Red Equinox by Douglas Wynne Read Free Book Online Page A

integers, angstroms, and Ohms. But on the morning of September 17th he awoke from a dream of smoots.
    In October 1958, members of the MIT fraternity Lambda Chi Alpha carried a young pledge dressed in black clothes and black gloves across the Harvard Bridge from MIT to Boston, laying him down at five foot, seven inch intervals (his height) and marking his progress with chalk followed by paint so that he, one Oliver R. Smoot, could be used as a unit of measurement. To this day the bridge bears painted markers every ten smoots, beginning with an arrow pointing toward MIT on the Boston side of the bridge and the indicator: 364.4 SMOOTS + 1 EAR.
    Whether the 1958 fraternity brothers selected the subject of the prank with preternatural insight into his destiny, or the ninety-minute prank itself fixed the course of his life, it should be noted that Mr. Smoot went on to become the chairman of the American National Standards Institute and the president of the International Organization for Standardization, and Google now offers the smoot as a unit of measurement in their calculator, maps, and Google Earth tools.
    The marks are repainted each semester, and when the bridge was renovated in the 1980s, the Cambridge Police department requested that the marks be maintained, as they had come to rely on them for identifying the locations of accidents on the bridge.
    Darius Marlowe was as familiar with the marks and their legend as any MIT student. He had walked over them countless times in waking life, and recognized them in the nascent hours of the 17th as he tossed and turned, winding himself in his dirty bed sheets in a double dorm room on the fourth floor of Fairborz Maseeh Hall while his roommate snored.
    Darius was dreaming of the pharaoh again, the black man, the faceless messenger who had introduced himself in other dreams as Nereus Charobim. In the dream Darius stood among the muddy reeds on the riverbank and watched the rain-lashed waters rushing and churning like the Mississippi in flood, carrying flotsam out to sea: a clapboard shed, a metallic blue car (desperate, prying fingers behind a slice of submerged window), a drowning Doberman, and a bicycle.
    Darius tracked the quick progress of these objects past the Community Boathouse where a fleet of Mercury keelboats rocked and strained against their tethers on the overwhelmed bank, toward a tattered mass of whirling black cloud downriver, from which sinuous, ashen tentacles and sheets of black water whipped around in rising spirals.
    The scene was washed in a cacophony of noise—wind and screams—but the pharaoh’s voice was loud and clear above the din, speaking, not shouting, Darius’s name, commanding that he turn his attention to the object in the palm of his hand. A key on a ring; the ornament on that ring a silver oval reflecting the storm-diffused September sun up at Darius’s face, washing his dark, heavy brow with its flickering light. Was it a signal mirror that he was supposed to use to send an S-O-S, he wondered, in the logic of the dream?
    No. The unmistakable face of Nereus Charobim now stared at him from the little mirror, features distorted as if sketched by a shaking hand or seen through a ragged glaze of Vaseline.
    “I have prepared a room for you in the Gryphon Tower,” Charobim said. “Cross the bridge and join me. I have work for you.”
    The face faded from the oval, the silver faded to onyx, and a green digital number glowed from the little window in Darius’s hand: 182.2 S.
    A measurement in smoots.
    Darius woke up tangled in sweaty sheets. He gazed around the room, expecting to see the pharaoh standing among the stacks of books and piles of dirty laundry. The only other body was his detested roommate, Mitchel, an acne-scarred robotics geek from Pennsylvania who either thought Darius couldn’t hear him when he jerked off or didn’t care if he could. Bottles of Mountain Dew lay in and around the too small trash basket beside Mitchel’s desk,