Warp (17 page)

He shrugged.

“It's never too late to start.”

“Hm.” She raised her eyebrows. “Well, what about that résumé? Do you have one made up?”

“Sure,” Hollis said, a little vaguely. “Look, Eileen, what's it like working at a place like this? I mean—Jesus, somehow I just can't picture what it would be
like.
”

“Well—” She hesitated. “Look, you don't really want a lecture, do you?”

“It's just—” Hollis met her gaze directly. “It's just that you know I could never make it in a place like this.”

He noticed she was wearing an apple-green ring made out of some kind of swirly plastic, one that she hadn't owned when they were going out. She turned it around her finger. By now their faces were very close together, and if he leaned forward only slightly he could have kissed her.

“No.” She put her hand on his arm. “I don't know that, Hollis. The truth is, you
are
going to end up here or somewhere like it—it's just going to take you a little longer than it took the rest of us.”

She closed her eyes and then opened them again, a slow blink.

“You'll find out,” she said. “Sometimes I think you have an overly vivid imagination, Hollis. With some things it's just not worth thinking about them too carefully before they happen. They almost never turn out to be as horrible as you think they will.”

She watched him for a few seconds, and he could see her biting the inside of her cheek, but neither of them spoke. The receptionist was pointedly ignoring them.

“I have somebody waiting in my office, Hollis,” she said finally. “I have to get back. Why don't you call me on Monday? Do you—? Wait. Here's my card.”

Eileen patted her thighs with both hands, as if she was looking for pockets. She turned to the secretary.

“Darcy, could you—?”

The secretary nodded instantly and opened her desk drawer.

“We'll make a time. I'll buy you lunch—you're starting to get a little skinny, even for you.”

Hollis nodded again, silently.

He was a mysterious figure—arrogant, aristocratic, coldly beautiful, impossible to understand.

Eileen got up, smoothing down her skirt, and took a step back down the hall towards her office. Hollis looked past her: somebody was leaning against the door frame, waiting for her. He was tall, and he had shoulder-length blond hair.

Hollis realized he recognized him. It was Brian.

Danger, Will Robinson! Danger!

“Not too early,” said Hollis expressionlessly, staring past her at him. “I hunt for insects at night.”

“We'll work something out. Tuesday, maybe.”

She took a step towards the door. For some reason he noticed some bits of dark green fluff that had migrated from her sweater onto the black fabric of her dress.

His vision was unusually acute.

“Do you want to see my office, real quick?” she said brightly, turning around again. “It's right here.”

Brian watched him from behind Eileen, over her shoulder, without hostility but also without any kind of warmth, or even recognition. Their eyes met for a second, and Hollis stared back at him for a long moment before Brian finally looked away.

Hollis slowly rubbed the side of his nose with one finger.

“It can wait,” he said.

“Call me Monday then?”

“Sure.”

She walked away back down the hall, and the office door closed softly behind them.

Hollis stood up.

I met the man himself today. On the moors.

Darcy was still holding out Eileen's card, waiting for him to notice, and he took it from her. Classical music was playing softly over hidden speakers, an overexposed Vivaldi violin concerto, and for the first time, underneath it, Hollis noticed the rustling noise of people working in the offices all around him. It was coming from all sides, directionlessly. The walls were just thin office partitions, and the sound carried right through them: phones ringing, keyboards clattering, people talking. The air reeked of coffee.

Hollis stood still and listened. Darcy watched him disapprovingly. He looked back at her, and then around at the rest of the room, and down the hall at the rows of office doors. One of them opened, and two youngish men in suits came out, talking business animatedly, both holding their camel overcoats draped over the same arm. They were barely older than Hollis. They swept through the room, nodding to the receptionist, and out the other door in the direction of the elevators.

Hollis's face was blank. He reached up and felt the stubble on his chin, gingerly.

Everybody has something to do.

 

CHAPTER 10

FRIDAY, 5:45 P.M.

Hollis's boots made an echoey sound on the marble floor of the lobby. As he pushed his way out through the revolving door the security guard yelled after him to sign out, but he didn't turn around. When he was a few blocks away, he took the piece of paper with Eileen's address on it out of his pocket and threw it into a steel trash can, which was twisted and half melted from having had a fire in it.

The air was full of exhaust from the rush-hour traffic. The temperature was dropping, and white fluorescent lights blinked on and off in random sprinkling patterns in the skyscrapers. The closest subway stop was Boylston, at the corner of Boston Common. Huge white clouds of steam billowed up out of storm drains and through the finger holes in manhole covers, even through cracks in the street.

Inside the subway station it was cold and crowded, the commuters staring straight ahead, emptily, like refugees in newsreel footage of a war-torn foreign country. Hollis looked down at the tracks from the platform: there was an inch of standing water under the wooden ties. He still wasn't far from the harbor.

When the train came it was almost full, and he had to squeeze himself in. The car rocked gently back and forth on the track. Hollis watched the gray stucco wall of the tunnel fly by, a yard in front of his face. All around him people were talking and shouting over the roar. When the tracks rose above ground at Kenmore Square, after twenty minutes, it got a little quieter.

The neon lights of the clubs went through their regular cycles in the darkness.

By the year 2097 the cities of the Eastern Seaboard had merged to form a single megalopolis of shocking size and squalor.

As the sun went down, the clouds started to glow with the weird orange light of the city. Hollis accidentally met his own eyes in the window and looked away. It was a Friday night, and the subway was free outbound after Kenmore, so wherever the train stopped lines of people waited to get on. Each time it took a few minutes to get them all packed in.

Hollis overheard people talking in Spanish, Greek, Russian, Vietnamese. As the neighborhood became more and more residential it got darker outside: more and more trees and fewer streetlights. By the time he got to the stop in front of his building it was after six.

Hollis stepped down. The bell rang, and the green-and-white train moved away up the hill. In the lobby of his building, dead leaves that had blown in through the front door lay strewn all over the floor. He took the elevator up to his apartment.

Standing at the window, with his coat still on, Hollis looked down at the darkness of the empty courtyard. He could hear geese honking as they flew by overhead, out of his line of sight. The broken storm window that Peters had dropped lay on a cement walkway, in the middle of a spray of broken glass. The aluminum frame had come apart at one of the corners.

He turned away and lay facedown on the bed.

CAPTAIN PICARD

Mr. Data, are you all right?

DATA

I believe I am experiencing some difficulty with my positronic circuitry, Captain. I do not seem to be functioning at full capacity.

PICARD

Can you identify the problem?

DATA

It seems to be some kind of subspace interference, sir. Possibly of alien origin. At the present rate of decay, I estimate the time to total neural net failure at one minute twenty-seven seconds.

Picard stands up and signals the helm.

PICARD

Ensign, take us out of here: warp nine point five. Dr. Crusher?

DR. CRUSHER

I'd better get him to sick bay, Captain.

PICARD

Agreed.

Dr. Crusher bends over Data, who is now lying prone on the bridge. She places her hand gently on his forehead, scanning him with a medical tricorder, then presses her communicator badge.

CRUSHER

Crusher to transporter room—two to beam directly to sick bay.

TRANSPORTER ROOM

Acknowledged, Doctor. Whenever you're ready.

She puts her hand on Data's shoulder.

COUNSELOR TROI

Oh Data, I hope you'll be all right!

PICARD

And … engage!

In the forward viewscreen, stars blur into lines. The
Enterprise
accelerates up to warp speed.

CRUSHER

Transporter room: Energize.

Light flares.

They vanish.

 

CHAPTER 11

FRIDAY, 9:15 P.M.

“Where are you going?” said Hollis. “We aren't getting Blake, are we?”

“I'm trying the other way. By Harvard Street.”

Peters tried to pass the slow, rusted-out station wagon in front of them, but a car coming the other way boxed him out.

“The Force is strong with this one,” he said.

The sky had cleared, and the cold was waking Hollis up. He rubbed his eyes and looked out the window at the shuttered and burned-out storefronts of Brighton scrolling past them.

“What did you do today?” he said.

“Went in to the office. Did some work. Delahay's trying to write this piece about interstellar ether—this stuff they thought was supposed to propagate light through space, or something, before they eventually figured out it didn't exist. In the nineteenth century. The Michelson-Morley experiments. She talks about it all the time now.”

“I don't get it,” said Hollis. “What do you mean, it propagates light through space?”

A motley crowd of people waited in line outside a nightclub, some sitting, some standing, some milling around talking, not in any particular order. A tour bus parked out front had an airbrushed mural of a barbarian warrioress on it, riding a giant iguana-like lizard. Her bare breasts, impossibly huge and firm, stood out against an idyllic shell-pink sunset.

“Well, they used to think light was like sound. Like, you can't hear anything in a vacuum, because there's no air to propagate the sound.”

“But there's still light in a vacuum,” said Hollis. “I mean, you can still see, even if there's no air.”

“That's exactly the problem, dude, that's why you need the ether to be there to propagate the light. In a vacuum, there's nothing else to do it. Except it turns out you don't have any ether there, either.”

“Ah. Now I get it.”

Hollis found a loose thread on the front of his coat and snapped it off.

“Fabu.”

They turned onto a shabby, patched-up old expressway crisscrossed with skid marks, and then onto an on-ramp to the Mass Pike. Hollis and Peters watched the traffic for the first few miles without saying anything. They were moving in a fast, tight-packed formation of cars, with nobody slowing down or changing lanes. People were leaving the city for the suburbs and the Cape.

Outside Boston the highway was lit up by yellowish-pink streetlights, and the shoulders on both sides rose up higher and higher the farther from the city they got. By the time they hit the suburbs Hollis and Peters were driving through a kind of artificial concrete canyon, carved out of the landscape of otherwise peaceful neighborhoods. Looking up, Hollis could see dark trees and lighted windows flying past them over their heads.

Ten minutes later they took a curving off-ramp over to Route 128.

“Did you sleep enough?” said Peters.

“I guess so.”

“So what did
you
do today? Anything?”

Hollis smiled wanly.

“If I told you, you wouldn't believe me.”

An old red pickup truck floated across their lane from right to left. They watched it cross back again farther ahead and accelerate away through traffic.

“I wonder what it's like to be a weaver?” said Peters. “Who would actually do that? I can remember when my dad was teaching me how to drive, and him saying, ‘You see that, son?
That's a weaver.
'”

He held up his index finger.

“And I've never forgotten his words.”

“Why don't you try it?” said Hollis.

“What do you mean? You want me to weave?”

“Sure. Look, you can get in right there. Come on, dude, live a little. I'll pay for the ticket. Go for it.”

“Oh, come on,” said Peters. “What's the point? There's no room, anyway.”

He didn't move.

“Besides,” he said, “how would you pay for it? With what money? It's not worth it. And since when are you so full of piss and vinegar, anyway?”

“Beats me.”

“Anyway, there's some kind of weird police action going on tonight. The streets are crawling with them. When I was driving over to get you there were cruisers everywhere, pulling people over. And vans. People with flashlights, looking in people's cars. I don't know why. State police, highway patrol. Hey, remember what I was saying before, about police? The future is now!”

He pointed at Hollis.

“Oh, I called Ashley: it's no go. I got her machine.”