by Larry Niven
“Dreamer laughed. ‘I’ll eat them both,’ he said, and did. ‘Ten years is a long time between shrimp cocktails,’ he said.
“The waiter took our empty cups away and brought us two more shrimp cocktails.
“‘This is too much of a good thing,’ said Dreamer. ‘Where do I go to talk to the manager?’
“‘I told you, it’s all automatic. The manager’s a computer in the basement.’
“‘Does it have an audio circuit for complaints?’
“ ‘I think so.’
“ ‘Where do I find it?’
“I looked around, trying to remember. ‘Over there. Past the payment counter. But I don’t—”
“Dreamer got up. ‘I’ll be right back.’ he said.
“He was, too. He came back within seconds, and he was shaking. ‘I couldn’t get out of the dining room,’ he told me. ‘The payment counter wouldn’t let me by. There was a barrier. I tried to give it some money, but nothing happened. When I tried to go over the barrier, I got an electric shock!’
“‘That’s for deadbeats. It won’t let you by until you pay for your lunch. You can’t pay until you get a bill from the waiter.’
“‘Well, let’s pay and get out. This place scares me.’
“So I pushed the summons button, and the waiter came. Before I could reach the typer it had given us two more shrimp cocktails and moved away.
“‘This is ridiculous,’ said Dreamer. ‘Look, suppose I get up and stand around at the other side of the table. That way you can reach the typer when it delivers the next round, because I’ll be blocking it from leaving.’
“We tried it. The thing wouldn’t come to our table until Dreamer sat down. Didn’t recognize him standing up, maybe. Then it served two more shrimp cocktails, and Dreamer got up quick and moved behind it. I had my hands on the typer when it backed off and knocked Dreamer flat.
“He got so mad, he stood up and kicked the first, waiter that came by. The waiter shocked him good, and while he was getting up the thing tossed him a printed message to the effect that robot waiters were expensive and delicate and he shouldn’t do that.”
“That’s true,” Masney said, deadpan. “He shouldn’t.”
“I’d have been helping him do it, but I wasn’t sure what those machines would do next. So I stayed in my seat and planned what I’d do to the guy who invented robot waiters, if I ever got out of there to track him down.
“Dreamer got up shaking his head. Then he started trying to get help from the other diners. I could have told him that wouldn’t work. Nobody wanted to get involved. In the big cities they never do. Finally one of the waiters shot a slip at him that told him to stop bothering the other diners, only it was more polite than that.
“He came back to our table, but this time he didn’t sit down. He looked scared. ‘Listen, Garner,’ he said, ‘I’m going to try the kitchen. You stay here. I’ll bring help.’ And he turned and started away.
“I yelled, ‘Come back here! We’ll be all right if—” But by that time he was out of earshot, heading for the kitchen door. I know he heard me shout. He just didn’t want to be stopped.
“The door was only four feet tall, because it was built for robots. Dreamer ducked under it and was gone. I didn’t dare go after him. If he made it, fine, I’d have help. I didn’t think he would.
“There was one more thing I wanted to try. I pushed the summons button, and when the waiter came with two more shrimp cocktails I typed ‘Phone’ before it could get away.”
“To phone Headquarters? You should have tried that earlier.”
“Sure. But it didn’t work. The waiter scooted off and brought me another shrimp cocktail.
“So I waited. By and by everyone disappeared, and I was alone in the Herr Ober. Whenever I got hungry enough I’d eat some crackers or a shrimp cocktail. The waiter kept bringing me more water and more shrimp cocktails, so that was all right.
“I left notes on some tables, so that when the dinner-time crowd showed up they’d be warned. But the waiters removed the notes as fast as I wrote them. Keeping things neat. I quit that and waited for rescue.
“Nobody came to rescue me. Dreamer never came back.
“Six o’clock, and the place filled up again. Along about nine, three couples at a nearby table started getting an endless supply of canapes Lorenzo. I watched them. Eventually they got so mad that the six of them circled the waiter and picked it up. The waiter spun its wheels madly, and then it shocked them and they dropped it. It fell on one man’s foot. Everyone in the place panicked. When the dust cleared there were only the seven of us left.
“The others were trying to decide what to do about the guy with his foot under the waiter. They were afraid to touch the waiter, of course. It wouldn’t have taken my order, because I wasn’t at one of its tables, but I got one of the others to type an order for aspirin, and off it went.
“So I got the six of them back to their table and told them not to move. One of the girls had sleeping pills. I fed three to the guy with the smashed foot.
“And so we waited.”
“I hate to ask,” said Masney, “but what were you waiting for?”
“Closing time!”
“Oh, of course. Then what?”
“At two o’clock our waiters stopped bringing us shrimp cocktails and canapes Lorenzo and brought us our bills. You wouldn’t believe what they charged me for all those shrimp cocktails … We paid our bills and left, carrying the guy with the smashed foot. We took him to a hospital, and then we got to a phone and called everybody in sight. Next day the Herr Ober was closed for repairs. It never reopened.”
“What about Dreamer?”
“He’s one reason the place never reopened. Never found him.”
“He couldn’t just disappear.”
“Couldn’t he?”
“Could he?”
“Sometimes I think he must have taken advantage of the publicity. Started life over somewhere else, with no prison record. And then I remember that he went into a fully automated kitchen, through a door that wasn’t built for humans. That kitchen machinery could handle full-sized sides of beef. Dreamer obviously wasn’t a robot. What would the kitchen machinery take him for?”
Masney thought about it.
It came to Masney as they were finishing desert.
“Mmmb!” he said. “Mmmb!” And he swallowed frantically. “You fink! You were sent straight from Homicide branch to Superintendent. You never had anything to do with the Intent to Deceive Branch!”
“I thought you’d catch that.”
“But why would you lie?”
“You kept bugging me about why I hated robot waiters. I had to say something.”
“All right. You conned me. Now, why do you hate robot waiters?”
“I don’t. You just happened to look up at the wrong time. I was thinking how silly our waiter looked in his ground-effect miniskirt.”
Cloak of Anarchy
Square in the middle of what used to be the San Diego Freeway, I leaned back against a huge, twisted oak. The old bark was rough and powdery against my bare back. There was dark green shade shot with tight parallel beams of white gold. Long grass tickled my legs.
Forty yards away across a wide strip of lawn was a clump of elms, and a small grandmotherly woman sitting on a green towel. She looked like she’d grown there. A stalk of grass protruded between her teeth. I felt we were kindred spirits, and once when I caught her eye I wiggled a forefinger at her, and she waved back.
In a minute now I’d have to be getting up. Jill was meeting me at the Wilshire exits in half an hour. But I’d started walking at the Sunset Boulevard ramps, and I was tired. A minute more …
It was a good place to watch the world rotate.
A good day for it, too. No clouds at all. On this hot blue summer afternoon, King’s Free Park was as crowded as it ever gets.
Someone at police headquarters had expected that. Twice the usual number of copseyes floated overhead
, waiting. Gold dots against blue, basketball-sized, twelve feet up. Each a television eye and a sonic stunner, each a hookup to police headquarters, they were there to enforce the law of the Park.
No violence.
No hand to be raised against another—and no other laws whatever. Life was often entertaining in a Free Park.
North toward Sunset, a man carried a white rectangular sign, blank on both sides. He was parading back and forth in front of a square-jawed youth on a plastic box, who was trying to lecture him on the subject of fusion power and the heat pollution problem. Even this far away I could hear the conviction and the dedication in his voice.
South, a handful of yelling marksmen were throwing rocks at a copseye, directed by a gesticulating man with wild black hair. The golden basketball was dodging the rocks, but barely. Some cop was baiting them. I wondered where they had got the rocks. Rocks were scarce in King’s Free Park.
The black-haired man looked familiar. I watched him and his horde chasing the copseye … then forgot them when a girl walked out of a clump of elms.
She was lovely. Long, perfect legs, deep red hair worn longer than shoulder length, the face of an arrogant angel, and a body so perfect that it seemed unreal, like an adolescent’s daydream. Her walk showed training; possibly she was a model, or dancer. Her only garment was a cloak of glowing blue velvet.
It was fifteen yards long, that cloak. It trailed back from two big gold disks that were stuck somehow to the skin of her shoulders. It trailed back and back, floating at a height of five feet all the way, twisting and turning to trace her path through the trees. She seemed like the illustration in a book of fairy tales, bearing in mind that the original fairy tales were not intended for children.
Neither was she. You could hear neck vertebrae popping all over the Park. Even the rock-throwers had stopped to watch.
She could sense the attention, or hear it in a whisper of sighs. It was what she was here for. She strolled along with a condescending angel’s smile on her angel’s face, not overdoing the walk, but letting it flow. She turned, regardless of whether there were obstacles to avoid, so that fifteen yards of flowing cloak could follow the curve.
I smiled, watching her go. She was lovely from the back, with dimples.
The man who stepped up to her a little farther on was the same one who had led the rock-throwers. Wild black hair and beard, hollow cheeks and deep-set eyes, a diffident smile and a diffident walk … Ron Cole. Of course.
I didn’t hear what he said to the girl in the cloak, but I saw the result. He flinched, then turned abruptly and walked away with his eyes on his feet.
I got up and moved to intercept him. “Don’t take it personal,” I said.
He looked up, startled. His voice, when it came, was bitter. “How should I take it?”
“She’d have turned any man off the same way. She’s to look at, not to touch.”
“You know her?”
“Never saw her before in my life.”
“Then—?”
“Her cloak. Now you must have noticed her cloak.”
The tail end of her cloak was just passing us, its folds rippling an improbably deep, rich blue. Ronald Cole smiled as if it hurt his face. “Yah.”
“All right. Now suppose you made a pass, and suppose the lady liked your looks and took you up on it. What would she do next? Bearing in mind that she can’t stop walking even for a second.”
He thought it over first, then asked, “Why not?”
“If she stops walking, she loses the whole effect. Her cloak just hangs there like some kind of tail. It’s supposed to wave. If she lies down, it’s even worse. A cloak floating at five feet, then swooping into a clump of bushes and bobbing frantically—” Ron laughed helplessly in falsetto. I said, “See? Her audience would get the giggles. That’s not what she’s after.”
He sobered. “But if she really wanted to, she wouldn’t care about … oh. Right. She must have spent a fortune to get that effect.”
“Sure. She wouldn’t ruin it for Jacques Casanova himself.” I thought unfriendly thoughts toward the girl in the cloak. There are polite ways to turn down a pass. Ronald Cole was easy to hurt.
I asked, “Where did you get the rocks?”
“Rocks? Oh, we found a place where the center divider shows through. We knocked off some chunks of concrete.” Ron looked down the length of the Park just as a kid bounced a missile off a golden ball. “They got one! Come on!”
The fastest commercial shipping that ever sailed was the clipper ship; yet the world stopped building them after just twenty-five years. Steam had come. Steam was faster, safer, more dependable and cheaper.
The freeways served America for almost fifty years. Then modern transportation systems cleaned the air and made traffic jams archaic and left the nation with an embarrassing problem. What to do with ten thousand miles of unsightly abandoned freeways?
King’s Free Park had been part of the San Diego Freeway, the section between Sunset and the Santa Monica interchange. Decades ago the concrete had been covered with topsoil. The borders had been landscaped from the start. Now the Park was as thoroughly covered with green as the much older Griffith Free Park.
Within King’s Free Park was an orderly approximation of anarchy. People were searched at the entrances. There were no weapons inside. The copseyes, floating overhead and out of reach, were the next best thing to no law at all.
There was only one law to enforce. All acts of attempted violence carried the same penalty for attacker and victim. Let anyone raise his hands against his neighbor, and one of the golden basketballs would stun them both. They would wake separately, with copseyes watching. It was usually enough.
Naturally people threw rocks at copseyes. It was a Free Park, wasn’t it?
“They got one! Come on!” Ron tugged at my arm. The felled copseye was hidden, surrounded by those who had destroyed it. “I hope they don’t kick it apart. I told them I need it intact, but that might not stop them.”
“It’s a Free Park. And they bagged it.”
“With my missiles!”
“Who are they?”
“I don’t know. They were playing baseball when I found them. I told them I needed a copseye. They said they’d get me one.”
I remembered Ron quite well now. Ronald Cole was an artist and an inventor. It would have been two sources of income for another man, but Ron was different. He invented new art forms. With solder and wire and diffraction gratings and several makes of plastics kit, and an incredible collection of serendipitous junk, Ron Cole made things the like of which had never been seen on Earth.
The market for new art forms has always been low, but now and then he did make a sale. It was enough to keep him in raw materials, especially since many of his raw materials came from basements and attics. Rarely there came a big sale, and then, briefly, he would be rich.
There was this about him: he knew who I was, but he hadn’t remembered my name. Ron Cole had better things to think about than what name belonged with whom. A name was only a tag and a conversational gambit. “Russell! How are you?” A signal. Ron had developed a substitute.
Into a momentary gap in the conversation he would say, “Look at this,” and hold out—miracles.
Once it had been a clear plastic sphere, golf-ball size, balanced on a polished silver concavity. When the ball rolled around on the curved mirror, the reflections were fantastic.
Once it had been a twisting sea serpent engraved on a Michelob beer bottle, the lovely vase-shaped bottle of the early 1960s that was too big for standard refrigerators.
And once it had been two strips of dull silvery metal unexpectedly heavy. “What’s this?”
I’d held them in the palm of my hand. They were heavier than lead. Platinum? But nobody carries that much platinum around. Joking, I’d asked, “U-235?”
“Are they warm?” he’d asked apprehensively. I’d fought off an urge to throw them as far as I could and dive behind a couch.
&
nbsp; But they had been platinum. I never did learn why Ron was carrying them about. Something that didn’t pan out.
Within a semicircle of spectators, the felled copseye lay on the grass. It was intact, possibly because two cheerful, conspicuously large men were standing over it, waving everyone back.
“Good,” said Ron. He knelt above the golden sphere, turned it with his long artist’s fingers. To me he said, “Help me get it open.”
“What for? What are you after?”
“I’ll tell you in a minute. Help me get—Never mind.” The hemispherical cover came off. For the first time ever, I looked into a copseye.
It was impressively simple. I picked out the stunner by its parabolic reflector, the cameras, and a toroidal coil that had to be part of the floater device. No power source. I guessed that the shell itself was a power beam antenna. With the cover cracked there would be no way for a damn fool to electrocute himself.
Ron knelt and studied the strange guts of the copseye. From his pocket he took something made of glass and metal. He suddenly remembered my existence and held it out to me, saying, “Look at this.”
I took it, expecting a surprise, and I got it. It was an old hunting watch, a big wind-up watch on a chain, with a protective case. They were in common use a couple of hundred years ago. I looked at the face, said, “Fifteen minutes slow. You didn’t repair the whole works, did you?”
“Oh, no.” He clicked the back open for me.
The works looked modern. I guessed, “Battery and tuning fork?”
“That’s what the guard thought. Of course that’s what I made it from. But the hands don’t move; I set them just before they searched me.”
“Aah. What does it do?”
“If I work it right, I think it’ll knock down every copseye in King’s Free Park.”
For a minute or so I was laughing too hard to speak. Ron watched me with his head on one side, clearly wondering if I thought he was joking.
I managed to say, “That ought to cause all kinds of excitement.”