Coming Back

Yes, by now he admits that Jennifer is not deliberately driving him crazy. Quit laying it on her, Rostow chides himself. His Bastilled lunacy is self-evidently self-inflicted. There can be no doubt, as Tania had always insisted, that his is a personality gruesomely at risk, pumping through spasms of mania and depression, elation and reproach. As he glances up, the bulwarks of censure shear free of their hinges. The three coil techs, finishing up, share his appreciation with ogles and grins.

Descending the worn rubber treads of the catwalk, its non-magnetic structure faintly creaking and spronging in ludicrous counterpoint, Jennifer’s legs are golden with undepilated summer hairs. Certainly he will lose his reason. It is her innocent, unconscious hauteur that propels Rostow’s intolerable aspirations.

Who would believe that less than three weeks ago, governed by hard liquor and soft drugs, his hands had crept like pussycats over those shins, pounced past her knees to her thighs and beyond, while all the while dexterous Auberon Mountbatten Singh, D. Sc., coolly worked at the far end of her torso with mysterious expertise, soothing her brow, the edges of her jaw, the latent weakness at her throat, the revealed swell of her breasts? Even at this moment Rostow can scarcely credit his role in that maniacal and tasteless contest. Was it a contest? As she steps from the catwalk to her computer terminal, Rostow groans at an ambiguity only he perceives.

If even once she took stock, fixed him with, say, a single killing glance of rebuke and rejection...that would put an end to it. He might flail himself definitively and be done. Instead, she moves with languid competence in his marginal survival spaces like a neutrino beam wafting through a mountain of solid lead.

“Hi,” she offers, settling herself in a molded seat. Her gaze penetrates him for an instant, moving after a beat to her keyboard. “Stan’s on his way with the entire entourage. I spied.”

“Jambo,” says Rostow. It’s all there, bolted into his larynx. Dutifully he runs the coded sequence of knobs and toggles which shunts the system from Latent to Standby. He nods to the departing technicians. There is a Parkinsonian tremor in his stupid fingers. “Pouring spirits down their throats, I guess. Softening them up.”

Neat square indicators simmer vividly as the control instrumentation, swift bleats from his console to hers and back, patch into readiness. “This little number should sober them,” she observes. “‘Jambo’?”

“Swahili for ‘Hello, sailor’.” A thread of mush in his voice and his brain tells his ear that the inflection was wrong. I blew it. Every time I blow it. With a mental fist he clouts his forehead. There is no time for limping second guesses. Stan Donaldson’s abrasive voice precedes the man by half a second as the door swings wide for the expensive feet of the Board of Directors.

“We acquired it from Princeton, Senator,” the department head is saying. “ERDA paid out a quarter of a billion dollars for a Tokamak Fusion Test reactor that was obsoleted overnight when Sandia secured sustained fusion by inertial confinement.”

It seems to Rostow, squinting from the side of his eye and jittery with alarm, that this approach is a mistake. The senator is notorious for his loathing of costly obsolescence. Uh-huh. Buonacelli halts in midstride, pokes a finger into Donaldson’s chubby chest. “Another sonofabitch Ivy League boondoggle. By the Lord, that’s the kind of crap I won’t abide.”

Donaldson stands his ground. His own rasp is melodic after the senator’s gravel hurtling from a tip-truck.

“Their blunder was our good fortune, sir,” he says. “They were going to haul off the toroidal coils for recycling, but I managed to have them diverted to this laboratory. Everything is surplus or off-the-shelf. It made for a considerable saving.”

Somewhat mollified, Buonacelli pushes forward to loom over Jennifer Barton’s supervisor terminal, his minnows in attendance. “I’m still god-damned if I know what your magnets are for. Come straight out with it, man. The trustees won’t be slow to scrap any project that smacks of self-indulgent tinkering.” The set of his agribiz frame shows approval of Jennifer at least. “Convince us, and fast. This is the third department we’ve been dragged through today, and my feet are killing me.”

“Miss Barton, could you fetch the senator a chair?”

Incredulous on her behalf, Rostow burns. Buonacelli holds the woman’s biceps as she rises. “That’s fine, honey, I’ll stand.” An arm goes around her shoulders in a friendly squeeze nobody in his right mind could construe as avuncular. Eddie Rostow damages his tooth enamel. “Don’t bother buttering me up, Dr. Donaldson. Let’s get straight to the meat. What does this pile of junk do? Why do you deserve more megabucks?”

Rostow’s chagrin buckles to delight as Stan’s moist, unhealthy jowls darken. No doubt this will be the third or fourth time Donaldson has tried to explain the advanced-wave mirror to the accountants. Probably, Eddie decides, Buonacelli is just baiting him. The old bastard might know zilch about high-energy physics, but he’s nobody’s fool.

There again, it would serve Donaldson right if they haven’t followed a word he’s been saying. The man revels in pretentious jargon. Rostow hears a scurry of furry feet in the cardboard box near his own, cranes his neck, breaks up in silent mirth. The white bunny rabbit in the box is making its own critical observations. Cottontail high, it’s dropping a stream of dry pellets into the shredded lettuce that litters the box.

Florid, Stan has decided to simplify his spiel. He’s saying: “A totally new branch of technology, gentlemen, Perhaps my previous remarks were overly technical.”

“New like Princeton?”

“New like Sandia,” the professor says, grasping thankfully at the straight line. “Yet thoroughly rooted in classical theory. What we have here, gentlemen, is the answer to a puzzle provoked by James Clerk Maxwell more than a century ago. Maxwell,” he glosses, “was the genius who first showed that electricity and magnetism were one and the same. His equations are the basis of all electronic technology.”

“For history we fund historians,” one of the committee says coldly, currying favor, and recoils slightly when Buonacelli growls.

Irritated and emboldened, the great physicist states loftily: “Physics is precisely the accumulated history of great physicists. My point, Senator, is that Maxwell’s equations for electromagnetic wave motion have two sets of solutions. One set describes what we term retarded waves, where fluctuations are broadcast outward due to the acceleration of a charged particle. Radio waves from a transmitter are retarded waves, akin to the ripples from a stone dropped in a pond.”

Rostow monitors surges of power in the system, holding it in equilibrium. He seeks Jennifer Barton’s eye, hoping for a shared long-suffering grimace, but her attention is directed to the listening senator.

Donaldson is creeping into pomposity again. “The other solutions, equally valid in theoretical terms, we call advanced waves. Until now they have never been detected, let alone utilized.”

“Radio waves get drawn back into a transmitter?” Buonacelli poses acutely, puzzled.

“Exactly.” Donaldson rewards him with a satisfied pout. “Advanced waves converge to a point. Another way of looking at it is to say that they travel backwards in time. They put time into reverse. Normally, for complex reasons, the two sets of waves interfere, yielding no more than the retarded component. What I’ve done here with this equipment—”

Unnoticed, Eddie Rostow sits bolt upright and his face distorts in a throttled shriek. What you’ve done, you thieving sonofabitch?

But Buonacelli’s scandalized roar has filled the lab. Suddenly it is obvious that indeed he had not grasped the earlier explanations. “Who in hell do you think you are, Professor—H. G. Wells? Don’t you ever learn? How dare you stand there and shamelessly tell us you’ve been spending the university’s endowment on a time machine? Credit me with the sense I was born with.”

As Rostow spins in his chair, the dignitaries are stomping toward the door. Before Donaldson finds words, Jennifer Barton has magically slipped into Buonacelli’s path. “Surely you’re not leaving yet, Senator? Won’t you at least wait for the demonstrations we’ve prepared for you?” She blinks as if something is in her eye.

“Harrumph!” Buonacelli lifts her hands in his beefy paws. “I don’t know how they’ve taken you in, my dear. Never trust a scientist. If they’re not lunatics, they’re swindlers. Either way, it’s a waste of good tax revenue.”

“Why, Senator! I’m a scientist myself.”

He releases one hand, strokes his jaw. “My apologies, dear lady. To tell the truth, my eldest son is a chemist at Dow.” Gallantly he bows, retaining one of her hands. “Very well, gentlemen. To please this charming lady, let’s take a look at the professor’s so-called demonstration.”

Wincing, Rostow spins quickly back to his station. He knows he’ll be the butt of Stan’s fuming humiliation the moment the directors are on their way. Why do I put up with it?

Tersely, the professor tells Buonacelli, “You may examine this equipment thoroughly.” He leads them to the mirror chamber buried between gigantic doughnut-shaped magnets, slides open the weighty hatch. With heavy sarcasm he says, “Assure yourselves it’s quite empty. There are no hidden trapdoors or disappearing rabbits.” Rostow swallows a snigger, his eye on the white bunny munching in its box between his feet. Poor little beast, he thinks an instant later. I hate that part of it. But it’s going to rock Buonacelli on his heels and open his wallet.

“Advanced waves are generated in every molecular interaction. Within

these confines they are reflected almost totally. The crystalline surface of the chamber constitutes an array of laser-like amplifiers which augment the advanced-wave component.” My idea, Eddie Rostow wants to shout. Without that, you’d have a big magnetic field going absolutely nowhere. But whose name will go on the paper? He says nothing. Donaldson puts his head inside the chamber. Dully, as he twists back and forth, his muffled voice states: “As you see, it’s perfectly safe at the moment.” An almost irresistible impulse floods Rostow. Regretfully, he pulls his finger back from the power switches.

“Okay,” growls Buonacelli, “it’s empty. So?”

Jennifer Barton leaves her terminal and returns with a flask of boiling water in one hand and a tray of ice cubes in the other.

“This will be simple but graphic, Senator,” she says. It is Stan’s notion of theatrics to have her fetch the props. “As you can see, this water is very hot. Would you care to dip in your pinky to test it, sir?”

“Thank you, honey, but I guess I recognize hot water when I see it.”

A crony adds, unnecessarily, “You’ve been in plenty of it in your time.” Everyone laughs ingratiatingly. Jenny drops two large ice cubes into the flask, places it inside the chamber. She goes at once to her terminal, and her features blank out in the inert Zen concentration of perfect egoless programming. The assembled company stare foolishly at the sight of two ice cubes slowly dissolving. Donaldson dogs the hatch. An enhanced but rudimentary image of the interior comes to life on an adjacent TV screen. It shows two ice cubes slowly dissolving.

“Ideally,” the professor says, fists clenched at his sides, “the chamber would be absolutely shielded. We’ve sacrificed some signal purity so you can see what’s going on inside. The process will still work reasonably well. Is the system on-line, Eddie?”

“Yeah.” Rostow’s own palms are wet. The whole performance is premature. Five successful tests and two fails. Donaldson’s a yo-yo, bobbing from an obsession for publicity at any cost through close-mouthed paranoia and back. It’d almost be nice if the damned thing blew out. Bite your tongue. It’s my baby. Go, go.

“Well, don’t just sit there.”

“Right, Stan,” says Rostow through his teeth, and smashes the toggle closed.

There is no new sound, no deep shuddering hum or rising whine. Current in the magnetic coils goes to fifty thousand amps, and there is a faint creaking as monstrously thick non-magnetic structural members crave one another’s company in the embrace of the stupendous field. Sometimes, with the lights dimmed, Rostow has seen phantom bars of pale light crossing his line of sight. Field strengths of this magnitude can screw with the visual cortex. Or maybe the magnets bend cosmic radiation through the soft tissues of his eyeballs and brain, nibbling tiny explosions of pseudolight in his synapses. It isn’t happening now. Everyone stares at the TV monitor, waiting for something apocalyptic. Caught by the mood, Rostow abandons his console and steals across to join them.

“I’m still waiting,” Buonacelli barks.

“Watch the ice cubes. Senator,” Jennifer tells him.

“Dear God.” It is one of the accountants who first grasps what is happening. “The bastards are getting bigger!”

“Just so,” Donaldson says, loosening his fists. “The basic conservation law: heat can’t pass from a cold object to a hot one. But time inside the mirror is now running backwards, gentlemen, for all practical purposes. Advanced Maxwell radiation, amplified by the lasing action, is converging on the flask. The Second Law of Thermodynamics is repealed.”

Rostow’s body thumps to his pulse. Steam is rising once more from the flask. A pair of unblemished cubes jounce at the surface of the boiling water.

“Fantastic,” Buonacelli groans. “I take it all back. Dr. Donaldson, this is the wonder of the age.”

“You have yet to witness the more dramatic part of our demonstration.” Turning abruptly, the professor stumbles into Rostow. “Wouldn’t it be better if you were at your console, Eddie? Please power the system down immediately and put it on Standby. Where’s that animal?”

Rostow chews at part of his face. “I’ll get him for you.” He slouches in his seat, runs the current down, feels in the box with his left hand for the bunny. Helplessly he glances at Jennifer Barton. She is watching him. Fingers tight around the bunny’s ears, he hoists it from the box and feels acid in his stomach as he identifies the flash of emotion in her face.

Taking the bunny, Donaldson suggests: “Remove the flask and then stand by for my mark.” Rostow seethes, but welcomes the distraction. Behind him the bunny squeals. Nothing wrong with its memory at any rate. There’s a meaty thunk. When he turns back with the remelted cubes, Rostow finds the professor marching toward him with the bunnv’s bloody, guillotined corpse in a sterile glass dish. One of the accountants, no great white hunter, is averting squeamish eyes. Buonacelli’s are narrowed in wild surmise.

Resurrection is at once prosaic, electrifying, impossible to comprehend. On the monitor, the bunny’s grainy sopping fur lightens as untold trillions of randomly bustling molecules reverse their paths. As the flow staunches, its poor partitioned head rolls upward from the glass bowl and fits itself seamlessly to its unmarked neck. Prestidigitation. The bunny blinks spasmodically, slow lids snapping upward, wiggles his ass, and disgorges a strip of unchewed lettuce. The lab thunders crazily with applause.

“By the Lord, you’re a genius!” Color has drained from Buonacelli’s seamed features; it surges back, as he beats Donaldson’s shoulders. “Reviving the dead....” He pauses and adds slowly, with avaricious appetite: “A man could live forever.”

“I doubt it,” Rostow tell him. “We can put people back together, and heal wounds. But unfortunately it won’t help those who die of natural causes.”

“Rejuvenate them!”

“It’ll rub out your memory.”

“Not your financial holdings, by God.” The senator flexes his fingers, thickened by incipient arthritis. “Plenty of memories I could happily live without. You could brief yourself—leave notes, tapes....”

“Sorry. Reversed time passes at the conventional rate. Do you want to spend forty years in solitary confinement? Besides, even the immensely rich couldn’t run this machine nonstop for that long.”

Donaldson is nodding his agreement, until it occurs to him that he’s no longer the center of attention. “I did ask you to stay at your console, Eddie. Miss Barton, thank you, that will be all today.” With smiles all around, he ushers the committeemen away from the mirror into a cozy space of his own contriving. Eddie Rostow watches them troop toward the door. They remain in shock, their several minds no doubt working like maniacs as each tries to figure himself in and the rest out. “Truly astounding,” one says as the door closes.

Rostow covers his face. In the huge empty lab he hears Jennifer Barton rise from her seat. He opens his fingers for a peek. She is regarding him across her deactivated terminal; he cannot read her expression with certainty. Once more he covers his eyes and listens to the tap of her shoes, the click of her exit. Wistfully he sniffs the air for a trace of her scent, more natural pheromone than applied cosmetic. On the monitor screen, the bunny is scratching at the walls of the mirror chamber. Poor little beast. Dazed by anger, lust, remorse and sympathy, Rostow strides to the chamber and plucks the bunny to freedom and mortality.

A dizzying aura of bloody light spangled with pinpoints of imploding radiance momentarily blinds him. “Cretin,” he mouths, dropping the rabbit and slamming the hatch. He runs toward the console, clutching his eyes, and barks his shin on the back of his chair.

Nothing explodes. When his vision clears he scans the bank of square lights on the system he had left running at full power without computer supervision. Christ Almighty, we need a fail-safe on that. Who’d expect anyone to be so dumb? Shuddering, he runs through the step-down with scrupulous attention to detail, double-checking every item.

As he finishes, he notes the bunny lumping near his numb toes, trying to get back into its box. The stupid bastard is hungry again. He heaves it in.

The afternoon is only half done. This is insane. Did Roentgen finish off his full day’s work after the first exhibition of X-rays? Surely Watson and Crick didn’t quietly mop up the lab after they’d confirmed the DNA helix. I’ll take myself off and tie one on, he decides. I’ll get drunk as a skunk. He’d done just that after the first successful trial of the advanced-wave mirror: alone, bound to secrecy by his nervous department head, he’d sat in a downtown bar and poured bourbon into his belly until the trembling urge to howl with joy dopplered into a morose blur. And paid for it next day. Oh, no, not that again. I’ll march down to Jennifer’s room and lay it all out for her. Invite her to a movie, a plate of Fricassée de Poulet at Chez Marius and a bottle or two of Riesling. We’ll get smashed together, bemoan Donaldson’s bastardry; hell we’ll leave Donaldson out of it; we’ll go to her apartment and screw our tiny pink asses off.

His hand had been all the way up her skirt, and the next day she’d acted as if nothing had ever passed between them. Did goddamned Auberon Mountbatten Singh have his evil Anglo-Indian way with her that night, rotating through ingenious positions? It doesn’t bear thinking about.

For a moment, to his horror, Rostow finds himself regretting his divorce. Worse, he finds his baffled free-floating lust drifting in the direction of the image of his ex-wife. Swiftly, before he damages his brain beyond repair, he puts a stop to that

With effort he levers up from the dead console and mooches to the foot of the catwalk, leaning on its handrail. I have to stop brooding about Jennifer. I could have killed myself shoving my hand into the powered mirror, through the temporal interface. I do not interest her strangely. Undoubtedly only fantastic self-restraint prevented her from smashing my impertinent jaw with her knee. My god, how can I look her in the eye?

This kind of maundering unreels through Rostow’s head until he is so bored with it that he turns back to check the data for tomorrow’s log of tests. Glancing at the wall clock, he sees that he’s wasted half an hour in useless self-laceration. Maybe, after all, he should simply run out the door, burst into her office, and screw her until the sweat pops from her admiring brow. Oh my God. He drags a heavy battered mathematical cookbook from the bench where the bunny rabbit was murdered and resigns himself to the honorable discharge of his employment. A dizzying aura of bloody light spangled with pinpoints of imploding radiance momentarily blinds him. “Cretin,” he mouths, dropping the rabbit and slamming the hatch. He runs toward the console, clutching his eyes, and barks his shins on the back of his chair.

Nothing explodes. A startled, unconvinced element in his mind asks itself: Hasn’t this all happened before?

He notes the bunny lumping near his numb toes trying to get back into its box. The stupid bastard is—Oh Jesus. A small disjointed part of him watches the wind-up golem, as detached as the bunny’s head after its sacrifice. This isn’t deja vu. It’s too sustained. I’ll take myself off and tie one on, he decides. I’ll get drunk as a skunk. Oh my God, I’m tracking through the same temporal sequence twice. But that’s truly insane, delusional. Time isn’t repeating itself. I’m using the advanced-wave mirror system as a metaphor, at some profoundly cracked-up level of my unconscious. Didn’t my dear sweet brilliant wife complain that I’m a cyclothymic personality, a marginal manic-depressive, obsessively driven to repeat my laments? I’ve careened into a rut. A conditioned habit of thought. Jennifer Barton is driving me nuts. I can’t even see her in the same room without brooding on the same stupefying regrets and fantasies. I’ll march down to Jennifer’s room and lay it all out for her. Invite her to a movie, a plate of Fricassée de—

All his sensations are scrambled. The terror in his head clangs against the lugubrious mood of his hormones. I looked at the clock, he tells himself desperately, clutching for a falsifiable test. Sound scientific method. What did it say? 4:37. Last time round. He grips that single datum, while his mutinous corpse leans on the railing of the catwalk, one foot propped on a rubber tread. Glancing at the wall clock, he sees that he’s wasted half an hour—

Oh God Almighty. 4:37. Exultation bursts in his mind, leaving his flesh to plod like lead. Hold it, that doesn’t mean you haven’t flipped your cranium. Everyone has a built-in clock. Three Major Biorhythms Ordain Your Fate, that sort of thing. He wants to giggle, but his chest and jaw don’t respond to the wish. His frail flesh has resigned itself to the honorable discharge of his employment. A dizzying aura of bloody light spangled with pinpoints of imploding radiance momentarily blinds him.

No! the small anarchic part screams silently. I can’t stand it. It’s happening again. I’m stuck in a loop of time. Wait, I can prove it. I dropped the rabbit. Any moment now I’ll glance down and see it....

...trying to get back into its box. The stupid bastard is hungry again. He heaves it in—

Rostow tells himself: this is the third time round. Or is it? Were he in control of his programmed muscles, he would shudder. Maybe I’ve been caught in this loop for all eternity, or at any rate long enough for random quantum variations in one part of my brain to set up an isolated observing subprogram. Jesus, how much pseudo-duration would that take? Ludwig Bolzmann’s Stosszahlansatz postulate: ordered particles spontaneously decay into chaos, but given enough interactions they can swirl together again into a new order, or even the old order. Suppose I’m at the bottom of a local fluctuation from unordered equilibrium. What’s the Poincaré recurrence time for a human being and his lab? Say ten to the tenth power raised to the thirtieth power. That’s absolutely grotesque. The entire universe would have evaporated into dead cold soot. So I’m recycling. I stuck my mitt in the hatch and screwed up the mirror. I’m looping through the same 30 minutes forever, knowing exactly what’s due next and unable to do anything about it. Maybe I’m not crazy—but I will be soon.

I’m a prisoner, Rostow realizes, in my own past.

For a moment, to his horror, he finds himself regretting his divorce. Worse, he finds—

Hold it, the isolated segment thinks. If I’m patched into the lasing system, the additional mass of my body is pushing the mirror into a singularity on an asymptotic curve, tending to the limit at 30-odd minutes duration. But Hawking has shown that quantum effects re-enter powerfully under such conditions. After all, Rostow debates with himself, they must, or I’d be unaware of what’s happening. The human brain has crucial quantum-scale interactions. Hadn’t Popper and Eccles been arguing that case for years? So maybe I can break free of my prior actions. What’s to stop me deciding to cross the room and pick up the flask from the bench where I put it?

Jenny, you bitch, he thinks, why are you doing this to me? Bitterly, he wanders to the bench and lifts the lukewarm flask of melted ice-cubes to his lips. It tastes terrible. He puts it down with revulsion, then picks it up once more and stares in amazement. I’m not thirsty. Something made me do that—

—the flask slips out of his fingers and shatters. The twin sectors of consciousness fuse.

Eddie Rostow goes stealthily to his console chair and lowers himself with infinite delicacy.

Aloud, he mutters: “I’m not out of it yet. Or am I? Is one change in the cause-and-effect sequence sufficient to take me off the loop?” Mellowing afternoon light slants across his fists from the barred skylight, a sympathetic doubling to the shadow from harsh white fluoros, and his voice echoes wanly. Rostow flushes. If Donaldson comes through that door to hear him mumbling to himself—

But that isn’t on the agenda, is it? If anyone in the entire world has a certified lease on his own immediate future, it’s Edward Theodore Rostow, doctoral candidate and imbecile. The sparkling impossible conjecture has come belatedly on tiptoes to smash him behind the ear. With a glad cry he leaps to his feet. “I can do anything! Anything I wish!”

I’m not trapped. I thought I was a prisoner, but I’m the first man in history to be genuinely liberated. Set free from consequences. Do it. If you don’t like the results, scrub it on the next cycle and try again.

Rostow grabs up paper and calculator, scrawls figures. Start by establishing the exact parameters. See if the loop is decaying or elongating. It’s aggravating, but he rounds out the cycle with his eyes clamped to the clock. The bloody aura flashes a half-minute after the digital clock jumps to 4:37. With iron control he keeps hold of the rabbit and wrenches his head around as vision clears. Three minutes after four. His endocrine fluids are telling him to panic, sluggishly stuck in the original sequence. Rostow’s excited mind shouts them down. Denying the inertia of previous events, he takes the wriggling bunny to his console and places it carefully in its cardboard home. A thirty-four minute loop, forsooth.

Considerable effort is required initially. Rostow’s First Theorem, he thinks, grinning. Any action will continue to be repeated indefinitely unless a volitional force is applied to counter that action. Fortunately, the energy necessary to alter intention and will is in the microvolt range. Yes. The brain is a quantum machine for making choices, once you understand that choice is possible.

He halts with his hand on the door latch. Think this through. Stan Donaldson, esteemed head of department and professor, is the last sonofabitch who deserves to know. Will I fall off the loop if I wander away from the mirror? Leaving the loop is suddenly a most undesirable prospect. Yet some obscure prompting dispels these trepidations. Rostow opens the door and enters the long colorless corridor.

Led by bombastic Donaldson, the Board of Directors is taking the stairs to the free hooch. Jennifer Barton’s thick mane swirls as she shakes her head, freeing her arm from the senator’s grip. On the bottom step she pivots and turns right, toward her small office in the Software Center. Not celebrating? Eddie shuts the lab door and pursues her down the corridor.

I can’t tell her about it. She’d be obliged to call for the men in white. Up ahead, she slips into her office without looking in his direction. Arousal stirs in him, fecklessly.

Not truly believing it, he reminds himself: Anything is possible. There are no payoffs. The world’s a stage, tra-la. “I’ll just lay it on the line,” he mutters seriously. A passing student blinks at him. With an inane giggle, Rostow nods. Loudly, in a crisp tone, he tells the student: “I’ll ask her what the hell it is between us.”

“Oh,” says the student, and walks on, swiveling his brows.

High out of his gourd on freedom unchecked by restraint, Rostow zooms toward joy with the woman of his dreams. In a magical slalom on the vinyl tiles, he bursts through Jennifer Barton’s door and thrusts his hands on the desk’s edge. Her lab coat lies on a filing cabinet; she stands at her window, brushing her hair. “Tell me, for Christ’s sake,” Eddie barks before his vocabulary can freeze up, “what the hell it is between us.”

His secret sweetheart narrows her eyes. With deflated, acute perception, Rostow surmises that perhaps he is not her secret sweetheart. “I hate it with the rabbit,” she tells him, putting the brush in a drawer. “But it was a sensational coup de théâtre. Coming up for a drink?”

“Didn’t you notice? I wasn’t invited.”

“Surely it was understood.” She is being patient with him. Rostow closes the door at his back and sits on the desk. Stress is winding him tight. Has the stoned euphoria gone already?

“Jennifer,” he says.

She waits. Then she rolls the caster-footed chair forward, sits before her impressive stacks of hard copy, and waits some more.

“Look. Jennifer, something went wrong with my upbringing. The only time I’m fluent is when I’m smashed, and then I turn into the maddened wolfman. So I don’t go out very often. For example. Six months ago, after a horrible divorce, I ventured to a party without a keeper. Nobody tied me up or shoved a gag in my face. I failed conspicuously to recognize an old acquaintance, and then hectored him about the polarity of his sexual cravings. In the crudest possible terms. With no provocation, I noisily engaged a stern feminist on the matter of her tits, which I found noteworthy. I ended by shouting in a proprietorial manner from one end of the host’s house to the other, at three in the morning, inviting young bearded people and their companions to drink up and depart swiftly, in what seemed to me a hearty and engaging fashion. When I got home I fell down in my own puke.”

After a further silence, Jennifer lights a cigarette. “How horrible.”

“Doubtless I’m a horrible person in every respect.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

Rostow starts to yell, then lowers his voice in confusion. “I stumble over you sprawled on a fat bean-bag in the middle of a room of colleagues and strangers having your tits massaged by a swarthy blackamoor—”

She’s on her feet. “Okay, sport. Enough. Out.” Eddie is taken aback at the power of her extended arm as she hoists him off the desk. He thumps down heavily, barring the door with one leg.

“No, goddamn it. So I sit down beside you and toy with your wonderfully hairy leg. You smile and extend your limbs. I can’t believe it. Up goes my little hand, hoppity-scamp—”

“Shut up, you creep.”

For this, Rostow is utterly unprepared. He gapes.

Jennifer refuses to lower her eyes. Blotches of color stand out on her cheekbones. “You’re right, Rostow, you are a horrible person. Incredibly enough, I once found you rather piquant. Your crass behavior the other night might have been forgivable as whimsy.” In authentic rage she clamps her teeth together and wrenches the door open. “Stay or go as you please.” Then the room is vacant, and Rostow slumps on the desk with his guts spilling out of his wounds and his brain whirling into sawdust and aloes.

The bloody aura is a jolt from one awful dream to another. With iron control he keeps hold of the rabbit and wrenches his head around as vision clears. Three minutes after four. Yet the appalling encounter echoes like a double image, a triple image in fact. His chemistry overloads and he vomits uncontrollably. Finally sourness sweeps away hallucination; he totters to the console and runs the mirror system down to Latent.

Aghast, he tells himself: “Scrub it out. Make it didn’t happen.” Regressing to childhood. His mouth tastes repulsive; he wipes his lips on the back of his hand. I can’t take much more of this, he thinks. The human frame wasn’t meant to handle the strain of dual sets of information. It’d take a Zen roshi to cope with this weirdness. The bitch, the lousy bitch.

But it isn’t Jennifer Barton’s doing. Rostow is doomed by his oafishness. I’ve got to keep away from her. I’d shred myself into a million messy bits. It is clear, though, that he cannot cower forever in the lab with only a canonized rabbit for company. Enough, he tells himself. Out. The clock shows a quarter after four. Cyclic time is slipping away. Down the corridor, unharassed, Jennifer Barton is presumably finalizing her coiffure.

Rostow slams the door, running for the stairs. As he expects, Buonacelli and his claque are milling in the Senior Faculty Bar. Donaldson dispenses whiskies in their midst, jovial, exonerated, cautioning them all to reticence under the rubric of security.

“A wonderful experience, Dr., uh, Rostow?” says one of the directors, a pleasant administrator. Eddie turns convulsively. “I’m Harrison Macintyre, Ford Foundation.” The man holds out his hand. “No problems with funding,” he smiles, “after today.”

“Oh. Thank you. Not ‘doctor,’ I’m afraid. I’ve never had time to write anything up.” Stan seems to be explaining how the advanced-wave project sprang fully armed from his professorial brow. Adrenalin begins a fresh surge.

Macintyre puts liquor into his hand and asks, “I’ve been wondering about that. Publication, I mean. Surely today wasn’t your first trial with the equipment?”

“No. No, Harrison. Call me Eddie. We knew it was going to work. It’s been operational for some weeks.” Across the russet carpet, Buonacelli is laughing boomingly. “The Nobel Prize for Physics, Stan,” says the senator. “The Nobel Prize for Medicine,” adds a beaming director. “Hot damn,” cries another “they’ll make it a hat trick and give you the Nobel Prize for Literature when your paper comes out.”

Rostow scowls hideously. “Normally we would indeed have published by now, Harrison,” he says loudly. “But after the tachyon fiasco, Professor Donaldson developed some misgivings about shooting his mouth off prematurely, you see.” Faces turn. “You must remember. Every man and his dog was hunting faster-than-light particles. The great physicist spied his chance at glory.” The Ford Foundation man, scandalized, tries to hush him. Eddie drains his glass, gestures for another. “But the professor blew it. His tachyons were actually pickup calls from the Green Cab Company. They snuck in through his Faraday cage. Someone didn’t check that out until after the press conference did we, Stan?”

Donaldson is peering at the half-full glass in Rostow’s grasp; slowly, he allows his gaze to rise until he studies a point somewhere near Eddie’s left ear. “Mr. Rostow,” he says from the depths of his soul, “hired hands are rarely invited into this room. Those who gain that privilege generally comport themselves with civility and a due measure of deference. Those who have just been fired without a reference do not linger here under any circumstances. Get out of my sight.”

Jennifer Barton arrives at that moment, smiling, hair lustrous. At the door she hesitates, scanning shocked faces. Their eyes meet. Her presence—oblivious of edited outrage, witness to new humiliation—sends Rostow into a frenzy. He throws down his glass and catches Donaldson by his lapels.

“I wish you wouldn’t shout, Frog-face,” he says, every sinew on fire. “You astounding hypocrite,” he says, jouncing the man back on his heels. “What’s a Nobel Prize or two between hired hands?” he says, thumping Donaldson heavily in the breast. Two or three of the directors have come to their senses by now and grapple with Rostow, dragging him away from his gasping and empurpled victim. “It happens all the time, doesn’t it?” Eddie squirms, kicking at targets of opportunity. “We poor bastards break our asses so some ludicrous discredited figurehead can whiz off to Stockholm to meet the king.”

Even in his own ears, Rostow’s outburst sounds thin, thin. Where righteousness should ring, only a stale peevishness lingers. Tears of anger and mortification star the pendant cut-glass lamps. He breaks free and pushes through business suits. Jennifer stares at him, off balance. “You don’t want to stay with these vultures,” he cries, seizing her arm. It seems that she studies his scarlet face for minutes of silence. With a minimal movement she dislodges his hand.

“Eddie,” she says regretfully, “when are you going to grow up?”

Bitch. Bitch, bitch.

And the bloody aura. He is holding the rabbit, wrenching his head around to check the clock. This time the shock of recurrence is curiously attenuated, as if lunatic hostility sits better than misery with a physiology keyed to fright. Rostow’s heart rattles, catches its beat; the pulse thunders in his neck and wrists. The rabbit struggles free. He moves with Tarquin’s ravishing stride to the console, at a pitch of emotion. Icily he shuts down the mirror system. There are cracks in the concrete where the supports for the magnetic coils are embedded. A faint regular buzzing comes from the fluoros. His skin is crawling, as if each hair on his body is a nipple, erect and preternaturally sensitive. Gagging, he closes the door and paces remorselessly down the corridor.

Jennifer Barton stands on the bottom step of the carved stairs, deflecting Senator Buonacelli’s horseplay. Rostow storms past them. “Hey, boy, that was a great show,” cries the senator. “Why don’t you and this little lady come up and join us in a drink?” Rostow hardly hears the man. His feet are at the ends of his legs. Jennifer’s door is not locked. He leaves it wide for her. Staring out into the afternoon light. Three tall blacks fake and run, dribbling a ball.

“Well, Jambo!” As Eddie faces her, Jennifer is closing the door, meeting him with an infectious smile. “It’s taken you long enough to find my office, sailor.”

“What?” he says, uncomprehending. He pushes her roughly back against the crowded desk and takes her thigh with cruel pressure. Speechless and instantly afraid, she repudiates his hand. He thrusts it higher and tugs at her underwear.

“Let’s pick up where we left off,” he informs her. An absolute chill pervades his flesh. Nothing had prepared him to expect this of himself. Everything he calls himself is outraged, shrunken in loathing at his own actions.

“Stop it,” she says distantly. “You fucking asshole.” Tactically her posture is not favorable; when she drives up her right knee, its bruising force is deflected from his leg. I can have whatever I want. The whole universe is a scourge slashing at my vulnerable back. Very well, let those be the rules. He imagines he is laughing. I have nothing to offer but fear itself. As she begins to scream and batter his neck, his cheek, his temple, he clouts her savagely into semi consciousness. Oh Jesus, you can’t be blamed for what happens during a nightmare. In the absence of causality, Fyodor, all things are permitted. She is bent backward, moving feebly. One of his hands clamps her mouth, hard against her teeth, the other unzips. I’m the Primary Process Man, oh, wow. But he is so cold. There is no blood under his skin. Rostow batters at her thighs with his limp flesh. He slides to his knees. The edge of the desk furrows his nose.

“You,” Jenny grunts. She is blank with detestation. Tenderly, she touches her skull. “You.”

Eddie Rostow lurches upright. Swaying, exposed, he falls into the corridor. The same young student, returning, regards him with astonishment and abhorrence. The boy reaches out a hand, changes his mind and pelts away in search of aid. It is all a grainy picture show, a world-sized monitor screen. They’ll fire him for this. Oh, shit, Jenny, you don’t understand, I love you.

In fugue, Rostow pitches down the corridor.

The cleaver is lying where Donaldson left it on the bench, a ripple of bunny blood standing back from its surgical edge. Rostow’s self-contempt has no bounds. As he lifts the blade, there is one final lucid thought. I’m an animal, he tells himself. We can’t be trusted. The cleaver’s handle slips in his sweating fingers. He tightens his grip and with a kind of concentration brings the thing in a whirling silvery arc into the tilted column of his neck. Shearing through the heavy sterno-mastoid muscle, in one blow it slashes the carotid artery, the internal jugular and the vagus nerve, before it’s stopped by the banded cartilage of the trachea. He scarcely feels his flesh open: all pain is in the intolerable impact. A brilliant crimson jet spears and spatters, but Rostow fails to see it: he collapses in shock, and the fluid pulses out of his torpid body until he is dead.

His corpse lies cooling until half a minute after 4:37.

A dizzying aura of bloody light spangled with pinpoints of imploding radiance momentarily blinds him.

Rostow screams.

There is nothing banal in this plunge upward into instantaneous rebirth. It is overwhelming. It is transcendental. It is a jack-hammer on Rostow’s soul.

Like a thousand micrograms of White Lightning, life detonates every cell of his brain and body. He has been to hell, and died afterwards. Let me stay dead. Let me be dead.

Catharsis purges him of every thought. Eddie cradles the white rabbit in his arms and sobs his heart out.

At length he is sufficiently composed to reflect: I never cried when Tania left. Everything wise within me insisted that I should cry, but I turned my back. He realizes that he hasn’t wept freely since he was a child. Dear Jesus, does it take this abomination to lance my constricted soul?

And his spirits do indeed soar. Without denying the reality of what he has done, his pettiness and spite and ignominy, he encompasses a mood of redemptive benediction. It brings a wide, silly grin to his mouth.

“Bunny rabbit,” he declares, lofting the animal high over his head, laughing as its big grubby hind feet thump the air, “ain’t nobody been where we wuz, baby. Let me tell you, buster, I like this side a lot better.”

Eddie feeds the rabbit a strip of lettuce and steps through the tedious details of shutdown. He meditates on his humbling and his bestiality, flinching at memory.

The frailty at his core yearns to interpret it all as a stress nightmare, an hallucination. Denial would be not merely futile and cowardly, it would betray what has been offered him. Rather piquant, eh? Holy shit. Still, it is a point of access. Eddie Rostow confesses to his worst self that he needs all the help he can get.

The next cycle brings swifter recovery. Rostow splashes tepid water from the flask into his face, dabbing at his reddened eyelids. Soon he must spend some time figuring how to replicate the loop condition after he gets off this one. Fertile conjectures multiply; he suppresses them for the moment. Nerving himself, he walks edgily to the Software Center, nodding companionably to the passing student. The directors have ascended to their solace. His knock is tentative.

Jennifer’s smile startles him with its warmth. She lowers her hairbrush. “Well, hello, sailor.”

Eddie stands in the doorway, drinking her unbruised face. Despite himself he flushes.

“Don’t just loiter there with intent, man. You’re the unsung hero of the moment. It was sensational.” She frowns. “I hated it with the rabbit, though.”

“Jennifer,” he says in a rush, “I’m sorry about the party. You know.”

“That. Yeah. You were rather blunt.”

“You inspire the village idiot in me.”

“Sailor, that’s the sweetest thing anyone ever. Coming up to poach on the Professorial Entertainment Allowance Fund?”

Eddie melts disgustingly within, wallowing in amnesty. “I happen to know a place.”

“You’ve got a fifth of Jack Daniels squirreled in your locker.”

“I’ve always admired your mind. Passionately.”

“That wasn’t the part you molested in public.”

“I am, “ he tells her, “truly sorry.” Her hair flows in his fingers and he puts his face against hers for a moment. Jenny touches his hand.

“While we dally,” she tells him, “Stan is up there screwing you,”

“No argument. He’s like that. All scientists are lunatics and swindlers. I intend to fight. More to the point, are you screwing Dr. Singh? Oh Christ, don’t answer that.”

“I will not, it’s none of your business. For God’s sake, don’t get snotty. Here, let me help you off with your—”

“Shouldn’t we shut the door?”

“Kick it, you’re closer. Why did it take you so long to get here?”

“Don’t ask.”

“Hmm. You know, I thought you were going to throw a tantrum in the lab.”

Eddie tries to keep his tone light. “Upon my soul, Miss Barton, that’d be no way for a besotted genius to contest his rights.” Shortly he asks: “Won’t the printouts get runkled?”

“There’s more in the computer, you fool.”

On the next loop, abandoning his dazed inertia for an instant, Eddie glances at Jennifer’s wrist watch and ensures that the flash comes as the flash comes as the flash comes