back in his chair. He grinned. “Don’t be bashful, son.”

  Cal froze. Leroy couldn’t know about his condition. But if he did, was he teasing Cal? Cal looked at him closely. Leroy seemed friendly enough. His hair was beginning to whiten about the edges, but he still had almost invisible dimples as he smiled. Cal decided that his problem was simply nerves. If Leroy was so good an actor that he could know about Cal’s memory loss and pretend not to, Cal was at a strong disadvantage.

  “Why don’t you run through it,” Cal said at last. “I’m content just to watch.”

  “Fine. Fine.” Leroy rolled his chair to the desk and rubbed his hands together briefly before he began.

  The wall screen lit up with several long paragraphs of legalese, headed by VITTORIA—DAEDALUS COMMUNICATIONS CUSTOMER ACCEPTANCE TEST.

  “Shouldn’t there be someone else here?” Cal asked, thinking about how formal the occasion really was.

  “Tolbor doesn’t seem to be too interested. He’s more likely to spot check the log than attend all the tests. I notified him.” Leroy looked up at the screen for a moment. “This is all boilerplate material. Slow me down if I go too fast.”

  He went too fast, but Cal was too inhibited to tell him. Pages of information flashed past. Skimming the green text, Cal was able to verify that the test procedure was designed to demonstrate satisfactory performance of the long-range communication system that would allow the Vittoria to keep in contact with Daedalus during the journey.

  Performance criteria included transmission and reception protocols, error-rate, redundancy, and power consumption. This final test concentrated on reception quality. The flow of text pages was interrupted by graphics showing antennae illustrations and shots of the various items of communications support gear.

  “We’re ready for the tests.” Leroy shifted in his chair. “The Jupiter bounce is complete. I didn’t think you’d want to wait around for a few hours, so I ran it last night. Any problem?”

  “That’s fine.” Cal didn’t ask for clarification, but assumed there was a repeater in Jupiter orbit or on one of the moons.

  “Great. Here are the reception results.”

  A multi-sectioned color display indicated performance characteristics in each reception mode. Green analog and digital indicators tracked instantaneous levels and showed minimum, maximum, and average values for signal-to-noise ratio, modulation percentage, signal strength, and other readings that Cal didn’t have time to absorb. Leroy turned on the second wall screen for overflow.

  The test transmission included audio, video, slow-scan video, and binary. Overwhelmed, Cal took a seat.

  Cal tried to examine one parameter and then another, narrowing his focus. Everything looked reasonable to him. Each value he checked seemed to be comfortably above its minimum acceptable level.

  Cal had looked at only a fraction of the measured parameters when Leroy said, “Okay. That pretty much finishes the Jupiter test. You satisfied?”

  “Fine,” Cal said, although he couldn’t really say whether the equipment had passed every possible test. But surely this test was merely a formality, documenting officially what Leroy knew all along was a good product. Leroy seemed calm and honest.

  “Let’s see now.” Leroy tapped a few keys, and a star-filled image came up on the screen. Slowly at first, then more quickly, the field of stars moved across the screen, until Luna entered the display. It was almost full. The moon moved to approximately the middle of the screen. Then the image began to zoom toward a spot midway between the center and the right edge.

  Luna filled the section of the screen, and surface features continued to grow. Presently Cal was sure the focus of interest was in the crater at center screen. Seconds later the crater walls expanded out of view, and a dark dot grew into a black mesh cubic structure on the crater floor.

  “That’s the corner reflector,” said Leroy. “Let’s crank it up.”

  A new set of display inserts flashed on the screen.

  “Okay,” Leroy continued, more animated now, as though he had enjoyed zooming in on the reflector. “We’re at point one percent power now. On the left we’ve got what we’re sending. On the right is what we’re getting back.”

  The left side showed a video of a moving test pattern, and then one of surf pounding on the rocks along an unidentified coastline on Earth. The right image was an obvious copy, delayed so slightly it was hard to be sure there was a communications lag, with one significant difference: the picture was grainy and snowy.

  The transmitter began a series of slow-scan, still-frame images, which came back perfectly clear, and then the dynamic video resumed. All level indicators were showing acceptable operation when the image faded for an instant. Cal might have not even noticed if he hadn’t been transfixed, staring at the recorded view of traffic in some now-dead city.

  Leroy sat at the keyboard and made no comment.

  “What was that?” Cal asked.

  “What was what?”

  “We lost the image for a second, on the receiver display.”

  Leroy looked up at the screen, his face expressionless. “Oh, that. Just an automatic failover test. We’re on the B transmitter now. He pointed to a section of the display: ACTIVE TRANSMITTER = B.

  “Oh” was all Cal could say.

  “It’s a normal part of the test. Didn’t you even read the test procedure ahead of time?”

  “It’s fine, Leroy. No problem.”

  Leroy turned back to the keyboard and continued the test, which ran for only another couple of minutes. “Okay,” he said finally. “Mark your approval.”

  Unsure of the proper procedure, Cal reached forward to the keyboard. Just as his hand brushed a key, the memory came back to him. He placed his thumb on the white square and looked up at the screen. There was his name, and a flowery graphic symbol that obviously indicated he was a witness.

  Leroy reached over to the keyboard, and his notation appeared below Cal’s.

  “Is that it, then?” asked Cal.

  Leroy turned to him. He looked at Cal intently for a brief moment. “That’s it,” he said, suddenly brusque. “All complete. Thanks very much.”

  Cal rose to leave, puzzled. Leroy seemed anxious, almost imperceptibly unsettled. In his place, Cal could imagine being nervous at the start of an important test and relaxed at the conclusion. Why were Leroy’s actions opposite? What guarded thoughts lay behind Leroy’s brown eyes? Or was Cal merely imagining mysteries where none existed? Maybe Leroy was surprised that Cal hadn’t known for sure that the session was complete.

  Leroy busied himself at the keyboard, and Cal walked down the hall to his office. People in nearby offices must have been busy, because no one called to him. Drained, he dropped into his desk chair and let his hands fall limply to the sides. After a moment he rose to shut the door and then sat again.

  “Vincent, has he always been that inconsistent?”

  “Leroy Krantz?”

  “Yeah. Last night it was ‘Let’s go for a drink.’ Today it’s ‘Thanks a lot. See you around.’”

  “All I can remember about Leroy is last night’s conversation and the one now. That’s not enough for me to pronounce him manic-depressive.”

  “It’s not quite that bad,” Cal said. “But it’s enough to worry me. I’m suspicious of everything right now. Leroy could have paid that guy this morning.”

  “Or you may have so many enemies that Leroy had to pay him not to do anything wo
rse. As the actor says to the director, what’s the motivation?”

  “As the doctor says, you’re asking the wrong person. It wouldn’t be so bad, not knowing who the right person was, if I at least knew the right questions.” Cal leaned back and shut his eyes for a moment, visualizing Krantz’s office. “You’re recording now, per our talk?” he asked.

  “I’ve got more pictures than a baby photographer, but they’re pretty dull.”

  “Let’s look at them anyway—the ones from about fifteen minutes ago, when the picture faded during the test. Can you transmit it to the desk computer so it can use the wall screen? I don’t need eyestrain on top of everything else.”

  The wall screen flickered, and the image of Leroy’s office appeared.

  “Great,” said Cal. “Now can you blow up the section that shows his screen? And rotate it so it’s level?”

  His arm had been lying on the armrest during those minutes, so the angles were distorted, but the picture was clear.

  “Let’s try some image enhancement,” Vincent said, and the bottom of the picture shrank slowly until the relative dimensions made it seem as though Vincent had been directly in front of Leroy’s screen. Cal’s screen looked like the original, except for a little graininess.

  “Vincent, you’re terrific.” The echoed video was just starting to fade, or was about to recover. “Go forward a frame.”

  The echoed picture had recovered. “How about back two frames?” Cal asked. Again clear. “You’re saving a frame a second for this interval, right?”

  “Yeah. It’s so cluttered in here I hardly have space to sit down.”

  “If you don’t shape up, I’ll start storing all my old school records in there too.”

  “They’re already down in the basement. You did even better in college than you did in high school.”

  “Okay, okay. Can you expand the upper left quadrant? It’s a little fuzzy.”

  “Picky,” said Vincent, and the magnification doubled.

  “Fine,” said Cal. “It says, ‘Active transmitter = A.’ Now forward three frames. Okay. Now it’s B. So Leroy was telling the truth. Was he bothered by something else?”