By Any Other Name

by Spider Robinson

  My father had loaded me with all the hatred and anger he felt for himself, aimed me toward a scapegoat and fired me like a cannon.

  But I would ricochet.

  I became aware of noise below me, in the interior of the building. I waited incuriously, not even troubling to lift my rifle from my lap. The noise became weary footsteps on the floor below me. They shuffled slowly up the iron stairway nearest me, and paused at the top. I heard hoarse, wheezing breath, struggling to slow itself, succeeding. I did not turn.

  “Hell of a view,” I said, squinting at it.

  “View of a hell,” Carlson wheezed behind me.

  “How’d you find me, Wendell?”

  “I followed your spoor.”

  I spun, stared at him, “You—”

  “Followed your spoor.”

  I turned around again, and giggled. The giggle became a chuckle, and then I sat on it. “Still got your adenoids, eh, Doc? Sure. Twenty years in this rotten graveyard and I’ll bet you’ve never owned a set of nose plugs. Punishment to fit the crime—and then some.”

  He did not reply. His breathing was easier now.

  “My father, Wendell, now there’s an absentminded man for you,” I went on conversationally. “Always doing some sort of Civilized work, always forgetting to remove his plugs when he comes home—he surely does take a lot of kidding. Our security chief, Phil Collaci, quietly makes sure Dad has a Guard with him when he goes outdoors—just can’t depend on Dad’s sense of smell, Teach’ says. Dad always was a terrible cook, you know? He always puts too much garlic in the soup. Am I boring you, Wendell? Would you like to hear a lovely death I just dreamed? I am the last assassin on earth, and I have just created a brand-new death, a unique one. It convicts as it kills—if you die, you deserve to.” My voice was quite shrill now, and a part of me clinically diagnosed hysteria. Carlson said something I did not hear as I raved of toilet bowls and brains splashing on a sidewalk and impossible thousands of chittering gray rats and my eyes went nova and a carillon shattered in my skull and when the world came back I realized that the exhausted old man had slapped my head near off my shoulders. He crouched beside me, holding his hand and wincing.

  “Why have no Muskies attacked me, here in the heights?” My voice was soft now, wind-tossed.

  “The windriders project and receive emotions. Those who sorrow as you and I engender respect and fear in them. You are protected now, as I have been these twenty years. An expensive shield.”

  I blinked at him and burst into tears.

  He held me then in his frail old arms, as my father had never done, and rocked me while I wept. I wept until I was exhausted, and when I had not cried for a time he said softly, “You will put away your new death, unused. You are his son, and you love him.”

  I shivered then, and he held me closer, and did not see me smile.

  So there you have it, Teach’. Stop thinking of Jacob Stone as the Father of Fresh Start, and see him as a man—and you will not only realize that his sense of smell was a hoax, but like me will wonder how you were ever taken in by so transparent a fiction. There are a dozen blameless explanations for Dad’s anosmia—none of which would have required pretense.

  So look at the method of his dying. The lid of the septic tank will be found ajar—the bathroom will surely smell of chlorine. Ask yourself how a chemist could possibly walk into such a trap—if he had any sense of smell at all?

  Better yet, examine the corpse for adenoids.

  When you’ve put it all together, come look me up. I’ll be at Columbia University, with my good friend Wendell Morgan Carlson. We have a lot of work to do, and I suspect we’ll need the help of you and the Council before long. We’re learning to talk with Muskies, you see.

  If you come at night, I’ve got a little place of my own set up in the lobby of the Waldorf-Astoria. You can’t miss me. But be sure to knock: I’m Musky-proof these days, but I’ve still got those subconscious sentries you gave me.

  And I’m scared of the dark.