The Seventh Science Fiction Megapack

by Robert Silverberg

  “Max knew he was going to be killed,” he said. “And yet he went ahead with it. Why?”

  “Maybe he wanted to die,” Gainer suggested. “Maybe he was bored with life, bored with always winning, bored with things as they were. The man was never born who could figure out Max Hawkes, anyway. You must have found that out yourself.”

  Gainer rose. “I’ll have to be moving along, now. But let me give you some suggestions, first.”

  “Sir?”

  “Go downtown and get yourself registered in Free Status. Have them give you a televector number. You’re going to be an important person when you get all that money. And be very careful about who your friends are. Max could take care of himself; you may not be so lucky, son.”

  “Is there going to be an investigation of the robbery?” Alan asked.

  “It’s under way already. You may be called down for questioning, but don’t let it worry you. I turned a copy of Max’s will over to them today, and that exonerates you completely.”

  It was strangely empty in the apartment that night; Alan wished Gainer had stayed longer. He walked through the dark rooms, half expecting Max to come home. But Max wasn’t coming home.

  Alan realized he had been tremendously fond of Hawkes. He had never really shown it; he had never demonstrated much warmth toward the gambler, especially in the final days when they both lived under the pressure of the planned robbery. But Alan knew he owed much to Hawkes, rogue and rascal though he was. Hawkes had been basically a good man, gifted—too gifted, perhaps—whose drives and passions led him beyond the bounds of society. And at thirty-five he was dead, having known in advance that his last day was at hand.

  The next few days were busy ones. Alan was called to Security headquarters for questioning, but he insisted he knew nothing about the robbery or Hawkes’ friends, and the document Hawkes had left seemed to bear him out. He was cleared of all complicity in the robbery.

  He next went to the Central Directory Matrix and registered in Free Status. He was given a televector transmitter—it was surgically embedded in the fleshy part of his thigh—and he accepted a drink from fat old Hines MacIntosh in remembrance of Hawkes.

  He spoke briefly with MacIntosh about the process of collecting on Hawkes’ estate, and learned it was a complex process, but nothing to be frightened of. The will was being sent through channels now.

  He met Hollis in the street several days later. The bloated loansman looked pale and harried; he had lost weight, and his skin hung flabbily over his bones now. Little as Alan liked the loansman, he insisted on taking him to a local restaurant for lunch.

  “How come you’re still hanging around York City?” Alan asked. “I thought the heat was on for any of Max’s old buddies.”

  “It is,” Hollis said, wiping sweat from his white shiny forehead. “But so far I’m in the clear. There won’t be much of an investigation; they killed two and caught two, and that’ll keep them happy. After all, the robbery was a failure.”

  “Any notion why it failed?”

  Hollis nodded. “Sure I have a notion! It was Kovak who tipped them off.”

  “Mike?—but he looked okay to me.”

  “And to everybody. But he owed Bryson a lot, and Bryson was anxious to dispose of Max. So Kovak turned the plans of the robbery over to Bryson’s boys in exchange for a quitclaim on the money he owed, and Bryson just forwarded it all on to the police. They were waiting for us when we showed up.”

  That cleared Gainer, Alan thought in some relief. “How did you find all this out?”

  “Bryson himself told me.”

  “What!”

  “I guess he didn’t know exactly who besides Max was in on the deal. Anyway, he certainly didn’t know I was part of the group,” Hollis said. “Old man Bryson was laying off some bets with me and he let something slip about how he tipped the police to Max. Then he told me the whole thing.”

  “And Kovak?”

  “Dead,” Hollis said bluntly. “Bryson must have figured that if he’d sell Max out he’d sell anybody out, so Kovak got taken care of. He was found yesterday. Heart failure, the report said. Bryson has some good drugs. Say, kid—any word yet on what’s going to happen to all Max’s dough?”

  Alan thought a moment before replying. “I haven’t heard a thing. I guess the government inherits it.”

  “That would be too bad,” Hollis said speculatively. “Max was well loaded. I’d like to get my hands into some of that dough myself. So would Bryson and his bunch, I’ll bet.”

  Alan said nothing. When he was through eating, he paid the check and they left, Hollis heading north, Alan south. In three days, Hawkes’ will would go through the courts. Alan wondered if Bryson, who seemed to be York City’s major criminal syndic man, would try to angle some share of Max’s money.

  A Bryson man did show up at the hearing—a slick-looking operator named Berwin. His claim was that Hawkes had been affiliated with Bryson a number of years ago, and that Hawkes’ money should revert to Bryson by virtue of an obscure law of the last century involving the estates of professional gamblers killed in criminal actions.

  The robocomputer who was in charge of the hearing pondered the request a few moments; then relays clicked and the left-hand panel on the computer face lit up with a bright red APPLICATION DENIED signal.

  Berwin spoke for three minutes, ending up with a request that the robocomputer disqualify itself from the hearing and allow itself to be replaced by a human judge.

  The computer’s decision was even quicker this time. APPLICATION DENIED.

  Berwin tossed Alan’s side of the courtroom a black look and yielded ground. Alan had engaged a lawyer recommended once by Hawkes, a man named Jesperson. Briefly and concisely Jesperson cited Alan’s claim to the money, read the terms of the will, and stepped back.

  The computer considered Jesperson’s plea a few moments, reviewing the brief which the lawyer had taped and fed to the computer earlier. Time passed. Then the green panel lit, and the words, APPLICATION GRANTED.

  Alan smiled. Bryson had been defeated; Max’s money was his. Money that could be turned toward intensified research on the hyperdrive.

  “Well, son?” Jesperson asked. “How does it feel to be a millionaire?”

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  At the time, he had been much too excited and flustered to answer anything. But, as the next twelve months went by, he learned that being a millionaire was quite pleasant indeed.

  There were headaches, of course. There was the initial headache of signing his name several hundred times in the course of the transfer of Hawkes’ wealth to him. There were also the frequent visits from the tax-collectors, and the payment to them of a sum that staggered Alan to think about, in the name of Rotation Tax.

  But even after taxes, legal fees, and other expenses, Alan found he owned better than nine hundred thousand credits, and the estate grew by investment every day. The court appointed a legal guardian for him, the lawyer Jesperson, who was to administer Alan’s money until Alan reached the biological age of twenty-one. The decision was an involved one, since Alan had undeniably been born three hundred years earlier, in 3576—but the robojudge that presided over that particular hearing cited a precedent seven hundred years old which stated that for legal purposes a starman’s biological and not his chronological age was to be accepted.

  The guardianship posed no problems for Alan, though. When he met with Jesperson to discuss future plans, the lawyer told him, “You can handle yourself, Alan. I’ll give you free rein with the estate—with the proviso that I have veto power over any of your expenditures until your twenty-first birthday.”

  That sounded fair enough. Alan had reason to trust the lawyer; hadn’t Hawkes recommended him? “I’ll agree to that,” Alan said. “Suppose we start right now. I’d like to take a year and travel around the world. As my legal guardian you’ll be stuck with the job of managing my estate and handling investments for me.”

  Jesperson chuckled. “You’ll be tw
ice as wealthy when you get back! Nothing makes money so fast as money.”

  Alan left the first week in December, having spent three weeks doing virtually nothing but sketching out his itinerary. There were plenty of places he intended to visit.

  There was London, where James Hudson Cavour had lived and where his hyperdrive research had been carried out. There was the Lexman Institute of Space Travel in Zurich, where an extensive library of space literature had been accumulated; it was possible that hidden away in their files was some stray notebook of Cavour’s, some clue that would give Alan a lead. He wanted to visit the area in Siberia that Cavour had used as his testing-ground, and from which the last bulletin had come from the scientist before his unexplained disappearance.

  But it was not only a business trip. Alan had lived nearly half a year in the squalor of Hasbrouck—and because of his Free Status he would never be able to move into a better district, despite his wealth. But he wanted to see the rest of Earth. He wanted to travel just for the sake of travel.

  Before he left, he visited a rare book dealer in York City, and for an exorbitant fifty credits purchased a fifth-edition copy of An Investigation into the Possibility of Faster-than-Light Space Travel, by James H. Cavour. He had left his copy of the work aboard the Valhalla, along with the few personal possessions he had managed to accumulate during his life as a starman.

  The book dealer had frowned when Alan asked for the volume under the title he knew. “The Cavour Theory? I don’t think—ah, wait.” He vanished for perhaps five minutes and returned with an old, fragile, almost impossibly delicate-looking book. Alan took it and scanned the opening page. There were the words he had read so many times: “The present system of interstellar travel is so grossly inefficient as to be virtually inoperable on an absolute level.”

  “Yes, that’s the book. I’ll take it.”

  His first stop on his round-the-globe jaunt was London, where Cavour had been born and educated more than thirteen centuries before. The stratoliner made the trip across the Atlantic in a little less than three hours; it took half an hour more by Overshoot from the airport to the heart of London.

  Somehow, from Cavour’s few autobiographical notes, Alan had pictured London as a musty old town, picturesque, reeking of medieval history. He couldn’t have been more wrong. Sleek towers of plastic and concrete greeted him. Overshoots roared by the tops of the buildings. A busy network of bridges connected them.

  He went in search of Cavour’s old home in Bayswater, with the nebulous idea of finding some important document wedged in the woodwork. But a local security officer shook his head as Alan asked for directions.

  “Sorry, lad. I’ve never heard of that street. Why don’t you try the information robot up there?”

  The information robot was a blocky green-skinned synthetic planted in a kiosk in the middle of a broad well-paved street. Alan approached and gave the robot Cavour’s thirteen-century-old address.

  “There is no record of any such address in the current files,” the steely voice informed him.

  “No. It’s an old address. It dates back to at least 2570. A man named Cavour lived there.”

  The robot digested the new data; relays hummed softly within it as it scanned its memory banks. Finally it grunted, “Data on the address you seek has been reached.”

  “Fine! Where’s the house?”

  “The entire district was demolished during the general rebuilding of London in 2982-2997. Nothing remains.”

  “Oh,” Alan said.

  The London trail trickled out right then and there. He pursued it a little further, managed to find Cavour’s name inscribed on the honor role of the impressive London Technological Institute for the year 2529, and discovered a copy of Cavour’s book in the Institute Library. There was nothing else to be found. After a month in London, Alan moved on eastward across Europe.

  Most of it was little like the descriptions he had read in the Valhalla’s library. The trouble was that the starship’s visits to Earth were always at least a decade behind, usually more. Most of the library books had come aboard when the ship had first been commissioned, far back in the year 2731. The face of Europe had almost totally altered since then.

  Now, shiny new buildings replaced the ancient houses which had endured for as much as a thousand years. A gleaming bridge linked Dover and Calais; elsewhere, the rivers of Europe were bridged frequently, providing easy access between the many states of the Federation of Europe. Here, there, monuments of the past remained—the Eiffel Tower, absurdly dwarfed by the vast buildings around it, still reared its spidery self in Paris, and Notre Dame still remained as well. But the rest of Paris, the ancient city Alan had read so much of—that had long since been swept under by the advancing centuries. Buildings did not endure forever.

  In Zurich he visited the Lexman Institute for Space Travel, a magnificent group of buildings erected on the royalties from the Lexman Spacedrive. A radiant statue sixty feet high was the monument to Alexander Lexman, who in 2337 had first put the stars within the reach of man.

  Alan succeeded in getting an interview with the current head of the Institute, but it was anything but a satisfactory meeting. It was held in an office ringed with mementoes of the epoch-making test flight of 2338.

  “I’m interested in the work of James H. Cavour,” Alan said almost immediately—and from the bleak expression that appeared on the scientist’s face, he knew he had made a grave mistake.

  “Cavour is as far from Lexman as possible, my friend. Cavour was a dreamer; Lexman, a doer.”

  “Lexman succeeded—but how do you know Cavour didn’t succeed as well?”

  “Because, my young friend, faster-than-light travel is flatly impossible. A dream. A delusion.”

  “You mean that there’s no faster-than-light research being carried on here?”

  “The terms of our charter, set down by Alexander Lexman himself, specify that we are to work toward improvements in the technique of space travel. It said nothing about fantasies and daydreams. No—ah—hyperdrive research is taking place at this institute, and none will take place so long as we remain true to the spirit of Alexander Lexman.”

  Alan felt like crying out that Lexman was a bold and daring pioneer, never afraid to take a chance, never worried about expense or public reaction. It was obvious, though, that the people of the Institute had long since fossilized in their patterns. It was a waste of breath to argue with them.

  Discouraged, he moved on, pausing in Vienna to hear the opera—Max had always intended to spend a vacation with him in Vienna, listening to Mozart, and Alan felt he owed it to Hawkes to pay his respects. The operas he saw were ancient, medieval in fact, better than two thousand years old; he enjoyed the tinkly melodies but found some of the plots hard to understand.

  He saw a circus in Ankara, a football game in Budapest, a nullgrav wrestling match in Moscow. He journeyed to the far reaches of Siberia, where Cavour had spent his final years, and found that what had been a bleak wasteland suitable for spaceship experiments in 2570 was now a thriving modern city of five million people. The site of Cavour’s camp had long since been swallowed up.

  Alan’s faith in the enduring nature of human endeavor was restored somewhat by his visit to Egypt—for there he saw the pyramids, nearly seven thousand years old; they looked as permanent as the stars.

  The first anniversary of his leaving the Valhalla found him in South Africa; from there he travelled eastward through China and Japan, across the highly industrialized islands of the Far Pacific, and from the Philippines he returned to the American mainland by jet express.

  He spent the next four months travelling widely through the United States, gaping at the Grand Canyon and the other scenic preserves of the west. East of the Mississippi, life was different; there was barely a stretch of open territory between York City and Chicago.

  It was late in November when he returned to York City. Jesperson greeted him at the airfield, and they rode home together. Alan had b
een gone a year; he was past eighteen, now, a little heavier, a little stronger. Very little of the wide-eyed boy who had stepped off the Valhalla the year before remained intact. He had changed inwardly.

  But one part of him had not changed, except in the direction of greater determination. That was the part that hoped to unlock the secret of faster-than-light travel.

  He was discouraged. His journey had revealed the harsh fact that nowhere on Earth was research into hyperdrive travel being carried on; either they had tried and abandoned it as hopeless, or, like the Zurich people, they had condemned the concept from the start.

  “Did you find what you were looking for?” Jesperson asked.

  Alan slowly shook his head. “Not a hint. And I really covered ground.” He stared at the lawyer a moment. “How much am I worth, now?”

  “Well, offhand—” Jesperson thought for a moment. “Say, a million three hundred. I’ve made some good investments this past year.”

  Alan nodded. “Good. Keep the money piling up. I may decide to open a research lab of my own, and we’ll need every credit we’ve got.”

  But the next day an item arrived in the morning mail which very much altered the character of Alan’s plans for the future. It was a small but thick package, neatly wrapped, which bore as return address the name Dwight Bentley, with a London number.

  Alan frowned for a moment, trying to place the name. Then it came back to him—Bentley was the vice-provost of the London Institute of Technology, Cavour’s old school. Alan had had a long talk with Bentley one afternoon in January, about Cavour, about space travel, and about Alan’s hopes for developing a hyperspace drive.

  The parcel was the right size and thickness to contain a book. Alan slit the fastenings, and folded back the outer wrapper. A note from Bentley lay on top.

  London

  3rd November 3877

  My dear Mr. Donnell:

  Perhaps you may remember the very enjoyable chat you and I had one day at this Institute last winter, on the occasion of your visit to London. You were, I recall, deeply interested in the life and work of James H. Cavour, and anxious to carry on the developments he had achieved in the field of space travel.