The Free Lunch

by Spider Robinson

  “And then one of the scientific breakthroughs that had come too late to help us produced a spin-off: time-travel.”

  Mike followed a thought train until it crashed. “But,” he blurted, “but if you succeed—if you guys manage to change history—even if you pull it off—”

  Hormat nodded calmly. “Our time—our world—ceases to exist. Yes.”

  “But—don’t you disappear with it, too? You and all your friends back here?”

  “How can we know that?”

  “Why…by…by—”

  “How would you design an experiment to answer that question?”

  Mike thought about it and felt his head spin. “Jesus, Hormat—”

  “Probably we will disappear, yes. Never have been. We will know we have succeeded if we notice ourselves fading out of existence. If it is given to us to know that. If we succeed.”

  “But how can you just—”

  “As with you and your mother,” Hormat said, “it will be very sad—but a relief for all concerned.”

  Mike told himself to shut up. “But aren’t there—I mean, don’t you have—?” He got control of his mouth back and closed it.

  “Loved ones in the future?” Hormat finished for him. “Whom I will miss as badly as you miss your mother? Yes, Mike.” He closed his eyes briefly. “We all do. But like you, we must do something. Even if it turns out to be wrong. We hope the future we bring about will be better. And if it is not, at least we will not know it.”

  Annie shivered slightly; sat up straighter, and squared her shoulders. “I have always prided myself on being able to handle three impossible things before breakfast,” she said. “Two to go. What exactly do you and your friends plan to do?”

  “I told you,” Hormat said.

  “You’re going to give us a free lunch.”

  “Exactly. We plan to make you all rich—without letting you catch us at it.”

  “Huh?” Mike said in spite of himself. “Isn’t that exactly how we screwed up everything for you guys? All of us trying to get rich?”

  Hormat almost smiled. “Most of you do not want to be rich,” he said, “although you think you do. Except for a few freaks, most of you do not really want anything so unreasonable. You want only a privilege you have been told belongs to the rich: freedom from fear. You want to be free of want, free of burden, free of worry, so that you may sit by your own vine under your own fig tree long enough to either grow bored or find someone to play with. You want enough to take care of your loved ones and indulge their reasonable whims.”

  “I guess,” Mike said.

  “Mike, history is a complex subject, and economic history is the worst. But most of the problems the human race has ever had—the real problems—trace back to the same cause. Insufficient wealth.”

  “Don’t you mean inadequate, inequitable distribution of wealth?” Annie asked.

  “In a sense, yes,” Hormat agreed. “But while you cannot control individual greed, you can overwhelm it—with enough wealth.”

  “Can you?” she asked, looking dubious.

  Mike started to see it. “Annie,” he said, “every society has parasites, right? They suck as much money out of it as they can, so they can play Who’s Got the Most Toys with their parasite friends. If there’s enough of them, and they’re greedy and short-sighted enough…well, the society dies, one way or another, and their wealth doesn’t mean shit anymore. But suppose there was so much money that even after they hauled off all they could carry, there was still enough to go around, enough to keep everybody fed and working.”

  She was grimacing. “That does sound like what America’s been trying to do for the last century or two—get rich faster than the parasites could steal it.”

  “And it has done so more successfully than most cultures in history,” Hormat agreed. “Even so, the racing has been…what is the expression about throats?”

  It was Mike who got the reference. “Neck and neck.”

  “Yes. So my friends and I are going to cheat.”

  “I repeat,” Annie said. “How?”

  He smiled. “By injecting wealth into the system—by stealth.”

  “Like pickpockets in reverse,” Mike breathed.

  “Yes,” Hormat said.

  Annie shook her head. “I don’t understand.”

  Things were falling into place in Mike’s head, like a mental game of Tetris. “I think I do,” he said. “Annie, listen: a truck leaves a warehouse with a load of five hundred widgets, okay? Any truck, anywhere on earth. When it gets where it’s going and they unload it, how many widgets are sitting there on the loading dock?”

  “Four hundred and eighty,” she said.

  “Tops,” he agreed. “Suppose that stopped happening?”

  Her jaw dropped. Hormat smiled.

  “Suppose five hundred and twenty widgets came off the truck. Who’d complain?” Mike went on. “Somebody will probably pocket the unexpected bonus—but who cares?”

  “It’s in the system now,” Hormat said, “part of the economy…and without being documented because it falls into a gray zone.”

  Annie was staring into space. “It’s a truism that you never quite get what you pay for, anywhere except Dreamworld—my God, we’re all so cynical that if it ever stopped being true, or reversed, it might be quite a while before anyone even noticed…”

  “Suppose a little more oil—of slightly better quality—started coming out of the Alaska pipeline than was pumped in?” Hormat said. “Just possibly it might be noticed…but would it be remarked? Who profits by investigating the phenomenon?

  “Suppose the generators feeding the national power grid started to perform just a little better than their design specs said they should—almost as if power were being fed into the system from some outside source? Who would complain?

  “Let’s say you were a geologist who could prove a massive new oil dome or iron deposit or copper vein or coal seam was in fact not there until ten minutes before the first exploratory drill discovered it—who would believe you?

  “Suppose sitologists suddenly made unexpected breakthroughs in genetically enhanced food crops—how many would deny that their own genius was responsible? How many would even mention, much less credit, their grad-student slave—that funny little dwarf?

  “If your computer never ever crashed again…well, you would notice, eventually—but would you actually call the newspapers? If you did, could anyone possibly track down the specific individual whose virus had rewritten and improved your operating system software?”

  “You and your friends can do all those things?” Annie asked.

  “And much more,” Hormat said. “We hope.”

  A thought occurred to Mike. “Aren’t you guys doing it the hard way? I mean, why can’t you just…I don’t know, like, hack into the world banking system and diddle all the computers into thinking there’s more wealth? Increase everybody’s bank balance by a few bucks a month—Mom never used to even look at her bank statements, and anyway, nobody’s gonna say anything if they do find a discrepancy in their favor.”

  Hormat and Annie were both shaking their heads. The dwarf let her take it. “That just creates more money, Mike—not more wealth. Money with nothing to back it up is one of the principal reasons the world economy is in the fix it’s in.”

  “What you need is more of what one buys with money,” Hormat amplified. “Raw materials. Power. Calories. Drinking water. Things nanotechnology can produce ‘out of thin air,’ very cheaply, by using invisibly tiny machines to build new molecules an atom at a time out of available parts. You will have the same amount of money in your bank account—but soon you will be able to buy more with it.”

  Mike nodded dubiously. “If you say so.”

  “I’ve listed only some of just the first-aid measures. We will do many other things. But those convey the overall idea. Your dying descendants have come back to hang an IV drip for your ailing civilization—to build its strength and make it healthy enough t
o survive the coming crisis. Our immense wealth is useless to us, for it cannot be left to our own descendants. So we must give it to our ancestors.”

  “WHAT KIND OF other things?” Mike asked.

  Annie shot him a look, moved her head from side to side, and unobtrusively moved her wrist so that the watch on her Band showed. We’ve got the general idea, Hormat’s late already, and there are more important things to—

  “Give me a couple of examples,” Mike said. Annie frowned, but he ignored her. Hormat was a big boy; he could take care of himself.

  Hormat apparently failed to notice the byplay. “Well, some of it will consist of persuading you to use more intelligently the resources you already have. Some of the most important things we want to bring you are not material goods, but ideas.”

  “Like what?”

  Hormat pursed his lips, consulted an imaginary list below him and to his right, and picked one. “Microwave roasting.”

  “You can’t roast with a microwave,” Mike said.

  “Not by itself, no,” Hormat said. “How much do you know about coffee, Mike?”

  He thought about it. “Use good beans and a pinch of salt and clean the gear immediately, without soap, every time.”

  “All anyone needs to know,” Annie murmured.

  Hormat sighed and nodded. “This will require a brief lecture, then.”

  Annie again shot Mike a dirty look, which he again ignored.

  “There are three basic strains of coffee plant,” Hormat began. “Arabica is the most expensive—not just because it is the best-tasting, but because it is the most delicate. It can only survive in very specific and narrow conditions, in ecological niches that occur only a few places on earth—and with luck. Each year, a whole nation’s crop may fail without warning. Slightly less feeble is Robusta coffee—it requires slightly less strict conditions and is a little less vulnerable to disease. But it is usually blended with at least a little Arabica, because its own brew does not taste as good.”

  “The cherries are too big,” Annie said before she could stop herself.

  Hormat nodded vigorously. “Exactly. They yield a much larger bean.”

  “Isn’t that good?” Mike asked.

  She shook her head. “When you roast them, by the time the inside is done—” She broke off suddenly and knitted her brow.

  “—the outside is burnt,” Hormat finished for her.

  “Cushlamachree,” Annie said softly. “I see where you’re going now.”

  Mike shook his head. “I don’t.”

  She turned to face him, an odd expression on her face. “The third kind of coffee, Liberica, grows anywhere. Almost like kudzu, you couldn’t kill it with an ax. It laughs at parasites and disease, doesn’t care what the weather is. And it’s perfectly worthless—because it produces cherries the size of golf balls. The coffee tastes like hell.”

  It hit Mike all at once. “Microwave and roasting, together.” He and Annie chorused the next sentence. “The inside and the outside get done at the same time—”

  Annie still had that funny look on her face. “The coffee industry is one of the biggest, most profitable industries on the planet,” she said, seeming to be talking to herself even though she was looking right at him. “Billions a year. Lots of billions.”

  “We can increase its productivity at least fivefold within a decade,” Hormat told her, “simply by whispering the idea in the right ears. They’ll be able to do their own arithmetic.”

  Her eyes were getting wider. She turned back to Hormat. “Liberica will grow anywhere,” she said, a singsong tone entering her voice, “but most of the places it happens to be growing already…”

  “Are some of the poorest countries on earth,” he said.

  “Now,” she said, and they both smiled broadly.

  “A lot of our work will be like that,” Hormat said. “Spreading ideas. Encouraging your people to think in new ways about resources they already possess—and to reexamine things they take for granted.”

  “Like what?” Mike asked. “Tell me another.” Annie glared at him reprovingly, but he failed to notice.

  “Software,” Hormat said at once, and then hesitated.

  “What do you mean?”

  Hormat chose his words. “Mike, for several reasons I want to tell you just as little as I can about exactly what went so horribly wrong to produce the world I come from. But…are you familiar with the basic notion of nanotechnology?”

  “Tiny robots,” Mike said, “way too tiny to see, small enough to take molecules apart into atoms and then reassemble them into different molecules.”

  Hormat nodded. “The key to infinite wealth. And each tiny robot must be run by an even tinier computer, yes?”

  Mike and Annie nodded agreement.

  Hormat pointed to Annie’s computer. “How reliable is yours?”

  Annie’s face began to change as she took his meaning. “Oh my God,” she breathed.

  “What is it, Annie?”

  “That thing crashes at least once every other day. They all do. I mean, it’s not like back in the twentieth, when they crashed twice an hour and nobody thought anything of it…but even today…God, Hormat’s absolutely right, and I can’t believe I never realized it before. Don’t you see, Mike? Nanobots could theoretically multiply faster than a plague. One teeny nanobot, running software as reliable as, say, the best-selling word processor on the market, might well be able to turn the entire planet into gray goo by this time next Thursday.”

  Mike thought about it and started to shudder. “We’re nowhere near ready for nanotechnology…”

  “You need a new computer language, an operating system and applications that are one hundred percent bug-free and crash-proof,” Hormat said. “Nothing less will do. Ninety-nine point nine nine repeated out to the thousandth decimal place is not good enough.”

  “And you’ll give us those?” Mike said. “But how? How are you gonna persuade all the nano guys in the world to give up all their own software and use yours?”

  “We probably couldn’t,” Hormat said. “Instead we hope to release a worm, which will eventually infect every piece of software already in existence. Think of it as a bug-eating worm. When it is through conquering the noosphere, computers will not crash anymore.”

  “But—”

  Reluctantly, but firmly, Annie interrupted. “Mike, that’s enough. Hormat’s out of time. He’s going to get home late as it is.”

  The dwarf shook his head. “Let him ask his questions, Annie. It does not matter. I am no longer in any hurry.”

  She looked dubious. “But surely the later you get back, the worse it—”

  “Thank you,” he said with great kindness, “but there is no later than late. The moment I missed my deadline, I became a dead man.”

  MIKE AND ANNIE both cried out at the same time, and cried the same word, but each meant separate things. “Why?”

  Hormat answered Mike first. “Because what we are doing can have no slipups. It is simply too dangerous. If we are to succeed, we must have not only great determination and exhaustive training…but perfect discipline. The moment my absence is noted, they will know what I’ve done. And why. I’ve committed the ultimate crime: anachrognosticism. I have given knowledge of future events and of our present plans to…we call you ‘locals,’ among ourselves. In effect, I’ve given you two the same power we all fearfully bear: the power to end the universe at any moment, simply by revealing our existence. If you had carried out the threat you made to me a while ago on your doorstep, Annie, and told even what you knew then to any medium of historical record…the End of Everything might have come.”

  She repeated her own question, more anguish in her voice than Mike had ever heard. “Why, Hormat? Why did you stay and answer our questions? Why sacrifice yourself?”

  To Mike’s astonishment, Hormat smiled broadly and actually emitted a rumbling gurgle that might have been his version of a chuckle. “I doubt I can explain it to you. I’m not su
re I understand it myself.” His expression sobered, and he looked as sad and skeptical as ever again. “Here is the best answer I can give you. I told you because I decided I owe it to you both.”

  Mike was appalled. He’d known he was pushing Hormat by dragging him home—Hormat had said that he mustn’t be late. When the appointed hour came and went, and the dwarf just kept on talking, Mike had suspected he was probably getting his new friend in a jam—but Annie needed all the information she could get to make her decision. So Mike had kept pumping him, on the assumption that Hormat would know when he really really had to go. Mike himself had once taken a beating rather than leave a friend in need just to get home on time.

  But, death? Some of his horror and guilt tried to transmute into indignation. “You owe it to us?” he cried. “What the hell does that mean?”

  “It means he’s a jerk,” Conway said.

  CONWAY STOOD IN the open doorway, aiming a shotgun at them.

  Mike froze like a rabbit. His face tingled, felt hot. His scalp crawled. He could hear his pulse thundering in his neck. Maybe this was okay. As long as Hormat still had some sleepy-gas left…

  Behind him he heard some very odd sounds, which suddenly converted themselves into a mental picture. Hormat had just leaned across the table, put his broad palm over Annie’s mouth, and pinched her nostrils shut. Mike was already holding his own breath. He began to flood with relief, at the same time trying to keep it from his face—

  Conway grinned broadly. “Nice try, Sneezy,” he said to Hormat.

  Mike kept holding his breath, but all the relief seemed to sigh out of him. Scrubbing Conway’s memory hadn’t kept him from deducing what must have happened to him and Haines back in the dungeon.

  “I’m man enough to admit you clowns made me look stupid twice in one day,” Conway said. “But I learn from my mistakes.” He took his left hand from the shotgun barrel just long enough to point to his own nose. “Filters,” he said. “Should have had them in when I was working on you, kid, I know. I didn’t realize you had pals with magic powers, then.” Despite his words, he was still looking directly at Hormat, speaking to him. “I do, now.”

  “How much did you hear?” Hormat asked.