Warp

by Lev Grossman

  “That’s a morbid idea, Hollis,” said Peters. “Listen, we’re going to be at the GT for a while—you guys should drop by.”

  The WALK signal was gone again, but the street was empty, and Eleanor stepped off the curb.

  “Maybe we will.” She smiled again. “See you later.”

  “See you,” said Peters.

  “Nice to meet you, Hollis.”

  Hollis and Peters stayed behind on the curb watching them go, then Peters steered them down the side street, away from the Square, to where the streets got narrower and darker.

  “Why did you have to say that thing about Teri Garr?” said Peters. “Here I am introducing you to a beautiful woman—”

  “Oh, for God’s sake,” said Hollis. “She’s an undergraduate—she must be eighteen years old.”

  “So? You’re only twenty-three,” said Peters. “Love is ageless. Besides, you’re probably the most undergraduate person I know. And I know a lot of undergraduates.”

  In the row of darkened storefronts there was one lighted window, a café where people were loading up on coffee and pastries after a night of drinking.

  “How would you feel if somebody said you looked like Scott Bakula, or something? Or Bronson Pinchot? God, no wonder Eileen dumped you.”

  “Teri Garr’s pretty well-preserved,” Hollis said calmly. “Anyway, I broke up with Eileen, not the other way around, if you want to know the truth.”

  “That’s what they all say,” said Peters.

  The side street led them to a wide plaza set with curvy, impressionistic stone benches. A few skinny saplings had been planted there, in square plots. A couple of buskers were still playing—two tough-looking women sitting facing each other on stools, an acoustic guitarist and a drummer. The music was very soft, almost inaudible, and the drummer bent her head down to listen more intently to the guitar. Hollis hugged his overcoat tight around him. He stopped and picked up a schedule out of a plastic milk crate sitting in front of a movie theater.

  “She has a boyfriend, anyway,” Peters said, after a while. “Eleanor does. He’s a real nebbish. Which reminds me—did you hear about Peter Bracey?”

  They stopped to wait at another crossing.

  “He got a job writing for Letterman. One day he’s sitting around in his apartment, making jokes about snot. No job, no furniture, no money, no nothing. Now he’s making a hundred thousand a year.”

  “Jesus Christ,” said Hollis.

  “He was on the Lampoon. Full of fucking connections.”

  The Ghost Town Café was on the corner of a dark alley that was closed off to cars by two metal posts set in the pavement. Hollis and Peters walked down it in step, silently, hands in their pockets. The alley was in the process of being metamorphosed into a pedestrian shopping zone: they’d replaced the asphalt with cobblestones, and a nearby department store had set up a row of display windows. A tangle of wrought-iron fire escapes still hung ominously overhead, and farther along a big blue Dumpster was overflowing in an alcove. The cobblestones were wet, and they gleamed in the light from a single streetlight.

  A group of three was already waiting for them outside the GT. Peters waved as they came up, and Blake gave a cursory wave back.

  “Hey hey, it’s the Manqués,” said Basil, who was tall and thin, with high cheekbones. His short dark hair was cut in a Spartacus style.

  “It’s fucking freezing out here,” said Rob, a redheaded undergraduate with a long Roman nose. His ears were almost perfectly perpendicular to his head. “I’m going in.”

  Blake had already pushed through the door. The interior of the GT was supposed to look like a Mexican cantina: everything was made of rough unfinished wood, and there were paintings of cactuses on the walls and neon Corona and Dos Equis signs hanging in the windows. About half the tables were full, and there was a noisy crowd around the bar. They sat down in a booth. Peters collected everybody’s coats and piled them up in an empty seat.

  “Your coat, sir?” he said, turning to Hollis.

  “Be careful. There’s a check in the inside pocket.”

  “Is there?” said Peters. “Let me guess—Mom’s life insurance paid off.”

  “I liquidated my last stocks today,” Hollis said. “My grandmother gave them to me when I was born. It was kind of depressing, actually—kind of like that scene in Risky Business, when Tom Cruise cashes all those bonds to pay for a call girl.”

  “You slept with a call girl?” said Rob.

  “What’d you make?” said Blake.

  “Not very much. Six or seven hundred. I only had a few shares left.”

  A tired-looking waiter came up to the table, and they ordered a round of drinks.

  “Wait,” Peters said, when the waiter was gone. “Wait. That can’t possibly be true. You hardly even got up today.”

  “So? Okay, I went yesterday.”

  “So why didn’t you just say you went yesterday?”

  “I don’t know,” Hollis said. “It just seemed simpler.”

  “Has it ever occurred to you that you’re a compulsive liar, Hollis?”

  “What’s wrong with lying?” Hollis said. “A lie is a blow to the tyranny of fact.”

  “Oh, that’s brilliant,” said Basil. “A lie is—? What did you just say?”

  Daylight often found him in the blackest of moods. But when night fell and the wine flowed freely, none could match his flashing wit and merry gibes.

  The drinks arrived on a wet plastic tray. When everyone had claimed one they lifted them silently and drank. No one said anything for a minute or two, and Rob stared in the direction of the door, toying absently with his glass.

  “Isn’t that one of those Linstead girls?” he said.

  They all turned to look. A pair of women had just walked in; one was talking to the host and taking off her coat. The other waited for her, standing gracefully on one leg with the other leg cocked up behind her. As they watched she rummaged in her purse, took out a scrunchie, and put her long blond hair through it.

  “It’s Fay,” said Basil. “It’s not like they’re twins, you know. Kay’s a lot shorter.”

  He craned his neck for a few moments, then looked away.

  “Let’s not stare at them, shall we?”

  Fay walked over to the bar, still arranging her hair.

  “Once I was at this party at the Snail Club,” Basil said. “And Kay pulled me into the bathroom with her. She just wanted to mess around a little, I guess, I don’t know. Anna was there that night, and I wanted to get out without anybody seeing us together, but I couldn’t figure out how, so I started to climb out the window, but I was too drunk and I ended up just falling out instead. It was only on the first floor. But guess who was in the driveway? Fay. She was on her hands and knees, throwing up, and I landed on her.”

  He looked over again.

  “Look at her jaw. They both have these Dudley Do-Right chins.”

  “It’s not like anybody forced you to sleep with her or anything,” said Rob.

  “Actually, I didn’t sleep with her, if you really want to know.”

  “Really?” Peters leaned forward. “Is she a virgin?”

  “A virgin?”

  “Oh, God,” said Rob. “Don’t talk about it.”

  Basil shrugged. “She was never not so by my hand,” he said.

  The women sat down at the bar; Fay sat with her back to it, leaning back on her elbows, and a tall, red-faced man came over and kissed them both on the cheek.

  “You never went out with her, did you, Hollis?” said Rob.

  “A gentleman never tells.” He took another sip of his gin and tonic.

  Peters announced that he had to go to the bathroom, and Blake stood up to let him out. More drinks came. As the waiter unloaded them, mariachi music started blaring out of some lo-fi-looking speakers up near the ceiling. Hollis began to feel detached from what was going on around him. He leaned back against his corner of the booth and let his head rest against the wall, while the othe
rs kept talking.

  Sea marks of dark seaweed, limp sea rags, laid out in parallel on a bank of yellow sand. Shreds of foam arise and subside upon a field of green-and-blue swells.

  I am Chingachgook—the Last of the Mohicans.

  “It’s not like a horse is going to be much help in a dungeon,” Blake was saying. “It’s just going to fall in a pit or something. Step on a caltrop. Then you basically have to shoot it.”

  “What’s a caltrop?” Basil asked.

  “It’s a trap. Ah—a little spiky thing.”

  He looked around for something to illustrate with.

  “It has four points, like a pyramid. They make it so however it lands, there’s always a spike pointing straight up. And it’s small: you just drop a whole bunch of them on the ground if someone’s chasing you on horseback, and the horse steps on them.”

  “Jesus Christ.”

  “Or in a car,” said Peters. “It works on tires. They still use them, actually.”

  Blake sipped his martini and made a face.

  “Is it bad?” Basil asked.

  “Too strong.”

  He took another sip and shivered.

  “Yeesh.” He shivered again. “Too much vermouth.”

  “And what are you going to do with it?” Hollis said. “Even outside a dungeon. The horse, I mean. Joust? There’s no point in jousting in D&D. I doubt I ever even owned a lance. All your adventuring gets done in a space that’s relatively tightly circumscribed—”

  Rob snorted derisively. “All your adventuring, maybe—”

  “But it doesn’t have to be a horse anyway,” Blake said. “It can be anything you can ride. Like a hippogriff. Or—”

  He thought hard for a second.

  “Or a pseudo-dragon.”

  “Oh, sure,” said Basil. “A pseudo-dragon. Good thinking.”

  “Gentlemen,” Peters said, raising his glass. “Please. I give you caltrops.”

  They all drank.

  Hollis closed his eyes and opened them again. Time seemed to be accelerating.

  “Fair knight,” said the Maiden, “if you would agree to tarry with me here, and leave aside your questing ways, I should be most grateful.”

  “That shall I not,” said the Knight.

  He made as if to fasten on his helm.

  “Oh please, fair knight,” said she, her bosom heaving. “Leave aside the ways of battle!”

  “That shall I not,” repeated the Knight. “For I do seek the Grail.”

  “First of all,” he heard Blake saying, when he focused again, “there’d be no noise in space. No torpedo noises, no explosion noises. Right? If you don’t have any air you can’t have noises, right? There’s no medium to … whatever. Propagate it with. The noise. No big roaring noise when the Enterprise goes by, or anything like that. None of those signature Star Trek subsonics.”

  His pale skin was flushed pink under his goatee. The waiter brought more drinks. Blake kept talking while he unloaded them with both hands.

  “In fact”—he held up his finger—“you don’t really use engines in space that much at all, really, since”—he stabbed his finger down on the table—“a ship proceeds at a constant velocity in free fall. In a vacuum. Right? There’s nothing to slow it down.”

  He took a sip.

  “Microparticles,” Rob said. “Maybe. Actually, they can carry sound, too—”

  “It just keeps going by itself. You only use engines when you accelerate or decelerate. None of this fucking ‘She can’t take much more o’ this, Cap’n!’ It’s space, right? You just coast, all the way!”

  “That’s it, Blake,” said Peters. “Get angry.”

  “Well, but think about it,” Hollis said. “What do we really know about warp anyway? They might be right.”

  He sat back against the back of the booth. He hadn’t said anything for a while, and suddenly everybody was looking at him.

  “What if warp is more like water? Maybe you need to run the engine all the time, just like a ship needs its propeller going all the time, to fight against the resistance of the water. See what I’m saying? Maybe there’s resistance, and you have to keep pushing all the time, or you just slow down and stop. What if warp isn’t all just coasting along all the time?”

  The calculating capacity of my artificial positronic brain is approximately seven trillion times that of your human brain.

  “Maybe,” Blake said. “Maybe. Still, they talk the same way about impulse power, too.”

  He thought for a moment.

  “All that bridge protocol comes from nineteenth-century naval stuff, you know. It’s all in Patrick O’Brian.”

  Malo climbed into his skiff and paddled out into the middle of the bay. No one saw him.

  “Transporters, though, that’s another thing: Scotty was trapped in a transporter for eighty years, right? In the Dyson Sphere episode. He doesn’t age, because he’s trapped in a transporter beam. Or does he? What about Lieutenant Barclay—when he’s stuck in the transporter, something bites him on the arm. The Transporter Psychosis episode. It’s not like he’s frozen in time, he’s still conscious. So why doesn’t Scotty age when he’s trapped in the transporter beam?”

  Blake finished his drink. Nobody said anything.

  “Well, anyway,” he said. “Think about it.”

  “Geordie says it’s on a special diagnostic circuit.”

  “Your mother’s on a fucking diagnostic circuit,” said Peters.

  A crowd of three or four people banged in through the door, talking loudly. Cold air washed through the room. More drinks arrived.

  “Plus,” said Blake, “if he was trapped for eighty years inside a transporter he’d go insane, even if he didn’t die of old age.”

  “Maybe he was lying,” Peters said.

  “Lie is a blow to the tyranny of fact,” Hollis said.

  He studied the backs of his hands, wiggling his fingers.

  “I think lies are good,” he said. “People should lie more. Lies are like these little peepholes into a better world.”

  “Milord waxes eloquent,” Peters said. “God, you’re a cheap date, Hollis.”

  None could match his merry gibes.

  “I heard about this perfect job the other day,” said Rob. “Some of my radio friends. There’s this Japanese news program that needs an entertainment reporter to cover, like, the whole U.S. scene. It has some dorky Japanese name, like Eyepopper News or something—you have to be fluent in Japanese. But if you were, you’d be set.” He shook his head, looking a little glassy-eyed. “The money was unbelievable.”

  Hollis unobtrusively took his wallet out of his pocket, under the table, and counted the money in it. His hands were shaking.

  Even those who tried to draw closer to him, lured by his wealth or the secret of his success.

  No one spoke, and Hollis’s attention wandered to the rest of the bar. Warm, humid air had steamed up the windows. A woman with short dyed-blond hair sat by herself, occasionally drinking beer from a glass, with a vacant expression. She was pretty, in a schoolgirlish way. Hollis caught her eye. She looked, then looked away. Some waiters and waitresses were sitting together in a closed-off section, sipping water and talking sedately among themselves. A few had already changed into their street clothes.

  “If there’s a bright side to the galaxy,” Peters said, more or less aimlessly, “we’re on the planet that’s farthest from it.”

  For the first time that night Hollis noticed some long strings of garlics and dried peppers that were hanging from the ceiling. He was definitely feeling the gin and tonics, and he closed his eyes and pressed on his eyelids with the tips of his fingers.

  The spins started.

  There once was a man named McGee

  Who lived almost entirely on tea

  When they said, “You’ll get fat.”

  He replied, “What of that?”

  That insalubrious old man from

  “There’s a monster GSAS party tonight,” said Blake
. “Free beer. It’s over in Lehman Hall.”

  “Can you get us in?” said Basil.

  He shrugged.

  “It’d be dicey. The Law School isn’t a graduate school, strictly speaking, it’s professional.”

  “Wise man,” said Hollis. “Learn a profession.”

  “Forget it,” said Peters. “It’s too late. By God, we’ll stand here, and we’ll die here.”

  “You think she’s seen me?” Basil said, fingering a button on his pinstriped vest.

  “Who?” Peters asked.

  “Fay.”

  He gestured at the bar with his chin. They looked, but she wasn’t there anymore. They found her sitting at a table with her woman friend in another part of the restaurant. The man she’d been talking to was gone.

  “Signs would point to no,” Hollis said.

  A waiter came over to announce last call.

  “My cousin’s coming to stay with me tomorrow,” Rob said. “He went to MIT. He stayed around here for a little while after he graduated, but he couldn’t get a job—it was weird. He just lived off some kind of trust fund, till it ran out.”

  A glass fell and smashed behind the bar, and everybody in the room stopped talking for a second.

  “After that,” Rob went on, “I remember he started buying these surplus bulk food consignments because they were cheaper: crates of yams and stuff like that. Star melons. The weirdest possible stuff—all these Southeast Asian vegetables nobody’d ever even heard of. He used to go down to the docks to find them. Our whole family was just totally baffled.

  Malo stayed awake until his parents were asleep, then slipped out the window and down to the docks where the fishing boats were kept.

  “After a while he moved out to some town in upstate New York, with some friends of his from school. I guess it was cheaper. Now he spends all his time playing role-playing games—last I heard he was running a play-by-mail simulation of the Napoleonic Wars. In real time.”

  As for that, mon vieux—je n’en ai rien.

  “Look,” said Blake. He was carefully folding up a dollar bill into sections. He held it up. “It says, ‘Tits of America’!”

  Hollis picked up a salt shaker and poured out some salt onto the table. He started pushing it into a crack in the tabletop with a steak knife. Somewhere somebody was making a tone by running a finger around the rim of a wineglass.