Brad followed the man, who was moving quickly, invigorated, perhaps, by this adventure. The incline grew steeper, the terrain devoid of all vegetation, a moonscape, and Brad thought he'd soon be crawling on his hands and knees. Abruptly, the ground leveled, and he saw Musky, stopped in front of him, back hunched, dirty gray hair shivered by the breeze.
"There's people who would pay a pretty penny to see this," he said, without turning around. Brad reached the man and looked down from the rocky shelf on which they stood. Beneath them, a great dazzling bowl stretched out and down, a curving motherof-pearl expanse, a skateboarder's idea of heaven — or imagine a giant satellite dish, its diameter measured in miles, pressed into the stone. No, it was nothing like anything. He knew he would never be able to describe it.
He felt a sharp, hot ember sear into the flesh immediately above his right eyebrow, brought his hand up quickly, and slapped the insect, crushing it. He opened his fist and looked at the wasp within. Its crumpled body trembled, and it began to vibrate faster and faster, emitting a high-pitched whirrrrr. It exploded in a purple flash that left an after-image in Brad's mind so that, when he turned toward the sound of Musky's voice, part of the man's face was eclipsed by a purple cloud.
"I always bring them up here," he said. "Toth calls 'em and I bring 'em the last lap."
"You brought my wife here?" Brad asked.
"Nope. Just you. She wasn't savory somehow. She had the chemicals in her, and it changed her somehow. Wouldn't do. Mind you, I ain't privy to every decision, I just get a notion sometimes. I think she was poison to it, so it didn't fool with her."
"But it changed her," Brad shouted, filled with fury, intent on killing this traitor to his race.
"It wasn't interested."
Brad's cell phone rang.
"You get good reception up here," Musky said.
Brad tugged the phone out of his pocket, flipped it open.
"Hello?"
"Brad?"
"Meta?"
"Where are you, honey? I've been trying to call you. I've been going crazy. I called the police. I even called Sheriff Winslow, although why —»
Brad could see her standing in the kitchen, holding the wall phone's receiver up to her ear, her eyes red and puffy from crying. He could see her clearly, as though she stood right in front of him; he could count the freckles on her cheeks.
Her tears, the flush in her cheeks, the acceleration of her heart, he saw these things, saw the untenable vascular system, the ephemeral ever-failing creature, designed by the accidents of time.
He was aware that the cell phone had slipped from his fingers and tumbled to the stony ledge and bounced into the bright abyss. He leaned over and watched its descent. Something was moving at the bottom of the glowing pit, a black, twitching insectile something, and as it writhed it grew larger, more spectacularly alive in a way the eye could not map, appendages appearing and disappearing, and always the creature grew larger and its fierce intelligence, its outrageous will and alien, implacable desires, rose in Brad's mind.
He felt a monstrous joy, a dark enlightenment, and wild to embrace his destiny, he flung himself from the ledge and fell toward the father of all universes, where nothing was ever lost, and everything devoured.
Denker's Book
David J. Schow
David J. Schow began publishing short stories in Rod Serling's The Twilight Zone magazine in the 1980s. His first novel, The Kill Riff (Tor), appeared in 1988. In 1990 he published three books: the novel The Shaft (Macdonald) and the story collections Seeing Red (Tor) and Lost Angels (New American Library/Onyx). He has gone on to publish several further collections — Black Leather Required (Ziesing, 1994), Crypt Orchids (Subterranean Press, 1998), Eye (Subterranean Press, 2001), Zombie Jam (Subterranean Press, 2005), and Havoc Swims Jaded (Subterranean Press, 2006), and the novels Bullets of Rain (Morrow, 2003), and Rock Breaks Scissors Cut (Subterranean Press, 2003). Schow is also the author of The Outer Limits Companion (Ace, 1986; rev. ed. GNP Crescendo Records, 1999) and the editor of the anthology Silver Scream (Dark Harvest, 1988).
You will forgive me if my recollections of Denker seem fragmented. I do know that his Nobel Prize was rescinded; that seemed unfair to me, but at the same time I understand the thinking behind it, the dull necessity of the counter-arguments, all the disparate points of view that had to swim together into a public accord in an attempt to salve the outrage.
It used to be held as common superstition that if you paint an interior door in your home with a certain kind of paint, the door might open into another time. The paint was lead-based and longprohibited. In 1934, there were doors like this all over the place. The doors generally had to be facing south. People have forgotten this now.
Chinese horticulturalists discovered that dead pets, buried in a specific pattern around the entryways to houses and gardens, not only seemed to restrict access by spirits, but lengthen daylight by as much as half an hour. Type of animal, number of burials, interment pattern, and even the sexual history of the pet owner all seemed to have modulating effects.
I cite these stories as examples among thousands — the kind of revelations that seem to defy not only physical laws thought to be immutable, but logic itself.
Nevertheless, they took Langford Meyer Denker's Nobel Prize away from him. They — the big, faceless «they» responsible for everything — probably should not have. Denker made the discovery and fathered the breakthrough. «They» claimed Denker cheated; that is, he did not play by strict rules of science. But there are no such things as rules in science; merely observations that are regularly displaced by new, more consolidated observations.
Some said that the dimensional warp door Denker created was real, that it worked. Others held that it was a flashy deception; sleight-of-hand rather than science. Still others maintained that Denker's demonstration was inconclusive. By the time the furor settled, all of them said Denker had cheated. Denker had used the book.
Denker's machine was a gigantic, Gothic clockwork; an Expressionist maze of gears, liquid reservoirs, lasers, and lenses. Lathed brass bins held clumps of humid earth. Common stones were vised by hydraulics in that peculiar way you can squeeze an egg between your palms with all your might and not break it. Particle-emitters were gloved in ancient lead. Imagine a medieval clepsydra wirelessly married to countless yottabytes of computing power and stage-managed by a designer who had been seduced by every mad scientist movie ever made. The containment chamber was made of pitted bronze shot through with rods of chemically pure glass; it weighed several tons and was completely non-aerodynamic, yet Denker claimed that once the whole package was transposed into a realm where earthly physics were irrelevant its properties recombined according to perverse rules to render the device as safe as a pressurized bathysphere or commercial space capsule.
Of course the earliest naysayers called him mad.
I remind you at this point in the story that without a totally arbitrary baseline of normalcy, «insanity» is not possible. (It has been said that normalcy is the majority's form of lunacy, which I suppose explains Christianity.)
Colors can drive people mad. It follows that there are spectra yet unknown to us, flavors and timbres that might catalyze our air, our light, in new and unpredictable ways. "Sounds that were not wholly sounds" — that sort of thing. The scientific community's rebuke of Denker was a denial of the most commonplace protocols of experimentation, but by that time the point was to demonize the man, not disprove the theory.