Universe 6 - [Anthology] Read online

  “What is it?” he asked with growing anxiety. “What did I do wrong?”

  “Nothing. I just don’t know why I came here, really. I don’t need anyone to tell me I’m human. It’s not good to get attached, anyway.” She was heading toward the door as she spoke.

  “SHUT UP IN THERE ALREADY!” the man next door shouted.

  “GO TO HELL!” Denton shouted back. He pulled on one of his uniforms. She went out the door, leaving him alone with all the noises of the city night, rumbling through the open window like a hungry belly. “Damn!” Denton said aloud, fumbling at buttons.

  Suddenly, apartments on three sides erupted, combining to grind the quiet evening into fine dust.

  “ALL OF YOU CUT IT OUT!”

  “I’LL BURN THIS HOLE TO THE GROUND IF YOU—”

  “I’M GONNA CALL THE PIGS!”

  Donna was stepping primly into the elevator just as Denton closed the door to his apartment behind him. He ran to the stairs and jogged swiftly down three flights, his footsteps echoing in the deserted concrete stairwell like the laughter of the generator.

  He ran into the empty street. The night was muggy, warm with summer smugness. He spotted Donna halfway down the block to his left. He ran after her, feeling foolish, but shouting “Hey, wait! It’s not that easy!”

  She passed a black alleyway, turned the corner. He scuffled across the mouth of the alley, saw her disappear around the corner—

  —something kicked his legs out from under him. He threw up his arms, felt the concrete edge of the curb crack an elbow, romancandling his arm; cheek striking the gutter grate: pain with snapping wires, cracking bullwhips. A hand pulled him roughly onto his back and he was looking at the twisted face of a teenage boy, ugly from barely repressed hatred. Someone else behind jerked Denton to his feet. His right eye was swelling and it hurt to squint, but with the other eye he saw that there were four hoods in all, each wearing transparent plastic jackets under which they were nude, muscular, and bristling with dark hairs. In sharp contrast to their hirsute lower parts, their faces and heads were shaved absolutely hairless. Their eyes burned with amphetamines. The drug made their maneuverings slightly spastic, like children flinching from expected blows.

  Two of them held Denton’s arms from behind. A third stepped in close with a knife. All four were strangely silent, almost pious. Denton saw the knife gleaming near his throat. He was paralyzed, numbed by what should have been unreality. He was watching viddy, he thought desperately. A commercial would come on in a moment. But one of the boys pulled Denton’s head back by his hair with a violent twist that sent spotlights of pain into the growing darkness in his skull. The darkness congealed into abject fear. He was without volition. He remembered Donna. He looked around desperately without moving his head. Had she deliberately brought him here to meet these men? Had she set him up? What would they do with the knife?

  One of the boys flicked quick fingers to unbutton Denton’s shirt. He parted the folds of the black uniform slowly, almost formally, as if he were undressing a lover. Denton knew the night was warm but he felt the air in his open shirt cold as a knife blade. If he shouted for help they would probably kill him right away. The streetlight overhead hurt his eyes; his arms were cramping uncomfortably behind him. He tried to change position and was rewarded with a kneejab in the small of his back. He looked around for Donna as the knife cut open his undershirt (a very sharp knife, he noted; the fabric parted easily, as if it had been unzipped). Then he felt the knife on his navel, pain like a tiny point of intense light flaring up, and a trickle of warm blood. Already the warmth of shock enveloped him in surrender. He closed his eyes and bit his lips against the sting near his navel. The pain made him open them again.

  The boy with the knife closed his eyes as if in anticipation of sybaritic satisfaction.

  A blur of movement—

  Then the boy with the knife screamed, his head snapped back, his mouth gaping, his back arched; he went rigid, yelling, ”Damn! Who—”

  He fell and Donna jumped easily aside and turned to face another. Denton felt the grip at the back of his neck relax as the boy behind him ran to aid his companion lying on the ground in front of her. Donna shot her booted foot, heel first, straight up and out, catching the third tough in the throat. She was tall and her long legs held her in good stead as the other two tried to get in close with their knives. The first two were lying almost like lovers on the ground; the boy who’d threatened Denton with the knife lay with his eyes wide open, unblinking, staring upward. He was perfectly still. The other was on his hands and knees, coughing blood onto his supine companion, one hand on his own crushed windpipe, his face staring and fascinated, as if he were tasting real pain for the first time, exploring it as a new world.

  Stopping another with a shoe-point in the groin, Donna spun and, without wasting momentum, came forward onto the foot and transferred the motion to her arm, striking the knife from his hand. The knife rang on the concrete, rolling in front of the boy with the crushed throat.

  Denton was breathing in huge gulps, still unable to act: he was sure that he would only run up against a television screen if he tried to intervene. But without a weapon, the last standing tough turned and fled into an alley.

  The other boy was still clutching his groin, rocking back and forth on his haunches, moaning, his face draining. Donna regarded him for a moment, then said in a low, calm voice:

  “I suppose I should try to undo what I’ve done now. I’ve got some first-aid stuff in my purse. If I can find it. . .” Kneeling before the boy who still rocked, she looked with anomalous tranquility at the place between his legs where she’d kicked him.

  Denton took a long breath, relaxing from his paralysis, an actor between scenes.

  He put a hand on Donna’s shoulder, felt her stiffen beneath his touch. He put his hand in his pocket, asking, “Where did you go when they jumped me?”

  “I hid in a doorwell. I thought they were after me. When I saw them surround you I went around to the other side of the alley and came through it, and up behind them.”

  She turned from him to face the boy. “Why?” she asked.

  Through grated teeth the boy answered, “Hurzbau . . .”

  The name made Denton realize where he had seen the leader of the gang before: in the park, the boy who had asked about his father under the generator. He stepped toward the other tough, demanding, “Hurzbau what?”

  “Hurzbau’s father’s in the hospital. Under the generator. He made us do it. He’s our packleader. He said you were a vampire killing his father. He watched you, followed you. . . .”

  Donna screamed shortly, the cry becoming a sigh as Denton heard her body hit the concrete sidewalk even before he turned around. A knife’s black hilt protruded from her side, stuck from the back by the boy who stood, wavering, ready to fall, still coughing blood. Denton recognized Hurzbau’s son, and he wondered: Why her instead of me?

  The boy collapsed, crumpling limply, blood sliding between his skin and the transparent suit, the plastic making the blood seem orange and artificial.

  Denton felt empathic pain in his own side as, sobbing, he ran to Donna. She was still breathing but unconscious. The knife was in to the hilt. He was afraid to pull it out and perhaps allow too much blood to escape.

  “Here. Call an ambulance.” The boy who had spoken before was standing, one hand still on his crotch, something like regret in his face. He handed Denton a public pocket-fone. Denton fumbled frantically to punch for emergency.

  A small metallic voice responded, and he gave directions. When he had done he looked up and down the street, wondering that it was so deserted after all the noise. There were three bright street lights on the block. Denton, Donna, and the remainder of the gang were visible and starkly outlined in the pool of light under the crowded skyscraper apartments lining both sides of the street.

  The events of the past few minutes caught up with Denton when he felt blood warming the hand resting on Donna’s still l
eg. He looked up at the boy who just stood there, face blanked.

  “All of you are going to regret this, kid,” Denton said in what he hoped was a steely, uncompromising tone.

  The boy just shrugged.

  * * * *

  He couldn’t go to work now, to watch a man die under a generator scoop knowing that Donna was dying under one just like it. He pondered the idea of quitting his job. Somehow he felt that losing his job at the generator would be a self-betrayal. It brought him a strange peace, as he sat in full health watching the patient wilt under the glass scoop like an ant burnt by a magnifying glass. Saying to himself: I’m still strong, it passed me by.

  He decided not to go to work. He kept seeing Donna’s name on the shift chart. They had expected him to tend her generator. No. No. He couldn’t visit her, even, while off duty. She was in a coma. He had to get his mind off it. He hadn’t slept at all that night and his eyes burned with exhaustion. He would go out and get something to eat and if Buxton decided to fire him because of his absence then the decision to leave the job would be made for him.

  He walked through the hospital lobby and into the glaring sunshine reflecting off the white buildings of the hospital complex. A growing tension was surmounting his composure. But he was an actor so no one could tell.

  Not even Alice. Alice was standing on the steps to the hospital, handing out pamphlets. She saw him immediately, seeing first the black uniform she hated, and then her once-lover interred inside.

  Denton hoped to avoid her, but before he could turn away she ran to him and, thrusting a pamphlet in his hand, embraced him. He pulled away, embarrassed, feeling tension about to break loose. The glare seemed to intensify, magnifying glass hovering over the ant. Alice laughed.

  “Still working there? I think you must really like your job, Ronnie.”

  His mouth worked but his lines wouldn’t come. He shook his head and finally managed, “I’d like to talk to you about it. Uh—welcome your opinion. But I’ve gotta go start my shift.” He turned and hurried back into the coolness of the hospital, feeling her smug smile hanging on to the back of his neck.

  It was suddenly important to him that he go to work. He had nothing to expiate.

  In the elevator, alone, he glanced at the crumpled pamphlet. He read:

  “... if it is inevitable that a man must die, let him do it with dignity. Death has long been a gross national product, especially since United States intervention in the Arab-Israeli conflict. But a bullet through the heart kills quickly; death under the generator comes tediously. The common fallacy that entropic generators promote death has been proven untrue, but what do they do to ease or inhibit death? The presence of a generator is psychologically damaging to the dying, causing them to give up the fight for recovery before they normally would. . .”

  He remembered Hurzbau’s words: Can you say it doesn’t take away from my life if you don’t know how it works?

  * * * *

  “Mr. Buxton? Can I talk to you?”

  Hardly looking up, Buxton demanded, “Well? What are you doing here? You were supposed to be in four-fifty-six twenty minutes ago.”

  “I want you to explain the principles of the entropic generator to me. I think it’s my responsibility to know.”

  “Oh hell,” Buxton spat, disappointed, “is that all? Look it up in the Encyclopedia Britannica.”

  “I did. It was all in jargon. And they told us briefly and none too clearly when I was being trained for this job. But I never really cared to understand till now. But a . . . friend of mine is under—”

  “Under the generator, right? And now you want to know. I’ve heard that one before too many times. Okay, Denton. I’ll explain. Once. And you are going to be docked for the time it takes me to explain and the time you weren’t working.”

  Denton shrugged, sat down across from Buxton. He felt like a boy going to confession.

  Buxton sighed and began, playing with a pencil as he spoke: “The word entropy, literally translated, means turning toward energy. From our relative viewpoint we usually define entropy as the degree of disorder in a substance. Entropy always increases and available energy diminishes. So it seems. From our point of view, when we see someone’s system of order decaying it seems as if the growth of entropy means a drop of energy. It appears that something is going away from us.” He paused to organize his thoughts, began to doodle on scratchpaper.

  Denton tapped his fingers irritably. “Yeah? So what? When people die they lose energy—”

  “No, they don’t lose it in the sense we’re concerned with, and SHUT UP AND LISTEN because I’m not going to explain this to you twice. This is already the fourth time this month I’ve had to go through all this. . . . Now, when you get old, your eyesight fails so it appears as if you see less and less all the time. Things in this world are blotting out, blurring up. Actually, you’re seeing something more than you could see before your eyesight failed. When your eyesight dims your entropy-sight increases. Objects look that way, blurred and graylike, in the other dimension, because they possess a form defined by where they are not rather than where they are.”

  “What dimension?”

  Denton was lost.

  “The dimension manifested concurrent with the accruence of entropy. We used to think entropy undid creation and form, but in its total sense, entropy creates a form so obverse to ours that it appears not to be there. It creates in a way we don’t really understand but which we’ve learned to use.” He cleared his throat, embarrassed by his lapse into erudition. “Anyway, the universe is constantly shifting dimensions. From entropic focus to our type of order and back again. When you get old and seem to be feeling and hearing and seeing less, you are actually perceiving the encroachment of that other universe.”

  They were silent for five breaths. The taciturn old Jew tapped his pencil agitatedly.

  Denton wondered if his inability to comprehend stemmed from his youth. He wasn’t decayed enough yet.

  “What I’m trying to say,” Buxton went on wearily, “is that entropy is a progression instead of a regression. When someone is walking past you it seems like they’re regressing, in a relative way, because they are walking toward where you have already been, to what is behind you. But to them, they are progressing. There are two kinds of known energy, on a cosmic scale: electrical-nuclear energy causing form, and the negative energy of antiform. Nothing is really lost when you die. What occurs is a trade.”

  “You mean like water displacement? Going into there, some of it is forced into here?”

  “More or less. The generators change the energy of death into usable electric power.”

  “But if you take energy from a dying person, doesn’t that make them die faster?”

  “WILL YOU PAY ATTENTION, FOR GOD’S SAKE!” Buxton was determined to get through. “No. It doesn’t take anything from a dying person. It accumulates energy that’s radiated as a result of dying. The negative energy is released into the inanimate environment whether the generator is there or not. The scoop doesn’t come into contact with the patient himself ... it reacts only to the side-effect of his biological dissolution.” He took a deep breath. “The main idea is that entropy is not the lack of something, not a subtraction, but an addition. We learned how to tap it because the energy crisis forced us to put up with the temporary discomfort—purely psychological and rather silly—of having the scoop directly over a dying person. When it comes my time to go, I’ll be damn proud to contribute something. None of my life is wasted that way, not even its end. One individual causes a remarkable amount of negative energy to be radiated as he dies, you know. We’ve only been using it practically for five years and there are still a lot of things we don’t understand about it.”

  “So why do it to people? Why not plants?”

  “Because various organisms have variegated patterns of radiating negative energy. We don’t know how to tap all of them yet. We can do it with cattle and people now. We’re working on plants.”

&
nbsp; “I don’t know, I, uh . . .” Denton stumbled over his words, knowing that Buxton would be infuriated by the objection. “But couldn’t a generator damage the morale of a person dying? Make him believe it’s too late and prematurely give up? I mean, susceptibility to disease is largely psychological, and if you’re under pressure by being under the scoop—” He cut short, swallowing, seeing Buxton’s growing anger.

  Hot ashes sprayed from Buxton’s wagging pipe as he spoke. “Denton, all that is a lot of conjectural hogwash. And it is pure stupidity to babble about it in the face of the worst energy crisis the world has ever known. We may have the energy problem licked forever if we can learn to draw negative energy from the dying of plants and small animals and such. But people like you might just ruin that hope. And I want you to know, Denton, that I’m going to seriously consider letting you go, so if you don’t want to clinch my decision you’d better get the hell to—”