Asimov's Science Fiction: April/May 2014 Read online

  "Ghosts? You think this place is haunted?"

  "Haven't you heard? Everywhere's haunted."

  Jimmy tilted his head quizzically. "You believe in ghosts?"

  They came to a turn, and Quarles paused, his thumb rubbing his weapon. "It isn't a question of what I believe. What matters," he said, lowering his voice as if in confidence, then letting one eyebrow twitch up, "is what the dog believes."

  6. A Mysterious Figure

  Following Max's lead, they took the cars into the city and parked in a nearly vacant supermarket lot. Bekka spotted the back of Max's neck over his collar.

  "Whoa. You missed on the sunblock."

  He gingerly patted. "Oh, yeah. Already raw."

  Megan tugged the collar down for a look. "We'll put aloe on it at home."

  They walked a few blocks to a vegetarian restaurant half below ground. The lights seemed dim to Jimmy, who struggled to read the menu and ordered a meal he spotted on a neighboring table. Max and Megan spent much of the time explaining a complicated television show—a spy story of sorts—to the two of them. Jimmy managed to lob some questions, but his food tasted wrong, the cheesy meal too sweet. He remembered a meal of similar sweetness from one evening in Iraq, a treat that accompanied a visiting general; his first non-MRE in a long time, he had studied everyone else's reaction as he picked at the food, suspecting an insurgent had poisoned them.

  Jimmy's eyes resisted focusing, so he asked Bekka to drive the next leg.

  At the Cornell campus, Max and Megan gave a meandering tour, ending in dusky half-light at the quad, where they sat on a statue's accommodating base and watched the students cross the lawn. At one point, Max saw someone he knew, a slender brown figure Jimmy could barely make out, and hurried across the grass to her. They hugged.

  "She's getting married next week," he said on his return, shaking his head, marveling.

  All of these people in their bubbles of safety pressed Jimmy further inward. He imagined holes opening in the walkways and people yanked down; he felt no anxiety, but rather a helpless concession to the dangerous reality underlying every solid thing. Perhaps some of these people thought about the two wars, desperate prisoners, families waiting for letters, the maimed in hospitals. The evening was too pleasant for his comfort.

  The day had gone dark by the time they separated stacked plastic chairs and set them scraping on the cement balcony at Max and Megan's apartment. A rough-voiced dog, blocks away, intermittently remarked on something it found agitating. Jimmy didn't quite appreciate the tension across his chest until Max said, "Man, that dog." Sickness gathered in Jimmy's mouth, and all the passages that take in air—nose, throat, the chambers of the lungs—clenched.

  In the bathroom, he ran water but didn't touch it, forearms on the sink's lip, his hands shaking as if palsied. Then he retreated to the one bedroom; the owners had insisted Jimmy and Bekka sleep there, a kindness that troubled him by its being too kind. He sat on the bed's sunken edge and studied the cover of The Methuselah Ray. Words and the impressions of words bubbled up, but he only said, "Goddammit."

  Bekka stood in the doorway. "What's that?"

  He held it up. "The book I bought."

  "No. What you said."

  "Oh. I was thinking about something."

  She asked if he was coming back or turning in, and he managed only noncommittal phrases; her hand lingering on the doorframe conveyed her disappointment. He resolved to return to the balcony after only a minute, after two paragraphs, but it took him ten pages to set it down, and when he did, he heard the balcony door slide closed as the group reentered the apartment. The bedroom door had been left ajar, and it had, through whatever means, eased half open. The TV came on. The insistent words buffeted him as he closed his eyes, shutting out the sound. He pictured Bekka and her friends arrayed about the living room. He sensed fragments of each person, edges, nothing more, nothing more than what he would catch by looking at them if he passed through the room.

  He adjusted the pillow at his back and opened his book again, but he didn't read. When he saw the word "left," he thought what it would be like if Bekka weren't with him tomorrow. This roused him at last.

  He stepped out among the uncertain faces and received a greeting from everyone that was so intended to make him feel welcome that instead he felt like the focus of speculation. Evidently, they had been talking about him.

  Max pottered about the kitchen; Bekka and Megan shared the small marshmallow of a sofa; Jimmy took a stuffed chair. They all watched the weather report. On the map of the state, every county line and town appeared clear and unobscured. Nothing was happening, meteorologically speaking, and this was the entirety of the report, though it went on for several minutes. Max turned off the television and sat on the wooden arm of the second sofa, and they recounted the day and batted about what they might do tomorrow. Not until the afternoon would Bekka and Jimmy set off to camp with gear borrowed from Max and Megan.

  After they had said their goodnights and Bekka had shut the bedroom door, Jimmy ventured, "I know you don't like my being so quiet."

  Bekka took in breath, stretching her upper body as if preparing to speak some truth, then seemed to def late a bit. She brought up both palms and crookedly grinned. "I don't know what I'm supposed to say. We've had this conversation."

  "You're right. Remind me what we've said."

  "Really? Mr. Randolph, you're being needy. That, I don't like. Quiet I'm fine with."

  "I hope you mean that." They stood on either side of the bed.

  "I do not find silence in a man enigmatic or charming. Okay? I know you're dealing with some... some unpleasant things, and I know there are things you haven't told me. If that becomes a problem for me, then I suppose we won't be together at that point. I've got private things too. I don't tell you everything."

  This hummed through him. He opened his mouth, but she continued.

  "As I've said, and as is obvious, I like spending time with you and even sharing a bed with you, which I do not take lightly. You're the first guy I've been around who makes me better, makes me a better person, a better version of who I am. How's that? And you've got a pretty face." They eyed each other bluntly, her wry smile unaltered. "What can I tell you?"

  He waited too long to voice something complementary, thinking whatever he said would sound insincere, and she let the moment go.

  They undressed and commenced to reading; he realized he hadn't asked about her morning's purchase.

  "What's that book again?"

  "Tyson. Astronomer. Talking about being a black scientist. How's your 'pulp'?"

  "Uh... fun. It started off with the Big Man taking out a few thugs wham bam. Then this other guy who looks like a bag of bones comes along and collapses at his feet. And then—Do you want to hear this?"

  "Keep going."

  He sat up a bit. "So two guys are in a restaurant and one just all of a sudden turns ancient. He was telling this longtime friend that he's made a discovery, and the friend goes to the bathroom, and when he comes back, the other guy is ninety and having a heart attack. Falls out of his chair, knocks over the waiter. Panic erupts. People run out waving their arms. Then the hero shows up to interview the friend. The police get out of his way and let him do whatever he wants. They know he's better at this kind of thing than they are."

  "I thought our friend said these were based on actual events. I mean, come on."

  Jimmy scowled at the cover. The heroic pose, even in defeat. The foregrounded figure with his back to the viewer, holding toward the hero the lantern-like device.

  "No, I get you. None of it seems tremendously believable. He did say some of the stories are invented. Listen to the other titles." He flipped to the page that listed other books in the series. " World Inside the Earth. He Died Three Times. The Living Comet. The Metal People. Message from the Future. No ma'am, these do not sound grounded in the real world."

  Bekka held up one finger. "As a student of physics, allow me to provide a counter-a
rgument: the more we know about the world, the more we know how little we know."

  "Still. I don't think anyone's invented a Methusaleh Ray."

  Her head rocked in consideration. "Maybe it's a metaphor for sunlight. That man's aged skin is entirely the result of not using sunblock." Both of their eyes shone. "Max is gonna look like that by the time he's forty!"

  They both laughed, then clamped their mouths shut—as if Max might know they were laughing at him. Jimmy tapped her on the nose with the book. The day had been, remarkably, salvaged.

  Three in the morning. Jimmy blinked his sticky eyes to confirm the numbers on the digital clock. Then, in a fugue of vivid recall, he truly heard the news report that had slipped through the open door hours ago. Multiple sinkholes had simultaneously opened in a small town in Pennsylvania. A woman's car had dropped into one hole and she had known with certainty, as water filled the car, that she was dead; but a man appeared. "He wrenched the door off, then pulled me up." Afterward, he had slipped away. She described a tall, elderly man, possibly black or Hispanic.

  Jimmy saw a dark passage and a silhouetted figure seated at the end, lifting his head, daring him to look back. He was going to need the car.

  7. Passageway

  The method had run into trouble when they had tried it in Iraq. The barriers were too great, a set of palisades too tall to leap, palisades not just of language, which in theory shouldn't have caused problems, but of worldview, of belief and intent. You needed, ideally, to not only know something of the other person, but understand the other person. The people Jimmy tried to connect with were, in some cases, his true and absolute enemy, people whose hatred for his country and its people was an insurmountable wall. He didn't have the tools to deconstruct such an edif ice. The training had not prepared them for this, and Jimmy suspected, though was never told, that the other members of his unit met the same level of failure.

  In other cases, though, where such firm convictions were not present, a connection was possible, and connections occurred. Being in the same room helped, but a subject who was fully conscious was more likely to be actively unwilling. Asleep could work, but the passageway remained dark for so long, Jimmy had sometimes panicked or lost consciousness himself.

  The holding facility—for captives en route to one or another prison—had been a terrible place for employing such outré methods, its halls and rooms too close, full of a smell the Americans hadn't been able to scrub from the walls, the facility occasionally coming under fire, and finally, after a year of no results, there had come one disastrous result, the prisoner shooting himself when he awoke from the passageway, having seized one of the MP's guns. He was a sixteen-year-old from the countryside who they'd hoped could give them solid information about the source of particularly nasty IEDs. Jimmy concluded that the notion of suicide—never far from the young man's mind in such hopeless circumstances—had taken hold due to whatever jostling Jimmy had done in the boy's psyche. No one else blamed Jimmy. In fact, given the way things were going that week in country, no one felt especially bad, which had unsettled him even more.

  Quarles helped Jimmy heft the thin mattress and iron frame down the hall to the observation room, then brought him half a box of MREs and several water bottles. That first afternoon at Perilous Base, Jimmy watched the prisoner without break. Sipping his water so he wouldn't have to hit the john too often, Jimmy paced, stood, or sat before the prisoner's image, observing a man who barely moved, gathering material, not yet constructing the passageway.

  Methusaleh—as Jimmy now thought of him—got up once from his cross-legged pose, unfolding himself with a slowness either pained or stately—Jimmy couldn't judge—to relieve himself in the corner toilet. Allowing him some privacy, Jimmy looked away, though the audio pickup, which he hadn't realized was on until then, let him know when the man was done.

  Eyes on the prisoner, he turned on one of the computers, then sat. Methusaleh now lay prone on the floor. Jimmy accessed the few remaining digital documents regarding the prisoner. Reports from across the decades hailed the man as an expert in a host of academic fields, and possibly even a medical doctor and surgeon. No one could say what had been lost at the Canadian Arctic base, but the recovered snowmobile, and accounts of the rapid implosion and contained conflagration that had destroyed whatever lay within, suggested the man had access to and was likely the inventor of impressive technology. The report also mentioned an extensive tunnel system, though what little remained of it, once American troops had sent charges deep inside and sealed one end, seemed naturally occurring rather than the result of a construction project. Everything he touched had been made strange.

  An additional document, images of someone's handwritten notes, concerned the August 2001 removal of print materials from World Trade Center Tower One, an indication that the prisoner knew what was to come. A charitable organization had collected the personal library and sold the entire contents to collectors and academic institutions. Twenty thousand volumes. Would it be worthwhile to track them down and search their pages for coded clues?

  Jimmy considered the blank cell, the man staring upward at the unremarkable ceiling. He left his seat and came close to the screen, stepping quietly, faintly worried that, in the passageway, the two of them would be together and alone.

  General Weston entered late-afternoon, capless but otherwise fully attired in desert dress. Jimmy's green jacket draped his chair back, and he had rolled up his tan sleeves.

  "You settled in?" She smiled at the mattress. "Want us to install a latrine?"

  "I'll let you know, ma'am."

  Weston ambled between Jimmy and the screen, hands clasped behind her back as she considered the prisoner. Jimmy flipped over his essentially blank notepad; it was dotted with blue marks from him tapping his pen.

  "Did this man ever read?" Jimmy asked.

  "What do you mean? Like as a test?"

  "Books. A newspaper."

  "He's never requested a book—but he's never spoken. I suppose we could put some books in with him. What, you want to run an experiment? Give him a Bible, Koran, poetry, Mein Kampf... a romance novel? See what he picks up?"

  Jimmy stood and splayed his hands on the table; his rear end had gone numb from sitting. "I don't think he'd pick up anything. It's just... the man's supposedly some kind of super-genius."

  "That's the good word."

  "Highly educated. Amassed a large personal library. And he doesn't feel the need to read? Ever?" Now he stood alongside Weston, though neither was looking at the other. As they watched, the prisoner sat up. He assumed a squatting position, head ducked down as if he might be sick. "Has he been traumatized? Maybe what interrogators have seen as resistance, such as his elective mutism, is depression."

  Weston pointed with her thumb. "Four years of this, according to all accounts. This absolute silence. But he moves when he's told to move. Eats his meals. Eats a fair amount, in fact. Brushes his teeth. Does this really look like depression to you? Or— I know this isn't a scientific term, but—does it look like despair?"

  The word entered Jimmy as if it had stepped into his chest. No, it didn't look like despair. Methusaleh hadn't collapsed under psychological pressure. He'd only, what? Burrowed deeper inside himself? Making it even harder to reach him.

  "Anyway," the general said. The door to the prisoner's room opened. "I wanted to give you the heads-up that it was time for his exercise. You'll want to see this. Maybe it'll help... structure your hypothesis."

  A guard entered the prisoner's room, carrying shackles.

  By the time Jimmy stepped into the hallway, the three BrightLine guards—one of whom was Quarles and one of whom had a dog—and Methusaleh had already started in the other direction, their pace dictated by the prisoner's shuffling, shackled gait. The loose-fitting prison garb made close observation a challenge, but it appeared that he walked with his knees bent, as if he could hardly support the weight of his slender body. The file had put the old man at six-foot-f ive, but he har
dly seemed six feet tall; even accounting for the reduced stature that comes with age, he didn't measure up. Upright and sturdy, the guards f lanked him like moving columns. Even the dog, a German shepherd, seemed like a larger, superior being.

  When the group stopped at a door, the old man's head dipped farther, and when they proceeded, Jimmy remained where he was for a moment, half sure that the prisoner had, at the dropping of his head, somehow caught sight of and assessed what was behind him. Jimmy felt the corridor constrict. But the moment passed, and the men vanished behind the door.

  The door swung back open. Quarles asked, "You coming, lieutenant? General?" Weston had lingered about ten steps back, watching.

  "Let's go," she said.

  Once through, there were doors ahead and to the left. The prisoner and two of the guards were gone. Quarles held the door on the left for Jimmy and Weston before leaving them.

  A window that Jimmy assumed was one-way, nearly the width of the room, showed the fenced dirt yard under a high canopy and, miles off, made more vague by the gray fence, mesas rising from the flatness; two computer screens showed the yard from two other angles, from cameras positioned, apparently, below the canopy. A man and a woman, both BrightLine employees, attended the monitors. It took Jimmy a moment to realize the man had been his driver, his face now a mask of seriousness that also appeared slack with boredom.

  "All for one man," Weston said.

  "How many people used to be held here?"

  "About two dozen, at the height. With more guards, back when we had MPs. Even after I came on, we had as many as ten prisoners."

  In the yard, the guards took stable positions and watched as the prisoner shambled a dozen steps along a curving course before stopping.

  "Audio, please," said Weston, and the woman flicked a switch.

  "—level ten," one man said. "You should see Covey. He gets up to twelve before he runs into trouble."