Kaleidoscope Century

by Barnes, John

  The other thing, which reporters were making a huge deal about, was that we were close to “phase reversal MAM.” I had to hop around flashchannel recordings a lot to find out what MAM was, but it turned out that some bright guy at Tsukuba University had finally explained why surplus power was coming out of the old “cold fusion” experiments; in just the right electromagnetic field, the quantum numbers of a proton could become indeterminate enough so that some protons would flip over to being anti-protons. It didn’t take many of those to get something hot.

  The scientist who had figured that out had been “killed by a prostitute still at large.” I had a sudden memory of my friend under the bridge, and a moment of admiration; she’d bagged a big one. Then I spent half an hour that day looking through my notes in my werp, to make sense of the memory. All I really figured out was that if she’d ripped me off, at least the person I was looking for was one hot piece.

  The hope was they would have MAM working as a practical technology within five years. At least the surviving best brains in physics were on the job, and money was being thrown at the problem like there was no tomorrow. Of course if they didn’t solve the problem, there wasn’t.

  Meanwhile, whether or not they’d have MAM to power it, they were going to be putting up space stations, and huge spaceships, and starting to colonize Mars and the Moon.

  So with all that going on, a guy who had a pretty good background in radar and electronics ought to do fine, even if the Organization no longer existed or didn’t want me. I just had to get back to the States, where it would be easy to get hired.

  After a few days of reading and studying, I thanked the nice old guy behind the counter at the library, checked out of the shelter, and went for a long walk. Around noon I had hutch and stashed the valise in a coin locker (using the last of my coins to do it), and started wandering around in the back streets near the Calle San Jeronimo, where if there were any tourists, they would be likely to be drifting around. Sure enough, there were a couple of kids, a man and a woman in their early twenties, wandering along in the narrow streets. I let myself shadow them for a while, listening in.

  I don’t know exactly what tipped me off that the guy had been a tourist psycho. One of the most bizarre features of the Eurowar: rich American kids who dodged the draft through any of the wide variety of legal means, then got themselves over to Europe, armed to the teeth with all kinds of weapons they’d bought privately, and wandered around attacking things and people in the areas controlled by whichever side they didn’t like.

  Weirder still to me was the fact that so many of the tourist psychos were Japanese, South Koreans, well-off Arabs, or Brazilians — people whose nations were not in the war at all.

  The favorite explanation seemed to be that entertainment had been so violent for so long that these kids thought an opportunity to go somewhere and commit random mayhem was better than Disneyland. Everyone denounced them but because almost all of them were anti-Sov and doing a lot of random damage in the Soviet-controlled areas, the West had done little to curb them. They were a great deal for their home governments: volunteer soldiers who paid their own way and who could be abandoned with a clear conscience if they were taken prisoner.

  Of course from reading through my notes I knew I had been no angel, but still, I had been professional; civilians I had killed were “collateral damage” — I hadn’t gone out of my way to kill them, their killing had just been incidental to my mission.

  I suppose I hated tourist psychos the way a call girl looks down on a streetwalker. Especially tourist psychos who were now walking around, hand in hand with the pretty girl from back home, showing her where they murdered Communist labor organizers and shot people they thought were Soviet agents. And most especially when the tourist psycho and his girlfriend were obviously carrying wads of hard cash.

  Late in the day. They still hadn’t noticed me. That might have been because they had each had a liter of wine in a cafe. I was hungry, I’d heard more sweet little nicknames for “Margaret” than I ever needed to hear again in my life, and finally they were taking a turn into a dim alley.

  He probably wasn’t armed now. Even if he was, he was drunk, and he’d more than proved he was unaware. Still, no sense taking chances. I came quietly up behind him, and at just that moment he stumbled.

  The note said I’d keep my motor skills, and that’s when I found out what they were. I sidekicked him a hard one, right into one kidney, as he was still catching his balance. He went down without a cry, probably too startled, maybe already in shock, and I gave him another hard kick, with everything I had, on the point of his chin.

  Little Princess Maggie Margie-pie Meggy Meggums turned around in a swirl of sharply styled red hair, her black-lipsticked mouth gaping to see him, knocked flat and still, with blood running out of his mouth. I grabbed the mass of big dangling earrings in one of her ears with my left hand, yanked her head toward me as hard as I could, and drove the heel of my right hand into her face. The earrings tore out and her mouth gushed blood. I closed in while she was still staring, not believing what had happened, and put her out with a solar plexus punch. She fell to the ground like a sack of wet sand.

  I got both their wallets and her purse; one of his loafers was lying by his foot, and I saw the money in it. More in his undershorts. These were the kind of people who put it everywhere.

  Sure enough. Two hundred dollars in Amex Universals — those traveler’s checks you could redeem for gold — ducked into her bra. Three little “microingots,” the pea-sized chunks of gold carried by nervous travelers these days, in her panties.

  I looked them over. His pants down to his thighs, her clothing pulled aside and ripped. Both still breathing, but I figured I’d concussed them good. Days at least before they woke up lucid.

  I drew my Boy Scout knife and slashed her clothes apart, flung her legs wide open, took his limp hand and scratched the nails all over her thighs and belly. I pulled his passport, city visitor permit, and i.d. papers from his inside jacket pocket, taking them with me. I dropped the bloody tangled mass of earrings into his open palm and folded his limp fingers around it.

  On my way back to the train station, I phoned the 091 emergency number, claimed I’d foiled a rape in progress and the girl was unconscious, told them where the two of them were, and left the phone dangling.

  I walked away whistling. As long as the cops got there before either of them woke up, she’d go to a regular hospital for treatment, and he’d go to a police hospital for interrogation. It could well be days before she was coherent enough to say anything about what had happened and get him out of there. Meanwhile the Spanish cops might kill him while questioning him, without anyone ever finding out who he was. By the time she woke up he might already be in a hidden, anonymous grave. I loved it.

  Maybe he had only been pretending, making up stories about his exploits. A lot of tourist psychos had gotten over to Europe, found out they had no balls, and spent their time in hotels or wandering the streets within a few safe blocks of home.

  Better still. If he wanted to pretend to the role, what could be better than his having to pay the price for it? And on the other hand, if he really had been a tourist psycho, we were well rid of him. I decided the same policy covered girls who dated tourist psychos, especially girls who encouraged them to brag about it.

  After cleaning out the money, I pitched the wallet and purse down any old alley that didn’t have anyone in it; I figured they wouldn’t stay there long — someone would see them and move them. His i.d. went down a storm sewer grate.

  I got my bags out of the coin locker, changed the cash, black-marketed the gold behind the station to get some more cash, bought a ticket, and was on my way to Paris with a stake in my pocket. I splurged for a compartment all to myself, so that I could sleep on the way.

  The next morning I was at the USA Repatriation Office, seeing if I could swing a berth to the US. I figured that given how fast they were going to be moving into space, a ra
dar whiz would be high priority.

  Apparently a lot of people were in my spot, or a similar one, to judge by the long line for “critical specialties — no papers.”

  I got in that line, told them my name was Ron Richards — such an ordinary name they’d never notice it — and half an hour later they parked me in front of a terminal to talk to the AI that would check me out on radar and electronics.

  Ever have that nightmare about knowing you studied for a test and not being able to remember anything? I knew everything up to when I’d had the injection. After that, maybe I knew and usually I didn’t.

  And when there’s been a major war, tech development has gone far and fast in ten years. Suppose you’d been an airplane mechanic in 1937, gone to sleep for ten years, and then tried to get hired in 1947.

  I might as well have come in qualified to shoe horses, run a keypunch, or troubleshoot tube radios for all the good it could do me. The AI administering the test noted that I had a lot of aptitude, and said that whenever I got my clearance to come over, I’d sure be welcome to take the test again, and even if they couldn’t use me just as I was, they’d be happy to train. But — (and I could swear that I heard regret in the artificial voice) — the need was for existing skills with state of the art equipment, and humma humma humma. Out the door, kid, and come back when you know some stuff.

  I had told it Ron Richards was twenty-five years old, so I was surprised that it didn’t bother to ask how I knew so much about radar from the years between my ages of six and fifteen, but it didn’t. Apparently they hadn’t yet asked the testing AIs to look for anomalies. This might be useful to remember.

  I wandered out into the bright daylight of Paris — a city that was already working hard. The French hadn’t bothered to worry about how they were going to pay for Reconstruction, so they’d just started rebuilding, because to them it was obvious that Paris needed to be a great city rather than a great ruin. Most of the workers were getting paid in scrip that could be redeemed somehow, sooner or later, in the sweet bye and bye, in theory. What the hell, the French always liked theory better than reality.

  The only place you could spend scrip was in the tent cities, or for soup and bread at the kitchens.

  It would at least conserve my cash. I was swinging a pick within the hour, helping to clear rubble from a caved-in Metro entrance.

  By the end of the day my hands were pretty sore — it cost me more scrip to get a pair of gloves from the little store at the camp, for the next day — but I had a bed in out of the rain, all mine, and food enough.

  The French don’t trust banks. Or at least they don’t trust French banks, and who can blame them? Paris has more safes, lockups, private storages, and so forth than any other city I’ve ever seen. I spent more scrip to lock up my cash and the jewelbox of keepsakes in a rented strongbox at the camp’s central office.

  I worked all fall, got into great shape. I wasn’t going anywhere, and meanwhile I got fed. When the first hard snow came in October, we all started to find out that they hadn’t been kidding about Rebound Winter. The Northern Hemisphere was about to start growing glaciers again.

  They moved our tents down into the Metro, but it was still cold. There was a new protonic power plant running outside the city, so they could afford to power space heaters for us. When they had space heaters. Different tents got them on different nights for a while, usually every other night but now and then your turn would come for two nights without heat in a row, which was bad. They were promising that by March there would be a heater in every tent.

  On nights when your tent had no heater, your choices were to lay out more scrip and rent additional blankets or towels (if you got there early enough), or huddle up with everybody and watch television together on the big screens they’d set up in the Metro stations. The trains roared through all night, but we were used to that; a lot of times I fell asleep wedged in between half a dozen other people. It beat freezing your ass off in the tent.

  The trouble was you could get shoved to the outside of the huddle, and then it was really cold. Usually I was big enough and aggressive enough so that that didn’t happen, but when I got in late, there I’d be, butt on the cold concrete, back to the windy runnel, huddled up and trying to press into the people in front of me.

  One night in February when that happened, my second night without heat, I finally gave up in disgust. I decided to go do something, anything, that I might enjoy. So I got some cash from the strongbox, and got on a Metro to the Place de la Republique. If you wanted anything people didn’t approve of — alcohol, drugs, pussy, violence, whatever your action was — you went to Republique.

  Fairly bright, outside the station. With so much power available, they had all the streetlights on. Far below freezing, but no wind, a crisp night. For a little while I just walked around the big, open space; the Place de la Republique is one of those places Paris is made out of where several major boulevards converge around a pillar with a statue. Before the war it had been kind of upscale. Now it was where several long corridors of rubble and a few choked streets emptied into a squatter’s encampment surrounding a shattered pedestal, the statue long gone, and the place for contraband.

  Around one corner I had to wait for a long convoy of trucks to pass. Their tires ground on the icy grit, plumes of exhaust roiled in their headlights.

  I thought of waving but probably only the lead truck was driven by a human. So many surplus robot vehicle controllers around after the war, price down to almost nothing, usually only the lead truck was driven by a person, the rest just programmed to follow it.

  When they had rumbled by, a girl, thin, with stringy black hair, wearing a cheap plastic raincoat over a bunch of sweaters, stood under the light across the street. I crossed the street. As I passed her at the corner (keeping a wary distance in case she had a gun or something) she said, “Wanna get high? Get laid? Get some travel i.d.?”

  I looked at her closely. She couldn’t have been more than nine. “Uh, you’re pretty young to be selling any of that stuff,” I said.

  “You’re telling me. Wish you’d tell it to Pop,” she said, in English. Obviously she’d recognized my accent.

  “He doesn’t make you — “

  “He doesn’t make me have sex,” she said. “And I don’t handle the dope, either, or the i.d. I just bring guys in for him, okay? And don’t think you can do anything with me, either, he’s got you covered right now. Make a wrong move and you’ll see a laser designator spot on your chest; keep moving if you want to see a bunch of holes.” Her chin was up and her lower lip stuck out a little.

  I didn’t believe her, but I was curious. It beat wandering around and getting colder, and there were a lot of ways to kill time that I didn’t like as much as I liked getting high or laid.

  “So how do I meet this solid citizen and president of the Chamber of Commerce?” I asked.

  “Don’t make fun of me just because I’m a kid and my old man’s a crook,” she said.

  “I wouldn’t dream of it.”

  “He’s over there in the shadows,” she said, pointing into a crooked alley. “Talk to him. He deals everything. Good prices, fair prices, he doesn’t care as long as you pay him something he can spend. But he discounts scrip ninety percent.”

  That was the normal street discount, easy to figure and the traffic would bear it. My scrip would count for one tenth of its face value.

  I followed the kid into an alley. If someone cracked my head, right now, I would probably lie in the alley and freeze to death, but they’d be wasting their arm strength on the job — I was carrying about enough cash for a round-the-world with one of the young girls who sold themselves over by the statueless pedestal, or for enough synthak — receptor-addressed coke — to be extremely happy for five or six hours. Enough for an evening’s fun, not enough for anything else.

  The man who squatted on his heels at the end of the alley turned on a rechargeable lantern between his knees. The blue-gray light, washing over
his face from beneath, made him eerie the way a kid’s face in a school fair “haunted house” is — that is, you could tell he was trying to give you the creeps and not succeeding. Probably forty-five, definitely overweight, and he’d be strung out on a bunch of shit for sure. I stopped well out of arm’s reach, but near enough to see both his hands clearly, and said, “Your daughter here said you got some merchandise.”

  “Yeah,” he said, wiping a blob of snot from his nose. Something glinted at his neck in the dun light. I wasn’t sure of what it was, but it looked familiar. “I deal a lot of stuff, man, you just gotta say what it is you need. If I ain’t got it, for a finder fee I can put you on to a man that does, someplace. The little chick will take you wherever I tell her to, to whatever your thing is, and bring your finder fee back as long as you’re satisfied. So there’s like no risk if you want something I don’t got. But I got most anything.”

  He talked like an old boomer, though the real born-in-the-1940s boomers were almost all dead. He looked like something that would grow gradually, over years, in this corner — or in any other dank, cold place, if there were enough dirt.

  “What’s your specialty?” I asked. “Just now I happen to be bored and cold. I want to be warm and amused.”

  Face wrenched sideways in an angry smile, he coughed like a sick dog. Definitely coming down off synthak. “How about a fucking cup of hot chocolate, a fireplace, and a nice storybook to read to the little chick?” The sneer in his voice was thick and loud; the attitude said synthak, the way he was just blurting it out said screamies. Bad mixture — coming down off them together made people paranoid and extremely horny. One very screwed-up staff sergeant I had known back in Prague got himself arrested on that mix, fortunately not too near any party I had thrown, and had tried to hump the cops’ legs. We all thought that was pretty funny. “You can read her Alice in Wonderland, and you can both have chocolate and marshmallows, and then you can make her eat your mushroom.”