The Very Best of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Volume 1

by Gordon Van Gelder

  “It’s not that.” He removed his coat, tie, shirt, and then his chest panel; kneeling down he began inserting his hands into the microtool gloves. Pausing, he looked up at her and said, “I found out I’m an electric ant. Which from one standpoint opens up certain possibilities, which I am exploring now.” He flexed his fingers and, at the far end of the left waldo, a micro-screwdriver moved, magnified into visibility by the enlarging-lens system. “You can watch,” he informed her. “If you so desire.”

  She had begun to cry.

  “What’s the matter?” he demanded savagely, without looking up from his work.

  “I—it’s just so sad. You’ve been such a good employer to all of us at Tri-Plan. We respect you so. And now it’s all changed.”

  The plastic tape had an unpunched margin at top and bottom; he cut a horizontal strip, very narrow, then, after a moment of great concentration, cut the tape itself four hours away from the scanning head. He then rotated the cut strip into a right-angle piece in relation to the scanner, fused it in place with a micro heat element, then reattached the tape reel to its left and right sides. He had, in effect, inserted a dead twenty minutes into the unfolding flow of his reality. It would take effect—according to his calculations—a few minutes after midnight.

  “Are you fixing yourself?” Sarah asked timidly.

  Poole said, “I’m freeing myself.” Beyond this he had several alterations in mind. But first he had to test his theory; blank, unpunched tape meant no stimuli, in which case the lack of tape...

  “That look on your face,” Sarah said. She began gathering up her purse, coat, rolled-up aud-vid magazine. “I’ll go; I can see how you feel about finding me here.”

  “Stay,” he said. “I’ll watch the captain kirk with you.” He got into his shirt. “Remember years ago when there were—what was it?—twenty or twenty-two TV channels? Before the government shut down the independents?”

  She nodded.

  “What would it have looked like,” he said, “if this TV set projected all channels onto the cathode ray screen at the same time? Could we have distinguished anything, in the mixture?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Maybe we could learn to. Learn to be selective; do our own job of perceiving what we wanted to and what we didn’t. Think of the possibilities, if our brains could handle twenty images at once; think of the amount of knowledge which could be stored during a given period. I wonder if the brain, the human brain—” He broke off. “The human brain couldn’t do it,” he said, presently, reflecting to himself. “But in theory a quasi-organic brain might.”

  “Is that what you have?” Sarah asked.

  “Yes,” Poole said.

  They watched the captain kirk to its end, and then they went to bed. But Poole sat up against his pillows, smoking and brooding. Beside him, Sarah stirred restlessly, wondering why he did not turn off the light.

  Eleven-fifty. It would happen anytime, now.

  “Sarah,” he said. “I want your help. In a very few minutes something strange will happen to me. It won’t last long, but I want you to watch me carefully. See if I—” He gestured. “Show any changes. If I seem to go to sleep, or if I talk nonsense, or—” He wanted to say, if I disappear. But he did not. “I won’t do you any harm, but I think it might be a good idea if you armed yourself. Do you have your anti-mugging gun with you?”

  “In my purse.” She had become fully awake now; sitting up in bed, she gazed at him with wild fright, her ample shoulders tanned and freckled in the light of the room.

  He got her gun for her.

  The room stiffened into paralyzed immobility. Then the colors began to drain away. Objects diminished until, smoke-like, they flitted away into shadows. Darkness filmed everything as the objects in the room became weaker and weaker.

  The last stimuli are dying out, Poole realized. He squinted, trying to see. He made out Sarah Benton, sitting in the bed: a two-dimensional figure that doll-like had been propped up, there to fade and dwindle. Random gusts of dematerialized substance eddied about in unstable clouds; the elements collected, fell apart, then collected once again. And then the last heat, energy, and light dissipated; the room closed over and fell into itself, as if sealed off from reality. And at that point absolute blackness replaced everything, space without depth, not nocturnal but rather stiff and unyielding. And in addition he heard nothing.

  Reaching, he tried to touch something. But he had nothing to reach with. Awareness of his own body had departed along with everything else in the universe. He had no hands, and even if he had, there would be nothing for them to feel.

  I am still right about the way the damn tape works, he said to himself, using a nonexistent mouth to communicate an invisible message.

  Will this pass in ten minutes? he asked himself. Am I right about that, too? He waited... but knew intuitively that his time sense had departed with everything else. I can only wait, he realized. And hope it won’t be long.

  To pace himself, he thought, I’ll make up an encyclopedia; I’ll try to list everything that begins with an “a.” Let’s see. He pondered. Apple, automobile, acksetron, atmosphere, Atlantic, tomato aspic, advertising—he thought on and on, categories slithering through his fright-haunted mind.

  All at once light flickered on.

  He lay on the couch in the living room, and mild sunlight spilled in through the single window. Two men bent over him, their hands full of tools. Maintenance men, he realized. They’ve been working on me.

  “He’s conscious,” one of the technicians said. He rose, stood back; Sarah Benton, dithering with anxiety, replaced him.

  “Thank God!” she said, breathing wetly in Poole’s ear. “I was so afraid; I called Mr. Danceman finally about—”

  “What happened?” Poole broke in harshly. “Start from the beginning and for God’s sake speak slowly. So I can assimilate it all.”

  Sarah composed herself, paused to rub her nose, and then plunged on nervously, “You passed out. You just lay there, as if you were dead. I waited until two-thirty and you did nothing. I called Mr. Danceman, waking him up unfortunately, and he called the electric-ant maintenance—I mean, the organic-roby maintenance people, and these two men came about four-forty-five, and they’ve been working on you ever since. It’s now six-fifteen in the morning. And I’m very cold and I want to go to bed; I can’t make it in to the office today; I really can’t.” She turned away, sniffling. The sound annoyed him.

  One of the uniformed maintenance men said, “You’ve been playing around with your reality tape.”

  “Yes,” Poole said. Why deny it? Obviously they had found the inserted solid strip. “I shouldn’t have been out that long,” he said. “I inserted a ten-minute strip only.”

  “It shut off the tape transport,” the technician explained. “The tape stopped moving forward; your insertion jammed it, and it automatically shut down to avoid tearing the tape. Why would you want to fiddle around with that? Don’t you know what you could do?”

  “I’m not sure,” Poole said.

  “But you have a good idea.”

  Poole said acridly, “That’s why I’m doing it.”

  “Your bill,” the maintenance man said, “is going to be ninety-five frogs. Payable in installments, if you so desire.”

  “Okay,” he said; he sat up groggily, rubbed his eyes, and grimaced. His head ached and his stomach felt totally empty.

  “Shave the tape next time,” the primary technician told him. “That way it won’t jam. Didn’t it occur to you that it had a safety factor built into it? So it would stop rather than—”

  “What happens,” Poole interrupted, his voice low and intently careful, “if no tape passed under the scanner? No tape—nothing at all. The photocell shining upward without impedance?”

  The technicians glanced at each other. One said, “All the neuro circuits jump their gaps and short out.”

  “Meaning what?” Poole said.

  “Meaning it’s the end
of the mechanism.”

  Poole said, “I’ve examined the circuit. It doesn’t carry enough voltage to do that. Metal won’t fuse under such slight loads of current, even if the terminals are touching. We’re talking about a millionth of a watt along a cesium channel perhaps a sixteenth of an inch in length. Let’s assume there are a billion possible combinations at one instant arising from the punch-outs on the tape. The total output isn’t cumulative; the amount of current depends on what the battery details for that module, and it’s not much. With all gates open and going.”

  “Would we lie?” one of the technicians asked wearily.

  “Why not?” Poole said. “Here I have an opportunity to experience everything. Simultaneously. To know the universe and its entirety, to be momentarily in contact with all reality. Something that no human can do. A symphonic score entering my brain outside of time, all notes, all instruments sounding at once. And all symphonies. Do you see?”

  “It’ll burn you out,” both technicians said, together.

  “I don’t think so,” Poole said.

  Sarah said, “Would you like a cup of coffee, Mr. Poole?”

  “Yes,” he said; he lowered his legs, pressed his cold feet against the floor, shuddered. He then stood up. His body ached. They had me lying all night on the couch, he realized. All things considered, they could have done better than that.

  At the kitchen table in the far corner of the room, Garson Poole sat sipping coffee across from Sarah. The technicians had long since gone.

  “You’re not going to try any more experiments on yourself, are you?” Sarah asked wistfully.

  Poole grated, “I would like to control time. To reverse it.” I will cut a segment of tape out, he thought, and fuse it in upside down. The causal sequences will then flow the other way. Thereupon I will walk backward down the steps from the roof field, back up to my door, push a locked door open, walk backward to the sink, where I will get out a stack of dirty dishes. I will seat myself at this table before the stack, fill each dish with food produced from my stomach... I will then transfer the food to the refrigerator. The next day I will take the food out of the refrigerator, pack it in bags, carry the bags to a supermarket, distribute the food here and there in the store. And at last, at the front counter, they will pay me money for this, from their cash register. The food will be packed with other food in big plastic boxes, shipped out of the city into the hydroponic plants on the Atlantic, there to be joined back to trees and bushes or the bodies of dead animals or pushed deep into the ground. But what would all that prove? A video tape running backward... I would know no more than I know now, which is not enough.

  What I want, he realized, is ultimate and absolute reality, for one microsecond. After that it doesn’t matter, because all will be known; nothing will be left to understand or see.

  I might try one other change, he said to himself. Before I try cutting the tape. I will prick new punch-holes in the tape and see what presently emerges. It will be interesting because I will not know what the holes I make mean.

  Using the tip of a microtool, he punched several holes, at random, on the tape. As close to the scanner as he could manage... he did not want to wait.

  “I wonder if you’ll see it,” he said to Sarah. Apparently not, insofar as he could extrapolate. “Something may show up,” he said to her. “I just want to warn you; I don’t want you to be afraid.”

  “Oh dear,” Sarah said tinnily.

  He examined his wristwatch. One minute passed, then a second, a third. And then—

  In the center of the room appeared a flock of green-and-black ducks. They quacked excitedly, rose from the floor, fluttered against the ceiling in a dithering mass of feathers and wings and frantic in their vast urge, their instinct, to get away.

  “Ducks,” Poole said, marveling. “I punched a hole for a flight of wild ducks.”

  Now something else appeared. A park bench with an elderly, tattered man seated on it, reading a torn, bent newspaper. He looked up, dimly made out Poole, smiled briefly at him with badly made dentures, and then returned to his folded-back newspaper. He read on.

  “Do you see him?” Poole asked Sarah. “And the ducks.” At that moment the ducks and the park bum disappeared. Nothing remained of them. The interval of their punch-holes had quickly passed.

  “They weren’t real,” Sarah said. “Were they? So how—”

  “You’re not real,” he told Sarah. “You’re a stimulus-factor on my reality tape. A punch-hole that can be glazed over. Do you also have an existence in another reality tape, or one in an objective reality?” He did not know; he couldn’t tell. Perhaps Sarah did not know, either. Perhaps she existed in a thousand reality tapes; perhaps on every reality tape ever manufactured. “If I cut the tape,” he said, “you will be everywhere and nowhere. Like everything else in the universe. At least as far as I am aware of it.”

  Sarah faltered, “I am real.”

  “I want to know you completely,” Poole said. “To do that I must cut the tape. If I don’t do it now, I’ll do it some other time; it’s inevitable that eventually I’ll do it.” So why wait? he asked himself. And there is always the possibility that Danceman has reported back to my maker, that they will be making moves to head me off. Because, perhaps, I’m endangering their property—myself.

  “You make me wish I had gone to the office after all,” Sarah said, her mouth turned down with dimpled gloom.

  “Go,” Poole said.

  “I don’t want to leave you alone.”

  “I’ll be fine,” Poole said.

  “No, you’re not going to be fine. You’re going to unplug yourself or something, kill yourself because you’ve found out you’re just an electric ant and not a human being.”

  He said, presently, “Maybe so.” Maybe it boiled down to that.

  “And I can’t stop you,” she said.

  “No.” He nodded in agreement.

  “But I’m going to stay,” Sarah said. “Even if I can’t stop you. Because if I do leave and you do kill yourself, I’ll always ask myself for the rest of my life, what would have happened if I had stayed. You see?”

  Again he nodded.

  “Go ahead,” Sarah said.

  He rose to his feet. “It’s not pain I’m going to feel,” he told her. “Although it may look like that to you. Keep in mind the fact that organic robots have minimal pain-circuits in them. I will be experiencing the most intense—”

  “Don’t tell me any more,” she broke in. “Just do it if you’re going to, or don’t do it if you’re not.”

  Clumsily—because he was frightened—he wriggled his hands into the microglove assembly, reached to pick up a tiny tool: a sharp cutting blade. “I am going to cut a tape mounted inside my chest panel,” he said, as he gazed through the enlarging-lens system. “That’s all.” His hand shook as it lifted the cutting blade. In a second it can be done, he realized. All over. And—I will have time to fuse the cut ends of the tape back together, he realized. A half hour at least. If I change my mind.

  He cut the tape.

  Staring at him, cowering, Sarah whispered, “Nothing happened.”

  “I have thirty or forty minutes.” He reseated himself at the table, having drawn his hands from the gloves. His voice, he noticed, shook; undoubtedly Sarah was aware of it, and he felt anger at himself, knowing that he had alarmed her. “I’m sorry,” he said, irrationally; he wanted to apologize to her. “Maybe you ought to leave,” he said in panic; again he stood up. So did she, reflexively, as if imitating him; bloated and nervous, she stood there palpitating. “Go away,” he said thickly. “Back to the office where you ought to be. Where we both ought to be.” I’m going to fuse the tape-ends together, he told himself; the tension is too great for me to stand.

  Reaching his hands toward the gloves he groped to pull them over his straining fingers. Peering into the enlarging screen, he saw the beam from the photoelectric gleam upward, pointed directly into the scanner; at the same time he saw the e
nd of the tape disappearing under the scanner... he saw this, understood it; I’m too late, he realized. It has passed through. God, he thought, help me. It has begun winding at a rate greater than I calculated. So it’s now that—

  He saw apples, and cobblestones and zebras. He felt warmth, the silky texture of cloth; he felt the ocean lapping at him and a great wind, from the north, plucking at him as if to lead him somewhere. Sarah was all around him, so was Danceman. New York glowed in the night, and the squibs about him scuttled and bounced through night skies and daytime and flooding and drought. Butter relaxed into liquid on his tongue, and at the same time hideous odors and tastes assailed him: the bitter presence of poisons and lemons and blades of summer grass. He drowned; he fell; he lay in the arms of a woman in a vast white bed which at the same time dinned shrilly in his ear: the warning noise of a defective elevator in one of the ancient, ruined downtown hotels. I am living, I have lived, I will never live, he said to himself, and with his thoughts came every word, every sound; insects squeaked and raced, and he half sank into a complex body of homeostatic machinery located somewhere in Tri-Plan’s labs.

  He wanted to say something to Sarah. Opening his mouth he tried to bring forth words—a specific string of them out of the enormous mass of them brilliantly lighting his mind, scorching him with their utter meaning.

  His mouth burned. He wondered why.

  Frozen against the wall, Sarah Benton opened her eyes and saw the curl of smoke ascending from Poole’s half-opened mouth. Then the roby sank down, knelt on elbows and knees, then slowly spread out in a broken, crumpled heap. She knew without examining it that it had “died.”

  Poole did it to itself, she realized. And it couldn’t feel pain; it said so itself. Or at least not very much pain; maybe a little. Anyhow, now it is over.

  I had better call Mr. Danceman and tell him what’s happened, she decided. Still shaky, she made her way across the room to the fone; picking it up, she dialed from memory.