by Anthology
I nodded, ignoring the sparks that were still stabbing randomly at what passed for my synapses these days.
And I did feel better. The roar of the data stream was still there, but all it gave me was a mild headache.
And even that would soon be over.
As soon as the data transfer was complete, I could begin the analysis. This time the process should be far quicker than last time. For one thing, the Scenario’s complexity index had been lowered by a factor of two, but it still encompassed thousands of years and countless more timelines of all lengths.
Abruptly I switched to the search functions which, as usual, I hadn’t known I had until I realized I needed them. The detailed analysis could wait. The cursory analysis the search function could provide would give me all the information I really wanted right now: Had this scenario, like all those that had come before, succumbed to the Styrofoam Syndrome?
“I take it you’re ready to go, Eldred?” The Hawking Voice sounded almost human now.
As expected, it didn’t take long to skim the timelines and snag the pertinent data. The only surprise was the disappearance of New Coke. Instead of digging in their heels, this last scenario’s decision makers had given in to plummeting sales and consumer complaints and decided it was pointless to continue to resist. After all, they made the same profits no matter which label they used.
Unfortunately, the same good sense was not applied to the one problem that had helped to shoot down every scenario so far: the Styrofoam Syndrome.
In all other respects, the scenarios were typical. Similar amounts of violence and altruism, of cruelty and kindness. Similar streaks of insanity and brilliance, often in the same individual or group.
But sooner or later, the Styrofoam Syndrome always strikes. People in those scenarios begin defying common sense in any activity having to do with tomatoes, and we daren’t release them into the general, forward-moving population for fear that this remarkable behavior would spread to other areas.
And it’s always the same. At some point, one or more of the growers invariably seem to forget that the primary function of a tomato is to taste good, and they start making them prettier to attract customers’ attention and begin making them firmer so they’re easier to ship. They are of course violating one of their primary rules: that any successful operation must be one in which form follows function, not the other way around. I mean, what good is a tomato that can be shipped across the country without a single unsightly blemish but tastes like Styrofoam?
Once that point is reached, it’s all over. The Syndrome is self-sustaining. As sales drop, fewer and fewer tomatoes are grown in the ground, and even fewer are grown in the kind of ground that produces good flavor, largely because by then no one believes the type of ground makes a difference. With growers interested only in shipability and experts blathering about appearance, real tomatoes are gone. Within another century, no one would recognize the taste of a real tomato, and they’ve gone from being the most delicious of vegetables to being a fading part of folklore.
Sadly, I made a few last minute changes to the waiting scenario and activated the Reset.
As the new scenario enveloped me, I could hear the Hawking Voice sigh.
“Good luck, Eldred,” it said. “Try to get it right this time.”
THERE AND THEN
Steven Utley
The wind had shifted, and the night was full of land smells, estuarine smells, green slime, black mud, rotten eggs. The only sounds were ship and sea sounds; occasionally, there was also a murmur of conversation in the shadow beneath the eaves of the helicopter deck. Chamberlain’s two assistants were back there somewhere, tending equipment, their voices muffled as if by layers of flannel. The moon had vanished into a vast, dense cloud bank. The fantail was so dark that I could see little of Chamberlain except his glowing red eye and, intermittently, red-tinged highlights of his face and hands. He looked devilish in those moments. He held the glowing eye sometimes between his fingers and sometimes between his lips. Every so often, its glow would expire, and he’d fumble with his pockets, there’d be a sputter of flame, the thick smells coming off the land would momentarily mix with that of burning tobacco. I wonder again how he got his ancient and disagreeable vice past screening.
Chamberlain sat in his beat-up deck chair, surrounded by a mutant-toadstool growth of meteorological godknowswhat. I leaned against the rail. Hundreds of people lived and worked abroad, but late at night it was easy to get the feeling, and hard to get rid of it, that we were the only human beings in all the world. Actually, we represented a few tenths of a percent of present world population.
After a while, I said, “You should come.”
“Too much work to do here.”
“Oh, come on. We’ve both been cooped up here too long. We could both use some excitement.”
“Hm.” Hm was the sound Chamberlain made when he meant to laugh. “I hear they could use some excitement ashore, too. There’s none of the tumult and squawk you just naturally associate with prehistoric times.”
“You don’t think a live sex act with trilobites will be exciting? Come on. A walk on the beach’ll do you good.”
“This the beach I smell? Ew.”
“We’ll be on a different beach. What you smell is blowing off the estuary. We’ll be way around the coast from here.”
“Still.” The old deck chair squeaked unhappily as he shifted his weight. “I’m a meteorologist. Meteorologists aren’t supposed to have to smell bad smells.”
“Then don’t smoke.”
He called me a body Nazi and ignited a new cigarette off the old. “Sure smells like the honey pot got kicked over.”
“Gripe, gripe,” I said. “You have it made. The weather never does anything here. The only forecast you ever make is warm, east wind, possibility of showers. You sleep when you want, come out and play with your expensive toys when you want—”
“You’ve got no damn idea what my workload’s like. Anybody has it made on this boat, it’s you.”
“—sit back and watch the sunset and drink till you nod off!” He made a rumbling noise deep inside himself. “You know as well as I do that nothing enhances a sunset better’n a drink. And nothing enhances a drink better’n a nap.” The glowing eye moved away from his face in the direction of his invisible assistants, Immelmanned, and went back to his face. When he spoke again, his voice was so quiet that I had to lean down into his nimbus of smoke to hear his words. “Those two wait till I’m asleep and then sneak away to fool around. If you know what I mean.”
“How simply, terribly shocking.”
“It’s true. Had my eye on ’em for a while.” The eye brightened for a moment, fell away in his hand. “Definitely something going on between ’em.”
“Well,” I said, “what could be more romantic than holding hands under a prehistoric moon? Ooh woo, what a little moonlight can do.”
“That from one of your damned old songs? Of course it is, got to be. I forgot, you’re one of them. Listen, it’s past the hand-holding stage with those two. They’re up to the bucking-and-grunting stage.”
I couldn’t recall having seen either of Chamberlain’s assistants in good light. Now, in my imagination, they appeared as shadows, rubbing against each other. I said, “Well, it’s still most people’s favorite way to pair-bond.”
“Fat lot of good pair-bonding ever did you, Kev. None of your ex-wives has spoken to you in years.”
“They’ve hardly been able to, under the circumstances.”
“Anyway, you think I want a couple of disgruntled ex-lovers on my team?” He made a disgusted sound. “When they fall out, this boat won’t be big enough for the two of ’em.”
“Ship. This is a ship, not a boat.”
“Ship, boat,” he said dismissively.
“Rain, dew,” I said, in the same tone. “If Captain Kelly ever hears you call his ship a boat, he’ll keelhaul you, hang you from the yardarm, and make you walk the plank all in the same afte
rnoon.”
“He makes allowances for dotty scientists. Point is—”
“The point is, your young honeys are happy together right now. Maybe they’ll stay happy together. There’s always the possibility that things’ll work out, you know.”
“Hm. That what you told yourself along about the third time you got married?”
“Sure was.”
“You are such a dog with women,” he said, and extinguished his latest cigarette. A moment later, I heard a faint click in the darkness. “Want another drink?”
“Sure.”
He gave me another capful of brandy from his flask. Officially, it was a long walk from the Paleozoic to the nearest liquor store. In fact, there was probably enough booze on board to float us the thousand of kilometers to Caledonian Land-proto-Greenland, Kalaallitt Nunaat-to-be. Old hands know that when a body needs a drink, only a drink will do. Pleasantly abuzz, I peered off into the darkness toward the shore. Its smells were palpable, but it wasn’t even a glimmer in the night. The moon gave no sign of coming out of its cocoon of clouds. After a time, I realized that Chamberlain had fallen asleep. I left him snoring harshly in his deck chair, and his assistants to their alleged smooching, and went up to the helicopter deck.
The helicopters sat there like big metal sculptures of dragonflies lighted for Christmas. Mechanics tinkered with the motors while people wearing overalls loaded equipment and supplies. A shirtsleeved man stood by with the unmistakable air of a junior supervisor. He looked my way as I passed and seemed about to ask if I was authorized to be there, but then two of the mechanics said hello to me and I said hello back, and you could see the wheel turn behind the shirtsleeved man’s face: maybe I wasn’t a scruffy old stowaway, maybe I was somebody eccentric but important. I knew the mechanics and loaders but had no idea who he was. So many similar-looking people had arrived in the past few weeks that I didn’t know who a tenth of them were.
The ship’s engines throbbed suddenly as Captain Kelly got us under way. I put strangers out of my mind and strolled all the way forward and halfway back. Ours was in no way a lovely vessel. It had originally been designed and built during the Oughts to deliver Marines to beachheads and provide support with Missiles and helicopter gunships. Not a lot had been done, or could have been done, to tone down its brooding militariness. The missile launchers were gone now, and the gun turret rebuilt to house one of the astronomy team’s big telescopes, but the superstructure, helicopter deck, and boat bay had required no redesign. The forest of antennae, scanner, things, and stuff rising above the bridge looked formidably thorny. Except for human beings in helicopters, there wasn’t an airborne creature on Earth, but still the dishes turned and cocked and listened, as intently as if swarms of kamikaze aircraft lurked over the horizon.
The task of renaming the vessel had fallen to a group of more or less prominent scientists, who duly voted to rechristen it the H.G. Wells. Some nasty hustling little demagogue in Congress scotched that on the grounds of Wells having been, besides a lousy stinking Brit—this, of course, was well after the end of the Special Relationship between the countries—a communist, or some closely related species of one-worlder. The story goes that, told to submit something “more patriotic and appropriate,” most of the scientists next agreed that the vessel should be renamed after one or another of certain late-twentieth century-and-early-twenty-first-century presidents, because the ship, too, would move boldly into the past. “This kind of reckless sarcasm,” a dissenter warned, “will backfire on us,” and sure enough, it did. Most of us since neglected to call the ship anything except “here” when we were aboard and “the ship” when we weren’t. And we did keep a big framed portrait of Bertie Wells hanging in the rec room, over his alleged epitaph: Dammit, I told you so!
The brandy and the stroll conspired to fill me with a luxurious sense of peace and belonging. When my pocketphone buzzed, I murmured absently into the mouthpiece.
“Kevo,” said Ruth Lott, “you’re up.”
Peace and belonging fled. Ruth had the mellifluous Georgia-accented voice I hated to hear. I said, “Ruth, all decent people are asleep at this hour.”
“That’s how I knew you’d be up.”
“Okay, I’m up. I just hope you’re calling about something really interesting, like maybe an out-of-clothes experience you personally have had.”
The phone barely did her great sweet laugh justice. “I have a little job for you.” She always had a little job for me. “Come see me, I’ll tell you all about it.”
I knew and she knew that she had me, but even a rabbit struggles in a lion’s grip. I said, “It really is kind of late.”
“Won’t take but a minute.” When I hesitated long enough to make her impatient, she said, “Oh, and before I forget—” her voice was as dulcet-toned as before, but I wasn’t fooled “—note on your calendar, extension review next month.”
“Now that’s low!”
“Why, whatever do you mean?”
“It’s blackmail!”
“No, actually, Kevo, it’s extortion. Bye.”
“Go ahead,” I said into a suddenly dead phone, “hang up on me, see what it gets you.”
Then, having no choice, I did as I was told.
Ruth was a Junoesque fiftyish woman with the world’s sliest smile. She trained it on me when I appeared in her hatchway. She said, “Are those the best clothes you have?”
“I was—I am going ashore when we get to Number Four camp.”
“Please see if you can’t make yourself just a teensy bit more presentable. I want you to meet a party at the jump station in a little while.”
“Since when am I the official greeter? You break your legs off above the knee?”
“These are media types. You should get along.”
“There’s got to be someone else on this bucket who’s—what am I supposed to do? It’s not like these people will arrive in any condition to listen to me give a welcome speech.”
“All you have to do is say hello, show them around when they’re up to it, whatever. I’m making them your responsibility.”
“But why me?”
“Because you are not snowed under with work, you bum. How often do you actually touch your wordboard?”
I gave her my most pained look. “Writing isn’t just a matter of touching a wordboard. You’d know that if you’d ever had specialized training in the putting together of subjects and verbs so that they agree. The real work’s mental.”
“You’re mental,” and she laughed her laugh again. “How is the book coming along? Think you’ll have it finished by the Mesozoic? Listen to me, and believe me when I tell you this, I’m doing you a favor. Once we’re privatized—don’t give me that look, we both know it’s a done deal—once we’re privatized, the new bosses will be looking very carefully at their assets and liabilities here. These include,” and she ticked them off on her fingers, “one converted assault ship with some el strange-o scientists embarked, and some hired help, and you. You’ve been hanging on here for too long. It’s time you had visible means of support. You need to be seen earning your keep. This little job won’t take too much of a bite out of your life. Just till these newcomers get acclimated. Just make sure they have a good time.”
“What, find them women, young boys?”
“I’m serious. Northemico’s sponsoring them.”
That impressed me. Northemico figured prominently in the push for privatization.
“Think of this,” Ruth went on, “as sort of an opportunity to do what a writer’s supposed to do, make all of this, this—” She gestured helplessly, unable to find a word that took in everything from ship’s routine to the reality of our surroundings and circumstances. I supplied it.
“Stuff,” I said.
“Right. Make all of this stuff make sense to them.” She eyed my attire again. “It really will help if you try not to look so much like a beachcomber.”
“I am a beachcomber.”
“Kevo, I put up
with you because you make me laugh.” She leaned toward me confidentially. “Even Captain Kelly puts up with you. He thinks of you as our resident artistic type and has the weird idea that you’re brilliant. God knows why. The new bosses, when they get here, aren’t going to put up with you unless you seem to be of use around here. They’ll probably institute a dress code, too. Now go on, get to the jump station,” and she urged me on my way with the kind of little wave women use to dry their fingernail polish.
The tang of ooze in the jump station was as sharp as an icepick up the nose. I tried out looks and gestures of welcome on Cullum and Summers, the two techs on duty. Summers appeared to think I was pretty funny. Cullum appeared to think I thought I was pretty funny. They did the synchronization countdown. The medical team stood around the rail-enclosed sending-and-receiving platform and watched as its surface shimmered and grew bright.
First to arrive was a woman who was so shaken up by the experience that the medical team had to roll her away on a gurney. The man who followed her looked gray but insisted that he was okay, please take him topside. I couldn’t talk him out of it. Cullum and Summers exchanged looks with me and quietly made a bet between themselves: I either would or would not get the fellow out of the jump station, through a short companionway, and onto the starboardside gangwalk before it was too late.
As it happened, I did, but just barely. The man made it the last couple of steps with both hands clapped over his mouth. He grabbed the rail, stood there uneasily for a moment, then leaned out over the dark sea, out into the blackness, and retched at length. He didn’t actually lose his lunch because he hadn’t any lunch to lose. Only the first visitors to the Paleozoic hadn’t known not to eat before making the jump. They had gone about suited as if for Mars—you weren’t even supposed to breathe the air here, let alone cough up your socks. The past was supposed to be as brittle as a Ming vase—you didn’t dare give it a cross look. It was years before people got comfortable with the idea that if the past was resilient enough to accommodate an 8500-ton ship, it could probably accommodate the everyday stupidity of the species embarked.