by Larry Niven
For the first time, Svetz looked part Reynolds...
The extension cage rested on a plain of cracked black glass. Nothing grew. Far in the distance was a line of... Svetz abruptly realized that it was a rim wall. They were in something like a lunar crater.
"This is your world?"
"That's right. I'm home."
"I can't say I like it much."
Reynolds laughed his hollow, grating laugh. "It's cleaner than your world, Svetz. If I'd known you'd kill off everything on Earth, poison the land and the water and the air...well, never mind. We'll fix that."
"What do you mean? All you've got to do is step outside! You're home!"
"But it isn't real. I need you to make it real. This is the only time I've ever been able to affect a time machine. You're my only chance, Svetz."
"But I told you-"
"Svetz. This is a stun gun. It can't hurt anyone, but it can hold you still while I immobilize you. After that, well, I've spent considerable time in medieval torture chambers."
"Wait Wait What year did you leave from? What was the date when you left to stop the Short War? Ah, twenty ninety-two. You wouldn't think to look at me that I was only twenty-two years old, would you? I haven't aged since-"
"What date Post Atomic?
"Let's see. One forty-seven."
The inertial calendar read + 134.
"All right. You can hitch a ride on your own time machine! It leaves thirteen years from now. We can't move back in time, but we can jump forward." Svetz reached for the Go-Home. In the same instant his arm became dead meat dropping limply back to his side.
Reynolds said, "But if we tried to go into the future we'd likely slip sidewise, wouldn't we? And then the pattern of events would have been different, and I wouldn't exist any more, would I?"
So it was certainly worth a try, thought Svetz. He said,
"What are you going to do, wait thirteen years?"
"If I have to." Reynolds clacked his teeth. Apparently it was his only expression; it must make do for a smile, a scowl, a thoughtful look. . . "Hah! I can do better than that. Svetz, can you get me to Australia? Will this thing travel in space coordinates?
"Yes."
"I'm going to change guns." Reynolds stood, examined the equipment lining the curved wall, selected a weapon. "A heavy needle gun. It wouldn't kill an elephant, maybe, but there's anaesthetic enough in here to kill a man."
"Yah," said Svetz. He felt very afraid.
"And now we'll go."
Australia. The eastern coast was a cityscape of streets and oblong buildings. "It's the only place on Earth that's even marginally habitable," said Reynolds. "It's mostly empty now." And he directed Svetz south along the coast.
He had not stopped talking during the entire flight. He sprawled motionless as a laboratory exhibit, the gun propped casually on one kneecap, while he poured out a steady monologue of reminiscence.
"Of course I have a poor opinion of mankind," he was saying in answer to one of his own questions. "Why not? If you'd seen people under stress as often as I have, in overcrowded hospitals, in torture chambers, on scaffolds and headsman's blocks, on battlefields-you'd know. People take stress badly. Especially on battlefields.
"Now, I may have a biased viewpoint. I suppose I should spend more time at square dances and New Year's Eve parties and palace balls, places where people laugh a lot, but, Svetz, who would I talk to? Nobody can see me or hear me unless he's about to die.
"And then they won't listen. Men bear suffering so badly! And they're so afraid to die. I've tried to tell them how lucky they are, to be able to buy eternal peace at the price of a few hours of agony. I've talked to millions of men and women and children, over tens of thousands of years. The only ones who listen are the children, sometimes. Svetz, are you afraid of death?"
"Yes."
"Idiot."
"Are you sure you know where we're going?"
"Oh, we'll find it, Svetz, don't worry. We're looking for the school."
"A school? What for?"
"You'll see. There's only one school, Svetz. It's far too big for the number of children. . . You know, sometimes the people I talk to seem to recognize me. But then they always behave like idiots. 'Don't take me!' As if I had something to do with it. I've had men offer me gold-how would I carry it? And what the women offer me makes even less sense, if they'd only use their own senses." Reynolds pointed. "There, that wide parkland."
Wide? It was vast, all green grass and the green heads of trees. Svetz was reminded of the jungle where he'd found the armadillo. But this greenery was neater, and there were white buildings showing here and there.
"That's the zoo, that low building. All the real animals are dead, but we have mechanical mockups. There, the athletic field; see the white lines on the grass? Veer right. We want the lower grade schoolyard."
There were children in the schoolyard, but not many, and they weren't playing much. Many were distorted, their deformities obvious even at this altitude. One nine year old was terribly thin; he looked like a small ambulatory skeleton.
"Hold her steady," said Reynolds. "Open the door."
"No!" Suddenly Svetz understood.
"Open the door." The bore of Reynolds's gun looked straight into Svetz's eyes. Svetz opened the door.
When Reynolds turned to the door, Svetz jumped him. His dead arm threw him off balance. Reynolds's gun butt caught him under the jaw. Svetz fell back with lights exploding in his head.
When his head cleared, Reynolds was braced in the doorway. Svetz struggled to his knees.
Reynolds fired into the playground.
Svetz staggered toward him with his good hand outstretched.
Reynolds fired again. Then he noticed Svetz and brought the gun around.
Svetz lurched forward to catch the muzzle.
Reynolds fought madly to turn the gun. He couldn't. Svetz, weak as a kitten and ready to die, was still too strong for him. When Reynolds suddenly kicked Svetz under the jaw, it was like being hit with foam plastic.
Six feet tall and a fifty pound weakling. Svetz jerked the gun toward him, out of Reynolds's grip, and threw it behind him. Reynolds staggered helplessly after it. Svetz reached out and took him by the neck.
If he closed his fist, Reynolds would be dead. There was no muscle to protect his windpipe.
Svetz looked down.
The skeleton boy was sprawled beside a green bench, surrounded by boys and girls and small indeterminate beings. He looked dead. Svetz wasted some time trying to think of something to do. Then he moved two levers with his foot...
Gravity changed. Reynolds struggled furiously for moment; and then Svetz's hand was empty. Something foggy seemed to be tugging at the Emergency Stop. Svetz watched it fade.
"But then he got away with it," said Ra Chen.
Svetz shrugged. "I did my best to stop him."
"You don't get it. He killed himself. He stopped himself from ever going back in time to stop the Short War."
Svelz nodded.
"Then-we aren't real! The Short War happened, and Reynolds's line of history happened, and ours didn't! So how can you be here at all?"
"The time machine pulled me home. An extension cage can't get lost, not if it's anchored to its own present."
Ra Chen's eyes were haunted. "But if Reynolds aborted our past, if we don't have a history any more, then-"
"Metaphysics! What if we aren't real! What if we never were real! Sir, you feel real, don't you? So do I. We can always tell ourselves that Project Retake went ahead without Reynolds."
"But-"
"Or maybe the boy lived. He had no hair and practically no scalp.' If Reynolds shot him in the head, the anaesthetic crystal would just ricochet off his skull, right? And knock him out."
"Um. I like that. If the kid was dead at age nine, Reynolds would have disappeared, right? Wrong, futz it!"
Ra Chen snarled. "If he made himself unreal, he made you unreal too. Why shouldn't you go on seeing him?"
>
"Come here a minute." Svetz pulled at Ra Chen's arm, without effect; but after a moment Ra Chen followed him voluntarily.
Beyond the glass wall that fronted the ITR building, half a dozen broken buildings surrounded the broken corpse of a bird. The bird was several blocks long and several weeks dead.
"Now, don't you have enough to worry about besides whether you're real or not?"
"Futz, yes. We've got to do something about that roc," said Ra Chen. "There it lies, in full view of the United Nations Palace..."
Flash Crowd
- 1 -
FROM EDGE to edge and for all of its length, from Central Los Angeles through Beverly Hills and West Los Angeles and Santa Monica to the sea, Wilshire Boulevard was a walkway.
Once there had been white lines on concrete, and raised curbs to stop the people from interfering with the cars. Now the lines were gone, and much of the concrete was covered with soil and grass. There were even a few trees. Concrete strips had been left for bicycles, and wider places for helicopters carrying cargo too big for the displacement booths.
Wilshire was wide for a walkway. People seemed to hug the edges, even those on bikes and motor skates. A boulevard built for cars was too big for mere people.
Outlines of the street still showed through. Ridges in the grass marked where curbs had been, with breaks where there had been driveways.
Some stretches in Westwood had a concrete center divider. The freeway ramps were unchanged and unused. Someday the city would do something about them.
Jerryberry Jansen lived in what had been a seaside motel halfway between Bakersfield and San Francisco. On long-ago summer nights the Shady Rest had been packed with transients at ten dollars a head. Now it made a dandy apartment house, with swimming pool and everything, including a displacement booth outside the manager's office.
There was a girl in the booth when Jerryberry left his apartment.
He glimpsed long, wavy brown hair and the shape of her back in the instant before she disappeared. Janice Wolfe. Too bad she hadn't waited.
. . but she hadn't even seen him.
Nobody was ever around the booths long enough to say hello to. You could meet someone by hovering outside the booths, but what would they think?
Meeting people was for the clubs.
A displacement booth was a glass cylinder with a rounded top. The machinery that made the magic was invisible, buried beneath the booth.
Coin slots and a telephone dial were set into the glass at sternum level.
Jerryberry inserted his C .B . A. credit card below the coin slots.
He dialed by punching numbered buttons. Withdrawing the credit card closed a circuit. An eye blink later he was in an office in the Central Broadcasting Association building in downtown Los Angeles.
The office was big and empty. Only once in an aeon was all that empty space ever used, though several score of newstapers saw it for a few seconds each day. One wall was lined with displacement booths. A curved desk down at the end was occupied by Jerryberry's boss.
George Bailey was fat from too much sitting and darkly tanned by the Nevada sun. He commuted to work every morning via the long-distance booths at Los Angeles International. Today he waved at Jerryberry without speaking. Routine, then. Jerryberry chose one of several cameras and slung the padded strap over his shoulder. He studied several lists of numbers posted over the table before picking one.
He turned and moved to avoid three more newstapers stepping out of booths. They nodded; he nodded; they passed. As he reached for a booth door, a woman flicked in in front of him. Rush hour. He smiled at her and stepped over to the next booth, consulted the list, dialed, and was gone.
He had not spoken to anyone that morning.
The east end of Wilshire Boulevard was a most ordinary T-intersection between high, blocky buildings. Jerryberry looked around even as he was dialing. Nothing newsworthy? No. He was two blocks away and dialing.
He punched the numbered buttons with a ballpoint pen when he remembered. Nonetheless, his index finger was calloused.
The streets of the inner city were empty, this early. In a minute or so Jerryberry was in sight of the freeway. He stepped out of the booth to watch trucks and bulldozers covering this part of the Pasadena-Harbor Freeway with topsoil. Old machines find new use-but others were covering the event. He moved on.
The booths were all identical. He might have been in a full-vision theater, watching scenes flick around him. He was used to the way things jerked about. He flicked west on Wilshire, waiting for something to happen.
It was a cheap, effective way to gather news. At a chocolate dollar per jump per man, C. B. A. could afford to support a score of wandering newstapers in addition to the regular staff. They earned low salaries, plus a bonus for each news item, plus a higher bonus per item used. The turnover was high. It had been higher before C.B.A. learned not to jumble the numbers at random. An orderly progression down a single street was easier on the mind and nerves.
Jerryberry Jansen knew every foot of Wilshire. At twenty-eight he was old enough to remember cars and trucks and traffic lights. When the city changed, it was the streets that had changed most.
He watched Wilshire change as he dialed.
At the old hat-shaped Brown Derby they were converting the parking lot into a miniature golf course. About time they did something with all that wasted space. He queried Bailey, but Bailey wasn't interested.
The Miracle Mile was a landscaped section. Suddenly there were people:
throngs of shoppers, so thick that many preferred to walk a block instead of waiting for a booth. They seemed stratified, with the older people hugging the curbs and the teens taking the middle of the street.
Jerryberry had noticed it before. As a child he'd been trained to cross only in the crosswalks, with the light. Sometimes his training came back, and he found himself looking both ways before he could step out from the curb.
He moved on, west, following the list of numbers that was his beat.
The mall had been a walkway when displacement booths were no more than a theorem in quantum mechanics. Dips in the walk showed where streets had crossed, but the Santa Monica Mall had always been a sanctuary for pedestrians and window-shoppers. Here were several blocks of shops and restaurants and theaters, low buildings that did not block the sky.
Displacement booths were thick here. People swarmed constantly around and in and out of them. Some travelers carried fold-up bicycles.
Many wore change purses. From noon onward there was always the tension of too many people trying to use the same space for the same purpose.
The argument started outside Penney's Department Store. At the time one could see only that the police officer was being firm and the woman-middle-aged, big, and brawny-was screaming at the top of her lungs. A crowd grew, not because anyone gave a damn but because the two were blocking the walkway. People had to stream around them.
Some of them stopped to see what was happening. Many later remembered hearing the policeman repeating, "Madam, I place you under arrest on suspicion of shoplifting. Anything you say-" in a voice that simply did not carry. If the officer had used his shockstick then, nothing more would have happened. Maybe. Then again, he might have been mobbed. Already the crowd blocked the entire mall, and too many of them were shouting-genial or sarcastic suggestions, random insults, and a thousand variations of "Get out of my way!" and "I can't, you idiot!"-
for any to be heard at all.
At 12:55 Jerryberry Jansen flicked in and looked quickly about him while his hands were reinserting his credit card. His eyes registered the ancient shops at the end of the mall and lingered a moment on the entrance to Romanoff's. Anyone newsworthy? Sometimes they came, the big names, for the cuisine or the publicity. No?-passed on, jumped to the crowd in front of Penney's two blocks down.
There were booths nearer, but he didn't know the numbers offhand.
Jerryberry picked up his card and stepped out of the booth. He sign
aled the studio but didn't bother to report. Circumstantial details he could give later. But he turned on his camera, and the event was now.. . real.
He jogged the two blocks. Whatever was happening might end without him.
A young, bemused face turned at Jerryberry's hail. "Excuse me, sir.
Can you tell me how this started?"
"Nope. Sony. I just got here," said the young man, and he strolled off. He would be edited from the tape. But other heads were turning, noticing the arrival of- A lean young man with an open, curious, friendly face, topped by
red-blond hair curly as cotton. A tiny mike at his lips, a small plug in one ear, a coin purse at his belt. In his hands, a heavy gyrostabilized teevee camera equipped with a directional mike.
A newstaper. One pair of eyes turned for an instant too long. The woman swung her purse. The policeman's arm came up too late to block the purse, which bounced solidly off his head. Something heavy in that purse.
The policeman dropped.
Things happened very fast.
Jerryberry talked rapidly to himself while he panned the camera.
Occasional questions in his earpiece did not interrupt the flow of his report, though they guided it. The gyrostabiized camera felt like a living thing in his hands. It followed the woman with the heavy purse as she pushed her way through the crowd, shot Jerryberry a venomous look, and ran for a displacement booth. It watched someone break a jeweler's window, snatch up a handful of random jewelry, and run. The directional mike picked up the scream of an alarm.
The police officer was still down.
Jerryberry went to help him. It occurred to him that of those present, the policeman was most likely to know what had been going on.
The voice in his earpiece told him that others were on their way, even as his eye found them leaving the booths: faces he knew on men carrying cameras like his own. He knelt beside the policeman.
"Officer, can you tell me what happened?"
The uniformed man looked up with hurt, bewildered eyes. He said something that the directional mike picked up, but Jerryberry's ears lost it in the crowd noise. He heard it later on the news. "Where's my hat?"