Read As She Climbed Across the Table for Free Online

after a week of spinning.
    Alice went on to describe the state of the experiment—Lack’s gradual stabilization, and the conversion of the chamber from Cauchy-space to earth-normal. “Lack’s tastes make up his being,” she said. “His preference for certain particles is all there is to him. If he stops choosing he stops existing.” She described the attempt to define his exact boundaries, the array of detectors, meters, and photosensitive plates they had aimed at this hint, this tenuous invisible presence.
    The audience applauded politely when she was done. Alice nodded her thanks and went to sit beside Soft, to field questions from the crowd.
    The questions that came were respectful and daunted. I lost my patience with the whole thing. I suddenly wanted to be out in the world. The campus, that is. But when I got to my feet I was mistaken for a questioner.
    “Yes? Professor Engstrand?” said Alice. Her amplified voice boomed in the auditorium. A student with a microphone hurried toward me through the crowd, trailing cord.
    It was a silly mistake. I’d been feeling invisible, but I was a recognizable figure. The Interdean should have something to say about Lack.
    I hated to disappoint. So I took the microphone. As I weighed it in my hand I felt the spotlight of the crowd’s attention swing toward me, heard it in the creaking of chairs.
    “It’s a conceit of physics,” I said, “that the rest of the world exists to supply metaphors for subatomic events. The
spin
of a particle, the
color
or
flavor
of a quark. A
field
or
horizon. Beauty, truth
, and
strangeness
. The physicist tends to see his subject as the indivisible core around which metaphor orbits. Physics is the universal tongue, the language the aliens will speak when they appear.”
    Some instinct led me to pause. I let the microphone drop to my waist. The audience looked up at Alice and Soft, searching their faces for response.
    I am the Lorax, I thought. I speak for the trees.
    “I have to question the assumption that Lack’s preference is for particles, in and of themselves,” I continued. “Why do we assume that our visitor is a physicist, that he finds particles interesting? So he prefers H’s to M’s. What about summer and winter? Which does he like best? Black and white, or color? Poetry or prose? Bebop or swing? I think we’re leading the witness. Our questions are dictating his answers. We want physics, so we get physics. But until we ask every question we can think to ask we’re—pardon me—failing to do anything except masturbate in front of a mirror.”
    My grand statement. If only I could reel it back in, swallowit, dissolve it in the acids of my stomach. For that’s when I played my part, with Soft and Alice, in our collective Dr. Frankenstein. That was how I conspired in the creation of my own monstrous rival, my personal Stanley Toothbrush.
    Would it have occurred without my help? I’ll never know. But until then I’d been passive, a victim of fate. Now I was as much to blame as anyone.

The next day the microactivity detectors were dismantled, and the proton gun wheeled away. In their place a small lab table was rolled up to the bottom edge of Lack’s particle strike zone. Otherwise Lack was left bare. Alice cleared the room of observers, locked the outer doors, and began the experiments that would etch her name forever in the history of physics.
    The first was a paper clip, I think. Just a curled steel wire. She slid it across the table, pulling her hand away just short of the calibration that indicated Lack’s edge. The paper clip slid across the table, through Lack, and dropped to the floor on the other side.
    Alice retrieved the paper clip and tried again. Again it fell to the floor behind the table. She fished in her pocket, brought out a dime. The dime slid through and fell. So did a penny, and so did a ballpoint pen. Alice emptied her pockets into a pile onthe other side of the table, and each item clattered to the