Текст книги "The Complete Short Stories"
Автор книги: James Graham Ballard
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Текущая страница: 17 (всего у книги 113 страниц)
‘Can you see those moist white discs on the sepals,’ Powers pointed out. ‘In some way they regulate the plant’s metabolism. It literally sees time. The older the surrounding environment, the more sluggish its metabolism. With the asphalt chimney it will complete its annual cycle in a week, with the PVC one in a couple of hours.’
‘Sees time,’ Coma repeated, wonderingly. She looked up at Powers, chewing her lower lip reflectively. ‘It’s fantastic. Are these the creatures of the future, doctor?’
‘I don’t know,’ Powers admitted. ‘But if they are their world must be a monstrous surrealist one.’
Three
He went back to the desk, pulled two cups from a drawer and poured out the coffee, switching off the bunsen. ‘Some people have speculated that organisms possessing the silent pair of genes are the forerunners of a massive move up the evolutionary slope, that the silent genes are a sort of code, a divine message that we inferior organisms are carrying for our more highly developed descendants. It may well be true – perhaps we’ve broken the code too soon.’
‘Why do you say that?’
‘Well, as Whitby’s death indicates, the experiments in this laboratory have all come to a rather unhappy conclusion. Without exception the organisms we’ve irradiated have entered a final phase of totally disorganized growth, producing dozens of specialized sensory organs whose function we can’t even guess. The results are catastrophic – the anemone will literally explode, the Drosophila cannibalize themselves, and so on. Whether the future implicit in these plants and animals is ever intended to take place, or whether we’re merely extrapolating – I don’t know. Sometimes I think, thovgh, that the new sensory organs developed are parodies of their real intentions. The specimens you’ve seen today are all in an early stage of their secondary growth cycles. Later on they begin to look distinctly bizarre.’
Coma nodded. ‘A zoo isn’t complete without its keeper,’ she commented. ‘What about Man?’
Powers shrugged. ‘About one in every 100,000 – the usual average – contain the silent pair. You might have them – or I. No one has volunteered yet to undergo whole-body irradiation. Apart from the fact that it would be classified as suicide, if the experiments here are any guide the experience would be savage and violent.’
He sipped at the thin coffee, feeling tired and somehow bored. Recapitulating the laboratory’s work had exhausted him.
The girl leaned forward. ‘You look awfully pale,’ she said solicitously. ‘Don’t you sleep well?’
Powers managed a brief smile. ‘Too well,’ he admitted. ‘It’s no longer a problem with me.’
‘I wish I could say that about Kaldren. I don’t think he sleeps anywhere near enough. I hear him pacing around all night.’ She added: ‘Still, I suppose it’s better than being a terminal. Tell me, doctor, wouldn’t it be worth trying this radiation technique on the sleepers at the Clinic? It might wake them up before the end. A few of them must possess the silent genes.’
‘They all do,’ Powers told her. ‘The two phenomena are very closely linked, as a matter of fact.’ He stopped, fatigue dulling his brain, and wondered whether to ask the girl to leave. Then he climbed off the desk and reached behind it, picked up a tape-recorder.
Switching it on, he zeroed the tape and adjusted the speaker volume. ‘Whitby and I often talked this over. Towards the end I took it all down. He was a great biologist, so let’s hear it in his own words. It’s absolutely the heart of the matter.’
He flipped the table on, adding: ‘I’ve played it over to myself a thousand times, so I’m afraid the quality is poor.’
An older man’s voice, sharp and slightly irritable, sounded out above a low buzz of distortion, but Coma could hear it clearly.
WHITBY:… for heaven’s sake, Robert, look at those FAQ statistics. Despite an annual increase of five per cent in acreage sown over the past fifteen years, world wheat crops have continued to decline by a factor of about two per cent. The same story repeats itself ad nauseam. Cereals and root crops, dairy yields, ruminant fertility – are all down. Couple these with a mass of parallel symptoms, anything you care to pick from altered migratory routes to longer hibernation periods, and the overall pattern is incontrovertible.
POWERS: Population figures for Europe and North America show no decline, though.
WHITBY: Of course not, as I keep pointing out. It will take a century for such a fractional drop in fertility to have any effect in areas where extensive birth control provides an artificial reservoir. One must look at the countries of the Far East, and particularly at those where infant mortality has remained at a steady level. The population of Sumatra, for example, has declined by over fifteen per cent in the last twenty years. A fabulous decline! Do you realize that only two or three decades ago the Neo-Malthusians were talking about a ‘world population explosion’? In fact, it’s an implosion. Another factor is – Here the tape had been cut and edited, and Whitby’s voice, less querulous this time, picked up again. just as a matter of interest, tell me something: how long do you sleep each night?
POWERS: I don’t know exactly; about eight hours, I suppose.
WHITBY: The proverbial eight hours. Ask anyone and they say automatically ‘eight hours’. As a matter of fact you sleep about ten and a half hours, like the majority of people. I’ve timed you on a number of occasions. I myself sleep eleven. Yet thirty years ago people did indeed sleep eight hours, and a century before that they slept six or seven. In Vasari’s Lives one reads of Michelangelo sleeping for only four or five hours, painting all day at the age of eighty and then working through the night over his anatomy table with a candle strapped to his forehead. Now he’s regarded as a prodigy, but it was unremarkable then. How do you think the ancients, from Plato to Shakespeare, Aristotle to Aquinas, were able to cram so much work into their lives? Simply because they had an extra six or seven hours every day. Of course, a second disadvantage under which we labour is a lowered basal metabolic rate – another factor no one will explain.
POWERS: I suppose you could take the view that the lengthened sleep interval is a compensation device, a sort of mass neurotic attempt to escape from the terrifying pressures of urban life in the late twentieth century.
WHITBY: You could, but you’d be wrong. It’s simply a matter of biochemistry. The ribonucleic acid templates which unravel the protein chains in all living organisms are wearing out, the dies inscribing the protoplasmic signature have become blunted. After all, they’ve been running now for over a thousand million years. It’s time to re-tool. Just as an individual organism’s life span is finite, or the life of a yeast colony or a given species, so the life of an entire biological kingdom is of fixed duration. It’s always been assumed that the evolutionary slope reaches forever upwards, but in fact the peak has already been reached, and the pathway now leads downward to the common biological grave. It’s a despairing and at present unacceptable vision of the future, but it’s the only one. Five thousand centuries from now our descendants, instead of being multi-brained star-men, will probably be naked prognathous idiots with hair on their foreheads, grunting their way through the remains of this Clinic like Neolithic men caught in a macabre inversion of time. Believe me, I pity them, as I pity myself. My total failure, my absolute lack of any moral or biological right to existence, is implicit in every cell of my body…
The tape ended, the spool ran free and stopped. Powers closed the machine, then massaged his face. Coma sat quietly, watching him and listening to the chimp playing with a box of puzzle dice.
‘As far as Whitby could tell,’ Powers said, ‘the silent genes represent a last desperate effort of the biological kingdom to keep its head above the rising waters. Its total life period is determined by the amount of radiation emitted by the sun, and once this reaches a certain point the sure-death line has been passed and extinction is inevitable. To compensate for this, alarms have been built in which alter the form of the organism and adapt it to living in a hotter radiological climate. Softskinned organisms develop hard shells, these contain heavy metals as radiation screens. New organs of perception are developed too. According to Whitby, though, it’s all wasted effort in the long run – but sometimes I wonder.’
He smiled at Coma and shrugged. ‘Well, let’s talk about something else. How long have you known Kaldren?’
‘About three weeks. Feels like ten thousand years.’
‘How do you find him now? We’ve been rather out of touch lately.’
Coma grinned. ‘I don’t seem to see very much of him either. He makes me sleep all the time. Kaidren has many strange talents, but he lives just for himself. You mean a lot to him, doctor. In fact, you’re my one serious rival.’
‘I thought he couldn’t stand the sight of me.’
‘Oh, that’s just a sort of surface symptom. He really thinks of you continually. That’s why we spend all our time following you around.’ She eyed Powers shrewdly. ‘I think he feels guilty about something.’
‘Guilty?’ Powers exclaimed. ‘He does? I thought I was supposed to be the guilty one.’
‘Why?’ she pressed. She hesitated, then said: ‘You carried out some experimental surgical technique on him, didn’t you?’
‘Yes,’ Powers admitted. ‘It wasn’t altogether a success, like so much of what I seem to be involved with. If Kaldren feels guilty, I suppose it’s because he feels he must take some of the responsibility.’
He looked down at the girl, her intelligent eyes watching him closely. ‘For one or two reasons it may be necessary for you to know. You said Kaldren paced around all night and didn’t get enough sleep. Actually he doesn’t get any sleep at all.’
The girl nodded. ‘You…’ She made a snapping gesture with her fingers.
‘…narcotomized him,’ Powers completed. ‘Surgically speaking, it was a great success, one might well share a Nobel for it. Normally the hypothalamus regulates the period of sleep, raising the threshold of consciousness in order to relax the venous capillaries in the brain and drain them of accumulating toxins. However, by sealing off some of the control loops the subject is unable to receive the sleep cue, and the capillaries drain while he remains conscious. All he feels is a temporary lethargy, but this passes within three or four hours. Physically speaking, Kaldrenhas had another twenty years added to his life. But the psyche seems to need sleep for its own private reasons, and consequently Kaldren has periodic storms that tear him apart. The whole thing was a tragic blunder.’
Coma frowned pensively. ‘I guessed as much. Your papers in the neurosurgery journals referred to the patient as K. A touch of pure Kafka that came all too true.’
‘I may leave here for good, Coma,’ Powers said. ‘Make sure that Kaidren goes to his clinics. Some of the deep scar tissue will need to be cleaned away.’
‘I’ll try. Sometimes I feel I’m just another of his insane terminal documents.’
‘What are those?’
‘Haven’t you heard? Kaldren’s collection of final statements about homo sapiens. The complete works of Freud, Beethoven’s blind quartets, transcripts of the Nuremberg trials, an automatic novel, and so on.’ She broke off. ‘What’s that you’re drawing?’
‘Where?’
She pointed to the desk blotter, and Powers looked down and realized he had been unconsciously sketching an elaborate doodle, Whitby’s four-armed sun. ‘It’s nothing,’ he said. Somehow, though, it had a strangely compelling force.
Coma stood up to leave. ‘You must come and see us, doctor. Kaidren has so much he wants to show you. He’s just got hold of an old copy of the last signals sent back by the Mercury Seven twenty years ago when they reached the moon, and can’t think about anything else. You remember the strange messages they recorded before they died, full of poetic ramblings about the white gardens. Now that I think about it they behaved rather like the plants in your zoo here.’
She put her hands in her pockets, then pulled something out. ‘By the way, Kaidren asked me to give you this.’
It was an old index card from the observatory library. In the centre had been typed the number: 96,688,365,498,720 ‘It’s going to take a long time to reach zero at this rate,’ Powers remarked dryly. ‘I’ll have quite a collection when we’re finished.’
After she had left he chucked the card into the waste bin and sat down at the desk, staring for an hour at the ideogram on the blotter.
Halfway back to his beach house the lake road forked to the left through a narrow saddle that ran between the hills to an abandoned Air Force weapons range on one of the remoter salt lakes. At the nearer end were a number of small bunkers and camera towers, one or two metal shacks and a low-roofed storage hangar. The white hills encircled the whole area, shutting it off from the world outside, and Powers liked to wander on foot down the gunnery aisles that had been marked down the two-mile length of the lake towards the concrete sight-screens at the far end. The abstract patterns made him feel like an ant on a bone-white chess-board, the rectangular screens at one end and the towers and bunkers at the other like opposing pieces.
His session with Coma had made Powers feel suddenly dissatisfied with the way he was spending his last months. Goodbye, Eniwetok, he had written, but in fact systematically forgetting everything was exactly the same as remembering it, a cataloguing in reverse, sorting out all the books in the mental library and putting them back in their right places upside down.
Powers climbed one of the camera towers, leaned on the rail and looked out along the aisles towards the sightscreens. Ricocheting shells and rockets had chipped away large pieces of the circular concrete bands that ringed the target bulls, but the outlines of the huge 100-yard-wide discs, alternately painted blue and red, were still visible.
For half an hour he stared quietly at them, formless ideas shifting through his mind. Then, without thinking, he abruptly left the rail and climbed down the companionway. The storage hangar was fifty yards away. He walked quickly across to it, stepped into the cool shadows and peered around the rusting electric trolleys and empty flare drums. At the far end, behind a pile of lumber and bales of wire, were a stack of unopened cement bags, a mound of dirty sand and an old mixer.
Half an hour later he had backed the Buick into the hangar and hooked the cement mixer, charged with sand, cement and water scavenged from the drums lying around outside, on to the rear bumper, then loaded a dozen more bags into the car’s trunk and rear seat. Finally he selected a few straight lengths of timber, jammed them through the window and set off across the lake towards the central target bull.
For the next two hours he worked away steadily in the centre of the great blue disc, mixing up the cement by hand, carrying it across to the crude wooden forms he had lashed together from the timber, smoothing it down so that it formed a six-inch high wall around the perimeter of the bull. He worked without pause, stirring the cement with a tyre lever, scooping it out with a hub-cap prised off one of the wheels.
By the time he finished and drove off, leaving his equipment where it stood, he had completed a thirty-foot-long section of wall.
Four
June 7: Conscious, for the first time, of the brevity of each day. As long as I was awake for over twelve hours I still orientated my time around the meridian, morning and afternoon set their old rhythms. Now, with just over eleven hours of consciousness left, they form a continuous interval, like a length of tape-measure. I can see exactly how much is left on the spool and can do – little to affect the rate at which it unwinds. Spend the time slowly packing away the library; the crates are too heavy to move and lie where they are filled.
Cell count down to 400,000.
Woke 8-10. To sleep 7-15. (Appear to have lost my watch without realizing it, had to drive into town to buy another.)
June 14: 9/2 hours. Time races, flashing past like an expressway. However, the last week of a holiday always goes faster than the first. At the present rate there should be about 4-5 weeks left. This morning I tried to visualize what the last week or so – the final, 3, 2, 1, out – would be like, had a sudden chilling attack of pure fear, unlike anything I’ve ever felt before. Took me half an hour to steady myself for an intravenous.
Kaldren pursues me like my luminescent shadow, chalked up on the gateway ‘96,688,365,498,702’. Should confuse the mail man.
Woke 9-05. To sleep 6-36.
June 19: 8/4 hours. Anderson rang up this morning. I nearly put the phone down on him, but managed to go through the pretence of making the final arrangements. He congratulated me on my stoicism, even used the word ‘heroic’. Don’t feel it. Despair erodes everything – courage, hope, self-discipline, all the better qualities. It’s so damned difficult to sustain that impersonal attitude of passive acceptance implicit in the scientific tradition. I try to think of Galileo before the Inquisition, Freud surmounting the endless pain of his jaw cancer surgery.
Met Kaldren down town, had a long discussion about the Mercury Seven. He’s convinced that they refused to leave the moon deliberately, after the ‘reception party’ waiting for them had put them in the cosmic picture. They were told by the mysterious emissaries from Orion that the exploration of deep space was pointless, that they were too late as the life of the universe is now virtually over!!! According to K. there are Air Force generals who take this nonsense seriously, but I suspect it’s simply an obscure attempt on K. ‘s part to console me.
Must have the phone disconnected. Some contractor keeps calling me up about payment for 50 bags of cement he claims I collected ten days ago. Says he helped me load them on to a truck himself. I did drive Whitby’s pick-up into town but only to get some lead screening. What does he think I’d do with all that cement? Just the ort of irritating thing you don’t expect to hang over your final exit. (Moral: don’t try too hard to forget Eniwetok.)
Woke 9-40. To sleep 4-15.
June 25: 7/2 hours. Kaldren was snooping around the lab again today. Phoned me there, when I answered a recorded voice he’d rigged up rambled out a long string of numbers, like an insane super-Tim. These practical jokes of his get rather wearing. Fairly soon I’ll have to go over and come to terms with him, much as I hate the prospect. Anyway, Miss Mars is a pleasure to look at.
One meal is enough now, topped up with a glucose shot. Sleep is still ‘black’, completely unrefreshing. Last night I took a 16 mm. film of the first three hours, screened it this morning at the lab. The first true horror movie, I looked like a half-animated corpse. Woke 10-25. To sleep 345.
July 3: 53/4 hours. Little done today. Deepening lethargy, dragged myself over to the lab, nearly left the road twice. Concentrated enough to feed the zoo and get the log up to date. Read through the operating manuals Whitby left for the last time, decided on a delivery rate of 40 rontgens/min., target distance of 350 cm. Everything is ready now.
Woke 11-05. To sleep 3-15.
Powers stretched, shifted his head slowly across the pillow, focusing on the shadows cast on to the ceiling by the blind. Then he looked down at his feet, saw Kaldren sitting on the end of the bed, watching him quietly.
‘Hello, doctor,’ he said, putting out his cigarette. ‘Late night? You look tired.’
Powers heaved himself on to one elbow, glanced at his watch. It was just after eleven. For a moment his brain blurred, and he swung his legs around and sat on the edge of the bed, elbows on his knees, massaging some life into his face.
He noticed that the room was full of smoke. ‘What are you doing here?’ he asked Kaldren.
‘I came over to invite you to lunch.’ He indicated the bedside phone. ‘Your line was dead so I drove round. Hope you don’t mind me climbing in. Rang the bell for about half an hour. I’m surprised you didn’t hear it.’
Powers nodded, then stood up and tried to smooth the creases out of his cotton slacks. He had gone to sleep without changing for over a week, and they were damp and stale.
As he started for the bathroom door Kaldren pointed to the camera tripod on the other side of the bed. ‘What’s this? Going into the blue movie business, doctor?’
Powers surveyed him dimly for a moment, glanced at the tripod without replying and then noticed his open diary on the bedside table. Wondering whether Kaldren had read the last entries, he went back and picked it up, then stepped into the bathroom and closed the door behind him.
From the mirror cabinet he took out a syringe and an ampoule, after the shot leaned against the door waiting for the stimulant to pick up.
Kaldren was in the lounge when he returned to him, reading the labels on the crates lying about in the centre of the floor.
‘Okay, then,’ Powers told him, ‘I’ll join you for lunch.’ He examined Kaldren carefully. He looked more subdued than usual, there was an air almost of deference about him.
‘Good,’ Kaidren said. ‘By the way, are you leaving?’
‘Does it matter?’ Powers asked curtly. ‘I thought you were in Anderson’s care?’
Kaldren shrugged. ‘Please yourself. Come round at about twelve,’ he suggested, adding pointedly: ‘That’ll give you time to clean up and change. What’s that all over your shirt? Looks like lime.’
Powers peered down, brushed at the white streaks. After Kaldren had left he threw the clothes away, took a shower and unpacked a clean suit from one of the trunks.
Until his liaison with Coma, Kaidren lived alone in the old abstract summer house on the north shore of the lake. This was a seven-storey folly originally built by an eccentric millionaire mathematician in the form of a spiralling concrete ribbon that wound around itself like an insane serpent, serving walls, floors and ceilings. Only Kaldren had solved the building, a geometric model of and consequently he had been able to take it off the agents’ hands at a comparatively low rent. In the evenings Powers had often watched him from the laboratory, striding restlessly from one level to the next, swinging through the labyrinth of inclines and terraces to the roof-top, where his lean angular figure stood out like a gallows against the sky, his lonely eyes sifting out radio lanes for the next day’s trapping.
Powers noticed him there when he drove up at noon, poised on a ledge 150 feet above, head raised theatrically to the sky.
‘Kaldren!’ he shouted up suddenly into the silent air, half-hoping he might be jolted into losing his footing.
Kaldren broke out of his reverie and glanced down into the court. Grinning obliquely, he waved his right arm in a slow semi-circle.
‘Come up,’ he called, then turned back to the sky.
Powers leaned against the car. Once, a few months previously, he had accepted the same invitation, stepped through the entrance and within three minutes lost himself helplessly in a second-floor cul-de-sac. Kaldren had taken half an hour to find him.
Powers waited while Kaldren swung down from his eyrie, vaulting through the wells and stairways, then rode up in the elevator with him to the penthouse suite.
They carried their cQcktails through into a wide glass-roofed studio, the huge white ribbon of concrete uncoiling around them like toothpaste squeezed from an enormous tube. On the staged levels running parallel and across them rested pieces of grey abstract furniture, giant photographs on angled screens, carefully labelled exhibits laid out on low tables, all dominated by twenty-foot-high black letters on the rear wall which spelt out the single vast word: ******YOU******
Kaldren pointed to it. ‘What you might call the supraliminal approach.’ He gestured Powers in conspiratorially, finishing his drink in a gulp. ‘This is my laboratory, doctor,’ he said with a note of pride. ‘Much more significant than yours, believe me.’
Powers smiled wryly to himself and examined the first exhibit, an old EEG tape traversed by a series of faded inky wriggles. It was labelled: ‘Einstein, A.; Alpha Waves, 1922.’
He followed Kaldren around, sipping slowly at his drink, enjoying the brief feeling of alertness the amphetamine provided. Within two hours it would fade, leave his brain feeling like a block of blotting paper.
Kaldren chattered away, explaining the significance of the so-called Terminal Documents. ‘They’re end-prints, Powers, final statements, the products of total fragmentation. When I’ve got enough together I’ll build a new world for myself out of them.’ He picked a thick paper-bound volume off one of the tables, riffled through its pages. ‘Association tests of the Nuremberg Twelve. I have to include these..
Powers strolled on absently without listening. Over in the corner were what appeared to be three ticker-tape machines, lengths of tape hanging from their mouths. He wondered whether Kaldren was misguided enough to be playing the stock market, which had been declining slowly for twenty years.
‘Powers,’ he heard Kaldren say. ‘I was telling you about the Mercury Seven.’ He pointed to a collection of typewritten sheets tacked to a screen. ‘These are transcripts of their final signals radioed back from the recording monitors.’
Powers examined the sheets cursorily, read a line at random.
‘…BLUE… PEOPLE… RE-CYCLE… ORION… TELEMETERS…’
Powers nodded noncommittally. ‘Interesting. What are the ticker tapes for over there?’
Kaldren grinned. ‘I’ve been waiting for months for you to ask me that. Have a look.’
Powers went over and picked up one of the tapes. The machine was labelled: ‘Auriga 225-G. Interval: 69 hours.’
The tape read:
96,688,365,498,695,96,688,365,498,694 96,688,365,498,693 96,688,365,498,692
Powers dropped the tape. ‘Looks rather familiar. What does the sequence represent?’
Kaldren shrugged. ‘No one knows.’
‘What do you mean? It must replicate something.’
‘Yes, it does. A diminishing mathematical progression. A countdown, if you like.’
Powers picked up the tape on the right, tabbed: ‘Aries 44R95 1. Interval: 49 days.’
Here the sequence ran:
876,567,988,347,779,877,654,434 876,567,988,347,779,877,654,433 876,567,988,347,779,877,654,432
Powers looked round. ‘How long does it take each signal to come through?’
‘Only a few seconds. They’re tremendously compressed laterally, of course. A computer at the observatory breaks them down. They were first picked up at Jodrell Bank about twenty years ago. Nobody bothers to listen to them now.’
Powers turned to the last tape.
6,554
6,553 6,552 6,551
‘Nearing the end of its run,’ he commented. He glanced at the label on the hood, which read: ‘Unidentified radio source, Canes Venatici. Interval: 97 weeks.’
He showed the tape to Kaldren. ‘Soon be over.’
Kaldren shook his head. He lifted a heavy directory-sized volume off a table, cradled it in his hands. His face had suddenly become sombre and haunted. ‘I doubt it,’ he said. ‘Those are only the last four digits. The whole number contains over 50 million.’
He handed the volume to Powers, who turned to the title page. ‘Master Sequence of Serial Signal received by Jodrell Bank Radio-Observatory, University of Manchester, England, 0012-59 hours, 21-5-72. Source: NGC 9743, Canes Venatici.’ He thumbed the thick stack of closely printed pages, millions of numerals, as Kaidren had said, running up and down across a thousand consecutive pages.
Powers shook his head, picked up the tape again and stared at it thoughtfully.
‘The computer only breaks down the last four digits,’ Kaldren explained. ‘The whole series comes over in each 15second-long package, but it took IBM more than two years to unscramble one of them.’
‘Amazing,’ Powers commented. ‘But what is it?’
‘A countdown, as you can see. NGC 9743, somewhere in Canes Venatici. The big spirals there are breaking up, and they’re saying goodbye. God knows who they think we are but they’re letting us know all the same, beaming it out on the hydrogen line for everyone in the universe to hear.’ He paused. ‘Some people have put other interpretations on them, but there’s one piece of evidence that rules out everything else.’
‘Which is?’
Kaldren pointed to the last tape from Canes Venatici. ‘Simply that it’s been estimated that by the time this series reaches zero the universe will have just ended.’
Powers fingered the tape reflectively. ‘Thoughtful of them to let us know what the real time is,’ he remarked.
‘I agree, it is,’ Kaldren said quietly. ‘Applying the inverse square law that signal source is broadcasting at a strength of about three million megawatts raised to the hundredth power. About the size of the entire Local Group. Thoughtful is the word.’
Suddenly he gripped Powers’ arm, held it tightly and peered into his eyes closely, his throat working with emotion.
‘You’re not alone, Powers, don’t think you are. These are the voices of time, and they’re all saying goodbye to you. Think of yourself in a wider context. Every particle in your body, every grain of sand, every galaxy carries the same signature. As you’ve just said, you know what the time is now, so what does the rest matter? There’s no need to go on looking at the clock.’
Powers took his hand, squeezed it firmly. ‘Thanks, Kaidren. I’m glad you understand.’ He walked over to the window, looked down across the white lake. The tension between himself and Kaldren had dissipated, he felt that all his obligations to him had at last been met. Now he wanted to leave as quickly as possible, forget him as he had forgotten the faces of the countless other patients whose exposed brains had passed between his fingers.
He went back to the ticker machines, tore the tapes from their slots and stuffed them into his pockets. ‘I’ll take these along to remind myself. Say goodbye to Coma for me, will you.’
