by Ben Bova
“Are there any questions at this point?” asked Calvin, her cold blue eyes scanning the audience.
“I have one,” said a pretty young woman, rising to her feet.
“Yes?”
The woman voiced her question.
“I thought I had covered that point,” said Calvin, doing her best to hide her irritation. “However…”
She launched into an even more simplistic explanation.
Isn’t it amazing? thought Geller. Here are two women, one with a mind like a steel trap, the other with an I.Q. that would probably freeze water, and yet I can’t take my eyes off the woman who asked that ridiculous question. Poor Dr. Calvin; Nature has such a malicious sense of humor.
Calvin noticed a number of the men staring admiringly at her questioner. It was not the first time that men had found something more fascinating than Calvin to capture their attention, nor the hundredth, nor the thousandth.
What a shame, she thought, that they aren’t more like robots, that they let their hormones overwhelm their logic. Here I am, explaining how I plan to spend twelve billion dollars of their money. and they’re more interested in a pretty face.
Her answer completed, she launched into a discussion of the attempts they were making to provide stronger bodies for those robots designed for extraterrestrial use by the application of titanium frames with tight molecular bondings.
I wonder, thought Geller, if she’s ever even had a date with a man? Not a night of wild passion, God knows, but just a meal and perhaps a trip to the theater, where she didn’t talk business. He shook his head almost imperceptibly. No, he decided, it would probably bore her to tears. All she cares about are her formulas and equations. Good looks would be wasted on her.
Calvin caught Geller staring at her, and met and held his gaze.
What a handsome young man, she thought. I wonder if I’ve seen him at any previous meetings? I’m sure I’d remember if I had. Why is he staring at me so intently?
I wonder, thought Geller, if anyone she’s loved has ever loved her back?
Probably he’s just astounded that a woman can have a brain, she concluded. As if anything else mattered.
In fact, thought Geller, I wonder if she’s ever loved at all?
Look at that tan, thought Calvin, still staring at Geller. It’s attractive, to be sure, but do you ever work, or do you spend all your time lazing mindlessly on the beach? She fought back an urge to sigh deeply between sentences. Sometimes it’s hard to imagine that people like you and I even belong to the same species, I have so much more in common with my robots.
Sometimes, thought Geller, when I listen to you wax rhapsodic about positronic brains and molecular bonding, it’s hard to imagine that we belong to the same species, you sound so much like one of your robots.
Still, thought Calvin against her will, you are tall and you are handsome, and you certainly have an air of self-assuredness about you. Most men won’t or can’t match my gaze. And your eyes are blue and clear. I wonder….
Still, thought Geller, there must be something there, some core oJ femininity beneath the harsh features and coldly analytical mind. I wonder….
Calvin shook her head inadvertently and almost lost track of what she was saying.
Ridiculous, she concluded. Absolutely ridiculous.
Geller stared at her one more time, studying the firm jaw, the broad shoulders, the aggressive stance, the face devoid of makeup, the hair that could have been so much more attractive.
Ridiculous, he concluded. Absolutely ridiculous.
Calvin spoke for another fifteen minutes, then opened the floor to questions.
There were two, and she handled them both succinctly.
“I want to thank Dr. Calvin for spending this time with us,” concluded Linus Becker, the young chief operating executive of United States Robots and Mechanical Men. “ As long as we have her remarkable intellect working for us, I feel confident that we will continue to forge ahead and expand the parameters of the science of robotics. “
“I’ll second that,” said one of the major stockholders. “When we produce a positronic brain with half the capabilities of our own Dr. Calvin, the field of robotics will have come of age.”
“Thank you,” said Calvin, ignoring a strange sense of emptiness within her. “I am truly flattered.”
“It’s we who are flattered,” said Becker smoothly, “to be in the presence of such brilliance.” He applauded her, and soon the entire audience, including Geller, got to their feet and gave her a standing ovation.
Then each in turn walked up to her to introduce himself or herself, and shake her hand, and comment on her intellect and creativity.
“Thank you,” said Calvin, acknowledging yet another compliment. You take my hand as if you expect it to be tungsten and steel, rather than sinew and bone. Have I come to resemble my robots that much?
“I appreciate your remarks,” said Calvin to another stockholder. I wonder if lovers speak to each other in the same hail-fellow-well-met tones?
And then Geller stepped up and took her hand, and she almost jumped from the sensation, the electricity passing from his strong, tanned hand to her own.
“I think you are quite our greatest asset, Dr. Calvin,” he said.
“Our robots are our greatest asset,” she replied graciously. “I’m just a scientific midwife.”
He stared intently at her for a moment, and suddenly the tension left his body. Impossible. You’re too much like them. If I asked you out, it would be an act of charity, and I think you are too proud and too perceptive to accept that particular kind of charity.
She looked into his eyes one last time. Impossible. I have my work to do-and my robots never disappoint me by proving to be merely human.
“Remember, everyone,” announced Becker, “there’s a banquet three hours from now.” He turned to Calvin. “You’ll be there, of course.”
Calvin nodded. “I’ll be there,” she said with a sigh.
She had only an hour to change into a formal gown for the banquet, and she was running late. She entered her rather nondescript apartment, walked through the living room and bedroom, both of which were filled to overflowing with scientific journals, opened her closet, and began laying out her clothes on the bed.
“Did anyone ever tell you that you have the most beautiful blue eyes?” asked her butler robot.
“Why, thank you,” said Calvin.
“It’s true, you know,” continued the butler. “Lovely, lovely eyes, as blue as the purest sapphire. “
Her robot maid entered the bedroom to help her dress.
“Such a pretty smile,” said the maid. “If I had a smile like yours, men would fight battles just for the pleasure of seeing it turned upon them.”
“You’re very kind,” said Calvin.
“Oh, no, Mistress Susan,” the robot maid corrected her. “ You’re very beautiful. “
Calvin noticed the robot chef standing in the doorway to her bedroom.
“Stop staring at me,” she said. “I’m only half-dressed. Where are your manners?”
“Legs like yours, and you expect me to stop staring?” said the chef with a dry, mechanical chuckle. “Every Bight I dream about meeting a woman with legs like yours.”
Calvin slipped into her gown, then waited for the robot maid to zip up the back.
“Such clear, smooth skin,” crooned the maid. “If I were a woman, that’s the kind of skin I would want.”
They are such perceptive creatures, reflected Calvin, as she stood before a mirror and applied her almost-clear lipstick. Such dear creatures, she amended. Of course they are just responding to the needs of First Law-to my needs-but how very thoughtful they are.
She picked up her purse and headed to the door.
I wonder if they ever get tired of reciting this litany?
“You’ll be the belle of the ball, “ said the robot butler proudly as she walked out of the apartment.
“Why, thank you very much
,” said Calvin. “You grow more flattering by the day.”
The robot shook its metallic head. “It is only flattery if it is a lie, my lady,” it said just before the door slid shut behind her.
Her emotional balance fully restored, as it always was whenever she came home from dealing with human beings, she headed toward the banquet feeling vigorous and renewed. She wondered if she would be seated near that handsome August Geller, who had listened to her so intently during her speech.
Upon reflection, she hoped that she would be seated elsewhere. He aroused certain uneasy feelings within her, this handsome young man-and fantasies, when all was said and done, were for lesser intellects which, unlike herself, couldn’t cope with the cold truths of the real world.
The Present Eternal
by Barry N. Malzberg
So arnold potterley went home. where, after all, was there to go? If there was nowhere to hide, then you might at least be uncomfortable, squirm under the knowledge of complete exposure where, at least, you were most comfortable.
At least, that was Potterley’s way of rationalizing this ultimate disaster. Others had different views, of course. Nimmo went to the outback. Foster went insane.
I have been asked to write a history of the world after the chronoscope. This is a great honor, of course. I am being honored in that request. It is not so long that I have been writing, after all, first numbers and then for a long time the alphabet, until at last I began to feel more secure with words and phrases and then whole sentences; still this is a big leap for me. “If you do not do it, Jorg, who will do it?” I have been told, rather asked, but this does not honor so much as it frightens me. Many things frighten me of course; the chronoscope taught us to be afraid of everything. The chronoscope taught us common sense. The chronoscope taught us the true way of the world. “ Jorg” is not real, is my nom, as they say, de plumay.
Caroline Potterley waited for months after she could have done it to finally bring the machine into her home, seek her dead daughter, Laurel. To see her again, to know the little girl as she had been had constituted the final passion of her life and yet when it was possible at last, when Arnold had insisted and Foster had made that thing and the time-viewer, for reasons she had never understood had escaped to the entire world…when that opportunity was, at last, hers, Caroline found herself in thrall, held back, locked against her own desire. She knew that once she brought in the machine and everyone was doing it now, Arnold refused but how could he have stopped her?, once she used the controls and instructions and found her dead daughter she would fall and fall, plunge into something, some quality of emotion which she had never known…and it was the need to fight against this stricture, to fight against that last and terrible plunge which caused her to hold back but there came finally that point at which she could no longer resist.
“I can’t hold back any longer, Arnold,” she would have said if they had still been talking in these months, but they were not. Arnold was never home except to sleep and sometimes even not at night, he wandered around in grief and shock, pulling at the pockets of his suit jackets and finishing the small bottles of wine which case by case he brought in and bottle by bottle he drained. So she did not say this to him, merely made the necessary arrangements which were easy to do in this strange and terrible world which had evolved, and opened the viewer to her history, to that time before the fire when
—When she had had a little girl laughing and tumbling in the corridors of her life, when she and Laurel had told one another secrets which now she could not, somehow, remember.
This is my partial history of the world after the chronoscope, then. No one can write the full history, who has the time? Who has the tools? It was the criminal, the necessary part of our lives. I am making some of this up. I am imagining some of this as the way it should have been. No one who was there at the time bothered to write it down or to put it in final form, it is left to me to make it up as best I can. That is what was said to me, “Make it up as best you can. If it seems to fit, then make it fit. There are no truths. What is truth? What can truth be? Set it down as you see fit. “ And so on and so forth in this difficult and imperfect time. I was talking about who used it first. Who is to say who used it first? All of them did, everyone did. But I think it must have been the thieves and lowlifes who perceived its lesser possibilities, those dedicated to the transcendent and the bravest view of matters who would have adapted the chronoscope first, not the leaders of nations but those who toiled in the outskirts of the nations. For them the chronoscope would yield a kind of eternal present through which they could scamper gratefully, thoughtfully, seeking grander device. Who else could it have been? It was these visionaries of course, who first made use of the device. This is no surprise, those like Potterley are always ahead of the herd in their willingness to try new and different means.
Of course everyone, theoretically, who used the timeviewer was a criminal by fiat; we are talking (notice how easily I slide into the voice of authority and generalization, that pontifical “we,” but I have been reading many of the old texts in preparation for this assignment and in order to find the proper approach) rather of professionals, those who considered it already an occupation. Secret combinations, long-buried hiding places, crevices containing the untaxed unconverted profits…all of these were easily available to a patient and understanding scan.
Crimes of violence and passion, surprisingly, diminished; the chronoscope made passion and violence vicariously available to the widest, most eager audience and the pre-chronoscope sex lives of the famous and desired were-well, they were most famous and desired.
In the viewer, then, in that narrow and focused tube of memory, Laurel waved at her, skipped to the bottom of the slide and began her tumbling ascent, in the shafts of indifferent late afternoon light (it must have been that first October they had the slide, Laurel’s teeth were uneven and the dress she wore had been somehow lost after one season, Caroline remembered this, she remembered everything) she seemed ever more vulnerable as she rose and yet somehow, mixed with the vulnerability, there was a toughness, a security of effort, a determination which would have fifteen years later, maybe less, made her a fearsome young woman. Caroline could see that strength, could take it for the moment into herself and knowing that, knowing that the twenty-year-old Laurel would have been able to direct circumstance as Caroline never could, gave her a sudden and shuddering moment of insight, of possibility, which in the thin gray light cast from the viewer seemed to cast her up very much as Laurel herself seemed to rise, seemed to lock them into some passionate and savage assertion which could, in that moment, reach out from the constricted space of the viewer and become, almost become, the world.
One year after the particulars of chronoscopy appeared on a popular science program any dummy could have figured out, your Tiffany, who thought of herself still as lost in the darkness of crime, walked into the home of Paul Taber, owner of half the casinos in Miami. There was no need to fear the presence of Taber or anyone else; she had cleared that. She had watched Taber and his fifth wife leave and, furthermore, she had watched them take a last look, another little security peek for them at the jewels and cash that a careful scan through the years had shown them so industriously accumulating right up to that point, twelve hours earlier, where they had secured the house (no problem for Tiffany) and left on a long, sudden, necessary trip.
On the way to the safe with the real stuff, humming a little song of accomplishment, Tiffany picked up a few bangles here and a few baubles over there, working from the map of the premises she had sketched out so carefully, so industriously, put them into her little sack. Just as she scampered toward the safe, she saw the shadows against the window and then a rough, clumsy but manifestly accomplished thug came into the light and stared at her. He seemed to be holding a sack of his own.
“I hadn’t thought of this,” Tiffany said.
“Who are you?” the thug asked.
“But I should have thought of i
t,” Tiffany said. “I mean, it doesn’t show the future, right?”
“What future?” the thug said. “This is the future. Okay, hand over the stuff.”
“It’s mine,” she said stupidly. “I worked for it.”
The thug pulled out a gun and pointed it with easy accomplishment at a dangerous area of Tiffany’s chest. “You didn’t work hard enough,” he said.
“Protestant ethic,” Tiffany said pointlessly. “I was here first, anyway. “
“But I’m here now. And I can open that safe as easy as you. Easier. I know the combination.”
“So do I.”
“The viewer,” he said. Understanding flooded the thug’s features; he appeared, suddenly, years younger and more alert. It did wonders for his complexion, too. “You have one of those things, too. You can look at the past.”
“I’m also patient and careful,” Tiffany said. “If you had done any real research at all instead of grabbing one of those ten-cent viewers and spinning the dials, you would have seen that there’s a spot in this place which has an alarm hooked up directly to headquarter, five minutes away. And you’re standing on it, dummy.”
“You’re just trying to get me to leave. “
“Would I try to scare you for no reason? A colleague? We’d better get out of here, pal.”
“You mean, like me first,” the thug said. “ And leave you to clean out the place on your own. No, not without that stuff I’m not going.” He brandished the gun.
Tiffany shrugged; Baubles and bangles, yes, but the supply was infinite. It was as infinite as time. Didn’t he understand this? The arena had become vastly more open; the walls had been taken down. “Take them,” she said generously, passing handfuls. She walked toward a window. “I’ve got three other places on the list and that’s just for tonight.”
The thug stood, clutching jewelry, his features fallen into their more accustomed places, his eyes stunned and blinking. “You’re so sure” he said, “so sure of everything.” He looked at the gun over which a necklace had been casually draped. “I never had your opportunities,” he said.