exasperation, knowing that he would probably have to explain his situation to the new man, who looked improbably officious, considering the human wreckage around him. What stupid nonsense, to abide by these rules while the world was disintegrating! Why couldn’t they just pass legislation granting a minimal income to everyone? So what that some would call it socialism? But no, they had to use the same cumbersome machinery that had made sense only under much different conditions, pretending that all these poor souls here were just temporarily unemployed, and would soon find nonexistent jobs, all the while extending the benefit period time after time.
“Your card,” the man said to Tinker. He showed traces of MS palsy that even artificial myelin couldn’t eradicate.
Tinker presented his ID, and the man brought up Tinker’s case on his terminal. The caseworker’s bland face lost its sternness and assumed a look of utter bafflement and awe.
“You were employed by the NIS?” he asked with amazement.
“Yes,” Tinker admitted.
“As a synchrogenesist?”
“Yes,” Tinker said, knowing what would happen with his admission.
All around him, in his line and others, applicants and clerks fall silent and turned to stare. They looked at him as if he were simultaneously devil and angel, scum and superman. Edgy and contemptuous again, denying in his mind that these people meant anything to him, Tinker raked them with his own gaze. Eyes dropped, as if to meet his would be to surrender their most private thoughts. Tinker savored this small triumph among his degradation.
The caseworker recovered himself and continued. “You were fired. Why?”
They loved to force him to utter the word, although Tinker knew it was right there shining on their screens.
“Malfeasance,” he said. Then: “But I’ve been through the waiting period. I’m entitled to collect.”
To beg, thought Tinker. Goddamn you, Thorngate!
“All right,” said the clerk, satisfied with this obesiance. He tapped a key and the printer by his elbow stuttered out a check, which he handed to Tinker. “Continue to look for work in the following week,” he concluded.
Tinker nodded, as if the ritualistic statement had any meaning. Then, gratefully, he left.
The bus ride back home was as tedious as the trip out. Once in the rundown building that had become his new home when he left the Institute, Tinker ascended the gloomy stairs (smelling of boiled cabbage and hopelessness) to his drab one-room apartment. Inside it was cold. Of course—the radiators weren’t running. The refining of heating oil had practically stopped, since the introduction of heat-blox.
Tinker moved to the small black cube—about the size of a hatbox—that sat on the floor near one wall. It had a small thumb-shaped depression in one corner, and was integrally pre-set somehow at the factory to 72 degrees. Tinker thumbed the on-spot.
Almost instantly the room began to warm. Soon it was comfortable.
Tinker laid a hand on the heat-blox, still amazed after all these months of use. The device was cool to the touch. It was a monolithic construct, he knew, with no interior structure and no fuel required. No one knew how it worked. There was one or more in nearly every home and office. It was Witkin’s flash.
Tinker lay down on his lumpy, unmade cot. He put his hands behind his head, and stared at the peeling ceiling. He realized that he felt totally unconnected from his own life and the rest of the world. It was a new and disturbing feeling, the total opposite of the flasher experience. It unnerved him, and he began to quiver as he lay there.
Longing for connections of any kind, he decided—in a pale flash that mimicked the ecstasy of synchrogenesis—that tomorrow he would visit Helen.
* * * *
The campus was strangely muted, a tenuous shadow of its old self, like a televised image with sound and contrast turned low.
As Tinker walked across the main quad, he tried to collate all the little changes into a syncretic whole, to establish the invisible, improbable, inevitable connections he had been trained to make.
The old, ivied buildings seemed essentially the same, pompous and infuriatingly calm. Tinker remembered how glad he had been to escape their cloistered embrace, when asked to consult at the fledgling NIS. But there was undeniably something different lurking beneath their surfaces—an aura of fear, as if they quailed at some threat.
Turning a corner, Tinker saw the reason for his intuitions of menace.
A huge geodesic frame had been erected on what was formerly a pleasant greensward. There were no workmen around the completed frame, installing panels in the way one would expect. Instead, the building was being left to grow.
Red quasicrystals had been seeded at the base of the frame. Now they were climbing up the structure in thin fiery sheets that caught the autumnal sunlight and magnified its splendor.
Only a yard or so of crystals was yet in place, but the building already looked alien. When it was finished, Tinker thought, it would resemble a giant carbuncle or roc’s egg. To stand inside it would be to worship in a nonhuman cathedral.
Tinker moved past it, and felt it beating like a dragon’s jeweled heart, sending its pulses through the staid campus. As he walked, he noticed the students.
There were fewer of them, for one thing. The paths seemed half-empty at a time of year when normally students would be rushing from library to party to football game. And those students who were about seemed preternaturally quiet, as if burdened with concerns much larger than final exams or lovers’ squabbles.
Tinker felt his hopes shattering into a million shards. Although he would have denied he had any, he quickly realized that he had nurtured a few with regards to the campus. Subconsciously he had been hoping that he would find here a refuge, an enclave somehow sheltered against the psychic storms sweeping the world. But he knew now, just from seeing the students slouch by, that the seeds of aparadigmatic psychosis had found fallow ground here as well.
Approaching the physics building, Tinker suddenly wondered what condition he would find Helen in. He had not even considered the possibility that she would be different. Although they had parted acrimoniously, she remained a touchstone to his past, and he always contemplated her just as he had last seen her.
Up broad steps and through glass doors into the physics building, Tinker moved swiftly. He found the receptionist—a woman newly hired from his days—at the usual desk.
“Is Professor Tinker in?” he asked.
The woman looked up at Tinker with her pretty features wreathed in puzzlement and alarm. Exhibiting the touchiness and anxiety with which most people greeted anything out of the norm these days, she said, “Who’s that, please? We have no such person on our faculty.”
For a moment, Tinker was taken totally aback, as if a gaping pit had opened beneath his feet, threatening to swallow his past whole. Then he realized his mistake. Helen must be using her maiden name.
“Kenner,” Tinker explained. “I meant Professor Kenner.”
The woman relaxed. “Oh. Let me check.” She consulted a schedule. “Yes, she has office hours now. Shall I announce
