Mad Science Cafe

by Ross, Deborah J.

  I thought I saw someone following us—and who would it be other than Professor Beeber?—but when I turned, nobody was there.

  The library was closed. Myna and I slipped beneath the door into the gloomy halls. Rats chittered. Decay shifted in the walls like sand across a wind-swept desert.

  “You wanna be the lookout?” I asked.

  “No way I’m staying here alone.” Myna rolled closer to me, and somehow, her flesh comforted me and bolstered my flagging confidence.

  It was easy for me to access the university computer. I sent a digital wave across the bookstacks and into the terminal, scanned the files, and quickly found what I needed. “The Necronomicon is in the basement,” I said.

  “Figures,” said Myna.

  With our legs tucked into our flesh, we rolled through the musty corridors and between the high, teetering book stacks. Gray steel shelves. Peeling yellow tomes. The Magazine of Comparative Cabalistic Disorders. The Philosophy of Digestive Enzymes.

  A red neon sign: EXIT (AT YOUR OWN RISK). An arrow pointing down.

  “Basement stairs,” whispered Myna.

  Huddled together, our fat masses oozing and curling slightly around each other, we peered down the cracked stone stairway.

  “Perhaps we should give this up, Glume, go back to Beeber’s lab.”

  My fat sprang from her body. Electricity pierced my flanks. “Never! That lab is death! I want to find chaos, Myna. I must find it. I must show Beeber that we are creatures, that we are intelligent, that we deserve life.”

  Far away, a door slammed.

  Myna and I flew back into each other’s fat.

  The rats stopped chittering.

  Shoes—perhaps black vinyl shoes—squished the floor.

  “Beeber!” cried Myna, and we flew from the landing and bounced three steps at a time into the black basement. At the bottom, we rolled quickly into deeper shadows and listened.

  A reed of light played on the bottom stair.

  Shoes squishing…

  …down one stair, now another…

  Beeber: “I know you’re down there, little Glume and baby Myna. I’ve wandered the streets of Arkham all night, looking for you. Finally, I saw you and followed you here. Please come back to me. Please. I’m nothing without you. My life is my work. You are my life.”

  We scuttled in blackness behind the cold steel limbs of the shelves. My head was whirling in a sea of must and mold and mildew.

  And behind us: Professor Beeber, his flashlight playing on his cheeks as a beam plays on the striated cheek of a cave wall. “Please, I won’t hurt you, I promise. I won’t punish you for this. I only want you back.”

  His eyes were soft and teary; and yet, life in Beeber’s lab was hell.

  My voice squeaked. “No. We can’t return.”

  Beeber’s eyes sharpened and reflected the light. He shuffled toward me.

  I wanted to run, but I had to face him, had to make him understand.

  And now he stood before me. His hand slowly reached—

  I bounced back…far enough to see his fingers close around the air before my eyeslits. Fingers: trembling and thin. Fingers tightening into a fist, then retreating to his thigh.

  He said: “Glume, my wife left me years ago. We had no children. I have nobody, Glume, and I have nothing…nothing but you and Myna.”

  “But you tortured us. With your scalpels and knives, with your nutrient trays and binding straps, with all those boring programs.”

  He stooped. The hair on his head was thin; a pouf of dandelion dust. He stroked my posterior humps. His eyes watered. “You don’t understand. I never thought that you would leave me. I never thought you could escape. I never realized the depth of your frustration and pain. But now, I see that without you, I’m nothing, and to keep you, I must treat you with compassion and kindness.”

  The flashlight lay upon the floor and from its halo stepped Myna.

  “I won’t hurt you. You have to come back,” said Beeber.

  “Maybe he’s not so bad after all. Maybe he can help us.” Myna’s fat molecular circuitry made her soft, more accepting, more willing to forgive.

  That’s when I decided to take a chance on Beeber. And so I made a big mistake. I told Beeber about Witch House. Had I known at the time what disasters lay ahead, I never would have told him anything.

  The three of us made our way to the back of the basement, where we found a large metal vault, which disgorged piles of papers and molding texts. The Professor dug through the rot and pulled forth the worm-riddled Necronomicon.

  I used my vocal tubule to flip the pages. “This is the John Dee English translation. Won’t do. I need the original text, Professor. And I don’t mean the Olaus Wormius Latin translation. I mean the original Arabic written by Abdul Alhazred.”

  Beeber’s flashlight probed the vault, and then he pulled out another copy of the ancient text; this time, the Arabic version, and my tubule shook just to flip the pages.

  For here were letters just like the ones in the subterranean pit beneath Witch House. Ancient Hebraic symbols: the backwards C was a mutated form of Bet, pictographic symbol for creation, diversity, and a place to lodge. I looked at Myna, now perched on top of a shelf. “Creation, as in species evolution. Diversity, as in the paths of infinite chaos. And the place to lodge: the place where chaos dwells.”

  “What’s next? What are the other symbols, Glume?” She hopped off the shelf onto Beeber’s bald head. Her coiled legs drooped over his eyes like locks of kinky hair.

  I riffled through the pages. The hoof: “Ancient Gamol, the letter that symbolizes nourishment of something until it ripens.”

  “Like the nourishment of the weird growths in the subterranean pit,” said Myna.

  “Exactly.” I riffled some more and found the final character that was molded in slime over the arch. “And the one I thought was a right angle: the Dalet, an open doorway…into what, I wonder. Hmmm, says here that the ancient Dalet has the numeric value of four and that the metaphysical world has four parts that flow into the physical world.”

  Beeber said, “Yes, the four parts that represent the various stages of holiness. Perhaps, Glume, you have found the bottom part, the least holy of them all, the place where hell meets reality, where Azathoth sits on his black throne in the center of chaos.”

  “It says here that Azathoth is a mindless puppet. There is no order to him, no reason, no true power. He’s a front man, a public relations guy protecting the real master of chaos.”

  “And who is this real master of chaos?” said Myna.

  “His name is Mandelbrot. Azathoth is just a powerless twit. All I know is that Mandelbrot lives in the pit beneath Witch House, and we have unleashed him upon Arkham. If we kill Mandelbrot, we kill true chaos.”

  I tucked the book back into the vault, swung the door shut. Things were churning in my mind. The way the cyanobacteria waited in the Miskatonic River for something to alter its course. The way the light had thrown the subatomic particles of mold beneath Witch House into orgies of chaotic coupling and decoupling. “Something’s happening here, something very strange. Before it’s too late, Myna, we’d better get back to—”

  “Witch House,” she said.

  o0o

  Daylight inched across the sky like a caterpillar through dirt. Frozen on the stairs of the university library was a young boy. His clothes unraveled, thread by thread, and fell to the cement. Leaves floated from the pavement to the trees.

  Coating everything: spores of ancient molds; shadows of spent time vibrating against intoxicating prisms of potential futures; festering pustules of bacteria and greenish gel. A foul sourness. An eerie whine.

  The mold that grew beneath Witch House.

  A rumble, and I turned; and the bricks of the library crumbled to dust. Beeber picked me up, then Myna, and held us close to his chest. His heart was loud and uneven. The dust formed again into bricks, and now the library was lopsided but otherwise looked the same; and then it happened
all over again: the bricks crumbled and reformed, and the library again was a shadow of its former self.

  Myna squirmed in Beeber’s arms. “Let’s get back to Witch House. Let’s do something before the whole world falls apart.”

  Professor Beeber’s fire-glazed face shifted slightly, became hard and deeply lined, somehow more angular. Then his face shifted again, and this time his too-tight grin split and buckteeth protruded from his lips. “If there’s an infinite possibility of things going wrong—and you two have somehow triggered it—then there’s also an infinite possibility of things going right. But how do we trigger whatever it is that makes things go right?”

  I tried to analyze the situation. I funneled particles through my quantum wells and came up with the composition of current reality: “Dense concentration of hadrons, which are decaying quickly into leptons. Strange quarks and charmed quarks combining into new hadrons—”

  And that’s when disaster hit.

  The boy’s feet sprouted roots that drilled through the cement and held him fast to the ground. The trees joined limbs and their roots tap danced across the pavement.

  Beeber dropped us and fell to the pavement, clutching his chest.

  Myna’s skin cracked open. Her blood clotted around the lips of her wounds. I didn’t understand what was happening, I hadn’t finished my calculations. The world was falling apart, and everything I loved was dying. My fat oozed around Myna, and I held her tightly to my humps. Infection bubbled in the deep pocks that riddled her flesh like bullet holes. Her body was hot, her breath faint.

  Yellow flowers twinkled like little suns, then exploded in big bangs. Moisture dripped from Myna’s wounds, the water splitting into hydrogen and oxygen.

  “Help me…” Beeber’s voice; a hiss through toothless gums and flabby lips.

  I slid Myna to the pavement. She moaned.

  I hated to leave her—I hated it!—but someone had to save Beeber.

  I leapt onto his chest and bounced as high as I could. Up and down I went, my footpods suctioned over his heart, my coiled legs stretching to their maximum limit, my body springing wildly up, then crashing down again.

  His face was red, then purple, then blue. His lips gurgled unintelligible words; prayers perhaps to an unknown god.

  “Come on, Beeber, you can’t die!”

  I pounded his heart with my footpods and my body, and then finally, his voice sputtered and rasped a few words that I knew: “Chaos…at last…the proof is in your cells, Glume…the proof…at long last…”

  He struggled to sitting position. His too-tight pants were baggy. His shredded shoe laces were firm leather.

  Chaos everywhere; all my fault. Myna and the Professor were both in danger of losing their lives: all because of me, all because I had to leave the lab and seek the edge of chaos.

  The hell had to end.

  I urged them on, and the three of us staggered toward the Miskatonic River, and beyond that, toward Witch House.

  We passed flowers that smelled like stale cigars. We passed gnarled oaks with human skin. We passed brown mold that sang old show tunes.

  And when we reached the river, Myna gasped. Her molecular circuitry whirled into high gear, her skin pores sniffed the air. I was working at the low levels again, trying to analyze what I saw before me in terms of quarks and tauons and gravitons.

  Filling the Miskatonic River and wobbling a good twenty feet above it was a throbbing mass of pink and purple sponge topped by froth. “What is it?” I asked.

  “A mutation of cyanobacteria. The Witch House mold was the event that triggered the cyanobacteria’s chaos. The mold tried to eat the bacteria. But the bacteria sucked the light from the mold instead, and by doing so, the bacteria mutated.”

  For once, Myna’s fat molecular circuitry was superior to mine. I felt a surge of pride, almost as if I had solved the problem. Myna was quiet, she didn’t display her knowledge very often; but Myna was no fool.

  “How can we get rid of this? What are we to do?” Professor Beeber’s right hand was pressed against his chest, and his breathing was so heavy that I feared for his life.

  Myna said: “Perhaps you should leave this problem to us. Perhaps you should return to your office or…wherever it is that you live…where do you live? I don’t even know.”

  “I have no home. Where I live is just a place. I store my clothes there, my booze. Glume, if I’m going to die, I might as well do it in the embrace of chaos.”

  The sponge in the river belched and wobbled and then erupted in its center, spewing white foam and fruiting stalks into the air.

  If we could go in one direction of chaos, why not in the other?

  Thanks to Myna, I now knew how to get rid of the Witch House molds and the hell I had unleashed upon Miskatonic University.

  I hurried back to Witch House, Myna rolling close behind me and the Professor limping after us with great difficulty. I kept hoping that we would lose him. He was a sick man and further terror could very well push him over the edge into death.

  But as Myna and I popped under the splintered oak door into the toilet from the beginning of time, Beeber’s shoes turned the corner into the alley that led to Witch House, and I knew that he would follow us all the way.

  The hall was filled with greenish gel. The eerie whine, now punctuated by shrieks and laughs, shook the walls and dislodged spiders’ webs and black plaster from the ceiling. The ancient letters meaning “the home and breeding place of chaos” were etched in slime by the radiator.

  I left Myna by the radiator—“Do not let Professor Beeber into the pit, Myna”—and then I slid down the mucous filaments to the rock ledge, and from there down the moss rope into the subterranean guts beneath the house.

  The pit was filled with Sierpinski’s Triangles and other fractal growths, all in shimmering molds of a thousand beautiful colors. I knew I could destroy it. I knew I had to destroy it. And yet…and yet, it was hard to destroy such perfection.

  “Did you know, Glume, that the genetic code is structured for mutation, for chaos?”

  “Who said that?”

  “Why, I did. I am Mandelbrot, Lord Supreme of All Chaos.” The shimmering gelatinous mold parted, and from the opening swept a surge of subatomic particles. Not an entity, not an electric force; just a surge of particles that never should have been together: unstable muons decaying into electrons, bosons spinning with fermions, leptons dancing and coupling and injecting yet new lifeforms into the queer gelatinous mold.

  Something gurgled behind me. I whirled and saw Beeber standing by the moss rope. In his hand was a scalpel.

  Would he never learn?

  “A scalpel won’t help you here!” I cried.

  Beeber’s face was bright red, the veins on his bald head throbbed like the mutated sponge in the Miskatonic River. Sweat saturated his white shirt.

  Mandelbrot laughed. “Listen to your computer, Professor. Scalpels cannot kill the likes of me.”

  Beeber screamed and lunged, the scalpel pointed directly at the hole in the slime from which the voice emanated. And as he hurled his body, he stumbled on his shredded shoe laces and fell into a wad of golden tetrahedrons, which embraced him, multiplied across his face, coated his nose, and suffocated. He slashed wildly at the growths, but the scalpel dug into his own flesh and rivers of bright red blood shot forth and splattered my humps.

  “Fool,” the word a snarl; and then Mandelbrot Moldrot rose as a mountain of squares; each square a picture frame encasing Beeber’s head, each square smaller than the last…smaller…until Beeber’s ears were flat against his scalp and his chin was thrust so tightly against his jaw that he couldn’t part his lips.

  I shut my eyeslits and began snorting the molds into my vocal tubule and through my skin pores. I decomposed the evil rot into quantum particles. And then, remembering how the cyanobacteria had sucked the light from the mold, I also sucked the light from it.

  I sucked the very thing from that evil mold that had triggered its muta
tion. And then I flushed the particles out of my body onto the muddy floor.

  “Stop! Stop it, I say! I am Lord Mandelbrot. I am the Fractal God. I am the Mighty Attractor, the Order that controls the mindless nothing of Azathoth. You cannot kill me. Nothing can kill me.”

  I didn’t respond. I just kept sucking the Mandelbrot Moldrot into my body and drinking its light and then decomposing it into subatomic particles. I worked until Beeber was free. I worked until Mandelbrot stopped screaming. I worked until Mandelbrot was gone and only Azathoth was left, the mindless chaotic nothing that cannot threaten the creatures of Earth or the balance of nature as we know it. Azathoth was chaos without logic and order: chaos without power.

  There, beneath Witch House, where Mandelbrot was strongest, where the mutated mold fed off Mandelbrot’s powers, I destroyed every fragment and every spore of rot. And I knew that, without Mandelbrot, the chaos that consumed Miskatonic University would end.

  Life would return to normal.

  I shoved Beeber up the slide. I sealed the hole behind the radiator using debris and trash. Later, I would stuff the hole with a plug of steel.

  Professor Beeber was slumped by the radiator, scalpel still in his fist. His nose was broken, his cheeks gouged, his face a bloody mess. One ear dangled from the side of his head. “You have proven my life’s work. There is order beneath chaos, and its name is Mandelbrot. You deserve to be Chairman of Miskatonic University’s Department of Quantum Lifeforms. Myna can be your assistant.”

  Myna said, “I may want to do something else with my life, Professor. I think I’ve had enough of chaos.”

  I looked at her. We were so much alike that it scared the hell out of me. And besides, Myna was no assistant; in many ways, she was my superior.

  Dog Star

  Jeffrey A. Carver

  “Don’t you think we’re coming in just a little fast?” asked a husky voice behind Jake in the tiny spaceboat.

  “There’s a critic on every ship,” Jake muttered, without breaking his concentration

  “Just doing my job, I’m just—whooo, that asteroid’s really coming at us!” Jake didn’t argue. The gray, potato-shaped object was indeed getting large quickly—which was exactly according to his plan. Its orbit was less than ideal, and he had only one day to make a survey before it caromed off another asteroid. He wanted to find out: Was it a candidate for mining? Was it worth chasing if it got knocked out of the cluster?