LITMIR.BIZ

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      “Maybe you’re right.”

      Tinker felt good to hear her acquiesce, but Helen’s next words indicated that she still didn’t understand everything.

      “But, Don—to actually get in so deep that you became one of those...”

      Tinker felt angered. “Say it, Helen. Go ahead. I’ve heard it before. We don’t regard it as an insult among ourselves. Although the way you normals say it really hurts at times. But I’m not even one anymore. And that’s the only thing I really regret.”

      Helen looked away and murmured the word: “Flasher...” She seemed to want to let the subject go now, sorry to have brought it up. But Tinker was aroused, and wouldn’t relent.

      “It’s just a word for what we do, Helen. Did, in my case. We swallow cheep—”

      Always a stickler for scientific correctness, Helen interjected contemptuously, “Connectivity-enhancing endogenous PCP. Wonder drug to make an age—or end one.”

      Ignoring her sarcasm, Tinker continued. “We swallow cheep, under carefully controlled conditions, and we let our minds expand, waiting for the revelation of new wonders. Is there anything wrong with that, Helen? If you could try some—if you could see the world then as we do—you’d soon see there’s not.”

      “But I’ll never be able to, even if I wanted, will I? No, the government has it locked up tight for its own use. And what a fine mess they’re making of things.”

      Tinker’s anger left him suddenly as it had come, like wind dying from a sail. Talk of the drug had brought back memories of the worldview it fostered, an edenic, shining landscape of startling possibilities, where everything seemed intimately connected, in a unified whole that dazzled while it simultaneously enlightened. Everything made such sense under CEEP. All the inventions that struck one as so bizarre upon leaving the altered state appeared completely sensible and unthreatening under the drug. But the effects of CEEP were only temporary, and one could not remain dosed up forever.

      In between doses one had to rely on faith.

      Dropping his head, regarding his folded hands between his knees, Tinker felt too drained to argue anymore, and began to wonder why he had even come.

      Helen said, apparently apropos of nothing, “Have you heard what’s happening to my department?”

      Tinker raised his head, said, “No.”

      “They’re shutting it down. The whole physics department. Also, chemistry, biology, geology, all the hard sciences.”

      Tinker was startled. “Why the hell would they do that?”

      “It’s you,” Helen said. “I mean, the flashers, and what they produce. You’ve upset twenty centuries of science in half a decade. All those impossible things that flow out of the NIS—how can we make sense of them fast enough, incorporate them into our pitiful paradigm of the universe? It can’t be done. There’s no use trying. So we’re giving up.” Helen stubbed her cigarette out viciously. “And I, for one, am glad. You don’t know what hell classes have been lately. Standing up in front of all those kids eager for certainty, spoouting formulas and laws that once used to be the cornerstones of your worldview, knowing that in the next few hours the NIS could release something that will totally contravene them. Or, at best, cast a completely new light on them.”

      Tinker could only nod grimly, knowing Helen was absolutely right. Suddenly, she gripped her biceps, arms crossed beneath her breasts, and shivered.

      “Christ, why don’t they stop, and let us go back to what we thought we knew? Why don’t they just stop?”

      “They can’t,” Tinker whispered. “When has mankind ever turned back? No, it’s impossible to put the genie back in the bottle. We have to keep rolling, and hope that something we flash on will get us all out of this fix.”

      And besides, Tinker thought, we’re addicted now. Everyone at the Institute is hooked on the power and the vision.

      And I miss my own dose.

      * * * *

      In the weeks that followed the desperation-inspired seeking-out of his ex-wife, Tinker felt a curious calm, born more of helplessness than confidence. Despite the headlong acceleration of the world toward utter breakdown of all sociological systems, Tinker was able to enjoy, on a personal level, his renewed relationship with Helen.

      The two of them spent time together almost every day. Neither had any other duties or responsibilities. In a bizarre way, sheltered for the moment by willful ignorance from the turmoil raging around them, they were able to act like young honeymooners, recapturing their long-vanished youth and a fraction of their innocence.

      Tinker had established one vital connection that would temporarily serve as a substitute for all the shining strands of coherence that he had lost. Still, though, the falsely random world coyly beckoned at the periphery of his vision, seeming to promise to restore what he had once enjoyed, a joining together of all that now appeared sundered.

      He and Helen found themselves going to places where they could for a time forget what was transpiring around them, the mass deracination that occasionally erupted into listless riots that were violently suppressed. They tended to favor art museums and the countryside.

      In the museums, their tireless meanderings were rewarded by encounters with occasional works that seemed immune to the current disintegration of the old weltanschauung. Most pieces, Tinker and Helen soon discovered, so embodied the worldviews of the ages that had created them that they were unable to stand the light of this strange new day that was dawning. The myth of the privileged visionary creator able to embody revelations not accessible to his peers seemed totally discredited now. Everyone including the artist was caught in the same pereceptual-intellectual gestalt, like insects in amber. Only rarely did someone stumble upon a new method of depicting the world that seemed to hint at expanded possibilities.

      Seurat, they agreed, was one such. His splotches of carefully juxtaposed color, so unintelligible at close range, so magnificent at a distance, were analogous to the current situation the world found itself in. Only the Flashers had the drug-mediated “distance” to make sense of the big picture. And theirs was only a fleeting revelation.

      When they tired of the museums—which were quite crowded in these end days, with others seeking solace too—they would head out of the city to the countryside, Helen driving of course. Tinker had almost forgotten about the cabin they had jointly owned, until Helen mentioned to him one day that she had continued to maintain it. On the spur of the moment they tossed a few provisions into the car and headed there.

      Out where the pavement and concrete disappeared, Tinker found himself relaxing the most. The fragrances of the outdoors—sodden, leaf-covered earth, the cool air blowing off a pond, even the musty interior of the cabin when they opened its door—affected his drug-heightened amygdala in a pleasant fashion, stimulating various joyful emotions and ghostly half-memories. He and Helen began to spend days at a time in the rude cabin, pretending successfuly for long stretches that they lived in another era.

      But even their fierce determination—surprising to both of them—to recreate the happiness they had once taken for granted, before the advent of flashing and Tinker’s subsequent involvement, could not sustain the illusion forever, and they frequently lapsed into discussion of the real world.

      One day, with a fire snapping on the hearth, providing the only light and heat against the damp cold and darkness outside the cabin, Helen brought up the subject she had so tactfully avoided on that first day.

      She and Tinker lay naked on a pile of blankets and pillows before the fire. They had finished making love just minutes before, and rested now with legs and arms intertwined. Helen’s hair smelled wonderful. Tinker admired the way the flames burnished her surprisingly ageless body with golden light. What they had just enjoyed seemed almost an antidote to all their troubles. But of course, those particular unique sensations—the radical rearrangement of the mind and senses during orgasm—lasted no longer than a dose of

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