Inside the envelope was a rectangle of shiny plastic. Written on it were the words, KARMIC BANK VISITOR’S PASS. GOOD FOR ONE HOUR. There was a square printed in one corner of the rectangle.
Musing, Zimmerman picked up a pencil and checked the square. Suddenly he wasn’t in New York anymore.
With no sense of transition Harry Zimmerman found himself in front of an old-fashioned gray stone office building. It stood all by itself in the middle of a wide green lawn. It had huge bronze gates, and they were open. Above them, chiseled into the granite, were the words: KARMIC BANK & CLEARING HOUSE.
Zimmerman waited, expecting that someone would come along and tell him what to do. But no one came. At last he walked inside.
There were rows and rows of desks. Men were examining piles of documents, making entries into ledger books, and then piling the documents into wire baskets at the sides of the desks. Messengers took away the examined documents and brought in new ones.
Zimmerman walked over to one of the desks. As he approached, a document slipped from the pile and sailed to the floor.
He picked it up and looked at it. It was made of a shimmery, transparent substance and showed a richly colored three-dimensional image of a landscape with figures. As he moved the document, the view changed. He saw a city street, and then a boat on a river, and then a lake with hazy blue mountains behind it. Other images slid past: elephants moving across a wide dusty plain, people talking to each other at a traffic intersection, a deserted beach with dusty palm trees.
“Careful!” the clerk said, and snatched the document out of his hand.
“I wasn’t going to hurt it,” Zimmerman said.
“I wasn’t worried about the document,” the clerk said. “I was worried about you. Turn one of those things the wrong way and it can pull you into its construct. Then we’d have a lot of trouble getting you back.”
The clerk seemed friendly enough. He was a rather fussy-looking middle-aged man, balding in front, dressed in a pearl-gray morning coat, sharply creased pinstriped trousers and gleaming black shoes.
“What are those things?” Zimmerman asked, indicating the shiny documents.
“I see that you’re new to this reality construct. They’re X2D invoices—sort of instant cosmic balance sheets. Each of them records a planet’s karmic status at a given moment. After deducting the bad karma, we convert the good karma into Intraversal Luck Units at the going rate of exchange, and deposit the ILUs in their account, to draw upon as required. It’s basically the same as banking anywhere, except that we deal in ILUs instead of money.”
“Are you telling me,” said Zimmerman, “that people can draw out good luck when they need it?”
“That’s it,” the clerk said. “Except that we don’t have individual accounts. We’re strictly planetary.”
“Do all planets with intelligent life have accounts here?”
“Oh, yes,” the clerk told him. “As soon as they develop abstract thought or better, we open an account for them. Then they can draw on it when things get out of hand. Like when disease is raging, or wars are flaring up for no good reason, or there are unaccountable droughts and famines. All planets have these runs. But with enough units of luck you can usually ride them out. Don’t ask me the actual mechanics. I’m a banker, not an engineer. And with a little luck, I won’t even be a banker much longer.”
“You’re getting out of banking?”
“Out of this entire construct,” the clerk said. “The Karmic Clearing House level is really very limited. There’s just this one building stuck in the middle of a lawn which is perched in the middle of a small nothingness. We do get additional hardship pay for working here, but personally I’ve had enough.”
“Where will you go?”
“There are many reality-constructs to choose among. I’ve picked quite a nice one from the catalogue. What with my pension and my ILU account I expect to have a good time for quite a long time. The individual ILU account is one of the best things about working for the Universal Technocrat. I must also admit that the cafeteria isn’t bad, and we do get the latest movies.”
A bell sounded within Zimmerman’s pocket, startling him. He took out the Visitor’s Pass. It was flashing and ringing. The clerk pressed it on a corner and made it stop.
“That means your time is almost up,” the clerk said. “It’s been a pleasure talking with you, sir. We don’t get many visitors out this way. Our reality-construct hasn’t even got a hotel.”
“Just a minute,” Zimmerman said. “What about Earth’s account?”
“It’s here in the bank, along with everyone else’s. No one has ever come around to collect it.”
“Well, I’m here now,” Harry said. “And I’m Earth’s authorized representative. Otherwise I wouldn’t be here. Right?”
The clerk nodded. He didn’t look happy.
“I want to draw out some of Earth’s luck. For the whole planet, I mean, not just for myself. I don’t know if you’ve checked us out lately but we’ve got a lot of problems. Every year we seem to get more war, pollution, famine, floods, typhoons, unexplained plane crashes, that sort of thing. Some of us are getting a little nervous. We could really use that luck now.”
“I knew someone from Earth would come along one of these days,” the clerk muttered. “I’ve been dreading this.”
“What’s the matter? You said our account is here.”
“It is. But there’s nothing in it.”
“But how could that be?” Zimmerman demanded.
The clerk shrugged. “You know how banks operate. We have to show a profit.”
“What does that have to do with Earth’s luck?”
“We loaned it out so it could earn some interest.”
“You loaned out our luck?”
The clerk nodded. “To Associated Civilizations of the Lesser Magellenic Clouds. A first-class risk.”
“Well,” Zimmerman said, “you’d better call it in now.”
“That’s the part I hate to tell you. Despite their very good credit rating, the Associated Civilizations of the L.M.C. recently vanished into a black hole. It’s the sort of space-time anomaly that could happen to anyone.”
“That’s tough for them,” Zimmerman said. “But what about Earth’s luck?”
“There’s no way we can recover it. It’s down there below the event-horizon with the rest of Associated Civilizations’ assets.”
“You lost our luck!”
“Don’t worry, your planet is bound to accumulate more. I’m sorry but there’s nothing I can do about it.”
The clerk’s sad smile and balding head began to dissolve. Everything was shimmering and fading out and Zimmerman knew that he was on his way back to New York. He didn’t feel so good about it. Here he was, the first human to get to another level of reality—the Columbus of the Galaxy—and the only thing he had to tell the folks back home was that Earth’s luck had gone down a black hole, sorry about that.
As the bearer of cosmic bad tidings his name would be cursed for generations. People would say, “Here comes a Zimmerman,” to indicate the bearer of supercolossal bad news on a big scale.
It wasn’t fair. He couldn’t stand the enormity of that rap hanging around his neck throughout eternity. There had to be something he could do to change it.
But what?
That moment, half in and half out of the fadeout, was decision time for Harry Zimmerman, the sticking-point, the time when Necessity, ordinarily without bias in anyone’s favor, suddenly becomes the Mother of Invention.
And so it was that suddenly Zimmerman had the answer.
“Wait!” he cried to the clerk. “We gotta talk!”
“Look, I already said I’m sorry.”
“Forget about that,” Harry said, “I’ve got business to discuss with you.”
The clerk made a gesture with his hand. The construct stopped fading. “What business?”
“A loan.”
“A luck loan?”
�
�Of course. A big one. To tide us over until things straighten out.”
“My dear sir,” the clerk said, “why didn’t you say so in the first place? Loaning luck is our business. Come with me.”
Harry followed the clerk back into the bank.
Like Columbus bringing back the gold and pearls of Hispaniola to Ferdinand and Isabella, so Harry Zimmerman, our envoy involuntary, returned to the Karmic Clearing House and negotiated the luck loan that we Earth people so desperately needed. And that is the true story behind our present-day peace and prosperity here in the easy-going 21st century.
The interest has turned out to be a little steep, of course: the Karmic Bank is not in this for their health. And Harry had to put up the planet for collateral. If we don’t find a way to pay back that loan soon, there’s only one thing we can do. We’ll have to hide out in a Chapter 13 Black Hole like the Associated Civilizations of the L.M.C. did. It’s a desperate measure, but anything’s better than losing the planet.
ROBOTVENDOR REX
When an automated chuck wagon laden with junk food appears in the middle of a mangrove swamp, can the cavalry be far behind?
At thirteen hundred hours, Mordecai Gaston’s front door scanner announced the arrival of Federal Mail Carrier 193CU (robot), temporarily replacing Fred Billings, out on sick leave. “Just put it through the slot,” Gaston called from the bathroom. “Requires a signature,” his scanner told him.
Gaston wrapped himself in a towel and went out. The robot postman was a large cylinder painted red, white, and blue and equipped with wheels and treads. It also had a lift control slaved to the Dade-Broward power grid so it could soar over traffic jams and open drawbridges. The robot extruded a piece of paper and a ballpoint pen. Gaston signed. The FMC robot said, “Thank you, sir.” A panel opened in its side, and a large package slid out.
Gaston knew it was the miniflier that he had ordered last week from Personal Transports, Inc., of Coral Gables. He carried the package out to his terrace, removed the interlock, and activated the assembly-memory. The package unfolded, and the machine assembled itself. When it was done, Gaston had an openwork aluminum basket with a simple set of controls, a bright yellow battery box that also served as the pilot’s seat, and a sealed power unit that slaved the flier to the Dade County power grid.
He got in and switched on. The power indicator light glowed a healthy red. Gaston touched the joystick lightly, and the little machine lifted into the air. Soon he was high above Fort Lauderdale, flying west over the Everglades. He could see the curve of Florida’s long Atlantic beach on one side, the dark green of the Everglades on the other. Miami was a shimmering heat haze to the south. He was almost halfway across the great swamp when the power indicator blinked three times and went out. The flier began to fall. Only then Gaston remembered the TV advisory he had heard last night: a brief power shutdown to allow Collier County to come into the grid.
He waited for the flier’s microprocessor to switch automatically to battery. But the power indicator stayed off. Suddenly Gaston had a terrible suspicion why. He looked inside the battery box. No battery. Only a sticker pasted in the lid telling him where he could buy one.
He was falling toward a flat, monotonous green-gray world of mangrove, palmetto, and sawgrass. He had time to remember that he had also neglected to fasten his seat belt or wear a crash helmet. Then his flier hit the water, rose again, and slammed hard into a mangrove thicket. Gaston passed out.
It must have been only minutes later when he recovered consciousness. The water around the mangrove island was still frothed. The flier was wedged into the close-woven network of mangrove boughs. Their resiliency had saved his life.
That was the good news. The bad news was, he was lying inside the flier in a really uncomfortable position, and when he tried to get up, a flash of pain went through his left leg, and he almost passed out. The leg was twisted under him at a strange angle.
It was a really stupid accident. The Rescue Squad was going to ask some embarrassing questions when they came to get him . . .
But when would that be . . .
Nobody knew he was out here, unless the robot postman had seen him fly off. But robots were not permitted to talk about what they saw people do.
In an hour he was supposed to be playing tennis with his best friend, Marty Fenn. When he didn’t show up, Marty would telephone his apartment.
Gaston’s scanner would announce that he was out. That’s all it would say.
Marty would keep on phoning. After a day or so he’d get really worried. He had an extra key, he’d probably check Gaston’s apartment. He’d find the carton the flier came in. He’d figure Gaston had gone for a ride. But how could he tell in what direction? Gaston could be halfway across the United States by now, riding the grids all the way to California. There’d be no reason to start looking for him in the Everglades, no reason to assume he’d crashed.
It was early afternoon, and the swamp was very quiet. A long-legged wood stork passed overhead. A cat’s-paw of wind ruffled the shallow surface of the swamp, and then it was gone. Something long and gray was floating toward him. Alligator? No, it was just a waterlogged tree trunk.
Gaston was sweating heavily in the humid air, but his tongue was dry, and his throat felt like sandpaper.
A hermit crab, carrying its conch shell home, came up from the water to look him over. Gaston waved violently at it, sending a shock of pain through his leg. The crab scuttled away a few feet, then stopped and regarded him steadily. It occurred to Gaston that the crabs might get him before the alligators got a chance.
Then he heard the small, thin sound of a motor. He grinned, ashamed of his own fears. The Rescue Squad probably had him on radar all the time. He should have realized that a person can’t just vanish like that in this day and age.
The engine sound grew louder. The vehicle was skimming just above the surface of the water, coming straight toward him.
But it turned out that it wasn’t the Rescue Squad. It was a scaled-down copy of an old-time chuck wagon. Its driver was a humanoid robot dressed in white jeans and an open-neck sports shirt.
“Howdy there, partner,” Gaston said, faint from relief. “What are you selling?”
“I am a multipurpose roving vending machine,” the robot said. “I work for Greater Miami Enterprises. Our motto is, ‘Enterprise makes its sales in unusual places.’ We find our customers in the backwoods, on mountaintops, and in the middle of swamps like this one. We’re robotvendors, and my name is Rex. What would you like, sir? Cigarettes? Hot dog? Soft drink? Sorry, but we’re not licensed to sell alcoholic beverages.”
“I’m sure glad to see you, Rex,” said Gaston. “I’ve had an accident.”
“Thank you for sharing that with me, sir,” said Rex. “Would you like a hot dog?”
“I don’t need a hot dog,” Gaston said. “I’ve got a broken leg. What I need is help.”
“I hope you find it,” the robot said. “Goodbye, sir, and good luck.”
“Wait a minute!” Gaston said. “Where are you going?”
“I must get back to work, sir,” the robotvendor said.
“Will you report my accident to the Rescue Squad?”
“I’m afraid I can’t do that, sir. We are not permitted to report on the activities of humans.”
“But I’m asking you to!”
“I must go by the Code. It’s been nice talking to you, sir, but now I really must—”
“Wait!” Gaston cried, as the robotvendor started to back away from him. “I want to buy something!”
The robotvendor returned cautiously. “Are you sure?”
“Yes, I’m sure! Give me a hot dog and a large lemon soda.”
“I thought you had said that you didn’t need a hot dog.”
“I need one now! And the soda!”
Gaston greedily gulped down the soda and ordered another.
“That’ll be eight dollars even,” Rex said.
“I can’t get at my wallet,
” Gaston said. “It’s under me and I can’t move.”
“No need to disturb yourself, sir,” Rex said. “I am programmed by the state to assist old people, cripples, and invalids who sometimes have similar problems.” Before Gaston could protest, the robotvendor had extruded a long, skinny tentacle, snaked out his wallet, taken the right change, and returned the wallet.
“Will there be anything else, sir?” the robot asked, backing his vending craft away from Gaston’s island.
“If you don’t help me,” Gaston said, “I could die out here.”
“No disrespect intended, sir,” the robotvendor said, “but death, for a robot, is not a particularly big deal. We call it being turned off. It’s just one of those things. Eventually somebody comes along and turns you back on again. Or if no one does, you don’t even know about it.”
“It’s different for people,” Gaston said.
“I didn’t know that, sir,” the robot said. “What is it like for people?”
“Never mind. Don’t go away! I’m going to buy something else!”
“I’m really spending too much time on these small orders,” Rex said.
Gaston had a sudden idea. “Then this one ought to please you. I want your entire stock.”
“An expensive decision, sir.”
“My credit card has an unlimited rating. You better start writing up that order.”
“I’ve already done it, sir,” Rex said. He got Gaston’s card out of the wallet, stamped it, returned it for signature. Gaston scrawled with the ballpoint pen.
“Where shall I put the goods?” the robotvendor asked.
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