by Fritz Leiber
But even this new development did not totally rid Vyrko of his own ennui. If there were only something he could do, some positive, Vristian, Kirth-Labberian step that he could take! He damned himself for having been an incompetent aesthetic fool, who had taken so for granted the scientific wonders of his age that he had never learned what made them tick, or how greater wonders might be attained.
He slept too much, he ate too much, for a brief period he drank too much—until he found boredom even less attractive with a hangover.
He tried to write, but the terrible uncertainty of any future audience disheartened him.
Sometimes a week would pass without his consciously thinking of agnoton or the yellow bands. Then he would spend a day flogging himself into a state of nervous tension worthy of his uniquely dramatic situation, but he would always relapse. There just wasn’t anything to do.
Now even the consolation of Lavra’s beauty was vanishing, and she began demanding odd items of food which the hydroponic garden could not supply.
“If you loved me, you’d find a way to make cheese…” or “…grow a new kind of peach…a little like a grape, only different.…”
It was while he was listening to a film wire of Tyrsa’s (the last she ever made, in the curious tonalities of that newly rediscovered Mozart opera) and seeing her homely face, made even less lovely by the effort of those effortless-sounding notes, that he became conscious of the operative phrase.
“If you loved me.…”
“Have I ever said I did?” he snapped.
He saw a new and not readily understood expression mar the beauty of Lavra’s face. “No,” she said in sudden surprise. “No,” and her voice fell to flatness, “you haven’t.…”
And as her sobs—the first he had ever heard from her—traveled away toward the hydroponic room, he felt a new and not readily understood emotion. He switched off the film wire midway through the pyrotechnic rage of the eighteenth-century queen of darkness.
* * * *
Vyrko found a curious refuge in the pulps. There was a perverse satisfaction in reading the thrilling exploits of other Last Men on Earth. He could feel through them the emotions that he should be feeling directly. And the other stories were fun, too, in varying ways. For instance, that astonishingly accurate account of the delicate maneuvering which averted what threatened to be the first and final Atomic War.…
He noticed one oddity: Every absolutely correct story of the “future” bore the same by-line. Occasionally other writers made good guesses, predicted logical trends, foresaw inevitable extrapolations. But only Norbert Holt named names and dated dates with perfect historical accuracy.
It wasn’t possible. It was too precise to be plausible. It was far more spectacular than the erratic Nostradamus often discussed in the pulps.
But there it was. He had read the Holt stories solidly through in order a half-dozen times, without finding a single flaw, when he discovered the copy of Surprising Stories that had slipped behind a shelf and was therefore new to him.
He looked at once at the contents page. Yes, there was a Holt and—he felt a twinge of irrational but poignant sadness—one labeled as posthumous.
This story, we regret to tell you, is incomplete, and not only because of Norbert Holt’s tragic death last month. This is the last in chronological order of Holt’s stories of a consistently plotted future; but this fragment was written before his masterpiece, The Siege of Lunn. Holt himself used to tell me that he could never finish it, that he could not find an ending; and he died still not knowing how The Last Boredom came out. But here, even though in fragment form, is the last published work of the greatest writer about the future, Norbert Holt.
The note was signed with the initials M. S. Vyrko had long sensed a more than professional intimacy between Holt and his editor, Manning Stern; this obituary introduction must have been a bitter task. But his eyes were hurrying on, almost fearfully, to the first words of The Lost Boredom:
There were three of them in the retreat, three out of all mankind safe from the deadly yellow bands. The great Kirth-Labbery himself had constructed.…
Vyrko blinked and started again. It still read the same. He took firm hold of the magazine, as though the miracle might slip between his fingers, and dashed off with more energy than he had felt in months.
* * * *
He found Lavra in the hydroponic room. “I have just found,” he shouted, “the damnedest unbelievable—”
“Darling,” said Lavra, “I want some meat.”
“Don’t be silly. We haven’t any meat. Nobody’s eaten meat except at ritual dinners for generations.”
“Then I want a ritual dinner.”
“You can go on wanting. But look at this! Just read those first lines!”
“Vyrko,” she pleaded, “I want it.”
“Don’t be an idiot!”
Her lips pouted and her eyes moistened. “Vyrko dear.… What you said when you were listening to that funny music.… Don’t you love me?”
“No,” he barked.
Her eyes overflowed. “You don’t love me? Not after…?”
All Vyrko’s pent-up boredom and irritation erupted. “You’re beautiful, Lavra, or you were a few months ago, but you’re an idiot. I am not in the habit of loving idiots.”
“But you.…”
“I tried to assure the perpetuation of the race—questionable though the desirability of such a project seems at the moment. It was not an unpleasant task, but I’m damned if it gives you the right in perpetuity to pester me.”
She moaned a little as he slammed out of the room. He felt oddly better. Adrenalin is a fine thing for the system. He settled into a chair and resolutely read, his eyes bugging like a cover-monster’s with amazed disbelief. When he reached the verbatim account of the quarrel he had just enjoyed, he dropped the magazine.
It sounded so petty in print. Such stupid inane bickering in the face of.… He left the magazine lying there and went back to the hydroponic room.
Lavra was crying—noiselessly this time, which somehow made it worse. One hand had automatically plucked a ripe grape, but she was not eating it. He went up behind her and slipped his hand under her long hair and began stroking the nape of her neck. The soundless sobs diminished gradually. When his fingers moved tenderly behind her ears, she turned to him with parted lips. The grape fell from her hand.
“I’m sorry,” he heard himself saying. “It’s me that’s the idiot. Which, I repeat, I am not in the habit of loving. And you’re the mother of my twins and I do love you.…” And he realized that the statement was quite possibly, if absurdly, true.
“I don’t want anything now,” Lavra said when words were again in order. She stretched contentedly, and she was still beautiful even in the ungainly distortion which might preserve a race. “Now what were you trying to tell me?”
* * * *
He explained. “And this Holt is always right,” he ended. “And now he’s writing about us!”
“Oh! Oh, then we’ll know—”
“We’ll know everything. We’ll know what the yellow bands are and what becomes of them and what happens to mankind and—”
“—and we’ll know,” said Lavra, “whether it’s a boy or a girl.”
Vyrko smiled. “Twins, I told you. It runs in my family—no less than one pair to a generation. And I think that’s it—Holt’s already planted the fact of my having a twin named Vrist, even though he doesn’t come into the action.”
“Twins.… That would be nice. They wouldn’t be lonely until we could.… But get it quick, dear. Read it to me; I can’t wait!”
So he read Norbert Holt’s story to her—too excited and too oddly affectionate to point out that her long-standing aversion for print persisted even when she herself was a character. He read o
n past the quarrel. He read a printable version of the past hour. He read about himself reading the story to her.
“Now!” she cried. “We’re up to now. What happens next?”
Vyrko read:
The emotional release of anger and love had set Vyrko almost at peace with himself again; but a small restlessness still nibbled at his brain.
Irrelevantly he remembered Kirth-Labbery’s cryptic hint of escape. Escape for the two of them, happy now; for the two of them and for their…it had to be, according to the odds, their twins.
He sauntered curiously into the laboratory, Lavra following him. He drew back the curtain and stared at the chair of metal rods. It was hard to see the control board that seemed to control nothing. He sat in the chair for a better look.
He made puzzled grunting noises. Lavra, her curiosity finally stirred by something inedible, reached over his shoulder and poked at the green button.
* * * *
“I don’t like that last thing he says about me,” Lavra objected. “I don’t like anything he says about me. I think your Mr. Holt is a very nasty person.”
“He says you’re beautiful.”
“And he says you love me. Or does he? It’s all mixed up.”
“It is all mixed up…and I do love you.”
The kiss was a short one; Lavra had to say, “And what next?”
“That’s all. It ends there.”
“Well.… Aren’t you…?”
Vyrko felt strange. Holt had described his feelings so precisely. He was at peace and still curious, and the thought of Kirth-Labbery’s escape method did nibble restlessly at his brain.
He rose and sauntered into the laboratory, Lavra following him. He drew back the curtain and stared at the chair of metal rods. It was hard to see the control board that seemed to control nothing. He sat in the chair for a better look.
He made puzzled grunting noises. Lavra, her curiosity finally stirred by something inedible, reached over his shoulder and poked at the green button.
* * * *
Vyrko had no time for amazement when Lavra and the laboratory vanished. He saw the archaic vehicle bearing down directly upon him and tried to get out of the way as rapidly as possible. But the chair hampered him and before he could get to his feet the vehicle struck. There was a red explosion of pain and then a long blackness.
He later recalled a moment of consciousness at the hospital and a shrill female voice repeating over and over, “But he wasn’t there and then all of a sudden he was and I hit him. It was like he came out of nowhere. He wasn’t there and all of a sudden.…” Then the blackness came back.
All the time of his unconsciousness, all through the semi-conscious nightmares while doctors probed at him and his fever soared, his unconscious mind must have been working on the problem. He knew the complete answer the instant that he saw the paper on his breakfast tray, that first day he was capable of truly seeing anything.
The paper was easy to read for a paleolinguist with special training in pulps—easier than the curious concept of breakfast was to assimilate. What mattered was the date. 1948—and the headlines refreshed his knowledge of the Cold War and the impending election. (There was something he should remember about that election.…)
He saw it clearly. Kirth-Labbery’s genius had at last evolved a time machine. That was the one escape, the escape which the scientist had not yet tested and rather distrusted. And Lavra had poked the green button because Norbert Holt had said she had poked (would poke?) the green button.
How many buttons could a wood poke poke if a wood poke would poke.…
“The breakfast didn’t seem to agree with him, doctor.”
“Maybe it was the paper. Makes me run a temperature every morning, too!”
“Oh, doctor, you do say the funniest things!”
“Nothing funnier than this case. Total amnesia, as best we can judge by his lucid moments. And his clothes don’t help us—must’ve been on his way to a fancy-dress party. Or maybe I should say fancy-undress!”
“Oh, doctor!”
“Don’t tell me nurses can blush. Never did when I was an intern—and you can’t say they didn’t get a chance! But this character here…not a blessed bit of identification on him! Riding some kind of newfangled bike that got smashed up.… Better hold off on the solid food for a bit—stick to intravenous feeding.”
* * * *
He’d had this trouble before at ritual dinners, Vyrko finally recalled. Meat was apt to affect him badly—the trouble was that he had not at first recognized those odd strips of oily solid which accompanied the egg as meat.
The adjustment was gradual and successful, in this as in other matters. At the end of two weeks, he was eating meat easily (and, he confessed, with a faintly obscene non-ritual pleasure) and equally easily chatting with nurses and fellow patients about the events (which he still privately tended to regard as mummified museum pieces) of 1948.
His adjustment, in fact, was soon so successful that it could not continue. The doctor made that clear.
“Got to think about the future, you know. Can’t keep you here forever. Nasty unreasonable prejudice against keeping well men in hospitals.”
Vyrko allowed the expected laugh to come forth. “But since,” he said, gladly accepting the explanation that was so much more credible than the truth, “I haven’t any idea who I am, where I live, or what my profession is—”
“Can’t remember anything? Don’t know if you can take shorthand, for instance? Or play the bull fiddle?”
“Not a thing.” Vyrko felt it hardly worth while to point out his one manual accomplishment, the operation of the as-yet-uninvented electronic typewriter.
“Behold,” he thought, “the Man of the Future. I’ve read all the time travel stories. I know what should happen. I teach them everything Kirth-Labbery knew and I’m the greatest man in the world. Only the fictional time travel never happens to a poor dope who took for granted all the science around him, who pushed a button or turned a knob and never gave a damn what happened or why. Here they’re just beginning to get two-dimensional black-and-white short-range television. We had (will have?) stereoscopic full-color world-wide video—which I’m about as capable of constructing here as my friend the doctor would be of installing electric light in Ancient Rome. The Mouse of the Future.…”
The doctor had been thinking, too. He said, “Notice you’re a great reader. Librarian’s been telling me about you—went through the whole damn hospital library like a bookworm with a tapeworm!”
Vyrko laughed dutifully. “I like to read,” he admitted.
“Ever try writing?” the doctor asked abruptly, almost in the tone in which he might reluctantly advise a girl that her logical future lay in Port Saïd.
This time Vyrko really laughed. “That does seem to ring a bell, you know.… It might be worth trying. But at that, what do I live on until I get started?”
“Hospital trustees here administer a rehabilitation fund. Might wangle a loan. Won’t be much, of course; but I always say a single man’s got only one mouth to feed—and if he feeds more, he won’t be single long!”
“A little,” said Vyrko with a glance at the newspaper headlines, “might go a long way.”
* * * *
It did. There was the loan itself, which gave him a bank account on which, in turn, he could acquire other short-term loans—at exorbitant interest. And there was the election.
He had finally reconstructed what he should know about it. There had been a brilliant Wheel-of-If story in one of the much later pulps, on If the Republicans had won the 1948 election. Which meant that actually they had lost; and here, in October of 1948, all newspapers, all commentators, and most important, all gamblers, were convinced that they must infallibly win.
On Wednesday, Nove
mber third, Vyrko repaid his debts and settled down to his writing career, comfortably guaranteed against immediate starvation.
A half-dozen attempts at standard fiction failed wretchedly. A matter of “tone,” editors remarked vaguely, on the rare occasions when they did not confine themselves to the even vaguer phrases of printed rejection forms. A little poetry sold—“if you can call that selling,” Vyrko thought bitterly, comparing the financial position of the poet here and in his own world.
His failures were beginning to bring back the bitterness and boredom, and his thoughts turned more and more to that future to which he could never know the answer.
Twins. It had to be twins—of opposite sexes, of course. The only hope of the continuance of the race lay in a matter of odds and genetics.
Odds.… He began to think of the election bet, to figure other angles with which he could turn foreknowledge to profit. But his pulp-reading had filled his mind with fears of the paradoxes involved. He had calculated the election bets carefully; they could not affect the outcome of the election, they could not even, in their proportionately small size, affect the odds. But any further step.…
Vyrko was, like most conceited men, fond of self-contempt, which he felt he could occasionally afford to indulge in. Possibly his strongest access of self-contempt came when he realized the simplicity of the solution to all his problems.
He could write for the science fiction pulps.
The one thing that he could handle convincingly and skilfully, with the proper “tone,” was the future. Possibly start off with a story on the Religious Wars; he’d done all that research on his novel. Then.…
It was not until he was about to mail the manuscript that the full pattern of the truth struck him.
Soberly, yet half-grinning, he crossed out KIRTH VYRKO on the first page and wrote NORBERT HOLT.