by Anthology
“I’m still waiting,” Buonacelli barks.
“Watch the ice cubes, Senator,” Jennifer tells him.
“Dear God.” It is one of the accountants who first grasps what is happening. “The bastards are getting bigger!”
“Just so,” Donaldson says, loosening his fists. “The basic conservation law: heat can’t pass from a cold object to a hot one. But time inside the mirror is now running backwards, gentlemen, for all practical purposes. Advanced Maxwell radiation, amplified by the lasing action, is converging on the flask. The Second Law of Thermodynamics is repealed.”
Rostow’s body thumps to his pulse. Steam is rising once more from the flask. A pair of unblemished cubes jounce at the surface of the boiling water.
“Fantastic,” Buonacelli groans. “I take it all back. Dr Donaldson, this is the wonder of the age.”
“You have yet to witness the more dramatic part of our demonstration.” Turning abruptly, the professor stumbles into Rostow. “Wouldn’t it be better if you were at your console, Eddie? Please power the system down immediately and put it on Standby. Where’s that animal?”
Rostow chews at part of his face. “I’ll get him for you.” He slouches in his seat, runs the current down, feels in the box with his left hand for the bunny. Helplessly he glances at Jennifer Barton. She is watching him. Fingers tight around the bunny’s ears, he hoists it from the box and feels acid in his stomach as he identifies the flash of emotion in her face.
Taking the bunny, Donaldson suggests: “Remove the flask and then stand by for my mark.” Rostow seethes, but welcomes the distraction. Behind him the bunny squeals. Nothing wrong with its memory at any rate. There’s a meaty thunk. When he turns back with the remelted cubes, Rostow finds the professor marching toward him with the bunny’s bloody, guillotined corpse in a sterile glass dish. One of the accountants, no great white hunter, is averting squeamish eyes. Buonacelli’s are narrowed in wild surmise.
Resurrection is at once prosaic, electrifying, impossible to comprehend. On the monitor, the bunny’s grainy sopping fur lightens as untold trillions of randomly bustling molecules reverse their paths. As the flow staunches, its poor partitioned head rolls upward from the glass bowl and fits itself seamlessly to its unmarked neck. Prestidigitation. The bunny blinks spasmodically, slow lids snapping upward, wiggles his ass, and disgorges a strip of unchewed lettuce. The lab thunders crazily with applause.
“By the Lord, you’re a genius!” Color has drained from Buonacelli’s seamed features; it surges back, as he beats Donaldson’s shoulders. “Reviving the dead . . .” He pauses and adds slowly, with avaricious appetite: “A man could live forever.”
“I doubt it,” Rostow tell him. “We can put people back together, and heal wounds. But unfortunately it won’t help those who die of natural causes.”
“Rejuvenate them!”
“It’ll rub out your memory.”
“Not your financial holdings, by God.” The senator flexes his fingers, thickened by incipient arthritis. “Plenty of memories I could happily live without. You could brief yourself—leave notes, tapes . . .”
“Sorry. Reversed time passes at the conventional rate. Do you want to spend forty years in solitary confinement? Besides, even the immensely rich couldn’t run this machine nonstop for that long.”
Donaldson is nodding his agreement, until it occurs to him that he’s no longer the center of attention. “I did ask you to stay at your console, Eddie. Miss Barton, thank you, that will be all today.” With smiles all around, he ushers the committeemen away from the mirror into a cozy space of his own contriving. Eddie Rostow watches them troop toward the door. They remain in shock, their several minds no doubt working like maniacs as each tries to figure himself in and the rest out. “Truly astounding,” one says as the door closes.
Rostow covers his face. In the huge empty lab he hears Jennifer Barton rise from her seat. He opens his fingers for a peek. She is regarding him across her deactivated terminal; he cannot read her expression with certainty. Once more he covers his eyes and listens to the tap of her shoes, the click of her exit. Wistfully he sniffs the air for a trace of her scent, more natural pheromone than applied cosmetic. On the monitor screen, the bunny is scratching at the walls of the mirror chamber. Poor little beast. Dazed by anger, lust, remorse and sympathy, Rostow strides to the chamber and plucks the bunny to freedom and mortality.
A dizzying aura of bloody light spangled with pinpoints of imploding radiance momentarily blinds him. “Cretin,” he mouths, dropping the rabbit and slamming the hatch. He runs toward the console, clutching his eyes, and barks his shin on the back of his chair.
Nothing explodes. When his vision clears he scans the bank of square lights on the system he had left running at full power without computer supervision. Christ Almighty, we need a failsafe on that. Who’d expect anyone to be so dumb? Shuddering, he runs through the step-down with scrupulous attention to detail, double-checking every item.
As he finishes, he notes the bunny lumping near his numb toes, trying to get back into its box. The stupid bastard is hungry again. He heaves it in.
The afternoon is only half done. This is insane. Did Roentgen finish off his full day’s work after the first exhibition of X-rays? Surely Watson and Crick didn’t quietly mop up the lab after they’d confirmed the DNA helix. I’ll take myself off and tie one on, he decides. I’ll get drunk as a skunk. He’d done just that after the first successful trial of the advanced-wave mirror: alone, bound to secrecy by his nervous department head, he’d sat in a downtown bar and poured bourbon into his belly until the trembling urge to howl with joy dopplered into a morose blur. And paid for it next day. Oh, no, not that again. I’ll march down to Jennifer’s room and lay it all out for her. Invite her to a movie, a plate of Fricassée de Poulet at Chez Marius and a bottle or two of Riesling. We’ll get smashed together, bemoan Donaldson’s bastardy; hell we’ll leave Donaldson out of it; we’ll go to her apartment and screw our tiny pink asses off.
His hand had been all the way up her skirt, and the next day she’d acted as if nothing had ever passed between them. Did goddamned Auberon Mountbatten Singh have his evil Anglo-Indian way with her that night, rotating through ingenious positions? It doesn’t bear thinking about.
For a moment, to his horror, Rostow finds himself regretting his divorce. Worse, he finds his baffled free-floating lust drifting in the direction of the image of his ex-wife. Swiftly, before he damages his brain beyond repair, he puts a stop to that.
With effort he levers up from the dead console and mooches to the foot of the catwalk, leaning on its handrail. I have to stop brooding about Jennifer. I could have killed myself shoving my hand into the powered mirror, through the temporal interface. I do not interest her strangely. Undoubtedly only fantastic self-restraint prevented her from smashing my impertinent jaw with her knee. My God, how can I look her in the eye?
This kind of maundering unreels through Rostow’s head until he is so bored with it that he turns back to check the data for tomorrow’s log of tests. Glancing at the wall clock, he sees that he’s wasted half an hour in useless self-laceration. Maybe, after all, he should simply run out the door, burst into her office, and screw her until the sweat pops from her admiring brow. Oh my God. He drags a heavy battered mathematical cookbook from the bench where the bunny rabbit was murdered and resigns himself to the honorable discharge of his employment. A dizzying aura of bloody light spangled with pinpoints of imploding radiance momentarily blinds him. “Cretin,” he mouths, dropping the rabbit and slamming the hatch. He runs toward the console, clutching his eyes, and barks his shins on the back of his chair.
Nothing explodes. A startled, unconvinced element in his mind asks itself: Hasn’t this all happened before?
He notes the bunny lumping near his numb toes trying to get back into its box. The stupid bastard is—Oh Jesus. A small disjointed part of him watches the wind-up golem, as detached as the bunny’s head after its sacrifice. This isn’t d�
�jà vu. It’s too sustained. I’ll take myself off and tie one on, he decides. I’ll get drunk as a skunk. Oh my God, I’m tracking through the same temporal sequence twice. But that’s truly insane, delusional. Time isn’t repeating itself. I’m using the advanced-wave mirror system as a metaphor, at some profoundly cracked-up level of my unconscious. Didn’t my dear sweet brilliant wife complain that I’m a cyclothymic personality, a marginal manic-depressive, obsessively driven to repeat my laments? I’ve careened into a rut. A conditioned habit of thought. Jennifer Barton is driving me nuts. I can’t even see her in the same room without brooding on the same stupefying regrets and fantasies. I’ll march down to Jennifer’s room and lay it all out for her. Invite her to a movie, a plate of Fricassée de—
All his sensations are scrambled. The terror in his head clangs against the lugubrious mood of his hormones. I looked at the clock, he tells himself desperately, clutching for a falsifiable test. Sound scientific method. What did it say? 4:37. Last time round. He grips that single datum, while his mutinous corpse leans on the railing of the catwalk, one foot propped on a rubber tread. Glancing at the wall clock, he sees that he’s wasted half an hour—
Oh God Almighty. 4:37. Exultation bursts in his mind, leaving his flesh to plod like lead. Hold it, that doesn’t mean you haven’t flipped your cranium. Everyone has a built-in clock. Three Major Biorhythms Ordain Your Fate, that sort of thing. He wants to giggle, but his chest and jaw don’t respond to the wish. His frail flesh has resigned itself to the honorable discharge of his employment. A dizzying aura of bloody light spangled with pinpoints of imploding radiance momentarily blinds him.
No! the small anarchic part screams silently. I can’t stand it. It’s happening again. I’m stuck in a loop of time. Wait, I can prove it. I dropped the rabbit. Any moment now I’ll glance down and see it . . .
. . . trying to get back into its box. The stupid bastard is hungry again. He heaves it in—
Rostow tells himself: this is the third time round. Or is it? Were he in control of his programmed muscles, he would shudder. Maybe I’ve been caught in this loop for all eternity, or at any rate long enough for random quantum variations in one part of my brain to set up an isolated observing subprogram. Jesus, how much pseudo-duration would that take? Ludwig Bolzmann’s Stosszahlansatz postulate: ordered particles spontaneously decay into chaos, but given enough interactions they can swirl together again into a new order, or even the old order. Suppose I’m at the bottom of a local fluctuation from unordered equilibrium. What’s the Poincaré recurrence time for a human being and his lab? Say 10 to the 10th power raised to the 30th power. That’s absolutely grotesque. The entire universe would have evaporated into dead cold soot. So I’m re-cycling. I stuck my mitt in the hatch and screwed up the mirror. I’m looping through the same thirty minutes forever, knowing exactly what’s due next and unable to do anything about it. Maybe I’m not crazy—but I will be soon.
I’m a prisoner, Rostow realizes, in my own past.
For a moment, to his horror, he finds himself regretting his divorce. Worse, he finds—
Hold it, the isolated segment thinks. If I’m patched into the lasing system, the additional mass of my body is pushing the mirror into a singularity on an asymptotic curve, tending to the limit at thirty-odd minutes duration. But Hawking has shown that quantum effects re-enter powerfully under such conditions. After all, Rostow debates with himself, they must, or I’d be unaware of what’s happening. The human brain has crucial quantum-scale interactions. Hadn’t Popper and Eccles been arguing that case for years? So maybe I can break free of my prior actions. What’s to stop me deciding to cross the room and pick up the flask from the bench where I put it?
Jenny, you bitch, he thinks, why are you doing this to me? Bitterly, he wanders to the bench and lifts the lukewarm flask of melted ice-cubes to his lips. It tastes terrible. He puts it down with revulsion, then picks it up once more and stares in amazement. I’m not thirsty. Something made me do that—
—the flask slips out of his fingers and shatters. The twin sectors of consciousness fuse.
Eddie Rostow goes stealthily to his console chair and lowers himself with infinite delicacy.
Aloud, he mutters: “I’m not out of it yet. Or am I? Is one change in the cause-and-effect sequence sufficient to take me off the loop?” Mellowing afternoon light slants across his fists from the barred skylight, a sympathetic doubling to the shadow from harsh white fluoros, and his voice echoes wanly. Rostow flushes. If Donaldson comes through that door to hear him mumbling to himself—
But that isn’t on the agenda, is it? If anyone in the entire world has a certified lease on his own immediate future, it’s Edward Theodore Rostow, doctoral candidate and imbecile. The sparkling impossible conjecture has come belatedly on tiptoes to smash him behind the ear. With a glad cry he leaps to his feet. “I can do anything! Anything I wish!”
I’m not trapped. I thought I was a prisoner, but I’m the first man in history to be genuinely liberated. Set free from consequences. Do it. If you don’t like the results, scrub it on the next cycle and try again.
Rostow grabs up paper and calculator, scrawls figures. Start by establishing the exact parameters. See if the loop is decaying or elongating. It’s aggravating, but he rounds out the cycle with his eyes clamped to the clock. The bloody aura flashes a half-minute after the digital clock jumps to 4:37. With iron control he keeps hold of the rabbit and wrenches his head around as vision clears. Three minutes after four. His endocrine fluids are telling him to panic, sluggishly stuck in the original sequence. Rostow’s excited mind shouts them down. Denying the inertia of previous events, he takes the wriggling bunny to his console and places it carefully in its cardboard home. A thirty-four minute loop, forsooth.
Considerable effort is required initially. Rostow’s First Theorem, he thinks, grinning. Any action will continue to be repeated indefinitely unless a volitional force is applied to counter that action. Fortunately, the energy necessary to alter intention and will is in the microvolt range. Yes. The brain is a quantum machine for making choices, once you understand that choice is possible.
He halts with his hand on the door latch. Think this through. Stan Donaldson, esteemed head of department and professor, is the last sonofabitch who deserves to know. Will I fall off the loop if I wander away from the mirror? Leaving the loop is suddenly a most undesirable prospect. Yet some obscure prompting dispels these trepidations. Rostow opens the door and enters the long colorless corridor.
Led by bombastic Donaldson, the Board of Directors is taking the stairs to the free hooch. Jennifer Barton’s thick mane swirls as she shakes her head, freeing her arm from the senator’s grip. On the bottom step she pivots and turns right, toward her small office in the Software Center. Not celebrating? Eddie shuts the lab door and pursues her down the corridor.
I can’t tell her about it. She’d be obliged to call for the men in white. Up ahead, she slips into her office without looking in his direction. Arousal stirs in him, fecklessly.
Not truly believing it, he reminds himself: Anything is possible. There are no payoffs. The world’s a stage, tra-la. “I’ll just lay it on the line,” he mutters seriously. A passing student blinks at him. With an inane giggle, Rostow nods. Loudly, in a crisp tone, he tells the student: “I’ll ask her what the hell it is between us.”
“Oh,” says the student, and walks on, swiveling his brows.
High out of his gourd on freedom unchecked by restraint, Rostow zooms toward joy with the woman of his dreams. In a magical slalom on the vinyl tiles, he bursts through Jennifer Barton’s door and thrusts his hands on the desk’s edge. Her lab coat lies on a filing cabinet; she stands at her window, brushing her hair. “Tell me, for Christ’s sake,” Eddie barks before his vocabulary can freeze up, “what the hell it is between us.”
His secret sweetheart narrows her eyes. With deflated, acute perception, Rostow surmises that perhaps he is not her secret sweetheart. “I hate it with the rabb
it,” she tells him, putting the brush in a drawer. “But it was a sensational coup de théâtre. Coming up for a drink?”
“Didn’t you notice? I wasn’t invited.”
“Surely it was understood.” She is being patient with him. Rostow closes the door at his back and sits on the desk. Stress is winding him tight. Has the stoned euphoria gone already?
“Jennifer,” he says.
She waits. Then she rolls the caster-footed chair forward, sits before her impressive stacks of hard copy, and waits some more.
“Look. Jennifer, something went wrong with my upbringing. The only time I’m fluent is when I’m smashed, and then I turn into the maddened wolfman. So I don’t go out very often. For example. Six months ago, after a horrible divorce, I ventured to a party without a keeper. Nobody tied me up or shoved a gag in my face. I failed conspicuously to recognize an old acquaintance, and then hectored him about the polarity of his sexual cravings. In the crudest possible terms. With no provocation, I noisily engaged a stern feminist on the matter of her tits, which I found noteworthy. I ended by shouting in a proprietorial manner from one end of the host’s house to the other, at three in the morning, inviting young bearded people and their companions to drink up and depart swiftly, in what seemed to me a hearty and engaging fashion. When I got home I fell down in my own puke.”
After a further silence, Jennifer lights a cigarette. “How horrible.”
“Doubtless I’m a horrible person in every respect.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
Rostow starts to yell, then lowers his voice in confusion. “I stumble over you sprawled on a fat bean-bag in the middle of a room of colleagues and strangers having your tits massaged by a swarthy blackamoor—”
