Time Pressure

by Spider Robinson

  I jammed my crown down over his hairy head.

  It was worth a try—hell, I had no other move—and the results were gratifying. He screamed.

  Maybe it was that my crown was “calibrated wrong” to “interface with his mind properly.” Maybe it was being unexpectedly dropped into the midst of a woman’s orgasm. Perhaps he misinterpreted that first surging rush, thought I had somehow acquired a Command Crown by mistake, and panicked.

  Most likely it was a combination of all of those. For whatever reasons, there were two or three entire seconds there during which he was no longer a highly skilled killer commando who could wipe up the forest with me without working up a sweat, but a grinning, gaping space-case rather like the Nazz I had always known and liked—

  —and before those two or three seconds had elapsed, I hit him with the heel of my fist, like pounding on a table, impacting solidly below his ear, whanging his head off the Egg so hard that the thing rang like a gong.

  CHAPTER 15

  WHETHER THAT BLOW knocked him unconscious or merely stunned him I could not say for sure. I sprang to my feet and kicked him twice in the head. The second kick caught him on the jaw shelf and snapped his head around, and the crown flew from his head as he went down. By then he was definitely unconscious. I stood over him breathing in great gulps and trying to decide whether or not to kill him. There was some urgency in the question. If I did not do so now, while I was pumped up, I never would.

  In those days I believed in the insanity defense. I did not believe that a man should be killed for something that was “not his fault.” It was “not fair.” Laugh if you will; I was young. The Nazz I knew would not have been held responsible for anything by any reasonable person. This new, sane Nazz was an enigma with an unknown half-life. Perhaps one day with luck this man could be made insane again. I decided I did not have the right to kill him. Then and only then did I let myself consider how inconvenient it was going to be keeping him alive.

  First things first. I removed his web belt of tools. The braided rope belt under it that he used to hold up his pants turned out to be long enough to secure both wrists and both ankles behind him in a classic hogtie. His own bandanna headband, which he had taken off in favor of the golden one, made a serviceable gag. I checked him carefully for holdout weapons without finding any. Once he was secured I looked around carefully.

  The excavation in which he planned to bury the Egg was only partly a dug hole. The Mountain is a glacier’s footprint: there’s so much bedrock to it that there might not have been soil deep enough to cover the Egg anywhere within a couple of klicks. So he’d dug what he could, and was now apparently in the process of dissolving an adequate hole in the bedrock with some kind of chemical reaction I didn’t understand. There were reagents of harmless-looking clear liquids, carefully kept far apart from each other, and lab gloves, and goggles. At the bottom of the trench, a circular film of cloudy liquid was seething. There was a faint odor that reminded me of an overheated engine. I guesstimated that in another couple of days he’d be able to get the bubble down in there and kick dirt over it.

  Why use such a clumsy, dangerous and slow method when dynamite was so cheap? Because I would have heard the blast and come to investigate. If I “forgot,” other neighbors would have heard, and would ask about it the next time they saw me.

  I returned to Nazz. My impression was correct: he had not had time to retrieve his “command crown” from the bubble before I put his lights out. So I could not simply…“put him on hold,” even if his crown would accept my orders and I could learn to use it. Part of me thought that a damn shame. Briefly I thought of trying to press his unconscious hands against the bubble, see if I could fool it. But I didn’t think I could. And what if I succeeded—and won the ability to make Nazz a zombie?

  Most of me, I think, was awash with gratitude at being spared the moral choice. I would much rather have killed my friend than done that to him.

  I began to regret that I had not killed him. I couldn’t leave him here overnight—he could catch pneumonia. But it was a long way back downhill to the Palace. He weighed more than Rachel had. All that hair. It’s very hard to carry a hogtied man without dislocating both his shoulders. I dared not even leave him alone long enough to go borrow a wheelbarrow or a horse. Even trussed up, there might be some way he could use the Egg to free himself, or worse, call Rachel.

  In the end I got a bunch of fresh alder boughs from the recent clearing activities, and built a makeshift travois. Probably a Micmac could have done a much better job. I laid Nazz on it on his left side, head end uphill. It was not necessary to lash him aboard.

  And I towed the son of a bitch down the Mountain.

  To my mild astonishment it worked just fine. I only got stuck five or ten times. The grooves that travois handle put in my shoulders didn’t quite break the skin or my collarbone. My cursing would probably not have killed anything outside a thirty-meter radius. Three fourths of the way down the trail, Nazz came to. He grunted behind his gag. I didn’t feel like talking to him. I tried turning him over on his right side and maybe that solved his problem; in any case he stopped grunting. Lot of rocks in that trail; couldn’t have been a comfortable ride.

  After only a thousand years of pain the trail leveled off at the garden. I didn’t hesitate. Couldn’t afford to lose the momentum. Smashed the gate flat and went right up the middle, destroying seedlings of squash and corn and radishes and carrots, dill and chives and broccoli. What survived was mostly onions and peppers and tomatoes and basil. Italian food all next winter, if I lived that long. Flattened the gate at the other end, bringing down that whole end of the fence, and was heading downhill again.

  When I got to the chicken coop I stopped, and thought. I rolled Nazz off the travois and into the coop. It was very difficult to get him through the low doorway without untying him, but I managed. He would not freeze at night here. Chickens are actually dumb enough to mistake a hogtied man for another chicken. They would snuggle up to him. And the henhouse was far enough from the house and road that he could yell all he wanted. (He would rub off that makeshift gag shortly after I left him alone—a good thing, too, as an effectively gagged man can die of the sniffles.)

  Of course, Foghorn Leghorn my rooster was going to hate it. And Nazz wasn’t going to enjoy the smell much. GIs have a proverbial hatred of chicken shit.

  When he understood I meant to leave him there he began to grunt furiously and emphatically, and thrashed around as much as was possible to him. I couldn’t blame him. His arms and legs must already have been cramping severely. Twenty-four hours in that position and he’d need expert physiotherapy, maybe surgery. Tough shit.

  I knelt by the doorway and waited in silence until he stopped grunting.

  “If I get Rachel, I’ll come back for you. If she gets me, she’ll come looking for you.”

  He grunted uh huh.

  “If we take each other out, I guess you’re fucked.”

  He grunted uh huh again. His unblinking eyes met mine, trying hard to speak volumes. They were, as Lord Buckley has noted, pretty eyes.

  I looked away and prayed the oldest prayer in human history—make it didn’t happen—and got to my feet. “So long, brother.”

  He grunted Sam, wait! and I left him.

  As the house came into view I suddenly swore and punched myself viciously on the thigh. I had forgotten the God damned moose again.

  It was good to see my little home. By now I knew it might be my last day there. I was busy—but I kept sneaking glances around me as I worked, cherishing what I was about to lose.

  The golden crown that had broken my heart and blown Nazz’s mind hung from my belt. The first thing I did was put it on the chopping block and whack it a few times with the splitting maul; that deformed it some but not enough to suit me, so I took it to my shop and clamped it in the vise and worked it over with heavy-duty pliers and a rat-tail file and the head-demagnetizer from my reel-to-reel; then I cut it into small pieces w
ith boltcutters and softened each piece with a blowtorch and hammered them flat with a mallet and went outside and threw each piece in a different direction as far as I could. Then I gathered up all the tools I’d used and threw them away too. I started up the Kemac jet, boiled water, scrubbed my hands. As an afterthought I got a facecloth and scrubbed my forehead where the gold headband had rested.

  Then I made a pot of coffee.

  Halfway through the pot, I heard the Blue Meanie approaching from the east. The pitch of its scream did not change; it was just passing through, on the way west somewhere. I sprang to the window. Snaker was driving, alone. I ran outside and flagged him down.

  “Hey, bro,” he called when the engine finally quit. “Just heading for Annapolis, guess what? There’s gonna be some honest-to-God MDA at the party!” He wore only jeans, a denim vest and boots. I’ve seen pictures of concentration camp survivors with more meat on them. His hair was tied back in a ponytail.

  I was experiencing inner turmoil. Flagging down Snaker had been instinctive. Now I faced a difficult choice. I planned to fight Rachel, and more than half expected to lose. Did I get my best friend involved, and probably get him killed too? Or leave him in an ignorance that would, whenever Rachel took the notion, be too blissful by half?

  He misinterpreted my expression. “Haven’t you done MDA before? You’ll really like it, honest: all the good features of acid, psilocybin and organic mesc, with none of the dis—wow, man, you look like hell.”

  It occurred to me that I had already made this choice—back when Rachel first arrived. The only difference was, now I knew the danger was real. “Come on inside.”

  “Are you all right?”

  “Come on inside.”

  I could feel him studying me as we walked up the driveway and around behind the house. He was silent while I got him coffee. The interval was not enough for me to find the words I needed, so we just looked at each other for a few moments.

  “What do you need?” he said at last.

  “Shithouse luck.”

  He nodded slightly. “That can come to any man.”

  My hands hurt. I looked down. They both clutched my cup, and they were shaking so badly that hot coffee was slopping on them. I tried to set the cup down and bounced it on the table three times. At once Snaker’s hand shot out, came down over the top of the cup, forced it firmly down onto the table and held it there until I could let go. It must have scalded the hell out of his palm.

  Something broke in me and I was weeping without sound, panting like a dog or a woman in LaMaze labour.

  God bless him, Snaker did not flinch or look embarrassed. He looked at me, now that I think of it, exactly as though I were talking to him, as if he were listening attentively to me and thinking about what I was saying. Or as though so many people had burst into tears in conversation with him that he had learned to understand weeping as well as words.

  Maybe he had. When I finally ran down and got my breath control back, he said softly, “That’s hard.”

  I blew my nose and wiped my face. “You don’t know the half of it.”

  “Talk to me.”

  “Snake…you know how I feel about Rachel?”

  “Sure. Same way I do.”

  “Pretty much, yeah.” Deep breath. “I have to kill her, Snake.”

  His face turned to stone.

  “And I am not at all sure I’m up to it. I nearly got greased once already today—by the Nazz, if you can believe that. Did you know he did time in Nam? And she’s much more dangerous. We blew it, Snake, you and me, that first day. She is a telepath.”

  Very slowly and deliberately, as if handling a delicate explosive, he removed his makings and a Riz-La machine from the pocket of his denim vest, and rolled a cigarette with the same care. “Tell me all, omitting no detail, however slight.”

  So I did.

  It took us halfway into the next pot of coffee. Or in his terms, eight cigarettes.

  “—so as near as I can see it, it comes down to a classic science fiction question: how do you kill a telepath? Ought to be right up your alley, Snake.”

  “There are two ways I know, actually. I started a story about it once. You have to assume that there’s some limit on the telepath’s range—”

  “I’m still alive. I still have my memories—I think. In any case, I have memories damaging to her. And she could have gotten here from Parsons’ cove by now. If I had to guess, I’d say her maximum range is on the order of, oh, say earshot.”

  “Check. So—carefully remaining out of range, you give one of the telepath’s socks to an attack-trained Doberman and say ‘Kill.’ Plan B: you build a killer robot and give it the same instruction. A nonsentient animal or a sentient machine, either will turn the trick.”

  “Terrific. I doubt there’s an attack dog anywhere in the Valley. And the only guy around here who could probably build a robot is up the hill a ways, wondering how hungry you have to be to eat a raw egg with its mother watching. Have you any practical thoughts?”

  “Abort the mission.”

  “Snaker, come on! We haven’t got time to fuck around—”

  “I’m serious.”

  “I haven’t got a chance, you mean? Dammit, don’t you think I know that? I’m asking you to help me pick the best way to die trying.”

  “Sam, Sam, why does it have to be life and death?”

  I stared at him.

  “Really, man. You have no coherent idea of what the hell Rachel is up to. The one thing you know for sure is that she won’t kill you, for fear of destroying the future she comes from—”

  “Wrong! Rachel would prefer not to kill my body. My mind is fair game. I am my memories, Snake. My ‘self’ is those memories. They are me. Rachel is the Mindkiller. I have to bring her down.”

  “But what exactly has she done to your memories?”

  Why was he being so obtuse? “That’s the fucking point: I don’t know! How can I know what things I don’t remember? How do I know what transpired while I was ‘on hold,’ smiling beatifically, my naked brain open to thief or voyeur? I have been raped so intimately that I will never know just how badly unless and until my rapist chooses to tell me. Intolerable. Unforgivable. You disagree?”

  “No. I share your horror of mind-tampering. As I sit here I keep probing my own head for memory gaps, badly glued seams, the way you poke at a toothache with your tongue. It’s a creepy feeling, knowing she’s been in my head, your head, Ruby’s head. I’m angry at her for it. I want to know what made her do it. I give her enough credit to believe she thought she had a good—”

  “Of course she thinks she has a good reason. I am not remotely interested in what it is! There is no good reason for what she did to you and me and Ruby. She dies. End of story. If I thought I could safely immobilize her, I might ask her what her motives were before I killed her—and then again I might not.”

  He was shaking his head. “You’re not indifferent to her motives. You actively refuse to learn them. I can only think of one reason why: you’re afraid you might agree with them if you knew them.”

  “You’re wrong, Snake. I really don’t care one way or the other.”

  “Bullshit. It would be tactically sound to know! It would aid you in attacking her. And you’re too smart not to realize that. Yet you have left your only source of military intelligence, the man who could tell all and is eager for the chance—our pal Nazz—lying in a chicken coop.”

  “I think I understand her motives.”

  “Then you’re way ahead of me.”

  “Think about a telepathic society, Snaker. Everybody knows everything about everybody. There’s no more voyeurism. No more mystery. No such thing as a candid camera, an unposed picture, an unexamined life. Everyone’s always ‘on-camera,’ wearing their ‘company face,’ even fantasies are constructed in the awareness that they will be public property. In effect, everyone is naked, and if you’ve ever spent any time in a nudist camp you know how bland and boring that becomes. A whole
planet becomes jaded.

  “So a market develops for memory-tapes with a ‘candid camera’ feel, the experiences of people who didn’t know anyone was looking. There’s only one place to get them, though. From the past, from people who lived in the day before all this brain-robbing technology was developed. From people so primitive they don’t even have copy-protection on their brains. We’re like the native women in National Geographic, too dumb and ignorant to know better than to go around naked. No wonder Rachel’s been in and out of every hippie bed in Nova Scotia, and for all I know half the local beds too: better value for the entertainment dollar.”

  He swung around in his chair, used the wrought-iron lifter to remove the front access plate from the stovetop, dropped a cigarette butt into the firebox, and replaced the plate with more crash-bang than was necessary. “Stipulate that such memory dubs would be desirable, even marketable. Would they be worth exiling yourself to a strange and primitive world, for life? Would they be worth giving up immortality? For the golden privilege of burying them in the woods, for your contemporaries to dig up and enjoy after you’re dust?” At the mention of mortality, he began to roll another cigarette.

  “On what authority do we know that Rachel has given up immortality to come here?”

  He winced. “Touché. For all we can prove, she has two-way time travel.”

  “No, that story I believe. If it were that easy to slide back home, she wouldn’t be reduced to using local talent like Nazz. Snaker, all of this is totally irrelevant. I told you already: her motives don’t matter. Whatever they are, she’s ashamed to tell her best friends, but even that is unimportant. A dozen times since I found out what a Command Crown was I have wished that I had one available to me…God help me. There is no material problem one of those could not solve. Rachel has brought absolute power into my world. I don’t care whether she can be trusted with it. It shouldn’t exist.”

  “But what can you do about it?”

  “Snaker, I’m surprised at you. For a writer you aren’t very inventive. I’ve thought of three ways to kill a telepath, in less than an hour.” I got up and poured the last of the coffee. “Point of order. We keep calling Rachel a ‘telepath.’ Is that strictly accurate? She can dub my memory-record, stipulated. Apparently she has to switch off my consciousness to do so. Can she perceive memories as they are forming? Can she really ‘read my mind,’ or does she have to stop my mind, take a wax impression of it, and read that?”