“But a very good attempt,” Sandy said, “and if you’re only listening to it over the phone, you’d swear it’s real.”
“Oh, sure, by words alone it passes the Turing test,” Tony agreed, “but somehow, when I’m listening, I never lose track of the fact that I’m hearing a machine that’s executing a program.”
“Pretty soon, you’ll be aware of that when you see a face on your viewphone,” Sandy predicted.
Tony smiled. “Good thing I try to be polite even when I know I’m talking to a machine.”
Sandy stared. “You do? Why?”
“Habit,” Tony said. “If I let myself start being rude to a robot, I might slip and start being rude to a human being. Besides, you never know, the voice might be real.”
“But is it any the less real because it comes from a computer than if it comes from a person?” Sandy gave herself a shake. “Now, that is definitely too serious for an evening’s fun. Let’s dance!”
Tony’s heart dropped three inches; he knew his own limitations. But he forced a smile, tried to sound cheery as he said “Sure!” and got up to take Sandy’s hand and step out onto the dance floor.
It was a disaster. Well, maybe only a qualified disaster—but that was certainly how it felt to Tony. He’d had some lessons in the lindy long years before but not much practice since. At least, with fast dancing, he couldn’t step on Sandy’s feet. He thought he faked it fairly well, standing in the same spot and moving his feet a little while he clasped her hand and pulled and pushed when he thought she wanted, and Sandy managed to keep her smile, but by the time the music ended, it was definitely strained.
The band shifted to a slow tune, and Tony tried to be game, holding up his hands, but Sandy shook her head. “That was fun, but I think I’d better finish my drink.”
Tony followed her back to the table with a feeling of doom.
Sandy managed some bright conversation while she was finishing her drink, but shifted to asking him what he did in his spare time. Tony couldn’t think of an interesting lie, so he had to tell the truth. “Well, lately, I’ve been helping St. Vidicon with some miracles.”
“St. Vidicon of Cathode?” Sandy stared. “When have you been doing that?”
“When I’m asleep, mostly.”
“Oh, dreams!” Sandy folded her hands under her chin, eyes bright. “Tell me!”
So Tony told her about countering a virus with a bugcatcher /comb, and Sandy laughed with delight. “You certainly have wonderful dreams! Tell me another one on the way home.”
So while they waited for the cab, Tony told her about helping with the electric car, and as they rode back to her place, he told her about the mother whose car wouldn’t start—so he was able to keep the evening from ending on a note of defeat. As he came back to the cab from seeing her to her door, though, he felt gloom settle over him. The evening had definitely lost its magic when he’d stepped onto the dance floor. As the cab bore him homeward, he vowed to learn to dance.
Sleep was slow in coming, but gradually images of Sandy faded into darkness. Then the darkness turned reddish, a redness that took on form and substance, and Tony found himself walking down the moist maroon hallway with St. Vidicon. “Thanks, Father,” he said fervently. “I don’t seem to have put a foot wrong until I actually had to move my feet, but I couldn’t have done it without you!”
“Oh, I think I may have had less to do with it than you think,” the priest said, amused. “You do have some instincts, you know.”
“Yes, and they’re all usually wrong.”
“Not really, if you’d trust them more often.” Father Vidicon smiled. “But enough of pleasant realities. Let’s see what else awaits us in this dream-realm. Do you know ‘Amazing Grace’?”
“Of course.” Tony said.
“Then let us walk.” Father Vidicon linked arms with him, and together they strode down the darkling hallway through deepening mauve, singing the words of the hymn, knowing that sooner or later, they would wind up in the same key.
Then, suddenly, St. Vidicon stopped, and because Tony’s arm was in his, he too could hear the young man and young woman who called out to the martyr.
“A complicated situation.” Father Vidicon frowned. “We’d better find out how they got into this mess.”
And, so help me, he scanned their section of the time line, back to when the whole predicament started.
Happy hour was just starting when the Gadget came in. Her name was Gidget Farnum, really, but for her classmates in engineering, the temptation had been too great, so she’d been Gadget since her first day on campus. That had been twelve years and two towns ago.
“So how’s things in the motor pool?” I asked as I set her scotch and soda in front of her.
“Very funny, Nick,” she said, with a look that could electrocute. “You know the union threatened a walkout if they ever saw me with a wrench in my hand.”
“You and all the other drawing board jockeys.” Actually, I doubted the union even knew she existed—just one more indentured servant toiling in the bowels of Research and Development. “How’s the lawsuit?”
Legal action had nothing to do with the Company, who knew they couldn’t claim the next-generation carburetor she had invented in grad school. It was the petroleum lobby who had persuaded Congressmen Annihile to introduce the bill banning manufacture of ethanol-burning cars; his speech to the House had painted a lurid picture of alcohol stations sprouting up all across the country, with legions of alcoholics lining up to sip from the nozzles.
“The suit went down faster than an Empire State Building elevator,” Gadget said, looking more like a bloodhound with each word. “The bill passed. Ethanol-burning cars are now illegal in the United States, before they ever had a chance to go into production—or invention, for that matter.”
I shrugged. “What was to invent? All they had to do was plug your carburetor into the engine instead of the old-fashioned kind, and voilà! You could fuel up from a cornstalk!”
“You left out a few steps, such as harvesting and distilling.” But Gadget looked at me with new awareness. “How much do you know about automobiles?”
“Enough to know that with the oil reserves down to the dregs and everybody buying electric cars, your patent is the only real hope Detroit has to avoid scrapping their old lines completely,” I said, “and as much as three years studying chemical engineering could teach me.”
Gadget stared.
“Because I forgot to graduate.” I answered the question she was too polite to ask. “I interned with Amalgamated Chemicals the summer before my senior year, and in July, they made me an offer I didn’t refuse.”
Gadget winced; like everybody else in the country, she knew what had happened to Amalgamated.
“Hey,” I said, “it was a great job for a year and a half.”
“How come you didn’t go back to school?”
“With what money?” I said. “I lived really well for that eighteen months. Who knew it was going to end?”
“Only Amalgamated’s accountants,” Gadget said darkly.
She didn’t even bother asking about a computer job. America’s youth had finally listened to reason and made sure they could all troubleshoot a program on their way out of high school. Result? A huge oversupply in skills.
Gadget’s eyes widened. “Thanks.”
I frowned. “What for?”
“Making me feel a little less sorry for myself.”
I actually laughed. “Yeah, sounds like we’ve both run afoul of Finagle.”
Gadget’s turn to frown. “As in ‘Finagle’s Variable Constant’?”
Any engineer knew that the Constant (also known as the Fudge Factor) was the number you added to or subtracted from the answer you worked out, to make it equal the answer in the back of the book.
I nodded. “Also the mythical author of human doom and source of Finagle’s General Statement.”
Gadget frowned. “Which is?”
“ ‘The perv
ersity of the universe tends toward maximum, ’ ” I quoted. “Its corollaries are endless, including Catch-22, Parkinson’s Laws, the Corollary of Stasheff the Elder, Stasheff’s Law of Reversal, and, of course, Murphy’s Law.”
“Impressive.” Gadget didn’t realize she was smiling. “But Finagle is master of them all?”
“The spirit behind the human urge to self-defeat,” I proclaimed. “He has minions, such as the Gremlin and Poe’s Imp of the Perverse, but he does pretty well even without them.”
The smile widened as she asked, “Is there no hype?”
“Plenty of it,” I said, “unless you mean ‘hope,’ in which case I should quit serving you.”
“All right, ‘hope.’ ” She shoved out her glass. “And about serving . . .”
I poured. “Of course there’s hope. Finagle has an antagonist—St. Vidicon of Cathode.”
Gadget gazed off into space, tracking a memory. “Isn’t he in a book somewhere?”
“Yes, but not Lives of the Saints—he’s fictitious.”
Gadget frowned. “I’ve heard engineers pray to him when they’re really frustrated.”
“Done it myself,” I said, “and whatever I am, I’m not Catholic—but anybody who’s fighting to make things come out right has my vote. Presumably St. Vidicon founded an order of monks, but to qualify for membership, you had to be an engineer.”
Gadget actually grinned. “Sounds like we could both stand to send him a quick prayer.”
“Let us pray,” I said solemnly, and we both bowed our heads with tongues firmly placed in cheeks. “St. Vidicon, patron of all who labor with calculator and soldering gun, send aid, we pray, for two suffering souls who have fallen afoul of human bureaucracy. Enlighten the politicians, St. Vidicon, that they may see that the benefits of ethanol for the many must be accounted greater than the fruits of human greed for the few—and while you’re at it, O Worthy One, if you could inspire some entrepreneur to start a new chemical company that needs engineers who didn’t graduate, I’d appreciate it vastly.”
“Amen,” Gadget said solemnly.
We both burst out laughing, and I knew I had done my good deed for the day. Then the laughing slackened and our eyes met, and I suddenly felt totally aware of Gadget, of her warmth, her humor, and her femininity—and from the way her eyes widened, I knew she had suddenly developed a corresponding awareness of me.
Then she looked down, blushing a little and muttering something about needing to be home.
“Yeah, me too,” I said, but she went out the door and I didn’t.
Father Vidicon paused in midstride, hearing the laughter, but also hearing the heartfelt cry, fighting despair, unworded beneath. The good priest shuddered.
“What is it, Father?” Tony asked, concerned.
“Two young people who have invented a car that runs on ethanol,” the priest answered, “but have seen pure alcohol outlawed as fuel by an Act of Congress. They want me to persuade the politicians to unmake that law—but what do I know of politicians?”
“I thought you were the expert on perversity!”
“In machinery, yes,” Father Vidicon said. “Certainly in electronics, even atoms—but I know little or nothing of those who govern! I might be able to bring these two young folk out of their denial of their attraction for one another—any priest has had to counsel those who run afoul of pride and prejudice in affairs of the heart—but the use and misuse of political power? I’m afraid not.”
Tony frowned, pondering. “What excuse did the politicians use for outlawing the ethanol car?”
“Some of their number managed to whip up fear of the threat of a plague of alcoholism.”
“Something most politicians can relate to, yeah.” Then inspiration struck, and Tony grinned. “What if people can’t drink the ethanol that’s being manufactured for fuel?”
“An ingenious thought!” Father Vidicon clapped him on the shoulder—and Tony felt the saint’s power flowing through him. “Suggest that to the young chemist, would you?” Father Vidicon asked.
Tony opened his mouth to ask how he was supposed to do that, then felt the answer bloom in his brain along with an awareness of the mind of the young chemist. “Yes, sir!” Grinning, he focused his attention on the young man who had offered the prayer, searching the time line for the moment when he would be most receptive—and hoping that, unlike so many, he would not prove so busy talking to the saints that he would forget to listen.
I sat up in bed, instantly awake, awed at my own genius. Visions of carbon rings danced in my head and faded, but I held on to them long enough to turn and scribble a diagram on the pad I kept on the bedside table. Then I turned on the light and started translating the diagram into formulas. When I finished, I straightened up, gazing at my handiwork and beaming. I allowed myself five minutes to congratulate myself on being a genius.
Then I reached for the phone and called Gadget.
“H’lo,” said a very sleepy and somewhat grumpy voice.
“Gadget?”
Silence. Then, with gathering anger, “Do you know what time it is, Nick?”
“Time to make a fortune,” I said. “I just invented an additive that will give ethanol such a disgusting flavor that nobody will be able to get past the first sip. Worse—if they do force themselves to choke it down, it’ll come right back up.”
Silence again. Then, fully awake and holding down excitement: “Don’t tell me you mixed up a batch already!”
“No, but I won’t be able to get back to sleep until I do.”
Silence yet again, but I could almost hear her thoughts racing. They settled on the least important: “I can’t pay you.”
“That’s okay,” I said. “I’ll settle for a half interest in your company. You can have an option on a half interest in mine if the ethanol car takes off the way we think it will.”
“Uh—don’t those halves kind of cancel out?”
“Don’t worry—I’ll charge your company through the nose.”
“I suppose that’s fair,” she said dubiously. “My lawyer’s Charlotte Russe. Meet you at her office tomorrow.”
“Make it day after,” I said. “I’ve got some serious sleeping to do tomorrow, ’cause tonight I’ve got a cocktail to mix. Want to stop over for the taste test?”
“Taste test?” she said. “I’ll be there to watch you brew—and I’ll bring a rat!”
The rat was of the rodent variety, white with a pink nose, and he had far too much sense actually to sip my concoction. One sniff and he was cowering against the other side of the cage, even though it was only one percent additive.
“I don’t blame him.” Gadget wrinkled her nose. “One sniff almost had me gagging.”
“Better him than us.” I took the additive out of the cage and swapped it for a mayonnaise jar lid of water with a touch of sleeping powder.
We waited.
The rat took a step or two away from the bars, his nose twitching.
We held our breaths.
He came, light-footed and hesitant, to sip from the lid—anything to wash away the smell of that last sample. We both restrained a shout of triumph as he lapped up the water. He hadn’t even finished before he fell asleep.
“Didn’t kill him, did it?” Gadget said with doubt.
“I didn’t put in that much.” I had to admit, though, that I was no expert on dosing rodents. Carefully, I pried his jaws open, poked in an eyedropper, and squeezed in a cc of additived ethanol. Then we stood back, watching and feeling guilty.
The little guy’s belly twitched. It buckled. It heaved, and the water gushed back out the way it had come in.
“Quick!” Gadget didn’t wait—she picked the wee tim’rous beastie up by the tail and let him hang so the last drops came trickling out. “Don’t want him to choke,” she explained.
Her compassion warmed my heart. “Good enough for me,” I said, “and I’ll be very surprized if it isn’t good enough for the FDA, too.”
“But Congress?�
�� she asked, still doubtful.
“The law only affects pure ethanol,” I said. “Anything we add this to will no longer be pure.”
The look on her face was all the corroboration I needed.
Tony gave himself a shake and realized he was back in the deep mauve of the tunnel to Hell. He turned to see Father Vidicon beaming fondly on him—but the priest’s hair was mussed and his cassock was disarrayed. Alarmed, Tony cried, “What happened to you?” Then he realized what the answer had to be. “You had to fight another supernatural enemy, didn’t you? And you sent me out of the way to make sure I wouldn’t get hurt!”
“No, I sent you to answer a prayer,” Father Vidicon said. “I didn’t know I would encounter an antagonist as soon as you were gone—but if you hadn’t been here, I couldn’t have helped those two young folk while I was fighting another Spirit of Perversity. Thank you, Tony. Did you manage to break through to Nick?”
“And how! I just hope they’ll be willing to introduce their product without too much fanfare.”
Saint Vidicon’s head snapped up, and his eyes glazed. After a few seconds, though, his eyes focused on Tony again, “Introduce their products without too much fanfare? No, they didn’t.”
Chapter 6
Maybe we shouldn’t have started out with a full-dress press conference, especially since it was such a rousing success. The media showed up with cameras already rolling as I poured a fifth of no-longer-pure ethanol into Gadget’s enhanced jalopy (what better way to make the point that the fuel was alcohol, and any conventional car could use it with only a change in carburetor?). She started up, drove off northward, and turned the corner.
“She’ll come in from the south,” I said helpfully.
The cameras panned to follow my pointing hand and kept recording.
The jalopy rolled around the corner, pulled up to the curb, and stopped.
Saint Vidicon to the Rescue Page 8