Adam Troy Castro by Gunfight on Farside

Author:Gunfight on Farside
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 2012-01-26T00:37:03+00:00

Malcolm Bell had disappeared.

There had been no puff of smoke, no flash of light, no pop of displaced air.

Had there been any visual manifestation of his disappearance, I’d missed it. By accident or design he’d picked the one moment when I would not be able to add any other sensory cues to my general store of knowledge.

But he was no longer sitting on his bed.

Nor was there any question of him using my momentary inattention to dart out of sight and hide. This was a Farside hermit’s habitat. There was a sonic shower (unoccupied) next to a head (unoccupied), storage cabinets (still sealed), a few alcoves too small to cast shadows sufficient to hide a human being (all within my direct line of sight).

I could argue a silent sliding panel of some kind, one that hid a closet-sized space just large enough to house an old man who wanted to play Houdini with the visiting rube. But I had an uncle once, a math teacher, who taught me the best way to avoid panic when facing insoluble problems. He said: Break them down into logic trees. At the very least, you’ll separate what you can figure out from what you can’t.

There were only two possibilities here. Or, at least, two different categories of possibility, each the central root of a thousand more specific explanations that branched out from those central assumptions.

First category: Bell’s disappearance had nothing to do with personal volition. He’d popped out of existence, or to another plane of existence, or just to the roulette table at the Fantazi Casino in Grissom Center, not because he’d wanted to shock and distress the busybody in his living room, but because of other forces beyond his control: say, some three-headed alien inputting the wrong coordinates in his personal teleportation booth a few hundred thousand light years away. Or maybe there’d been a Rapture. Whatever. However you constructed it, maybe he hadn’t expected anything to happen, and was now sitting under a polka-dotted sky, wondering about the fresh madness that had just given his life a brand new dose of surreality.

The chief drawback of every theory that fit under this umbrella was that if it was beyond his control it was also beyond my control, and I’d just exchanged one set of mysteries for another, a billion times bigger, that I couldn’t resolve just by asking a cranky old man a few intrusive questions. So I might as well not even try to explore any of the possibilities that sprung from this particular root. There was no point. By definition, they were beyond me.

So that left the only subcategory of possibility worth worrying about: that Bell had disappeared deliberately, on cue, whether by clever magic trick or extraordinary capability unknown to me.

If I followed that theory to the next set of branching possibilities, I was left with two more. Either he’d vanished knowing that I’d never be able to determine how, or he’d vanished knowing that I could.

If the first was

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