by Roger Elwood
Nevertheless, I felt compelled to do something in memory of the anniversary, Babe having been one of my enthusiasms of years back and one of the basic prophets as well. Selected, therefore, a chisel from the excellent batch of weaponry I kept behind this very desk and went out into the streets. A small boy would have been best but the law is not up to that yet; will not understand for at least a few more years that it is better to catch problems at the source, not outcome. A geriatric then. It is always a geriatric. I am getting so bored with them! But this would be with a chisel and in memory of the Babe; maybe I could make something special out of it. I cornered the one I wanted in a bare glade in the park, having tracked him for fifteen minutes for the isolation. Seventy-five or so with liver patches all over him; a high, quivering aspect to the nostrils in motion, which reminded me vaguely of my father, now unfortunately deceased. Newspapers under the arm, a brown paper bag dangling from his fingers. Ready, ready, ready to die; ten years past his time and needing release. I backed him against a tree, raising the chisel.
“No,” he said, when he finally confronted me and understood the situation. I never like to take them from behind; part of the pleasure is in seeing and sharing their knowledge of death. Some shriek, some lean to embrace, others are apathetic, but ultimately with the geriatrics it is always the same: at last an acceptance. This is why I am getting bored with them. “Please,” he whimpered, “I don’t want to.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, raising the chisel. I always say that I am sorry; in some basic sense I am. It is dull to kill one geriatric after the next, even if one must take pleasure where one can and even if it is ultimately for the sake of the government. “It’s got to be done.”
“Please,” he said again, “you don’t want to do it. Not to me. I never bothered anyone. Listen, I’m a sick man: a heart condition. The doctors told me just last week that I’m going to die soon anyway.” His eyes blinked. “If I’m going to die soon, it’s just such a waste,” he said, and I could see him try to work cunning into the proposal. “There are lots of healthy jerrys around. Get one of them and it would be a service. A year from now, six months I won’t even be here, son. Son. You remind me of him, do you know that? I got to write him a letter soon; I owe him one.”
“Sorry,” I said again, “you know that illness is no excuse.” Most of them he anyway, whether from fear, confusion, or genuine senility I could not care. For you, Babe, I whispered, raising the chisel, and for you too while I’m at it, Dick, you poor, born-too-early, out-of-your-time, sons of bitches. I got him clean with the first shot in the forehead, cracking his skull open like the windshield of a rental car, then added another one in the guts for the double tribute. You too, Dick. The bag fell first and the geriatric on top of it. I hate to call them jerrys even though this is their own name for themselves; it deprives them of dignity.
I left him in the glade.
Later, as necessary, I phoned into the local center to report the elimination. “You’ll find a chisel next to the body,” I added somewhat obscurely, “it’s a kind of tribute to someone.”
“Surely sir,” the blank voice of the secretary said, “and thank you very much for the service.”
“Don’t think of it.”
“If you’ll give me your name and coding number now, we’ll see that it’s properly entered to your credit.”
“That’s all right,” I said, winking at the phone and already putting it down, “I don’t want the credit. It isn’t necessary. I did it in memory of a friend of mine.”
A FEW MINUTES
by
Laurence M. Janifer
You sit down in the largest chair in the room, There’s no reason why the luxury of the place surprises you, is there? it being your own living-room in your own house, after all. Carol designed it especially for you and your visitors, now that there are so many of them; you ought to be used to being a famous man by now. Rich, famous, virtually a National Resource . . . pride would be a very easy trap to fall into, and perhaps that tiny shock of surprise keeps you out of the trap.
You smile, a little; and Charley knows that smile nearly as well as you do. “What’s wrong?”
So you look across the room at Charley, lounging against the fireplace-that-actually-works, and you realize, perhaps for the very first time, that he’s a man. Charles Schumann, thirty years old, six-feet-one-inch tall, married, two children—he’s been a man for quite a time, but you’d never entirely seen that, seeing instead your son. “I was just thinking—well, nothing much. The Committee’s going to be here in a few minutes.”
“I know. And you were wondering whether there would be a street named after you or a whole damned city.” Close enough; your smile broadens. “Well—it is important. One world. Or something very like it.”
“One world,” Charley says. Almost an actor’s voice. A solidly athletic body. And saved from the fate of a matinee idol by an early interest in particle physics—your influence, perhaps, though you’ve always tried to keep from directing the boy, and if he’d wanted to be an actor, actually . . .
“Sooner or later, it had to happen. No balance between nations stays stable forever.”
“Of course not,” Charley says. “Nation A emits a beta particle, becoming Nation A», and attracting Nation B, whose eigenstate—”
“Point made,” you cut in. “Nothing’s stable. Nothing at all, in the long run. But—the stability of nations could have been measured in years, if we’d been lucky, months if we hadn’t. Between 1945 and 1993, God alone knows what prevented a major atomic war. A series of miracles, maybe.”
“And then,” Charley says, “came the big miracle. The Schumann miracle.”
Pride? But you wish the words made you more uncomfortable than they do. “It was there. The application was there. If I hadn’t found it, someone else—”
“Someone else,” Charley says, and stretches. In the new gray cloaking, with that build and with the faintly withdrawn, faintly amused expression that settles on his face at rest, he must be fighting off the girls. A good deal more bother, that way, than his father had ever run into; but Charley and Jacqueline knew how lucky they were. “And by the time someone else did find it, and realized what he had, and translated it into hardware, and spent four months trying to convince the right people that he wasn’t one more refugee from the funny farm—”
“All right.” Praise at any length, thankfully, really does make you uncomfortable. “All right: but it was mostly luck.”
“Oh, now, come on—”
“Luck,” you say flatly. “And . . . well, I will say: luck, and knowing what to do with the luck when it came. But the muon decay chain—there wasn’t any special reason for me to get interested in that, just then. Or to take the particular direction I did take.”
“The hand of God,” Charley says without embarrassment: Charley, for some fool reason, really does talk like that. Believes it, too; as if being alive and human weren’t enough, so a complicated mythology had to be tacked onto it. “You might call it the hand of God—or, of course, you might call it luck.”
“Whatever,” you say. “It’s the same thing.”
“Exactly,” Charley says, and grins. Well, you’ve learned not to argue with him, not on that subject.
And you reach for another subject. Not too far away. “You know, Charley, I don’t have the faintest idea what to say to them.”
The grin carves your son’s face. “You’ve told it often enough. Prizes, honorary degrees . . . you can go through it one more time without any trouble.”
“I suppose.” But the idea of a permanent historical record, something for the sight-and-sound archive President Taine had finally pushed through the new World Council—why, the idea of the World Council itself was enough to make you blink. This one, this time, had to be right. This was the definitive version: even for Dr. Schumann, the story could only be recorded once. Equipment of archive quality was fantastically expensive—and fantastically in demand. The passion fo
r history . . . “Well, we’re making a new world, I suppose that’s it.”
“Sure,” Charley says. “But don’t tell them that: they know that.”
“I wasn’t—”
“Relax, aged parent.” Almost, you looked round to see if Carol were laughing, the way she nearly always did at that phrase. But Carol was in Mauritania, doing a job no white person could have done: arranging African pledges for the Council. So that it wouldn’t be a featureless, hopeless League of Nations or a nervous, equally useless UN; this time, the Council was going to have the power. Everyone knew that, and knew why, and accepted it; but a good many African states had the pride of novelty to deal with. They hadn’t been independent countries so very long, and it took a woman whose ancestors were very visibly African to smooth the passage for them, from independence (and continuing, horrible danger) to the Council (and security for a slightly lessened nationhood, at least). “Just a joke. A small joke, meant to lighten tension, you know.”
“Well, what do they want, then?”
“Your story, aged parent. Not theirs.”
And with no smile at all: “Not all of it.”
Charley nods. “I don’t think they’d want all of it. That’s for—personal archives. So far, anyhow. It’ll take time . . .” Not all of it, no. Not the early years, when—despite government directives, despite the written law—a physicist with a Negro wife was, somehow, a security risk; when you changed jobs to find a new set of neighbors who wouldn’t look at you that way; even if Carol insisted it didn’t matter, it by-God mattered to you. And besides, you knew how she felt. And then there were the jokes, the conversations cut short when you approached them . . .
Maybe no white man could ever know what it was like being black; but you’d found one way to come close. You’d married Carol, and it hadn’t freed her, not at all: it had bound you instead.
But there had been the work, and the work was good. And then there had been Charley, who simply could not be afforded. Charley cost too much money, and that was all there was to it. And who knew, anyhow, what new troubles a child of that marriage might have. . . .
And Carol only nine weeks along. It would be inexpensive, it would even be easy. . . .
The arguments were, doubtless, very good. But somehow, in spite of them, there was Charley; and Charley made home a place to rest in (and no matter all that infant wailing and screaming!) and a place to relax in (and never mind the midnight bottle, the three A.M. bottle, the diaper pail . . .). Charley had kept them going for—my God, for fifteen years! It had taken that long, from the first sight of an oddity in a page of transformations . . .
Until, with the theory half-understood and no more than that, translated into a sort of tangled hardware, into one irreplaceable machine, it had been Charley who had saved the machine and the notes as well. When the fire had started (spontaneous combustion? lightning? no one ever knew), you’d headed for Carol’s room; and when you woke up, you were in a hospital bed. Carol had jumped, landed safely in the damned rosebushes, and managed to get you out with the help of a neighbor and some dilatory firemen.
Nobody had been left to rescue the work, but Charley.
And then . . .
“After the fire,” you say. “I can start there. Convincing the government—everybody knew a time machine was impossible, and how was a Congressman who couldn’t do high-school algebra to get it into his head that we didn’t have a time machine there.”
“We?”
“You dragged it out.”
“And you’d have rebuilt it,” Charley says. “It’d have taken time, but you’d have rebuilt it.”
“Time . . .” You fight a cigarette and Charley frowns down at you: that fight’s been going on for twenty-eight years. “Who knows if we’d have had time?”
“You could find out,” Charley says, watching you smoke. But the stuff hasn’t killed you yet, and it’s your lungs. “Same way you found out I wasn’t going to have any sisters, no matter what anybody did.”
Another puff. “We’d have—liked that, I think,” you say. “We didn’t plan on only one child. When we were ready—and maybe, like you, even before we were ready. Since the sample turned out so well, after all.”
“Sample?” Charley says. “You know, I’m not sure I like that.” The grin blinks-on and off in the big dark face. “But—what can’t be helped . . .”
“I wonder, sometimes . . . but there was no way. Not even adoption.” And your eyes begin to shut; Charley’s voice snaps you back to the present.
“So it wasn’t a time machine. It was a probability machine. And you finally got Senator Wellman to understand.”
“After explaining it to him for five weeks—and being thought a fool all that time. He’d never have put up with me if I—if we—”
“If Carol hadn’t swung some voting weight with the black community hereabouts,” Charley said. “Might as well be honest about it—though not, I think, for the record.”
“Not yet,” you say. “In a few years, perhaps . . . five, ten years . . . things are settling down, you know.”
“I know,” Charley says. “I would.”
And they are, they really are. One world . . . and a world with something called the race problem stuck away in the history texts, no part of the present at all . . .
“The machine could show the results of a given choice. But the choice had to be important.”
Charley says: “Any choice is important.” And that’s been a long fight, too. But whatever you think and whatever your son thinks, the hardware works the way it works.
“The big ones,” you say. “The nodal points. The ones that change—a nation. A society. A world.”
“All right,” Charley says, “We won’t argue now—even if my having sisters or not was a nodal point. But if it could be made more responsive . . .” He shrugs. “I know. It can’t. The uncertainty principle’s part of the world, too.” And then, slowly: “The only world there is.”
“I’ll tell them that,” you say, “because they still don’t understand it. All the stories . . . people liked to imagine that all the probability choices really existed, and that you could move from one to another. . . .”
“Wish fulfillment,” Charley says, distantly. “Dream-stuff.”
“Which is the one way it couldn’t work,” you say. “Energy levels—”
“And whatever you do,” Charley breaks in, “don’t give them that. We’re still not teaching particle physics in the average high school.”
“No. But they ought to understand by now—the machine can show you the result of a given choice. Show you which is the right road to take. It can even dig back into the past, some, and show you what the result of some choice you didn’t make would have been; but you didn’t make it, then. And you can’t, now. You get the results of what you actually did choose. The others—don’t exist any more.”
“Never did.”
“Exactly,” you say. “Except as possibilities real enough, maybe, to experience through a machine. But once the choice is past . . . that’s all they are. All they ever can be.”
“A good thing. Worlds where the atomic war happened . . . where . . .” Charley spreads his hands.
“Dream-stuff, as you said.” Over Charley’s right shoulder the wall clock goes on humming. “Hey, now—they really will be here. Any second.”
“Want your makeup kit?”
“Now look, you—you damned brat—”
“Cool it, aged parent,” Charley said. “I only—”
The warning-chime sounds. “There they are.”
“I’ll open the door,” Charley says. “You just sit there and look famous. After all, it’s a big moment in—”
The headset is heavier than it seemed, though you’ve only been wearing it a few minutes. The machine draws more power than it should, too; an automatic glance at the bread-board dials tells you that. Though you aren’t thinking about the dials.
A test run. A decision-point . . . fifteen
years ago . . .
So you’d have had more peace, finished the machine a little bit more quickly, pushed it through to actual use by now, instead of a first, solo test . . .
(More power? Then that’s where the fire—that’s how the fire started! This time, you’ll be able to . . .)
Carol is sleeping upstairs, while you sit, fifteen years younger, in the basement at the jerry-built machine, the machine which, in the real world (the only world), Senator Wellman hasn’t even heard of yet. And the cause of the fire isn’t going to matter, not at all. You’re going to find out about that in less than a minute. You haven’t been away long; in a way, you came back just in time. When the power gave out. When . . .
Thirty seconds or so, now. And you just might figure out, in those thirty seconds, who’s telling you all this. Perhaps it’s your own subconscious, trying to warn you, to blame you, to explain to you, one last time. . . .
It can’t be me, you know. It can’t be me, aged parent: I’m dream-stuff now. All I ever can be.
I was quite real, once. But getting rid of me was cheap. And you couldn’t afford . . .
And you don’t believe in the supernatural. In the complicated mythology:
It’s your last chance not to believe, aged parent. I want no more than you to hear the sirens start. But this is not a test: the sirens have started.
It’s all over. The choice was made.
You’re—quite a decent guy, you know. In spite of . . .
Well. Forget all that. But . . .
I love you. If . . .
THE FRESHMAN ANGLE
by
Edgar Pangborn
Elmo obDavid Hunnington was suffering trouble under three heads; like a sensible boy he wrote them down on scratch paper:
I. Assistant Professor Clance Mahew requires of me a discussion of the 20th century (Primitive Calendar usage) within the historical perspective, in 2000 words.
A. Is this the demand of a rational pedagogue?