"Stalemate till then, anyway," said Blood.
"Yes, but look what Newton did."
"How could you have known?"
"That is the difference between a good player and an inspired player. I saw his potential even when he was fooling around with alchemy. Look what he did for their science, single-handed--everything! Your next move was too late and too weak."
"Yes. I thought I might still kill their computers by destroying the founder of International Difference Machines, Ltd."
Dust chuckled.
"That was indeed ironic. Instead of an IDM 120, the Beagle took along a young naturalist named Darwin."
Blood glanced along to the end of the sequence where the radioactive dust was scattered across a lifeless globe. "But it was not the science that did it, or the religion." "Of course not," said Dust. "It is all a matter of emphasis." "You were lucky. I want a rematch."
"All right. I will even give you your choice: Blood or Dust?"
"I'll stick with Blood."
"Very well. Winner elects to go first. Excuse me."
DUST MOVED TO second-century Rome and healed the carotid lesions that had produced Cato's cerebral hemorrhage. "Move one completed."
Blood entered eastern Germany in the sixteenth century and induced identical lesions in the Vatican assassin who had slain Martin Luther.
"Move one completed."
"You are skipping pretty far along."
"It is all a matter of emphasis"
"Truer and truer. Very well. You saved Luther. I will save Babbage. Excuse me."
An instantless instant later Dust had returned.
"Move two completed."
Blood studied the playing area with extreme concentration. Then, "All right."
Blood entered Chevvy's Theater on the evening in 1865 when the disgruntled actor had taken a shot at the president of the United States. Delicately altering the course of the bullet in midair, he made it reach its target.
"Move two completed."
"I believe that you are bluffing," said Dust. "You could not have worked out all the ramifications:'
"Wait and see."
Dust regarded the area with intense scrutiny.
"All right, then. You killed a president. I am going to save one—or at least prolong his life somewhat. I want Woodrow
Wilson to see that combine of nations founded. Its failure will mean more than if it had never been—and it will fail.—Excuse me."
Dust entered the twentieth century and did some repair work within the long jawed man.
"Move three completed:'
"Then I, too, shall save one."
Blood entered the century at a farther point and assured the failure of Leon Nozdrev, the man who had assassinated Nikita
Khrushchev.
"Move three completed."
"Ready, then?"
"Ready."
They reentered the sequence. The long whip cracked. Radio noises hummed about them. Satellites orbitted the world. Highways webbed the continents. Dusty cities held their points of power throughout. Ships clove the seas. Jets slid through the atmosphere. Grass grew. Birds migrated. Fishes nibbled.
Blood chuckled.
"You have to admit it was very close:' said Dust.
"As you were saying, there is a difference between a good player and an inspired player."
"You were lucky, too."
Blood chuckled again.
They regarded the world, its two and a half billions of people, their cities, their devices …
After a time, the inhabitant of the forward point spoke:
"Best two out of three?"
"All right. I am Blood. I go first"
.. And I am Dust. I follow you"
Calling Your Name
Howard Waldrop
Here's a wry and compassionate look at the proposition that sometimes it's the little things that count—and when they do, they count for a whole hell of a lot. In fact, they can change everything … including the world itself.
Howard Waldrop is widely considered to be one of the best short-story writers in the business, and his famous story The Ugly Chickens" won both the Nebula and the World Fantasy Awards in 1981. His work has been gathered in the collections: Howard Who?, All About Strange Monsters of the Recent Past: Neat Stories by Howard Waldrop, Night of the Cooters: More Neat Stories by Howard Waldrop, and Going Home Again. Waldrop is also the author of the novel The Texas-Israeli War: 1999, in collaboration with Jake Saunders, and of two solo novels, Them Bones and A Dozen Tough Jobs. He is at work on a new novel, tentatively entitled The Moon World. His most recent books are the print version of his collection Dream Factories and Radio Pictures (formerly available only in downloadable form online), the chapbook A Better World's in Birth!, and a collection of his stories written in collaboration with various other authors, Custer's Last Jump and Other Collaborations. Coming up is a new chapbook collection. Having lived in Washington State for a number of years, Waldrop recently moved back to his former hometown of Austin, Texas.
All my life I've waited
for someone to ease the pain
All my life I've waited
for someone to take the blame
—from "Calling Your Name"
by Janis Ian
I REACHED FOR the switch on the band saw.
THEN I WOKE up with a crowd forming around me.
And I was in my own backyard.
IT TURNS OUT that my next-door neighbor had seen me fall out of the storage building I use as a workshop and had called 911 when I didn't get up after a few seconds.
ONCE, LONG AGO in college, working in Little Theater. I'd had a light bridge lowered to set the fresnels for Blithe Spirit, just after the Christmas semester break. Some idiot had left a hot male 220 plug loose, and as I reached up to the iron bridge, it dropped against the bar. I'd felt that, all over, and I jumped backward about fifteen feet.
A crowd started for me, but I let out some truly blazing oath that turned the whole stage violet-indigo blue and they disappeared in a hurry. Then I yelled at the guys and girl in the technical booth to kill everything onstage, and spent the next hour making sure nothing else wasn't where it shouldn't be.
That's while I was working thirty-six hours a week at a printing plant, going to college full-time and working in the theater another sixty hours a week for no pay. I was also dating a foul-mouthed young woman named Susan who was brighter than me. Eventually something had to give—it was my stomach (an ulcer at twenty) and my relationship with her.
She came back into the theater later that day, and heard about the incident and walked up to me and said, "Are you happy to see me, or is that a hot male 220-volt plug in your pocket?"
That shock, the 220, had felt like someone shaking my hand at 2700 rpm while wearing a spiked glove and someone behind me was hammering nails in my head and meanwhile they were piling safes on me … .
When I'd touched the puny 110 band saw, I felt nothing. Then there were neighbors and two EMS people leaning over me upside down.
"What's up, Doc?" I asked.
"How many fingers?" he asked, moving his hand, changing it in a slow blur.
"Three, five, two,"
"What's today?"
"You mean Tuesday, or May 6th?"
I sat up.
"Easy," said the lady EMS person. "You'll probably have a headache."
The guy pushed me back down slowly. "What happened?" "I turned on the band saw. Then I'm looking at you."
He got up, went to the corner of the shed and turned off the breakers. By then the sirens had stopped, and two or three firefighters and the lieutenant had come in the yard.
"You okay, Pops?" he asked.
"I think so," I said. I turned to the crowd. "Thanks to whoever called these guys." Then the EMS people asked me some medical stuff, and the lieutenant, after looking at the breakers, went in the shed and fiddled around. He came out.
"You got a shorted switch," he said. "Better replace it."
I thanked Ms. Krelboind, the neighbor lady, everybody went away, and I went inside to finish my cup of coffee.
MY DAUGHTER MAUREEN pulled up as I drank the last of the milk skim off the top of the coffee.
She ran in.
"Are you all right, Dad?"
"Evidently," I said.
Her husband, Bob, was a fireman. He usually worked over at Firehouse #2, the one on the other side of town. He'd heard the address the EMS had been called to on the squawk box, and had called her.
"What happened?"
"Short in the saw," I said. "The lieutenant said so, officially."
"I mean," she repeated, "are you sure you're all right?" "It was like a little vacation," I said. "I needed one."
SHE CALLED HER husband, and I made more coffee, and we got to talking about her kids—Vera, Chuck and Dave, or whichever ones are hers—I can't keep up. There's two daughters, Maureen and Celine, and five grandkids. Sorting them all out was my late wife's job. She's only been gone a year and a month and three days.
We got off onto colleges, even though it would be some years before any of the grandkids needed one. The usual party schools came up. "I can see them at Sam Houston State in togas:' I said.
"I'm just real sure toga parties will come back," said Mo. Then I mentioned Kent State.
"Kent State? Nothing ever happens there," she said.
"Yeah, right:' I said, "like the nothing that happened after Nixon invaded Cambodia. All the campuses in America shut down. They sent the Guard in. They shot four people down, just like they were at a carnival."
She looked at me.
"Nixon? What did Nixon have to do with anything?"
"Well, he was the president. He wanted "no wider war.' Then he sent the Army into Cambodia and Laos. It was before your time."
"Daddy," she said, "I don't remember much American history. But Nixon was never president. I think he was vice president under one of those old guys—was it Eisenhower? Then he tried to be a senator. Then he wanted to be president, but someone whipped his ass at the convention. Where in that was he ever president? I know Eisenhower didn't die in office."
"What the hell are you talking about?"
"You stay right here," she said, and went to the living room. I heard her banging around in the bookcase. She came back with Vol 14 of the set of 1980s encyclopedias I'd bought for $20 down and $20 a month, seems like paying for about fifteen years on them …. She had her thumb in it, holding a place. She opened it on the washing machine lid. "Read."
The entry was on Nixon, Richard Milhous, and it was shorter than it should have been. There was the HUAC and Hiss stuff, the Checkers speech, the vice presidency and reelection, the Kennedy-Nixon debates, the loss, the Senate attempt, the "won't have Dick Nixon to kick around anymore" speech, the law firm, the oil company stuff, the death from phlebitis in 1977—
"Where the hell did you get this? It's all wrong."
"It's yours, Dad. It's your encyclopedia. You've had them twenty years. You bought them for us to do homework out of. Remember?"
I went to the living room. There was a hole in the set at Vol 14. I put it back in. Then I took out Vol 24 UV and looked up Vietnam, War in. There was WWII, 1939-1945, then French Colonial War 1945-1954, then America in 1954-1970. Then I took down Vol II and read about John E Kennedy (president, 1961-1969).
"Are you better now, Daddy?" she asked.
"No. I haven't finished reading a bunch of lies yet, I've just begun."
"I'm sorry. I know the shock hurt. And things haven't been good since Mom … But this really isn't like you."
"I know what happened in the Sixties! I was there! Where were you?"
"Okay, okay. Let's drop it. I've got to get back home; the kids are out of school soon."
"All right," I said. "It was a shock—not a nasty one, not my first, but maybe if I'm careful, my last."
"I'll send Bill over tomorrow on his day off and he can help you fix the saw. You know how he likes to futz with machinery."
"For gods sakes, Mo, it's a bad switch. It'll take two minutes to replace it. It ain't rocket science!"
She hugged me, went out to her car and drove off. Strange that she should have called her husband Bob, Bill. No wonder the kids struggled at school. Those encyclopedias sucked. I hope the whole staff got fired and went to prison.
I WENT DOWN to the library where they had Britannicas, World Books, old Compton's. Everybody else in the place was on, or waiting in line for, the Internet.
I sat down by the reference shelves and opened four or five encyclopedias to the entries on Nixon. All of them started Nixon, Richard Milhous, and then in brackets (1913-1977).
After the fifth one, I got up and went over to the reference librarian, who'd just unjammed one of the printers. She looked up at me and smiled, and as I said it, I knew I should not have, but I said. "All your encyclopedias are wrong."
The smile stayed on her face.
And then I thought Here's a guy standing in front of her; he's in his fifties; he looks a little peaked, and he's telling her all her reference books are wrong. Just like I once heard a guy, in his fifties, a little peaked, yelling at a librarian that some book in the place was trying to tell him that Jesus had been a Jew!
What would you do?
Before she could do anything, I said, "Excuse me." "Certainly," she said.
I left in a hurry.
MY SON-IN-LAW CAME over the next morning when he should have been asleep.
He looked a little different (His ears were longer. It took a little while to notice that was it.) and he seemed a little older, but he looked pretty much the same as always.
"Hey. Mo sent me over to do the major overhaul on the band saw."
"Fuck it," I said. "It's the switch. I can do it in my sleep." "She said she'd feel better if you let me do it."
"Buzz off."
He laughed and grabbed one of the beers he keeps in my refrigerator. "Okay, then," he said. "can I borrow a couple of albums to tape? I want the kids to hear what real music sounds like."
He had a pretty good selection of 45s, albums and CDs, even some shellac 78s. He's got a couple of old turntables (one that plays 16 rpm, even). But I have some stuff on vinyl he doesn't.
"Help yourself," I said. He went to the living room and started making noises opening cabinets.
I MENTIONED THE Who. "Who?"
"Not who. The Who"
"What do you mean, who?"
"Who. The rock group. The Who."
"Who?"
"No, no. The rock group, which is named The Who."
"What is this," he asked. "Abbott and Hardy?"
"Well get to that later," I said. "Same time as the early Beatles. That …"
"Who?"
"Let me start over. Roger Daltry. Pete Townsend. John Entwistle. Keith—"
"The High Numbers!" he said. "Why didn't you say so?"
"A minute ago. I said they came along with the early Beatles and you said—"
"Who?"
"Do not start."
"There is no rock band called the Beetles," he said with authority.
I looked at him. "Paul McCartney …"
He cocked his head, gave me a go-on gesture.
"… John Lennon, George Harri ..
"You mean the Quarrymen?" he asked.
.. son, Ringo Starr."
"You mean Pete Best and Stuart Sutcliffe," he said.
"Sir Richard Starker. Ringo Starr. From all the rings on his fingers."
"The Quarrymen. Five guys. They had a few hits in the early Sixties. Wrote a shitpot of songs for other people. Broke up in 1966. Boring old farts since then—tried comeback albums, no back to come to. Lennon lives in a trailer in New Jersey. God knows where the rest of them are."
"Lennon's dead," I said. "He was assassinated at the Dakota Apartments in NYC in 1981 by a guy who wanted to impress Jodie Foster."
"Well, then, CNTV's got it all wrong, because they did a where-are-they-now t
hing a couple of weeks ago, and he looked pretty alive to me. He talked a few minutes and showed them some Holsteins or various other moo-cows, and a reporter made fun of them, and Lennon went back into the trailer and closed the door."
I knew they watched a lot of TV at the firehouse.
"This week they did one on ex-President Kennedy. It was his eighty-fourth birthday or something. He's the one that looked near-dead to me—they said he's had Parkinson's since the Sixties. They only had one candle on the cake, but I bet like Popeye these days, he had to eat three cans of spinach just to blow it out. His two brothers took turns reading a proclamation from President Gore. It looked like he didn't know who that was. His mom had to help him cut the cake. Then his wife, Marilyn, kissed him. He seemed to like that."
I SAT THERE quietly a few minutes.
"In your family," I asked, "who's Bill?"
He quit thumbing through the albums. He took in his breath a little too loudly. He looked at me.
"Edward," he said. "I'm Bill."
"Then who's Bob?"
"Bob was what they called my younger brother. He lived two days. He's out at Kid Heaven in Greenwood. You, me and
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