Turing & Burroughs: A Beatnik SF Novel (35 page)

“Susan says that skuggers vibrate at a rate faster than normal humans.”

“Our V-bomb is no bohemian elixir,” exclaimed Ulam with a short laugh. “I think Susan and I are talking about very different things.”

“Well, yes,” said Alan, embarrassed to be caught out. “Of course I know this. But as a metaphor—” He stopped himself and began again. He should be on the attack, not defending himself. “If you kill the skugs, you kill the skuggers. Including Susan and me. You’re talking about an American genocide!”

“I am aware of this issue,” said Ulam shortly. “This is why I toss at night and see ugly ghosts. And this is the reason number one why I am glad to be confiding in you. I want you to avert the deaths of the skuggers.”

“Me!” exclaimed Alan, dismayed. “But
you’re
the one setting off the V-bomb!”

“I want you to compose a warning we can spread to the skuggers,” said Ulam. “We must tell them to expel their skugs by noon tomorrow. And then these people are safe. And my conscience is lily white.”

“How are we supposed to
expel
our skugs?” asked Alan, growing angrier. “You have no idea what you’re talking about, Stan. A skug is completely integrated into a skugger’s metabolism.”

“Use your noodle,” said Ulam, falling back on one of his newly learned American idioms. “I give you twenty-four hours.” He lowered his voice. “Understand that I am acting independently here. I have no authorization from the higher authorities. But if you can find a deskugging method, I’m sure the authorities would disseminate your instructions for good press. As if offering civilians a chance to leave a targeted zone. Our military is not wanting the bad press of a domestic Hiroshima.”

Alan tried to consider the offer in a rational way. But his thoughts were muddled by the angry clamor of his inner skug. And when he tried to push the skug down, the room began to spin. His vision blurred, his knees wobbled, and he dropped to the floor.

The next thing Alan knew, Ulam was helping him to sit up, and offering him a glass of water. “You fainted, Alan. You steer between a Scylla and Charybdis. As do I. We’ll help each other through.”

“I’m afraid,” said Alan, reassembling his scattered thoughts. The moment of unconsciousness had been like a jump-cut. A literal experience of the void. “I’m terribly afraid.”

“I have a second motivation for cooperating with you and the skugs,” said Ulam, gazing at Alan in his chair. The scientist resumed pacing, as collected as if he were ticking off points on a list. “I know all to well how polarities can flip. Perhaps the V-bomb is a big flop. Perhaps the skugs win and everyone on Earth is a skugger. In this case, I am hoping you will stand up for me and, above all, for my family.”

“Of course,” said Alan readily. “We’re both mathematicians.”

Ulam nodded in agreement. “You are a brilliant man, Alan, and I’d like you to go over my calculations with me. I’m terribly worried that I’ve gotten something wrong. And what I’m telling you about the V-bomb may help you in seeking a way to expel your own skug.”

Of course this kind of talk set Alan’s inner skug to ramping up for another rebellion. “Let’s not even talk about such things,” said Alan quickly. Already he was seeing spots before his eyes.

They sat sat in silence for a minute, until Alan’s vision cleared. And now he posed a different question. “Can you explain why you think I’ll help you build the V-bomb at all?”

Ulam tapped his diagrams and gave Alan a knowing smile. “For the same reason that I corrected that fool Teller’s botched design for a hydrogen bomb. You and I like to know. We like to make things work.”

“Yes,” said Alan, nodding his head. “I do want to know the secrets of the V-bomb. What
are
the V-rays? How do you make them? How do you tune them to the frequency of the skugs?” His skug was cautiously in favor of this line of inquiry. Knowledge is power.

Ulam drifted over to his blackboard and began drawing lines. “V-rays are a style of radiation that’s associated with living organisms. Not an electromagnetic wave and not a particle. A purely quantum mechanical wave of contingent probability. The V stands for vitality—and for the element vanadium, which happens to potentiate the ray production. By shaping a vanadium-doped bomb’s core to certain peculiar specifications of my own design, we can produce a burst of V-rays with very specific properties.”

On the blackboard Ulam drew a kind of circle with dents in its edge. He gazed it for minute, then erased it and went to lean over his table again, poking at his diagrams and his pages of tightly written equations. “Come see.”

“How far can the V-rays travel?” asked Alan, peering over Ulam’s shoulder.

“This the beauty part,” said Ulam. “My V-rays resemble neutrinos, in that hardly any form of matter impedes their motion. They sail through concrete or lead or the body of a cow, but if they are stumbling upon a living skug—
tzack
! A kick in the pants.”

They pulled up chairs to be more comfortable and spent the rest of the day poring over Ulam’s work. The hours flew by. The reasoning was remarkably lucid, the formulas very clean. And by late afternoon, Alan had an idea about how to pervert the design for his skug’s purposes. But he still needed to know how one would go about physically tweaking the bomb.

Ulam went across the room to fetch them some cookies and a couple of glasses of apple juice. “My working lunch,” he said, handing Alan his share. “Or supper. So now—your verdict. No problems?”

Feeling the old lust for intellectual battle, Alan began savagely picking at the construction’s weakest point. “Shouldn’t you be using the Hermitian conjugate of this Hilbert space operator?” he said, tapping one of the sheets of formulae. “Perhaps you know better than I. But it hardly seems obvious that the V-ray operator is self-adjoint. Can you truly be sure that your detonation process will produce a discrete spectrum with a single, unique eigenvalue?”

Ulam’s lips began soundlessly to move. Repeatedly he ran his hands down the sides of his face.

Alan pressed harder. “If there were to be a multiplicity of points in the discrete measurement spectrum, then the V-bomb might annihilate quite a wide range of life forms. Even more dire: If the spectrum were in fact continuous, then your V-rays could disintegrate the planet Earth itself.”

“Already I think of that,” muttered Ulam. “Thinking about this all the time. Pipe down.” He clawed a fresh sheet of paper over to himself and went into a frenzy of calculation. “Another bump in the core shape,” the mathematician murmured after about five minutes. He was scribbling at a tiny, crooked diagram and talking to himself. “A bump at azimuth thirty-seven, elevation forty-nine, and then we’re safe, please dear God. Then we are being safe.”

“Stout fellow,” said Alan.

Ulam glanced up as if he’d forgotten Alan were there. “I have to go on-site now,” said Ulam. “Project Utopia. Down in the canyon. This evening is my last chance to be making adjustments. I would not be going near that bomb tomorrow. It will be on countdown starting at midnight, and from then on in a risky condition.”

“Can I come along now?” asked Alan. “I’d like to see it.” His skug wanted him there. He already had a rough outline for a method to make the thing into a universal skugging ray. Perhaps he could overpower Ulam at the Project Utopia and—

“No, no, no,” said Ulam. “Only me. I am the only one with clearance to go down there. Well, I suppose that Dick Hosty has clearance as well. Just Hosty and me. None of the other LANL scientists is understanding what’s going on with Project Utopia—and none of is wanting to risk any blame. We’ll leave my office together, and I’ll be bidding you farewell out front.”

On the way down the windowed hallway, they saw that it was twilight and that the snow storm had returned with new force. The sky was yellow-gray with the teeming flakes. A security agent ordered up a tracked snow vehicle to ferry Ulam into the canyon.

Ulam almost forgot to say goodbye. All that was in his mind was correcting the Hermitian conjugate error in his V-bomb. But at the last minute he focused on Alan and again exhorted him to find a deskugging routine while there was time. The tank-like vehicle clanked off with Ulam aboard. Alan was on his own.

His mind was in turmoil. The skug was pressing him to pursue the path towards universal skugification, but by now Alan longed to somehow free himself. Not that he could safely think about these issues right outside the lab. He had to maintain his Pfaff cover.

The despised Dick Hosty appeared in his white ambulance. He had heavy, knobby chains on his tires, and he wore his pistol even more prominently than before. He wanted to drive Alan home. And once again he wouldn’t take no for an answer.

Although Alan had his tiresome Peter Pfaff personality firmly in place, Hosty seemed even more suspicious than yesterday.

“Where are you actually staying?” he asked Alan as soon as the ambulance pulled away from the curb. As before the squawk-box was tuned to a police channel, and a hand-held microphone danged near Hosty’s head.

“Well, I
was
at the Cowboy Motel,” said Alan uncertainly.

“I checked there, and they don’t got any record of you, Pete,” said Hosty. “So I asked around at that Big Bow Wow where you like to eat. Waitress wouldn’t give me the sweat off her butt, but a good old boy eatin a steak said you was rentin a cottage from a vet lady down the road. Sue Stook? The waitress is Sue’s girlfriend, what I hear. I hate shit like that.”

“How is this any of your business at all?” said Alan, mustering his gumption. He needed to put an end to this conversation. It would be a disaster if Hosty and the skugsniffer got near his cottage.

“Aren’t you wanting to renew your security clearance tomorrow?” taunted Hosty. “Way you’re goin’, I don’t see that happening at all.”

“Frankly I don’t give a ruddy fuck,” said Alan, at the end of his rope. “Set me out at the Bow Wow and we’ll part ways for good.”

“Nice talk for a tech,” said Hosty. He addressed himself to the skugsniffer once again. “Hey, Roland, you really sure this guy ain’t a skugger?”

“No skuggers in sight,” said the skugsniffer in a weary tone. “This man checks out the same as yesterday. And don’t go shocking me for nothing.”

“Like this?” said Hosty, sadistically tapping his shock button. The skugsniffer in the tank sent out a howl of pure agony.

“That’s so you’ll keep your sniffer primed real good,” said Hosty. He motored past the friendly lights of the Big Bow Wow with no reduction in speed. “We gonna deliver Pete direct to his abode. Just in case he’s got something to hide. We got jeeps and soldiers on the ready at the labs.”

All the old fears and resentments came boiling up within Alan. Proctor Whitsitt caning him, Detective Jenkins arresting him, the MI5 men poisoning Zeno—always more enemies—Pratt in Tangier, Landers in Palm Beach, Rupert Small in New Orleans—and now Dick Hosty, who’d killed two of Alan’s ex-lovers with a flame-thrower.

“Skuggers up ahead!” blared the skugsniffer’s speaker. “A nest of them—a woman and two men.”

A calm golden light filled Alan’s head. Vassar was with him, giving him strength—the aethereal manta ray’s tail was plugged into the ambulance’s cigarette lighter. Everything seemed outlined with bright beads. The squawk-box police radio had gone dead. Vassar’s easy voice sounded in Alan’s ears.

“Go ahead, man. This is it. Even up the score.”

The next thing Alan knew he was choking Hosty, his hands gone huge and massive, digging into Hosty’s flesh, breaking his windpipe and snapping the vertebrae of his neck. Hosty clawed at his microphone to no avail.

In his final spasms, Hosty may have formed an idea that his skugsniffer had betrayed him. Pressing a hidden control with his foot, he sent a lethal bolt of power into the skugsniffer’s tank. Alan could smell the burnt flesh. Hosty was dying at the wheel, and poor Roland Gill was dead in back.

Meanwhile nobody was driving the ambulance. It lurched to a harmless stop in a roadside snowdrift. Fortunately no other cars were out in the storm. There in the dark, Alan saw Hosty’s soul, a small writhing turnip thing that drifted out the window and dwindled down to nothing against the snow-smeared sky.

“No curtain calls?” challenged Alan. “After all your honk and menace?” He heard no response, and he was glad. As for Roland Gill in back, his ghost has found its onward path unseen.

Alan laid Hosty’s corpse on the seat , took the wheel, and restarted the stalled car. He drove through the streaming flakes to Sue Stook’s and parked in the empty barn behind the lit-up granny cottage. He covered the ambulance—now a hearse—with tarps.

Now what? Go indoors? Alan studied his hands. The hands of a killer. He wasn’t quite ready to face his friends.

For their part, Neal, Susan, or Bill could readily have teeped Alan’s presence, but they were otherwise involved. An unobtrusive telepathic scan showed Burroughs to be necking with Ginsberg on the couch. Susan and Neal were having sex in Susan’s bed. To add spice to the love-making, Neal had grown an extra penis. And the wanton Susan had a second vagina. The couple were linked together like puzzle pieces.

The anatomical extravaganza was hardly Alan’s cup of tea. Unnoticed by his friends, he withdrew his telepathic tendrils. He was starting to shiver from the cold, and from his stormy emotions.