“We are not coming in here blind,” said Braxia smoothly. “We know your Professor Coombs’ work. She is passionate, stubborn. We like that, we understand that.”
“I think it goes somewhat beyond that,” I said. “Alice’s feeling is that we’re past traditional approaches here. That this is more along the lines of, say, alien contact, first contact, and that we ought to have a heightened sensitivity to, uh, anthropological or exobiological concerns. I think she’s likely to object to a strenuously hard-physics approach at this point. Speaking as her representative here.”
I was winging it. Stalling. But if Soft wanted to come between Alice and Lack, did I really want to stand in the way? My wishes and hers weren’t necessarily one and the same.
Carmo Braxia stretched back in his seat, and crossed his leg over his knee. “My dear fellow. It’s extraordinary to me that you would oppose an exercise of the basic scientific rigorousness that the situation is demanding. Just, for example, setting up a sonar or light beam to try and bounce a signal off the interior surface of this Lack. No damage is risked. Why has this not been attempted?”
“I’m afraid he’s right, Philip. There’s a basic threshold of responsibility here. We’re currently below it.”
“Perhaps there is a corresponding Lack, an out-hole,” suggested Braxia excitedly. “Undiscovered somewhere. Spewing out the junk you push into your end here. In some third-world nation perhaps. Hah! Very American.”
“Professor Coombs will have her time,” said Soft. “She’ll have plenty of chances to vindicate her theories. We’re all going to stay open and receptive. We’ll all pursue our own conclusions. At some point the teams will converge on the actual truth. We’ll know what we’re looking at here.”
“Results,” said Braxia gravely.
“And so you need my help with Alice,” I said.
Soft winced again. He wanted me to call her Professor Coombs. “More than that,” he said. “We’re inviting your presence. Work closely with Professor Coombs, with Carmo and the Italians, with myself, and look for correspondences we’re missing. Things we’re too close to see. Your kind of thing. And use your influence to keep Professor Coombs on an even keel. Focused, but not … obsessive.”
Braxia had pulled a tuft of stuffing out of the torn arm of his chair and was holding it up quizzically to the light.
“What if I were to submit a competing claim for time,” I said, improvising. “Representing, say, the concerns of the interdisciplinary faction. Sociological, psychological, even literary concerns. I’d represent the community of the bewildered, the excluded. I think yesterday’s demonstration proves the existence of my constituency. Would that be compatible with your time-share format?”
Soft looked like he was trying to swallow his Adam’s apple. “I see no problem there,” he managed to say. “Put in your claim. We’ll run it through the usual review process.”
“What’s important, my dear fellow, is that we get some physics done. We understand your Professor Coombs is feeling unwell. We extend our best wishes. Until she is ready to utilize her time we propose to offer a further exchange.” Braxia rustled in his pockets, pulled out a single folded sheet, and opened it. “For every additional weekly hour past the initial allotment,” he read, “one additional square foot of observation space in the Pisa facility. After an additional ten hours weekly, the rate changes to six additional inches per additional square hour.”
“I don’t think Alice will consider any concessions.”
“Here.” Braxia handed me the paper. “You will have our offer at hand. That is all I ask. The exchange is no concession. We have a very desirable facility—ask Soft. Four thousand events per run. A very nice machine. Explain it to him, Soft.”
“They have a very nice machine,” said Soft. “The envy of the international community.”
“Not anymore,” I said.
19
Soft had Lack’s chamber sealed off during the reorganization, leaving Alice to founder in the apartment. She never went out. I would come home to find her dazedly channel-surfing, or stirring a can of condensed chowder to life on the stove, or fallen asleep on the couch, a notepad clutched to her chest, pages blank. We didn’t talk. We avoided each other. I slept on the couch and was awake and out of the house before she even stirred. She and the blind men dined together, I ate separately. The apartment was a museum of unspoken words.
Finals were faintly visible on the event horizon, and students began making pilgrimages to my office to ask about their status, negotiate extra-credit assignments, beg extensions on work already due, or plead for outright mercy. I started pinning notes to my door. I employed the uncertainty principle, offered only fleeting glimpses of my trajectory. The coffee machine, second floor, between three-fifteen and three-twenty, Wednesday. Walking across the east lawn toward the parking lot, eleven-forty-five, Monday. With correction fluid I shortened my phone number in the posted directories to six digits.
The Italian team appeared, led by Braxia. They took over a table in the far corner of the faculty cafeteria, chattering in the incomprehensible double language of Italian and Physics. Lackwatch vanished, or was suppressed. Soft’s stature was restored. He could again be seen striding through hallways like a comet with a tail of students, his brow knit, his finger cutting a swath through the air.
That morning forest fires to the north produced a carpet of ash that reddened the skies. The sun glowed orange in the east, an eerie morning sunset. The gray flecks settled in a fine coat over windshields, automatic teller machines, and public art. The entire day was dusk. When night finally came it was like a benediction.
In the parking lot after the day’s class, the flakes still falling like snow, I felt oddly peaceful. I thought of Alice and the blind men affectionately. Forgivingly. I decided to drive home and share a meal with them, instead of going to a restaurant. So I drove to a liquor store, the flakes lit like movie-theater smoke in the beam of my headlights, and bought a bottle of red wine as evidence of my good intentions.
But when I jogged up the porch steps and went inside I found the blind men in a tizzy. Alice had left the apartment, for the first time since Soft’s rescue.
“She was supposed to be here,” Evan said. They were both dressed up in their jackets and hats. Their canes were ready. They wore expressions of exaggerated dismay, jaws clenched, noses wrinkled. “She said she’d drive us. And now she isn’t even here.”
“Where’d she go?” I said, confused. “Drive you where?”
“Therapy,” said Evan.
“Huh,” said Garth. “If we knew where she was she’d be here, and we’d be gone already. You wouldn’t be talking to us.”
“She said, ‘I’ll see you back here at five-thirty.’ ” said Evan. “ ‘I’ll give you a lift.’ Her exact words. It is five-thirty, isn’t it?”
Garth smacked at his watch. “Five-forty-seven.”
“That’s seventeen minutes late,” Evan pointed out, his voice rising. “It is Thursday, isn’t it?”
I stood holding my bottle of wine.
“My watch could be wrong,” Garth mused. “But it’s certainly Thursday. That much I know.”
Evan felt at his watch. They were going to conduct a survey of all tangible objects and irrefutable facts at hand. I stepped in.
“Oh, look,” I lied. “Note on the refrigerator.” I craned my neck and squinted, pretending to read from a distance, fooling some invisible spectator. “ ‘Philip,’ ” I pretended to quote, “ ‘will you give E. and G. lift? Emergency meeting. Don’t worry. Alice.’ So there’s your answer. Don’t worry. I’ll drive you.”