Russell Hoban - Fremder

‘Heale never forgave her for winning that prize. As soon as she was appointed Head of Project Review she went through Helen’s file, saw some references to Elijah, got curious, and came over to investigate. Heale got a lot of pleasure out of that — you could almost see her flicking her boot with a riding crop while she interrogated Helen.

‘Helen told her those Elijah ideas had never gone anywhere and Heale told her to try again and to keep in touch. Helen said she’d see what she could do. “Jewish brains they can always use,” she said to me later. “One of these days they’ll find a way to separate the Jew brains from the Jew bodies and that’ll be The Final Solution.”

‘“What will they do with the brains?” I said.

‘“They’ll transplant them into the top goyim,” she said, “which of course will make them think Jewish. So maybe the whole thing’s a Jewish plot.”’ Sixe shook his head.

‘From then on,’ he continued, ‘we worked on Elijah day and night. But we kept double books — the blackboards and diagrams anybody would see on a surprise visit weren’t the real thing. The idea was to make the jump before they knew where we were with it.’

‘The two of you were going to do it.’

‘That’s right; she couldn’t find anyone better so I was invited.’

‘But you talk about making the jump the way bank robbers in films talk about getting away to Rio. Were you expecting a completely different world where all of your troubles would be left behind or what?’

‘It’s hard to tell you how it was without sounding stupid and maybe we were stupid. And maybe your mother was crazy but it was a world-class craziness if you know what I mean — she could have told me the moon was made of green cheese and I’d have believed her because somehow she’d have made it seem believable. And what happens when you get caught up in an idea like that — it expands to take in everything, it becomes the answer to all your problems even though you know better.’

‘How close were you to doing it?’

‘Pretty close. The preliminary calculations were easy enough. The hard part came after we got the WPR figures from Lossiter. It took quite a long time and a lot of models to work out the phase-scaling fractal and sync it up: if Being is B and Non-Phase is NP, then all we had to do was make B/NP jump WPR which isn’t any harder than jumping over yourself but as far as we knew it hadn’t ever been done and it took us a while to figure it out. We were going to use oscillator implants similar to the ones for flicker drive. The difficulty was in scaling the input for the phase jump and of course there was the matter of the implants. Helen had authority to call in medical personnel but once she used it they’d be on to us. We were under surveillance but through the old family network she was able to find a neurosurgeon who said she’d do it whenever we had the oscillators ready.’

‘Let me get this straight — you were going to use the oscillators with a VMET?’

‘That’s right, but instead of transmitting ourselves to a distant point we were going to collapse our wave function into another world.’

‘ Your wave function? Wasn’t all the rest of the world included in that same wave function?’

‘That’s what I said to Helen and she said the rest of the world would have to take its chance. She used to sit there at her computer working up equations and diagrams and singing under her breath while she played Bach’s Art of Fugue over and over on the audio beam. The words she sang were always the same: “I will tell you what I will do …” Just those words over and over again to that Bach tune that kept repeating itself. It was spooky.’

‘I can’t place the words.’

‘Isaiah, Chapter Five, Verse Five:

And now come, I will tell you

What I will do with my vineyard:

I will take away the hedge thereof,

And it shall be eaten up;

I will break down the fence thereof,

And it shall be trodden down;…

‘Verse Six begins:

And I will lay it waste …’

‘That must have been a little worrying.’

‘It was, and when she wasn’t doing her Art of Fugue thing she’d be playing a recording of Mendelsohn’s Elijah which isn’t exactly a knees-up either. She said to me, “Listen to how Elijah out of nowhere jumps in and says how it’s going to be.” The recording was in German and she translated the opening words for me, First Kings, Seventeen, One:

As truly as the Lord, the God of Israel, lives,

before whom I stand, there shall these years

neither dew nor rain come unless I say so.

‘I said to her, “What is it with you and this no-rain business? Has there been a long drought in your life lately?”

‘She ignored that. Sometimes she talked about sex in a very common way and other times she acted as if she had nothing between her legs but four thousand years of history. She said, “You’ll notice that he says ‘before whom I stand’. He’s letting Ahab know straightaway where he stands with his Baal rubbish. Ahab is a Jew too and he knows Elijah has him by the balls, he knows he’s in big trouble.’

‘I said, “The chorus sound like Gentiles.”

‘She said, “Choruses always sound like Gentiles; what I’m saying is that the spirit of Elijah possessed the spirit of Mendelssohn when he was putting down the notes on paper. And it’s possessing me as I do my equations.’

‘I said, “OK, any possessor of yours is a possessor of mine.”

‘“Not unless you get circumcised,” she said. She was high on Elijah. I think one of the reasons she liked me was that I was hairy like him.

‘By the middle of September 2022 we had a computer model that worked and Helen wanted to wire the oscillators and get them implanted and have a go. I wanted to run the model against a list of “What if?” parameters which would have taken a few more days to evaluate. She said why not a test run. With what? I wanted to know. She said, “I don’t really care a rat’s arse, so why not a rat?”

‘I still wasn’t altogether happy with the numbers and I didn’t feel too comfortable with the whole thing. I said, “Let’s wait a little — at least until we’ve run all the what ifs. Even if we do it with a flea we could change the whole universe.”

‘“Big deal,” she said. “Who’s going to notice a rat-sized change?”’

‘I said, “How can we know it’ll only be a rat-sized change? Mightn’t the rat take everything else with it?” But she was the one who made the decisions, I was only a kind of kept man, never her equal. So we did it with a rat.’

‘ Do you think she was crazy? Really crazy, I mean.’

‘What does crazy mean? Crazy is anything different from what the majority think isn’t crazy. Your mother was never with the majority.

‘We always had lab rats around and we had a small VMET we used for parcels. I limited the field to the rat’s cage and checked the shielding to make sure the rest of the room was safe from flare. I did an EEG to get the frequency of the rat’s carrier wave, then I scaled down the phase input figures to that output and printed up an oscillator.

‘It was a male rat, a Delta Three laboratory strain. I anaesthetised him and shaved his head. Helen drilled a hole in his skull and implanted the oscillator which was smaller than the head of a pin. While she was doing that I ran the phase input figures again to be sure they checked out. They did. The first part of the procedure was the same as flicker drive: switching on the VMET would activate the oscillator and phase the rat to M-waves. Then a second signal from a hand transmitter would jump the rat to a parallel phase and presumably another world.