Rare Science Fiction

by Ivan Howatd (ed. )

  “Before you say anything,” Tan Eck continued, “I think I should tell you that while I’m not a registered D. P. I have friends high in the Determinist Party. They are willing to help me force this through as a test case. Refuse me without cause and you will prove you are not serving this country, but controlling it!”

  I didn’t question him. Even if he were lying, the Determinists would help him as soon as they heard. Let him turn the Earth into a madhouse of magic if it proved Luck, Inc. was not acting entirely impartially to all, particularly them.

  “I’ll think it over,” I said.

  “You can,” he agreed, “until midnight.”

  The possibility of failure hadn’t been discussed by Tan Eck and myself. I knew he would not accept a simple Negative Prognosis, explanations of chancial drift and incompatibility void. He would yell “Fake!” to the D. P.’s as soon as he saw the report. And he would be right; we had never yet encountered a single situation where we couldn’t noticibly influence it by the inertia of a compatibly warped positive probability. Of course, the area of Effectity was limited—you couldn’t make the world simply wonderful by selecting a Utopia from the infinite possibilities and bringing it alongside. That would be too big a job to focus.

  As I was thinking, the facsimile unit on my desk printed an Offbeat pulse. Some little guy in Maine wanted to be the strongest man in the world. There was no cross-purpose; our previous customer for the position was dead of a knotted hernia. 1 checked the minimum fee box, punched it OK and fed it back. I was a little sore at the lunkhead cybernetic sorter who couldn’t understand the concept of ’important’. Who gave a damn who the strongest man in the world was? Not even the second strongest man—he would probably have enough sense to distinguish himself in some other, important way. His application* I might want to see.

  The interruption might have been a good thing. Brooding was no good. I picked up my phone and placed a call.

  Presently the dialscreen focused on the homely, shockhaired face of Gaylord Prince, titular head of the Determinist Party.

  “Mr. Prince,” I said, “we may not agree on many things, but I hope we can come to an understanding about a certain problem that has come up.” I didn’t really have any hope at all, but I had to try.

  “This is a coincidence, Baron. Your call has been relayed to my coptercar. I’m on my way to see you now.”

  “Oh? About Tan Eck, I presume.”

  “Who?”

  “You will die before midnight. The Assassin sees it”

  “Threatening me, Baron? I’m not surprised.” But we were both doing a lot of lying on this call.

  “That isn’t me, Prince,” I said quietly. “The voice is similar to yours. Could easily be a doctored recording.”

  “You will die.”

  “See what I mean?” I asked him.

  “Are you trying to tell me there’s a third party on the line?”

  The click was clear. “There was,” I said.

  “I don’t believe it. You were threatening to kill me, Baron.”

  “Which way is your flyer headed now?”

  “Still towards your office, Baron. In politics, a man doesn’t let a little thing like threat of murder stop him.”

  “Come right in!” I said with what I knew was false heartiness.

  Prince was a sour-looking old man with a tanned, wrinkled hide that had turned to leather around his neck. He entered and without apparent hesitation shook hands with me. I knew immediately that all social gestures were meaningless formalities to him.

  “This is a major break in protocol,” I said to him, offering him the visitor’s chair. “A prince shouldn’t come calling on a Baron.” I chuckled foolishly.

  “I am not a Prince, Mr. Baron—to me, that is only a label.”

  It had been a stupid overture, inviting the usual cheap play on my name. Why had I offered the opening? Was I a masochist, or maybe did I secretly like being thought of as some kind of aristocrat?

  “I believe,” I said “you stated you were coming here when I called, Prince. What did you want to see me about?”

  The old man pursed his thin lips. “Who is Tennant?”

  Obviously, he meant Tan Eck—he hadn’t got the name correct even from listening to a recording of our conversation.

  “Mr. Prince, I have decided that if you don’t know, I simply am not going to tell you. Do you still want to tell me why you wanted to see me in the first place?”

  After a second, Prince nodded and seemed to forget about “Tennant.”

  “Yes, Mr. Baron, I’ll tell you. As titular head of the Determinist Party, I want to hire Luck,

  Inc. to help put the probability of winning this election on our side.”

  “That,” I said, “is an unusual—but admittedly legal—request. Of course, if the D. P.’s do gain power you will immediately begin work to ruin this company, which you want to help you into office.”

  “We will put you out of business—but you will receive full evaluated restitution for your assets. I’m sure a man of your executive ability will have no trouble building another company and a second fortune.”

  “Thanks; I like this one,” I said. “You are aware of the Ethical Provisions Act. If your party wins, it must be or become the more ethical of the contenders. That may mean quite a shake-up in your membership and the individual personalities of your leaders.”

  “Considering our opposition,” Prince said dryly, “I don’t expect any great change will be necessary to make us the more ethical.”

  I set aside the forms I had been holding. “Sir, you realize that we could simply offer you a negative prognosis for successfully warping probability in your favor.”

  “You could, thus proving everything we said about you was true—that you do control our lives by changing probability only when you want a change.”

  “You don’t need proof; you have your prejudices. They will be good enough cause for you to outlaw Luck, Inc. even if we help you win.”

  “Yes, that’s settled. You won’t help yourself any by helping us, but remember you are duty-bound to help even your enemies.”

  “I won’t even promise to try until I’ve studied this proposition more carefully, to see if it isn’t in conflict with some other client…

  “The other party isn’t buying success—not with the pollsters giving it away to them, and their misguided belief that we wouldn’t use something which we oppose. I’ll give you until time for the evening news summary before announcing your illegal refusal to accept our assignment. That’s eleven o’clock in this time zone, I believe.”

  “I imagine that would rate a bulletin. Would you mind giving me until midnight?”

  “Midnight? Very well, call it that.”

  “Thanks, I’m a methodical man. I like to keep things neat, even.”

  Prince stood up, his eyes still moving over my face speculatively. “Too bad we had to be on opposite sides in this thing, Baron. I’ll expect to hear from you then?”

  “You can expect it, Mr. Prince, but I don’t guarantee that you will.”

  “So blank it’s black on the ’phone call,” Valesq reported. “We don’t know where the second voice came from during the Prince call.”

  “It could have come from Prince’s coptercar, couldn’t it?” I asked. “A recording, a second man—even Prince changing his voice.”

  Eddie Valesq shrugged. “Possible. But even if Prince is stooping to sick threats like that, he probably would take the precaution of staging a real break-in from outside. We could have placed the voice inside the car if we had been focused in on it.”

  “This is one of the times we need access to the past. If ire could integrate the time stream, it would be simple to look back there and see if Prince was responsible for the Assassin’s threat. What’ll we find if we check alternate probabilities? In one universe, Prince did make the threat; in another he didn’t. In a third, you made the threat, Eddie, just before you rushed in here and killed me.” He
nodded thoughtfully. “You can control the future from the present but it would be easier by going into the past. The past is stable—the present is too slippery—it becomes tomorrow too easily.”

  I checked over the reports. “A profound thought for a Thursday afternoon. I’m not to the report on Tan Eck. What’s it say?”

  “He’s pretty much what he claims. A research physicist, subsidized by Webbington. Private laboratory in New Haven. Typical Scientist-Engineer’s contract: they pay his bills and get first option on anything he comes up with, if he wants to sell it. Never understood why those pirates get first crack at something instead of the inventor selling it on the open market, just because they subsidize him. Where would industry be without research?”

  ’Times change. A few years ago researchers would be happy with that kind of contract. What else?”

  “He was married to Ellen Schweitz, heiress to a middling hunk of the Kola-Kicks fortune. She was killed, along with 437 others, in a Pan-Europe crash—Tan Eck was one of the two survivors. He’s invented several specialized, technical gadgets for industry. Minor innovations that were technologically overdue. That’s all the meat in the report.”

  “Thanks.” I had come to the report and now put it aside. “Anything strike you as unusual about the man, Eddie?”

  “Yeah, he rediscovered magic and made it work.”

  I nodded. “That’s part of it; the man’s a fortune prone.”

  “That Pan-U crash makes him sound more like an accident prone.”

  “Not when he was one out of two who escaped. Look at the record. The man has what is really a pretty cushy job with prestige, privileges, and money—despite your remarks to the contrary. He marries a rich girl and by the time he gets tired of her, she gets killed and he gets her money. Tan Eck makes important but ’obvious’ (to paraphrase you) inventions. Finally, he stumbles across what amounts to magic—wish-fulfillment in full. Tan Eck is probably the luckiest man who ever lived!”

  “If he is,” Eddie growled suspiciously, “he’s all his own man. There’s no record of his ever trying to buy luck from us before. We’re a benevolent monopoly like telephones and telegraph, so there’s no place else for him to go.”

  “He doesn’t need to go anyplace.”

  “I can think of someplace for him to go. I don’t want to live in a world where roses turn to snakes. Sounds psychotic to me.”

  I grunted affirmatively.

  The intercom winked at me, but it was still electricity, not necromancy; I answered it.

  Anne Tremaine rolled up the screen into view, her cheeks flushed pink. She still looked good to me, but I remembered she was Eddie’s girl now.

  “Frank,” she said hoarsely, “I think the boy is going into Trauma. I couldn’t get anything more out of him than his name, Trank Baron, Jr.’ and the fact that as soon as he didn’t have to stay here, he wanted to go home. Wilmot wanted to use sodium pentathol but 1 stopped him.”

  “Why?”

  “I’ll answer that, Frank, when I have at least fifteen minutes to yell at you. There isn’t time now. I’ve heard from one of the girls that there’s a rumor…”

  “A rumor, hmm? That’s faster than Eddie’s intelligence any—well, some days. What is it?”

  “We didn’t get all of our leaks and plants last time. The government is sending over a man. I don’t like to think what will happen if the boy dies. The government is under pressure. There’ll be corporative and personal charges against us.”

  “Against me, Anne,” I corrected. “It’s fixed so all responsibility reverts to me.”

  “That’s the way you want it,” her voice caught, “but don’t you know yet that not everybody wants to let you have things your own way.”

  “I’ll be right over,” I told her.

  The boy was having a chill on the bed, the sheet upi around his throat. His eyes were open, glittering with the heat and the cold inside his body, staring at me.

  “How long has he been like this?” I asked.

  “I called you when it started,” Anne said. “Looks like shock to me, but I haven’t been a nurse for several years; I’m probably rusty. Wilmot administered a trace curare solution. I looked him over. No knotted muscles I could feel.”

  “He stood the shock of transition…”

  “Did he?” Anne questioned. “It took time for him to realize he was in a different world.”

  “I don’t think he is capable of realizing that. Anything else happen that could account for the shock?”

  Anne moistened her tastefully painted mouth. “You beat him.”

  “I hit him. But he has been beaten at times. See that back of his?”

  “Yes.”

  “A little slap isn’t going to cause a kid who’s gone through that to wilt.”

  Anne touched me—it was the first time in months. “He glanced towards us; he heard us. He can’t be completely out.”

  “Do you have any objections to a little light hypnosis?”

  She looked at die boy. “No. It can’t do him any harm now.”

  I reached out my hand towards his face. His cheek ticked in the shadow of my palm, but when my fingertips only brushed his eyes a line in his throat relaxed. I kept stroking his eyes and whispering to him quietly.

  “Okay, open your eyes, ’Frank Baron, Jr.’”

  His small black eyes opened.

  “Is that really your name?” I asked him.

  “I guess so. That’s what they call me.”

  “Wiat’s your father’s name?”

  “Daddy.” He snickered; he was making fun of me.

  “No stalling. What’s his legal name. You’re old enough to know that.”

  His eyebrows jerked up towards his hairline in stages, his breathing came more rapidly. “I don’t. I don’t know.”

  “Temporary amnesia,” Anne suggested. “He’s had a middling bad shock.”

  “Could be,” I admitted reluctantly. “Look, kid, you remember if you have a father. Is he alive?”

  The eyes went wide. “Look out! Look out!”

  The boy must be remembering how his father had died, I decided. Yet he didn’t seem to be in a state of recall. He seemed to be looking at me and seeing me; and something else.

  I ducked and the blast seared right across the kid’s blankets, scorching them to rust. The only thing I could see out of the perimeter of my sight was a hand with a gun in it, inserted through the door.

  Moving like a sidewinder, I made the threshold and slid the door shut fast, past the safety ease, on the wrist of the gun hand. Fingers exploded apart and the weapon dropped into my own palm. But then the hand wiggled out of the crack; the door came shut, and, infuriatingly latched.

  By the time I had used my key the corridor was empty. There was no need to notify Eddie Valesq’s security guards. They were on a constant alert, specially since the threats had begun in earnest.

  I was finally realizing how deadly earnest those threats had been.

  “Are you all right?** I asked Anne. It was a silly question; she had never been in the line of fire.

  “Fine.** Her face was flushed and for once her hair was disarrayed.

  “How’s the boy?”

  “He*s all right. The blast never touched him, only the bedclothes. He seems in natural sleep.”

  I nodded. “I can see. With a smile on his face. The last thing he saw was somebody getting ready to shoot me in the back.”

  “But he warned you.”

  I snorted. “Instinctively. But he thinks that it fortunately wasn’t in time.”

  “You don’t think he is your son—or some Frank Baron’s son from another probability track.”

  “No. I think he’s my father, from our past.”

  “And you hate him,” Anne said. “You never told me why you hated your father. Why did you?”

  “Why does any boy hate his father? I didn’t want to, but he made me—he hated me. Wait, I’ll tell you about it. My grandfather and his only son both fell
in love with the same girl. Old man Baron, the inventor of the probability warp, was only about forty, a widower, and the son was half that. The son married the girl, my mother, and against medical advice, they decided to have a child—me. My mother died. Grandfather blamed my father—my father blamed me. I never found out who Mother had a grudge against.”

  “Your grandfather left you the business and the invention.”

  “Of course. After Dad died. He wouldn’t let him benefit from anything, even through me. We lived in what used to be Hell’s Kitchen. The name still fits. In the closing years of his life, Dad became what might be described as a sadist. I was handy.”

  “Frank, I know you pretty well. You couldn’t be planning on taking out revenge on a boy who would become your father.”

  “Why not?” I asked. “He couldn’t appreciate things the way I did if he was full grown, could he?”

  “You have ten minutes left before midnight,’* Dr. Tan Eck said, seating himself across my desk. “Do you have your decision for me so soon?”

  “Yes, Doctor. 1 have three appointments for midnight and 1 think I may as well give you the courtesy of hearing my answer first.”

  “I warn you again, Mr. Baron—refuse me, and I’ll go straight to the faxsheets and the government”

  “There should be a government agent here shortly, Tan Eck. One of my associates, Miss Tremaine, has been systematically losing him in the esoteric corridors of this building; but he should have located one of his own spies by now who will lead him here.”

  “Am I going to have to file a complaint with him?” The young scientist smiled charmingly.

  “That’s your choice. However, Luck, Inc. is not going to help you. Your application is refused. We believe unleashing magic in the modem world is not in the public interest.”

  “There’s no such provision in the Warp Bill!” Tan Eck ranted. “If there were, who’s to interpret it? You’ve set yourself up as judge, jury, censor, guardian of public morals. You’re a scoundrel, Baron.”

  ’True enough. But not a killer like you.”

  Tan Eck leaned back, his face entirely transparent He was an emotional man. “What do you mean?” he said calmly enough.