By Any Other Name

by Spider Robinson

  “About two meters in diameter. It’s alive. We think it’s sentient. And we think it’s hurt.”

  Ran made no visible reaction; the widening of his eyes was of course unseen beneath his goggles.

  “We dropped into normal space for mid-course corrections, as usual,” Groombridge said, “and it blundered right into our screens.”

  “How do you know it’s alive?”

  “It’s trying to pull free of the tractor beam right now,” the Captain said.

  Ran nodded. “And it must be hurt, because it’s not succeeding.”

  “More than that. Kreel tried to make contact with it.” Like most ships’ medicos, Kreel was a Domanti empath. “He’s down in his own sickbay now, sedated, and you know what it takes to sedate a Domanti. That thing hurts.”

  “How do you know it’s sentient?”

  “We don’t, for sure,” the Exec said. “Kreel thought so, but…”

  “So what do you want me for?”

  “Advice,” the Captain said. “I respect your brains, Ranny.”

  “Advice on what?”

  “How to communicate with the damned thing.”

  “What’s the problem? A ship’s computer can translate anything.”

  “Given enough input, sure. That’s the kicker. Ranny, we don’t know what it uses for senses.”

  “Oh.”

  “Maybe we could cure whatever’s wrong with it. Maybe not; maybe we could just talk to it until it dies, find out where and how to find its kin. It’s a new species, Ranny, and interstellar space seems to be its natural habitat. We don’t know what fires its metabolism, how it moves, we don’t know anything.”

  “‘The problem,’” Ran quoted to himself softly, “‘is to get the mule’s attention…’” He smiled. “I begin to see. A new species could make Intersystem even richer. But every minute you sit here in normal space, you lose millions in schedule penalties—and you dasn’t move the thing.”

  “Correct,” Groombridge said unhappily. “We can’t take it into n-space with us without bringing it inboard, and we have no way of knowing whether it can survive inside a radiation-opaque hull.”

  “Let alone whether it can survive n-space,” Ranny agreed. “A pretty problem.”

  “Hell, yes,” Groombridge growled. “Every other sentient race we’ve ever encountered has been planet-dwellers, with sensory equipment more or less analogous to our own. I never imagined we’d find a space-dweller.”

  “And if we lose this one, the odds approach zero that I’ll ever find another,” Exton put in.

  Ran was thinking hard. “Let’s see—even a space-dweller would have some use for light, visible or otherwise.”

  “Sure,” the Captain agreed. “On a cosmic scale. All we have to do to ‘talk’ with it is turn a couple of stars on and off. But how does it reply?”

  “Doesn’t it put out anything?”

  “Yeah. Constant body temperature about eight degrees Absolute. Electrical potential fluctuates around its surface in what might very well be meaningful patterns. If so, how do we reply? My electrical potential varies across my surface—but not at will. The computer has to have dialogue, even on the ‘Me Tarzan—you Jane’ level, before it can begin extrapolating language.”

  Ran locked his hands behind his head, the free-fall equivalent of chin-on-fist. “Hmm. I’d bet my socks it perceives gravity gradients, but that’s no use. You must have tried radio frequencies by now.” He squeezed coffee. “What’s it made of?”

  “Beats us.”

  “Damnation,” Groombridge said. “We assume that others of its race exist. They must have some means of interspecies communication.”

  “Perhaps,” Ran said. “But there’s no reason to assume it’s anything we’ve ever encountered. Maybe they communicate through n-space.”

  “How about—” the multibillionaire began, and then caught himself.

  “Mr. Groombridge,” Captain Kartr said diplomatically, “believe me, we’ve tried everything in the electromagnetic spectrum. As far as I know, the damned things converse by witchcraft. We need something else. A breakthrough.”

  “I’ve got it,” Ran said with absolute confidence, and sipped coffee.

  Involuntary muscle reactions sent the other three spinning around the bridge. Groombridge recovered first. “Well? Out with it!”

  “Will you meet my price?”

  Groombridge began to sputter, then regained control. “Name it.”

  “I want my ticket back.”

  “Out of the question.”

  Captain Kartr decided to stick her neck out. “Sir, with all due respect, Ranny’s the best skipper you ever had. I was his exec when he lost his optic nerves saving the Heimdall. He spent the last eighty-five years getting rich enough to afford a Visual Analog System, and now he’s got better vision than I have. Nobody deserves a master’s ticket more.”

  Groombridge studied Ran’s VAS goggles. The computer built into them, which processed the signals for their camera lenses into a form his visual cortex could accept, was as expensive as a good starship computer. They did not provide sight as Ran had once known it—it took about ten years to learn to interpret the new data—but that accomplished, they provided a very satisfactory substitute. “I’m familiar with Mr. Mushomi’s record and history. I followed his case, and I’m afraid I agree with what the Board decided last week. It simply isn’t sensible to have all the command functions of an n-space vessel funneled through a single, potentially fallible system.”

  “I repeat,” Ran said quietly, although there was murder in his heart. He had once been a starship pilot. “Meet my price and I can solve your problem. Payment on delivery.”

  Interstellar executives hate to reverse themselves—but Groombridge was not a fool, and the clock was ticking. “All right, damn you,” he snarled. “You’ll get your ticket and the command of your choice—witnessed, recorded and binding. Now give.”

  “Get me a pressure suit, Jax,” Ran said instantly, and laughed, because his superior peripheral vision allowed him to see all three stunned faces at once.

  Many hours later the ship was once again under way in n-space, and Ran and Jax were celebrating in the Captain’s quarters.

  “Who would ever have guessed that what the God damned thing needed was water ice?” she said, taking fresh bulbs of Scotch from the cooler and tossing one to Ran.

  “Certainly not me. With a metabolism evolved in space, it must take a long time to get thirsty.”

  “And even longer to die of it,” Jax agreed. “You earned your ticket back, Ranny. Nobody else in the Universe could have done it.”

  “Nonsense,” he said cheerfully, and sucked Scotch. “I spent those eighty-five years earning my eyes on Darkside, because my handicap didn’t exist there. It’s got a permanent, opaque, planet-wide cloud cover. The natives call it ‘God’s Rectum,’ because it’s the only place in the Universe where the sun never shines.” The Captain giggled. “Quite a few optic-nerve cases go there—they’re not different anymore. Everybody knows hand-talk on Darkside.”

  “S’not what I mean. Oh, that speeded things up, sure, which is penalty saved. But we couldn’t have done anything without your original insight. I still don’t see how you could have been so sure the thing had tactile sense.”

  “I wasn’t,” Ran said complacently. “I was bluffing Groombridge. What did I have to lose if I was wrong?”

  Jax stared openmouthed, then roared with laughter. “You son of a bitch, you were guessing?”

  “Well, it just seemed reasonable to me. I pictured a race of beings evolved in interstellar space, and I just…pictured them touching a lot. It’s lonely out there.” He drained his Scotch. “And after that, of course, all we had to do was use our…uh…common sense.”

  CHRONIC OFFENDER

  In respectful memory of Damon Runyon,

  Who knows no other tense than the present,

  And sometimes the future.

  You will think that when a guy see
s eighty summers on Broadway, he sees it all, and until recently so will I. It is a long time since I see something that surprises me very much, and in fact the last time I remember being surprised is when the Giants take the wind for L.A. But when I come home a couple of nights after my eightieth birthday, along about four bells in the morning, and find a ghost watching my TV, I am surprised no little, and in fact more than somewhat.

  At first I do not figure him for a ghost. What I figure him for is a hophead, what they call nowadays a junkie, and most guys will figure this proposition for a cinch, at that. I decide that my play is to go out again, and have a cup of coffee, and come back when he is finished, or maybe even ask the gendarmes to come back before he is finished. But Astaire will never hoof again and neither will I, because I have not even managed to get her into reverse when this character hauls out a short John Roscoe and says like this:

  “Stand and deliver.”

  This is when I figure him for a ghost, because I recognize the words he uses, and then his voice, and finally his face, and who is it but Harry the Horse.

  Now, Harry the Horse is never a guy I am apt to hang around with, as he is a very tough guy, who will shoot you as soon as look at you, and maybe even sooner. Furthermore he is many years dead at this time, and I figure the chances are good that the climate where he is lately is hot enough to make him irritable. In fact, I am wishing more with every passing moment to go have this cup of coffee, but I cannot see any price at all on arguing with a John Roscoe, especially such a John Roscoe as is being piloted by Harry the Horse, or even his ghost. So I up with my mitts and say as follows:

  “Don’t shoot, Harry.”

  Well, it turns out that nobody is more surprised than Harry when he recognizes me. I cannot figure this, since I always understand that ghosts know who they are haunting, but then again I never hear of a ghost packing a John Roscoe, at that. In fact, I start to wonder if maybe Harry the Horse is not a hallucination, and I am gone daffy.

  You have to understand that Harry the Horse looks not a day older than when I see him last, which is going back about fifty years. Furthermore his suit is the kind they do not make for fifty years, except it looks no older than is customary on Harry when I know him, and likewise his hair is greased up like only some of the spics and smokes still do anymore, and in fact he looks in every respect like he does when I last see him, except that he is not smiling and not laying down and does not seem to have several .45 caliber holes in him. In fact, he looks pretty good, except for his forehead being wrinkled up a little like something is on his mind.

  “Well,” he says, “it is certainly good to see you, even if you do become an ugly old geezer. I will never think to guzzle your joint if I know it is you. If fact, I will not guzzle your joint, even though this causes me some inconvenience, because,” he says, “you have always been aces with me. So now you must help me pick some other joint to guzzle.”

  Now, I hear of ghosts that like to scare a guy out of his pants, although personally I never meet one, but I never hear that they are interested in the contents of the pants pockets. Even if they are the ghost of Harry the Horse. “Harry,” I say, “what would a guy such as yourself be doing working the second story?”

  “Well,” Harry the Horse says, “that is a long story. But if I do not tell the story to someone soon I think I will go crazy, and in fact you are just the guy to tell it to, because you remember the way things used to be in 1930.”

  “Harry,” I say, “I have nothing better to do than to hear your story.”

  And Harry the Horse nods, and says to me like this:

  One day me and Spanish John and Little Isadore all happen to be in the sneezer together, on account of a small misunderstanding about the color of some money we are spending, and I wish to say in passing that this beef is a total crock, as we steal that money fair and square from a bank on Third Avenue, and can we help it if things are so bad that banks are starting to pass out funny money? But anyway there we are in the sneezer, so naturally we call Judge Goldfobber to get us out. As you probably know, Judge Goldfobber is by no means a judge, and never is a judge, and in my line it is a hundred-to-one against him ever being a judge, but he is a lawyer by trade, and he is better than Houdini at getting citizens out of the sneezer, and in fact when it comes to getting out of the sneezer Goldfobber is usually cheaper than buying a real judge, at that.

  So we call him and he comes right down and springs us, and then he takes us back uptown to his office and pours us a couple of shots of scotch, and furthermore it is scotch he gets from Dave the Dude, and you know that Dave the Dude handles only the very best merchandise. So we knock them back and then Goldfobber says like this: “Boys, when I spring a guy for bad paper it is my firm policy never to accept my fee in cash. None of you has any gold or securities, so I propose to take it out in trade.”

  “Judge,” I say, “you have always been a good employer, and in fact it seems to me that every time you put a little job our way, we come away with a few bobs for our trouble. Furthermore you are a right gee, because you put down several potatoes to bail us out, and you must know that you have no more chance of seeing us show up in court than Hoover has of seeing another vote. So we are happy to entertain your proposition.”

  “Well,” he says, “it is not exactly a job you can be proud of.”

  “How do you mean?” Little Isadore asks.

  “For one thing, it involves chilling a guy, and an old guy besides, and furthermore he is one of those guys who is so brilliant that he is like a baby. It is not exactly sporting.”

  “Judge,” Spanish John says to him, “I and my friends are suffering greatly from the unemployment situation, because if nobody is working and making money, there is nobody for us to rob, and if there is nobody for us to rob, we are reduced to robbing banks, and you see how that works out. I do not speak for my friends, but I myself will be happy to chill somebody just on general principles, and if it is an old guy that does not shoot back, why, so much the better.”

  “It involves work,” Judge Goldfobber says.

  “How do you mean ‘work’?”

  “Physical exertion. Manual labor. You will have to carry something very much like a phone booth, and which weighs maybe twice as much as a phone booth, down three flights of stairs and deliver it to my place out on the Island.”

  “Judge,” I say, greatly horrified, “we are eternally grateful for what you do for us. But to do manual labor in satisfaction of a debt is perilously close to honest work, and that is more grateful than I, for one, wish to be. However,” I say as he starts to frown, “not only am I grateful, but I just remember that you know where Isadore and me bury Boat-Race Benny three years ago, so we will accept your job.”

  So he gives us an address up in Harlem, and that night we borrow a truck somebody is not using to go up there.

  The job goes down as easy as a doll’s drawers, or maybe even easier. The building is a big fancy joint, with a doorman and everything, but the lock on the back door does not give Little Isadore any difficulty, and neither does the lock on the apartment door of the old geezer. The name on his door is “Doctor Philbert Twitchell,” so we figure him for a sawbones, except it turns out he is not that kind of doctor, but the professor kind.

  Anyway, we stick him up in his bed, and we scare him so bad we nearly save ourselves the trouble of croaking him. We tell him to show us the phone booth, and toots wheat, and he just blinks at us. This Doc Twitchell is about a million years old and bald as an eight ball, and I wish to say I never see another guy like him for blinking. In fact I remember thinking that he will be a handy guy to have around on a hot day, since he keeps a pretty good breeze going, except of course that by the time the next hot day comes around he will not be blinking so good, and is apt to smell bad, besides.

  About the time I haul the hammer back on my Roscoe he gives up blinking and gets up and puts on a bathrobe that looks like it belongs to Jack Johnson, and he takes us to the phone booth. It is in
a big room way in back of his apartment, and the room is a kind of a lavatory, like in this movie I see when I am ten years old called Frankenstein, which I hear they are going to remake as a talkie. Anyway there is all kinds of machines and gadgets and gizmos, and a wire the size of a shotgun barrel taped along the floor from the wall to the bottom of this phone booth. It is the size and shape of a phone booth, but it does not really look much like one, and in fact it makes me think of a stand-up coffin, except for all the wires and things hanging off of it. There is no door in it, so I can see the thing is empty, and it occurs to me that it will make a fair coffin, at that, since we can carry the Doc downstairs in it and save an extra trip.

  “Okay,” I say. “This is a cinch. Spanish John, you go down and get the dolly out of the back of the truck. Little Isadore, you go along and wait for him at the door, keep lookout whilst I croak the Doc here.” At this the Doc starts in blinking a mile a minute. He starts to say something, and then he thinks better of it and waits until Spanish John and Little Isadore are gone, and then he starts talking even faster than he is blinking, which is pretty fast talking indeed. He talks kind of tony, with lots of big fancy words, but I give you the gist:

  “Goldfobber the mouthpiece sends you guys to see me, am I right?”

  I admit this, and starting putting the silencer on my John Roscoe.

  “Would you consider double-crossing Goldfobber?”

  “Certainly. What is your proposition?”

  “You mean Goldfobber does not tell you?” he says, very surprised.

  “Tell me what?”

  “This thing you call a phone booth is a time machine.”

  “You mean like a big clock? Where is the hands?”

  “No, no,” he says, real excited. “A machine for travelling in time.”

  “In time for what?”

  “No, through time! My machine can take you into next week, or next year, or the year after that. It is the only one in the world.”

  “Well, I never hear of such a machine, at that.”