“And you get a new big bang?”
“Yes.”
I snorted. “Come on, Nick. A few kilograms wouldn’t give you a good-sized rock.”
He set his glass down and immediately picked it up again. His fingers curled around it, gripped it. “The seed is only a seed. It contains the trigger, and the plan. Once it explodes, the process takes on a life of its own. It creates what it needs. The forces come into existence, and the physical constants lock in. The clock begins to run.”
“That doesn’t make sense.”
Nick looked amused. “Nevertheless, it happens. It has already happened. If it hadn’t, you and I wouldn’t be standing here.”
“You’re saying we could do this?”
“No, Michael. We don’t have the technology. Yet. I’m saying it could be done. Almost certainly has been done.”
Nick had brightened numerous evenings in the old days with quantum stories. We were a family of stockbrokers and financial experts. He used to come home and go on about objects that exist simultaneously in two places, or move backward in time, or wink in and out of existence. Father had occasionally described Nick’s mind in much the same terms.
“All right,” I said. “If you went out into your kitchen tonight, and cooked one of these things up, what would happen to us when it let go?”
“Probably nothing. The blast would create a new space-time continuum. The lights might dim a little. Maybe the room would even shake. But that would be about all.”
I let him refill my glass. “Well,” I said, “whatever.” Even for Nick, that one was off the wall. “What has any of this got to do with—?” I hesitated.
“—With David?”
“Yes. No. I don’t know. What connection has it with your hiding out up here?”
His eyes were very round, and very hard. “Let me take you a step further, Michael. We’ve gone beyond the quantum world now. Anyone with the technology to manufacture a new cosmos would also be able to set the parameters for the universe that would result. In fact, they would almost certainly have to, or they’d get nothing more than cosmic sludge.”
“Explain, please.”
He leaped to his feet, knocked over a stack of books on an end table, and threw open the glass doors. The city lights blazed beneath a crescent moon and cold, distant stars. “Unless you were very lucky, Michael—incredibly lucky—unless a world of constants balanced very precisely, and a multitude of physical laws came out just right, there would be no moon hung in this sky, no distant suns to brighten the night. And certainly no eyes to see the difference.” He strode out onto the terrace and advanced toward the edge of the roof. Uncertain what he might do in his agitated state, I hurried after him. “But,” he continued, “with a little ingenuity, we can create whatever we wish. Flowers. Galaxies. An immortal race.”
“The Creator did not see fit to do that,” I said firmly.
He swung round. “No, He did not.” He raised his face to the stars. “Indeed, He did not. Certainly, He did not lack the imagination. Everything around us demonstrates that. But He chose to show us the possibilities of existence, to let us taste love, and to snatch it away. To create transients in this marvellous place. What are our lives, finally, but a long march toward a dusty end? Michael—.” His eyes widened, and his voice sank, “the stars were created not in love, but in malice. If you could create angels, would you make men?”
“That’s not my call,” I said.
“Isn’t it? You and I are victims, Michael. If not us, then who?”
The wind blew across the rooftop.
“Think, Michael: what kind of being would give us death when He had life in His hands?”
The temperature was dropping. Lights moved against the stars, headed in the general direction of Seattle-Tacoma International. “If you’re correct, Nick,—and I say if—the kind of Deity you’re describing might take offense.” It was really an effort to lighten the mood. It didn’t.
“Thunderbolt out of a clear sky? No: we are safely beyond His reach.”
“What makes you think that?”
“Once He released the cosmic seed, we expanded into a universe other than His. He can’t touch us. That’s the way it works. We’re alone, Michael. No need to worry.” He began to giggle. The laughter bubbled out of his throat but stopped when he rammed a fist into the waist-high brick wall at the edge of the roof.
He did not cry out but only stood with blood pouring between clenched fingers. His hysteria broke off, and I took him back inside, sat him down, and got the Mercurochrome. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I really shouldn’t have loaded all that on you.”
“That’s true.” Our eyes met. “And not on yourself.”
A storm blew out of the Pacific that night. It carried no rain, but there was electricity, and it dumped a lot of hail into the area. I lay awake through much of it, watching the light in the bedroom curtains alternately brighten and fade, listening to the rhythmic breathing of my wife. At one point I got up and wandered through the house, checking the kids.
And, for the first time in many years, I prayed. But the familiar words sounded empty.
I could not take Nick’s ideas seriously. But I kept thinking: surely, a Technician who could wire gravity into the universe could manage a mechanism to dispose of malcontents. In spite of common sense, I was worried.
I called him in the morning, got no answer, waited an hour, and tried the lab. Cord picked up the phone. “Yes,” he said. “He’s here. Did you want to talk to him?”
“No,” I said. “Is he okay?”
“Far as I can tell. Why? Did something happen?”
So there had been no bolts. Nothing had come in the night to carry him off.
He remains in that gloomy tower. Occasionally, I can see him up there, framed in the light of a single lamp. Staring across the city. Across the world.
And it has occurred to me that there are subtler ways than lightning bolts.
AULD LANG BOOM
I’ve never believed in the supernatural. The universe is too subtle, too rational, to permit entry to gods or devils. There’s no room for the paranormal. No fortune telling. No messages from beyond. No divine retribution.
But I am not sure how to explain certain entries in my father’s diary, which came into my hands recently after his death in the Jersey Event. On the surface, I have no choice but to conclude that there is either a hoax or a coincidence of unimaginable proportions. Still, it is my father’s handwriting, and the final entry is dated the day before he died. If there is deception, I cannot imagine how it has been accomplished.
I found the diary locked in the upper right hand drawer of his oak desk. The keys were in a small glass jar atop the desk, obviating the point of the lock, but my father was never one to concern himself with consistency. He would have put it in there himself: my mother had died many years before, and he lived alone. The desk was intact when I got to it after the disaster, although it had been ruined by rain.
Nobody will ever be sure how many died when the rock came down off the Jersey coast. Conservative estimates put the figure at a million and a half. A hundred thousand simply vanished, probably washed out to sea by the giant tidal waves. Others died in the quakes, storms, power disruptions, and epidemics that followed the strike.
That night was, of course, the kind of seminal event that marks everyone who lives through it. No family in the country was untouched by this worst natural disaster in recorded history. What were you doing when the meteor fell?
I was a thousand miles away, watching Great Railway Journeys with my family when they broke in with the initial reports. I spent the balance of the evening trying to call my father, or anyone else I knew who lived in the South Jersey-Philadelphia area. But there was no phone service.
So now I have this cryptic document, stretching back into 1961. It is less a diary than a journal, a record of political, literary, and social opinions. My father was a dentist. He was good with kids and with nervous adults.
A sign in his waiting room advertised: WE CATER TO COWARDS. But his interests extended far beyond his office. He was alert to every scientific and political trend, a student of the arts, a champion of the afflicted. He was a Renaissance dentist. He was capable of sulfurous explosions when he detected some particularly outrageous piece of hypocrisy or venality. He was a sworn enemy of politicians, lawyers, and professional athletes who charge kids twenty bucks an autograph. He instinctively distrusted people in power.
He favored requiring all heads of state to be mothers with six or more draft-age children. He wanted to mount a massive national effort to save the schools, to be funded by “downsizing” the federal establishment. He would have applied capital punishment with vigor because it has the dual advantage of reducing the criminal population and providing the average malefactor with the attention he desires.
My father was sexually active, and many of the women who drifted through his life would no doubt have been shocked to read his appraisals of their performances:
Lisa: screams and groans and bites a lot, but can’t act well enough to carry it off. Down deep, where it counts, she is about as wild and uninhibited as a good phone directory.
Michele: probably better than an old movie.
Martie: woman doesn’t know when to quit. Would wear out a jackhammer.
I have of course fictionalized the names.
The pages were also full of antireligious views: for reasons never clear to me, he believed Methodist ministers to be uniformly a pack of scoundrels. This was especially odd in that he had never had any connection that I knew of with that church. The average congressman, he wrote during the late 80’s, is roughly equal in moral content to a Methodist preacher. The Creator himself did not escape criticism: The world is such a misbegotten wreck that it is impossible to believe any self-respecting deity would accept the blame for it. And: If there is a career more attractive to scoundrels and frauds than professional politics, it must be the Methodist ministry.
Perhaps I violated an ethic in reading my father’s diary I wish now that I had not. But the charm and vitality of his observations, his obvious appetite for life, his Olympian assaults against those he considered frauds and halfwits, were irresistible. Once started, I could not stop. And I began to realize how little I had appreciated him during his lifetime.
I started seriously reading the diary at about the time I’d given up hope that he might have survived. I’d seen the final entries and knew that he planned to be in Atlantic City, the worst possible place. But there was the chance that he might have been sidetracked, gone somewhere else, been delayed by a woman. I know better now.
The first entry was dated July 16, 1961. It spells out the rationale behind the diary, which was that he hoped his “occasional ruminations” would one day be of general interest. (My father was never afflicted with modesty.) He also revealed an ambition to become an essayist, and believed that a daily account of his reflections would be a priceless aid to such an endeavor. I should add, parenthetically, that his ambitions came to nothing. If he ever actually tried to compile a manuscript, I have no knowledge of it.
Six days later, he recorded my birth. And, in another week, the death of my mother. He seldom mentioned her to me, but the diary gave over a dozen pages of cramped handwriting to reminiscences of their early years together, and of his conviction that, were it not for his responsibilities (by which I gathered he was talking about me), his life had become worthless. Judging from the diary, he never after seriously considered marriage although, as I mentioned, there were many women. I was aware of his escapades, of course, while I was growing up. And I was baffled: my father’s appearance was rather ordinary. He was also short and, when I was a teen-ager, beginning to lose his hair. It was hard to see what brought that endless supply of women to his door. I don’t know yet.
By the time I had read into the late ’70’s, I noticed an odd trend. There are passages, and implications, which are unsettling. My father was, if anything, a rationalist. And I could sense his increasing dismay at events which he could not explain. I began to read more intently, and eventually found it impossible to lay the book aside. I will never forget the cold, rainswept evening during which I came back to the final entry. And read it in the frantic glare of what had gone before.
Now I don’t know what to make of it. The only possible conclusion is that the diary is a fabrication. It has to be. Yet I do not see how that is possible. My wife, after she finished it, suggested we burn it.
I have not been able to bring myself to do that. Nor can I simply pretend it does not exist. Consequently, without taking a position on the matter, I have had the pertinent entries privately printed, in order to make them available to a small group of my friends whose judgment I trust. Perhaps someone among them will be able to offer a rational explanation.
One final note: the “Rob” who figures so prominently in this narrative was Orin R. Robinson, who served 1958-60 in the Far East with my father. Curiously, they seem not to have been close friends until after the chance meeting in the Minneapolis airport described in the first entry in the Extract below. My father, incidentally, was on his way to Fargo, pursuing a young woman of his acquaintance.
(ATTACHMENT)
Being Extracts from the Diary of Samuel H. Coswell
Minneapolis, Friday, November 22, 1963
Black day. The President is dead.
I was having lunch with Rob. First time I’d seen him since Navy days on the McCusker. Hell of a reunion. We were sitting in a dark little place off Washington Avenue, all electric candles and checkerboard tablecloths and bare hardwood floors. A waitress had filled our glasses with Chianti and set the bottle down. We were already deep into reminiscing about old friends and old times, and Rob swept up his glass with a flourish and raised it toward the light. “Here’s to you, Sam,” he said, “I’ve missed you,” and in that brief hesitation, when one tastes the moment before the wine, I became aware of raised voices.
Chair legs scraped the floor. “—Shot him—” someone said. The words hung in the still air, whispered, almost disembodied. Then Kennedy’s name. Doors banged, and traffic sounds got loud. Outside, a postal truck pulled up beside a mailbox.
There were bits and pieces of conversation. “How badly hurt?” “—They get the guy?” “Be fine. Can’t kill—” “What time is it? Is the stock market still open?”
They brought out a television and we watched the early reports and learned the worst. “Not much of a reunion,” I told Rob.
He lives in L.A. We’d met at the airport, both passing through. He’s an aircraft design consultant, and he was on his way home from Chicago. We got to talking, decided not to miss the opportunity, and rearranged our flight schedules. Which was how we came to be eating a late lunch together when the news came from Dallas.
We walked back to our Sheraton and pushed into the bar. The TV threw a pale glare over the crowd, which kept getting bigger. Nobody said much. Cronkite reported that a police officer had been shot, and then he was back a few minutes later to tell us that a suspect had been captured in a movie theater. Name’s Oswald. Nobody seems to know anything about him. I guess we’ll start getting some answers tomorrow. Meantime, there’s a lot of talk about a conspiracy. And we now have Lyndon Johnson.
I’m surprised this has hit me so hard. I’ve never been high on Kennedy. Although, as politicians go, he was likable. But it will be harder to run the Republic if presidents have to go into hiding.
Rob is up one floor. We’d originally planned to have breakfast together. He has an early flight, though, and I don’t think either of us feels much like socializing. My own flight’s at noon. So I will sleep late. And maybe one day we’ll meet again in some other airport.
Fargo, Saturday, November 23, 1963
Ellen and I spent the day parked in front of a TV. Gloomy business, this. Oswald looks like a loony. Still no explanations. There are theories that he was working for the Cubans, or the CIA, or the Russians. You ta
ke a look at this guy, and it’s hard to believe any sensible organization would use him. He doesn’t look reliable. We’ll see. If we trace it to Moscow, what happens then?
Ellen is showering now. She’s a knockout, enough to get anyone’s juices running, but there’s a ceremonial quality to the preparations. The assassination has cast gloom on us all, I guess.
En route to Philadelphia, Sunday, November 24, 1963
Kennedy’s funeral tomorrow.
Never knew anyone as wild as Ellen was last night. Is this the way we hide from our mortality?
Philadelphia, Saturday, August 1, 1964
Call from Rob. He’s going to be in town next week, and we will get together. Funny about him: when we were in the Navy, he seemed a bit stand-offish. Difficult to get to know. Maybe it’s the Kennedy thing, but he seems warmer, friendlier than I remember. I wouldn’t have believed he’d ever have taken the time to look me up. He’s a curious mix, simultaneously idealistic, and cynical, gregarious and distant. He’d be horrified to hear this, but the truth is, he’s a fascist. A goodhearted one, but a fascist all the same. He’s a great believer in order and is fond of quoting Plato on the dangers of giving freedom to the undisciplined. We talked for almost an hour (his nickel). We agreed that western civilization is on its last legs. I don’t really believe that, but he’s persuasive, and anyhow predicting doom always gives one such a warm feeling. Is that why there are so many Fundamentalists?
We were both elated by the lunar photographs taken by Ranger 7. First closeups ever. I told him we were taking the first steps into a vast sea. He laughed. A vast desert, maybe. He doesn’t think we will ever leave the Earth-moon system. Why not? Where else is there to go?
Philadelphia, Friday, August 7, 1964
Great day.
I don’t know when I’ve enjoyed myself more. We spent most of the evening arguing over Goldwater. Rob is worried that Johnson will win, and then give away Southeast Asia. I’m scared to death Barry would give Hanoi an atomic alternative shortly after the swearing-in ceremony. Get out or get fused.
Cryptic - The Best Short Fiction of Jack McDevitt Page 50