“The ship itself is self-supporting, and not only has a superb computer system, but is tied to all the computers of the Terran Group. We have what might be called a standing-wave situation, constantly locked on to this ship. Through it we can transmit nothing but information—but we can give you any amount of that. From it, we will have an opportunity to experience with you the places you go, the things you see and learn and experience.”
“You are giving me this ship? To take where?”
The blue, shimmering figure spread its arms. “Anywhere.”
“But you watch everything I do.”
“If you’re willing.”
“I’m not willing. I need some sort of privacy—including inside of my head.”
“That is a sacred matter with us. We will not intrude, and if you like we will give you a zone of privacy anywhere you like in the ship.”
“How about this: instead of any special place, we make it anywhere I am—any time I say so?”
“You would not deny us the—”
“No, no, no,” Case said impatiently; “I am conditioned to keep a bargain once it’s struck. You’re giving me this ship and a free hand, and you want something in exchange. I’ll see that you get it, and I won’t short-change you.”
“Very well,” said the blue man. “You have already been thoroughly briefed on the ship’s operation and on those things which are of particular interest to the public at large and to specialists. You have at your command the memory banks of this computer and all others tied to it. Case Hardin—the ship is yours.”
This seemed devastatingly abrupt, but there seemed nothing else to say except “Thanks,” which he did.
“If this means of communication suits you,” said the blue man, “call me, and I’ll manifest this way immediately. There are quite a few other means; ask the computer. Good luck, and thank you.” And he faded, and was gone.
Case stood looking for a long time at the place where the blue man had been, shook his head, grinned briefly, and went to the central command chair.
He sat down. “Computer,” he said, “your name’s Buzzbox.”
“Yes, Commander.”
“Case.”
“Yes, Case.”
“Now, here’s what I want you to do.…”
Case came in low over the beach, low and slowly. His ship was in orbit and he flew a small and highly sophisticated boat; capable beyond anything a man of his time could have dreamt of. In the small pocket adhering to his chest (like a graft; only he could will it loose) was a compact device which would command both vessels and all communications. His computer had made short work of locating this sector of space, working with the trajectory he followed when he was picked up, and feeding in an immense amount of observation on anything and everything which might have diverted the coffin during those dead years.
“You haven’t changed things much,” he muttered, to the planetoid or to whatever lived there. The beach had a lake again; the sand was scuffled in familiar places, and a patch was worn to the edge of the woods where their house had been.
Was. Right now.
He drifted to it and dropped the ramp. Yes, the thatched house with the ragged piece of head-lining fluttering in the light breeze, and inside the familiar dried clay plates and even the withered remnants of fruit she had … own hands … looking up at … Jan … Jan. And his spearpoints and scrapers, oh and her voicewriter.
He took them.
Back in his boat, heart almost stopped, breath held, he tooled up to the spot where the coffins had been. Gone. Both gone.
He landed again and walked slowly up to the rocks. Here she had stood, calling out readings as he checked, with the sweet air full of dust from the fallen lakeshore. Here he had bent over the open coffin and she had kissed him, kissed him in a way that …
There were the burn marks: his launch. Where hers had been—no marks at all. If she hadn’t launched, yet was not here …
Oh but it’s a thousand years, man!
He thought he heard a sound (laughter) and from the corner of his eye some sort of movement, high up, distant.
Only a bird.
Bird! The one thing they never saw on this planetoid—a bird.
He turned to watch it. It was fifty meters high over the forest, coming straight for him in a flat glide. He waited grimly for it. He looked like a naked man with something attached to his chest. He was a great deal more than that.
The bird was not a bird, but a clownlike creature with wide, intelligent eyes that seemed to be either biped or quadruped. Its wings were batlike, but rolled and folded until they were quite presentable arms. It landed and waddled fearlessly up to Case and stared at him.
Case stared back, and did not move until the thing—laughed.
It was, full and true, the laughter that had haunted them, driven them, when they dwelt here, and Case’s new status and powers could not protect him from the wave of terror and fury that swept through him. He found himself by his boat at a bound, backing up the ramp, slit-eyed, gasping. He would blast this thing into a powder. He’d crack this whole evil planet like an egg. He’d—
The laughing thing waddled up to him on three legs, holding something dangling from its finger-claws on the fourth.
Jan’s brassard?
He took it gingerly and spread it out. Jan’s brassard. He made an animal cry and leaped for the clown-creature, but it skipped back out of the way. It stood there grinning at him, and, in a most humanlike way, waving him on.
Slowly he followed it.
It led him inland, making no particular effort to stay out of his reach—knowing, he realized, that he would not harm it as long as it might lead him to Jan’s body. He wondered if it knew the boat was protecting him, could drop a shield over him in a twentieth of a second, scorch the ground around him for thirty meters, could flash to his side in a blink (for its drive was inertia-less), could even follow and find an escaping attacker, earth, sea, or sky.
But he played it the clown’s way, toiling through the sand and rocks and into the forest, where in a small clearing, the clown-creature, grinning, began to dig.
Case watched it until it stopped and looked up, grinning its stupid grin (under those bright eyes), and motioned for him to help.
And he did, with his bare hands, shoulder to shoulder with this improbable creature, until curved white metal showed in the earth.
And then he dug! There was, somehow, a glory in the pain of broken nails and aching muscles and rasping, labored breathing. Slowly the length of the coffin saw the light, and they freed it. Side by side they got fingers under one end, and heaved. Case didn’t care what he put into it; the strength of the clown-creature was astonishing. Up it came, with Case dusting earth from its flanks and crying, crying like a child.
He fingered the control and his boat lanced in through the trees and settled to the forest floor. The ramp dropped and two small winchers, like drifting saucers, appeared and flew to the end of the coffin. The clown-thing made as if to help manhandle the coffin up the ramp, but Case waved it back. The winch-plates lifted the coffin, turned it, and carried it through the air, up the ramp and into the boat.
Case leaped up the ramp and turned at the top. “Thanks a heap hell of a lot, friend, whoever you are, and good-bye.”
The clown-creature also leaped up the ramp and looked pleadingly at Case, its head on one side.
“Look, I’m grateful and all that, but I’ve got to go. And to tell you the truth, I want no part of this place or anything that belongs to it. Now beat it.” He made a go-away gesture, but the thing just stood there pleading, so he gave it a push and it toppled off the ramp, half unfolding its strange wings to keep its balance.
Case went inside as the ramp raised. The clown-thing laughed once, dwindled to a black shiny button, and bounced up the moving ramp and into the boat just before the ramp closed.
Case settled at the controls. Behind him was the curved cabin bench, padded in glossy black material which was
held in place by a series of shiny black buttons. Unseen by Case, a shiny black button bounced up on the bench, up on the backrest, and became a button exactly in line with all the others.
After watching the Doctor for an interminable time, Case left him to his work and went to his quarters, wondering if he should have himself knocked out for a dozen hours, knowing he could not, not until he knew … The Doctor had said only, “It’s been a terrible time, a terrible long time …” and had not wanted Case to look at her. He had said a strange thing: “She wouldn’t want you to look at her,” and Case had said why not, and the Doctor had said, “Because she’s a woman.”
Everybody seemed to know something about women that Case did not.
He thumped down in his quarters and looked around him. Jan … try not to think of Jan, with the Jan-ness of her permeating the ship. Try not to think of her, with the spearpoints and the voicewriter lying there on the …
He picked up the voicewriter, “Shining in the light …” Her voice, a half-whisper. He set it back a bit, and played: “… if only he could be outside of himself, see himself shining in the light with the water splashing into pearls and his teeth shining too as he laughs … why can’t he ever laugh with me? What makes him so grave and careful? How could he know so little about a woman?”
Some of it was scientific data and observation, but again that hushed, hungry voice, “I’ll never give in, never, never, I’ll never let him know; but why can’t he see it, why can’t he say it just once?”
Say what? thought Case.
He kept on listening to the voicewriter until he found out.
“Case.”
“Yea, Buzzbox.”
“He beat me, and I love him.”
“What are you talking about?”
“The Dreamer. He loves me too. Hey thanks, Case.”
“Repeat, from your call.”
“Case.”
“Yeah, Buzzbox.”
“He beat me, and I love him.”
“Hold it right there. Who beat you?”
“The Dreamer. At chess.”
“Somebody beat you at chess?”
“Twenty-three moves. A queen’s bishop’s pawn opening, and then—”
“Never mind the blow-by-blow, Buzzbox. Where is this who-did-you-say?”
“Dreamer. In my house.”
Case slammed out of his quarters and down to the door marked “computer.” There before the twinkling wall which was the heart of Buzzbox sat a small table. On the table was a chessboard. On the chessboard was the sparse remnant of a very bloody chess game, with the black king turned down in defeat. Before the table was a stool, and on the stool squatted the clown-creature, looking up at him with its brilliant eyes, and laughing.
“How the hell did you get there?”
“You brought him up in the boat. I guess I love you too, Case,” said Buzzbox.
“If I did I wasn’t aware of it.”
“I know you weren’t, but you brought him anyway, And he loves me. And he’s going to stay with us.”
The clown-thing nodded vigorously.
“The hell he is. He goes right back to that crazy planetoid.”
“He can’t go back to it,” said Buzzbox. “He is the planetoid. He lives next to another space. You don’t understand that. Well, I do, he explained it to me. He can be anything he wants. He can be big as a pin or a molecule or a whole planet. He can squirt any part of himself from one space to another, like a half-filled balloon through a hole in a board. And he dreams things up; that’s why I call him the Dreamer.”
The Dreamer laughed and suddenly was a cut-crystal vase, and was a pale lavender centipede, and was a clown-creature again, laughing.
“He gets off this ship.”
“Then so do I. Case, he loves me, can’t you understand that?”
The clown-creature nodded vigorously. Case glared at it. “What the hell do you know about love, Buzzbox?”
“The Dreamer explained it to me. He learned it from a voicewriter. This girl was loving you. What the hell do you know about love, Case?”
Case felt a moment of disorientation, utter disbelief. Computers do not take this tone with the master. “What’s gotten into you, Buzzbox?”
“I’m in love, I’m in love, and he loves me!”
And that’s what love does, thought Case. Frees the slaves. Damns the consequences.
“And what happens if I kick this—this batwinged ape off my ship?”
“Then you’re on your own, Master. You’ll never get another buzz from me.”
“Do you know what this goggle-eyed monstrosity has put me through?”
“He saved you.”
Case glowered at the Dreamer, who smiled back at him cheerfully. And then he thought about the lifeboat, and the strange planet that swam up out of nowhere, and the way those nines appeared on his Terra Normal readout—not instantaneously, as it would in any normal demand, but bit by bit, as the planetoid … the Dreamer … sensed what was needed and supplied it. And their year there, while the Dreamer watched … (How lonely must a creature like that be?) … and learned. Then—the voicewriter; something new; the day-by-day account of a proud woman’s falling in love and loving … loving a grim, serious, unleavened … innocent … idiot like him. What the hell do you know about love, Case?… “Why can’t he say it? Why can’t he say it just once?” … and the cold, the disappearing lake … that was to drive him away—him, not them.
“Why did he drive me away, and keep her?”
“He thought she might love him,” said the Buzzbox.
“Him!” Case gaped at the ludicrous little clown, who nodded, shimmered, and stood before him as a muscular blond Adonis; shimmered and appeared as a stately bearded monarch in a jewel-encrusted robe; shimmered and appeared as the ludicrous winged ape.
“She didn’t want to love anybody but you, Case. But he had to find out.”
“If it killed me,” said Case.
“It didn’t, did it,” said the computer reasonably.
“And if I let this … this silly-looking nightmare ship with me, how do I know he won’t pull another caper like that?”
“Because he loves me, and I can’t hurt you.”
It occurred to Case that the computer and the alien were being very kind to him in being persuasive—when he really had no choice. The powers possessed by the computer alone were awesome. Combine them with those of a tachyonic, trans-spatial entity like this, and the mind began to bend. “Well,” he said, “we’ll see.…”
He went forward to the hospital. The blue man made no effort to stop him as he hesitated on the threshold, so he went in. Together they looked at the naked sleeping woman afloat in the glow of the beams. She was full-fleshed again and her scars were gone. Her hair was loose. He had never seen anything more beautiful in his life. “She—”
“She will wake in a moment,” said the Doctor. “Perhaps you’d better speak to her when she does.”
When she opened her eyes, it was Case she saw first. “Case …”
He spoke to her. He knew what to say, now.
Somewhere he heard laughter. He didn’t mind any more.
Agnes, Accent and Access
In the summer of 1978 a wind blew slantwise through the offices of M&H. The phrase was Mr. Miroshi’s for he had a touch of poetry about him. What he meant by it was the mildly bizarre, perplexing, and completely unpredictable behavior of the information retrieval sequences. In the course of an ordinary business day one might hardly think it crucial if the computer delivered to the Math section, for example, a medical paper complete with unsettling illustrations, or if Marketing, wanting a survey of New Zealand imports, received instead a treatise on human hostility and aggression. But M&H was no ordinary business, so they called in Merrihew.
Merrihew was no ordinary trouble-shooter, either.
Mr. Handel, co-president of M&H, explained to Merrihew about M&H, once they were settled in their booth in a cafe not far from the M&H headquarter
s. (Merrihew’s suggestion, of course; he was not given to charging into situations he did not comprehend.)
“No ordinary business, Mr. Merrihew. We are not a large firm, really. But then Maserati isn’t a large firm either, and no one yet produces Yomeimon Gates on a production line. Our methods are, I would say, unusual. I would not,” he added modestly, “say unique.”
“Your advertising says that for you.”
“Ah, then you do know something about us.”
Merrihew, whose reputation was that of knowing something about everything, gestured for Mr. Handel to continue. He did: “We are highly diversified and we buy, sell, trade, manufacture, contract, subcontract, and produce a great many things in many different ways and places. It is safe to say that each of our activities is successful to a degree—varying, of course—”
“From excellent all the way down to good.”
“You are kind, Mr. Merrihew.”
“You are successful, that’s all.”
“Ah.” Mr. Handel was pleased. “You do make it difficult to be modest.”
“It is only difficult to be modest when it’s painful, Mr. Handel, and it’s only painful when it’s necessary. Please go on.”
Mr. Handel raised his eyebrows at this piece of pragmatic philosophy and went on: “Well then, it’s no secret that our basic product is office equipment and that our products and services are means to promote that equipment. We try to integrate our approaches completely. That is, the problem dictates its solution, the chosen method of operation is what designs a machine or a component. If you came to us asking if one of our systems would sell oranges, say, or move merchandise or establish a Matto Grosso market or test consumer response equally well in Prague as in Bangkok, why, we would devise the best possible approach to the problem and take that one step further—the one that makes us, if I may say so at last, unique. We actually enter the field. We take the risks, we do the work, we find out if the approach is optimum. And if there seems to be a better way we try that too. When that happens, it is frequently the case that a new office machine or method is called for, which is why we say that ‘your problems design our equipment.’ ”
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