[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
.He glanced at Carla.To his surprise, she didn’t seem to notice anything unusual about him.She was looking up into his face with her sad blue eyes.“Science is a tool,” she was saying.“Like a wrench or a shovel.Or a gun.You choose what you want to do with that tool.What you want to build, and what you want to destroy.“You choose, Walter.”And then, the floor beneath his sneakers cracked and opened up, and before he could react, he was plunged into the icy water beneath.For a terrifying moment, the shock of it—the vicious toothy cold so intense it felt like burning—completely overwhelmed his senses.He flailed, and thrashed in the water, consumed by a blind panic, his eyes clenched tightly shut.But when he opened them, he found that he could see perfectly, as if he were wearing goggles in a clear, clean pool.There were throbbing red shapes dancing around the edges of his vision, and he could see that he wasn’t alone.A small child was floating, just out of reach, asleep or unconscious.Head tucked down, dark hair drifting around a pale face.Walter stretched his arm out, fingers brushing against the child’s sleeve.The contact seemed to jolt the child back to terrified consciousness, body jerking and face turning, eyes wide and unseeing.Peter.Now that he was turned toward Walter, he seemed to age.It was clear that this was Peter today, thirteen years old and dressed in the same black sweatshirt and jeans he’d been wearing when he came to the lab earlier.Peter…Was this a hallucination, or a memory? Had this already happened? It seemed so vivid and real at its core, as solid and unquestionably true as any other memory.But it couldn’t be.It was impossible.He and Peter were alive.Or were they?Walter tried to say his son’s name, but all that came out of his mouth was a rush of silver bubbles.Peter reached out his hand, eyes desperate and pleading as he began to sink into the inky darkness below.His lungs ached for air.Close to blacking out from lack of oxygen, Walter flailed with all his remaining strength, paddling toward the receding form.Reaching out, he gripped the boy’s hand.It felt ice cold and rigid—like the hand of a corpse.He pulled his son into his arms, not sure what he actually planned to do, but not willing to let him go down alone.Above them was an unbroken bluish-white ceiling of ice.They were trapped.Darkness began to eclipse his vision, the unforgiving cold swiftly shutting his body down and making his thoughts sluggish and murky.Just before he blacked out completely, he looked down at Peter and was shocked to see a totally different child, looking back up at him.A strange, frail child with a smooth, bald head like that of a chemotherapy patient, and big dark eyes that seemed to look right through him.Then he felt a dozen hands gripping him, all at once, grabbing his arms and twisted fistfuls of his shirt and hauling him rapidly upward until he slammed violently against the ice.Only now it wasn’t a ceiling above him anymore, it was a wall.An opaque smooth wall, like frosted glass.And he himself was no longer underwater.He was standing upright in the middle of his safe familiar lab.The strange child that used to be Peter was gone.He took a moment to collect himself, to breathe deeply and try to stabilize his thoughts.This was just a bad trip.A particularly vivid, frightening trip, but nothing Walter couldn’t handle.The key was to remain calm, rational, and objective.Observe the unusual effects of this new blend and accurately remember them in detail, so that he would be able to use this data when the time came to reformulate.Yet he still felt scattered and breathless, heart skittish and desperate like a trapped rat in his chest.He remained pressed against the inexplicable glass wall that trapped him in the middle of the lab, unable to move.Nothing seemed certain.Even the simplest, most fundamental things seemed ephemeral.Who was he, really?And who was that other me?As if summoned by his question, the other Walter—the hard one—appeared on the other side of the frosted glass, facing away.Indistinct and blurred at first, just a sinister shadow, then becoming clearer as the glass became clear around him, the way a warm hand melts the frost on a winter window.Walter touched the glass and found it soft and yielding, like living skin.By peering over Hard Walter’s shoulder, he could see Carla standing there, still glowing as if lit from within.“You need to burn it,” Carla was saying, holding up the journal.“It’s the only way.”“Don’t be ridiculous,” Hard Walter replied.“Why should I do that?”“No,” Walter whispered.“It’s my… my life’s work…”“This isn’t your life’s work,” Carla said, her hand on the cover of the journal.“You are your life’s work.You choose who you want to be.But you need to make the right choice [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]