Phil Westerburg, the Los Angeles Police Agency chief deputy coroner, said to General Felix Buckman, his superior, ‘I can explain the drug best this way. You haven’t heard of it because it isn’t in use yet; she must have ripped it off from the academy’s special-activities lab.’ He sketched on a piece of paper. ‘Time-binding is a function of the brain. It’s a structuralization of perception and orientation.’
‘Why did it kill her?’ Buckman asked. It was late and his head hurt. He wished the day would end; he wished everyone and everything would go away. ‘An overdose?’ he demanded.
‘We have no way of determining as yet what would constitute an overdose with KR-3. It’s currently being tested on detainee volunteers at the San Bernardino forced-labor camp, but so far’ – Westerburg continued to sketch – ‘anyhow, as I was explaining. Time-binding is a function of the brain and goes on as long as the brain is receiving input.
Now, we know that the brain can’t function if it can’t bind space as well … but as to why, we don’t know yet. Probably it has to do with the instinct to stabilize reality in such a fashion that sequences can be ordered in terms of before-and-after – that would be time – and, more importantly, space-occupying, as with a three-dimensional object as compared to, say, a drawing of that object.’
He showed Buckman his sketch. It meant nothing to Buckman; he stared at it blankly and wondered where, this late at night, he could get some Darvon for his headache. Had Alys had any? She had squirreled so many pills.
Westerburg continued, ‘Now, one aspect of space is that any given unit of space excludes all other given units; if a thing is there it can’t be here. Just as in time if an event comes before, it can’t also come after.’
Buckman said, ‘Couldn’t this wait until tomorrow? You originally said it would take twenty-four hours to develop a report on the exact toxin involved. Twenty-four hours is satisfactory to me.’
‘But you requested that we speed up the analysis,’ Westerburg said. ‘You wanted the autopsy to begin immediately. At two-ten this afternoon, when I was first officially called in.’
‘Did I?’ Buckman said. Yes, he thought, I did. Before the marshals can get their story together. ‘Just don’t draw pictures,’ he said. ‘My eyes hurt. Just tell me.’
‘The exclusiveness of space, we’ve learned, is only a function of the brain as it handles perception. It regulates data in terms of mutually restrictive space units. Millions of them. Trillions, theoretically, in fact.
But in itself, space is not exclusive.
In fact, in itself, space does not exist at all.’
‘Meaning?’
Westerburg, refraining from sketching, said, ‘A drug such as KR-3 breaks down the brain’s ability to exclude one unit of space out of another. So Here versus There is lost as the brain tries to handle perception.
It can’t tell if an object has gone away or if it’s still there.
When this occurs the brain can no longer exclude alternative spatial vectors. It opens up the entire range of spatial variation.
The brain can no longer tell which objects exist and which are only latent; unspatial possibilities. So as a result, competing spatial corridors are opened, into which the garbled percept system enters, and a whole new universe appears to the brain to be in the process of creation.’
‘I see,’ Buckman said. But actually he did not either see or care. I only want to go home, he thought. And forget this.
‘That’s very important,’ Westerburg said earnestly. ‘KR-3 is a major breakthrough. Anyone affected by it is forced to perceive irreal universes, whether they want to or not. As I said, trillions of possibilities are theoretically all of a sudden real; chance enters and the person’s percept system chooses one possibility out of all those presented to it. It has to choose, because if it didn’t, competing universes would overlap, and the concept of space itself would vanish. Do you follow me?’
Seated a short way off, at his own desk, Herb Maime said, ‘He means that the brain seizes on the spatial universe nearest at hand.’
‘Yes,’ Westerburg said. ‘You’ve read the classified lab report on KR-3, have you, Mr. Maime?’
‘I read it a little over an hour ago,’ Herb Maime said. ‘Most of it was too technical for me to grasp. But I did notice that its effects are transitory. The brain finally reestablishes contact with the actual space-time objects that it formerly perceived.’
‘Right,’ Westerburg said, nodding. ‘But during the interval in which the drug is active the subject exists, or thinks he exists —’
‘There’s no difference,’ Herb said, ‘between the two. That’s the way the drug works; it abolishes that distinction.’
‘Technically,’ Westerburg said. ‘But to The Subject an actualized environment envelops him, one which is alien to the former one that he always experienced, and he operates as if he had entered a new world. A world with changed aspects … the amount of change being determined by how great the so to speak distance is between the space-time world he formerly perceived and the new one he’s forced to function in.’
‘I’m going home,’ Buckman said. ‘I can’t stand any more of this.’
He rose to his feet. ‘Thanks, Westerburg,’ he said, automatically extending his hand to the chief deputy coroner. They shook. ‘Put together an abstract for me,’ he said to Herb Maime, ‘and I’ll look it over in the morning.’
He started off, his gray topcoat over his arm. As he always carried it.
‘Do you now see what happened to Taverner?’ Herb said.
Halting, Buckman said, ‘No.’
‘He passed over to a universe in which he didn’t exist. And we passed over with him because we’re objects of his percept-system. And then when the drug wore off he passed back again. What actually locked him back here was nothing he took or didn’t take but her death. So then of course his file came to us from Data Central.’
‘Good night,’ Buckman said. He left the office, passed through the great, silent room of spotless metal desks, all alike, all cleared at the end of the day, including McNulty’s, and then at last found himself in the ascent tube, rising to the roof. The night air, cold and clear, made his head ache terribly; he shut his eyes and gritted his teeth. And then he thought, I could get an analgesic from Phil Westerburg. There’s probably fifty kinds in the academy’s pharmacy, and Westerburg has the keys. Taking the descent tube he rearrived on the fourteenth floor, returned to his suite of offices, where Westerburg and Herb Maime still sat conferring. To Buckman, Herb said, ‘I want to explain one thing I said. About us being objects of his percept system.’
‘We’re not,’ Buckman said. Herb said, ‘We are and we aren’t — Taverner wasn’t the one who took the KR-3. It was Alys.
Taverner, like the rest of us, became a datum in your sister’s percept system and got dragged across when she passed into an alternate construct of coordinates.
She was very involved with Taverner as a wish-fulfillment performer, evidently, and had run a fantasy number in her head for some time about knowing him as an actual person.
But although she did manage to accomplish this by taking the drug, he and we at the same time remained in our own universe. We occupied two space corridors at the same time, one real, one irreal. One is an actuality; one is a latent possibility among many, spatialized temporarily by the KR-3.
But just temporarily. For about two days.’
‘That’s long enough,’ Westerburg said, ‘to do enormous physical harm to the brain involved. Your sister’s brain, Mr. Buckman, was probably not so much destroyed by toxicity but by a high and sustained overload.
We may find that the ultimate cause of death was irreversible injury to cortical tissue, a speed-up of normal neurological decay … her brain so to speak died of old age over an interval of two days.’
