Spider Robinson - The Mind 2 - Time Pressure

[version history and scanning notes]

Time Pressure

Spider Robinson

For all my North Mountain friends,

hippies, locals and visitors,

and for Raoul Vezina and Steve Thomas

PROLOGUE

I guarantee that every word of this story is a lie.

ONE

It was a dark and stormy night . . .

Your suspension of disbelief has probably just bust a leaf-spring: how can you

believe in a story that begins that way? I know it's one of the hoariest cliche[aas in pulp

fiction; my writer friend Snaker uses the expression satirically often enough. "It was a

dark and stormy night—when suddenly the shot rang out. . . ." But I don't especially want

you to believe this story—I just want you to listen to it—and even if I were concerned

with convincing you there wouldn't be anything I could do about it, the story begins

where it begins and that's all there is to it.

And "dark" is not redundant. Most nights along the shore of the Bay of Fundy are

not particularly dark, as nights go. There's a lot of sky on the Fundy Shore, as transparent

as a politician's promise, and that makes for a lot of starlight even on Moonless evenings.

When the Moon's up it turns the forest into a fairyland—and even when the big clouds

roll in off the water and darken the sky, there is usually the glow of Saint John, New

Brunswick on the horizon, tinting the underside of clouds sixty kilometers away across

the Bay, mitigating the darkness. (In those days, just after Canada went totally metric, I

would have thought "forty miles" instead of sixty klicks. Habits can be changed.)

The day had been chilly for late April and the wind had been steady from the

south, so I was not at all surprised when the snowstorm began just after sundown.

(Maybe you live somewhere that doesn't have snow in April; if so, I hope you appreciate

it.) It was not a full-scale mankiller blizzard, the sort where you have to crack the attic

window for breathing air and dig tunnels to the woodshed and the outhouse: a bit too late

in the year for that.

Nonetheless it was indisputably a dark and stormy night in 1973—when suddenly

the snot ran out. . . .

***

Nothing less could have made me suit up and go outside on such a night. Even a

chimney fire might not have done it. There is a rope strung from my back porch to my

outhouse during the winter, because when the big gusts sail in off that tabletop icewater

and flay the North Mountain with snow and stinging hail, a man can become hopelessly

lost on his way to the shitter and freeze to death within bowshot of his house. This storm

was not of that caliber, but neither was it a Christmas-cardy sort of snowing, with little

white petals drifting gently and photogenically down through the stillness. Windows

rattled or hummed, their inner and outer coverings of plastic insulation shuddered and

crackled, the outer doors strained and snarled at their fastenings, wind whistled through

weatherstripping in a dozen places, shingles complained and threatened to leave,

banshees took up residence in both my stovepipes (the two stoves, inflamed, raved and

roared back at them), and beneath all the local noise could be heard the omnipresent

sound of the wind trying to flog the forest to death and the Bay trying to smash the stone

shore to flinders. They've both been at it for centuries, and one day they'll win.

My kitchen is one of the tightest rooms in Heartbreak Hotel; on both north and

south it is buffered by large insulated areas of putatively dead air (the seldom-used,

sealed-up porch on the Bay side and the back hall on the south). Nevertheless the

kerosene lamp on the table flickered erratically enough to make shadows leap around the

room like Baryshnikov on speed. From where I sat, rocking by the kitchen stove and

sipping coffee, I could see that I had left about a dozen logs of maple and birch piled up

on the sawhorse outside. I was not even remotely inclined to go back out there and get

them under cover.

Dinner was over, the dishes washed, the kitchen stove's watertank refilled and

warming, both stoves fed and cooking nicely, chores done. I cast about for some stormy

night's entertainment, but the long hard winter just ending had sharply depleted the

supply. I had drunk the last of my wine and homebrew a few weeks back, had smoked up

most of the previous year's dope crop, read all the books in the house and all those to be

borrowed on the Mountain, played every record and reel of tape I owned more than often

enough to be sick of them, and the weather was ruining reception of CBC Radio (the only

tolerable station of the three available, and incidentally one of the finest on Earth). So I

decided to put in some time on the dulcimer I was building, and that meant that I needed

Mucus the Moose, and when I couldn't find him after a Class One Search of the house I

played back memory tape and realized, with a sinking feeling, that I was going to have to

go outside after all.

I might not have done it for a friend—but if Mucus was out there, I had no choice.

Mucus the Moose is one of my most cherished possessions, one of my only

mementoes of a very dear dead friend. He (the moose, not the friend) is about fifteen

centimeters tall, and bears a striking physical resemblance to that noblest of all meece,

Bullwinkle—save that Mucus is as potbellied as the Ashley stove in my living room. He

is a pale translucent brown from the tips of his rack down to wherever the Plimsoll line

happens to be, and pale translucent green thereafter. Picture Bullwinkle gone to fat and

extremely seasick. His full name and station—Mucus Moose, the Mucilage Machine—are

spelled out in raised letters on his round little tummy.

If you squeeze him gently right there, green glue comes out of his nostrils. . . .

If you don't understand why I love him so dearly, just let it go. Chalk it up to

eccentricity or cabin fever—congenital insanity, I won't argue—but he was irreplaceable

and special to me, and he was nowhere to be found. On rewind-search of my head I found

that the last place I remembered putting him was in my jacket pocket, in order to fasten

down the Styrofoam padding on Number Two hole in the outhouse, and he was not in the

said pocket, and the last time that jacket pocket had been far enough from vertical for

Mucus to fall out had been—

—that afternoon, by the sap pot, halfway up the frigging Mountain, more than a

mile up into the woods. . . .

I have a special personal mantra for moments like that, but I believe that even in

these enlightened times it is unprintable. I chanted it aloud as I filled both stoves with

wood, pulled on a second shirt and pair of pants, added a sweater, zipped up the

Snowmobile boots, put on the scarf and jacket and gloves and cap and stomped into the

back hall like a space-suited astronaut entering the airlock, or a hardhat diver going into

the decompression chamber.

The analogies are rather apt. When I popped the hook-and-eye and shouldered the

kitchen door open (its spring hinge complaining bitterly enough to be heard over the

general din), I entered a room whose ambient temperature was perhaps fifteen Celsius

degrees colder than that of the kitchen—and the back hall was at least that much warmer

than the world outside. I sealed the kitchen door behind me with the turnbuckle, zipped

my jacket all the way up to my nose, took the heavy-duty flashlight from its perch near

the chainsaw, and thumbed open the latch of the outside door.

It promptly flew open, hit me sharply in the face and across the shin, and knocked

the flashlight spinning. I turned away from the incoming blast of wind-driven snow, in

time to see the flashlight knock over the can of chainsaw gas/oil mixture, which spilled

all over the split firewood. Not the big wood intended for the living room Ashley, the

small stuff for the kitchen stove. I sleep above that kitchen stove at nights, and I was

going to be smelling burning oil in my sleep for the next week or so.

I started my mantra over again from the beginning, more rhythmically and at

twice the volume, retrieved the flashlight, and stomped out into the dark and stormy

night, to rescue fifty cents worth of flexible plastic and a quarter-liter of green glue. Love

is strange.

***

I had been mistaken about those banshees. They hadn't been inside my stovepipes,

only hollering down them. They were out here, much too big to fit down a chimney and

loud enough to fill the world, manifesting as ghostly curtains of snow that were torn apart

by the wind as fast as they formed. I hooked the door shut before me, made a perfectly

futile attempt to zip my jacket up higher—all the way up is as high as a zipper goes—and

pushed away from the Hotel to meet them.

The woodshed grunted a dire warning as I passed. I ignored it; it had been

threatening to fall over ever since I had known it, back in the days when it had been a

goatshed. As I went by the outhouse I half turned to see if the new plastic window I'd

stapled up last week had torn itself to pieces yet, and as I saw that it had, a shingle left the

tiny roof with the sound of a busted E-string and came spinning at my eyes like a ninja

deathstar. I'm pretty quick, but the distance was short and the closing velocity high; I took

most of it on my hat but a corner of it put a small slice on my forehead. I was almost glad

then for the cold. It numbed my forehead, the bleeding stopped fairly quickly for a

forehead wound, and what there was swiftly froze and could be easily brushed off.

When I was clear of the house and outbuildings the wind steadied and gathered

strength. It snowed horizontally. The wind had boxed the compass; wind and I were

traveling in the same direction and, thanks to the sail-area of my back, at roughly the

same speed. For seconds at a time the snow seemed to hang almost motionless in the air

around me, like a cloud of white fireflies who had all decided to come jogging with me. It

was weirdly beautiful. Magic. As the land sloped uphill, the snow appeared to settle in

ultraslow motion, disappearing as it hit the ground.

Once I was up into the trees the wind slacked off considerably, confounded by the

narrow and twisting path. The snow resumed normal behavior and I dropped back from a

trot to a walk. As I came to the garden it weirded up again. Big sheets of air spilled over

the tall trees into the cleared quarter-acre bowl and then smashed themselves to pieces

against the trees on the far side. It looked like the kind of snowstorm they get inside those

plastic paperweights when you shake them, skirling in all directions at once.

I realized that despite having fixed it in my mind no more than three hours ago, I

had forgotten to bring the chamber pot with me from the house. I certainly wasn't going

back for it, not into the teeth of that wind. Instead, it shouldn't be a total loss, I worked off

one glove, got my fly undone and pissed along as much of the west perimeter as I could

manage, that being the direction from which the deer most often approached.

Animals don't grok fences as territory markers because they cannot conceive of

anyone making a fence. Fences occur; you bypass them. But borders of urine are made,

by living creatures, and their message is ancient and universally understood. A big

carnivore claims this manor. (The Sunrise Hill commune had tried everything else in the

book, fences and limestone borders and pie-pan rattles and broken-mirror windchimes,

and still lost a high percentage of their garden to critters. Vegetarian pee doesn't work.)

Past the garden the path began to slope upward steeply, and footing became

important. It would be much worse in a few weeks, when the path turned into a trail of

mud, oozing down the Mountain in ultraslow motion, but it was not an easy walk now.

This far back up into the woods, the path was in shadow for most of the day, and long

slicks of winter snow and ice remained unmelted here and there; on the other hand, there

had been more than enough thawing to leave a lot of rocks yearning to change their

position under my feet. My Snowmobile boots gave good traction and ankle support—

and were as heavy as a couple of kilos of coffee strapped to my feet. The ground

crunched beneath them, and I sympathized. I had to keep working my nose to break up

the ice that formed in it, and my beard began to stiffen up from the exhalations trapped by

my scarf. Mucus, I thought, I hope you appreciate the trouble I go through for you.

I thought of Frank then for a while, and a strange admixture of joy and sadness

followed me up the trail. Frank was the piano-player/artist who had given me Mucus,

back in Freshman year. Fragile little guy with black curls flying in all directions and a

tongue of Sheffield steel. His hero was Richard Manuel of The Band. (Mine was Davy

Graham then.) He only smiled in the presence of friends, and his smile always began and

ended with just the lips. The corners of his mouth would curl all the way up into his

cheeks as far as they could, the lips would peel back for a brief flash of good white teeth,

then seal again.

The way our college worked it, there was a no-classes Study Week before the

barrage of Finals Week. Frank and I were both in serious academic jeopardy, make-or-

break time. We stayed awake together for the entire two weeks, studying. No high I've

had before or since comes close to the heady combination of total fatigue and mortal

terror. At one point in there, I've forgotten which night, we despaired completely and

went off-campus to get drunk. We could not seem to manage it no matter how much

alcohol we drank. After five or six hours we gave up and went back to studying. Over the

next few days we transcended ourselves, reached an exhilarated plane on which we

seemed to comprehend not only the individual subjects, but all of them together in

synthesis. As Lord Buckley would say, we dug infinity.

By the vagaries of mass scheduling we both had all our exams on Thursday and

Friday, three a day. We felt this was good luck. Maximum time to study, then one brutal

final effort and it was all over. One or two exams a day would have been like Chinese

water torture.

As the sun came up on Thursday morning I was a broken man, utterly whipped.

Frank flailed at me with his hands, and then with that deadly tongue—Frank only used

that on assholes, the kind of people who mocked you for wearing long hair—without

reaching me. He and the rest of the world could go take Sociology exams: I was going to

die, here, now. He left the room. In a few moments I heard him come back in. I kept my

eyes shut, determined to ignore whatever he said, but he didn't say anything at all, so with

an immense irritated effort I forced them open and he was holding out Mucus Moose the

Mucilage Machine.

He knew I coveted the Moose. It was one of his most cherished belongings.

"I want you to have him, Sam," he said. "I've got a feeling if anything can hold

you together now, it's Mucus."

I exploded laughing. That set him off, and we roared until the tears came. We

were in that kind of shape. The laugh was like those pads they clap to the chests of fading

cardiac patients; it shocked me reluctantly back to life.

"You son of a bitch," I said finally, wiping tears away. "Thanks." Then: "What

about you?"

"What about me?"

"What's going to hold you together, if I take Mucus?"

His cheeks appled up, his lips peeled apart slowly, and the teeth flashed. "I'm

feeling lucky. Come on, asshole."

I passed everything, in most cases by the skin of my teeth, but overall well

enough to stagger through another semester of academic probation. Frank passed

everything but not by enough and failed out.

If you want to really get to know someone, spend two weeks awake with them. I

only saw him twice after that—he made the fatal mistake of trying to ignore an

inconvenient asthma attack—but I will never forget him.

And I was not going to leave Mucus on a snowy mountainside with his only

bodily fluid turned to green fudge in his belly.

As the trail made the sharp turn to the left, I saw a weasel a few meters off into

the woods. He looked at me as though he had a low opinion of my intelligence. "You're

out here too, jerk," I muttered into my scarf, and he vanished.

There was something electric in the air. It took me awhile to realize that this was

more than a metaphor. I became aware of an ozone-y smell, like—but subtly different

from—the smell of a NiCad battery charger when you crack the lid. You know the smell

you get when you turn on an old tube amplifier that's been unused long enough to collect

dust? If you'd sprinkled just a pinch of cinnamon and fine-ground basil on top first, it

might smell like the air smelled that night, alive and tangy and sharp-edged. I knew the

stimulant effect of ozone, had experienced it numerous times; this was different. Better. I

knew a little about magic, more than I had before I'd moved to the North Mountain. Nova

Scotia has many kinds of magic, but this was a different kind, one I didn't know.

I stopped minding the cold and the snow and the wind and the steepness of the

trail. No, I kept minding them, but I became reconciled to them. Shortly a unicorn was

going to step out from behind a stand of birch. Or perhaps a tornado was going to take me

to Oz. Something wonderful was about to happen.

A part of my mind stood back and skeptically observed this, tried to analyze it,

noted that the sensation increased as I progressed upslope (ozone was lighter than air,

wasn't it?), wondered darkly if this was what it smelled like before lightning struck

someplace, tried to remember what I'd read on the subject. Avoid tall trees. Avoid

standing in water. Trees loomed all around me, of course, and my boots had been

breaking through skins of ice into slushwater for the last half klick. (But that was silly,

paranoid, you didn't get lightning with snow.) That part of my mind which thought of

itself as rational urged me to turn around and go back downhill to a place of warmth and

comfort, and to hell with the silly glue-dispenser and the funny smell and the electric

night.

But that part of my mind had ruled me all my life. I had come here to Nova Scotia

specifically to get in touch with the other part of my mind, the part that perceived and

believed in magic, that tasted the crisp cold night and thrilled with anticipation, for

something unknown, or perhaps forgotten. It had been a long cold winter, and a little shot

of magic sounded good to me.

Besides, I was almost there. I kept on slogging uphill, breathing big deep lungfulls

of sparkling air through the scarf, and in only a few hundred meters more I had reached

my destination, the Place of Big Maples and the clearing where I boil sap.

That very afternoon I had hiked up here and done a boiling, one of the last of the

season. Maple syrup takes a lot of hours, but it is extremely pleasant work. Starting in

early Spring, you hammer little aluminum sap-taps into any maple thicker than your thigh

for an acre on either side of the trail, and hang little plastic sap-trap pails from them. You

take a chainsaw to about a Jesus-load and a half of alders (I'll define that measurement

later) and stack them to dry in the resulting clearing. The trail is generously stocked with

enough boulders to create a fireplace of any size desired. Every few days you hike up to

the maple grove, collect the contents of the pails in big white plastic buckets, and dump

the buckets into the big castiron sap pot. You build a fire of alder slash, pick a

comfortable spot, and spend the next several hours with nothing to do but keep the fire

going. . . .

You can read if you want, if the weather permits—it's hard turning pages with

gloves on—and toward the end of sap season you sometimes can even bring a guitar up

the Mountain with you, and sing to the forest while you watch the pot. Or you can just

watch the world. From that high up the slope of the Mountain, at that time of year, you

can see the Bay off through the trees, impersonal and majestic. I'm a city kid; I can sit

and look at the woods around me for four or five hours and still be seeing things when it's

time to go.

Sap takes a lot of boiling, and then some more. Raw maple sap has the look and

consistency of weak sugar water, with just a hint of that maple taste. That afternoon had

been a good run: I had collected enough to fill the pot, maybe fifty liters or so—then kept

the fire roaring for hours, and eventually took a little more than three liters down the

Mountain with me in a Mason jar. (Even that wasn't really proper maple syrup—when I

had enough Mason jars I would boil them down further [and more gently] on the kitchen

stove—but it was going to taste a hell of a lot better on my pancakes than the "maple"

flavored fluid you buy in stores.)

At one point I had scrounged around and picked some wintergreen, dipped up

some of the boiling sap in my ladle and brewed some fresh wintergreen tea with natural

maple sugar flavoring, no artificial colour, no preservatives, and sipped it while I fed the

fire. Nothing I could possibly have lugged uphill in a Thermos would have tasted half so

good. I had not felt lonely, but only alone. It had been a good afternoon.

I remembered it now and felt even better than I had then—good in the same way,

and good in a different and indefinable and complimentary way at the same time. This

afternoon the world had felt right. Tonight felt right, and about to get even better—even

the savage weather was an irrelevancy, without significance.

So of course luck was with me; Mucus was just where I'd hoped to find him, half-

buried in the heap of dead leaves beside the stone fireplace, where I had for a time today

lain back and stared through the treetops at the sky. I didn't even have to do any digging:

the flashlight picked him out almost at once. He was facing me. His features were

obscured by snow, but I knew that his expression would be sleepy-lidded contentment,

the Buddha after a heavy meal.

"Hey, pal," I said softly, puffing just a little, "I'm sorry."

He said nothing.

"Hey, look, I came back for you." I worked my nose to crack the ice in my

nostrils. "At this point, the only thing that can hold me together is Mucus." I giggled, and

my lower eyelids began to burn. If I felt so goddam good, why did I suddenly want to

burst out crying?

Did I want to burst out crying?

I wanted to do something—wanted it badly. But I didn't know what.

I picked up the silly little moose, wiped him clean of snow, probed at the hard

little green ball in his guts, and poked at his nostrils to clear them. "Forgive me?"

But there was only the sound of wind sawing at the trees.

No. There was more.

A faint, distant sound. Omnidirectional, approaching slowly from all sides at

once, and from overhead, and from beneath my feet, like a contracting globe with me at

the center. No, slightly off-center. A high, soft, sighing, with an odd metallic edge, like

some sort of electronically processed sound.

Trees began to stir and creak around me. The wind, I thought, and realized that the

wind was gone. The snow was gone. The air was perfectly still.

When I first moved to Nova Scotia they told me, "If you don't like the weather, sit

down and have a beer. Likely the weather you was lookin' for'll be along 'fore you

finish." No climatic contortion no matter how unreasonable can surprise me anymore.

This was the first snowstorm I'd ever known to have an eye, like a hurricane; fine.

But what was disturbing the trees?

They were trembling. I could see it with the flashlight. They vibrated like plucked

strings, and part of the sound I was hearing was the chord they made. Occasionally one

would emit a sharp cracking sound as rhythmic accompaniment to the chorus.

Well, of course they're making cracking sounds, said the rational part of my mind,

it's a good ten degrees warmer now—

—ten degrees warmer?

A thrill of terror ran up my spine, I'd always thought that was just an expression

but it wasn't, but was it terror or exhilaration, the cinnamony smell was very strong now

and the trees were humming like the Sunrise Hill Gang chanting Om, a vast, world-sized

sphere of sound contracted from all sides at once with increasing speed and power and

yes I was a little off-center, it was going to converge right over there—

Crack!

A globe of soft blue light did actually appear in the epicenter, like a giant robin's

egg, about fifty meters east of me and two or three meters off the ground. A yellow birch

which had stood in that spot for at least thirty years despite anything wind or water could

do obligingly disintegrated to make room for the globe. I mean no stump or flinders: the

whole tree turned in an instant into an equivalent mass of sawdust and collapsed.

The humming sound reached a crescendo, a crazy chord full of anguish and hope.

The globe of light was a softly glowing blue, actinic white around the edges, and

otherwise featureless. It threw out about as much light as a sixty-watt bulb. The sawdust

that fell on it vanished, and the instant the last grain had vanished, the globe disappeared.

Silence. Total, utter stillness, such as is never heard in a forest in any weather.

Complete starless Stygian darkness. It might have taken me a full second to bring the

flashlight to bear.

Where the globe had been, suspended in the air in a half-crouch, was a naked bald

woman, hugging herself.

She did not respond to the light. She moved, slightly, aimlessly, like someone

floating in a transparent fluid, her eyes empty, her features slack. Suddenly she fell out of

the light, dropped the meter and a half to the forest floor and landed limply on the heap of

fresh sawdust. She made a small sound as she hit, a little animal grunt of dismay that

chopped off.

I stood absolutely still for ten long seconds. The moment she hit the earth, the

stillness ended and all the natural sounds of the night returned, the wind and the snow and

the trees sighing at the memory of the effort they had just made and a distant owl and the

sound of the Bay lapping at the shore.

I held the flashlight on her inert form.

A short dark slender bald woman. No, hairless from head to toe. Not entirely

naked after all: she wore a gold headband, thin and intricately worked, that rode so high

on her skull I wondered why it didn't fall off. Eurasian-looking features, but her hips were

Caucasian-wide and she was dark enough to be a quadroon. Smiling joyously at the

Moonless sky. Sprawled on her back. Magnificent tits. Aimlessly rolling eyes, and the

blank look of a congenital idiot. Arms outflung in instinctive attempt to break her fall, but

relaxed now. Long, slender hands.

Well, I had wanted an evening's entertainment . . .

TWO

I guess this is as good a place as any for your suspension of disbelief to snap

through like an overstressed guitar string. I don't blame you a bit, and it only gets worse

from here. Con-men work by getting you to swallow the hook a little at a time; first you

are led to believe a small improbability, then there are a series of increasingly improbable

complications, until finally you believe something so preposterous that afterward you

cannot fathom your own foolishness. My writer friend Snaker says the only difference

between a writer and a con-man is the writer has better hours, works at home, and can use

his real name if it suits him.

So I guess I'm not a very good con-man. Without the assistance of Gertrude the

Guitar, anyway. I'm giving you a pretty improbable thing to swallow right at the start. It's

okay with me if you don't believe it, all right?

Spider Robinson - The Mind 2 - Time Pressure

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