“Well, the Red can be worse’n the Mississippi even, when it rains enough. It’s been like pourin’ piss out’n a boot up there in Oklahoma.”
Back in his car, moving on the highway, he realized that somehow he must have paid the restaurant cashier. Otherwise the two state troopers would already be in hot pursuit.
Fifty-five was the law, and maybe in some places they cared about that. But once he got to Texas he felt sure that nobody was going to give a damn. He opened her up.
Greenery and rivers dried up and blew away in the hot wind of his passage. Signs indicated where to turn to get to Midland, Odessa, Corsicana. Nazareth. If a name existed in the universe, if a name was even conceivable, and maybe sometimes if it was not, it could be found somewhere in the vastness of Texas, applied to a small town.
He slept in a motel somewhere, in a room where he turned on no radio or television. And sometime after that he crossed a border that lay invisibly athwart the unfamiliar lunar landscape and found that he was in New Mexico. Maybe he had never come exactly this way before. He couldn’t remember things being quite this barren even here.
Signs told him he was nearing Carlsbad. The highway topped a stark rise to disclose an unexpected wall of greenery waiting for him, not far ahead. Pecos River, a small sign added. He drove across a highway bridge over the river, which was for this part of the country so wide and full that he was astonished by it until he saw the dam.
If he tried to go any farther tonight he was going to drive right off the road somewhere in exhaustion. And yet, once settled in the Carlsbad Motel, he couldn’t sleep. He had to know first what was happening. No, not quite right. He had to know if he was going to have to admit to himself that something was happening. Maybe he was just going a little crazy from being alone too much in summer heat. If that was all, he should just stay in one cool room for a day and a night and sleep.
He forced himself to turn on the ten pm television news, and he listened to the whole half hour attentively, and there was not a word about drowned bodies anywhere. He started to relax, to feel that whatever had started to happen to him was over. When the news was over, he found a talk show, on another channel that came in by cable from the west coast. Show biz people and famous lawyers sat around a table. During the first commercial he roused himself and went out to get half a pint of good bourbon. To hell with being so careful, you could probably drive yourself crazy that way. Tonight he was going to drink. He had the feeling that things were going to be all right after all.
He thought he had turned off the television set, but the voices were busy when he came back with the whisky. The same host, but evidently a new segment of the show, for the guests were different.
The scientist had no mustache, but he was certainly a scientist, and he even looked a little like that one on the other show. Well-entrenched in the world and imperturbable.
“. . . from Cal Tech, going to talk with us a little about nuclear physics, quantum mechanics, the nature of reality, all kinds of good stuff like that there.” Laughter in the studio followed, febrile and feeble at the same time, predictable as the outcome of a lab demonstration.
The nature of reality,” said another panelist. “You left that out.” But it hadn’t been left out. Didn’t they even listen to each other’s words?
Someone else on the panel said something else, and they all laughed again.
“Speaking of reality, we’ll be right back, after this.”
The cable brought in a good many channels. Here was Atlanta. Who knew where they all came from? But he knew that he would have to switch back.
“. . . pretty well accepted now by everyone in the field that it can’t have any effect on the general perception of reality, what people generally experience as reality, no matter how many of these experiments you have going on around the world at the same time, or how many of them are concentrated on the same type of subject. The concentration effect, if there is one, sort of goes off somewhere; we can’t even trace where it goes.”
“You’re saying that in effect you fire a volley off over the fields . . .”
“. . . and it could possibly hit someone, but the chance is very small.”
“Endor, did you say a moment ago?”
“The Witch of Endor?” another guest put in, archly, oh they were sharp out there on the coast, and there was more reflexive laughter, from people who recognized their cue, even if they didn’t know what they were laughing about.
“ENDOR is an acronym,” the scientist with no mustache was explaining, “for Electron-nuclear double resonance. You see, it seems now that resonance is set up not only in the real atoms but in virtual atomic particles in nearby time-frames. The implications are enormous. Someday, theoretically, we could each have our own personal universe to carry around with us, tuned to our own skulls, our own perceptions. The original idea was only to measure the hyperfine . . .”
Flying a little high on bourbon now, and getting doses of jargon like that one, he needed only a few more sips from the bottle before he drifted off. To wake up, as it seemed, almost at once, with daylight coming in around the motel drapes. The air conditioner was humming already, the television had somehow been turned off. He lay there feeling better than he had dared to expect. Jargon is the thing, he thought. Jargon is definitely in. Where the hell have I been the last few days, anyway? But it seemed to be over now, whatever it had been.
He thought: I’m going to have to try to get on some talk show myself.
Taking his time in the warm morning, he listened without much apprehension to what scraps of news the radio was willing to give up. No drowned bodies anywhere. He went out and breakfasted. As far as he could tell from looking out across the landscape away from town, he might still have been in Texas. But in town there were trees, and lawns, though the grass when he looked at it closely was of an unfamiliar variety.
Driving away from the motel, he was still unsure about whether to head north, east, or west. South—Mexico—he didn’t want. On impulse he drove a couple of blocks toward the massed trees, the river. Above the dam it looked like an eastern river, wide and full and slow-moving, and there for some distance the banks were lined with expensive-looking houses. There was the sound of a motorboat, and in a moment a crack in the green wall showed a skier passing on the brown water. Nearby was a city park; he entered and drove through it slowly. There was a small sand beach, already in use in the day’s heat.
There was also a police car, and a small but steadily growing crowd, fed by running children who were not interested just now in swimming. Between the standing bodies he caught a single glimpse of brown hair, yellow cloth. Bare, tanned arms being worked up and down by arms in blue policeman’s sleeves.
He remembered to gas up the car and have the oil checked before heading on west. He was worried. But somehow he didn’t seem to be as worried as he ought to be. He had the feeling that he was forgetting, putting behind him, a log, an awful lot of recent happenings. Nothing essential, though. Excess baggage. Part of the feeling of strangeness was no doubt due to the fact that he was just coming out of a bad time. Even if he hadn’t been on good terms with her lately, it was only to be expected that such a loss would leave him in a shocked condition for several weeks. But he was starting to come out of it now.
Later that day, he was almost at Tucson where he realized where he was going.
At home in San Diego, he watched the sun go down into the one great ocean, just as once, long ago, he had watched it rise. On the Atlantic horizon, he could remember, there had been pink-gray nothingness, and then, instantly out of nowhere, a spark. Now at the last instant of sunset the shrinking sun became what looked like that identical same, long-remembered spark. And then, then night.
This house was his, this house right on the beach, only a hundred feet from water at high tide. Decades ago his parents had first rented then bought it, and he had hung onto it as an investment. This afternoon as soon as he got into town he had driven past the place on an
impulse. It had looked unoccupied, though he had been sure that it was rented. He was going to have to talk to the agent about that in the morning.
The place had looked completely deserted from the outside, but when he had let himself in with the key he always kept, it was hard to be sure whether it was currently being lived in or not. There were furnishings, not all of them unfamiliar. Pictures on the walls, some of which he could remember.
He turned on a couple of lights after watching the sunset. A little food in the kitchen cabinets, a little in the refrigerator. As if some people might just have moved out, not bothering to take everything or use it up.
He went out again, through the French windows, to sit in a lawn chair on the patio overlooking the sea. The ocean, never quite silent, was now almost invisible in the gathering darkness. The smell of it brought back to him no memories that were peculiar to this place. He had looked at and smelled the sea in too many other, different places for that. The one great ocean that went on and on.
Through low clouds there came suddenly the halffamiliar, half-surprising sound of a slow Navy plane from the air station not far away. One of the search and rescue craft, and it sounded like it was heading out. Would they commence a search at night? That seemed unlikely, but there were always new devices, new techniques. Anyway, they wouldn’t be using a plane to look for her, she hadn’t gone out in a boat. And if they hadn’t started to look for her last night, when she walked out, they wouldn’t be starting now.
He paused, trying to clear his thoughts. How could they have started any search last night? He still, up to this minute, hadn’t told anyone how she had gone. Not yet . . .
If you can’t stand your own life, he had said to her, then I suggest you put an end to it. I have an interesting life of my own that’s going to take all my time. The room seemed still to echo with the words.
The waves were getting a little louder now, rolling invisibilities up the invisible beach.
He went into the house and turned up the volume of the television slightly; he could not really remember having turned it on. The voices from the talk show came with him as he went outside again, onto the seaward patio. The hyperfine and superhyperfine splittings could now be measured accurately, but that was only the start. Police forces all over the country were using the technique on unidentified bodies every day, with great success. Nobody worried anymore that the technique might offer any danger to the fabric of the world. The implications were really vast. The ligand fields expanded without limit. The voices continued to follow as he opened the gate in the low wall and walked down a slope of sand to meet the still invisible burden of the waves.
1981
WHERE THY TREASURE IS
He would do anything for the ones he loved—even leave them . . . if he could.
It was a small private hospital, so Benedict Cunningham and his doctor had a small private elevator to themselves, going down.
“Call me at any time if you think any problems are developing,” said the doctor. He was youngish and intense, and was carrying Cunningham’s valise himself. “Any sort of problems.”
Cunningham smiled. He had just turned fifty, and looked quite healthy and vigorous. A sun lamp, installed in his hospital room at his insistence, had maintained his golf tan during his stay. His new wig was so well made that only the very few who knew him well were likely to spot it as a difference. He said now: “We went into all the possibilities pretty thoroughly ahead of time, as you’ll recall. And everything has gone well. I don’t anticipate problems.”
“Nor do I. But, since you’re the first.”
“I had better be the last as well. At least for some time to come.”
“Of course.”
“Don’t look so grim, doctor. You’re going to do quite well out of this.” Cunningham’s smile was faintly prolonged by the grim look he observed on the young face; if the man hadn’t needed money desperately, he wouldn’t have done this . . . .”
A faraway look came into Cunningham’s eyes. “Wait,” he said softly. “I’m making contact with what must be another company. Oh. Giant . . . I think . . . it’s got to be AT&T. Whole networks of metal . . . networks of finance . . . I can’t describe it, any more than I could the others. But it’s there, yes, it’s definitely there. The whole structure . . . you know, there’s one detail in all this it’s just occurred to me to wonder about.”
At that point the elevator door opened onto the ground floor lobby. Cunningham grabbed his valise from the doctor’s hand and stepped out briskly, determined to impress the small group of waiting reporters with his smiling health.
“I’m fine,” he assured them. “Just elective surgery to have a wen removed. Then I stayed over for my annual checkup and a little rest.”
The doctor, speaking to the reporters in turn, issued a short and somewhat vague statement that revealed nothing about the unheard-of thing that he had really done. Then he walked with Cunningham to where Cunningham’s chauffeur stood holding open the door of a waiting limousine.
Motioning the doctor to follow, Cunningham got into the car and greeted his wife with a hurried kiss. Shirley was a quiet, attractive woman a few years younger than her husband, with a dread of the press intense enough to have kept her waiting in the car today.
Her face was worried; the doctor, shaking her hand hastily, wondered how much her husband had really told her.
One reporter was still watching, and Cunningham touched the intercom and told the chauffeur to drive away.
“What’s the detail that’s just occurred to you?” the doctor asked, as soon as the auto was in motion.
Cunningham raised his fingers to touch the deceptive fabric of his wig, where it covered the healed incision behind his right ear. New hair growth had made a start, and in a month or so the wig could probably be discarded. “Huss tells me that the transmitting device is concealed exactly where we wanted it at the Exchange; it should put me in contact with every corporation that’s traded on the Big Board. But in fact the only ones I’ve been able to feel are those in which I own some stock.”
The doctor relaxed slightly. “And about which you are naturally more concerned. We expected there to be all kinds of psychological interaction with the device.”
“About which you may someday be able to publish.”
“But nothing else bothers you.”
“There’s a . . .” Cunningham hesitated for just a moment. “There’s a certain feeling, hard to describe. Like being spread out, diffused, that’s the best way I can find to put it.”
“You didn’t mention this before.” The doctor’s voice was at once sharp and resigned.
“It’s nothing, I just notice it a little more today. If it should be permanent, well, I can get used to it. Shirley, you should see that chimp in the lab. The device in his skull is just like mine, and it connects him electronically with a machine that delivers food. And he knows infallibly just when and where that next banana is going to fall, and he’s there to grab it every time. Believe me, I’ve got my eye on some ripe bananas already.”
The last signature had just been inked onto the document that transferred twenty thousand hectares of Idaho timberland to Benedict Cunningham, and the transaction electronically recorded for the central data banks as the law required, when he pushed his chair back from the table and uttered a low exclamation.
“All right, Ben?” asked the man who had just sold him the timber.
“Yes, fine.” Cunningham straightened his business collar. As far as he knew, he was all right; it was just that a new sensation had surprised him.
As soon as the timber-dealer had departed, Cunningham phoned the president of the newly formed Macrotron Engineering Company.
“Huss, I’d like you to come over to my office right away.”
“OK?” Carl Huss’s voice was guarded. “Something important?”
“I’m calling you, am I not? Get over here.” He switched off without waiting for a reply.
Cunningham k
new that his order would be obeyed. He had in effect given Macrotron to Huss in payment for the two cybernetic devices and the secret installation of one of them at the Exchange; but, as Huss well knew, Cunningham still held the financial fate of Macrotron in his own masterly hands.
“Have you added anything to the device at the Exchange?” Cunningham demanded, as soon as he was alone with the engineer.
Huss was an electronic genius and a rapid talker, even more nervous and younger than the doctor.
“Of course not. Nothing needs to be added. And If I did want to try out some improvement, I’d certainly tell you about it first.”
“I should hope so.” Cunningham frowned. “I don’t suppose anyone or anything else could be causing interference?”
“The chance of that is so small—” Huss made a gesture of dismissal. “The technicians at the Exchange don’t open up the Board once in six months now, the equipment has become so reliable. And when they do open it, they’ll notice nothing to make them suspicious. I did a good job.”
“All right, then. I just wanted to make sure nothing had changed.”
“What’s gone wrong?”
“Probably nothing.” Cunningham shook his head. “It’s just that I’ve begun feeling things, identifying with things, that aren’t on the Board. Things that have nothing to do with the Stock Exchange.” Huss, unconsciously scowling, thought it over. “That’s not electronically possible.”
“It happens. I bought some timberland today, and the instant I owned it, it was as if a part of myself went there. That’s the only way I can describe it. I can tell that there’s copper under the soil there, a great deal of copper.”
“I don’t understand.” Huss for once spoke slowly. “How can you know a thing like that?”
“I was hoping that you could tell me.” Cunningham shrugged. “It’s the same substance that I see in copper wires, but mixed in with rock and dirt and buried. I just feel it there. How do you know that your toenails are hard and nerveless?”
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