“I… Well…” Barney gave the door a look of baffled resentment.
“If Mr Haggle dies now the three of us are going to be cooped up in here for ever. Have you thought of that?”
“No, I haven’t,” Barney said hotly. “All I’ve been able to think about was seeing you again. I’ve crossed the depths of space to be with you, because I loved you, hoping that you loved me in return – but I realize now that I was wrong. I’m sorry if all I succeeded in doing was to anger you, and in future I’ll try to stay out of sight to spare you further annoyance.”
Barney made to turn away, but during his impassioned speech a misty expression had appeared in Mary’s eyes and she reached out to take his hand. The contact gave Barney a pleasurable thrill.
“Do you really love me?” she said softly.
“You know I do. You must know.”
“And I have similar feelings for you, though we have scarcely met,” Mary said wonderingly. “I don’t know why that should be, because I’m a spirit now and I haven’t been troubled by such desires since I quit my mortal body.”
“I can’t understand it, either.” Barney took Mary’s other hand in his, completing a circuit which intensified his feeling of delight. There’s nothing in the rules of particle physics to account for it, unless… unless…”
“Don’t question it,” Mary whispered urgently, moving close to him. “Hold me, Barney, hold me.”
“Darling!” Barney took her in his arms, and in the instant their bodies met a pang of orgasmic rapture fountained through him with an intensity he could never have imagined, obliterating his senses, filling him with the joyous realization that his whole life had merely been a prelude to this divine moment. He clung to Mary, and she to him, and time itself seemed to cease.
“My love,” Barney said eventually, surfacing through a golden haze of pleasure, “do you know what has happened to us?”
Mary laid her head on his shoulder. “Yes – our souls have united in heavenly bliss.”
“That’s one way of putting it,” Barney replied. “But I think I understand everything now. You were once a woman and I was a man, and a trace of sexual difference is carried over into our present state, a difference represented by the antisymmetric wavefunctions characteristic of particles which obey Fermi-Dirac statistics. You have half integral spin in one direction, and I have it in the opposite direction, and when we paired up together we fully occupied the available energy state. That’s what gives us this feeling of bliss and…”
“Don’t try to analyse it,” Mary said. “Just tell me we will always be together like this.”
Barney smiled at her. “Of course we will. Just the two of us.”
“That’s what you think!” The voice of Haggle, loaded with gloating malice, interrupted the lovers’ communion, and when they turned towards the bed they saw his ghost-figure spring up from congruency with a lifeless body. He came towards them, face contorted, limbs quivering with pent-up emotion.
Mary shrank away, hiding in Barney’s embrace. “Mr Haggle has died! Oh, Barney – what are we going to do?”
“It looks as though you’ve already done it, you shameless wanton,” Haggle hissed. “You betrayed me with this young jackass the minute my back was turned, but I’ll have my revenge. You’ll see! The three of us are going to be in here for a long time, and I’m…”
“Correction,” Barney put in, sounding relaxed and unconcerned. “You are going to be in here for a long time – but Mary and I are leaving almost immediately.”
Haggle looked alarmed for a moment, then a sneer tilted his walrus moustache. “And how do you propose to get out?”
“Through the walls, of course.” Barney was aware of Mary looking up at him with an expression of surprise, but he continued to stare Haggle straight in the eye.
Haggle gave a derisive laugh. “You young fool! You’ve learned absolutely nothing.”
“I’ve learned how to do this.” Barney put out his right hand and thrust it into the stone wall beside him. His hand and arm slid into the ancient masonry with no trace of resistance. Mary gave a cry of wonderment.
“But that’s imposs…” Haggle darted at the wall, bounced off it and stood glaring at Barney with impotent fury.
“There’s no point in your trying it,” Barney told him. “You see, it’s hard enough for an ordinary ghost to penetrate a thick wall, and for a ghost like you – bursting with anger and hate – it’s quite impossible. You’ll be trapped in here until the building crumbles.”
“So will she,” Haggle snarled, pointing at Mary. “She was in here for three centuries without being able to escape.”
“Ah, but that was before Mary and I were bonded.” Barney gave Mary a reassuring squeeze. “The probability density distributions of our wavefunctions are now finite beyond the boundaries of this room, which means that we can tunnel through the walls and exist outside. I’m using the word ‘tunnel’ as it is employed in quantum mechanics, of course, to account for the passage of an electron through a potential barrier in a…”
“I don’t believe all this theoretical twaddle,” Haggle snapped. “You can’t leave me here alone.”
“We can,” Barney said sternly. “In fact, we have very little choice in the matter. If you consider this room as a quantized space, then the three of us can’t continue to exist inside it without violating the Pauli Exclusion Principle.”
“Balls to the Pauli Exclusion Principle.” Haggle’s voice thickened with venom. “There’s one thing you’ve forgotten – the solar wind! If you go outside this castle you’ll be blown away into the depths of space.”
“I would have dreaded that at one time,” Barney admitted, “but not any more. Now that I’m pair-bonded with Mary I can see that it’s our natural destiny to journey across the universe together, exploring all the wonders of creation hand-in-hand, meeting and welcoming cosmic travellers from other worlds. I’m not daunted by that prospect, and I don’t think Mary is.” Barney glanced down at his partner and gave her a fond smile. “Are you, sweetheart?”
“Not as long as we’re together,” Mary said. “Eternity seems as friendly and homely to me as a rose-covered cottage in which the love you and I have for each other will flourish and blossom, and will continue to do so long after the stars have grown cold and the galaxies have returned from their lonely flights and new cycles of…” Her words faded away as, still exchanging looks of mutual adoration, she and Barney faded into the stonework and were lost to view. “Pompous bores,” Haggle muttered to himself. “If that’s what pair-bonding does for you, they can keep it. I think I had a lucky escape.” He squatted on the floor, produced an insubstantial pack of playing cards and settled down to the first of many, many games of solitaire.
IN THE HEREAFTER HILTON
The apartment was neat, stylish and comfortable – not at all like a machine designed for killing people.
For a few seconds after the entrance door had locked itself behind him, Renfrew stood perfectly still, taking stock of the place, trying to identify the most likely sources of death. The kitchen – always the most complicated room in any habitat – was one area that obviously had to be avoided. Every particle of food and drop of liquid was suspect in case poisons had been administered; the appliances could have been wired in such a way as to electrocute the unwary user; and the bright-lettered canisters could be bombs which would explode on removal of their lids. Even the simple act of opening a cupboard door might release a cloud of instant-acting gas into his face, and one startled intake of breath would be enough to…