As She Climbed Across the Table

8

My heart and the elevator, a plummet inside a plummet. Down into my stomach and the gloomy core of the physics complex, to walk those barren concrete corridors, brave those sterile labs, in search of what I’d lost. Where else could I go? I’d phoned in cancellation of my afternoon thesis tutorial, then wandered campus, hesitating like a ghost at mailboxes, bulletin boards, and coffee machines, but there was no pretending. I was looking for Alice.

I stepped out of the elevator into a parade of students wearing radiation suits. They were carrying delicate chunks of electronic equipment through the Cauchy-space lab. Something important was happening, I thought bitterly. They were back on the verge of making history.

Unnoticed, I went inside. The observation room was filling with dismantled electronics, set onto cushioned pallets and draped with anti-static drop cloths. The screen overhead was black. The student technicians padded in and out in their white clown suits, headset radios buzzing and clicking. Robots, but they had more in common with Alice than I did. They were the same species. Physicists. I was some other thing, a spider or rabbit or carrot.

A student in a lab coat stopped in front of me. I recognized him. Part of Alice’s inner circle.

“Mr. Engstrand.”

“Yes.”

“You want to talk to Ms. Coombs?”

“Yes.”

“Follow me.”

He gave me a suit and hood, helped me seal myself inside, and pointed out the buttons that operated the headset radio, the private frequency that would link me to Alice. Before I could object he aimed me through the airlock doors, into the outer chamber of the Cauchy-space lab. The doors opened and sealed behind me automatically as I stumbled through, no physicist, just a clumsy earthbound astronaut, a beekeeper.

The outer chamber was a narrow, dimly lit area, separated from the Cauchy-space by a thickness of Plexiglas. I was alone there. White-suited figures ambled about on the other side of the glass, in the garishly floodlit lab, like spirits trapped in a bottle. They were dismantling the equipment that lined the walls, winding cables, decompressing valves, gathering washers and fittings in their soft white gloves. I was invisible at my dark window. I could only guess which was Alice.

The lack is gone, I thought hopefully. It’s all over. They’re mopping up.

I pushed the button and spoke into the headset mouthpiece. “Alice.” My own voice was piped back to my ear, rendered mechanical and feeble, a toaster or vacuum cleaner bidding for human attention. But one of the figures turned to face me at my window.

As the mask of its hood passed through the light I saw it was Alice. She unclipped a lamp and brought it to shine through the window. When she leaned her headgear against her side of the glass the reflections were layered, so my features were superimposed over hers.

“Philip,” she said, through static.

“What are you doing?”

“Lack is ready. We’re taking down the field.”

“Lack?”

“He’s stabilized. We don’t need to maintain the Cauchy-field anymore. Gravity and time are compatible. We’re dismantling the generators.”

“Soft says ‘the lack,’ and ‘it.’ Not ‘Lack’ and ‘he.’ ”

“Soft and I disagree.”

“Soft says your physics are crappy. He says you don’t have the right outlook.”

“Soft is retrenching. It’s his physics that are crappy. He refuses to admit that Lack has a preference for H’s.”

“What?”

“Lack is selective. He prefers H’s. M’s pass through him and accumulate on the screen. So he’s making selections. It’s not random. It’s discernment, intelligence.”

I fell silent. Our channel buzzed.

“Soft is predisposed against void intelligence,” said Alice. “It threatens him.”

“You’re saying Lack displays intelligence?”

“Lack is intelligence, Philip. There’s nothing else there. He has no other qualities. Without gravity and time irregularities he’s impossible to measure. His only aspect is his preference for the H’s.”

“So far.”

“You’re right, I think there’s more. In a few days we’ll be able to walk through this chamber in our street clothes.”

“Then what?”

“We’ll be able to bring subtler instruments to bear.”

“Tarot cards, you mean. Magic eight-balls. Seeing-eye dogs.”

Alice frowned through three layers of glass. I realized I had no stake in siding with Soft. I hadn’t come here to debate “Lack’s” nature.

“Alice,” I said again. I winced at the electronic slush the radio made of my whisper.

She didn’t speak.

“Alice, let’s quit. Let’s go away.” I knew it was wrong as I said it. I was breaking the silence that bound us. I might as well ask her to marry me now.

“What?”

“Let’s disappear together. Leave no gravity or time irregularities behind.”

“This isn’t the right time to suggest that.”

“That’s what’s great about it,” I said. “It wouldn’t be exciting if there was a right time.”

I was testing her. It was better than blurting out accusations, at least a little.

Another voice came onto the channel, encrusted with static. “Excuse me, Ms. Coombs.”

“That’s all right.”

“We’re ready to distribute the yeast.”

“I’ll be there in a minute.”

The voice crackled away.

“Yeast?” I said.

“G. P. Neumann Yeast. It was developed by a German firm for use in reactor settings. It devours radiation. We’re using it to clean the chamber.”

I didn’t know what to say. My momentum was gone. I was in a floppy suit discussing yeast.

“Philip?”

I looked up. She’d stepped back behind the lamp, so her own face-place was reflective. I saw two of myself, and none of her.

“We’ll talk later, okay, Philip?”

“Okay.” I wanted to say no, later isn’t soon enough. A German yeast is about to devour the radioactive traces of my hands on your body, the isotope emanations of my heart. They’re delicate things, no match for yeast.

But I didn’t say it. I plodded back through the airlock and waited to be helped out of my suit, like a child in clip-on mittens standing in a puddle of melted snow.

A student with a clipboard was checking off items in a Buddhist monotone. “Gas barriers. Scintillation counters. Photo-multipliers. Photodiodes, phototriodes.”

I left the lab.

In the corridor I found myself on the heels of Alice’s blind men. They were tapping with their canes to the elevator. I slowed and stayed behind them, wary, jealous, not wanting to be detected.

They hesitated at the sound of my footsteps, then shrugged together and groped at the elevator doorway for the button.

“You must have done something wrong,” said Evan.

Garth didn’t speak.

“You must have done something wrong,” said Evan again. Nothing.

“You must have done something wrong.”

“What time is it?” said Garth. They groped their watches.

“Two-fifty-seven.”

“Right. At least we’re synchronized. I didn’t do anything wrong. I saw a particle.”

“I don’t think you did it right.”

“She wanted to measure the spin. But there wasn’t any spin. It wasn’t spinning. Huh.”

“That was no particle.”

The elevator doors opened. They stepped inside, and I followed. They bustled into the rear, canes tangling.

“Would you press lobby?” said Evan.

I hit the button.

“Whoever it is, they’re probably going to the lobby too, you know,” said Garth, as if I couldn’t hear it.

“We can’t be sure,” said Evan.

“Probably about seventy-five percent of the people in a given elevator are going to the lobby,” said Garth.

“Unless they got on at the lobby,” said Evan.

I remained silent.

“You didn’t see anything,” said Evan, a little viciously. “That’s why she has no use for you. That wasn’t a particle.”

“How would you know?”

“It wasn’t a particle. It wasn’t anything.”

“Correction. I don’t see things that aren’t there. That’s the whole point.”

The elevator opened to the lobby and I stepped out.

“Lobby?” said Evan.

I didn’t speak.

“It sounds like the lobby,” said Garth.

“We’re about five blocks from the bus stop,” said Evan as they came out of the elevator.

“We should be there in about five minutes.”

“It took four minutes on the way over. Not that there was any reason to rush, as things turned out.”

They tapped past me, toward the breeze and its smells, the chirping insects, the warm invisible sunlight. The bus stops and parking meters waiting to be cataloged and curated.

My mystery had deepened. The blind men were like me and Soft. They stood outside of Alice’s narrowing circle of favor. I’d have to find other suspects.

Garth paused at the entrance and raised his head, wrinkling his nose as though detecting my presence by scent. He pursed his lips and frowned, like a bullfrog. “At least I saw a particle,” he said, as much in my direction as Evan’s. “She never had any use for you in the first place.”