Asimov's Science Fiction: April/May 2014 Read Online Free PDF

lantern-like device.
    "No, I get you. None of it seems tremendously believable. He did say some of the stories are invented. Listen to the other titles." He flipped to the page that listed other books in the series. "
World Inside the Earth. He Died Three Times. The Living Comet. The Metal People. Message from the Future.
No ma'am, these do not sound grounded in the real world."
    Bekka held up one finger. "As a student of physics, allow me to provide a counter-argument: the more we know about the world, the more we know how little we know."
    "Still. I don't think anyone's invented a Methusaleh Ray."
    Her head rocked in consideration. "Maybe it's a metaphor for sunlight. That man's aged skin is entirely the result of not using sunblock." Both of their eyes shone. "Max is gonna look like that by the time he's forty!"
    They both laughed, then clamped their mouths shut—as if Max might know they were laughing at him. Jimmy tapped her on the nose with the book. The day had been, remarkably, salvaged.
    Three in the morning. Jimmy blinked his sticky eyes to confirm the numbers on the digital clock. Then, in a fugue of vivid recall, he truly heard the news report that had slipped through the open door hours ago. Multiple sinkholes had simultaneously opened in a small town in Pennsylvania. A woman's car had dropped into one hole and she had known with certainty, as water filled the car, that she was dead; but a man appeared. "He wrenched the door off, then pulled me up." Afterward, he had slipped away. She described a tall, elderly man, possibly black or Hispanic.
    Jimmy saw a dark passage and a silhouetted figure seated at the end, lifting his head, daring him to look back. He was going to need the car.
7. Passageway
    The method had run into trouble when they had tried it in Iraq. The barriers were too great, a set of palisades too tall to leap, palisades not just of language, which in theory shouldn't have caused problems, but of worldview, of belief and intent. You needed, ideally, to not only know something of the other person, but understand the other person. The people Jimmy tried to connect with were, in some cases, his true and absolute enemy, people whose hatred for his country and its people was an insurmountable wall. He didn't have the tools to deconstruct such an edif ice. The training had not prepared them for this, and Jimmy suspected, though was never told, that the other members of his unit met the same level of failure.
    In other cases, though, where such firm convictions were not present, a connection was possible, and connections occurred. Being in the same room helped, but a subject who was fully conscious was more likely to be actively unwilling. Asleep could work, but the passageway remained dark for so long, Jimmy had sometimes panicked or lost consciousness himself.
    The holding facility—for captives en route to one or another prison—had been a terrible place for employing such outré methods, its halls and rooms too close, full of a smell the Americans hadn't been able to scrub from the walls, the facility occasionally coming under fire, and finally, after a year of no results, there had come one disastrous result, the prisoner shooting himself when he awoke from the passageway, having seized one of the MP's guns. He was a sixteen-year-old from the countryside who they'd hoped could give them solid information about the source of particularly nasty IEDs. Jimmy concluded that the notion of suicide—never far from the young man's mind in such hopeless circumstances—had taken hold due to whatever jostling Jimmy had done in the boy's psyche. No one else blamed Jimmy. In fact, given the way things were going that week in country, no one felt especially bad, which had unsettled him even more.
    Quarles helped Jimmy heft the thin mattress and iron frame down the hall to the observation room, then brought him half a box of MREs and several water bottles. That first afternoon at Perilous Base, Jimmy watched the