Buying Time

by Joe Haldeman

  “Hands up keep ’em up!” Dallas shouted as we went through the door. I slowed things down. We crept through.

  There were two men in police uniforms in the hall. Their guns were still in midair; they were raising their hands. I looked around as quickly as I could, neck muscles straining against the inertia of my head, and saw a third policeman just visible at the top of a flight of stairs, bringing a rifle to his shoulder. Our eyes met and I raised my pistol. He threw the rifle away, arms splaying slowly out, saying something in a voice too deep to understand. I brought time back to normal.

  “There’s a man in there needs a tourniquet fast,” Dallas said, and nodded at one of the policemen. “You go tend to him.” He picked up the guns awkwardly and we piled into the waiting elevator, rode it up, and left it stuck open with the EMERGENCY STOP button broken off. We shorted out all the extra weapons and left them there.

  Out on the roof, Dallas took the floater’s keys, unlocked it, and told the pilot to get in. The man hesitated, rolled Briskin through the side door onto the floor of the van, and stepped back.

  “Just leave me here. I won’t try to follow or anything.”

  “Get in.” Dallas poked him in the side with the pistol. “The more hostages, the better.”

  “Oh, all right.” He got in and slid the door shut while Dallas and I got in front. “Guess you better throw that red switch up there.”

  There was a red on-off switch taped to the console with the letters DO written on the tape. “What’s DO?”

  “Defense override. Otherwise we’ll be fried by the automatic lasers.”

  Dallas snapped the switch and laughed. “Handy guy to have along.” He strapped himself in and saw that I was having trouble. “What’s wrong?”

  “Hurt my hand. Hitting Sir Charles.”

  He unstrapped and leaned over to secure me, one eye on the pilot. Quick kiss. He held the hand gently and looked at it with concern. It was swelling, discolored. “Broken. Was it worth it?”

  “Oh yes. Everything.”

  He strapped himself in. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”

  Dallas

  I’ve never driven so fast, so low, as when we left Alaska with Briskin. We got to Los Angeles in ninety minutes, after treating about a million shore dwellers to an illegal sonic boom, and had a sizable police escort by the time I brought it in to the first traffic station.

  By that time, Briskin was awake, but confused. I called Kamachi in Tokyo, and he assembled most of the rest of the board. I explained what had happened as economically as possible. Kamachi and Alenka Zor were on my side, having been lukewarm about Briskin from the beginning. I got depositions from Dr. Ulric and Big Dick Goodwin, who styled himself “marshal” of Ceres.

  I accused Briskin of murder and he accused both me and Maria of the same, so all three of us wound up in holding cells while the authorities figured out what to do with us. Briskin was the first one released, not having been accused of any murders on American soil. Perhaps he spread some money around, as well. But he didn’t even make it to the courthouse steps. An Interpol squad, no doubt lubricated by Alenka Zor’s fortune, was waiting with extradition papers to Yugoslavia.

  I was the only person who actually admitted killing somebody on this planet, but since it was the Conch Republic, it didn’t really count. There were other charges to be sorted out, though: kidnapping, conspiracy, illegal restraint of trade, mopery on the high seas. The California speeding ticket I simply paid, but the others kept us moving in and out of various courtrooms for the next three years.

  Briskin was convicted of first-degree murder in Yugoslavia, but his sentence was “mitigated by the court’s mercy” on presentation of evidence of acute mental imbalance. He spent a few years confined to a mental institution, carefully studied by Stileman scientists and others. He died the swift “natural” death of the penniless ex-immortal. The autopsy revealed nothing abnormal. Maybe they couldn’t cut deeply enough.

  His Steering Committee turned out to have been forty-some newly minted immortals, people whose loyalty he’d won by giving them a million pounds’ worth of life. He hadn’t bought their treatments, though. All those years of being the senior economist on the foundation’s Board of Governors had paid interesting dividends. Being in control of all of the checks and balances meant that he could put people through either clinic for free. And he could siphon off small amounts of money, mere tens of millions, without fear of detection.

  The Stileman Foundation did not collapse, but it did have to change its policies in order to compete with Ulric’s Long Life Unlimited. Both of them wound up offering one to two hundred years’ rejuvenation for a million pounds, with no other financial strings attached. That opened up the clinic doors to a large fraction of the world’s population, since a high-income professional facing a century of productivity is a pretty good credit risk.

  Kamachi became chairman of the Stileman board, and urged me to join, to ease the foundation’s transition back into real life. For some reason I agreed, though all I really wanted to do was retire to some warm island with Maria and lie in the sun. And figure things out.

  We do spend a week or two on tropical islands sometimes, or desert ones, or the Moon or wherever, to love each other and talk things over. Usually we take Eric along, as an inexhaustible fount of data and logical arbiter. (He did lose some faculties when Briskin’s laser jolted him in Alaska, but he was able to reinstall most of them from his file copy stashed in Vegas.) But it’s obvious to him as well as to us that no normal intelligence, human or machine, is going to get to the bottom of this new thing. We’ll have to build new tools and figure out how to use them.

  The scientists haven’t begun to explain what happened to Maria, and then later to me, and others. The supermeditative state that allows us to manipulate our perception of time. The cross-cultural ability to communicate through expression, gesture, body language. Heightened sensory perception; the ability to concentrate physical strength. And other things that can’t be described by language.

  Clinically, it’s a side effect of the zombi drug, combined with extremely advanced age. The scientists stopped testing it, though, after it appeared that one out of every four or five doesn’t survive the combination. That’s what happened to the little man who kidnapped Maria from Ceres. The autopsy showed nothing—an unusually robust man, less than a year out of his first Stileman.

  It’s no mystery to Maria or me, what killed him. But it’s not something you can quantify. He was imprisoned for twenty years in his own skull, with himself as a cellmate. He literally couldn’t live with himself, and so let himself die. His autonomic body functions kept going until the antidote was administered. Then the body realized it was a corpse, and stopped.

  It happens to a significant number of immortals. That doesn’t stop people from trying. Because the other Stileman immortals are just old people made young. We are something new. Not supermen. But not simply men and women, either.

  A complex analogy occurs to me, but it’s more a felt thing than a reasoned thing. A verbal simulacrum of it goes like this: a normal human adult stands in relation to us—rather, to what we are becoming—as a normal child stands in relation to the adult. The child can’t really comprehend an adult’s attitude toward love, work, morality, and so forth, and he doesn’t have to, in order to be a “successful” child. As he grows, then, he moves toward being a successful adult partly by copying the adults around him and partly by developing internal resources adequate for facing adult life.

  We’re in a situation sort of like that. In a real sense, normal humans can never actually understand us. But that doesn’t mean superiority; inside, we are like children with no adults to copy. Like children who are compelled to invent love, work, morality in the absence of models. Though the things we’re inventing don’t have names.

  All we really know is that we aren’t children any more. That we blinked and found the playground has suddenly become infinite.

  A Biograph
y of Joe Haldeman

  Joe Haldeman is a renowned American science fiction author whose works are heavily influenced by his experiences serving in the Vietnam War and his subsequent readjustment to civilian life.

  Haldeman was born on June 9, 1943, to Jack and Lorena Haldeman. His older brother was author Jack C. Haldeman II. Though born in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, Haldeman spent most of his youth in Anchorage, Alaska, and Bethesda, Maryland. He had a contented childhood, with a caring but distant father and a mother who devoted all her time and energy to both sons.

  As a child, Haldeman was what might now be called a geek, happy at home with a pile of books and a jug of lemonade, earning money by telling stories and doing science experiments for the neighborhood kids. By the time he entered his teens, he had worked his way through numerous college books on chemistry and astronomy and had skimmed through the entire encyclopedia. He also owned a small reflecting telescope and spent most clear nights studying the stars and planets.

  Fascinated by space, the young Haldeman wanted to be a “spaceman”—the term astronaut had not yet been coined—and carried this passion with him to the University of Maryland, from which he graduated in 1967 with a bachelor of science degree in physics and astronomy. By this time the United States was in the middle of the Vietnam War, and Haldeman was immediately drafted.

  He spent one year in Vietnam as a combat engineer and earned a Purple Heart for severe wounds. Upon his return to the United States in 1969, during the thirty-day “compassionate leave” given to returning soldiers, Haldeman typed up his first two stories, written during a creative writing class in his last year of college, and sent them out to magazines. They both sold within weeks, and the second story was eventually adapted for an episode of The Twilight Zone. At this point, though, Haldeman was accepted into a graduate program in computer science at the University of Maryland. He spent one semester in school. He was also invited to attend the Milford Science Fiction Writers’ Conference—a rare honor for a novice writer.

  In September of the same year, Haldeman wrote an outline and two chapters of War Year, a novel that would be based on the letters he had sent to his wife, Gay, from Vietnam. Two weeks later he had a major publishing contract. Mathematics was out of the picture for the near future.

  Haldeman enrolled in the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he studied with luminary figures such as Vance Bourjaily, Raymond Carver, and Stanley Elkin, graduating in 1975 with a master of fine arts degree in creative writing. His most famous novel, The Forever War (1974), began as his MFA thesis and won him his first Hugo and Nebula Awards, as well as the Locus and Ditmar Awards.

  Haldeman was now at his most productive, working on several projects at once. Arguably his largest-scale undertaking was the Worlds trilogy, consisting of Worlds (1981), Worlds Apart (1983), and Worlds Enough and Time (1992). Immediately before releasing the series’ last installment, however, Haldeman published his renowned novel The Hemingway Hoax (1990), which dealt with the experiences of combat soldiers in Vietnam. The novella version of the book won both the Hugo and Nebula Awards, a feat that Haldeman repeated with the publication of his next novel, Forever Peace (1997), which also won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for Best Science Fiction Novel.

  In 1983 Haldeman accepted an adjunct professorship in the writing program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He taught every fall semester, preferring to be a full-time writer for the remainder of the year. While at MIT he wrote Forever Free, the final book in his now-famous Forever War trilogy.

  Haldeman has since written or edited more than a half-dozen books, with a second succession of titles being published in the early 2000s, including The Coming (2000), Guardian (2002), Camouflage (2004)—for which he won his fourth Nebula—and The Old Twentieth (2005). He also released the Marsbound trilogy, publishing the namesake title in 2008 and quickly following it with Starbound (2010) and Earthbound (2011).

  A lifetime member and past president of the Science Fiction Writers of America, Haldeman was selected as its Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master for 2010. He was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame in 2012.

  After publishing his novel Work Done for Hire and retiring from MIT in 2014, Haldeman now lives in Gainesville, Florida, and plans to continue writing a novel every couple of years.

  The author and his brother, Jack, around the year 1948. The image is captioned “Stick ’em up or I’ll shoot. Woy Wogers and the Long Ranger.”

  Haldeman in third grade, the year he discovered science fiction.

  Haldeman’s mother, Lorena, and a bear cub in Alaska around the year 1950.

  Joe and Gay Haldeman on their wedding day, August 21, 1965.

  The author, with a cigarette, a beer, and a book, waits for a helicopter to arrive on the tarmac in Vietnam, July 1968.

  A pamphlet with details on how to handle prisoners of war. Haldeman carried this with him in Vietnam.

  The author in Vietnam, examining bullet holes on a US Army vehicle.

  Haldeman and the actor Jimmy Stewart in Cam Ranh Bay, Vietnam, 1968.

  The author in Vietnam with a book and sandbags.

  Joe and Gay Haldeman with their friend, prominent science fiction personality Rusty Hevelin (at right) in Alaska, 1993.

  The author with his Questar telescope in 2004.

  Janis Ian, Joe Haldeman, and Anne McCaffrey at the 2005 Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America Nebula Awards weekend.

  Honoring tradition, Haldeman wears the infamous tiara after winning the James Tiptree, Jr. Award for his novel Camouflage.

  Celebrated science fiction author Harry Harrison (at left) and Haldeman dressed as pirates during the 2005 World Fantasy Convention in England.

  Joe and Gay Haldeman enjoying the Valley of the Kings in Egypt during a trip to see a total solar eclipse in 2006.

  The author outside St. Augustine, Florida, on the first day of a cross-country bicycle trip with his wife in February 2013.

  The author’s Hugo and Nebula Awards.

  Joe and Gay Haldeman, 2013.

  All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 1989 by Joe Haldeman

  Cover design by Amanda Shaffer

  ISBN: 978-1-5040-4858-3

  This edition published in 2017 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

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