Bears Discover Fire полностью

“I know what it looks like while I’m working on it,” I said. “After it’s dry, no. If you need a theory, my theory is that colors have smells; smells that are pitched too high for most people. So I’m like a dog that can hear a high-pitched whistle. That’s why I paint in oil and not acrylic.”

“So you don’t agree with the article in the Sun that it’s a psychic ability?”

“As a scientist, surely you don’t believe that crap.”

“As a scientist,” DeCandyle said, “I don’t know what I believe anymore. But let’s go to work.”

There was something different about the echoes in the launch lab. I was led directly to the gurney, and helped onto it. “Where’s the car?” I protested.

“We are dispensing with the car for the rest of this series,” DeCandyle said. I knew he was only partly talking to me when I heard the click of his recorder. “With this insertion we will begin using the C-T or Cold Tissue chamber developed while I was in Europe. It will allow us to penetrate deeper into LAD space.” Click.

“Deeper?” I was alarmed; I didn’t like lying down. “By staying dead longer?”

“Not necessarily longer,” DeCandyle said. “The C-T chamber will cool the home tissue more rapidly, allowing faster LAD penetration. We hope on this insertion to actually penetrate the threshold barrier.” Click.

By home tissue he meant the corpse. “I don’t like this,” I said. I sat up on the gurney. “It’s not in my contract.”

“Your contract calls for five LAD insertions,” DeCandyle said. “However, if you don’t want to go—”

Just then Sorel came into the room in her jumpsuit. I could hear the swishing of the nylon between her legs.

“I didn’t say I didn’t want to go,” I said. “I just want—” But I didn’t know what I wanted. I lay back down and she lay down beside me. I heard the snap of tubes being attached; guided by hers, my hand slid into the smelly, cold mash of the glove. Our fingers met and entertwined. They were like teenagers, getting together in secret, each with its own little libido.

“Series forty-one, insertion three,” DeCandyle said. Click.

The gurney was rolling and we were pushed into a small chamber. I felt rather than heard a door close just behind my head: a softer click. I panicked but Sorel clutched my hand and the smell of atropine and formaldehyde filled the air. I felt myself falling—no, rising, with Sorel, linked, hand in hand, toward the light. This time we went more slowly and I saw our bodies laid out, spinning, naked as the day we were born. We rose into the lattice of light and it parted around us like a song.

And it was gone.

All around was the gray darkness.

We were on the Other Side.

I felt nothing. It filled me. I was frozen.

Sorel’s presence now had a form; she who had been all light was all flesh. I find it impossible to describe even though I was to paint it several times. She had legs but they were strangely segmented; breasts but not the breasts my lips and fingers knew; her hands were blunt, her face was blank and her hips and what I can only call her mind were bone-white. She moved away into the gray distance and I moved with her, still linked “hand” to “hand.”

I felt—I knew—I had always been dreaming and only this was real. The space around me was a blank and endless gray. “Life” had been a dream; this was all there was.

I drifted. I seemed to have a body again, although it was not in my control. For hours, centuries, eternities we drifted through a world as small as a coffin, yet never reached an end. At the still center of it all was a circle of stones.

I followed Sorel down toward them. Somebody—or something—was inside.

Waiting.

She passed through the stones toward the Other, pulling me with her. I pushed back; then pulled away, filled with terror. For I had touched stone. Nothing here was real and yet—I had touched stone. Suddenly I knew I was awake because everything was dark, only I could no longer see.

Beside me was her body; its dead hand clutching mine. I had never before awakened—retrocuted—before Sorel. I reached up with my left hand, fearfully, tentatively, until I felt the lid of my coffin just where I knew it would be. It was porcelain or steel, not stone. But cold as stone.

I tried to scream but there was no air. Before I could scream there was a shock, and I fell into another, a darker, darkness.

“What you felt was the roof of the C-T chamber,” DeCandyle was saying. “It enables you to remain in LAD space longer without damage to the home tissue. And with ultrasonic blood cooling, to cross directly to the Other Side.” It was the first time I had heard the term yet I knew immediately what he meant.

Someone was clutching my right hand; it was Sorel. She was still dead. I was lying on the gurney; it rocked on its wheels as I struggled to sit up.

I shuddered as I remembered. “Before I touched the lid, while I was still dead, I touched stone.”