Песах Амнуэль - Zion's Fiction - A Treasury of Israeli Speculative Literature

“Yair, what have you done?” she screamed.

“What happened?” Galia asked from the bedroom.

“Call an ambulance, quick!” Rina called. She opened the medicine cabinet and searched for the inhaler. It was supposed to be there, but she couldn’t find it.

“Hurry, he’s having an attack,” she screamed.

“I’m dialing.”

“Yair, what did you do with the inhaler?”

She started tossing out the entire contents of the medicine cabinet.

“Where is the inhaler?”

Galina walked into the bathroom dressed in the robe.

“The ambulance is on its way,” she said. “Rina, he’s not breathing!”

Rina looked down and saw that Yair’s chest was not moving.

“Yair, breathe!” She kneeled beside him and put her fingers on his main artery.

“He’s still got a pulse. Do you know CPR?” she asked.

Galia bit her lip.

“Please,” Rina pleaded.

Galia knelt down and started performing CPR. Rina continued to fumble through the cupboard. This time she found the inhaler. “Got it,” she said. She shook it and handed it to Galia, who pushed it into Yair’s mouth and pressed twice.

They went with the ambulance to the hospital. The paramedics already managed to steady his breathing, but he did not wake up. The doctor in the emergency room was not optimistic. His experience taught him that people who developed such an acute allergic reaction to the medicine either died or went into a coma from which they never woke up. Rina was sobbing on the bench outside the emergency room. Galia sat next to her and put her arm around her shoulders.

“This is all my fault,” she said.

Rina wanted to say that it was not true, that it wasn’t her fault, but she cried so hard she could not talk.

“I pushed him into it,” Galia went on in a shaking voice. “I knew he wasn’t doing this to me on purpose. I shouldn’t have talked like that.”

Rina kept crying. Galia stood up. She went to the nurses’ station and talked with them for a while. Then she brought a cup of water from the nearby water fountain.

“Drink,” she told Rina. “You have to drink.”

Rina took the cup from her hand and forced herself to sip a little. The water was cold and made her cough.

“It wasn’t your fault,” she said. “He was probably desperate because….” Her sobs took over again, and she could not complete the sentence. She rubbed her eyes, which started to burn from the tears. Galia hugged her shoulders.

“I asked the nurses to let the police know that I’m here, to explain what happened,” she said. “They’ll probably be here any minute now to take me away, but the minute they let me go, I’ll come right back to help you, okay?”

One of the nurses went up to them to let them know there was no news. Yair was unconscious and the doctors said that these were the familiar symptoms of the coma. They were getting ready to transfer him into a ward. She promised to let them know when the transfer would be done.

Two policewomen approached her.

“Galia Kena’an?” asked one of them.

“Yes, it’s me,” Galia sighed. “The doctors will issue a permit that states that this was a Dreaming accident and that I didn’t break out of custody. The man who’s responsible tried to commit suicide, and he’s hospitalized now.”

“We know,” said the officer. “But we still need to get you back into custody. They’ll let you out today.”

“Can’t we wait a little with this?” asked Galia. “This is his wife. I can’t leave her like this.”

One of the officers sat down next to them. The other went into the emergency room.

“Would you like some more water?” Galia asked Rina.

Rina nodded. Galia stood up and started to walk towards the water tank. Then she vanished.

The cop called out.

Rina fell silent. They heard the screams coming from the emergency room. They looked at each other and then stormed into the hall. On Yair’s bed, Galia was sitting naked again and calling out for help. She tried to climb off the bed, but the invisible barrier blocked her. The medical staff started to gather around her.

Rina ran forward and started to shake Yair.

“Yair, Wake up!”

His head tossed from side to side, but his eyes did not open. Galia threw herself at the invisible barrier. She screamed with all her might. The doctors, the nurses, the cops and the patients, all stood and watched the spectacle.

“Yair, wake up!” Rina begged. “Please, wake up! Wake up! Wake up!”

In retrospect, Tommy knew his suspicions should have been aroused from the very beginning. The deliveryman did not have the respectable appearance of an official representative of World Wide Puzzles and Riddles Organization. The hovercraft that conveyed him, despite the display of the well-known logo, was also rickety and dilapidated. But the most glaring of oddities was the fact that the package was delivered two minutes too early—something strictly forbidden by the rules of the competition. In their haste and enthusiasm they never gave this infraction a second thought and just blessed their good fortune in having those two extra, illegal minutes to try to complete the puzzle. And they opened the package, thereby instigating the sequence of events they could never have foreseen.

The very fact that the package had been delivered to the Lintons’ home was no trivial event. It was one of the hundred packages sent to the finalists of the 2137 World Puzzle Championship, and indeed, just qualifying for it evoked high esteem in itself. The entire population of the little township of Cape Cass was proud that three local children had made it to the finals of the most prestigious competition in the world. A lengthy article, including a large picture of the three, appeared on the front page of the Cape Cass Gazette, and the media had at least one item on them every day for the past month.

It was the second occasion that Tommy, David, and Lily Linton had appeared in the press, the first being about a year earlier, when they surprised the world by finishing second in the Youth Open Tournament. This was quite a sensation, as it was the first time ever that the New York, San Francisco, or London teams, the so-called brain tanks, had failed to walk off with the top three prizes. Furthermore, the Lintons missed first prize by a mere thirty seconds. Everyone joined in the wave of adulation for the modern-day Cinderella story, wherein regular kids (albeit very talented) succeeded in outshining teams of certified geniuses of the highest order. The teams in the first three places were eligible for entering the world adult championship, thus placing the children among the elite group of one hundred competitors for the coveted title of World Puzzle Champion.

The contest pitted groups of geniuses, three members to a group, against each other, somewhat akin to the chess championships of a century ago (which lost much of their popularity due to the advent of simple computer programs that could easily beat any grand master). The challenges provided by Professor—the organization’s computer—could be approached only by teams of exceptionally brilliant solvers equipped with advanced accessories and appliances. The sealed boxes, each containing exactly twenty thousand pieces, did not contain a picture or model of what should be constructed out of these fragments. The competitors were expected to derive the method of assembling the pieces and create a three-dimensional replica of an image or scene designed by Professor. This replica could rise to a man’s height, and its base diameter could be twice as long. It could depict any random idea that Professor might have had at the moment of creation; a wild lunar landscape and a bustling city scene were two of the subjects used by Professor in previous contests.