Universe 6 - [Anthology] Read online

  Never mind that. The locks spring open at my bidding, almost magically. As the door whirs open, they appear at the end of the corridor. “There! He’s going in!” “Stop him!” they shout as they rush forward.

  But they are too slow. Quickly I am inside, and the door booms shut on them, and I reset the locks from the inside. Sudden exhaustion overcomes me, and I have to lean against the door; I feel their ineffectual poundings as slight tremors through the thick metal. It goes on and on, but it doesn’t matter. They can’t get in. I am safe.

  Exhaustion gives way to elation, and I begin to laugh, shortwinded as I am. “Fools,” I shout. “Go ahead. Keep pounding. You’ll never get in.” Still laughing, I turn—and the laughter dies away, as I see where I am.

  The room is high, not wide, and softly lit. Against the walls on either side are enclosed rows of tanks, the glassteel banded by protecting metal. Within are solutions, bubbled through with gas feed lines. Floating in them are gray shapeless lumps, each with many wire leads going back and away: the Stables.

  I’ve done it. I’ve found the Stables’ chambers—the room of our rulers. The room of my—

  My—

  Something strange, rising in me. It reaches my throat, becoming a moan, then a groan, and then I am screaming, over and over again. I claw at the door, scratching to get out, to get away from them, those horrible gray lumps, throwing the relays, spinning the locks wildly until I hit the right combination and the door slides open and I tumble out into the midst of the others, who instinctively back away.

  I get to my feet. “Stay back,” I say. My voice quavers uncontrollably. “Don’t come near me.”

  They circle around me, wary, ever watchful. They look at me with—fear? No. A wide-eyed horror and fascination. And something akin to—pity.

  “Poor little phantom.” I can hear it in Macombray’s voice.

  “What do you mean by that?” I demand. “What are you going to do?”

  “Nothing. Nothing at all.” Macombray points at me. “Do you know who you are? What you are?”

  “What is this? I’m Yang. A crew member, like you.”

  “Are you? What happened in there?” He points to the chamber behind me. I fight a horrifying urge to look back.

  “Nothing. A queasiness. Don’t come closer.” I back up against the door for support.

  “Don’t you think we heard the screams?” Ostermeyer says. “Would the sight of the Stables be that horrible to a crew member? Or did you react like that because you couldn’t face yourself?”

  “What kind of idiocy is this?” I say. “I’m as much a crew member as the rest of you. I came on board forty-seven periods ago, just like you did—”

  “Forty-seven?” Ostermeyer turns to Lee. “Tell him.”

  Lee says, “I checked records for the hatch locks. I also called for the roster. There is no Yang on it.”

  “No,” I say. “Impossible.”

  “And Ship launch was fifty earth-years ago, real time. On this Ship, the equivalent of seventy-eight periods.”

  “Liar,” I say angrily, and swing at Lee. But my hand—my arm—they pass right through him. He stands there, untouched.

  “That’s right,” he says, smiling sadly. “We know you now. And because we do, you become less effective. And less real.”

  I feel confusion and terror like a whirlpool around me. “But then—what—”

  Macombray points behind me once more. “Look again,” he says. “Face yourself this time.”

  And turn. I do not want to look, but I turn anyway. Against my will, I look again into the shadowy chamber, and see myself—

  I am a great gray shapeless thing, grown in vitro from tissue cultures, kept in a saline nutrient solution maintained at thirty-seven degrees plus or minus point two degrees Centigrade, sustained by external voltage of seven plus or minus point one millivolts and by oxygen bubbler kept constant at thirty dynes per square centimeter pressure. I am used as guidance, intellect, psychologist/psychiatrist, and for datastorage, computation, Ship maintenance, and all cognitive functions. I am responsibile for maintenance of the internal, adiabatic world of the Ship on its years-long journey to other stars. Responsible for well-being of crew members, keeping them as close to psychological and social norms as possible, and eliminating all aberrant factors. In short, a Stable.

  No.

  “A figment of a Stable’s imagination. Maybe too much oxygen pressure, or a fluctuation in solution pH. No matter. We’ve located the defective Stable. We should have known it before, with your access to ‘confidential’ files, and how easily you were able to readjust the machines . . .” Lee shakes his head.

  “But what now?” I plead. I can only plead, now.

  “We deactivate you. After a while.”

  “What do you mean?” I say with apprehension. They all look at me. Accusers.

  “You treated us like things,” Lee says. “You took advantage of us—of our weaknesses—playing with them and toying with us for your own perverted games. But you’re only a phantom. We, on the other hand, are human. We feel. When you took us into dream, we felt all the pain and terror and agony you wanted us to feel. After all that, we could hate, and ache for revenge.

  “That’s what we’re going to do now: take a little revenge. And we have you to thank for showing us the way.” They all turn and begin to leave.

  “Wait,” I say, reaching for them. “What do you intend to do?”

  Lee turns. He is smiling. “We’re going to have a little dream,” he says. “But don’t feel left out. You’ll be in it.”

  “No,” I say. “No. No!”

  But it’s no use. I can’t stop them. All I can do is wait, huddled with fear, until they come for me, and take me, and—

  Strap me to the table, split my belly open with knives, and pull the organs out—

  Whittle my limbs slowly down to stubs with glittering blades—

  Tear my skin off with snapping bullwhips—

  Shoot me—

  Brain me—

  Castrate me—

  Disembowel me—

  Again and again. A hundred times, a thousand, until I beg for it to end, for them to stop.

  But it doesn’t stop. Oblivion doesn’t come.

  They lied. They’re going to torture me forever. As I used them, so they’re now using me. And I can do nothing except die, over and over again.

  They’ve learned well.

  <>

  * * * *

  As our technology continues to grow and proliferate, permeating every corner of our society, it opens new possibilities for everyone: new careers, new abilities . . . and new crimes. It may soon be possible (if it isn’t already) for an industrial spy with the key information to steal every bit of computerized data a company has stored—and he could do it with the same ease with which he might tap a phone. Then there are the other capabilities that go along with such technological crime. . . .

  Charlie haas was born in Brooklyn in 1952, studied writing at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and has sold stories to the men’s slicks. At last report he was working on a historical novel.

  * * * *

  Shifting Parameters in Disappearance and Memory

  BY CHARLIE HAAS

  ONE

  “A big change came into my life at that point, because I was suddenly deluged with information—information about life in general.”

  —jimmy webb, songwriter,

  interviewed in The New Yorker, January 9, 1971

  The second call had me expecting something out of an espionage movie: At 2:13 in the same diner as last time you’ll get directions to a noisy bar in an Asian port where the fat man with the ginger-colored beard and the eyepatch will hand you a tan briefcase, electronically sealed, containing five forged telegrams, a yellow capsule, a thermos of vodka martinis. Work on your silence. Anyone who needs you can spot the rolling, aikido-tempered walk, the all-but-obsolete precision tailoring, the apparent vague distaste around the
nose and mouth—a grimace, actually, of jet-lag and near-deaths catching up with you, drying remote tissues. They’re watching and they’re fast, how fast we can’t say, but this is how it always is, passing overnight from each smoky city to the next without a trace.

  But the third call dispelled that, and I didn’t think that way again for a few weeks. The phone rang twice before I got to it but only because I stood up and walked around the counter when I could have reached. I was in the breakfast nook, a half-room with dimmer-switch lighting, where high-backed wrought-iron chairs with thin round avocado-colored cushions on their seats and backs surrounded a short white counter. The catalog had listed the cushions in avocado, bone, brandywine, and flamenco. The chairs came high-backed or low-backed, and with the cushions you could go for your circle or your soft-cornered square. By nature I am a friend to catalogs. But I am an enemy of multiplicities generated solely to fake freedom of choice, a runoff of pointless options in which the colors take code names and seek cover in print. The carpet was sherry, which was red. The house, my house, was in Beverly Hills, and the tan telephone, one of those new rectangular instruments with the dial on the underside of the receiver, looked like an iced maple bar from Mr. Donut. I had two such maple bars cued up on a plate on the counter; that’s how I noticed. The plate was Malibu, blood-red with a double black racing stripe. The stripes were parallel chords of varied thickness, which extended the plate’s area, while the concentric version, also available, confined it.

  “Hello?” I said.

  “This shouldn’t be difficult.” A young male voice, long distance.

  “Should I get a pencil?”

  “You know Sacramento airport?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Can you fly up tonight?”

  “Which flight?”

  “Anything that gets in early, like before ten.”

  “Who are you?” I said.

  “Steve Golden will come out and pick you up. He should be there about then, about ten, but if he doesn’t show up after a while you could call him. You just wait in the coffee shop.”

  “What’s his number?”

  “It would be in the phone book. It’s on S Street. That’s where you’re going. Or you could call information, it might be new.”

  “Okay.”

  “Only it might not be under his name. Oh no, yeah it would, yeah. For sure.”

  “And he plans to get me at ten?”

  “Well, he might be doing something first, but he’ll get over there if his car is okay. You should use a different name when you buy the ticket. You need anything?”

  I picked up a maple bar. “I don’t think so,” I said. He hung up. That was the third call, the last one. The second call, which had set me up for intrigue, came about half an hour earlier in the same room.

  “We really like what you did,” the girl said when I answered the phone.

  “You said that before,” I said. “Who is this?”

  “Have you figured out what to do next?”

  “No,” I said, holding the receiver with my shoulder, picking up a Ho Ho and unwrapping it. This was before I found the maple bars in a bag in the breadbox.

  “We can get you out of there,” the girl said.

  “Who are you?”

  “You want to get out for a few weeks?”

  I was licking the icing on the Ho Ho and holding it too tightly. Flakes of chocolate fell on the counter. “To where?” I said.

  “We’ll just put you up in this house with some people up here and you can just stay there for a few weeks, okay?”

  “How?”

  “We’ll call you back,” she said, and hung up. I finished the Ho Ho in four bites, then made the fallen flakes stick to my thumb and licked them off.

  The first call came about twenty minutes before that, upstairs. The same girl said they liked what I had done and then hung up right away. I went downstairs to get something to eat.

  * * * *

  I put the second maple bar back in its bag and put the bag in one of the side pockets of my carry-on suitcase. After I finished packing I drove out to the swimming club where my wife, Elaine, was swimming with my children, Aaron and Kimberly, and left a note under the windshield wiper of her car.

  In May 1968, in Los Angeles, you could subject your skin and throat to the air for hours and get no reading at all: it was still more like remembering heat than being in it. The reason you feel so unsupported, so singled out, by the spring and summer weather there is that the brightness and dryness have taken all the presence out of the air and what you wind up with is essentially static, stubbing your lungs on each thin sample.

  I put the car in long-term parking and made a six-thirty flight, reading the L.A. Times late edition and eating Zaanland chocolate from the gift shop all the way to Sacramento. There was nothing about me in the Times that day, but it took me a long time to get through it because I was blocking, which I do sometimes. I see a headline, such as park board asks $ two million, and my concentration is too scattered to register it, so without thinking about it I find myself abstracting it further and silently hearing some variation like They want the two million, or The parks are asking for the dollars now, great, or even Where am I going to get two million dollars?, all part of an intensive involuntary program aimed at the sense. Meanwhile there’s the guilty sensation of trying to repair something by forcing it, the one method you’re never supposed to use. It does make the newspaper last longer, and I love the paper as much as anyone, so maybe that’s the cause. Except that I don’t apply it to just the newspaper, but to my situation as well. At least once a day the surroundings and circumstances blank, like a word spoken several times so that first its meaning goes and then even its existence is implausible. Apart from the immediate problems, this is exactly what was responsible for my taking the nearly empty jet to Sacramento in the first place. I’m neither slow nor stupid and I mean to understand, but in numerous cases the interference has been prohibitive. And it’s not just me, it’s everybody, restating most of what comes in and waiting for something to click.

  * * * *

  In Sacramento I bought a Time at the airport newsstand and took it to the coffee shop, where I ordered a roast beef sandwich, cole slaw, cherry pie, and coffee. I couldn’t start eating or reading for a few minutes after I got the food, though, because a string arrangement of “Wichita Lineman” started on the airport Muzak and I had to listen to it.

  This was right in the middle of the period when Jimmy— Jimmy L. Webb, the Los Angeles songwriter—had so many songs being played on the radio at once. I don’t imagine that I was hearing them unusually often, since they were hits, but the frequency of chance encounter was working out to about once every two days, what with the Glen Campbell and Fifth Dimension things catching on almost simultaneously, and then Richard Harris right on top of that with his all-Jimmy album. In Los Angeles you’re dealing with a radio economy, which is to say that radio is assumed into the atmosphere as a commonly negotiable presence independent of its own content. In no other city do you undergo as many air minutes a day, invited through your own receiver or enforced by others, nor can you hear station preferences defended as heatedly by as many laymen. In big places there is always the need for private entertainment along with the fear of missing something, but the biggest consideration where these station loyalties are concerned is format. Not just format in the sense of voice preference and jingle preference, which do exist, but in the sense that some programming practices involve more listener risk than others. Meaning: in its simultaneity of production and consumption, radio has the means of abrogating your right to screen by bringing to your attention what you’d rather let go. Sometimes format knows best, and sometimes the most pressing matters will find their own channels. In my own case, for example, I wasn’t much concerned with music and not at all with the music industry, but the Jimmy Webb songs became important immediately, the first time I heard “By the Time I Get to Phoenix.” I was in the middle of changi
ng stations in the car, Glen was in the middle of the second stanza, my hand dropped, and my voluntary and involuntary facilities chose up sides then and there and have never really reconciled since. Immediately I heard myself thinking: What am I doing listening to this, to this gummy, gleaming International Harvester of a song, with some moping hayseed counting off the names of bus-station cities, shipping out from one to the next?

  But at the same moment my heart locked on that sound and it was literally all I could do to remember that I was driving. Not only was I transfixed, not only did I sense correctly that I was committing the song and Glen’s arrangement to permanent memory on first hearing, but I could feel some awful jamming applied to my veins, glands, and organs, a battery of interior gushes and starts such as I’d never before had and no music should have produced. My eyes lost focus, and while I could concentrate on the song enough to know that I shouldn’t have liked it, I was unable to think of anything else until it was over and my tissues, liquid and solid, had been shunted back into place inside. The overriding impression, even then, was that I had been listening to something I wasn’t supposed to have heard, that a serious mistake had been made. When the same thing happened with “MacArthur Park,” “Up, Up, and Away,” and the others, I started an active file of the titles on a Wil Wright’s bag and had soon isolated the composer as the unifying factor. I had no information on him beyond that when I arrived in Sacramento. I’d been doing nothing about my reaction to the songs, just waiting it out, even though I’m fat so these physical things scare me and “Up, Up, and Away” had been picked up and adapted as an airline commercial, pushing the incidence up a little.