Tinker moved to the small black cube—about the size of a hatbox—that sat on the floor near one wall. It had a small thumb-shaped depression in one corner, and was integrally pre-set somehow at the factory to 72 degrees. Tinker thumbed the on-spot.
Almost instantly the room began to warm. Soon it was comfortable.
Tinker laid a hand on the heat-blox, still amazed after all these months of use. The device was cool to the touch. It was a monolithic construct, he knew, with no interior structure and no fuel required. No one knew how it worked. There was one or more in nearly every home and office. It was Witkin’s flash.
Tinker lay down on his lumpy, unmade cot. He put his hands behind his head, and stared at the peeling ceiling. He realized that he felt totally unconnected from his own life and the rest of the world. It was a new and disturbing feeling, the total opposite of the flasher experience. It unnerved him, and he began to quiver as he lay there.
Longing for connections of any kind, he decided—in a pale flash that mimicked the ecstasy of synchrogenesis—that tomorrow he would visit Helen.
* * * *
The campus was strangely muted, a tenuous shadow of its old self, like a televised image with sound and contrast turned low.
As Tinker walked across the main quad, he tried to collate all the little changes into a syncretic whole, to establish the invisible, improbable, inevitable connections he had been trained to make.
The old, ivied buildings seemed essentially the same, pompous and infuriatingly calm. Tinker remembered how glad he had been to escape their cloistered embrace, when asked to consult at the fledgling NIS. But there was undeniably something different lurking beneath their surfaces—an aura of fear, as if they quailed at some threat.
Turning a corner, Tinker saw the reason for his intuitions of menace.
A huge geodesic frame had been erected on what was formerly a pleasant greensward. There were no workmen around the completed frame, installing panels in the way one would expect. Instead, the building was being left to grow.
Red quasicrystals had been seeded at the base of the frame. Now they were climbing up the structure in thin fiery sheets that caught the autumnal sunlight and magnified its splendor.
Only a yard or so of crystals was yet in place, but the building already looked alien. When it was finished, Tinker thought, it would resemble a giant carbuncle or roc’s egg. To stand inside it would be to worship in a nonhuman cathedral.
Tinker moved past it, and felt it beating like a dragon’s jeweled heart, sending its pulses through the staid campus. As he walked, he noticed the students.
There were fewer of them, for one thing. The paths seemed half-empty at a time of year when normally students would be rushing from library to party to football game. And those students who were about seemed preternaturally quiet, as if burdened with concerns much larger than final exams or lovers’ squabbles.
Tinker felt his hopes shattering into a million shards. Although he would have denied he had any, he quickly realized that he had nurtured a few with regards to the campus. Subconsciously he had been hoping that he would find here a refuge, an enclave somehow sheltered against the psychic storms sweeping the world. But he knew now, just from seeing the students slouch by, that the seeds of aparadigmatic psychosis had found fallow ground here as well.
Approaching the physics building, Tinker suddenly wondered what condition he would find Helen in. He had not even considered the possibility that she would be different. Although they had parted acrimoniously, she remained a touchstone to his past, and he always contemplated her just as he had last seen her.
Up broad steps and through glass doors into the physics building, Tinker moved swiftly. He found the receptionist—a woman newly hired from his days—at the usual desk.
“Is Professor Tinker in?” he asked.
The woman looked up at Tinker with her pretty features wreathed in puzzlement and alarm. Exhibiting the touchiness and anxiety with which most people greeted anything out of the norm these days, she said, “Who’s that, please? We have no such person on our faculty.”
For a moment, Tinker was taken totally aback, as if a gaping pit had opened beneath his feet, threatening to swallow his past whole. Then he realized his mistake. Helen must be using her maiden name.
“Kenner,” Tinker explained. “I meant Professor Kenner.”
The woman relaxed. “Oh. Let me check.” She consulted a schedule. “Yes, she has office hours now. Shall I announce you?”
“No,” said Tinker. “I’ll knock. Thanks.”
He left the woman and moved down a corridor to a familiar door. It was ajar, and he pushed it open.
Helen was inside, her back to him. She wore a cream-colored blouse and fawn skirt. She was taking books down off a shelf and packing them into a cardboard box. Hearing the door open, she turned.
Marked by more lines than he recalled, Helen’s intimately memorized face was framed by brown hair shot with grey that curled under her sharp jaw. Tinker experienced a pang as he catalogued the changes she had undergone. Stress and worry had left their marks. He wondered if his looks had altered as drastically.
Helen’s face underwent a quick succession of expressions: recognition, amazement, hesitancy, and finally reluctant acceptance. Her jaw tightened, and Tinker watched her fight to relax it. She spoke.
“What are you doing here?”
Tinker laid the most important card on the table right away. “I’ve left the NIS. Or rather, they gave me the boot.”
Helen visibly pondered this a moment, seeming to accept it at face value. Tinker flinched inwardly, expecting her to ask what he had done to get terminated. But he should have known better than to expect Helen to put him on the spot. She simply brushed back her hair with one dusty hand, nodded, and said, “Sit down then. I assume you want to talk about something. I need a cigarette first, though.”
Tinker sat down on a coffee-stained couch, expecting Helen to join him. Apparently, however, she felt compelled to maintain some distance between them yet. She rested her left hip on her desk and her skirt rose higher on her extended leg. Tinker felt a stirring of excitement as he recalled the feel and scent of her body. He wondered if she felt anything similar, after all their years together.
After lighting a cigarette, inhaling deeply, and releasing the smoke like unpent emotions, Helen said, “Jesus, it was a shock to turn and see you like that. I thought you were a ghost.”
An ironic grin tugged Tinker’s lips, as he recalled rumors he had heard toward the and of his time at the Institute. “No, it’s me, Helen. I just felt a need to see you.”
Helen smiled ruefully. “Better late than never, I suppose. Although I don’t recall you expressing any such needs when the NIS beckoned, and it was a choice between them and me.”
Tinker raised his hands placatingly, as if to ward off a physical attack. “Let’s not rehash the past, Helen. I made my motives clear at the time. You know I wanted to stay with you—but my career was at stake.”
Helen puffed smoke in a gauzy cloud. “You were a respected historian, Don. Tops in your field. You didn’t need to get involved with the NIS.”
Tinker sighed. “But I did. It was too big a chance to pass up. I was going to make my name in a way no amount of academic stuff ever could. Imagine advising on the history of technology to the people responsible for revolutionizing our entire method of inventing. If you had been me, you wouldn’t have been able to pass it up either.”