Harlan Ellison - Come to Me Not in Winter's White

She was dying and he was the richest man in the world, but he couldn’t buy her life. So he did the next best thing. He built the house, different from any other house that had ever been. She was transported to it by ambulance, and their goods and furnishings followed in many vans.

They had been married little over a year; then she had been stricken. The specialists shook their heads and named a new disease after her. They gave her six-months-to-a year; then they departed, leaving behind them prescriptions and the smell of antiseptics. But he was not defeated. Nothing as comrnonplace as death could defeat him.

For he was the greatest physicist ever employed by AT T in the year of Our Lord and President Farrar, nineteen hundred and ninety-eight.

(When one is incalculably wealthy from birth, one feels a sense of one’s own personal unworthiness; so having been denied the joys of grueling labor and abject poverty, he had labored over himself. He had made of himself one who was incalculably worthy—the greatest physicist the world had ever known. It was enough for him…until he had met her. Then he wanted much more.)

He didn’t have to work for AT T, but he enjoyed it. They allowed him the use of their immense research facilities to explore his favorite area—Time—and the waning thereof.

He knew more about the nature of Time than any other human being who had ever lived.

It might be said that Carl Manos was Chronos/Ops/Saturn/Father Time himself, for he fitted even the description with his long dark beard and his slashing, scythe-like walking-stick. He knew Time as no other man had ever known it, and he had the power and the will and the love to exploit it.

How?

Well, there was the house. He’d designed it himself. Had it built in less than six weeks, settling a strike by himself to insure its completion on time.

What was so special about the house?

It had a room; a room like no other room that had ever existed, anywhere.

In this room, Time ignored the laws of Albert Einstein and obeyed those of Carl Manos.

What were those laws and what was this room?

To reverse the order of the questions, the room was the bedroom of his beloved Laura, who had Lora Manosism, an affliction of the central nervous system, named after her. The disease was monstrously degenerative; four months after diagnosis, she would be a basket case. Five months—blind, incapable of speech. Six-months-to-a year—dead. She dwelled in the bedroom that Time feared to enter. She lived there while he worked and fought for her. This was because, for every year that passed outside the room, only a week went by within. Carl had so ordained it, and it cost him eighty-five thousand dollars a week to maintain the equipment that made it so. He would see her live and be cured, no matter what the cost, though his beard changed its appearance with each week that passed for her. He hired specialists, endowed a foundation to work on her cure; and every day, he grew a trifle older. Although she had been ten years his junior, the gap was rapidly widened. Still he worked to slow her room even more.

“Mister Manos, your bill is now two hundred thousand dollars a week.”

“I’ll pay it,” he told the power light people, and did. It was now down to three days for every year.

And he would enter her room and speak with her.

‘“Today is July ninth,” he said. “When I leave in the morning it will be around Christmastime. How do you feel?”

“Short of breath,” she replied. “What do the doctors tell you?”

“Nothing, yet,” he said. “They’re working on your problem, but there’s no answer in sight.”

“I didn’t think so. I don’t think there ever will be.”

“Don’t be fatalistic, love. If there’s a problem, there’s an answer—and there’s plenty of time. All the time in the world…”

“Did you bring me a newspaper?”

“Yes. This will keep you caught up. There’s been a quick war in Africa, and a new presidential candidate has come onto the scene.”

“Please love me.”

“I do.”

“No, I know that. Make love to me.”

They smiled at her fear of certain words, and then he undressed and made love to her.

Then, after, there came a moment of truth, and he said, “Laura, I have to tell you the way it is. We’re nowhere yet, but I have the best neurological minds in the world working on your problem. There’s been one other case like yours since I locked you away—that is, since you came to stay here—and he’s dead already. But they have learned something from him and they will continue to learn. I’ve brought you a new medicine.”

“Will we spend Christmas together?” she asked. “If you wish.”

“So be it.”

And so it was.

He came to her at Christmastime, and together they decorated the tree and opened presents.

“Hell of a Christmas with no snow,” she said.

“Such language—and from a lady!”

But he brought her snow and a Yule log and his love.

“I’m awful,” she said. “I can’t stand myself sometimes. You’re doing everything you can and nothing happens, so I harass you. I’m sorry.”

She was five feet seven inches in height and had black hair. Black? So black as to be almost blue, and her lips were a pink and very special pair of cold shell-coral things. Her eyes were a kind of dusk where there are no clouds and the day sets off the blue with its going. Her hands shook whenever she gestured, which was seldom.

“Laura,” he told her, “even as we sit here, they work. The answer, the cure, will come to pass—in time.”

“I know.”

“You wonder, though, whether it will be time enough. It will. You’re virtually standing still while everything outside races by. Don’t worry. Rest easy. I’ll bring you back.”

“I know that,” she said. “It’s just that I sometimes—despair.”

“Don’t.”

“I can’t help it.”

“I know more about Time than anybody else… You’ve got it: on your side.”

He swung his stick like a saber, beheading roses that grew about the wall. “We can take a century,” he said, quickly, as though loath to lose even a moment, “without your being harmed. We can wait on the answer that has to come. Sooner or later, there will be an answer. If I go away for a few months, it will be as a day to you. Don’t worry. I’ll see you cured and we’ll be together again in a brighter day—for God sake don’t worry! You know what they told you about psychosomatic conversions!”

“Yes, I shouldn’t have one.”

“Then don’t. There are even other tricks I will be able to play with Time, as it goes on—such as freezing. You’ll come out okay, believe me.”

“Yes,” she said, raising her glass of Irish Mist. “Merry Christmas.”

“Merry Christmas!”

But even for a man who has been thought incalculably wealthy, lack of attention to compounding that wealth, monomaniacal ferocity in pursuing a goal, and a constant, heavy drain, inevitably the end comes in sight. Though the view to that end was a long look, though there were more years that could be put to use, even so it became obvious to everyone around him that Carl Manos had committed himself to a crusade that would end in his destruction. At least financially. And for them, that was the worst sort of destruction. For they had not lived in the thoughts of Manos, were unaware that there were other, far more exacting destructions.

He came to her in the early summer, and he brought a recording of zarzuela love duets by de la Cruz, Hidalgo Breton. They sat beside each other, their hands touching, and they listened to the voices of others who were in love, all through July and August. He only sensed her restlessness as August drew to a close and the recording shusssed into silence.