Connie Willis - Schwarzschild Radius

“ ‘Dear son,’ ” Müller reads, “ ‘I have not heard from you in three months. Are you hurt? Are you ill? Do you need anything?’ ”

The last letter is from Professor Zuschauer in Jena. I can see his name quite clearly in the corner of the envelope, though mine is blurred beyond recognition. I tear it open. There is nothing written on the red paper.

I thrust it at Müller. “Read this,” I say.

“I have not finished with your mother’s letter yet,” Müller says, but he takes the letter and reads: “ ‘Dear Herr Rottschieben, I received your letter yesterday. I could hardly decipher your writing. Do you not have decent pens at the front? The disease you describe is called Neumann’s disease or pemphigus—’ ”

I snatch the letter out of Müller’s hands and run out the door. “Let me come with you!” Müller shouts.

“You must stay and watch the wireless!” I say joyously, running along the communication trench. Schwarzschild does not have the front inside him. He has pemphigus, he has Neumann’s disease, and now he can be invalided home to hospital.

I go down and think I have tripped over a discarded helmet or a tin of beef, but there is a crash, and dirt and revetting fall all around me. I hear the low buzz of a daisy cutter and flatten myself into the trench, but the buzz does not become a whine. It stops, and there is another crash and the trench caves in.

I scramble out of the trench before it can suffocate me and crawl along the edge toward Schwarzschild’s dugout, but the trench has caved in all along its length, and when I crawl up and over the loose dirt, I lose it in the swirling snow.

I cannot tell which way the front lies, but I know it is very close. The sound comes at me from all directions, a deafening roar in which no individual sounds can be distinguished. The snow is so thick, I cannot see the burst of flame from the muzzles as the guns fire, and no part of the horizon looks redder than any other. It is all red, even the snow.

I crawl in what I think is the direction of the trench, but as soon as I do, I am in barbed wire. I stop, breathing hard, my face and hands pressed into the snow. I have come the wrong way. I am at the front. I hear a sound out of the barrage of sound, the sound of tires on the snow, and I think it is a tank and cannot breathe at all. The sound comes closer, and in spite of myself I look up and it is the recruit who was at the quartermaster’s.

He is a long way away, behind a coiled line of barbed wire, but I can see him quite clearly in spite of the snow. He has the motorcycle fixed, and as I watch, he flings his leg over it and presses his foot down. “Go!” I shout. “Get out!” The motorcycle jumps forward. “Go!”

The motorcycle comes toward me, picking up speed. It rears up, and I think it is going to jump the barbed wire, but it falls instead, the motorcycle first and then the recruit, spiraling slowly down into the iron spikes. The ground heaves, and I fall, too.

I have fallen into Schwarzchild’s dugout. Half of it has caved in, the timber balks sticking out at angles from the heap of dirt and snow, but the blanket is still over the door, and Schwarzschild is propped in a chair. The doctor is bending over him. Schwarzschild has his shirt off. His chest looks like Hans’s did.

The front roars and more of the roof crumbles. “It’s all right! It’s a disease!” I shout over it. “I have brought you a letter to prove it,” and hand him the letter which I have been clutching in my unfeeling hand.

The doctor grabs the letter from me. Snow whirls down through the ruined roof, but Schwarzschild does not put on his shirt. He watches uninterestedly as the doctor reads the letter.

“ ‘The symptoms you describe are almost certainly those of Neumann’s disease, or pemphigus vulgaris. I have treated two patients with the disease, both Jews. It is a disease of the mucous membranes and is not contagious. Its cause is unknown. It always ends in death.’ ” Dr. Funkenheld crumples up the paper. “You came all this way in the middle of a bombardment to tell me there is no hope?” he shouts in a voice I do not even recognize, it is so unlike his steady doctor’s voice. “You should have tried to get away. You should have—” and then he is gone under a crashing of dirt and splintered timbers.

I struggle toward Schwarzschild through the maelstrom of red dust and snow. “Put your shirt on!” I shout at him. “We must get out of here!” I crawl to the door to see if we can get out through the communication trench.

Müller bursts through the blanket. He is carrying, impossibly, the wireless. The headphones trail behind him in the snow. “I came to see what had happened to you. I thought you were dead. The communication trenches are shot to pieces.”

It is as I had feared. His curiosity has got the best of him, and now he is trapped, too, though he seems not to know it. He hoists the wireless onto the table without looking at it. His eyes are on Schwarzschild, who leans against the remaining wall of the dugout, his shirt in his hands.

“Your shirt!” I shout, and come around to help Schwarzschild put it on over the craters and shell holes of his blasted skin. The air screams and the mouth of the dugout blows in. I grab at Schwarzschild’s arm, and the skin of it comes off in my hands. He falls against the table, and the wireless goes over. I can hear the splintering tinkle of the liquid barretter breaking, and then the whole dugout is caving in and we are under the table. I cannot see anything.

“Müller!” I shout. “Where are you?”

“I’m hit,” he says.

I try to find him in the darkness, but I am crushed against Schwarzschild. I cannot move. “Where are you hit?”

“In the arm,” he says, and I hear him try to move it. The movement dislodges more dirt, and it falls around us, shutting out all sound of the front. I can hear the creak of wood as the table legs give way.

“Schwarzschild?” I say. He doesn’t answer, but I know he is not dead. His body is as hot as the Primus stove flame. My hand is underneath his body, and I try to shift it, but I cannot. The dirt falls like snow, piling up around us. The darkness is red for a while, and then I cannot see even that.

“I have a theory,” Müller says in a voice so close and so devoid of curiosity it might be mine. “It is the end of the world.”

“Was that when Schwarzschild was sent home on sick leave?” Travers said. “Or validated, or whatever you Germans call it? Well, yeah, it had to be, because he died in March. What happened to Müller?”

I had hoped he would go away as soon as I had told him what had happened to Schwarzschild, but he made no move to get up. “Müller was invalided out with a broken arm. He became a scientist.”

“The way you did.” He opened his notebook again. “Did you see Schwarzschild after that?”

The question makes no sense.

“After you got out? Before he died?”

It seems to take a long time for his words to get to me. The message bends and curves, shifting into the red, and I can hardly make it out. “No,” I say, though that is a lie.

Travers scribbles. “I really do appreciate this, Dr. Rottschieben. I’ve always been curious about Schwarzschild, and now that you’ve told me all this stuff, I’m even more interested,” Travers says, or seems to say. Messages coming in are warped by the gravitational blizzard into something that no longer resembles speech. “If you’d be willing to help me, I’d like to write my thesis on him.”

Go. Get out. “It was a lie,” I say. “I never knew Schwarzschild. I saw him once, from a distance—your fixed observer.”

Travers looks up expectantly from his notes as if he is still waiting for me to answer him.