The Collected Stories of Robert Silverberg, Volume Seven: We Are for the Dark

by Robert Silverberg

  He was very guarded, as was only to be expected, when I would bring the conversation around to the topic of eating. He made it clear that his eating habits were his own business and he would rather not discuss them with me, or anyone. Yet there was an aggressive glow on his face whenever we spoke of the way he ate that called Kafka’s hunger artist to my mind: he seemed proud of his achievements in starvation, even eager to be admired for his skill at shunning food.

  Too much directness in the early stages of therapy is generally counterproductive where anorexia is the problem. The patient loves her syndrome and resists any therapeutic approach that might deprive her of it. Timothy and I talked mainly of his studies, his classmates, his stepbrothers. Progress was slow, circuitous, agonizing. What was most agonizing was my realization that I didn’t have much time. According to the report from his school physician he was already running at dangerously low levels, bones weakening, muscles degenerating, electrolyte balance cockeyed, hormonal systems in disarray. The necessary treatment before long would be hospitalization, not psychotherapy, and it might almost be too late even for that.

  He was aware that he was wasting away and in danger. He didn’t seem to care.

  I let him see that I wasn’t going to force anything on him. So far as I was concerned, I told him, he was basically free to starve himself to death if that was what he was really after. But as a psychologist whose role it is to help people, I said, I had some scientific interest in finding out what made him tick—not particularly for his sake, but for the sake of other patients who might be more interested in being helped. He could relate to that. His facial expressions changed. He became less hostile. It was the fifth session now, and I sensed that his armor might be ready to crack. He was starting to think of me not as a member of the enemy but as a neutral observer, a dispassionate investigator. The next step was to make him see me as an ally. You and me, Timothy, standing together against them. I told him a few things about myself, my childhood, my troubled adolescence: little nuggets of confidence, offered by way of trade.

  “When you disappear,” I said finally, “where is it that you want to go?”

  The moment was ripe and the breakthrough went beyond my highest expectations.

  “You know what a microchip is?” he asked.

  “Sure.”

  “I go down into them.”

  Not I want to go down into them. But I do go down into them.

  “Tell me about that,” I said.

  “The only way you can understand the nature of reality,” he said, “is to take a close look at it. To really and truly take a look, you know? Here we have these fantastic chips, a whole processing unit smaller than your little toenail with fifty times the data-handling capacity of the old mainframes. What goes on inside them? I mean, what really goes on? I go into them and I look. It’s like a trance, you know? You sharpen your concentration and you sharpen it and sharpen it and then you’re moving downward, inward, deeper and deeper.” He laughed harshly. “You think this is all mystical ca-ca, don’t you? Half of you thinks I’m just a crazy kid mouthing off, and the other half thinks here’s a kid who’s smart as hell, feeding you a line of malarkey to keep you away from the real topic. Right, doctor? Right?”

  “I had a dream a couple of weeks ago about shrinking down into the infinitely small,” I said. “A nightmare, really. But a fascinating one. Fascinating and frightening both. I went all the way down to the molecular level, past grains of sand, past bacteria, down to electrons and protons, or what I suppose were electrons and protons.”

  “What was the light like, where you were?”

  “Blinding. It came in pulsing waves.”

  “What color?”

  “Every color all at once,” I said.

  He stared at me. “No shit!”

  “Is that the way it looks for you?”

  “Yes. No.” He shifted uneasily. “How can I tell if you saw what I saw? But it’s a stream of colors, yes. Pulsing. And—all the colors at once, yes, that’s how you could describe it—”

  “Tell me more.”

  “More what?”

  “When you go downward—tell me what it’s like, Timothy.”

  He gave me his lofty look, his pedagogic look. “You know how small a chip is? A MOSFET, say?”

  “MOSFET?”

  “Metal-oxide-silicon field-effect-transistor,” he said. “The newest ones have a minimum feature size of about a micrometer. Ten to the minus sixth meters. That’s a millionth of a meter, all right? Small. It isn’t down there on the molecular level, no. You could fit 200 amoebas into a MOSFET channel one micrometer long. Okay? Okay? Or a whole army of viruses. But it’s still plenty small. That’s where I go. And run, down the corridors of the chips, with electrons whizzing by me all the time. Of course I can’t see them. Even a lot smaller, you can’t see electrons, you can only compute the probabilities of their paths. But you can feel them. I can feel them. And I run among them, everywhere, through the corridors, through the channels, past the gates, past the open spaces in the lattice. Getting to know the territory. Feeling at home in it.”

  “What’s an electron like, when you feel it?”

  “You dreamed it, you said. You tell me.”

  “Sparks,” I said. “Something fizzy, going by in a blur.”

  “You read about that somewhere, in one of your journals?”

  “It’s what I saw,” I said. “What I felt, when I had that dream.”

  “But that’s it! That’s it exactly!” He was perspiring. His face was flushed. His hands were trembling. His whole body was ablaze with a metabolic fervor I had not previously seen in him. He looked like a skeleton who had just trotted off a basketball court after a hard game. He leaned toward me and said, looking suddenly vulnerable in a way that he had never allowed himself to seem with me before, “Are you sure it was only a dream? Or do you go there too?”

  Kafka had the right idea. What the anorexic wants is to demonstrate a supreme ability. “Look,” she says. “I am a special person. I have an extraordinary gift. I am capable of exerting total control over my body. By refusing food I take command of my destiny. I display supreme force of will. Can you achieve that sort of discipline? Can you even begin to understand it? Of course you can’t. But I can.” The issue isn’t really one of worrying about being too fat. That’s just a superficial problem. The real issue is one of exhibiting strength of purpose, of proving that you can accomplish something remarkable, of showing the world what a superior person you really are. So what we’re dealing with isn’t merely a perversely extreme form of dieting. The deeper issue is one of gaining control—over your body, over your life, even over the physical world itself.

  He began to look healthier. There was some color in his cheeks now, and he seemed more relaxed, less twitchy. I had the feeling that he was putting on a little weight, although the medical reports I was getting from his school physician didn’t confirm that in any significant way—some weeks he’d be up a pound or two, some weeks down, and there was never any net gain. His mother reported that he went through periods when he appeared to be showing a little interest in food, but these were usually followed by periods of rigorous fasting or at best his typical sort of reluctant nibbling. There was nothing in any of this that I could find tremendously encouraging, but I had the definite feeling that I was starting to reach him, that I was beginning to win him back from the brink.

  Timothy said, “I have to be weightless in order to get there. I mean, literally weightless. Where I am now, it’s only a beginning. I need to lose all the rest.”

  “Only a beginning,” I said, appalled, and jotted a few quick notes.

  “I’ve attained takeoff capability. But I can never get far enough. I run into a barrier on the way down, just as I’m entering the truly structural regions of the chip.”

  “Yet you do get right into the interior of the chip.”

  “Into it, yes. But I don’t attain the real understanding that I’m after. Perhaps the
problem’s in the chip itself, not in me. Maybe if I tried a quantum-well chip instead of a MOSFET I’d get where I want to go, but they aren’t ready yet, or if they are I don’t have any way of getting my hands on one. I want to ride the probability waves, do you see? I want to be small enough to grab hold of an electron and stay with it as it zooms through the lattice.” His eyes were blazing. “Try talking about this stuff with my brother. Or anyone. The ones who don’t understand think I’m crazy. So do the ones who do.”

  “You can talk here, Timothy.”

  “The chip, the integrated circuit—what we’re really talking about is transistors, microscopic ones, maybe a billion of them arranged side by side. Silicon or germanium, doped with impurities like boron, arsenic, sometimes other things. On one side are the N-type charge carriers, and the P-type ones are on the other, with an insulating layer between; and when the voltage comes through the gate, the electrons migrate to the P-type side, because it’s positively charged, and the holes, the zones of positive charge, go to the N-type side. So your basic logic circuit—” He paused. “You following this?”

  “More or less. Tell me about what you feel as you start to go downward into a chip.”

  It begins, he said, with a rush, an upward surge of almost ecstatic force: he is not descending but floating. The floor falls away beneath him as he dwindles. Then comes the intensifying of perception, dust motes quivering and twinkling in what had a moment before seemed nothing but empty air, and the light taking on strange new refractions and shimmerings. The solid world begins to alter. Familiar shapes—the table, a chair, the computer before him—vanish as he comes closer to their essence. What he sees now is detailed structure, the intricacy of surfaces: no longer a forest, only trees. Everything is texture and there is no solidity. Wood and metal become strands and webs and mazes. Canyons yawn. Abysses open. He goes inward, drifting, tossed like a feather on the molecular breeze.

  It is no simple journey. The world grows grainy. He fights his way through a dust storm of swirling granules of oxygen and nitrogen, an invisible blizzard battering him at every step. Ahead lies the chip he seeks, a magnificent thing, a gleaming radiant Valhalla. He begins to run toward it, heedless of obstacles. Giant rainbows sweep the sky: dizzying floods of pure color, hammering down with a force capable of deflecting the wandering atoms. And then—then—

  The chip stands before him like some temple of Zeus rising on the Athenian plain. Giant glowing columns—yawning gateways—dark beckoning corridors—hidden sanctuaries, beyond access, beyond comprehension. It glimmers with light of many colors. A strange swelling music fills the air. He feels like an explorer taking the first stumbling steps into a lost world. And he is still shrinking. The intricacies of the chip swell, surging like metal fungi filling with water after a rain: they spring higher and higher, darkening the sky, concealing it entirely. Another level downward and he is barely large enough to manage the passage across the threshold, but he does, and enters. Here he can move freely. He is in a strange canyon whose silvery walls, riven with vast fissures, rise farther than he can see. He runs. He runs. He has infinite energy; his legs move like springs. Behind him the gates open, close, open, close. Rivers of torrential current surge through, lifting him, carrying him along. He senses, does not see, the vibrating of the atoms of silicon or boron; he senses, does not see, the electrons and the not-electrons flooding past, streaming toward the sides, positive or negative, to which they are inexorably drawn.

  But there is more. He runs on and on and on. There is infinitely more, a world within this world, a world that lies at his feet and mocks him with its inaccessibility. It swirls before him, a whirlpool, a maelstrom. He would throw himself into it if he could, but some invisible barrier keeps him from it. This is as far as he can go. This is as much as he can achieve. He yearns to reach out as an electron goes careening past, and pluck it from its path, and stare into its heart. He wants to step inside the atoms and breathe the mysterious air within their boundaries. He longs to look upon their hidden nuclei. He hungers for the sight of mesons, quarks, neutrinos. There is more, always more, an unending series of worlds within worlds, and he is huge, he is impossibly clumsy, he is a lurching reeling mountainous titan, incapable of penetrating beyond this point—

  So far, and no farther—

  No farther—

  He looked up at me from the far side of the desk. Sweat was streaming down his face and his light shirt was clinging to his skin. That sallow cadaverous look was gone from him entirely. He looked transfigured, aflame, throbbing with life: more alive than anyone I had ever seen, or so it seemed to me in that moment. There was a Faustian fire in his look, a world-swallowing urgency. Magellan must have looked that way sometimes, or Newton, or Galileo. And then in a moment more it was gone, and all I saw before me was a miserable scrawny boy, shrunken, feeble, pitifully frail.

  I went to talk to a physicist I knew, a friend of Timothy’s father who did advanced research at the university. I said nothing about Timothy to him.

  “What’s a quantum well?” I asked him.

  He looked puzzled. “Where’d you hear of those?”

  “Someone I know. But I couldn’t follow much of what he was saying.”

  “Extremely small switching device,” he said. “Experimental, maybe five, ten years away. Less if we’re very lucky. The idea is that you use two different semiconductive materials in a single crystal lattice, a superlattice, something like a three-dimensional checkerboard. Electrons tunneling between squares could be made to perform digital operations at tremendous speeds.”

  “And how small would this thing be, compared with the sort of transistors they have on chips now?”

  “It would be down in the nanometer range,” he told me. “That’s a billionth of a meter. Smaller than a virus. Getting right down there close to the theoretical limits for semiconductivity. Any smaller and you’ll be measuring things in angstroms.”

  “Angstroms?”

  “One ten-billionth of a meter. We measure the diameter of atoms in angstrom units.”

  “Ah,” I said. “All right. Can I ask you something else?”

  He looked amused, patient, tolerant.

  “Does anyone know much about what an electron looks like?”

  “Looks like?”

  “Its physical appearance. I mean, has any sort of work been done on examining them, maybe even photographing them—”

  “You know about the Uncertainty Principle?” he asked.

  “Well—not much, really—”

  “Electrons are very damned tiny. They’ve got a mass of—ah—about nine times ten to the minus twenty-eighth grams. We need light in order to see, in any sense of the word. We see by receiving light radiated by an object, or by hitting it with light and getting a reflection. The smallest unit of light we can use, which is the photon, has such a long wavelength that it would completely hide an electron from view, so to speak. And we can’t use radiation of shorter wavelength—gammas, let’s say, or x-rays—for making our measurements, either, because the shorter the wavelength the greater the energy, and so a gamma ray would simply kick any electron we were going to inspect to hell and gone. So we can’t see electrons. The very act of determining their position imparts new velocity to them, which alters their position. The best we can do by way of examining electrons is make an enlightened guess, a probabilistic determination, of where they are and how fast they’re moving. In a very rough way that’s what we mean by the Uncertainty Principle.”

  “You mean, in order to look an electron in the eye, you’d virtually have to be the size of an electron yourself? Or even smaller?”

  He gave me a strange look. “I suppose that question makes sense,” he said. “And I suppose I could answer yes to it. But what the hell are we talking about, now?”

  I dreamed again that night: a feverish, disjointed dream of gigantic grotesque creatures shining with a fluorescent glow against a sky blacker than any night. They had claws, tentacles, eyes by the
dozens. Their swollen asymmetrical bodies were bristling with thick red hairs. Some were clad in thick armor, others were equipped with ugly shining spikes that jutted in rows of ten or twenty from their quivering skins. They were pursuing me through the airless void. Wherever I ran there were more of them, crowding close. Behind them I saw the walls of the cosmos beginning to shiver and flow. The sky itself was dancing. Color was breaking through the blackness: eddying bands of every hue at once, interwoven like great chains. I ran, and I ran, and I ran, but there were monsters on every side, and no escape.

  Timothy missed an appointment. For some days now he had been growing more distant, often simply sitting silently, staring at me for the whole hour out of some hermetic sphere of unapproachability. That struck me as nothing more than predictable passive-aggressive resistance, but when he failed to show up at all I was startled: such blatant rebellion wasn’t his expectable mode. Some new therapeutic strategies seemed in order: more direct intervention, with me playing the role of a gruff, loving older brother, or perhaps family therapy, or some meetings with his teachers and even classmates. Despite his recent aloofness I still felt I could get to him in time. But this business of skipping appointments was unacceptable. I phoned his mother the next day, only to learn that he was in the hospital; and after my last patient of the morning I drove across town to see him. The attending physician, a chunky-faced resident, turned frosty when I told him that I was Timothy’s therapist, that I had been treating him for anorexia. I didn’t need to be telepathic to know that he was thinking, You didn’t do much of a job with him, did you? “His parents are with him now,” he told me. “Let me find out if they want you to go in. It looks pretty bad.”