by Anthology
She’s on her feet. “Okay, sport. Enough. Out.” Eddie is taken aback at the power of her extended arm as she hoists him off the desk. He thumps down heavily, barring the door with one leg.
“No, goddamn it. So I sit down beside you and toy with your wonderfully hairy leg. You smile and extend your limbs. I can’t believe it. Up goes my little hand, hoppity-scamp—”
“Shut up, you creep.”
For this, Rostow is utterly unprepared. He gapes.
Jennifer refuses to lower her eyes. Blotches of color stand out on her cheekbones. “You’re right, Rostow, you are a horrible person. Incredibly enough, I once found you rather piquant. Your crass behavior the other night might have been forgivable as whimsy.” In authentic rage she clamps her teeth together and wrenches the door open. “Stay or go as you please.” Then the room is vacant, and Rostow slumps on the desk with his guts spilling out of his wounds and his brain whirling into sawdust and aloes.
The bloody aura is a jolt from one awful dream to another. With iron control he keeps hold of the rabbit and wrenches his head around as vision clears. Three minutes after four. Yet the appalling encounter echoes like a double image, a triple image in fact. His chemistry overloads and he vomits uncontrollably. Finally sourness sweeps away hallucination; he totters to the console and runs the mirror system down to Latent.
Aghast, he tells himself: “Scrub it out. Make it didn’t happen.” Regressing to childhood. His mouth tastes repulsive; he wipes his lips on the back of his hand. I can’t take much more of this, he thinks. The human frame wasn’t meant to handle the strain of dual sets of information. It’d take a Zen roshi to cope with this weirdness. The bitch, the lousy bitch.
But it isn’t Jennifer Barton’s doing. Rostow is doomed by his oafishness. I’ve got to keep away from her. I’d shred myself into a million messy bits. It is clear, though, that he cannot cower forever in the lab with only a canonized rabbit for company. Enough, he tells himself. Out. The clock shows a quarter after four. Cyclic time is slipping away. Down the corridor, unharassed, Jennifer Barton is presumably finalizing her coiffure.
Rostow slams the door, running for the stairs. As he expects, Buonacelli and his claque are milling in the Senior Faculty Bar. Donaldson dispenses whiskies in their midst, jovial, exonerated, cautioning them all to reticence under the rubric of security.
“A wonderful experience, Dr, uh, Rostow?” says one of the directors, a pleasant administrator. Eddie turns convulsively. “I’m Harrison Macintyre, Ford Foundation.” The man holds out his hand. “No problems with funding,” he smiles, “after today.”
“Oh. Thank you. Not ‘doctor’, I’m afraid. I’ve never had time to write anything up.” Stan seems to be explaining how the advanced-wave project sprang fully armed from his professorial brow. Adrenalin begins a fresh surge.
Macintyre puts liquor into his hand and says, “I’ve been wondering about that. Publication, I mean. Surely today wasn’t your first trial with the equipment.”
“No. No, Harrison. Call me Eddie. We knew it was going to work. It’s been operational for some weeks.” Across the russet carpet, Buonacelli is laughing boomingly. “The Nobel Prize for Physics, Stan,” says the senator. “The Nobel Prize for Medicine,” adds a beaming director. “Hot damn,” cries another “they’ll make it a hat trick and give you the Nobel Prize for Literature when your paper comes out.”
Rostow scowls hideously. “Normally we would indeed have published by now, Harrison,” he says loudly. “But after the tachyon fiasco, Professor Donaldson developed some misgivings about shooting his mouth off prematurely, you see.” Faces turn. “You must remember. Every man and his dog was hunting faster-than-light particles. The great physicist spied his chance at glory.” The Ford Foundation man, scandalized, tries to hush him. Eddie drains his glass, gestures for another. “But the professor blew it. His tachyons were actually pickup calls from the Green Cab Company. They snuck in through his Faraday cage. Someone didn’t check that out until after the press conference did we, Stan?”
Donaldson is peering at the half-full glass in Rostow’s grasp; slowly, he allows his gaze to rise until he studies a point somewhere near Eddie’s left ear. “Mr Rostow,” he says from the depths of his soul, “hired hands are rarely invited into this room. Those who gain that privilege generally comport themselves with civility and a due measure of deference. Those who have just been fired without a reference do not linger here under any circumstances. Get out of my sight.”
Jennifer Barton arrives at that moment, smiling, hair lustrous. At the door she hesitates, scanning shocked faces. Their eyes meet. Her presence—oblivious of edited outrage, witness to new humiliation—sends Rostow into a frenzy. He throws down his glass and catches Donaldson by his lapels.
“I wish you wouldn’t shout, Frog-face,” he says, every sinew on fire. “You astounding hypocrite,” he says, jouncing the man back on his heels. “What’s a Nobel Prize or two between hired hands?” he says, thumping Donaldson heavily in the breast. Two or three of the directors have come to their senses by now and grapple with Rostow, dragging him away from his gasping and empurpled victim. “It happens all the time, doesn’t it?” Eddie squirms, kicking at targets of opportunity. “We poor bastards break our asses so some ludicrous discredited figurehead can whiz off to Stockholm to meet the king.”
Even in his own ears, Rostow’s outburst sounds thin, thin. Where righteousness should ring, only a stale peevishness lingers. Tears of anger and mortification star the pendant cut-glass lamps. He breaks free and pushes through business suits. Jennifer stares at him, off balance. “You don’t want to stay with these vultures,” he cries, seizing her arm. It seems that she studies his scarlet face for minutes of silence. With a minimal movement she dislodges his hand.
“Eddie,” she says regretfully, “when are you going to grow up?”
Bitch. Bitch, bitch.
And the bloody aura. He is holding the rabbit, wrenching his head around to check the clock. This time the shock of recurrence is curiously attenuated, as if lunatic hostility sits better than misery with a physiology keyed to fright. Rostow’s heart rattles, catches its beat; the pulse thunders in his neck and wrists. The rabbit struggles free. He moves with Tarquin’s ravishing stride to the console, at a pitch of emotion. Icily he shuts down the mirror system. There are cracks in the concrete where the supports for the magnetic coils are embedded. A faint regular buzzing comes from the fluoros. His skin is crawling, as if each hair on his body is a nipple, erect and preternaturally sensitive. Gagging, he closes the door and paces remorselessly down the corridor.
Jennifer Barton stands on the bottom step of the carved stairs, deflecting Senator Buonacelli’s horseplay. Rostow storms past them. “Hey, boy, that was a great show,” cries the senator. “Why don’t you and this little lady come up and join us in a drink?” Rostow hardly hears the man. His feet are at the ends of his legs. Jennifer’s door is not locked. He leaves it wide for her. Staring out into the afternoon light. Three tall blacks fake and run, dribbling a ball.
“Well, Jambo!” As Eddie faces her, Jennifer is closing the door, meeting him with an infectious smile. “It’s taken you long enough to find my office, sailor.”
“What?” he says, uncomprehending. He pushes her roughly back against the crowded desk and takes her thigh with cruel pressure. Speechless and instantly afraid, she repudiates his hand. He thrusts it higher and tugs at her underwear.
“Let’s pick up where we left off,” he informs her. An absolute chill pervades his flesh. Nothing had prepared him to expect this of himself. Everything he calls himself is outraged, shrunken in loathing at his own actions.
“Stop it,” she says distantly. “You fucking asshole.” Tactically her posture is not favorable; when she drives up her right knee, its bruising force is deflected from his leg. I can have whatever I want. The whole universe is a scourge slashing at my vulnerable back. Very well, let those be the rules. He imagines he is laughing. I have nothing to offer b
ut fear itself. As she begins to scream and batter his neck, his cheek, his temple, he clouts her savagely into semi consciousness. Oh Jesus, you can’t be blamed for what happens during a nightmare. In the absence of causality, Fyodor, all things are permitted. She is bent backward, moving feebly. One of his hands clamps her mouth, hard against her teeth, the other unzips. I’m the Primary Process Man, oh, wow. But he is so cold. There is no blood under his skin. Rostow batters at her thighs with his limp flesh. He slides to his knees. The edge of the desk furrows his nose.
“You,” Jenny grunts. She is blank with detestation. Tenderly, she touches her skull. “You.”
Eddie Rostow lurches upright. Swaying, exposed, he falls into the corridor. The same young student, returning, regards him with astonishment and abhorrence. The boy reaches out a hand, changes his mind and pelts away in search of aid. It is all a grainy picture show, a world-sized monitor screen. They’ll fire him for this. Oh, shit, Jenny, you don’t understand; I love you.
In fugue, Rostow pitches down the corridor.
The cleaver is lying where Donaldson left it on the bench, a ripple of bunny blood standing back from its surgical edge. Rostow’s self-contempt has no bounds. As he lifts the blade, there is one final lucid thought. I’m an animal, he tells himself. We can’t be trusted. The cleaver’s handle slips in his sweating fingers. He tightens his grip and with a kind of concentration brings the thing in a whirling silvery arc into the tilted column of his neck. Shearing through the heavy sterno-mastoid muscle, in one blow it slashes the carotid artery, the internal jugular and the vagus nerve, before it’s stopped by the banded cartilage of the trachea. He scarcely feels his flesh open: all pain is in the intolerable impact. A brilliant crimson jet spears and spatters, but Rostow fails to see it: he collapses in shock, and the fluid pulses out of his torpid body until he is dead.
His corpse lies cooling until half a minute after 4:37.
A dizzying aura of bloody light spangled with pinpoints of imploding radiance momentarily blinds him.
Rostow screams.
There is nothing banal in this plunge upward into instantaneous rebirth. It is overwhelming. It is transcendental. It is a jackhammer on Rostow’s soul.
Like a thousand micrograms of White Lightning, life detonates every cell of his brain and body. He has been to hell, and died afterwards. Let me stay dead. Let me be dead.
Catharsis purges him of every thought. Eddie cradles the white rabbit in his arms and sobs his heart out.
At length he is sufficiently composed to reflect: I never cried when Tania left. Everything wise within me insisted that I should cry, but I turned my back. He realizes that he hasn’t wept freely since he was a child. Dear Jesus, does it take this abomination to lance my constricted soul?
And his spirits do indeed soar. Without denying the reality of what he has done, his pettiness and spite and ignominy, he encompasses a mood of redemptive benediction. It brings a wide, silly grin to his mouth.
“Bunny rabbit,” he declares, lofting the animal high over his head, laughing as its big grubby hind feet thump the air, “ain’t nobody been where we wuz, baby. Let me tell you, buster, I like this side a lot better.”
Eddie feeds the rabbit a strip of lettuce and steps through the tedious details of shutdown. He meditates on his humbling and his bestiality, flinching at memory.
The frailty at his core yearns to interpret it all as a stress nightmare, an hallucination. Denial would be not merely futile and cowardly; it would betray what has been offered him. Rather piquant, eh? Holy shit. Still, it is a point of access. Eddie Rostow confesses to his worst self that he needs all the help he can get.
The next cycle brings swifter recovery. Rostow splashes tepid water from the flask into his face, dabbing at his reddened eyelids. Soon he must spend some time figuring how to replicate the loop condition after he gets off this one. Fertile conjectures multiply; he suppresses them for the moment. Nerving himself, he walks edgily to the Software Center, nodding companionably to the passing student. The directors have ascended to their solace. His knock is tentative.
Jennifer’s smile startles him with its warmth. She lowers her hairbrush. “Well, hello, sailor.”
Eddie stands in the doorway, drinking her unbruised face. Despite himself he flushes.
“Don’t just loiter there with intent, man. You’re the unsung hero of the moment. It was sensational.” She frowns. “I hated it with the rabbit, though.”
“Jennifer,” he says in a rush, “I’m sorry about the party. You know.”
“That. Yeah. You were rather blunt.”
“You inspire the village idiot in me.”
“Sailor, that’s the sweetest thing anyone ever. Coming up to poach on the Professorial Entertainment Allowance Fund?”
Eddie melts disgustingly within, wallowing in amnesty. “I happen to know a place.”
“You’ve got a fifth of Jack Daniels squirreled in your locker.”
“I’ve always admired your mind. Passionately.”
“That wasn’t the part you molested in public.”
“I am,” he tells her, “truly sorry.” Her hair flows in his fingers and he puts his face against hers for a moment. Jenny touches his hand.
“While we dally,” she tells him, “Stan is up there screwing you,”
“No argument. He’s like that. All scientists are lunatics and swindlers. I intend to fight. More to the point, are you screwing Dr Singh? Oh Christ, don’t answer that.”
“I will not. It’s none of your business. For God’s sake, don’t get snotty. Here, let me help you off with your—”
“Shouldn’t we shut the door?”
“Kick it, you’re closer. Why did it take you so long to get here?”
“Don’t ask.”
“Hmm. You know, I thought you were going to throw a tantrum in the lab.”
Eddie tries to keep his tone light. “Upon my soul, Miss Barton, that’d be no way for a besotted genius to contest his rights.” Shortly he asks: “Won’t the printouts get runkled?”
“There’s more in the computer, you fool.”
On the next loop, abandoning his dazed inertia for an instant, Eddie glances at Jennifer’s wrist watch and ensures that the flash comes as the flash comes as the flash comes . . .
COMPOUND INTEREST
Mack Reynolds
The stranger said in miserable Italian, “I wish to see Sior Marin Goldini on business.”
The concierge’s manner was suspicious. Through the wicket he ran his eyes over the newcomer’s clothing. “On business, Sior?” He hesitated. “Possibly, Sior, you could inform me as to the nature of your business, so that I might inform his Zelenza’s secretary, Vico Letta . . .” He let his sentence dribble away.
The stranger thought about that. “It pertains,” he said finally, “to gold.” He brought a hand from his pocket and opened it to disclose a half dozen yellow coins.
“A moment, Lustrissimo,” the servant blurted quickly. “Forgive me. Your costume, Lustrissimo . . .” He let his sentence dribble away again and was gone.
A few moments later he returned to swing the door open wide. “If you please, Lustrissimo, his Zelenza awaits you.”
He led the way down a vaulted hall to the central court, to the left past a fountain well to a heavy outer staircase supported by Gothic arches and sided by a carved parapet. They mounted, turned through a dark doorway and into a poorly lit corridor. The servant stopped and drummed carefully on a thick wooden door. A voice murmured from within and the servant held the door open and then retreated.
Two men were at a rough-hewn oak table. The older was heavy-set, tight of face and cold, and the other tall and thin and ever at ease. The latter bowed gently. He gestured and said, “His Zelenza, the Sior Marin Goldini.”
The stranger attempted a clumsy bow in return, said awkwardly, “My name is . . . Mister Smith.”
There was a moment of silence which Goldini broke finally by saying, “And this is my secretary,
Vico Letta. The servant mentioned gold, Sior, and business.”
The stranger dug into a pocket, came forth with ten coins which he placed on the table before him. Vico Letta picked one up in mild interest and examined it. “I am not familiar with the coinage,” he said.
His master twisted his cold face without humor. “Which amazes me, my good Vico.” He turned to the newcomer. “And what is your wish with these coins, Sior Mister Smith? I confess, this is confusing.”
“I want,” Mister Smith said, “to have you invest the sum for me.”
Vico Letta had idly weighed one of the coins in question on a small scale. He cast his eyes up briefly as he estimated. “The ten would come to approximately forty-nine zecchini, Zelenza,” he murmured.
Marin Goldini said impatiently, “Sior, the amount is hardly sufficient for my house to bother with. The bookkeeping alone—”
The stranger broke in. “Don’t misunderstand. I realize the sum is small. However, I would ask but ten per cent, and would not call for an accounting for . . . for one hundred years.”
The two Venetians raised puzzled eyebrows. “A hundred years, Sior? Perhaps your command of our language . . .” Goldini said politely.
“One hundred years,” the stranger said.
“But surely,” the head of the house of Goldini protested, “it is unlikely that any of we three will be alive. If God wants, possibly even the house of Goldini will be a memory only.”
Vico Letta, intrigued, had been calculating rapidly. Now he said, “In one hundred years, at ten per cent compounded annually, your gold would be worth better than 700,000 zecchini.”
“Quite a bit more,” the stranger said firmly.
“A comfortable sum,” Goldini nodded, beginning to feel some of the interest of his secretary. “And during this period, all decisions pertaining to the investment of the amount would be in the hands of my house?”
“Exactly.” The stranger took a sheet of paper from his pocket, tore it in two, and handed one half to the Venetians. “When my half of this is presented to your descendants, one hundred years from today, the bearer will be due the full amount.”