She had a small key chain, and on its end, a gift a dozen years ago from her ever-practical then-mother-in-law, was a yellow plastic rape whistle.
There had never been a chance to use it—not until it was too late. Oh, she could have blown it after the attack, but …
… but rape was a crime of violence, and she had survived it. A knife had been held to her throat, been pressed against her cheek, and yet she hadn’t been cut, hadn’t been disfigured. But if she’d sounded the alarm, he might have come back, might have killed her.
There was a gentle chime; another elevator had arrived. One of her neighbors would be in the corridor within a second. Mary fumbled the key into the lock, the whistle dangling, and quickly entered her dark apartment.
She hit the switch, the lights came on, and she turned around and closed the door, cranking over the lever that caused the deadbolt to clunk into place.
Mary removed her shoes and passed through the living room, with its peach-colored walls, noting, but not caring, that the red eye on the answering machine was winking at her. She entered her bedroom and took off her clothes—clothes that she knew she would throw out, clothes that she could never wear again, clothes that could never come clean no matter how many times they were washed. She then entered the en suite bathroom, but didn’t turn on the light in there; she made do with the illumination spilling in from the Tiffany lamps on her night tables. She climbed into the shower and, in the semidarkness, she scrubbed and scrubbed and scrubbed until her skin felt raw, and then she got out her heavy flannel pajamas—the ones she saved for the coldest winter nights, the ones that covered her most completely—and she put them on, and she crawled into bed, hugging herself and shivering and crying some more and finally, finally, finally, after hours of trying, falling into a fitful sleep punctuated by dreams of being chased and dreams of fighting and dreams of being cut with knives.
Reuben Montego had never met his ultimate boss, the president of Inco, and the doctor was actually surprised to find he had a listed number. With considerable trepidation, Reuben called him.
Reuben was proud of his employer. Inco had started, like so many Canadian companies, as a subsidiary of an American firm: in 1916, it had been created as the Canadian arm of the International Nickel Company, a New Jersey mining concern. But twelve years later, in 1928, the Canadian subsidiary became the parent company through an exchange of shares.
Inco’s principal mining operations were in and around the meteor crater here in Sudbury where, 1.8 billion years ago, an asteroid between one and three kilometers wide had slammed into the ground at fifteen klicks per second.
Inco’s fortunes rose and fell along with the worldwide demand for nickel; the company provided a third of the world’s supply. But during it all, Inco really did strive to be a good corporate citizen. And when Herbert Chen of the University of California had proposed, in 1984, that the depth of Inco’s Creighton Mine, its low natural radioactivity, and the availability of large amounts of heavy water stockpiled for use in Canada’s CANDU reactors, made Sudbury the ideal location for the world’s most advanced neutrino detector, Inco had enthusiastically agreed to make the site available for free, and to do the additional excavation for the ten-story-tall detector chamber, and the 1,200-meter drift leading to it, at cost.
And although the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory was a joint project of five Canadian universities, two American ones, Oxford, and America’s Los Alamos, Lawrence Berkeley, and Brookhaven National Laboratories, any trespassing charges against this Neanderthal, this Ponter, would have to be laid by the site’s owner. And that was Inco.
“Hello, sir,” Reuben said, when the president answered the phone. “Please forgive me for disturbing you at home. This is Reuben Montego. I’m the site doc—”
“I know who you are,” said the cultured, deep voice.
That flustered Reuben, but he pressed on. “Sir, I’d like you to call the RCMP and tell them that Inco is not going to press any charges against the man found inside the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory.”
“I’m listening.”
“I’ve managed to convince the hospital not to discharge the man. Massive heavy-water ingestion can be fatal, according to the Material Safety Data Sheet. It upsets the osmotic pressure across cell boundaries. Now, the man couldn’t possibly have taken in enough to do real damage, but we’re using that as a pretext to keep him from being discharged. Otherwise, he’d be in the slammer right now.”
“‘The slammer,’” repeated the president, sounding amused.
Reuben felt even more discombobulated. “Anyway, like I said, I don’t think he belongs in prison.”
“Tell me why,” said the voice.
And Reuben did just that.
The president of Inco was a decisive man. “I’ll make the call,” he said.
Ponter was lying on a—well, it was a bed, he supposed, but it wasn’t recessed to be flush with the floor; instead it was raised up by a harsh-looking metal frame. And the pillow was an amorphous bag stuffed with—he wasn’t sure what, but it certainly wasn’t dried pine nuts, like his pillow back home.
The bald man—Ponter had now seen that there was a stubble against his dark scalp, so the baldness must be an affectation, not a congenital condition—had left the room. Ponter had interlaced his fingers behind his own head, giving some firmer support for his skull. It wasn’t rude to Hak. His Companion’s scanners perceived everything within a couple of paces; it only needed its directional lens uncovered when looking at an object outside its scanning range.
“It’s clearly nighttime,” said Ponter, into the air.
“Yes,” said Hak. Ponter could feel the cochlear implants vibrate slightly as his head pressed back against his arms.
“But it’s not dark out. There’s a window in this room, but they seem to have flooded the outdoors with artificial light.”
“I wonder why?” said Hak.
Ponter got up—so strange to dangle one’s feet over the side of the bed in order to rise—and hurried to the window. It was too bright to see stars, but—
“It’s there,” said Ponter, facing his wrist out through the glass so Hak could see.
“That’s Earth’s moon, all right,” said Hak. “And its phase—a waning crescent—is exactly right for today’s date of 148/118/24.”
Ponter shook his head and moved back to the strange, elevated bed. He sat on the edge of it; it was uncomfortable to do so, what with no back support. He then touched the side of his head, which had been bandaged by the man with the wrapped head; Ponter wondered if that man’s bandages were because of a massive head wound of his own. “I hurt my head,” Ponter said, into the air.
“Yes,” replied Hak, “but you saw the deepviews they took of you; there was no serious damage done.”
“But I almost drowned, too.”
“That’s certainly true.”
“So … so maybe my brain was injured. Anoxia, and all that …”
“You think you’re hallucinating?” asked Hak.
“Well,” said Ponter, lifting his right arm, and gesturing at the bizarre room around him, “how else to explain all this?”
Hak was silent for a moment. “If you are hallucinating,” the Companion said, “then my telling you that you are not could just be part of that hallucination. So there’s really no point in me trying to disabuse you of that notion, is there?”
Ponter lay back down on the bed and stared up at the ceiling, which was devoid of timepieces and artwork.
“You really should try to get some sleep,” said Hak. “Maybe things will make more sense in the morning.”
Ponter nodded slightly. “White noise,” he said. Hak complied, playing a soft, soothing hiss through the cochlear implants, but still it seemed to Ponter to be a long time before he fell asleep.
Chapter 9