Deathbird Stories (41 page)

So the laboratory had been painstakingly built to his specifications, and the particle accelerator dwarfed the CERN Machine. It dwarfed the four-mile ring at the Fermi National Accelerator Lab in Batavia, Illinois. It was, in fact, the world’s largest, most advanced “synchrophasotron.”

Only seventy per cent of the experiments conducted in the underground laboratory were devoted to projects sponsored by CEERN. One hundred per cent of the staff of Victor’s complex were personally committed to him, not to CEERN, not to the Eastern Bloc, not to philosophies or dogmas...to the man. So thirty per cent of the experiments run on the sixteen-mile-diameter accelerator ring were Victor’s own. If CEERN knew—and it would have been difficult for them to find out—it said nothing. Seventy per cent of the fruits of genius was better than no per cent.

Had Talbot known earlier that Victor’s research was thrust in the direction of actualizing advanced theoretical breakthroughs in the nature of the structure of fundamental particles, he would never have wasted his time with the pseudos and dead-enders who had spent years on his problem, who had promised everything and delivered nothing but dust. But then, until Information Associates had marked the trail—a trail he had previously followed in every direction but the unexpected one that merged shadow with substance, reality with fantasy—until then, he had no need for Victor’s exotic talents.

While CEERN basked in the warmth of secure knowledge that their resident genius was keeping them in front in the Super Accelerator Sweepstakes, Victor was briefing his oldest friend on the manner in which he would gift him with the peace of death; the manner in which Lawrence Talbot would find his soul; the manner in which he would precisely and exactly go inside his own body.

“The answer to your problem is in two parts. First, we have to create a perfect simulacrum of you, a hundred thousand or a million times smaller than you, the original. Then, second, we have to
actualize
it, turn an image into something corporeal, material, something that exists. A miniature
you
with all the reality you possess, all the memories, all the knowledge.”

Talbot felt very mellow. The milky liquid had smoothed out the churning waters of his memory. He smiled. “I’m glad it wasn’t a difficult problem.”

Victor looked rueful. “Next week I invent the steam engine. Get serious, Larry.”

“It’s that Lethe cocktail you fed me.”

Victor’s mouth tightened and Talbot knew he had to get hold of himself. “Go on, I’m sorry.”

Victor hesitated a moment, securing his position of seriousness with a touch of free-floating guilt, then went on, “The first part of the problem is solved by using the grasers we’ve developed. We’ll shoot a hologram of you, using a wave generated not from the electrons of the atom, but from the nucleus...a wave a million times shorter, greater in resolution than that from a laser.” He walked toward the large glass plate hanging in the middle of the lab, grasers trained on its center. “Come here.”

Talbot followed him.

“Is this the holographic plate,” he said, “it’s just a sheet of photographic glass, isn’t it?”

“Not this, “ Victor said, touching the ten-foot square plate,
“this!”
He put his finger on a spot in the center of the glass and Talbot leaned in to look. He saw nothing at first, then detected a faint ripple; and when he put his face as close as possible to the imperfection he perceived a light
moiré
pattern, like the surface of a fine silk scarf. He looked back at Victor.

“Microholographic plate,” Victor said. “Smaller than an integrated chip. That’s where we capture your spirit, white-eyes, a million times reduced. About the size of a single cell, maybe a red corpuscle.”

Talbot giggled.

“Come on,” Victor said wearily. “You’ve had too much to drink, and it’s my fault. Let’s get this show on the road. You’ll be straight by the time we’re ready...I just hope to God your mite isn’t cockeyed.”

Naked, they stood him in front of the ground photographic plate. The older of the female technicians aimed the graser at him, there was a soft sound Talbot took to be some mechanism locking into position, and then Victor said, “All right, Larry, that’s it.”

He stared at them, expecting more.

“That’s it?”

The technicians seemed very pleased, and amused at his reaction. “All done,” said Victor. It had been that quick. He hadn’t even seen the graser wave hit and lock in his image. “That’s
it?”
he said again. Victor began to laugh. It spread through the lab. The technicians were clinging to their equipment; tears rolled down Victor’s cheeks; everyone gasped for breath; and Talbot stood in front of the minute imperfection in the glass and felt like a retard.

“That’s it?” he said again, helplessly.

After a long time, they dried their eyes and Victor moved him away from the huge plate of glass. “ All done, Larry, and ready to go. Are you cold?”

Talbot’s naked flesh was evenly polka-dotted with goosebumps. One of the technicians brought him a smock to wear. He stood and watched. Clearly, he was no longer the center of attention.

Now the alternate graser and the holographic plate ripple in the glass were the focuses of attention. Now the mood of released tension was past and the lines of serious attention were back in the faces of the lab staff. Now Victor was wearing an intercom headset, and Talbot heard him say, “ All right, Karl. Bring it up to full power. “

Almost instantly the lab was filled with the sound of generators phasing up. It became painful and Talbot felt his teeth begin to ache. It went up and up, a whine that climbed till it was beyond his hearing.

Victor made a hand signal to the younger female technician at the graser behind the glass plate. She bent to the projector’s sighting mechanism once, quickly, then cut it in. Talbot saw no light beam, but there was the same locking sound he had heard earlier, and then a soft humming, and a life-size hologram of himself, standing naked as he had been a few moments before, trembled in the air where he had stood. He looked at Victor questioningly. Victor nodded, and Talbot walked to the phantasm, passed his hand through it, stood close and looked into the clear brown eyes, noted the wide pore patterns in the nose, studied himself more closely than he had ever been able to do in a mirror. He felt: as if someone had walked over his grave.

Victor was talking to three male technicians, and a moment later they came to examine the hologram. They moved in with light meters and sensitive instruments that apparently were capable of gauging the sophistication and clarity of the ghost image. Talbot watched, fascinated and terrified. It seemed he was about to embark on the great journey of his life; a journey with a much desired destination: surcease.

One of the technicians signaled Victor.

“It’s pure,” he said to Talbot. Then, to the younger female technician on the second graser projector, “ All right, Jana, move it out of there.” She started up an engine and the entire projector apparatus turned on heavy rubber wheels and rolled out of the way. The image of Talbot, naked and vulnerable, a little sad to Talbot as he watched it fade and vanish like morning mist, had disappeared when the technician turned off the projector.

“All right, Karl,” Victor was saying, “we’re moving the pedestal in now. Narrow the aperture, and wait for my signal.” Then, to Talbot, “Here comes your mite, old friend.”

Talbot felt a sense of resurrection.

The older female technician rolled a four-foot-high stainless steel pedestal to the center of the lab, positioned it so the tiny, highly-polished spindle atop the pedestal touched the very bottom of the faint ripple in the glass. It looked like, and was, an actualizing stage for the real test. The full-sized hologram had been a gross test to ensure the image’s perfection. Now came the creation of a living entity, a Lawrence Talbot, naked and the size of a single cell, possessing a consciousness and intelligence and memories and desires identical to Talbot’s own.

“Ready, Karl?” Victor was saying.

Talbot heard no reply, but Victor nodded his head as if listening. Then he said, “ All right, extract the beam!”

It happened so fast, Talbot missed most of it.

The micropion beam was composed of particles a million times smaller than the proton, smaller than the quark, smaller than the muon or the pion. Victor had termed them micropions. The slit opened in the wall, the beam was diverted, passed through the holographic ripple and was cut off as the slit closed again.

It had all taken a billionth of a second.

“Done,” Victor said.

“I don’t see anything,” Talbot said, and realized how silly he must sound to these people. Of
course
he didn’t see anything. There was nothing to see...with the naked eye. “Is he...is it there?”

“You’re there,” Victor said. He waved to one of the male technicians standing at a wall hutch of instruments in protective bays, and the man hurried over with the slim, reflective barrel of a microscope. He clipped it onto the tiny needle-pointed stand atop the pedestal in a fashion Talbot could not quite follow. Then he stepped away, and Victor said, “Part two of your problem solved, Larry. Go look and see yourself. “

Lawrence Talbot went to the microscope, adjusted the knob till he could see the reflective surface of the spindle, and saw himself in infinitely reduced perfection

staring up at himself. He recognized himself, though all he could see was a cyclopean brown eye staring down from the smooth glass satellite that dominated his sky.

He waved. The eye blinked.

Now it begins.
he thought.

Lawrence Talbot stood at the lip of the huge crater that formed Lawrence Talbot’s navel. He looked down in the bottomless pit with its atrophied remnants of umbilicus forming loops and protuberances, smooth and undulant and vanishing into utter darkness. He stood poised to descend and smelled the smells of his own body. First, sweat. Then the smells that wafted up from within. The smell of penicillin like biting down on tin foil with a bad tooth. The smell of aspirin, chalky and tickling the hairs of his nose like cleaning blackboard erasers by banging them together. The smells of rotted food, digested and turning to waste. All the odors rising up out of himself like a wild symphony of dark colors.

He sat down on the rounded rim of the navel and let himself slip forward.

He slid down, rode over an outcropping, dropped a few feet and slid again, tobogganing into darkness. He fell for only a short time, then brought up against the soft and yielding, faintly springy tissue plane where the umbilicus had been ligated. The darkness at the bottom of the hole suddenly shattered as blinding light filled the navel. Shielding his eyes, Talbot looked up the shaft toward the sky. A sun glowed there, brighter than a thousand novae. Victor had moved a surgical lamp over the hole to assist him. For as long as he could.

Talbot saw the umbra of something large moving behind the light, and he strained to discern what it was: it seemed important to know what it was. And for an instant, before his eyes closed against the glare, he thought he knew what it had been. Someone watching him, staring down past the surgical lamp that hung above the naked, anesthetized body of Lawrence Talbot, asleep on an operating table.

It had been the old woman, Nadja.

He stood unmoving for a long time, thinking of her.

Then he went to his knees and felt the tissue plane that formed the floor of the navel shaft.

He thought he could see something moving beneath the surface, like water flowing under a film of ice. He went down onto his stomach and cupped his hands around his eyes, putting his face against the dead flesh. It was like looking through a pane of isinglass. A trembling membrane through which he could see the collapsed lumen of the atretic umbilical vein. There was no opening. He pressed his palms against the rubbery surface and it gave, but only slightly. Before he could find the treasure, he had to follow the route of Demeter’s map—now firmly and forever consigned to memory—and before he could set foot upon that route, he had to gain access to his own body.

But he had nothing with which to force that entrance.