Shuteye for the Timebroker Page 9

  And to the souls of the passengers?

  Suddenly, without warning, my perceptions of the scene flipped ninety degrees. The tunnel, instead of being horizontal, became vertical.

  It was an endless pit. And we were plunging straight down it.

  I witnessed our heart-stopping fall for countless seconds, sweat beading my brow, my pulse racing. My hand clutching the handle of my briefcase ached.

  A portion of the tunnel on both sides suddenly flared brightly, and I knew we were pulling into another station. The spell began to lift. But for a long moment I saw the station as a vertical slice of the pit, all the people hanging at right angles to gravity’s inexorable pull.

  I yanked back at last from the window with an involuntary grunt as the train pulled completely into the station and the illusion shattered. My palms were wet and my heart was pounding. Still the girl stood by the door, apparently unfazed by—if she had indeed shared—my dizzy vision.

  I waited for other passengers to board the train so that I could shuck off the responsibility for this girl onto them.

  But no one dared step in with me.

  The doors rattled shut.

  We pulled out, acceleration tugging my limbs like an angry demon.

  The girl was—looking?—at me again. The lower portion of her features was wreathed with mixed puzzlement and anger.

  “Why underground?” she demanded.

  “What?”

  “Why did they have to build these damn tracks underground?” she nearly yelled. Her lowered hands were balled into fists. “Why couldn’t they have left them out in the sun and air, out with the living?”

  “Well,” I said, my voice sounding much too sane for the circumstances, “some of the tracks are aboveground. You know that, I’m sure. But as for the rest—it saves valuable space to bury them.”

  Even to my ears this explanation sounded lame and inane. To her, in her crazed condition—and by now I was beginning to feel reluctantly convinced that whatever my initial estimation, she was indeed crazy—my words must have sounded positively insulting.

  “So it saves space,” she shouted above the noise of the train’s swift rush. “Is that the most important thing? Cremating the dead saves space, but mostly we bury them, don’t we?” That rough bark escaped her throat again. “Oh, yes, we bury them, although they don’t always rest easy, even with such a blanket,”

  Now I definitely felt that it was useless to continue to try to help this girl. She was beyond any aid I could render. I made as if to move away.

  She laid a hand on my arm.

  Through suit jacket and shirtsleeve, it felt cold as her hip.

  I found I couldn’t leave.

  Her goggled insect eyes fixing me, she said:

  “I want to feel the breeze once more. Open the door for me.”

  I wanted desperately to say no. I struggled to. But it was beyond me.

  Instead I found my free hand moving toward the latch.

  I pulled the latch up and back.

  The front door of the front car slid back like the well-oiled jaw of a snake.

  A wind that stank of decay and piss, of grease and electricity, flooded into the car. It caressed us like a skeletal lover.

  “Step out with me,” she said. “It’s easy—I’ve done it before.”

  I did.

  Out on the tiny rocking platform everything happened both fast and slow.

  The driver saw us through his window. His face cracked in amazement and he brought a walkie-talkie to his lips.

  The girl—still gripping my arm—reached up to her face and removed her glasses.

  She had no eyes. Where they should have been were only two pools of underground blackness.

  “Come with me,” she said.

  Then she jumped.

  But she never screamed.

  Her grip on my arm, before it came loose, upset my balance. I came up hard against the chains and the top two snapped. I let go of my briefcase and it fell beneath the wheels of the train. The lower two chains caught me in the back of the knees. I started to topple over and out, following my briefcase down.

  My flailing hands found one of the thin poles that supported the chains and clamped on. I kept falling. My right leg swung out to dangle in midair in front of the train. My left leg got snared in the chains, both the ones that had broken and the ones that remained.

  Hanging like some obscure figurehead, I kept my eyes shut as the train slowed.

  At last it stopped.

  When I was done talking with the cops and transit officials, they let me go out into the daylight and fresh air. They were still looking for the body of the girl.

  Outside I blinked wetly and looked around like one reborn. The familiar street scene struck me like some new paradise.

  There was a newsstand at my elbow. The daily tabloids were propped up so passersby could see the headlines. Automatically I read them:

  COED IN MIDNIGHT SUBWAY SUICIDE

  I had a moment of supreme disorientation, as I imagined that what I had just lived through had already been miraculously digested and excreted by the media. But when I bought a copy and read the story, I knew that it was only a coincidence. The incident the papers referred to had happened as I slept. I realized then that that was what one of the cops had meant when he muttered something about “another one.”

  I went off to work, outwardly normal but inside strangely numb after what that had happened. All day I listened to the radio, expecting each minute to hear that the authorities had found the second girl’s corpse.

  But when I saw the first girl’s picture on the six o’clock news that night, I knew they never would.

  As I recall, this story owes its inception to my reading of Jack Williamson’s great story from 1930, “The Cosmic Express.” In Williamson’s tale, two ultracivilized decadents end up at the mercy of nature in their quest for a more “primitive” existence. The same essential riff informs my tale as well. But whereas Williamson’s protagonists are able to fall back on their wits and educated sensibilities, I saw fit to tamper with that mental refuge, trying to amp up the terror.

  Going Abo

  “I really need to get away from all this.” Brian used his full glass of fine white wine to indicate with a broad sweep the whole scene around them.

  Cindy Rose looked up from the prime rib and vegetables on her plate. Usually she ignored Brian’s penchant for melodrama. But tonight was different. She could tell by his tone that he was unusually serious.

  Across the room the waiters moved with elegance and precision. Fellow diners chatted wittily. Crystal and china chimed. Chandelier light fell buttery on wainscoting and wallpaper.

  Deliberately choosing to misconstrue her husband, Cindy Rose said, “What’s wrong with this place? I thought it was your favorite restaurant.”

  “You know perfectly well that it’s not just the restaurant I’m talking about. It’s everything. Work. The city. Civilization.”

  “That’s a lot to escape.”

  “With good reason. I’m really feeling burnt.”

  Cindy Rose sipped at her own wine. “I suppose this means you’ll want to go camping again.”

  “Camping is OK. I know you weren’t crazy about it. But it’s the closest I’ve ever come to forgetting my responsibilities. Yet it’s still not enough. With these new satellite phones, the office can reach you in the middle of Yosemite or the Yukon, for God’s sake. And you’re made to feel practically unpatriotic if you leave the unit at home. ‘What if there’s a family emergency?’ ‘What if negotiations fail?’ ‘What if the market plunges?’ Jesus, I know all those things are important and affect my future. But they’re precisely what I want to leave behind!”

  “You could forget all those things right here in the city, without leaving the apartment, if you only knew how to relax.”

  “Easy enough for you to say. Your job is low-stress.”

  “Yours could be, too. If you let it.”

  Brian threw
his linen napkin on the table. “Let’s quit comparing angst. I’m determined to take some serious time off. But I’m not going to waste my vacation the same way we always do. I’m going to find a really unique place, somewhere that offers total escape from this twenty-first-century morass.”

  “Good luck.”

  “Oh, I’ll find it, believe me. And despite your jeers, you’re still welcome to come along when I do.”

  Cindy Rose stabbed the meat on her plate and began to saw it. “Don’t I always end up going with you?”

  She did not add, Whether I want to or not.

  * * *

  “No harmful side effects? None at all?”

  The travel agent regarded Cindy Rose with a complacent look that radiated complete confidence. “You’re free to consult any of our past customers. They’ll all assure you that the drug acts just as I’ve stipulated. The FDA is not in the habit of approving dangerous substances for recreational use. And the AMA endorses Devotemp without any reservations. It’s all here in the brochure, including file codes to download further information. You can even access the molecular formula for Devotemp if you wish.”

  Cindy Rose snorted. “Not that I could understand it.”

  Brian was growing impatient. “What’s the trouble, Cindy? Either you assume the man knows what he’s talking about and is telling us the truth, or else he and everyone else connected with this program is lying. For my part, I buy it. It’s just what I’ve been looking for.”

  The travel agent spread his hands in an attitude of openness. “Thousands of satisfied devolutionists are our best advertisement. As I mentioned, you can speak to any of them.”

  “We already have,” said Brian. “That’s how we learned about your trip.”

  “Hmph. Janet and Peter. Hardly the smartest people in the world to begin with. It would be hard to tell whether they’d come back from the trip or not.”

  “Ignore her. I trust that the drug will work as you say. I want to hear more about the physical aspects of the vacation.”

  Fanning out several glossy leaflets, the travel agent dove deeper into his spiel. “Devotemp Incorporated leases several thousand square miles from four different cooperative Third World governments. The locations of these preserves are kept secret, even from our customers, in order to frustrate trespass or intervention from the curious or the malicious. Each preserve features a different motif. Rain forest, savannah, Polynesian, or semi-arid. The vacation zones are telemonitored twenty-four hours a day by a trained staff alert for any possible large- magnitude inconveniences to the customers.”

  Cindy Rose interrupted. “So much for escaping modern gadgets, Brian. It sounds like a high-tech concentration camp. And what’s ‘large-magnitude inconveniences’? It wouldn’t be a synonym for something harmful or, perish the thought, even fatal, would it?”

  Now the travel agent looked a little nervous. “To provide the realistic ambiance which our psychological staff insists offers the most cathartic possibilities for the Devotemp user, the preserves are essentially wild and unregulated ecosystems. So, yes, bodily harm is possible, and accidents might happen. But the same is true of, say, a snorkeling vacation in the Caribbean, a hundred yards offshore. Not to mention the streets you walk down every day. In fact, statistics show that the average urban environment is a thousand times more deadly than one of our preserves.”

  “A little risk is just what’s missing from our lives, Cindy. C’mon, what’s the matter? Don’t you have any adventurous bones in your body?”

  “Yes, and that’s just where I’d prefer to keep them.”

  The travel agent focused on Brian. “I can guarantee you that a Devotemp vacation is like nothing you’ve ever experienced before. You’ll return with your psyches fully soothed and reintegrated. As our slogan goes, ‘It’s like visiting Eden.’”

  “I never looked good in snakeskin.”

  Ignoring his wife’s gibe, Brian took out a pen. “Where do we sign?”

  * * *

  The copter stuttered off into the cloudless African sky. In the end, with Cindy Rose sighing as she signed, they had chosen the savannah preserve. A patch of thorny, scraggly trees surrounding a watering hole had been the landmark to which they had been delivered, after a long transatlantic flight deliberately shrouded in an atmosphere Cindy Rose could only compare to a cheap “mystery-theater dinner” production.

  Rubbing an arm still sore from vaccinations, Cindy Rose watched their transportation disappear with a feeling of utter desolation. Then she turned to her husband, who was busy fooling with the supplies that were part of the Devotemp vacation package.

  “Before we get stupid, Brian, I just want you to know that I’ll never really forgive you for this.”

  Brian was wrestling with a tall, slim unit that vaguely resembled the traditional Christmas tree packaged in fishnet to confine its branches. Finally, he managed to trigger a catch somewhere inside it. The unit popped open, and internal aluminum rods unfolded and locked into position, resulting in what appeared from the outside to be a crude handmade hut or tepee of plastic palm fronds.

  Standing back and surveying the shelter with evident satisfaction, Brian addressed Cindy Rose without looking at her. “I don’t believe that, dear. I think that after this week, you’ll be glad I talked you into this adventure.”

  “If that should ever be true—which I very much doubt—it won’t be because of these new clothes you bought us.”

  Cindy Rose fingered the hem of her outfit with distaste.

  They man and woman were dressed in authentically ill-cured skins from which bits of noisome gristle still hung. Hers was a cheetah shift; his a zebra loincloth. There were also fur capes provided against the evening chill. The barbaric clothes were theirs to keep afterward—at a price, of course—as souvenirs of their week in the prehistoric past.

  Their only other adornments were transponder patches pasted to their skin behind their left ears.

  Cindy Rose was grateful for the comforting steady throb emitted by the microcircuitry of her patch. It felt like civilization.

  Brian faced his wife. “You look beautiful. Admit it. Doesn’t it feel good to leave all your makeup and pantyhose behind?”

  Cindy Rose regarded Brian as if she had never seen him before. “Judging by the stupidity of that remark, the drug must’ve started working in you already.”

  With a hurt look on his face, Brian said, “I’ve told you a dozen times. Devotemp doesn’t make you ‘stupid.’ And it’s not going to hit us all at once, either. Because it’s time-encapsulated, it’ll trickle into our systems slowly, so that we have a chance to adjust to it. The effect will be cumulative, until the last day. By then we should be thinking just like our remote ancestors.”

  “I hope I’m not as dumb as your father was on the day he decided to have you.”

  Brian scowled. “Our primitive ancestors were not exactly dumb, dear. They survived for hundreds of thousands of years under the challenging conditions we’re going to face. I admit that certain parts of their brain were less developed than ours. The so-called higher centers. Though I can’t say what good those extra bits really do, looking at the way we live today. But other parts of their brains were perhaps even more sophisticated than what we inherited. The parts for processing sensory input, or sensing the passage of time, for example. The reptilian brain dominated. All of this is what Devotemp is supposed to simulate in us.”

  Cindy Rose curved her spine and scratched under an armpit, hopping and chittering like a chimp.

  “Oh, just forget being sensible then.” Brian returned to unpacking their supplies. “They told us to make sure everything was out of the containers before we forgot how to open them.”

  Straightening, Cindy Rose staggered a bit; she was off-balance and felt all at once all over odd. Her vision seemed to sparkle at the edges.

  “Don’t worry,” she said, frowning. “I’m forgetting all right.”

  * * *

  Their patches woke them
by dying.

  That first night they had eaten a semicharred yet still tasty supper, watched a beautiful equatorial sunset, and seen the multitude of stars emerge. Brian had added the Everglo element to the fire to insure that it would remain permanently burning throughout their big forgetting, and they had retired to the hut.

  Unfamiliar, majestic animal noises had provided an organic symphony to their satisfying lovemaking. Afterward, in the shelter, covered with the furs, holding Brian, Cindy Rose had almost felt inclined to forgive him, so pleasant had their evening been. Maybe it was just the drug washing away her modern worries. In any case, it had been almost impossible to remain disgusted with him. The steady pulse behind her ear lulled Cindy Rose into dreams.

  But all those peaceful feelings suddenly vanished as their patches jolted them out of deep sleep.

  The regular pulse from the little devices had gone crazy, hammering away like a palsied blacksmith. Then a shrill whistle erupted from the tiny speakers. Before they could react to rip the patches away, both the whistle and the hammering ceased.

  At the same time, the repetitive crump of distant explosions could be heard.

  Cindy Rose and Brian scrambled outside.

  Things perceived as huge shadows that blocked the stars were zooming across the sky. Cindy Rose tried to think of the word for them, but couldn’t. Birds. Big birds.

  As the big dark birds neared the northern horizon, fingers of light shot upward, like lightning in reverse, followed by flaring explosions both in the sky and on the ground.

  “It’s—it’s fighting,” said Brian.

  “Where are we?” asked Cindy Rose.

  “You know. Away from home.”

  “No. I mean—the name for the whole big place.”

  “I don’t know. They wouldn’t tell us, remember?”