by Anthology
After his father was gone, Herel had only his career to live for. Not only had he never married, he’d never had many relationships at all, certainly none that lasted.
As the years had passed, he’d told himself that he simply couldn’t find a suitable mate; that he was too dedicated to engineering for romance; that he wasn’t like other people, but a man of superior intelligence; he was nobly pushing humankind into the future, and his time was too important for ephemeral dalliances. He was obsessive about his work.
Like any good engineer, Herel prided himself on his ability to solve problems.
He began to plan something while he brooded in his cell. It was no different than outlining any other project: First you become committed to it, and then you arrive at a general method of achieving it. After that you begin to put flesh on its bones, adding details and refining the framework. You try whatever you think might work and discard whatever doesn’t contribute to the plan until it’s perfected.
He had to draw his blueprint carefully. There were variables. For example, Conway was strong and he’d have no compunctions about using violence. Ironically, that might give Herel an advantage. Conway wasn’t afraid of Herel, because he had no idea what kind of courage and determination it had taken to be one of the first to go into the future. How could an illiterate criminal imagine the level of competition that Herel had overcome? He wouldn’t expect Herel to do anything.
Or would he? Criminals were wary, and they believed everyone was of like mind: greedy, violent, narrow, controlled by base urges. Herel had to take that into consideration.
He observed Conway’s habits, looking for patterns.
While he watched and waited, he noticed a change in Mae. At first she tried to ignore Conway’s tales of lawbreaking in two solar systems, perhaps thinking the young man would take the hint. But as she became accustomed to his unfamiliar slang, his swagger drew her curiosity. Herel guessed that her own gentle sense of rebelliousness responded to Conway’s outlaw persona. He was a charismatic young man. Not only that, but he often made her laugh, something Herel couldn’t do. There was so little to occupy oneself with at the time station that it was understandable Mae had become attracted to Conway.
That understanding didn’t make it any easier for Herel to bear.
When Conway wasn’t boasting, his attention frequently wandered, sometimes right in the middle of a conversation. The only times he seemed focused were when he talked about his crimes or his sexual conquests. He wasn’t interested in literature or drama, no matter how often Mae tried to persuade him to read, but he loved to tell stories about himself.
He flirted with Mae with increasing boldness. His remarks to her became ever more crude.
“You want to slip-slide with me?” he asked Mae during dinner, flashing his sharpened teeth in a wolfish grin. “I thrust true and true.”
Mae laughed off the advance, but Herel let go of his food packet and hauled himself out of the galley, grinding his teeth in anger. He could hear Mae’s laughter fading behind him as he returned to his cell, where he angrily concentrated on his project. He wished that he could stay away from Conway until the time came to finish it, but he had to watch him as closely as possible. A behavioral pattern was emerging.
Conway could have just bided his time until Herel was gone, but he was too impatient to hide his intentions. He thought he’d soon have Mae to himself and he’d be able to do anything he wanted, and he was prematurely boastful about it.
His impatience would be his undoing.
The opportunity came later than Herel had anticipated. He was beginning to fear that the ship would arrive before he could carry out his plan. But at last Conway said the words he’d been waiting for.
“Wanna go out?” Conway asked while Herel stared through the oval window.
“Out?” Herel said, aware of a catch in his voice.
“Out there.” Conway jerked his head toward the airlock. “I hike after we eat. Wanna come?”
Herel hesitated. He was careful not to appear too eager.
“You blink?” Conway persisted.
“Yes, I blink,” Herel said, his mouth dry. “Have you asked Mae?”
“Sure, but she said uh-uh.”
“I guess I could go with you,” Herel said, “just for something to do.”
The three of them dined together a little while later, Mae reading over her food.
“Mae,” Conway said to her as maintenance tendrils whisked away their empty food packets.
“Yes,” she said, turning the reader off. The paragraphs faded from the air as she gave Conway her attention.
“Herel and me hike after dinner.”
“Oh.” She was indifferent, perhaps looking forward to being rid of them both for a little while. “That’s nice.”
“You’re welcome to come with us,” Herel said.
“No, that’s all right,” she said. “I’m enjoying this novel.”
Herel had been pretty sure she’d say that.
“What is it that’s got you so involved?” he asked.
“Something I’ve always meant to read, but never got around to,” she said. “Crime and Punishment.”
“Story of my life,” Conway said.
“Oh, yeah,” Mae laughed. “You’re a regular Raskolnikov.”
Conway looked puzzled, but for once he said nothing.
The two men walked to the docking node and suited up. Herel knew exactly what he was going to do. He’d worked it all out. He couldn’t trap Conway in the airlock and let out the oxygen. There was a breaker inside, and even Conway could figure out how to work it.
The inner hatch opened and they both went inside the airlock. Once they were sealed off, Conway flipped the switch that worked the outside hatch. It was a big switch, easily manipulated by gloved hands.
The outer hatch opened like the mouth of the leviathan.
“No stars?” Conway said, peering into the darkness.
“Just one.”
“Huh?”
“The white hole we came through.”
“Where?” Conway said.
“It’s out there, but you can’t see it.”
“Not white?”
“That’s just a term to contrast it with a black hole.”
“I blink.”
Conway gripped a handhold as Herel attached a tether to his own suit. He saw the Arrowheads that had carried them through the white hole limned in hard chiaroscuro, three coffin-sized projectiles fastened to the time station’s fuselage.
“Fired me out like a torpedo,” Conway said, looking at the Arrowheads. “Nitty slap ride.”
“Did you know I was the Arrowhead’s designer?” Herel asked.
“Oh, yeah? You lived a long time back, huh?”
“Long ago, yes.” Herel knew that Conway considered him old-fashioned and stodgy. That would make it all the easier. “Here, let me attach the tether to you.”
Once the tether was secured, Conway reached back to test its strength. Satisfied, he floated out through the hatch. Herel followed, but he didn’t let go of the handhold. It was strange to see empty space, no stars or gas clouds, nothing but black emptiness. If it wasn’t for the light cast from the window, the two men might have been nonexistent.
Herel knew there was a remote possibility that the robot would interfere with his plan, but it was a risk he was willing to take. He was betting that it was too far away, stationed at the point where a chunk of warm, living tissue could be detected amid particles flowing from the white hole. Without an Arrowhead, Conway couldn’t survive. There simply wasn’t enough oxygen in his tank to keep him going for more than a few hours, and his suit wouldn’t shield him for long from the hard, relentless radiation.
“Dark, huh, Herel?” Conway said, not as a friend but as a man who had grown accustomed to Herel’s proximity. Herel supposed it was like that in prisons everywhere. A convict didn’t get to choose his cellmate, so he talked to anyone who was there.
“That’s rig
ht.” Herel kept his words to a minimum, trying not to reveal his hatred or his fear.
“You blink what I do?” Conway said as he pushed off with his legs, launching himself away from the station.
“What’s that?”
“I tell Mae stories.”
“Are they true?”
“Not all.”
“You mean you’re not really so bad?”
“Bad enough. I do what I do.”
“I suppose that’s true of everyone.”
“Yeah, you blink my way, Herel,” Conway said.
“Do I?” Herel was beginning to wonder if he could follow through with his plan, now that Conway seemed to be speaking honestly for once.
“Yeah, we both blink,” Conway said, floating farther out on the tether. “Two men and one woman. Both slip-slide her. Airlock her.”
“Really?”
“True and true,” Conway said. “We take turns until you slap out. Like that?”
Herel was so angry that he couldn’t speak for a moment, but then he quietly said: “No, I don’t.”
“Mae gonna slip-slide me anyhow,” Conway said, unaware that he was about to be set loose. “Whenever I want. But you can have Mae before you go.”
“That’s very generous of you, Conway.” His heart pounding, Herel released the tether from its mooring.
“Yeah, I slip-slide with Mae no matter what.”
“She’s never known anyone like you,” Herel said, barely able to control his tone now that he was finally about to complete the project.
“Nobody has,” Conway said, getting smaller and smaller while his cocky voice retained the same volume over Herel’s helmet receiver.
“Haven’t they?”
“I thrust good, true and true. Women love Conway.”
“I see.”
“Slip-slide. Tie her down, switch bitch, rosy cheeks. Burn a little. Fun.”
Herel ground his teeth. He had never been so furious.
“Hey, how long’s this rope?” Conway asked, breaking off from his twisted sexual fantasizing.
“Long enough.”
Conway’s dwindling figure reached back to turn himself around, but the slack tether prevented it. It trailed behind him.
“What goes on?”
“You do,” Herel said. “Blink that?”
“Huh?”
“Good-bye.” Herel’s breathing was ragged. He took one last look at Conway disappearing into the eternal night and pulled himself into the airlock. He shut the hatch and began to pressurize the enclosure.
“Herel . . .”
Herel didn’t reply.
“Herel!” Conway’s panicky, piping voice cried over the hissing oxygen. “Pull me back!”
Herel listened to Conway scream while the airlock filled up.
“Herel! Herel! Herel!”
Conway kept screaming. Sweat stung Herel’s eyes. He could have shut off the receiver, but he didn’t.
Finally the airlock was pressurized. Herel pulled himself inside the time station and sealed off the airlock. He removed his helmet and carried it with him as he sprang the inner hatch. It took him a while to catch his breath, and then he quietly stripped off his suit and stowed it. He went to his room to lie down, pleased that he would never hear Conway’s voice again. He strapped himself into his bunk and snatched a reader he’d left on a line. Everything was quiet.
It was a job well and neatly done. He hadn’t really killed Conway; he’d just let the little bastard drift away.
He turned on the reader and ordered an interactive play, Othello. The Renaissance scenery and characters sprang up around him, but the actors’ words sounded like gibberish. He snapped off the play and ordered a novel, Rabbit Run, but he was unable to get past the first paragraph. He tried poetry, but it was no good. Not even Donne. He let the reader float away. The light dimmed.
He lay in the dark, waiting.
“Conway?” Mae was silhouetted in the doorway as she looked into the cell across the corridor.
“He’s not there,” Herel said, stung that she’d been looking for Conway instead of him. Well, that was all over now.
Mae turned toward him, her head and shoulders inside the stateroom, the rest of her floating in the corridor.
“Where is he?”
“He’s gone,” Herel said, wishing that he hadn’t been lying here when she found him.
“Gone?”
“He said he was getting out of here,” Herel said. “I tried to stop him, but he wouldn’t listen. He just pushed off and disappeared.”
“What?” Her body stiffened.
“Don’t worry,” Herel said. “The robot will pick him up.”
“No, it won’t,” she said, her voice quaking. “He’ll be dead long before it can get to him.”
“Do you think so?”
“I know it.”
“I didn’t realize that.”
“My God,” she said, tears in her eyes.
Herel unstrapped himself from the bunk. He got up and went to Mae, trying to touch her with his pale, freckled hands.
“Why did he want you out there?” she demanded, yanking herself away from him to back into the corridor. “If he was trying to escape, why did he ask you to go?”
“Because he knew you’d think something was wrong if he went alone.”
“I could have prevented it,” she said, sobbing.
“No, I don’t think so,” Herel said, pulling himself closer to her. “He never understood the difference between a white hole and a Kerr hole.”
“Yes, he did,” she said, backing farther away. “I made sure he understood.”
“No, he didn’t get it.”
She looked at him hard. “You’re lying.”
“What? Mae, I—”
“You’re lying,” she repeated, transfixing him in the fierce depths of her brown eyes.
“How can you say that?”
“Tell me it isn’t true, then.”
As much as he wanted to, he couldn’t lie to her anymore. She knew.
“You were jealous and you killed him,” she said, tears balling into drifting pearls that framed her face.
“No, Mae,” he said desperately. “It wasn’t like that.”
“What was it like?”
“He wanted to share you like a slab of meat—he was sadistic—he intended to tie you up, to burn your skin, to beat you,” Herel said, speaking very rapidly. “He wasn’t a decent person.”
“And you are?” She turned and quickly hauled herself down the corridor to her room. The light soles of her feet were the last he saw of her.
Herel felt paralyzed. He was suspended between the floor and the ceiling, the bulkheads closing in on him for what seemed an eternity.
“Herel!” Conway’s voice cried at last, shocking him.
Was he losing his sanity? How could he hear Conway now?
“Herel!”
He pushed himself through the corridor and heard the panicky voice again: “Herel, please!”
He entered the galley and heard Conway there too.
“Herel!”
And then he realized that Mae was broadcasting it all over the station.
“Herel, help me! I don’t want to die!”
“Oh, God,” Herel murmured.
“Herel!” the frightened voice echoed around him.
Mae forced Herel to listen to the doomed man’s voice until it weakened and faded away, leaving behind nothing but static.
It took a long time.
Herel rarely saw Mae after that. She kept to herself, reading and exercising. She came out to eat only when she knew Herel was in his cell. He tried to talk to her the few times he saw her, but it didn’t do any good. She had shut him out.
Herel consoled himself by remembering that the ship would come sooner or later and he would go to a place where Mae’s accusing eyes would never light on him again.
He had hoped to make her love him. She’d been fine stranded here until he showed up and fell
for her. She’d been resigned to spending the rest of her life in the time station, a peaceful enough existence, its monotony occasionally relieved by the arrival of a traveler. Now he had turned it into a place of death.
He’d thought he could save Mae from violence by what he’d done.
How could he have believed such a thing? It was like thinking you could pour water down the throat of a drowning man to save him. He’d thrown away Mae’s friendship, let alone any love she might ever have felt for him. He’d deprived her of companionship in this lonely prison after he was gone.
He reminded himself of what Conway had in mind for her. It didn’t help.
Until he’d come here, Herel had always managed to avoid looking inward, but he couldn’t do that anymore, not here in this claustrophobic place. He thought about his lonely life and the terrible thing he had done. In the distorted strangelet world he subsisted in, he stared into his own soul no matter how much he tried to fight against it. It was as black as the space outside the time station.
He hated himself for his weakness even more than he hated himself for murdering Conway.
He realized for the first time that he’d always secretly been afraid of where his emotions would lead him. He’d been right to be afraid.
He rubbed his stinging eyes and tried not to think about it anymore.
By the time the ship came he was a much older man. Decades had passed, centuries, millennia. Not inside time—which could not be quantified—but inside his tormented skull.
At first it was just a soft hum, something he might have imagined. And then he was sure he heard it, but he thought it was the power surging through conduits behind the bulkheads, something he’d never really listened to even if he’d heard it all along. He imagined electrons leaping from one orbit to another, forever fleeing their nuclei.
It got louder.
Mae emerged from her stateroom and he knew. The sound was a signal.
“Is it the ship?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said, pulling herself past him through the corridor. He followed her.
“How long will it take to dock?” he asked, unable to hide the excitement in his voice. It sounded strained and raspy, almost as if it came from somewhere else.
