Читать книгу Long Fall from Heaven - George Wier - Страница 7

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He paced the long floor in the night. Twenty-eight steps the long way, nine steps the width of the old hardwood floor. After the first hour of the first night he knew the square footage down to the inch. From there it was a quick extrapolation to determine the cubic area, given the fourteen-foot antebellum ceilings. He loved the old house, the way the floors creaked and groaned. He also hated it. The scent of old resin and yellowing linen wallpaper hung in the air, the constant reminder of age and a dissolution held in long abeyance. The house should have been shelled or burned during the Civil War, but somehow the old building had escaped that insane bloodbath. It was likely one of only a few.

At night, he could see the dim glow of the Capitol above the trees that hemmed in the old mansion, but only when the lights were out inside. He could navigate fine indoors using only moonlight. But even when there was no moon, his perceptions were sharp—you didn’t have to see a thing to know it was there. You had to be able to feel the night. And the night was his only friend.

The night was also quiet, but for the occasional outburst from one of his roommates. When one of them was pushed or fell ‘beyond the beyond,’ as he called it, they would cry or scream or gibber unintelligibly. This night they were quiet.

The military men needed him. They needed him against Hitler and Mussolini and Hirohito. He had little use for them. But there were steel bars on the windows and there was nowhere else to go.

One of the orderlies had taken to calling him ‘Longnight.’ He’d never had a nickname before. Somehow it fit him. Yes, the nights were long. Yes, he slept only during the day. He would be Longnight then, he decided.

Sometimes during the day, when they roused him and put him at a table with a writing tablet, Longnight would mock them by drawing cartoon figures instead of the ciphers. He sensed they wanted to hurt him, as if doing so would somehow make him do what they wanted. He knew there was no power on earth that could compel him.

He sensed the dawn long before it arrived. The orderly had come to check on him an hour before and left without saying a word. Maybe the man would go catch a catnap in the living room of the old house. Who knew? He sensed the dawn and stopped, staring out into the inky blackness beneath the line of trees across the lawn. There was something there. Something in the dark. But really, there wasn’t—it was something in the darkness of his own mind, this he knew. It lived in the hollow places between thoughts. And it had a name.

Longnight realized he had stopped pacing. He stood, rapt. He exhaled, staring at the window four feet away with its heavy black steel bars. And waited.

It took a while, waiting there like that, unmoving, but finally the night breathed back at him. A low mist had arisen. Longnight watched it separate from the ground and begin to rise.

Longnight smiled. He stepped to the window and reached a hand between the ugly vertical bars. He breathed onto the window and wrote one of the equations the military men were looking for—the secret behind stabilizing Uranium 238.

He stepped back, waited for the figure to fade into nothingness and then wrote another figure, one with more far-reaching implications than simple nuclear fission—the secret for getting mankind to the stars:

That was the real secret after all. Nothingness. It was the one thing that the limited minds of most scientific men could not fathom. All along they were looking for some grand unifiying theory, and the answer was simply...nothing. And nothing was the answer they would never see. The answer was even contained within his new name, the nothingness of the long night.

Longnight watched as this figure also faded into the night.

At that moment he began planning his escape. After all, there was time. The World War was still on and it was stopping for no man. He could dole out hints at the true nature of the secret in return for day after day of breathing and still they would know less than nothing. And if he were to be deliberate, slow, he would find a way out. And then...

His name was Longnight, and the night was his only friend.