Memory Blank

by John Stith

  “I don’t get it,” he said at last. “Almost everywhere I’ve been, I’ve gotten twitches, or small fragments coming back to me. But here I get nothing. Just a complete blank.”

  “So you did remember Domingo’s apartment?”

  “Enough to convince me I’ve been there before.”

  “And you didn’t learn anything there either?”

  “On the contrary,” said Cal, and told Vincent about the message and the hologram. “And save that message.”

  Cal walked back to the center of the room. “What’s in these boxes?”

  “According to the part numbers on the labels, hardware. Nuts, bolts, washers.”

  “No drugs?”

  “Not if the labels are right.”

  “I have to assume they are. Surely the police would have searched the place carefully.” Cal sat down on the clean floor. “You know, I really don’t think I was ever here. Vincent, what does that message mean to you? I know Galentine’s is a bar, but what about ‘one twenty-four nineteen’ and ‘S and G’?”

  “Numbers could be almost anything. Dates, times, account numbers, passwords, codes, coordinates, angles, hat sizes. I could keep going for months, and it’s already crowded enough in here. For ‘S and G,’ I could list all the businesses with names like Sand and Gravel, or all the couples with names like Susan and George.”

  “It may be pointless, but when we get back to a computer with a printer, I want you to make as complete a list of possibilities as you can in, say, an hour.”

  “Do I get overtime for this?”

  “Guess.”

  “Chronologically, I’m a minor. Do you have any idea how many child-labor laws are still on the books?”

  “Don’t tell me. I think I need a drink.”

  It was after dinnertime when Cal saw Galentine’s bar ahead.

  “Vincent, can you display a picture of Domingo?”

  “To hear is to obey.”

  Inside, the crowd tried to compete with the raucous noise radiated by a four-person group. It wasn’t much of a contest; the group was equipped with high-power amplifiers and speakers. The long room held the bar and the band at opposite ends, as if management were employing the group to drive patrons back to the bar for more drinks. In the middle lay a haphazard assortment of tables and chairs, most occupied by people trying to shout over the music or apparently too drunk to care.

  Cal picked a stool at the counter and punched the call button to order a drink he didn’t want. When the bartender paused to deliver it, Cal shouted, “You ever see this guy in here?”

  The bartender, a short, stocky man who gave the impression that he was also a bouncer, looked briefly at the image on Vincent and said, “Nope.”

  The man started to move away, but Cal called, “Wait. Have I been in here before?”

  “Yep.” This time the bartender gave Cal a piercing look before he busied himself again.

  Cal got the feeling he wouldn’t learn much more from a man who gave binary answers, so he found a two-person table as far away from the light and noise as possible. He rested his chin on his hand.

  “I don’t know about you,” he said, “but this is not music to my ears.”

  “I can’t understand a word they’re saying,” said Vincent, just audible over the din.

  “You’re not meant to. If they knew how to write lyrics, they’d be proud of them and want you to hear them.”

  Cal said nothing more for several minutes, sipping his drink and watching people come in and out.

  “Why are we here?” Vincent asked at last.

  “That’s a pretty cosmic question to answer on only one drink.”

  “And you call me a smart ass.”

  “We’re here because I want to find out more about Domingo. If I knew what he really did, or what our relationship actually was, maybe I could find out what I’ve been doing, and why. But this seems like a waste. I’m—”

  “You’re what?” Vincent asked when Cal didn’t finish.

  “I’m surprised to see Russ Tolbor in here.”

  The commander had entered and was pushing through the crowd. He gave no sign of seeing Cal. Without speaking to anyone, he went directly to a door at the back of the room. Now that Cal looked more closely, he realized there must be a quieter section in back.

  “Why are you surprised?”

  “No particular reason. He’s entitled to a drink just as much as anyone else. But I don’t like coincidences. Or, more accurately, I don’t always believe coincidences are actually coincidences.”

  “Run that by me again?”

  “I don’t think it’s random chance that I just saw Tolbor. Galentine’s bar was in the message at Domingo’s. Tolbor visits Galentine’s. There’s a link there—not coincidence,” Cal said. “I want to see who he’s with. Are you ready with your camera?”

  “Ready and willing.”

  Cal strolled leisurely, looking for the men’s room. The door Tolbor had used did indeed lead to a second, secluded lounge with a few doors along its back wall. Besides the doors to the rest rooms, there were another three doors, all apparently connecting to private booths.

  Back at his table, Cal reviewed the images Vincent had captured. He looked at the groups at each table, magnifying the faces when necessary, but he didn’t see Tolbor.

  “He must be in one of the booths,” Cal said. “When he comes back out, let’s take some more pictures.”

  As Cal watched, trying to block out the music, he thought about Nikki and Lynn. The longer he waited, the more he wanted simply to go back to the house and talk to Nikki. If she were there.

  Either the noise must have gradually numbed him, or his thoughts provided ample isolation. He realized that someone was talking to him.

  “I said, are you waiting for someone?” The speaker was a fair-haired woman in a turquoise party dress cut so low that Cal didn’t need to stand to enjoy the view. She had her hand on the back of the other chair at Cal’s table and leaned toward him, looking at him expectantly.

  “I’m awfully sorry, but yes, I am,” Cal said, retreating to the literal truth.

  The woman grinned briefly before turning her palms up and shrugging her shoulders. She moved away with what Cal thought was a trace of disappointment.

  He was still wondering what to say to Nikki, when Tolbor finally came out. There were two other men who seemed to be with him. They were both older than Tolbor, perhaps mid-fifties. Clean shaven, both were lean men. The one in front never took his eyes off the door ahead of him as he weaved his way through the crowd. The other tried to continue a conversation with Tolbor as they moved through the bodies, but Cal could tell that the foursome with the power amplifiers were still winning. And then the three were gone.

  “You got pictures, Vincent?”

  “Right.”

  “Save a couple of views of each and erase the rest.” Cal walked to the back room, where he saw the door to booth number one lay open.

  Cal bought another unneeded drink and asked the bartender, “Tolbor comes in here every night?”

  “Yep.”

  Cal left the drink on the bar, thinking about the myth of talkative bartenders, and walked out into the evening air. He hadn’t realized how stuffy it was in the bar.

  Tolbor and his companions were not in sight. That was just as well. Cal had felt a faint urge to follow them, but he didn’t know what he would have done.

  He started toward home, wondering if Nikki were there.

  The house was dark. Disappointment came to him far stronger than he realized it would. And loneliness. He tried to think of something else. Maybe at least he could find a meal in the kitchen. He was starved.

  As he passed the bedroom doorway on his way, he saw a dark form on the bed, on top of the covers.

  He came closer. Nikki. For no reason he could explain, he suddenly worried that she might not be alive. Cal paused just inside the bedroom door, inexplicably nervous. She couldn’t be dead. It wasn’t possible. He brok
e away from his thoughts and moved quickly to the bedside.

  Unthinking, he grasped her wrist, feeling for a pulse. “Nikki,” he said, his voice ragged.

  Her arm moved. “What are you doing?” she asked, apparently waking from a light sleep.

  Cal pulled his hand away abruptly, as though her skin were white hot. “I was—this will sound really stupid, but I was afraid for a moment that you might be dead.”

  Nikki sat up slowly on the bed and switched on a reading light. “Maybe not stupid,” she said. “Maybe bizarre. Do you still think you did the right thing by leaving the clinic?”

  “I had no choice.” Cal sat on the bed beside her and put his chin on his hands.

  “Don’t you think you’re exaggerating?” Nikki pulled her knees up and wrapped her arms around them. Her eyes were hard to see in the dim room.

  Cal looked at her for a long moment, reviewing the day’s events, sifting through his feelings and trying to resolve them with the information he had learned since he woke up on the hillside. He had to trust someone.

  Making a decision, he said at last, “Nikki, I realize I’ve hurt you quite a lot. I don’t have any defense, any excuse. But I need you now. Things I don’t understand are happening, and there’s more to it than my overactive imagination. I’m asking you to call a truce for a few days. I’m not trying to say you can’t move out. Obviously that’s your right. But would you talk to me and help me?”

  Nikki was silent for a moment, her face unreadable. “I don’t know. I don’t understand.”

  “Something bad has happened, or is going to happen. I don’t know which. Ever since my memory was blotted out, I’ve felt a sense of urgency, a compulsion to do something. But I don’t know what. Today I started acting like a spy and broke into an apartment. And I still don’t feel all that much closer to knowing what the problem really is. This morning I almost got killed, and—”

  “Wait,” she said, sitting up straighter. “You said ‘killed.’ That’s a pretty specific word, with distinct implications. Are you using the word loosely, or do you mean that?”

  “I mean precisely that.” Cal rose and paced lightly to fight off the nervous tension. “Dr. Bartum told me about a substance called Lendomen. It’s capable of inducing a seizure. And its odor is like something I smelled just before the symptoms began. Bartum didn’t strike me as a guy who’d suggest something like that unless he felt pretty confident. What do you think?”

  “I think Bartum’s competent, but so unimaginative that he probably did his thesis on why yawns are catching. He wouldn’t mention anything he had doubts about. Whose apartment did you break into?”

  “Domingo’s. Except I didn’t literally break in. The door was coded to accept my thumbprint. As was his computer.” Cal told her about the rest of his day.

  “But you don’t think you actually killed Domingo?” she asked.

  “I can’t be totally sure about anything,” Cal said, totally sure that he didn’t want to lose Nikki. “But I don’t see how I could have. If I said to Vincent, ‘How could I have done this to you?’ it has to have a context that explains it. I’m not a killer.”

  “I know that.” Nikki’s voice softened. “Whatever has happened, I believe that. You still have the holo?”

  He took it out of his pocket and handed it to her. “We should have a viewer somewhere, shouldn’t we?”

  Nikki rose and retrieved one from a shelf. “Will you turn the light on?”

  Cal did so and sat back on the bed while she removed the original hologram and inserted the one from Domingo’s apartment. She snapped it on, and they could see the church.

  “It’s the Presodist church in Machu Picchu,” she said, and handed it to Cal.

  Now that he had more time to look, he realized there were people in front of the church, on their way out. “Do we have a magnifying glass?” he asked.

  Nikki retrieved one from the desk.

  With its help, Cal could see slightly blurred faces. He wished he’d taken the entire hologram, but he found that by turning the hologram as he watched, letting his mind form the composite, he could more easily distinguish the people.

  “One of the two guys with Tolbor tonight is here,” he said after a brief inspection. “And there’s—there’s Tolbor and the other one.”

  “But you have no idea what the link is between Tolbor, Domingo, and the church?” Nikki asked.

  “True—other than that Tolbor is a Presodist.”

  Nikki shook her head. “I don’t see how you can hope to piece all this together in a few days, assuming it does all fit. You’re sure you’re not just trying to keep me off balance long enough that I’ll forget about a divorce? That’s not the way I am.”

  “I know that,” he said truthfully. “If I thought for a moment that I had any chance at all of persuading you to stay, I’d probably do anything I thought I could get away with, maybe even lie to you. But this isn’t fabricated. It’s possible that I’m misinterpreting some of the things that have happened to me, but they’re all real. And I’m convinced that something is very wrong here. Help me, Nikki.”

  She looked at her hands, making a minute inspection. “Cal, I can’t,” she finally said softly. “I think the stress has been too much for you lately. You need a different kind of help.”

  Cal said nothing for a moment, feeling like the world was washing away from him and the only thing he could grasp was silt. “Nikki, if that’s what you think, then I understand. But do one thing for me now. Look in my eyes when you say it.”

  Nikki looked up. She seemed about to cry.

  Cal gave her a level gaze and said, “But I really need your help, not a doctor’s.”

  “All right,” she said at last. “For a few days. Then I’m leaving.”

  Cal realized he had been holding his breath, and he breathed out heavily. “You’ve got to do whatever you feel you have to.”

  “Where’s the message you found at Domingo’s?” Her decision made, Nikki didn’t hesitate any longer.

  Cal wrote it on a piece of paper. “I know what ‘Galentine’s’ means. But the ‘one nineteen twenty-four’ and ‘S and G’ are still a puzzle. I’ll have Vincent print a list of possibilities.”

  “I wonder. Maybe they tie into the church.”

  “How so?”

  “Just a few minutes. Let me try some alternatives.” Nikki walked to the desk computer and started typing.

  Cal watched the back of her head as she worked. He was grateful for her help, realizing that Nikki didn’t do anything in a mediocre manner; if she agreed to help, she would do her absolute best. The sense of loneliness grew larger within him. How could he have been so stupid or preoccupied as to force her from him?

  “Come here a minute,” she called. “I think this is it.”

  Cal stood behind her and looked at the screen. The top row said, “Genesis 19:24.”

  “The church was the link. Presodists use the Bible. If you assume a biblical reference, this is where it takes you. There were three numbers instead of the usual two, so I assumed the first one meant the book: Genesis.”

  A cold feeling passed through Cal as he read the balance of the text: “At the same time, the Lord rained down sulfurous fire upon Sodom and Gomorrah.”

  “That’s it,” he agreed. “It has to be.” His knees felt weak, so he pulled up a chair. “What’s the context?”

  “Genesis nineteen talks about the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. It says they were places of lust and evil, and God destroyed them just after an innocent man left. Cal, you don’t suppose—no, that couldn’t be.”

  “Suppose what?”

  “No, it’s too incredible.”

  “Come on, Nikki. We’ve got to share all our thoughts. We’ll throw out the unlikely ones later.”

  Nikki’s voice was husky. “Well, it’s a pretty large jump just from reading this passage, but it made me wonder if what happened to Earth was really an accident.”

  CHAPTER 9

&nb
sp; Housecall

  Horrified by Nikki’s suggestion, Cal reviewed what he knew so far. “I wonder, too,” he said grimly.

  “But if the disaster on Earth wasn’t an accident, that would mean someone is unbelievably mad,” Nikki said, looking back at him from her seat at the desk terminal. She was obviously worried, but there was no hint that she was regretting her decision to help.

  “History’s littered with instances of millions of people being killed in short lengths of time. It might only be a matter of degree. Is there any more to the chapter on Sodom and Gomorrah?”

  “Not much. Abraham implored God to search for innocent men. He supposedly couldn’t find enough innocents to justify saving the cities—only one man: Lot. On the way out, Lot’s wife looked back, disobeying God, and was turned into a pillar of salt. Zoar, the last city of the plain, was spared.”

  “That’s all?” Cal asked.

  “There’s a good deal of repetition in the Bible. In the previous chapter, while Abraham’s arguing with God about how many innocent people it takes to justify saving the cities, he goes through almost the whole argument with the number fifty, then forty-five, forty, thirty, twenty, and ten.”

  “So, if this possible nightmare is true, Daedalus may correspond to Zoar, as the city that was spared,” said Cal. “But it just seems too monstrous.”

  “Maybe so. But the parallels are scary. For instance, the passage says ‘rained down sulfurous fire.’ The bacteria caused a strong burning in the lungs before death.” Nikki moved to a more comfortable chair. Her face was pale.

  “Okay. We can’t tell yet if this is our imagination, but, if it isn’t, why have I felt this strong urge to hurry? As though I have to do something before Vittoria leaves?”

  “You tell me,” she said.

  “Well, if we assume Tolbor is the person responsible—he figures in this, he’s a churchgoer, I’m sure of it—then maybe I was afraid he would get away.”

  “That explanation has a problem. All we’d need to do is call Vittoria and tell them what happened. He would still get caught.”

  “There’s still a chance that, without sufficient proof, we couldn’t justify sending the message. I don’t know. There are still too many ifs.”