by Larry Niven
“A minute ago you were opposed to murder.”
The old man did have a way with words. “Point taken. Could you get us funding? It’d be a guaranteed Nobel Prize. I like the fact that you don’t need a scope-sighted rifle. A hypo full of sulfa drugs doesn’t have to be kept secret. What antibiotic?”
“I don’t know what cures consumption. I don’t know which year or what ship. I’ve got people to look those things up, if I decide I want to know. I came straight here as soon as I read the morning paper. Why not? I run every day, any direction I like. But I haven’t heard you say it’s impossible, Andrew, and I haven’t heard you say you won’t do it.”
“More coffee?”
“Yes, thank you.”
Proxmire left him alone in the kitchen, and for that Andrew was grateful. He’d have made no progress at all if he’d had to guard his expression. There was simply too much to think about.
He preferred not to consider the honors. Assume he had changed the past; how would he prove it before a board of his peers? “How would I prove it now? What would I have to show them?” he muttered under his breath, while the coffee water was heating. “Books? Books that didn’t get written? Newspapers? There are places that’ll print any newspaper headline I ask for. ‘Waffen SS to Build Work Camp in Death Valley.’ I can mint Robert Kennedy half-dollars for a lot less than thirteen million bucks. Hmm…” But the Nobel Prize wasn’t the point.
Keeping Robert Heinlein alive a few years longer: was that the point? It shouldn’t be. Heinlein wouldn’t have thought so.
Would the science fiction field really have collapsed without the Menace From Earth? Tradition within the science fiction field would have named Campbell, not Heinlein. But think: was it magazines that had sucked Andrew Minsky into taking advanced physics classes? Or…Double Star, Red Planet, Anderson’s Tau Zero, Vance’s Tschai series. Then the newsstand magazines, then the subscriptions, then (of course) he’d dropped it all to pursue a career. If Proxmire’s staff investigated his past (as they must, if he was at all serious), they would find that Andrew Minsky, Ph.D., hadn’t read a science fiction magazine in fifteen years.
Proxmire’s voice came from the other room. “Of course it would be a major chunk of funding. But wouldn’t my old friends be surprised to find me backing a scientific project! How’s the coffee coming?”
“Done.” Andrew carried the pot in. “I’ll do it,” he said. “That is, I and my associates will build a time machine. We’ll need funding and we’ll need active assistance using the Washburn accelerator. We should be ready for a man-rated experiment in three years, I’d think. We won’t fail.”
He sat. He looked Proxmire in the eye. “Let’s keep thinking, though. A Navy officer walks the tilting deck of what would now be an antique Navy ship. An arm circles his throat. He grips the skinny wrist and elbow, bends the wrist downward and throws the intruder into the sea. They train Navy men to fight, you know, and he was young and you are old.”
“I keep in shape,” Proxmire said coldly. “A medical man who performs autopsies once told me about men and women like me. We run two to five miles a day. We die in our eighties and nineties and hundreds. A fall kills us, or a car accident. Cut into us and you find veins and arteries you could run a toy train through.”
He was serious. “I was afraid you were thinking of taking along a blackjack or a trank gun or a Kalashnikov—”
“No.”
“I’ll say it anyway. Don’t hurt him.”
Proxmire smiled. “That would be missing the point.”
And if that part worked out, Andrew would take his chances with the rest.
He had been reaching for a beer while he thought about revising the time machine paper he’d done with Tipler and Penrose four years ago. Somewhere he’d shifted over into daydreams, and that had sent him off on a weird track indeed.
It was like double vision in his head. The time machine (never built) had put William Proxmire (the ex-Senator!) on the moving deck of the USS Roper on a gray midmorning in December, 1933. Andrew never daydreamed this vividly. He slapped his flat belly, and wondered why, and remembered: he was ten pounds heavier in the daydream, because he’d been too busy to run.
So much detail! Maybe he was remembering a sweaty razor-sharp nightmare from last night, the kind in which you know you’re doing something bizarrely stupid, but you can’t figure out how to stop.
He’d reached for a Henry Weinhart’s (Budweiser) from the refrigerator in his kitchen (in the office at Washburn, where the Weinhart’s always ran out first) while the project team watched their monitors (while the KCET funding drive whined in his living room). In his head there were double vision, double memories, double sensations. The world of quantum physics was blurred in spots. But this was his kitchen and he could hear KCET begging for money a room away.
Andrew walked into his living room and found William Proxmire dripping on his yellow rug.
No, wait. That’s the other—
The photogenic old man tossed the spray hypo on Andrew’s couch. He stripped off his hooded raincoat, inverted it and dropped it on top. He was trying to smile, but the fear showed through. “Andrew? What I am doing here?”
Andrew said, “My head feels like two flavors of cotton. Give me a moment. I’m trying to remember two histories at once.”
“I should have had more time. And then it should have been the Washburn accelerator! You said!”
“Yeah, well, I did and I didn’t. Welcome to the wonderful world of Schrödinger’s Cat. How did it go? You found a young Lieutenant Junior Grade gunnery officer alone on deck—” The raincoat was soaking his cushions. “In the rain—”
“Losing his breakfast overside in the rain. Pulmonary tuberculosis, consumption. Good riddance to an ugly disease.”
“You wrestled him to the deck—”
“Heh heh heh. No. I told him I was from the future. I showed him a spray hypo. He’d never seen one. I was dressed as a civilian on a Navy ship. That got his attention. I told him if he was Robert Heinlein I had a cure for his cough.”
“‘Cure for his cough’?”
“I didn’t say it would kill him otherwise. I didn’t say it wouldn’t, and he didn’t ask, but he may have assumed I wouldn’t have come for anything trivial. I knew his name. This was Heinlein, not some Wisconsin dairy farmer. He wanted to believe I was a time traveler. He did believe. I gave him his shot. Andrew, I feel cheated.”
“Me too. Get used to it.” But it was Andrew who was beginning to smile.
The older man hardly heard; his ears must be still ringing with that long-dead storm. “You know, I would have liked to talk to him. I was supposed to have twenty-two minutes more. I gave him his shot and the whole scene popped like a soap bubble. Why did I come back here?”
“Because we never got funding for research into time travel.”
“Ah…hah. There have been changes. What changes?”
It wasn’t just remembering; it was a matter of selecting pairs of memories that were mutually exclusive, then judging between them. It was maddening…but it could be done. Andrew said, “The Washburn accelerator goes with the time machine goes with the funding. My apartment goes with no time machine goes with no funding goes with…Bill, let’s go outside. It should be dark by now.”
Proxmire didn’t ask why. He looked badly worried.
The sun had set, but the sky wasn’t exactly black. In a line across a smaller, dimmer full moon, four rectangles blazed like windows into the sun. Andrew sighed with relief. Collapse of the wave function: this was reality.
William Proxmire said, “Don’t make me guess.”
“Solar power satellites. Looking Glass Three through Six.”
“What happened to your time machine?”
“Apollo Eleven landed on the Moon on July 20, 1969, just like clockwork. Apollo Thirteen left a month or two early, but something still exploded in the service module, so I guess it wasn’t a meteor. They…shit.”
“Eh?”<
br />
“They didn’t get back. They died. We murdered them.”
“Then?”
Could he put it back? Should he put it back? It was still coming together in his head. “Let’s see, NASA tried to cancel Apollo Eighteen, but there was a hell of a write-in campaign—”
“Why? From whom?”
“The spec-fic community went absolutely apeshit. Okay, Bill, I’ve got it now.”
“Well?”
“You were right, the whole science fiction magazine business just faded out in the fifties, last remnants of the pulp era. Campbell alone couldn’t save it. Then in the sixties the literary crowd rediscovered the idea. There must have been an empty ecological niche and the lit-crits moved in.
“Speculative fiction, spec-fic, the literature of the possible. The New Yorker ran spec-fic short stories and critical reviews of novels. They thought Planet of the Apes was wonderful, and Selig’s Complaint, which was Robert Silverberg’s study of a telepath. Tom Wolfe started appearing in Esquire with his bizarre alien cultures. I can’t remember an issue of The Saturday Evening Post that didn’t have some spec-fic in it. Anderson, Vance, MacDonald…John D. MacDonald turns out novels set on a ring the size of Earth’s orbit.
“The new writers were good enough that some of the early ones couldn’t keep up, but a few did it by talking to hard science teachers. Benford and Forward did it in reverse. Jim Benford’s a plasma physicist but he writes like he swallowed a college English teacher. Robert Forward wrote a novel called Neutron Star, but he built the Forward Mass Detector too.”
“Wonderful.”
“There’s a lot of spec-fic fans in the military. When Apollo Twenty-one burned up during reentry, they raised so much hell that Congress took the manned space program away from NASA and gave it to the Navy.”
William Proxmire glared and Andrew Minsky grinned. “Now, you left office in the ’60s because of the Cheese Boycott. When you tried to chop the funding for the Shuttle, the spec-fic community took offense. They stopped eating Wisconsin cheese. The San Francisco Locus called you the Cheese Man. Most of your supporters must have eaten nothing but their own cheese for about eight months, and then Goldwater chopped the milk price supports. ‘Golden Fleece,’ he called it. So you were out, and now there’s no time machine.”
“We could build one,” Proxmire said.
Rescue Apollo Thirteen? The possibility had to be considered…Andrew remembered the twenty years that followed the Apollo flights. In one set of memories, lost goals, pointlessness and depression, political faddishness leading nowhere. In the other, half a dozen space stations, government and military and civilian; Moonbase and Moonbase Polar; Life photographs of the Mars Project half-finished on the lunar plain, sitting on a hemispherical Orion-style shield made from lunar aluminum and fused lunar dust.
I do not commit murder under any circumstances.
“I don’t think so, Bill. We don’t have the political support. We don’t have the incentive. Where would a Nobel Prize come from? We can’t prove there was ever a time line different from this one. Besides, this isn’t just a more interesting world, it’s safer too. Admiral Heinlein doesn’t let the Soviets build spacecraft.”
Proxmire stopped breathing for an instant. Then, “I suppose he wouldn’t.”
“Nope. He’s taking six of their people on the Mars expedition, though. They paid their share of the cost in fusion bombs for propulsion.”
May 12 1988—
Greg Benford called me a couple of months ago. He wants new stories about alternate time tracks for an anthology, I told him that the only sideways-in-time story in my head was totally unsalable. It’s just recreation, daydreaming, goofing off. It’s about how William Proxmire uses a time machine and a hypodermic full of sulfa drugs to wipe out the space program.
Greg made me write it.
I called Robert to get dates and other data, and asked if I could use his name. I had so much fun with this story! I made lots of copies and sent them to friends. I sent one to Robert of course. That was only a few weeks ago.
And now I’m thinking that sometimes I really luck out. Robert’s death feels bad enough, but it would be one notch worse if I didn’t know he’d read this story.
• • •
• • •
Lovely, one of the guards was thinking. But no expression. You’d think she’d be happy to be out of that stinking prison camp, but she doesn’t look it. Perspiration dripped steadily down his ribs, and he thought, She doesn’t sweat. She was carved from ice by the finest sculptor that ever lived.
THE MOTE IN GOD’S EYE, 1974
THE TALE OF THE JINNI AND THE SISTERS
“The Tale of the Jinni and the Sisters” happened because Susan Shwartz wanted sequels to The Arabian Nights.
I found her suggestion irresistible. My shelves held two versions of The Thousand and One Nights. Almost immediately I saw that the clever Scheherezade had missed crucial clues…
Publishers Weekly compared me to Boccaccio for this story!
• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •
Scheherezade said, “Tell me a story.”
In the dark of the tent she could see the glint of his open eyes, but the King didn’t stir. She would have felt that. King Shahryar said, “You do that better than I.”
Four years they’d been married; seven years she had been his mate; three boys and a girl she had given him. Scheherezade was coming to believe that the bad times were over. But Shahryar was still a dangerous man, and he’d been wire-tight these past two days. Something had frightened him. Something he couldn’t talk about.
Sometimes the danger of him excited her. Not tonight. She moved against him anyway and said, “What other diversion have we, awake in the night, with all of our entertainers left behind?”
He declined the hint. “Hah. This traveling-bed and the lumpy ground beneath—”
“—Are the reason we cannot sleep. Tomorrow night will bring us rooms in King Zaman’s palace.”
“Yes. Well, we left the scribes too.”
“Then tell me a story you will not want studied by tomorrow’s scholars.”
He was quiet for a time. Did he sleep? But something burned in his mind. He’d tried to speak and then turned away, a dozen times in these two days of travel.
He said, “We never speak of the time before we met.”
“My father, your Wazir, he warned me of your…trouble. I came to you anyway.”
“Sometimes I think I might forgive myself for the women, and then forget. But who can forget a tale without an ending? You who know so many tales, what do you really know of the Jinni?”
“Whimsical. Powerful. Prone to extravagance. Dangerous, the ones who fought the Prophet’s law. Why?”
“Ten years ago, my brother Zaman told me how he had caught his wife in adultery with a slave cook, and killed them. Then he told me he’d seen my own wife betray me. I could have killed him. I followed him instead, and watched, and still couldn’t believe. The Wazir must have told you this much.”
“Yes.”
“Then we swore that we would depart our palaces and never return until we knew that someone, somewhere, had suffered a greater misfortune. Do you know how long we traveled?”
“Father didn’t tell me that.”
“He never knew. Two hours.”
She laughed before she could stop herself.
“We traveled fast. Sometimes we ran to burn off our rage and sorrow. We were seven or eight leagues from my palace and into a meadow, with no dwellings in sight, and exactly one tree.
“Then a black whirlwind appeared and began to draw into itself. No monkey could have climbed faster than I, yet Zaman beat me into the tree.”
She swallowed her laughter. His muscles were rigid and his arms were too tight around her.
“We were hidden before the Jinni became solid. That tree was the only shade anywhere. The Jinni set a crystal coffer down in the shade. Th
ere was a woman in it.”
“Holes in the casket?” An experienced storyteller would have mentioned those.
“Holes? No, it was sealed like a treasure chest, with seven separate locks, but I could see her through the sides. The Jinni got it open and she came out.”
“What was she like?”
“Not a girl. Twenty-two or -three years old, and lovely. Foreign. Yellow like the moon near setting. Straight black hair. Something about her eyes. I’d need a scribe’s help to describe her.”
“You’re doing well.”
“The Jinni went in unto her. I…wondered what I would see of foreign practices, but she only submitted. Then the Jinni slept. We were going to be there a long time. I tried to shift my weight, and the tree shook, and the woman looked up and saw us.
“She made us come down.”
“How?”
“She swore she would wake the Afrit. We came down. She led us away from the tree, and ordered us to go in unto her.” Shahryar laughed; he made himself laugh, and Scheherezade dared not. “We are kings, Zaman and I. When we desired a woman, we brought her to our beds and we took her. We are not summoned. We had a hard time of it—” He laughed again, painfully. “A soft time of it. We’d moved far from the tree, there was no shade, and we were desperately afraid of making noise. But Zaman succeeded in giving her what she willed, and watching them excited me…Should I be telling it the other way around?”
“Was she good?”
“She wrung us dry. We had trouble walking away…running when we could. But why not? She claimed five hundred and seventy lovers taken under the nose of the Afrit!”
“Incredible.” How could he not feel her tension?
“A disgraceful episode. It put the seal on my opinion of women. If even a Jinni’s precautions weren’t enough to keep her for himself…”
Scheherezade’s mind was racing. She had not thought so fast in many years; and what she chose to say was nothing.
“I was a long time losing that hatred. The Koran warns against women; I cannot blame myself too much. But sometimes I wonder. She told us that the Jinni had snatched her on her wedding night, while she was still a virgin. He keeps her beneath the sea, where no man can reach. How can he have been careless five hundred and seventy times?”