John Varley - Millennium

"A little of both, these days. I was always a tinkerer, but I made my reputation in pure physics, in mathematics. A "physicist," these days, is usually more engineer than scientist, to my way of thinking. While I've never been afraid to get my hands dirty, I tired of weapons development. I .have no interest in building a more powerful laser or a smaller fusion bomb.

If you weren't already in such trouble, I'd feel honor-bound to warn you away from me. I'm a terrible security risk. Being seen with me is enough to get you kicked out of almost any government job."

"That's no problem anymore."

"Indeed. At any rate ... they wanted me to work on a larger particle accelerator. I decided not to. I kept thinking of Newton, of Rontgen ... men like that. Men who did the basic thinking that led to gigawatt particle accelerators."

"You don't think those accelerators are worthwhile research tools?"

"On the contrary. I keep abreast of all the results. It may very well be that the breakthrough I'm looking for will come from Batavia, or Stanford. But I don't really think so.

I think it will come from the most unexpected place, as so many breakthroughs do.

Something as simple as Wilhelm Rontgen accidentally exposing a photographic plate and discovering X rays."

"So what is it you're looking for? What is your basic research?"

"The nature of time," he said, and leaned forward. "And now that you've examined my bona fides, I think it's your turn."

I took another sip of the whiskey, and started to tell him.

It took most of the morning. I went into great detail, much more than I had been willing or able to before the Board.

He asked very little, but took a lot of notes. A few minutes into the story he asked if I minded being recorded. I said I didn't care. He didn't turn anything on, so I assumed he'd been doing it right along.

At lunchtime he led me into the kitchen. I talked while he prepared a salad and some cold-cut sandwiches. We ate them, and I continued to talk.

And finally I was through. I looked at the glass of whiskey and saw it was still half-full.

I've got to say, that made me proud.

To be honest, I had expected an uncritical reception. The little I knew about Mayer was from a few comments Roger Keane and Kevin Briley had made after the night of that press conference, to the effect that he was the "local crackpot," who showed up at air crashes and other disasters all over California and much of the west. I had expected a sympathetic ear, one as eager to fall for my "evidence" as a grad student in astrology looking at one of Uri Geller's spoons.

So what did Mayer do? He grilled me unmercifully for two hours. If the bastard had been running for California Attorney General, he'd have had my vote.

He went at me up, down, and sideways. He had me sketch the stunner Louise had taken from me. He tore at anything that looked inconsistent -- and let's face it, that included the whole unlikely story. He wanted to see physical evidence. I'd brought it with me, and laid it out before him: Louise's clothes, the glass she had handled, a photo of the fingerprints obtained from it, ten grainy blowups of her face from various angles, photostats of the autopsy reports, a watch I'd stolen that was still off by forty-five minutes because I'd kept winding it, a Vicks inhaler, and an empty package of Clorets.

He sniffed the inhaler, and wrinkled his nose. The smell was faint by now, but it was still foul. He fingered the material of her skirt, poked at her abandoned underwear with a penal eraser.

"We can run some tests on this cloth," he said. "Though I doubt it would tell us anything.

Tell me, Bill, would you object to telling this story again, under hypnosis?"

I Laughed.

"I'd try anything, Arnold, but I don't think that"ll do you any good. I've tried it before, and I can't be hypnotized."

"When I count three, you will wake up, refreshed. One, two, three."

I sat up. I felt great. Naturally, it hadn't done them any good, I'd just told the story again as I had before ...

Son of a bitch.

"You did it," I said, awed. "You put me under."

I was talking to one of the two other people in the room, Docto Leggio who Arnold had called after I agreed to try hypnotism. He was a medical doctor.

"I remember everything," I said, still a little stunned "I was just going along with the joke ... "

Leggio laughed.

"That's the only way to make it work, Mister Smith. You were a good subject. Your memory is excellent."

I looked at Mayer.

"And I told it just the same way, didn't I?"

He nodded, grudgingly.

"We obtained more detail ... but, yes, you never wavered."

The doorbell rang its little five-note theme again. Leggio was shaking hands with me as he got ready to leave, and so was the, other new arrival, who I hadn't talked to at all because she'd arrived while I under and Leggio hadn't asked me to talk to her. She was Frances Schrader, and she had a doctorate in biochemistry and a talent for pencil sketching. Damn, the doctors were getting so thick around that place I could hardly walk.

Leggio and Schrader left, and in came a new fellow lugging some heavy equipment.

While he was opening it and setting it up, Arnold introduced us. The man was Phil Karakov, and he was a polygraph expert.

I sighed, sat down, and let them hook me up.

"I can't shake anything in his story," Karakov said, at last.

Mayer didn't seem to be listening closely. I was feeling relief that I'd passed the lie detector as well as the hypnotic examination, and here was Mayer, gazing out the window at the sun setting over the orchard.

"Thank you, Phil," he said. "I'll let you know what becomes of this."

Karakov packed up his equipment and left. Mayer continued to stare out the window.

Then he picked up the sketch Frances Schrader had made, looked at it, and tossed it to me.

It was very good. Leggio had made me recall things about the stunner that I hadn't been able to get at before. Schrader had worked with me looking over her shoulder, erasing and filling in details as Leggio pressed me to look deeper into my mind. There were two views, one much better than the other. The first showed what I'd seen on the outside. The second showed the inner workings, which I'd only seen for a second before I got zapped. , Mayer seemed finally about to say something, when his trick doorbell rang again. He frowned, got up, and went to the front door. He was back soon.

"No one there," he said. "That's never happened -- "

It rang again. He looked like he'd bit into something sour, but once more he went to the door. He was gone longer this time. While he was gone, the damn thing chimed three more times.

"I looked all around. It must be malfunctioning. I disconnected it, so it shouldn't give us any more It rang again. He was about to say something nasty, when his Edison phonograph started to play. It was some Scottish ditty, scratchy as hell. While we were still staring at that, his hifi came on at full volume with something that must have been Wagner. As he hurried to shut it off, the Xerox machine started to run. It was .spewing paper all over the place. I could see his computer terminal had lit up. All the lights in the house dimmed, then came on very bright.

I was on my feet by then. I wouldn't have been surprised if a fleet of toy cars had come through the kitchen door, followed by a vacuum cleaner. Steve Spielberg, where are you now that we need you? Then every pane in Mayer's glass wall blew out into the vegetable garden.

We were looking down an infinite tunnel.

There was a sound. I'd heard it before: the low rumble as I stood in the hallway outside my hotel room. This time it was much louder. The floor started to shake, and two points of very bright light appeared somewhere along the length of that impossible tunnel.