Bix’s Angel by Bob Brill	Table of Contents Chapter 3, part 1 Chapter 4 appear in this issue.
Chapter 3: 1955 part 2 of 2

Feynman turned with the thought of bolting for his van, but he was met by several more young men emerging from his house. “Dr. Feynman?”

“Who wants to know?”

“I do,” said the speaker, brandishing a pistol. “You are Dr. Feynman, are you not?”

“If you’ve been properly briefed, you already know that I am.”

“Very well, it’s time.” Two of the audacious strangers linked arms with Feynman and secured his wrists. A third grasped his ankles from behind and lifted him off his feet. Feynman struggled and squirmed but he could not break free. Even in his distress he saw his situation as analogous to that of a carbon atom locked into a hot diamond. Suddenly the world disappeared and he found himself in a dark void through which a powerful wind was blowing. His hair was streaming and fine dust-like particles stung his face, forcing him to close his eyes.

Just as suddenly he emerged into the world again, or was it the world? He was in a vast enclosed space, brilliantly lit and filled with unfamiliar machinery. His captors released him and he stood in amazement, gazing at his surroundings. The walls seemed miles away. He looked up. High above, catwalks and ladders receded into the distance.

“What is this place?” he asked.

“The LCA wants to see you right away. Please come this way.”

He was led to a closed door and told to enter. Feynman opened the door and looked inside. It was clearly somebody’s office. A desk was covered with papers and books, the walls lined with bookshelves, stuffed and overflowing with books and periodicals and papers.

Someone sat facing away from him behind the desk. “Come in, come in.” The figure spun around in his swivel chair and Feynman saw with a shock a man who looked exactly like himself.

“Ah,” said Feynman, “I get it. I must be dreaming. Amazing what the mind can do.”

His double behind the desk said, “Even more amazing is when reality is more fantastic than a dream. I’m the LCA, Local Chief Adjustor. Please, Dr. Feynman, take that chair over there.”

“Oh, yes,” said Feynman, slipping into the seat offered, “Gvedn has briefed me about you and the Continuum.”

“Good. Any questions?”

Feynman had a lot of questions, but he surprised himself by asking, “Do I get out of this alive?”

“Good question, Dr. Feynman. Right to the point.”

“How about an answer, Dr. Local?”

“Depends on your level of cooperation. The more you put your trust and faith in the process, the likelier that you’ll survive it.”

“Then I have a problem, Dr. Doppelganger. I have absolutely no faith in the process whatsoever. I’m not even sure that I’m here, wherever here is.”

“Ah, let me see if I can help you with that. I’ll try to put this in terms that are familiar to you.” Leaning forward and planting his elbows on the desk, the LCA joined his fingertips steeple-fashion and looked straight into Feynman’s eyes. A faint smile played about his lips.

Feynman shuddered inwardly. He thought, He’s trying to intimidate me, showing me how good he is at simulating a human, and at the same time, knowing that I suspect he really is human, pretending to be an alien simulating a human. But that Feynman face. He’s spooking me.

“What happens,” the LCA continued, “when new experimental evidence is totally at odds with a well accepted theory? At first, confusion, then denial. Maybe the experimenters made an error. Maybe this doesn’t imply what we think it implies. Maybe we can make some minor corrections to the theory to accommodate this new information. Finally, you calm down, you accept the data, you scrap the theory and build a new one. Science marches on.”

“Yes, but this isn’t science.” Feynman struggled to recover his poise. “Such hubris to think you can adjust the universe.”

“You’ve got me there, Dr. Feynman, but it works. We have no theory for it. It just works.”

“How do you know it works? What is it doing for you? How did you figure it out in the first place? And above all, will you please explain to me what it is that you actually do when you think you’re adjusting the universe?”

“There’s no point in answering such questions. But I’ll say this much. We inherited our culture from a much older civilization. Much of it we don’t understand, but it serves us well. We have faster-than-light travel. We can beam from our plane of existence to yours and back. That’s how you got here. We can change our shapes. You can be sure this is not my real shape.” Again, that faint unnerving smile. “Along with our technology we inherited an obligation to carry on the tradition of adjusting the universe. If we gave that up, we could lose everything.”

“This reminds me of a friend of mine,” replied Feynman. “Every time he gets on an airplane he pats the fuselage with his right hand as he enters the plane. I saw him do this once, so I asked him about it. He looked embarrassed and said, ‘O that’s a little prayer to keep the plane from crashing.’ ‘That’s just a superstition,’ I told him. ‘It has no basis in fact.’ ‘I know that,’ he said, ‘but so far it’s working and who knows what might happen if I stop? It costs me nothing and it reassures me.’ You guys are doing the same thing, only the difference is there is a very big cost.”

“And there is a very big payoff.”

“You mean it keeps you in power.”

“Oh perhaps, but that’s not what I meant. The payoff is that we have a beautifully functioning society. Some of our activities may not be necessary, but we don’t know which ones, if any, those are. It’s a package deal. We bought it all, we keep it all going.”

“I guess I’m still in the state of confusion, maybe slipping into denial. I’ve seen some things tonight that confound my basic understanding of nature. I don’t quite believe this is real. I’m definitely not ready to scrap everything I know and start over. So what can we do here? Since I can’t really cooperate with your project, can I really be of any use to you? Why not just send me home? Find someone else, someone who can buy into your fantasy.”

“No, I’m afraid not, Dr. Feynman. We can use you whether you cooperate or not. It’s just that cooperation would be healthier for you. We leave in a few hours for Machu Pichu. It would be best if you had something to eat and got an hour or two of sleep.”

“I’d like to see your real shape.”

“No, you wouldn’t like it. Believe me, you wouldn’t. Besides, we don’t have the time. It takes an hour and a half in the machine, not counting the programming.”

“Show me someone else already in their natural form.”

“Here at HQ we always take human form. Continuum policy. Keeps us alert to the human condition, aids us in our need to maintain a connection with the human mindset.”

“It would help me to believe.”

“I understand, but I see that you are in no way ready to believe, so there’s nothing more to say.”

Feynman noted how skillfully the LCA, while seeming to answer his questions, parried his attempts to gain a deeper understanding of his situation. He tried a new tack. “What happened to young Gvedn?”

“He’s not as young as you may think.”

“So he told me.”

“For many years Gvedn served the Continuum faithfully, but for some time now he has been waging a secret war against us. Only recently have we fully understood this. Tonight we monitored your conversation with him and confirmed our suspicions.”

“But where is he?”

“When my agents came to your house he beamed to HQ and quickly beamed out again. He managed to erase the transporter logs and disable the tracking device we had placed on him, so for the moment his whereabouts are unknown, but there is no doubt that we will find him.”

“What will you do to him?”

“Dr. Feynman, that needn’t trouble you. It will be referred to a higher authority. What you should do now is get some rest. We have a big day tomorrow.” At a signal from the LCA Feynman’s escort reappeared and he was led away to a small room with a cot.

After a light meal Feynman lay down to sleep, but sleep eluded him. His guts were churning. Oh yeah, he thought, this is a digestion problem all right. Can’t seem to digest these new data. Having some real trouble digesting the fact that I might not live through this. Hey, not to mention all the beer I drank tonight.

But at last sleep came, so that he was quite startled when he was awakened by someone placing a hand over his mouth. “Dick, it’s me, Gvedn. Wake up, be quiet and follow me. We’re leaving.”

Feynman instantly awoke and stood up. His heart beat wildly. Gvedn took his hand, opened the door carefully, looked out into the corridor and said, “Let’s go.”

Feynman instinctively realized that his lifelong practice of thinking everything through for himself was at this moment an impediment. He suspended all thoughts and slipped into a state of automatic obedience. They passed quickly through the corridor and entered the space Feynman had first seen when he arrived, the vast room full of machinery. “Stand there on that platform.” Feynman moved into position.

Suddenly he was back in the dark void with its stinging particles and then he found himself standing in what appeared to be a public lavatory. “What?”

Gvedn handed Feynman an overnight bag. Feynman recognized it as his own. “Go into one of those stalls and take off every stitch of clothing. Change into the clothes in this bag. Don’t ask. Just hurry.”

Feynman obeyed. He discovered that the clothes in the bag were his own. He emerged with the discarded clothing stuffed into the bag. Gvedn took it from him, dropped it on the floor and said “Let’s go.”

“But...”

“No time. Let’s go.”

They left the washroom, walked through the lobby of a hotel and left by the front door. Feynman’s van was parked by the curb. “Get in. I’ll drive,” said Gvedn. They got in the van, Gvedn pulled away and in a few minutes they were barreling down a freeway. “I think we did it. And in case you’re wondering, I removed the tracking device from your vehicle. You can relax now.”

“If you say so.”

“Oh, here’s your wallet. It’s full of money. Yours.”

Feynman released a huge sigh. The crisis seemed to be over. His mind switched on again. “Where are we going?”

“Anywhere you want except your place. Sorry about the clothes. There wasn’t time to check you for tracking devices. They’ve probably already picked up your clothes in the hotel, but now without their bugs on you they won’t know where to look.”

“So are you telling me I can’t go back to my house?”

“Not your house, not your office, none of your usual haunts. But only for a few days. Since they caught on to me, I’ve been rather uncertain about their timing, but once the critical window closes, they’ll lose interest in you. They’ll have to wait for the next stellar conjunction, which won’t occur for about twenty years. By then they’ll have a new victim lined up.”

“I was abducted by aliens,” said Feynman.

“That is certainly the case,” replied Gvedn.

“I was just thinking that might have to be the title of my next paper. That will be the end of my reputation, of course. It’s bad enough that I go to topless bars and play drums, but now they’ll know that I’ve lost my mind as well.”

“You’re saying that no one will believe you.”

“Of course not. I don’t really believe it myself, although I probably will as my mind gets used to it. And if that happens then I’ll have to tell it like it is. It was my first wife who said ‘What do you care what other people think?’.”

Feynman lapsed into silence and stared ahead, watching the cone of the headlights push into the darkness, thinking of his dead wife, thinking how peculiar the world was with electrons going forward and backward in time, but that here in the macro world he could only go forward, hurtling through the darkness into an unknown future. He was still living through a day that was far stranger to him than electrons going backward in time. He had yet to work through the implications of how this day would affect his future life and yet at some level he had already made a decision.

He turned to Gvedn and said, “Actually I do care what people think.”

Proceed to Chapter 4...

Copyright © 2007 by Bob Brill