Adrift in the Noösphere (13 page)

“This will be simple but graphic,
Senator,” she says. It is Stan's notion
of theatrics to have her fetch the props. “As you can see, this water is very hot.
Would you care to dip in your pinky
to test it, sir?”

“Thank you, honey, but I guess I
recognize hot water when I see it.”

A crony adds, unnecessarily,
“You've been in plenty of it in your
time.” Everyone laughs ingratiatingly.
Jenny drops two large ice cubes into
the flask, places it inside the chamber.
She goes at once to her terminal, and
her features blank out in the inert Zen
concentration of perfect egoless pro
gramming. The assembled company
stare foolishly at the sight of two ice
cubes slowly dissolving. Donaldson
dogs the hatch. An enhanced but rudi
mentary image of the interior comes to life on an adjacent TV screen. It shows two ice cubes slowly dissolving.

“Ideally,” the professor says, fists
clenched at his sides, “the chamber
would be absolutely shielded. We've
sacrificed some signal purity so you
can see what's going on inside. The
process will still work reasonably well.
Is the system on-line, Eddie?”

“Yeah.” Rostow's own palms are
wet. The whole performance is prema
ture. Five successful tests and two fails.
Donaldson's a yo-yo, bobbing from an
obsession for publicity at any cost through close-mouthed paranoia and
back. It'd almost be nice if the damned
thing blew out. Bite your tongue. It's
my baby. Go, go.

“Well, don't just sit there.”

“Right, Stan,” says Rostow
through his teeth, and smashes the tog
gle closed.

There is no new sound, no deep
shuddering hum or rising whine. Current in the magnetic coils goes to fifty
thousand amps, and there is a faint creaking as monstrously thick non-
magnetic structural members
crave one another's company in the
embrace of the stupendous field.
Sometimes, with the lights dimmed, Rostow
has seen phantom bars of pale light
crossing his line of sight. Field
strengths of this magnitude can screw
with the visual cortex. Or maybe the
magnets bend cosmic radiation
through the soft tissues of his eyeballs
and brain, nibbling tiny explosions of pseudolight in his synapses. It isn't happening now. Everyone stares at the
TV monitor, waiting for something
apocalyptic. Caught by the mood,
Rostow abandons his console and
steals across to join them.

“I'm still waiting,” Buonacelli
barks.

“Watch the ice cubes. Senator,”
Jennifer tells him.

“Dear God.” It is one of the ac
countants who first grasps what is hap
pening. “The bastards are getting big
ger!”

“Just so,” Donaldson says, loosening his fists. “The basic conservation law: heat can't pass from a cold object
to a hot one. But time inside the mirror is now running backwards, gentlemen, for all practical purposes. Advanced
Maxwell radiation, amplified by the
lasing action, is converging on the
flask. The Second Law of Thermodynamics is repealed.”

Rostow's body thumps to his pulse.
Steam is rising once more from the flask. A pair of unblemished cubes jounce at the surface of the boiling
water.

“Fantastic,” Buonacelli groans. “I
take it all back. Dr. Donaldson, this is
the wonder of the age.”

“You have yet to witness the more
dramatic part of our demonstration.”
Turning abruptly, the professor stum
bles into Rostow. “Wouldn't it be bet
ter if you were at your console, Eddie?
Please power the system down imme
diately and put it on Standby. Where's that animal?”

Rostow chews at part of his face. “I'll get him for you.” He slouches in
his seat, runs the current down, feels in
the box with his left hand for the bun
ny. Helplessly he glances at Jennifer Barton. She is watching him. Fingers tight around the bunny's ears, he hoists
it from the box and feels acid in his
stomach as he identifies the flash of emotion in her face.

Taking the bunny, Donaldson sug
gests: “Remove the flask and then
stand by for my mark.” Rostow
seethes, but welcomes the distraction. Behind him the bunny squeals. Noth
ing wrong with its memory at any rate. There's a meaty thunk. When he turns
back with the remelted cubes, Rostow
finds the professor marching toward
him with the bunnv's bloody, guillotined corpse in a sterile glass dish. One
of the accountants, no great white
hunter, is averting squeamish eyes. Buonacelli's are narrowed in wild sur
mise.

Resurrection is at once prosaic,
electrifying, impossible to compre
hend. On the monitor, the bunny's grainy sopping fur lightens as untold trillions of
randomly bustling molecules reverse their paths. As the flow staunches, its
poor partitioned head rolls upward
from the glass bowl and fits itself seamlessly to its unmarked neck. Prestidigi
tation. The bunny blinks spasmodical
ly, slow lids snapping upward, wiggles
his ass, and disgorges a strip of unchewed lettuce. The lab thunders crazily with
applause.

“By the Lord, you're a genius!” Color
has drained from Buonacelli's seamed
features; it surges back, as he beats Donaldson's shoulders. “Reviving the dead....” He pauses and adds slowly,
with avaricious appetite: “A man
could live forever.”

“I doubt it,” Rostow tell him. “We
can put people back together, and heal
wounds. But unfortunately it won't
help those who die of natural causes.”

“Rejuvenate them!”

“It'll rub out your memory.”

“Not your financial holdings, by
God.” The senator flexes his fingers,
thickened by incipient arthritis. “Plen
ty of memories I could happily live
without. You could brief yourself—
leave notes, tapes....”

“Sorry. Reversed time passes at the
conventional rate. Do you want to
spend forty years in solitary confine
ment? Besides, even the immensely
rich couldn't run this machine nonstop
for that long.”

Donaldson is nodding his agree
ment, until it occurs to him that he's no
longer the center of attention. “I did
ask you to stay at your console, Eddie.
Miss Barton, thank you, that will be all
today.” With smiles all around, he
ushers the committeemen away from
the mirror into a cozy space of his own
contriving. Eddie Rostow watches
them troop toward the door. They remain in shock, their several minds no
doubt working like maniacs as each
tries to figure himself in and the rest
out. “Truly astounding,” one says as
the door closes.

Rostow covers his face. In the huge empty lab he hears Jennifer Barton rise
from her seat. He opens his fingers for
a peek. She is regarding him across her
deactivated terminal; he cannot read her expression with certainty. Once
more he covers his eyes and listens to
the tap of her shoes, the click of her ex
it. Wistfully he sniffs the air for a trace
of her scent, more natural pheromone than applied cosmetic. On the monitor screen, the bunny is scratching at the
walls of the mirror chamber. Poor little
beast. Dazed by anger, lust, remorse and sympathy, Rostow strides to the
chamber and plucks the bunny to free
dom and mortality.

A dizzying aura of bloody light spangled with pinpoints of imploding
radiance momentarily blinds him. “Cretin,” he mouths, dropping the
rabbit and slamming the hatch. He
runs toward the console, clutching his
eyes, and barks his shin on the back of his chair.

Nothing explodes. When his vision
clears he scans the bank of square
lights on the system he had left running
at full power without computer supervision. Christ Almighty, we need a
fail-safe on that. Who'd expect anyone
to be so dumb? Shuddering, he runs
through the step-down with scrupu
lous attention to detail, double-checking every item.

As he finishes, he notes the bunny lumping near his numb toes, trying to
get back into its box. The stupid bas
tard is hungry again. He heaves it in.

The afternoon is only half done.
This is insane. Did Roentgen finish off his full day's work after the first exhibi
tion of X-rays? Surely Watson and
Crick didn't quietly mop up the lab
after they'd confirmed the DNA helix.
I'll take myself off and tie one on, he
decides. I'll get drunk as a skunk. He'd done just that after the first successful
trial of the advanced-wave mirror: alone
, bound to secrecy by his ner
vous department head, he'd sat in a
downtown bar and poured bourbon
into his belly until the trembling urge
to howl with joy dopplered into a
morose blur. And paid for it next day.
Oh, no, not that again. I'll march
down to Jennifer's room and lay it all
out for her. Invite her to a movie, a
plate of
Fricassée de Poulet
at Chez
Marius and a bottle or two of Riesling. We'll get smashed together, bemoan Donaldson's bastardry; hell we'll leave Donaldson out of it; we'll go to her
apartment and screw our tiny pink
asses off.

His hand had been all the way up her skirt, and the next day she'd acted
as if nothing had ever passed between
them. Did goddamned Auberon
Mountbatten Singh have his evil Anglo-Indian way with her that night,
rotating through ingenious positions?
It doesn't bear thinking about.

For a moment, to his horror,
Rostow finds himself regretting his divorce. Worse, he finds his baffled free-floating lust drifting in the direc
tion of the image of his ex-wife. Swiftly, before he damages his brain beyond
repair, he puts a stop to that

With effort he levers up from the
dead console and mooches to the foot
of the catwalk, leaning on its handrail. I have to stop brooding about Jennifer.
I could have killed myself shoving my
hand into the powered mirror, through the temporal interface. I do not interest
her strangely. Undoubtedly only fan
tastic self-restraint prevented her from smashing my impertinent jaw with her
knee. My god, how can I look her in
the eye?

This kind of maundering unreels through Rostow's head until he is so
bored with it that he turns back to
check the data for tomorrow's log of
tests. Glancing at the wall clock, he
sees that he's wasted half an hour in
useless self-laceration. Maybe, after
all, he should simply run out the door, burst into her office, and screw her until the sweat pops from her admiring
brow. Oh my God. He drags a heavy
battered mathematical cookbook from
the bench where the bunny rabbit
was murdered and resigns himself to
the honorable discharge of his employ
ment. A dizzying aura of bloody light spangled with pinpoints of imploding
radiance momentarily blinds him. “Cretin,” he mouths, dropping the
rabbit and slamming the hatch. He
runs toward the console, clutching his
eyes, and barks his shins on the back of
his chair.

Nothing explodes. A startled, un
convinced element in his mind asks it
self: Hasn't this all happened before?

He notes the bunny lumping near his numb toes trying to get back into its box. The stupid bastard is—O
h Jesus. A small disjointed part of him watches the wind-up golem, as de
tached as the bunny's head after its
sacrifice. This isn't
deja vu.
It's too sus
tained. I'll take myself off and tie one
on, he decides. I'll get drunk as a skunk. Oh my God, I'm tracking
through the same temporal sequence
twice. But that's truly insane, delu
sional. Time isn't repeating itself. I'm
using the advanced-wave mirror
system as a metaphor, at some pro
foundly cracked-up level of my uncon
scious. Didn't my dear sweet brilliant
wife complain that I'm a cyclothymic
personality, a marginal manic-
depressive, obsessively driven to
repeat my laments? I've careened into a
rut. A conditioned habit of thought. Jennifer Barton is driving me nuts. I
can't even see her in the same room
without brooding on the same stupe
fying regrets and fantasies. I'll march
down to Jennifer's room and lay it all
out for her. Invite her to a movie, a
plate of
Fricassée de
—