by Anthology
Tarrington had a thumb needle out of his belt and charged across the room to stick it in her neck.
Paitin managed a shout. “Snap! Snap your fingers NOW!”
Paitin didn’t hear her do it. A small explosion formed itself out of the air in front of Tarrington’s chest and hit him like a speeding car. Paitin saw his feet fly out in front of him before he was blown, doubled, through the window.
The curtains fluttered. The familiar ozone smell filled the room, and the broken window let in the wail of a hundred mournful sirens sounding the end of a civilization and the smoke of a thousand fires.
Eventually Paitin got up. He lurched to Sandra and released her from the web snare. She fell to the floor and scuttled away from him like a crab.
Paitin had to waste precious minutes speaking soothingly to her through a locked closet door. His love for her made him patient despite his desperation, and she eventually agreed to open the door wide enough to receive the objects he handed through: the minicorder, a pair of seashells, and a sealed envelope. The silence that followed seemed to stretch to eternity and back. Paitin’s heart became hollow and ready to collapse from the combination of her nearness and her distrust. He heard rumpling paper in the closet.
He’d shone a naked-ray through the envelope after she’d given it to him a month ago at his suggestion. It contained a piece of her very own stationary paper and a message penned by her own perfect little hand. It said:
Dear Sandra,
You are going to be frightened and confused when you read this, but listen to one piece of advice from your closest friend: Trust Him.
Sandra
Of course she couldn’t trust him completely. Not right away. But she would. Over the last three months, she had come to love him at least half of the time.
When she opened the closet door it was like a birth. Sandra emerged on wobbly legs with her damp hair matted to her forehead. He delivered her, holding her beneath the armpits so she wouldn’t fall, then let her collapse against him. Her body was stiff and unyielding, but that would change.
Paitin watched her. Tarrington had called her an animal, but that was ignorant. Modern civics taught that conditionals were inconsequential, but also that they gave their consent to the Invasion with their treatment of each other. They would have believed in the Invasion. Sandra’s misty civilization had already rejected liberalism. The upshot: Paitin’s lover was a human being capable of understanding him.
So who was the pervert?
He smiled and gave Sandra the minicorder again when she asked for it, holding the little screen in the palm of her hand. She watched scenes of the two of them laughing, walking along the beach (here she brought the shells out of her pocket, feeling their weight), dressing after lovemaking. She stared at her own stolen image. The emotions in her face were impossible for Paitin to sort out, but he thought he saw some grounds for hope, some allowance that it was all true, that he loved her and she’d loved him.
While she stared at herself, he stared at her. Sandra. The spectrum of Sandra, the could have, would have, politically incorrect should have, conditional perfect tense Sandra, even the metaphysical might have but did not Sandra. He never bothered to wonder which she was.
At one point she became deeply quiet and seemed to come to a hard decision. She became stiff and heavy as wood against him. Then a giant explosion brought dishes off of shelves and plaster from the walls. Sandra jumped and he seized her protectively in his arms, and she did not push him away.
He told her they had to leave, to get away from the area where Tarrington had called for the extract.
His arm was around her shoulders as they left by the front door. She still wasn’t steady on her feet. But that was normal.
Many of the buildings were burned and gutted in the aftermath of the world’s most spectacular party. To Paitin they seemed flat, truly unreal, as he’d been accustomed to think of them. He still experienced a certain visceral reaction to the red blood of the conditional perfects themselves, which made them a little more real. But Sandra . . . she’d glowed from the first.
He helped her pick her way over a spill of rubble in the street. He stood in front of her when a nude figure darted between two buildings and dove behind a garbage can. As they walked slowly and steadily, others broke cover like timid forest animals. Some of them had escaped captivity or been set loose and wore incongruous bits of costume: jester hats or bits of shackles; they had flaps torn out of the backs of their pants; some bore lash marks. The dead lay in strange contortions, embedded in four inches of cracked asphalt, eyebrows still glazed with the frost of the high clouds through which they’d fallen.
Paitin knelt to scoop his prize over his shoulder as she collapsed with a moan. It was for the best: he could hear the heavy buzzing drone of a splatterbot far down the street. He could even faintly see it. It worked away in the crisp morning, tall as a house with a swiveling torso, picking up victims and smashing them together, flinging them through the air, dashing their innards out against the blackened walls of the buildings. Where they tried to flee it stomped on them or kicked them, and the hovers followed languidly above, their passengers staring down tired and glazed from the night’s revelries. Sandra groaned.
Paitin patted her rump affectionately. “It’s alright,” he said. “Not you. Never you.”
She sagged, but Paitin felt confident she would rebound. She would never have to be a splatterbot victim or a gladiator or a sex show. He would keep her safe. Paitin clicked a button in his tooth, and a few minutes later Drew came swooping down with a hoverload full of clanking liquor bottles and stretched underwear. He came in low so that a naked man chained to the fender by his ankle would bang into the sides of buildings.
Drew stopped. He spoke without looking at Paitin as if he were ashamed. “We’re going to see the catapult, chum. Are you coming or not.”
Paitin pictured all the dumb shocked faces of the naked people in some makeshift corral, waiting to be flung over the hills. He found he didn’t need to see it.
“Just pitch her up here,” said Nick with a grin, “no reason she can’t come.” He began reaching for Sandra’s belt.
Paitin pulled Tarrington’s police-issue Twirp out of his belt and held it over his head. Nick disappeared behind his door.
Drew shook his head. “Just chirp again in an hour, pucker. You can have that again next weekend.”
“Fly away, Drew.”
Drew did. The ankle-chained man smacked against every chimney on the horizon, twisting on the length of chain.
Paitin chose a direction and started to hike across the rubble. Soon he would set Sandra on her feet and tell her to walk with him. At the thought of them walking side by side, hand in hand, Paitin knew he wanted to stay and protect her, forever.
He would stay.
If not this time, then certainly next time.
CONVOLUTION
James P. Hogan
Professor Aylmer Arbuthnot Abercrombie looked up irascibly from the chore of tidying up his notes as the call tone sounded from his desk terminal. He moused the screen’s cursor to the Call Accept icon and clicked on it. “Yes?”
A window opened showing the head of a youth aged twenty or so, with collar-length, studentish hair, a wispy attempt at a beard, and shoulders enveloped in a baggy sweater. “Oh, er, Jeremy Qualio here, Professor.” He was a postgraduate that Abercrombie had assigned a design project to, in one of the labs below in the building. “We were expecting you here at ten-thirty, sir.”
“You were?”
“To review the test of the transcorrelator mixing circuit. You were going to help us set the power parameters for the output stage.”
“I was?”
“We’ve completed the runs with simulated input data and normalized the results. They’re here ready for you to check through now.”
“They are?” Abercrombie’s brow knitted into a frown. He cast around the littered desk for his appointments diary on the off chance that it
might give him a way out, but couldn’t see it. He was cornered. “Very well, I’ll be there shortly,” he replied, and cut off the screen.
Abercrombie left his “public” office at the front of the lab area, which he used for receiving visitors and dealing with routine day-to-day affairs. On the way out, he stopped by the open cubicle and reception desk from where the stern, meticulous, and fearsomely efficient figure of Mrs. Crawford, the departmental secretary and custodian of all that pertained to proper procedures, commanded the approach from the elevators.
“Do you have my appointments diary, by any chance?” Abercrombie inquired. “I appear to have mislaid it.”
“You took it back this morning.”
“Did I?”
“After I found it again, the last time.” The pointed pause, followed by a sniff, invited him to reflect on the enormity of his transgression. “You know, Professor, it really would be more convenient if you’d keep your schedule electronically, as do other members of the staff. Then I could maintain a copy in my system, which wouldn’t get mislaid. And I’d be in a position to give timely reminders of your commitments—which it seems you are in some need of.”
Abercrombie shook his head stubbornly. “I won’t go into that again, Mrs. Crawford. You know my views on computerized records. Nothing’s private. Nothing’s safe. They can get into your system from China. The next thing you know, some fool who doesn’t know a Bessel function from a Bessemer furnace is publishing your life’s work. No, thank you very much. I prefer not to become public property, but to keep my soul and my inner self to myself.”
“But that’s such an outmoded way to think,” Mrs. Crawford persisted. “It’s absurd for somebody with your technical expertise. If I may say so, it smacks of pure obstinacy. With the encryption procedures available today . . .” But Abercrombie had already stopped listening and stalked away to jab the call button by the elevator doors.
“Oh, and by the way,” he threw back over his shoulder while he waited, “has that FedEx package arrived from Chicago yet?”
“Yes. I’ve already told you so, Professor.”
“When?”
“Less than half an hour ago.”
Abercrombie checked himself long enough to send back a perplexed, disbelieving look before stepping into the elevator. Mrs. Crawford shook her head in exasperation and returned her attention to the task at hand.
Jeremy Qualio and Maxine Turnel, his bubbly, bespectacled, blond-haired partner on the project, were waiting in the prototype lab with the bird’s nest of wires, chips, and other components connected to an array of test equipment. The results from their trial runs of the device were displayed on a set of monitors.
Abercrombie jutted his chin and scanned over the bench with a series of short, jerky motions of his head.
The layout was neat for a lab prototype, with careful wiring and solid, clean-looking joints; the data had been graphed onto screens showing time and frequency series analysis, along with histograms of statistical variables, all properly annotated and captioned. A file of hard copy was lying to one side for Abercrombie’s inspection. He looked at the circuit work again and grunted. “You’ve used nonstandard colors for the board interconnections. I expect the approved coding practices to be observed.”
“Yes, Professor,” Qualio agreed, looking a bit crestfallen.
But Abercrombie couldn’t fault their experimental design and procedure as they went through it and discussed details for over an hour. The analysis was comprehensive, with computation of error probabilities and the correct algorithms for interpolation and best-curve fits. Maxine took the absence of further criticism as indicating a rare opportunity to probe the obsessive screen of secrecy that Abercrombie maintained around his work. She and Qualio had been given just this subassembly to develop to a specification in isolation. Abercrombie hadn’t told them its purpose, or the nature of the greater scheme of which it was presumably a part.
“We’re still trying to figure out what it’s for,” she told him, doing her best to sound casual and natural.
“What, exactly is a ‘transcorrelator’ ? The inducer stage seems to create an electroweak interaction with the nuclear substructure that stimulates a range of strong-domain transitions that we’ve never heard of before.”
Qualio came in. “They’re not mentioned in any of the standard references or on the Net. It’s as if we’re dealing with a new area of physics.”
“That’s not for you to speculate about,” Abercrombie said. “All you’ve done is graduate from basic training in the army of science. It doesn’t give you a voice in deciding strategy. Leave the big picture to the generals.” He gave a curt nod in the direction of the bench. “Satisfactory. Have the report written up by the end of the week.”
“Yes, Professor,” Qualio said. Maxine flashed him a look with a shrug that said, Well, we tried .
Abercrombie picked up the folder of hard copy and turned to leave.
“I told you. It has to be something military,” he overheard Maxine whisper as he went out the door.
After stopping for lunch in the cafeteria, Abercrombie took the stairs back up through the warren of partitioned offices and labs that now filled the space amid the massive brick walls and aged wooden floors of the original building. The City Annexe of Gates University’s Physics Department occupied a converted warehouse on the downtown waterfront of what was no longer a major trading port. Hence, it had been acquired at a knock-down price and qualified for the city’s urban-renewal grant scheme, making it a fine investment property for the university trustees. It was also where the department secluded its oddball projects and other undertakings that the governors preferred to keep out of sight, away from its main, prestigious campus. They were retained, as often as not, to humor some high-paying source of research grants or other primary influence on funding.
No premature publicity, Abercrombie reiterated to himself as he emerged on his own floor and weathered Mrs. Crawford’s Gorgonesque stare to return to his lab. When this project came to fruition, it would be the news event of the century. And not just with the public media. Everyone who was anyone worth talking about in the entire physics-related sector of the scientific Establishment would learn of it in a mass-announcement that Abercrombie had been preparing as methodically as the design studies and calculations that had occupied him for eight years. He had all the names listed, covering academic, private, and government science elites throughout the world. This would be his ticket to a Nobel Prize and permanent fame as surely as geometry had immortalized Euclid and the laws of motion were virtually synonymous with Newton. Maybe even more. The things that Nobels had been awarded for seemed mundane in comparison. Perhaps, even, a new grade of award would have to be instituted especially for him.
He came to the inner, windowless workshop area that he had designated as the place where the device would be assembled, and stopped for a moment to picture it completed. It wouldn’t be especially heavy or bulky—little more than a metal lattice boundary surface to define and contain the varichron field, with a control panel supported on a columnar plinth, and the generating system and power unit beneath. If anything, it would resemble an oversize parrot cage with a domed cap, standing on a squat cylindrical base. Howard Jaffey, the dean, and the few others from the faculty who were in the know as to the aim of Abercrombie’s project, were polite in avoiding mention of it; but with a billionaire like Eli Zaltzer writing the backing, and the amounts that he lavished on the university as a whole, nobody had been inclined to turn the proposal down, even if they secretly thought Zaltzer was an eccentric. Well, let them think what they liked, Abercrombie told himself. The parts were coming together now, and the initial tests were under way. It wouldn’t be much longer before the full system was assembled—three months, maybe, in his estimation. They’d be singing a different tune then, when the whole world came flocking to his door. Never mind for a better mousetrap. Abercrombie was going to give them a working time machine!
He stood, savoring the moment in his imagination for a few seconds longer, and then proceeded through a door and along a corridor to his inner, private office at the rear of the lab area. This was where he conducted his more secretive business. Inside, he locked the door, cast a wary eye around instinctively, even though it was obvious there could be no one else there—and at once spotted the missing appointments diary on a corner of the desk. Tut-tutting to himself, he went over to the wall cabinet and released the catch that allowed it to slide aside, revealing his hidden safe. Armor plate, sunk into the brickwork of the original walls. No electronic security for him, whatever the administrators tried to say about how solid it was these days. How could anyone believe it, when half the people in the world seemed to spend their lives trying to make computers do what they were supposed to do instead of contributing to anything useful?
He dialed in the combination sequence and swung the door open to disclose his trove of files, papers, and notes from the time when he first met Eli Zaltzer and the dream began the course that would one day make it reality. He took out the file box reserved for test results, added the hard copy that he had brought from downstairs, and was just replacing the box, when he heard footsteps in the corridor outside. They sounded furtive, as if someone were creeping past warily. Normally, Abercrombie always locked the door when he opened his safe, but on this occasion, after the momentary distraction of seeing the appointments diary on the desk when he walked in, he was unable to recall whether or not he had.
“Who’s there?” he called out, fearful of being found with the cabinet open. There was no reply. The footsteps hastened away.
Hurrying to the door, Abercrombie found that he had locked it after all and had to fumble for his keys before he could get out, by which time the corridor was empty. He followed it to the back stairs and the freight elevator but found no sign of anyone there. As he began retracing his steps toward his rear office, a peculiar, low-pitched whine emanated from the other side of the door to the workshop area ahead of him. He increased his pace, heading past his office door. “Who is that in there?” he yelled ahead, but the noise ceased just before he burst in, and he found the place empty. With rising agitation he carried on through to Mrs. Crawford’s post, but she had seen no one go that way. Then Abercrombie realized that he had committed the cardinal sin of leaving his private office door unlocked with the safe open.
