The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction 22nd Annual Collection (109 page)

Jim crumpled to the floor.

Between her sheltering arms, she caught sight of his face as he went down. Astonishment gaped open the mouth, widened the eyes. The image clapped onto her brain. His body fell heavily on top of hers, and didn’t move.

When she could breathe again, she crawled out from under him, whimpering with short guttural sounds:
uh uh uh
. Yet a part of her brain worked clearly, coldly. She felt for a pulse, held her fingers over his mouth to find a breath, put her ear to his chest. He was dead.

She staggered to the phone and called 911.

Cops. Carrie didn’t know them; this wasn’t Jim’s precinct. First uniforms and then detectives. An ambulance. A forensic team. Photographs, finger-prints, a search of the one-room apartment, with her consent. You have the right to remain silent. She didn’t remain silent, didn’t need a lawyer, told what she knew as Jim’s body was replaced by a chalked outline and neighbours gathered in the hall. And when it was finally, finally over and she was told that her apartment was a crime scene until the autopsy was performed and where could she go, she said, “St Sebastian’s. I work there.”

“Maybe you should call in sick for this night’s shift, ma’am, it’s —”

“I’m going to St Sebastian’s!”

She did, her hands shaky on the steering wheel. She went straight to Dr Erdmann’s door and knocked hard. His walker inched across the floor, inside. Inside, where it was safe.

“Carrie! What on Earth —”

“Can I come in? Please? The police —”

“Police?” he said sharply. “What police?” Peering around her as if he expected to see blue uniforms filling the hall. “Where’s your coat? It’s fifty degrees out!”

She had forgotten a coat. Nobody had mentioned a coat. Pack a bag, they said, but nobody had mentioned a coat. Dr Erdmann always knew the temperature and barometer reading, he kept track of such things. Belatedly, and for the first time, she burst into tears.

He drew her in, made her sit on the sofa. Carrie noticed, with the cold clear part of her mind that still seemed to be functioning, that there was a very wet spot on the carpet and a strong odour, as if someone had scrubbed with disinfectant. “Could I . . . could I have a drink?” She hadn’t known she was going to say that until the words were out. She seldom drank. Too much like Jim.

Jim
. . .

The sherry steadied her. Sherry seemed so civilized, and so did the miniature glass he offered it in. She breathed easier, and told him her story. He listened without saying a word.

“I think I’m a suspect,” Carrie said. “Well, of course I am. He just dropped dead when we were fighting . . . but I never so much as laid a hand on him. I was just trying to protect my head and . . . Dr Erdmann, what is it? You’re white as snow! I shouldn’t have come, I’m sorry, I —”

“Of course you should have come!” he snapped, so harshly that she was startled. A moment later he tried to smile. “Of course you should have come. What are friends for?”

Friends. But she had other friends, younger friends. Joanne and Connie and Jennifer . . . not that she had seen any of them much in the last three months. It had been Dr Erdmann she’d thought of, first and immediately. And now he looked so . . .

“You’re not well,” she said. “What is it?”

“Nothing. I ate something bad at lunch, in the dining room. Half the building started vomiting a few hours later. Evelyn Krenchnoted and Gina Martinelli and Erin Bass and Bob Donovan and Al Cosmano and Anna Chernov. More.”

He watched her carefully as he recited the names, as if she should somehow react. Carrie knew some of those people, but mostly just to say hello. Only Mr Cosmano was on her resident-assignee list. Dr Erdmann looked stranger than she had ever seen him.

He said, “Carrie, what time did Jim . . . did he drop dead? Can you fix the exact time?”

“Well, let me see . . . I left here at two and I stopped at the bank and the gas station and the convenience store, so maybe three or three-thirty? Why?”

Dr Erdmann didn’t answer. He was silent for so long that Carrie grew uneasy. She shouldn’t have come, it was a terrible imposition, and anyway there was probably a rule against aides staying in residents’ apartments, what was she thinking —

“Let me get blankets and pillow for the sofa,” Dr Erdmann finally said, in a voice that still sounded odd to Carrie. “It’s fairly comfortable. For a
sofa
.”

SIX

Not possible. The most ridiculous coincidence. That was all – coincidence. Simultaneity was not cause-and-effect. Even the dimmest physics undergraduate knew that.

In his mind, Henry heard Richard Feynman say about string theory, “I don’t like that they’re not calculating anything. I don’t like that they don’t check their ideas. I don’t like that for anything that disagrees with an experiment, they cook up an explanation. . . . The first principle is that you must not fool yourself – and you are the easiest person to fool.” Henry hadn’t liked Feynman, whom he’d met at conferences at Caltech. A buffoon, with his bongo drums and his practical jokes and his lock-picking. Undignified. But the brilliant buffoon had been right. Henry didn’t like string theory, either, and he didn’t like ideas that weren’t calculated, checked, and verified by experimental data. Besides, the idea that Henry had somehow killed Jim Peltier with his
thoughts
. . . preposterous.

Mere thoughts could not send a bolt of energy through a distant man’s body. But the bolt itself wasn’t a “cooked-up” idea. It had happened. Henry had felt it.

DiBella had said that Henry’s MRI looked completely normal.

Henry lay awake much of Thursday night, which made the second night in a row, while Carrie slept the oblivious deep slumber of the young. In the morning, before she was awake, he dressed quietly, left the apartment with his walker, and made his way to the St Sebastian Infirmary. He expected to find the Infirmary still crammed with people who’d vomited when he had yesterday afternoon. He was wrong.

“Can I help you?” said a stout, middle-aged nurse carrying a breakfast tray. “Are you feeling ill?”

“No, no,” Henry said hastily. “I’m here to visit someone. Evelyn Krenchnoted. She was here yesterday.”

“Oh, Evelyn’s gone back. They’ve all gone back, the food poisoning was so mild. Our only patients here now are Bill Terry and Anna Chernov.” She said the latter name the way many of the staff did, as if she’d just been waiting for an excuse to speak it aloud. Usually this irritated Henry – what was ballet dancing compared to, say, physics? – but now he seized on it.

“May I see Miss Chernov, then? Is she awake?”

“This is her tray. Follow me.”

The nurse led the way to the end of a short corridor. Yellow curtains, bedside table, monitors and IV poles; the room looked like every other hospital room Henry had ever seen, except for the flowers. Masses and masses of flowers, bouquets and live plants and one huge floor pot of brass holding what looked like an entire small tree. A man, almost lost amid all the flowers, sat in the room’s one chair.

“Here’s breakfast, Miss Chernov,” said the nurse reverently. She fussed with setting the tray on the table, positioning it across the bed, removing the dish covers.

“Thank you.” Anna Chernov gave her a gracious, practiced smile, and looked inquiringly at Henry. The other man, who had not risen at Henry’s entrance, glared at him.

They made an odd pair. The dancer, who looked younger than whatever her actual age happened to be, was more beautiful than Henry had realized, with huge green eyes over perfect cheekbones. She wasn’t hooked to any of the machinery on the wall, but a cast on her left leg bulged beneath the yellow bedcover. The man had a head shaped like a garden trowel, aggressively bristly grey crew cut, and small suspicious eyes. He wore an ill-fitting sports coat over a red tee-shirt and jeans. There seemed to be grease under his fingernails – grease, in St Sebastian’s? Henry would have taken him for part of the maintenance staff except that he looked too old, although vigorous and walker-free. Henry wished him at the devil. This was going to be difficult enough without an audience.

“Miss Chernov, please forgive the intrusion, especially so early, but I think this is important. My name is Henry Erdmann, and I’m a resident on Three.”

“Good morning,” she said, with the same practised, detached graciousness she’d shown the nurse. “This is Bob Donovan.”

“Hi,” Donovan said, not smiling.

“Are you connected in any way with the press, Mr Erdmann? Because I do not give interviews.”

“No, I’m not. I’ll get right to the point, if I may. Yesterday I had an attack of nausea, just as you did, and you also, Mr Donovan. Evelyn Krenchnoted told me.”

Donovan rolled his eyes. Henry would have smiled at that if he hadn’t felt so tense.

He continued, “I’m not sure the nausea was food poisoning. In my case, it followed a . . . a sort of attack of a quite different sort. I felt what I can only describe as a bolt of energy burning along my nerves, very powerfully and painfully. I’m here to ask if you felt anything similar.”

Donovan said, “You a doctor?”

“Not an M.D. I’m a physicist.”

Donovan scowled savagely, as if physics were somehow offensive. Anna Chernov said, “Yes, I did, Dr Erdmann, although I wouldn’t describe it as ‘painful’. It didn’t hurt. But a ‘bolt of energy along the nerves’ – yes. It felt like —” She stopped abruptly.

“Yes?” Henry said. His heart had started a slow, irregular thump in his chest. Someone else had also felt that energy.

But Anna declined to say what it had felt like. Instead she turned her head to the side. “Bob? Did you feel anything like that?”

“Yeah. So what?”

“I don’t know what,” Henry said. All at once, leaning on the walker, his knees felt wobbly. Anna noticed at once. “Bob, bring Dr Erdmann the chair, please.”

Donovan got up from the chair, dragged it effortlessly over to Henry, and stood sulkily beside a huge bouquet of autumn-coloured chrysanthemums, roses, and dahlias. Henry sank onto the chair. He was at eye level with the card to the flowers, which said FROM THE ABT COMPANY. GET WELL SOON!

Anna said, “I don’t understand what you’re driving at, Dr Erdmann. Are you saying we all had the same disease and it wasn’t food poisoning? It was something with a . . . a surge of energy followed by nausea?”

“Yes, I guess I am.” He couldn’t tell her about Jim Peltier. Here, in this flower-and-antiseptic atmosphere, under Donovan’s pathetic jealousy and Anna’s cool courtesy, the whole idea seemed unbelievably wild. Henry Erdmann did not like wild ideas. He was, after all, a
scientist
.

But that same trait made him persist a little longer. “Had you felt anything like that ever before, Miss Chernov?”

“Anna,” she said automatically. “Yes, I did. Three times before, in fact. But much more minor, and with no nausea. I think they were just passing moments of dozing off, in fact. I’ve been laid up with this leg for a few days now, and it’s been boring enough that I sleep a lot.”

It was said without self-pity, but Henry had a sudden glimpse of what being “laid up” must mean to a woman for whom the body, not the mind, had been the lifelong source of achievement, of pleasure, of occupation, of self. What, in fact, growing old must mean to such a woman. Henry had been more fortunate; his mind was his life source, not his aging body, and his mind still worked fine.

Or did it, if it could hatch that crackpot hypothesis? What would Feynman, Teller, Gell-Mann have said? Embarrassment swamped him. He struggled to rise.

“Thank you, Miss Chernov, I won’t take up any more of your —”

“I felt it, too,” Donovan said suddenly. “But only two times, like you said. Tuesday and yesterday afternoon. What are you after here, doc? You saying there’s something going around? Is it dangerous?”

Henry, holding onto the walker, turned to stare at him. “You felt it, too?”

“I just told you I did! Now you tell me – is this some new catching, dangerous-like disease?”

The man was frightened, and covering fear with belligerence. Did he even understand what a “physicist” was? He seemed to have taken Henry for some sort of specialized physician. What on Earth was Bob Donovan doing with Anna Chernov?

He had his answer in the way she dismissed them both. “No, Bob, there’s no dangerous disease. Dr Erdmann isn’t in medicine. Now if you don’t mind, I’m very tired and I must eat or the nurse will scold me. Perhaps you’d better leave now, and maybe I’ll see you both around the building when I’m discharged.” She smiled wearily.

Henry saw the look on Donovan’s face, a look he associated with undergraduates: hopeless, helpless lovesickness. Amid those wrinkles and sags, the look was ridiculous. And yet completely sincere, poor bastard.

“Thank you again,” Henry said, and left as quickly as his walker would allow. How dare she treat him like a princess dismissing a lackey? And yet . . . he’d been the intruder on her world, that feminine arena of flowers and ballet and artificial courtesy. A foreign, somehow repulsive world. Not like the rigorous masculine brawl of physics.

But he’d learned that she’d felt the “energy”, too. And so had Donovan, and at the exact same times as Henry. Several more data points for. . . . what?

He paused on his slow way to the elevator and closed his eyes.

When Henry reached his apartment, Carrie was awake. She sat with two strangers, who both rose as Henry entered, at the table where Henry and Ida had eaten dinner for fifty years. The smell of coffee filled the air.

“I made coffee,” Carrie said. “I hope you don’t mind . . . This is Detective Geraci and Detective Washington. Dr Erdmann, this is his apartment . . .” She trailed off, looking miserable. Her hair hung in uncombed tangles and some sort of black make-up smudged under her eyes. Or maybe just tiredness.

“Hello, Dr Erdmann,” the male detective said. He was big, heavily muscled, with beard shadow even at this hour – just the sort of thuggish looks that Henry most mistrusted. The Black woman was much younger, small and neat and unsmiling. “We had a few follow-up questions for Ms Vesey about last night.”

Henry said, “Does she need a lawyer?”