Seasons Between Us

by Alan Dean Foster

  “Guys, can you quit it? I have to finish this for Professor Stafford.”

  “What’s going on here?” Elaine asked.

  Bill’s eyes widened in surprise. “Elaine! You’re back early.”

  “What’s going on?” she asked again, turning to Ross.

  The chubby Manitoban pulled the straw out of his mouth. “We’re just having some fun with Maria.”

  “This is fun?” Elaine asked rhetorically.

  “It’s just a joke,” Ross whined. “Don’t you think it’s funny?”

  “I guess this was a real knee-slapper back in Manawaka, eh?”

  Ross flashed a gap-toothed grin.

  Elaine’s eyes scanned from Ross to Bill and back again. She had pegged them as juvenile jokers from the moment she joined Stafford’s research group, and initially she had brushed aside their childish antics. In recent months, however, she’d begun to seriously question whether their behaviour was acceptable. She wondered if what she had just seen might actually constitute harassment, in which case she should probably say something. But she was stuck working with them for at least another year, and she wanted to maintain a cordial working relationship.

  She hesitated, unsure of what to do.

  Maybe spitballs are going a little too far.

  She turned to Ross and looked him straight in the eye. “Ross?”

  “Yes?”

  “June 28th.”

  The gap-toothed grin abruptly vanished.

  “‘Bubbles’,” Elaine continued. “‘Doing the turtle’ . . . ‘There’s always room in my bed’ . . .”

  Ross threw the straw and paper into the recycling bin, whirled in his seat, and turned on his computer.

  “Wait a minute!” Bill pointed at Elaine. “You have dirt—” he pointed at Ross “—on him?” He pulled up his chair. “Hey Ross, do you know the Law of Conservation of Information?”

  “Thank you,” Maria whispered.

  Elaine spent an hour working out at her jujitsu dojo, then went to Chinatown for groceries before returning to her apartment at the Village by the Grange. As she slid her key into the lock, she heard a noise from inside.

  She opened the door. As her eyes adjusted to the darkness she discerned a silhouette. She lunged for the light switch.

  “Derek!”

  An inebriated, semiconscious Derek Tsai was sprawled on her sofa, moaning loudly. “Elaine? Aw, Elaine . . .”

  “Oh, for God’s sake!” Elaine navigated around a minefield of empty beer cans. She grabbed Derek and pulled him to his feet.

  “Aw, gee . . . S-sorry, Elaine. Had ta . . . ta feel? Okay? Gotta, I dunno . . . crash it down . . .”

  She endured his slurred, incomprehensible speech all the way to the door. Without ceremony, she dumped him into the hall. He hit the floor like a sack of potatoes.

  “The last time . . .” she muttered. “This is the last time.” Elaine rummaged through his pockets, found the key chain, and removed her apartment key from the lot. “I’ve had it with you, Derek! I don’t ever want to see your stinking hide again!”

  “But—”

  Elaine slammed the door. Why the hell do I always end up with guys like Derek? She leaned against the door, closed her eyes, and slowly breathed in and out a few times. After a while, she picked herself up and made her way to the kitchen, and then . . .

  . . . No. Not before Elaine . . .

  . . . Was almost at the door when Corey Stadtmauer called out to her.

  “Hey Elaine, thanks again for participating in the experiment,” he said. “Did I get your email, so that I can send you payment?”

  “Actually,” she replied, “I wrote my mailing address on Professor Takayoshi’s form so that he can send me a cheque. Old school, right?”

  “Yeah, sure. Hey, um . . . I, ah—I lost my partial differential equations textbook. Hillen and Leonard. Do you maybe have a copy I could borrow?”

  Elaine was caught off guard. In fact, she did have a copy of Hillen and Leonard. After a moment of thought, she nodded. “Sure, no problem. Are you around next week? I’ll bring it by your office.”

  Corey smiled. “Thanks so much. I’ll be here. Please drop by.”

  The following week, Elaine went up to the eighth floor of Burton Tower to find Corey. As she approached the office door, a frisson passed over her. She’d finally broken up with Derek Tsai after finding him passed out drunk on her couch. I really don’t know anything about Corey, and I don’t know what this all means, or even if it means anything at all, but it’ll be good just to get to know him.

  Elaine entered the office and found her way to Corey’s cubicle. He wasn’t there. Another student was at a nearby desk. He was dark and muscular, dressed in a faded old tank top and track pants. The name tag on his cubicle said “Ibrahim Zaher”.

  “Excuse me, Ibrahim?”

  He was holding a pen in one hand while staring at his laptop with a blank expression. After a moment, he looked up. His obsidian eyes gave Elaine a piercing, suspicious look.

  “Is Corey around?” she asked.

  “Corey is not here!” he snapped.

  “Uh . . . I can see that. Do you know where he is?”

  Ibrahim slammed the pen down. “Corey is supervising another volunteer experiment for Takayoshi.”

  “Again? Really?”

  “Yes, really!” Ibrahim balled his large, calloused hands into fists. “Takayoshi spends all his time on Corey’s project. He has left me nothing but odd jobs. I am but his slave boy!”

  Elaine was immediately tired of his whining. “If you hate Takayoshi so much and you hate it here so much, why don’t you just quit?”

  Leaving the brooding young man, Elaine went back to Corey’s cubicle and put the book on his desk. As she turned to leave, she scanned the whiteboard on which a series of mathematical derivations was scrawled. One formula in particular caught her eye. It was the Hamiltonian function, one of the equations of quantum mechanics. Another equation was derived from the Hamiltonian by allowing the matrix H to be dependent on z and z*, the state vector and its complex conjugate for some unique quantum state Ψ. But that made the new equation nonlinear, which didn’t make sense to Elaine because from what she understood of quantum theory the behaviour of atomic systems should be linear.

  “Elaine!”

  She jumped.

  Corey laughed. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to startle you.”

  “It’s okay.” She smiled sheepishly, then gestured at his desk. “Here’s the book. Sorry it took so long to get it to you. I don’t need it back anytime soon, so take your time.”

  “Thanks a lot. I really appreciate this.”

  Elaine pointed to the equations on the white board. “This is pretty neat. I’m surprised you need anything from Hillen and Leonard.”

  “Oh, no,” Corey said. “The textbook’s for an undergraduate course I’m tutoring.”

  “Right . . .” Elaine said slowly. “Anyway, like I said, I don’t need it back anytime soon.” She started to leave. “Well, have a nice day.”

  Corey picked up the book, hefting it. “Hey, um . . . Elaine?”

  She turned.

  “I’m really grateful for your help, and I was wondering if . . . would you, maybe, like to have dinner with me sometime?”

  Elaine blinked, but she quickly pulled herself together. “Sure. Are you doing anything on Friday?”

  “Friday would be great,” he replied.

  “Where would you like to go?”

  His head swayed, as if he were trying to shake an answer out of his brain. “Ever been to that market restaurant place?”

  “You mean Marché Mövenpick?”

  “Yeah. Would that be all right?”

  “Sure,” Elaine said. “My email
address is my initials ‘emc’ with the number two and the usual UofT Atmospheric Physics domain.”

  “Great! I’ll drop you an email with my phone number and details.”

  As she left the office, Elaine glanced over his shoulder and caught Ibrahim’s hard stare.

  On Friday night, Elaine met Corey at the fountain near the entrance to the Marché Mövenpick restaurant in Brookfield Place. After posing for selfies with the green and white cow sculptures by the restaurant entrance, they went inside. Instead of ordering from a menu, they went “shopping” for their meals in an old European food market setting.

  “How’s your dinner?” Corey asked.

  “It’s good,” Elaine replied. “How’s yours?”

  “Not great,” Corey grinned, “and I’m guessing neither is yours, really.”

  They looked at each other for a moment, then burst out laughing.

  “They used way too much oil,” Elaine said, poking her chopsticks into the Asian stir-fry rice noodles with tofu and mixed vegetables.

  “Mine’s supposed to be seafood bouillabaisse, but it’s smothered in tomato sauce,” Corey said. “Who uses tomato sauce in bouillabaisse? Isn’t it supposed to be a clear or white broth?”

  “I didn’t know you were such a foodie,” Elaine said.

  Corey smiled. “Anything else you’d like to know about me?”

  She put down her chopsticks. “Tell me about your research.”

  Corey’s eyes widened. “My research?”

  “Sure. What is it exactly that you’ve been working on with Takayoshi? I mean, is it some secret project or something?”

  Corey chuckled, perhaps a little nervously. “Oh, no. Goodness, no. It’s no secret. Well . . . not very secret, anyway.”

  She stared him down.

  “So you do want to hear.”

  Elaine nodded sweetly.

  “All right.” Corey leaned back in his chair. “But before I let you in on the conspiracy, you need to do something for me.”

  “What is it?” she asked.

  “Would you be willing to do the experiment again? I’ve set up a new online version I’d like you to try.”

  Elaine shrugged. “Sure, I can do that.”

  “Great.” Corey’s thumbs flew over his phone. “I just sent you the link.” He put the phone down, took a swig of water, and looked at Elaine. “You know Maxwell’s equations, right?”

  She began to recite. “Del dot B equals zero. Del dot E equals q over epsilon. Curl of B equals—”

  “All right, all right. Anyway, the weird thing about Maxwell’s equations is that if you do the math there are actually two sets of solutions for the effect of a moving electric charge. One describes an EM wave moving out from the particle for time greater than or equal to zero. We call these the ‘retarded’ waves.”

  “Okay . . .”

  “But there’s also another set of solutions.”

  Elaine pursed her lips. “You mean . . . the solutions for time less than zero?”

  Corey nodded. “That’s exactly what I mean. They’re called the ‘advanced’ solutions, and the math—” At that moment, his phone rang. He looked at the number and frowned. “Hello, this is Corey. Yes . . . uh, huh . . . What? Oh, my God! When . . .”

  Elaine furrowed her brow in concern.

  “Right . . . uh, okay. Right. Uh, t-thank, thank you.” Corey put down the phone, then buried his face in his hands. “Oh, my God.”

  “What? What is it? What’s wrong?”

  “It’s Professor Takayoshi. He’s been . . . murdered.”

  Elaine gasped.

  Corey struggled to stand up. “I’m so sorry. We’ve . . . we’ve got to go.”

  While standing in line to pay, Corey told Elaine what little he knew. The campus police believed Professor Takayoshi had surprised an intruder in his office. There was a violent struggle, during which Takayoshi managed to hit the police call button on his desk phone. But by the time the cops reached the office, the old physicist was already dead. He had suffered a severe beating, and at some point in the assault, his neck had been broken.

  The funeral for Professor Michiru Takayoshi took place a week later. He was laid to rest at the Mount Pleasant Cemetery in North York. A large delegation of family and friends as well as colleagues from the Physics Department were there to pay their respects. Elaine accompanied Corey to the funeral, but he seemed uncomfortable with her presence. She skipped the reception and went to work out at her dojo before going home.

  Alone in her apartment, she heated a plate of leftovers and sat in front of the TV. Flipping through the online library, she selected retro films and started streaming Back to the Future. By the time she reached the scene where George McFly tells Marty about the science fiction stories he was writing, she’d lost interest in the movie. She turned off the TV, went to her computer, and opened the email from Corey with the invitation to the online version of the experiment. After a brief moment of hesitation, she clicked on the link.

  Consider a radioactive decay counter that has been used to generate a sequence of positive and negative random numbers. The numbers produced, which you will not see, are stored on a secure remote server. Your task is to imagine the case in which all the numbers are positive.

  Elaine got a curt email from Corey the next day, thanking her for doing the online experiment. She wrote back right away, saying she was thinking of him and offering to help in any way she could. There was no acknowledgement. Later in the afternoon, she texted and then called, but again there was no response.

  The clack of furious typing shook her out of her thoughts. Elaine peered around the partition of her cubicle office. Bill O’Leary was working on his computer.

  “Hey Bill, what are you doing?” She squinted, at first not quite believing her eyes. “Oh, my God! Are you reading other people’s email?”

  “Will you keep it down? Yes, I’m reading people’s email.”

  “How do you do that?”

  “Somebody sitting on their bed that weighs 400 pounds told me,” he said sarcastically.

  Elaine didn’t understand the reference and decided not to pursue it further. But another idea came to her. “Bill, did you read Takayoshi’s stuff?”

  “No.”

  “No?”

  “Takayoshi was a dinosaur, a weird old dinosaur,” Bill explained. “The guy didn’t have a smart phone, refused to use his university email account . . . basically, he never used the network. The sum total of his wisdom was on this ancient Windows NT computer in his office that didn’t even have a network card. All his stuff was on that museum piece.”

  Elaine thought aloud. “So, the only way for someone to access Takayoshi’s computer is . . . by breaking into his office.” She glanced at her phone. The Physics Graduate Students Association served free coffee and cookies on the first floor lounge every Thursday afternoon at five o’clock, but she decided to go up to Corey’s office instead.

  Corey wasn’t there. The only person in the room was Ibrahim Zaher. He was cleaning out his desk.

  “Ibrahim?”

  He looked up. “Oh. You are . . .”

  “Elaine.”

  “Yes, of course. Elaine. I saw you at the funeral.”

  She nodded. “What are you doing?”

  Ibrahim tossed a pile of paper into the recycling bin. “I am quitting the Physics Department. Takayoshi is dead, but I should have done this a long time ago. I should never have agreed to be his accessory!”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Takayoshi’s research,” Ibrahim breathed. “That project he was working on with Corey? It is funded by the United States Department of Energy.”

  “DOE?” Elaine snapped. “You have proof of this?”

  “I saw a letter in
his office.”

  “In his office . . .” Elaine narrowed her eyes.

  Ibrahim resumed packing. “I cannot—will not—be associated with research that is in any way associated with the American death machine!”

  Elaine was moved by the intensity of his emotion. “Why?”

  Ibrahim clenched his fists, and the muscles in his arms rippled. “Our family was from Hodeidah. The Saudis launched an air strike against the hospital and the fish market. The hospital and the fish market! Who would do such a thing? My entire family was killed! Only I survived because I was in Sana’a that day. The Saudis pulled the trigger, but the Americans gave them the gun. Those were American planes, with American bombs.” He was shrieking now. “How could they do this? How?”

  “Ibrahim, I’m . . . I’m sorry. I didn’t know you—”

  “No, you do not know me.” His eyes burned. “Nobody knows me. Nobody wants to know me. They sneer and laugh at me behind my back. You think I do not know?”

  Elaine reached out to touch Ibrahim’s shoulder, but he pulled away.

  “What’s going on here?”

  Elaine turned and found herself face-to-face with Corey Stadtmauer.

  Their eyes briefly locked, and the colour drained from Corey’s face. “What are you doing here?” he stammered.

  “Looking for you,” she said. “I was thinking of you and wanted to know if you’re okay.”

  “Yeah, well . . . please don’t—You don’t have to ‘think’ of me, all right?”

  “Corey, what’s got into you?” Elaine asked. “Why haven’t you responded to any of my messages?”

  “I’ve been busy, really busy, since Takayoshi died.” He was now avoiding eye contact with her. “Listen, it would really be best if we didn’t see each other anymore.”

  Anger welled up in her. “Well that’s going to be hard, since we all work in the same building.” A bizarre thought crossed her mind. “Are you breaking up with me?”

  Corey laughed sardonically. “One dinner and one funeral do not make a relationship, Elaine.” He still would not look her in the eye.