by Eric Flint
"I haven't got anything else that belonged to Rankin," I lied. "And I can't stock equipment that only works when it feels like it. Come back to me when it's fixed."
Audran gave me a sour look. He picked up his kit and went upstairs to stow it away, safe from the prying hands of rival scientists. Paranoid? Yes, but I remembered the chap who invented antigravity—someone got sick of him showing off, sabotaged his flying belt to stick at full power, and the inventor spent the rest of the convention glued to the ceiling.
I put the lid back on the collie, who looked sadder than ever. The sharp tang of formaldehyde hung in the air, so I zapped it with an Odor-Exploder—item #16024 in my catalog. I left the specimen jar on the table. The chances of anyone wanting to buy an ill-preserved dead dog were low, but not zero. It might be just the thing for someone's latest research. And if Rankin became angry at me for selling his late pet—well, he'd have to come back to be annoyed, and that would be worth it. I was worried about him. I'd known him for years, and he'd never been so eccentric as to disappear without telling anyone. He was a friend.
And he was one of my best customers.
Calverley had been standing by my booth, watching the attempt to locate Rankin. He had a smirk on his face, presumably satisfaction at the failure of Audran's Quent. There's a lot of competition among the inventors, and Calverley fancies himself as the top experimentalist. He likes to remind people that he's discovered five new principles, eight strange particles, and eleven mysterious forces. He even wears a white coat to the convention, when most of the others make their annual attempt at dressing up and come along in suits that smell of mothballs and year-old sandwiches in the pockets.
"Have you heard from Rankin?" he asked Vanzetti.
Vanzetti, the president of the Advanced Studies Association, was lurking by my bookshelf. "No one's seen or heard from him in months," he said. "It's very odd. Maybe he was abducted." He pulled down Kay's Field Guide to Aliens of the Nearer Galaxies and began flicking through it. I knew he wouldn't buy it, so I gave the penniless theorist my best shopkeeper's glare.
"More likely the government press-ganged him into weapons research in a secret lab somewhere." Calverley mimed a Super Blaster Ray with the enthusiasm of an eight-year-old boy, pointing the imaginary weapon at Audran, who'd just come back.
"Or maybe the Reds nabbed him," said Audran. They don't have much grasp of current affairs, these scientists.
"Perhaps he's taking the chance to break into our labs and see what we're all up to," said Calverley.
"I'd like to see him try," said Audran. "I've got my lab so protected it takes me ten minutes to get in. If anyone else tries, my ParaZap throws them into the Holding Pit." He smiled and held Calverley's gaze. "I check the pit every week or so, or whenever it starts to smell."
All this speculation seemed uninformed; I wondered if any of the speakers knew more than they were letting on. Rankin's daughter had hinted darkly at rivalries, saying he'd been worried someone else was working on the same project.
As more people arrived, conversation turned to scientific matters: the known, the unknown, and the dubious maps of the border in the Advanced Studies Journal. When acronyms and mathematics started outnumbering real words, I bought a round of drinks, hoping that this would bring the talk back down to my intellectual level. The scientists congregated in the bar, playfully spiking each other's drinks with lab alcohol, and Rankin's mysterious disappearance sparked recollections of the great experimental mishaps of old colleagues.
"Remember Hogg?" said Vanzetti. "Clever fellow—invented the Practical Angel Trap. I remember the demo as if it were only last year: never been so moved in my life. We all warned him of the consequences if he fiddled with the apparatus, but he just had to see what happened if he reversed the polarity. Next thing he knew, a swarm of demons carried him off to Hell. That's no way for a scientist to go."
Everyone shuddered. Calverley said, "Then there was Caprivi. He built a dimensional traveler, and ended up proving that the higher spatial dimensions are tiny. He came back as a red smear about a nanometer thick."
"So Rankin might have suffered a laboratory accident?" I said.
"It's possible," said Vanzetti. "Though he never struck me as being rash. He wasn't a tinkerer."
This disparaging term drew frowns from Calverley, Audran, and the other practical scientists. While the experimenters may bicker among themselves, they all gang up on the theorists.
"But there was no sign of an explosion in his lab," I said. "It looked more as if he'd been kidnaped than blown up."
Calverley turned to me. "You seem rather keen on that interpretation. Is that the sign of a guilty conscience?"
"What do you mean?"
"I mean that if he had an accident in his lab, it could have been the result of rash experiments—or faulty equipment."
"There's nothing wrong with my equipment," I said.
"There's the prices, for one thing," said Audran.
I ignored the price issue—it's an argument I can't win—and said, "I only sell stuff that's been properly tested and vetted. That's why I refused to stock your Quent when you couldn't get it to work."
"You can't possibly test all your stock," said Audran. "You don't know what half of it is for."
Before I could answer that, Calverley said, "I think you should tell us what equipment you sold to Rankin. Then we can test it and see if it's safe."
"Rankin asked me to keep his purchases confidential, just as you all do," I said.
"His project can't be that secret if he was planning to present it at Demonstration Day tomorrow," said Calverley.
"He might only want to demonstrate one aspect of his work. He could have several projects on the go." I looked round at all the gadgeteers and said, "How many of you want me to abandon confidentiality and let everyone know what you're buying?"
There was a swell of protest, but Calverley shouted over it. "Rankin's gone! What's wrong with a safety check?"
I laughed. "That's the most pathetic attempt at spying I've ever seen. Are you really that desperate to find out what Rankin's been doing?"
"I'd like to find out if he's been killed by your products," said Calverley.
"You want to believe that, don't you? Because if Rankin was killed by his own bad judgment, that makes you realize the same could happen to any of you. Whereas if he was killed by dangerous equipment, that doesn't reflect on him or on you, only on me—"
"—And you can be replaced," said Calverley. "We can get our apparatus elsewhere."
"But this is all supposition. There's no evidence that my supplies killed him."
"Except that you won't let us test—"
"Because his purchases are confidential—"
At this impasse, we all looked at Vanzetti. This is why the president of the Association is usually a theorist, someone neutral in these arguments.
Vanzetti said, "You're all assuming that Rankin's dead, just because no one's seen him lately. But the demonstration isn't till tomorrow—there's still plenty of time for him to arrive. Let's not worry just yet. If he turns up in the morning, we'll feel silly for having this argument."
The optimism sounded hollow. And I realized from everyone's expressions that if Rankin didn't show up, they would blame me. As the outsider, the only nonscientist at the convention, I was the easy scapegoat. They'd worry about the safety of my products, start buying elsewhere. . . .
Unless I could prove that Rankin's disappearance wasn't my fault, my business was in deep trouble.
* * *
Saturday morning looked like an advert for washing powder: the fresh white snow outside was clean and bright as a New Improved Ultra-Detergent. Inside, however, an Inferior Rival Brand had been used. There were drifts of papers everywhere, all covered with smudged equations, circuit diagrams, obscure notes, preprints of ASJ articles, and sketches of elaborate experiments. The tables were stacked with journals, books, notepads, and my equipment catalogs, all overlaid with scatter
ed hats, scarves, umbrellas, and galoshes, not to mention miscellaneous toolkits, specimens, and devices.
In the middle of the hall, three robots were constructing houses of cards—I recalled a drunken argument last night over whose robot had the most nimble, delicate manipulators. The robots had spent all night competing to build the highest structure, using punch cards from someone's old mainframe. Three slender, elegant towers rose high above the convention detritus, the oblong holes in the punch cards looking like windows in miniature skyscrapers. Metal Boy was winning: he was busy cutting a hole in the ceiling to make room for further ascent.
I was the first real person out of bed. I don't drink, and I always get up early so that I can dispense Crabtree's Hangovercome to the scientists staggering downstairs. The morning passed in a gentle drone of conversation and brunch. I sold some equipment, and took orders and inquiries. But I wasn't as busy as I had been in previous years. After last night's safety smear, was my custom dropping off already?
Rankin still hadn't shown up, and the long gaps between customers were making me edgy. I decided that I had to break my confidentiality rule. When Vanzetti appeared, red-eyed and bedraggled—he might be a theorist, but he'd been experimenting with cocktails last night—I gave him a double dose of Crabtree for instant sobriety.
"What is it, Drake?" he said. "You know I don't buy apparatus—none of that dangerous mucking about with unknown forces for me."
"I know. That's why I want to show you something."
I turned on the Impenetro force field around my booth, giving us a private space. Then I uncapped a plastic tube containing a set of blueprints. I unrolled the largest print, and weighted each corner with my latest novelty item: a plastic bubble containing a tiny castle on a crag. As Vanzetti picked one up for a closer look, his touch sparked a lightning bolt onto the castle and a roll of thunder followed by maniacal laughter.
"For the scientist whose budget doesn't stretch to a real gothic mansion," I explained. I tactfully didn't mention that some budgets don't even stretch to lab equipment, which is one way theorists are born.
Vanzetti laughed. "You never give up, do you?"
"One day you'll buy something, even if it's only a piece of chalk. But never mind that. As I said last night, I keep all my orders in strict confidence—you know how paranoid people get about their work—but I think the circumstances call for an exception. Rankin still hasn't turned up, so he can hardly complain. As a theorist, you're not one of his direct rivals, so you're the best person I can think of to show this to."
"But I thought Rankin didn't leave any notes."
"Not in his lab, no. But he gave me these specs for the device he was building and disappeared two months after I delivered the equipment. This has got to be the key to the puzzle. What is it? What does it do?"
Vanzetti looked at the print with a keen interest. I'd already looked at it a dozen times, so I watched him instead, hoping to spot a spark of comprehension. But his brow remained furrowed.
"The only way to see what it does would be to build it. And I don't think even that would suffice. Most of this is just framework—he's left out the activating principle. I'm afraid I can't tell you any more than the obvious."
"Which would be?"
"Look," he said, pointing. "That's a seat. Why would he build a seat inside the apparatus? He'd only need to do that if it was intended to move in some way: it's a form of transport. But the engine details are missing from the diagram. So how it's powered and where it would go are anyone's guess."
I felt stupid for not having realized this myself, but I'm used to feeling stupid around the scientists, so I didn't let it bother me. "What's your guess?"
He shrugged. "There's lots of possibilities—" Then he smiled. "Maybe that's where he went. Possibilities, lots of possibilities."
I was puzzled for a second until I realized what he was driving at. "You mean parallel universes, where history took different paths?"
"Could be. There's no evidence for it, other than the fact that he hasn't come back."
"Why is that evidence?"
"Think how many parallel universes there must be by now, billions of years after the Big Bang. Sideways navigation would be a nightmare. After leaving your home universe, how could you ever get back? Forget looking for a needle in a haystack: you'd have a better chance of finding a black cat in a black hole."
Vanzetti must have seen my face drop. He said, "I was just speculating. It might not be that at all. It's a shame we won't find out what he was working on—I was looking forward to his demonstration."
I remembered that, as president of the Association, Vanzetti was in charge of Demonstration Day. "Didn't he tell you what he wanted to show?"
He laughed at the thought. "No, they never do that. Surprise is everything: it's the only way to make everyone's jaws drop off in admiration. If I announced beforehand that I was going to turn lead into gold, for instance, one guy would say that he'd already made a mountain of gold and had suppressed the process because it would disrupt the economy, and another guy would say that it was an interesting advance but not half so significant as his Patent Bootlace Fastener."
"Then how do you decide who gets the billing?"
"If there's more than one applicant, I give it to whoever's waited longest since his last demonstration or since joining the Association. Rankin had years of seniority."
I frowned. "But if Rankin doesn't turn up, does that mean you have to cancel the show?"
"Oh, no," said Vanzetti. "Demonstration Day is the highlight of the convention. Calverley was next in line, so I've said he can do it. He's already setting up, though he's got so much equipment that it's bound to be a frightful bore. I always say the best demonstrations need the least apparatus. Less is more, you know. In my younger days, experimenters poked the universe with a stick to see if it jumped, but now they can't even do that without buying your Cosmo-Prod 4000."
He wagged a finger at me. "It's all your fault. You keep selling fancy equipment, so now everyone's building complicated machines with flashing lights and beeping gizmos. Big boys' toys, that's all they are. And there's no theory behind any of it. None of the new people in the Association could integrate a spanning function to save their lives. They're a stranger to footnotes, the lot of them. . . ."
While he rambled on, a big neon sign flashed in my skull. Calverley was Rankin's rival, possibly working on similar research. I had seen Calverley smirking when the Quent failed to find him. And Calverley had benefited from Rankin's disappearance by acquiring the coveted Demonstration Day lecture.
Calverley was the number one suspect. No wonder he'd tried to deflect suspicion onto my equipment.
I put Rankin's blueprints away, then de-energized the force field surrounding the booth. Vanzetti wandered off, still muttering about the mathematical inadequacies of the younger generation. I wondered how to approach Calverley, and a notion began to take shape.
I was about to go look for him when he came through the door.
"Calverley!" I shouted.
"Ah, Drake," he said, hurrying across the hall. "Have you got any more of those monopoles?"
I thought I might as well make a sale, and it was a good opening. "Sure," I said. "Today's special: with every ten monopoles, a gremlin trap. See how smoothly your experiments run when the little bastards are squeaking under a bell jar."
"I already have a gremlin trap."
"Only one? How often is it out of action? You need another trap to stop them jinxing the first trap."
"And a third to protect the second, no doubt," said Calverley, with a twitch of a smile. But he looked interested.
I brought out my best trap and placed it in the middle of the table. I needed bait, so I began activating curious devices. A ball lightning generator sparked and hissed as it emitted glowing spheres of electricity, which floated around the hall until they grounded themselves or fell into the Domestic Star like doomed comets. I set a universal Turing machine to grind out the
decimal expansion of pi, and fed a stack of notes into my counterfeit detector. Other scientists gathered round, attracted by the noise, and one or two added their own gadgets to the rapidly developing Shrine of the Machine.
Soon there was a crunch as the Turing machine's tape jammed, followed by a faint cackle of glee, then a shriek as the trap sprung.
"Look what we have here," I said. The gremlin was blue and about five inches high; one arm was a spanner set and the other was a multi-screwdriver. Its wheels span furiously but gained no purchase on the frictionless floor of the trap. "A Class Five, tooled up for action."
"Kill it! Kill it!" shouted the scientists, their eyes full of hate at the sight of their ancient enemy.
"It's back to entropy for you, pal," I said, opening the trap. But instead of squishing the gremlin, I flung it right into Calverley's face.