by Timothy Zahn
“Of course,” Westmont said, almost soothingly. His hand slipped beneath his suit coat, withdrawing a slender wallet. Selecting a card, he flicked it onto the desk. “Think about it, Dr. Sommer, Dr. Sands. And consider the fact that you’re down to your last shoestring on this. Without our money, Soulminder is finished.” He nodded toward the card as he put the wallet away and gathered his topcoat from the back of a nearby chair. “Call me when you’ve made your decision.”
The door closed behind him, and Sands spat a curse. “Damn him,” she snarled. “Damn him, damn Barnswell—double damn the idiot who let this leak.”
“Try to ignore him,” Sommer said. The confrontation-induced adrenaline was draining away, leaving behind a growing depression. Pulling over the chair Westmont had been sitting in, he sank into it, wincing at the residual warmth.
“Ignore him how?” Sands retorted. “In case you missed it, Adrian, Congressman Bigot-Lunatic Barnswell and his brain-dead fringe know about us. How long do you suppose it’ll be before they break the wonderful news that there are distinct and measurable differences between the souls of different races and genders?”
“The differences are between individuals, not races or whatever.”
“I know that,” she snapped. “You think such subtleties aren’t going to be lost once people like Barnswell get their grubby hands on it?”
“So what do you suggest we do?”
Some of the steel went out of Sands’s back. “I don’t know,” she admitted. “We could release it ourselves, but Barnswell and everyone else with an axe to grind would jump on it and the final result would be the same. Not to mention that the publicity would probably scare off any potential renewals by our underwriters.”
Something in her voice … “You aren’t seriously considering Westmont’s offer, are you?” Sommer asked, frowning.
She took a deep breath, her eyes meeting his with visible effort. “He was right, Adrian,” she said softly. “Soulminder is on its last shoestring here. Besides, we’d have three days to run the data through some more analysis—maybe decorrelate it beyond even Barnswell’s ability to distort it.”
Sommer stared at her. “Jessica, maybe to you this is just another job—”
“You know better than that,” she snapped. “Soulminder is just as important to me as it is to you. But all the sentiment in the world isn’t going to change the facts. A, that we’re broke, and B, that Barnswell has money.”
Sommer locked eyes with her. “I am not,” he said, biting out each word, “going to let people like Barnswell get their filthy hands on Soulminder. Period; end of discussion.”
For a long moment they glared at each other in silence. Sands blinked first. “I don’t much like it, either,” she sighed. “Look. That stuff about moving to LA last night wasn’t all froth. I’ve got some feelers out to the police department there, trying to get them interested in the possible forensic applications of our Mullner-trace work. Why don’t I fly out there and see if I can squeeze some money out of them? It would at least postpone any decision on Barnswell’s offer.”
“The decision’s already been made,” Sommer told her stubbornly.
Her standard patient expression began to look a little strained. “Sure,” she said. “All the more reason for me to shoot over to LA.”
Sommer got back to his feet. “Yeah, go ahead,” he told her tiredly. “Has last night’s data been chewed over yet?”
“I got it running before Westmont arrived,” she told him, reaching for her terminal. “It’ll be done soon if it isn’t already.”
“Thanks,” he nodded.
She was studying one of the consolidated airline websites as he stepped through the back door of the office into the lab.
Keying off the last page of the correlation analysis, Sommer leaned back in his chair, reaching wearily for his coffee cup. Sands’s gut-feeling statement the night before had been correct: the basic kernel of the old man’s soul-image was indeed the same as all the other hundred-odd Mullner traces they’d collected over the last three years. Just the same, without any new correlations the analysis could detect.
In other words, the deathwatch had been a total waste of time and effort.
As had been the one before, and the one before that, and the one before that. The last five samplings combined, in fact, had yielded only a single new correlation factor; even with a hundred samples to do comparisons of, they still didn’t have the slightest clue as to how the incredible tangle of embellishments could be interpreted, read, or otherwise made use of.
Soulminder wasn’t just running out of money. It was also running out of steam.
“Nothing, huh?” Sands said from over at her own terminal.
Sommer shook his head. “Not a drop. I think we’ve finally hit the wall, Jessica.”
She grunted deep in her throat. “Well, no one ever said this was going to be easy. Have you tried doing a similarity analysis on the embellishments yet?”
“The program’s still running, but I’m not expecting anything. If the computer can’t even distinguish Alzheimer’s patients from normal people, it’s sure not going to be able to find anything more subtle.”
Sands swiveled her chair around to frown at him. “Last night must have hit you pretty hard. You usually bounce back from blind alleys better than this.”
“Maybe I’ve bounced off one blind alley too many. Maybe the whole concept of Soulminder is just one massive blind alley.”
“No,” Sands said firmly. “It’s going to work—we’re going to make it work. We just haven’t got the right handle on it yet. And we’re not going to find it sitting around feeling sorry for ourselves.”
Sommer took a deep breath, exhaled it between tightly clenched teeth. She was right, as usual. “All right,” he growled. “Let’s run it by again. We’ve proven the existence of the soul—or at least that there’s something that leaves the body at death,” he corrected himself before she could do it for him. “We can make a trace/map of this thing, show it consists of a common kernel plus embellishments, the complexity of the latter correlating slightly with age. We can even trap the soul for—how long did you have hold of it last night?”
“Two point three seconds. Up two-tenths of a second from the last time.”
He nodded. “And that gain represents three generations of trap upgrades, to the tune of eight hundred thousand dollars, and setting the trap directly beneath the patient’s bed.” He waved his hands helplessly. “So where do we go from here?”
Sands’s lips compressed briefly. “We stall for time,” she said. “We find something else of commercial or scientific value in the Mullner traces and peddle it to interested customers in exchange for fresh money.”
He eyed her suspiciously. “Like Congressman Barnswell, for instance?”
“I didn’t say that,” she said. But there was a distinctly defensive set to her mouth. “I don’t especially want his hands on our data either, you know. Do bear in mind, though, that there’s absolutely no evidence in our Mullner traces to support his small-minded opinions. All he’d do would be to make a fool of himself if he tried it.”
“A fool, or a martyr,” Sommer said sourly. “He may be smart enough to play the one into the other. And don’t forget that there are a lot of people out there whose brains shut down when they’re faced by loud people waving scientific data.”
Sands’s eyes slipped from Sommer’s gaze and came to rest on the trace printer—a highly sophisticated piece of equipment that they still owed nearly ten thousand on. “All right, Adrian,” she said. “There’s no point in discussing it anyway until I get back from LA. Which reminds me”—she glanced at her watch—“I really ought to get home and pack.”
“Will you need a ride to the airport?” Sommer asked as she keyed off her terminal and got to her feet.
“No, thanks—I’ve got an airport shut
tle coming to get me. Oh, here”—she scooped up a folder and handed it to him—“If you get a chance, you might want to file this into the database.”
Sommer accepted the folder and glanced at the first page. The psychological profile and history of the man they’d watched die last night. “Sure,” he sighed, tossing it onto his desk.
“Okay. Be good, and I’ll see you tomorrow evening.”
For several minutes after she left he just sat in the quiet room, staring at the display before him. So close … and yet so very, very far.
Sands didn’t understand. How could she? She was an electrical engineer, unschooled in the formalized ethical training that physicians like him had been run through in school and often needed to call upon. For all her enthusiasm she still saw Soulminder as little more than an intriguing challenge, and perhaps the road to future wealth and fame. A scientific and technological breakthrough, to be treated on a scientific and technological level.
Not as a way of saving lives. Certainly not as a memorial.
For a minute Sommer teetered on the brink of self-pity. But there was work to do … and anyway, he’d traveled that road all too often in the last eleven years. Taking a deep breath, he picked up the folder Sands had left him and opened it up.
It wasn’t as depressing as he’d feared it would be. There was the heavy sense of a wake about it, certainly, leafing through the facts and figures of a man now dead. But on the other hand, the man had been old, and had lived a full and rich life before the effects of aging and Alzheimer’s had sapped his strength and memory. Sommer turned the pages, scanning the records of the man’s childhood and youth, a copy of his marriage certificate, the beginnings of his family—
A hand seemed to close over Sommer’s heart. First-born son, Harold, the line read. Died 8/16/51, five years old.
The page dissolved into a blur as fresh tears rose to Sommer’s eyes. The same age as David had been.
Except that, in this man’s case, life had continued on afterwards. He’d pulled himself back together, kept his wife, had had more sons and daughters. He hadn’t let his son’s death become an obsession …
Angrily, Sommer rubbed the moisture and self-pity from his eyes. “It’s not like that,” he snarled aloud to the empty room. He wasn’t just doing it for David, but for every child who’d ever had to die unnecessarily. For every parent who’d ever had to face such a crushing trauma—
Abruptly, his train of thought froze on its rails. Trauma: an injury or shock to a person’s body or psyche. And, perhaps, to the pattern of embellishments making up his soul-trace?
And if so, would similar events cause similar changes?
He looked up, glancing around the room. Their main Mullner setup was still back at the hospital, but they had a secondary one that Sands was forever tinkering with. The recording itself would be no problem—he could skip the data pack and just run it directly into the computer’s memory. If Sands wanted something of commercial value, this might just do it.
For a moment he hesitated as natural caution reasserted itself. They hadn’t hooked a living person to the Mullner since the very first calibration readings, and Sands had boosted both the power and read-density a hundredfold since then. Besides that, basic safety rules said never to try something new alone.
But it could easily take a day or more to find the proper correlation between his soul-trace and that of the old man. And if Sands came back from LA empty-handed, she might not be willing to wait that long.
The thought of Barnswell’s bigots with their hands on David’s memorial made up his mind for him. Pushing his chair back against the Mullner computer feed, he got to work.
The first time he’d gone under the Mullner, Sommer had been struck by the dreamlike qualities the device seemed to induce. Now, after Sands’s improvements, the effect was even stronger. Sitting alone in the lab, the walls of which seemed to fluctuate between too close and too far, he listened to the hum in his ears and brain.
And dreamed of David.
David’s birth, and the sixteen-hour labor that Sally had had to go through to bring him into the world. David’s first step, ten months later, which had careened him headfirst into the corner of the coffee table. David at his daycare center when he turned two, at first impossibly shy and then turning completely around to become the world’s shortest tyrant.
David on the night of his death.
Sommer had relived that night a hundred thousand times in the past eleven years, and though the emotion surrounding it had subsided from an exquisitely sharp pain to a dull background ache, the wound had never entirely healed. Would never heal.
The accident, and David’s death. The funeral, and his frustrated sublimating into the burning need to find a way to keep such unnecessary deaths from ever happening again. His growing obsession with the Soulminder project—yes, he could admit now that it had been an obsession. Sally’s inability to understand his drive and reliving of the past. Ultimately, her inability to put up with it and him any longer.
David would have been sixteen this year. Sommer tried to envision him as a teenager, but he couldn’t. The small, five-year-old face kept intruding, and eventually he gave up the effort. The face faded, and he drifted off into other, less painful dreams …
It seemed to take him a long time to find his way back to consciousness, and when he finally became aware he discovered that that, at least, hadn’t been an illusion. His desk clock read six-twenty: two hours and four minutes exactly since he’d activated the Mullner. Blinking aching eyes, he worked himself out of his chair and limped over to the computer. Even with the relatively low read-level he’d set the Mullner on it shouldn’t have taken nearly that long.
Sure enough, the time indicator showed the Mullner had finished its trace two hours and two minutes earlier and had been waiting patiently ever since then for new instructions.
Frowning, Sommer keyed for storage and duplication of the trace and then took a moment to stretch stiff muscles. Knocking him out for two hours was a new trick, something the original Mullner model hadn’t been capable of, and for a minute he wondered uneasily if he was in for a long night of equally unexpected side effects. But aside from fatigue and a few muscle twinges he felt all right, and dismissed the worries as being overly paranoid.
Besides, he’d been pretty exhausted lately. Maybe all that had happened was that his body had seen the opportunity for a quick nap and taken it.
His stomach growled, reminding him it was dinnertime. Taking a deep breath, rib cage creaking with the effort, he sat down at the terminal and began to set up the comparison program. There would be plenty of time to run over to the deli down the street after the computer was chugging away.
As he worked he thought about the dreams. And wondered whether the Mullner apparatus induced similar ones in the dying.
“It’s amazing the tricks one’s mind plays when one starts getting old,” Sands said conversationally, her fingers dancing nimbly over the relevant sections of the two Mullner traces, Sommer’s and the old man’s. “Take me, for instance. Thirty-six is hardly approaching senility, and yet, I would have sworn I could take off cross-country for a day without worrying that my partner would do something damn-fool stupid.”
“Guilty as charged,” Sommer said, mentally urging Sands on. “Except that anything that works isn’t stupid, is it?”
“You’re thinking of treason,” she corrected him absently. “‘For if it prosper, none dare call it treason.’ Stupid risks are always stupid risks.” She hissed between her teeth, a sound that was as much thoughtful as it was deprecating.
Sommer could stand it no longer. “Well? What do you think?”
Sands hesitated, then shrugged. “I don’t know, Adrian. I really don’t know.”
“Why not?” he demanded. He jabbed a finger at the spots where her fingers rested. “The exact same curl on both Mullner traces? W
hat else could it be?”
“You’re assuming—again—that it’s the topography of the embellishment tendrils that’s significant,” she reminded him tartly. “We don’t know that that’s true. Besides which, you’ll note that the two curls aren’t in anywhere near the same area. How do you explain that?”
Sommer sighed, feeling the excitement of the discovery beginning to fade and slip from his grasp. “I don’t explain it,” he told her tiredly. “I presume it’s related to the differing circumstances of our sons’ deaths—timing, emotional impact, life afterwards; that sort of thing. Yes, there’s a lot more work that’ll need to be done on it. But it is a start. Isn’t it?”
“Of course it’s a start,” she soothed him. “And anything that helps us understand the lifeforce certainly qualifies as progress.” She waved a hand helplessly. “But whether it’s enough to shake more money out of our underwriters is something else entirely.”
Sommer clenched his hands into fists. “Did the people in LA give you any kind of timeframe for their response?”
“If you mean can we get this written up and sent to them before they make a decision, yes. Whether it’ll affect that decision, I don’t know.” She hesitated. “And at any rate, we need to be thinking about long-term funding, not these last-minute, stop-gap things. I don’t know about you, but I don’t focus well when I’m wondering where my next circuit board is coming from.”
“Barnswell is not getting his hands on Soulminder,” Sommer said flatly.
Her lip twisted, just a bit, before she could smooth it out. But it was there long enough for Sommer to read the impatience. “Look, Adrian, I know how you feel—”
“No, you don’t,” he cut her off brusquely. “We both know what Barnswell would do with the data. He’d tear it apart until he found something he could use as evidence for his petty little prejudices. And in the process he’d destroy Soulminder.”
“Oh, come on,” Sands snorted. “Aren’t you getting just a little melodramatic here?”
