“Not exactly,” said Elliott. “The question is: What gives people the willies and why? As you can see, it's a contentious issue."
“So what do you think, Doctor Geller?” Avram asked. “Bio-physics or evolution?"
“What's the difference?"
“Oh, Doctor Geller!” Richard's dismay, Elliott knew, was only half-feigned. “There is a world of difference.” He checked his watch, then got up from his desk and excused himself. “I have interviews to conduct. Are you coming, Dr. Evolution?"
“Pedant,” muttered Avram and followed him from the room.
Annette chuckled, moving to perch on a stool next to Elliott's workbench. “When you said you were doing aversion studies, I didn't realize you were referring to your colleagues’ aversion to each other."
“They're just passionate about their work. And they're enjoying themselves immensely."
“If you say so. I take it you're the go-between?"
“It works. So, what's the consult?"
“My binge eater. I know you're not doing any food-related studies right now, but I wondered if you knew of any available medication that will damp endorphins."
“Sure. In fact, we're using endorphin blockers in this study."
“Really? In what way?"
In answer, Elliott swung back to his computer and loaded a video clip. It showed a man sitting in a cubicle, wired for heart rate, blood pressure, and brain waves. He wore a set of headphones.
“The subject,” said Avram's voice from the computer speaker, “is a forty-three-year-old American male of Asian descent. He will be given a series of aural stimuli."
What followed still seemed comic to Elliott, despite the fact that he'd seen it too many times to count. It was also uncomfortable, for the sounds the subject heard were also audible to the observers. Footsteps in mud. A finger circling the rim of a glass. Paper rattling. A balloon being rubbed. And the inevitable fingernails on a chalkboard. The expressions on the subject's face were priceless.
Elliott watched his wife watch the test subject as the video played. She reacted to all but the rattle of paper, her mouth and nostrils twitching as she fought her own responses. When the clip was over, Elliott loaded a second one. “Here's the same subject after he's been given a small dose of naloxone to inhibit the expression of endorphins."
The sounds repeated. Annette wriggled uneasily, but the test subject barely reacted. In fact, only nails on a chalkboard—which Avram likened to primate screeches of warning—got any visible reaction.
“Wow,” said Annette, rubbing her goosebumps. “Does that work with positive stimuli as well?"
“Better. They tested this at Stanford years ago, using evocative music. Naloxone suppressed reaction in low doses in three of ten subjects and in higher doses, it suppressed reaction in all subjects. Why the interest?"
Avram came back into the lab just then, humming an old Thomas Dolby tune, and Annette said, “Got a minute for a cup of coffee?"
“Sure, but I'd recommend a cup of tea, instead. Coffee's toxic this morning. I think one of the other teams is working on an aversion study of their own."
They wandered down to the break room. Elliott didn't bother to prompt Annette. Silence meant she was gauging how much she needed to tell him about her patient.
“When I interviewed Victoria this morning,” she said finally, dunking a bag of Tetley's into hot water, “I was struck by the role endorphins seemed to play in her disorder. The cycle goes something like this: She gets emotionally revved up about something—positive or negative, minor or major—it doesn't seem to matter. Then she sees a food item. The thought of eating it excites her further, and while she's eating it, she feels great. But when she's all done, she feels like crap. She's disappointed herself. Again. She feels guilty, which only serves to feed a later binge—no pun intended."
“So, you're hoping an endorphin damper might break the cycle?"
Annette looked at him over the rim of her teacup. “What do you think? Is it feasible?"
“Well, yeah. I assume you're interested in an oral application."
Annette nodded. “Can you give me the minimum effective dosage?
“Sure. I'll check Avram's lab notes."
“Side effects?"
“Headache, fatigue, nausea in a few subjects."
“Worth a try?"
“Maybe. I need to warn you, though,” Elliott said. “This is not a drug you're going to want to use long term. Damping the emotions for any period of time—"
“I know. Believe me, I'm reluctant to medicate at all. But, Elly, this girl is desperate. She's tried everything. How long do the effects last?"
“In our trials, an hour or two, depending on the dosage and the sensitivity of the subject."
“She'd only need to take it at meal time.” Annette set down her teacup and gave him a sly look from under her lashes. “You haven't said ‘I told you so’ or gloated over me asking you to recommend medication for one of my patients."
Elliott shrugged, smiling. “I'm just not that kind of guy. Which, I assume, is why you married me."
“No, I married you because you're smart and sexy.” She wound her arms around his waist and kissed him.
“So, what made you wonder about endorphins?” he asked when their lips parted.
“Frustration. I've hit an impasse with Vic. This morning she said, ‘I wish there was a pill I could take.’ I thought, ‘Okay, what would Elly do? What questions would he ask?’”
He nodded. “You asked about the emotions surrounding the binging."
“Yes. Then I asked, ‘If you could take a pill, what would it do?’ She said, ‘Make me hate croissants.’”
“Naloxone won't give her an aversion to rich food, unless one of her side effects is nausea."
Annette, who hated nausea more than just about anything, shuddered. “Perish the thought. I—” She broke off, her face going blank in that way that told Elliott wheels were turning. “Elly, could I get you to have lunch with me and Vic? I'd like you to help me assess whether she's a candidate for medication."
“When?"
“Today, if I can arrange it."
“O-kay..."
Annette laughed. “Don't look so skeptical. I'm not a talk therapy fanatic, just a slightly biased zealot."
* * * *
They lunched that afternoon with Victoria Spoon. An unfortunate name, Elliott thought, for a woman with an eating disorder. Annette chose the restaurant—a bistro that was apparently one of Ms. Spoon's favorite places to fall off the wagon. Elliott didn't wonder at that—the eatery had a boulangerie whose gleaming glass cabinets contained a horrifying array of high-calorie, high-fat goodies. Enough, Elliott was sure, to make a nutritionist run screaming into the night.
Seated, Victoria dithered over her order, her eyes drawn irresistibly to the forbidden items mere feet away. Still, she ordered a sensible sandwich with a curried dressing obviously intended to enhance the flavor and “mouth feel” of low-cal dishes. As they ate, Annette told her patient about her endorphin theory and explained why she'd called Elliott in to consult.
“Anything,” the young woman said. “I'll do anything. How long would I have to be on medication?"
“We're not sure,” said Elliott. “What Annette is hoping to do is keep you on meds just long enough to break the cycle of binging. The object of the drug is to dampen your enjoyment of eating or anticipating eating so that rich food doesn't excite you quite so much."
As if on cue, Victoria's eyes strayed to the dessert cart, which was even now wending its way through the tables steered by a smiling waitress who clearly had never sampled her own wares.
Elliott glanced at his wife, who nodded. Yep, her expression said, this is a desperate case.
The dessert cart drew near; Victoria's eyes never left it. “I'm really excited,” she said absently. “I hope this treatment will work."
“Me too,” said Annette.
The cart stopped next to their table and the waitre
ss cheerfully described each of five deadly dishes.
“Oooh,” breathed Victoria, leaning over the flans, tortes, cheesecakes, tiramisus, and truffles.
Annette kicked Elliott under the table. He glanced up at her, startled. She laced her fingers together, pantomimed at him, and mouthed, “Crack your knuckles.” When he hesitated, she kicked him again and repeated the pantomime.
Out of the corner of his eye, he could see the waitress lifting a hunk of cheesecake from the cart. He laced his fingers together under the table and flexed, cracking all ten knuckles in a perfect and percussive arpeggio.
Annette jumped.
Across from her, Victoria shuddered visibly and tore her eyes from the cheesecake that hovered above her plate. “Ew!” she said. Then to the waitress, “No, thanks. I'll pass.” The expression on her pretty face as she watched the dessert return to the cart was eloquent with loathing, as if a whipped cream-covered chunk of earwax graced the dainty plate. “I'll be right back,” she told Annette. “I need to get a glass of water."
Elliott stared at his wife, who was grinning from ear to ear. “You didn't bring me here to consult about naloxone. You brought me here to give Victoria the willies."
“You think?"
“You,” he said, “made use of my research."
She shrugged and sipped her latte. “Think of it as a field study. Avram and Rich will be intrigued."
“Avram and Rich will be thrilled. If this works—for Victoria, for other patients with compulsive disorders—we'll be able to suggest a real-world application for our research."
“Yeah. Ain't private practice grand?"
“Young man."
The voice came from Elliott's left shoulder and drew his gaze up to a pair of pale blue eyes that glittered with icy disapproval. They belonged to a well-dressed older woman whose short silver hair was fairly bristling with indignation.
“That was incredibly rude of you—cracking your knuckles like that in a busy restaurant, of all places. You,” she said accusingly, “gave me the heebie-jeebies."
She turned and walked off then, back ramrod straight, looking larger than life and amply menacing.
Copyright 2006 Maya Kaathryn Bohnhoff
[Back to Table of Contents]
* * *
THE TELLER OF TIME
by CARL FREDERICK
Illustrated by Laurie Harden
* * * *
Most scientific experiments “fail"—but there's more than one measure of success.
“Look to!” bell one's handler called out into the silence of the ringing chamber. “Treble's going."
Dr. Kip Wolverton, his hands on the sally of bell eight's rope, glanced at the other ringers. They stood in a ten-foot-diameter circle, hands on the ropes that hung down from the belfry through holes in the chamber's ceiling. With faces alert, expressions eager and expectant, their eyes were fixed on old Caruthers, the tower captain.
“Treble's gone."
The captain gave a nod and the ringers began in sequence to pull their ropes.
Bell one sounded first. At a mere 500 pounds, this bell, the treble, led the rest of the bells in playing a descending scale. Every two seconds, eight bells rippled down the scale, over and over, pouring a torrent of sound out into the English countryside. Each repetition of the scale ended with a strike from the huge tenor, Great Peter. This was Kip's bell, the lowest-pitched of the ring of eight.
The tower trembled under the motion of the bells in the belfry above. Though Kip couldn't see it, he knew his bell: 22 hundredweight, 52-inch diameter with the inscription Vigilate et orate, watch and pray, engraved on its rim.
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But these rounds were just a warm up. The captain gave the signal and the band of ringers began a quarter peal of Stedman Triples, permutations of the ringing order of the first seven bells, with Kip's tenor following each row of changes.
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Like clockwork, they worked their ropes, their faces rapt in concentration. But Kip didn't need to concentrate; his bell, Great Peter, wasn't involved in the permutations so, even through the roaring of the bells, he was able to think and to observe. Vigilate et orate.
He hadn't rung a bell in twenty-five years, and he wouldn't be ringing now if one of the band hadn't been sick. Kip looked up the length of his rope and thought of Malvyn, his boyhood best friend. Twenty-five years ago, Kip had seen a trickle of red snaking down from the rope hole, striping the yellow hemp and changing the light blue sally to glistening crimson. Malvyn had been hiding out in the belfry. The bells were set for ringing and something, an accidental kick perhaps, had set the bell in motion. The ton of iron swung down and....
Kip blinked his eyes, trying to blot out the event, trying to expunge the image of the bell's inscription embossed in reverse on Malvyn's crushed flesh. Even through the harmony of a ring of eight in full voice, he remembered the teller with clapper muffled, tolling fifteen strikes, Malvyn's age, at the funeral. For the first and only time, the teller was not Great Peter but the next heaviest bell in the ring.
Poor Malvyn. They'd been a unit: he, Malvyn, and Neville. The Three Musketeers out to conquer the world. One for all and all for one. Kip smiled, sadly. Malvyn had been almost a year older than he, and Neville half a year older than Malvyn. Young, opinionated innocents, we were. More like the Three Blind Mice.
Cocooned in the blanket of sound, Kip reminisced. Malvyn the moderator. With Malvyn gone, the age difference was too large. Kip and Neville had drifted apart—this despite both going on to get doctorates in theoretical physics at the same university.
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Kip looked across the ringing chamber at Audrey. He couldn't help but admire how she handled her bell: grace, efficiency, elegance, beauty—although no longer ravishing beauty; she'd put on some weight in the last quarter century. He used to think of her as his girl back then. In fact, she'd been the reason he'd taken up tower ringing. But he'd been too shy to ever ask her out. That was when he was fourteen. Kip smiled. As he'd done frequently so long ago, he gazed at “his girl” handling a bell, although now perhaps he watched with less lust.
Kip decided that at the end of the peal, he'd make amends for his decades of shyness—meaningless now as the damage had long been done. When he was off on a postdoc in America, the country of his parents’ birth, he got the letter saying that she'd married Neville. And Kip, possibly from regret, had chosen to remain single for life.
Now, a full professor of physics at Syracuse University in the States, he was back in England on a grant to do an experiment on the very edge of physics: an experiment that needed bells—three towers of bells. It was too bad Neville thought it was nonsense. It would have been great if two of the Three Musketeers could still conquer the world together—at least the world of physics.
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In the thunder of the bells both heard and felt, Kip turned his mind to the experiment. If it worked, it would relate the structure of time to processes in the human mind. What more appropriate place to run it than among a ring of bells sounding in a church tower?
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About forty-five minutes after it had started, the quarter peal ended with a touch of rounds.
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Old Caruthers motioned that the bells be rung down—ever since Malvyn's death, the bells were not set upside-down between ringings. The full-throated striking grew soft as the bells came to their positions favored by gravity, and finally went silent.
Flushed from the exertion, Kip coiled his bell rope and, when his breathing had slowed to normal, walked over to Audrey. He took a couple of quick swallows to clear his ears, trying to silence the phantom bells he'd always heard after a long session of tower ringing. “Can I perhaps interest you in a milkshake?” he said, his voice sounding hollow
and empty in the tower.
As she hung up her rope, Audrey laughed. “No. Not a milkshake. But a cup of tea would be nice."
“How ‘bout at Beowulfie's?"
“Wonderful."
Kip followed Audrey down the narrow, circular staircase from the ringing chamber to the chapel, and then outside for the five-minute walk to the coffeehouse. Although it was warm for early November, yellow and gold leaves swirled on the sidewalk and many inhabitants of the old university town were already enshrouded in scarves displaying their college colors.
“I still hear bells,” said Audrey as they walked along.
“Not phantom bells, I think,” said Kip, looking off into the distance. “Tower West is also rehearsing the experiment today."
Audrey laughed. “Tower West? Still fighting religion, are you?"
Kip answered seriously, even though he knew he was being teased. “Not at all. I have three towers to coordinate. It's much less confusing to call them Tower North, East, and West instead of the Church of the holy whatever, or Saint what's-his-face."
“Dearest Kip,” she said, patting him on the arm. “Don't ever change.” She glanced sideways and examined him like a specimen. “Actually, you haven't changed. Not really."
Kip returned the glance. “Neither have you,” he said, hoping she couldn't tell he was giving a ritual answer in lieu of the truth. She wasn't the bright young thing he'd cherished in his memory.
University towns being what they were, everyone knew everything about everyone else and Kip had heard the talk: Audrey's marriage lacked passion. Neville's first, and apparently only, love was theoretical physics. It showed clearly on Audrey's face.
At Beowulfie's, they found a table near the window and ordered tea.
“You know,” said Kip, his hands enveloping a hot fragrant cup of Lapsang Suchong, “when we were teenagers, I always thought of you as my girl."
Audrey looked down at her cup of Darjeeling. “Things might have been very different had you thought to tell me that at the time.” She looked up, meeting Kip's eyes. “Your girl? You always took me for granted, never asked me out, never even really talked to me."
Analog SFF, July-August 2006 Page 23
