The Flicker Men (23 page)

He was dressed in a dark turtleneck that stood out in contrast to his golden hair. Two men and a woman followed behind him, but kept their distance. The men were probably bodyguards of some kind, but the woman was harder to place.

She wore a dark business suit and carried a briefcase. A lawyer or an accountant perhaps. She was in her midforties, too sharp-cornered to be beautiful exactly, but striking nonetheless. Her eyes a pale, liquid green.

“Mr. Argus,” Brighton said as he extended a hand. “It's good to see you again.”

I let his extended hand hang in the air. “Why am I here?”

The smile changed shape, tightening to a thin slit. His hand lowered. “Right to the point,” he said. “I like that. It lets us bypass the usual niceties. I can see that we're beyond them now anyway.” He turned to the woman. “If you'll excuse us.”

The woman nodded and left without a word. The two guards stayed.

When she was gone, Brighton turned toward me. “Apologies if I kept you waiting, but business responsibilities beckon,” he said. “I thought it was time that you and I had another chat.”

A chat. Was that what this was going to be? “I'm listening.”

“Alone.” He gestured to his men, and the guards moved to stand near Satvik. One of them placed a casual hand on Satvik's shoulder. Like a familiar friend might. Satvik gave no resistance.

“Come,” Brighton said, gesturing for me to follow. He walked toward the veranda doors at the back of the room.

“You are a difficult man to pin down, Eric,” Brighton said, as we stepped outside. The patio was enormous. White marble flooring, glass railings. The air was cool, and the sound of traffic wafted up from the street below. Thirty floors, I decided, as I took in the view.

“Not so difficult,” I said. “You found me easy enough.”

“Well, a difficult man to understand, then. Nothing with you is ever simple, is it? Which is why I wanted a chance for us to speak.”

“So you kidnap me?”

“Kidnap?” He chuckled. “You came willingly. You were politely asked, and you complied. Or am I mistaken?”

He was right, of course. In a court of law I wouldn't have been able to say otherwise. “And what about Satvik?”

“He wasn't so politely asked, I will admit. But it couldn't be helped in his case. He is a fighter, that one, though you might not know it by looking.” He glanced at me. “You, though, not so much. You are an avoider of fights, aren't you? A runner.”

I pulled my phone out of my pocket. I lifted it, hit
DIAL
, and then put the phone to my ear.

I expected him to rush me. Instead, his smile came again. “Who would you call? What would you say?”

He hadn't moved. No guard ran in to jerk the phone away.

After three seconds of silence, I pulled the phone away from my ear and looked at it. The call had failed.

“It's a simple thing to block calls,” he said. “Better that I have your undivided attention, without the distraction of phones, so that we may talk this out and come to a meeting of the minds.”

“So then talk.”

I slid the phone back into my pocket.

He laughed. “You look at me like I'm your enemy. I'm not so bad as you imagine. It is a common fallacy, to imagine the worst of those whose motives you don't understand. We like to paint things in good and evil, but rarely are things so easily divided. In truth, it's all a manner of perspective. There is only the arrow of the universe to consider. The rest is just … unnecessary filigree. Ornamentation.”

“And what about the Discovery Prize? Ornamentation as well?”

His eyes narrowed momentarily. I'd caught him off guard. “In some ways. But not in others. As I said, there is no good or evil but merely the arrow. But there
are
those who work against that arrow. And there are those whose goal it is to help it along. Which are you, I wonder?”

“I don't have any idea what you're talking about.”

“Sure you do. You know more than you might expect.” He paced the white marble. “How
is
your sister, by the way?”

The threat was implicit. “What do you want?”

“I want to know your opinion on something. It's a question I have about a subject in which you have a particular expertise, it seems.” He glanced at me while he continued to pace. “If you're drinking, and you do something in a blackout, does it count?”

I stared at him.

“Certainly, the question must have crossed your mind,” he said. “Consciousness is such a finite resource after all. So if you slam a door—break your sister's hand while drunk—break it so bad that it takes surgery to fix the bones…” He let the question trail off.

I felt my face grow hot.

“It must be some consolation—that uncertainty,” he said. “That
excuse.
Are you still there, behind your eyes, when you're blackout drunk? Are you still responsible for what you do?” He came up beside me and stopped pacing. He spoke softly near my shoulder. “Does it still count against you?”

My hands clenched and unclenched. I opened my mouth to speak but didn't trust the words.

He chuckled softly. “Ah, so there is something behind that calm exterior, after all. I was beginning to wonder. Tell me, in your professional opinion, would you still collapse the wave while blacked out? We could test it, you know. We have good bourbon right here. Special reserve, double oaked. You just have to drink and drink, and then we'll use Satvik's little box to see what happens. Absolve you of your sins, or not.” Brighton stepped to the railing. The wind gusted. From the distance came the sound of a car horn and then another. The sounds of the city. He leaned out over the handrail. I thought about rushing him. Grabbing his legs and lifting. He turned back toward me as if he'd read my mind. “When you drink until you black out, where does consciousness go, I wonder?” He looked at me as if expecting an answer. “That weight that you feel so strongly,” he continued. “Such a gift, this consciousness, yet some find it unbearable. They work hard to blot it out. What are you afraid of?”

He stepped closer. “They say that to know somebody, you must learn what they fear. What's your worst fear, Eric? Is it that you won't be remembered?” He seemed to read my face. “No, that's the fear of other men, not you,” he said. “Perhaps you fear not being able to finish your work?” His searching eyes seemed to find something in my face. “Ah, that's it, isn't it? It must have been hard on you, what happened in Indianapolis.”

“Why am I here?”

“You ask a question, and yet the answer is before you. Tell me, what use are you to me? What use is Satvik?”

“I don't know.”

“These are strange days we live in. For in all of recorded history, it has never been possible to reconcile the husk with the spirit. And yet now here we find ourselves.”

I looked at him sharply.
Husk with the spirit
. It sounded familiar.

“You've talked to Robbins.”

He nodded. “I've whispered in his ear. Whispered enough to know that he won't be a problem. But you”—he gestured in my direction—“what a world of problems you have created.”

He turned and looked out over the city again. “What kind of world have you created, Eric? Have you ever stopped to think? Your little test, you and Satvik, and all the nosy scientists who will come after you, checking and rechecking, until they find what you have found—that there exists a segment of the population who can't collapse the wave. Do you think that information can be stopped now? Do you think a discovery can be undiscovered?”

“No.”

He shook his head. “Not easily anyway. Civilizations have lost knowledge before, but not without pain. Once your paper was published, it was all doomed, I think. The world spins on its axis, but it has more axes than you can see. Even now there are labs out there, setting up equipment, applying for funding. Even now there are people who have taken notice. The machine is in motion. If I close my eyes, I can hear the gears turning. They will push forward; they'll find what you found, and then what will happen?”

“What do you mean?”

“What will happen to the human beings who are different? You must have considered this.” He turned his face toward me. “Robbins called it a soul, and others will, too, but no matter what name it goes by, the fact remains that your test has drawn a line. Exposed the paradox to the dissector's scalpel.”

“What paradox?”

He cocked his head to the side in puzzlement. “The paradox of free will. Do you really not see?”

I didn't see. Brighton's face shone pale in the dim light. His expression solemn.

“Will people demand that their politicians be tested? Their judges? Their potential spouses? The process is already incubating—spurred by Robbins's findings. The question is being asked, in churches, in mirrors. And where will it take us? These people who aren't people … what happens to them? Can they be trusted? Are they fair game for work camps? Fair game for genocide?”

“You're crazy.”

“These are extreme responses, I will admit, but consider. What about humankind makes you suspect that they are disinclined toward extreme responses? People kill each other over differences in religion, differences in culture, differences in race. What divides one tribe from another? Is it anything so significant? People look for any reason to believe in the inhumanity of their fellow man, and you've provided the ultimate justification. Villages will burn, if not here, then elsewhere. If not this year, then next. An old story writ anew, like the witch trials of Salem—tying stones to the backs of innocents just to see if they float. It's in our nature. Do you even realize what you've started, Eric? You broke the world. You broke the illusion.”

A chill climbed slowly up my neck. “Who are you?”

“Ah,
now
you ask the question. I am one who has lived long enough to know.”

“And who are they?” I asked. “The ones you speak of. The ones who can't collapse the wave. What are they?”

“They have a name. You haven't guessed it yet, Eric?”

“What name?”

He turned his face away from me, looking out over the city again. “They're born, they live, they die.” He turned toward me. “We call them the fated.”

*   *   *

Brighton led me back inside. He walked leisurely, keeping me beside him as we crossed the suite. The lights seemed bright after the darkness outside. We passed a library, where I saw Satvik sitting in a high-backed chair, two guards standing near the open doorway. Satvik sensed the movement and looked up. Our eyes made contact briefly before I passed the doorway. It was hard to read anything in that split second, but I thought I'd caught fear in his eyes. Fear for himself. Or perhaps for me. It was hard to tell.

At the far end of the hall, Brighton led me through a set of doors and into a large and dimly lit room. “Do you play?” Brighton asked.

In other penthouses this might have been called a bonus room. It might have held a big-screen TV, a full bar, several couches and stools. In Brighton's version of luxury, the room held four pool tables. The windows were blacked out with dark paper. The pool tables themselves were ornate works of art. Leagues of plush green felt. Delicate woodwork. Against the wall was hung an assortment of pool cues. And here, at last, I saw the drink bar, set up tastefully at the far end of the room. That bourbon that Brighton had spoken of, along with every other kind of spirit. Glass bottles on thin glass shelves positioned in front of a long mirror.

On the pool table nearest the door, a strange assortment of equipment had been set up. I looked at it closely, trying to make sense of it. What looked like an audio speaker was lying on its back, with a white plate of some kind attached above. It was then that I noticed the stains on the second pool table. Leagues of plush green felt, yes, except for those places where the felt was darker. I tried to imagine the stains were something benign, but my mind kept filling it in. Huge, dried pools. A large circular stain at the far end of the table. Two smaller stains in the center. Another near the side pocket. As if a man had been laid out, bleeding from a dozen wounds.

Brighton noticed me staring. He walked past the stained table and stopped in front of the table with the equipment.

He motioned to his guard near the door. There was a click, and the light over the first table suddenly came on, and I could see the equipment clearly. It wasn't a speaker exactly, I now saw, but something else. A black box with several knobs and some kind of mesh surface along the top. A handful of pool balls were spread out randomly across the table. Above the box, held by a metal bracket, was the small white plate—a flat disk of hard plastic. A two-pound bag of black sand lay tipped over near the box, splaying black specks across the table, ruining the felt.

“All great discoveries have their martyrs,” he said. “There's always a price to pay for revelation.” He grabbed the cue ball off the table. “Wernher von Braun created the V-2 rocket. It killed tens of thousands in World War II, but it also led directly to NASA's Mercury capsules.” He held the white cue ball up and then placed it on the table. “The moon,” he said and rolled the white ball. It bounced against the rail and hit the six-ball before coming to rest. “Before von Braun was Niccol
ò
Tartaglia, the father of ballistics. Poor, stammering, smash-faced Tartaglia, who invented the parenthesis in mathematics and proved that trajectories had curves.” Brighton put his hand on the two-ball. “And here's a parenthetical aside for you—all those people who died because of those trajectories.” Brighton rolled the two-ball across the table, where it clacked into other balls, which bounced off the rails. A ball hit the black box in the center of the table and got mired in the sand. “And then there was the discovery of fission, first detailed theoretically by Lise Meitner, who wondered what kind of chain reaction might be possible. A few years later, we got our answer, didn't we? And so it always goes; the discovery of steel leads inexorably to the blade, and the martyrs bleed.”