by Dan Simmons
He does. And he has to hold it that way while he takes aim. His muscles are freezing and for a second he begins to shake up and down, but he takes a big, deep breath and holds it steady … the bow … on that first lizard, the one who’s standing closest to the door. It’s real dark now but there’s a little bit of red light coming from around that door.
Swiish! Raul lets her go. And no sooner than he lets the first one fly but than he’s notchin’ the second arrow and pulling back on it. The first lizard—the one nearest the door?—he makes a funny little sound as the arrow gets him smack dab in the throat and sticks out the other side. But the other lizard, he’s looking out the other way and when he turns to see what’s going on—swiish—there’s an arrow growin’ out of the back of his neck too and then he falls, but he slides over the edge and keeps on going down to the frozen ice about two miles below, but neither one of them made no sound.
And then Raul’s coming down the hill on all four legs, sort of slipping and sliding and making straight for the door. Well, it’s a real big metal door and there ain’t no doorknob or nothing and it’s locked. But the first lizard—the one who’s laying dead in the snow—he’s got this ring of keys with about sixteen big keys on it. And one of them fits. But it’s lucky that he wasn’t the one who fell over the edge, is all.
So Raul sticks this key in and the door slides back sideways and there’s this long tunnel going off straight ahead ’til it turns and it’s all lit with red light and sort of spooky. He walks into the tunnel and maybe he done something wrong or maybe there’s an electric eyeball or something ’cause suddenly these bells are going off like an alarm.
“Well, I done it now,” Raul thinks to hisself and takes off galloping down the hallway full speed. He’d put his bow back by this time and he’s got his sword out.
Meanwhile, you remember that Gernisavien was all strapped down to this steel table and there was a Wizard standing over her fixing to slit open her belly to get at that farcaster key? He had the knife out—it was sort of like a doctor’s knife, it was so sharp you could cut butter with it—and he was standing there just sort of deciding where to make the cut when all the bells went off.
“It’s Raul!” yells Dobby who’s hanging there on the wall and who’s still alive.
The Wizard, he turns real fast and throws some switches and all these TV screens light up. On some of the screens you see lizard soldiers running and others you see a couple of Wizards sort of looking around and on one you see Raul running down this hallway.
The Wizard says something in Wizard talk to these other guys in robes in the room and then they go running out of the room together. So now Dobby and Gernisavien are all alone in there, but there ain’t nothing they can do except to watch the TV because they’re all tied up.
Raul, he’s coming around this bend and all of the sudden here are a bunch of lizards in front of him and they’ve got crossbows and he’s just got his sword. But they’re more surprised than he is and he puts his head down and charges full speed into them and before they can get their crossbows loaded and everything he’s in there swinging and there are lizard heads and tails and stuff flying around.
Now Gernisavien can see this on the TV and she and Dobby are cheering and everything but they can see the other TVs too, and the halls is full of lizards and the Wizards are coming too. So Dobby, he begins to pull and pull against the chains as hard as he can. Remember, his arms are stronger than they look like we found out when he held up part of Tartuffel’s Treehouse that time.
“What’re you doing?” goes Gernisavien.
“Tryin’ to get at that!” goes Dobby and he points at the table full of test tubes and bottles and all the chemical stuff where the Wizards had been working.
“What for?” goes Gernisavien.
“It’s nucular fuel,” Dobby says, “and that blue stuff is anti-gravity stuff like in the sky galleon. If it gets all mixed up …” And Dobby keeps pulling and pulling until the veins stood up out of his head, but finally one of the chain things breaks and Dobby’s hanging down by one arm but he’s too tired to keep going.
“Wait a minute,” goes Gernisavien. She’s watching the TV.
Raul was killing lizards this way and that and he got to within maybe a hundred feet or so to where Dobby and Gernisavien’s being kept, but he don’t know that and suddenly here come these four or five Wizards with their fire guns. Raul, he barely gets his shield up in time. As it is they scorched off some of his hair and mane and burned up all of his arrows and stuff on his back. And they burned up his daddy’s bow, too.
So Raul starts going backwards and he knows they’re trying to cut him off ’cause he can see the lizards running down these side hallways. So he turns and gallops as fast as he can but the Wizards are coming down the main way and when they get a clear shot he’ll be a goner. So Raul stops and picks up a crossbow and he sort of keeps them back by shooting their way.
All of the sudden he’s in this big room where the Wizards keep their flying platforms. And Raul goes and jumps the railing and lands on one and starts to look at the controls. He pushes this button and the wall rolls up—it’s the door on the side of the mountain. Raul looks outside and sees the fresh air and stars and everything. And when he looks back all he can see is doorways full of lizards and here come the Wizards with their fire guns and everything and Raul knows that if he stays he can’t dodge them all. Raul’s not so much afraid of getting killed as he is of getting hurt real bad and having to stay there all chained up like Gernisavien and Dobby.
So Raul, he pushes the buttons until the flying platform starts flying and the Wizards are blasting away with their fire guns, but he’s already outside in the night air and they can’t get a good shot at him as he flies away sort of zig-zagging.
Now back up the hallway, Gernisavien and Dobby’ve been watching all this on the TV. Dobby’s face, it always looks kind of sad but now it looks sadder than ever.
“Can you get your other arm loose?” goes Gernisavien.
Dobby just shakes his head no. He ain’t got no leverage.
Gernisavien, she knows that the key’s still in her stomach. And she knows that the Wizards’re planning to use it to get at all those other worlds in the Web of Worlds. And maybe the humans could fight them off but it looks like it’d be real hard what with the Wizards coming on them by surprise and all. Gernisavien remembers all the times they talked about when they would get to the farcaster and all the planets they’d go to together and all the people they’d see.
“It’s been fun, hasn’t it?” goes Dobby.
“Yeah,” says Gernisavien. And then she says. “Go ahead. Do it.”
Dobby knows what she means. He smiles and the smile, it’s sort of sad and sort of happy at the same time. Then he leans out real far until he’s standing on the wall sideways. That’s when they hear the Wizard’s footsteps in the hallway. So Dobby starts swinging his right arm—the one with the chain hanging loose from it—and then he brings it down on the nucular fuel and other things on the table and smashes them all together.
Raul is five or six miles away when he sees the mountain blow up. The top just sort of came off and the whole thing went up in the air like a volcano. Raul’s just high enough and just far enough away that he didn’t get blown all to pieces with it. And he knew who did it. And why.
Now I don’t know what else he was thinking about. But he was all by himself now. And he flew around up there alone while all the lava runs down the mountains and sparks shoot up into the air. And there’s nowhere for him to go now. He can’t get the farcaster to work all by himself. Gernisavien had the key and Dobby was the only one who knew how to turn it on.
Raul stayed up there in the dark for a long time. Then he turned the platform around and flew away. And that’s the end.
There was a silence. Children sat stone still and watched as Terry went back to his desk. His corduroys went whik-wik. As he sat down, several of the girls began to sob. Many of the boys looked d
own or raised their desk lids to hide their own tears.
Mrs. Borcherding was at a loss. Then she turned to the wall clock, turned back angrily to the alarm clock, and raised it between her and the class.
“See what you did, young man,” she snapped. “You’ve wasted the class’s entire recess and put us behind schedule on our clean-up. Quickly everyone, get ready to scrub your desks!”
The children rubbed at their eyes, took deep breaths, and obediently set to the final tasks that stood between them and freedom.
Introduction to
“Two Minutes Forty-Five Seconds”
One of my favorite people in publishing—if not the world—is Ellen Datlow, fiction editor of OMNI. For awhile they were calling Ellen the Mother of Cyberbunk, but I think they were getting her mixed up with Mother Teresa.
One day Ellen phoned me, announced that she was commissioning a bunch of very short horror-SF pieces for OMNI and asked if I would be interested.
“Ellen, is this so you can pay three grand for seven or eight of us rather than the same amount for one story?” I ask.
“Sure,” she says.
“And is it so you can say you ran eight pieces of fiction in the issue instead of the one measly story they allow you that month?” I persist.
“Of course,” says Ellen. “What else?”
“And are you calling me because you know I work cheap, write fast, and essentially worship the ground you walk on?”
“Sure,” says Ellen. “Plus you’re behind on payments from the deal where we let you sit at the OMNI table at the World Fantasy Con banquet two years ago, and I figure I can deduct most of your fee for this to get you caught up.”
“Count me in,” I said.
She had only one condition. The other contributors (their stuff was already in, but there was room for one more story because layout had moved a Trojan ad) had written horror stories that were horror. “They forgot it was horror/SF,” said Ellen. “Make sure yours is high-tech horror.”
“High-tech horror,” I said. “Right. No problem.”
I hung up the phone, warmed up the computer, flexed nimble fingers over the keyboard, turned off the computer, and said to myself, “What the hell is high-tech horror?”
Now I know. “Two Minutes Forty-five Seconds” is high-tech horror.
As a footnote, I should mention that I spent several hours on the phone with OMNI’s lawyers about this story. A partial transcript of one conversation follows:
OMNI LAWYER: Is this story really about the Challenger explosion?
ME: Of course it’s really about the Challenger explosion.
O.L.: No, it is not about the Challenger explosion.
ME: Of course it’s not about the Challenger explosion. Uh … what’s it about?
O.L.: Obviously it’s about an alternate reality … one in which a certain unnamed shuttle exploded, possibly related to alleged negligence by an unnamed and/or fictional corporation which bears no resemblance to any corporation, individual, and or planet in this universe. Correct?
ME: Uh, right. That’s what I had in mind. O.L.: One more thing. You’ll have to change your working title for this story. ME: Right! Sure. Why?
O.L.: We think “Love Song to J. M*rt*n Th**k*l” is … ah … inadvisable.
ME: OK. How about … “The Day Corporate Greed and Malfeasance Killed Seven of Our Astronauts and Almost Killed Our Space Program?”
O.L.: Let us think about that. We’ll get back to you.
Epilogue to the Footnote:
Recently Ellen Datlow chose “Two Minutes Forty-five Seconds” to be in the second annual edition of The Year’s Best Fantasy, a collection she co-edits with Terry Windling. Ellen wrote the introduction to the story, and in it she says:
It’s a compact and chilling tale about guilt, based in part on a very well-publicized event in our recent past—the Challenger disaster.
Excuse me, I have to go now. The phone’s ringing, there’s a process-server at the door, and a corporate helicopter has just landed in the back yard.
Two Minutes
Forty-Five Seconds
Roger Colvin closed his eyes and the steel bar clamped down across his lap and they began the steep climb. He could hear the rattle of the heavy chain and the creek of steel wheels on steel rails as they clanked up the first hill of the rollercoaster. Someone behind him laughed nervously. Terrified of heights, heart pounding painfully against his ribs, Colvin peeked out from between spread fingers.
The metal rails and white wooden frame rose steeply ahead of him. Colvin was in the first car. He lowered both hands and tightly gripped the metal restraining bar, feeling the dried sweat of past palms there. Someone giggled in the car behind him. He turned his head only far enough to peer over the side of the rails.
They were very high and still rising. The midway and parking lots grew smaller, individuals growing too tiny to be seen and the crowds becoming mere carpets of color, fading into a larger mosaic of geometries of streets and lights as the entire city became visible, then the entire county. They clanked higher. The sky darkened to a deeper blue. Colvin could see the curve of the earth in the haze-blued distance. He realized that they were far out over the edge of a lake now as he caught the glimmer of light on wavetops miles below through the wooden ties. Colvin closed his eyes as they briefly passed through the cold breath of a cloud, then snapped them open again as the pitch of chain rumble changed, as the steep gradient lessened, as they reached the top.
And went over.
There was nothing beyond. The two rails curved out and down and ended in air.
Colvin gripped the restraining bar as the car pitched forward and over. He opened his mouth to scream. The fall began.
“Hey, the worst part’s over.” Colvin opened his eyes to see Bill Montgomery handing him a drink. The sound of the Gulfstream’s jet engines was a dull rumble under the gentle hissing of air from the overhead ventilator nozzle. Colvin took the drink, turned down the flow of air, and glanced out the window. Logan International was already out of sight behind them and Colvin could make out Nantasket Beach below, a score of small white triangles of sail in the expanse of bay and ocean beyond. They were still climbing.
“Damn, we’re glad you decided to come with us this time, Roger,” Montgomery said to Colvin. “It’s good having the whole team together again. Like the old days.” Montgomery smiled. The three other men in the cabin raised their glasses.
Colvin played with the calculator in his lap and sipped his vodka. He took a breath and closed his eyes.
Afraid of heights. Always afraid. Six years old and in the barn, tumbling from the loft, the fall seemingly endless, time stretching out, the sharp tines of the pitchfork rising toward him. Landing, wind knocked out of him, cheek and right eye against the straw, three inches from the steel points of the pitchfork.
“The company’s ready to see better days,” said Larry Miller. “Two and a half years of bad press is enough. Be good to see the launch tomorrow. Get things started again.”
“Here, here,” said Tom Weiscott. It was not yet noon but Tom had already had too much to drink.
Colvin opened his eyes and smiled. Counting himself, there were four corporate vice presidents in the plane. Weiscott was still a Project Manager. Colvin put his cheek to the window and watched Cape Cod Bay pass below. He guessed their altitude to be eleven or twelve thousand feet and climbing.
Colvin imagined a building nine miles high. From the carpeted hall of the top floor he would step into the elevator. The floor of the elevator would be made of glass. The elevator shaft drops away 4,600 floors beneath him, each floor marked with halogen lights, the parallel lights drawing closer in the nine miles of black air beneath him until they merged in a blur below.
He looks up in time to see the cable snap, separate. He falls, clutching futilely at the inside walls of the elevator, walls which have grown as slippery as the clear glass floor. Lights rush by, but already the concrete floor of the shaft is visib
le miles below—a tiny blue concrete square, growing as the elevator car plummets. He knows that he has almost three minutes to watch that blue square come closer, rise up to smash him. Colvin screams and the spittle floats in the air in front of him, falling at the same velocity, hanging there. The lights rush past. The blue square grows.
Colvin took a drink, placed the glass in the circle set in the wide arm of his chair, and tapped away at his calculator.
Falling objects in a gravity field follow precise mathematical rules, as precise as the force vectors and burn rates in the shaped charges and solid fuels Colvin had designed for twenty years, but just as oxygen affects combustion rates, so air controls the speed of a falling body. Terminal velocity depends upon atmospheric pressure, mass distribution, and surface area as much as upon gravity.
Colvin lowered his eyelids as if to doze and saw what he saw every night when he pretended to sleep; the billowing white cloud, expanding outward like a time-lapse film of a slanting, tilting stratocumulus blossoming against a dark blue sky, the reddish brown interior of nitrogen tetroxide flame, and—just visible below the two emerging, mindless contrails of the SRBs—the tumbling, fuzzy square of the forward fuselage, flight deck included. Even the most amplified images had not shown him the closer details—the intact pressure vessel that was the crew compartment, scorched on the right side where the runaway SRB had played its flame upon it, tumbling, falling free, trailing wires and cables and shreds of fuselage behind it like an umbilical and afterbirth. The earlier images had not shown these details, but Colvin had seen them, touched them, after the fracturing impact with the merciless blue sea. There were layers of tiny barnacles growing on the ruptured skin. Colvin imagined the darkness and cold waiting at the end of that fall; small fish feeding.
“Roger,” said Steve Cahill, “where’d you get your fear of flying?”