LITMIR.BIZ

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those of everyone else around them. But below this pitiful subterfuge, he recognized the initial manifestations of the mutant schizophrenia brought on by the crumbling of the underpinnings of modern civilization.

      Helen’s troubles hurt him more than anything had since he was banished from the Institute. He felt like lashing out at someone, anyone whom he could hold responsible for the turmoil the world was undergoing. But instead, he could only squeeze Helen tightly, hoping to somehow hold her mental distress at bay.

      She seemed to sense Tinker’s intentions, but with the perversity of the mentally troubled insisted on exacerbating matters, unable to forget the subject that was becoming an obsession.

      In a monotone totally typical of those with altered affect, her face partially muffled in his shoulder, Helen asked, “What did you do?”

      Tinker was unprepared. “Do? Do when?”

      “At the Institute. To get dropped from the program.”

      It all flooded back upon Tinker, and he braced himself to relive the humiliation and self-pity and self-disgust of the incident. Amazingly, it wasn’t as intense as it had once been, and he found himself able to talk about it.

      “We were all on salary,” Tinker began. “A really generous pay, just for sitting around doing what we couldn’t live without doing—psychonauts diving into the creative sea and surfacing with pearls of knowledge. All our discoveries, of course, became the property of the Institute, to be leased out in the commercial marketplace as they saw fit. It was a perfect setup. But I got greedy. I started to wonder why the government should get all the profits from our work. Wouldn’t it be only fair for me to get a little of the money flowing into the federal coffers? So I kept back one of my flashes, told them I had a dry run, which was not unheard of.”

      Helen raised her face from Tinker’s shoulder. She seemed intrigued now, somewhat distanced from her own problems. Tinker felt repaid for the pain he was experiencing in the telling.

      “What was it?” she asked.

      “Oh, I was clever. I waited until I flashed on something not quite so revolutionary as most of our discoveries. I was hoping that whatever I released would go unnoticed as a normal product of industrial R&D. Among all the new products, I was betting that mine would be innocuous. So I contacted someone with the capital and right connections, and gave him the flash, for a share of future profits. It was an aerosol polymer—”

      “Spray-plaz!” Helen said. “I’ve used that to get airtight seals on certain equipment.”

      Tinker smiled ruefully. “That’s it. A great product with a lot of uses. I would have been a millionaire today. Much good it would have done me, with the world going to hell in a handcart. But of course, wearing the blinders of the Institute, I didn’t see any such thing at the time. All I was concerned with was setting myself up big. But they caught me. And kicked me out. “

      Helen hugged Tinker tightly. “Don’t worry, Don. For a while there, you really contributed to the happiness of humanity.”

      “How’s that?” said Tinker innocently.

      “No more wet basements,” said Helen.

      “You jerk,” Tinker said, and they began to wrestle.

      When they were finished making love again, they fell asleep.

      In the middle of the night Tinker awoke, knowing Helen wasn’t sleeping. The flames had died away, until only embers were left. In their glow, Tinker could see Helen staring at the raftered ceiling.

      “Don,” she said softly. “With so much tension and uncertainty, why hasn’t there been a big nuclear war yet? We’re the only country with flashers. Surely that represents a threat to everyone else. “

      “That’s one thing you don’t have to worry about,” said Tinker sleepily. “The President’s got a brand-new button.”

      “What do you mean?”

      “The man doesn’t bother with the doomsday alert anymore. He’s got a little black box that’s better. As soon as he gets the warning of an ICBM launch, he presses it and every fission or fusion reaction on the globe above a certain critical threshold is nullified. Result: a lot of dead missiles will land with a big thud. And then, if we want, we can still launch ours. This information has been disseminated to the ruler of every nuclear state.”

      “This really works?”

      “They’ve already extinguished a powerplant with a smaller model as a test. “

      Helen clenched her fists and sat up. As a physicist, she seemed to take the news as a personal affront. “Why don’t they tell everyone about this? Let the people have at least one less thing to worry about?”

      “Are you kidding? Atomic war has become one of those shibboleths everyone needs. It’s almost an object of worship. Mad Max post-apocalypse freedom. I really think everyone’s hoping we have one. it looks like the only way out at this point. If you take that away, you’d be knocking out one final prop to sanity.”

      Helen lay back down. “I’ll be damned.”

      “Me too,” Tinker said. “Me too. “

      * * * *

      Tinker and Helen couldn’t spend all their time together; there were odd edges to their personalities, acquired in their years apart, that still grated, and they felt the need to be separate at times.

      Left with hours that ached to be filled, Tinker conceived the idea of a combination rnemoir-cum-study of the flasher phenomenon, as told by one who had had intimate knowledge of it. He had no idea who, if anyone, would ever read it, but composing it served to fill the demanding hours.

      He purchased a recorder. It was one of those new models that utilized tiny crystals as a recording medium. (He tried not to puzzle out how it worked, since that way madness lay.) Then he began to dictate his thoughts.

      “Mankind is running a race between two factions of itself. For the first time since Neanderthals battled with Cromagnons, two distinct subgroups of the same species are competing for dominance of the world. And just like that earlier competition, the contest is more between opposing worldviews than any differing physical imperatives. Although of course the outcome will be decided in a physical way, with the eventual extermination of one group or the other.

      “On the one hand, we have those individuals—not uniquely suited, by any means—who have been arbitrarily subjected to CEEP, connectivity-enhancing endogenous PCP. This drug, initially discovered during research on hog brains, and later purified and synthesized in human-assimilable form, has had effects unlike any other psychotropic agent in the history of pharmacology. Binding to receptors in the cortex and hippocampus, just like the destructive exogenous PCP sold on the streets as “angel-dust,” CEEP increases the connectivity of the cell-assemblies in the brain. Acting throughout the brain, but particularly on the amygdala and limbic system, CEEP fosters a surge of creativity, commonly called a ‘flash.’ Technically the process is refered to as synchronicity-based genesis, or synchrogenesis. During such states, insight into hitherto unnoticed or unexplainable phenomena of the universe is achieved, in a fashion no one has yet accurately detailed. (For instance, how is it that technically untrained persons such as myself have equal access with engineers and others to the ability to imagine new wiring diagrams and other speciality-specific devices? It would seem that one’s mind would be able to work only with what has been input. Much remains to be explained about cheep-fostered creativity.)

      “Accompanying the flashing ability, of course, is the emotional state in which the world seems to be an intricately connected whole, self-existent and undemanding of explanation. There is no anxiety about one’s actions or the meaning of the world during this state.

      “Anxiety, however, is precisely what the non-flasher is most subject to today.

      “For as long as mankind has kept records, we know there have been attempts to explain the universe as a rational, predictable whole. Initially religious in

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