Magic Time

by Marc Scott Zicree

  Twice, in those days, he’d been caught in cave-ins, once seen his brother Gil half-crushed when the face collapsed. It had taken the company hours to even locate them and nearly two days to dig them out.

  Though Gil had survived—he’d been back at work in six months and had worked for Applby until emphysema got him in ’88—it was not something Hank planned to ever let happen again if he could help it.

  Men were coming out of the locker room to crowd around the pithead elevator, gray coveralls still damp from yesterday, clumsy-footed in boots and kneepads. Sonny Grimes stubbed his Marlboro on the elevator doorjamb and with the other hand fished a pack of smokeless from his coverall pocket, chewing even as he tucked the half-smoked butt behind his ear. “The fuck you lookin’ at?” he demanded, when Hank put distance between himself and the inevitable spit to come.

  “My mama was frightened by a cow in the pasture,” said Hank. “Gave me a complex.”

  “Fuck you.”

  A few feet away Ryan Hanson was twisting his body into a corkscrew in an effort to demonstrate Hideo Nomo’s pitching style to Gordy Flue: “Kicked the Braves’ ass that one year.”

  “Bunch of Japs,” opined Grimes and spit tobacco on the cement floor. “Damn dumb game anyway. Give me football.”

  “You like those guys in the spandex britches, Sonny?” asked Gordy, getting a general laugh and another “Fuck you” from Grimes.

  Ryan grinned, ridiculously like Wilma when she was nineteen, the year Hank had first proposed to her. Her brother—Ryan’s dad, Lou—had been only fourteen then, a towheaded kid picked on by the bevy of long-legged girls that comprised the Hanson family; Hank remembered playing sandlot ball with him in a weedy field behind the old pit-head. Remembered Wilma in the first miniskirt the town had ever seen (and not all that mini, compared to these days), somehow managing to make it look prim, as if she were laughing at herself. Long slim legs in what looked like a mile and a half of stocking.

  “Whole National League’s got Nomo’s timing down now,” added Gordy, as the car doors slid open and the men crowded in.

  They continued to argue amicably about baseball as the elevator headed down, not really wanting to think about the endless drop in darkness, the rock whizzing past outside. Everybody talking and thinking about something else with the adeptness of long practice. Young Al Bartolo was showing pictures of his son to Tim Brackett, who was grinning his big slow brilliant gap-toothed grin with the cheerful understanding of a man who’s felt the same high at seeing the little red monkey face of his own child seven times before: “Gina all right?” he asked, and Al nodded.

  “She’s fine. It was only a couple hours, and them Lamaze classes she took at Adult Ed work like a champ. Her mom’s over there now, helping her out.”

  And Tim’s bright brown eyes in the electric dinginess seemed to say, Wait till his eyes track for the first time, and he looks at you. Wait till the first time he reaches out and grabs your finger. Wait till the first time he throws a baseball to you, or comes into your room at night because he’s had a bad dream and he’s scared. Wait till you see him graduate high school with honors. You’re on the road, my friend, but you don’t know what happiness is yet.

  A good man, thought Hank. Not very bright—not the way Ryan was bright—but good.

  The doors opened to the yellow blear of electric bulbs, the smell of earth and rock, of coal and mud. The damp touch of cold air on the cheeks. Up close to the downcast the company had put in sprinklers to keep the dust down, and it even worked, though everyone still came out of the mine looking as if they’d been spray-painted, and Hank still spit black and blew black out of his nose for hours after he went off-shift. Still, it was far better than it had been when his father had worked for Applby before him.

  There was a little electric tram, like a string of golf carts, to haul everybody out to the coal face, and that was an improvement, too. Hank recalled places in the Green Mountain diggings where the coal bed was thin, the men had had to be trundled through tunnels on a conveyor belt with their tools between their knees and the rock seven inches above their prone backs. The headlamps of the men, and the single glaring light on the front of the tram, glittered on mud and wet rock on the conveyors that bore the coal back to the downcast, flashed on the puddles dripped from the pipes. Glistened on the coal.

  And beyond those feeble lights, night blacker than the coal.

  By the time they got to the new main, the conveyors had started up in the areas behind them, and in the distant mazes of rooms and pillars machinery started to buzz and clank as other teams got going. No sprinklers here, just the smell of the rock dust that lay like dirty snow on the floor to keep the coal dust down. At least the seam was thick here, nearly five feet. It meant he could stretch his back, if he got down on his knees to do it.

  The uneven ceiling pressed down overhead, making the steel props seem feeble and small. The darkness, too, seemed to press in close from all sides, as if the headlamps made a watery wall, a weak denial of some inevitable fact.

  Hank’s father had been a miner. He’d started each day with a shot of whiskey; ended it with half a dozen more.

  Hank understood.

  Almost more than the fear of explosions, fear of the roof falling in, or of a boulder loosening from the ceiling and squashing you. It waited for you, that darkness.

  In a way it was worse that there were so few men, that so much of the work was done by machine. Not just because of all the men Hank knew who’d been laid off, whose families had been on food stamps for three or five years, who were trying to make ends meet on what their wives could earn. As Al disappeared to chart butt entries in the new section and Sonny loafed over to his loader, Hank felt an uneasiness that had nothing to do with the logistics of coal or manpower. In the sixties and seventies there’d been lots of guys down here, lots of friends. Voices to keep the silence at bay.

  “C’mon, Hank,” Sonny called out as Hank methodically checked over the shearer. “The fucker was all right when you left it yesterday. What you think, the fairies came and fucked with it while you were away?” Hank ignored him. Diesel—okay; hydraulic fluid—okay; oil levels—he checked everything about the big, grimy yellow world-eater before he hit the switches that woke it to deafening life.

  Sliding back and forth, chewing at the coal face, the black seam between the gray. Spewing rock and mud and shining black lumps onto the greasy shale floor for Sonny’s loader to pick up, to start their long journey back to the top of the ground. Tim’s headlight swooping and swaying as he shoveled. Shadows dipping, reaching like monster hands.

  Ryan and Roop McDonough angled the metal supports upright, wedging them with hunks of shale or working them into shallow drilled sockets in the floor, and Hank thought, It’s no good pretending. No good trying not to think about the weight, and the dark, and the silence.

  They were close to a mile down. If the world ended, they wouldn’t know a thing about it until they went back up again.

  Chapter Four

  GROUND ZERO—7:09 A.M. CDT

  “All right, here I am. What is it?” Dr. Fred Wishart strode into the Ops Chamber, the blast doors hissing softly closed behind him. The others were already bent over the electronic schematic that tracked the flow of energy in the Resonance Chamber beyond the dark windows filling the opposite wall. Through the two-inch Plexiglas it looked like curious fleeting blue gleams among and between the narrow, mirrored walls of the maze, here and there a sort of glowing mist. On the schematic he saw half a dozen places where hot spots had glowed violently white, now cooling down to the safer hues of red-orange, dulling back to green. “What happened? What caused it?”

  Marcus Sanrio sighed. “The siren song of cause and effect... And if causality were irrelevant, if all were mutable, what then?” His long, sensitive fingers trailed across the tracking schematic, slightly ridged and grooved to accommodate his handicap; the energies electronically mirrored from Resonance showed up on the surface as changes in temp
erature. Probably, reflected Fred, it was a more accurate system than the colors. “There was a sudden intensification of energy starting in the eighth sector, building up very quickly to burnthrough levels. We ran tap rods into it, and everything is fine.”

  “Everything is not fine,” Fred said quietly, “if we don’t know what caused it.” Anything in the nature of a burn-through scared the hell out of him, even the ones that didn’t result in bizarre manifestations like telekinetic energy flows at Sioux burial sites or the resurrection of packs of skeletal prairie wolves. Thank God they’d been able to hush that one up. For security reasons alone they were deadly—sooner or later something like that would occur under circumstances that couldn’t be passed off as some poor Indian with d.t.’s—but what really scared Fred was the fact that they didn’t know why such things occurred. What unknown stresses they might foreshadow. “Was it a malfunction of equipment?”

  “We could tell that better,” muttered Jill Pollard, “if we knew exactly how the equipment works. I don’t mean how to increase or decrease the intensity of the energy at the Source, or tapping it off or directing the flow of the field. I mean what is it, exactly? What little electrons or neutrons are bumping into each other; what’s happening at a subatomic level? Why is it happening?”

  “To answer Dr. Wishart’s question,” said Sanrio, pointedly ignoring her, “no, there does not at this point appear to have been an equipment malfunction. Lilleburger noted the development of spontaneous hot spots in 1940 . . .”

  “Which my investigations of the Russian research never found any mention of,” cut in Pollard.

  “Well, God forbid we should proceed without confirmation from Dr. Pollard’s research,” purred Sanrio. He turned back to Wishart.

  “According to the schematic the leakage involved a very small area northeast of here, along...”he checked a Braille notecard with one insectile forefinger, “along Medicine Water Creek. At that hour of the morning it’s unlikely anyone was there to see a manifestation anyway—if there was a manifestation.”

  “You are minimizing the extent of the burnthrough!” St. Ives slapped the table angrily with a sheaf of papers. “I’ve warned this committee before about security.”

  “And I have warned this committee about timidity!” retorted Sanrio. “Some members of this organization seem to have the two words confused. We’re running a system-wide check to make sure, but there should be no reason we cannot proceed to the establishment of a limited field later this morning.”

  “That’s nonsense,” cried Sakamoto. “I’ll barely have time to set up proper observation equipment.”

  “You can’t be serious,” Pollard added. “No responsible researcher could countenance . . .”

  “Might I suggest that the limited-field experiment be put off until tomorrow?” Wu’s soft voice cut across the general clamor of My research, My observation, My data.

  Sanrio heaved an exaggerated sigh and made a slight gesture of turning his head, like a glance, from her to Pollard— the two women had become close friends during the months of incarceration at the project.

  Unperturbed, the old woman continued, “Not for any reason of equipment failure nor even due to the fact that we still have no idea why hot spots develop. It is simply that you have not taken a rest period in the past twenty-four hours, Dr. Sanrio. It is over ninety hours since you have remained off-shift for a complete rest period. Dr. Wishart has not had a formal rest period for sixteen, and prior to that, two rest periods in eighty hours. I believe one reason that this hot spot developed to burnthrough was because the technician on duty was overtired and his reflexes slow. The human body is not designed—”

  “If you need to go take a nap, Dr. Wu,” Sanrio cut her off, “please feel free to do so. I apologize for taking up your time.” He swung his head around, not so much like a sighted person as a machine, zeroing in on the body heat of the others in the room. “And that goes for the rest of you. Evidently none of you remember—perhaps because, as Dr. Wu so obviously points out, of the bonecracking labor involved in sitting at a computer terminal in an air-conditioned room all day—that we are working against a deadline, a deadline that none of us know. Some fool in Washington may even now be standing up on his hind legs in a Senate sub-committee and yapping about cutting expenditure, and tomorrow’s mail may very well contain a request that we pack up our things in a little cardboard box and get out; they’re giving our money to buy crayons for day-care centers.”

  His thin white hand, its long nails stained with nicotine, bunched tight where it rested on the schematic, whose lights had all cooled now to green. Behind him a random swirl of white sparks blossomed from some corner of the Resonating Maze, framing him in misty diamond fire.

  “And what will we be able to say, when the imbeciles in charge of appropriations ask us, ‘What do you have to show for five years of active research? What do you have to show for seventy years’ worth of research by some of the best minds in prewar Germany, in Russia, in America?’ I’m not talking about next week, or next month. I may be talking about tomorrow. I don’t want to have to say—” and he transformed his light, expressive voice into an apologetic whine, “ ‘Well, sir, we’re working on it.’ ”

  He gestured sharply to the black glass behind him, and Wishart thought he saw, all along the tops and edges of the resonator panels, a blue flicker of lightning, eerily mimicking the sweep of his arm.

  “I am going to put forward plans to establish a limited field this morning,” Sanrio said. “Now the rest of you have my permission to go and take your little naps.”

  Fine, thought Fred. I’ll do that. Dreaming of home— dreaming of Bob—was more productive than wrangling about whose research conflicted with whose and whether or not St. Ives’ theories were being proved or disproved.

  While the others were still arguing, he walked quietly out the door. He thought he heard Dr. Pollard call after him, but he didn’t turn his head, hastening back to the safety of his office.

  NEW YORK—8:11 A.M. EDT

  Mornings were always a bitch.

  Colleen Brooks slicked back the wet hair from her face and stepped from the shower, not even glancing at the bathroom mirror, which was steamed to a silvery fog anyhow. Most people would have thought she was referring to the five-mile run, the pushups, the lat pulls, the crunches, the rest of the routine that it took to get her motor running, but that was just something she did; something that burned off the fumes of the previous day.

  No, it was the gauntlet. She steeled herself as she buttoned the denim shirt, zipped up her work pants, slid thick socks into steel-toed boots. She opened the bathroom door.

  “You gonna comb your hair?”

  “It’s combed, Rory.”

  “That thing washed?”

  “Yeah.”

  He reclined, resplendent in the old BarcaLounger, the Simpsons TV tray in front of him, sucking up Frosted Flakes and knocking them back with a Bud. He was on day three of his shaving rotation—shave one of every four—which he thought gave him that cool Johnny Depp look (which was so old, anyway) but which to Colleen seemed more Jed Clampett. Mainly, he looked like a younger, taller Danny DeVito. Not that much taller, though. At five-six, he had only an inch on her. “It’s got a spot.”

  Like his T-shirt wasn’t dribbled with them.

  “They don’t pay me for my looks.”

  “That’s the truth.”

  Colleen felt tired and looked away. It hadn’t always been like this, she told herself, trying to remember the sweetness. That week in Cabo they’d had three years back; he’d filled the place with orchids and roses and irises and God knew what, an explosion of blossom, told her not to pack a thing—they’d buy it all there. He’d blown a month’s pay plus commissions on that. That was before the FTC had cracked down on the toner-cartridge phone scam and his boss had flown the coop to the Caymans. Not that he’d ever bothered to mention to her what his phone sales consisted of till it hit the Daily News. Thank god the feds h
adn’t cared about the little fish . . . at least, as long as they proved cooperative.

  She poked in the fridge, found last night’s fried-egg sandwich and, as she gulped it down, extended the newspaper to him, folded over to one item.

  “What’s this?” he asked.

  “Read it.” He rolled his eyes, his old standard I-don’t-need-this-shit look. She held his gaze, not backing down. With a martyred sigh he took it and read.

  “ ‘Dear Abby, the man in my life is a boorish pig who drinks up my paycheck and won’t get work.’ ” He tossed it back to her. “Who writes this crap?”

  She tried not to think about breaking one of his fingers. Tried not to think about living by herself. About waking up in the darkness, in a cold bed, alone. Looking at him, she spied her reflection in the flamingo-framed mirror they’d gotten in Cabo. Maybe they didn’t pay her for her looks, but she was cut and strong and not bad for twenty-six. She still had all her teeth and not that many scars. Not on the outside, anyway.

  Let’s not deal with that today, she told herself and pitched the paper in the trash. One day at a time, right? And what the hell would happen to him if she walked out on him now? He’d end up living in a refrigerator carton under a bridge. She wouldn’t put a cat out like that. But as soon as he was more on his feet . . .

  She owed it to the man he used to be and, she hoped, would be again, once he found the thing that really rang his chimes. Not that she’d ever found that thing for herself.

  She reached over to the antlers where her belt hung. Thing was a heavy sucker, especially now that she was packing that big wrench. She fastened it on, grabbed up her sack lunch and made for the door.

  “Hey, babe,” Rory called to her. He seemed to be melting into that ratty lounger, ever more one with it. Colleen turned, tensing for the parting shot. “Don’t let the bear eat you.”

  Her shoulders relaxed; she even smiled. “Not a chance,” she said. The bear wasn’t out there. And whatever was, she knew she wouldn’t break a sweat.