Rolling Thunder (41 page)

“So where does that leave us?”

“Probly nowhere.”

“You can’t use what you know to … I don’t know … stop them?”

He shook his head, sadly.

“First, I don’t hardly know nothing. I got little kiddy toys like the squeezer and the stopper, me. I sorta understand ‘em, but I can’t ‘splain ‘em to nobody else, no.”

Kiddy toys. To Jubal, I guess they were.

“What do you mean when you said ‘quick’?”

“They thoughts is slow,” he said. “That music you make, it be their thoughts, in their minds, and you have to goose it up to even hear it at all. Computer, it use bytes, little hunks of info’mation. Whizzin’ around in that computer brain like nobody’s bidness. We slower than that, but we hummingbirds compare to them. Time they finish a thought, why your children and they children and
they’s
children born and died. I don’t think we’ll ever track their ‘tention, me. We just too quick, and I don’t ‘speck they really lookin’, and might not care if they
did
look.”

“Is there any way that can work to our advantage?”

“I don’t see how, me. Mebbe so, but I ain’t seen it yet.”

OVER THE NEXT
few days I got the benefit of Jubal’s thinking about the crystals, the bubbles, and a lot of other things, much of it way over my head. There’s no point in using Jubal’s words, or not many of them, anyway, as they were often confusing and took me a while to decode. So let me summarize, going all the way back to that year of Manny, Kelly, and the
Red Thunder
…

“That first day, when I was ‘splainin’ to Manny, your granddaddy, ‘bout how the squeezer work … I dint know what I was talkin’ about.”

He said he had ” ‘splained” the squeezer in terms of superstrings, and six dimensions, and “twists in space.” But he’d had years to do more study while interned in the Falklands, and he’d decided he was looking at it from a too-parochial way. He disproved string theory—whatever that is—to his own satisfaction, and even published some of his results, which was rare for him, so “everybody wouldn’t go harin’ off down the wrong gator trail.”

The real model, he said, contained ten dimensions. He tried to explain it to me, and lost me at the fifth, or maybe, on a good day, the sixth.

So he got to wondering how, if his theoretical model had been so inaccurate, he had still managed to make the bubble machine.

He could remember the moment vividly, he said.

“I was lookin’ at a new circuit chip. It was a two nanny-meter thing, so eensy-weensy it was apt to melt from your eyetracks on it. I do that to relax sometimes when my brain hurts. I ‘magine I’m an electron just a-racin’ around tru them logic gates and stuff. Sometimes I can see a way to make it better, me. Put in an overpass here and there, or tunnel some electrons tru the quantum expressway. I ain’t tellin’ it right.”

Right or wrong, he lost me several exits back. The cyberpatrol had pulled me over for insufficient IQ points in the fast lane, and flashing my baby blues at them wasn’t doing me a damn bit of good.

By whatever roundabout route, one day Jubal found himself in possession of what he called a “singularity.” He couldn’t describe it to me, no matter how hard he tried. He said he could describe the process, but he’d tried it many times before with people who could do the math, and they’d gotten nowhere. So he didn’t try … for now. I didn’t know what he meant by that, but he was on a roll, so I let him pass over it.

“In a few weeks I figgered out how to poke that thing here and there in a bunch of dimensions, and it would do tricks. The bes’ one was makin’ these little silver bubbles that I could make bigger or littler by goosin’ it here and there. And I built me a thing, held the singularity safe as could be.”

That would be the original bubble maker, which he’d cobbled together from scraps in his laboratory in Florida. The outside of it was just several electronic remote controls, like they used to use with old television sets. He used them because they had buttons and knobs that he could wire for his own purposes, but the insides didn’t contain anything the manufacturers had put in there. He must have had at least a vague idea that he was playing with fire, even with that first one, because he made it such that if you opened it up, the singularity went away.

“I was playin’ with the quantums,” he said. “It was like that German cat. Dingley’s cat. Only it was rigged. Wit’ the singularity, I could stack the deck, see? I could change the odds by givin’ it a bowl of milk here and a kick in the butt there.”

Googling … okay, Schrödinger’s cat. I remember we talked about it in one of my science classes, which we called Physics for Dummies. It was a famous thought experiment to demonstrate some principle of quantum mechanics. I wasn’t clear if it meant that quantum effects
do
scale up to the “real world,” or that they don’t. If you understand all this, please consult a physics site for more info; the rest of you dunces, come along with me and we’ll try to get out of this alive.

There was a lot more about quantum stuff, which I have a hard time understanding when it’s being explained by a professional, with good audiovisuals. Confession: C-student in Physics for Dummies. You wanna make something of it? And it doesn’t really matter, anyway, in a practical sense, except to another scientist. What we were about to get into might as well have been voodoo. In science, you’re supposed to be able to replicate an experiment, right? That’s basic. A machine should work for everybody, and not only if you “hold your mouth right,” as Jubal put it. There should be no crossing of one’s fingers involved, no incantations to the spirit of Schrodinger or Max Planck or anybody else. You shouldn’t have to be hypnotized to make it work.

But that’s exactly what Jubal did, eventually. Hypnotize me. Finally I’d had enough of trying to understand it all. I didn’t see what difference it made, anyway.

“Jubal, let’s just admit I’m a dumb bunny and you tell me what you’re trying to get at?”

He smiled tenderly, and reached out without thinking and patted my knee. Then he hastily withdrew his hand and blushed like a teenager.

“Okay. You no dumb bunny, you, but I know you ain’t got the math. What I want, I want tell you what the no-place place is like fo’ me, and see do you reckanize it.”

And that’s what he did.

“I BEEN IN
the bubble t’ree times, me. First it was to get away from that island. Then I went in again for a long time. Long
real
time. That first time I noticed the … the … I called ‘em the points of light, but they wasn’t really points, and they wasn’t really lights. I’m messing this up …”

“No, I was there, Jubal, I know what you’re talking about. No time, no place, no eyes or ears or any other senses I know, but
something.”

“Yeah, I can’t do no better than that, either, me. Something. I thought about it a lot that first time Travis took me outta the bubble. I hyp … hyp …”

“Hypnotized?”

“That’s it. They hipenized me lots on that island. I learned how to do it my ownself. I hipenized myself, and I tried to bring it all back. And it all slippery, but I got some pieces of it, ‘cause I used to thinkin’ ‘bout multidimensimul geometry. And the first words outta my mouth, I said, ‘Where’s Podkayne?’ “

“That’s amazing,” I said.

He smiled. “Me, too,
cher.
‘Cause I didn’t have no idea why I said it, me.”

“You’re kidding.”

He grinned. “Nope. It just pop out. And then I got a picture of a real, real pretty girl, who was smiling at me and I think she was singin’ a song, and …” He stopped himself and blushed furiously. “I didn’t mean nothing …”

“Sure you did,” I said, grinning back at him. “Jubal, believe this: No girl has ever been insulted when a guy calls her pretty. So long as he means it.”

He was so flustered it took him a few minutes to get back on track. It was enough time for me to ask a few questions of my own.
What are you up to, Podkayne?
Are you deliberately needling him? You’ve never been a tease. You like a guy, you come out and tell him so. Well, I liked Jubal plenty, but he was so insecure about himself I felt I had to walk on eggs. And as for the whole sexuality angle … I felt sure he had next to no experience at it. Maybe his sexuality had been one of the things destroyed when his brains were scrambled by Crazy Daddy. Dancing the Cajun Jitterbug with me was probably as far in that direction as he could go.

So Podkayne, stop teasing him.
Lay off, girl!

“Anyways,” he said, after a while, “I thought about it, and I hipenized my ownself, like I learned to do, and tried to get back to that noplace place.”

“Did you?”

“I got back some memories, me. See if you reckanize any of this.”

HE WAS IN
the place I’ve found so hard to describe, and given his verbal limitations, Jubal found even harder. But he groped his way through it.

Since there was no time, no space, no location, no sensory input that was familiar to either of us, all I can do is use euphemisms to describe the experience. When I say he, or we, “felt” something, accept that it wasn’t feeling something in any way you or I or Jubal had ever experienced before. When I say something seemed “distant,” I realize that in no-space nothing can be distant from anything else. Yet there was a “feeling” of distance.

Got it? I didn’t think so. Take heart from the fact that if you’re confused, you’re in the same boat with me and Jubal. Or with me, anyway.

After a while in his trance state Jubal came to perceive, to feel, other presences around him. There were thousands of them. Most were clustered in a group not far away. Later, thinking about it, Jubal concluded that these presences, these abstractions of consciousness, were in the Utopia Planitia Time Suspension Facility, where Gran is. He “felt” that he could read their minds … but they were almost as blank as fetuses in the womb. Yet he could sense emotions in them.

He could sense more “points of light” much, much farther away. They seemed to be in three groups, which was odd, considering there was no possibility of numbering anything in no-space, which wasn’t a geometrical point, and wasn’t a mathematical infinity. But the number three came to him after the trance. He could guess what those points were. They were the trapped souls on the three black ships he had helped Travis trap in big black bubbles.

“I felt guilty ‘bout that, me,” Jubal said. “Always will.”

“They were bad people, Jubal. They would have killed Mom and Dad and Travis and you.”

“I know that, me. And I could feel something … not right about ‘em. In the trance. Don’t make no difference. I still feel bad.”

What are you going to do with somebody that decent? I searched my conscience for any feelings of guilt about what I’d allowed to happen to Cosmo—because I’m pretty sure that if I’d shown mercy, the Martian people would have let him off. I didn’t feel a thing. Does that make me a bad person? So be it. But it didn’t stop me from recognizing a truly good man when I found one.

Jubal felt presences even farther away than that. Could they be the people who left on starships before I was born and still hadn’t returned? It was possible. But there were others, even farther away.

“Thousands of light-years,” he said, and I don’t know where he came up with the figure, but I was willing to believe him. If it was right, then it could hardly have been human beings he was sensing. Other races, living around other stars?

Impossible to answer.

There was another cluster of points of light. His trance state brought it back to Jubal that he’d been aware of them at some point before Travis woke him up the first time, shortly after Grumpy lifted off. He tried to remember if he had been aware of them appearing, but that was such a slippery concept he couldn’t get a handle on it. If there is no time, how could he be aware of a time when those points of light weren’t there, and a time when they were?

But some information had been transferred in some way, because he knew my name, and he knew my face. Travis showed him my picture in an array of other girls who looked something like me, and he picked me right out. Travis told him who I was, and Jubal wanted to see me, and Travis told him that I wasn’t available, that I was off-planet. He didn’t mention that I was buried under a mile of ice.

“I knew it, though,” Jubal said. “I knew you wasn’t on Mars, and I knew you was in a bubble.” He shrugged. “Travis tries to proteck me. He knows I gets the jimmy-jams real easy.”

He said it sort of forlornly, and I wasn’t sure if it was because he regretted the fact that he was so easily upset or the fact that Travis protected him so thoroughly. Note to self: Think that one over, later. Everybody had a tendency to treat Jubal like a child because he was— let’s face it—so childlike in so many ways. Everybody in my family older than me had a history with Jubal, and their stories always mentioned how immature he was, emotionally, socially, everything but intellectually. I was seeing him fresh, without any preconceptions—or if I had any, I was quite willing to throw them out. Jubal was seeming to be a much more complex individual than I’d been led to believe.

“Those points was you and the others, on Europa,” Jubal said. “And how you
shined
! All of y’all, in a way, but you most of all.”

“You recalled this after you came out of the trance the second time? After you met me, down here in the Fortress?”

“Yessum. That first day, I went to bed all druggy, and I put myself under, and I knew those points of light were different. They was magni-ficated.”

“Magnified?”

“That, too. But I come to feel that we was touching, me and you. In that no-place place. The others, they was shinier than most, but you was just a-blazin’!”

He went silent, recalling that moment. I thought it over.

“So … what does it mean?”

“I’m tryin’ to figger it out, me. Befo’, I didn’t make no contact with nobody, no. Knew they was there, me, but that was all. And I didn’t contact any of them others what was trapped with you, not a one. But they was mixed up with this other thing, which I think, mebbe, is them crystal things. And what with you passin’ out and all ever time Europa makes a trip around Jupiter … it muss all conneck some whichaway.”