Revolver

by Joshua Roberts

They were all in the lounge, the room they’d agreed to call the lounge:
an unused space in the compound, not very large but available,
empty at first of everything but a sink and the most pragmatic office furniture, and into which they’d shoved or dragged over the course of prior weeks such extracurricular items as a lime Naugahyde sofa, a wooden
cabinet, a small fridge for ice cubes and soda, and a shaky hi-fi player
that Tromley had found at a yard sale down in Hiko, the closest town,
twenty-three miles south on 318. A color TV was on the agenda (their
individual bungalows had black-and-white sets, courtesy of ARPA) so
that they could be ready in style when this new show Star Trek got
underway next month—they were all, even Julie, excited by what they’d
been hearing about Star Trek. They pinched glasses from the mess hut
and kept them in the cabinet along with the bottles and plates and
spoons and plastic straws and nonperishable snacks, and an oversized
combination padlock stayed on the cabinet door even after somebody
taped a note there, an anonymous typewritten note that read: We all
know the combination so who is this for really? They learned to mix drinks
in Vandevoort’s giant Thermos. No one had asked him yet why he’d
brought a Thermos to Nevada in the summer. There was one long window
on the west wall, sealed now for the air-conditioning, and the
guards’ machine rifles were always in view whenever a jeep swung by
outside, black gunmetal under the killing sun, around and around in
routine sweeps of the perimeter’s double fence.
         The five of them sat there in the lounge, late afternoon, post-programming
mode, as if they were regular office types unwinding after the
standard button-down 0900h–1700h. Dan Crutchfield sipping his martini
slowly and talking shop, elaborating on current theories of artificial
intelligence.
         “Time flies like an arrow, fruit flies like bananas.”
         A pause while the rest of them processed the sentence. No one was
going to give Dan the satisfaction of outright laughter. He tried very
hard not to look as though he was trying not to look at Julie. Frobnitz,
squatting by a mound of science-fiction paperbacks (Ace, Ballantine,
Pocket) exposed scummy upper teeth: his version of a grin.
         “Do you get it?” Dan said.
         “Of course we get it. Jesus . . .” Vandevoort was alone on the sofa,
kangaroo legs crossed under his heavy gut. He still had on the white lab
coat he wore as a joke, and he held his own martini in its water glass up
against the overhead fluorescent light and shivered.
         “You sure?” Dan said. “The whole thing? Because you’ve got two
clauses in that sentence, like two subroutines, and each routine’s got
multiple subtrees.”
         “But it’s not really a joke-joke,” Frobnitz said. His pale eyes hung
behind thick lenses like deep-sea life. Young and shaggy in a plaid shirt,
Frobnitz was part of that growing MIT breed, the ones hatching out of
the Model Railroad Club in Building 20 back in Cambridge: hardcore,
talmudic, coding for days without sleep, bumming machine language
into purity and rightness. The ones who called themselves hackers. His
haircut seemed older than he was. “More like just a play-play on
words,” he said. One 4 a.m. Dan went down to the lab and found the
little PDP-8 beeping out the NBC theme over and over, three notes
constantly reascending off the major sixth,G–E–C, pause,G–E–C, while
on the cathode screen a fair semblance of the NBC peacock (unfortunately
restricted to green display lines—but wait till they got that color
TV and patched into it) spread its feathers fanwise again and again,
Frobnitz sitting there in a bucket seat, giggling proudly over his latest
triumph.
         “But whatever the case,” Dan said, “would you be able to anticipate
every syn . . . every syntactical possibility in every subtree before you
coded the program?”
         “This is why AI is a crock.” Vandevoort swirled his glass, sneering.
“Because it’s you writing the code.”
         “No no, first you tell the computer how to do it, then it takes it from
there, and once it has the semblance of conscious thought—”
         “Oh, the semblance,” Vandevoort said.
         The hi-fi sang in its corner: one for you, nineteen for me. Tromley way
over there, rotating his head over the spinning record.
         “What’s so difficult about the subtrees?” Julie said. “We’re not dealing
with a giant number.” She stood in front of the window with a
wasp-bodied bottle of Coke. Her green cotton frock was cinched neat-
ly at the waist, such that she and the green glass bottle in her hand
seemed members of the same set, a replication of form and color across
scale. Her frizzy brown hair was pinned up behind her in a compromised
bun, thin dark kinks roiling out of the bundle to flare and dull in
sequence as she turned her head in the slanting rays of the afternoon
sun. Dan tried to stare—really and truly tried. If the others noticed him
looking away they’d figure the reason why. Everyone else (excluding
Tromley, of course, with no apparent effort on his part) stared openly,
even after two months of teamwork in the Nevada desert. The others
were men too, computer jockeys for Uncle Sam in ironed shirts and ties
but still in the family of men. And wasn’t Julie Katz something? Not
just “pretty for a science gal” but really something? Dan was close to
shouting, skipping in the sun, on the brink of letting everybody know
that just three hours ago he had watched Julie Katz, she of the Vassar
honors degree in math, she with the husband and son back east, pin up
her hair in haste while she stood in his bungalow bathroom just a few
steps away, across the burning grounds of the compound,
watched her pluck pins from her compressed lips with her head bowed.
He, Daniel Boone Crutchfield, thirty-one years old, single guy and
heretofore not precisely a devil with the ladies, was the reason for her
disheveled hair! The urge to sing this fact was in him constantly, like
breathing, like pulse. So he had to consider it in all likelihood a good
thing that Julie was proving quite skilled, even excellent in point of hard
fact, at behaving publicly as if there were no personal connection
between her and Dan at all. And not only no connection but, perhaps
even more importantly, no disconnection either, no deliberate unattraction,
no faked disgust or contrived repulsion, such that she did not even
seem to be ignoring him. Julie Katz was proving phenomenally good
at behaving in front of the others as if nothing but a cordially professional
relationship existed between herself and Dan, nothing emotional
whatsoever, nil, zero, not even a faint and minimal dislike, and Dan
found this behavior of Julie’s, this act of hers, absolutely indistinguishable
from the real thing—and wasn’t that reassuring? For his first adulterous
affair? Wasn’t it a good thing, precisely what his peace of mind
required? Huh? Wasn’t it? He swallowed hard, sweating, and he surrendered
now, averting his eyes in mortal shyness as Julie made careful
sweeps in the air with her bottle of Coca-Cola.
         “The first branch is obvious, naturally,” she said. “‘Time flies like an
arrow,’ comma, that’s your first part. And ‘fruit flies like bananas’ is the
second. So let’s focus on the first branch, simple assignation of base sentence
structure. ‘Time’ is the subject and ‘flies’ . . . that’s what kind of
verb? Intransitive? And ‘like an arrow’ is your modifier, so subject, verb,
adverb phrase, not much of a challenge really.”
         “Give it a rest,” Vandevoort groaned. “My brain’s too futzed right now.”
“Your brain is munged,” Frobnitz said. His nose was deep into one
of the paperbacks: Clans of the Alphane Moon.
         “For a change?” Julie said. “Come on, you guys, Dan’s idea is sort
of ordinary.”
         Dan felt something turn over behind his ribs.
         No one was going to try and draw Tromley into the conversation.
He stood by the hi-fi, unbudging. The only thing about him that
seemed to move was his head—the skull, the seat of thought, the
appendage where the brain tends to be housed—and Tromley’s oscillated
mildly but steadily as he peered down at the rotating turntable, hypnotized
as usual by the record’s motion, the new Beatles album that he
couldn’t get enough of and which just now, over a maudlin layer of violins
and cello (this is rock and roll? this is the Beatles? what’s gotten into
those moptops?), was urging everyone to look at all the lonely people.
Hard to say what Tromley liked most: the sounds the album made when
interacting with a high-fidelity phonograph needle, or the vision of the
album revolving at the standard rate of 33 1/3 times per minute. He
seemed fascinated by the physical disc as much as by the music it generated,
his eyes tracking the black circle like he was pulling in radio
waves from beyond Pluto. His copy of the LP was imported directly
from England (someone had mailed it to him from there, a careful
square of cardboard and packing tape and wads of foam rubber, some
penpal of his, proof that Tromley actually had some sort of friend somewhere,
even if at a distance of five thousand miles—the only way, Julie
told Dan privately, that he could have one), because this British version
on the Parlophone label was better, longer than the American version
released through Capitol Records—it had more songs, it was The Real
Thing, and Tromley even managed to speak about this at dinner in the
mess hut one night, one of the very rare occasions when he had spoken,
wondering aloud in a horrible dead tone why the American label persisted
in doing this to the Beatles when it was clear that the British versions
of their albums were superior. Why dilute a great album simply to
piece together an alternate second-rate product? Surely one great
phonographic album from the Beatles was better than a string of inferior
ones? Surely money didn’t matter more to a record company than
the quality of the albums it distributed? Tromley’s un-touched plate of
greens sat cooling in front of him. No one answered him because he
was weird,weirder even than Frobnitz. At least Frobnitz sought the ele-
ment of play within computers, if sometimes to the detriment of personal
hygiene, and everyone understood that, but Tromley did not submit
to comprehension. The story was he’d worked for Bell Labs figuring
signal-to-noise ratios, and whether or not that was the case, he now
worked almost entirely by himself, simulating trajectory decay and fallout
ripples at his time-share terminal, submitting his Hollerith cards to
the reader for processing and almost always getting back flawless program
results, eerily bug-free. Tromley seemed to wear the same clothes
every day without collecting a speck of dirt. His flat eyes under his
cropped black hair expressed nothing. His skin appeared more like a
polymer of sleeker substances, and his voice, when they heard it, was
always a toneless output of words, with never any inflection nor a hint
of laughter. Even Frobnitz avoided him.
         “It’s not like syntax is a mystery,” Julie said. Her eyes lit casually on
Dan’s, skimmed away as casually. “It’s almost like—is this what you’re
driving at?—you’d have to train the computer to find mystery. To recognize
how English isn’t binary, isn’t cut and dry but fuzzy.”
         Vandevoort snorted.
         “So it can recognize the ambiguity, the sort of humor in different
uses of the word ‘like’ within the same sentence,maybe even make some
sort of comment . . .”
         “Okay, hold it right there,” Dan said. Was that too harsh? He saw
Julie’s eyes widen as he interrupted her, saw Frobnitz and Vandevoort
glance over sharply, Vandevoort looking especially beady. What had
they guessed?
         “I got started last night. Snuck a program through the 7090 when
no one was looking.” He pulled the folded printout from his back
pocket. “It’s already started, take a look . . .”
         Vandevoort stood from the sofa with a grunt, annoyed. Frobnitz
came too, with his troll’s breath, his shaggy head peering over Dan’s
shoulder at the crumpled sheet from the printer. Julie remained by the
window.
         “Julie?” Dan felt a whinny of panic. “You want to see this?” He
had to ask her to look, he couldn’t not ask her to look—how obvious
would that be, why was she making him ask?
         She set down her Coke bottle with a shrug, came to join the others
bent over the printout.

~

         The installation, the site, the compound, the base, the facility, the
grounds, the zone, the range.
         Dan Crutchfield and Paul Vandevoort had gone out for a stroll one
morning, a little exercise before the sun achieved prime hostility mode.
They got along well, showy arguments in the lounge notwithstanding;
they were the two least-weird male programmers there and had a mutual
respect they fell into quietly when alone together. They shuffled
along the perimeter fence while the sun pawed their heads. At the east
gate was a small wooden structure with a bored soldier inside, a kid
hunched on a stool beside a radio and automatic rifle. Coils of barbed
wire topped the fence. A painted sign faced outward: Advanced Research
Projects Agency, United States Department of Defense.
         They looked across the desert. The installation lay between foothills
of the Timpahute Range, almost a mile west of Route 318, and
Dan and Vandevoort squinted east toward the next range of mountains
across the plain, the sky blue and immense and pure, interfered with
only by rises of distant rock—more Timpahutes or was that the
Pahranagat Range? What was the goddamn difference? Epic loaves of
broken rock running north to south, eternally banded with strata of
pale red and gray. Older than the first sketch of the Bible. Old. A gravel
road began at the gate and disappeared in the haze on its way to 318,
the main route invisible from this point, the occasional source of a faint
traveling whirr as some vehicle or other passed. The plain stretched out
and it stretched out: cracked soil under a spotty cover of sagebrush, creosote
bushes, and yucca with long spiky leaves and pale flowers.
Ground squirrels scampered in places, thin white tails curving over
small furry backs. A high speck of hawk rode a thermal on motionless
wings. Forever.
         Vandevoort stopped, tilted his head back to squint into the sky. “Still
blue. Still up there.”
         “Big.”
         “Yup. Overarching.”
         “Big blue,” Dan said.
         “Yup. The big blue room.”
         “Lacking only giant radioactive insects.”
         “They’re coming, Dan. Hear that whirr? The mutant insects are
coming.”
         Sweat ran down the lengths of their arms, bloomed on the backs of
their white shirts, dark patches of spreading stain.
         “Star Trek’s supposed to have some real writers lined up,” Vandevoort
said. From eroding hairline to jaw, his stubbled face gleamed with moisture.
“Bloch, Sturgeon, Richard Matheson. I have high expectations.”
         “Yeah,” Dan said. “Sure hope it catches on. God knows television
needs better science fiction.”
         “What, Batman doesn’t do it for you?”
         They stood absolutely still, waiting for a hint of breeze. Vandevoort
raised his heavy arms carefully and lowered them as carefully and you
could hear the squelch of his armpits.
         “A roadrunner,” he said. “I’m dying to see an actual roadrunner.”

~

         In his corner of the lounge,Tromley flipped his record over on the
hi-fi turntable, set the tone arm going again, good day sunshine, good day
sunshine blaring out as if reminder was needed that every day in central
Nevada was a jointless span of sun and rock and heat, a sagebrush griddle.
Tromley’s head oscillated in study.
         Vandevoort didn’t like the printout. The martinis were making
themselves felt and Vandevoort was making his opinions known. A
muddy grin widened his lips as his blunt finger tapped the paper.
“Wait’ll Johnny Taxpayer hears how you’re wasting his money, Dan.
Flagrant misuse of government funds. Nothing personal, but what’s the
point of all this again?”
         “I think it’s kind of neat.” Milton Frobnitz, badbreath defender of
digital foolery worldwide. If something could be done on a computer,
then it ought to be done, had to be. “What about you and Spacewar anyway?
You play-play it as much as anyone, shooting down rocketships all
night long.”
         “That’s a game,” Vandevoort said regally. “You know what von
Neumann said about games, how much we can learn from them. That’s
what we’re doing here. War games. Simulations. We learn from those,
right, Julie?”
         She allowed Vandevoort a tight smile of professional agreement.
         “But this . . .” Vandevoort continued, “this is just—”
         “It’s nice, Dan,” Julie said. “You surprise me sometimes.”
         There was a pause, everyone waiting for whatever she might surrender
next. Dan grinned slightly. A slight grin in these circumstances was
a reasonable display of pride. Or was she only having fun with him, or
fun with the others in the room, or with the whole Depart-ment of
Defense . . . ?
         “Is this LISP?” One of her bitten nails ran down the columns of
output.
         “No, just regular FORTRAN,” Dan said. “FORTRAN IV does it,
no problem.”
         Julie leaned forward more. She had to be the nicest-smelling thing
for a hundred miles—likely even showgirls down in Vegas didn’t smell
so nice. No one minded that she took her time studying the printout.
         “This is funny,” she finally said. Her finger was on Analysis Number
3. “This is such a funny way to look at the phrase, see?”
         “Oh, come on.” Vandevoort had angry flecks of spittle at the corners
of his lips. “You may think it’s funny, I don’t know why—but even
if you really do think it’s funny, the 7090 does not. It does not say ‘ha
ha’ anywhere on this printout. The computer is not laughing.” Vandevoort
was seriously irritated now, his eyes darting between Dan and
Julie. “And neither am I. Come on, this is just silly, this number three
here, it’s just that the program is being so literal, it makes ‘time’ a verb
and ‘flies’ a noun—so what? So the program thinks ‘time flies like an
arrow’ is some kind of command: ‘Hey you, I want you to get a stopwatch
and find some flies, I want you to time the flies, and above all I
want you to time the flies in an arrowlike manner.’ You’re telling me
you think that’s funny?”
         “Yes,” Julie said, smiling wider.

~

         She had arrived at the compound already under some superhuman
strain. Bitter eyes, a quaver in her voice, manifest even in casual conversation,
everyday programming confabs. They knew she had a husband
and a son, a continental divide between herself and them; they figured
that was her problem. What did Dan know? Never exactly a devil
with the ladies, he knew about Venn diagrams, Boolean algebra, electronic
transforms of And and Or and Not. The routings of female mood
were vague territory to Daniel Boone Crutchfield. All he knew was the
knock on his bungalow door late one night. And the fact that she
entered quickly, not seeming to mind his unmade bed, his shirts and
papers all over the sandy floor. She’d flicked his worn socks from the
back of a chair, sat down, and begun to tell her troubles. All he knew
was that she’d chosen him.

~

         Dan rubbed sweat from his forehead, staring down at the sheen in
his palm, the living moisture. He said,“Meep meep.” The heat was like
a game, like Red Light/Green Light or Simon Says. How long can you
keep moving before you break down?
         A patrol jeep passed him and Vandevoort where they stood at the
fence, the driver staring ahead through the windshield and glare, the
other soldier nodding to the two programmers from his shotgun seat.
Dan looked after them, frowning.
         “Explain this to me again, Paul. Guns and barbed wire way out here
in the middle of nowhere. Doesn’t that just call attention to the place?
Who is this fence for really? To impress us? Not Russian spies, but us?
Sure there’s security issues but . . . why did they put us in the desert?
This is exactly the worst place for computers—even underground in a
controlled lab, it’s exactly the worst place. ARPA must spend a million
dollars a day on air-conditioning just in the lab. We could run our simulations
just as well in Washington, or hell even back in Cambridge.
Those places are easily secured. But the desert? The desert is for artists,
Paul. Artists and saints. This is no place for computers.”
         Vandevoort barely smiled. Minimal effort is the watchword under
the sun.
         “They want us to see what the world’ll look like if our programs
fail,” he said. “If we can’t deter Ivan’s missiles. See?” Vandevoort pointed
beyond the fence, to an unbounded patch of burning ground. “Over
there? That’s the Empire State Building.” He pointed to another patch.
“Forty-second Street.” He moved his finger through the baking air,
indicating dry bushes and arid rock. “There’s the Hudson River.
There’s the Charles River. And the White House and the Statue of
Liberty and the tenement you grew up in back in Philadelphia.”
         “I didn’t grow up—”
         “Dan, this is a diorama they’ve plopped us in. This is the world after
World War Three. They’re saying: if you don’t like this now, think of
spending the rest of your life this way. Which incidentally, what’s she
like?”
         Dan stepped back from the fence. He looked up at Vandevoort carefully.
“What’s who like?”
         “I’m not stupid, Dan. And even if I was, I’m not blind.”
         They could stand there till the jeep came around again, till they
melted like butter into the parched earth. Dan wondered if Vandevoort
had as little experience as himself in discussing sexual affairs, as little
experience in lying about them.
         “She’s married, Paul.”
         “So are a lot of people. I’m married, but you don’t hear me bragging
about it.”
         “We just talk sometimes,” Dan said.
         “Yeah, inside your bungalow. I’ve figured out that much already
without using my powers of X-ray vision.”
         Vandevoort waited, breathing heavily. Dan understood he had to
reroute this line of inquiry, redirect the program to an alternate target.
The likeliest method he knew involved sacrificing some genuine
data.
         “It’s her son,” he said. “She talks to me about her son.”
         “Yeah?” Vandevoort was all attention. “What about him?”
He was going to try telling some of the truth to avoid telling it all.
He was going to be a weasel. “He’s sick, Paul. The little guy’s only three
years old and . . . there’s something wrong with his hip. Where the femur
joins the hip, the bone is crumbling there, it’s called Perthes’ disease. Or
Legg-Calvé-Perthes’ disease. Jesus, what a name.”
         Vandevoort’s big face clouded up under the faultless sky. “Shit. I
didn’t know any of that.”
         “Yeah, well, she just needs somebody to talk to about it. Of course
she’s going crazy out here, thousands of miles from her family, but she
really needs the money. She and her husband both, they need all the
money they can get for tests, therapy, there might be operations, it’s all
so expensive.” Would this work out easier than he’d thought, with his
hands flapping in front of him and his tongue racing? He was telling
the truth, and it was an agitating story. “She wants to make a bundle
here and then quit, but come on, you can’t just quit ARPA, you know
that. This whole thing’s eating her up and she needs somebody to talk
to about it.”
         He could see Vandevoort running the information over in his mind,
looking for flaws, bugs, while sweat flowed down his wrinkled brow.
         “What about her husband?” Vandevoort said. “Don’t we have
phones here, can’t she talk to him?”
         “She’s a human being, Paul, sometimes she has to talk to somebody
in person.”
         “That’s all the two of you have been doing? Talking about her kid?”
         “I swear. Honest. We all have to blow off a little steam here. Like
Frobnitz with those tricks of his, those hacks, and our Spacewar tournaments,
and . . . hey, even I’ve been working on a little side program, a little
syntax assessment program. I ought to have results to show you in a
few days, maybe I’ll show everybody . . . just a few days . . .” Dan trailed
off, relaxing slightly.
         Vandevoort worked his lips through a procession of bitter shapes,
variations of the helicoid. “How come she picked your shoulder to cry
on?” he said finally. “The rest of us are no good?”

~

         Perhaps they weren’t professional bartenders, perhaps they were only
ICBM launch-and-response simulators and not the world’s greatest
mixologists, but damn it, their martinis had alcohol the same as anyone’s.
Vandevoort slumped red-faced on the lounge sofa, speaking with drunken
care. “No good, Dan. No good at all. You need to think what intelligence
really is. What it really, uh . . . entails. Need to think about ants.”
         Frobnitz’s laugh sounded like he was trying to blow a short hair from
his lips.
         “Serious now. Next time you’re outside, look at some ants. Get
close to ’em. Hum a little Mozart and see what happens. Do the ants
stop work to listen to Mozart? No. They care about your language
games, Dan? Your little puns? No. That mean ants are dopes? No. It
means ants are really, really smart.”
         Dan and Frobnitz were grinning vacantly. What else could you do
when a man talked like this? Vandevoort had his arms folded over his
gut, lab coat in disarray. He twisted his neck to look at Julie behind him,
her back against the window.
         “Julie? You listening? What’s an ant need with puns? His little brain
is streamlined, only registers what he needs to live, that’s the essence of
intelligence. That’s how a computer should operate. Filter-ing out distractions,
useless data.” Vandevoort faced forward again but Dan knew
he was still focused on Julie, she was there in the bovine mass of his
neck, his shoulders, her face was growing harder by instants, the room’s
conditioned air was thickening . . . “This is what we need, people, numb
minds for mindnumbing calculations. Ever wish your mind was totally
numb, like a computer? Why make computers human when it’s their
inhumanity we need?”
         Tromley still had his head down, singlemindedly intent on his
turntable.
         “You want computers laughing at your jokes?” Vandevoort said.
“Kissing your ass, going ‘there there’ while you pour out your troubles . . .
what a waste of time, right, Julie?” He turned to her again, a sudden
full-body twist, the lime Naugahyde cushion farting beneath him.
“Ever want to numb your mind? Get rid of your troubles? Don’t be
shy. Tell everybody.”
         Dan had both hands to his forehead. According to standard configurations,
the lounge would still be there if he shut his eyes, but he went
ahead and shut them anyway. He sensed Frobnitz a yard to his right,
discomfort radiating from the younger man in solid waves.
         “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Julie said.
         “I’m talking about the human mind. Human intelligence,”
Vandevoort said. “This model of brilliance the AI guys want to work
toward. Sure, what better model than the human mind? Look at
Whitman.”
         Dan opened his eyes. Julie’s face softened faintly as she said, “The
poet?”
         “Poet? I’m talking about the sniper.” Vandevoort lunged at the stack
of New York Times sections on the far end of the sofa. “In Texas last week,
Austin, the gunman up in that watchtower . . . Charles Whitman . . .
where’s that headline? You want to talk about the human mind—he
killed how many? Thirteen, fourteen? Wounded a couple dozen more?
Very impressive statistics, hell of a lot better than that other one in
Chicago last month, that Richard Speck. All he did was knock off eight
nurses in a dormitory, big deal, they were all just sitting there. But
Whitman, he shot down moving targets from a high angle, and we all
know that’s not easy. Too bad he’s dead now,we could use skills like his
here on the—”
         “Stop it!”
         Dan had never seen Julie so savagely upset and he began to put up
his hands, perhaps to quiet Vandevoort, perhaps to attempt a general
peace, perhaps to start flapping his arms and see if he could fly away.
“You’re disgusting, Paul, you really are . . .”
         “You didn’t let me finish.” Vandevoort waved the section of newspaper
in his hand. “I didn’t even mention his note.”
         “I don’t want to hear any more.”
         “But Whitman left a note after he killed his mom and wife. Before
he left for the tower he killed his mom and wife and left a note. He said
. . .” Vandevoort bent his flaming face to the newsprint. “. . . he killed
them ‘to save them the embarrassment of what I was going to do,’ my
God, isn’t the human mind wonderful?” Vandevoort leaned back, grinning
at Dan, triumphant. “The human mind. Dan, if you want to program
a joke into the 7090, I suggest you try that one and see what kind
of—”
         “You’re horrible!”
         Vandevoort looked pleased with himself as Julie began to shout.
Dan bowed his head.
         “I don’t care how drunk you are,” Julie said, her voice trembling.
“It’s horrible. Don’t try to hide your face, Dan. How many people will
die because of what we’re doing here? Preemptive strike, my God, kill
a million to save ten million—that’s the way Hitler talked. And you all
pretend it’s a game. All of you, your music, your jokes . . . I wish I was
a thousand miles from here, I wish I was someplace that has nothing to
do with trying to figure out how many people are allowed to die.”
         “That is not possible,” Tromley said.
         The hi-fi had built to quite a racket. Was that really The Beatles on
the turntable? The song, whatever it was, seemed to be going backwards,
there was weird seagull keening, and the drumming was . . .
crooked, irregular, with no apparent tendency toward anything like a
chorus as John Lennon’s voice (if it was John Lennon) came out of the
speaker in a dreamy slur: Turn off your mind, relax, and float downstream . . .
         “I am very sorry, Julie, but it is impossible to separate yourself from
the work being done at this installation. People always imagine separation,
but this is an error. A thing is not one thing but is linked to other
things. There is a phonographic album and there is a type of weapon
and they are both called Revolver. They may appear to be separate
things, but there is always an association between them which makes
them one thing, connected. That is why there is the misconception
about the number of grooves on a phonographic album.”
         They all stared at him dumbly. Julie’s mouth was open. She’d been
about to leave the lounge, Dan was certain, and it might have been the
best way to resolve the afternoon’s scenario, the emotional mess bubbling
up out of the linoleum and sun and martinis. Dan might even
have gotten away with saying,“No, wait” or “Julie, no”; might have satisfied
the minimum emotional requirements of their relationship (as he
figured them) without revealing the full extent of that relationship in
front of the others, the grinning pig Vandevoort especially. Except that
this routine (stormy exit, serviceable exclamation) was superseded by
the disturbing fact that Tromley had elected to speak.
         “There is a common misconception that the information on a
phonographic album exists in a series of grooves. I have been studying
this misconception closely. There are no grooves on a phonographic
album, there is only a single groove. If there were more than one, the
tone arm with its needle would be unable to make the required jump
between grooves and the album would be unplayable. There is necessarily
only one groove impressed upon each side of a phonographic
album, one looping spiral conveying all information in a unified progression.
There are no separate songs and the apparent silence between
them is itself part of the groove, the same way a zero is not an absence
but instead conveys its own type of information. I hope I have corrected
the misconception about the phonographic album groove in a way
that corresponds to Julie’s remarks. We cannot leave this installation
because the only places to go are themselves connected in some way to
this place. We were here before we got here. We all know the combination,
so who is this for really? Time flies like an arrow, fruit flies like
bananas.”
         Tromley began to laugh. Julie covered her mouth, her eyes widening
in horror. They’d never heard him sound remotely like this, and Dan
wondered if this was laughter at all. A rusty species of bark. A seizure.
Vandevoort did not look at all well. Frobnitz pushed hair back from his
forehead nervously. Dan began to edge as slowly as possible toward
Julie, her side, her hand.
         “That is funny,” Tromley said. “I just got it. Time flies like an arrow,
fruit flies like bananas. I get it now, Dan. That is really, really funny.”
         The patrol jeep passed the window again, the driver staring ahead
through the windshield, the other soldier nodding in the passenger seat.
The setting sun on his automatic rifle. Around and around the perimeter,
in routine sweeps.

 

(AGNI 61)

Joshua Roberts lives in Philadelphia and works at Drexel University’s School of Public Health. His fiction has appeared in Pindeldyboz, Blue Mesa Review, Eyeshot.net, The Aurelian, and other publications, and he has been a finalist in the Heekin Group Foundation Fiction Fellowships and Utah Writers at Work Fellowship Competition. “Revolver” is part of a longer work-in progress. Note:The diagram is reproduced from a printout of computer interpretations of the sentence “Time flies like an arrow” that appears in the 1966 article “The Uses of Computers in Science,” by Anthony G. Oettinger, Scientific American, September, 1966,Vol. 215(3), pp. 160–172.i. (4/2005)