open, with a dark concrete tunnel beyond, leading to what had once been
an airlock.
I took a couple of steps toward the opening before I realized that Bobby
was speaking to me. As I turned toward him, I glimpsed the door again,
this time from the corner of my eye. But when I looked directly at the
damn thing, it wasn’t there.
“What’s happening? ” I asked nervously.
Bobby had extinguished his flashlight. He pointed at mine.
“Douse it.” I did as he asked.
The fireworks in the glassy surface of the room should have at once
vanished into absolute darkness. Instead, colorful star shells and
chrysanthemums and glittering pinwheels continued to arise within this
magical material, swarmed around the chamber, casting off a farrago of
lights and shadows, and then faded away as new eruptions replaced them.
“It’s running by itself, ” Bobby said.
“Running? ”
“The process.”
“What process? ”
“The room, the machine, the process, whatever it is.”
“It can’t be running by itself, ” I insisted, in full-on denial of what
was happening around me.
“The beam energy? ” he wondered.
“What? ”
“The flashlight beams? ”
“Can you be any more obscure? ”
“Way more, bro. But I mean, that’s what must’ve powered it up.
The energy in the flashlight beams.” I shook my head. “Doesn’t make
sense. That’s almost no energy at all.”
“This stuff soaked in the light, ” he insisted, sliding one foot back
and forth on the radiant floor, “spun it into more power, used what it
absorbed to generate more energy.”
“How? ”
“Somehow.”
“That’s not science.”
“I’ve heard worse on Star Trek.”
“It’s sorcery.”
“Science or sorcery, it’s real.” Even if what Bobby said was trueand
obviously there was at least some truth in it the phenomenon was not
perpetually self-sustaining.
The number of bright eruptions began to decline, as did both the
richness of the colors and the intensity of the lights.
My mouth had gone so dry that I needed to work up some saliva before I
could say, “Why didn’t this happen before? ”
“Were you ever here with two flashlights? ”
“I’m a one-flashlight guy.”
“So maybe there’s a critical mass, a critical amount of energy input,
needed to start it.”
“Critical mass is two lousy flashlights? ”
“Maybe.”
“Bobby Einstein.” With my concern not in the least allayed by the
subsidence of the light show, I looked toward the exit. “Did you see
that door?”
“What door? ”
“Totally massive vault, like a blast door in a nuclear-missile silo.”
“Are you feeling that beer? ”
“It was there and not there.”
“The door? ”
“Yeah.”
“This isn’t a haunted house, bro.”
“Maybe it’s a haunted laboratory.”
I was surprised that the word haunted felt so right and true, resonating
loudly in the tuning fork of instinct. This wasn’t the requisite
decaying house of many gables and creaking floorboards and inexplicable
cold drafts, but I sensed unseen presences nonetheless, malevolent
spirits pressing against an invisible membrane between my world and
theirs, the air of expectancy preceding the imminent materialization of
a hateful and violent entity.
“The door was there and not there, ” I insisted.
“It’s almost a Zen koan. What’s the sound of one hand clapping?
Where does a door lead if it’s there and not there? ”
“I don’t think we have time for meditation just now.” Indeed, I was
overcome by the feeling that time was running out for us, that a cosmic
clock was rapidly ticking toward the stop point.
This premonition was so powerful that I almost bolted for the exit.
All that kept me in the egg room was the certainty that Bobby would not
follow me if I left. He was not interested in politics or the great
cultural and social issues of our times, and nothing could rouse him
from his pleasant life of sun and surf except a friend in need. He
didn’t trust those he called people with a plan, those who believed they
knew how to make a better world, which seemed always to involve telling
other people what they should do and how they should think.
But the cry of a friend would bring him instantly to the barricades, and