Quantum Night

36

Late June was about as nice as Winnipeg ever got. This year the last snowfall had been in April, and the mosquitoes wouldn’t make their first appearance for another month. Menno Warkentin walked down the hallway, his black Bruno Magli shoes making soft impacts against the institutional tiles. During the academic year, the corridors had been bustling with overworked students and harried faculty rushing from place to place. But although there were some summer students, few were on hand here, the Friday night leading into the Canada Day long weekend.

Menno entered the lab he shared with Dominic Adler and walked over to the worktable. Stacked on its surface were eight new sensor packs that would go on the Mark III helmet, and next to them, the old green transcranial-focused-ultrasound pucks. Those wouldn’t be included on the new unit, of course, but Dom kept running tests with them, trying to figure out why they’d caused people to black out; the DoD had goosed his grant by a hundred grand so he could pursue that.

Menno looked around to see if there was any sign that Dom had been in the lab today. His usual spoor included open bottles of Dr Pepper with a flat inch left undrunk at the bottom, but there were none to be seen. Menno hit the power-bar switch that turned on the desktop computer and its bulky seventeen-inch VGA monitor. Windows 98 began its slow boot-up; he wondered if XP, due later this year, would be any faster.

He heard the door opening. “Ah, Dom. I was hoping—” But it wasn’t Dominic. “Oh! Jim. I wasn’t expecting you. I thought you were going to Lake Winnipeg for the long weekend.”

A voice emanated from Jim’s mouth. “That’s what I told everybody. Never hurts to have an alibi.”

Menno made a snort. “Yeah, I guess that’s true. You happen to pass Dom on the way in?”

The mouth worked again: “He’s in his office.” Eyes swiveled toward the wall, where the faux Louisville slugger was held up by its two acrylic, U-shaped supports. A comment required; one made: “Chekhov’s gun.” The bat was taken down, the grip encircled by hands. The club was swung at empty air.

“Dom’s pretty particular about that thing,” Menno said. “You should probably put it back.”

More words were generated, empty, automatic: “Remember when the Blue Jays won those back-to-back World Series? I was eleven the first time and twelve the second. In Calgary, we don’t often root for anything related to Toronto, but we did then.”

Jim started closing the distance between them, the bat held firmly, his heels making ticking-bomb clicks. Startled, Menno backed away. His rear was soon against the worktable, and—

Shit!

Jim swung the bat right at him. Menno moved with the same poor coordination he brought to his squash game, barely getting out of the way in time. “For God’s sake, Marchuk!”

Jim wheeled around and swung once more. Menno ducked. “Help!” he shouted. “Somebody help!” But he’d been right earlier—the campus was dead. Backing the other way across the room now, he found himself stumbling onto a metal folding chair. He rolled off it just as the bat came smashing down onto the top of the chair’s back. Menno grabbed the chair’s legs and hefted it, using it as a shield to ward off additional swings. Jim tossed the bat aside so he could grab the chair’s frame and soon had wrested it free. He threw the chair aside; it folded up flat when it clattered to the floor.

Menno tried to make it to the door, but the younger man was thinner and more agile; he easily positioned himself in front of it. Jim lunged, and Menno, to his own astonishment, managed to deke out of the way. As Jim sailed past, Menno tried a maneuver he’d seen on TV, interlacing his own fingers to form a two-fisted club and bringing it crashing down on the student’s back, driving him face-first into the floor.

Menno turned to escape but found himself pitching forward—Jim had grabbed his ankles. As soon as he hit the ground, he rolled onto his back. Jim came toward him, picking up the folded chair, but it was an unwieldy weapon, and he tossed it aside again. Menno pulled his knees up toward his chest, then lashed out with a double kick as Jim came nearer, sending the student backward against the worktable, the neat stack of sensor modules scattering across its surface from the impact.

There was excruciating pain in the small of Menno’s back; he’d perhaps broken his coccyx. He pushed himself up from the floor, while Jim tried to lift the computer monitor. It came up about a foot, then jerked to a halt, its video cable, screwed in at the back, anchoring it. But the heavy AT-style keyboard, the size of a window shutter, pulled free from its connection, and Jim came forward, whooshing it back and forth.

Menno tried once more for the door, but Jim quickly blocked the way. He swung the keyboard repeatedly, and Menno felt the wind of its movement as he pivoted and dashed toward the worktable. He hated turning his back but did so for an instant, grabbing one of the TUS hockey pucks in each hand.

Jim surged in, smashing the keyboard onto Menno’s head. Menno staggered for a moment; Jim tossed the keyboard aside and threw the professor to the ground. Menno landed flat on his back, arms splayed as if making a snow angel—but he’d held on to the pucks. Although they were normally activated by commands sent through the helmet, each one had a slider switch on its rim for manual testing; Menno desperately tried to find those switches with his thumbs.

Straddling him, Jim grabbed Menno’s throat. Menno almost let go of the pucks so he could tear at the kid’s arms, but he knew the younger man was stronger. Instead, he rotated each puck in his hands, the way one turned thermostat knobs, and at last found the switch on the left one, sliding it forward.

He felt his eyes bugging out and his larynx compressing as he continued rotating the right puck clockwise, working his grip around its circumference. The crazed student kept squeezing his throat, but at last Menno found the other switch, but—fuck!—that one seemed to be stuck. His vision was blurring and his lungs were on fire, and—

—and it finally dawned on him that, given the way he was holding them, if the left puck’s switch moved up, then you had to slide the right one’s switch down, which, just as the pain was reaching unbearable levels, he did. He then slammed the pucks onto the sides of Jim’s head, clashing cymbals, and held them there like green earmuffs, until—

—until his attacker’s eyes rolled up, and his arms went slack, and he came crashing down on top of Menno, who immediately pushed him off, leaving the boy unconscious on his side. The professor also lay there for a moment, gasping, then, slowly, he pulled himself to his feet. He was hunched over, still trying to recover, when the landline phone rang. He had no intention of answering it—he wasn’t even sure if he could speak yet—but the goddamned jangling just added to the pounding in his ears.

He turned off the pucks, then looked down at Jim.

Riiiiing!

His first thought was to haul back and kick the bastard in the head—

Riiiiing!

—but that faded. He knew Jim Marchuk, and this wasn’t him: not the old, inquisitive A-student with the inner monologue—

Riiiiing!

—and not the new philosopher’s zombie without one.

Riiiiing!

This sudden outbreak of violence had to be the result of what Menno himself had recently done to the poor boy.

Riiiiing!

The phone finally stopped, thank God. Menno was too winded to run away, and, damn it, if he left the boy lying here, knocked into unconsciousness, whoever eventually found him would doubtless call 911, and at the hospital they’d do an MRI and see the damage to his paralimbic system—and people would wonder how those fresh laser-carved lesions had been made.

Menno staggered over, found a chair, put the pucks in his lap, and closed his eyes for—

—for how long he didn’t know, but he was awoken by the sound of movement. Oh, God! On the floor, Jim was rolling onto his back. And then the phone rang again, just twice, its bell signaling round two.