by Jerry
New York Harbor, November 4, 1872—a cold, blustery day. A two-masted ship rides at anchor; on her stern is lettered: MARY CELESTE. Smith advances the time control. A flicker of darkness, light again, and the ship is gone. He turns back again until he finds it standing out under light canvas past Sandy Hook. Manipulating time and space controls at once, he follows it eastward through a flickering of storm and sun—loses it, finds it again, counting days as he goes. The farther eastward, the more he has to tilt the device downward, while the image of the ship tilts correspondingly away from him. Because of the angle, he can no longer keep the ship in view from a distance but must track it closely. November 21 and 22, violent storms: the ship is dashed upward by waves, falls again, visible only intermittently; it takes him five hours to pass through two days of real time. The 23rd is calmer, but on the 24th another storm blows up. Smith rubs his eyes, loses the ship, finds it again after a ten-minute search.
The gale blows itself out on the morning of the 26th. The sun is bright, the sea almost dead calm. Smith is able to catch glimpses of figures on deck, tilted above dark cross-sections of the hull. A sailor is splicing a rope in the stern, two others lowering a triangular sail between the foremast and the bowsprit, and a fourth is at the helm. A little group stands leaning on the starboard rail; one of them is a woman. The next glimpse is that of a running figure who advances into the screen and disappears. Now the men are lowering a boat over the side; the rail has been removed and lies on the deck. The men drop into the boat and row away. He hears them shouting to each other but cannot make out the words.
Smith turns to the ship again: the deck is empty. He dips below to look at the hold, filled with casks, then the cabin, then the forecastle. There is no sign of anything wrong—no explosion, no fire, no trace of violence. When he looks up again, he sees the sails flapping, then bellying out full. The sea is rising. He looks for the boat, but now too much time has passed and he cannot find it. He returns to the ship and now reverses the time control, tracks it backward until the men are again in their places on the deck. He looks again at the group standing at the rail; now he sees that the woman has a child in her arms. The child struggles, drops over the rail. Smith hears the woman shriek. In a moment she too is over the rail and falling into the sea.
He watches the men running, sees them launch the boat. As they pull away, he is able to keep the focus near enough to see and hear them. One calls, “My God, who’s at the helm?” Another, a bearded man with a face gone tallow-pale, replies, “Never mind—row!” They are staring down into the sea. After a moment one looks up, then another. TheMary Celeste, with three of the four sails on her foremast set, is gliding away, slowly, now faster; now she is gone.
Smith does not run through the scene again to watch the child and her mother drown, but others do.
The production model was ready for shipping in September. It was a simplified version of the prototype, with only two controls, one for space, one for time. The range of the device was limited to one thousand miles. Nowhere on the casing of the device or in the instruction booklet was a patent number or a pending patent mentioned. Smith had called the device Ozo, perhaps because he thought it sounded vaguely Japanese. The booklet described the device as a distant viewer and gave clear, simple instructions for its use. One sentence read cryptically: “Keep Time Control set at zero.” It was like “Wet Paint—Do Not Touch.”
During the week of September 23, seven thousand Ozos were shipped to domestic and Canadian addresses supplied by Smith: five hundred to electronics manufacturers and suppliers, six thousand, thirty to a carton, marked “On Consignment,” to TV outlets in major cities, and the rest to private citizens chosen at random. The instruction booklets were in sealed envelopes packed with each device. Three thousand more went to Europe, South and Central America, and the Middle East.
A few of the outlets which received the cartons opened them the same day, tried the devices out, and put them on sale at prices ranging from $49.95 to $125. By the following day the word was beginning to spread, and by the close of business on the third day every store was sold out. Most people who got them, either through the mail or by purchase, used them to spy on their neighbors and on people in hotels.
In a house in Cleveland, a man watches his brother-in-law in the next room, who is watching his wife getting out of a taxi. She goes into the lobby of an apartment building. The husband watches as she gets into the elevator, rides to the fourth floor. She rings the bell beside the door marked 410. The door opens; a dark-haired man takes her in his arms; they kiss.
The brother-in-law meets him in the hall. “Don’t do it, Charlie.”
“Get out of my way.”
“I’m not going to get out of your way, and I tell you, don’t do it. Not now and not later.”
“Why the hell shouldn’t I?”
“Because if you do I’ll kill you. If you want a divorce, OK, get a divorce. But don’t lay a hand on her or I’ll find you the farthest place you can go.”
Smith got his consignment of Ozos early in the week, took one home and left it to his store manager to put a price on the rest. He did not bother to use the production model but began at once to build another prototype. It had controls calibrated to one-hundredth of a second and one millimeter, and a timer that would allow him to stop a scene, or advance or regress it at any desired rate. He ordered some clockwork from an astronomical supply house.
A high-ranking officer in Army Intelligence, watching the first demonstration of the Ozo in the Pentagon, exclaimed, “My God, with this we could dismantle half the establishment—all we’ve got to do is launch interceptors when we see them push the button.”
“It’s a good thing Senator Burkhart can’t hear you say that,” said another officer. But by the next afternoon everybody had heard it.
A Baptist minister in Louisville led the first mob against an Ozo assembly plant. A month later, while civil and criminal suits against all the rioters were still pending, tapes showing each one of them in compromising or ludicrous activities were widely distributed in the area.
The commission agents who had handled the orders for the first Ozos were found out and had to leave town. Factories were fire-bombed, but others took their place.
The first Ozo was smuggled into the Soviet Union from West Germany by Katerina Belov, a member of a dissident group in Moscow, who used it to document illegal government actions. The device was seized on December 13 by the KGB; Belov and two other members of the group were arrested, imprisoned and tortured. By that time over forty other Ozos were in the hands of dissidents.
You are watching an old movie,Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice . The humor seems infantile and unimaginative to you; you are not interested in the actresses’ occasional seminudity. What strikes you as hilarious is the coyness, the sidelong glances, smiles, grimaces hinting at things that will never be shown on the screen. You realize that these people have never seen anyone but their most intimate friends without clothing, have never seen any adult shit or piss, and would be embarrassed or disgusted if they did. Why did children say “pee-pee” and “poo-poo,” and then giggle? You have read scholarly books about taboos on “bodily functions,” but why was shitting worse than sneezing?
Cora Zickwolfe, who lived in a remote rural area of Arizona and whose husband commuted to Tucson, arranged with her nearest neighbor, Phyllis Mell, for each of them to keep an Ozo focused on the bulletin board in the other’s kitchen. On the bulletin board was a note that said “OK.” If there was any trouble and she couldn’t get to the phone, she would take down the note, or if she had time, write another.
In April, 1992, about the time her husband usually got home, an intruder broke into the house and seized Mrs. Zickwolfe before she had time to get to the bulletin board. He dragged her into the bedroom and forced her to disrobe. The state troopers got there in fifteen minutes, and Cora never spoke to her friend Phyllis again.
Between 1992 and 2002 more than six hundred improvements
and supplements to the Ozo were recorded. The most important of these was the power system created by focusing the Ozo at a narrow aperture on the interior of the Sun. Others included the system of satellite slave units in stationary orbits and a computerized tracer device which would keep the Ozo focused on any subject.
Using the tracer, an entomologist in Mexico City is following the ancestral line of a honey bee. The images bloom and expire, ten every second: the tracer is following each queen back to the egg, then the egg to the queen that laid it, then that queen to the egg. Tens of thousands of generations have passed; in two thousand hours, beginning with a Paleocene bee, he has traveled back into the Cretaceous. He stops at intervals to follow the bee in real time, then accelerates again. The hive is growing smaller, more primitive. Now it is only a cluster of round cells, and the bee is different, more like a wasp. His year’s labor is coming to fruition. He watches, forgetting to eat, almost to breathe.
In your mother’s study after she dies you find an elaborate chart of her ancestors and your father’s. You retrieve the program for it, punch it in, and idly watch a random sampling, back into time, first the female line, then the male . . . a teacher of biology in Boston, a suffragette, a corn merchant, a singer, a Dutch farmer in New York, a British sailor, a German musician. Their faces glow in the screen, bright-eyed, cheeks flushed with life. Someday you too will be only a series of images in a screen.
Smith is watching the planet Mars. The clockwork which turns the Ozo to follow the planet, even when it is below the horizon, makes it possible for him to focus instantly on the surface, but he never does this. He takes up his position hundreds of thousands of miles away, then slowly approaches, in order to see the red spark grow to a disk, then to a yellow sunlit ball hanging in darkness. Now he can make out the surface features: Syrtis Major and Thoth-Nepenthes leading in a long gooseneck to Utopia and the frostcap.
The image as it swells hypnotically toward him is clear and sharp, without tremor or atmospheric distortion. It is summer in the northern hemisphere: Utopia is wide and dark. The planet fills the screen, and now he turns northward, over the cratered desert still hundreds of miles distant. A dust storm, like a yellow veil, obscures the curved neck of Thoth-Nepenthes; then he is beyond it, drifting down to the edge of the frostcap. The limb of the planet reappears; he floats like a glider over the dark surface tinted with rose and violet-gray; now he can make out individual plants. He is drifting among their gnarled gray stems, their leaves of violet horn; he sees the curious misshapen growths that may be air bladders or some grotesque analogue of blossoms. Now, at the edge of the screen, something black and spindling leaps. He follows it instantly, finds it, brings it hugely magnified into the center of the screen: a thing like a hairy beetle, its body covered with thick black hairs or spines; it stands on six jointed legs, waving its antennae, its mouth parts busy. And its four bright eyes stare into his, across forty million miles.
Smith’s hair got whiter and thinner. Before the 1992 Crash, he made heavy contributions to the International Red Cross and to volunteer organizations in Europe, Asia and Africa. He got drunk periodically, but always alone. From 1993 to 1996 he stopped reading the newspapers.
He wrote down the coordinates for the plane crash in which his daughter and her husband had died, but never used them.
At intervals while dressing or looking into the bathroom mirror, he stared as if into an invisible camera and raised one finger. In his last years he wrote some poems.
We know his name. Patient researchers, using advanced scanning techniques, followed his letters back through the postal system and found him, but by that time he was safely dead.
The whole world has been at peace for more than a generation. Crime is almost unheard of. Free energy has made the world rich, but the population is stable, even though early detection has wiped out most diseases. Everyone can do whatever he likes, providing his neighbors would not disapprove, and after all, their views are the same as his own.
You are forty, a respected scholar, taking a few days out to review your life, as many people do at your age. You have watched your mother and father coupling on the night they conceived you, watched yourself growing in her womb, first a red tadpole, then a thing like an embryo chicken, then a big-headed baby kicking and squirming. You have seen yourself delivered, seen the first moment when your bloody head broke into the light. You have seen yourself staggering about the nursery in rompers, clutching a yellow plastic duck. Now you are watching yourself hiding behind the fallen tree on the hill, and you realize that there are no secret places. And beyond you in the ghostly future you know that someone is watching you as you watch; and beyond that watcher another, and beyond that another . . . Forever.
WHAT IS LIFE?
Robert Sheckley
he knew that if he answered correctly, instant guruhood was only a few steps away
MORTONSON RELATES that while he was out strolling in the foothills of the Himalayas one day, a tremendous voice that seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere said to him, “Hey, you.”
“Me?” Mortonson asked.
“Yes, you,” the voice boomed. “Can you tell me, what is life?”
Mortonson stood, frozen in mid stride, pouring perspiration, aware that he was having a genuine mystical experience and that a lot was going to depend on how he answered the question.
“I’m going to need a moment or two for tills one,” he said.
“Don’t take too long,” said the voice, reverberating hugely from all sides.
Mortonson sat down on a rock and considered the situation. The god or demon who had asked the question surely knew that Mortonson—a mere mortal and not too fantastic a specimen, at that—hadn’t the faintest idea of what life was. So his answer should perhaps reveal his understanding of his own mortal limitations but also show his awareness that it was somehow appropriate for the god or demon to ask this question of a potentially divine creature like man, here represented by Mortonson with his stooped shoulders, sunburned nose, orange rucksack and crumpled pack of Marlboros. On the other hand, maybe the implication of the question was that Mortonson himself really did know what life was and could spontaneously state it in a few well-chosen words. But it was already a bit late for spontaneous wisdom.
“I’ll be light with you.” Mortonson said.
“OK,” said the tremendous voice, booming off the mountains and rolling through the valleys.
It was really a drag to be put on the line like this spiritually. And it wasn’t fair. After all, Mortonson hadn’t come to Nepal as a pilgrim, he was only here on a 30-day excursion. He was simply a young American with a sunburned nose chain-smoking Marlboros on a hillside in Nepal, where he had come through a combination of restlessness and an unexpected birthday gill of $500 from his parents. So what could you infer from that, contextwise? “Raw American Encounters Immemorial Eastern Wisdom and Fails Miserably to Get with It.” A bummer!
Nobody likes to be put on the spot like that. It’s embarrassing and potentially ego damaging to have this vast otherworldly voice come at you with what has to be a trick question. How do you handle it? Avoid the trap, expose the double bind, reveal your knowledge of the metagame by playing it in a spirit of frivolity! Tell the voice: Life is a voice asking a man what life is! And then roar with cosmic laughter.
But to bring that oil, you need to be sure that the voice understands the levels of your answer. What if it says, “Yeah, that’s what’s happening, but what is life?” And you’re left standing there with ectoplasmic egg on your face as that cosmic laughter is directed at you—great gusty, heroic laughter at your pomposity, your complacency, your arrogance at even attempting to answer the unanswerable.
“How’s it coming?” the voice asked.
“I’m still working on it,” Mortonson said.
Obviously, this was one of those spiritual quickies, and Mortonson was still stalling around and hadn’t even gotten around yet to considering what in hell life was. Quickly, he r
eviewed some possibilities: Life is a warm Puppy. Life is Asymmetry. Life is Chance. Life is Chaos shot through with Fatality (remember that one). Life is just a Howl of Cherries. Life is Birdcall and Windsong (nice). Life is What you make it. Life is Cosmic Dance. Life is a Movie. Life is Matter become curious (did Victor Hugo say that?). Life is Whatever the hell you want to call it.
“This is really a tough one,” Mortonson said.
“That’s for sure,” the voice said, rolling from peak to peak and filling the air with its presence.
One should always be prepared for this kind of spiritual emergency, Mortonson thought. Why didn’t NYU have a course in Normative Altitudes Toward the Unexpected? But college never prepared you for anything important, you just went along learning a little here and there, picking up on Chuang-tzu, Thoreau. Norman Brown, Rajnecsh, the Shivapuri Baba and the other insiders who really knew the score. And all their stuff sounded absolutely right on! Hut when you closed the book, that was die end of it, and there you were, scratching your nose and wishing that someone would invite you to a party where you’d meet a beautiful childlike young woman with long straight hair and upright pointy breasts and long slender legs, but now was no time to get into that, because that damned voice was waiting for the answer, the Big Answer, but what in almighty hell was life?
“I’ve almost got it,” he said.
What bugged him was the knowledge that he had a lot to gain if he could only come up with the right answer. It was an incredible chance for spiritual advancement, an opportunity to skip a few intermediate steps and get right up to Enlightenment, Moksha, Satori! A really together person could solve this and parlay the ensuing insight into guruhood, maybe even into Buddhadom! You could spend a lifetime going to Esalen or a Gurdjieff group and never get near anything like this! But what was life?