The yellow sun was setting; its dying rays illuminated the useless bulk of the gray ghost which was its neighbor, hanging low on the horizon and blotting out a great chunk of sky.
“We’re ready,” came the tense, tinny voice of Werner.
“So are we,” Yatagawa said.
He threw the switch. The generator throbbed, and began shooting current through the copper wire. Electrons flowed; power was dissipated; electrical energy was transformed into heat.
The heat spread through the highly conductive plastic jacket of the Calypso, The Calypso’s hull began to grow warm.
“How’s the weather in there?” Yatagawa asked.
“We’re doing fine,” Werner said.
“Glad to hear it. Your hull’s temperature is probably well above zero now, and getting hotter.”
The hot wires had already melted thin lines through the ice to the ship; vapor rose.
“It’s starting to melt,” Helmot called.
“Get the siphon working.”
The pump they had found in the Andromeda*s hold and dragged with such effort over the ice began to come to life. It groaned under the burden, but started to function, hauling the newly-melted water away from the warming surface of the spaceship and through the siphon, spurting it down the side of the hill, where it froze instantly into a spire of fantastic shape.
“It’s working,” Yatagawa said, half to himself. “It’s really working.”
Later—after the entire volume of water had been siphoned away, after the Calypso had grudgingly righted itself and settled on its landing fins on the rock shelf, standing strangely naked in a pit thirty feet across and a hundred deep, the rescue operation began.
Still later—after the Calypso had blasted off amid much roar of jets, and brief melting of additional ice; after the ship had levelled off and gone into its absurd orbit just above the frozen surface of Valdon’s World; after the twelve survivors of the Andromeda had shinnied up the ropes into the Calypso’s airlock, the two captains came face-to-face:
Commander Yatagawa, who had lost his ship—and Captain Werner, who had lost his face.
Together, they peered out the viewport at the rapidly-retreating brightness of the Valdon’s World. “I think I see it,” Werner said. t
“That dot over there? Maybe that is where we were, after all. That must be the pit.”
“And that’s the wreck to the AndromedaWerner said. Suddenly, he began to laugh.
“The joke?” Yatagawa inquired.
“We’ve got to fill out reports on all this,” said Werner.
“And I’ve got to notify Central Control that the rescue’s been effected.”
“And what’s so funny about that?”
Werner, red-faced, said: “Officially, I rescued you. Dammit, I’m going to get a medal for this!”
LUCK, INC.
by Jim Harmon
It just doesn’t ante up right, the way people are always eager to kill off their good luck,” Eddie Valesq said over the coffee dixies on my desk. “Why should they want to murder you?”
“Who wants to murder the golden goose this time?” I asked my Chief of Investigations.
“Typical psychotic file.” He sailed a sheet of paper across to me.
It was yellow second sheet-stuff with words and letters on it trimmed from faxsheets.
To the Baron your new domain will be hell you will not Continue to rule This planet earth through the Guise of Luck, Inc. I will kill You at Your Earliest Convenience
the assassin
I handed over the paper. “I don’t like the part where he says we are running the world at Luck, Inc. There’s too much of that kind of thing whispered around.” Valesq looked sour. “Every reasonable man knows that linc only stacks the cards in the favor of the customer who pays us our standard fee first. The Probability Warp your old man’s old man invented is only a tool, no more dangerous than a hammer. Anything else is superstition.”
“Right. Well adjusted people know we only twist this continium closer to a universe where chance was on their side, an alternate world where things worked out the way they should. When the co-ordinant systems get so close, naturally some of it rubs off in Favorable Inertia.1* Eddie nodded eagerly. “People understand that we have no control over fate at Luck, Inc. No one has to deal with us. They can let their rivals pay us scale first if they want to. Everybody knows that, no matter what the Determinists say.”
“Nothing could be plainer,” I said. “Take this file Anne sent into me. A man named Dekker, over at mwb studios, writes background music for flickers—he wants to be head man of A & R sections, instead of Michael Falwain.”
“Have they run a Peep on the situation?”
“Yes. It shows a strong affinity for a world track where Falwain takes over and becomes a vital modem composer.”
“I suppose linc must regretfully refund Dekker’s retainer?”
I oscillated my head, and punched the file with a perforated ok for the ibm. “No. Dekker gets the job. It means destroying some creative art but we have to keep up our quota of successes. If people stop coming to us, we lose our legal out for interfering in crucial decisions.”
“Frank,” Valesq said, “the public knows we don’t make moral judgments on our clients, but we know different. How long can we keep it a secret?”
“Long enough, I hope, to let your and Anne’s kids grow up. I’d hate for them to have to see their parents and good old Uncle Frank Baron burned at the stake.”
“Easy. Anne and I aren’t married yet. And we don’t have any kids yet.”
“Glad to hear it. Hate to think of you and Anne settling down. The three of us had some great times together.”
Eddie nodded. “Some of it by two’s. But for the past couple of years you’ve been sober even on the job.”
“The Old Man of the Atlantic is riding my shoulders,” I said seriously. “Higher every day.”
“You just inherited this business from an old man who hated your father. The responsibility for old Baron’s frank-enstein isn’t yours.”
“Who else’s then?”
The emergency bell rang.
“Breakthrough!” Eddie said unnecessarily.
We scrambled to our feet and headed for the door. It happened in our faces and Anne Tremaine stood there as cool and self-possessed as ever.
“Never mind, gentlemen. It’s been taken care of. I’ve received the report.”
I let the adrenalin try to soak back into my glands. “Small hole?”
“Small enough. Listen, when you two have a free moment, I want to introduce you to somebody.”
“Who?” I asked her.
“Frank Baron, Jr.,” she said.
“Now’s a fine time to tell me this,” Valesq yelped.
“I find that hard to believe.”
“Really?” she asked. “Well, he just came through the Breakthrough.”
Eddie Valesq grinned. “In one world of probability you found time to marry and have a family, Frank.”
“Maybe.” I swallowed. “Or maybe this is it—the Breakthrough into our own world. Maybe, for the first time, Project Integration has succeeded in touching our own past—not some close variation in another universe.”
“Why do you say that?” Anne asked.
“Remember, I’m not the first Frank Baron; that was my grandfather. I’m Frank Baron III. It was my father, not my son, who would be Frank Baron Jr.”
“Let’s go see the kid,” he said quickly. “Maybe there’s some way you can tell.”
“I’m not sure if I want to tell. I hated my father as much as my grandfather did, and for better reason.”
The past—that was the one thing Luck, Inc. couldn’t touch, not with granddaddy’s Probability Warp or with our new and secret Peepers to view future probability tracks. We were constantly at the mouth of a great river; we could travel down any tributary we chose and divert one stream into another but we could never go back up the river, to its source.
>
“Are you sure the kid didn’t come from that track’s future?” Valesq asked Wilmot belligerently.
Wilmot removed his glasses and polished them on his sleeve. “Positive. Mr. Baron was dead in the world we were tracking, and believe me, it was a mess. As usual, since Intergration probing began, we had the resistance circuits on full. We must have finally hit that soft spot we were looking for, snapped into a backtrack and broke a hole in the continuim through which the boy fell.” Eddie shook his head, unconvinced. “I’d sooner believe it was a sideslip, rather than a backtrack.”
“Valesq,” Wilmot said with dangerous patience “we haven’t had a case of sideslipping since we developed fixed orientation—not for thirty years.”
“Yeah,” he admitted “but you’ll have to agree that it’s a lot less rare than breaking through into our own past.” I interrupted them. “Let me see the boy.”
“Oh,” Wilmot said “you want to see him now, Baron.”
“I don’t think I want to see him at all. But 1 suppose I must.”
“This way, Baron.”
Wilmot lead me down one of the offshoots of his administration center. “This is the first time any Breakthrough has resulted in holing a human being, except for the time 27 years ago when that wounded soldier came through. He lived only a few minutes.”
“I remember the case,” I told him.
“Of course. Sometimes I’m naive as to how much information a layman can have at his disposal. I suppose you know that our catalogue of holed objects is quite extensive, including…”
“I know what it includes, Wilmot. I may be a layman but I happen to own this damned plaice. I know what’s going on in it.”
We walked on a few paces and my chief for the Integration Project sullenly indicated the door. “In there. Double doors, air lock-like arrangement. Use your master key. I’ll be back at the hub.”
I fished out my electronic pencil for decoding the tumblers, and happened to glance behind me.
“You still here?” I asked Valesq and Anne.
“Are you telling us to go away?” Eddie said.
“I’m not.”
I buzzed the doors and went through on into the room. The kid was as ugly as me mid he was crying. He wouldn’t have won any charm contest then, if ever. I supposed he could have been my son—or my father as a boy.
“No clothes,I observed. “Wonder why? Plenty of inorganic matter has come through the holes before.”
“I want to go—hooommme,” the kid shrieked, ending with a little chuckling sob.
I took his chin in my palm. “Want to go home, boy? Listen to that, Eddie, Anne. He wants to go home. He came in on a bus that’s run twice in 27 years and he wants it to run again, just for him.”
“Frank, there’s a legal problem here,” Anne the Advisor said. “We are holding this boy against his will; this might be kidnapping.”
“Nuts,” 1 said. “This boy has had an accident. There are doctors here who can judge what’s better for him than he’s able to do for himself.”
She shuddered delicately. “This cage, this antiseptic cage. Bed, plumbing, four blank walls.”
“We’ll get him a TV set or some books,” I said, still holding on to the small face. “Hear me, boy—you’ve got to stay here until we can get you back where you belong. Do you understand?”
*Wo!” he screamed. “I want to go home!”
I hit him across the mouth. “Understand that? You’re staying here until we tell you you can go home.”
The kid lowered his eyes and his mouth became a straight line. “Yes, sir. I understand. I’ll stay.”
I patted his head. “Good boy. Anne, you’re a woman—maybe he’ll talk to you.”
‘
“Yes.” She moved to him, knelt, and held his shoulders. The boy’s eyes glittered at her. Anne wasn’t a large woman, but she was big enough to take care of him.
Eddie and I quit the room. He said to me, “You didn’t have to hit the kid, did you, Baron?”
“Who’s got a better right?” I yelled. “Whether he’s my son from some future or my father from our past, who’s got a better right?”
Eddie didn’t have an answer.
I wasn’t feeling so good by the time I reached my office. There was some aspirin in the upper right hand drawer but as I reached for it I saw the folder on my desk, one with a bright red cover.
Opening it immediately I scanned the single sheet of double-spaced typing. It neatly condensed the problem.
I thumbed the intercom. “Have them send in Dr. Tan Eck, Stacy.”
Tan Eck paced in six minutes later and took a seat in front of my desk at my invitation. He was a young blond man, too handsome but rugged. The thin-rimmed steel glasses were out of place on him.
“I have a breakdown on your problem from Analysis, Doctor,” I began, “but sometimes there are semantic errors. Will you explain the situation to me, in your own words, and make it briefer than you think is wise. I may be able to get by on fewer details than you are in position to believe.”
The research man showed strong teeth and a stronger jaw. “I know the Baron’s time is valuable…”
“We don’t use ’the* as an adjective around here, Doctor,” I said, idly pencilling an ok on a form. “My last name is Baron; it isn’t a title or rank.”
Tan Eck shook his head slowly. “I didn’t mean to be discourteous, but you are fighting the wind, sir. The only time people don’t call you the Baron is in your presence.”
I looked up at his cold blue eyes. “Don’t you think I know that, Tan Eck? But if I don’t continue to fight for the proper form of my name in public, who else is going to have any respect for it? As long as I fight it, ‘the Baron* means I’m an authoritarian. Accept the title and it becomes the distinction for a pompous fool.”
“I suppose so, but I shouldn’t have wasted part of my time-quota by arguing with you about your name. I think I can put my basic request of Luck, Inc. in one sentence.”
“Commendable.”
“I want you to help me put an end to the dictatorship of cause and effect in our universe,” Dr. Tan Eck said.
“You mean you want to produce results—physical products and changed relationships—without following the steps of usual action?”
“More or less. Think of it as a further violation of the maxim of conservation of energy. Atomic energy has been violating this principle for years; I want to go a step further.”
I pulled over a blank form, pencil in hand. “Outline the areas of activity in which you hope to become engaged through the application of your invention or process.”
“Matter duplication and production. That is, producing original objects, and duplicating any existing ones, without the use of matter or energy. Arranging favorable states and conditions without the loss of time or energy. Giving a man an education without his having to work for it; making a wife and husband securely and blissfully in love, without the difficulties of either courtship or adjustment.”
I laid down my pencil. “You would invade the working areas of many of our customers, Doctor.”
“I would participate in those areas but I wouldn’t monopolize them. I couldn’t hold a monopoly any more than they can.”
“True,” I admitted. “But this line of research you want us to help you with—is it biological, electronic • • • •
“Mechanical. Based on the fundamental principles of motion, and another factor…”
I glanced at my watch.
“The additional factor has been necromancy, an invocation to various demons and gods for aid in making our experiment a success.”
I made a careful notation. “You say ‘various* supernatural beings. Why not the same one each time?”
“Because they don’t always cooperate! That’s why I want you to help me take my machine—the Producer—out of the area of chance and make it a working, dependable device.”
“linc doesn’t always succeed,” I pointed out.
/> “But you have a better record for successful intervention than any ancient immortal.”
“But in the field of necromancy…
“Please,” Tan Eck interrupted, “don’t think me a crackpot. I know that these invocations do not really snag divine or infernal help. The method by which we achieve success is different, but the result is the same. I don’t know why these elements of necromancy make the Producer work—sometimes—but they do. Whatever the reason, magic is too unreliable. I want you to make for permanent success.”
“Doctor, magic is unreliable,” I told him. “You are asking Luck, Inc. to help you unleash magic on the modem world. With your Producer operating, no man will be able to have confidence in anything. We won’t even be able to know which way is up—levitation can play hell with gravity. When cause and effect goes out the window, you wife may go out the door. She may be instantly in love with the next unappetizing stranger. The Producer, in producing logically unrelated states, would be as good as a love potion. The social order will crumble—how will you know whether a man mortgaged a year’s salary for his Lincocad or had you produce it out of thin air for a reasonable fee.”
Tan Eck waited until he was sure I had finished. “Entirely correct. My invention may well mean the end of human civilization. Now that we have cleared up that amusing philosophical point; how much do you want to do the job? Or have you started making moral decisions, decisions of rule, as the Determinist party claims?”
“Of course not,” I lied with practiced speed, “but you must realize you are asking us to jeopardize the interests of our clients.”
“Every warping of probability in somebody’s favor, jeopardizes someone else. That’s not the meaning of ’Cross-purpose’ under the Warp Bill. No one else has hired you to do this particular thing before. No? Then how can you refuse me?”
I thought about how I could refuse him, because that’s exactly what I was going to do. Luck, Inc. couldn’t let anyone gain the unlimited power of magic, any more than the patent office could grant a crank the rights to the wheel or let him copyright the alphabet.
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