INTERFACE

 

by A. A. Attanasio

 

 

Morning sunlight running invisibly through the long, slender glass windows gives the laboratory a surreal attitude. The walls are white, circular, and indifferent. And the remote ceiling is a luminescent circle with an eleven-meter diameter. The cylindrical room itself is a menagerie of electrical equipment describing the circumference of an amphitheater recessed in the center of the room. In the amphitheater is a mechanized chair of graying leather before a television screen. The floor is well waxed.

 

Dr. Michel Ibu advances several paces into the laboratory and looks across the amphitheater at a small bank of data collaters, mute in the sunlight. Their metallic faces, catching the sun, wear several small rainbows.

 

Dr. Ibu walks around a crowd of oxygen tanks and stands at the edge of the amphitheater. He is lanky and has a slight stoop. His face would be virtually flat except for high, prominent cheekbones laced with fine wrinkles in the black skin. His temples are gray.

 

“Dr. Reed?” he calls tentatively.

 

“Be with you in a minute,” a distracted female voice answers.

 

Dr. Ibu folds his arms and grins.

 

So this is how we meet, he thinks.

 

A slender, dark-haired woman in a light-blue lab smock emerges from behind a portable canvas partition that has a large, assertive red ! printed on it. She is tall, and her hair is loose, falling about her shoulders.

 

“Yes?” she asks.

 

“Dr. Reed, I’m Michel Ibu from the marine labs.”

 

She raises her eyebrows in a gesture of surprise. “So you’re the neurophysiologist-biophysicist I’ve been warned about,” she says without a smile.

 

“I’ve been tracking you down for two weeks.” Ibu grins. “It seems you’re kept quite busy here.”

 

“Frankly, Dr. Ibu, I’ve just been trying to avoid you.”

 

He cracks a disconcerted smile. “Why?”

 

“I’m not interested in working with terminal patients.”

 

“How do you know I’m going to ask you to?”

 

“Are you going to be coy?”

 

“Who told you about the project?”

 

“I received your first invitation to work on the project, and then I went to Comptrol, and I looked into it myself. I’m just not interested in working on it.”

 

“But do you understand what it’s about?”

 

“I don’t understand why you have to use a terminal patient.”

 

“Look, Dr. Reed, have you had breakfast yet?”

 

“Yes.”

 

“Well, I’d like to talk with you—to familiarize you with the project.”

 

“I’m listening.”

 

“Well, why don’t you let me take you down to the marine labs so I can show you what we’re doing?”

 

“I haven’t got the time, Dr. Ibu.”

 

“Okay,” he says, exasperated, running one hand over his face. “In a nutshell, I’m on the verge of interspecies communication. I’m working with Lenny, a dolphin, and Heath Underhill, an eighteen-year-old terminal.”

 

“Underhill? Do you mean he’s from Underhill Clone?”

 

“Yes. But it would be more accurate to say that he’s a reject from Underhill Clone. He’s a ‘cdd’—the defect is on an independent geriatric allele. In a short while, two or three years, he’ll start decomposing. But right now he’s in perfect health and with an IQ that easily categorizes him as a genius. He was purchased for just those reasons.

 

“Underhill Clone sent me Heath when he was six months old. As a ‘cdd’ he would have been euthed immediately. But we kept him here, and when he turned seven, we introduced him to Lenny. They’ve grown up together; their psyches have been interacting for most of their lives. They have a good, healthy relationship.”

 

“You talk as if they’re equals.”

 

“If anything, Lenny is Heath’s superior. The dolphin has a cerebral cortex the size of a human’s. But the parietal area, the silent zone linked to abstract thinking, is almost twice as large. When I began to study dolphin sounds, I found they had an immensely more complex communication system than we do. This is what led me to question whether we might establish interspecies communication. Our biggest problem right now is structural. The dolphin language is sonic, but it’s waterborne and is therefore ten times faster than ours. We just think too slowly to talk with a dolphin. But that’s where you come in.”

 

“And how’s that?”

 

“Your field is psychobiology. Your specialty is neurology. And your research project for the past six years, since you first came to the clinic, has been autonomous visceral control. I know that you’ve taught subjects how to control their heartbeat, blood pressure, even certain glandular excretions. What I’d like is for you to teach Heath much of the same, only more intensively.”

 

“But what has that to do with talking dolphins?”

 

“Dr. Madoc, the psychophysicist here, has synthesized a hallucinogen that, in some way I’m not familiar with, mobilizes awareness. It distorts temporal perception so radically that, for any practical purposes, time for the user no longer exists. Most remarkably, it’s possible when using this drug to shift consciousness to any part of the body. There’s one drawback: even the smallest trace quantities of this drug are enough to dislocate consciousness for hours. And he’s found, working with rats, and in the six volunteer cases he’s had, that it’s impossible to survive without extensive conscious visceral control. Many of the primitive parts of the brain are shut down by the drug, and normally independent functions simply stop. Only one of the six volunteers survived.”

 

“I still don’t see where the talking dolphins come in.”

 

“It’s the mutual belief of Dr. Madoc and myself that within the expanded state of awareness of this drug, it will be possible to ‘race up the mind,’ so to speak, to the faster rate of communication that the dolphin employs. With the proper precontact training, most of which in Heath’s case is unnecessary, considering the simpatico between him and Lenny as it is, we may establish the first interspecies communication; we may be exposed to a culture whose structure is totally alien to us.”

 

Dr. Reed deliberates for a brief moment. Presently she says, “There are two others in this department who have been working on visceral control—Kapowitz and Jennings.”

 

“Yes, but only you have had extensive experience with humans. Heath may be synthetic, but he’s still human, and you’re the most qualified to deal with him.”

 

“All right,” she says, shrugging. “I have to admit you’ve interested me. When do we begin?”

 

* * * *

 

“You may begin whenever you’re ready,” she says, securing the headrest. “Take it from sixty-four to one hundred and ten.”

 

Dr. Reed walks to the front of the amphitheater and steps behind a console, from where she can monitor the heartbeat of the young man in the mechanized chair and still observe him. The subject’s face is calm, and his eyes are fixed on the TV screen in front and slightly above him.

 

Several minutes of inactivity pass, and then a small red light on the face of the screen blimps once, indicating an alteration in the heartbeat of the young man.

 

Focus on that, Dr. Reed thinks.

 

Another red light blimps. A moment passes, and then there is another flash. And then another. The TV screen registers an acceleration of heartbeat by displaying a cardiograph with more frequent spikes. With deliberation, the rate climbs to one hundred and ten beats per minute.

 

“Okay, now bring it down to fifty,” Dr. Reed orders.

 

Immediately another red light flashes on the screen. This occurs once more before the spikes on the cardiograph become more separated, spacing out to fifty beats per minute.

 

“Fine,” she says. “Now maintain that rate, and increase your blood pressure. Take it to one-twenty over ninety.”

 

Another graph flicks onto the TV screen, showing his relative blood pressure. Thirty seconds pass before the graph indicates an increase in the pressure. It increases steadily, leveling off at the assigned pressure.

 

“Very good,” Dr. Reed says, recording the time intervals on a clipboard.

 

“He’s progressing well, I take it,” a gravel voice says at her side. It’s Dr. Ibu.

 

“Hold it there for another minute,” she directs, and then turns her attention to Ibu. “Yes, his will is remarkably well integrated. He’s a good subject to work with.”

 

“I’m glad to hear that you’re satisfied,” Ibu says. “Would you say, then, that he’s ready?”

 

“Ready for what? Short-term suspension of visceral control—yes. Prolonged suspension—no.”

 

“You’ve been working with him for six weeks. How much longer before he can master his visceral responses?”

 

“Master them for what period of time?”

 

“Indefinitely.”

 

Dr. Reed turns back to the experiment. “That’s it for now, Heath.” She looks at Ibu. “I’ll need another two weeks, at least.”

 

Ibu’s mouth slips open. “Two weeks! My dear, do you realize how impatient I am?”

 

“I’m doing as thorough a job as I can, as quickly as I can, doctor,” she says, studying her console and recording some final data. “You yourself pointed out that if he doesn’t master this, his life may be forsaken. Besides, if you didn’t hog all of his time, this process would have been over long ago.”

 

“I’m not hogging his time. It’s Lenny. But that’s necessary, too. Their relationship is important.”

 

She shrugs.

 

“I just think you’re jealous of Lenny,” Ibu says mock seriously.

 

Dr. Reed puts down her clipboard and regards him with a solemn stare. She looks vexed.

 

“Hello, Michel,” Heath says, approaching them. He is of average height, perhaps a trifle smaller. His complexion is light and smoothly clear, enhancing his pleasing features—prominent jaw and soft gray eyes. His physique is ideal.

 

“Hello, Heath,” Ibu responds with a smile. “Elisabeth tells me that she’s very satisfied with you.”

 

Heath grins and makes a sarcastic gesture.

 

“Listen, you,” Elisabeth says with feigned anger, “keep that up, and tomorrow you’ll get a real workout in the chair. As for you”—she glares at Ibu—”why don’t you go tell it to your fish ... or ... or mammal, or whatever it is.”

 

Ibu laughs his staccato laugh, indicating his own satisfaction. “I’m going to do that right now,” he says, putting his arm around Heath’s shoulders. “It’s just about time for Lenny’s session.”

 

Heath faces Elisabeth. “Why don’t you come with us?” he asks.

 

“I don’t think I can afford the time now,” she says. “I’ve got all of today’s data to correlate, still.”

 

“You can do that tonight,” Heath says. “Besides, I’m tired of showing off in front of Michel and his cronies. It’d be more satisfying for me if you were there.”

 

Ibu chuckles. “What can you say to that?”

 

“I’m coming,” she says. The young man’s abruptness makes her nervous.

 

It is a long, cool walk through the air-conditioned halls of the clinic from the neurology labs to the marine labs. Occasional artistic blurbs of multicolored geometric designs printed on walls and doors relieve some of the monotony of the otherwise bland white corridors.

 

The marine labs take up the entire west face of the complex of buildings that make up the clinic. It faces the sea.

 

The particular lab that they enter is more like an enormous gymnasium. The ceiling is several stories high, and many naked steel beams cross each other up there. On the tile floor of the lab, besides a series of bleachers and several large water-purifying units, there is a red stripe that outlines a hundred-meter pool. Ibu leads up to the demarkation and finds a metal ring that opens a door in the tile floor. Ibu and Elisabeth descend into an observation room that is a chamber whose one wall is a glass side to the pool.

 

The pool is connected to a large underwater tunnel that leads directly to the sea. It is rarely closed off, and all manner of sea life find their way. Dr. Ibu learned long ago that to confine a dolphin against his will was futile. They just won’t cooperate. He found that the creatures responded better to his experimentation when they were treated warmly and consistently and were allowed to come and go as they pleased.

 

Elisabeth touches her fingertips to the glass. The water is pellucid enough to see the surface clearly. Up there Heath is stripping.

 

“It’ll be a few moments before Lenny gets here,” Ibu says, looking at his watch.

 

“Does he always come on time?”

 

“Always.”

 

The sound of someone singing in a falsetto seeps through the walls from unseen corridors. It is a happy tune.

 

“Tell me, Michel,” Elisabeth says, studying her reflection in the glass (she considers herself good-looking; most men would agree), “is there any possibility of . . .”

 

There is a blurred, elusive movement in front of her. Focusing her eyes, she sees a dolphin, slightly larger than a man, its gray form sleek. It darts longitudinally across her field of vision.

 

“Punctual, indeed,” Ibu says, his flat, black face bright with pride. He returns his attention to Elisabeth. “Excuse me. What was it you were going to ask?”

 

She had meant to ask about Heath, and if there were any chance of his life being prolonged. She knows it is hopeless and thinks it better not to give Ibu any more reason to suspect that she is infatuated with Heath.

 

“My answer is out there,” she says, gesturing toward the water. “I was going to ask if Lenny was really coming or not.”

 

A silvery-blue congeries of bubbles thrusts itself soundlessly before the glass wall, resolving itself into a human form that gracefully arcs back up toward the surface, completing a perfect parabolic sweep.

 

Heath returns immediately, but this time he is clinging to Lenny’s back, trailing his legs behind him. The duo complete several spirals and then surface for air.

 

“They’ll play for a couple of hours,” Ibu says.

 

In the pool, Heath is completing the transition between two worlds. He lets the above world slip away, shrugging off its gravity. The below world, the world of muted colors and buoyant substance, adopts him—not a foster world, though, nor less genuine, but more congenial than above, more real.

 

He skims along the surface of the pool, Lenny keeping time beside him, his bottle nose and permanent smile above water. Then, with a stretch of stroke, Heath picks up the pace, and with dazed and jumping eyeballs he looks once more above, then dives below. He reaches the bottom, touches it with hands and knees, and then unforms and sprawls shapeless as a dead man, hanging limply in suspension.

 

Lenny slips under him and pushes him.

 

They latch together and streak up. The green edges of the pool whirl, dizzy with the eruption of their surfacing, and the pumping heart shakes the brilliance from the electric lights.

 

Heath loops his arms around Lenny again, and they somersault below, easing into a slow sweep of the bottom.

 

Heath feels his body become exhilarated with the smooth effort. His brain is hurled from platitude, the forced lungs cry for meager air, organs of sense are strained beyond their common catch, and the world and tortured body pulse into chaos. Together they unmake old realms.

 

Having to halt, they drift to the surface. Heath gasps for breath and hears the blood grow soft and usual. Seeing the green pool’s edge and his pile of clothing, he feels stale threats come up abreast and reassert their normalcy, before whose arrogance he straightens, fills his lungs, begins to dive.

 

“Yes, they’ll play for hours together,” Ibu says, his eyes glazed over.

 

* * * *

 

Dr. Corin Madoc, sitting in his cramped office with the glass panel that looks out into his cramped lab, sees Elisabeth Reed as soon as she enters the lab. She walks toward his office with a straight-backed, slow step that he is very fond of in her. He doesn’t know her very well—only by word of mouth and his own sexual curiosity—but he has admired her for a long time, since his wife died (that long? really?).

 

Having seen him staring at her, she does not bother to knock. He likes that, too.

 

“Dr. Madoc, I’m Dr. Reed,” she announces congenially.

 

“Come in and sit down, if you wish,” Dr. Madoc offers in a voice with a trace of Australian accent. “I’d ask you to make yourself comfortable, but the room’s too small for that.”

 

“Yes, you’re really tight—even your lab.”

 

“It’s unfortunate, all right. Comptrol thinks that because all of my work is molecular, I can do with correspondingly diminutive working space.”

 

Dr. Reed smiles and sits down in a worn green overstuffed chair flanked by stacks of equally worn journals. “I’ve come to talk about your drug—the psychotrope that’ll be used in Dr. Ibu’s experiments.”

 

“US-Twelve,” Dr. Madoc confirms.

 

“I wasn’t aware of its name.”

 

“It doesn’t have a name yet. That’s just a temporary label. It stands for Unspecified Structure. I determined the structure, despite the current label, long ago—I just never got around to registering an official IUPAC name with Comptrol.”

 

She nods. “Well, if I can be direct, I’m contributing to Dr. Ibu’s project, too, and I’m curious to know exactly what the nature of US-Twelve is. It seems no one really knows.”

 

Dr. Madoc smiles. Though he is forty-one, his sullen eyes, behind tinted, silver-framed glasses, look much older, dark and netted with wrinkles. Dr. Reed recalls having seen him at the computer center occasionally and remembers him as what some of the female techs there described as “dark, tall, and lonely.” Though he still wears a wedding band, she also remembers having heard from someone that his wife had died a few years ago. She pities him, almost. She believes he is the kind of introverted scientist-type who’ll probably never again go out of his way to meet another woman.

 

“US-Twelve, admittedly, is strange,” Dr. Madoc says. “Only five or six molecules of it are required to precipitate a psychotomimetic experience in an average male. It works directly on the reticular activating system, initiating a seretonin-based chemical reaction within the RAS that very quickly affects the cerebral cortex and, in the only way I can describe it, dislocates consciousness.”

 

“That, specifically,” Dr. Reed says, “is what I’m curious about. What do you mean? You’re not talking about ‘out-of-body experiences’?”

 

Dr. Madoc shakes his head. “No—if anything, the opposite. By a remarkable biochemical rearrangement, the scope of awareness is infinitely enhanced by the drug. The sensory level of our consciousness is limited to the few sense organs by means of which we make our fumbling contact with the external world. This somatic level of consciousness is limited to the organs and tissue centers of the body.

 

“A large enough dosage of US-Twelve, four to five milligammas, which I suppose most of us would call ‘trace quantities,’ activates the cellular level of consciousness. There are as many distinct levels of consciousness as there are anatomical, cellular, subcellular, and neural structures within the body. And this drug can activate any of them.”

 

“But that’s not related to Dr. Ibu’s work?”

 

“No, it isn’t. He merely wants to increase the somatic consciousness of his subject to enable quicker neural responses. We’ll use eight molecules for that.”

 

“Have you experimented with that quantity before?”

 

“Six times.”

 

“What were your results?”

 

“Five of those subjects died as a result of being unable to cope with the effects of the drug—specifically, loss of autonomic visceral control.”

 

“What about the other one?”

 

“He survived, but he had been trained to. Indirectly, though. He was a Yogin. That’s how we stumbled onto the necessity for conscious control of visceral responses. But if I’m not mistaken, that’s your role in the project. Isn’t it?”

 

“Yes, it is.”

 

“Well, then, we may be working together quite soon.”

 

Dr. Reed frowns quizzically.

 

“I’ll be supervising the administration of the drug during the preliminary experiments. There are some exercises the subject should master before he’s introduced to the drug; other than that, though, he’ll be chiefly your charge. By the way, what’s his name?”

 

* * * *

 

“Heath!” she shouts, her hands funneling her mouth. She feels a moment of desperation.

 

The young man has drawn far ahead of her and is running along the wet, flat sand, following the slow curve of the shrunken sea. Three hundred yards to his left, the small waves are breaking, running in shallow streams along the smooth beach. Huge black rocks, crusted with gray barnacles below the high-water line, rip out of the sand at random intervals, upsetting the perfect flatness of the landscape in a peculiar way. They remind Heath of bent witches, draped by heavy, dark shrouds.

 

He splashes through a knee-deep pool and runs up to a narrow, natural jetty made up of a collection of small black boulders. He stands with his back to the low sun and the broad expanse of the sea reach.

 

After a few minutes, Elisabeth, her hair falling long past her shoulders and stringy with salt, jogs up to the jetty and sits down at Heath’s feet. She is breathing hard from her run, and there are small droplets of sweat at her temples.

 

She is wearing denims, cut very short, and the top of a white bathing suit.

 

“I can’t run any farther,” she breathes.

 

“Okay, let’s stay here and watch the sun set,” Heath says, squatting beside her.

 

The slanting beams of sunset ripple off the distant thin line of ocean and touch the many pools of water around them with a fiery glow. The repeated call of some bird, sharp and discordant, is all that disturbs the silence of the world.

 

Heath sits with his chin resting in one hand, his profile catching a vague line of light that follows the outline of his features: soft lines, but with sharp touches—maturity emerging from childhood. His fair hair curls around the small ears and along the sleek tendons of his neck, not quite hiding a blue vein.

 

Elisabeth shifts so that they are touching, pleased by the warmth and firmness of his flesh. For the first time, she is caught up in the thought that he might accept her physically.

 

“Istigkeit” Heath says, without removing his eyes from the horizon. “That’s the word Meister Eckhart liked to use.”

 

“Is-ness?” she translates.

 

He turns, focusing his steady gaze on her. “That’s a funny thing to say, isn’t it? But that’s what this reminds me of. Being. The chant of the sea rolling in, with the sea breeze, and those colors. Three different things that produce one feeling. They are simply one.”

 

Elisabeth turns to look away, and he watches how her hair slips back from her rounded shoulder. She’s confused, he realizes, but she doesn’t want to pursue.

 

“Ignorance is a bliss we can never afford,” he murmurs. “We have to understand the self as thoroughly as we can.”

 

She glances at him, catching the odd tone, but her mind is still on their touching, thinking about how it might be extended, thinking how to narrow their proximity.

 

“You’re sounding pedantic,” she says curtly. She stretches her legs out; they are long and slender, and she is proud of them.

 

Heath pretends not to notice. He studies her face, seeing the up-angled cheeks, the lime-toned eyes, the olive complexion, and the expressive mouth.

 

“Don’t blame me for that,” he says flatly. “I learned to talk in a laboratory, not a classroom.”

 

“So?” she asks with uninterest.

 

“So I may not talk like normal people.”

 

“We shouldn’t have wandered this far from the city,” she says, facing to look down the strand they had walked up.

 

He sees that she hasn’t been listening to him, focuses on her words, wondering why she sounds frustrated. He looks down at her legs, sees the white flesh of her thighs spilling from the tight denims.

 

“How have you been getting along with Corin?” she asks suddenly.

 

“Let’s not talk about that now.”

 

“No. Let’s,” she presses. “Tomorrow’s the first preliminary experiment. I want to know if you and Corin have had any more scraps. His training is important. I’m concerned.”

 

“As a scientist?” he asks with a grin that his boyish features make mischievous.

 

She trains her eyes on the remote undulation of the falling waves. “How else would I be interested?”

 

He speaks quickly because here is a fact and a change of subject. “I may not be human, but I do have real feelings. And I know that you’re attracted to me.”

 

She stares hard at him, a defiant ripple along her jaw.

 

“When are you going to stop harping on your identity? I hate that!”

 

He feels a pang of foolishness surge through him. “I can only be what I am,” he says in a strained voice. “I can’t delude myself.”

 

“But you don’t have to be so hard all the time. You’re strong, you’re intelligent, and you’re beautiful.”

 

“And I’m a carrier of defective DNA,” he adds in a sardonic tone. “A ‘cdd.’ What does that do for my strength and my intelligence and beauty? They’re all synthetic—and more temporary than a third of your life.”

 

“Listen, Heath, I’ve heard it all before,” she says, sharply. “Why don’t you cut it?”

 

In the silence that comes between them, a breeze fingers their hair.

 

“You’re acting like a child,” she says, breaking the pause with a bitterness that is final. She stands up and walks toward the water. He watches her slow, deliberate stride, observing how the sleek muscles tighten and loosen, flowing under the tan skin. She is physically perfect, thanks to modifications of her own alleles. He pushes that thought out of his mind and entertains the idea of going after her.

 

He unbends, stretching in the suddenly cooler air. He begins to walk after her slowly, swinging his legs loosely, stooping several times to pick up and examine seashells, and then snapping them toward the sea. In his head, an extravagant fantasy begins to jell into an idea. He feels suddenly bold.

 

He saunters up beside her and runs a damp hand along the curve of her back.

 

“Are you attracted to me?” he asks, stopping and holding her by both of her elbows.

 

“Why do you think I can’t stand to watch you tear yourself apart?”

 

“Just say yes.”

 

“Yes.” She feels her back and her thighs harden.

 

“I’ve felt that way about you for a long time.”

 

She hears the nervousness in his voice.

 

He moves his hands up her arms, past her shoulders, glancing her neck; and pressing his palms to her cheeks, he moves his lips over hers. This, it seems to her now, is a bandit pleasure.

 

They walk, holding each other tightly, to a large, overhanging black rock. They sit down at its base, and Heath pulls her close to him. She is warm and soft. Her eyes are large and clear and make her willingness apparent. His hands are gentle, and he caresses her in such a way that she feels he is confident. That pleases her.

 

His hand undoes her denims and her white top and then retreats to his canvas shorts.

 

Her dusky body reclines, the neck and the swelling breasts, the curve of the hips, the belly with its beginning traces of dark down, the full thighs, the legs stretched out, wide apart, and the black fleece, provocative, proffered, henceforth available.

 

He smiles and bends over her in the failing light.

 

Noverim me, noverim Te, he thinks wryly.

 

There is a long and pleasing physical interlude that ends reluctantly in the twilight.

 

When he has collapsed, Elisabeth pushes his weight off. In the ensuing stillness, the cool darkness licking the sweat from their bodies, she experiences a moment of clarity. She realizes that there is no longer any feeling. She had failed or refused to see that her passion was produced by the restraints that were opposed to her sexual impulse. Now lying limp, she sees the object of her desire as a frustrated adolescent gripped by the absolute fear of an imminent and unavoidable future. To think that she had craved his total acceptance so adamantly makes her smile without mirth. She knows he feels some degree of pride, and this irks her.

 

The return walk to the clinic is long and tedious.

 

* * * *

 

In front of the canvas partition with the large red ! printed on it, Dr. Ibu and Dr. Reed stand. They are looking into the pit of the amphitheater where Dr. Madoc, sitting on a stool, is addressing a white-smocked Heath.

 

Heath shifts his weight in the leather chair, his eyes closed, hearing the dull voice of Dr. Madoc resonate in his right ear.

 

“I’m going to place a breathing mask over your nose and mouth,” Madoc is saying. “Take one deep breath and hold it for as long as you can. There will be no immediate effect, except for a slight dizziness.”

 

Heath has read all of Madoc’s papers on the psychotrope: he knows its structure, the paths of its synthesis, and its physiological effects perfectly well; and he is annoyed that Madoc still treats him as if he knew absolutely nothing.

 

The mask is clear plastic and fits snugly. Heath drags the thick air in slowly, recognizing the mixture of oxygen and helium by its sweet odor. But undetectable within it are a handful of large, clumsy adrenochrome molecules.

 

The mask is removed, and tightening his lips, Heath lets the muscles in his arms and legs relax, waiting for the first effect, which will be an outstanding intensification of visual stimuli.

 

“If you open your eyes,” Madoc says, “in a few moments you’ll become aware of an alteration in your color perception.”

 

Heath’s lids slip open. The expectant dizziness has not come. As yet, he is feeling unaffected.

 

Dr. Reed has moved into his line of vision. She walks to a console where she can monitor his metabolism. She is wearing a skirt and no stockings, and he admires her legs, toast-colored.

 

Looking up, he sees that she is watching him, and he gives her a sly, mischievous grin that makes her look away.

 

Just in front of her, the metallic face of the console catches the sunlight that is streaming into the laboratory. To Heath, the light is shattering off the metal in complicated broken lines and spirals, webbing bright stars, and fainter ones that are reflecting with it.

 

He snaps his attention out of its focus, realizing that the first effect of the drug has manifested itself.

 

Elisabeth’s hair, tumbling about her shoulders, seems to glow with a living light; the natural wave of the hair presses against the space around it, bending the air almost as if with heat waves. Her green eyes are like crystals, faceted, casting off color in all directions, and her face, impassive, caught in an instant of remote or vacuous emotion, is like a detail from a Vermeer—perfectly still and radiant.

 

Heath lets his gaze scan the room, becoming more and more aware of the relationships between patterns. Two silver oxygen tanks with blue waistbands stand at attention in the twilight of a shadow cast by an overbearing piece of computer machinery; all of this comes together like some modern interpretation by Braque or Juan Gris. It’s a still life, but without realism, lacking depth.

 

He again pulls his attention away, realizing that he must stop his mind from wandering independent of his volition. Down that path, when the full effect of the drug comes over him, lies madness. Instead, he must strive to maintain a constant and unstrained alertness.

 

“Within the next sixty seconds,” Madoc’s voice begins again, “you will experience your first temporal lapse. Remember to keep your attention fixed on your metabolic responses programmed on the screen and not to allow them to trespass beyond the indicated tolerance points. When the lapse is over, indicate so to me with a raised hand.”

 

Heath looks up at the screen before him, where four graphs are registering his heart rate, blood pressure, respiration, and brain waves. On each of the graphs, two red lines indicate the safety limit of that graph. For any of the four graphs to range into those regions means almost certain death.

 

Closing his eyes, he concentrates on his mental disciplines. They are all now that is between him and oblivion.

 

Sitting there, with the sterile light of the laboratory filtering pink through his lids, he recalls Spinoza’s statement that “blessedness is not the reward of virtue, but is virtue itself”; and whereas, before, this had been to him a vaguely pregnant piece of intuition, now it is clear, and he cannot understand why he could not fully grasp it before. But to someone who has trained himself in goodness, training his desires, his will, as he has trained his own responses, diligently, relentlessly, virtue really is blessedness.

 

Heath opens his eyes. There is an absolute quiescence about the laboratory. Movements—Elisabeth moving her hand, Ibu walking behind her—are slowing down. They continue to brake, until Ibu, in the midst of negotiating a turn, is casting an unchanging shadow.

 

Sunlight itself appears different, darker in hue, like a thin plasma stretched to web thickness over the entire room.

 

He attempts to speak, but opening his mouth demands intense concentration, and the heart and blood-pressure graphs both nosedive toward toleration limits.

 

He reasserts his mental discipline, focusing his attention over the entire neural extent of his being. He endures by his own will.

 

Now, with his metabolism regulated semiconsciously, a vast expanse of time lies before him. The temporal lapse, he recalls, will last only two minutes, but that, in this almost timeless state, will be experienced as indefinite duration.

 

Heath shifts his attention to Ibu. His skin is dark black, almost blue-black. The flat face, caught in midstride, is slightly drawn, but the features are plain: the practically nonexistent nose, merely two flaring nostrils; the thin lips, tight against the face; and the texture of the skin itself, very smooth, like polished stone. The whole face emits energy, and Heath realizes that he is seeing more of Ibu’s face than he had ever been aware of. It is now more than just spatial relationships—it is visionary beauty.

 

He shuts his eyes again. The rosy darkness unmasks inner sensations that he had never faced before. He can feel his eyes, still tense from their exposure to light, retaining a ghost image of the laboratory. He is aware of the entire eye, warm from the light, the entire multilayered swamp of rods and cones, hungry for light.

 

He holds his eyes open to mere slits. Streams of light energy flood into him, so that his head becomes dizzy with sensation. He shuts his lids.

 

It’s true what Bergson said—that the sense organs are eliminative. But now this drug has unfettered him.

 

Within his darkness he can feel his whole body: other than his open awareness to messages from the autonomic nervous system, he is conscious of a linkage to every cell within his body, so that he knows he can map any somatic sensation.

 

But there is more.

 

He feels himself sinking down into the soft tissue marsh of his own body, drifting slowly down dark capillary canals, propelled through endless cellular factories, ancient fibrous clockworks.

 

Presently, after an indeterminable time, Heath gathers his attention and opens his eyes to see if the temporal lapse has completed itself.

 

There is a brief flash of seeing the laboratory—white, brilliant, with Madoc’s face, motionless and very near—and then it passes, dissolving into a shimmering filigree of pulsating white waves.

 

For an instant Heath panics and the light intensifies; but then he realizes what he is seeing: the subcellular worlds of neural energy shuttling everywhere within him. It is an endless sea of dancing particles, and even though he knows what it is, he feels cold and apprehensive. His violent longing to return to normalcy makes a fiercer chill run through him, and he fights a strange, oncoming ice age of the will.

 

He tries to remember seeing. He holds a winter landscape in his mind. Known tracks, habitual roads are covered now by a blank sameness. There are many trees bunching up to the horizon, hazy skeletons in the cold.

 

* * * *

 

“Try the respirator again,” Madoc orders softly.

 

“But he’s breathing perfectly well,” Reed retorts.

 

“The oxygen may loosen him from the coma,” Madoc explains, looking at his watch. “He’s been catatonic for twelve hours now.”

 

“But why, Madoc?” Ibu asks in a raspy voice.

 

“I don’t know.”

 

“How long before the drug runs itself out?” Ibu asks.

 

“It ran itself out nine hours ago,” Madoc replies calmly.

 

“Well, why is my boy like that?”

 

“I don’t know.”

 

“Why don’t you know? Haven’t you done this before?”

 

“Yes, of course. You know that . . . but only one has survived.”

 

“This project is my life, Madoc. He better survive.”

 

“I’m sorry, Michel. This is beyond my control.”

 

Ibu’s face is taut. “Keep me posted.” He turns sharply and leaves the lab.

 

“This is everything to him,” Elisabeth apologizes.

 

“I told him about the risks,” Madoc says quietly, readjusting a sensor on the boy’s temple. He holds the respirator to Heath’s nose and mouth.

 

Elisabeth watches him, noting the detached efficiency with which he toils over the reclining boy. Not once during the past tense hours has he raised his voice or displayed anything but complete self-control. She is impressed by this.

 

“Let’s get a glucose unit in here,” he says. “We’re just going to have to sit back and wait.”

 

* * * *

 

Ibu returns four times in the next six hours, the last time merely standing over the boy and clenching his fists.

 

“Madoc,” he says, not facing the doctor, “if my boy dies, I’m going to file a report with Comptrol against you.”

 

Madoc says nothing. He sips his coffee and thumbs through a journal.

 

Ibu, his eyes red, walks slowly out of the lab.

 

Elisabeth, who is sitting behind the console, looks across at Madoc. “Why didn’t you say something?”

 

“What was there to say?”

 

“He can’t file a report. You did nothing wrong.”

 

“I know. And he knows, too.”

 

“Then you shouldn’t have let him threaten you like that.”

 

Madoc says nothing. He riffles through several pages.

 

“You’re due for some sleep,” Elisabeth says after a brief silence.

 

“Yes ... I guess so,” he says, standing up. He checks over the console and walks toward the door. “I’m sorry,” he says, looking back.

 

* * * *

 

Twenty-four hours after the experiment had begun, Ibu leaves the laboratory and Dr. Reed comes on. It is raining outside, and the large room has a lazy, nocturnal feeling to it.

 

Madoc is sitting at the console, flipping the pages of another journal. He is not wearing a tie, as he usually does; his dark, heavy hair is uncombed; and his sullen eyes are listless.

 

He watches Elisabeth’s straight-backed, slow step as she walks around to examine Heath. The physician has just left, but Madoc feels there is no harm in her looking.

 

She is more beautiful than his wife was, he realizes, but she does not have the same quiet ways of doing things that he loved his wife for. She has too much emotional remove, too. She is demanding and cold, Madoc sees.

 

She comes around the console and moves a chair so that she is sitting beside him. The fragrance of her body lotion, vague and feminine, reaches him and he remembers the warm odor of his wife.

 

A week ago, with the strength of surprise, he had seen a rumpled advertisement photograph of a woman who reminded him of his wife. It had shocked him. It lay on the third step down of a subway entrance. He took it up; the nose and chin did not really match, after all, but the harm was done.

 

“Why don’t you get more sleep?” Elisabeth asks him.

 

“No. I’ll stay here for a while.”

 

“What are you thinking about?”

 

“My wife.”

 

Ibu, who has just returned, stops in the doorway, unnoticed.

 

“Forgive me for asking, but how did she die?”

 

Madoc remains quiet. He recalls vividly the wild night, walking in the dark and the wind over broken earth, half-made foundations and unfinished drainage trenches and the spaced-out circles of glaring lights marking streets that were to be, walking with her, but so far from her, his arms full of linen—that daring venture to the laundry, going downriver four blocks away, to the train somewhere underground that was to bring them to their living place. As if by design, from out of the dark air and the cold wind, four figures emerged. Cruel decision: enjoy .... A boy with a pimply face pulled the magenta ribbons from her hair; the short, bearded one gripped a fold of her skirt; the pale, severe one pushed him from his wife and approached her with icy and painful motives and gestures half-familiar from worlds of shadow violence. There was a brief struggle by the hidden river, and when it was over, he turned from them and fled.

 

“I’m sorry, Corin ... I didn’t . . .”

 

“Well, why don’t you tell her, Madoc?” Ibu says, stepping several paces into the laboratory.

 

“Stay out of this,” Madoc says, his voice breaking. “I don’t want to discuss it.”

 

“She was raped one night while Madoc watched,” Ibu says. “She died that night in a hospital. . . and he was nowhere to be found. It took a witness and two good lawyers to get him off the hook.”

 

Madoc stands up and walks quietly out of the room.

 

Elisabeth glares at Ibu and walks out after Madoc.

 

He is standing at the end of an adjacent corridor, staring out one of the glass walls at a courtyard six stories below. The rain has streaked the window, making the wide, desolate concrete court look even more dismal.

 

He had met his wife one hot evening in Amman. She was not beautiful then, nor was she ever, but she was attentive to what he said, and he liked her voice and quiet mannerisms. She was American, and so they hit it off together right away, because he was an Australian working for his American citizenship papers at the American-sponsored clinic at Tel Aviv. They spent two weeks together in Amman.

 

The day before he was due back in Jerusalem, fighting erupted again, and the roads were blocked off. Ann, later his wife, went to work at one of the field hospitals, and though Corin was classified as “valuable personnel,” he had grown very fond of Ann and followed her to the field. He applied what little medical training he had to fulfilling his role as a medic, and at night he spent all of his time with her. They had been sleeping together for two months when an envoy, in passing, brought orders to return Madoc to Tel Aviv. They had wanted to get married then and there, but most of their papers were missing.

 

She wrote to him often; he wrote back less often. She wrote about the wounded and about how much she loved him and needed him and wanted to have his babies; he wrote about his research, about the kind of home he wanted them to have, about how much money he could save for them.

 

After a time, he was discharged and given his citizenship papers. He wanted to go straight to America, and had his research material shipped immediately. But Ann was reluctant to leave at once, because her parents were in America, and all the friends she didn’t want to see. They quarreled about it, and he left, feeling bitter, but with her promise that she would follow in a few months.

 

He rented a flat outside of San Diego, near the clinic. He wrote more often to Ann, but her letters were shorter and arrived less frequently. It frustrated him to have so much to say and not be able to get an immediate response.

 

It was lonely and hot in Amman, and Ann made friends with the son of an Arab colonel. He was, himself, only a corporal, but he was very impressive; and besides, it was lonely and hot that time of year. She wrote to Corin that she had met the son of an Arab colonel, and that he was friendly, and she was sure that he wouldn’t mind the soldier taking her to lunch now and then, because it was awfully hot and lonely. They finally made love at his apartment, and she soon moved in with him, writing to Corin that she was more involved now with the soldier and that it was only a childish, quick affair and that she would come to the States when it was over, and they would get married, for she said she really loved him and said she felt nothing whatever for the soldier.

 

Madoc did not write back. At first, he thought he would never see her again. But he was very fond of her, and he thought he loved her. Two months later he made arrangements with her to come to him. They spent over a year making him understand it was only a quick, childish affair, and then they married.

 

“The pressure’s really getting you down, isn’t it?”

 

Her contralto is jolting, and Madoc turns from the window.

 

“Don’t let Ibu pressure you,” she says. “I don’t care what he says. Nor do I care about your wife or your past. I’m sorry I started that.”

 

Madoc says nothing.

 

“I like you,” she says to him. “I thought you should know.”

 

She turns and walks back to the lab.

 

Thirty-seven hours, forty-three minutes, and eight seconds after the beginning of his initial exposure to US-Twelve, Heath awakens.

 

“It’s night,” he mumbles sitting up. “How long have I been out?”

 

“Thirty-eight hours,” Elisabeth says, as if in greeting. She undoes the sensors and rubs both of his cheeks. “You really had us scared.”

 

Heath grins slyly, his face beginning to flush. “You especially?” he asks.

 

“Michel, if anyone,” she says, brushing a loose piece of tape from his face. After having seen him impassive for all those hours, Elisabeth feels an uncertain excitement just to watch him move and hear him talk.

 

Madoc and Ibu appear almost simultaneously in the door. Michel runs up to Heath, his face lighting up.

 

“Heath! My God, are you all right?” he blurts.

 

“I’ll go get the physician,” Elisabeth says, leaving the room.

 

“I didn’t realize how much time had passed,” Heath explains.

 

“What happened?” Madoc asks.

 

“Apparently I internalized my awareness,” he says. “I knew exactly where I was all the time, but I had no concept of duration.” 

 

“Then you just willed yourself out?” Madoc asks.

 

“Yes. The same way I willed myself in.”

 

“Why the hell did you will yourself out in the first place?” Ibu asks.

 

Elisabeth and a physician enter, and the doctor immediately begins his examination.

 

“I was bored,” Heath answers, sitting up straighter.

 

“You were bored?” Ibu repeats.

 

“After the time lag began, I had nothing to do.”

 

“What did you experience?” Elisabeth asks.

 

“It’s difficult to explain.”

 

“Don’t move your eyes, please,” the physician says, fixing Heath’s lids open.

 

“I actually saw cellular activity in my body—visually, clearly,” Heath says. “And then I went deeper, and I saw neural activity—an incredible array of brilliant light energy. I was a little frightened of it all.”

 

“That’s pure nonsense,” Ibu says sternly.

 

“Don’t be so quick,” Madoc warns. “We know that the brain receives information about every process in the body; all of the ‘biologically useless’ information is screened out by the reticular activating system . . . and it is the RAS that is affected first by the drug. It’s very possible that Heath had shifted his awareness to that center of the brain.”

 

“It’s also very possible that Heath merely hallucinated the entire experience,” Ibu says. “I feel that’s something we should leave for the psych people.”

 

Madoc shrugs his shoulders. “You didn’t remember our lessons,” he says to Heath, who is now flat on his stomach. “Remember, I told you to fix your attention on a single object or idea, otherwise you’d lose your awareness during the temporal lapse.”

 

“Yes, I know,” Heath says, “but I didn’t expect the experience to be that total. It was more than just my eyes—it was everything that I am.”

 

“He’s going to need some sleep,” the physician says. “I’d like him moved to an observation room, too. Just as a safety precaution.”

 

“Fine,” Ibu says. “Do whatever you feel is best.” He faces Madoc. “I’d like to speak with you, outside.”

 

In the corridor, Ibu assumes a paternal air. “Corin, I’ve known you for seven years, and I was instrumental in getting your research qualified here. I’m not saying this to make you feel indebted, but I do want you to have a sense of how important this project is for me. I’m not holding you responsible for what happened. I flew off the handle, but you know that’s my character. You also know that I’m a scientist, as you are. We are not like the psych people. We work in areas where we can apply the laws of nature. So, because we are scientists and because I head this project, I don’t want you using my subject to test any of your theories. I don’t want to hear about internalization—I want him to externalize, to reach out and communicate with that dolphin. And remember, I own Heath. He’s my lab property, and I have the last say about what he does and doesn’t do. Clear?”

 

“Of course,” Madoc says indifferently, and turns to leave.

 

“Corin.”

 

“Yes.”

 

“Keep in mind that despite his IQ, he’s still just a teen-ager.”

 

“Sure.”

 

* * * *

 

Heath’s room is narrow and not very long. The ceiling is one fluorescent light. The two longer white walls are broken up by large prints by Ernst Fuchs. At the far end of the room, opposite the door, is an oval window that looks out onto the bay. Two large, flat speakers emerge from the face of one wall over his desk. When Madoc enters, Heath is lying on his low bed, listening to Gesualdo’s Moro lasso, which is playing rather loudly.

 

Heath rises and turns down the music.

 

“Hello, Corin! What brings you to this quarter of the known world?” he asks with a chuckle.

 

Madoc sits on the edge of Heath’s desk. “I want to talk about tomorrow’s preliminary.”

 

“Look, I’ve got it straight about the time lag.”

 

Madoc holds up his hand. “Not that. I want to ask you to give up the project entirely.”

 

Heath raises his eyebrows inquisitively.

 

“I’d like you to work for me,” Madoc says.

 

“No. I can’t do that.”

 

“Why?”

 

“I’m personally committed to this project.”

 

“You mean Lenny?”

 

“Aye, that’s it, mate,” Heath says, miming Madoc’s accent.

 

“Won’t you consider it?”

 

“There’s no reason to. That dolphin and I are too close as it is for me to stop now. Sometimes, in the pool, I feel that I can communicate with him. I’m not about to lose an opportunity like this.”

 

Madoc nods his head and stands up. Above Heath’s bed is a Chinese ceramic square of exceptional subtlety and beauty. It depicts a cuckoo about to alight on a thin branch. He stares at it for a moment and then leaves.

 

* * * *

 

Heath takes a long drag from the face mask. He looks down at Madoc’s hand, focusing on his wedding ring. He stares at the ring until the golden glow diffuses and then collects itself in a single sharp star of reflected light. He moves his eyes across the extent of his field of vision. Madoc’s glasses, tinted by the sunlight in the room, look opaque. Ibu is standing just on the edge of the amphitheater, his long white lab coat draped about him like a cloak. He is standing still, and Heath moves his eyes away from him until he finds Elisabeth, who is sitting by her console, clipboard propped in her lap. She is wearing a white skirt and has her long tanned legs crossed. Her suspended foot is wagging anxiously, and Heath pays it special attention.

 

The lighting of the room seems to dull, as if a cloud is passing the sun. Gradually, Elisabeth’s foot rocks to a stop. The time lag has commenced.

 

Heath notices the small bones in the ankle, which create soft shadings. He examines the region where her foot enters the white shoe. A small callus is there, barely visible from his perspective, which he picks out because he knows it is there. He tracks his eyes over the shoe, noting each scuff mark carefully, scrutinizing the seams. Finally he rests his eyes on the heel, and then begins all over again at the ankle. He does this thirty-one times before the foot begins to wag again.

 

The foot is moving slower than it had been, and Heath notices that if he focuses his eyes, the foot moves more quickly. He is on the interface of different rates of time.

 

He raises his hand to indicate that he is out of the time lag.

 

Madoc places a set of black headphones over his head, covering his ears.

 

“Are you comfortable?” Madoc asks, adjusting a tiny microphone that snakes around his cheek.

 

Heath hears the question normally, but his visual perception of Madoc’s lips is not synchronized with his audio perception. He nods.

 

“Fine,” Madoc says. He looks over his shoulder at the pudgy physician who is standing there. The physician catches the glance and approaches Heath. He examines Heath’s reflexes. When he is done, he nods at Madoc approvingly.

 

“Okay, let’s play,” Madoc says, swinging around on his stool so that he is facing a desk machine with a typing face. He punches out a pattern, and five digits flash on the screen before Heath for an instant. Heath moves his hand over a similar machine resting just above his thighs. He taps out the same figure.

 

Madoc repeats the procedure, this time with six digits, flashing more briefly on the screen. Finally, he lets the computer take over, moving at a rate his fingers cannot.

 

For over an hour they play, with more numerals and geometric patterns, more and more quickly. By the end of the session, Heath’s fingers are a blur, the screen blinking nonsensically.

 

Madoc shuts down the computer.

 

Heath settles into the white leather.

 

“How’d I do?” he asks with a grin.

 

* * * *

 

“You’re remarkable,” she says, her voice muffled in his shoulder.

 

Elisabeth and Heath are lying naked on his bed. The Sanctus in Beethoven’s Mass in D is seething through the room. She is lying on her stomach, her dark hair spreading its tendrils over his chest.

 

When the music is over, Elisabeth gets up from the bed and scans the row of tapes just above Heath’s desk. She selects the Vespers by Claudio Monteverdi. After injecting the cartridge into the player, she moves to the window. The sea is still breaking violently, and night has steamed into the bay. Two white lights are moving along the horizon. They are lusterless in the thin fog and remind her of cabin windows on a stranded hulk heavy with sand.

 

Heath watches her from the bed.

 

“Where were you born?” he asks.

 

“In Madaket.”

 

“Where’s that?”

 

“Massachusetts, on Nantucket Island. Why do you ask?”

 

“Just curious.”

 

He turns his head to look into the darkness by the door, and then he asks, “Why did you change your mind?”

 

“About what?”

 

“About sleeping with me.”

 

“You don’t snore.”

 

Heath laughs, a very natural laugh. “Is it because Madoc disappoints you?”

 

Elisabeth says nothing, but walks up to the bed and sits down.

 

“He’s still strongly affected by his wife,” he says. “He would never go for you. For him, you have noli me tangere written all over your yummy body.”

 

“How can you say that?”

 

“I’ve listened to him talk. And I know how you operate.”

 

“I don’t like him. He’s a coward.”

 

“He only believes he’s a coward.”

 

“Same difference.”

 

“What do you see in him?”

 

“Are you jealous?”

 

“Maybe. Am I being crude?”

 

“How hard are you trying?”

 

“Not very. Again, I’m just curious. I like Corin.”

 

“Why?”

 

“He’s brilliant. For me, he’s the easiest person to communicate with—besides you, of course.”

 

“Of course.”

 

“He’s not the stereotyped psychophysicist with chemical formulae for love and hate. He’s truly interested in the human psyche. Do you know, he actually asked me to continue internalizing so that he might study the time-dilation effect of his drug? If it wasn’t for Lenny, I know I’d do it.”

 

“Michel would kill you.”

 

“True, but I don’t like Michel. He strong-arms everybody.”

 

“He’s highly regarded by Comptrol, and he’s in well with the security force. He can get anything he wants.”

 

“He’s a bully. His personality is twisted.”

 

“Value judgment.”

 

Heath grunts and rolls over so that he is facing her.

 

“Again?” she asks.

 

“Sure.”

 

“Do you love me?”

 

“No.”

 

* * * *

 

In the pool, Lenny is circling. Madoc, in a green polo shirt that reveals a physique with no signs of middle age, is briefing Heath, who is sitting forward in a large mechanized chair at the edge of the pool. Several heavy computer components on casters outflank the chair. Ibu is standing on the other side of the pool with Elisabeth and a short bald man who is a Comptrol representative.

 

“Off the record, Michel,” the bald man is saying, “how does this computer tie-up work, and where’d you get the idea?”

 

“The dolphin world is almost strictly acoustic,” Ibu explains, “just as ours is visual. The total amount of information received by dolphins and humans from their environment is roughly the same. But the types differ.

 

“Before the war, research on dolphin sounds was not uncommon. Here in the States, in fact, dolphins were taught to mimic our speech. Well, in this experiment something very similar is being done. Our subject has had his world ‘speeded up,’ so to speak, to permit him to work comfortably with a sound system that will feed acoustic patterns into the pool at about the rate of dolphin communication.

 

“Quite simply, we’re going to start establishing rudimentary communication today. We don’t really expect any profound intercourse for some time.”

 

“Why must you use the boy at all? What’s wrong with computers?”

 

Ibu smiles. “A typical question from a Comptrol man,” he says. “That type of communication has been attempted time and again by myself and others, with minimal success. We don’t know why, yet, but dolphins have a predilection for man. I’m betting my professional career and a lot of your money that I can exploit that predilection. Heath, our subject, has grown up with that dolphin. By broadcasting his voice to the dolphin, we’re making it clear that he, the dolphin’s companion, wants to communicate. We’ve had excellent results with preliminary experiments along this line.”

 

Heath, sitting back in the chair, looks at the frozen world around him. Ibu, Elisabeth, and the Comptrol man at the far end of the pool look like mannequins posed realistically. The banks of computer components that an instant before were faces of winking lights have tilted, the lights freezing. He shifts his gaze to the water, where he can see the gray, submerged form of Lenny.

 

After studying the still surface of the water several times, Heath realizes that the temporal lag is lasting too long. It should have ended long ago.

 

He tries to look at Madoc, but he is out of his visual scope. He looks across the pool; the mannequins there have changed their positions slightly. Now he knows that the time lag is excessively long.

 

Returning his gaze to the pool, he detects a faint odor. He smells the esters of some sweet substance, like aloe.

 

It’s the drug. There is a leak in a tube just alongside of his neck.

 

The odor becomes more acrid, pinching his nostrils. He tries to hold his breath, but the light vapors rise up his nose.

 

He fights to maintain his calmness. Too much of this can kill me, he realizes. Such a stupid accident, absurd . . . . Or is it an accident?

 

The water of the pool has become completely transparent, so that it no longer exists. Suspended in the pool is Lenny, looking up at him. The dimensionality of the vision startles Heath, and he attempts to avert his eyes, but he cannot. He is totally paralyzed.

 

Did Madoc do this? he wonders. Is Madoc forcing me to internalize?

 

He tastes the vapors in his nostrils, in the roof of his mouth, in his eyes—a biting sweetness.

 

Dizzy.

 

He feels that he can no longer keep his eyes open without becoming nauseated, yet he cannot close them.

 

The air around him becomes hot and close, and he has trouble breathing. His stomach is nervous, sending spasms of sour pain down into his bowels.

 

Lenny, hanging before and below him, has become Heath’s entire visual universe. Every detail, every gradation of shading on the dolphin’s body, is revealed to him.

 

Suddenly he is very close to Lenny, so close that he can feel the smooth skin on the dolphin’s nose and can see every close detail of the dolphin’s left eye. The tactile-visual image grates on his mind with an undreamlike quality that arrogates his fright.

 

This is real, he thinks with a calmness that surprises him. I’ve externalized myself.

 

He draws closer to the eye, aware that he is commanding some kind of psychokinesthetic extension of himself. He sees a silhouette in the black iris, ghosts of motion, but with no proximity.

 

He floats up even closer, free of the contiguities he has always known . . . and then he is within the cloudy mirror, and like some wide-eyed Alice, turns to look back at the world he has left. But there is nothing there in the gray light.

 

A cry catches in his absent throat, while the thin walls of the alien cornea thicken like distance, and he is most alone.

 

* * * *

 

Ibu scrambles along the side of the pool, stopping short of Madoc.

 

“What’s wrong?” he asks, suppressing his anger.

 

“I don’t know,” Madoc replies.

 

“Has he internalized?”

 

“It looks that way.”

 

A physician who has been standing by a computer component runs up and bends over Heath. He looks up at Ibu. “Get this apparatus off him, and have him moved to an observation room.”

 

Ibu and Madoc quickly respond. After Heath has been removed from the lab, Ibu faces Madoc, says, “You’re going to have to explain this.”

 

Elisabeth, who has been standing behind Ibu, asks, “Why? You’ve known about the risks all along.”

 

Madoc shakes his head. “Elisabeth.”

 

Ibu steps back, relaxed, studying Elisabeth silently.

 

“You can’t hold Corin responsible,” she says.

 

“Dr. Reed,” Ibu says in a quiet tone, “your job on this project is over. Please don’t concern yourself with my job.”

 

The short bald man from Comptrol steps up behind Ibu. “What’s happened, Michel?”

 

“It seems that Dr. Madoc has made an extravagant error. Our subject has ODed.”

 

Elisabeth faces Madoc. He avoids her eyes, and it takes her a moment to put down the upsurge of rage that threatens to overcome her. She speaks in a faltering voice, “Dr. Madoc was not responsible for what happened. The risk of the subject inter—”

 

“Dr. Reed!” Ibu barks. “That’s enough from you.”

 

“The risk of what has just occurred,” she continues, “has always been understood by all concerned.”

 

Ibu slashes the back of his hand across her face, so that she stumbles back with the impact. “I said that’s enough!”

 

Madoc steps forward, eyes flashing.

 

Ibu fixes his stare on him. “Yes, Madoc?”

 

Madoc drops his gaze to the floor.

 

The Comptrol man glares at Ibu, asks Madoc, “Just what has happened to the boy?”

 

“I don’t know.”

 

“Don’t you understand the effects of your drug?”

 

“Not fully.”

 

“Then why is it being employed?”

 

“Dr. Ibu and I . . .”

 

Ibu fires an intent look at Madoc. “Don’t try to transfer the responsibility, Madoc.”

 

“Apparently,” the Comptrol man intervenes, “the drug being employed is not backed with the proper research to qualify its use. I think we should shut down this project until more data regarding the drug can be acquired.”

 

He walks toward the exit. Ibu flashes Madoc one threatening glance and then follows after.

 

Elisabeth touches Madoc’s arm. “This time, I’m sorry.”

 

He walks to the exit.

 

She watches him until he is out of sight.

 

“Coward,” she breathes.

 

* * * *

 

The sun is striking over the void observation room as Dr. Ibu walks in. Six vacant beds occupy the long room, each one under a slender window. Audible from an adjacent room is a lutanist plucking away at “Rocky Raccoon.” Ibu walks toward the music.

 

He enters the adjacent room, and against the glare of a window, he recognizes the curly-headed physician who is playing the song. Seeing Ibu, he puts aside his instrument and stands up.

 

“Your boy was discharged earlier this morning,” the doctor says.

 

“I know that. I was told that the final reports would be ready for me by now.”

 

“Let me see.” The physician walks to a cluttered desk and fumbles among the papers. He comes away with a blue folder, the contents of which he examines at length.

 

“Well, what’s the story?” Ibu asks.

 

“It seems he’s in excellent physical shape. Suffered no damage whatsoever from the experiment. However . . .” He remains silent while he studies the folder again.

 

“Well?”

 

“There’s a marked difference in his personality profile. The psych who examined him indicates here that your boy is less aggressive, displays signs of potentiating away from the death fixation all of his previous examinations have turned up, and, to put it bluntly, he’s lost his sexual identity.”

 

“What does that mean?”

 

“He’s lost his sexual potential. You might even say he’s very close to being asexual.”

 

* * * *

 

“I always thought that you and Liz were having an affair,” Madoc says. He is sitting on a park bench of twisted metal.

 

“Was it that apparent?” Heath asks.

 

Madoc nods, grinning softly.

 

“Maybe for you it would have been,” Heath says.

 

They are in a sunburned park on Sunday, in the wide waste beyond the city. Two teams in gray deploy through the sunlight.

 

“What was that supposed to smack of?” Madoc asks.

 

“I just think that you admire Liz and would have noticed something like that.”

 

Coming in stubby and fast, the baseman gathers a grounder in fat green grass, picks it stinging and clipped as wit into the leather; a swinging step wings it dead-eye down to first. Smack.

 

“Attaboy,” Heath says.

 

“Well done,” Madoc agrees. He wipes the sweat from his brow, removing his glasses to do so. “Tell me about what happened with Lenny again.”

 

The catcher reverses his cap and squats in the dust. The pitcher rubs the ball on his pants, chewing, spits behind him. He nods past the batter, taking his time.

 

“I extended myself—there was that gas leak.”

 

“I wasn’t responsible for that, Heath.”

 

“I believe you,” he says, though he is not sure. “Anyway, I extended beyond my body. I actually . . . merged consciousness with Lenny.”

 

“That’s what I want you to expound on.”

 

The batter settles, tugs at his cap. A spinning ball comes at him, and he steps and swings to it, catching it with hickory before it ducks.

 

“Socko, baby!” Heath yells.

 

Cleats dig into the dust. The outfielder, on his way, looking over his shoulder, makes it a triple.

 

“Tell me again about the dolphin consciousness,” Madoc says.

 

“Why do you persist?” Heath asks. “No one would believe you if you told them.”

 

“I want to know.”

 

“All right. But let’s get away from this game. It’s too compelling.”

 

They walk toward a remote colony of trees, the afternoon sun pacing their shadows before them.

 

“Everything I’m going to tell you now,” Heath says, “I’ve acquired by the mind meld I experienced with Lenny. I don’t know if I can make you understand it.” He says nothing more for several seconds, as he gathers his thoughts.

 

“The difference between dolphins and humans is not a matter of intelligence or spirituality—it’s a difference in direction. Man is constantly striving outward. All of his serious sciences attempt to explain and cope with what is around him. The dolphins, on the other hand, have done just the opposite. They’ve moved inward, researching the inner universe that each individual dolphin possesses. While we’ve banded together into social units to probe everything around us, the dolphins have remained essentially individuals, but they have progressed inwardly at a collective rate.”

 

“But how is that possible?” Madoc asks.

 

“You’re suffering from a problem that most of us are stymied by. As far as physical science is concerned, we have long since gone beyond the eighteenth-century notion of dead hunks of matter moving in the black void of space. Yet our psychological sciences are still restricted to eighteenth-century mechanistic notions: minds are simply located hunks of gray matter moving in the black void of time. The dolphins, however, realize that the mind of their species, just like the mind of mankind, is a collective and interpenetrating field.

 

“The unconscious is not personal, but in order not to be swamped by infinite information, the brain functions as what Aldous Huxley called a ‘reducing valve.’ It shuts out the universe so that the individual can do what is in front of him. The million signals a second must be reduced to a few. But the intuition and the imagination maintain an opening to the unconscious, which contains all the information that could not register in immediate consciousness. Where we ignore intuition and imagination in favor of deduction and the logical sequence, the dolphins have exploited those faculties to penetrate into their collective unconscious, and to advance inwardly, as we have advanced outwardly. And that’s why they have no ‘culture’ as we recognize it—no cities, museums, no artwork or history books. All of that and much more is available to them in their unconscious.”

 

“But how do they mark their progress?”

 

“In a more unified way than we do. We have history, they have their whole collective memory, right back to the beginnings of their species. They’re not hindered by time because they’ve almost eliminated their immediate consciousness. Since the immediate consciousness must work in a step-by-step incremental sequence of events, its perception of time is linear. Certainly all the information cannot be restricted to that line, and so the time of the unconscious is out of time; the line must be widened and lengthened until it becomes a sphere if you want to achieve the consciousness of the dolphin.

 

“And while I was one with Lenny, I experienced that.”

 

“You were aware of the future?”

 

“There was no future. Time was not linear.”

 

They enter shadows shattered by sunlight and sit beneath the trees.

 

“You know, Heath, since you first told me about them, I’ve wanted to join you.”

 

“Why don’t you?”

 

“I can’t take US-Twelve.”

 

“If you had the training you could.”

 

There is a long pause; then: “I’ll have to think about it.”

 

Heath frowns. “One thing you learn when you minimize immediate consciousness, and that is not to think too much. You have to be able to act gracefully, and thinking makes you heavy and clumsy. Any decision in life can be decided any number of ways. I’ve learned to think like a strategist and act like a savage.”

 

* * * *

 

A quick length moves as a slip of silver light, not disturbing the slick surface of the pool. Lenny circles the pool twice and then breaks the water in a jumping invitation to Heath, who is standing on toes at the edge. He strips off his cotton shirt and knifes into the water.

 

Lenny is cruising the bottom of the pool and rises to meet him. Together they dance in the filmy world, bobbing slowly to the surface for air.

 

Skimming the surface, Heath shakes the water from his face and sees the stark figure of Dr. Ibu at the poolside, staring down at him. He strokes toward him, lifting himself into the heavy gravity.

 

“I’ve been looking for you,” Ibu says, sitting on his heels.

 

“I heard Comptrol shut down the project temporarily,” Heath says, wiping water from his eyes. “I thought I’d be the last person you’d want to see for a while.”

 

“Where’ve you been?”

 

“With Madoc.”

 

“I don’t like you seeing him.”

 

“Why?”

 

“He’s subversive.”

 

“In what way?”

 

“Isn’t it apparent? He’s no scientist. He’s a mystic. He doesn’t want to understand. He wants to be enlightened.” 

 

“How can you say that?”

 

“I know very well that Madoc asked you to work for him, so he could study the internalizing effect of his drug.”

 

“How’d you find out?”

 

“He approached me and told me. He wanted to buy you, of course.”

 

“I don’t like to be discussed financially. You told me that I can do what I want, when I want. You told me you’re never going to exercise your ownership rights.”

 

“Oh, let’s be realistic, Heath. I do own you. I can do whatever I want with you.”

 

Heath looks down at his knees and says nothing.

 

“I don’t want you working for Madoc,” Ibu says.

 

“What makes you think I will?”

 

“Nothing. But I know that he’s applied here and at two other clinics to continue his research with US-Twelve. I’m going to do everything I can to thwart him, the way he thwarted me.”

 

“He didn’t thwart you.”

 

“It was his failure that shut down my project—that has meant your whole life has been lived in vain.”

 

“My life has been fulfilling. I am satisfied . . . just disappointed that you didn’t get your money’s worth. And your blaming Madoc for a technical flaw is nonsense.”

 

“Nonsense or not, you’re not to cooperate with him. I forbid it.”

 

Heath looks at him passively, as if studying his features.

 

“And don’t get smart with me,” Ibu says. “My signature can have you euthed at any time.”

 

He makes his last remark as he is standing; then he turns and walks away with clipped steps.

 

Heath stares out over the water until Lenny slices the surface, beckoning him with sharp, happy cries. Holding his nose, he slips into the pool.

 

I feel dead, he thinks. I feel as if I were the residue of a stranger’s life, that I should pursue you.

 

He sinks toward the bottom, and Lenny passes over him.

 

I feel imperfect, unable to tell you that I understand you but cannot follow, and that it was a mistake that placed you in that world, and me in this; or that misfortune placed these worlds in us.

 

* * * *

 

After the first lesson in Dr. Reed’s laboratory, Madoc rises from the white-leather chair, stifling a yawn. “How’d I do?”

 

Elisabeth steps out from behind her exclamatory partition, regarding her clipboard, and with a pencil-in-mouth accent replies, “Lousy.”

 

“That bad?”

 

“Probably worse, but I’ve an uncontrollably optimistic attitude.”

 

“Well, how long will it be?”

 

She raises her eyebrows and widens her eyes in feigned surprise. “Didn’t they teach you that a scientist’s chief virtue is his patience?”

 

“They never mentioned that at Austral—but then, that’s purely a technical school, and you can’t expect such refined ethical training.”

 

She laughs warmly.

 

“Where’d you study?” he asks.

 

“Harvard, ten years.”

 

He moves around her and puts on his buckskin vest. It fits him well, but Elisabeth thinks it is somewhat incongruous with his white shirt, and white slacks and shoes.

 

“It’s lunchtime,” he announces. “May I join you?”

 

“If you’d like.”

 

The elevator dip and the four turns to the cafeteria are accompanied by a strained silence. Madoc puts his hands in his pockets and tries to walk as casually as he can.

 

He selects the meatloaf with mashed potatoes and string beans, she the swordfish and baked potato. Both have tea.

 

Sitting under the parabolic steel arc of a main support, they are silhouetted by a china-blue sky that hovers over the thousands of green acres that separate the clinic from San Diego.

 

“You’ve quite a physique,” she says, spreading her potato.

 

“Your physique isn’t so bad, either.”

 

“Oh, come on, Corin. That line died before the war.”

 

His face flushes hot and red. He stuffs his mouth with mashed potato.

 

“Do you work out a lot?” she asks.

 

“Occasionally. But I haven’t that much time. I’m involved with Nayaka’s karate forum.”

 

Genuine surprise crosses her face. “Sincerely?”

 

“Don’t be too impressed. I’ve been at it for seven years now, and I’m still his worst student.”

 

They eat for a moment in silence.

 

“I’ve been meaning to ask you about Heath,” she says. “He’s changed quite a bit hasn’t he?”

 

Madoc feels some disappointment at the bend of the conversation. “Why ask me?” 

 

“You and he do spend a considerable amount of time together, don’t you?”

 

“I thought that you knew him better than I do.”

 

“Not lately,” she answers honestly. “He hasn’t avoided me, but he hasn’t been around to pursue me, either.”

 

“You miss that, I assume.”

 

“He’s decidedly attractive.”

 

“I wouldn’t know.”

 

She regards him with a contemplative expression.

 

He sees that and is afraid of what she’s about to say, so he speaks first. “The incident at the pool was almost mystical for him; at least, that’s what he told me. All of his interests have changed.”

 

“For the better or worse?”

 

“You’ll have to decide that for yourself.”

 

* * * *

 

She walks down the boulevard alone. It is late afternoon, the sunlight is thick yellow, and she feels like she is about to cry again. She remembers that she hasn’t felt this way in almost eight years. It makes her tired to think it’s been that long.

 

She stops at a corner and tries to get her bearings. She has to return to the clinic before nightfall. There is no place for her to stay in the city. She has no money.

 

She turns down an intersecting road that leads to the highway that leads to the expressway. She wipes the tears from her eyes, but they return immediately.

 

She thinks about being alone in Cape Cod that summer eight years ago. She had had many technical lovers by that time, and she had lost count. But she loved him as she had loved only one person before him.

 

She recalls how it hurts your eyes to watch the sunrise coming off the bay. They had quarreled that night before she had gone out He had whored the whole time they were together, and then, when that was over, he had wanted one of his whores to move in with them.

 

She despised him then and ran off, as she has run off now. No money, just hurt. She had walked for hours, but that had failed to kill her despair. It was night when she had made it into Boston. She had no place to stay, so she stayed with a nicotine-perfumed journalist who had picked her up on a park bench. His apartment was cramped, his breath was stale, and his only compliments were that he liked dark-haired women and was enthusiastic about needing no pillow under her buttocks.

 

She hitched to Cambridge the next morning, and as soon as she got to her flat, she got sick.

 

She stands on the macadam, her thumb out. Two cars hum by before a dirt-caked, formerly red, old-fashioned gas-piston jerks to a stop. She hops in, and the car has lurched off before she regards the driver.

 

He is bulky, strong-looking, and with close-cropped hair and bright, lidless eyes. He’s wearing only an undershirt without sleeves, and there is a green-and-blue stain on his bicep that she strains to recognize as a tattoo. He is close to fifty and unshaven.

 

“Hi. Name’s Bill,” he says. His voice is expectantly deep and gruff.

 

“I’m Elisabeth.”

 

“Where you goin’, Liz?”

 

“The expressway.”

 

“Fine. So’m I. Where down that?”

 

“The Diego Clinic.”

 

“What you want with that?” he asks, giving her a narrow-eyed glance. He smiles broadly. His teeth are yellow-brown. “What you want with them scientist types?”

 

“I work there.”

 

He opens his window and spits out. “You mean you’re a scientist?” he says with a chuckle.

 

“Yes.”

 

He stops laughing. “Sorry, ma’am,” he says, his face serious. “You look much too fine to be a scientist.”

 

“But I am.”

 

“You’re fine, all right.”

 

The car turns onto the expressway and accelerates. They drive for fifteen minutes in silence; then he pulls off the expressway and careens down a winding dirt road.

 

She looks at him. “What are you doing?”

 

He says nothing, merely smiles his dirty smile.

 

“Stop the car,” she orders.

 

“Will do, love. Will do,” he says, laughing. The car rocks to a stop, and Elisabeth jumps out before he can grab her. She starts running toward the expressway, hears the car door slam behind her and the quick scratch of his pursuit.

 

“Now, hold on, love,” he calls.

 

When he is directly behind her, she spins about, feeling inside the pocket of her jacket. He grabs her left arm and pulls her toward him. In one smooth, unified motion, she withdraws the knife from her pocket, hisses it open under his chin, and slashes his neck. Blood drools over his chest, and he jumps back with a startled gasp.

 

She turns about and runs to the expressway. The fourth car that passes picks her up. The driver, a bony businessman, sees the blood on her hand and cuff but says nothing. He is going past the clinic, and leaves her off at the ramp entrance.

 

* * * *

 

It is time for the ocean to move on. Somehow, sheathed in the warm current of the pool, he’d lost his desire for the sea. He usually left with the tide, but today he feels comfortable staying. He falls shuddering among the detritus of kelp that has washed into the pool from the ocean. His belly touches the smooth bottom as he runs aground on his own shadow. In the world above, two legs dangle, thrashing for the fun of it, thirty feet above the weary shadow.

 

Lenny noses up for air. He rises slowly, a long gray feather slendering up through the dense air of the sea. His eyes of bolted glass are fixed on a roundness as of sun and white flesh, glittering like stars above his brain; the dolphin rises gradually. He is very tired. As he rises, his shadow pales and enters the colorless bottom, dissolved in the whirling liquid that his thrusting tail spawns.

 

A sense half of anguish overcomes him. A desire to sleep in the currents fights against the strong enchaining links of hungry lungs.

 

He knows the path up is direct, but the dolphin is tired. He dawdles awhile, swerves, pauses, turns on his side, and cocks a round eye up at the dense thrashing. In the calm water, ten feet down, twisting, he thinks himself around and around in a slow circling of doubt, powerless to be a dolphin. He rises slowly.

 

Heath climbs out of the pool, kneels facing Madoc, and pulls his canvas trunks up.

 

“He’s sick,” Heath says.

 

“Can we do anything?”

 

“Very little.” He stands up, dripping. “I’ve fed him. I’m going to just let him be until tomorrow. He may get over it.”

 

He walks to a pile of clothing and extracts a thick pink towel and begins drying himself.

 

“Have you seen Elisabeth today?” he asks Madoc.

 

“Yes, I had my lesson.”

 

“How are you progressing?”

 

“It’s been only four weeks.”

 

“How’s Liz?”

 

“She seemed to be upset, but she wouldn’t talk about it.” 

 

“Yeah,” Heath sighs, stripping off his trunks.

 

“Do you know what’s happened?”

 

“We went into the city yesterday. I really didn’t want to—that was my mistake. You should never surrender yourself to anything. Always battle to the end.”

 

“What?”

 

“I should have told her here, and not gone into the city with her, but I didn’t think she’d take it that hard.”

 

“You mean, she loves you?”

 

“Don’t be silly. Love is respect and admiration. It has nothing whatsoever to do with sex, despite anything and everything those marriage manuals say. Sex is a biological drive.”

 

“But you told her that you’re not interested in her anymore?”

 

“Yes. She started arguing about it—got quite vicious, too. Then she just ran away.”

 

Heath finishes toweling himself and then crawls into his clothes.

 

“Always treat everything with respect,” he says. “That was my heroic flaw.” He grins broadly. “I gave myself up to Elisabeth for a time. You can’t do that. You can’t surrender yourself to anything— not even your death. That’s how dolphins think.”

 

“Do they put much emphasis on death?”

 

“More than anything else. You must often think of your death, wonder about it, explore it. Do that so your life will be more defined.”

 

“That sounds rather grim.”

 

“Naw. It’s just the paradox of our reality. Only the tragic sense of life is capable of sustaining an enduring strength and joy.”

 

“Once you told me that we must act more and think less. Do I smell the dregs of a paradox?”

 

“You’re smelling the stink of your confusion. Act your life out, don’t think it out. You can’t think your death out—that, you’ll act when the times comes whether you want to or not. But the constant knowledge of it provides the clarity we need to act without looking back.”

 

“It’s too pat for me.”

 

Heath smiles. “What else is life but a journey to death?”

 

* * * *

 

It is late night or early morning. The large laboratory housing the pool is not shaken by the rising wind, but a plate-glass window rattles. Heath stands alone at the pool’s edge, where the dripping of the filter machine, at any silence of the wind, can be heard tapping like a blind man through the lab.

 

Lenny floats in the pool, most gray, turning up his grinning head. He is without life.

 

Heath covers his face with his hands and prepares to sob, but he does not. There is no reason to. Everything he has been taught, everything he has learned from the dolphin, does not permit tears. Instead, he wonders why. He is convinced that Lenny was poisoned. There can be no other explanation. But who? And how to proceed to find the murderer without misleading sophism? Or is that possible?

 

Elisabeth? She was at the clinic yesterday, and certainly she is angry enough, and that makes up for cruelty.

 

Ibu? That makes no sense. Lenny was a vital part of his beloved experiment.

 

Madoc? Incredible jealousy? Hardly likely. But was he responsible for that gas leak that was almost fatal? Using that as a pawn to strike Ibu? And now using Lenny, too? Possible. There is enough suppressed emotion. It is possible. But only that, possible.

 

Who, really?

 

A stocky, towering man with a football-shaped head and a nose almost flat against his big-boned face enters the dim-lit room with the grace of a ballet dancer. Like a large cat, he squats obscenely in the center of the room. Another door opens, and Dr. Ibu steps out on a carpet of light. He is wearing only a cotton robe. His face is haggard with want of sleep. He had not truly wanted the dolphin killed. He had changed his mind even as he was administering the poison. But that is irrevocable. It was a means of venting his torment. As irrational and prodigal as anything that is man’s.

 

“I want Madoc dead,” he whispers.

 

The big man sits quite still, staring forward as if he has heard nothing.

 

“I will invite him here tomorrow night,” Ibu continues. “He will have to pass through the marine lab to get here. I have made arrangements with the security patrol that night so that they will avoid the area. Four dangerous adolescent delinquents, drugged and looking for adventure, will break into the lab just as Madoc is passing through. He will be assaulted and most unfortunately drowned in the pool. We will supervise the affair but not interfere.”

 

The hulking man rises and leaves.

 

* * * *

 

It is nine-thirty. Dr. Madoc is standing in his laboratory examining a distilling apparatus. There is nothing about him but glassware mating with glassware. A single row of fluorescent lights is on overhead, and most of the small lab is crowded with shadows. The fragrance of volatile esters is strong.

 

He looks up at the wall clock, which has just clicked 9:33, and reminds himself that he is due at Ibu’s apartment at ten. He turns to lower the heating unit under the boiling flask. It is an abrupt turn, too precipitous, and his cuff catches the end of a stand. There is a crack, the sound of splintering glass, followed by a moment of uncertain panic as Madoc faces about to see the damage. A sweet aloe odor catches him full in the face, and he collapses to the floor with the realization of what it is.

 

He falls on his back, and the row of fluorescent lights retreats further and further. Madoc senses memories rolling in his mind—the few weeks of training with Elisabeth. The room, his workbench, the air above him, bent waves from a Bunsen burner—all compress themselves in his field of vision. He tries to recall everything Elisabeth has told him.

 

He pulls himself to his feet. It will be a minute, maybe longer, before the time lag hits him. It all depends on how much of the drug caught him. He cups his hands over his mouth and staggers from the lab. Behind him, he hears the distant crash of glassware.

 

The corridor he stumbles down, he sees in a broken symmetry. His legs are beginning to feel rubbery, and he knows he won’t make it to Heath’s room.

 

Time becomes a sequence of layers, so that each step seems to propel him durationally and not spatially. If he stops moving, he has the terrible feeling that all time will stop.

 

Do I know enough to survive?

 

He falls to his knees with a groan and slides along the wall of the corridor. His arm, which is falling before him, suspends itself in the air. He watches it, aware that at the same instant a tight fist has clenched itself in his chest.

 

I can’t breathe!

 

There is a stark pain that shoots along his left shoulder and down his back. He feels the blood in his veins slowing.

 

No!

 

The tightening increases.

 

No! No!

 

The cramp and the pain ease and then subside.

 

Silence.

 

His mind is now a bin without a bottom, filling with visual sensations. His suspended arm appears to be a magnificent work of art, positioned just for his observation. The white sleeve, like a closed Chinese fan, appears very delicate. But he knows it is a mountain that not even faith can move.

 

It is a long time later when the arm collapses in his lap. He moves his head, but everything is wrong. The colors are not right. These walls were white once. Now they’re anything but that.

 

He struggles to his feet and falls again. He crawls along the corridor several feet and then attempts to rise. With much difficulty he gets his leg under him, and he forces himself to his feet. He staggers for a moment, and then he vomits, collapsing again. He retches for several minutes, holding the pain in his sides with both white-knuckled hands. When the spasms have stopped, he braces himself against the wall and stands. Lacking all coordination, he limps down the hall, holding his eyes to mere slits to reduce the nauseous shifting of his vision.

 

He reaches an elevator and takes it down to the floor he wants. Riding, he vomits again and collapses. After getting to his feet, he edges his way toward the marine lab.

 

Entering, he recognizes only the saltwater odor. The room is dense with shadows, and he is afraid to advance farther, remembering how Lenny was found yesterday, like a fetus dead in the womb.

 

There is a movement, he thinks. He looks for it again and sees it. He tries to call out, but he cannot vocalize.

 

The movement disappears. There is a dull thud, and then the heavy sigh of generators being turned on, and the electric lights flood the room.

 

Madoc staggers back and falls, stumbling over his feet. Shoes clamber toward him, and a figure blots out the light.

 

It is Heath.

 

“Corin! What’s happened?”

 

They are words heard through a cotton blanket.

 

Heath opens Madoc’s mouth and smells his face. The aloe odor is faint.

 

“Did you do the drug?”

 

Madoc rolls his eyes, gasps, “Yes.”

 

“Okay,” he says, picking him up by the armpits. “Let’s get to my room.”

 

They struggle together into the lab toward the exit on the other side. “It’s a good thing I was coming to see you,” Heath says. “How’d you survive the time lag?”

 

There is a metallic scream. A door is being kicked open. At the far end of the pool, four young men dressed in stained overalls and carrying nightsticks climb over each other into the room. Screaming war cries, they charge toward Heath and Madoc.

 

Heath pushes Madoc against the generator. “If you can move, get out of here,” he says.

 

Heath runs to meet the assailants and then slumps forward. He spins to his left as he sees the foremost attacker raise his arm to bring his nightstick down on Heath’s new position. He leaps up and catches his opponent’s arm with both of his hands, pulling it back and down, simultaneously driving his knee into the man’s groin. There is a crackle as the shoulder joint snaps.

 

Before the man crumbles, Heath lifts the club from him and blocks the attack of the next man. He buries his free open hand under the man’s sternum and falls behind him, using his body as a temporary shield.

 

The two other men have drawn knives and are approaching slowly, trying to outflank him. He charges one of them, screaming wildly, and then, in midstep, turns his body about and hurls his nightstick with a yelp at the unapproached assailant. The club catches the man between the eyes and splits his skull.

 

The final attacker is upon Heath, his knife catching Heath’s arm. They struggle together briefly and then tumble into the pool. In his element, Heath disarms his opponent by applying pressure to his wrist and then drags him to the bottom of the pool, where he strikes the man’s windpipe and drowns him.

 

He surfaces slowly, his arm oozing blood. Leaning at the edge of the pool, he looks for Madoc, who is gone. He remains clinging to the side, breathing hard. Then, from behind a computer component, Dr. Ibu and a powerfully built man emerge. They approach Heath, and the large man offers his hand. He helps the boy out of the water.

 

“Thanks,” Heath says, holding back a sneeze.

 

Ibu looks at the giant and nods. The man grabs Heath and bends him backward over his knee, forcing his forehead back with the palm of his hand until the neckbone snaps. Then he casts the rag-doll body into the pool.

 

Madoc stumbles back into the lab. Three reluctant security men are with him. He runs along the pool, but stops short when he sees Heath’s body floating.

 

“We just arrived, officers,” Ibu explains. “It appears that four thugs had broken in. Two of them are dead . . . and so is my subject. They murdered him.”

 

* * * *

 

From Heath’s window Elisabeth watches the ebb slip from the rocks, the sunken rocks lifting streaming shoulders out of the slack. The slow west is sombering its torch. A ship’s light shows faintly, far out, over the weight of the ocean, on the low clouds. 

 

A footfall makes her turn slowly. It is Madoc. 

 

“Hello,” he says. 

 

She returns her gaze to the sea.

 

“I’ve looked for you so I might say good-bye,” he says. 

 

“You’re leaving?”

 

“Cumberland has reviewed my work and is giving me a grant to continue research.” 

 

“When do you leave?”

 

“Tomorrow. My material’s being shipped after me.” 

 

She continues to look out of the window for a long time, and then faces Madoc.

 

“I shouldn’t mourn him, should I?”

 

Madoc shakes his head. “He wouldn’t approve.”

 

He turns to leave.

 

“Corin?”

 

He looks over his shoulder. She smiles.

 

He smiles back and is gone.

 

She looks out of the window again to the sea, where great waves awake and are drawn like smoking mountains bright from the west.

 

* * * *

 

It is quite late when Ibu enters Madoc’s lab. He is dressed as usual in his lengthy white lab coat and dark-blue tie.

 

Madoc, dressed entirely in white, is easily spotted in the dark lab, sitting on one of his lab tables, accompanied by rows of glassware. “Come in, Michel.”

 

Ibu walks up to Madoc and stands before him. “I hope you’ll excuse my intrusion, Corin,” he says.

 

“I wasn’t doing anything, not even thinking.”

 

“A remarkable feat.”

 

“It comes with practice.”

 

“You’re leaving tomorrow?”

 

“Yes.”

 

“You’ve gotten a grant to continue your work?” 

 

“Yes.”

 

“How fortunate. My own project has been reviewed here again and considered too impractical. It’s been shut down permanently.”

 

“How unfortunate.”

 

“Yes, you can joke. You’ve lost nothing.”

 

“I squandered nothing.”

 

“Do you imply that I have?”

 

“I am merely suggesting that you might have.”

 

“Well, it so happens that you are very right, Corin. I have squandered all of my resources. All of them.”

 

“What are you going to do now?”

 

“Do I detect a hint of apprehension?” Ibu smiles. “I’m jealous of you, Corin. But more importantly, more intensely, I am angry with you. In fact, it is you that I see as the cause of my misfortune.” He slips his hand into his pocket, and Madoc tenses.

 

“Don’t be afraid. I’m not going to kill you.” He withdraws something white. “It’s only a handkerchief.” He unwraps it and moves to hold it to his face, but with a turn of his wrist he faces it toward Madoc and reveals a thin aerosol can. Ibu sprays a fine mist. The odor, sweet, like aloe, envelops Madoc’s face. He throws his arms out wildly, kicking and falling backward. The sound of glassware shattering is very far away.

 

Iron hands on his collar jerk him into a standing position.

 

“How ironic, letting your own drug do you in.” Ibu laughs loud and long.

 

Madoc is breathing hard through his mouth, his hands at his throat.

 

Ibu spins him about so that they are facing. Madoc feels that in the darkness of the room everything is dominated by degrees of smallness: Ibu appears to be at the far end of a long tunnel, like some small trinket of an African god.

 

“My God, Madoc!” Ibu mockingly shouts. “You’ve just accidentally inhaled a gas mixture of your own drug!” He pushes Madoc, so that he skips backward, falling against the bench. More glassware collapses in the distance.

 

“And now, scared for your life . . . Oh, you do get so scared for your life, don’t you, Corin?” Ibu laughs again, gripping Madoc’s collar and dragging him out of his lab. “Scared for your life, you run madly out of your lab. You run and run,” Ibu screams, “you run and run until everything slows, everything stops!”

 

Ibu heaves him down the corridor, and Madoc sprawls to the floor and slides.

 

Inside his head, the confusion rages for a moment. Only a moment. His chest is tightening uncontrollably, and a burning pain sears his whole back and left side.

 

No!

 

“Yes, moan, you bastard!”

 

No! No!

 

Ibu’s laughter is uncontrollable, echoing in the corridor and in Madoc’s ears until the physical universe comes to a halt.

 

He tries to focus on a mark on the floor, but his vision is blurring. His glasses are half off, and he cannot focus his eyes. His head feels as if it has been disconnected from his body, but the pain is gone. He has mastered his responses again.

 

The time lag ends with a burst of spaced-out, distant laughter.

 

Madoc feels quite calm, despite it, quite serene.

 

Ibu pulls Madoc to his feet. “So you survive the initial tests of your own creation. But you are still dazed, and you stagger blindly down the hall, groping.”

 

Ibu pushes Madoc forward, holding him by his hair and arm.

 

The corridor seems to stream past him. But he can control his vision now. His glasses are intact, and he has some grip on his senses.

 

“You come to the elevator, and you wait for it, uncertain where you are headed, only running scared.”

 

Footsteps, quick footsteps, crash down the hall. A young orderly rounds the bend.

 

“Hey! What’s going on?” he calls.

 

Ibu releases Madoc. The orderly draws closer, and Ibu whips his aerosol can out, spraying the man in the face. The boy gags once and slams himself against the wall, a surprised look on his face.

 

“You fool, Madoc! In your mindless flight you kill an innocent man whose only intent was to help you.”

 

The elevator arrives, and Ibu kicks Madoc in. When it stops, Ibu drags him out and down the corridor. The smell of the sea is strong.

 

“Driven mad by your drug, you walk aimlessly into the Marine Lab. Here you will unwittingly drown yourself.”

 

You must not surrender yourself. For Madoc, suddenly, everything begins to clarify itself. He stands in the doorway to the lab. The pool is still, a soft blue light is reflecting off it. There is absolute silence in there. The smell of brine is cool and relaxing. The combined effect reminds him of a temple. Can violence be permitted here?

 

Ibu pounds him in the back of the neck, and Madoc lunges into the room, more from his own power than from the force of the blow.

 

In his mind, his years of defensive training flash almost visibly through his awareness. But he knows that it does not matter whether he understands it or not. He must feel it. It must be automatic. Action, not thought.

 

A hulking figure appears to his left, approaching him.

 

Madoc rises to his feet and crouches. The drug has enhanced all of his perceptive powers. Simultaneously, he can watch the giant and Ibu, study their movements, know their thoughts.

 

He begins sidling to the right, toward the pool.

 

“What do you think you’re doing, Madoc?” Ibu calls, hilarity breaking his voice. “You’re not seriously going to fight?” He erupts into peals of laughter.

 

Madoc stares through the shadows at the giant. The man’s body looks like knotted whipcord and layers of solid muscle.

 

He feels no fear, only serenity—his mind and body one. One will.

 

He circles warily, opposite the huge man, his muscles poised and ready.

 

Madoc sees the motion from behind him. It is Ibu, and he delays responding for a fraction of an instant, waiting until he can skip to the side.

 

He maneuvers, and Ibu hops past him clumsily. Madoc shifts his weight and kicks out and up, catching Ibu on the side of his head. The black man falls down heavily.

 

Now Madoc circles the giant. With unexpected speed, the man pounces, catching Madoc’s right arm. Madoc screams loudly and drives his fingers to the man’s throat.

 

The giant howls and pulls away, the realization sweeping over him that this is no untrained fighter.

 

Madoc presses the fight now, circling but not attacking.

 

The giant leaps high, feinting so that Madoc draws back to the pool’s edge.

 

Trapped!

 

The giant, crouched low, large hands ready, closes in. He sweeps out with his arms in a blurred movement. Madoc shifts his weight, using the drug to follow the giant’s movements, and ducks below the arms. Then he springs up, screaming, driving his right foot forward and high. It catches the giant in the face, full force, and topples him. Madoc moves swiftly and delivers a death blow to his temple.

 

He looks up. Ibu is standing, blood glistening on his cheek. He is breathing hard, frightened. The dim light catches on a knife he is holding, and he charges.

 

Madoc crouches, accepts the charge. Over Ibu’s shoulder, he sees approaching shadows. He catches the knife arm in one hand, drives his foot into Ibu’s groin, and pushes him away.

 

Four security officers scramble behind Ibu, pistols withdrawn.

 

“Shoot him!” Ibu yells, his voice frantic.

 

Madoc remains crouched, hands at shoulder height, eyes intent.

 

Death is acted, he thinks.

 

They level their guns, hesitant.

 

“He’s mad! Shoot him! You know me! Shoot him!”

 

There is a barrage of fire. The impact lifts Madoc off his feet and kicks him into the pool.

 

When the echoes stop and the smoke has cleared, his body resurfaces, the blue light reflecting on it.

 

* * * *

 

A. A. Attanasio writes:

 

“Interface” is the first science fiction I ever wrote. I began it in the seventh grade, in Mr. Nunezes algebra class. It stewed in my unconscious caldron five years before I found it in a bedraggled notebook and rewrote it. I never thought anything creative would come out of Nunez’s class, but such is the synchronous symphony of being oneself. Since completing “Interface” I have been hemorrhaging ink, writing poetry and fiction. My work habits, however, have expansive phases. When I begin writing, something leads the days through me the way the wind herds light through the bones of the unburied. During the months that I don’t write, I walk the flat of the blade, seeking the edge where the dark is sliced from the light. I am constantly stumbling over my tail. Aside from the tarot, the calender of shadows, which shows me its small eyes, I have no close relations. But like the magician who rolls over in his sleep and wakes the fool, the world sustains me on unknown paths, and I am not lonely. We have invented ourselves. Have you forgotten already?