"The truth of the matter, " Fermeti said, "is that we've never titled it." Brusquely, he added, "But I agree with you; that's an even better name for it. Waterspider. Yes, I like that."
The door of the office opened and there stood a uniformed, bonded messenger. "From the Smithsonian," he informed them. "You requested this." He produced a parcel, which he laid on Fermeti's desk.
"I don't remember ordering anything from the Smithsonian," Fermeti said. Opening it cautiously he found a can of roasted, ground coffee beans, still vacuum packed, over a century old.
The three men looked at one another blankly.
"Strange," Torelli murmured. "There must be some mistake."
"Well," Fletcher said, "in any case, back to Project Waterspider." Nodding, Torelli and Oilman turned in the direction of their own office on the first floor of Outward, Incorporated, the commercial firm at which they has worked and the project on which they had labored, with so many heartaches and setbacks, for so long.
At the Science Fiction Convention at the Sir Francis Drake Hotel, Poul Anderson looked around him in bewilderment. Where had he been? Why had he gone out of the building? And it was an hour later; Tony Boucher and Jim Gunn had left for dinner by now, and he saw no sign of his wife Karen and the baby, either.
The last he remembered was two fans from Battlecreek who wanted him to look at a display outside on the sidewalk. Perhaps he had gone to see that. In any case, he had no memory of the interval.
Anderson groped about in his coat pocket for his pipe, hoping to calm his oddly jittery nerves--and found, not his pipe, but instead a folded piece of paper.
"Got anything for our auction, Poul?" a member of the Convention committee asked, halting beside him. "The auction is just about to start--we have to hurry."
Still looking at the paper from his pocket, Poul murmured, "Urn, you mean something here with me?"
"Like a typescript of some published story, the original manuscript or earlier versions or notes. You know." He paused, waiting.
"I seem to have some notes in my pocket," Poul said, still glancing over them. They were in his handwriting but he didn't remember having made them. A time-travel story, from the look of them. Must have been from those Bourbons and water, he decided, and not enough to eat. "Here," he said uncertainly, "it isn't much but I guess you can auction these." He took one final glance at them. "Notes for a story about a political figure called Gutman and a kidnapping in time. Intelligent slime mold, too, I notice." On impulse, he handed them over.
"Thanks," the man said, and hurried on toward the other room, where the auction was being held.
"I bid ten dollars," Howard Browne called, smiling broadly. "Then I have to catch a bus to the airport." The door closed after him.
Karen, with Astrid, appeared beside Poul. "Want to go into the auction?" she asked her husband. "Buy an original Finlay?"
"Um, sure," Poul Anderson said, and with his wife and child walked slowly after Howard Browne.
What the Dead Men Say
I
The body of Louis Sarapis, in a transparent plastic shatterproof case, had lain on display for one week, exciting a continual response from the public. Distended lines filed past with the customary sniffling, pinched faces, distraught elderly ladies in black cloth coats.
In a corner of the large auditorium in which the casket reposed, Johnny Barefoot impatiently waited for his chance at Sarapis's body. But he did not intend merely to view it; his job, detailed in Sarapis's will, lay in another direction entirely. As Sarapis's public relations manager, his job was--simply--to bring Louis Sarapis back to life.
"Keerum," Barefoot murmured to himself, examining his wristwatch and discovering that two more hours had to pass before the auditorium doors could be finally closed. He felt hungry. And the chill, issuing from the quick-pack envelope surrounding the casket, had increased his discomfort minute by minute.
His wife Sarah Belle approached him, then, with a thermos of hot coffee. "Here, Johnny." She reached up and brushed the black, shiny Chiricahua hair back from his forehead. "You don't look so good."
"No," he agreed. "This is too much for me. I didn't care for him much when he was alive--I certainly don't like him any better this way." He jerked his head at the casket and the double line of mourners.
Sarah Belle said softly, "Nil nisi bonum."
He glowered at her, not sure of what she had said. Some foreign language, no doubt. Sarah Belle had a college degree.
"To quote Thumper Rabbit," Sarah Belle said, smiling gently, " 'if you can't say nothing good, don't say nothing at all.' " She added, "From Bambi, an old film classic. If you attended the lectures at the Museum of Modern Art with me every Monday night--"
"Listen," Johnny Barefoot said desperately, "I don't want to bring the old crook back to life, Sarah Belle; how'd I get myself into this? I thought sure when the embolism dropped him like a cement block it meant I could kiss the whole business goodbye forever." But it hadn't quite worked out that way.
"Unplug him," Sarah Belle said.
"W-what?"
She laughed. "Are you afraid to? Unplug the quick-pack power source and he'll warm up. And no resurrection, right?" Her blue-gray eyes danced with amusement. "Scared of him, I guess. Poor Johnny." She patted him on the arm. "I should divorce you, but I won't; you need a mama to take care of you."
"It's wrong," he said. "Louis is completely helpless, lying there in the casket. It would be--unmanly to unplug him."
Sarah Belle said quietly, "But someday, sooner or later, you'll have to confront him, Johnny. And when he's in half-life you'll have the advantage. So it will be a good time; you might come out of it intact." Turning, she trotted off, hands thrust deep in her coat pockets because of the chill.
Gloomily, Johnny lit a cigarette and leaned against the wall behind him. His wife was right, of course. A half-lifer was no match, in direct physical tete-a-tete, for a living person. And yet--he still shrank from it, because ever since childhood he had been in awe of Louis, who had dominated 3-4 shipping, the Earth to Mars commercial routes, as if he were a model rocket-ship enthusiast pushing miniatures over a paper-mache board in his basement. And now, at his death, at seventy years of age, the old man through Wilhelmina Securities controlled a hundred related--and non-related--industries on both planets. His net worth could not be calculated, even for tax purposes; it was not wise, in fact, to try, even for Government tax experts.
It's my kids, Johnny thought; I'm thinking about them, in school back in Oklahoma. To tangle with old Louis would be okay if he wasn't a family man... nothing meant more to him than the two little girls and of course Sarah Belle, too. I got to think of them, not myself, he told himself now as he waited for the opportunity to remove the body from the casket in accordance with the old man's detailed instructions. Let's see. He's probably got about a year in total half-life time, and he'll want it divided up strategically, like at the end of each fiscal year. He'll probably proportion it out over two decades, a month here and there, then towards the end as he runs out, maybe just a week. And then--days.
And finally old Louis would be down to a couple of hours; the signal would be weak, the dim spark of electrical activity hovering in the frozen brain cells... it would flicker, the words from the amplifying equipment would fade, grow indistinct. And then--silence, at last the grave. But that might be twenty-five years from now; it would be the year 2100 before the old man's cephalic processes ceased entirely.
Johnny Barefoot, smoking his cigarette rapidly, thought back to the day he had slouched anxiously about the personnel office of Archimedean Enterprises, mumbling to the girl at the desk that he wanted a job; he had some brilliant ideas that were for sale, ideas that would help untangle the knot of strikes, the spaceport violence growing out of jurisdictional overlapping by rival unions--ideas that would, in essence, free Sarapis of having to rely on union labor at all. It was a dirty scheme, and he had known it then, but he had been right; it was worth money. The girl h
ad sent him on to Mr. Pershing, the Personnel Manager, and Pershing had sent him to Louis Sarapis.
"You mean," Sarapis had said, "I launch from the ocean? From the Atlantic, out past the three mile limit?"
"A union is a national organization," Johnny had said. "Neither outfit has a jurisdiction on the high seas. But a business organization is international."
"I'd need men out there; I'd need the same number, even more. Where'll I get them?"
"Go to Burma or India or the Malay States," Johnny had said. "Get young unskilled laborers and bring them over. Train them yourself on an indentured servant basis. In other words, charge the cost of their passage against their earnings." It was peonage, he knew. And it appealed to Louis Sarapis. A little empire on the high seas, worked by men who had no legal rights. Ideal.
Sarapis had done just that and hired Johnny for his public relations department; that was the best place for a man who had brilliant ideas of a non-technical nature. In other words, an uneducated man: a noncol. A useless misfit, an outsider. A loner lacking college degrees.
"Hey Johnny," Sarapis had said once. "How come since you're so bright you never went to school? Everyone knows that's fatal, nowadays. Self-destructive impulse, maybe?" He had grinned, showing his stainless-steel teeth.
Moodily, he had replied, "You've got it, Louis. I want to die. I hate myself." At that point he had recalled his peonage idea. But that had come after he had dropped out of school, so it couldn't have been that. "Maybe I should see an analyst," he had said.
"Fakes," Louis had told him. "All of them--I know because I've had six on my staff, working for me exclusively at one time or another. What's wrong with you is you're an envious type; if you can't have it big you don't want it, you don't want the climb, the long struggle."
But I've got it big, Johnny Barefoot realized, had realized even then. This is big, working for you. Everyone wants to work for Louis Sarapis; he gives all sorts of people jobs.
The double lines of mourners that filed past the casket... he wondered if all these people could be employees of Sarapis or relatives of employees. Either that or people who had benefited from the public dole that Sarapis had pushed through Congress and into law during the depression three years ago. Sarapis, in his old age the great daddy for the poor, the hungry, the out of work. Soup kitchens, with lines there, too. Just as now.
Perhaps the same people had been in those lines who were here today.
Startling Johnny, an auditorium guard nudged him. "Say, aren't you Mr. Barefoot, the P.R. man for old Louis?"
"Yes," Johnny said. He put out his cigarette and then began to unscrew the lid of the thermos of coffee which Sarah Belle had brought him. "Have some," he said. "Or maybe you're used to the cold in these civic halls." The City of Chicago had lent this spot for Louis to lie in state; it was gratitude for what he had done here in this area. The factories he had opened, the men he had put on the payroll.
"I'm not used," the guard said, accepting a cup of coffee. "You know, Mr. Barefoot, I've always admired you because you're a noncol, and look how you rose to a top job and lots of salary, not to mention fame. It's an inspiration to us other noncols."
Grunting, Johnny sipped his own coffee.
"Of course," the guard said, "I guess it's really Sarapis we ought to thank; he gave you the job. My brother-in-law worked for him; that was back five years ago when nobody in the world was hiring except Sarapis. You hear what an old skinflint he was--wouldn't permit the unions to come in, and all. But he gave so many old folks pensions... my father was living on a Sarapis pension-plan until the day he died. And all those bills he got through Congress; they wouldn't have passed any of the welfare for the needy bills without pressure from Sarapis."
Johnny grunted.
"No wonder there're so many people here today," the guard said. "I can see why. Who's going to help the little fellow, the noncols like you and me, now that he's gone?"
Johnny had no answer, for himself or for the guard.
As owner of the Beloved Brethren Mortuary, Herbert Schoenheit von Vogelsang found himself required by law to consult with the late Mr. Sarapis's legal counsel, the well-known Mr. Claude St. Cyr. In this connection it was essential for him to know precisely how the half-life periods were to be proportioned out; it was his job to execute the technical arrangements.
The matter should have been routine, and yet a snag developed almost at once. He was unable to get in touch with Mr. St. Cyr, trustee for the estate.
Drat, Schoenheit von Vogelsang thought to himself as he hung up the unresponsive phone. Something must be wrong; this is unheard of in connection with a man so important.
He had phoned from the bin--the storage vaults in which the half-lifers were kept in perpetual quick-pack. At this moment, a worried-looking clerical sort of individual waited at the desk with a claim check stub in his hand. Obviously he had shown up to collect a relative. Resurrection Day--the holiday on which the half-lifers were publicly honored--was just around the corner; the rush would soon be beginning.
"Yes sir," Herb said to him, with an affable smile. "I'll take your stub personally."
"It's an elderly lady," the customer said. "About eighty, very small and wizened. I didn't want just to talk to her; I wanted to take her out for a while." He explained, "My grandmother."
"Only a moment," Herb said, and went back into the bin to search out number 3054039-B.
When he located the correct party he scrutinized the lading report attached; it gave but fifteen days of half-life remaining. Automatically, he pressed a portable amplifier into the hull of the glass casket, tuned it, listened at the proper frequency for indication of cephalic activity.
Faintly from the speaker came, "...and then Tillie sprained her ankle and we never thought it'd heal; she was so foolish about it, wanting to start walking immediately..."
Satisfied, he unplugged the amplifier and located a union man to perform the actual task of carting 3054039-B to the loading platform, where the customer could place her in his 'copter or car.
"You checked her out?" the customer asked as he paid the money due.
"Personally," Herb answered. "Functioning perfectly." He smiled at the customer. "Happy Resurrection Day, Mr. Ford."
"Thank you," the customer said, starting off for the loading platform. When I pass, Herb said to himself, I think I'll will my heirs to revive me one day a century. That way I can observe the fate of all mankind. But that meant a rather high maintenance cost to the heirs, and no doubt sooner or later they would kick over the traces, have the body taken out of quick-pack and--God forbid--buried.
"Burial is barbaric," Herb murmured aloud. "Remnant of the primitive origins of our culture."
"Yes sir," his secretary Miss Beasman agreed, at her typewriter. In the bin, several customers communed with their half-lifer relations, in rapt quiet, distributed at intervals along the aisles which separated the caskets. It was a tranquil sight, these faithfuls, coming as they did so regularly, to pay homage. They brought messages, news of what took place in the outside world; they cheered the gloomy half-lifers in these intervals of cerebral activity. And--they paid Herb Schoenheit von Vogelsang; it was a profitable business, operating a mortuary.
"My dad seems a little frail," a young man said, catching Herb's attention. "I wonder if you could take a moment to check him over. I'd really appreciate
it."
'Certainly," Herb said, accompanying the customer down the aisle to his deceased relative. The lading report showed only a few days remaining; that explained the vitiated quality of cerebration. But still--he turned up the gain, and the voice from the half-lifer became a trifle stronger. He's almost at an end, Herb thought. It was obvious that the son did not want to see the lading, did not actually care to know that contact with his dad was diminishing, finally. So Herb said nothing; he merely walked off, leaving the son to commune. Why tell him? Why break the bad news?
A truck had now appeared at the loading platform, and two men h
opped down from it, wearing familiar pale blue uniforms. Atlas Interplan Van and Storage, Herb realized. Delivering another half-lifer, or here to pick up one which had expired. He strolled toward them. "Yes, gentlemen," he said.
The driver of the truck leaned out and said, "We're here to deliver Mr. Louis Sarapis. Got room all ready?"
"Absolutely," Herb said at once. "But I can't get hold of Mr. St. Cyr to make arrangements for the schedule. When's he to be brought back?"
Another man, dark-haired, with shiny-button black eyes, emerged from the truck. "I'm John Barefoot. According to the terms of the will I'm in charge of Mr. Sarapis. He's to be brought back to life immediately; that's the instructions I'm charged with."
"I see," Herb said, nodding. "Well, that's fine. Bring him in and we'll plug him right in."
"It's cold, here," Barefoot said. "Worse than the auditorium."
"Well of course," Herb answered.
The crew from the van began wheeling the casket. Herb caught a glimpse of the dead man, the massive, gray face resembling something cast from a break-mold. Impressive old pirate, he thought. Good thing for us all he's dead finally, in spite of his charity work. Because who wants charity? Especially his. Of course, Herb did not say that to Barefoot; he contented himself with guiding the crew to the prearranged spot.
"I'll have him talking in fifteen minutes," he promised Barefoot, who looked tense. "Don't worry; we've had almost no failures at this stage; the initial residual charge is generally quite vital."
I suppose it's later," Barefoot said, "as it dims... then you have the technical problems."
"Why does he want to be brought back so soon?" Herb asked.
Barefoot scowled and did not answer.
"Sorry," Herb said, and continued tinkering with the wires which had to be seated perfectly to the cathode terminals of the casket. "At low temperatures," he murmured, "the flow of current is virtually unimpeded. There's no measurable resistance at minus 150. So--" He fitted the anode cap in place. "The signal should bounce out clear and strong." In conclusion, he clicked the amplifier on.
The Minority Report: 18 Classic Stories Page 34