Needle in a Timestack Read online

  “No,” we said.

  The logic of the ape is not easy to refute. We told him that death comes to all living creatures, that it is natural and holy, but that only God could decide when it was going to happen. God, we said, calls His creatures to Himself one at a time. God had called Hal Vendelmans, God had called Grimsky, God would someday call Leo and all the rest here. But God had not yet called Chicory. Leo wanted to know what was wrong with sending Chicory to Him ahead of time. Did that not improve Chicory’s condition? No, we replied. No, it only did harm to Chicory. Chicory would have been much happier living here with us than going to God so soon. Leo did not seem convinced. Chicory, he said, now could talk words with her mouth and wore shoes on her feet. He envied Chicory very much.

  We told him that God would be angry if any more chimpanzees died. We told him that we would be angry. Killing chimpanzees was wrong, we said. It was not what God wanted Leo to be doing.

  “Me talk to God, find out what God wants,” Leo said.

  We found Buster dead by the edge of the pond this morning, with indications of another ritual murder. Leo coolly stared us down and explained that God had given orders that all chimpanzees were to become human beings as quickly as possible, and this could only be achieved by the means employed on Chicory and Buster.

  Leo is confined now in the punishment tank and we have suspended this week’s meat distribution. Yost voted against both of those decisions, saying we ran the risk of giving Leo the aura of a religious martyr, which would enhance his already considerable power. But these killings have to stop. Leo knows, of course, that we are upset about them. But if he believes his path is the path of righteousness, nothing we say or do is going to change his mind.

  Judy Vendelmans called today. She has put Hal’s death fairly well behind her, misses the project, misses the chimps. As gently as I could, I told her what has been going on here. She was silent a very long time—Chicory was one of her favorites, and Judy has had enough grief already to handle for one summer—but finally she said, “I think I know what can be done. I’ll be on the noon flight tomorrow.”

  We found Mimsy dead in the usual way late this afternoon. Leo is still in the punishment tank—the third day. The congregation has found a way to carry out its rites without its leader. Mimsy’s death has left me stunned, but we are all deeply affected, virtually unable to proceed with our work. It may be necessary to break up the community entirely to save the animals. Perhaps we can send them to other research centers for a few months, three of them here, five there, until this thing subsides. But what if it doesn’t subside? What if the dispersed animals convert others elsewhere to the creed of Leo?”

  The first thing Judy said when she arrived was, “Let Leo out. I want to talk with him.”

  We opened the tank. Leo stepped forth, uneasy, abashed, shading his eyes against the strong light. He glanced at me, at Yost, at Jan, as if wondering which one of us was going to scold him; and then he saw Judy and it was as though he had seen a ghost. He made a hollow rasping sound deep in his throat and backed away. Judy signed hello and stretched out her arms to him. Leo trembled. He was terrified. There was nothing unusual about one of us going on leave and returning after a month or two, but Leo must not have expected Judy ever to return, must in fact have imagined her gone to the same place her husband had gone, and the sight of her shook him. Judy understood all that, obviously, for she quickly made powerful use of it, signing to Leo, “I bring you message from Vendelmans.”

  “Tell tell tell!”

  “Come walk with me,” said Judy.

  She took him by the hand and led him gently out of the punishment area and into the compound and down the hill toward. the meadow. I watched from the top of the hill, the tall, slender woman and the compact, muscular chimpanzee close together, side by side, hand in hand, pausing now to talk, Judy signing and Leo replying in a flurry of gestures, then Judy again for a long time, a brief response from Leo, another cascade of signs from Judy, then Leo squatting, tugging at blades of grass, shaking his head, clapping hand to elbow in his expression of confusion, then to his chin, then taking Judy’s hand. They were gone for nearly an hour. The other chimps did not dare approach them. Finally Judy and Leo, hand in hand, came quietly up the hill to headquarters again. Leo’s eyes were shining and so were Judy’s.

  She said, “Everything will be all right now. That’s so, isn’t it, Leo?”

  Leo said, “God is always right.”

  She made a dismissal sign and Leo went slowly down the hill. The moment he was out of sight, Judy turned away from us and cried a little, just a little; then she asked for a drink; and then she said, “It isn’t easy, being God’s messenger.”

  “What did you tell him?” I asked.

  “That I had been in heaven visiting Hal. That Hal was looking down all the time and he was very proud of Leo, except for one thing, that Leo was sending too many chimpanzees to God too soon. I told him that God was not yet ready to receive Chicory and Buster and Mimsy, that they would have to be kept in storage cells for a long time until their true time came, and that was not good for them. I told him that Hal wanted Leo to know that God hoped he would stop sending him chimpanzees. Then I gave Leo Hal’s old wristwatch to wear when he conducts services, and Leo promised he would obey Hal’s wishes. That was all. I suspect I’ve added a whole new layer of mythology to what’s developing here, and I trust you won’t be angry with me for doing it. I don’t believe any more chimps will be killed. And I think I’d like another drink.”

  Later in the day we saw the chimps assembled by the stream. Leo held his arm aloft and sunlight blazed from the band of gold on his slim hairy wrist, and a great outcry of grunts in god-talk went up from the congregation and they danced before him, and then he donned the sacred hat and the sacred shirt and moved his arms eloquently in the secret sacred gestures of the holy sign language.

  There have been no more killings. I think no more will occur. Perhaps after a time our chimps will lose interest in being religious, and go on to other pastimes. But not yet, not yet. The ceremonies continue, and grow ever more elaborate, and we are compiling volumes of extraordinary observations, and God looks down and is pleased. And Leo proudly wears the emblems of his papacy as he bestows his blessing on the worshipers in the holy grove.

  The Dead Man’s Eyes

  A crime story, one of the few I’ve ever written. Crime fiction has never interested me as a reader, let alone as a writer. I’ve read the Sherlock Holmes stories with pleasure, yes, and some Simenons, and in 1985 I suddenly read seven or eight Elmore Leonard books in one unceasing burst. But such acknowledged masters of the genre as P. D. James or John D. MacDonald inspire only yawns in me, which is not to say that they aren’t masters, only that the thing they do so well is a thing that basically does not speak to any of my concerns. Doubtless a lot of mystery writers feel the same way about even the best science fiction. “The Dead Man’s Eyes” isn’t a detective story, but it is crime fiction, to the extent that it seems actually to have been in the running for the Edgar Award given out by the Mystery Writers of America. It’s also science fiction, though, built as it is around a concept of detection that exists today only as the wildest speculation.

  I wrote it in a moment of agreeable ease and fluency in the summer of 1987, and Alice Turner of Playboy bought it in an equally uncomplicated way and published it in her August 1988 issue. I’m never enthusiastic about complications, but the summer is a time when I particularly like everything to go smoothly. This one did.

  On a crisp afternoon of high winds late in the summer of 2017 Frazier murdered his wife’s lover, a foolish deed that he immediately regretted. To murder anyone was stupid, when there were so many more effective alternatives available; but even so, if murder was what he had to do, why murder the lover? Two levels of guilt attached there: not only the taking of a life, but the taking of an irrelevant life. If you had to kill someone, he
told himself immediately afterward, then you should have killed her. She was the one who had committed the crime against the marriage, after all. Poor Hurwitt had been only a means, a tool, virtually an innocent bystander. Yes, kill her, not him. Kill yourself, even. But Hurwitt was the one he had killed, a dumb thing to do and done in a dumb manner besides.

  It had all happened very quickly, without premeditation. Frazier was attending a meeting of the Museum trustees, to discuss expanding the Hall of Mammals. There was a recess; and because the day was so cool, the air so crystalline and bracing, he stepped out on the balcony that connected the old building with the Pilgersen Extension for a quick breather. Then the sleek bronze door of the Pilgersen opened far down the way and a dark-haired man in a grubby blue-gray lab coat appeared. Frazier saw at once, by the rigid set of his high shoulders and the way his long hair fluttered in the wind, that it was Hurwitt.

  He wants to see me, Frazier thought. He knows I’m attending the meeting today and he’s come out here to stage the confrontation at last, to tell me that he loves my famous and beautiful wife, to ask me bluntly to clear off and let him have her all to himself.

  Frazier’s pulse began to rise, his face grew hot. Even while he was thinking that it was oddly old-fashioned to talk of letting Hurwitt have Marianne, that in fact Hurwitt had probably already had Marianne in every conceivable way and vice versa but that if now he had some idea of setting up housekeeping with her—unbelievable, unthinkable!—this was hardly the appropriate place to discuss it with him, another and more primordial area of his brain was calling forth torrents of adrenaline and preparing him for mortal combat.

  But no: Hurwitt didn’t seem to have ventured onto the balcony for any man-to-man conference with his lover’s husband. Evidently he was simply taking the short-cut from his lab in the Pilgersen to the fourth-floor cafeteria in the old building. He walked with his head down, his brows knitted, as though pondering some abstruse detail of trilobite anatomy, and he took no notice of Frazier at all.

  “Hurwitt?” Frazier said finally, when the other man was virtually abreast of him.

  Caught by surprise, Hurwitt looked up, blinking. He appeared not to recognize Frazier for a moment. For that moment he was frozen in mid-blink, his unkempt hair a dark halo about him, his awkward rangy body off balance between strides, his peculiar glinting eyes flashing like yellow beacons. In fury Frazier imagined this man’s bony nakedness, pale and gaunt, probably with sparse ropy strands of black hair sprouting on a white chest, imagined those long arms wrapped around Marianne, imagined those huge knobby fingers cupping her breasts, imagined that thin-lipped wide mouth covering hers. Imagined the grubby lab coat lying crumpled at the foot of the bed, and her silken orange wrap beside it. That was what sent Frazier over the brink, not the infidelities themselves, not the thought of the sweaty embraces—there was plenty of that in each of her films, and it had never meant a thing to him, for he knew it was only well-paid make-believe—and not the rawboned look of the man or his uncouth stride or even the manic glint of those strange off-color eyes, those eerie topaz eyes, but the lab coat, stained and worn with a button missing and a pocket-flap dangling, lying beside Marianne’s discarded silk. For her to take such a lover, a pathetic dreary poker of fossils, a hollow-chested laboratory drudge—no, no, no—

  “Hello, Loren,” Hurwitt said. He smiled amiably, he offered his hand. His eyes, though, narrowed and seemed almost to glow. It must be those weird eyes, Frazier thought, that Marianne has fallen in love with. “What a surprise, running into you out here.”

  And stood there smiling, and stood there holding out his hand, and stood there with his frayed lab coat flapping in the breeze.

  Suddenly Frazier was unable to bear the thought of sharing the world with this man an instant longer. He watched himself as though from a point just behind his own right ear as he went rushing forward, seized not Hurwitt’s hand but his wrist, and pushed rather than pulled, guiding him swiftly backward toward the parapet and tipping him up and over. It took perhaps a quarter of a second. Hurwitt, gaping, astonished, rose as though floating, hovered for an instant, began to descend. Frazier had one last look at Hurwitt’s eyes, bright as glass, staring straight into his own, photographing his assailant’s face; and then Hurwitt went plummeting downward.

  My God, Frazier thought, peering over the edge. Hurwitt lay face down in the courtyard five stories below, arms and legs splayed, lab coat billowing about him.

  He was at the airport an hour later, with a light suitcase that carried no more than a day’s change of clothing and a few cosmetic items. He flew first to Dallas, endured a 90-minute layover, went on to San Francisco, doubled back to Calgary as darkness descended, and caught a midnight special to Mexico City, where he checked into a hotel using the legal commercial alias that he employed when doing business in Macao, Singapore, and Hong Kong.

  Standing on the terrace of a tower thirty stories above the Zona Rosa, he inhaled musky smog, listened to the squeals of traffic and the faint sounds of far-off drums, watched flares of green lightning in the choking sky above Popocatepetl, and wondered whether he should jump. Ultimately he decided against it. He wanted to share nothing whatever with Hurwitt, not even the manner of his death. And suicide would be an overreaction anyway. First he had to find out how much trouble he was really in.

  The hotel had InfoLog. He dialed in and was told that queries were billed at five million pesos an hour, pro rated. Vaguely he wondered whether that was as expensive as it sounded. The peso was practically worthless, wasn’t it? What could that be in dollars, a hundred bucks, five hundred, maybe? Nothing.

  “I want Harvard Legal,” he told the screen. “Criminology. Forensics. Technical. Evidence technology.” Grimly he menued down and down until he was near what he wanted. “Eyeflash,” he said. “Theory, techniques. Methods of detail recovery. Acceptance as evidence. Reliability of record. Frequency of reversal on appeal. Supreme Court rulings, if any.”

  Back to him, in surreal fragments which, at an extra charge of three million pesos per hour, pro rated, he had printed out for him, came blurts of information:

  Perceptual pathways in outer brain layers … broad-scale optical architecture … images imprinted on striate cortex, or primary visual cortex … inferior temporal neurons … cf. McDermott and Brunetti, 2007, utilization of lateral geniculate body as storage for visual data … inferior temporal cortex … uptake of radioactive glucose … downloading … degrading of signal … degeneration period … Pilsudski signal-enhancement filter … Nevada vs. Bensen, 2011 … hippocampus simulation … amygdala … acetylcholine … U.S. Supreme Court, 23 March 2012 … cf Gross and Bernstein, 13 Aug 2003 … Mishkin … Appenzeller …

  Enough. He shuffled the printouts in a kind of hard-edged stupor until dawn; and then, after a hazy calculation of time-zone differentials, he called his lawyer in New York. It took four bounces, but the telephone tracked him down in the commute, driving in from Connecticut.

  Frazier keyed in the privacy filter. All the lawyer would know was that some client was calling; the screen image would be a blur, the voice would be rendered universal, generalized, unidentifiable. It was more for the lawyer’s protection than Frazier’s: there had been nasty twists in jurisprudence lately, and lawyers were less and less willing to run the risk of being named accomplices after the fact. Immediately came a query about the billing. Bill to my hotel room, Frazier replied, and the screen gave him a go-ahead.

  “Let’s say I’m responsible for causing a fatal injury and the victim had a good opportunity to see me as the act was occurring. What are the chances that they can recover eyeflash pictures?”

  “Depends on how much damage was received in the process of the death. How did it happen?”

  “Privileged communication?”

  “Sorry. No.”

  “Even under filter?”

  “Even. If the mode of death was unique or even highly
distinctive and unusual, how can I help but draw the right conclusion? And then I’ll know more than I want to know.”

  “It wasn’t unique,” Frazier said. “Or distinctive, or unusual. But I still won’t go into details. I can tell you that the injury wasn’t the sort that would cause specific brain trauma. I mean, nothing like a bullet between the eyes, or falling into a vat of acid, or—”

  “All right. I follow. This take place in a major city?”

  “Major, yes.”

  “In Missouri, Alabama, or Kentucky?”

  “None of those,” said Frazier. “It took place in a state where eyeflash recovery is legal. No question of that.”

  “And the body? How long after death do you estimate it would have been found?”

  “Within minutes, I’d say.”

  “And when was that?”

  Frazier hesitated. “Within the past twenty-four hours.”

  “Then there’s almost total likelihood that there’s a readily recoverable photograph in your victim’s brain of whatever he saw at the moment of death. Beyond much doubt it’s already been recovered. Are you sure he was looking at you as he died?”

  “Straight at me.”

  “My guess is there’s probably a warrant out for you already. If you want me to represent you, kill the privacy filter so I can confirm who you are, and we’ll discuss our options.”

  “Later,” Frazier said. “I think I’d rather try to make a run for it.”

  “But the chances of your getting away with—”

  “This is something I need to do,” said Frazier. “I’ll talk to you some other time.”

  He was almost certainly cooked. He knew that. He had wasted critical time running frantically back and forth across the continent yesterday, when he should have been transferring funds, setting up secure refuges, and such. The only question now was whether they were already looking for him, in which case there’d be blocks on his accounts everywhere, a passport screen at every airport, worldwide interdicts of all sorts. But if that was so they’d already have traced him to this hotel. Evidently they hadn’t, which meant that they hadn’t yet uncovered the Southeast Asian trading alias and put interdicts on that. Well, it was just a lousy manslaughter case, or maybe second-degree at worst: they had more serious things to worry about, he supposed.