As She Climbed Across the Table (5 page)

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.”

Alice never packed a bag. Her time in the apartment just dwindled. I pretended we were suffering a temporary rift, and that in her silent way she would slip back into my arms. Four or five lonely nights had passed before the morning I cornered her in the hall of the administration building.

“Philip,” she said, almost sweetly.

“Alice.”

“I have to stay with Lack,” she said. “He can’t be left unobserved.”

Neither can I, I wanted to say.

“I’m canceling my classes. This is a big opportunity. Lack’s all mine now. I understand what he’s saying. I’m the only one.”

“You’re the only one for Lack.”

“Yes.”

It was work holding back my sarcasm. The result was silence.

“Philip. You understand, don’t you?”

I closed my eyes, leaned against the wall. “You’re sleeping with Lack.”

She ignored the provocation. “I’m sleeping in the lab. I mean, I’m not really sleeping much, to tell the truth. Please understand, Philip. I’m on the edge of the territory.”

Horizon of the real
, I silently corrected.

A desultory student passed us in the hall, headed for some office to beg for reprieve.

“You’re leaving me,” I said.

“I have to be where this takes me.”

“It takes you away. You’re gone, and I’m alone.”

“You’re not alone.”

“Worse than alone, actually. I’m partial. I’m part of something that isn’t there anymore. I’m a broken-off chunk.”

Alice looked down. “What I’m doing is very important.”

“When will you come back?”

Silence.

“Say something encouraging,” I said. “Tell me it’s good for us. Tell me you think I’m overreacting. Use the word
us
.”

She met my eyes with a look of terror.

“What I’m hearing is you won’t use the word
us
,” I said.

She stared at her feet again. “Soft once told me that certain discoveries choose the scientist who discovers them. They wait for the right one. That’s me and Lack.”

Welling sarcasm again drowned my tongue.

Alice took my hand. “I have to go, Philip.”

“To Lack.”

“Yes.” She pulled her hand away, ran hair out of her eyes, smiled feebly. “I’m sorry.”

Before I could speak she was gone.

When Alice held her press conference I crept in and sat unobtrusively at the back. It turned out that Alice was right, Soft wrong. Lack was displaying a preference for certain particles. There wasn’t any explanation, but Alice had dubbed it
vacuum intelligence
, and Lack was instantly and forever anthropomorphized.

Lack had star potential, at least on campus. He was a charismatic mystery, a mute ambassador, a cosmic Kaspar Hauser. Developments in his chamber went murmuring through the faculty daily. And today he was being offered to the larger world.

The larger world was showing only the slightest interest. The conference hall was less than half full, and I recognized a lot of the faces. The physicists might have overestimated Lack’s sex appeal. Alice sat up on the dais, sipping water and paging through her notes, unperturbable, wrapped in silence. Soft was
beside her, his legs crossed, pants hitched up awkwardly to reveal spindly ankles, his expression distant. The momentum in the department belonged to Alice now. Soft was just a token, a reminder of the Prize that could be had.

The lights dimmed. Alice stepped up to the podium, waiting for the crowd to fall silent, and introduced herself and Soft. Then she explained, in lucid detail, the sequence that had led to the discovery and naming of Lack. Soft’s venture, the false vacuum bubble. The aneurysm. The gravity event. The audience followed her closely.

My attention wandered. I was busy righting myself. It was useful, seeing Alice at a fixed distance, so far away. She was up there, and I was over here, she was apparently intact—maybe I was intact, too. So I sat and adjusted my own vertical hold after a week of spinning.

Alice went on to describe the state of the experiment—Lack’s gradual stabilization, and the conversion of the chamber from Cauchy-space to earth-normal. “Lack’s tastes make up his being,” she said. “His preference for certain particles is all there is to him. If he stops choosing he stops existing.” She described the attempt to define his exact boundaries, the array of detectors, meters, and photosensitive plates they had aimed at this hint, this tenuous invisible presence.

The audience applauded politely when she was done. Alice nodded her thanks and went to sit beside Soft, to field questions from the crowd.

The questions that came were respectful and daunted. I lost my patience with the whole thing. I suddenly wanted to be out in the world. The campus, that is. But when I got to my feet I was mistaken for a questioner.

“Yes? Professor Engstrand?” said Alice. Her amplified voice boomed in the auditorium. A student with a microphone hurried toward me through the crowd, trailing cord.

It was a silly mistake. I’d been feeling invisible, but I was a recognizable figure. The Interdean should have something to say about Lack.

I hated to disappoint. So I took the microphone. As I weighed it in my hand I felt the spotlight of the crowd’s attention swing toward me, heard it in the creaking of chairs.

“It’s a conceit of physics,” I said, “that the rest of the world exists to supply metaphors for subatomic events. The
spin
of a particle, the
color
or
flavor
of a quark. A
field
or
horizon. Beauty, truth
, and
strangeness
. The physicist tends to see his subject as the indivisible core around which metaphor orbits. Physics is the universal tongue, the language the aliens will speak when they appear.”