Not billions. Hundreds of billions. Even the T word was beginning to crop up in the news. I’m an accountant, and still these were numbers beyond meaning. Down a black hole? Sure. Why not.
But look who I was talking to: A man who hadn’t claimed a personal exemption for his youngest child. Maybe that was too much to ask. Alistair, Jr., was only four. The boy hadn’t had long to make an impression.
Winkler smiled uncertainly at my little joke, then frowned. His eyes glazed over. I mean, I knew by then that he marched to a different drummer—but suddenly it seemed like the drummer resided on Pluto. Alistair’s pen started flying over a scrap of paper, which happened to be the back of a receipt. He shushed me when I cleared my throat.
As abruptly as Winkler had left planet Earth, he returned. “Why yes,” Alistair said, “I do have a theory about the mortgage mess.”
* * * *
They make the best piña coladas here in the islands. It must be the fresh coconut milk. Or the lack of extradition. Now, where was I?
Ah, yes. Straight from my chat with Alistair, I began investigating new office space. I sold my car and pawned my office furniture to do it, but—just barely—I signed a lease on a small office only two floors above the main branch of Great Big First American Federal Trust Savings Bank. That isn’t exactly the name. After so many mergers, no bank’s name made sense. The bank with the cute cartoon eagle in their ads.
Name notwithstanding, the depositors had lost their trust and feared for their savings. The bank was hemorrhaging cash. I knew the feeling, but that wasn’t why I wanted this lease.
To the horror of my new landlord, I hunkered down in my unfurnished office. I had barely scraped together enough money to move in. This had to work—and fast.
The universe failed to share my sense of urgency. I hate that in a universe.
Days later, dispirited, I needed reassurance. Or clarification. Or electroshock. I arranged to visit Alistair at his house to discuss his returns. Even he might have noticed the barrenness of my office. A dead fern would.
Casually, in the middle of a discussion about his itemizable deductions, I asked, “So everything is quantum mechanical? I’m not sure what that means.”
He tugged pensively at his hair, and the resemblance to Einstein increased a bit. “Okay, try this. To you and me, matter looks like it’s made of stuff—particles, but matter also has a wave nature.
“A particle’s position is described by a probability function that resembles the mathematical description of a water wave. The particle isn’t at any one location with certainty; instead it has some probability of being anywhere. Until you measure it. Then it has to be someplace, of course.”
Those two abused words again: of course. Did Winkler ever say anything to which the phrase applied? I nodded.
“Naturally the probability is highest that a particle will be where you expect it—that is, at the crest of the wave. Still, there is a probability that the particle will turn up elsewhere.”
Like receipts escaping the shoebox, I thought. Alistair swore he had had lots more receipts.
Alistair brightened as an example occurred to him. “The particles that comprise an atomic nucleus lack the energy to escape from the forces that bind them. Only the particles don’t know that.”
“Huh,” I contributed. So much for clarification. Or reassurance.
Alistair gestured grandly. “Think of a bullet shot into the air. It’s too slow to overcome Earth’s gravity, so it falls back. In the same way, there are forces that won’t let a particle escape from a nucleus. Still…”
We were circling around to our conversation of the other day, if not by a route as mundane as a circle. Maybe that was because Winkler grooved on tiny, wrapped-up-on-themselves, invisibly small dimensions. Seven or eight of them? Don’t ask me.
“Still?” I prompted hopefully.
Alistair nodded. “There is a low but real probability that the particle exists outside the nucleus. That’s why, occasionally, a particle simply appears far away. The farther away, the less likely, of course. Given enough atoms, and enough time, things will escape by quantum tunneling. Not that there are tunnels, of course.”
Of course, twice.
Alistair didn’t see me flinch. He was on a roll. “That’s radiation. That’s how a plutonium atom turns spontaneously into uranium. Its nucleus emits an alpha particle.”
“Really?” I asked. Double-declining-balance depreciation, I got, and the alternative minimum tax. But this?
“Oh, yes. That’s why there is virtually no naturally occurring plutonium on Earth. Over the eons, almost all of it has decayed into uranium.”
“And everything behaves quantum mechanically,” I said, tapping a Schedule B with my pencil, not much liking the skepticism in my voice. My car hadn’t been much, but I missed it. What the hell had I done? “Stuff shows up in places it can’t get.”
“If it’s made of atoms, it does,” Alistair said firmly. “It’s all only a matter of probability. Trust me on this.”
“I do,” I lied.
But soon I would believe. My office, when I returned that evening, thinking about measuring positions and about tunnels that weren’t—
Brimmed with cash. Made of atoms.
The next day, the feds took over Great Big First American Federal Trust Savings Bank.
* * * *
I’m as human as the next guy, so, yeah, it occasionally bothers me that I don’t precisely understand where my money came from. Precision is overrated.
Let me tell you a story.
This high-school class is holding its twenty-fifth reunion. Naturally everyone is checking out everyone else. There’s this one guy who no one recognizes: the guy who drove up in the new Jaguar, wearing the Italian suit. The ballroom buzzes with speculation until the class president works up his nerve to ask. “I’m sorry, my friend,” Prez says, “but I can’t place you. Are you sure you’re at the right reunion?”
The mystery guest smiles condescendingly. “To be honest, I dropped out before graduation. Maybe I should leave.”
Prez takes another look at that two-thousand-dollar suit and starts sucking up. Mr. Most Likely To Succeed hadn’t. “No, no. Anyone who attended Jefferson is welcome. Now what’s your name again?”
To make a long story short—if it’s not too late—the rich guy no one can place was the class dummy, and he’s made a fortune in the restaurant business. The class president swallows hard and asks, “How did you do it? I’ve heard profit margins are very thin at restaurants.”
“Oh they are,” agrees the dummy. “I only make ten percent.”
Prez is incredulous, remembering the Jag. “Ten percent?”
“That’s right. I buy a steak for five dollars and sell it for fifty dollars.”
I understand the ten percent that I need to, too.
THE DEVOTEE OF EVIL, by Clark Ashton Smith
The old Larcom house was a mansion of considerable size and dignity, set among oaks and cypresses on the hill behind Auburn’s Chinatown, in what had once been the aristocratic section of the village. At the time of which I write, it had been unoccupied for several years and had begun to present the signs of desolation and dilapidation which untenanted houses so soon display. The place had a tragic history and was believed to be haunted. I had never been able to procure any first-hand or precise accounts of the spectral manifestations that were accredited to it. But certainly it possessed all the necessary antecedents of a haunted house. The first owner, Judge Peter Larcom, had been murdered beneath its roof back in the seventies by a maniacal Chinese cook; one of his daughters had gone insane; and two other members of the family had died accidental deaths. None of them had prospered: their legend was one of sorrow and disaster.
Some later occupants, who had purchased the place from the one surviving son of Peter Larcom, had left under circu
mstances of inexplicable haste after a few months, moving permanently to San Francisco. They did not return even for the briefest visit; and beyond paying their taxes, they gave no attention whatever to the place. Everyone had grown to think of it as a sort of historic ruin, when the announcement came that it had been sold to Jean Averaud, of New Orleans.
* * * *
My first meeting with Averaud was strangely significant, for it revealed to me, as years of acquaintance would not necessarily have done, the peculiar bias of his mind. Of course, I had already heard some odd rumors about him; his personality was too signal, his advent too mysterious, to escape the usual fabrication and mongering of village tales. I had been told that he was extravagantly rich, that he was a recluse of the most eccentric type, that he had made certain very singular changes in the inner structure of the old house; and last, but not least, that he lived with a beautiful mulatress who never spoke to anyone and who was believed to be his mistress as well as his housekeeper. The man himself had been described to me by some as an unusual but harmless lunatic, and by others as an all-round Mephistopheles.
I had seen him several times before our initial meeting. He was a sallow, saturnine Creole, with the marks of race in his hollow cheeks and feverish eyes. I was struck by his air of intellect, and by the fiery fixity of his gaze — the gaze of a man who is dominated by one idea to the exclusion of all else. Some medieval alchemist, who believed himself to be on the point of attaining his objective after years of unrelenting research, might have looked as he did.
I was in the Auburn library one day, when Averaud entered. I had taken a newspaper from one of the tables and was reading the details of an atrocious crime — the murder of a woman and her two infant children by the husband and father, who had locked his victims in a clothes-closet, after saturating their garments with oil. He had left the woman’s apron-string caught in the shut door, with the end protruding, and had set fire to it like a fuse.
Averaud passed the table where I was reading. I looked up, and saw his glance at the headlines of the paper I held. A moment later he returned and sat down beside me, saying in a low voice:
“What interests me in a crime of that sort, is the implication of unhuman forces behind it. Could any man, on his own initiative, have conceived and executed anything so gratuitously fiendish?”
“I don’t know,” I replied, somewhat surprised by the question and by my interrogator. “There are terrifying depths in human nature — more abhorrent than those of the jungle.”
“I agree. But how could such impulses, unknown to the most brutal progenitors of man, have been implanted in his nature, unless through some ulterior agency?”
“You believe, then, in the existence of an evil force or entity — a Satan or an Ahriman?”
“I believe in evil — how can I do otherwise when I see its manifestations everywhere? I regard it as an all-controlling power; but I do not think that the power is personal in the sense of what we know as personality. A Satan? No. What I conceive is a sort of dark vibration, the radiation of a black sun, of a center of malignant eons — a radiation that can penetrate like any other ray — and perhaps more deeply. But probably I don’t make my meaning clear at all.”
I protested that I understood him; but, after his burst of communicativeness, he seemed oddly disinclined to pursue the conversation. Evidently he had been prompted to address me; and no less evidently, he regretted having spoken with so much freedom. He arose; but before leaving, he said:
“I am Jean Averaud — perhaps you have heard of me. You are Philip Hastane, the novelist. I have read your books and I admire them. Come and see me sometime — we may have certain tastes in common.”
Averaud’s personality, the conception he had avowed, and the intense interest and value which he so obviously attached to these conceptions, made a singular impression on my mind, and I could not forget him. When, a few days later, I met him on the street and he repeated his invitation with a cordialness that was unfeignedly sincere, I could do no less than accept. I was interested, though not altogether attracted, by his bizarre, well-nigh morbid individuality, and was impelled by a desire to learn more concerning him. I sensed a mystery of no common order — a mystery with elements of the abnormal and the uncanny.
The grounds of the old Larcom place were precisely as I remembered them, though I had not found occasion to pass them for some time. They were a veritable tangle of Cherokee rose-vines, arbutus, lilac, ivy and crepe-myrtle, half overshadowed by the great cypresses and somber evergreen oaks. There was a wild, half-sinister charm about them — the charm of rampancy and ruin. Nothing had been done to put the place in order, and there were no outward repairs in the house itself, where the white paint of bygone years was being slowly replaced by mosses and lichens that flourished beneath the eternal umbrage of the trees. There were signs of decay in the roof and pillars of the front porch; and I wondered why the new owner, who was reputed to be so rich, had not already made the necessary restorations.
I raised the gargoyle-shaped knocker and let it fall with a dull, lugubrious clang. The house remained silent; and I was about to knock again, when the door opened slowly and I saw for the first time the mulatress of whom so many village rumors had reached me.
The woman was more exotic than beautiful, with fine, mournful eyes and bronze-colored features of a semi-negroid irregularity. Her figure, though, was truly perfect, with the curving lines of a lyre and the supple grace of some feline animal. When I asked for Jean Averaud, she merely smiled and made signs for me to enter. I surmised at once that she was dumb.
Waiting in the gloomy library to which she conducted me, I could not refrain from glancing at the volumes with which the shelves were congested. They were an ungodly jumble of tomes that dealt with anthropology, ancient religions, demonology, modern science, history, psychoanalysis and ethics. Interspersed with these were a few romances and volumes of poetry. Beausobre’s monograph on Manichaeism was flanked with Byron and Poe; and “Les Fleurs du Mal” jostled a late treatise on chemistry.
Averaud entered, after several minutes, apologizing profusely for his delay. He said that he had been in the midst of certain labors when I came; but he did not specify the nature of these labors. He looked even more hectic and fiery-eyed than when I had seen him last. He was patently glad to see me, and eager to talk.
“You have been looking at my books,” he observed immediately. “Though you might not think so at first glance, on account of their seeming diversity, I have selected them all with a single object: the study of evil in all its aspects, ancient, medieval and modern. I have traced it in the religions and demonologies of all peoples; and, more than this, in human history itself. I have found it in the inspiration of poets and romancers who have dealt with the darker impulses, emotion and acts of man. Your novels have interested me for this reason: you are aware of the baneful influences which surround us, which so often sway or actuate us. I have followed the working of these agencies even in chemical reactions, in the growth and decay of trees, flowers, minerals. I feel that the processes of physical decomposition, as well as the similar mental and moral processes, are due entirely to them.
“In brief, I have postulated a monistic evil, which is the source of all death, deterioration, imperfection, pain, sorrow, madness and disease. This evil, so feebly counteracted by the powers of good, allures and fascinates me above all things. For a long time past, my life-work has been to ascertain its true nature, and trace it to its fountain-head. I am sure that somewhere in space there is the center from which all evil emanates.”
He spoke with a wild air of excitement, of morbid and semi-maniacal intensity. His obsession convinced me that he was more or less unbalanced; but there was an unholy logic in the development of his ideas; and I could not but recognize a certain disordered brilliancy and range of intellect.
Scarcely waiting for me to reply, he continued his monologue:
“I have learned that certain localities and buildings, certain arrangements of natural or artificial objects, are more favorable to the reception of evil influences than others. The laws that determine the degree of receptivity are still obscure to me; but at least I have verified the fact itself. As you know, there are houses or neighborhoods notorious for a succession of crimes or misfortunes; and there are also articles, such as certain jewels, whose possession is accompanied by disaster. Such places and things are receivers of evil… I have a theory, however, that there is always more or less interference with the direct flow of the malignant force; and that pure, absolute evil has never yet been manifested.
“By the use of some device which would create a proper field or form a receiving station, it should be possible to evoke this absolute evil. Under such conditions, I am sure that the dark vibration would become a visible and tangible thing, comparable to light or electricity.” He eyed me with a gaze that was disconcertingly exigent. Then:
“I will confess that I have purchased this old mansion and its grounds mainly on account of their baleful history. The place is unusually liable to the influences of which I have spoken. I am now at work on an apparatus by means of which, when it is perfected, I hope to manifest in their essential purity the radiations of malign force.”
At this moment, the mulatress entered and passed through the room on some household errand. I thought that she gave Averaud a look of maternal tenderness, watchfulness and anxiety. He, on his part seemed hardly to be aware of her presence, so engrossed was he in the strange ideas and the stranger project he had been expounding. However, when she had gone, he remarked:
“That is Fifine, the one human being who is really attached to me. She is mute, but highly intelligent and affectionate. All my people, an old Louisiana family, are long departed…and my wife is doubly dead to me.” A spasm of obscure pain contracted his features, and vanished. He resumed his monologue; and at no future time did he again refer to the presumably tragic tale at which he had hinted: a tale in which, I sometimes suspect, were hidden the seeds of the strange moral and mental perversion which he was to manifest more and more.
The Mad Scientist Megapack Page 31