Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

"Vaporized?" a woman called, and Jim Ash picked her out.

— but the measurable brain power now perfectly spread itself, the technician continued, and came alike from the cell matter that had gone on living as well as from these gaps, these vacancies, these voids with shapes that you had seen before. . these voids. . presumably left by the bomb.

The fugitive technician had rediscovered sheer science. His ruminative pause made Jim Ash and the other defenders at the door turn to look, and this was just long enough for the feds to rush the room. This happened so suddenly that Ash had a moment to get away.

The officers were not interested in him then. The former major’s physician phoned to ascertain Jim’s whereabouts. A medical hardware firm phoned, wanting Ash to see their lab in a remote wooded area of New England; they sounded too nice. One of the six biggest cathedrals in an unidentified eastern European country was reported to have been resolved and absorbed in a test employing American advisers and technicians. More and more survivors were being sequestered because their common problems of adaptation were thought to be best met among their own kind. A woman known to be checking out the links between the breath of survivors and recent changes in weather patterns was visited by Jim Ash, who tried to explain what an early survivor woman had revealed to him — how total-body auras dispersed pure vibration prior to the light of dawn.

Ash at last phoned in to report that two California survivors, who had been about to present to the bridge contractor their plan to replace the Golden Gate Bridge with a force field spread like an airy milk by the energy of people who had been resolved by survival, had suddenly been sequestered. A test on an Austrian concert hall was called off because Ash was reported to be racing there in order to become a survivor, but later a group of heart specialists convening only a stone’s throw from the concert reported that Ash had come and urged them to support the bomb as a cure, whatever it did to the pacemaker industry.

Above the Hungarian pampas an unidentified hovering object was resolved without residue in a test that failed to determine if any aliens or Hungarians had been aboard. Here in the U.S. in areas where homes had been resolved/ subtracted, we arrived at a new clemency of weather. The government investigated a link between this meteorological change and a diminution of wind velocities at what had been the third windiest place in America. Jim Ash was caricatured in the newspapers as a man both hiding out when no one was looking for him and trying to discover the next test site in order at last to become a survivor himself. The Committee for a Sane Bomb advised the President that these unpredictable alterations in the weather were due to the wholesale elimination of building across the continent. A philosopher replied that Memory is the estranged spouse of Prediction. We could not put all these facts together but we knew again that the contemplation of a completed past might yield not just regret but certainty.

The government shut up shop and declared the so-called "People-Oriented Bomb" illegal. We were not clear if the now very great number of survivors sequestered around the world were letting themselves be sequestered or couldn’t help it; and were they affecting the rest of us from their safe distance or not? and was it safe? Widespread information on the dynamics between the extant and the vacant areas of survivors’ brains achieved fabulous proportions. It could now be told that many survivors had disappeared during extended debriefing; they had relatives to prove it. More disappeared than reappeared. One day a man called to say he was the kidnapped major whose landmark pacemaker had been vaporized; he had felt so good after the resolution of his three-story outerwear factory and subsequent debriefing and hilarious X-rays that he had tried to double his luck and had got past the guards claiming to be a physician in attendance. So he had been resolved twice over, and this second time he had had exploded out of his overall person that last anxious urge to maintain his body as constant evidence of the past and assurance of the future. Thus, he had found he could suck by means of a quickened circulatory system all of himself into those new gaps of brain vacancy that this charge, so curiously equal in distribution, disguised as regular cells. But he did not take to invisibility and was glad of it only since it had helped him escape his kidnapper-torturers who were prepared to impose old-fashioned nuclear blackmail upon a major city to be named later even though everyone knew the government would not buckle under.

When we spoke of Mara’s love for Jim Ash, we knew it was the truth. Her two loves, really. We remembered the first, who had died of excess charge and died at dawn. Jim, then, had been the second love, but it was the two men together who were the love of Mara’s life. And Jim she had loved too much to attach him to herself. He must remain outside the company of survivors. This was a familiar issue. Had the sexton called forth by his thought about clothes the new added capability of the People-Oriented Bomb, or had the potential in the bomb caused him to think the thought that proved to be prediction? Likewise, Jim had often said he wanted no part of survival and would rather be himself, as long as he had all his faculties and, if it wasn’t asking too much, his limbs and principal appurtenances, and would rather from his limited angle look at these people and the powers which survival gave them — and here the former major was saying Mara had wanted this for Jim, perhaps destined it for him.

In his absence Ash was being discussed. He became the current history he had been unwilling to sum up. Why didn’t he get back in touch? He was dead, if that was possible. He was sequestered. He had been put to sleep, or we had. Wherever he was, information from anonymous sources kept reaching our news bank first. At perhaps the birthplace of wind power where Nile boats translate taut sails into authentic motion, a fugitive archaeologist discovered in the inmost burial chamber of the one pyramid not yet leveled both the formula for the pyramids and the original plans for the Parthenon, which had recently fallen apart in gratuitous sympathy with what was going on. The archaeologist disappeared — twice-resolved, sequestered, or stowed away.

Mara had told Jim that blast preceded flair. The flair, of course, for controlled personal descent but also for concentrating upon the buoyancy-choice locus both between the eyes and between the ears. Yet who had given the outerwear employees the last-minute order to concentrate on this locus? It was an order that became standard in later tests. Jim himself had tried concentrating on this locus. It helped him forget a whole lot of what he didn’t much want to know. But when he had gone hang-gliding off a two-thousand-foot ledge during an energy trip to Vermont, he had felt it was the wings and not some subcerebral buoyancy that held him up. But we knew in our banks that he had never been the same after Mara confided in him that day in Biomorph Valley. The test at the jojoba ranch had left her with a white rim beginning to grow around her head and the knowledge that if she kept changing she might have the dubious chance to go on living indefinitely. The radiance given off of her and the other survivors would be measured, she predicted, but its source, no. What had been cleared away in her left room for motion; but the motion was a growth form of what had done the clearing; and the life she now held in her was wholly in the motion between what had stayed and the new gaps. These were partly in the flesh of her head and her calves and her waters, and were partly the activity freed as if unknown hopes had become space.