Eleven years was more than half what Rip Van Winkle slept. “Damn it,” I said. “Damn you.” We prize our sleep. The grave rested peacefully among the trees. “Damn you,” I said again, looking up at the sky.
On a snowy Oregon mountainside I was no longer dead.
And yes, Amanda. Yes.
* * *
After changing planes at Albuquerque, we flew into Los Alamos on a small feeder line called Ross Airlines. I’d never flown before on so ancient a DeHavilland Twin Otter, and I hoped never to again; I’d take a Greyhound out of Los Alamos first. The flight attendant and half the other sixteen passengers were throwing up in the turbulence as we approached the mountains. I hadn’t expcted the mountains. I’d assumed Los Alamos would lie in the same sort of southwestern scrub desert surrounding Albuquerque. Instead I found a small city nestled a couple of kilometers up a wooded mountainside.
The pilot’s unruffled voice came on the cabin intercom to announce our imminent landing, the airport temperature, and the fact that Los Alamos has more Ph.Ds per capita than any other American city. “Second only to Akademgorodok,” I said, turning away from the window toward Amanda. The skin wrinkled around her closed eyes. She hadn’t had to use her airsick bag. I had a feeling that despite old friendships, a colleague and husband who was willing to oversee the clinic, the urgency of helping a patient, and the desire to observe an exotic experiment, Amanda might be regretting accompanying me to what she’d termed “the meson factory.”
The Twin Otter made a landing approach like a strafing run and then we were down. As we taxied across the apron I had a sudden sensation of déjà vu: the time a year ago when a friend had flown me north in a Cessna. The airport in Los Alamos looked much like the civil air terminal at Sea-Tac where I’d met the Seattle poet. It happened that we were both in line at the snack counter. I’d commented on her elaborate Haida-styled medallion. We took the same table and talked; it turned out she’d heard of me.
“I really admire your stuff,” she said.
So much for my ideal poet using only precise images. Wry thought. She was – is – a first-rate poet. I rarely think of her as anything but “the poet from Seattle.” Is that kind of depersonalization a symptom?
Amanda opened her eyes, smiled wanly, said, “I could use a doctor.” The flight attendant cracked the door and thin New Mexican mountain air revived us both.
* * *
Most of the New Mexico Meson Physics Facility was buried beneath a mountain ridge. Being guest journalist as well as experimental subject, I think we were given a more exhaustive tour than would be offered most patients and their doctors. Everything I saw made me think of expensive sets for vintage science-fiction movies: the interior of the main accelerator ring, glowing eggshell white and curving away like the space-station corridors in 2001; the linac and booster areas; the straightaway tunnel to the meson medical channel; the five-meter bubble chamber looking like some sort of time machine.
I’d visited both FermiLab in Illinois and CERN in Geneva, so I had a general idea of what the facilities were all about. Still I had a difficult time trying to explain to Amanda the Alice in Wonderland mazes that constituted high energy physics. But then so did Delaney, the young woman who was the liaison biophysicist for my treatment. It became difficult sorting out the mesons, pions, hadrons, leptons, baryons, J’s, fermions and quarks, and such quantum qualities as strangeness, color, baryonness and charm. Especially charm, that ephemeral quality accounting for why certain types of radioactive decay should happen, but don’t. I finally bogged down in the midst of quarks, antiquarks, charmed quarks, neoquarks, and quarklets.
Some wag had set a sign on the visitors’ reception desk in the administration center reading: Charmed to meet you. “It’s a joke, right?” said Amanda tentatively.
“It probably won’t get any funnier,” I said.
Delaney, who seemed to load every word with deadly earnestness, didn’t laugh at all. “Some of the technicians think it’s funny. I don’t.”
We rehashed the coming treatment endlessly. Optimistically I took notes for the book: The primary problem with a radiological approach to the treatment of cancer is that hard radiation not only kills the cancerous cells, it also irradiates the surrounding healthy tissue. But in the mid-nineteen-seventies, cancer researchers found a more promising tool: shaped beams of subatomic particles which can be selectively focused on the tissue of tumors.
Delaney had perhaps two decades on Amanda; being younger seemed to give her a perverse satisfaction in playing the pedagogue. “Split atomic nuclei on a small scale –”
“Small?” said Amanda innocently.
“– smaller than a fission bomb. Much of the binding force of the nucleus is miraculously transmuted to matter.”
“Miraculously?” said Amanda. I looked up at her from the easy cushion shot I was trying to line up on the green velvet. The three of us were playing rotation in the billiards annex of the NMMPF recreation lounge.
“Uh,” said Delaney, the rhythm of her lecture broken. “Physics shorthand.”
“Reality shorthand,” I said, not looking up from the cue now. “Miracles are as exact a quality as charm.”
Amanda chuckled. “That’s all I wanted to know.”
The miracle pertinent to my case was atomic glue, mesons, one of the fission-formed particles. More specifically, my miracle was the negatively charged pion, a subclass of meson. Electromagnetic fields could focus pions into a controllable beam and fire it into a particular target – me.
“There are no miracles in physics,” said Delaney seriously. “I used the wrong term.”
I missed my shot. A gentle stroke, and gently the cue ball rolled into the corner pocket, missing the eleven. I’d set things up nicely, if accidentally, for Amanda.
She assayed the table and smiled. “Don’t come unglued.”
“That’s very good,” I said. Atomic glue does become unstuck, thanks to pions’ unique quality. When they collide and are captured by the nucleus of another atom, they reconvert to pure energy; a tiny nuclear explosion.
Amanda missed her shot too. The corners of Delaney’s mouth curled in a small gesture of satisfaction. She leaned across the table, hands utterly steady. “Multiply pions, multiply target nuclei, and you have a controlled aggregate explosion releasing considerably more energy than the entering pion beam. Hah!”
She sank the eleven and twelve; then ran the table. Amanda and I exchanged glances. “Rack ’em up,” said Delaney.
“Your turn,” Amanda said to me.
In my case the NMMPF medical channel would fire a directed pion beam into my recalcitrant prostate. If all went as planned, the pions intercepting the atomic nuclei of my cancer cells would convert back into energy in a series of atomic flares. The cancer cells being more sensitive, tissue damage should be restricted, localized in my cancerous nodule.
Thinking of myself as a nuclear battlefield in miniature was wondrous. Thinking of myself as a new Stagg Field or an Oak Ridge was ridiculous.
Delaney turned out to be a pool shark par excellence. Winning was all-important and she won every time. I decided to interpret that as a positive omen.
* * *
“It’s time,” Amanda said.
“You needn’t sound as though you’re leading a condemned man to the electric chair.” I tied the white medical smock securely about me, pulled on the slippers.
“I’m sorry. Are you worried?”
“Not so long as Delaney counts me as part of the effort toward a Nobel Prize.”
“She’s good.” Her voice rang too hollow in the sterile tiled room. We walked together into the corridor.
“Me, I’m bucking for a Kalinga Prize,” I said.
Amanda shook her head. Cloudy hair played about her face. “I’ll just settle for a positive prognosis for my patient.” Beyond the door, Delaney and two technicians with a gurney waited for me.
* * *
There is a state beyond indignity that define
s being draped naked on my belly over a bench arrangement, with my rear spread and facing the medical channel. Rigidly clamped, a ceramic target tube opened a separate channel through my anus to the prostate. Monitoring equipment and shielding shut me in. I felt hot and vastly uncomfortable. Amanda had shot me full of chemicals, not all of whose names I’d recognized. Now dazed, I couldn’t decide which of many discomforts was the most irritating.
“Good luck,” Amanda had said. “It’ll be over before you know it.” I’d felt a gentle pat on my flank.
I thought I heard the phasing-up whine of electrical equipment. I could tell my mind was closing down for the duration; I couldn’t even remember how many billion electron volts were about to route a pion beam up my backside. I heard sounds I couldn’t identify; perhaps an enormous metal door grinding shut.
My brain swam free in a chemical river; I waited for something to happen.
I thought I heard machined ball bearings rattling down a chute; no, particles screaming past the giant bending magnets into the medical channel at three hundred thousand kilometers per second; flashing toward me through the series of adjustable filters; slowing, slowing, losing energy as they approach; then through the final tube and into my body.
Inside …
The pion sails the inner atomic seas for a relativistically finite time. Then the perspective inhabited by one is inhabited by two. The pion drives toward the target nucleus. At a certain point the pion is no longer a pion; what was temporarily matter transmutes back to energy. The energy flares, expands, expends, and fades. Other explosions detonate in the spaces within the patterns underlying larger patterns.
Darkness and light interchange.
The light coalesces into a ball; massive, hot, burning against the darkness. Pierced, somehow stricken, the ball begins to collapse in upon itself. Its internal temperature climbs to a critical level. At six hundred million degrees, carbon nuclei fuse. Heavier elements form. When the fuel is exhausted, the ball collapses further; again the temperature is driven upward; again heavier elements form and are in turn consumed. The cycle repeats until the nuclear furnace manufactures iron. No further nuclear reaction can be triggered; the heart’s fire is extinguished. Without the outward balance of fusion reaction, the ball initiates the ultimate collapse. Heat reaches one hundred billion degrees. Every conceivable nuclear reaction is consummated.
The ball explodes in a final convulsive cataclysm. Its energy flares, fades, is eaten by entropy. The time it took is no more than the time it takes Sol-light to reach and illuminate the Earth.
* * *
“How do you feel?” Amanda leaned into my field of vision, eclipsing the fluorescent rings overhead.
“Feel?” I seemed to be talking through a mouthful of cotton candy.
“Feel.”
“Compared to what?” I said.
She smiled. “You’re doing fine.”
“I had one foot on the accelerator,” I said.
She looked puzzled, then started to laugh. “It’ll wear off soon.” She completed her transit and the lights shone back in my face.
“No hand on the brake,” I mumbled. I began to giggle. Something pricked my arm.
* * *
I think Delaney wanted to keep me under observation in New Mexico until the anticipated ceremonies in Stockholm; I didn’t have time for that. I suspected none of us did. Amanda began to worry about my moody silences; she ascribed them at first to my medication and then to the two weeks’ tests Delaney and her colleagues were inflicting on me.
“To hell with this,” I said. “We’ve got to get out of here.” Amanda and I were alone in my room.
“What?”
“Give me a prognosis.”
She smiled. “I think you may as well shoot for the Kalinga.”
“Maybe.” I quickly added, “I’m not a patient anymore; I’m an experimental subject.”
“So what do we do about it?”
We exited NMMPF under cover of darkness and struggled a half-kilometer through brush to the highway. There we hitched a ride into town.
“This is crazy,” said Amanda, picking thistle out of her sweater.
“It avoids a strong argument,” I said as we neared the lights of Los Alamos.
The last bus of the day had left. I wanted to wait until morning. Over my protests, we flew out on Ross Airlines. “Doctor’s orders,” said Amanda, teeth tightly together, as the Twin Otter bumped onto the runway.
* * *
I dream of pions. I dream of colored balloons filled with hydrogen, igniting and flaming up in the night. I dream of Lisa’s newsprint face. Her smile is both proud and sorrowful.
* * *
Amanda had her backlog of patients and enough to worry about, so I took my nightmares to Jackie Denton at the observatory. I told her of my hallucinations in the accelerator chamber. We stared at each other across the small office.
“I’m glad you’re better, Nick, but –”
“That’s not it,” I said. “Remember how you hated my article about poetry glorifying the new technology? Too fanciful?” I launched into speculation, mixing with abandon pion beams, doctors, supernovas, irrational statistics, cancerous nodes, fire balloons and gods.
“Gods?” she said. “Gods? Are you going to put that in your next column?”
I nodded.
She looked as though she were inspecting a newly found-out psychopath. “No one needs that in the press now, Nick. The whole planet’s upset already. The possibility of nova radiation damaging the ozone layer, the potential for genetic damage, all that’s got people spooked.”
“It’s only speculation.”
She said, “You don’t yell ‘Fire!’ in a crowded theater.”
“Or in a crowded world?”
Her voice was unamused. “Not now.”
“And if I’m right?” I felt weary. “What about it?”
“A supernova? No way. Sol simply doesn’t have the mass.”
“But a nova?” I said.
“Possibly,” she said tightly. “But it shouldn’t happen for a few billion years. Stellar evolution –”
“– is theory,” I said. “Shouldn’t isn’t won’t. Tonight look again at that awesome sky.”
Denton said nothing.
“Could you accept a solar flare? A big one?”
I read the revulsion in her face and knew I should stop talking; but I didn’t. “Do you believe in God? Any god?” She shook her head. I had to get it all out. “How about concentric universes, one within the next like Chinese carved ivory spheres?” Her face went white. “Pick a card,” I said, “any card. A wild card.”
“God damn you, shut up.” On the edge of her desk, her knuckles were as white as her lips.
“Charming,” I said, ignoring the incantatory power of words, forgetting what belief could cost. I do not think she deliberately drove her Lotus off the Peak road. I don’t want to believe that. Surely she was coming to join me.
Maybe, she’d said.
* * *
Nightmares should be kept home. So here I stand on my sundeck at high noon for the Earth. No need to worry about destruction of the ozone layer and the consequent skin cancer. There will be no problem with mutational effects and genetic damage. I need not worry about deadlines or contractual commitments. I regret that no one will ever read my book about pion therapy.
All that – maybe.
The sun shines bright – The tune plays dirgelike in my head.
Perhaps I am wrong. The flare may subside. Maybe I am not dying. No matter.
I wish Amanda were with me now, or that I were at Jackie Denton’s bedside, or even that I had time to walk to Lisa’s grave among the pines. Now there is no time.
At least I’ve lived as long as I have now by choice.
That’s the secret, Nick …
The glare illuminates the universe.
HOWARD WALDROP
The Ugly Chickens
Howard Waldrop has been called “the residen
t Weird Mind of his generation,” and he has one of the most individual and quirky voices (and visions) in letters today. Nobody but Howard could possibly have written one of Howard’s stories; in most cases, nobody but Howard could possibly have even thought of them. Nor is any one Waldrop story ever much like any previous Waldrop story, and in that respect (as well as in the panache and pungency of the writing, the sweep of imagination, and the depth of offbeat erudition), he resembles those other two great uniques, R. A. Lafferty and Avram Davidson. And, like them, in a climate where the familiar is desirable and originality is viewed with suspicion, if not with outright fear, he remains seriously underappreciated, while writers inferior in mind and skill and heart march on to garner the big bucks, and the audiences of millions.
Waldrop’s first story was sold to John W. Campbell in 1970, and appeared in Analog in 1972, but, like Kate Wilhelm before him, Waldrop made an unlikely Analog writer, and soon was seen no more in its pages. He began cropping up here and there instead, Universe, Galaxy, during the first few years of the ’70s, and even published a novel (The Texas-Israeli War, co-authored with Jake Saunders – interesting, but uneven), but to no great effect. His remained one of those names that were vaguely in the air during the early part of the decade, new writers whom you would hear of now and then, but who had yet to really make a mark. That would change in 1976, the year when the first of the really good Waldrop stories started coming out, “Mary Margaret Road-Grader” and (in collaboration with Steven Utley) “Custer’s Last Jump,” work a quantum jump better than anything that he’d done before. From then on, he’d produce some of the best short work of the ’70s and ’80s, stories like “God’s Hooks,” “Flying Saucer Rock & Roll,” “Ike at the Mike,” “Save a Place in the Lifeboat for Me,” “Man Mountain Gentian,” “Fair Game,” “The Lions Are Asleep This Night,” “Heirs of the Perisphere,” “He-We-Await,” “Do Ya, Do Ya Wanna Dance?,” “Night of the Cooters.”
And the story that follows, “The Ugly Chickens,” one of only two SF stories about dodos that I can call to mind (I leave the identity of the other story as an exercise for the reader), and perhaps one of the single best stories of the ’80s.
Modern Classics of Science Fiction Page 53