Quantum Night

11

“Good evening, Jim. Thanks for coming in again.”

Jim Marchuk was carrying a plastic bag with the green McNally Robinson logo. “No problem, Professor Warkentin. Bit surprised anyone’s working on New Year’s Eve.”

“Oh, Christmas break is my favorite time on campus,” Menno said. “Peace and quiet. Summers are great, too—the campus is mostly empty, and the weather’s nicer then, but Christmas is the best; the place is dead.”

Jim’s tone was light. “Universities would be wonderful if it weren’t for all those pesky students.”

“No, no, no,” said Menno. “It’s faculty that drive me up the walls. Departmental meetings, committee meetings, so-and-so’s retirement dinner, somebody else’s birthday lunch. Here, with almost everyone away, a body can finally concentrate.”

“Huh,” said Jim.

“You got a party to get to?”

“Kinda. Bunch of friends, we’re going to Garbonzo’s—hang out, watch Ed the Sock do Fromage.”

“I’m sure that means something,” said Menno. “Anyway, we’ll get you out of here long before midnight.”

“I’m happy to come in,” said Jim. “Dorm’s kinda lonely. But my parents are off on a cruise for their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary, so not much point in going back to Cow Town.”

Dominic Adler entered the room, carrying the Mark II. “That’s not the same helmet as before,” said Jim, but there was nothing suspicious in his tone; he was just making conversation, and it beat talking about the weather.

“True,” said Dominic. “Completely new design.” They were hoping that by using transcranial focused ultrasound—a new brain-stimulation technique the DoD was experimenting with—they could boost the phonemes enough to punch through the background noise.

“Great,” said Jim, reaching for the helmet. It had different modules attached to its surface, and, in addition to ones that looked like decks of cards, there were two—one on either side—that looked like green hockey pucks.

“Put it on,” Dominic said.

Jim pulled it over his head, and Dominic loomed in to make various adjustments. “It’s a snugger fit than the old one,” Jim offered.

“Yes. We thought maybe we were losing alignment with the previous setup.” Dom pulled on the chin strap, cinching it. “How’s it look, Menno?”

Jim glanced toward Menno, as if expecting an assessment of his appearance, but Menno was peering at the oscilloscope, which showed the thick, chaotic trace of the para-auditory scan. “I think it’s fine,” Menno said.

“Okay,” said Dominic. He glanced at his calculator watch, then: “Take your seat next door, Jim.”

Jim headed out into the corridor and went into the other room, lowering himself onto the swivel chair on the opposite side of the glass.

Menno turned on the cassette recorder, which had a little microphone on a plastic stand. “Project Lucidity, stage two, test number fourteen on thirty-one December 2000, 7:49 P.M. PIs: Dominic K. Adler and Menno Warkentin. Subject JM is in place.”

Menno looked at Dom, who said, “Okay. Let’s rock and roll.” Menno nodded and typed “execute” at his computer’s command prompt. He poised his chubby index finger over the backward L of the enter key, took a deep breath, then tapped it.

Through the window, in the chair, they could see Jim’s head loll back, as though he were looking up at the ceiling, the way one might when lost in thought.

Menno and Dom exchanged glances. Menno halted the program, then touched the intercom button. “Jim?”

No response.

“Jim?” said Dom, as if somehow the young man could hear him even if he couldn’t hear Menno. “Are you okay?”

“Oh, shit,” Menno said, pointing at the oscilloscope, which showed nothing but a perfectly flat green phosphor line.

Dominic’s eyes went wide, and the two of them rushed toward the door, did a hasty turn in the corridor, then entered the testing room.

“Jim!” said Menno, crouching before him.

Dominic tipped Jim’s head forward by gently lifting the back of the helmet. The student’s chin dropped to his chest.

Menno attempted to check for a pulse in Jim’s right wrist. Unused to doing the test he’d seen so often on TV, his own heart raced as he tried to find it, but at last he did, feeling the rhythmic movement of Jim’s radial artery, good and strong and at the normal pace, too. “He’s just fainted.”

“Maybe the helmet is too tight,” Dominic said as he undid the chin strap, then pulled the helmet off, setting it gently—it had cost sixty thousand dollars, after all—on the tile floor. “Might have restricted his circulation.”

Menno tried something else he’d seen on TV: lightly slapping Jim on one cheek and then the other. “Come on,” he said. “Wake up.” But there was no response from Jim. Menno then held his own hand in front of Jim’s nose, feeling breath—warm, regular—on his palm.

“What should we do?” asked Dominic.

“Let’s get him out of the chair and onto the floor, before he falls out.”

They did just that, laying Jim on his back.

“He’s not sweating,” said Menno. “He’s not breathing hard. He’s just…”

“Unconscious.”

“Yeah.”

“But the others we tested,” said Dom, “the ones who normally didn’t have an inner voice—nothing happened to them.”

“True.”

“So,” said Dominic, sounding increasingly desperate, “why in God’s name won’t he wake up?”

“I don’t know,” replied Menno, “but we’ve got to call 911.”

“No, we can’t do that.”

“But he’s unconscious.”

“There will be too many questions. Lucidity is classified.”

“Yes, but this boy—”

“Look,” said Dominic. “He’s breathing. His pulse is steady.”

“What if he’s in a coma, for God’s sake? He needs to be in a hospital. He’ll need water soon. Food. And he’ll have to go the bathroom.”

“Well, how do we explain—”

“I don’t care about that!” snapped Menno. “We’re in no position to look after him.”

“We’re under a military nondisclosure agreement.”

“Damn it, Dominic!” Menno took a deep breath. “Okay, all right. Fine. Let’s get him out of here, out of the lab. Move him down to, I don’t know, the men’s room. Then we can say we stumbled upon him, found him passed out. New Year’s Eve—they’ll take him for a drunk student.”

“Until they do a blood test.”

“Look, I’m not going to just abandon him. Now, are you going to help me move him or not?”

Dominic thought for a moment. “What if we’re seen?”

“Everyone’s gone for the night. Come on!”

Dominic hesitated.

“For Christ’s sake, Dom. If I drag him on my own, it’ll leave dirt on his clothes and scuff marks leading back here.”

Dom frowned, then bent over and took Jim’s ankles in his hands. Menno nodded his thanks and grabbed Jim’s arms just below the shoulders. They lifted him so his bottom cleared the floor by a few inches and moved, Dominic walking backward. At the threshold, they put Jim down for a second and Dominic opened the door. He checked that the coast was clear, then took his end again, and they quickly moved Jim along the corridor, going by closed doors, the little windows in them nothing but dark squares.

They were just passing the women’s room—the men’s was the next one along—when Menno heard a grunt. He looked down and saw that Jim’s eyes were now open, showing whites all around the irises.

Hearing was restored, as was vision. Fluorescent tubes behind frosted panels moved by overhead.

A male voice: “Dominic, stop.” And then the same voice: “Jim, um, you, ah, you passed out. How do you feel?”

A response required; one made: “I’m okay.”

Arms freed; legs, too. Pressure on the back.

A different voice: “Can you stand?”

Knees flexed; palms pushed against the dusty floor. The word “yes” was uttered as hands moved to brush away dirt.

The first speaker again: “You gave us quite a start.”

Silence. Then, filling the space: “I’ll be all right.”

“Yes, yes,” said the second speaker quickly. “Of course you will.”

Hours later, long after Jim had headed off to his sock-and-cheese thing—whatever the hell that was—Dominic and Menno were in the lab, still trying to make sense of it all. Dom was sitting on a three-legged stool, looking at a printout of the oscilloscope tracings, showing the noise in Jim’s auditory cortex disappearing at the instant he lost consciousness. On the wall behind him, held up by a pair of U-shaped acrylic braces, was a souvenir baseball bat, commemorating the two consecutive World Series wins by the Toronto Blue Jays. Menno, leaning against the opposite wall, looked at it, idly wondering what it was like to be a bat.

His reverie was interrupted by Dominic, saying for what seemed like the hundredth time, “For God’s sake, all we were trying to do was boost the queued phonemes so they wouldn’t be drowned out by his inner voice. What could have possibly gone wrong?”

“I don’t know.”

“We have people like Jim,” said Dom, trying to puzzle it out, “who do have an inner voice, and then there are those who are—what? Monologue-less? Soliloquy-free?” He shook his head. “Bah. Those are both awkward names.”

“True,” said Menno softly, as his heart suddenly began pounding. “But, my God, there is an established term for those without inner voices—at least in my field of study…”