Three Days to Never by Tim Powers

peculiar tests—he was asked to describe photographs in sealed cardboard envelopes, to identify playing cards just by looking at the backs of them, and to heat up coffee in a cup inside a glass box. To this day he had no idea if his guesses about the photos and the cards had been accurate, or if the coffee had heated up at all.
    For the next several months he was called back for more tests, but these were more mundane—he was given a number of thorough physical examinations, and his reflexes were tested; the medical staff gave him strict dietary instructions, steering him away from preservatives, hard liquor, and most meats.
    After three months the program had become more instruction than testing. If he hadn’t been amply paid for the time all this took, he might have refused to go on, even though he understood this was part of his army reserve service. Certainly it was pazam in both senses of the word: service time, and a long time too. Luckily he had still been single in those days.
    The instruction was mostly done in a windowless trailer that was driven from place to place throughout the day, perhaps at random; five other students, all males of about his own age, sat with him at a bolted-down trestle table that ran the length of the trailer, and the twenty-one-year-old Lepidopt was soon able to take readable notes with his left hand, even when the truck braked or turned unexpectedly. The students seldom had the same instructor twice, but Lepidopt was surprised that each instructor was a tanned, fit-looking man of obviously military bearing, in spite of the anonymous suits and ties they all wore.
    He would have expected bent old scholars, or disheveled fanatics—for the texts the students analyzed were spiral-bound photocopies of old Hebrew mystical books. Some had titles— Sepher Yezirah, Raza Rabba —but others just bore headings like British Museum Ms. 784 or Ashesegnen xvii or Leipzig Ms. 40d.
    Often when the texts were in Hebrew they had to be copied out in the student’s handwriting before they could be read aloud, and in those cases the students had also had to fast for twenty-four hours before beginning, and make sure to write each letter of the text so that it touched no other letter; and often the lectures were delivered in whispers—though surely there could have been no risk of being overheard.
    The texts had largely been antique natural histories with interesting but outlandish theories, such as Zeno’s paradoxes that appeared to show that physical motion was impossible; but Lepidopt had been surprised to see that the fourteenth-century Kabbalist Moses Cordovero, in his book Pardes Rimmonim, had defined lasers while describing God and the amplified light that connects Him with His ten emanations; and that the succession of these emanations, or sephirot, seemed to be a stylized but clear presentation of the Big Bang theory; and that these medieval mystics apparently knew that matter was a condensed form of energy.
    It had seemed to young Lepidopt that the instructors emphasized these things a bit defensively, in order to lend some frail plausibility to the wilder things in the texts.
    Those wilder things began to have a stark, firsthand plausibility on the day when the students were taken in several jeeps out to some ruins in the desert north of Ramle—and that night in his own room, having pulled the curtains closed to block the view of the night sky, Lepidopt had wondered what sort of action the Fourth Battalion would have been faced with in the Sinai desert, at the Rephidim stone, if the orders had not been changed.
    The instructor that day had been a deeply tanned, gray-haired old fellow with eyes as pale as spit; he had taken them into the wilderness to show them a thing that he claimed was “one of the Aeons”—specifically the Babylonian air devil Pazuzu.
    Far out in the desert, half an hour’s steep hike from where they had had to park the jeeps, the