Warp

by Lev Grossman

  Eileen patted her thighs with both hands, as if she was looking for pockets. She turned to the secretary.

  “Darcy, could you—?”

  The secretary nodded instantly and opened her desk drawer.

  “We’ll make a time. I’ll buy you lunch—you’re starting to get a little skinny, even for you.”

  Hollis nodded again, silently.

  He was a mysterious figure—arrogant, aristocratic, coldly beautiful, impossible to understand.

  Eileen got up, smoothing down her skirt, and took a step back down the hall towards her office. Hollis looked past her: somebody was leaning against the door frame, waiting for her. He was tall, and he had shoulder-length blond hair.

  Hollis realized he recognized him. It was Brian.

  Danger, Will Robinson! Danger!

  “Not too early,” said Hollis expressionlessly, staring past her at him. “I hunt for insects at night.”

  “We’ll work something out. Tuesday, maybe.”

  She took a step towards the door. For some reason he noticed some bits of dark green fluff that had migrated from her sweater onto the black fabric of her dress.

  His vision was unusually acute.

  “Do you want to see my office, real quick?” she said brightly, turning around again. “It’s right here.”

  Brian watched him from behind Eileen, over her shoulder, without hostility but also without any kind of warmth, or even recognition. Their eyes met for a second, and Hollis stared back at him for a long moment before Brian finally looked away.

  Hollis slowly rubbed the side of his nose with one finger.

  “It can wait,” he said.

  “Call me Monday then?”

  “Sure.”

  She walked away back down the hall, and the office door closed softly behind them.

  Hollis stood up.

  I met the man himself today. On the moors.

  Darcy was still holding out Eileen’s card, waiting for him to notice, and he took it from her. Classical music was playing softly over hidden speakers, an overexposed Vivaldi violin concerto, and for the first time, underneath it, Hollis noticed the rustling noise of people working in the offices all around him. It was coming from all sides, directionlessly. The walls were just thin office partitions, and the sound carried right through them: phones ringing, keyboards clattering, people talking. The air reeked of coffee.

  Hollis stood still and listened. Darcy watched him disapprovingly. He looked back at her, and then around at the rest of the room, and down the hall at the rows of office doors. One of them opened, and two youngish men in suits came out, talking business animatedly, both holding their camel overcoats draped over the same arm. They were barely older than Hollis. They swept through the room, nodding to the receptionist, and out the other door in the direction of the elevators.

  Hollis’s face was blank. He reached up and felt the stubble on his chin, gingerly.

  Everybody has something to do.

  CHAPTER 10

  FRIDAY, 5:45 P.M.

  Hollis’s boots made an echoey sound on the marble floor of the lobby. As he pushed his way out through the revolving door the security guard yelled after him to sign out, but he didn’t turn around. When he was a few blocks away, he took the piece of paper with Eileen’s address on it out of his pocket and threw it into a steel trash can, which was twisted and half melted from having had a fire in it.

  The air was full of exhaust from the rush-hour traffic. The temperature was dropping, and white fluorescent lights blinked on and off in random sprinkling patterns in the skyscrapers. The closest subway stop was Boylston, at the corner of Boston Common. Huge white clouds of steam billowed up out of storm drains and through the finger holes in manhole covers, even through cracks in the street.

  Inside the subway station it was cold and crowded, the commuters staring straight ahead, emptily, like refugees in newsreel footage of a war-torn foreign country. Hollis looked down at the tracks from the platform: there was an inch of standing water under the wooden ties. He still wasn’t far from the harbor.

  When the train came it was almost full, and he had to squeeze himself in. The car rocked gently back and forth on the track. Hollis watched the gray stucco wall of the tunnel fly by, a yard in front of his face. All around him people were talking and shouting over the roar. When the tracks rose above ground at Kenmore Square, after twenty minutes, it got a little quieter.

  The neon lights of the clubs went through their regular cycles in the darkness.

  By the year 2097 the cities of the Eastern Seaboard had merged to form a single megalopolis of shocking size and squalor.

  As the sun went down, the clouds started to glow with the weird orange light of the city. Hollis accidentally met his own eyes in the window and looked away. It was a Friday night, and the subway was free outbound after Kenmore, so wherever the train stopped lines of people waited to get on. Each time it took a few minutes to get them all packed in.

  Hollis overheard people talking in Spanish, Greek, Russian, Vietnamese. As the neighborhood became more and more residential it got darker outside: more and more trees and fewer streetlights. By the time he got to the stop in front of his building it was after six.

  Hollis stepped down. The bell rang, and the green-and-white train moved away up the hill. In the lobby of his building, dead leaves that had blown in through the front door lay strewn all over the floor. He took the elevator up to his apartment.

  Standing at the window, with his coat still on, Hollis looked down at the darkness of the empty courtyard. He could hear geese honking as they flew by overhead, out of his line of sight. The broken storm window that Peters had dropped lay on a cement walkway, in the middle of a spray of broken glass. The aluminum frame had come apart at one of the corners.

  He turned away and lay facedown on the bed.

  CAPTAIN PICARD

  Mr. Data, are you all right?

  DATA

  I believe I am experiencing some difficulty with my positronic circuitry, Captain. I do not seem to be functioning at full capacity.

  PICARD

  Can you identify the problem?

  DATA

  It seems to be some kind of subspace interference, sir. Possibly of alien origin. At the present rate of decay, I estimate the time to total neural net failure at one minute twenty-seven seconds.

  Picard stands up and signals the helm.

  PICARD

  Ensign, take us out of here: warp nine point five. Dr. Crusher?

  DR. CRUSHER

  I’d better get him to sick bay, Captain.

  PICARD

  Agreed.

  Dr. Crusher bends over Data, who is now lying prone on the bridge. She places her hand gently on his forehead, scanning him with a medical tricorder, then presses her communicator badge.

  CRUSHER

  Crusher to transporter room—two to beam directly to sick bay.

  TRANSPORTER ROOM

  Acknowledged, Doctor. Whenever you’re ready.

  She puts her hand on Data’s shoulder.

  COUNSELOR TROI

  Oh Data, I hope you’ll be all right!

  PICARD

  And … engage!

  In the forward viewscreen, stars blur into lines. The Enterprise accelerates up to warp speed.

  CRUSHER

  Transporter room: Energize.

  Light flares.

  They vanish.

  CHAPTER 11

  FRIDAY, 9:15 P.M.

  “Where are you going?” said Hollis. “We aren’t getting Blake, are we?”

  “I’m trying the other way. By Harvard Street.”

  Peters tried to pass the slow, rusted-out station wagon in front of them, but a car coming the other way boxed him out.

  “The Force is strong with this one,” he said.

  The sky had cleared, and the cold was waking Hollis up. He rubbed his eyes and looked out the window at the shuttered and burned-out storefronts of Brighton scrolling past them.
/>   “What did you do today?” he said.

  “Went in to the office. Did some work. Delahay’s trying to write this piece about interstellar ether—this stuff they thought was supposed to propagate light through space, or something, before they eventually figured out it didn’t exist. In the nineteenth century. The Michelson-Morley experiments. She talks about it all the time now.”

  “I don’t get it,” said Hollis. “What do you mean, it propagates light through space?”

  A motley crowd of people waited in line outside a nightclub, some sitting, some standing, some milling around talking, not in any particular order. A tour bus parked out front had an airbrushed mural of a barbarian warrioress on it, riding a giant iguana-like lizard. Her bare breasts, impossibly huge and firm, stood out against an idyllic shell-pink sunset.

  “Well, they used to think light was like sound. Like, you can’t hear anything in a vacuum, because there’s no air to propagate the sound.”

  “But there’s still light in a vacuum,” said Hollis. “I mean, you can still see, even if there’s no air.”

  “That’s exactly the problem, dude, that’s why you need the ether to be there to propagate the light. In a vacuum, there’s nothing else to do it. Except it turns out you don’t have any ether there, either.”

  “Ah. Now I get it.”

  Hollis found a loose thread on the front of his coat and snapped it off.

  “Fabu.”

  They turned onto a shabby, patched-up old expressway crisscrossed with skid marks, and then onto an on-ramp to the Mass Pike. Hollis and Peters watched the traffic for the first few miles without saying anything. They were moving in a fast, tight-packed formation of cars, with nobody slowing down or changing lanes. People were leaving the city for the suburbs and the Cape.

  Outside Boston the highway was lit up by yellowish-pink streetlights, and the shoulders on both sides rose up higher and higher the farther from the city they got. By the time they hit the suburbs Hollis and Peters were driving through a kind of artificial concrete canyon, carved out of the landscape of otherwise peaceful neighborhoods. Looking up, Hollis could see dark trees and lighted windows flying past them over their heads.

  Ten minutes later they took a curving off-ramp over to Route 128.

  “Did you sleep enough?” said Peters.

  “I guess so.”

  “So what did you do today? Anything?”

  Hollis smiled wanly.

  “If I told you, you wouldn’t believe me.”

  An old red pickup truck floated across their lane from right to left. They watched it cross back again farther ahead and accelerate away through traffic.

  “I wonder what it’s like to be a weaver?” said Peters. “Who would actually do that? I can remember when my dad was teaching me how to drive, and him saying, ‘You see that, son? That’s a weaver.’”

  He held up his index finger.

  “And I’ve never forgotten his words.”

  “Why don’t you try it?” said Hollis.

  “What do you mean? You want me to weave?”

  “Sure. Look, you can get in right there. Come on, dude, live a little. I’ll pay for the ticket. Go for it.”

  “Oh, come on,” said Peters. “What’s the point? There’s no room, anyway.”

  He didn’t move.

  “Besides,” he said, “how would you pay for it? With what money? It’s not worth it. And since when are you so full of piss and vinegar, anyway?”

  “Beats me.”

  “Anyway, there’s some kind of weird police action going on tonight. The streets are crawling with them. When I was driving over to get you there were cruisers everywhere, pulling people over. And vans. People with flashlights, looking in people’s cars. I don’t know why. State police, highway patrol. Hey, remember what I was saying before, about police? The future is now!”

  He pointed at Hollis.

  “Oh, I called Ashley: it’s no go. I got her machine.”

  “Whatever,” said Hollis. “It’s probably just as well.”

  He was looking out the window. Every minute or so the plain white reflector of a mile marker lit up in the headlights.

  “I remember her,” he said. “Ashley. Quite the fiery little zippie she was. She must wear colored contacts—nobody’s eyes are really that shade of green.”

  Eyes are nice.

  “You’re more her type than I am anyway,” said Peters.

  “I wasn’t really on that night.”

  “Come on, you were a hit. You were a cheeky little R2-D2 to my obsequious, servile C-3PO.”

  Hollis could feel the cold through the car window against his right hand. He secretly slipped it up under his shirt and pressed it against his ribs with his other arm to warm it up.

  There’ll be no escape for the Princess this time.

  As time went by the numbers on the exit signs decreased, and Hollis started to feel more alert. Peters turned the radio on and off. They experimented with the moon roof, but it was too cold outside to keep it open. Factories appeared off to one side with their brand names lit up by spotlights: Polaroid, Raytheon, Microsoft, BayBank, IBM. When they got to the Dover exit they swung smoothly off the highway and plunged into the darkness of the woods. The noise of the traffic and the red and white streams of headlights and taillights dwindled behind them through the trees.

  They pulled up to the light at the crossroads. Everything was quiet. Even the throb of the engine was barely audible.

  “It’s red, Jim,” said Peters soberly.

  Another car came up behind them, lighting up the interior of the Lexus with its headlights.

  “Once,” Peters said, “when I was in high school, I got a pimple on the back of my neck. It was huge—literally, it was the size of an egg. Wherever I went, whatever I was doing, I was conscious of it. I could feel it, just riding around back there. It was so big I started to think I could pop it just by leaning my head back and looking up at the ceiling. I spent a whole day sort of tossing my head back, over and over again, trying to pop this God damn pimple on the back of my neck. But I never could. After a while my neck started to hurt, and I went to the nurse. She said I had whiplash.”

  Hollis watched the traffic light, waiting for it to change.

  I am now the last human being left alive on earth.

  The light changed. The rear wheels sprayed gravel.

  This time there were a few stores open in the quiet little suburban strip in the center of town. From the car Hollis could see two teenage girls in white T-shirts cleaning up behind the counter at a Steve’s Ice Cream, looking very busy and efficient in the warm, yellow electric light. Past the main commercial area it got quiet again. The pale fans of sprinklers waved silently back and forth in the dark, on the front lawns of old Unitarian churches with box steeples.

  The roads were narrow and winding, but Peters knew them by heart, and he took them at full speed. Hedges, stone walls, and tree branches flew by, ridiculously close to Hollis’s window, and he flinched back a couple of times. For a while Hollis tried to keep track of where they were, but soon he gave up.

  At first when they pulled over he didn’t recognize it as the same spot where they’d parked that morning. Peters switched off the headlights.

  There was a second of silence.

  “Suddenly,” he said, “I knew fear.”

  He took out the key, and they climbed out. The doors chunked shut behind them in perfect unison.

  “It’s better if we park around the corner,” he said. “The neighbors might notice the car.”

  The stars were surprisingly bright. Crickets chirruped wildly in the trees, and they walked away from the car without saying anything. When they turned the corner there were a few lights on in the Victorian farmhouse across the street, but it was quiet.

  I am now the last human being left alive.

  There were lights on in the Donnellys’ house, too. The globe on the lamppost was lit, and the light reflected off the dew on the grass.
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br />   “They’re probably on a timer,” Peters said. “Got the keys? Just kidding.”

  He dug them out of his pocket, saying:

  “My precious, my precious.”

  They set out across the lawn and circled around to the back of the house, looking over their shoulders a little nervously at the house across the street. Hollis held the screen door while Peters tried the knob on the inner door. It was locked.

  “Welcome to the jungle, baby,” Peters said softly, as he slid the key in. “You’re gonna die.”

  The door opened. It was pitch-black in the little storeroom. Hollis waited while Peters stumbled around in the clutter on the floor.

  “How the hell can you see anything?” he said.

  Peters didn’t answer.

  “Motherfucker,” he said after a while, and Hollis heard him rattling the doorknob.

  “This one’s locked too.”

  “Wasn’t it before?”

  “No.”

  Peters sighed and fumbled around with the doorknob some more.

  “Is it the same key?” said Hollis.

  He smelled dust in the air, and a moment later he sneezed. As his eyes got used to the darkness he could make out the indistinct shape of Peters’s broad back, hunched over the lock.

  His ability to see through the comfortable illusions of everyday life set him apart from his fellow man.

  He heard Peters scratching around with the key trying to find the keyhole, then a grunt of satisfaction. The door opened onto the darkened kitchen. Peters barged in, with his hands together out in front of him like a pistol.

  “Freeze, motherfuckers!”

  He held still for a few seconds, listening. Nothing happened. He relaxed and waved Hollis inside.

  The Donnellys had cleaned up before they left, and everything was even neater and tidier than it had been before. The drainer was empty. The coffee machine was unplugged.

  “You know, I wish that girl had showed up,” said Hollis, blinking at the light, as he stepped in over the threshold. “The one we met before. What the hell was her name again? Ellen? Evelyn?”

  Peters spun around, arms still out, and covered Hollis with the pistol. He sighted down it at him.

  “Eleanor,” he said.